What Lies Between Us (7 page)

Tongue-clicking noises of disapproval, eyes rolled toward the heavens.

“These modern-day girls, what to do?”

“In my time we couldn't even look at boys.”

“My mother would have beaten me to death. Home and school and back again. That was it. Now they are going wild. One has to be so careful with girls. I never let my Shalini anywhere near that one. Cheap girls like that only ruin the others.”

They stop suddenly, remembering Puime and me with our ears open wide in their midst. I know the girl they are talking about. What happened to her? I know it has something to do with what has just happened to me, which is called “falling off the jambu tree,” for the bright red fruit of the jambu. It has to do with boys and maybe even something to do with what happens to me when Samson catches me alone, something bad and secret for which only a girl is responsible, for which a girl always has to pay. I know that these women will not keep the secret. By tomorrow, the girl's reputation will be dust. Even her marriage will not protect her from the barbs of gossip. Shame is female; shame is the price I must pay for this body. The fabric of my white dress is suddenly cloying.

Amma says, “Why don't you two go to your room.” We slip out. Climbing the stairs, Puime whispers, “God, when I grow up, I'm going to drink arrack in the garden with the men. I'm not going to sit around drinking lime juice and gossiping about
every single
person.”

I nod. I feel as though I have watched an execution.

*   *   *

After school we go to Puime's house. In the kitchen her mother is wearing just a sari blouse and her father's old sarong, her hair pulled into a messy bun at the nape of her neck. She is fleshy, rounded, jiggly, and maternal in a way I long for. She grabs Puime, gives her a loud sucking kiss on the forehead, and then turns to kiss me on both cheeks.

Puime groans and wrinkles her nose. “Ammie, what are you wearing?”

“What? You don't like it?”

“Is that Thatha's old sarong?”

“Yes, child, why can't I use it? Waste not, want not, isn't it?”

She pours batter into the small curved hopper pan, turns it deftly so that the liquid coats the rounded surface, breaks an egg into the middle of it, says, “Sit and eat. Now while they're still hot-hot. Otherwise it's useless. Here, have with this seeni sambol, a little bit of kata sambol.”

She flips delicate pancake-like hoppers with the bright yellow egg onto the middle of our plates, the edges delicate, the middle thick and slightly sour sweet. We break off the crispy lace ends to scoop up the sweet, burning onion sambol.

She says, “So … how was school today?” in a singsong voice.

“Ammie, the same, school is always the same.”

“Come on, can't be exactly the same.”

She turns her attention to me. “What about you? How was school for you? Since my one won't tell her mother a single word.”

“Good. Aunty, it was good. We had a speaker at assembly today.”

“Ah, see,
something
happened. At least you can talk, unlike my one. Takes a hundred and one times before she tells me anything.”

I nod along to her chatter. I wish my mother did these things. I can't imagine her in the kitchen making hoppers, barefoot in a sarong and a sari blouse. Even when she makes pancakes for me, it is different. She's tighter, contained and serious.

Later, in her room, both of us lying on her bed, our braids falling off the edge, Puime says, “My god. My mother is such a disaster. I wish she was like yours, always so elegant and polished, no?”

“Mmm-hmmm. But yours makes the best hoppers. I wish mine did that.”

“Why do you need her to make hoppers? You have Sita for that. A mother should be cool, calm, and collected like yours. That's how I'm going to be when I'm a mother. Not sweating and wearing my husband's old sarongs.”

“No way. When I'm a mother, I'll be just like yours.” The words leap through my mouth, and with them an instant flush of guilt. How Amma would hate to hear me say this. What an ungrateful daughter I am. And maybe Puime feels a like guilt because we go quiet, both of us staring up at the ceiling fan doing its slow revolutions.

*   *   *

I have a childhood brimful of river swimming and schoolgirl friendship. We eat papayas split open to reveal ruby flesh and small black seeds like obsidian pearls. I pick anthuriums, like flattened red hearts spiked by golden stamens; masses of frangipani, like bridal bouquets spreading their luxuriant perfume; small bell-shaped pink bougainvillea flowers frothing over the garden walls. The monsoon breaks over our heads and makes us splash in the street, joyous at the swift scent of wetted earth. Our uniform hems, shoes, and socks are soaked before the three-wheeler man rushes up and waves us in, drives us pell-mell through the suddenly flooded streets toward home. Carved jade geckos on the tops of doors bob up and down like miniature dinosaurs doing push-ups, darting out their heads for the grains of rice we hold stuck on the ends of sticks for them. In August, elephants trudge up the roads that lead to Kandy, a mountain of grass on their backs for their lunches, mahouts at their sides. They gather in the city for the annual Perahera, the procession of the Buddha's tooth through the streets that grants the city its sacred stature. We have the beauty of Kandy Lake and the royal palaces and the Temple of the Tooth. I have friends, school, books, and cousins; it is a childhood brimming over. But also here are some things you should know about this place in these years.

A civil war rages in the North and the East. These are the years when the military and the Tamil Tigers fight over ownership and land and belonging. These are the years of burning in the streets, when crowded buses are blown up by suicide bombers, when people necklace others in tires and set them alight. When driving in the night a family can be stopped and asked if they are Tamil or Sinhala. If they give the wrong answer, if they are Tamil facing a Sinhala mob or Sinhala facing Tiger cadres, they can be pulled out of their car and dragged in the dust by the back of their shirts, the women hauled away into darker corners.

Now here, in this other place so many years later, where I am locked up in my white cell, they ask me about it, my various doctors and lawyers. They think that maybe growing up in a war-torn land planted this splinter of rage in me, like a needle hidden in my bloodstream. They think that all these years later, it was this long-embedded splinter of repressed trauma that pierced the muscle of my heart and made me do this thing. “PTSD,” they say.

I remember walking to school with Puime once, seeing schoolboys rushing by, going the wrong way,
away
from school. She calls out, “What happened?”

A tall boy says, “The Tigers have closed the university. There are signs hanging up on the gates. If anyone goes, they will be killed.” We see stricken faces hurrying home.

She says, “We should go home.”

I say, “But I have a math exam.”

“And I have drama practice. But I don't think that matters now.” She was right. We learned that none of the normal cadences of life were important. We learned to go home, close the gates and the windows, and stay inside the house. In these days that sometimes slid into weeks, there was nothing to do but wait. The waiting itself was a sort of occupation we all shared. The shops were closed, the university was shut and then open and then shut and then open until everyone involved lost their bearings. Whole generations of students were blown off their life courses, rendered jobless, unmoored by direction or occupation. My father raged about the incessant closing of the university. “How are we supposed to work like this?” he asked us over and over and took refuge in his ever-present glass of arrack. But beyond this, we knew we had it easy, since elsewhere in the country, blood was flowing. I never witnessed a bus bombing, I never lost a friend or a relative, and so to me the war in our country seemed far away.

We saw the reports nightly on television, of course. We saw the rising body counts, the footage of bloody mayhem caused by suicide bombs, the maps showing the Tigers or the army always moving back and forth over the landscape of the North and the East like voracious enemy locust tribes. But mostly it was happening to people we did not know.

The war was just something we lived with. There was no other choice. We even made jokes about it because that was the only way to survive. And because of this, I laugh at the doctors and lawyers now when they tell me I have PTSD. If I have PTSD, then the entire island must have it. The only ones who don't have it are the lucky dead. So the war is not my excuse. The war happened to other people. I leave the story of that other, bigger war for some other teller.

But there is something else. There
was
a war, just not the one they are thinking of. In the shadow of that greater war, there was another smaller one. It was enacted within my body and between my bones. It took the small, delicate creation that I was, smashed it with a hammer, and set it upside down. All my pieces fell in the wrong order. I was separated from myself, and empty, echoing spaces were opened in me for a darker inhabitant. No one knew, no one suspected. And yet even this smaller war is not my excuse. My sin is only and ever my own.

 

Five

Our books and sheets of homework are spread across the living room table when Puime looks at me from under her lashes. I can tell she wants to say something, so I say, “What?”

She shrugs, then says, “I don't know … I shouldn't say. But why does he look at you like that?”

“Who?” My heart is jumping in my throat. I keep my eyes on the page.

“You know who.”

“Like what?”

“Just strange.”

“Strange like what?” I grip my pencil to keep my fingers steady.

She says, “Just strange, you know. Strange.” And then she looks away and is asking me if the five needs to be carried or if the ellipsis means it will be divided later, and I attend to her question. Later that night just before I fall asleep, I remember this moment. It is startling because someone else has sensed the other and impossible world I live in. Someone else has sensed what is happening to me. But how can I tell her? I have no words.

Sometimes nothing happens for months. I do not have to start at each sound; I do not have to run for cover if I hear him behind me. Some mysterious cease-fire and he is just my old friend Samson. I am diligent, but in these times he is nice, gathering guavas and avocados for me, pointing out the fishing birds in the trees. These kinds of things do not happen to girls like me. I am from a good family. I go to a good school. I have an Amma. So how can this be happening in my own home? It is unimaginable.

When I'm sure I have only dreamed everything, I am grabbed. My body held tight. A lurching against me. Hands fumbling on my chest, rubbing against my nipples. Fingers across my mouth. A throat against my nape. He rubs against my skin, and there down below I can feel it smashing up against my flesh, grinding against my buttocks. His fingers under my uniform, on the bare skin of my buttocks, moving to the cloth of my underwear; pressure against that part of me that has become bad, the source of all corruption. Fingers groping and entering sacred space. He takes my hand and forces the fingers open, puts it there around him, his large fingers wrapped around mine, moving. I can feel his rage. Something transferring from him to me. I know that I will never again be alone in my body. A grunt, and my hand is sticky. He sags against me and I think of grabbing the hand that rests on my shoulder and putting it in my mouth and crushing my teeth down until I taste red. I don't do it. I am always too afraid of what will happen after that.

He holds me against him as his breath calms. He whispers against my hair, “Don't tell. Don't tell. Your Amma will leave.” His voice is almost weeping. I stagger away. I go into the bathroom, bend my head. I vomit every single time.

*   *   *

I stop going down to the river. Thatha tries to persuade me to go, but I say I have too much homework. I miss the glide of the river over my skin. But it is so much better to give up these things than to think of Samson hidden and watching. I stop wearing my American shorts. I put them in a bottom drawer until Puime says, “What happened to your shorts? You never wear them anymore.”

“Do you want them?”

Her eyes narrow in surprise. “What? Really? You don't want them?”

“No, I'm sick of them. You take them.”

Glee in her voice. “Really? But your aunt sent them
from America
.”

I brush away the words, as if shorts from America are an everyday occurrence. “No, I don't want them. They barely fit anyway. You take them.”

“Okay!”

I pull them out of the bottom drawer; with them, the memory of his hand, huge and tight around my bare thigh. I swallow hard and throw them at her head. She catches them, laughing. “I can't wait to wear these! Amma will have a fit.”

*   *   *

I go from his clutch to sitting at my desk at school, and it is like being in another world where what happens to me at home is impossible. Someone says, “What is that? What happened to you?” She points at the bruise on my arm, just above the elbow and therefore not hidden like the others by my uniform. I rub it and shrug. “Nothing. Just bumped it somewhere.”

In the bathroom I undress fast, bathe quickly, never pausing to look. My body doesn't belong to me anymore. There is a fog around it, that white cloud settling. So I never see the bruised flesh, the imprint of his fingers.

*   *   *

I push my table against my door every night. He has never come inside at night. But he
could
come. At any time he could come. Something has started happening inside my skin. Sprouting from my shamed heart, a dark, fibrous waterweed grows and spreads along the nerves of my body. It reaches to every far capillary and vein, turning them green, the green of algae or stagnant water. I am covered, choked up, clogged on the inside. I know that if I am cut, I would not bleed red, but instead, a rotted putrid green.