What Lies Between Us (13 page)

*   *   *

There was the before-mother and here now is the after-mother. Another way of saying it: the Sri Lankan mother and the American mother. Whereas the earlier had been delicate and controlled (except when she was not), kept like a hothouse flower amid the beautiful carved furniture, the American mother is broader, a part of the world, out there among people in a way that would have been unthinkable in the world she grew up in.

Between my aunt and uncle and Amma, the travel agency is growing. There are always islanders willing to pay for passage home. There are always relatives dying, getting married, being born—so many reasons for return. My mother is there when they call. She says, “Yes. You can take a flight out on Sunday, early in the morning. I can book it now itself, if you like.”

Behind her head at the office is a lurid Technicolor poster of a Lankan beach, a lone palm tree stretching long over the tranquil water. This is what paradise looks like, all white sand and light playing on waves.

But Amma has never thought of home as a tropical paradise. She has never lain down on such a beach, and even if she had been forced to, she would have cowered under the shadow of a giant black umbrella, fearful for her complexion. And yet she longs to return, speaks often of going back, of reclaiming our house. Her true life is not here. The food is still strange; the people are cold. The only thing still holding her here: me. She can't go while I am still here. She won't leave me here alone. For this I'm grateful.

*   *   *

We are seventeen, Dharshi and I, giggling at her father's birthday party. We slide away to her room, where with a flourish she pulls out a secret stash of cigarettes. We light them up in the bathroom with the fan turned on and end up coughing and choking. She frowns and says, “What the hell? I thought it'd be more fun.” She waves the stubbed-out cigarette around and puts her other hand on her jutted hip. She says, “This looks cool, right? Super sexy?” I nod. She is beautiful, with or without the cigarette.

We go downstairs and find a table loaded with curries, a crowd of people singing old, forgotten songs, a cake Aunty Mallini has made in the shape of an airplane with a goggled teddy bear pilot whose billowing scarf proclaims “Fifty and Still Fabulous!” Uncle Sarath dissects a piece of teddy bear ear, holds it up to feed his wife and then his daughter. He wipes tears from his eyes and says, “So happy to have all of you. What a lucky man I am.” I kiss him on the cheek.

In the later stages of the party, baila music blaring, dancing aunties and uncles all around, Dharshi and I sway our hips. We hook arms and swing around each other. This is as much at home as I have ever felt.

*   *   *

A few months later I open a fat envelope with trembling fingers and buckle in joy. An acceptance letter to UC Berkeley. Amma holds me and cries, openly joyous; everything has been worth it, all her long hours, her weariness, America itself. She holds my face in her hands and says, “I am so-so proud of you.” My heart leaps. This is all I've ever wanted. To be told I am worthy of her love.

In September, she drives me to the leafy campus, my many new college-student necessities piled high in the car. In my room, she packs my tiny fridge with containers of rice and curry. Then I bundle her out and watch as she drives tearfully away. I feel guilty to be leaving her. But more than that, I am finally, gloriously free.

I have done it. I have won the immigrant prize, a scholarship to an American university. In just four years I have achieved this holiest of miracles. Below me, the campus spreads out like an ancient city waiting to be unearthed. This is the place in which my life will change, the place where my life is finally my own. I lie on my small bed in my dorm room. My roommate is coming tomorrow. The hours are my own. Sunlight pours onto me from the window like a rainstorm. It flames into the room, sets everything aglow, a thousand shades of burnished gold. The doors of the world swing wide open. I see my future self beckoning me with both hands. She is beautiful. She wears my face. It has lost the soft padding of youth. She is lined around the eyes and the mouth, silver glittering in her tumbling hair. Her body is heavier, rounded. It is exactly the body of the Sigiriya Queen. Her eyes, they shine with so much that is coming. “Hurry! Hurry!” she says. “Come now and grasp our life! I have been waiting for you, and I am
everything
.”

 

Eleven

Dharshi calls from her dorm at the University of Texas in Austin. She too has made good, made her parents' college dreams come true. She says, “You won't believe what my mother is on about now.” I can picture her eye roll, the phone balanced against her ear as she walks around her room, excited to feed me some tidbit of gossip.

And I, equally eager for her news, say, “What, what?”

“Okay, are you ready?”

“Yes, for god's sake. Just tell me.”

“Okay. So get this. She says I'm running wild at college, so she thinks it's high time I settled down and got married.”

“No!” I suck my teeth to express my horror. “Is she mad? It's still only our first year.”

“I know. You won't believe this. She's already written my matrimonial ad. She wants to put it in those awful Lankan papers that run in Toronto and London and Australia.”

“Oh my god. Do you have it?”

“Yah, listen to this. ‘Parents of Sinhala Buddhist girl. Govigama caste. Wheatish complexion, well educated, looking for similar boy. Must be well educated with potential for financial growth and strong family background. Dowry and astrological details to follow.' And then there's pictures of me.”

“Wheatish … ha-ha!”

“I know, right? I'm much darker than that. He's going to have a fright when he sees me.”

“Why is your mom doing this?”

Dharshi sighs. “She says dating like Americans is stupid. Leaving everything to love that can end at any time. She says marriage needs to be based on something much stronger, you know, wise parents who can pick properly for you without being confused by hormones and whatnot. She says she'll find me an amazing guy. And also she says architecture school is expensive. If I get a nice guy with loads of money, then he can pay for it.”

“What'd you say?”

“I said if that's the case, she should marry him and go to architecture school herself.”

I can picture my aunt's face when Dharshi said this. We break into peals of laughter.

She sighs. “I think she thinks she's just being practical. We aren't rich, and architecture school
is
expensive. Amma and Thatha had an arranged marriage, you know, and your mom married your dad, who was older and richer, so she thinks it's normal.”

I stumble at the mention of my parents' marriage. She and I have never talked about the things that had happened before we arrived on the set of our parents' lives.

“So what'd you tell her?”

“I said if she ever talked about it again, I'd go out and find the whitest boy on campus and marry him.”

“Even better, you should have said you'd find the blackest boy.”

We giggle, imagining my aunt's face if Dharshi ever said this. We are both well informed about our parents' hierarchy of desirable husbands, a perfect portrait of the recent immigrant's inherent racism. At the very mucky bottom layer of this pyramid and completely undesirable is a boy of the “duskier races.” To bring home a black or Latin man would be to risk forced smiles in the living room and a great deal of screaming after said male had departed. Directly above this layer is another, smaller layer made up of respectable, educated white boys with old families and lots of money. Not really acceptable, but less horror inducing than the darker Americans. Above the white guys, an even thinner stratum of other kinds of South Asians: Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis. Higher still would be other kinds of Lankans: Christian Sinhalese, Burghers, or god forbid, Muslims or Tamils. They weren't “our people,” but they were as close as possible to the zenith. And there, poised teetering on a glorious throne at the very top of this pyramid, is the prize, that almost mythic being: a Buddhist Sinhala boy of a “good old family” with “excellent earning potential.”

She says, “What I really told her was that if she made me do it, I'd kill myself.”

I'm silent for a moment, some sharp knife point of panic breaking my skin, and then she starts laughing. “Don't be an idiot. This is all stupid. She'll forget about it soon. She'll have to.”

*   *   *

I hang up ten minutes later, go back to my studies, and forget all about this. There is so much on campus to catch my love. The old, venerable buildings so different from the suburbs I grew up in, the miniature redwood forest in the middle of campus, the fat gray squirrels that come up and chatter like old friends, the color and hustle of Telegraph Street, with its marijuana haze and dreadlocked denizens. There are lectures in gorgeous brick and ivy buildings. There are new friends and beers in the evenings, plays and films and books. All of it alive, all of it exciting.

*   *   *

In our junior year, this happens. In the middle of the monsoon season on the island, Uncle Sarath goes back for the wedding of his cousin's daughter. Aunty Mallini refuses to go, claiming she is too tired for the two-day crossing of the planet, the checkpoints, and the curfews. So she sends Uncle Sarath with a suitcase full of presents and he goes alone to Colombo.

It is a year of a merciless monsoon. Rain smashes down until the roads are flooded, cars stuck tire deep in the mire of Galle Road. The power is cut daily. When the rain stops momentarily, people wade through knee-deep water to get their necessities before the deluge returns. The family of the bride whom Uncle Sarath is staying with are disheartened. How to have a wedding in the midst of this monsoon madness? The hall has been booked for months, the flower girls and poruwa makers are all sorted, but what if it floods on the day? What if the guests can't make it to the hotel? What will happen to the fancy saris and expensive hairdos in the onslaught? The father of the bride seeing his investments—the costs of the hall, the caterer, the dowry—swept away in the flood walks about with a stormy face. The bride breaks into tears at every opportunity. The mother of the bride has even wetter, more thunderous breakdowns.

Uncle Sarath remains in his room and tries not to get in their way. They have exclaimed over his presents, Mallini's cast-off clothes and handbags and his own old shirts and trousers, but now they seem to have forgotten him in the fervor of their wedding-day anxieties. He stays in the house for a week, and then perhaps deciding that he has had enough, he decides to go out into the street, face the rush of water head on. I imagine him excited at the prospect. Looking forward to being showered in the monsoon, as surely he must have been while growing up in this city. He must have decided to walk somewhere, perhaps to the Vijitha Yapa bookshop or to the Saraswathi Lodge for one of their legendary thosai. His destination will remain one of those little unanswered mysteries in our lives.

But Uncle Sarath has been in America for so long that he has forgotten the rules. He steps out onto Galle Road, sinks into water up to his calves, and raises his face to the sun, which is breaking through the clouds. Then he does a sudden dance. People hurrying by with their umbrellas finally folded think he is making a joke, welcoming the brightness back. But when his face goes black, they realize that his slippers have been swept away and he has stepped on a live wire under the water.

There are frantic, panicked calls to America. Aunty Mallini cannot comprehend what is being said. Someone she barely remembers from her own wedding decades ago, her husband's cousin he says he is, is sobbing and saying, “Sarath has died, Sarath is gone.” My mother calls me and tells me to come now, immediately. I call Dharshi's phone but get no response. I take the train and my mother picks me up at the station, her face ravaged. We drive to the house that was our first home in America. There are people sitting in the living room. I push past them into Dharshi's room. She is sitting cross-legged on the bed, her face perfectly wiped as if she is made of plastic. I go to her and she crumples. I had read this phrase before, but I had never seen it, the way a person's body literally deflates under the rush of grief. I hold her in my arms for hours while she shakes, her face against my chest, her hands clawing the bedclothes.

From the next room we can hear Aunty Mallini raging, “Why did he go there? Back to that cursed place? Why? He should have stayed here. We were safe
here
.” My mother tries to comfort her, but there's so little that can be said. We are again in a house bereft of men. We are again surrounded by haunted shadows and disbelief. How can two sisters lose their husbands to the rage of water? I am plunged back into those days after Thatha died. The same static hum has descended on this house. It sits eerie and everywhere in these rooms as I cook and clean and make sure these women are taken care of.

But whereas Dharshi's family had swept in during our time of tragedy to offer us succor and taken us with them to the far, golden edge of the new world, now there is nowhere farther we can take them. The four of us, we are two widowed sisters and their fatherless girls. A coven of women left by their men.

*   *   *

I stay for a week. But then I can't swallow it anymore. The house, the heaviness of female grief, the hum of loss that hangs so heavy in the air that it vibrates at its own frequency. This is the kind of grief I do not want to remember, do not want to enter, because I know that if I do, I will never leave this room of sorrow.

Every night I dream of my father climbing that curving tree in the rain, pausing at the top as if waiting to hear me call him back, and then dropping into the water. I had not seen his face after they pulled him out of the river. Amma had acquiesced on a closed casket, but I see his face now, bruised and torn and blue tinged over the brown, the destroyed unseeing eyes. I wake up shuddering in the dark. I remember what it is to lose a father, to feel unmoored in a great rushing stream one had never realized before rushed just under one's feet. I remember what it is to be uprooted, in deep water, so that your feet are over your head, the feeling that they will never again settle peacefully on solid earth. I know there is nothing more I can say to Dharshi that will bring her quiet.