Hannah Tennant-Moore - Wreck and Order

KANDY

I ignore the rickshaw drivers crowding the bus stop—“Tuk-tuk, madam? Yes, madam! Come, madam!”—and decide to carry my backpack the two miles to my guesthouse. Maybe the pain in my shoulders and sweat soaking my kurta will hurry me into the old sense of belonging. By the time I turn up the steep, narrow road to Rose Land, my legs have roasted beneath my long skirt and my sticky inner thighs grate with each step. Mary sits on the front porch, her bare feet crossed at the ankles. The calluses on the pads of her big toes are cracked and bloody. She stands and opens the gate.

“Remember me?” I ask.

“Yes, yes,” she says, letting me know she meets many tourists and I am not to embarrass us both with further questions. I ask if the small room in the back is free. Mary nods and stands. Her unruly hair has been tamed into a braid. I follow her through a large, furnitureless common area to my old room abutting the monastery.

Mary gives me a tiny key, which unlocks the tiny padlock on the door to my room. Sitting on the edge of the thin, hard mattress, I untie the mosquito net hanging from the ceiling and let it fall around the bed. Lying on my back, I blink at the water-stained ceiling through blue gauze. I was a panicked mess leaving Brooklyn, moving my stuff into my old room at my dad’s house, so afraid that I would end up there after all. And then as soon as I got on the plane and turned off my phone and put it away for — I don’t know how long — I felt like laughing. It all seems so far away now. That wistful line in old movies. I don’t feel wistful. I feel relaxed for the first time in months. Shadows of crows fly across my face. For the next twelve hours, my eyes close out the world.

I yawn and roll onto my belly. Monks patter and whoosh past my window in bare feet and maroon robes. Soon there will be chanting, followed by the ping and clank of pots, the beginning of days whittled down to the most basic decisions. It’s good to be near people who have committed to being human in the simplest way, to remind myself that such a life is possible, that even I have another self who is quiet and content, aware above all of her breath. Maybe this time I will become her.

—

Morning at Rose Land unfurls one way only. The black Lab, no longer a puppy, steals guests’ underwear out of their rooms and pulls towels off the line in the backyard. Mary bustles about in a long white skirt and tie-dyed T-shirt, cutting curry leaves off the karapincha, wringing out bedsheets faded all to the same soft beige, leaving scraps for the crows in worn metal buckets hanging from the fence in the backyard. Skinny, shaggy-haired Europeans smoke cigarettes in the courtyard at the center of the house. Breakfast is five pieces of toast with pineapple jelly, a pot of dark tea with milk powder, half of an overripe papaya. “You want more toast, you ask,” Mary says, as I know she will.

I drink the pot of tea, pick dead ants out of the jelly, and eat all five pieces of toast. Then I head down to the lake, a body of unnaturally still grayness around which the town careers. A boy wearing a crisp, white school uniform follows me. Do I want to see his baby alligator? Come and see, madam, no charge. The tinny, high-pitched notes of the ice cream song trickle out of a cart pulled by a grinning, toothless man. Halfway around the lake, I pause to squint up at the Tooth Temple, which is said to hold one of the Buddha’s left canines in a gilded turret piercing smog. A hurried man in flip-flops and a faded suit stops short in front of the temple gates, drops a coin in a padlocked box, and bows his forehead to his hands, pressed together in the center of his chest.

Will the coffee-colored man still be lying in the muddy grass outside the temple gates, his legs bent at the knees, his right hand mechanically swatting his forehead? Yes, here he is, his clothes the color of his hair, which is the color of his skin, which is the color of his eyes, which is the color of coffee grinds from the strongest, oiliest beans. I watch his swats for several minutes. A sick-animal smell wafts off his clothes like the vapor of all the things I have failed to do. A juvenile, narcissistic thought, but calming nonetheless. Nearby, a family of red-faced monkeys stares out of tiny, ruthless eyes.

Main street. Men hawk inflatable kitty cats and bags of pineapple covered in chili salt. A blind woman sits on a sheet of newspaper, palms open on her lap, a real kitten curled beside her. It’s easy to give her a coin because she cannot see me. I don’t have to make eye contact and smile, pretending to believe she’ll be just fine. I pass my reflection in the black-tinted glass door of a shop advertising Internet and phone services, and push on my face to enter the store. I sit down at a computer and open the drafts folder of my email. When I told my boss at Barnes and Noble that I was quitting to focus full-time on translating Fifi , she encouraged me to contact a friend of hers, the publisher of a small press specializing in translations. I reread my note to the publisher: Might he be so kind as to read a sample chapter or two of this quietly brilliant magnum opus by an idiosyncratic thinker who died before reaping the recognition he deserved?

A bit florid, sure, but my humble notes never got me anywhere. I’m hopeful this time. I have a contact. My coworkers at Barnes and Noble said you had to have contacts, cold submissions got you nowhere . On the balcony across the street, a young girl hops back and forth, back and forth. Gripping my hands together over the keyboard, I press Send with my pinkie finger.

The town center is crowded with beggars and monkeys stalking roti stands and wooden tables piled with spices and men’s underwear and fish doused in kerosene to keep the flies away. Auto rickshaws pull up beside me, one after the other. I flip my palm back and forth in the air, meaning no. One of them continues crawling alongside me. “I am walking,” I say to the air in front of me.

“Yes, come,” he says. I shake my head no and continue walking. The rickshaw coughs.

“Yes, come, you, come.”

I glance toward him to say no again. His face is a large, gleaming eye. There is more activity in the area of his crotch than I suspect is necessary to operate a rickshaw.

“Yes, come. You so nice. You come.”

He looks like all of them, the way I’ve learned to see them: soft bellies; thin, floundering arms; a tongue too quick to flick his cracked upper lip. I put up my hand to shield my eyes and quicken my pace. “Go away. Leave me alone.” How have I forgotten the only Sinhala words I ever needed? The movement in his lap becomes frenzied. His voice hardens into a monotone chant. “You come. You come. You come.” I shout to drown out his voice. “Go away. Leave me alone.” Two women in saris pause their conversation to frown at me in either concern or irritation. I rush down a side street and lean against the wall, gritting my teeth. A gray-haired man sidles up to me. “He-llo.” I march back toward the lake, eyes glued to the ground. My body is well covered in a long skirt and baggy T-shirt. My greasy hair is pulled back into a messy, low bun. The object of my rage becomes the white woman I saw in the Internet café, wearing a red spaghetti-strap dress, her breasts spilling over the gold belt tied above her waist. She’s probably on vacation with a man she wants to impress and doesn’t care that she may as well be prancing around buck naked as far as the locals are concerned, freely doling out erotic delight. Not that I’m usually the champion of propriety. But I don’t want to be reminded of familiar social games.

A cloud of black-and-white birds blows through the trees bordering the lake, a cacophony of squawks and waste. Unlike the women around me, I have no umbrella and get shit on three times. When I pause to wipe the back of my forearm against a tree, I notice a long fish floating on its side in the smoky lake, its glassy eye reflecting the gray sky, one fin sticking up like a tiny sail. A swarm of smaller fish pecks at its underside.