What Lies Between Us Read online

  My mother sits and stares at a page in a Mills & Boon novel. Sometimes she sighs loudly, declaratively. Sometimes she leaps up, puts on music, grabs my hands, sends my book flying, says, “Come, child! Dance.” Anxiety and joy flood through me in equal measure. Joy at her closeness, anxiety at the thought of what my ungraceful feet are doing under me.

  She holds me, her hands on my haunches, pushing them one way and then the other. “Like this, like this, sway your body, move, child. Don’t be so stiff. Move around.” My elegant, beautiful mother. I can read the messages in the arch of her supple, fluid body: “How is this my child? So different from me, so stiff and so serious?” I can’t tell her that I am not serious. That it is only this unexpected closeness to her that is making me awkward and gawky. In the garden with Samson, in the kitchen with Sita, I can dance mad baila like an undulating dervish. I can lose myself and be just a whirl of motion. I can be silly and unfettered and ridiculous. But here with her, I am tongue-tied and thick-footed.

  Her hands push me away. Quick footsteps. The bedroom door slams, reverberating through the house. My father looks up from his papers and says, “Your mother is delicate. We need to treat her carefully. You understand this, don’t you? The need for care.”

  Of course I do. She is my mother. I know better than anyone that she must be handled with diligence, like all things precious and dangerous.

  * * *

  Sometimes on the weekends when I wander down to the kitchen, she is already there. She says, “We don’t need Sita today. I sent her to the market. I’ll make you breakfast myself.” I sit at the table and watch. She talks fast, her housecoat wrapped over her nightdress, her hair pulled into a gushing ponytail on the very top of her head, cascading down in an inky waterfall to her elbows. She says, “I’ll make pancakes. The way you like. Thin. Crispy like an appa.” Her fingers crack eggs on the rim of the bowl, slide them in with one quick motion. “Just the way you like.”

  I watch this mother, the one that appears sometimes. She is demonstrative, coming over to hug me, so I open my nostrils wide to inhale her scent—like nothing else, the smell of this woman. She pushes a bowl at me. “Here, you whip the eggs.” She heats oil, tilts the pan to coat it. Pours the batter onto the hot oil and swirls it so that the thinnest of crepes emerge. She flips these onto a plate, sprinkles sugar granules on the hot surface, squeezes a lemon over it, rolls up the little package, and passes the plate to me. I love the sweetness and the bite of the lemon, the hot delicious crepe. She watches me with hungry eyes. She never eats while I do. Watching me is enough for her, she says.

  * * *

  This too happens. I’m playing outside her locked door, waiting and wishing for her. I’m being careful, but somehow the big doll slips from my fingers, falls banging on the wooden floors. Her bedroom door whacks open and she comes for me. The clutch of her fingers around my upper arm is like a tourniquet. Her face close to mine, she hisses, “I told you to be quiet. I need to rest. I need to sleep. Migraine is splitting my head apart. You need to be silent. Do. You. Understand.” Important information is being transmitted. Yes, I understand. I must not make noise. I must be quiet; I must let her rest. By the age of seven I have learned the lesson of silence perfectly.

  * * *

  In every house on this island, in a frame as extravagant or as meager as the family’s fortunes can afford, is the talisman of the wedding portrait. Without this photograph the house cannot stand.

  The wedding photograph of my parents is in a heavy gold frame poised in the center of the living room wall. It shows my mother enwrapped in a Kandyan osari, her eyes huge, the gleam of lipstick on those virgin lips. Her neck is weighed down by the seven concentric gold necklaces that go from encircling her throat to dangling at her waist. Her hair is bisected by a ruler-straight part, on one side of it an ornament in the shape of a dazzling sunburst and on the other a curved crescent moon.

  Next to her, my young father-to-be wears the costume of the Kandyan kings. In later decades it will become fashionable for all young grooms to don these garments, but during this period, the early 1970s, they are still reserved exclusively for the old Kandyan families. So he wears it not as fashion but as a marker of a certain heritage, a certain history. Here on his feet are the curved slippers, and above that, the various complicated sarongs. One’s eyes move upward to the maroon matador jacket studded at the shoulders with sequined lions. On his head is a tricornered crown, itself topped with a small golden bodhi tree. The only costume in the world perhaps where the male’s outshines the female’s.

  They don’t look at each other, these two. They face the camera and barely touch. They are not smiling; smiles were not requisite in those days. This is one of the only photographs that has survived, so it remains here large on the wall. If my mother had had another, she would have replaced this one, but she doesn’t, so it is the one that endures.

  * * *

  When Amma is in a bright mood she tells me how matches are made. We are Sinhalese Buddhists, and this is how it has always worked. When a son comes of age, a mother makes inquiries. The matchmaker comes to the house wearing his cleanest white sarong and swinging his black umbrella, sheaves of astrological charts and photographs of girls in his battered briefcase. He sits in the best chair and makes his pronouncements. “The Kalutara Ratnasomas have four daughters of marriageable age. No sons. The mother must have very bad karma. The eldest girl is ready and they are eager to find a boy for her so that they can also start looking for the younger three.”

  When he leaves, the women of the family gather to compare the girls he has suggested. Beauty, lineage, docility, and culinary skills—these are the subjects of comparison. And then a girl is chosen. For a doctor son, an engineer son, a mother can expect a pretty, fair-skinned daughter-in-law from a good family. For a son who drinks or who is lame, who shouts so the neighbors can hear, a dark girl or one who has done badly at her O levels will do. A dowry of course changes everything. A father will collect money for years to marry off a daughter. A father of many daughters is an unlucky man: he will work tirelessly, and after his girls are married off, will have nothing to show for it.

  Everybody knows that happiness in marriage is not expected. It is a possibility, of course, but it is not the reason one gets married. If it happens, one is lucky, but marriages are arranged for many reasons—financial, social, as a calming agent on the hot tempers of young men and the possible waywardness of young girls. Happiness is hoped for but is never an expected consequence.

  * * *

  Amma says, “We didn’t do it like that. We broke the rules.” I can tell she is both proud of and ashamed about this. They had been on an up-country bus. My father, a young man on his way to the university; Amma, a girl of unknown pedigree, certainly not someone his parents if they had been alive would have approved of. He had seen her, her bare arm snaking up out of her sari blouse sleeve to hold on to the swaying strap of that bus, which moved like a boat. She was willowy in her printed sari, her feet in leather sandals, the toenails painted the lightest blush of pink. He had looked at these toes and then dared to look at her face, and she had not looked away, as almost any other young woman would have done. Instead she had held his gaze for the briefest moment, and he had been snagged on that glance.

  She says, “He had a nice shirt. I knew he was a Peradeniya boy, and that was all the difference.” She continues, “He passed me notes after that. On the bus. He was so nervous. He didn’t even need to take the bus. He had the car. But that one day it had broken down and he had taken the bus, and from then on, every day he took the bus and I was there.”

  He’d had his friends make inquiries. They learned that she was poor. Her sister and she were living with relatives after the parents had been lost in some typhoid complication. Her dowry was meager. What she did have was beauty, and for my father, who owned this house by the river, whose own parents had died, and even more important, who was rich enough to do as he pleased—including studying somethin
g as useless as history, getting a doctorate in it, and then teaching it at the university—this was enough.

  They saw each other on the bus for months. He passed her notes that declared his undying passion, slipping them into the open mouth of the shopping bag at her feet or into the cheap unclasped bag under her armpit. She never responded either in word or through letters of her own. She never even looked at him again. That initial meeting of his gaze, that was all she could declare. After that everything was up to him. “A girl can’t be cheap,” she says. “You have to maintain yourself. Do you understand? You have to keep your pride. Without that, a girl is nothing.”

  * * *

  They met formally thrice before they were married. He went to her relatives’ small, battered house and was fussed over and served weak tea and plain cake on two occasions. Once he had escorted her to the cinema, where a thin, sweating aunt had sat between them and they had watched the earnest Professor Higgins labor over the guttersnipe Eliza Doolittle’s vowels before falling in love with her. The young professor sat in the dark and wondered if he could enact a similar metamorphosis with the girl who sat on the other side of the thin aunt. Meanwhile, the girl was rigid with terror and excitement at the spectacle of the moving giants above her. It was her very first movie. She was seventeen years old, and her suitor was twenty-nine.

  After the movie they went for falooda and Chinese rolls. The thin aunt had gone off to the bathroom and the young man had realized that what he had seen in her eyes when she first met his gaze on the bus had not been passion or rebellion but desperation. It was frightening to realize this, but it did nothing to assuage his desire. He was hooked.

  They were engaged and her relations were jubilant. Most incredible, this bridegroom had not asked about dowry, had not mentioned the requisite plots of land, refrigerators, or houses that were usually expected. His own family was livid. An extensive collection of aunts and uncles and cousins and assorted jetsam of the far-flung family refused to come to the wedding. There were only the groom’s colleagues and their wives. On the bride’s side, only her older sister, some of her badly dressed family, and a few of her young school friends, shy around the older people. It was a truncated and odd assortment in a country where extravagant weddings are a national pastime. And then even in this small gathering, all around the couple, a hum of gossip.

  One professor’s wife bows her head close to another’s, says, “Do you know? They met on a bus?”

  The other takes a shocked suck of air. “What? Can’t be.”

  “It’s true. I heard from Sujatha’s son.”

  “These modern girls. They’ll do anything to catch a good one.”

  “Yes men. Can you imagine if his parents were alive to see?”

  “They must be turning in their graves. Such a good old Kandyan family.”

  “Yes. What to do? The world is not what it was. All the old rules are broken.”

  They, the newlyweds, heard the whispers and ignored them. They ran out to his car in a hail of rice. No more buses for them. Then they were alone. They were not used to each other’s scents or tastes. The bride had only ever shared a bed with her older sister. They had never kissed or held hands. But this was normal and natural. For it to be otherwise would have been unthinkable. In this place and time, one did not dip a toe into marriage; one plunged into it, fully dressed.

  There is only one other wedding picture in the house. It sits on my mother’s dressing table, and when she sees me looking at it, she says, “I was just a child. Only seventeen. And I had you the next year. You were with us from the very beginning. It was always the three of us.” She considers the picture and tells me the story yet again. “Only those two photographs. The photographer went out and got drunk after the wedding. Got in a fight and destroyed his camera. All the rolls were ruined. I cried for a week when they told me. Thank god, at least Aruna Uncle had a camera. Otherwise even these two we wouldn’t have.”

  Beneath the glass of its frame, the photograph still shows off its cobwebbed crinkles. I had been small, maybe four or five. I had awoken in the middle of the night to loud voices. I had slipped out of my narrow bed and gone to stand in the hallway that led to their bedroom. I saw his arm raised and this photograph in its previous frame hurled across the room. Heard the crash of it against the wall. He saw me then. He came to the door, put his finger to his lips. Shh, he was saying, I must be quiet. I must be good and go back to bed. He closed the door.

  Later either he or she had taken the picture, unfurled it, and put it in a new frame. It was something I learned then. That you could take the crumpled remains of something destroyed and smooth them into newness. You could pretend certain things weren’t happening even when you had seen or felt them. Everything done can be denied.

  * * *

  Sometimes at twilight she goes out to stand at the line of trees by the river’s edge. She watches the dark water flow by her bare feet. I watch from a window. I know my father is watching her from a different window in his study. His hand is curled around a glass of arrack. He will drink for hours and then he will fall asleep in his chair. I have found him there, his head lolling on the student papers, the empty glass dropped from his nerveless fingers onto the floor, making a pungent puddle by his bare feet. I don’t wake him. I have done this before and he had looked at me with some terrible warning in his eyes, so now I always let him be.

  Now from our separate windows, we watch her. She does not belong to us, but to some other state, some other mood, and even if we called to her, she would ignore us or stare back at the house, past us in the windows as if we did not exist. When the sun drops as suddenly as a shot bird, all we can see are her earrings, jagged lines of silver that dart from the tips of her earlobes to the silhouette of her rounded shoulders. We watch these lightning flashes until they too disappear.

  Two

  She bakes cakes; she sings songs. She sews clothes for herself and for me and my dolls on her Singer. Matching outfits in the same fabric—a long yellow maxi for her, a mini for me, and a tiny replica for my doll. She is bright; she is beaming. She is just like the mother in my English storybooks.

  But some mornings I wake to muffled shouting across the hall. I pull the single sheet over my head and pretend it is only the roar of the ocean, which I have seen on trips to Colombo.

  Later my father tells Samson, “Keep an eye on Madame today. Okay, Samson? She’s resting.”

  “Yes sir.”

  He drives me to school. Hours later, I come back in a trishaw with my friend Puime, who lives nearby. Samson greets me at the gate, takes my bag. I say, “Did Amma come out?”

  He says, “No, Baby Madame, not today.”

  I go and sit against her door, my knees folded under me, an ear pressed to the wood. I hear nothing. No rustling of clothes, no whisper of pages, not even the sound of a body turning in bed. For hours I wait to hear the slightest sound, the merest whisper of evidence that she is inside. Crying, shouting, raging—anything rather than this haunted silence.

  Later I open the door and go in as quietly as I can, moving as sly as a cat. She lies in the bed, her eyes following the spokes of sunlight that move across the wall. I climb onto the bed, take the hand that lies clenched over the coverlet, ease open the fingers. She clutches my hand like she is drowning, won’t look at me.

  We stay like this for a long time and then her head whips across the pillow, her gaze narrowing on me. “Why do you always look at me like that?”

  My heart racing, I shrug.

  “Honestly, child, what is wrong with you? Sometimes I feel like you will eat me up. It’s frightening.”

  I look away. How do tell her I am afraid she will disappear? That one day I will push against the door, come in on my cat feet, and find no sign of her. They will tell me that she never existed. That I never had a mother. It is the most terrifying thing I can think.

  * * *

  On good days she leaves her room as soon as my father’s car has pulled away and goes
down to the garden with Samson. When I don’t have to go to school, I follow along, quiet as a shadow. I listen to them speaking in Sinhala, a language she never uses with my father. Samson says, “Look, Madame, the double-petaled hibiscus has flowered.” Her face dips to the blossoms, deep red and frilled like one of her dresses. The stamens leave golden stains on her nose. They stay there because he cannot reach out and dust them off as I can, or as my father can.

  She sits on the wicker chair under the shade of spreading trees and arranges lush bouquets of frangipani, jasmine, and orchids, giant crab claws curving over the other blossoms. Samson brings her a silver tray of tea and sandwiches and waits to hear her instructions: the new flowers she wants planted, the number of coconuts he must scale the trees for.

  She waves her slender arm and says, “Samson, don’t you see? There, in the guava tree. The birds are eating all the fruit.” Samson says, “Yes, Madame,” and runs to chase the birds away while she watches keen as a hawk.

  * * *

  She does not believe in safety. Catastrophe is always around the corner. It is clear in the sharpness with which she looks at me if I sneeze or cough. The sudden fear sparking in her voice like a match lit in a dark room. “Are you getting sick? Are you feeling hot? Come here.” The back of her cool hand against my throat, her palm cupping my forehead. If I go to the toilet at night, I creep silent along the wall, afraid to turn on the light, feeling my way with my bare toes. She calls out in the dark: “Is that you? Where are you going?” Her voice urgent, afraid, wide awake.