Island of a Thousand Mirrors (6 page)

One says, “Sir. I am C. K. Suraweera. This is Anuradha Munasingha. We are, both of
us, in the engineering batch at Peradeniya.” The Doctor notes their nervousness, the
trickles of sweat running down their necks, is perplexed but says, “Aha … You are
friends of Nishan’s. Only … he is not here just now. He is in Colombo.”

The first young man says, “Actually, sir, we have come about your daughter, Mala.”
And Mala, hiding just behind the curtain, pushes her hand against her fluttering heart.

When they leave, Beatrice Muriel stamps her foot, shouts, “Madness! This boy comes
on his own! No family members, no proposal, nothing at all? Only that sweating, sweating
friend of his. Who does he think we are?” Pausing for breath and shifting the direction
of her ire, “Mala, what do you have to say about this boy? If you have done anything
with him I will skin you alive.”

And the Doctor, “Shhh, wife, let her explain. Duwa, tell us, who is this boy? What
are his intentions?”

And Mala, looking at the floor, a toe tracing designs on the polished red wax, “His
name is Anuradha. We became friends at the university. He has done really well. He
will take a degree and has a job already in Colombo.”

Beatrice Muriel, wringing her hands, “Yes, yes, girl, but has he talked of marriage?”

“Yes, we have talked about it. If you will agree, he wants to get married as soon
as possible.”

There is silence and then the familiar smack of Beatrice Muriel’s palm against her
forehead. “A love marriage,” she says. In her opinion, love marriages border on the
indecent. They signify a breakdown of propriety, a giving in to the base instincts
exhibited by the lower castes and foreigners. She believes marriages are far too important
to be relegated to the randomness of chance meetings and hormonal longings. They must
be conducted with precision, calculated by experts, negotiated by a vast network of
relations who will verify the usual things: no insanity in the family, evidence of
wealth and fertility, the presence of benevolent stars.

Now she is faced with the thorniest of dilemmas. Whether to hold on to her philosophies
and see Mala a spinster, or succumb to impropriety and see her daughter married without
the benediction of astrologers or a proposal.

Practicality decides the matter quickly. Anuradha is invited back to the house, installed
in the best chair, handed a cup of tea and a slice of Beatrice Muriel’s love cake.
After he leaves, the Doctor tells his daughter, “A good boy. You will be happy,” with
moisture in his eye.

Beatrice Muriel says, “What a wedding we will have! With plumeria flowers and an Indian
sari for you. We will put that Samaraweera girl’s wedding to shame. These modern boys
will marry even if the horoscope is bad, no? So why fight progress?”

*   *   *

While his sister is being spoken for, at a birthday party in a large white house by
the ocean, Nishan is about to meet the seventeen-year-old who will be his wife. Around
him, men swirl whiskey and politics. “God only knows what is happening in the north.
Those Tamil buggers talking rot, oppression, separate country and whatnot. Should
just send the whole lot back to India. That’s what I say.”

Nishan juggles whiskey glass in one hand, cake plate in another. It is one of those
rare occasions when he has been dragged away from his books by the uncle in whose
Colombo house he is spending the university holidays. This uncle now steps forth to
play his momentous though short-lived role in our story. “This,” he booms, “is the
youngest daughter of the house.” Nishan looks, and observes the most delicate of features.
The uncle continues, “Lucky boy who gets this one. She is studying now. Wants to be
a lady doctor.”

Witness Nishan. The sudden sweat that has broken out on his brow. He sees big eyes,
sharp chin, fragile collarbones. He can only smile and nod, attempting to keep whiskey
and cake steady.

Whereas she, object of his desire, what is she thinking? She, nursing a secret pain
in her chest, her thoughts occupied by desperate plans. How to get upstairs? How to
see him again? She sees and doesn’t see the man in front of her. Much later, after
the proposal has come, the marriage plans laid, she will cast back in her memory for
this moment and burst out, “But he was such a mouse! Is it possible?”

*   *   *

In Hikkaduwa, Beatrice Muriel fumes and storms. She cannot believe her stars. First
one child and now the other has made rubbish of her finely laid marriage machinations.
The girl was fine. Lucky, even, to have the burden of a dark-skinned daughter lifted
off her hands by a boy who doesn’t seem to care much about dowry, hasn’t even raised
the question of what property or wealth Mala brings with her. But this, her son! An
engineer! How to just give him up to the first girl who takes his fancy? Some Colombo
girl of reduced circumstance, no less! How is it to be borne?

But histrionics make no difference. For once, the young man has made up his own mind.

*   *   *

On a September afternoon when the skies are liquid silver, Visaka comes home to find
her mother in the front garden doing a sort of whirling dance, sari flying, fat arms
shaking. She calls, “Come, come quickly!” Draws Visaka under the wing of her sari,
into the house and away from curious eyes. “Look, Duwa.” She lays down an opened letter,
the concentric circles of an astrological chart. “See who has sent a proposal for
you. An engineer! From a far branch of the family. If we catch this one, all our troubles
are finished.” Sylvia Sunethra is smiling so broadly that Visaka can only arrange
her features in a similar way.

The news flies. “The eldest son of the Hikkaduwa Rajasinghes! A qualified engineer,
even!” Female relations gather at the Wellawatte house to offer congratulations. They
drink tea, nibble Marie biscuits, and pinch Visaka’s cheeks. They pat Sylvia Sunethra
on the shoulder. “You have done so well for her. And all by yourself even. No father
to help spread the word or negotiate the dowry. She’s such a lucky girl.” They scrutinize
the girl, trying to ferret out the qualities that draw engineers to young, available
daughters. Is it in the tilt of the chin? The delicate forehead? This girl looks like
any other schoolgirl, painfully thin in her white uniform, heavy braids hanging on
either side of her face. Her eyes are perhaps bigger than usual, her face a little
more feline. But by what alchemy has Sylvia Sunethra produced such an illustrious
boy for this perfectly ordinary-looking girl?

While relatives conjecture and theorize, Sylvia Sunethra sets the wedding machinery
in motion. Astrologers confer with stars. Caterers are engaged. Small girls are measured
for half sari.

*   *   *

On her wedding day, Visaka is awoken before dawn. She is bathed and dressed, her limbs
are oiled, her lips and eyelids painted by careful hands. And all the while she is
convinced of impossibility. She is not being dressed in yards and yards of white,
this veil like sea mist is not descending over her head. These relatives are not gathered
to wish her well, they are not placing her gently in a car adorned in jasmine. None
of this is really happening, she tells herself over and over.

At the hotel, crowds of people. She is thankful now for the frothy protection of the
veil, hiding her from their eyes, a filmy membrane between her and the real world
in which Kandyan dancers twirl and flip and drummers pound her arrival. Her, the bride!
This, too, is not happening. Then Alice is at her elbow whispering, “Be careful. He
is here.” She looks and sees a crowd of Shivalingams. Yes, they have come, too, honoring
Sylvia Sunethra’s invitation. And there he is, Ravan, next to his wife, who wears
a leaf-green sari. She must look away. Force herself not to look at that side of the
room because she knows that if his eyes meet hers, she will sag under the weight of
this sari, this blouse, skintight and constraining her breath.

On the
poruwa,
she is barely aware of the young man beside her. When she bends and unbends, worshiping
at the feet of a long line of elders, he too bends and unbends so that it seems he
is her double, her shadow, something without substance. It is only when their pinkie
fingers are tied together, the water flowing over their hands, that she is suddenly
aware that he is real, an actual man standing next to her, touching her.

She lets this man (her new husband! she thinks without comprehension) take her hand,
lead her off the
poruwa
to a settee bedecked in pure white plumeria, the fragrance from the flowers so intoxicating
that her head spins. She sits, she smiles over the heads of the people who come to
wish them well. She offers first one and then the other cheek to lipsticked aunties
who leave their mark on her skin, offers her hand to be grasped over and over by hearty
uncles.

There are so many people, some she has never seen before, some she hasn’t seen since
the Judge’s death. There are her new in-laws and their various people speaking to
her as if from far away, their tones suspiciously reminiscent of some fishing village.
She smiles, she nods, and is glad that this is all that is asked of her.

She sees him coming toward her. Ravan, as she has not seen him before. Confident,
self-contained, not the boy she knew. She knows he has come to claim her. Knows he
will lay his strong hand on her skin, those fingers will encircle her wrist, erasing
the touch of all these others, she knows he will say to all these strangers, “She
is mine. I’m taking her away now.” She is rising from her seat. His eyes are vacant
except for a sort of seething hatred. She watches his familiar lips move while he
says, “Congratulations. All the best to you.” He shakes her husband’s hand. The green-saried
wife kisses her quickly on each cheek and then they have moved away, into the crowd.
Visaka sits down carefully. The edges of things move back into themselves. There is
no more uncertainty in this world for her.

*   *   *

They honeymoon in the misty tea country where dark women in bright saris pulled over
their heads bend over bushes, fingers twisting about the very top leaves like quick,
busy insects. On cool hotel-room mornings she wakes to find her new husband, Nishan,
bringing her tea. They spend days in the hushed lunchrooms of various hotels or wandering
lush botanical gardens. At night there are awkward gropings. It isn’t until the fourth
night that she allows him to push hard into her. A completely new sensation, her flesh
wrapped around this man. It is painful, frightening, the way his breath becomes tense,
taut, until finally he shudders into her. She had not thought it would be like this.
She had never suspected that this was the ultimate goal in all those long embraces
in her hidden love-den. She realizes how carefully Ravan has kept this knowledge from
her.

When afterward, her husband looks carefully at the sheet to find the splotch of blood
that indicates her honor, she turns her head away. In the morning before they leave
she strips it from the bed, folds it up carefully, and puts it in their bag so that
he can present it to his mother. She knows that at the homecoming in two weeks it
will be discreetly displayed in the proper way so that all the family will know that
he has married a good girl, an unspoiled girl. Now she turns her head, settles it
into the crook of her elbow, in her heart twin shards of gratitude and resentment.

What they both remember best: the rush and roar of an upcountry waterfall on the drive
back to Colombo. The ferocity with which it poured into the pool so that they were
only able to approach cautiously, slipping into the quiet edges of the water and wading
in slowly. Extending first an arm, then a leg, and then their tentative heads to be
beaten upon like drums, the sarongs tugged from their bodies leaving them half naked
and laughing, exposed to each other for the first time in sunlight. For hours after,
during the long drive toward the city, as the chill of the mountain water turned to
sweat, the crash of falling water and each other’s laughter rang in their ears.

They come together like misaligned planets and yet there must have been passion because
after merely a year of wedded life, while people are still asking the usual questions
about married life, the bride is starting to swell gently in the right areas. Sylvia
Sunethra is delighted. The young engineer outwardly chagrined, but secretly proud.
Visaka, herself, astonished at the rapidity with which her body transforms from that
of an angular schoolgirl into the softness of maternity.

*   *   *

Upstairs, the wife of Ravan Shivalingam is also pregnant. The two women’s bellies
grow as if they had been inseminated at precisely the same moment. When Visaka sees
her rival, swaying on the arm of her husband, her ire swells and surges so that I,
nestled and suspended in the seas within her, grimace and twist my stubs of fingers
into minuscule fists.

In more peaceful moments, I must have desired specificities because daily she longs
for only one thing, that strangest of fruits, the spiky red rambutan. Every morning
Alice returns from the Wellawatte market, her shopping basket full of every kind of
delicacy. In the kitchen, she sweats over pots of lentils, fish curries, coconut sambal.
Anything to tempt Visaka’s appetite, but she is only interested in one flavor. She
eats rambutan by the heap, splitting the bitter shells between her front teeth, feasting
on the gelatinous white flesh until broken shells lie like shattered sea anemones
at her feet.

And perhaps it is this glut of the scarlet fruit that brings on my birth, because
one afternoon, two weeks before she is due, Visaka, sucking on a rambutan, feels me
twist and turn and begin my headlong journey to light. Her screams summon the household.
Nishan has taken the car to work so Sylvia Sunethra must ask Mr. Shivalingam if he
will drive. In the ensuing commotion, the other pregnant woman, too, perhaps in sympathy
with Visaka’s shouts, goes into labor. The two are driven to the hospital, pain making
them forget enmity so that they grip each other’s hands white and scream in unison.