Island of a Thousand Mirrors (7 page)

*   *   *

Shiva and I are born on adjacent beds in a large white room while the nurses stroke
the thighs of our writhing, crying mothers. We enter the world on waves of our mothers’
iron-flavored blood. First I, secretive and shy. I did not cry, they say, until he,
too, had arrived. Purple faced, I had to be slapped into breathing. And then immediately
after me, Shiva, as if he had been waiting for me to test the terrain. But when he
does arrive, our crying fills the room, makes our tired and torn mothers laugh. Our
fathers come rushing to claim us. They hold us awkwardly along the length of their
hands, rest our slightly furred heads in their palms and look at us with shock while
our mothers, to whom motherhood comes easily, giggle at their uncertainty.

Later we lie like replete kittens on our mothers’ bellies and are taken separately
to be blessed by the appropriate gods. Shiva to the temple of his namesake, where
the
pusari
smears turmeric across his scrunched forehead. I to the Kelaniya temple, where the
shaven-headed monk ties a white thread around my tiniest of wrists. It is here that
my mother, still undecided about what to call me, looks carefully at the murals depicting
the Buddha’s life and pronounces with so much certainty that she cannot be contradicted,
“Yasodhara.”

five

Shiva and I grow up, twinned from birth, in some strange fashion, repeating the pattern
of my father and Mala, the male and female twins that floated in our family history.
In those early years our mothers take pleasure in each other. Who else can understand
Visaka’s bloated breasts, her ripped innards, her strange and unaccountable moods
better than another woman who has just performed the same impossible feat? We are
breastfed at the same time, our mothers nodding over our tiny heads, chatting in a
mixture of Tamil, Sinhala, and English that makes them laugh often. We are patted
to sleep, encouraged to burp, held and loved by two mothers. The strange timing of
our birth allows us entry into each other’s families in the most intimate ways since
the two women, previously rivals, now seek out the comfort of each other’s company.
The result being that as a child I knew the contours of the upstairs as well as Shiva
knew our rooms downstairs.

Three years after my birth, my mother swells again. When Lanka is born and brought
home, Shiva and I gaze over the edge of the bassinet at this strange, alien creature
and claim her as our own. We are a threesome from then on. Joined at the hip. A pyramid.
A triangle. It is only in later years that she and I are taught the insurmountable
differences between him and us.

Decades later and on a colder continent, I am fishing in my mother’s desk for a recipe
when a photograph tumbles across my hands. Wellawatte beach. Our delicate mother in
oversized sunglasses and a minidress hefts a baby on her hip, grasps another child
by the hand. Nothing physically maternal in her except the authority with which she
holds my outstretched hand, pulls me to face the camera. Beside her, Alice, her hunch
silhouetted by the setting sun, and then Sylvia Sunethra. In the corner a streak of
motion, Shiva. I recognize him only because I remember the day. He had come with us,
holding my hand, but tentative in the presence of our grandmother. We had been talking
in our own shared language, that particular blur of Sinhala, Tamil, and English much
like what our mothers used in the early days, when suddenly my grandmother, her attention
telescoped on us, pins him like an insect. Her iced voice, incredulous, “Are you teaching
my granddaughter Tamil?” Her hand smashing hard across his cheek. He rips his hand
from mine, turns to run. The camera in my father’s hand clicks shut.

I pass my hands over my face. I remember that moment so vividly. It was the first
time we knew without question that we were different, separate, and that this difference
was as wide as the ocean. In the other room my mother calls, have I found that recipe
yet? She is waiting. I hide the photo back in the drawer, shut it resolutely. That
was a lifetime ago. What came between us later was so much more painful, I have no
desire to remember any more.

*   *   *

Our mother and our father then. She is cruel to him in ways we cannot understand.
It is a subtle cruelty of unkind looks, pauses, and a way of undercutting his opinions
in public so that he, the more educated, is easily rendered the fool. As children,
we often resent her for it. It is only later that I understand her ferocious rage
at the idea of being bought, of being wed despite the dictates of her own wildly beating
heart.

But as children we are our father’s pets. He takes us down to the beach, each of us
grasping one of his fingers. Me and La, as we called Lanka almost from the beginning—that
simple musical note that was exactly her, on one hand, Shiva on the other. My father
liked it, I think, when people on the beach assumed he was the father of not just
the two little girls, but also that slim-limbed boy.

He teaches us to dive, passing on fisherfolk lessons. Teaches us to plunge fearlessly
into the surf, eyes open despite the rushing strength of the water. It sends us tumbling
head over heels, swallowing brine. We emerge spluttering, almost drowned, dizzy. But
in the ensuing years, all three of us learn to negotiate the waters until we are as
agile as otters, as sinuous as eels, delighting in the suspended weightlessness of
liquid.

*   *   *

In the smoky kitchen of the Wellawatte house, Alice is cooking. Between her fingers,
garlic cloves slip out of their skins, naked and pungent white. Green chilies slit
themselves lengthwise, fat stubs of ginger reduce themselves into paste. Spices perform
fireworks in her frying pan. She teaches the three of us the precise engineering skills
required to construct Christmas cakes, gingerbread houses, cream caramels. She makes
us whip eggs until our forearms are aching and the eggs are transformed into stiff
towers of frothy white. She gives us authority over the sharpest and cruelest of her
tools, the flashing knives, the ridged coconut scraper with its stool. So that from
childhood, we are intimate with these instruments.

Nightly, Alice still unfolds her mat outside Sylvia Sunethra’s door. A small dark
shack made of shabbily aligned walls and a corrugated tin roof behind the house holds
her few possessions. This is also where her son, Dilshan, sleeps.

Some years older than us, he is our greatest playmate and ally. He lives barefoot
and in a checked blue-green sarong. The soles of his feet are thick and black as tire
rubber. He lets us poke at the deep, sunbaked cracks and laughs, “I don’t need Bata
slippers like you, Baby Nona. I have them already on my feet.”

It is always easy to locate Dilshan in the house. The house cats congregate wherever
he goes. Yet he is immune to their persistent mewing ardor and pushes them gently
away with a pointed toe, an impatient foot. He is sinuous himself, winding his way
about the house, fulfilling Sylvia Sunethra’s various dictates for shopping or clearing
the inner courtyard after the monsoon has ravaged the jasmine tree. If he is angry
that his mother, one of our own, is now reduced by the trembling hump and his own
illicit birth to this in-between place between aunt and servant, he does not show
it. In later years, when he joins the army, it is the cats that mourn most openly,
raising their whiskered faces to the sky and yowling outside the opening of his hut,
refusing to eat even the fisherman’s best tidbits for weeks.

*   *   *

Alice sits sideways on the coconut scraping stool. Her hands push the half coconut
repeatedly over the rounded blade and a steady stream of fragrant whiteness falls
into her bowl. The rhythm of her words matched to the back and forth of her body,
she spins us stories of far-flung villages, mud, wattle, and coconut-thatched huts
in roadless places, where life is ruled by the cycles of moonlight and sunlight, monsoon
and drought. The jungle lies thick on the edges of such villages, and if it were not
tamed daily by machete, it would burst in and reclaim its dominion. The night is always
loud with jungle creatures. The gunshot exclamation of a crocodile’s jaw cracking
through turtle shell, the crash of a musth-dripping bull elephant, the yellow-lit
eyes of a hunting leopard.

She heaves herself off the coconut scraper and inspects the day’s vegetables. We beg
her for more. More stories. We are addicted as if to food. So she tells us of the
demons that stalk these lonely places. The full-lipped Kalu Kumara, who takes on the
aspect of a seductive youth and emerges on moonlit nights, causing usually staid village
damsels to tear at their clothes and utter long, moaning sighs. The other various
demons that come creeping into the villages and cause mischief, illness, bad fortune.
“When one of these demons enters a person, a child like you,” she whispers and makes
us jump, thrilled, “the village has to summon the devil dancers. All night long, they
dance and drum, and spin and leap and flip in the air. They wear masks with bulging
eyes and huge headdresses of human and raffia hair. They are six foot tall and the
next morning the sick child, the child who was almost dead, is better, is laughing
and walking. I’ve seen it with my own eyes,” she says.

We are mesmerized. “But Alice,” Lanka says, “can’t you take us there? Can’t we go
and see?”

The onions she is chopping seem to break through her defenses. She flicks moisture
from her eyes into a dark corner of the kitchen with a deft movement of the wrist.
Her voice is suddenly gruff. “Too dangerous. There are worse things than the Kalu
Kumara in those places now.” She will not elaborate. Her knife moves through vegetable
matter with purpose and fury.

Later, she boils water in her great earthen pot and Dilshan, called forth by the fragrance
of heated milk and cinnamon, comes to squat on the back steps. She pours tea, steaming
and frothy, into delicate teacups, takes them into the house on a silver tray for
our parents, then comes back to reach for the metal beakers set aside for her and
Dilshan. We have been warned away from these by Sylvia Sunethra. “Otherwise,” she
has whispered in our ears, “you will grow a hump as big as Alice’s.”

Alice pours long falls of milky tea. She takes the two beakers outside to her son.
They squat on the back steps as the twilight falls and the reign of insects begins,
talk in low, muted voices. And we, running inside after games, even in childhood,
are always taken by the ocean of tenderness between them.

*   *   *

On Sundays, our father drives us all across the city to Mount Lavinia to visit his
twin sister and her husband, our Mala Aunty and Anuradha Uncle. My father’s parents,
too, have left Hikkaduwa and come here to the house of their daughter. There are now
two camps. In one our mother, in the other Mala and Beatrice Muriel, and between these
two camps the sort of subtle rivalry that exists between women who lay claim to the
same man. No harshness is ever uttered, but we sense animosity in the sugar-dripping
words that pass with the teacups, the overly polite conversation so different from
the familiar, bantering way our mother talks with her childhood friends, the laughing
girls she was a schoolgirl with.

Eager to leave this unacknowledged battlefield, we press Mala to take us into her
garden, where green things shoot out of the ground, thick flowers explode into fruit,
ferns unfurl themselves like plumage. Even on this island, where foliage spills effortlessly
from every crevice, her garden is exceptional. In later years, on a different continent,
the sentence “On the island of her youth, one could spit and a tree would grow” makes
me smile and remember Mala Aunty’s garden.

Here, Colombo does not exist. It is the chattering of the mynas, the conversations
of toads, squirrels, and snakes that hold court. We play hide-and-seek, wade into
her ponds to fill jam jars with writhing tadpoles, and cavort with her pack of dogs,
named Brandy, Whiskey, Lager, so that just calling the pack makes one feel light-headed
and drunk. Showing us around the garden with such joy that her face almost splits
from smiling is our aunt’s Tamil servant girl, Poornam. She is small and sprite, a
few years older than me, but so much tinier

We all know the story, how years ago a Tamil woman came to my aunt’s gate with the
child. Rang and rang until Mala, annoyed, came to the gate and the woman thrust this
little girl at her saying, “Please take,” and our aunt saying, “No, I don’t need any
servant girl now,” but then looking closely to see the bruises on the edges of the
child’s face, on her legs under the too tight dress, she opened the gate. The woman
pushed the child forward and turned away to disappear. Our aunt was left with this
malnourished, dirty little thing. In the bathroom scrubbing the child, she found bruises
and lacerations everywhere, had to try hard not to break down and cry in front of
the girl. Now Poornam sleeps on a pallet outside my aunt’s bedroom. She wears dresses
that Mala Aunty sews just for her on the machine. Every fortnight, her father comes
to spew filth in Tamil at my aunt’s gate. When Poornam hears his voice, she hides
under the kitchen table rocking and holding her head. He screams outside the gate
that our aunt is a bitch in heat, that she has stolen his child, that she conjures
evil spirits and black magic. His breath is fiery with the local toddy. It is not
until Mala has passed over an envelope of rupees that he leaves and Mala is able to
extract the child from beneath the table, hold her while she convulses in silent terror.

But these days Poornam is our merry playmate. She shows us the varied delights of
the garden that she and Mala Aunty have made blossom. At the back wall, a row of coconut
palms waits to be plucked and in honor of our visit, Mala sends for the coconut plucker,
Alwis. Alwis is taut, composed of skin stretched over long bones He smiles and flashes
enormous gaps, bloodred betel-flavored spittle. He gathers up his sarong around stick-thin
legs, wraps his limbs around the tree trunks, hauls himself up as quick as a monkey
to send coconuts, heavy as bricks, bouncing on the lawn. His voice floats above our
heads, suspended in the midday light. “Careful, Baby Nona! Only one of these will
crush your head. Pattasssss! Like a smashed frog on the road. Then it won’t be Baby
cracking coconuts. It will be coconuts cracking Baby!” Laughter echoes as he slides
down the rough trunk. Earthbound, he grasps a coconut in one hand, smashes down with
the machete. A spume of liquid arcs skyward.