Island of a Thousand Mirrors (13 page)

*   *   *

In later years, Lanka’s paintings will cover entire walls. She will paint fluorescent
green paddy fields stretching into sapphire skies, mangosteens split and glistening
with erotic plumpness, tumescent green plantains bursting off the canvas. She will
paint ferocious forest orchids and elegant five-petaled plumeria. From her brush will
spill forth all those we have lost. Mala in the garden, surrounded by a whirlwind
of dogs, Alice smiling her crooked beaming smile, Alwis’s gap-toothed grin. The entire
island will burst from her brush, so that entering a room containing her paintings,
one will feel the air suddenly wet, the hair will stick to one’s forehead. “I can
remember it all this way,” she will tell people, “only when I paint.”

*   *   *

If La’s particular obsession was the precise moment at which blue becomes green, mine
had to do with books, words, paragraphs, and the ways they fit together on a page,
nestled next to each other, waiting like time bombs. The greatest thing about America
to me was the constant availability of books. The first time I walked into an American
library, bells rang and cherubs sang about my head.

I wandered about in rapture, borrowed books by the armload, and became known to the
librarians. I liked to inhabit books, devour them. Reading seemed so similar to eating,
to consumption. I didn’t like to eat now unless there was a book open by my plate.
A habit Amma hated and shouted at me often over. If I could get away with it, I would
have written in the margins of my favorite books, drawn diagrams, arrows, and small
pictorial commentaries in direct conversation or argument with the writer. Instead
I read in the bathtub, at the dinner table, on the bus, leaving a trail of books behind
me. Amma and Thatha revered books. They read carefully without bending pages or breaking
spines, bent to kiss them if they fell on the floor. They were aghast at what they
saw as my irreverence, and I in turn could never understand the politeness with which
they read.

*   *   *

Three years later we leave the combat zone of the apartment for that most cherished
slice of the immigrant dream pie, our own piece of land. The house sits on a quiet
street, long rows of houses stretching on either side of it like carefully set dominoes.
These are houses painted in innocent pinks and peaches, with silver basketball hoops
and green-green lawns in front. Oh, the sanctity of that green! We had not realized
before with what pride the American suburban family tends its lawn. The shade of its
greenness indicating all manner of propriety and belonging. We, too, tended our tiny
bit of the North American continent with care. Every weekend we watered and weeded
and manicured. It was supremely important to ensure that our lawn was the same color
as those of the other houses stretching into the far distance.

Amma has a proper kitchen now. There is counter space, quickly multiplying pots and
pans, a large collection of knives. “There is nothing like a good knife,” she tells
us, drawing a sharp blade along the leg joint of a chicken, pulling it apart effortlessly
so that there is only a thin trickle of blood through the pink flesh. “Keep them sharp
and they’ll never betray you.” She plunges all the bits of the chicken into the pot,
cooks it with dark roasted curry powder and red chili powder in coconut milk, so that
hours later it is succulent and dripping off the bone. We eat it with coconut sambal
and white rice. We eat with our fingers. Here inside the house we don’t have to use
forks, and yes, it does make the food taste so much better.

The house allows La and me those prerequisites of an American adolescence, bedrooms
of our own. Mine, a flushed creamy pink. Hers, phosphorous blue-green, the shade of
deep water just beyond the surf, so that entering her room felt like falling into
the lair of a mermaid. I remember her head on the very edge of the bed, her hair spilling
onto the floor in swirling eddies and whirlpools. In those years, I almost expected
a silver sequined fishtail flashing among her bedclothes. In this room she is free
to experiment with paints, pastels, colored pencils. She tapes white sheets on the
walls, no longer limited to the brown paper bags of our first immigrant days, and
paints. She fills the walls top to bottom with scenes of other places, huge portraits,
fruits and flowers, so that soon the blue-green walls are not even evident anymore.
Meanwhile I, in the next room, build towers of books, fortresses of words, scribble
into the night. In this way we are each claimed early by the muses who will stay with
us through our lives.

*   *   *

By the time she turned fourteen, it was confirmed. La was going to be, indeed … already
was … a beauty. Skin as smooth as creamy plumeria petals, eyes as big and lashed as
extravagantly as a cow’s, and that heavy mass of hair. So much beauty that I witnessed
all the clichés. The old men reading their newspapers who looked up like bloodhounds
on the trace when we walked to the drugstore for ice creams, the love notes that appeared
wedged in the crevices of her locker that made her sigh and crumple them up in her
fist, the phone that rang in the middle of the night only to click off when picked
up by our irate parents.

And I, how did I feel about all this one-sided bounty?

I, finding myself that comic figure, the plain older sister? I can’t lie. It broke
my heart. To be confronted in my mirror with a plainness that suited Jane Eyre, the
flat listless wall of hair, the dull eyes and round figure, while just a bedroom away
slept my sister who evoked spasms of desire. How tragic! How unfair! How could it
be that some beautiful long-ago ancestor had revealed herself in La’s features and
not in mine? I was the older by those all-important three years, and yet it was for
her the phone rang, it was she who was invited out on weekends and Friday nights.
Of course my parents made her refuse these invitations. No daughter of theirs would
go out with boys or even groups of girls at night. Who knew what could happen to young
girls in this country? There would be no “dates,” they declared, except the type that
could be eaten, an often-repeated joke that invariably made them giggle. But at least
La had the satisfaction of being asked, while I was never invited out at all. The
few friends I had were book-hungry nerds like myself, held back by thick glasses and
myopic stares. And the worst of it, La had no use for it. She threw her beauty around
like an old shoe, wearing the baggiest of our father’s shirts, the most unflattering
of men’s pants, the strangest combinations of colors and patterns. It drove a wedge
between us, of course. I retreated behind my books, behind an impenetrable wall of
studiousness. La knocked literally and figuratively at my doors. I think she was astounded
by this distance. We had always been so close. But I was angry with her for her sudden
beauty, and I kept myself closed from her.

Only years later did I understand the carelessness with which she dressed. It was,
I think, an attempt to reach over the walls that had sprung up between us. Her need
to tear up the labels that had us pinned like specimens under glass.

“Yasodhara Rajasinghe: dusty, brown-winged bookworm. Lanka Rajasinghe: luminous, blue-green,
glitter-winged butterfly.” That carelessness, it was her attempt to claim me as sister
and ally.

*   *   *

Then, too, something else profoundly painful has begun. On the island when we left
there had been stirrings. Now there are outright bloodlettings. There is a new group.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam coalesced around the Leader, who is ruthless,
unafraid of death. They are calling for secession, for a separate homeland. They desire
a long curving slice of land along the northern and eastern coasts of the island.
They call it Eelam. They are willing to kill and die for the maternal comfort of this
homeland, for the possibility of belonging. The government, too, is willing to send
Sinhala soldiers to kill and die to protect this sliver of contested homeland. I don’t
remember the first time I heard the term “civil war” in reference to Sri Lanka. Civil
war? How was that possible? We could not fathom what this term meant or the implications
of what would be.

When a bomb detonates, our first indication is a phone call from our grandmother Sylvia
Sunethra. She tells Amma about the explosion that has happened a half mile from the
Wellawatte house. She reports the numbers of wounded and dead, the state of the suicide
bomber’s body. Amma hangs up the phone, leans against the wall as she recounts these
details to us. She talks in her most sedate voice, attempting to alleviate our fears,
soothe our anxiety. She knows that if we are to survive watching this war from a distance,
as spectators, we do not have the privilege of indignation or anxiety.

Once I walk into a room I had thought empty, to find my entire family, silent, eyes
riveted on the television. On the screen, the chaos of a just detonated bomb. The
camera bobs between running feet and bleeding bodies. It comes to rest on a round
object lying on the steps of a building. In the instant that the camera focuses, we
see that this is the decapitated head of a woman. Her eyes and mouth agape, hair streaming
down the steps and with it the various sinews and octopus strips of flesh blown from
her neck. Her blood drips quickly before the camera pulls abruptly away and a newscaster
fills the screen.

We never talk of this. But I dream of that head every night for a week. I know it
must have been the suicide bomber. Only an extremely close detonation would pop a
head off a body like that. It makes me ponder this woman, girl really. What could
have led her to this singularly terrible end? What secret wound bled until she chose
this most public disassembly of herself? Just moments earlier she had been just another
nameless woman in the teeming crowd; now, blown to bits, she was either martyr or
mass murderer, according to one’s taste. Either way she had attained instant immortality.
But what had led her to that moment? This is a question that haunts me.

We never talked about that woman. But there were images like this around all the time,
casual reminders of what was happening just outside the stage of our lives.

*   *   *

Another adolescent memory: Thatha driving Lanka and me to school, each of us caught
in our various concerns.

I have a physics test I’m not sure I will pass. I comb the pages over and over attempting
to make sense of the symbols, this incomprehensible language that our teacher assures
us will be necessary to navigate our adult lives. I am not convinced of this necessity,
but this coming test is tying tight sailor’s knots in my stomach. Thatha drives carefully,
reaches for the radio, and suddenly a reporter is informing us of bloodshed on the
other side of the world. “Suicide bombing in Colombo, Sri Lanka.” The words fall like
perfectly pronounced shrapnel around us. We hear the crash of bodies, a voice crying
out in Sinhala, picture instantly the dark bodies pierced by ball bearings, the chaotic
swarm of strangers, the intimacy of damage under the fierce May sun. Thatha turns
the radio off. We drive through silent streets. The scenery incongruous with the images
that flicker behind our eyelids.

I remember the moment when I knew that we were all involved, that the island was not
some vague and distant memory, but vivid and alive. Most Sundays, we went to Ananda
Uncle’s house, where La and I were always sequestered in a back bedroom with the other
kids. All of us had been threatened with all fashion of misfortune if our homework
remained undone. And yet ignoring these threats, we entertained ourselves according
to our various proclivities. The boys paying tribute to a pre-beach-strolling David
Hasselhoff in deep philosophical discussion with his car Kit, Lanka at a table, immersed
in the drag of her brush on new canvas, her forehead furrowed, every now and then
indulging that disgusting habit she had then of sucking the point of her brush into
an ever sharper point. I lay on the bed, reading
Wuthering Heights
, wondering at the cosmic unfairness at which, instead of wandering the moors with
fire-eyed, uncouth rapscallions, I was stuck here with these particularly unsympathetic
companions.

End of book. Enough of Heathcliff and his Cathy. I bounce off the bed, go searching
for food and parents. Loud voices burst like fireworks from the living room. The servant
woman Rosie lurks in the shadows, listening. She grabs my sleeve, pulls me close to
her, whispers in a fiery, fumy snarl, “Baby, better not go in. Sir is very angry.
Listen.” A chink in the door, and I see Ananda Uncle stomping about the room, the
other adults slouching in their seats like guilty children.

He shouts, “What are you going to do? Sit here and let these Tiger bastards take the
country? How many of you are here because you got a free education in Sri Lanka? All
of you buggers! Otherwise you would be in Colombo watching the Tigers ride in. You
owe it to help stop them. The government can’t fight these bastards without our help.”

He mops his streaming face. Someone raises a tentative schoolboy hand. “But should
we fund the military? What about the reports that they are killing villagers?”

Ananda Uncle’s voice gets quiet, drips venom. “You and your bloody principles. You
sit on your arse in America and have principles. Meanwhile, rich Tamil bastards here,
and in London, Canada, Australia, fuckers who haven’t been home in decades, all of
them send money streaming, pouring, overflowing into the Tiger coffers. They’re not
crying about Sinhala villagers. They’re not worried about principles.”

There is a stirring as people reach for their money. Wallets are opened, checks are
written.

Ananda Uncle says, “That’s better. That island is our motherland. We owe it to her
to help her in her time of trouble. This money will help keep kids from becoming orphans.
It will keep people alive.” In his voice the reverence of true belief.