Wreck and Order (17 page)

“You're an animal,” the woman groaned. She sounded idolatrous.

During the last set of crunches, I grunted at the same time as the woman next to me. Our eyes locked and we smiled at our misery reflected in the other's face. It feels productive to suffer. Without desperation, what momentum would there be to my days? If I were to tell my life as a story, surely the listener would be more interested in my sordid shenanigans with Jared than in my eventless days in this foreign village. Yet I feel
good
here. What does that say about goodness? Or about the human brain—mine in particular? All those concerned parties in Barbara Pym's
Excellent Women
pity the unmarried thirty-year-old, who reads and goes to church and has lots of friends, because she does not have a “full life in the accepted sense.” The part of me that believes in that kind of fullness is comforted by drama. With Jared, my life felt full. Too full to worry over whether I was eating or sleeping or meditating. Even from here, the memory of that chaos doesn't seem all bad: the crying and the sex and the ostensible meaning in every street sign and song lyric. It felt like I was doing something important—feeling all that.

What I have now—swimming in the lake, eating rice and curry out of lotus leaves, sleeping nine hours a night, waking to Pali chants at dawn, sipping sweet tea, chatting with Suriya until I fall asleep—is joy, not tiny, bleating, toy-human fun. But part of me still wants the toy-human fun. I have to fight upsurges of resentment against Suriya's family for their groundedness, their lack of ambitions and judgments, their ignorance of the giddiness I felt when I downed cans of beer while trying on clothes and dancing alone to fast, bright songs that everyone knows before heading out to a bar, stupidly hoping that this night of all nights would be worth it. “Abandon hope”: something a Buddhist nun said at a talk in Carpinteria, which I taped over my desk at home. But it feels good to be stupid.

In the afternoons, Suriya sits in the yard with a giant binder filled with vocabulary lists, verb conjugations, and summaries of books and plays, studying for the first round of exams to become an English teacher. I test her on vocabulary and ask her to repeat sentences in various tenses. I'm surprised when we get to the literature section: She is expected to be familiar with writers like Dickens and Shakespeare. “You've read Shakespeare?” I ask.

“Just some small parts. The play is about Romeo and Juliet. Until my teacher explains, I did not understand one word.”

“Well, that's all right. Most American students can't understand it without help, either. So,” I say, reading a question from her binder, “what is one of the main themes in Shakespeare's play
Romeo and Juliet
?”

Suriya bites the tip of her index finger. “The theme of karma?”

I ask how she would explain that on an exam. “The families of Romeo and Juliet,” she says, “they create bad karma by their fighting and their anger. And then the children suffer for the bad karma of the parents.”

“In English we would say this is fate or destiny. Do you know those words?”

“Yes! My teacher has said the word fate. But I do not understand.”

“It's that Romeo and Juliet's love is doomed to fail. There's nothing anyone can do to save it. It's what the stars want.”

“I do not understand. Why do the stars want that children suffer?” Suriya's cousin comes out of the house with the baby, feeding him sips of tea out of a glass cup.

“Well, they suffer because they don't accept their fate. No one can fight the stars.”

Suriya widens her eyes and tilts her head, as if I'm being intentionally ridiculous. “Some nights it is bright and I say, ‘Look at the stars!' But this is not making me suffer and die.”

“But you ask Lord Buddha for things—good health and protection and stuff.”

“But Lord Buddha is not stars. He is a person.”

“But now he's dead.”

“He is not dead. He has got nibbana.”

“Well, wherever he is, don't you think asking him for things is kind of like believing the stars have power over your life?”

Suriya shakes her head emphatically side to side. “When we ask Lord Buddha, we must remember him. And remember that he acted in a good manner and became like a god. That is karma.”

“And you think this is the main theme of
Romeo and Juliet
?”

“Yes. For me.” She settles back in her chair and runs the end of her braid through her fingernails.

The rush of air on the motorbike is like the spritz of mist from the spray bottle that kept me company on hot summer nights in junior high. I'd stretch out in my underwear, listening to the Violent Femmes and Radiohead and Nirvana, making myself wait between squirts until the heat gathered at the white tufts of baby hair along my forehead, then crept downward and rouged my cheeks, prettily, I hoped. I am sitting on the motorbike between Ayya and Suriya, on our way to their parents' home in a neighboring village. Suriya insisted I ride in the middle, lest I fall off the back on a fast turn. I take care to sit up straight, gripping the side of the bike, although Suriya keeps shouting over the wind, “El, you must hold to Ayya!” This seems such an intimate position to be in with a Sri Lankan boy that I worry Suriya may be pushing me toward her brother, fantasizing about a romance between us, her brother marrying an American girl, bringing instant success to her family. But the bike is fast and loud and unsteady, and it soon jostles away my concerns about other people's imagined imaginings.

This is poya, full moon day, and so we stop at an ancient cave temple on our way. The entrance is crowded with pilgrims dressed in airy white skirts and sarongs. Suriya hands me a five-rupee coin to feed to a green-faced wooden man. I place the coin on his thick, curled tongue and watch it roll down his throat into a padlocked box. I try to laugh with Suriya and Ayya, but it's hard to watch them spend money on gimmicks at a well-endowed temple. We add our sandals to the heap of flip-flops just inside ornate iron gates. The stone pathway is scorching. We run on the balls of our feet toward the gaping mouth of a cave. Women with slack, twiggy arms crowd our faces with lotus flowers to offer inside the temple. Ayya buys us each one. The seller peels back the outer leaves of the thick bud, making a star of deep purple petals.

The statues inside this cave that has been a place of worship for thousands of years remind me of
Simpsons
characters, their beatific smiles sardonic imitations of beatific smiles. Suriya stops short before a potbellied blue man, covered in coarse gray hair, with fangs like daggers. In one hand, he holds a scythe; in the other, the thin arm of a sexy, bare-chested woman with huge, black teardrops painted on her cheeks—an adulterous woman reborn in the hell realms, at the mercy of this hairy demon about whom Suriya used to have nightmares after she came here to worship with her parents when she was young. Her girlhood fear reminds me of my mother's stories of growing up Southern Baptist—lying awake at night worrying that she had accidentally committed the Unforgivable Sin of blasphemy and was already doomed to eternal torment. Or worrying that she hadn't committed any unforgivable sins and was doomed to be herself forever and ever, floating on a cloud in the sky, no escape. For my mother, Buddhism was the escape. She'll be disappointed when I tell her how the religion is practiced in an actual Buddhist country, rather than by hippies and “recovering Christians,” as my mother likes to call herself. She mostly uses spiritual practices to fortify her desperate grip on “bliss experiences”—she actually calls them that—rather than to challenge her narrow idea of what she needs to be okay. Not that I'm finding many fruitful challenges in this cave myself. Suriya offers her flower to a fat, happy, cartoon Buddha, lovingly removing the stem and bowing her head as she lays the fanned-out petals in the Buddha's lap. I try to imitate her, but I pull too hard on the stem and the lotus flies out of my hands, landing at a startled pilgrim's feet. Suriya scoops it up and tosses it in the bucket of discarded stems. “Cannot give to Lord Buddha,” she whispers.

I'm glad when we are returned to the bright, dry day. Suriya asks if I like to climb mountains. I do, very much. We walk to the base of the mountain towering above the cave. A trail leads up through lichen-covered boulders under a canopy of waxy little leaves dancing and shimmering. “This is the sky palace,” Suriya says. “Okay, Akki?” Okay, Nangi. Ayya removes his shirt and shoes, and carries his water bottle in a backpack he's fashioned out of string. He shows me how to put the straps of my sandals over my wrists so we can use our toes and fingers to clamber up the rocks. “We go,” Ayya cries and darts upward. “You are pig!” Suriya yells up at him. He pauses and grins down from a sheer-faced boulder.

“You are noodle!”

The two English sentences I've heard Ayya speak:
Single rocks forever
and
You are noodle
. This strangeness almost endears him to me.

For a long time, we climb in silence. The boulders are warm on my feet, the dirt cool. Suriya's loud exhalations are a beat longer than mine. A green-and-purple bird swoops in front of us, pausing midflight to chirp and stare. I am lost in the spiritual joy I could not find in the temple. I once made the mistake of mentioning “spiritual joy” on a first date with an attractive bartender/musician and he replied, “Spiritual joy, huh? I think that phrase is the reason my brother started doing heroin.” But most purely good things sound sappy in description—a kind of punishment, maybe, for insisting on confining goodness in words. The bartender/musician begged me to marry him while we were having sex and then never called me again.

It's late afternoon when we resume our journey. The triumphant drone of the bike's engine dies in a yard filled with decaying blue and pink plastic bags that seem more real than the dirt they rest on. Suriya's home is two-story and concrete, one of the few large houses we've passed on the two-hour ride from Hashini's. Aside from a few tenacious yellow patches, the building has shed its paint. A metal sign that says
BODHI BAKEHOUSE
is propped against the side of the building, spilling its advertisement into a pile of crushed water bottles. A sliding glass door cracked into a jagged web of prisms opens to a large, barren room on the ground floor. The only furniture is an old swivel chair with a dangerously tilted seat.

“Your home is big,” I say.

“So big, yes. But now it is broken.” Suriya's voice is loud and quick. “You know about eye poison, Akki?” Suriya's family used to run a bakery and restaurant that made them sort of rich. Their neighbors had eye poison, the unconscious ability to cause harm through envy. The restaurant started to lose money, then collapsed completely. Suriya thanks god for her brother's army job, but still it is very difficult; the money is not enough for so many people. “I have more works,” she says, and leads me up the stone staircase on the outside of her house. “My mum is sick so she must not clean.”

Two rooms open onto the upper balcony. One of them contains a bed piled to the ceiling with linens and saris and T-shirts. The light switch makes a hollow cluck when Suriya flicks it. A young man flicks a light switch on and off with the tip of his tongue to improve his oral sex technique in that “Self-Improvement” poem by Tony Someone, which my dad gave me when I was just old enough to be disturbed by my father's placing thoughts of oral sex in close proximity to my own. But still I liked what my father suspected I would like—that the girlfriend dumped the boy after demanding he school himself in pleasure, that what he was really practicing was how to suffer. Tiny claws scurry across the floor. “I think rats make home,” Suriya says, and flicks the switch once more. A rowdy snore responds. A man is nestled between the wall and the mountain of multicolored cloth, his cracked hands resting on his stupendous belly. “My father,” Suriya whispers. Her voice tries not to apologize. “Come to put your bag in my room.”

Her room is large and empty save for another sheetless mattress. The small square window frames the top of a palm tree wilting in the late-day sun. “Hide your valuables,” Suriya says, and leaves me to order my things. I paw through my bag until my hand lands on my small stuffed whale, lopsided and covered in smiling frogs, sewn for my first birthday by my grandmother, two years before she died. The consolation of losing Brian has been sleeping with Whaley again. I'd shoved him under the bed the first time Brian slept over, and then could never find a way to casually reintroduce him. Of course many young women have worn teddy bears on their beds. I guess the bow ties and missing glass eyes add an appealing irony to the moments before a one-night stand. But there is nothing ironic to me about Whaley's threadbare flippers or loose seams, revealing thin strips of crayon yellow, the color he was before my fitful sleep wore him into countless shades of beige. I hid Whaley from Brian because I still believe he's real, meaning that when I wake up in the dark, panicked and lonely, a reject of my own thoughts, the half-moon of Whaley's polyester body is always right there, smooth and cool and ready to receive my cheek.

When I was six, my mother took me on a whale watch in Boston Harbor. I brought Whaley with me, excited to show him where he came from. But as soon as we were on the open sea, I became afraid of holding him, imagining his tiny fins consumed by the opaque, frothy water. I didn't trust myself not to throw him overboard. I did bad stuff sometimes, like opening the car door on the highway; I'd just imagined pulling the lever and then the door was flying open and Dad was screaming and swerving into the breakdown lane. I clutched Whaley with both hands as I peered over the ship's guardrail. “Let's reconnoiter the top deck, shall we?” Mom said as the ship moved farther offshore. Reconnoiter was one of my mother's pet fancy words. Rec and oyder, rec and oyder. I sang the phrase to myself as I handed Whaley to my mom, so she could order him among her belongings while we went to wreck the deck of the ship.

Sitting on the edge of Suriya's lumpy mattress, I wrap my passport in a skirt and rest Whaley on the pillow. Suriya will think he's cute. Women here play with dolls and stuffed animals well into their twenties.

Downstairs, a woman sits with her legs outstretched, her silver-streaked black hair matted against the wall behind her. Ayya's head rests on her thigh. The woman's fingers are long and slender and play through Ayya's hair. Suriya sits on the other side of the woman, her head resting on her shoulder. “Amma,” she says to me. The tenderness is almost obscene. “Hello,” I offer. A loud cough sounds above us, followed by the guttural yank of phlegm. Glistening spittle lands in the dirt yard.

Suriya stands. “I must cook.”

The kitchen is a vast chaos of cookery—empty display cases, a pile of bamboo spoons, rusted baking sheets. Suriya opens tall plastic containers until she finds rice, an onion, some dried chilies, a head of garlic sprouting long, green curlicues. She speaks to Ayya, menacingly. He hands her some coins.

In the store across the street, Suriya points to buckets filled with beans and vegetables. “Meka keeyada?” she asks. When no price allows her to relax her face, I insist on paying. We leave the store carrying dried garbanzo beans, coconuts, and mango. She makes me promise I will not tell her family that my money paid for this meal. “So many secrets to keep love, no?” She circles my wrist with her hand as we cross the street.

For the next several hours, Suriya chops and sifts and sautés on a single-burner hot plate. She walks back and forth from the well to the kitchen with a large jug resting on her hip, forcing her upper body nearly parallel to the ground. Ayya darts in and out of the kitchen, stealing handfuls of chickpeas and slices of mango. Suriya lunges toward him as he does a backward skip out the door, dangling the stolen food like a prize. “He not know how to work,” she says. “He only know how to play.” Which is true—her laughter or my rage?

Useless in the kitchen, I work on my translation, meaning that I read one paragraph several times and pity the sentences the undue anxiety of their current reader, who tries to say the word
tournure
aloud several times, distressed each time by her inability to create the sound she can hear in her head, telling herself that her French has not improved since junior high and she'd better give up on ever saying
tournure
or any other French word correctly because right now she sounds like a mentally ill gorilla trying to communicate with her zookeeper. I ought to just be translating. But I'm finding
Fifi
increasingly boring. A man takes in stray cats. He describes the color of their fur, their eating habits, their sleeping positions, the reasons for their names, the photographs he takes of them. A maliciously boring account, as if the narrator were exacting revenge on the world for refusing to accept him. And I undertook the translation with similar malice, set on distinguishing myself from the concretely productive masses. With my purposeless virtue, the line from the book that first made me fall in love with it:
Il a atteint l'hésitation.
Well, I perfected the art of hesitation, too. But at least now I know better than to congratulate myself for analyzing instead of acting. So stop analyzing
Fifi
; just translate it. If I give up on this, what will I have? I'll hit my mid-thirties without one thing to show for myself. My breath grows ragged at that thought. I sludge through the next two pages.

Suriya's father walks downstairs, nods sharply at me, and points toward his daughter, who is placing a bamboo spoon in a steaming bowl. “English,” he says. “English.” He stares at me as a metal chain of unknown words clangs from his mouth. I feel like I have three nostrils or a missing eye, some deformity against which he must harden himself in order to bear looking at me.

Like Hashini, Suriya does not eat with us. She serves me a plate heaped with coconut sambol, rice, chickpea and mango curries, and then hovers over my plate with a spoon as I eat, replacing the curries with a flamboyant dollop as soon as I make a dent in one. I should play my part, saying how
rasai
everything is, this is the best curry I've ever tasted, just one more helping, how could I refuse? But I disrespect the stakes of the game too much. When Suriya tries to give me a third spoonful of mango, I stop her with my palm. “That's enough. Really.”