Island of a Thousand Mirrors (2 page)

The back room of the house is the Doctor’s dispensary. On the walls, dusty emerald
bottles display their variously oily or transparent contents. On the verandah, patients
gather each morning. They are fishermen and farmers who often pay in kind. A large
thora fish for the health of a child, a pound of paddy rice for an ointment to ease
a grandmother’s arthritic knees. The Doctor is dedicated to this motley group of patients,
but lacks further ambition and is most satisfied walking the beach with his children.

Often Beatrice Muriel finds him in conversation with fishermen, toddy tappers, servants,
sometimes even the Tamil coolie who comes to empty the latrine buckets each dawn.
When she sees him talking to this blackened djinn who smells of shit and carries the
stiff-bristled broom with which he performs his inauspicious duties, it takes all
her willpower to walk past them, her stiffly held head eloquent in its disapproval.

She has been brought up with definite ideas about the value of each thing and person,
its significance and appropriate place on a strict hierarchy. She is unable to tolerate
this laxity, her husband’s inability or indeed conscious decision not to treat each
person according to ancient laws. Her anger takes aim for her husband’s head through
her children’s ears.

“In my father’s day, those people kept out of sight. If one of them had come into
the village spreading misfortune and bad smells everywhere, he would have been beaten
with his shitty broom. This is your father’s fault. Talking to these people. Treating
them like every other person. If it were up to him, you know what you all would be
doing?” Big-eyed children attempt to imagine. “You would be gathering up shit with
that one. Would you like that? Going door to door in the morning emptying out the
buckets of kakka with your hands and a small broom?” Children shaking their heads
emphatically. No, they would definitely not like that.

To counter her husband’s carelessness, Beatrice Muriel buys thora fish. She boils
it slowly and then pours the water on the thirsty earth of the front yard. She sets
the dish in front of her family with great festivity. “Now they will know what kind
of people we are.” Outside, the pungent odor rises. Passersby inhale with distended
nostrils and know that the family has feasted on the most expensive sea fish.

Those less fortunate eat dried fish while the truly destitute fight with the spiny
shells of crabs or lobsters. Decades later, my father will find it incomprehensible
that Americans crave what in his childhood was considered repugnant fare. He will
look at seafood menus with wonder and shake his head at the truly inexplicable nature
of human beings.

*   *   *

One midnight, the singing of bullfrogs is shattered by human pandemonium. Shouting
men burst into the house. They grasp a young fisherman by the arms and legs like a
heavy sack of rice, heave him onto the Doctor’s table where he writhes and sobs. The
family, torn from sleep, witnesses the great, medieval lance skewering the boy’s kneecap.
The beak of a swordfish, the fishermen say. They had hooked the fish, were reeling
it in, when it turned and pierced through the wood and knee as cleanly as if it had
aimed exactly for this place. They had to saw through the thing’s beak to free him
while it smashed itself against the catamaran over and over again. One amputation
is rewarded by another. The Doctor must saw through flesh and break through bone by
the light of a spluttering kerosene lamp. Outside the window, the entire village gathers,
an agitated anthill.

Afterward, the fisherman is kept in the dispensary, battling infection, drifting between
throbbing pain and dreams of the sea. His name is Seeni Banda and it is Nishan’s job
to feed him and accompany him to the outhouse. In later years, Seeni Banda will acquire
his lifelong companion, the three-legged dog, Kalu Balla, who unlike so many of her
four-legged colleagues survives the quiet morning train, losing only a leg to the
Doctor’s merciful knife.

*   *   *

For Beatrice Muriel, marriage has not been the pleasant idyll she had been brought
up to expect. In an astonishingly short time, the pleasant softness of her body melts
away, corroded by relentless sun, salt air, and marital dissatisfaction. Overnight
she becomes gaunt, her nostrils pinched, her gaze sharp as knives. She develops the
schoolteacher’s uncanny ability to detect and subdue childish mischief. Nishan must
watch his friends being sent to squat at the back of the schoolroom, arms crossed
to grasp opposite ears. As they walk home together, these boys say, “
Aiyo
, she has two eyes in the back of her head.” And only filial devotion keeps him from
replying, “
Machang,
you should see her at home.”

Because marital disappointment has bred maternal ambition, Beatrice Muriel dreams
of the day her son will enter university and reverse the legacy of a father who is
content in daydreams and beach wanderings. Daily, she squats over the open flame,
her sari pulled up between her knees, and cooks. Into the fish curry she stirs coconut
milk and heady perseverance. Into the sambal, she mixes red onion, green chili, and
expectation. Under her breath she mutters invocations to protect her son from
as-vaha,
the poisonous darts of envy thrown by the gaze of those with less illustrious sons.

The days of ocean diving, octopus communing, sand-covered sleep become rare. He spends
all his time over books that she has gathered. Head bent over the small pool of light
that falls from the lantern, he struggles to memorize English poems and mathematical
equations, trace winding Sinhala hieroglyphs. His mother sits by him, her fingers
quick with needle and thread. She will not go to sleep until he has finished.

*   *   *

And now leaving Nishan struggling over his books in the seaside village, we journey
northward into the smoky realms of Colombo. Just sixty miles away but a world apart.
This is the humid and pulsating capital city where the crowd spills over the pavements
and onto the belching buses that swerve around bullock carts, and every language and
every god of the island is in attendance over the multitudes. Here, where Galle Road
reigns supreme connecting the city to the island and giving way to the quiet residential
streets, here on one of those quiet and leafy lanes in the private ward of an exclusive
nursing home, Nishan’s wife-to-be and subsequently my mother-to-be, Visaka Jayarathna,
is busy getting herself born.

Having accomplished this feat with no more than the usual traumas, she grows up in
a large white house in Wellawatte, one of the more distinguished neighborhoods of
Colombo. Separated from the ocean only by the railroad tracks, and a short but dignified
distance away from the Wellawatte vegetable market, the house is ruled by Visaka’s
father, the Judge, who, Oxford-returned, insists upon a painful formalism learned
in undergraduate days when he was made to feel the unbearable shame of brownness.
In tribute to those frigid days, ankles are crossed, accents carefully monitored,
pinkie fingers trained to point away from teacups. The family eats puddings and soups,
beefsteaks and muttonchops, boiled potatoes, orange- and crimson-tinted sandwiches.
They take tea at five, with sugar and milk, choose pastries off a multilayered silver
tray. In December, there is Christmas cake, fruitcake, cheesecake. The dressmaker
comes monthly. Visaka is chauffeured to school in her father’s car and picked up at
the gate after. On Tuesdays, she has elocution lessons and on Fridays she practices
Bach and Beethoven for two hours on the baby grand piano.

Yet the heart of the house is an interior courtyard, built in the days of the Portuguese,
who liked to keep their women sequestered in these interior gardens, full of spilling
foliage, birdcall, and monkey chatter. Annoyed by this exuberance and lack of order,
the Judge sends the gardener to rip and uproot. But days after these attacks, the
mutilated branches send forth vines to once again wind into the embrace of the wrought
iron balcony. Birds return once again to build nests in the outstretched arms of the
trees. The queen of this domain, an enormous trailing jasmine, impervious to pruning,
spreads a fragrant carpet of white. When the sea breeze whispers, a snowy flurry of
flowers sweeps into the house so that Visaka’s earliest and most tender memory is
the combined scent of jasmine and sea salt.

It is into this pulsing, green space that she escapes after the boiled beef and vegetables.
It is here she plays her childhood games, befriended at a distance by the birds, the
geckos and squirrels. She says of her variously prim and jungled childhood, “It was
like growing up in a garden of Eden in the middle of coldhearted England.”

*   *   *

A photograph from this time witnesses the whole family suited and saried on the front
lawn, Colombo heat perceptible only in the snaking tendrils that cling to the women’s
cheeks and necks. Our mother is flanked by her two much older sisters, each beautiful
in an entirely different way. One, round-faced and dark like a plump fig, succulent.
The other tall, slim, and elegant, calling to mind something lunar.

Our mother, a sapling next to these hothouse beauties, poses on the edge of an ebony
chair. A serious, spectacled schoolgirl in long braids and a stiff, ironed uniform,
she is caught in a blur as if about to run off. Her formidable mother, Sylvia Sunethra,
wears a sari in the old Victorian way, all ruffled sleeves, starch, and ramrod straight
posture, her hand on the girl’s shoulder holding her down. Behind them all, her handsome
brother, Ananda, debonair in a three-piece suit. In the chair sits the Judge, who
despite his profound baldness looks too young to be the father of these grown children.

The photograph gives no forewarning. Yet it captures the end of my mother’s childhood,
because if we enter with the certainty of history into the secret, red passageways
leading to my grandfather’s heart, we see lurking within his tissue-thin arteries
an amoeba-shaped blood clot that will lead him to sit up in bed six months later,
clutching at his chest. He will not die of this first stroke, but some years later
under the assault of successive ones and in the midst of his house-building obsession.

It is around the time of this photograph that our mother remembers the coming of Alice.
Male relatives from the Judge’s ancestral village squat on the verandah waiting for
the Judge. With them, a woman, face obscured behind her sari pallu. Our mother remembers
the outline of a large, fair-skinned face, round as the full moon, long, she-deer
eyelashes. And over the left shoulder, stretching the cheap cloth of the sari blouse,
an enormous, quivering hump. “This is Alice Nona,” the men say and meticulously retrace
the capillaries of familial blood that make her “our people.”

She is unmarried for obvious reasons. She has been living with her aged parents, taking
care of them. But in the last year there has been trouble. The men are vague. They
will not specify. The Judge thunders, “What is this nonsense? You have brought a fallen
hunchback woman to my house?”

The men shift on their haunches. One says, “She can cook and also clean … only take
her as a servant.”

The woman is silent, her eyes pulled earthward. But there must have been some mute
appeal implicit in the twisting of her large-knuckled hands because now, Sylvia Sunethra,
twelve years younger than her husband, but already becoming the iron-handed matriarch
of her later years, says, “I will take her.”

The Judge is aghast. But there is something in his wife’s eye that threatens unknown
violence if he does not comply. So as the men breathe sighs of relief, he says only,
“Alright. She can stay and join the staff. But one problem and I will send her packing.”

The men leave, and Alice is installed somewhere between family member and servant.
She sleeps on a mat outside Sylvia Sunethra’s bedroom. For three months, her face
is a study in impassivity, she moves as if in a sleepwalk, and not even the crashing
of a dish just behind her causes the slightest of reactions. Finally Sylvia Sunethra,
annoyed beyond endurance, says, “Oh, enough with this long face all the time. Tell
them to bring the child.”

The very next week, a wizened woman arrives at the gate. From within her sari folds
comes a hungry, kittenish mewing and now Alice goes about her day laughing and with
a baby clinging to her breast. At night, mother and infant fall asleep, rolled together
outside Sylvia Sunethra’s door, and even the Judge, afraid of the venom of his wife’s
tongue, dares not question the origins of this baby that Sylvia Sunethra has decided
to shelter along with its wayward mother. It is in this way that we who are not yet
born acquire Alice, that beloved Quasimodo of our childhoods, and also her son, Dilshan.

two

In the southern fishing village, under his mother’s eagle eye, Nishan develops the
aura of nascent success, evident in his newly acquired eyeglasses and paid for by
the loss of cricket games, bicycle rides, and beach wanderings.

During the school holidays, hooligan cousins are sent to spend their days under his
mother’s command. They run through the garden like wild hares; spin marbles with the
concentration of gambling addicts; hold their noses to dive into the deep, chill well;
but when they walk through the house they are quiet, respectful of their cousin’s
head bent over outspread books. Beatrice Muriel warns, “The rest of the house you
can demolish any way that you like, but stay away from Aiya and his studies.”

Yet even as she is proud of her son, a pointed thorn pierces the tenderest areas of
Beatrice Muriel’s heart. Neither her prayers nor the village women’s many potions
have made the slightest difference. Mala, the boy’s twin and shadow, remains as stubbornly
dark as at birth.

A slip of a girl, she is quiet in company, silent in her mother’s presence. Next to
her, Beatrice Muriel grows in bulk, the solid folds of her sari firmly anchoring each
of them, the wispy female child, the dreamy doctor, the scholarly boy, to earth.