Island of a Thousand Mirrors (4 page)

*   *   *

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 talking 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.