Hannah Tennant-Moore - Wreck and Order

“Hashini-Mommy say this is your room. You may leave your bag and valuables. This village have not thieves.”

I rifle through my pack for the small gift I brought my hosts. When I look up, Hashini is standing in the doorway, holding a tray of sweets and glass mugs of steaming tea. She motions to me to follow her and sets the tray on a folding chair in the main room. A calendar of presidential photos shows Rajapaksha’s plump, beaming face superimposed over a group of cross-legged, beatific monks. Rajapaksha won the election by throwing his opponent in jail on trumped-up charges, all the while pretending to be the great protector of Buddhism. Well, apparently it worked. The president’s photo is the only adornment on Hashini’s walls.

I hand Hashini three foil packages of Ceylon tea, the one thing she surely has in abundance. I ought to have brought American treats — chocolate and coffee, T-shirts flaunting the Statue of Liberty — but I only remembered the necessity of gift-giving an hour before I met Suriya at the bus stop. She is so much better at people than I am. All those cards she’s mailed me over the years — for the Buddha’s birthday, the American New Year, the Sri Lankan New Year — decorated with stickers and pressed flowers. Hashini nods at the tea and runs her hand over the top of my head. She gestures to the sweets, oil cookies in the shape of stars. The cookies are bland and greasy, but I eat three in the hope of relaxing my hosts, who stand in silence while I munch from my post on a wooden bench covered in flowered fabric. Only when I reach for a fourth cookie do they turn to each other and exchange a soft stream of Sinhala words about the sudhu, white person.

“Hashini-Mommy ask me if you are working in the U.S.A.,” Suriya says.

“I write.” This is my socially appropriate shorthand for “very slowly translating the fictive diary of a lonely cat lover.” I hold an imaginary pen and scrawl invisible cursive letters in the air. Hashini nods her approval. When I told a Dutch couple staying at Rose Land that I was a writer, the woman exclaimed over how lucky I was to be able to travel and work at the same time. “That’s really the dream, isn’t it? Sometimes I think I’ll just quit my job and write a book. I already have the title. Wonderful Wandering .” I smiled and returned my eyes to my fraudulent notebook. The only reason I was able to travel around, occasionally rendering a French sentence or two into English, was the senseless way money flowed through the world, pooling here, evaporating there. Of course I could only think of money as senseless because I’d never been forced to think of it otherwise. My father gave me a birthday check soon before I left for Sri Lanka. And why was I so smug about the woman’s wonderful wandering? She seemed like a happy person.

Hashini-Mommy picks up my hands, turns them over, points to my empty ring finger, speaks hurriedly in Sinhala. “Hashini-Mommy say she worry for you,” Suriya says. “No husband. Thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two!” She counts the years on her fingers and then opens her palms skyward: A woman’s life evaporated once she reached her thirties.

“I was going to be married. But my boyfriend”—my eyes widen with shock as the words leave my lips—“is dead. My fiancé died.”

“Oh, El.” Suriya shortens my name to a single, masculine letter. “This is too sad. How does the man die?”

“He had — it was an accident. He was buying groceries, and when he was leaving the store, there was some construction in the parking lot, and a forklift, a small one — it’s a machine for lifting heavy things, and it didn’t see Brian walking, and so—” I stand up and mimic a claw scooping toward my face, cupping me under the chin. Snap. Beheaded by a miniature forklift in the Stop and Shop parking lot. Poor Brian. I sit down and stare into my lap, sighing, red-faced, frightened of myself. How else to justify being a grown woman with no family, no job, no permanent home?

Hashini-Mommy leaves the room and returns bearing a new plate of cookies. “So full,” I say, placing my hand over my belly.

“I think the hunger leave you,” Suriya says. “Because of your sad.”

Brian in his boxers in the doorframe of our bedroom, tall and grinning and well-made. A sudden giddiness would come upon him at times, as if a spring inside him had been tightened and then released. He’d pin me down and tickle me and I’d squeal, “No, no, not the hook!” and he’d growl like a lion and dig his fingers into my ribs. Or he’d give me airplane rides on the bed, balancing me on his feet like a toddler. Once I fell on top of him, we’d give each other smacking kisses that vibrated our eardrums. “I need you, I need you,” I said after an airplane ride, burying my face in his neck. Silent, he rested his hand on my lower back.

Suriya suggests we visit her uncle. “He will make leave your sad.”

—

Her uncle turns out to be a neighbor sitting in his dirt yard in a plastic chair, wearing a sarong and chewing betel leaf, an expanding puddle of red spit at his feet. He stares at me as Suriya talks. Then he picks up a large carving knife and disappears into a thicket of plantain trees. His shoulders hunch up close to his ears; his upper arms are stiff and motionless, and his forearms jut out from his sides. He returns from the jungle cradling a jackfruit the size of a watermelon, axes through the bumpy green shell, and holds the sticky flesh out to me.

“For White Daughter.”

I peel a gummy ribbon from the rind. “So sweet,” I say, wide-eyed and sincere.

Uncle claps and exhales a low-bellied laugh. As we squat around the fruit, Uncle points to his back and explains to me, Suriya translating, that he was poisoned by Tamil Tigers. They infiltrated his air force unit, pretending to be cooks. He was lucky, Suriya tells me. The other men died, including his two brothers. Uncle escaped with partial paralysis.

“White Daughter, husband have?” he asks.

Suriya answers in Sinhala, nearly whimpering as she describes something that happened to me that seems sad even here, alongside the story of a man who lost his brothers and his freedom of movement in a war. I almost wish it were true, that I merited such compassion from strangers.

Uncle is staring at me with concern. “He ask if you know martial arts,” Suriya says.

“Martial arts?”

“Ka-ra-tay?” he says.

“No. No karate.” I shake my head, perplexed.

“He thinks you are scared to live alone,” Suriya says.

“No, no. In the U.S.A., a woman can live alone, no problem,” I say, lying again. A woman living alone has no one to keep her mind in check, to tell her not to call 911 when she hears voices in the night, to force her body not to succumb to the mental anguish that assails her at times for reasons she rarely understands and with a force that seems to have little to do with her. Pain chooses her as its vessel, makes itself at home for a while, moves on. Unable to relieve herself of this reasonless pain, she is always able to imagine the many forms relief might take, and does imagine them, endlessly. An almond croissant and a latte at her favorite coffee shop. Reading in the park. Getting a massage. Baking cookies. Sitting in a sauna at the Turkish bathhouse. So many accessible, luxurious treats, suggesting a life of such ease and privilege and contentment that she wishes she would just lose her mind once and for all and get checked into an insane asylum, so that her circumstances would, at last, match her reality.

A psychiatrist would call my bad times depression, but I prefer to call them dukkha. If I use the Sanskrit word, my periods of heavy, wet, cold malaise become a matter of enlightenment and the dozens of lifetimes I am away from it, rather than the solipsism of time passing while I wonder why I’m doing what I’m doing instead of doing something else.