Island of a Thousand Mirrors (5 page)

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 know 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.

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.