Cinnamon Gardens

BOOKS BY SHYAM SELVADURAI

FICTION
Funny Boy
(1994)
Cinnamon Gardens
(1998)

ANTHOLOGIES
Story-Wallah! A Celebration of South Asian Fiction
(2004)

A
nnalukshmi Kandiah often felt that the verse from that great work of Tamil philosophy, the
Tirukkural
– “I see the sea of love, but not the raft on which to cross it” – could be applied to her own life, if “desire” was substituted for “love.” For she saw clearly the sea of her desires, but the raft fate had given her was so burdened with the mores of the world that she felt it would sink even in the shallowest of waters.

Like most visionaries, Annalukshmi somewhat exaggerated her constraints. For a young woman of twenty-two from a good Tamil family, living in the year 1927, her achievements were remarkable – or, depending on your conviction, appalling. She had completed her Senior Cambridge, an accomplishment fairly rare in that time for a girl; she had stood first islandwide in English literature, much to the discomfiture of every boys’ school. Then she had gone on to teachers college and qualified as a teacher.

Annalukshmi’s qualification as a teacher was held to be her greatest crime by her mother’s relatives, the Barnetts. A career as
a teacher was reserved for those girls who were too poor or too ugly to ever catch a husband. They saw it as a deliberate thumbing of her nose at the prospect of marriage. She might as well have joined a convent. They blamed her wilful, careless nature on both parents. Her father, Murugasu, had gained notoriety in his village in Jaffna for beheading the Gods in the household shrine during a quarrel with his father, running away to Malaya, and converting to Christianity. Louisa, her mother, had defied family dictates and married Murugasu. The Barnetts were one of the oldest Christian Tamil families of Ceylon. Murugasu was too recent a convert to have, like them, generations of the civilizing influence of Christianity behind him.

Louisa placed the blame for her eldest daughter’s nature squarely on her husband’s shoulders. In the absence of a son – there were three daughters in the family – he had raised Annalukshmi as if she were a boy.
He
was responsible for her reckless nature, a disposition that would have been admissible, even charming, in a boy, but in a girl was surely a catastrophe. Louisa had tried to warn him of his mistake. She had tried to curtail Annalukshmi’s freedom, to inspire in her an understanding of the necessary restrictions that must be placed on a girl to protect her reputation and that of her family. Yet her attempts were useless, with her husband taking Annalukshmi off to the family rubber estate on inspections, teaching her tennis and swimming.

Louisa would have liked to feel satisfied that the entire blame rested on her husband, but she had to admit that the estrangement between Murugasu and her, which had finally forced her to return to Ceylon from Malaya, had sundered the close bond between father and daughter as well. It had left Annalukshmi with a deep hurt. Louisa had, indeed, agreed to let
Annalukshmi go to teachers college in the hope that the responsibility of teaching would finally settle her down.

If Annalukshmi had been asked the reason for her nature – which she considered not wilful but that of the “new woman” who was not ashamed or afraid to ask for her share of the world – she would have pointed to two people: Miss Amelia Lawton, the missionary headmistress at the school she had attended and where she now taught, and her adopted daughter, Nancy (whose parents, impoverished villagers, had died of cholera when Nancy was thirteen years old). Annalukshmi felt that it was Miss Lawton and Nancy who had provided the cheer and pleasure in her life after her parents’ marriage failed and she and her sisters had returned to Colombo with their mother. Their bungalow had become her second home, and she spent most of her spare time with them, going for sea baths and occasionally taking holidays in the hill country. It was through Miss Lawton that she learnt about the struggles for women’s rights in England and Miss Lawton’s own small part in them during her college days. It was Miss Lawton who had encouraged her reading habit, which, she knew, had led to her standing first in English literature. It was the headmistress who had truly supported her in the decision to be a teacher.

When Miss Blake, the assistant headmistress, presented Annalukshmi with a gift of her bicycle on the day Miss Blake returned to England, Annalukshmi was spurred on to accept because of the smiling faces of Miss Lawton and Nancy, standing on the verandah steps above Miss Blake, nodding their approval.