What Lies Between Us Read online

  I say that this is old-fashioned, not all families follow these traditions anymore. I tell her that I am missing schoolwork; my exams are coming soon. But she is adamant; she is doing the best possible thing for me. She will secure my future, my chastity and marriage to a good boy from a good family. She says, “If you aren’t properly looked after now, no man will take you for his wife. You will stay here with us until you are old and dried up. All alone without a husband or children.” She strokes my hair and says, “You don’t want that, do you?” and I have to shake my head.

  On the fourth day, I can’t stand it anymore. I go to the window and tug aside Amma’s old red sari. A blade of sunlight falls onto my face and across the room. I stretch my arms overhead and look out onto the garden, down the sloping lawns and to the river. There with his back to me is Samson, and even as I am pulling the sari back, he turns as if pulled by my gaze and looks straight at me and his hand goes to his gaped mouth. I twitch the sari down, blocking out sunlight and his shocked face. I stand there, heart throbbing. What have I done? What demons have I called forth? What pollution have I allowed to pass from me to him? I walk to the bed, sit down carefully. I have unraveled all of Amma’s plans, all of Thatha’s trust. It feels as if someone has pierced my skin, pulled back the plunger on a syringe full of shame and shot it deep into me. When shame reaches and floods my heart, I know I have done what cannot be undone.

  * * *

  I try to forget his eyes. The old fog descends. Everything is cloudy.

  On the seventh day, Amma wakes me at dawn, says, “Come, come. Quickly, it is your auspicious time. Come before we miss it.” I get up, bleary-eyed, dry-mouthed. She leads me outside, her arm holding my elbow. The nerves in my toes are alive, feeling cautiously along the ground, trying not to stumble. She leads me to the well, and I stand there blinded in the pink-lit dawn. The dhobi woman is there, an old woman with breasts like wrinkled fruit in her sari blouse but smiling as if it were her wedding day. Amma gives her a package: my uniform, my destroyed panties, the small gold earrings, everything I was wearing when the blood first came.

  The dhobi woman has filled a tub with well water, floating jasmine, cloves, and sticks of cinnamon. She pulls my nightdress over my head and pushes me down into a crouch. I wrap my arms around my knees. Her clawed fingers undo the ends of my plaits and rake the hair down my back. She fills a small earthen pot, pours it slowly over my head. The shock of cold water is electric against my skin. Jasmine flowers cascade onto my head, tumble down my back, land in the groove between my thighs and on my small breasts. I open my nostrils wide to catch their scent. The dhobi woman moves my head this way and that, scrubbing my scalp with expensive-smelling shampoo. She pulls me up to standing, soaps each of my limbs until every inch of me is covered in frothy white suds. She washes away the suds in streams of water. I am reborn, embraced by the light, the old woman’s hands, and my mother’s smile.

  * * *

  Amma takes me into her bedroom. I sit on the bed as she pulls out sari after sari. They are silver and bottle green, peacock blue, and every shade of gold. They throw light onto the ceiling and the walls from the reflection of their sequins, crystals, and embroidery, so the room feels like a treasure cave. She says, “All of these will be yours when you get married. I’ve been collecting them for you. Look at this one. It was the first your father ever bought for me.” She pulls out a sari of faded ivory with a pattern of fine ebony swirls. She shakes her head. “That man. No taste at all.” But the way she fingers the material tells me there is some small tenderness in the memory.

  She looks straight at me and says, “You have to be careful from now on. People will make up ugly stories. If they see you with a boy. Even if you are just talking to him. Even a cousin. You have to be very, very careful. You are a big girl now, and your reputation is your responsibility. Do you understand?” I nod. She goes on. “You have to guard yourself carefully. You must make us proud. You know that, don’t you?” I nod again. I agree with whatever she says, this beautiful and loving mother. I’d do anything for her. The memory of Samson turning to look straight at me jabs like a thorn. Shame flushes through me while I smile at her. She holds my face in her hands like a flower, brushes my cheeks with the pads of her thumbs, kisses my forehead with the tenderest lips.

  * * *

  At my attaining age party I wear a white dress with a full skirt and puffed sleeves that Amma has made for me. I pull it over my head and it falls perfectly into place around my body. It billows around my legs when I twirl for Puime in my room. We talk and talk. She tells me everything I have missed. Suresh has still not even looked at her. But she doesn’t really care because a much nicer boy has started going to the boys’ school, and anyway he has much better hair than Suresh.

  When I come out, people hug me and kiss my cheeks. Amma and Thatha are beaming. No one can say Amma hasn’t done everything the proper way for me. We have dinner, and then I slice into a cake covered in pink-icing roses that tumble down onto the mirrored platter, hold up a piece so that Amma and then Thatha can take a bite. They feed me too, pride and love glistening in their eyes.

  Later Puime and I sit with the women as the men go outside. We drink lime juice or Fanta, and the women tell stories of calamity. There are misfortunes of the financial, emotional, or physical sort. But the most important are the disasters of love.

  A woman begins: “Have you heard about the Somarathna girl?”

  The rest of them lean in, hungry for the tale. “No men, I knew something must have happened with that one. We haven’t seen her for months, and she was always a little wild, isn’t it? Always people were saying this and that about that one.”

  Another chimes in. “Suddenly there was a proposal and a wedding. I didn’t even have time to get a proper sari done. Fancy reception at the Galle Face Hotel.” She sniffs so that we all know she thinks the family was putting on airs, continues, “But I always thought something funny was behind it. Aiyo, give us the details, will you? What happened?”

  The first woman arches her eyebrow. “I can’t tell anything. The mother swore me to secrecy. Absolute”—she puts a manicured finger to her lips—“secrecy.”

  A chorus of disappointment. “Aney, please.”

  “Come on, you know we won’t tell anyone.”

  “That girl is like a daughter to me.”

  “Yes men, we’ll protect her reputation no matter what. After all, they are my relatives on the father’s side.”

  She flaps her hands at them, says, “Okay, okay! But don’t breathe a word of this, okay? Any of you. It has to stay within these four walls.” She points at each wall around us to emphasize the secrecy that everyone knows will not be maintained. She says, “I know the whole story. The mother came to me for help. Here’s the thing. The girl was carrying on with that good-for-nothing, jobless, no-degree, next-door fellow. And by the time the parents found out, they were in a hotel and the deed was done. Two months later, no periods.”

  Delighted, shocked gasps; a collective fluttering of hands to bosoms and throats. Someone says, “And then what?”

  “The mother and I had to take her to a clinic. They covered it up. That’s why they married her off so quickly and all. Before the proposed family found out anything the papers were signed, the poruwa built. That mother-in-law must be kicking herself. No white sheet at the homecoming, isn’t it? Who knows if she can even conceive after what that doctor did.”

  Tongue-clicking noises of disapproval, eyes rolled toward the heavens.

  “These modern-day girls, what to do?”

  “In my time we couldn’t even look at boys.”

  “My mother would have beaten me to death. Home and school and back again. That was it. Now they are going wild. One has to be so careful with girls. I never let my Shalini anywhere near that one. Cheap girls like that only ruin the others.”

  They stop suddenly, remembering Puime and me with our ears open wide in their midst. I know the girl they are talking about. Wha
t happened to her? I know it has something to do with what has just happened to me, which is called “falling off the jambu tree,” for the bright red fruit of the jambu. It has to do with boys and maybe even something to do with what happens to me when Samson catches me alone, something bad and secret for which only a girl is responsible, for which a girl always has to pay. I know that these women will not keep the secret. By tomorrow, the girl’s reputation will be dust. Even her marriage will not protect her from the barbs of gossip. Shame is female; shame is the price I must pay for this body. The fabric of my white dress is suddenly cloying.

  Amma says, “Why don’t you two go to your room.” We slip out. Climbing the stairs, Puime whispers, “God, when I grow up, I’m going to drink arrack in the garden with the men. I’m not going to sit around drinking lime juice and gossiping about every single person.”

  I nod. I feel as though I have watched an execution.

  * * *

  After school we go to Puime’s house. In the kitchen her mother is wearing just a sari blouse and her father’s old sarong, her hair pulled into a messy bun at the nape of her neck. She is fleshy, rounded, jiggly, and maternal in a way I long for. She grabs Puime, gives her a loud sucking kiss on the forehead, and then turns to kiss me on both cheeks.

  Puime groans and wrinkles her nose. “Ammie, what are you wearing?”

  “What? You don’t like it?”

  “Is that Thatha’s old sarong?”

  “Yes, child, why can’t I use it? Waste not, want not, isn’t it?”

  She pours batter into the small curved hopper pan, turns it deftly so that the liquid coats the rounded surface, breaks an egg into the middle of it, says, “Sit and eat. Now while they’re still hot-hot. Otherwise it’s useless. Here, have with this seeni sambol, a little bit of kata sambol.”

  She flips delicate pancake-like hoppers with the bright yellow egg onto the middle of our plates, the edges delicate, the middle thick and slightly sour sweet. We break off the crispy lace ends to scoop up the sweet, burning onion sambol.

  She says, “So … how was school today?” in a singsong voice.

  “Ammie, the same, school is always the same.”

  “Come on, can’t be exactly the same.”

  She turns her attention to me. “What about you? How was school for you? Since my one won’t tell her mother a single word.”

  “Good. Aunty, it was good. We had a speaker at assembly today.”

  “Ah, see, something happened. At least you can talk, unlike my one. Takes a hundred and one times before she tells me anything.”

  I nod along to her chatter. I wish my mother did these things. I can’t imagine her in the kitchen making hoppers, barefoot in a sarong and a sari blouse. Even when she makes pancakes for me, it is different. She’s tighter, contained and serious.

  Later, in her room, both of us lying on her bed, our braids falling off the edge, Puime says, “My god. My mother is such a disaster. I wish she was like yours, always so elegant and polished, no?”

  “Mmm-hmmm. But yours makes the best hoppers. I wish mine did that.”

  “Why do you need her to make hoppers? You have Sita for that. A mother should be cool, calm, and collected like yours. That’s how I’m going to be when I’m a mother. Not sweating and wearing my husband’s old sarongs.”

  “No way. When I’m a mother, I’ll be just like yours.” The words leap through my mouth, and with them an instant flush of guilt. How Amma would hate to hear me say this. What an ungrateful daughter I am. And maybe Puime feels a like guilt because we go quiet, both of us staring up at the ceiling fan doing its slow revolutions.

  * * *

  I have a childhood brimful of river swimming and schoolgirl friendship. We eat papayas split open to reveal ruby flesh and small black seeds like obsidian pearls. I pick anthuriums, like flattened red hearts spiked by golden stamens; masses of frangipani, like bridal bouquets spreading their luxuriant perfume; small bell-shaped pink bougainvillea flowers frothing over the garden walls. The monsoon breaks over our heads and makes us splash in the street, joyous at the swift scent of wetted earth. Our uniform hems, shoes, and socks are soaked before the three-wheeler man rushes up and waves us in, drives us pell-mell through the suddenly flooded streets toward home. Carved jade geckos on the tops of doors bob up and down like miniature dinosaurs doing push-ups, darting out their heads for the grains of rice we hold stuck on the ends of sticks for them. In August, elephants trudge up the roads that lead to Kandy, a mountain of grass on their backs for their lunches, mahouts at their sides. They gather in the city for the annual Perahera, the procession of the Buddha’s tooth through the streets that grants the city its sacred stature. We have the beauty of Kandy Lake and the royal palaces and the Temple of the Tooth. I have friends, school, books, and cousins; it is a childhood brimming over. But also here are some things you should know about this place in these years.

  A civil war rages in the North and the East. These are the years when the military and the Tamil Tigers fight over ownership and land and belonging. These are the years of burning in the streets, when crowded buses are blown up by suicide bombers, when people necklace others in tires and set them alight. When driving in the night a family can be stopped and asked if they are Tamil or Sinhala. If they give the wrong answer, if they are Tamil facing a Sinhala mob or Sinhala facing Tiger cadres, they can be pulled out of their car and dragged in the dust by the back of their shirts, the women hauled away into darker corners.

  Now here, in this other place so many years later, where I am locked up in my white cell, they ask me about it, my various doctors and lawyers. They think that maybe growing up in a war-torn land planted this splinter of rage in me, like a needle hidden in my bloodstream. They think that all these years later, it was this long-embedded splinter of repressed trauma that pierced the muscle of my heart and made me do this thing. “PTSD,” they say.

  I remember walking to school with Puime once, seeing schoolboys rushing by, going the wrong way, away from school. She calls out, “What happened?”

  A tall boy says, “The Tigers have closed the university. There are signs hanging up on the gates. If anyone goes, they will be killed.” We see stricken faces hurrying home.

  She says, “We should go home.”

  I say, “But I have a math exam.”

  “And I have drama practice. But I don’t think that matters now.” She was right. We learned that none of the normal cadences of life were important. We learned to go home, close the gates and the windows, and stay inside the house. In these days that sometimes slid into weeks, there was nothing to do but wait. The waiting itself was a sort of occupation we all shared. The shops were closed, the university was shut and then open and then shut and then open until everyone involved lost their bearings. Whole generations of students were blown off their life courses, rendered jobless, unmoored by direction or occupation. My father raged about the incessant closing of the university. “How are we supposed to work like this?” he asked us over and over and took refuge in his ever-present glass of arrack. But beyond this, we knew we had it easy, since elsewhere in the country, blood was flowing. I never witnessed a bus bombing, I never lost a friend or a relative, and so to me the war in our country seemed far away.

  We saw the reports nightly on television, of course. We saw the rising body counts, the footage of bloody mayhem caused by suicide bombs, the maps showing the Tigers or the army always moving back and forth over the landscape of the North and the East like voracious enemy locust tribes. But mostly it was happening to people we did not know.

  The war was just something we lived with. There was no other choice. We even made jokes about it because that was the only way to survive. And because of this, I laugh at the doctors and lawyers now when they tell me I have PTSD. If I have PTSD, then the entire island must have it. The only ones who don’t have it are the lucky dead. So the war is not my excuse. The war happened to other people. I leave the story of that other, bigger war for some oth
er teller.

  But there is something else. There was a war, just not the one they are thinking of. In the shadow of that greater war, there was another smaller one. It was enacted within my body and between my bones. It took the small, delicate creation that I was, smashed it with a hammer, and set it upside down. All my pieces fell in the wrong order. I was separated from myself, and empty, echoing spaces were opened in me for a darker inhabitant. No one knew, no one suspected. And yet even this smaller war is not my excuse. My sin is only and ever my own.

  Five

  Our books and sheets of homework are spread across the living room table when Puime looks at me from under her lashes. I can tell she wants to say something, so I say, “What?”

  She shrugs, then says, “I don’t know … I shouldn’t say. But why does he look at you like that?”

  “Who?” My heart is jumping in my throat. I keep my eyes on the page.

  “You know who.”

  “Like what?”

  “Just strange.”

  “Strange like what?” I grip my pencil to keep my fingers steady.

  She says, “Just strange, you know. Strange.” And then she looks away and is asking me if the five needs to be carried or if the ellipsis means it will be divided later, and I attend to her question. Later that night just before I fall asleep, I remember this moment. It is startling because someone else has sensed the other and impossible world I live in. Someone else has sensed what is happening to me. But how can I tell her? I have no words.

  Sometimes nothing happens for months. I do not have to start at each sound; I do not have to run for cover if I hear him behind me. Some mysterious cease-fire and he is just my old friend Samson. I am diligent, but in these times he is nice, gathering guavas and avocados for me, pointing out the fishing birds in the trees. These kinds of things do not happen to girls like me. I am from a good family. I go to a good school. I have an Amma. So how can this be happening in my own home? It is unimaginable.