Wreck and Order (18 page)

She suspends the spoon a few inches from my eye. “At Hashini's, you ate more.”

“It's not hospitality to force-feed your guests,” I want to yell. “I'm just full,” I say.

Her father's eyes weigh on me as she returns the bowl to the kitchen. Suriya serves tea after the meal, heating the water with a metal coil attached to an electrical cord. I take small sips of the sugar-thick liquid. The wrinkles in her father's forehead knot between his eyes. He raises himself off the floor and walks as if in imitation of an angry man marching. Amma stands up also, glides into the kitchen. The soft splash of water by the tank, where Suriya is washing dishes, stops. I wince every time I hear the words
sudhu
and
Amereeca
in her father's eerily calm speech. A crash of water, a gasp. His footsteps punish the stairs. I find Suriya wiping her face with her shirt, her spine arched into a flat C to keep from exposing her stomach. “Did he just—was that tea? Are you okay? Are you burned?”

“No, Akki. No burn.”

“Is this about the food?”

“Do not worry for that, El.”

“Can you please tell him that I love your food? And I didn't come visit you just to eat curry?”

“I think he not hear that.” She shakes her head impatiently, as if trying to reason with a child. “He is a madman. Sometime.” She lathers bar soap on the plates, speaking quietly and hurriedly. If she came in second or third on a test when she was younger, her father would heat up the metal coil and hold it against her stomach and back, where the marks wouldn't show. She has been the top student in her class since she was nine.

“What about your brother?”

“He hates to study. And now he is a soldier. The soldier's life is so hard. So when he has vacation time he must do as he wants.” She tilts the water jug onto the sudsy plate.

“Your life is hard, too, Nangi.”

She sets the jug upright and faces me. “If you are not here, I am all alone.” I touch her wrist. Suriya lives with her family; she knows everyone in her village; she is always busy with schoolwork and chores. Maybe separateness is not a person's fault; maybe some people just come into the world that way.

Suriya swirls the water at the center of the plate. Then she giggles. “My father say, You feed sudhu garbage!” She imitates his voice in a deep, robotic whisper. “He say, She will never get you job in America if you—” She claps her hand over her mouth. “That's not why you're my friend, El—but—for my father—”

“No, no, of course, I understand.” Confused and embarrassed, neither of us notices when I start helping Suriya wash the dishes. I haven't considered the roots of her family's excessive desire to please me. I figured they were simply bored. Just as I was. But every bored person hopes.

I dread using Suriya's parents' shower—a cold-water spigot and a bucket inside the outhouse—but there is no way I can sleep without freeing myself from the day's grime and sweat. I latch the door behind me, hang up my sarong, and bend down to fill the bucket, facing away from the shit-smeared hole. I could be staying in a well-appointed guesthouse for less than ten dollars a night. Why am I still here? A sense of obligation to Suriya, a sense that my presence is making her feel more alive or something. Maybe I'm flattering myself. In any case, I will be out of here soon. I miss solitude, living by my own daily rhythms. And Jared. He's probably upset I've been out of touch so long. I don't want to think of how he might be distracting himself.

The shock of cold water crashing over my head stops my thoughts. How instantly it erases the heat and the dirt, so that I find myself in a new state—cool, private, immediate. After I've lathered myself in bar soap, I fill up another bucket. As I'm lifting it overhead, a gleam of light through the outhouse slats catches in the corner of my eye. My throat constricts. I turn my head to the side just in time to glimpse two dark eyes retreating. Disgusted and outraged, I dump the bucket over me and cover up with the sarong, not even bothering to rinse the soap off my legs. I want to chase Ayya down and shout insults, shaming him in front of his family. But for all I know, it's perfectly acceptable for young men to spy on naked women here. Maybe Suriya's father has implied that Ayya should make a pass at the American girl. And of course, Ayya could simply deny it and make me seem crazy. Causing a scene would only humiliate me.

How wily of him to put me in a position where I have no way to fight back against his violations. I want to talk to Jared, touch the dimple in his chin as he pulls me toward him and tells me not to worry. Sharp ache. How different helplessness feels when imposed by someone you don't care for. With Jared, the helplessness hurts, yes, but there is a kind of relief in how he makes me hate him one moment and forgive him the next, as if he's freed me of the responsibility to protect myself.

I once asked a boy I was fucking to pretend to rape me. The fucking bored me and the boy bored me, but I didn't realize that at the time. I thought I was bored of life. So I told the boy—I don't remember his name—that I often fantasized about coercive sex. His eyes widened. Would I really let him fake-rape me? With a stocking covering his face and everything? Sure. I would love it, in fact, if he liberated us of his face. I was living with my father after my year in Paris, and I gave the boy keys to our house one Friday night when Dad was away for the weekend, shooting a cereal commercial in Philadelphia. The boy could “break in” anytime he chose. The moments leading to the fake-rape had a limpid fineness—closing my eyes in the shower, leaning into the refrigerator for a jar of peanut butter, turning the handle of my bedroom door, my heart pounding, demanding I be exactly where I was.

But once the boy was really there—he slipped, predictably, into my room just after I turned out the light—I was aware of myself acting, trying to make him feel tough and scary. He gagged my mouth with a stocking, but I could have shouted through it if I wanted. I twisted left and right as he held my arms over my head, but the power in the motion was all mine. I knew how I looked as I writhed, naked from the waist down. I could have kneed him in the testicles, shaken off my gag and captured the tip of his nose in my teeth. Instead I stared up with cartoon fear at the reflective surface of his masked face, and let him hold my hips still with one hand. I made breathy protest moans into the stocking. It took him too long to come and I had to twist and moan ever more histrionically to distract him from his failure at brutality. At last, he extracted himself, told me I'd better not tell a fucking soul about this if I knew what was good for me, whispered that he'd call me tomorrow, maybe we could get a drink. I didn't even feel like touching myself when I was alone. All I felt was the stupidity of finding even pretend rape erotic. The unsocialized abandon I fantasized about had nothing to do with actual coercion.

The boy called and texted for weeks afterward. I felt guilty every time I saw his name on my phone. Even as my rapist, he couldn't make me feel more than indifference. Whereas my outrage for Ayya's real, calculated transgressions keeps me awake long after Suriya drifts off that night, my arms crossed over my squirming chest.

The words Ayya is yelling seem like they're trying to strangle him. His nostrils flare out of his crimson face, his skin stretched tight around his protruding jaw. Or at least that's how I see him when I enter the kitchen, picturing him in a lookout tower above a Tamil town where the Tigers have killed a prominent monk or taken off one of his friend's legs with a hand grenade. Ayya's actual demeanor is more pouty than maniacal. Suriya sets down her knife to pat his hand, speaking quietly. After he stalks out of the kitchen, she explains that one thousand rupees—about ten bucks—are missing from his room. Karma's a bitch, I do not say out loud.

Suriya flattens garlic cloves with the wide blade of her knife to loosen their skins. “My brother is so sad. He works hard for this money. But I cannot do for him. I can only look at him.” There is a woman thief in this village, she explains. One time, she stole the chairs out of Suriya's yard. They would walk past her house and see her sitting in them.

“Why didn't you take them back?”

“We don't want fighting with her. Maybe we get back our chairs, but it makes anger in us. This woman thief, also she is a”—Suriya rests her knife on the cutting board and searches the ceiling for the word—“a depraved. Mens come to her home. She says, he is my brother, he is my uncle. And we laugh because she has no brother and no uncle.”

“So she's a prostitute? She has sex with men for money?”

“Yes. She is so greedy.”

“What about the men who go to her? Aren't they the ones who are greedy?” Sarasi from Rose Land told me that widows are considered used goods, ineligible for marriage and fair game for sex. If the widow had children to raise and no family to support her, she might become a sort of informal prostitute, temporarily kept by one man after another.

“Why isn't the woman married?” I ask Suriya.

“Her husband dies in a fire.”

“Suriya, that is so sad. The woman probably has no other way to make money.”

“But many women are poor and they do not become a depraved. This woman love money. My mother tells me that.” She crushes garlic with the flat edge of a knife, her forehead creased. “Why do you say it's sad, El?”

She has not yet known the moment just before a man ejaculates, when his whole self is on the surface of his body. They all make different noises or guard different silences and they each have a different way of clutching your body as the semen rushes to the tip of the cock, and his openness widens you so much that you would do anything to safeguard the release he needs, for that instant, more than anything else in the world and which, for that instant, you alone can give him. And then he groans and empties himself of this need and rolls away and wipes himself off and stands up and clothes his body and the loneliness that rushes in as a yawn escapes his limp face is the worst pain I have known in my life, a full-body longing that has sometimes felt so unbearable I would rather have been raped, to at least have the clarity of being the victim of exploitation and cruelty instead of the confusing, self-loathing knowledge that I chose to be the receptacle for the sticky, cloying, arrogant goo the man needed to be rid of. A lot of women who have sex for money would laugh at the stupidity of that. They would laugh at me for talking about the man's whole self being on the surface of his body, for thinking about his ejaculate long enough to personify it. But they need the money to live.

I try to explain a tame version of this thinking to Suriya. “You know something, El?” she says, scooping the crunchy shells of garlic cloves into her palm and tossing them out the window. “You are a kind lady.”

The cousins from Hashini's are crowded into the living room, stopping by on their drive back to Colombo. Suriya hops from foot to foot as she sets out dishes and plates. “Are your legs okay?” I ask when she hands me my lunch.

“I have to make toilet. No time yet today.” It is noon. She rubs her temples, still hopping. “Is your head okay?” I ask.

“It is paining.”

“You have a headache? Do you want pills? I have good pills with me.”

She looks stricken. “No pills.”

“Can I bring you some water at least? You're probably dehydrated.”

“Please, Akki, sit, eat.” So I sit and eat, knowing what she wants is to feel her suffering has been put to use. Her relatives' fingers are covered in the food she prepared. Her father has seconds and thirds. He murmurs to Suriya as he hands her his plate to wash. She meets his eyes. His smile is brittle, awkward. He turns toward me, saying, “English. Daughter. English.”

“Her English is very good,” I tell him. “She is very smart.”

He nods once and walks toward the outhouse.

After Suriya's relatives have eaten another meal and then slipped inside their loud vehicles without saying goodbye, I ask Suriya where I can go to use the Internet. She taps her nose with her index finger. “Why do you need a computer, Akki?”

Well, if I get to a computer, it's theoretically possible that I'll read emails from Jared claiming to have given up drinking and dealing, begging me to come back and marry him; or telling me he fell off a roof when he was drunk and is paralyzed from the waist down and I need to move back to California and care for him. Or I'll have an email from a publisher offering me a generous contract for my translation, or telling me this book is crap and my translation is not much better and did I know how easy it is to self-publish on Amazon? Or Brian will have found life unbearable without me and beg me to give it another try. Or my mother will have found her calling as the proprietor of a gluten-free escort service, and would I like in on the enterprise?

“I might have some important letters,” I say. I haven't checked my email since I left Kandy. It's nice to be unmoored, but I can't just float here forever. Suriya retrieves a rusty, heavy bicycle from the field behind their house. I sit on the handlebars, holding my legs out in front of me. My tailbone wobbles on the metal bar. “The wind tastes sweet on my arms,” Suriya says. Her breath tastes sweet on my ear.

We pass a motorbike going the other way. The driver does a U-turn and pulls up in front of our bicycle, blocking the way. The boy is small and unsmiling. He and Suriya chat in soft, withholding tones.

“That boy is my school friend,” she says when we bike away. “He asked me about love one time.”

“He wanted to be your boyfriend?”

“To marry.” She leans over my shoulder to press her weight on the pedals. “Many boys asked me about love in the money season. But when my father lose—losed?”

“Lost.”

“When my father lost his business, the boys all stopped speaking to me. So I hate them.” I smile. Suriya is quietly fierce.