Island of a Thousand Mirrors (25 page)

“Tell about the fish!”

“Okay, okay. We’d take our Bata slippers off. That’s a kind of shoe like a Nike, and
throw them over the balcony onto the ground.”

“And then you would fish for them?”

“Yes. We’d tie big safety pins to string and throw them over the balcony and try to
hook the slippers. We were fishermen on a boat in the middle of the sea, and then
the storms would come.”

“Storms! With rain and lightning?”

“Yes. Big storms, and we would be swept all over the deck of our ship like this!”

I hear him scoop her up. Her delighted squeals as he lurches around the room with
her in his arms. Playing at long-lost fishermen. In the kitchen I am trembling. My
knife stilled. Has he forgotten that there was a third with us in those days? Her
child-sized ghost inhabits his stories. I see her in the shadows of the Wellawatte
house slipping between us, between the wall and the house into the back garden. Is
it not sacrilege to talk of those days without saying her name?

But that very week, Samudhra tugs at my sleeve: “Who’s this?” I turn to her and she
is clutching a picture. La and I hand in hand. We are laughing. Behind us the big
white house. I thought I had put away all the pictures of her. I take the photo, caress
my sister’s downy cheek with the ball of my thumb.

“This is your aunt. Lanka, my sister.”

Samudhra stares hard at me. “You have a sister?”

“Yes, Sam, her name is Lanka. She was your Lanka Aunty. See … you have her eyes, her
ski lift of a nose.” I trace the nose in front of me, and the one in the picture.

“Where is she?”

“Sweetie. She’s not here. She … she passed away before you were born.”

“You mean she died?” Her eyes are wide. She has not experienced death yet. Not even
a beloved dog or goldfish has died, and her steady concentrated stare makes me certain
that she understands none of this.

“How?” The word conjures low tables, flies, that decapitated woman, her head like
a ball that had rolled down the street, the octopus shreds of her blasted neck.

“She … she had a heart attack,” I stammer.

Samudhra stares at me: “I thought only really, really, really old people have that.”

“Yes, that’s true but your aunt … she had a weak heart, you know, baby. She couldn’t…”
I grab at fairy tales to shield her from what cannot be spoken. Distract her with
other tales, promises of a puppy to keep old Dodo company. She forgets easily enough.
But when I put her to bed that night, her thumb already in her mouth, she clutches
the wrinkled photo and I must pry it out of her sleeping grasp.

In bed Shiva asks, “Did you tell Sam that La died of”—he pauses in incredulity—“a
heart attack?”

I nod vigorously. “I couldn’t, you know … tell her. It’s too much to explain. I mean,
what does ‘suicide bomber’ mean when you’re six, anyway?”

His lips press against my forehead. The tenderest of kisses. They trace their way
to the corner of my left eye, along the curve of my cheek. Soft plumpness of his lip
against my eyelashes. His tongue flashing out to taste my sorrow. He holds me and
I know that I am forgiven, that he will not berate me for lying to our daughter, that
I will not scold him for keeping Lanka alive in what little way he can. When he slides
into me, it is homecoming. We ride each other like seas. Gasp and moan. We fall asleep
in each other, sated.

I am reminded, a triangle is the safest of shapes. A pyramid the soundest of structures.
We are three again.

*   *   *

Sometimes after we have put Samudhra to bed, old friends visit. We have spent these
last nine years finding them and then drawing them around us. We learned early that
we shared this rollicking city with other exiles from other wars and other states
of disquiet. They come to talk, drink wine, and taste our curries. They might not
know much about where we come from, but they know our food intimately. Around our
table Americans, South Americans, Europeans, and Africans gather to lament the lack
of a Sri Lankan restaurant in the Bay Area and cajole us once again to start one because,
as they say, “This is incredible. So good!” They have learned that the food tastes
better when the fingers are involved. And in this way we carry a sliver of the island
with us, nurture and treasure it.

*   *   *

We had begun to feel safety. A state in which the island was a dimly remembered hallucination,
some nightmare with no relevance in the waking world. But then suddenly, the news
reports are full of it. Headlines burst upon us like opened monsoon skies: “Sri Lankan
Conflict Escalates,” “Worst Humanitarian Crisis in Decades,” “Thousands of Civilians
Trapped Between Army and Tigers.”

My father calls from Los Angeles. He is jubilant. “It will be over within a month.
Really. We have them now. Those Tiger bastards are finished. We will have peace very
soon, very soon.” After I hang up the phone, I stand there for a long time. What he
says is an impossibility. The Tigers killed my sister. I have seen the results of
their fury. I have seen what the soldiers do. I know the absolute ferocity of these
enemies. They have been fighting this war for most of my life. I cannot imagine a
world without it.

All around the world, the Tamil diaspora floods into the streets in protest. In San
Francisco itself, they pour into the Ferry Building. There is a huge upswell of international
support. The Sri Lankan government is accused of war crimes. The UN threatens sanctions.
The international female pop star cries genocide. We watch in shocked silence. At
what cost peace? we wonder. How many must die? And yet, how do you vanquish an enemy
this brutal? What is the world becoming for us? What will it be for our child, who
is both American and Sri Lankan, but beyond this, also Tamil and Sinhala?

Suddenly friends who had never mentioned Sri Lanka bring it up. “Aren’t you from there?
What is happening? Don’t you have family there?” They can’t imagine the dagger edge
that slips beneath my heart at their questions.

They say, “Aren’t the Tigers like freedom fighters? Aren’t they fighting for a separate
homeland because they are discriminated against so terribly? Like our African-Americans
here?”

I try to explain. There are no martyrs here. It is a war between equally corrupt forces.
I see their eyes glaze over. I realize they do not desire a complicated answer. They
wanted clear distinctions between the cowboys and the Indians, the corrupt administration
and the valiant freedom fighters, the democratic government and the raging terrorists.
They want moral certainty, a thing I cannot give them.

*   *   *

And then, just like that, the impossible happens. One evening we go to dinner, return
home fingers clasped and tipsy. Talking as we walk through the house, dropping our
bags on the floor and turning on lights. Samudhra is sleeping at a friend’s house.
We have the evening to savor each other. I pour claret into two slim glasses, flirt
with the idea of licking ice cream from the hollow of his throat. I stand before the
open freezer trying to choose between vanilla and chocolate, tap my foot on the floor
to the beat of the song we had sung together in the car, “You don’t have to be rich
to be my girl.” Finally, I take both containers; tonight I am greedy. I’m opening
the dishwasher for spoons when I hear his sharp shocked call in the other room.

I run in and he is staring at the computer screen. I take his trembling hand and together
we witness. The muddy bank of a lapping lagoon. A crowd of weary-eyed soldiers in
dirty green fatigues. At their feet, an overweight man flat on his back. The eyes
popped open as if he is staring at the worst scenes of hell, a slack open mouth, bristled
mustache, and hardened limbs, naked except for stained blue underwear, mud streaks
across the belly. A startle-eyed, obese corpse. A blue handkerchief covers his head.

Shiva’s arms snake around my waist. He holds me, I can feel his body shaking, my own
hands curling and uncurling into fists. This fat man dead on the ground changes the
course of the earth’s trajectory for us. I assimilate every detail. Him. There. On
the ground. Naked. Beaten. They have killed the Leader. It has happened. The war is
over.…

*   *   *

The island bursts into celebration. We watch as the President returns from Jordan.
Landing at Katunayake he falls to his knees and kisses the ground, behind him are
two beautiful stewardesses, their palms joined in welcome. This is a man who has been
accused of war crimes, whom the UN has censored for his relentless pursuit of the
enemy at the cost of civilian lives. At this moment he is victorious. He has triumphed
over the cruelest of enemies by using the cruelest of means, and all is justified
in the minds of his populace. They call him King Mahinda. When asked by foreign journalists
about the possibility of a truth and reconciliation commission he says, “I don’t want
to dig into the past. I don’t want to open up this wound.” He knows the wound is there,
just under the surface, waiting to erupt. Over the decades we will witness how it
heals or festers.

There is jubilation in the streets, dancing men in the hundreds, music all day and
night, the crash of firecrackers, women banging in unison on the low round drum. In
the villages they light lamps, sing songs, pass arrack bottles, cook milk rice and
auspicious sweets to pass out to strangers. The temples and churches are full. Oil
lamps flutter before serene-eyed Buddhas. The people give thanks. They hope.

*   *   *

I dream of the eighty thousand who did not live into this moment. Those who were left
behind in the lagoons and paddy fields, in the cement jail cells, in the white vans,
beneath the rolling waves of the ocean. Those who were broken, dismantled, disappeared;
those who were shattered in bomb blasts; those who were bludgeoned, burned in tires,
thrown from helicopters into the sea; those who were taken in the midst of giving
speeches; those who were taken from their beds in the night; those who were lampposted;
those who were pitched into the rivers; those who were taken as children; those who
were pierced by shrapnel; those who lost limbs to the land mines; those who lost eyes,
hearts, livers, the tender, pulsing, precious flesh; those who were called to strap
bombs on and detonate themselves. I dream of the one that I can give a name to: my
sister, Lanka Rajasinghe. And that other, her unnamed, unloved assassin.

Eighty thousand: it is a number beyond comprehension. I must mourn for them. I must
cry and shake and tremble for them. I shall cry for a long time. And then when my
weeping is spent, when I have no more sorrow to give, I shall celebrate peace. I shall
wake up from these long decades of war and begin to see what we can do in peace, what
sort of creatures we are when the mask of lion or tiger falls from us.

The day is coming, I think, when I will share with my child the ocean she was named
after. I shall show her the island. The schoolchildren walking home. The girls in
white dresses, their hair in coiled plaits, their feet shod in pristine white socks
and sturdy white shoes. The boys arm in arm wearing white shirts and blue shorts,
recklessly happy at release from the classroom.

I shall take her out into the country, where the buffalo stirs in the jade paddy fields,
the solitary egret on his shoulder. I shall show her the creeper plants that grow
giant, curling around trees and jumping into canopy, the plumeria that bursts into
blossom scenting the air, the spiky insect-like orchids. We shall go high into the
misty hill country where the bowed, saried women pick tea, where the flower boys race
your car down twisting, turning mountain passes. I shall show her the big white house
by the sea in which her mother, her father, and her aunt played games, were fed, found
each other.

But it is the ocean that I long to show her most of all. I want her to learn its depths,
know its many blue-green moods, and meet its finned creatures: the many-armed octopus
with its all-seeing eye; the schools of silver fish that wait for the turning of the
tides; the sinuous, sharp-toothed sharks. I ask that she be at peace in the bosom
of an ocean-skimming boat, the sea spray sparkling across her features. I want her
to know the bare-chested fishermen with their scarlet smiles and dawn-returning catamarans.
They will teach her their songs and I will teach her to dive deep. To become one with
the skin of the water until she feels its fluid pulse as her own. To claim this submerged
world as her own.

I see her emerging from the ocean, as she will be in some distant future. She drips
seawater. She has grown so tall, into a young woman with wild and snaking hair studded
with drops of silver water. Her skin is shining dark, polished by sun and salt. She
walks in purpose and self-knowledge, a long, rolling walk that unfolds from the hip.
She is a child of the peace, the many disparate parts of her experience knit together
in jumbled but peaceable unity. The waves lick away her footsteps, the sand retaining
no record of what came before her.

Acknowledgments

My profound gratitude to the following:

My wonderful editor, Jennifer Weis, at St. Martin’s Press. From that very first phone
call while I was in Sri Lanka, I knew I was in the best of hands.

The original editor of this work, Michael Meyler.

The Sri Lankan publishers, Sam and Ameena of Perera Hussein, who were the first to
see that this book might have promise.

Dineli Bartholomeusz, my earliest friend from my Nigeria days who stepped back into
my life after a gap of decades and led me to Sam and Ameena.

My darling writers: Phiroozeh Romer, Yosmay Del Mazo, Maria Allocco, Ayesha Mattu,
Tara Dorabji, and Dilnavaz Bamboat.

The teachers: Dr. Parama Roy, Dr. Piya Chatterjee, and ZZ Packer.

Shyam Selvadurai, for being an amazing mentor and friend.

Write to Reconcile participants, you inspire me.