Island of a Thousand Mirrors (24 page)

Shiva’s fingers tight around my wrist, “Yasodhara, let’s go. I’ll drop you home before
I go to the hospital. She must be home by now.” The lilt of hope at the edge of his
brittle, unshaven voice.

Inside the house, the phone is screaming. He runs in through the door I left swinging
open lifetimes ago. I sit in the car, waiting, and when I hear him sobbing, I drop
my head onto my hands and scream.

*   *   *

The police say, “Family members only.” So Shiva drives me across town to the station.
He looks straight ahead, his fingers grasping and releasing the wheel endlessly. He
says, “They’re not sure. It doesn’t have to be her.” I can’t speak so I nod. “Can
you do this? I can call Mala.” I shake my head, ferocious. If La is there, waiting
to be claimed, I know I am the one to do it.

I leave him in the car, hope and despair fighting in his eyes. I push my way through
the silent crowd. All of them waiting for names. The same thoughts evident in the
eyes of old men in sarongs, young women holding babies, panic-stricken mothers. “Maybe
she wasn’t there … Maybe he took a different bus … Maybe he’s already home.”

My blue passport grants me quick access. Inside all is chaos and people in uniforms
shouting. I am shown a plastic chair, told to wait. I sit with my head flung backward
to stare at the slowly revolving ceiling fan. A profusion of flies zigzag in the space
above my head. My bowels seize and I am sure she lies here slowly turning from flesh
to stone, my sister, my sister, my sister. Panic flooding my body. Like drowning.
Great moaning gasps ready to erupt, but in the next moment I am adamantly as sure
that she is at home, in the kitchen, mystified by the half-cut vegetables sauced with
my blood, annoyed at our lateness: “Everyone on this island. Always late!” I want
to wake up and describe this malevolent, unsettling dream to my beautiful sister and
her lover. Sit in their garden and have sweet, milky tea, let them laugh over my paranoid
imagination, my big-sister overprotectiveness. Listen to her say, “Akka, must you
always imagine the very worst?” in her exasperated voice.

A young policeman comes for me. He looks harried, a scar running across the length
of his left cheek, the slash of a machete in some old conflict perhaps. Something
vaguely canine in his face, the large brown eyes perhaps. Above his pocket a name
tag reads
C. SERASINGHE
. He says, “We have found a victim with the ID card of your sister. Usually we wait
for confirmation … but…” Unsaid between us are the threats I used, the invocation
of the American Embassy. I can feel the resentment in his gaze at the heavy privilege
that grants me access, while outside a throng waits to have the same questions answered.

I don’t care about his resentment or my privilege. I don’t care about where and how
I fit into this place anymore. I only need to confirm that my sister’s body is not
lying here so that I can go home to her, laugh with her about this particularly macabre
episode. “Only in Sri Lanka,” we will say, and shake our heads. In later years we
will say, “Remember when I had to go to the morgue to identify your body?” and smile
at the horror on friends’ faces.

I say, “Can you show me?” C. Serasinghe shrugs his shoulders, turns, and leads me
into the dark interior of the station, down loud, crowded corridors to a door.

“You have a handkerchief?” When I shake my head, he says, “Here, take. Otherwise the
smell is very bad.” He pulls out a soiled piece of cloth. I take it in fingers that
are suddenly nerveless and fluttering like windswept leaves. He makes a noise like
a disgruntled bear, pulls the cloth from me, holds it up beneath my eyes, ties it
behind my head, gently gathers and frees my hair. His eyes ask if I am ready. I nod.
I cannot trust my voice here behind the yellow cloth. I put my trembling hands under
my armpits.

C. Serasinghe says, “Come,” pushes open the door with his shoulder, ushers me into
a crowded room where people walk about taking pictures. It is well lit and full of
low tables that are covered in sheets under which lie lumpy shapes. The scent of burned
flesh, like a barbecue by the pool at home, sweet, makes me gag. I have to swallow
violently, press my fingers against my throat to ease down bile. We walk past tables,
my mind struggling to reconstruct what lies under these sheets, piecing together the
incongruent shapes like jigsaw pieces, the outline of a severed leg, the abrupt place
where the sheet dips indicating a loss of bodily cohesion. Images that will forever
populate my nightmares, a curling strand of hair, childish fingers, a man’s large
foot, graceful in its curve, the toes blackened and charred. This room, a circle of
hell.

C. Serasinghe stops at a table, says, “Okay. You are ready?” I push fingers through
my hair, imagine running from this place where the ripped-apart pieces of children
lie beneath dirty sheets.

The policeman clears his throat. He picks up the cloth as if he were picking flowers
with his index fingers and thumbs. Pulls it aside, a magician revealing secrets.

The mass of her hair. Her face. A bruise on the left temple like a huge crimson rose.
Eyes focused on the ceiling in wonder, mouth puckered. As if she were seeing it happen.
Dust on her features, sediment on the whites of her eyes, the wet shine of them dulled,
immobile. Transformed into stone.

My body quaking, underground fissures rupturing in my eyes, my skin cracking open,
earthquakes within me. I am free-falling through space, stars rushing like comets
past me, her hair like octopus tentacles welcoming me, sucking me into her chest,
which is soft and wet and broken. The edges of her ribs scraping jagged against my
breasts. I sink into her like into wet red quicksand. Pulsating screamings and shriekings
burst from me, they bounce around the walls of this room, burst out into the building,
hurl policemen into ceiling fans, smash open the doors and crash into the street to
lodge in the throats of those waiting outside. An eruption of caterwauling, keening,
mourning rising from our one throat into the smoky air of the island. The sound of
pure and absolute anguish breaking out from each of us who has paid a price to the
demons of war. A sound forged in the lungs of the mothers whose sons have died unnamed
in the fields, the fathers whose daughters have gone to fight. A sound to make the
war makers quake and flee like the ancient demons, taking with them their weapons,
their land mines, their silver-tongued rhetoric, their nationalism, their martyrs,
and sacred Buddhist doctrines, the whole pile of stinking bullshit.

C. Serasinghe tears me from her. I am unglued with a popping sound, the front of me
scarlet drenched. He smashes me against his hollow chest. His fingers raking through
my hair, the gash of his scar against my lips as I pour out my horror.

He lets me disintegrate in his arms, until I am dissolved, pulled apart, incoherent,
insubstantial. Then he drags me out of the room, his grip around my waist painful.
His voice is harsh in my ear, “You are lucky. A lot of the other people have no body.
Only pieces of flesh to burn or bury.”

He leaves me at the station door, in the bright island sunshine. In the car, Shiva,
with knowledge that will never leave his black, black eyes, waits for me.

Epilogue

Before the dawn comes, Shiva shudders in my arms. His heartbeat thuds staccato under
my cheek, his breathing is ragged like ripping cloth. I know he is running across
the heat-dazed streets of Colombo, he is pushing past the immobile crowd, fighting
his way to the bus, shrieking, keening at the impossible heaviness of his limbs. I
know what greets his eyes when he reaches the center of that crowd, that bus upturned
like a downed animal, spilling its metallic entrails onto the street, glinting red.
In our dreams it has grown, gigantic until it dwarfs the sky, a replete beast torn
open, an anaconda split after a heavy meal. It dumps flesh onto the road at our feet
like macabre offerings. When he has these dreams, it is her name he whispers. I hold
him close, stroke his moist and beautiful forehead, press my lips against his fluttering
eyelids and whisper his name, Shiva Shiva Shiva. He shudders as he is released from
the nightmare. His arms press me closer. His sleep in the shared shelter of our bed
is tender once again.

Shiva and I, we fled that shattered country like tongue-tied, gaunt, and broken ghosts.
After the fires, after she was burned, all we wanted was each other. There was refuge
in each other that could be found nowhere else. We had shared a childhood, a house,
and the murder of our most beloved. Together we formed a country, a kingdom. We ran
as far west as America would allow. Not to the endless freeways and purple-hazed sunsets
of Los Angeles where Amma and Thatha with their unstaunchable grief and unanswerable
questions waited. Where my ghost of a husband waited, hungry. Instead, we pushed farther
north to a glittering city ringed by cold ocean. When the fog lifts, San Francisco
sparkles. In this most European of American cities, exile, forgetting, escape seemed
possible, even common. We sought solace here, found work, bought a small house. We
put down crude roots.

We have learned not to care about the state of that other place even as it burns or
drowns. We cut ties, never calling across the oceans, and thus we are never woken
up at 3:00
A.M
. by foreign-sounding accents on the phone. We do not seek out brown faces; we do
not start at the sound of Sinhala or Tamil no matter how rarely we hear them spoken.
Instead we have burrowed down, picked our comrades in exile, and built a fortress
about ourselves.

These days, I do not even speak of that place to myself. There is no thread of a life
I want to follow there. The ocean does not call to me. I no longer long for those
myriad shades of green. The island dropped away from me the moment I left it framed
in the airplane porthole. This is the only way we may survive.

There is one other thing, most miraculous and unforeseen. We have a little girl, six
years old and named for the ocean she has never seen, Samudhra. She calls herself
Sam. She has entrancing eyes and a head of bouncing curls. When she laughs, I am pierced
with a sharp joy. She sleeps with a hand curled under her cheek, the other around
the fat Labrador that was once a baby with her and now wheezes and coughs climbing
the stairs of our creaking old house. She likes to dress this patient dog in frills
and ribbons. She calls it Dodo, which is the sound she first designated for “dog.”
She likes Barbie dolls, also pizza and spaghetti. She is enraptured with the color
pink in all its various hues. Her weight in my arms is the most distinct of pleasures,
the scent of her skin delectable. I had not known that mothering would replicate falling
in love so intimately, but I have learned that it is the biology in us that reacts
to both states. She has transformed us in unexpected, unimaginable ways. I still catch
myself in disbelief—we are parents? Shiva and I together? After all we have seen,
we have undertaken this most perilous of roles? The explaining of the world to this
new creature. It seems beyond possibility.

Sam paints. The vivid lines of her childhood imaginings so certain, that I know she
has inherited La’s love of color, the dexterity of her brush. A year ago she brought
me an advertisement ripped out of the newspaper I had picked up at an Indian restaurant,
a Bharatha Natyam dancer, kohl eyed, fingers fanned into flowers. “I want to do this,”
she announced. So twice a week, Samudhra dances. Her teacher pushes down her shoulders
so that she must dance from an even lower squat. It will make her leg muscles develop
in the proper way, the teacher tells me. She tells me that my daughter has skill in
the dance. It must have lain dormant in our veins, some long forgotten memory of sinuousness.

On the hilly car ride home from class, Samudhra weaves me the stories she is learning
to dance. Kunti on the riverbank, Ravana swooping down to steal Sita, Arjuna and Krishna
on the battlefield. I never speak of Sri Lanka to her. I do not mention it in story
or rhyme or memory. Perhaps her childish recitation is some attempt to cajole me into
speaking of where we come from. These Indian stories that are not even ours, these
characters we cannot claim except for the Demon King Ravana coming for Rama’s Queen.
I wonder sometimes if I have stolen something that is hers by birthright, if she should
know the details of where we are from.

I know she is confused when adults ask her (they invariably ask), “Where are you from?”
When she says, “From here, San Francisco. I was born here,” they insist, “I mean your
mommy and daddy. Where are they from, originally?” Their stress is on that last word,
“Or-i-ginally.” She says, “They’re from Siri Lanka.” But the words are barely audible,
so that there is an almost automatic and incredulous repetition of the adult question,
“Where?” Then, often, she is silent, unwilling to speak of this other and possibly
mythical place that her parents sometimes, rarely, speak of.

*   *   *

I am in the kitchen, my blade reducing onions into long curling ribbons. Shiva and
Samudhra are in the living room piecing together a giant puzzle of puppies and kittens.
I hear her say, “Tell me a story. When you and Ammi were growing up. In the big house
by the sea.” I feel the muscles in my stomach clench, a stone drop into my belly.

“You know Ammi doesn’t like when I tell you those stories.”

“Please, Appa, when I grow up I’m going there anyway. Tell me about when you were
fishermen. From the balcony. Pleeeeeese!” I can imagine her pursed pout, her large
and wet eyes. Sam crossed is hard to resist.

“Okay. We were in the Wellawatte house. Your great-grandmother Sylvia Sunethra’s house.”

“Uh-hmmmm.”

“We’d climb to the top story. That’s where I lived with all my cousins and uncles
and aunties and everyone. Your mother lived below us. We were about your age, I think.”