Wreck and Order (15 page)

“Rasai,” I say. “Delicious.” An explosion of laughter—the kindness inside our respective insecurities unloosed. I take another bite. The crisped exterior of a strip of eggplant gives way to a creamy mix of cinnamon, cumin, coriander, and green chili. The well-being of others is so contingent on my displays of well-being that it is necessary for me to be well. Hashini nods, satisfied, and heads toward the kitchen as the others fill their plates and then sprawl across the room, crowding onto the couch and sitting cross-legged on the floor.

“Hashini-Mommy will not eat with us?” I ask Suriya.

“She eats when she cooks. She has more works. So many people.”

Suriya mashes her curries and rice into a perfect ball and then opens her mouth wide, her tongue drooping over her lower lip. I imitate her wide mouth and eager tongue. It's fun to eat. As soon as one of my curries gets low, Suriya balances her plate on her hip and dishes me more with her clean left hand.

The family kneads their leftovers into pasty balls that they drop in the dirt yard. A pack of dogs gathers around the food, snarling and wagging their tails. One of them has a gouged-out eye socket from which dangles a filthy string of something I don't want to believe is excess eyeball. He runs and growls and gorges like the other dogs. I stand behind Suriya's cousin at the pump, waiting to rinse off my plate, but Suriya slides it from my hand. “No, Akki. You are guest.” A twenty-one-year-old—or is she twenty-two now?—treating me like a child. I ought to be looking after her. But I'd be terrible at that, even if we were in the States.

I grip the back of my neck, watching Hashini carry curry bowls back and forth from the house to the cooking hut. “Hashini is always working,” I say.

“Yes. She does the mother's situation very well.” Suriya dries my plate on her T-shirt. Her placid praise frightens me. But maybe Hashini is happy doing the mother's situation. Why do I want only inconvenient things?

I've decided not to use my iodine tablets, to force my body to adjust to the well water. I'm grateful for my headlamp during my second trip to the outhouse that night. Squatting over the hole, my long nightshirt gathered up in my right hand, I'm reaching for the blue plastic bowl floating in the water bucket, preparing to splash myself clean, when I hear something moving on the dirt yard, close to the outhouse. I pause, shirt in one hand, bowl in the other. It could be any number of tiny, harmless animals—I tell myself—but then I hear the movement again, too delicate to belong to an animal. The sound of a human trying not to be heard. Calm your breath. It's probably just Suriya or Hashini, making sure I'm okay out here.

I crane my neck to the side of the outhouse, where the noise came from. My headlamp catches two disembodied gleaming orbs, pressed against a slat in the boards. Illogically, impulsively, I return my eyes to the ground, fully illuminating my naked lower half. Fuck. I switch off my headlamp and sit on my heels in the dark, heart pounding, gripping the bowl of water like a weapon.

Please God, let those eyes belong to a pervy uncle. Do not let them belong to someone from the village lying in wait for me. How awful that a pervy uncle would not be so bad, compared to—no. Calm down. My bent knees start to ache. Mechanically, I wash myself, pull up my underpants, and stand. I can't stay in this outhouse forever. I can scream if I need to. I turn my headlamp back on and flash the side wall. The eyes withdraw. That sound again: calculated delicacy. I hold my breath to hear the direction into which it retreats—a sure path to Hashini's house.

So it was a family pervert. Fear gives way to disgust. Ayya of course. It couldn't be Rajesh. He's old and timid and sweet. And Sri Lankan soldiers are notorious sexual predators—the awful thing in Haiti, how the soldiers who went to help after the earthquake had to be sent home for having sex with underage girls, people in Jaffna telling me women were forced to give sexual favors in exchange for seeing their husbands or sons in political prisons. Suriya rolls onto her back when I return to our room. “Okay, Akki?” she whispers. How blind she is to all this.

“Okay, Nangi. Go back to sleep.”

The next afternoon, I work on my translation while Suriya watches cartoons with her cousins. I can't bring myself to tell her that her brother is a Peeping Tom. She would be crushed—disillusioned. The permanent kind. I'm sure she's not even capable of imagining sexual deviance, let alone associating it with her brother. And in daylight the whole thing seems more pathetic than nefarious: Ayya is so desperate for sexual contact he's willing to spy on his sister's friend squatting over a shit-smeared hole.

So I smother the thought and become a ludicrous foreigner with a giant dictionary on my lap, seeking the right word for
fougue
in the context of a man comforting himself over a lost cat by attributing it to the creature's
fougue
. I love the French word because I can't explain it precisely in English. Any potential equivalent (vitality, chutzpah, pizzazz, spirit) is too colloquial by comparison—because, of course, French is never colloquial for me. I've barely spoken the language since my year in Paris more than a decade ago. I lean back in my chair. Sweat gathers under the heavy dictionary on my lap. There's something sad to me about the act of translating. To fit the book into my language destroys what I originally loved about it—the French sounds like instruments lending nuance to coarse song lyrics, manipulating emotion into shapes as gaudy outside the body as they felt inside; the subtle, unconscious work required to make literal sense of words not native to me replacing the subtle, unconscious criticism I bring to English sentences.
La musique sonne mieux quand on n'a rien d'autre à aimer.
Music sounds better when one has nothing else to love. Or maybe: You feel music most strongly when it's the only thing you love. Hideous. Is the original sentence pretentious and self-pitying, rather than the blunt expression of strong, simple feeling I took it to be when I first read it in French? Or am I just a bad translator? On the cartoon inside, female characters giggle and gasp in response to a man's bravado monologue. Suriya laughs. Maybe the publisher will be interested in
Fifi.
Then it won't matter how I feel about translating. I'll just do it.

Ayya returns on his motorbike. He's been out most of the day, visiting friends in the neighborhood. He offers me a brief smile as he walks to the house. I lower my narrowed eyes to my book. A tuk-tuk hurls itself into Hashini's yard. A tall, soft-bellied man who seems very conscious of the beauty of his hair spills out of his tiny, open-air car, shirtless, the top button of his trousers undone. His wife follows, sweaty and plump in the annoyingly forgivable way of full-time mothers, a naked baby on her hip. “Puta!” Rajesh kisses the man on both cheeks. Puta means son, Suriya tells me. Or sometimes daughter, if favorite daughter. This is the family of Hashini's eldest son, visiting from Colombo. Suriya coos at the baby.

Within minutes, Puta has distributed plastic cups of Sprite, spiked his and his father's with Johnnie Walker, handed me a guava and Suriya the gold bangles off his wife's wrist, held his baby's feet straight upward in a worrisome handstand, and put on a CD so loudly the family has to shout to be heard over it. Suriya picks up the baby and starts dancing—small, precise jumps in rhythm with the sitar blasting from the stereo. I take the baby's other hand and bounce along. Suriya mashes his cheek with her lips and tries to hand him to me. I back away, still bouncing. I like babies, but they make me uncomfortable. I would like to just observe their barbaric humanness—the intense, mercurial parade of facial expressions and sounds that overtake their bodies—but people always expect you to reach out for them, grinning and cooing.

“A baby is only heart. No head!” Suriya shouts over the music. I shout back my agreement, delighting in the chaos Puta has wrought, delighting in my sober delight. When the sitar album comes to an end, Suriya hands the baby to his mother. “I think you want to make shower before bed, El,” she says. My toes are caked in dirt, the hair around my ears matted with dried sweat, my shirt plastered to my back. I am so grateful for my perceptive host! I follow her into the bedroom. “Open shower, so we must cover,” she says, and shows me how to knot a sarong tightly over my breasts. We pad out to the backyard. The showerhead protrudes from the outhouse. Suriya watches me, saying, “Is okay, Akki? Is okay?” I am so irritated by my overeager host! I just want to feel the cold water soaking my hair and sarong, look up at the cloud masses combing the purpled sky and the loud, tiny birds dipping in and out of fluffy, persimmon-colored flowers blooming atop lanky trees. Yes, Nangi, is okay.

When we return to the house in our sopping sarongs, Hashini is preparing pallets on the living room floor. The drunk cousin snores on the couch. They have offered me the one bed. “I can sleep out here, Nangi,” I say. “The older people should have the bed.” But Suriya laughs and tells me again that I am guest. Guiltily, I follow her into the bedroom. We change, facing away from each other, into loose pants and T-shirts that will dry too quickly in the parched air. I want to stretch out naked and savor these brief moments of coolness. Impossible. Suriya showers clothed, changes into oversize pajamas without exposing herself, sleeps in a room covered by a translucent cloth into which her family members peer unhindered. She is almost never alone with her body. I clutch my stomach against that imagined deprivation. I need my closeness to my body partly because it makes me feel close to my own death, that empty space inside me that none of my words or behaviors can touch.

“You must loose your hair for sleep,” Suriya says, brushing her knee-length black mane, resting one swath at a time over her forearm. “To make long your hair.”

I leave my hair in a messy topknot, exasperated by Suriya's preening. She's always smoothing out my shirts, brushing imaginary dust off my shoulders, asking if she can braid my hair. As if I need even more unwanted attention from men like Ayya. “I'm traveling,” I say. “I'm not trying to impress anyone.”

“But we must always look our best, no?” Suriya says. “For Sri Lankan peoples, if you dress a dirty shirt or messy hair, it is like a beggar. You understand?”

“Yes.” It's wrong of me to insist on my right to comfortable slovenliness. But Suriya's obsessive grooming makes me think of photos of my mother dressed like a little woman in the second grade, with her starched dress and permanent. Her mother made her sleep in rollers every night, just because that's what one did then, even if one was six years old and tossed and turned all night because the rollers were too tight. To make a child suffer discomfort in order to appear a certain way: a mild form of barbarism. Now that children are free to dress however they want, they begin gleefully objectifying themselves in elementary school, courting power through miniskirts and high heels. I dressed that way, too. Freedom and power are not the same thing. It's always refreshing to see a little girl haphazardly clothed, her hair messy, her eyes distracted by a million things besides how she looks. I feel like that girl in Sri Lanka, the one I should have been when I was eight. I understand this is a privilege denied to Suriya, and I know that I am exploiting it when I tell her I could care less how long my hair grows, I'm just trying not to die of heatstroke. She laughs. I love when she gets my jokes.

She combs her shiny hair through her fingers, staring at something I can't see, her lips parted. “One time I brushed my boyfriend's hair with my fingers,” she says. “He said, So gently. Your hands move so gently.” Her voice moves far away from the snoring cousin and the sloppy American visitor. “I was just thinking about that.”

I used to have those thoughts. It stings to remember that there was a time when I lay awake at night worrying about what bra to wear the next time I went to my boyfriend's house.

“Do you still have that same boyfriend?” I ask. “The one you wrote me about?”

“Of course! I only love one.”

“Is he still working in Qatar?” When I met Suriya, he had just finished university and taken a computer-ish job abroad.

She nods. “I miss him more.”

“You haven't seen him this whole time?”

“No. But we write letters. Sometime we talk on the phone.” The loose ends of Suriya's straw mat grate across the concrete floor as she settles into bed. I roll onto my back. A spider disappears into a brick cave at the top of the wall. I wonder if Suriya's calm goodness will survive her first contact with sex. Maybe it will. The first time will be with her husband, and it will hurt as it's supposed to and she will be relieved when he finishes. Maybe she will never have orgasms and never miss them. She will never know why the snore of a man who has just climaxed inside you is the loneliest sound there is.

Suriya yawns. I raise myself on one elbow and whisper down. “You realize I've had sex before, right?”

She bolts upright. Her hair spills into the basket of her crossed legs. “You have done the sex?”

We stay up late, whispering over the snores and stirrings coming from the main room. I tell her about losing my virginity to my high school boyfriend, how happy I was during and afterward, and how I told my father and he brought me to the gynecologist and paid for my birth control pills. I explain birth control pills and condoms and IUDs. I tell Suriya that I love having sex. “I know your words are true,” she says. “But I cannot believe.”

Just as it is hard for me to believe that Suriya has never kissed her boyfriend on the lips because she is afraid it will lead to pregnancy; that there will be a white sheet on her wedding night and if there is no blood on it, her husband can demand an immediate divorce; that her married cousins all brag about being pure on their wedding night; that she knows it's perfectly normal for some virgins not to bleed at all and her only feeling about sex since her big girl celebration is fear that she will be one of these godforsaken girls; that she thinks some boys in Sri Lanka do the self…(she grimaces, unable to complete the phrase), but girls would never, ever do the self…because they have too much fear for their wedding night; that she has a friend who had love for an older man and that man tricked her and made her to have sex and the girl became pregnant and the man's family made him marry the girl and now she is nineteen and she has two kids and her husband is drunk and mean and angry that he is made to marry this poor girl; that where that girl went is a hell and Suriya will not go to that hell; that her boyfriend never tries to French kiss her or touch her body because he is protecting her until marriage, when she will be his forever and ever. She runs her hand down the side of her neck and kneads her collarbone.