Island of a Thousand Mirrors Read online

  Yet the heart of the house is an interior courtyard, built in the days of the Portuguese, who liked to keep their women sequestered in these interior gardens, full of spilling foliage, birdcall, and monkey chatter. Annoyed by this exuberance and lack of order, the Judge sends the gardener to rip and uproot. But days after these attacks, the mutilated branches send forth vines to once again wind into the embrace of the wrought iron balcony. Birds return once again to build nests in the outstretched arms of the trees. The queen of this domain, an enormous trailing jasmine, impervious to pruning, spreads a fragrant carpet of white. When the sea breeze whispers, a snowy flurry of flowers sweeps into the house so that Visaka’s earliest and most tender memory is the combined scent of jasmine and sea salt.

  It is into this pulsing, green space that she escapes after the boiled beef and vegetables. It is here she plays her childhood games, befriended at a distance by the birds, the geckos and squirrels. She says of her variously prim and jungled childhood, “It was like growing up in a garden of Eden in the middle of coldhearted England.”

  * * *

  A photograph from this time witnesses the whole family suited and saried on the front lawn, Colombo heat perceptible only in the snaking tendrils that cling to the women’s cheeks and necks. Our mother is flanked by her two much older sisters, each beautiful in an entirely different way. One, round-faced and dark like a plump fig, succulent. The other tall, slim, and elegant, calling to mind something lunar.

  Our mother, a sapling next to these hothouse beauties, poses on the edge of an ebony chair. A serious, spectacled schoolgirl in long braids and a stiff, ironed uniform, she is caught in a blur as if about to run off. Her formidable mother, Sylvia Sunethra, wears a sari in the old Victorian way, all ruffled sleeves, starch, and ramrod straight posture, her hand on the girl’s shoulder holding her down. Behind them all, her handsome brother, Ananda, debonair in a three-piece suit. In the chair sits the Judge, who despite his profound baldness looks too young to be the father of these grown children.

  The photograph gives no forewarning. Yet it captures the end of my mother’s childhood, because if we enter with the certainty of history into the secret, red passageways leading to my grandfather’s heart, we see lurking within his tissue-thin arteries an amoeba-shaped blood clot that will lead him to sit up in bed six months later, clutching at his chest. He will not die of this first stroke, but some years later under the assault of successive ones and in the midst of his house-building obsession.

  It is around the time of this photograph that our mother remembers the coming of Alice. Male relatives from the Judge’s ancestral village squat on the verandah waiting for the Judge. With them, a woman, face obscured behind her sari pallu. Our mother remembers the outline of a large, fair-skinned face, round as the full moon, long, she-deer eyelashes. And over the left shoulder, stretching the cheap cloth of the sari blouse, an enormous, quivering hump. “This is Alice Nona,” the men say and meticulously retrace the capillaries of familial blood that make her “our people.”

  She is unmarried for obvious reasons. She has been living with her aged parents, taking care of them. But in the last year there has been trouble. The men are vague. They will not specify. The Judge thunders, “What is this nonsense? You have brought a fallen hunchback woman to my house?”

  The men shift on their haunches. One says, “She can cook and also clean … only take her as a servant.”

  The woman is silent, her eyes pulled earthward. But there must have been some mute appeal implicit in the twisting of her large-knuckled hands because now, Sylvia Sunethra, twelve years younger than her husband, but already becoming the iron-handed matriarch of her later years, says, “I will take her.”

  The Judge is aghast. But there is something in his wife’s eye that threatens unknown violence if he does not comply. So as the men breathe sighs of relief, he says only, “Alright. She can stay and join the staff. But one problem and I will send her packing.”

  The men leave, and Alice is installed somewhere between family member and servant. She sleeps on a mat outside Sylvia Sunethra’s bedroom. For three months, her face is a study in impassivity, she moves as if in a sleepwalk, and not even the crashing of a dish just behind her causes the slightest of reactions. Finally Sylvia Sunethra, annoyed beyond endurance, says, “Oh, enough with this long face all the time. Tell them to bring the child.”

  The very next week, a wizened woman arrives at the gate. From within her sari folds comes a hungry, kittenish mewing and now Alice goes about her day laughing and with a baby clinging to her breast. At night, mother and infant fall asleep, rolled together outside Sylvia Sunethra’s door, and even the Judge, afraid of the venom of his wife’s tongue, dares not question the origins of this baby that Sylvia Sunethra has decided to shelter along with its wayward mother. It is in this way that we who are not yet born acquire Alice, that beloved Quasimodo of our childhoods, and also her son, Dilshan.

  two

  In the southern fishing village, under his mother’s eagle eye, Nishan develops the aura of nascent success, evident in his newly acquired eyeglasses and paid for by the loss of cricket games, bicycle rides, and beach wanderings.

  During the school holidays, hooligan cousins are sent to spend their days under his mother’s command. They run through the garden like wild hares; spin marbles with the concentration of gambling addicts; hold their noses to dive into the deep, chill well; but when they walk through the house they are quiet, respectful of their cousin’s head bent over outspread books. Beatrice Muriel warns, “The rest of the house you can demolish any way that you like, but stay away from Aiya and his studies.”

  Yet even as she is proud of her son, a pointed thorn pierces the tenderest areas of Beatrice Muriel’s heart. Neither her prayers nor the village women’s many potions have made the slightest difference. Mala, the boy’s twin and shadow, remains as stubbornly dark as at birth.

  A slip of a girl, she is quiet in company, silent in her mother’s presence. Next to her, Beatrice Muriel grows in bulk, the solid folds of her sari firmly anchoring each of them, the wispy female child, the dreamy doctor, the scholarly boy, to earth.

  Witness, however, a daily transformation. At noon, Beatrice Muriel returns from the schoolroom for lunch and overcome by the heavy afternoon air, withdraws into her bedroom for exactly two hours. In these hours, a different Mala awakens. Assured of Beatrice Muriel’s immobility by the snores erupting from the bedroom, she is in the street lightning fast, playing cricket with the boys, making sure that her voice does not join their cries. Someone screams, “Look out! There behind you! The ball!” and Nishan knows that Mala is bowling. He goes to the window, sees her poised like the Nataraja, arm over knee, a ferocious whirlwind of limbs, and the ball goes whizzing past heads.

  In these magic hours, Mala climbs high onto forked branches and throws down fruit to the other children too afraid to follow her ascent. She cavorts on the beach. Stands on her hands, her dress inverted, a billowing tent, white shorts and black legs exposed.

  When Beatrice Muriel awakes, there are twin furrowed brows, twin pencils working in tandem, four legs swinging under the table where Kalu Balla scratches fleas in his sleep. When the villagers come to complain, “That daughter of yours has been in our avocado tree. Stealing all the ripest.” Beatrice Muriel points to Mala, innocent and scholarly at the table, bellows, “What nonsense! Look at my girl, doing her work. You mad fellows think you can come and insult us. Better you get out of my house before I call Seeni Banda.” And the poor man, knowing Seeni Banda and his ancient rifle, scurries off the porch, cursing the uppity nature of high-caste neighbors and their spoiled children.

  As they walk to school, Nishan’s friends will say, “Aday machang. That sister of yours can bowl like a goddamn champion. We should have her on the school team, even Ariyasinghe doesn’t have an arm like hers.” And he will feel the stings of pride and resentment at this sister who exists for exactly two hours of each day.

  * * *
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  At dusk, Beatrice Muriel and Mala gather soiled clothes, ash to brush teeth, a sliver of soap, and walk toward the river. At water’s edge, a flock of women gather, loud as birds. They wear sarongs tied above their breasts. Their shoulders gleam like polished wood in the dying sun. They pull fingers through buns and braids, freeing streams of hair that unfurl along their spines. Water slides over ankles, calves, knees. The river is warm from the day’s heat. The women wade to their waists, pour buckets of water over their heads, soap dark limbs white and frothy.

  On the riverbank, Beatrice Muriel squats with Mala clasped between her knees. She pulls a comb through the girl’s hair, fighting the knotted curls, laments, “Look at this hair. Won’t straighten no matter how much oil I put on it.”

  The women scrutinize Mala’s scrawny figure. They offer advice.

  “Rub a coconut husk on her.”

  “River sand is better.”

  “Bathe her in buffalo milk.”

  “Grind turmeric and spread it all over her. My sister’s girl was black like that. Every day she put turmeric and now the girl is smooth and white as buffalo curd.”

  “Nonsense. I’ve seen that girl, she’s still dark like a demon’s backside! My advice, take her to the devil dancers. Maybe they can improve her color.”

  Beatrice Muriel grits her teeth. She has tried these various suggestions to no avail. Between her knees, Mala practices bowling imaginary cricket balls. Feels the swing of her shoulder, the perfect arc of the ball, the astonished faces of the women before they are split wide by the smashing ball. She smiles into the quick-falling darkness.

  * * *

  Seeni Banda, the one-legged fisherman, spends his mornings at the tea shop sucking steaming, sugary milk tea from the saucer. At the Doctor’s house, he gives the children lessons in tea shop politics: “Of the two races on this island, we Sinhala are Aryans and the Tamils are Dravidians. This island is ours, given to us from the Buddha’s own hand long, long before they came. And now they have come and we are forced to share this place. But really it belongs to us.”

  Mala says, “But Seeni Banda, our teacher says the Tamils have been here just as long as we have. She says that no one really knows who came first.”

  He flaps a loose-fingered hand at her, continues in the mode of the local pundits. “Tamil buggers, always crying that they are a minority, so small and helpless, but look! Just over our heads, hovering like a huge foot waiting to trample us, south India, full of Tamils. For the Sinhala, there is only this small island. If we let them, they will force us bit by bit into the sea. Swimming for our lives.”

  The children listen, their eyes big. They had not realized that the Tamil children they go to school with harbored such insidious and watery intentions.

  * * *

  In the dry season of the year 1958, Nishan is a gawky teenager, black spectacles slipping down the sweat of his nose, the weight of large textbooks curving his spine. The tea shop rumors have turned into the smoky scent of sulfur drifting down from Colombo. Whispers flutter like insects drawn to the lamplight: “They are killing Tamils in Colombo.” From the opaque darkness, an answer: “This is a Buddhist country. Such things cannot happen here.”

  He is rendered immune to these rumblings by the drama of his own adolescence. Each night, a Beatrice Muriel–faced vulture gnaws at his liver, his failed examination papers clutched in her curved talons. He wakes sodden in a chilling sweat. His exams are upcoming and wrapped up in a fog of equations, memorized test papers, and complicated mathematical proofs. He is not consciously aware of the fear on people’s faces, the way in which his parents or Seeni Banda greet strangers with a new suspicion, his mother’s hoarding of red rice under the kitchen floorboards.

  At dawn, he and Mala walk along the silver ocean toward the railway station. It is quiet, until the terminal. Then schoolboys and girls, giddy in this brief interlude between the authority of parents and that of teachers, chatter like mynas. There is a girl in this crowd that he likes. She is a few inches taller than him, so the other schoolboys tease him mercilessly. But there is invitation in the girl’s eyes, a certain glance he is sure she reserves for him that allows him to endure the ribbing and gives him thrills of pleasure when she looks his way.

  In the darkened carriage, boys talk of cricket scores and slide their eyes surreptitiously toward chattering girls. The forward motion of the train rocks them into delicious, early morning languor.

  All this is smashed open with an ear-shattering shriek of metal, the train thrown against some hard, resisting object. Boys and girls are flung like bits of paper from an enormous and uncaring hand, bright blood blooming on white uniforms, and bare-chested, saronged, machete-armed men enter the carriage, stalk heavy-footed down the aisle. Schoolkids cower, arms over heads. The men breathe words flaming of coconut toddy, “Tamil devils. Get up! Stand up! Stand up!”

  “Look at this one.” A man grasps Radhini, object of Nishan’s ardor, by the upper arm, above the elbow. She is jerked upward like a fish plucked out of water by a cormorant’s skewering beak. A machete tip traces her upper arm where uniform gives way to smooth flesh. Cold metal on skin. A tear trembles on her lash, catching light in that dark interior.

  “Tamil? No?”

  Shamefaced schoolboys turn their faces. The odor of panicked sweat settles like a cloud. My father cannot avert his eyes, Mala claws his arm. “Do something,” her fingers beg, but though his heart drums staccato, his feet remain leaden.

  “Tamil? But no pottu? Trying to get our boys to think you’re a Sinhala girl?”

  “Maybe we should make a pottu for you, no? In the middle of the forehead. Nice big one. Red, I think.”

  Swift as a striking cobra, a streak of red across the girl’s curved forehead. The sudden and unmistakable smell of urine. The front of her white uniform yellowed, spreading. From the back of the carriage, a loud voice. It is a teacher of the fourth standard, a tiny fury in a pink sari and thick glasses. “Leave them alone! They’re just schoolkids.” She pushes past hefty shoulders, wraps her arms around the girl. “This girl has done nothing. Let her be.”

  “She’s Tamil. That’s enough. They take our land, our jobs. If we let them they will take the whole country.” Miss Abeyrathna, sari rustling like angel wings, says, “Look at her. She’s a Sinhala girl. Only a little dark. You goondas can’t even tell the difference.”

  A rustling in the mob. A collective pushing forward, and from the back a single, toddy-slurred voice: “If she’s Sinhala, prove it.”

  Miss Abeyrathna pushes Radhini’s shoulder. “Girl. Recite something … the Ithipiso Gatha, say it.”

  In a shivering, breaking voice Radhini recites the Buddhist verses preaching unattachment, impermanence, the inevitability of death.

  For the rest of his life, the cadence of this particular verse will cause my father’s bile to rise. It will conjure grasping fingers of guilt that wrap about his throat and make him remember Radhini in that dark compartment, the Tamil-inflected undercurrents of her accent hidden by her years in Buddhist schools, the front of her uniform sodden yellow with fear and shame.

  She was saved, he will tell us, by the courage of that teacher. The mob, deterred by her bravery, left then. But there is something that lingers in his eye when he tells this story that makes us know the weight of it upon his heart.

  * * *

  There is, of course, another child in this tale, a Tamil child growing up in the north where grasping fingers of land reach into the frothing ocean. While Radhini recites terrified verses, he is four years old. At the age of four, the course of any life lies uncharted; there are perhaps no fangs in this mouth, no incipient claws in evidence. He is perhaps too young to remember these days of lootings, when houses were surrounded and set aflame with children crying inside them. He is perhaps too young to have this memory, but he claims to remember these things. Most specifically, he remembers an old Tamil woman beset by Sinhala youths, who beat her with sticks and then, laughing as if at a
fair or some other amusement, set her alight so that she squawks and screams, her sari flapping like the wings of a great flaming bird. Perhaps he is too young to remember, but these are the images that filter into his dreams. In the decades to come, when he has become the Leader with blood-drenched claws and ripping fangs, a tiger-striped army ready to die at his command, these are the images he will offer when asked why.

  three

  In Colombo, weakened by his first stroke, his ramrod straight walk broken by an insistent limp, the mutton soup dripping disobediently out of the corner of his mouth and onto his starched white shirt front, the Judge dreams of demolishing his meandering mansion. In its place, he wishes to install a simple modern two-story house.

  An army of sarong-clad men is moved in to trample the carefully laid flowerbeds, spitting betel like blood on the floors and abandoning tools everywhere. In daylight, the ground shakes incessantly and the family must shout to make themselves heard. At night, they are kept awake by the laughter of the men who squat in a circle smoking beedis like buzzing red fireflies and drinking arrack before falling asleep in the room erected for this purpose.

  While a fine cement dust falls on their heads, rendering all white haired and aged, the Judge spends most of his time railing against these sons of the soil. “These bastards will be the death of me! If I look away even for a minute they have put in the staircase facing the wrong way. Country going to these uneducated dogs.”