Wreck and Order (29 page)

Suriya leans over my shoulder as we bike past the swampy lake. “El, that is the first time I have seen my boyfriend in two years. And I will see his real face soon. He is coming back to Sri Lanka. In six months or one year. We will be married.”

I backpedal to a stop in Suriya's yard. “And you are sure he will be a good husband?” As if that question has an answer. Suriya walks the bike to the back of the house. She cannot know everything of her husband until they marry. But she knows some things. She runs her hand down the side of her face and lets it rest on her neck. She takes the broom leaning against the house and starts sweeping trash and dead frangipani flowers toward the street. Ayya pulls up on his motorbike and throws anxious words at Suriya. The machine coughs dust around our ankles as he roars off.

“The funeral takes Ayya's money,” Suriya says. “So he goes to find money in the village. One man, he owes my father money from some years ago. Maybe Ayya can find that man.” Suriya stares at the crosshatched line Ayya's bike leaves in its wake. His military leave was extended for the funeral. It will be awhile before he returns to his sentry point in Colombo and gets a paycheck.

“Ayya is such a kind person,” I say, following Suriya to the backyard. “Does he ever feel bad supporting—” Stop this right now, says a calm, male voice in my head. Suriya's mother just died. “I mean, ruling over the Tamils, helping to keep them down?”

“The soldiers must rule.” She sounds bored. “LTTE was so bad. We cannot let them come again.”

“The way to stop the LTTE from beginning again is to give equal rights. Treat the Tamils well. Your president has done the opposite.” Suriya's father is sitting alone on a pink lawn chair, a plate of untouched food resting on his lap.

“Maybe you are right, El. I cannot say. The rulers have the power. We cannot fight our ruler. We do not have this power.” In my head, a chorus of imaginary activists groans, “Speak truth to power! Fight the good fight! Don't give in to injustice!” But Suriya is not an activist; she is something else. She takes the plate from her father's lap. “Why did you come to Sri Lanka, El.”

She says it as if it's an answer she understands for the first time and she feels sorry for me. There is no particular person or event I'm running from, no tidy past tragedy to justify my current desperation. I am a confused American who came to a land of poor, dark-skinned, war-scarred people hoping to learn how to be simple and happy. I am aware of the cliché of my journey and so have diminished in the retelling of it even the parts that did truly change me—if change means relinquishing the habitual markers by which one measures the progress of one's life—because I am loathe to turn the real goodness I felt in the lake, in the sky palace above the cave temple, on the handlebars of Suriya's bike, into a self-congratulatory moral, yet another way to manipulate the minute smudge of my personality. So if I ever do manage to make anything out of these notes, it will be the story not of who I am but of who I fear I am.

“I don't know,” I say. “I don't know why I came here.” For half of an instant, I become the person I feel myself to be late at night when I can't sleep and I'm all alone with the minutes passing, and I'm wide awake with thoughts I want to force the minutes to understand, but the seconds are too fast, they pass and pass, and then pass again. I take Suriya's hands, cool and pliable, all those necessary, tiny bones. “I love you, Nangi. I love how you are.”

“Okay. I love you also. You have hungry, Akki?”

We take bouncing steps through frothy brown water, where women are bathing and washing clothes. They smile and nod, smile and nod. Suriya is the girl who just lost her mother and I am her friend all the way from America. I'm no longer embarrassed by my U.S.A. T-shirt and Nike running shorts. I walk through the soapy canal and then dive beneath opaque stillness, keeping my eyes open. The underwater world is a blue lace curtain billowing over a bright window. When I surface, two women about my age are talking excitedly, pointing to the far edge of the lake, where a small circle of sky rains on green, green paddy fields.

Suriya swims over and stands beside me. She whispers my name. I crane my neck upward: an untroubled pastel dome. “There must be a rainbow,” I say, just as the women nearby smile hugely and point to the other side of the lake. “I never—” I shut my mouth. A thick band of colored light is climbing slowly over our heads, forming a perfect arc that touches down at last on the tall grasses near the mouth of the canal.

A young father carries his baby into the water. The infant gurgles and smacks the surface of the lake with her small palm. The sky takes a huge breath, sucking the heat from the air. Suriya cups her ear. “Heard you that noise?” she says, English failing her. “It's coming, oh, it's coming.” And then we are engulfed in raindrops so huge and fast and loud that it feels like my skin is leather stretched taut over the surface of a drum. I shield the rain from my eyes, while everyone around me cups their hands over their ears. Even physical discomfort is cultural. We turn in slow circles, watching drops bounce off the mirrored lake. Suriya hops lightly. The lake water is hot on my thighs. Cool rain pelts my shoulders. “Disaster wind,” she says, beaming, wide-eyed, enjoying her fear. She puts her arm around my waist under the water. Distant thunder grows closer. Gilded daggers cut jags out of the slate sky. “We should get out of the water,” I say. “You can die.”

“Oh no!” But Suriya moves deeper into the lake. She floats on her back, her mouth opened wide. She swims back to me and takes my hand. We hop together back to shore. The sun comes out on the walk home, raising steam from the rain-soaked earth.

The next morning, I tell Suriya that I would like to take her to America with me. She's hanging freshly washed sheets and towels on the line, wearing her purple pajama pants and True Love Forever T-shirt. “Before you get married,” I say. “We can stay with my father. He has a very big house. And travel around.”

She lets the sheet she's rinsing fall back in the bucket. “I go to U.S.A.?” She lowers herself to the ground, rests her elbows on her crossed legs and her chin in her hands. She looks up at me through the space between her first two fingers. “Akki, this is my dream. But I never risk to ask you.” I finish rinsing the sheet as I tell her that we'll need to go to Colombo to get her a passport and fill out forms for a visa. We can travel all around the East Coast. Visit the Statue of Liberty. Go to the beach in Florida.

“In your country, I can wear a bikini?”

“Of course. You can wear whatever you want.”

“Wow,” she tells her lap.

But as we're brushing our teeth at the water pump that night, she says that she has been thinking about the trip to America and she has decided that she must not go. Before she met me, she never thought about leaving her country. Lanka is enough for her. This is the best way. She begs me not to have angry with her. I tried to make her dream come true. But she cannot go to America.

So instead of booking plane tickets and waiting for hours in air-conditioned offices in Colombo, we spend days letting the rain soothe our senses. After the storms exhaust themselves, I stand in the yard and watch the spidery watermarks on Suriya's concrete house get slowly erased by the sun. I didn't really want to sit on a Miami beach with Suriya in a bikini. I just wanted to give her something.

“Are you lazy, El Akki?” Suriya asks me one afternoon. I'm resting my head on the chair back, my legs stretched in front of me. I sit upright. Ayya and Suriya stand in front of my chair, gazing at me expectantly. “Lazy?” I say. My head grows stuffy and hot. Ayya raises his arms as far as he can above his head, making a wide V, and then yawns dramatically. “You. Lazy. Here?”

“You mean bored?”

“Lazy?” Ayya says.

“Sitting. Eating. Talking. Gazing.” I pause after each word so Ayya can understand my meaning through cadence. “I love it here.” He smiles, reassured, and heads up the stairs. “But, Nangi, I do need to leave soon.”

“I know. You must go back to your country and make a family.” Suriya taps an imaginary watch on her wrist.

“No, no.” I shake my head vigorously.

“El. I am joking.”

I squeeze her hand. “You have to go back to Kandy soon, anyway, right? How long can you take off school?”

Suriya gives me the look of condescending surprise that means I have failed to grasp some obvious fact of her life. “I will not go back to school. I must stay here and care for my father.”

I drop her hand. “Suriya. Please. Your father is a grown man. You can't give up your studies. You've worked so hard.”

“I do not give up my studies. My success with school gives me power and it makes me brave. Like the first time I spoke to you in Kandy.”

“That's exactly why you have to finish school. Get a good job.”

“My boyfriend is here soon,” she says, as if I haven't spoken at all.

“Will be here soon,” I say.

“Will be.” She walks toward the kitchen.

I email my father: I'll be home in a week. I'm coming to stay with him for a little while, before I move back to California. Can he pick me up at the airport? He writes back within minutes. He can't believe how perfectly I timed my email. He had
just
been sitting down to write me. He misses me so much, can't wait to see me, how long will I stay? Just a warning: His accountant has told him that the inheritance money is getting low and the remainder needs to be invested, blah blah blah (my father's words), he's not going to worry about it, he's never agonized over money in his life and he's never gone hungry. He's started working as an electrician again, like he used to when he was practically still a kid—I knew that, didn't I? (I didn't.) He likes it better than film work, really. No ego. And pretty fucking good pay, considering.

Suriya bikes us home from the house with a computer. Too fast, perfect fast.

Suriya insists we visit a highly revered cave temple, to make a fruit offering to the gods in exchange for protecting me on my trip home. We make the two-hour trek by bus on a Saturday. The temple gates are frenzied with pilgrims buying lotus flowers, candles, and fruit platters. Suriya requests the largest platter and asks the harried fruit seller to fill it with rose apples, mangoes, bananas, pineapples. As the young woman deftly slices a pineapple and fans the pieces into floral arrangements, I wish I were buying this food as an offering to Suriya. Her family needs a beautiful plate of fresh produce much more than this famous temple that enjoys the government's showy patronage. And it seems highly unlikely that any god will concern himself with my personal safety in exchange for a banana in the shape of a tulip.

At the top of the craggy pathway leading to the temple, Suriya and I join a long line of weary worshippers, also bearing elaborate fruit and flower offerings. At first, the people at the back of the line join their hands in prayer when the chanting from inside the cave drifts back to us. But after some time in this sticky mass of bodies shuffling toward the cave's narrow passage, waiting becomes just something to get through. Two teenage girls lean against each other's backs, making ineffectual fans out of their hands. A tiny elderly woman elbows past me, and I nearly elbow her back.

At last it is our turn to duck inside the mouth of the cave, which opens to a candlelit hotbox too small to stand up in. The altar is a mess of coins, flower petals, and melted wax. An infant wearing gold earrings and glass bangles shrieks against the dark and the heat. The shirtless, round-bellied priest makes a signal and we all kneel, our thighs pressed against one another's and our knees mashing the toes of the person in front of us. The baby keeps wailing and the priest starts chanting in a monotone, wiping sweat from his forehead. Why the hell are we waiting to drop a coin or a pineapple or a wilted flower on this overfull altar so that the exhausted priest will tie a protection string on our wrists with limp fingers while intoning some words he has memorized? Suriya brings her hands together and bows her forehead to her fingertips. I imitate the gesture. Because we want to live well and we don't know how. I peel my hands apart and let them fall open at my chest, two empty cups.

When I wake up the day before my flight, Suriya has already folded her mat and swept our room. I'm going to take an early bus to Colombo and stay in a hostel near the airport. I get dressed, shove my pajamas in the top of my backpack, snap it shut. Then I lie down on the bed like a starfish. An arm of light reaches for my throat and chin. I open my mouth to taste sun. I force myself to stand, carry my packed bag downstairs. A small gray cat sits on the foot of the stairs, a patch of fur missing on his back.

I walk into the kitchen and lean my bag against the doorway. “I make you small eats, for your trip,” Suriya says, aggressively stirring a pot of red rice.

“Oh, Nangi. You are so sweet. I can't thank you enough for—there's no way to explain—what you've given me—I don't—”

“No, El.” She begins wrapping the meal in a torn plastic bag and newspaper. She turns her back to me. “Now you leave and I am a frog in a well.” The words tiptoe across a tightrope. She folds each side of the newspaper into a triangle.

I put my hand on her shoulder and try to turn her toward me. “You'll be okay.” She folds the newspaper into a neat package. “I still think you should go back to school. You could just take some time off, help your—”

“I think my mother was sick because she works too much. So much worries and all the time fighting with my father. And she did it all because of me. She said, I cannot leave your father because you are little, and later, when she was sick the first time, she said, I cannot stop working because you must go to school. But she is always calm and happy. Everyone love her more.”