Island of a Thousand Mirrors Read online

  He bangs about the property, crashing his cane against walls and doorways. The men humor his violent moods, but when he turns his back, they snigger and imitate his uneven walk. The country is theirs now. The reign of brown-skinned sahibs dreaming of Oxfordshire and sweating in three-piece suits is ancient history.

  As her husband battles contractors and shrieks at laborers, Sylvia Sunethra negotiates marriages for her children, spreading photographs and astrological charts of Colombo’s most eligible sons and daughters on the dining table. A single dream emerges: to build a house and fill it chock-full of dutiful children, illustrious sons and daughters-in-law, an army of projected grandchildren stretching into the distant future.

  Trying to ignore the chaos around her, Visaka does her schoolwork out of dusty textbooks. She works with ears blocked against the drilling and sawing by puffs of cotton wool. Despite these distractions, she is a good student, bringing home distinctions and prizes, managing by intense effort to leave the house immaculately uniformed. Secretly, she wishes to follow in the steps of her brother, Ananda, and become that most respected and rare of persons, a doctor.

  But in her room, hidden behind the tall mirror, taped to the wall, are posters of clean-shaven, fair-skinned boys, Elvis with his cocked hips and Pat Boone. At surreptitious moments, she listens to tapes cajoled from her older sisters, dances across the room to “Love me tender, love me true.” Presses her lips against the slick paper on the wall, imagines what it would be like to fall in love. To be swept away and destroyed, merged with another so that your souls are one, one heart beating in two bodies.

  At family parties, tottering in their first heels and the unfamiliar weight of saris, she and her cousins look furtively at the shy boys gathered on the other side of the room. Which of them will it be? Who will sweep her away on a wave of love, into her real life? Who will love her tender, love her true? Her heart beats erratically with these questions, a throbbing in her head.

  * * *

  Unable to wield a pen between increasingly stiff fingers, Sylvia Sunethra enlists the hand of her youngest daughter so that from the age of ten, Visaka is familiar with the intricacies of the Colombo marriage market.

  The eldest child and only son of the clan, Ananda, is encamped in England, studying for his medical degree. He is the jewel in Sylvia Sunethra’s crown. For months, she searches fervently for a bride suitable to his eminent doctorship, scrabbling among Colombo’s most elite daughters like a gem miner searching the riverbank for hidden sapphires. She finds one girl too plump, another too gaunt, and a third’s eggplant curry an insult.

  But all of this picking and choosing, weighing and consulting, is undone by the closing lines of a letter penned by an England-dwelling female relative. “Why didn’t you tell us that your son was seeing such a pretty Burgher girl? You must be more forthcoming, my dear, after all it won’t do for outsiders to hear about these things before the family does.”

  Sylvia Sunethra rages, then pens a hurried letter to her son: “What nonsense is this? Aunty Malini says you are going here, there, and everywhere with some unknown, unplanned girl.”

  When the reply comes weeks later, her son writes that, yes, he has chosen for himself, worse, he is in love, and even that his love is a Burgher, her bloodlines infused with who-knows-what distillations of Dutch sailor and Portuguese soldier.

  Sylvia Sunethra fumes and cajoles, writes ponderous letters alternately pleading and menacing. But her son will not give up his beloved. She is after all, he says, Sri Lankan. What does it matter if some of her ancestors were of the fair-skinned variety? He does not believe in the primitive custom of arranged marriage, he says. And if Sylvia Sunethra cuts off his allowance, he will wash dishes and sweep floors, immigrate to the United States. Nothing will induce him to return to that backward island if he cannot bring his love with him.

  Sylvia Sunethra wrings her hands and whispers to her daughter so that her husband doesn’t hear, “We sent him to England to become a doctor. And now he is taking a Burgher wife and moving to that bang-bang, shoot-shoot country. What am I to do?” She holds her head and says, “This will kill your father, I just know it. It will kill him dead.”

  They keep the secret from him, but in the end this effort proves unnecessary. In the midst of these chaotic months, the unfolding of further catastrophe. The Judge, lying in bed next to his wife, contorts like a marketplace marionette, utters a sound like a water pipe bursting, and gasps his last. The family has no time to mourn because immediately after the funeral, it is revealed that in order to fund his house-building obsession, he has emptied all the accounts, sold all the lands.

  Sylvia Sunethra, who as a bride of fifteen left her mother’s bed for her husband’s, whose sole monetary experience has concerned the payment of servants, must find ways to spin the empty echoing coffers into gold. Overnight servants are dismissed. Piano lessons, tuition, Tuesday elocution classes rendered a dim memory. Ebony furniture and previously coveted dowry jewelry are sold on the black market.

  Only Alice remains. “Where is there for us to go?” she asks, the gaunt, large-eyed child peering from behind the folds of her sari. And Sylvia Sunethra, moved by this example of need so much greater than her own, allows them to stay and share in the family’s misfortune. In return, Alice is granted reign over the kitchen, where she learns trickeries by which to stretch dhal and rice into all their mouths.

  During these days, Sylvia Sunethra grows even more steely eyed and fierce. Women say, “My! How she has changed. So strong and all. If it was me, I would just die.” What they do not see: the nights in which Visaka lies in her mother’s bed, arms wrapped around the back of the rigid, unmoving woman who does not cry and does not sleep. Together they listen to the waves rising in the darkness.

  When the rooster calls before light, Visaka wakes to see her mother, wraith-like in her white sleeping sari, rise to sitting, wind the long, thin hair into a bun. The mother-ghost rises and walks barefoot across the silent house, making her way through the dark with a blind person’s certitude. She slips past Alice asleep on the floor, through the front door, past the slumbering dogs on the verandah. She walks across the street and the railway tracks, not looking, as she has warned her daughter countless times, for the rushing morning train. She walks down to the sand and sea.

  Behind her, the young girl follows, afraid of the mother in her ghostliness, afraid of what will happen if she does not follow, sits on her slim, adolescent haunches in the sand and watches her mother climb high onto rocks, face oceanward. She knows that now the tears are falling, mixing with the salt spray, the sobbing lost behind the water’s roar. She waits, teeth chattering in the morning chill, arms wrapped about knees until far on the horizon there is a single hair of pink and suddenly the skies are alight, the ocean sparkling emerald and her mother is climbing back. They walk home together and no mention is ever made of these sobbing dawns to which the sea and Visaka are the only witnesses.

  It is in these days that my mother learns survival is the walking of a tightrope stretched between hunger and satiety, that relatives will mock and look away, that fathers die, that the sensation of being held and given succor is an illusion. These are the lessons she will carry with her into adulthood and whisper into the ears of her children.

  * * *

  A year after the Judge’s death, the house is finished but the family’s accounts are empty. Only one thing of value remains. Sylvia Sunethra has started to notice the love-struck boys who cycle up and down the lane, hoping for a glimpse of her youngest daughter. She has noted the scouring eyes of male cousins, the dresses that need to be let out at the bust and hips, cinched at the waist. She has made measurements and calculations.

  One morning, she calls Visaka into her room, pulls her stiffened fingers through the girl’s bath-wet hair, massages coconut oil into it, and lets the mass fall from one of her forearms to the other. Fingers pulling gently, easing knots, Sylvia Sunethra says, “You’re a big girl now. We have to start talki
ng about what will happen to you. This studying business was fine when your father was alive. But now what good can it do? We must start looking for a boy who can take care of you.”

  Visaka cries, “But Amma, what about university?”

  To which Sylvia Sunethra purrs, “No, my darling, there is nothing to be gained from bending over books all the time, except a hunch as big as Alice’s. We must start looking for a nice boy. Amma won’t be here to take care of you forever, you know.”

  Visaka sees her best-laid plans, nurtured over dusty textbooks, over nights of sleepless study, softly gasp and die. There is a corresponding constriction in her throat as if suddenly the air itself is in short supply, it too regulated by maternal will.

  * * *

  Soon afterward, searching for other ways to stave off her mounting debts, Sylvia Sunethra places an advertisement offering the upstairs of the house for immediate rent. When an extensive family of Tamils collected under the name of Shivalingam telephone, she is wary. “Named after Lord Shiva’s privates. These Tamils. So shameless. Who can tell what all kind of nonsense they could get up to. Anyone but them.”

  But when the Shivalingam patriarch shows up early the next morning with a fan of rupees, spread beautifully blue-green like a peacock’s tail, an offer of three months’ rent, she suspends her suspicions.

  Soon thereafter, ancient furniture, cooking pots, bags of flour, statues of Ganesh and Shiva, Tamil and English books are borne upstairs and the Shivalingams settle in.

  Overnight, the upstairs becomes foreign territory, ruled by different gods and divergent histories, populated by thick-braided, Kanjivaram-saried women; earnest bespectacled young men; a gang of kids; one walnut-skinned grandmother; and the unsmiling patriarch.

  This is the beginning of what we will come to call the Upstairs-Downstairs, Linga-Singha wars. When Sylvia Sunethra calls Buddhist monks to the house, their monotone chant is interrupted by the voice of a Tamil film heroine winding seductively down the stairs. When her flowers die, she is convinced that Shivalingam boys hold pissing contests off the balcony. When she finds splashes of red among the yellow, she is sure the ancient grandmother shoots betel as expertly as her grandsons shoot urine. Counting her rent money she mutters, “Bloody Tamil buggers. Hanging their washing from the balconies. Dirty water dripping on our heads. Enough to give a nonstop headache.”

  From upstairs, too, come complaints. Once a week, the Shivalingam patriarch comes to grumble that his grandchildren cannot study because Sylvia Sunethra’s daughter is again playing her Western songs too loudly or that the smoke from Alice’s kitchen is rising into his windows.

  The two heads of state engage in battle.

  “Please, lady, understand that this all-the-time singing of Elvis the Pelvis, as he is known, is not suitable music for the ears of my various unmarried daughters and small grandchildren. In our house, it is permitted for the females only to listen to classical music and sometimes the music from Tamil films. Perhaps, it is advisable that you, likewise, restrain your good daughter in her musical tastes.”

  To which Sylvia Sunethra responds, “Yes, Mr. Shivalingam, having only just come to Colombo from the outstation places, you are not yet familiar with modern music. But in my part of the house, we embrace change and progress.”

  “Yes, but perhaps you will be kind enough to keep this ‘progress’ limited to your own part of the house.”

  “Maybe that can happen if we downstairs are also no longer bothered by that army of small ones running up and down the stairs.”

  Ten minutes later they exchange polite farewells and retire to their respective empires, muttering icy sedition under their breaths.

  The greatest wars are fought over the mango tree. In season, fruit-laden fingers dip straight onto Shivalingam balconies, ripe mangoes press wetly against Shivalingam windows and splatter on their roof. When Sylvia Sunethra finds Shivalingam boys with their fingers sticky, upturning yellow pulp into their open mouths, she turns apoplectic.

  Visaka, attempting to soothe, “But Amma, what are they to do? The tree grows straight onto their balcony.”

  “Doesn’t matter! Stealing is stealing. This is our land. Anything that grows on it belongs to us. They should keep their fingers off our things!” She calls to unmerciful gods, “Bloody Tamils everywhere. What all have I done in another life to deserve this invasion business?” and hires little boys to skim up the tree to collect red, yellow, or even hard, pubescent, green mangoes, until the house reeks of them, first heady and pungent, then overripe and rotting, and Visaka faced with one more mango curry with mango chutney and mango sorbet must push fingers against her mouth and run for the toilet.

  Perhaps it is this preoccupation with the mango tree. Perhaps it is her daily struggle to keep the family clothed and fed. Whatever the reason, at this time, Sylvia Sunethra’s eagle eye is missing certain unforgivable breaches of propriety. Daily, Visaka on her walk home from school is followed by various schoolboys on bicycles who disperse when she reaches her gate. On the bus, there are always haggard, languorous-eyed young men attempting to drop notes promising eternal devotion into her lap. So far, none of these attentions has caused the slightest ripple in her slumbering biology. But now, the youngest Shivalingam boy, a few years older than her, nineteen or so, she guesses, loiters at the front gate at the exact time she arrives home. Most days she is unable to lift her eyes to his, but when she does, he is looking at her so intently that she must rush past, hurry into her room, throw herself on the bed, and wait until her heart has stopped thudding.

  Because, after all, how is it possible that she feels this recognition? As if she knows him! So that despite his foreignness in so many ways, the oil shining in his hair, the scents of unfamiliar foods on his clothes, he feels intimate in a way that shocks her.

  His name is Ravan. She learns this when his sisters call him for tea or his brothers for cricket in the lane. She writes this name in minuscule letters in her exercise books, then scribbles over it in dark ballpoint, tears out the pages, teaches herself not to repeat it, for fear of muttering it in her sleep. “Ravan,” she thinks, “the name of the Lankan king in The Ramayana, brilliant strategist and warrior, abductor of Sita.” She imagines being carried away by the Demon King, taken to his palace and seduced by a thousand courtesies. She smiles into the darkness, while inches away, Sylvia Sunethra turns uneasily and utters small, wounded noises in her sleep.

  * * *

  It buds with infinite slowness. A romance of glances and tiny signs doled out over months. The slide of a glance as they cross paths and that night she lies in her humid bed, wondering where he sleeps in the rooms above her, pictures his blossoming lips. What would it mean to press a fingertip against them? Would they spring back? Would he bite with those perfectly white, slightly wolfish teeth?

  She learns the routines of his day, the hour at which he leaves the house, pushing his bicycle, schoolbooks in a satchel. She watches for his return, wet furrows under his arms, dark against the white shirt. The sound of his bicycle in the lane gives her vertigo. She listens, breathless, to the creak of the steps until he is swallowed by the unknown spaces overhead.

  She starts to find presents on the windowsill of the room she shares with Sylvia Sunethra. A sprig of bright fuchsia bougainvillea left amid the flurry of white jasmine, a curving pink seashell. She runs her finger along the rim of it, holds it to her ear to hear the sea roar and mermaids call.

  One day, as she passes the dark outside staircase, he is waiting. A whirlwind of limbs, like getting caught in a cyclone, being pulled and pressed against his hard, slim body. Madness, desire, his lips so close and then a sound and he is gone. She wonders if this has actually happened and knows it did by the pressure of his fingers still alive on her skin.

  The next time he is gentler, pulling her against his chest, where she shelters, wondering at the density of him, the solidity of his sinew and muscle. She inhales the unfamiliar surface of his skin, flavored with spices she does not kno
w the names of. His lips, by her ear, whisper her name, Tamil-inflected, so that it sounds foreign to her, the name of an Indian princess in a fairy tale. The sound of it makes her bold, makes her want to wrap her arms around him, cradle his face against her throat, but even as she decides to do this, there is the slightest sound, Alice in the corridor, and he has pulled away like the tide receding into that other, alien world.

  One day at the gate, he says, “Come with me,” takes her by the hand, and half drags her along the wall of the house. He whispers, “I have to show you something. A secret.” A delighted edge to his voice and she lets him take her, like Sita being abducted by the Demon King, trepidation and exhilaration beating in equal measure along her throat. At the very back of the house, he pushes away jasmine and reveals a step leading down. He enters first, holds out his hand for her, and then she has stepped into a small, perfectly square room, the floor made of dirt, blue walls revealed by the tiny oil lamp he has placed on the floor, the thick fragrance of flowers. His voice next to her ear, “It must be from when they were building. A place for the workers to rest. I don’t think anyone knows it is there.”

  For months, there are kisses by her ears, the corners of her mouth. They whisper in English, their only common language. Haltingly, stumblingly, learning the unfamiliar contours of each other’s lives. He tells of the land his family has left, far up in the north, a place of dry soil and palmyra trees, lagoons that reflect the hard blue bowl of the sky. He wants to go to the university, he says, study, become a doctor maybe. It makes her remember her own dreams. Maybe they could be doctors together, he says when she tells him that she, too, has wanted this. A dim outline of a shared future reveals itself while the ghosts of their ancestors, her newly dead father, and others, similarly unseen, quake in rage.