Island of a Thousand Mirrors Read online

  It is in this small, square blue room that she learns the intimacy of another’s heartbeat. The almost unbearably tender way in which his perfectly rounded shoulder falls into the hollow of her palm. It is here she learns the contours of her own body, its boundaries and spreading pleasures.

  * * *

  She learns how easy it is to deceive those who do not expect deception. Learns that Sylvia Sunethra, unable to imagine the possibility of her daughter trembling in the arms of the upstairs Tamil boy, perceives threats only from the men on the street, the male cousins at parties, the usual avenues by which deception may be enacted.

  Over the months, they become ruthless, disappearing often into their jasmine-shrouded den. Held within the blue walls, they can hear the diverse workings of the house. The faraway-sounding calls of their various families, his brothers and sisters, Sylvia Sunethra and Alice. It is like being submerged underwater, lying on the ocean bed listening to the voices of a different world.

  He takes away the necklace of her teeth marks on his shoulder blade like a prize won in battle. A bruise blooms on her inner arm, and she almost flaunts it, spinning an elaborate story concerning a cricket ball when asked to explain. The deception easy to spot, if anyone were looking closely. But no one is, and there is in her this demon that wants love to be acknowledged, wants to claim the slim, handsome boy as her own despite the punishments that such claiming would entail.

  * * *

  It has been six months since they first found the room. While upstairs Sylvia Sunethra works hard to manipulate the marriage market in favor of her youngest daughter, Ravan holds her head in his hands, the thumbs pulling very slightly at the corners of her eyes, staring into first one, then the other. She tries to pull away, his gaze has become so intense, so demanding, and she doesn’t know what he is asking for. He says in a rush, “Let’s get married. I have an aunt who married a Sinhalese. There’ll be an uproar for some time, and then they’ll forget.” She stares at him with those enormous and uncomprehending eyes as she realizes what he is asking for, the whole of her life, the weight of her entire life. This is what he wants. Then she is shaking her head violently. Pulling herself out of his hands. Pushing past his reaching arms. Such madness he speaks. As if the differences between them could be blown away like dusty cobwebs. As if Sylvia Sunethra, brokenhearted dawn-beach walker, could survive the idea of one of her daughters wedded to a Tamil. She runs from him, bursting out of the room, both hands held out to push past heavy jasmine, but not before she has seen the thing that is smashing open in his eyes.

  * * *

  He will not speak to her. He ignores everything, her frantic, whispered pleas at the gate, the notes left in their various hiding places, her hours of waiting in their small, square love nest. Icy claws squeeze her heart, jab needles deep into the muscle of it. Such pain. When she takes to her bed, Sylvia Sunethra hovers, but she mutters, “Cramps … monthly visitor.” Then her mother leaves and she gasps huge, silent, shuddering sobs into her pillow.

  Heartbreak, like an illness. The heavy limbs, the aching head, the pain across her chest, akin to nothing so much as childhood malaria. Only Alice seems to know the truth, comes to stroke her head, pull long fingers through her hair, mutter, “It is alright. It had to happen. This is the best thing.” And she realizes that Alice has always known, since the beginning, that nothing in the house escapes the woman’s cat eyes. She realizes that perhaps Alice, too, has experienced this sickness, been bereft of love and heartsick sometime in the past, that they are united by the knowledge of loss. She buries her head in Alice’s lap, inhales the scents of garlic, cumin gathered there, cries her eyes out. When she falls asleep, it is in exhaustion, like losing a wrestling match or drowning.

  Three months of slow despair, and then the upstairs servant girl comes dancing into the kitchen. There will be sweets and music! The youngest son of the house is getting married! The old man has chosen him a bride from a northern village and now after months of stubborn, inexplicable protest he has agreed. She hears this and has to clasp her hands tight between her clenched thighs to arrest their uncontrollable shuddering.

  At the gate, his gaze slides over her. He strides away into his again-unknown life and a hatred throbs along the passageways of her body, a ferocious, furious blush. She hates him and also the bride being prepared for him. At night she dreams of her rival’s face, round and innocent. She rakes claws along the girl’s skin, tears across belly and breasts, bites into flesh like dining on fruit. Hate throbs on her tongue, courses through each tiny vein of her body. She thinks that if hate glowed, they would all see her entire circulatory system, exposed like the veins of a leaf, surging with green envy, bright yellow rancor.

  “Ravan,” she thinks. “The name of a demon.”

  * * *

  She grows careless with her heart, and worse, her reputation. She climbs upstairs, ignoring various Shivalingams who stare, openmouthed. She stands at the door knocking, and when the servant comes, she says, “Tell Ravan I’m here to see him.” The woman scurries away, her eyes enormous, and then he comes, buttoning his shirt. He has been awakened from his afternoon rest. She stares at the disappearing triangle of his narrow chest, that space where she has placed her hands so many times, her fingers against the fluttering of a pulse in his throat.

  His voice steady, he says, “Miss Jayarathna, right? What is it? What can we do for you?”

  She, breathless, “You were right … we could … like your aunt and … Be together. After some time they’ll forget, they’ll leave us alone…” Her arm extended, describing a wide circle to indicate who would forget, the whole world, everyone except him and her. This is what she wishes for now, only them alone together, as they had been.

  Fingers close tight around her elbow, the end of a sari thrown over her as if she had wandered up here naked. She is borne away in an iron grip, Alice come to rescue her, but not before she has heard him say something in Tamil. Not before she has heard the resulting giggles and the rising waves of laughter.

  four

  In the Hikkaduwa house, the whole family watches Beatrice Muriel slowly scan the newspaper lists hoping desperately to find her son’s name among those who have passed the national examinations. When she lays the newspaper on the table, pushes tired fingers against her eyes like she does when she has a migraine, and it is clear that his name is not among the chosen, Nishan feels himself drop into a deep pit of shame and guilt. He makes his way to the door, hoping to slip quietly and calmly to the well and thereby drown himself, when Mala calls, “But look, there is a R. W. Rajasinghe on the Arts list. Could they have put you in the wrong column, Aiya?” And then he is shaking and laughing and jumping about and so are his mother, the Doctor, and Mala, because he has done it. He has changed all their lives. He has changed the course of their history. He has won himself a university seat. He will be one of the fifty engineers trained that year. When the jubilation has subsided, it is noted that Mala, too, has passed.

  * * *

  At university, Nishan hangs suspended between exhilaration and anxiety. He lives in crowded, disheveled rooms full of books, clothes, trays of tea, and snacks bought from vendors. Young men walk about the campus with their arms draped around each other’s shoulders, their easy teasing and virile comradeship foreign to him. He worries about the stain of village in his speech, about his ill-fitting clothes and cheap new shoes. When the ragging starts, strapping seniors break into the dorms and exact all manner of humiliations. He is deposited on his bed each morning, aching in every soft place of his anatomy. On other nights, long examinations take over his dreams so that he awakens from a few hours of sleep further exhausted.

  But Peradeniya is also the site of newfound freedoms. The campus spreads around him like the verdant pleasure garden of an ancient king. He is enraptured by the enormous trees that lift branches like cathedral roofs overhead, shoot roots like polished ballroom floors underfoot. In the hot afternoons he leaves the crowded rooms to study under the protection of these spreading giants. Escape from Beatrice Muriel’s domain and the sensation of hours that are solely his, to fill as he wishes, are pleasures he had not anticipated.

  * * *

  In the women’s dorms, Mala too is transformed. She lives in a room with three other girls, their clothes draped on the back of chairs, books opened on every surface. They sit on the balcony and share tea and ideas. It is close to dawn before they sleep. In her happiness, she blooms like a forest orchid. Her skin retains its dusky hue, but unhindered by Beatrice Muriel’s ministrations, it gleams in the sun, polished ebony. There is a new voluptuousness in her. Young men notice her hair, not its kinkiness, but the curling vines that flee her bun to linger about her throat.

  The campus has turned rebellious. Students read Lenin, Marx, Trotsky, and debate with their teachers, taking on the plight of the common man, class inequality, corruption and nepotism. Old separations and prejudices are dropping away. The struggle brings young men and women suddenly elbow to elbow. Never before have most of them been so close to men and women not related to them, and mere access to the opposite sex proves more intoxicating than rousing rhetoric. Eyes are allowed to meet at inflammatory speeches. Fingertips graze in the passing of revolutionary pamphlets. As the rhetoric of equality gathers steam, romances of all sorts bud and blossom.

  The sway in Mala’s waist, the curve of her hip beneath the folds of her sari, have caught the eye of many young men, each of whom is secretly willing to denounce the colonial prejudice of skin color by falling in love with her. For the first time in her life, history and circumstance have conspired to make her a desired commodity. She is granted the heady power of choice. And despite her lack of experience, she chooses wisely.

  He is an engineering student, a friend of her brother’s. She likes the way he looks at her, not appraisingly like some of the others, but as if he actually desired her opinion, and he trusts her judgment whether the question is mathematical or where they should have tea. There is, in him, a slowness of movement, inherent in the way he twirls a pencil while thinking. But also she likes the plane of his stomach under the thin, white shirt, the slimness of it, fanning out into his widespread shoulders. She has seen it once, as he came into Nishan’s room, toweling his hair, water still dripping down the muscles of it. He had been shy, turning immediately on his heels when he saw her. Apologetic, when he reappeared, appropriately dry and shirted. But the memory of his skin comes back to her at the most inopportune moments, when she is opening an examination copy or writing a paper on Matisse, making her bite her lip and inhale sharply.

  * * *

  In Hikkaduwa, during the December holidays, Seeni Banda comes to the surgery door to announce visitors. Drying his hands, the Doctor is confronted by two young men, both stiff shirted and sweating.

  One says, “Sir. I am C. K. Suraweera. This is Anuradha Munasingha. We are, both of us, in the engineering batch at Peradeniya.” The Doctor notes their nervousness, the trickles of sweat running down their necks, is perplexed but says, “Aha … You are friends of Nishan’s. Only … he is not here just now. He is in Colombo.”

  The first young man says, “Actually, sir, we have come about your daughter, Mala.” And Mala, hiding just behind the curtain, pushes her hand against her fluttering heart.

  When they leave, Beatrice Muriel stamps her foot, shouts, “Madness! This boy comes on his own! No family members, no proposal, nothing at all? Only that sweating, sweating friend of his. Who does he think we are?” Pausing for breath and shifting the direction of her ire, “Mala, what do you have to say about this boy? If you have done anything with him I will skin you alive.”

  And the Doctor, “Shhh, wife, let her explain. Duwa, tell us, who is this boy? What are his intentions?”

  And Mala, looking at the floor, a toe tracing designs on the polished red wax, “His name is Anuradha. We became friends at the university. He has done really well. He will take a degree and has a job already in Colombo.”

  Beatrice Muriel, wringing her hands, “Yes, yes, girl, but has he talked of marriage?”

  “Yes, we have talked about it. If you will agree, he wants to get married as soon as possible.”

  There is silence and then the familiar smack of Beatrice Muriel’s palm against her forehead. “A love marriage,” she says. In her opinion, love marriages border on the indecent. They signify a breakdown of propriety, a giving in to the base instincts exhibited by the lower castes and foreigners. She believes marriages are far too important to be relegated to the randomness of chance meetings and hormonal longings. They must be conducted with precision, calculated by experts, negotiated by a vast network of relations who will verify the usual things: no insanity in the family, evidence of wealth and fertility, the presence of benevolent stars.

  Now she is faced with the thorniest of dilemmas. Whether to hold on to her philosophies and see Mala a spinster, or succumb to impropriety and see her daughter married without the benediction of astrologers or a proposal.

  Practicality decides the matter quickly. Anuradha is invited back to the house, installed in the best chair, handed a cup of tea and a slice of Beatrice Muriel’s love cake. After he leaves, the Doctor tells his daughter, “A good boy. You will be happy,” with moisture in his eye.

  Beatrice Muriel says, “What a wedding we will have! With plumeria flowers and an Indian sari for you. We will put that Samaraweera girl’s wedding to shame. These modern boys will marry even if the horoscope is bad, no? So why fight progress?”

  * * *

  While his sister is being spoken for, at a birthday party in a large white house by the ocean, Nishan is about to meet the seventeen-year-old who will be his wife. Around him, men swirl whiskey and politics. “God only knows what is happening in the north. Those Tamil buggers talking rot, oppression, separate country and whatnot. Should just send the whole lot back to India. That’s what I say.”

  Nishan juggles whiskey glass in one hand, cake plate in another. It is one of those rare occasions when he has been dragged away from his books by the uncle in whose Colombo house he is spending the university holidays. This uncle now steps forth to play his momentous though short-lived role in our story. “This,” he booms, “is the youngest daughter of the house.” Nishan looks, and observes the most delicate of features. The uncle continues, “Lucky boy who gets this one. She is studying now. Wants to be a lady doctor.”

  Witness Nishan. The sudden sweat that has broken out on his brow. He sees big eyes, sharp chin, fragile collarbones. He can only smile and nod, attempting to keep whiskey and cake steady.

  Whereas she, object of his desire, what is she thinking? She, nursing a secret pain in her chest, her thoughts occupied by desperate plans. How to get upstairs? How to see him again? She sees and doesn’t see the man in front of her. Much later, after the proposal has come, the marriage plans laid, she will cast back in her memory for this moment and burst out, “But he was such a mouse! Is it possible?”

  * * *

  In Hikkaduwa, Beatrice Muriel fumes and storms. She cannot believe her stars. First one child and now the other has made rubbish of her finely laid marriage machinations. The girl was fine. Lucky, even, to have the burden of a dark-skinned daughter lifted off her hands by a boy who doesn’t seem to care much about dowry, hasn’t even raised the question of what property or wealth Mala brings with her. But this, her son! An engineer! How to just give him up to the first girl who takes his fancy? Some Colombo girl of reduced circumstance, no less! How is it to be borne?

  But histrionics make no difference. For once, the young man has made up his own mind.

  * * *

  On a September afternoon when the skies are liquid silver, Visaka comes home to find her mother in the front garden doing a sort of whirling dance, sari flying, fat arms shaking. She calls, “Come, come quickly!” Draws Visaka under the wing of her sari, into the house and away from curious eyes. “Look, Duwa.” She lays down an opened letter, the concentric circles of an astrological chart. “See who has sent a proposal for you. An engineer! From a far branch of the family. If we catch this one, all our troubles are finished.” Sylvia Sunethra is smiling so broadly that Visaka can only arrange her features in a similar way.

  The news flies. “The eldest son of the Hikkaduwa Rajasinghes! A qualified engineer, even!” Female relations gather at the Wellawatte house to offer congratulations. They drink tea, nibble Marie biscuits, and pinch Visaka’s cheeks. They pat Sylvia Sunethra on the shoulder. “You have done so well for her. And all by yourself even. No father to help spread the word or negotiate the dowry. She’s such a lucky girl.” They scrutinize the girl, trying to ferret out the qualities that draw engineers to young, available daughters. Is it in the tilt of the chin? The delicate forehead? This girl looks like any other schoolgirl, painfully thin in her white uniform, heavy braids hanging on either side of her face. Her eyes are perhaps bigger than usual, her face a little more feline. But by what alchemy has Sylvia Sunethra produced such an illustrious boy for this perfectly ordinary-looking girl?

  While relatives conjecture and theorize, Sylvia Sunethra sets the wedding machinery in motion. Astrologers confer with stars. Caterers are engaged. Small girls are measured for half sari.

  * * *

  On her wedding day, Visaka is awoken before dawn. She is bathed and dressed, her limbs are oiled, her lips and eyelids painted by careful hands. And all the while she is convinced of impossibility. She is not being dressed in yards and yards of white, this veil like sea mist is not descending over her head. These relatives are not gathered to wish her well, they are not placing her gently in a car adorned in jasmine. None of this is really happening, she tells herself over and over.

  At the hotel, crowds of people. She is thankful now for the frothy protection of the veil, hiding her from their eyes, a filmy membrane between her and the real world in which Kandyan dancers twirl and flip and drummers pound her arrival. Her, the bride! This, too, is not happening. Then Alice is at her elbow whispering, “Be careful. He is here.” She looks and sees a crowd of Shivalingams. Yes, they have come, too, honoring Sylvia Sunethra’s invitation. And there he is, Ravan, next to his wife, who wears a leaf-green sari. She must look away. Force herself not to look at that side of the room because she knows that if his eyes meet hers, she will sag under the weight of this sari, this blouse, skintight and constraining her breath.