Hannah Tennant-Moore - Wreck and Order

“And what about your father?” I ask Suriya. “Is he still cruel?”

“No.” She dumps the sifted rice in a large pot and fidgets with the Buddhist protection cord on her wrist. “Now he is tired.” On the road, a group of boys walk slowly past, some of the many villagers who have come to see the sudhu sitting in Hashini’s yard. My existence carries weight here, effortlessly. I don’t need any convenient explanations for who I am, any concrete descriptions of what I’m doing with my life.

—

In the days before the New Year, a loud, unremarked succession of motorbikes and auto rickshaws delivers Suriya’s family members to Hashini’s main room, where the TV blares holiday programming. Men in white cotton suits and women with glossy braids report in voices bright as doorbells from a manicured lawn in front of a palace. I sit outside the open door to the house, next to a teenage girl wearing a pink T-shirt that says STAR CUTIE. She stares at me and giggles, her hand over her mouth. “You good girl?” she says at last, jumps up, runs inside.

Nope, I tell the backs of her small, quick calves, irritated with these angelic Sri Lankan girls.

“My sisters so pretty, so fair,” Suriya says.

“Your sisters? I thought you only had one brother.”

“The daughters of Hashini-Mommy.”

“Your cousins — your aunt’s daughters.”

“Yes. My sisters.”

“Okay,” I say. “Your sisters are very pretty, it’s true.”

“I am so dark.” Suriya marks the word with a wide flick of her wrists. “My mum takes pills when she is pregnant with me.”

I smile at Suriya’s oddly posh diction, learned from a British textbook. “Took pills,” I say.

“Took pills. To not get malaria. And it turned my skin. My father tease me — my dark daughter. Like that.” She almost sings the last two words, moving her chin once left, once right.

A pity your mum didn’t take pills that turned you albino. You’d be partially blind and have a reduced life expectancy, but no one could deny that you were the fairest of your cousin-sisters. “People want dark skin in the U.S.,” I say. “They lie in the sun and use creams to make their skin darker. We don’t think it’s attractive to be fair.”

“I don’t believe! You too?”

“Yes, I love when I have a suntan,” I admit, righteousness deflated. My hopeless reflection on a winter morning: dim pink blotches beneath my freckles. I used to try to wake up before Brian so that I could splash water on my face and put on blush before he saw me.

“In the U.S.A., I will be so pretty,” Suriya says.

A motorbike pulls up, driven by a young man wearing square-shaped sunglasses, bleached jeans, and a worn T-shirt nestled against his soft belly. “Ayya!” The second syllable flattens itself against Suriya’s tongue. “My elder brother,” she tells me. He removes his helmet and stares, seeming unable to reconcile what he knows about his aunt’s yard with the sight of a blue-eyed American woman. He and Suriya speak for a while with careless intimacy — quickly and softly, not looking at each other. I sometimes think I would be normal if I had a sibling. A real one. The IVF twins don’t count.

When Ayya goes inside, Suriya explains that her parents will not be coming for the family gathering this year. Her mum is in poor health and cannot travel. In a few days, we will visit her parents at their home. Ayya will drive us on his motorbike. He has four weeks’ leave from the army.

“What’s he doing now that the war is over?” I ask.

“He works at a sentry point. Still there is much need for safety. Soldiers are working so hard in these days to make the country strong.”

I look away and tell her that’s great — an American word I loathe. “Did I ever tell you that I visited Jaffna the first time I came here?” I ask Suriya.

“Oh, El, were you afraid? My brother was in Jaffna for a time. I had so fear for him. In those days, I made water offerings to Lord Buddha two times per day.”

“I loved Jaffna. Some of the kindest, most intelligent people I’ve ever met.”

Suriya purses her lips. “Well, you are tourist. So they are kind to you.”

“Did you hear about the Tree Demon that was attacking people up there?”

“Yes, we have heard that story. But the government has shown it is false. So we do not think on that.” She speaks quickly, walking toward the house. “And now my brother is in Colombo. Is better. You have hungry, Akki?”

—

Steamy bowls are laid out on the table inside. Hashini gestures to me with a spoon. She dumps a mound of rice in the center of a metal plate and surrounds it with curries. Suriya gives words to each thwack of the spoon: Jackfruit. Potato. Dhal. Aubergine. Hashini hands me the plate and motions to me to sit on the one chair in the room. Suriya frowns. “I think chair is — I don’t know the word.” She shakes the chair back to show me how loose it is. “Take care, Akki.” She bends her knees gingerly in demonstration.

The family stands around me, silent, waiting. “Aren’t you going to eat, too?” I ask Suriya. Jared is the only person I’ve ever been comfortable eating around. He always sits next to me at restaurants, not across, so he can keep one hand on my thigh while we eat. When he slid in the booth beside me for the first time, I told him it was embarrassing to be so intimate in public, people would think we were rude. “Who cares?” he said. “People think all kinds of things.” He tucked the hair behind my ears and kissed me on the mouth as the waitress walked up to take our order. I shied away and softly asked for huevos rancheros. And when they came, I struggled to cut the fried tortillas into bite-size pieces, my eyes fixed to my plate, until he took the fork from me, broke off a piece of tortilla with his bare hands, smothered it in salsa and cheese, and brought it to my lips.

But now I am a guest of honor surrounded by eager witnesses. Strips of fried eggplant cling to my fingers as I try to work the curries into a ball. A piece of potato falls to the floor as I lift the ball. Rice coats my chin as I place the ball on my tongue. My fingers have vertigo; they know they’re being watched.

“Is it taste, Akki?” Suriya whispers the question, reminding me of a Sinhala word she taught me while we ate ice cream cones the day we met.

“Rasai,” I say. “Delicious.” An explosion of laughter — the kindness inside our respective insecurities unloosed. I take another bite. The crisped exterior of a strip of eggplant gives way to a creamy mix of cinnamon, cumin, coriander, and green chili. The well-being of others is so contingent on my displays of well-being that it is necessary for me to be well. Hashini nods, satisfied, and heads toward the kitchen as the others fill their plates and then sprawl across the room, crowding onto the couch and sitting cross-legged on the floor.

“Hashini-Mommy will not eat with us?” I ask Suriya.

“She eats when she cooks. She has more works. So many people.”

Suriya mashes her curries and rice into a perfect ball and then opens her mouth wide, her tongue drooping over her lower lip. I imitate her wide mouth and eager tongue. It’s fun to eat. As soon as one of my curries gets low, Suriya balances her plate on her hip and dishes me more with her clean left hand.

The family kneads their leftovers into pasty balls that they drop in the dirt yard. A pack of dogs gathers around the food, snarling and wagging their tails. One of them has a gouged-out eye socket from which dangles a filthy string of something I don’t want to believe is excess eyeball. He runs and growls and gorges like the other dogs. I stand behind Suriya’s cousin at the pump, waiting to rinse off my plate, but Suriya slides it from my hand. “No, Akki. You are guest.” A twenty-one-year-old — or is she twenty-two now? — treating me like a child. I ought to be looking after her. But I’d be terrible at that, even if we were in the States.