What Lies Between Us (3 page)

*   *   *

Amma says, “We didn't do it like that. We broke the rules.” I can tell she is both proud of and ashamed about this. They had been on an up-country bus. My father, a young man on his way to the university; Amma, a girl of unknown pedigree, certainly not someone his parents if they had been alive would have approved of. He had seen her, her bare arm snaking up out of her sari blouse sleeve to hold on to the swaying strap of that bus, which moved like a boat. She was willowy in her printed sari, her feet in leather sandals, the toenails painted the lightest blush of pink. He had looked at these toes and then dared to look at her face, and she had not looked away, as almost any other young woman would have done. Instead she had held his gaze for the briefest moment, and he had been snagged on that glance.

She says, “He had a nice shirt. I knew he was a Peradeniya boy, and that was all the difference.” She continues, “He passed me notes after that. On the bus. He was so nervous. He didn't even need to take the bus. He had the car. But that one day it had broken down and he had taken the bus, and from then on, every day he took the bus and I was there.”

He'd had his friends make inquiries. They learned that she was poor. Her sister and she were living with relatives after the parents had been lost in some typhoid complication. Her dowry was meager. What she did have was beauty, and for my father, who owned this house by the river, whose own parents had died, and even more important, who was rich enough to do as he pleased—including studying something as useless as history, getting a doctorate in it, and then teaching it at the university—this was enough.

They saw each other on the bus for months. He passed her notes that declared his undying passion, slipping them into the open mouth of the shopping bag at her feet or into the cheap unclasped bag under her armpit. She never responded either in word or through letters of her own. She never even looked at him again. That initial meeting of his gaze, that was all she could declare. After that everything was up to him. “A girl can't be cheap,” she says. “You have to maintain yourself. Do you understand? You have to keep your pride. Without that, a girl is nothing.”

*   *   *

They met formally thrice before they were married. He went to her relatives' small, battered house and was fussed over and served weak tea and plain cake on two occasions. Once he had escorted her to the cinema, where a thin, sweating aunt had sat between them and they had watched the earnest Professor Higgins labor over the guttersnipe Eliza Doolittle's vowels before falling in love with her. The young professor sat in the dark and wondered if he could enact a similar metamorphosis with the girl who sat on the other side of the thin aunt. Meanwhile, the girl was rigid with terror and excitement at the spectacle of the moving giants above her. It was her very first movie. She was seventeen years old, and her suitor was twenty-nine.

After the movie they went for falooda and Chinese rolls. The thin aunt had gone off to the bathroom and the young man had realized that what he had seen in her eyes when she first met his gaze on the bus had not been passion or rebellion but desperation. It was frightening to realize this, but it did nothing to assuage his desire. He was hooked.

They were engaged and her relations were jubilant. Most incredible, this bridegroom had not asked about dowry, had not mentioned the requisite plots of land, refrigerators, or houses that were usually expected. His own family was livid. An extensive collection of aunts and uncles and cousins and assorted jetsam of the far-flung family refused to come to the wedding. There were only the groom's colleagues and their wives. On the bride's side, only her older sister, some of her badly dressed family, and a few of her young school friends, shy around the older people. It was a truncated and odd assortment in a country where extravagant weddings are a national pastime. And then even in this small gathering, all around the couple, a hum of gossip.

One professor's wife bows her head close to another's, says, “Do you know? They met on a
bus
?”

The other takes a shocked suck of air. “What? Can't be.”

“It's true. I heard from Sujatha's son.”

“These modern girls. They'll do anything to catch a good one.”

“Yes men. Can you imagine if his parents were alive to see?”

“They must be turning in their graves. Such a good old Kandyan family.”

“Yes. What to do? The world is not what it was. All the old rules are broken.”

They, the newlyweds, heard the whispers and ignored them. They ran out to his car in a hail of rice. No more buses for them. Then they were alone. They were not used to each other's scents or tastes. The bride had only ever shared a bed with her older sister. They had never kissed or held hands. But this was normal and natural. For it to be otherwise would have been unthinkable. In this place and time, one did not dip a toe into marriage; one plunged into it, fully dressed.

There is only one other wedding picture in the house. It sits on my mother's dressing table, and when she sees me looking at it, she says, “I was just a child. Only seventeen. And I had you the next year. You were with us from the very beginning. It was always the three of us.” She considers the picture and tells me the story yet again. “Only those two photographs. The photographer went out and got drunk after the wedding. Got in a fight and destroyed his camera. All the rolls were ruined. I cried for a week when they told me. Thank god, at least Aruna Uncle had a camera. Otherwise even these two we wouldn't have.”

Beneath the glass of its frame, the photograph still shows off its cobwebbed crinkles. I had been small, maybe four or five. I had awoken in the middle of the night to loud voices. I had slipped out of my narrow bed and gone to stand in the hallway that led to their bedroom. I saw his arm raised and this photograph in its previous frame hurled across the room. Heard the crash of it against the wall. He saw me then. He came to the door, put his finger to his lips. S
hh,
he was saying, I must be quiet. I must be good and go back to bed. He closed the door.

Later either he or she had taken the picture, unfurled it, and put it in a new frame. It was something I learned then. That you could take the crumpled remains of something destroyed and smooth them into newness. You could pretend certain things weren't happening even when you had seen or felt them. Everything done can be denied.

*   *   *

Sometimes at twilight she goes out to stand at the line of trees by the river's edge. She watches the dark water flow by her bare feet. I watch from a window. I know my father is watching her from a different window in his study. His hand is curled around a glass of arrack. He will drink for hours and then he will fall asleep in his chair. I have found him there, his head lolling on the student papers, the empty glass dropped from his nerveless fingers onto the floor, making a pungent puddle by his bare feet. I don't wake him. I have done this before and he had looked at me with some terrible warning in his eyes, so now I always let him be.

Now from our separate windows, we watch her. She does not belong to us, but to some other state, some other mood, and even if we called to her, she would ignore us or stare back at the house, past us in the windows as if we did not exist. When the sun drops as suddenly as a shot bird, all we can see are her earrings, jagged lines of silver that dart from the tips of her earlobes to the silhouette of her rounded shoulders. We watch these lightning flashes until they too disappear.

 

Two

She bakes cakes; she sings songs. She sews clothes for herself and for me and my dolls on her Singer. Matching outfits in the same fabric—a long yellow maxi for her, a mini for me, and a tiny replica for my doll. She is bright; she is beaming. She is just like the mother in my English storybooks.

But some mornings I wake to muffled shouting across the hall. I pull the single sheet over my head and pretend it is only the roar of the ocean, which I have seen on trips to Colombo.

Later my father tells Samson, “Keep an eye on Madame today. Okay, Samson? She's resting.”

“Yes sir.”

He drives me to school. Hours later, I come back in a trishaw with my friend Puime, who lives nearby. Samson greets me at the gate, takes my bag. I say, “Did Amma come out?”

He says, “No, Baby Madame, not today.”

I go and sit against her door, my knees folded under me, an ear pressed to the wood. I hear nothing. No rustling of clothes, no whisper of pages, not even the sound of a body turning in bed. For hours I wait to hear the slightest sound, the merest whisper of evidence that she is inside. Crying, shouting, raging—anything rather than this haunted silence.

Later I open the door and go in as quietly as I can, moving as sly as a cat. She lies in the bed, her eyes following the spokes of sunlight that move across the wall. I climb onto the bed, take the hand that lies clenched over the coverlet, ease open the fingers. She clutches my hand like she is drowning, won't look at me.

We stay like this for a long time and then her head whips across the pillow, her gaze narrowing on me. “Why do you always
look
at me like that?”

My heart racing, I shrug.

“Honestly, child, what is wrong with you? Sometimes I feel like you will eat me up. It's frightening.”

I look away. How do tell her I am afraid she will disappear? That one day I will push against the door, come in on my cat feet, and find no sign of her. They will tell me that she never existed. That I never had a mother. It is the most terrifying thing I can think.

*   *   *

On good days she leaves her room as soon as my father's car has pulled away and goes down to the garden with Samson. When I don't have to go to school, I follow along, quiet as a shadow. I listen to them speaking in Sinhala, a language she never uses with my father. Samson says, “Look, Madame, the double-petaled hibiscus has flowered.” Her face dips to the blossoms, deep red and frilled like one of her dresses. The stamens leave golden stains on her nose. They stay there because he cannot reach out and dust them off as I can, or as my father can.

She sits on the wicker chair under the shade of spreading trees and arranges lush bouquets of frangipani, jasmine, and orchids, giant crab claws curving over the other blossoms. Samson brings her a silver tray of tea and sandwiches and waits to hear her instructions: the new flowers she wants planted, the number of coconuts he must scale the trees for.

She waves her slender arm and says, “Samson, don't you see? There, in the guava tree. The birds are eating all the fruit.” Samson says, “Yes, Madame,” and runs to chase the birds away while she watches keen as a hawk.

*   *   *

She does not believe in safety. Catastrophe is always around the corner. It is clear in the sharpness with which she looks at me if I sneeze or cough. The sudden fear sparking in her voice like a match lit in a dark room. “Are you getting sick? Are you feeling hot? Come here.” The back of her cool hand against my throat, her palm cupping my forehead. If I go to the toilet at night, I creep silent along the wall, afraid to turn on the light, feeling my way with my bare toes. She calls out in the dark: “Is that you? Where are you going?” Her voice urgent, afraid, wide awake.

She is afraid of
as vaha
, evil eye.
As
meaning eye and
vaha
meaning poison. The poison that drips from covetous eyes. She believes that people envy the good fortune that has brought her to this house, saved her from whatever horrors there were before. The as vaha can bring ill fortune, sickness, and death, so once a year she takes me to a temple where a Hindu priest sits bare-chested, ash on his forehead. He takes the small green limes we have brought and holds each one up to my forehead one by one. He slices them in two with his silver lime cutter. Fifty limes, cut one by one. He intones the verses that will splash acid juice in the eyes of all those who envy our good luck.

We don't tell Thatha about these trips. He is Buddhist in a lazy way, but he will not like this. He will say that she is polluting her Buddhism with these Hindu rituals and superstitions. So the lime-cutting trips are a secret held tight between Amma and me.

*   *   *

In the morning before school I am tugging my hair into sections for braids. The rules are strict. The part in the hair must be straight as a ruler and the hair must be pulled away from our faces, secured at the ends with the blue ribbons that along with the blue tie on the white uniform are emblematic of our school.

Amma comes in quietly, takes the comb from me, glides it through my hair, the teeth a gentle rasp against my skull, her hands careful. There is a slight tug as she sections the hair, intertwines the shanks. I close my eyes and imagine that this is always so. We are like this for a long, quiet time. She says, “I think that's good.” A kiss on the top of my head. “That looks nice, right?” We survey her work in the mirror. My plaits are perfect, so much better than what I can usually manage alone. I say, “Yes, Amma. That's very nice. Thank you.” She breathes a sigh of relief, pats my head, goes off. Some loveliness blooms.

*   *   *

Thatha's dogs, Punch and Judy, were named for the puppets that were popular in his childhood. They lie at his feet watching his face with the devotion of lovers, waiting for instruction from this god. There is devotion too in the way he speaks to them. A certain tone of voice that makes these enormous, snarl-snouted dogs writhe with delight when he pauses with his hand on their heads. When he is home, they have no eyes for anyone else. But there are always students waiting, lectures to be written, books to be read, so often the dogs must make do with me. When he is not home, they are my constant companions. I throw stones, which they dash to retrieve. They come back panting, drop saliva-covered, river-smooth rocks at my feet to be thrown again and again.