What Lies Between Us Read online

  She is afraid of as vaha, evil eye. As meaning eye and vaha meaning poison. The poison that drips from covetous eyes. She believes that people envy the good fortune that has brought her to this house, saved her from whatever horrors there were before. The as vaha can bring ill fortune, sickness, and death, so once a year she takes me to a temple where a Hindu priest sits bare-chested, ash on his forehead. He takes the small green limes we have brought and holds each one up to my forehead one by one. He slices them in two with his silver lime cutter. Fifty limes, cut one by one. He intones the verses that will splash acid juice in the eyes of all those who envy our good luck.

  We don’t tell Thatha about these trips. He is Buddhist in a lazy way, but he will not like this. He will say that she is polluting her Buddhism with these Hindu rituals and superstitions. So the lime-cutting trips are a secret held tight between Amma and me.

  * * *

  In the morning before school I am tugging my hair into sections for braids. The rules are strict. The part in the hair must be straight as a ruler and the hair must be pulled away from our faces, secured at the ends with the blue ribbons that along with the blue tie on the white uniform are emblematic of our school.

  Amma comes in quietly, takes the comb from me, glides it through my hair, the teeth a gentle rasp against my skull, her hands careful. There is a slight tug as she sections the hair, intertwines the shanks. I close my eyes and imagine that this is always so. We are like this for a long, quiet time. She says, “I think that’s good.” A kiss on the top of my head. “That looks nice, right?” We survey her work in the mirror. My plaits are perfect, so much better than what I can usually manage alone. I say, “Yes, Amma. That’s very nice. Thank you.” She breathes a sigh of relief, pats my head, goes off. Some loveliness blooms.

  * * *

  Thatha’s dogs, Punch and Judy, were named for the puppets that were popular in his childhood. They lie at his feet watching his face with the devotion of lovers, waiting for instruction from this god. There is devotion too in the way he speaks to them. A certain tone of voice that makes these enormous, snarl-snouted dogs writhe with delight when he pauses with his hand on their heads. When he is home, they have no eyes for anyone else. But there are always students waiting, lectures to be written, books to be read, so often the dogs must make do with me. When he is not home, they are my constant companions. I throw stones, which they dash to retrieve. They come back panting, drop saliva-covered, river-smooth rocks at my feet to be thrown again and again.

  In a corner of the garden is the well. Its mouth sinks down into the river through some long, secret drop. When the cousins come for school holidays we look over the edge, feel the cool breath of hidden water, peer down into the deep darkness with no end. We drop stones to hear them splash minutes later, shiver to imagine what it would be like to fall, to hurl ourselves into the cold water, to look up and see that perfect circle of light.

  On the hottest days when everything is sticky and sweating and the cousins are far away in their boarding schools and Amma is closed up in her darkened room, I make Samson go down to the well with me. I take off my sandals and stand on the soft earth in my cotton housedress. Samson throws the bucket into the depths; we hear it clanging as it falls. He draws it up arm over arm, cold water sloshing over the lip, and says, “Ready, Baby?” I stand there, arms crossed over my shoulders in the fierce beating sunlight, tensed and ready for the chill. And even though I know it is coming, when the icy water spills down over me I jump, looking up through that veil of silver water into the sunlit world. The water is electric, alive. It sets me ablaze, it is so cold. Through chattering teeth I say, “Again, again, again!” He hauls up the bucket, pours the water slowly over my upturned head and shivering body. He does it over and over until finally he says, “Okay, Baby Madame. Enough now. Samson has so much to do and your Amma will be up soon.”

  I lie flat, spread-eagled on the grass, soaking wet, my dress clinging to me. The red of it has turned a wet maroon. But minute by minute it is pulling free of my skin, the breeze is taking it, the sun is smashing down, and quickly I am dry again, sand dry, the only hint of wetness, like a secret, in the depths of my braids.

  * * *

  In the evenings, Sita brings dishes to the table. Red rice on a platter with a small tea saucer to serve it, the curries in their various bowls, fried beetroot, crackling papadams, a fiery chicken curry. The ceiling fan stirs the air methodically. We gather under it, an assortment of whatever relations have come that night. A clatter of spoons as we serve curries onto the rice. Gathered around the table, we sink our fingers in the food, smashing together rice, silver-skinned fish, fried potatoes, coconut sambol, making perfect bite-size balls, a bit of every delicious thing. The heat of the air, the heat on our tongues, a scorchingly delicate, almost unbearable pleasure.

  My mother keeps a sharp eye on every plate, serves whatever is missing before recipients have realized they are low on rice or curry. It is important that everyone be treated well. She has won over my father’s family with patience and generosity. But she knows their allegiance is paper-thin and she must be solicitous so that they will not go away bearing tales that she is still that girl he met on the bus.

  After dinner, chairs are scraped away and a dance floor is created. Music on the stereo. Boney M. or ABBA. Everyone is singing, “Brown girl in the ring, tra la la la la. There’s a brown girl in the ring, tra la la la la la … She looks like a sugar in a plum, plum, plum,” and then inevitably the baila music starts. Sinhala lyrics on top of old creole Portuguese rhythms. Women hitch saris up to their knees, pretend to be the coy Surangani waiting for her fisherman. They sway around men who channel the fisherman with the freshest catch. A shuffling and swaying of hips as they circle each other, arms hooking, skipping and swaying, eyes and hands flirting. My father refuses to join. But he smiles and claps us on. My mother grabs my hands and sways with me around and around in a riotous circle until I am sure that I am that girl, the “brown girl in the ring … like a sugar in the plum.” All of us singing the words to songs as we’ve done hundreds of times.

  Later there are long ambling gossips that last through the night. The women stay in the parlor. The men drift out onto the lawn to settle themselves in chairs and nurse their glasses of arrack in the midnight breeze. Their faces are blurred and indistinct in the dark. The smoke rises from mosquito coils. The frogs in the pond sing long and loud. I sit in the hammock-like curve of my father’s sarong at his feet, half asleep but listening as they talk, the ebb and flow of voices washing over me. They discuss the situation in the country, the skyrocketing price of everything, the Tamil trouble gathering in the North.

  A sudden plunge into darkness in the house behind us, loud aws and ohs from the women. The electricity has gone off again. Samson is shouted for and comes slowly, his face lit by candles. The talk continues, the darkness pushing closer until we see one another only as silhouettes. Long drowsy hours of half-lit talking and drinking. And then with the suddenness of a threat, the lights jump on. I had been cradled and almost rocked to sleep in the low sling of my father’s sarong.

  He says, “Ahaaaa, still here? Go to sleep. Go-go. Quickly before I give you a swift slap.” But his voice is laughing. I leave them then, my hand in Sita’s as she leads me to my bed. Behind me, that close knot of men still talking and laughing as dawn comes.

  * * *

  I am ten years old and cast in a school play. It is based on a collection of Kipling’s stories. I am the evil old Crocodile who snaps onto the trunk of the Elephant’s Child and pulls and pulls until the Elephant’s Child’s once tiny piglike snout is long and sinuous. Onstage under the lights I preen in a costume Amma has labored over on her Singer for weeks. It is the most fantastic of her creations, made of a green bodysuit replete with scales, a long swishing tail waggling behind, a row of white teeth through which I look out upon the delectable Elephant’s Child as he approaches my forest pool. I love this. I feel seen. A tingling joy runs through me
as I bellow my duplicitous reptilian lines.

  Afterward there is applause, and as I come offstage, looking for my parents, Thatha catches me in a bear hug, says, “So good, so good. You were wonderful.”

  I say, “Really?”

  “Yes! Perfect, excellent.”

  He says, “Okay, come, let’s take a photo. Stand here, pose like this. With your friends, now.” We pose, all of us in our costumes. Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, Shere Khan, Kaa, Crocodile, Elephant’s Child. My arms are around Shivanthi and Puime’s shoulders. Thatha is beaming, clicking and clicking. Amma says, “We need to go. Now.” I turn to her, wanting to hear everything he has said, but in her voice. She says nothing.

  He says, “Come on. Just a few more. Almost done.”

  She walks by him, and with a heart-sickening crash, Thatha’s beloved camera is dashed on the floor, the film curling and exposed, lenses broken, small cogs rolling under women’s saris. People stare and whisper. Thatha’s face breaks and then reassembles even as he bends to pick up the various pieces, muttering, “An accident. That was an accident,” then out loud to anyone who was near and had seen, “An accident, she walked by and it must have caught on her sari. My fault, really. Must be more careful.”

  She waits for us in the car. The look on her face, imperial. He says, “What the hell was that?”

  “What? The camera?”

  “Yes, the bloody camera, of course. What else?”

  “Well, you should take pictures of the rest of us too.”

  “Why wouldn’t I take pictures of her? It’s a big day for her.”

  “The way you treat her. Don’t be sorry when she gets a big head. Spoiled rotten. It’s only a school play. What will you do when she attains age? When she gets married? Rent the bloody Grand Oriental Hotel?”

  In the backseat, I peer out from between the rows of white teeth and hold on to the tip of my emerald tail and know that I must be even quieter, even more still.

  * * *

  I read Alice in Wonderland obsessively. Not because I like it. All those panicked, devious animals, the uncontrollable growings and shrinkings that suggest one’s body is never quite one’s own. When the Queen of Hearts shouts and demands obedience, it feels real and close. When everyone scampers to obey her orders, when the soldiers paint each white rose red so that she is appeased and satisfied, I understand the threat of the cold blade slicing through their necks. They are waiting to hear her words “Off with their heads!” I too am waiting for the cold steel of her disapproval to drop. In these days I too live in the kingdom of the Queen of Hearts.

  * * *

  I go into the kitchen to find Sita. She is stirring red rice in a pot, rinsing the dust out of it. She watches me from the corner of her eye as I drift about the kitchen. She says, “What happened?”

  “Nothing.”

  She shrugs her shoulders, slowly pours the water out of her pot, not looking at me. I say, “I hate her. She broke Thatha’s camera. And he didn’t even do anything. He was just taking pictures of me.”

  She doesn’t look at me when she says, “Your mother. She doesn’t mean it, you know. She’s had a hard life.”

  “She hates me.”

  She sighs, turns to me, wipes her hands, says, “Okay, come with me.”

  She takes me into her little room; unlike Samson’s, this one is inside. She sits on the sagging bed and puts her arm around me. She says, “Your mother came to this house very young. She doesn’t have any people, you know. Her parents, they died when she and her sister were small. Then her sister went abroad to America. It’s difficult to be alone in the world.”

  I say, “She’s not alone. She has Thatha.” I don’t say the other person she has: me.

  She pulls me into the circle of her arms. “Yes. But your Thatha is from a different world. His people are different. They are rich people. Your mother’s people were poor like me, like Samson. It’s hard for her to fit into this life. To be the big Madame.”

  I lean into her. “What was it like? Before I was born?”

  “We came here together. My sister and I. From a village down south. We came to work for your father’s parents. We were young then. My sister had Samson, and then your father was born and she was his ayah. So they were brought up together. But your father is the master now. And Samson is Samson, you see?”

  I don’t see anything, but I nod so she will continue.

  “And then your father grew up and married your mother, and then you were born.” She tweaks my nose, grabs my face, and inhales each side of my face, a fierce and potent kiss.

  * * *

  The lotus has risen in the pond again, taking over the water, so the koi must circle the stems. I am not supposed to trim them alone, and anyway it’s no fun without Samson. I go to his small shedlike room at the back of the house and I can hear him inside muttering to himself. I have never been inside, but now I say his name and enter his small, enclosed space. He is sitting on his bed; it’s bright outside, but inside there are deep shadows. There are posters of film stars on the walls. The place smells like him, as if he has been shut up here for weeks, his sweat permeating everything. I sit on the bed next to him. His face is in his hands, his hair in porcupine quills as if he has run his hands through it. Between his fingers and in a broken voice he says, “Baby Madame, you shouldn’t come here.”

  I put my small hand on his rounded back. “What is it, Samson? What happened?”

  He jumps up away from my touch, but there is nowhere to go in that small space. He says, “My mother, Baby Madame. They say she is very sick. I don’t know what to do. Your Amma. I can’t ask her for leave again. I went to the village last month, and she said if I asked again I should go but not come back.” He shakes his head as if to clear it. He turns and looks at me, says, “You should go. If someone sees you in my place, it won’t be good.” And knowing somehow that he is right, that I shouldn’t be found here, I leave that claustrophobic space, my lungs filling with air as I step outside as if I had been holding my breath the whole time.

  * * *

  Later in the week, Amma slaps her palm against the table. “Where the hell is Samson? This floor is filthy.” She turns to me. “Make yourself useful. Find him.”

  I race through the garden down to his tiny room. I know before I enter that it is empty. In the kitchen Sita is crying, wiping the tears with the edge of her sari. She says, “That stupid boy. He went without telling her. Now all hell will come down on our heads.”

  * * *

  The lotus grows so thick in the pond that the fish rise close to the skin of the water, their scales dull, their movements sluggish. The guavas drop from the tree until the ground under it is sludgy. I miss Samson as much as the garden does. No one to cavort with on the grass or at the river’s edge. No one to pour buckets of silver well water over my head. I sit in the kitchen and sigh until Sita sends me away. Two weeks after he is gone, the news comes to us that his mother has died. Now Sita too must go for the funeral. My mother sits and stares at the river. She does not talk to us and we keep out of her way.

  * * *

  It’s two months later and I am sitting next to her when he comes back. We look up and there he is, thinner than before, sparse as if he has not eaten well since he left. There is something new in the way he walks, flat-footed, as if careful to walk anchored so that some rage will not lift him aloft and carry him away. Amma says, “Well, what the hell happened to you? Why didn’t you just ask me if you could go?”

  He looks at the floor and says, “Sorry, Madame.”

  “I would have let you go if I knew Kusuma was dying. She looked after my husband when he was small, after all. We would have let you go.” But something in his eye tells me he doesn’t believe this.

  She raises her hand, says, “Okay, you can go back to the garden now. It’s running riot. You’ll have to work hard to get it in hand.”

  But he stands there so that she cannot go on reading her newspaper, sipping her tea. She must instead look up at him
, and then through gritted teeth he says, “You think you own us? You think that just because we are your servants, you own us?”

  My mother’s hard laugh is loud. “What, Samson, have you turned into a communist? My goodness, what a speech.” Her eyes turn down to her newspaper. “Get out, Samson, go before I get very angry and throw you out. Your people have been with the family for a long time. But I don’t need to keep you. I could throw you out at any time. And there are no jobs for people like you out there. Don’t forget that.” He leaves then and she pets my hair, says, “Servants, one has to know how to deal with them. Otherwise they can go out of control, no?” I nod. Yes, whatever she says, I agree with.

  * * *

  I had missed Samson while he was gone. But now I see a new quality quivering in his eyes, something frustrated and dark. He cuts the grass or tends the plants in silence and refuses to play with me. Now there are no walks in the garden, no wading thigh-high into the pond, no gathering of frog’s eggs. His face is stormy, and when I dare ask about the trip to the village, he says, “What’s to tell? We had the funeral. We burnt my mother. By the time I went, that’s all there was to do,” and turns away.

  One day after hours of silence he says quietly, “Baby Madame, do you know how they train the wild elephant?”

  I’m delighted that he’s talking to me again. “No, Samson.”

  “They tie a big log to its leg when it’s small. It pulls and pulls, but the log will not move. It fights so hard. But at some time it will give up, and then later, when it is very much bigger than the little men who control it, they will not need that log. It will remember the weight on its leg and it will not fight. It will just remember the weight. Do you understand?”

  I don’t. I stand there waiting and he says, “Samson is like that elephant. Maybe I could have done something else. Maybe had a trishaw or a small shop? A wife. A woman of my own. Maybe children. Something. So now I’m like that elephant. Even my mother I couldn’t see before she died. I went out to see if I could have a life away from your family, but there was nothing. Not even a job. I almost starved.”