Hannah Tennant-Moore - Wreck and Order

What did I love about it here? Kandy is smoggy, stifling, dull, dangerous, needy, indifferent, raging with heat and noise and trash and con artists and molesters, all the while pretending to be Lord Buddha’s chosen city.

A huge sound wakes me from my string of complaints. What is that? Violins? Cicadas? Siren song; siren song. The phrase marks each of my slow, heavy steps toward the temple. Tiny white birds fly in one butterfly-shaped mass from tree to tree, causing a brief, isolated tremor with each landing. The siren song blares from speakers outside the temple. Monks chanting. Pirith, I remember it’s called. I cannot pronounce the word and I cannot describe this congruence of voices eddying, swooping, sinking, falling, rising, retreating, drawing near. On the lawn outside the temple, families walk and loaf. A little girl picks a jasmine flower off a bush and hands it to her baby sister. Men sit atop their briefcases with bowed heads and prayered hands and closed eyes. Here is my love for this place.

—

Dinner is dhal and rice out of a plastic bag. I eat in my room, mashing the spicy yellow lentils and rice into little balls with my fingers, then scooping up the balls and pushing them onto my tongue with my thumb. My hand moves quickly from the bag to my mouth. Cardamom seeds and garlic cloves and curry leaves and chilies and whole cinnamon sticks. I will sleep well again tonight, my senses exhausted.

At the hallway sink, I try to scrub the yellow out from under my nails. The guesthouse murmurs with the day’s many endings — Mary’s grandsons chatting in their bunk bed, the dog sighing in the courtyard, a sad German song on a radio in one of the guest’s rooms. I walk back to my room and stretch out beneath my mosquito net, one hand on the soft knot of my pubic hair and one hand on my breast. My body has no context here. I’ve never been attracted to a Sri Lankan man. And even if I were, I wouldn’t let myself feel it. Lust is forbidden to women in this country. Maybe that’s partly why I came back here. An island that makes my sexual need irrelevant.

NILLAMUWE

Suriya is waiting for me at the entrance to the Tooth Temple, next to a guard shifting his rifle strap from one shoulder to the other. I wave with too much emphasis as I approach, surprised by the intensity of my discomfort. How to behave at a reunion with a near stranger? Even when I’m directly in front of Suriya, my hand worries the air between us. Her smile is oppressively genuine, sharpened by an eagerness for something I doubt I can provide.

After we say hello to excess, Suriya clarifies the plan that was vague to me in our emails: She has two months off from classes. We’re going to the home of the sister of her mother, in the rural northeast. Suriya’s family — cousins, uncles, and aunts — are gathering there to celebrate the New Year. They are all excited to meet me. I am to stay as long as I like. Suriya is especially glad for me to meet her brother. He has vacation time from the army. She grabs her small bag off the ground. “Bus coming!” We run down the center of the street to avoid the throngs of merchants and shoppers, hoist ourselves onto the back steps of the bus just as it picks up speed. Because I’m white, a young woman gives up her seat for us. Suriya and I wedge ourselves onto the narrow bench, me saying, “Sthoo-thiy,” again and again, a word I learned from a guidebook and have never heard a Sri Lankan person use.

As we come down the mountain, the air on the bus grows so sticky and thick that it’s almost soothing — nothing else to feel. It no longer matters whose bony thigh is pressing against my shoulder or whose hand is on top of mine on the metal seat back, squeezing my knuckles as we stop short for motorbikes and lurch around sharp turns. Holograms of Lord Buddha and Ganesh flash above the driver’s seat. A little boy on his mother’s lap blows a whistle every few seconds, then giggles. I try to explain to Suriya how angry Americans would be if a toddler were allowed to play with a whistle during a five-hour bus ride, but I grow weary with the effort of communication. Her English is much worse than I remembered, my Sinhala as nonexistent as it will always be. Why did I agree to stay with her? I could be traveling on my own, doing exactly as I pleased, speaking only if I felt like it.

We pass a roadside marketplace, an angry racket of money. Suriya taps my arm and points out the window. A throng of singing, clapping people walks alongside a ditch filled with multicolored trash. A teenage girl in a sari blaring sunset colors leads the pack, casting backward glances at the others, sometimes worried, sometimes glad. “I think is big girl party,” Suriya says.

“Big girl party?”

“When small girl becomes big girl.” She smiles largely, revealing her crooked front tooth. “Have not big girl party in U.S.A.?”

“Only Jewish people do that.” She stares at me. Her thick eyebrows draw together. “You don’t know about Jewish people?”

“No!” The word comes out as a small yelp.

“It’s a religion. You know the Holocaust, in Germany? World War II? Hitler?”

“Hitler,” she repeats, emptily. The bus thumps over a pothole and we tighten our grip on the seat back.

“He was an evil, evil man. Killed millions of Jewish people. Took them out of their homes, put them in prisons, and murdered them all.”

Suriya bites the inside of her cheeks and tilts her head. “Have not big girl party in U.S.A.?”

I turn to the world outside the window — decrepit advertisements plastered to the side of a high concrete wall. One of the posters is an ad for Rambo IV , peeling away at the top and bottom so that only Stallone’s sweaty headband and sharp eyes are visible. A shopkeeper in Jaffna told me that the Tamil Tigers played Rambo movies for child fighters before sending them into Sinhalese villages armed with machine guns. It’s good to remember that I know that fact. It makes my presence on this bus more appropriate, as if I’m here to document something important, a kind of white lie to myself. The bus comes to a rolling stop. The mass of bodies shifts frantically — bags tossed through windows, women in long skirts running and jumping onto the platform just before the bus rumbles onward.

Gradually, the storefronts and fruit carts give way to soupy rice fields and purpled lakes. Giant beehives, golden in the afternoon sun, hang from the knobby branches of ironwoods, or some other tree with a less satisfying name. A metallic rendition of “Jingle Bells” rings out from a phone behind me.

“My boarding home is so lonely,” Suriya says. “Now you are here and I can share my lonely with you.” She speaks to the window. Her shiny black bun is tied with an orange scrunchie at the base of her neck. “Yes,” I say, grateful now for her imperfect English, familiar words arranged unfamiliarly. I unclench my fists in my lap, letting the breeze from the window pour over my sweaty palms.

—

“Nilla, Nilla, Nillamuwe,” the ticket taker calls, leaning out the bus door into the tornado of dust stirred up by the tires. Suriya grabs my hand and pulls me through the knot of hot flesh toward the front of the bus. We jump to the side of the road as a crowd of villagers thrusts into the grumbling machine, already pulling away from the stop.

“Your bag. I think is hard for you,” Suriya says as we walk down a dirt road toward her aunt’s house. She reaches over and lifts up the bottom of my backpack with her hand in a vain effort to relieve some of the weight.

“I’m fine, really. I’m used to traveling like this.” But I do find it hard to carry my heavy pack in this heat. Perhaps I’ve outgrown backpacking around third world countries. We pass one-room concrete homes with palm-leaf roofs, men in sarongs sitting on plastic chairs in dirt yards, following us with unblinking eyes. Suriya points to one of these houses. “Hashini-Mommy’s home.” Crotons form a fence of oblong leaves in varied shades of pink, green, and yellow. Suriya’s aunt is washing metal bowls in the tap outside. She dries her hands on her dress and nods hello. Wisps of gray enliven her long dark hair. Her two front teeth protrude even when her mouth is closed, suggesting a smile that never takes shape. Speaking softly and quickly, she walks inside and pushes aside a blue curtain covering the entrance to the one bedroom. I had forgotten how people here rarely say hello or goodbye; they simply arrive and depart. Dusty sunlight passes through the small triangles carved throughout the brick wall. “Net,” Hashini-Mommy proclaims, pointing to the pink gauze tied in a knot above the bed. She speaks to Suriya in Sinhala, then motions to me.