Island of a Thousand Mirrors (12 page)

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Six months after landing in the desert city, we leave Ananda Uncle’s mansion and move
into a one-bedroom apartment where the carpet is a worn gray-green. In these close
quarters the tension between Amma and Thatha boils and swelters. Each little room
becomes disputed territory. Amma takes over the bedroom, spreading her few clothes,
paltry makeup, and costume jewelry everywhere. Her perfume colonizes the air, her
photographs are laid out on each flat surface. Thatha takes over the front room, sleeping
on the couch. His clothes spill like the guts of a disemboweled animal from a suitcase
on the floor. In these months, he is purse-lipped and preoccupied with studying for
the Professional Engineer Exam. His books, broken-spined and covered in scribbled
calculations, lie all over the floor and front table.

We negotiate these territories carefully, striving for neutrality like the Swiss or
the Norwegians. We sleep in the bedroom, piled together around Amma. We watch cartoons
with the sound turned low while Thatha studies at the table. Ananda Uncle has been
true to his word, moving him out of the clinic’s parking lot and into the office where
he now answers phones and directs patients. But his dissatisfaction is apparent in
the determination with which he studies. At dawn, or on breaks, during meals and on
the bus, at whatever moments he can steal, he studies. When he falls asleep on the
couch, a book clutched to his chest, we see his lips moving in the secret language
of engineers. He has contracted the recent immigrant’s fever. He wants more, so much
more. He wants to conquer this new country. Make it recognize his talents, his abilities,
make it see him. When he falls asleep on the couch, we learn not to wake him. When
even our muffled whispers rouse him, he is angry and disoriented, furious that these
brief moments of respite have been stolen from him.

On weekends, the tiny apartment is as tense as a war zone. Amma and Thatha circle
each other, testing terrain, pushing the pulse points that are most tender, most vulnerable
to injury and cutting word. Some days, we must duck smashing dishes like rapid machine
gun fire. When the crash of plates takes over that of voices, I make La change into
her bathing suit. We go out quietly, making sure we are not heard above the recriminations
and the accusations. Outside, the apartment pool is loud, the voices of kids like
those of seabirds echoing across the water. They cry “Marco” and “Polo” to each other
from opposite ends of the pool. We don’t understand the rules of this strange game,
so we stay aloof, each of us slipping into the water with a relief akin to that of
long exiled mermaids allowed to reenter their native element. In the water, sunlight
quivers like cobwebs of light. We swim with arms arching overhead, eyes open to the
curved bottom of the pool, the long ribbons of our breath released in streams of silver-spun
bubbles. We pass each other in streamlined motion, each of us frustrated at the rounded
edge that comes far too soon, flipping legs against the hard surface that propels
us the other way. We remember the ocean that we have lost. Those morning walks down
to the beach. Our father’s swimming lessons inherited from the fishermen of his own
youth. We are used to water without cease, water that stretches warm and endless to
the very rim of the world. This glorified bathtub cannot satisfy our desire for water.
We swim to exhaustion, lungs threatening to burst, our just developing biceps and
thighs quaking, sinews stretched and lengthened.

Afterward, I want to read with my elbows flung over the side of the pool, wet thumbs
cleaving to pages, rivulets running down my skin until half of me is submerged and
the other half desert dry. But La wants me to tell her stories. She wants the stories
Thatha used to tell when we lived in that white house by the railroad track. The ones
that he has no time for now. She wants the one about the foxes’ and hens’ wedding,
the one that he used to spin for hours, full of details, the hens’ wedding clothes,
the slavering foxes, the farmers at the very end scaring away the furry bridegrooms
from their plump feathered brides. She wants me to tell her about Mala and Alice and
Achi. She is forgetting their faces, she says. So I tell her stories while she floats
on her back, her hair spread weightless like a dark waterweed. We stay until the other
kids leave, claimed by parents or older siblings to various meals of dim sum or tamales.
We stay until our hands are wrinkled like pink mice and the setting sun lights the
tired little pool a tepid apricot.

When we return to the apartment, a sort of peace reigns. Thatha is at the table, his
pencil skimming quick sums and calculations, worry on his forehead. Amma is in the
bedroom, sorting through her photographs, touching her fingers to beloved features,
ourselves as babies, Alice hunched and scowling into the sun like a fairy-tale villain,
all of us at Wellawatte beach, our hair thrown about by the sea winds, the colors
startlingly vivid. We had forgotten that such colors existed. For a moment we, too,
feel the sea breeze. But Amma holds the picture, gazes at it for so long, that we
are uneasy. For all her determination to build a new American life, we can see her
longing to return to that lost weave of women.

*   *   *

But there are also the triumphs, as when Thatha, answering an advertisement in a newspaper,
buys a car, a battered brown station wagon, a decade old. Our very own car! The space
of it! The backseat that folds down! The windows that slip noiselessly away at the
push of a button! To celebrate, we drive seaward. That afternoon there is a sort of
affection lingering between Amma and Thatha, her fingers grazing his arm as he drives
and he returning the attention even as he stops to consult the map, tells stories
about the clinic, the impatient patients, the homeless drug addicts who gather in
the parking lot. La and I are quiet, willing this peace to last, to expand into our
other, everyday life.

When the beach swings into sight, it is as glorious as celluloid promised, long and
sun drenched, the sand peppered with people in various states of undress. Thatha carries
a large cloth bag into which Amma has packed careful containers of rice and curry,
plates, a flask of tea. She shelters under an immense black umbrella as if from the
most potent of thunderstorms. She will not allow herself to get dark even in this
mad country where people actually lie in the sun turning obscenely brown and black.

The Pacific. That farthest western ocean. It churns and seethes, dark blue flecked
with diamonds. The sight of it makes me realize how much I have missed salt water.
La throws off her T-shirt. In shorts and bathing suit she rushes to the water’s lacy
edge. I run to her. We step in and instantly the water cuts at our ankles like a hundred
shiny silver blades. We leap out shivering, icy drops splashed across our skins. The
ocean we grew up with was as warm as bathwater, pulling you in to hold you tenderly;
you could fall asleep in such water, lulled and embraced, the temperature at one with
that of your own body.

We retreat to Amma and Thatha, shivering, chastised. Amma says nothing, but her look
is triumphant. It says that we are stupid to trust this place, to expect its rules
to be the same as the ones we were born under. She hands us heaped plates of rice
and curry. We eat with forks (we are, after all, Americanized now), shivering in the
bright sunlight and wondering at the various bodies that sport and play, at home in
the icy water.

*   *   *

Amma has never really cooked before. “It wasn’t necessary,” she says, “Alice was always
there.” But now there is the necessity of feeding us, and so the recipes come, transcribed
on onionskin-thin blue aerogrammes. Alice’s words transcribed through Sylvia Sunethra’s
hand to our mother’s ear. She reads them, frowning, her mind fixed on the intricacies
of substitution. What can she use in place of gotukola, jaggery, coconut oil? The
myriad things that do not grow in this foreign soil. She must learn the skill of appropriation.
To use spinach when the recipe calls for gotukola, brown sugar for jaggery, olive
oil for coconut oil.

On weekends she takes us in search of potent spices and fresh vegetables. We brave
Mexican markets where quivering brains, coiled intestines, and the enormous scarlet
hearts of bulls lie in piles, while we look for red chili and turmeric. We buy exotic
vegetables we have only seen in shiny foreign cookbooks, serrated broccoli, hard and
cool white cauliflower. We bear these treasures home, heavy brown bags on our laps
in the lurching bus, ignoring the curious sideways glances of other passengers.

In the apartment, Amma roasts curry powder in the oven. La and I crush mustard and
cumin seed with a mortar and pestle. Vegetables pile on the counters, carrot and beetroot
greens trailing off the edge like the blue-green plumage of tropical birds. Pots boil,
spices fry, oil sizzles. The room is shrouded in steam, which wafts into the hallways
and makes our neighbors, those erstwhile Mexicans and dutiful Chinese, glance up curiously,
inhale sharply and deeply. But they are only curious. They have their own foody witchcraft
to remind them of various homelands. It is only the envy-eyed landlady, her hair cut
short, arm fat wriggling out of her sundress, who wrinkles her nose as she walks by
our open window. She drags her equally overweight dachshund on the end of a leash
and gossips about us to the dog. “Ohhh, are they making your nose twitch, my Wogums?
These Indians. Always cooking with their onions and their curry. How can they breathe
in there? Must be used to it. Where they come from, it must seem like a palace.”

Inside, La and I stifle giggles. She thinks we are Indians. We have never even been
to India! Amma pushes a sweaty hand against her forehead and frowns. This landlady
is the bane of her life, coming often to complain about the smells coming out of our
windows or the noise we supposedly make. Amma is always sweet and courteous on these
occasions, but now inside the sanctity of her own crowded and tiny kitchen, she whispers,
“Ooo, my little Wogums. Why don’t you just come over here and kiss your mommy on the
mouth with your dirty little dog breath, your filthy little doggie teeth. Come here,
little Woogums! Mmmmmuuuahhhh…” She pantomimes the fat woman’s swaying elephantine
walk, the way she holds the poor squirming dog high in the air, bringing it down to
her lipsticked mouth to kiss passionately. Thatha, too, has come into the kitchen
now. The three of us hold our hands tight against our mouths to hold in the giggles,
but it is no use and outside the landlady stands nonplussed listening to the gales
of laughter floating out of our window into the sunshine.

*   *   *

In these first years we learn the lesson of our inadequacies. In school we learn quickly
that the smell of our bodies is shameful, and must be dissipated by perfume, deodorant.
That the hair on our legs, the fine down that we had never noticed before, must be
daily shaved to smoothness. That certain kinds of clothes are acceptable and that
these do not include the ones we have brought with us from the “old country” or those
that Amma makes for us, no matter how painstakingly, on her old, beaten machine. We
learn that acceptable clothes can only come from stores, and for this reason we become
adroit shoppers at the local bargain basements, the Salvation Armies and the Goodwills,
looking for shirts, jeans, sweaters that will mark us as normal, as acceptable and
undistinguished in the crowd. We learn also that hair conditioner comes in bottles
and must be bought separately from cooking oil. We learn that although we have been
speaking English from birth, people cannot understand the crispness of the Queen’s
English mixed effortlessly with the roundness of Sinhala in our mouths. We have singsong
accents, they say. A tendency to substitute V’s when W’s are called for and vice versa,
so that “veil” comes out sounding like a large sea mammal. Various conversations are
thus rendered incoherent.

These are lessons about shame learned by watching eyes: by noticing the way the other
kids wrinkle their noses or pretend not to see us when we sit next to them at the
lunch table or on the school bus. By careful observation we realize that adaptation
and emulation will be necessary if we are to survive in this new place. So quite quickly
we learn to shed our old clothes, our old manners. We say “cookie” now quite effortlessly,
knowing that the word “biscuit” will be answered with blankness.

*   *   *

On our second Christmas in America, Ophelia Aunty gives us ribbon-festooned presents.
I forget what La’s box contained, but for me there was a tray of colored oil pastels
arranged from the deepest midnight to the purest moon. I am uninterested, but Lanka
is enraptured, in love with each hue. Suddenly she is playing with color, testing
and mixing shades so that our brown paper–bound schoolbooks become orgies of violet,
rose, scarlet. All surfaces become her playground. Thatha’s notes and Alice’s letters
bear tiny sketches in the corners, bits of mural appear on the wall behind Amma’s
bed. She asks for drawing paper and pads, but Amma says these are too expensive, so
I take grocery bags, slit them along the seams, and smooth them on the table for her.
These are her first drawing books, grocery bags carefully stapled together at the
edges.

In these days, it is always dark before Amma and Thatha get home. We let ourselves
into the apartment, heat the food Amma has left in the freezer on the stove. We are
supposed to be doing homework, but La is drawing faces, her tongue against the roof
of her mouth. I can see the curl of it between her slightly parted lips, her forehead
wrinkled in concentration. I should play big sister, bring her back to her schoolwork,
but I let her draw instead. She mutters to herself, “No, no, not like that.” She says,
“Look, Akka, a lip is like the petal of a hibiscus flower. The way it curls over.”
She draws for me a set of the most luscious curling lips, and I know that the colors
have released something inside her.