Hannah Tennant-Moore - Wreck and Order

Suriya flattens garlic cloves with the wide blade of her knife to loosen their skins. “My brother is so sad. He works hard for this money. But I cannot do for him. I can only look at him.” There is a woman thief in this village, she explains. One time, she stole the chairs out of Suriya’s yard. They would walk past her house and see her sitting in them.

“Why didn’t you take them back?”

“We don’t want fighting with her. Maybe we get back our chairs, but it makes anger in us. This woman thief, also she is a”—Suriya rests her knife on the cutting board and searches the ceiling for the word—“a depraved. Mens come to her home. She says, he is my brother, he is my uncle. And we laugh because she has no brother and no uncle.”

“So she’s a prostitute? She has sex with men for money?”

“Yes. She is so greedy.”

“What about the men who go to her? Aren’t they the ones who are greedy?” Sarasi from Rose Land told me that widows are considered used goods, ineligible for marriage and fair game for sex. If the widow had children to raise and no family to support her, she might become a sort of informal prostitute, temporarily kept by one man after another.

“Why isn’t the woman married?” I ask Suriya.

“Her husband dies in a fire.”

“Suriya, that is so sad. The woman probably has no other way to make money.”

“But many women are poor and they do not become a depraved. This woman love money. My mother tells me that.” She crushes garlic with the flat edge of a knife, her forehead creased. “Why do you say it’s sad, El?”

She has not yet known the moment just before a man ejaculates, when his whole self is on the surface of his body. They all make different noises or guard different silences and they each have a different way of clutching your body as the semen rushes to the tip of the cock, and his openness widens you so much that you would do anything to safeguard the release he needs, for that instant, more than anything else in the world and which, for that instant, you alone can give him. And then he groans and empties himself of this need and rolls away and wipes himself off and stands up and clothes his body and the loneliness that rushes in as a yawn escapes his limp face is the worst pain I have known in my life, a full-body longing that has sometimes felt so unbearable I would rather have been raped, to at least have the clarity of being the victim of exploitation and cruelty instead of the confusing, self-loathing knowledge that I chose to be the receptacle for the sticky, cloying, arrogant goo the man needed to be rid of. A lot of women who have sex for money would laugh at the stupidity of that. They would laugh at me for talking about the man’s whole self being on the surface of his body, for thinking about his ejaculate long enough to personify it. But they need the money to live.

I try to explain a tame version of this thinking to Suriya. “You know something, El?” she says, scooping the crunchy shells of garlic cloves into her palm and tossing them out the window. “You are a kind lady.”

—

The cousins from Hashini’s are crowded into the living room, stopping by on their drive back to Colombo. Suriya hops from foot to foot as she sets out dishes and plates. “Are your legs okay?” I ask when she hands me my lunch.

“I have to make toilet. No time yet today.” It is noon. She rubs her temples, still hopping. “Is your head okay?” I ask.

“It is paining.”

“You have a headache? Do you want pills? I have good pills with me.”

She looks stricken. “No pills.”

“Can I bring you some water at least? You’re probably dehydrated.”

“Please, Akki, sit, eat.” So I sit and eat, knowing what she wants is to feel her suffering has been put to use. Her relatives’ fingers are covered in the food she prepared. Her father has seconds and thirds. He murmurs to Suriya as he hands her his plate to wash. She meets his eyes. His smile is brittle, awkward. He turns toward me, saying, “English. Daughter. English.”

“Her English is very good,” I tell him. “She is very smart.”

He nods once and walks toward the outhouse.

—

After Suriya’s relatives have eaten another meal and then slipped inside their loud vehicles without saying goodbye, I ask Suriya where I can go to use the Internet. She taps her nose with her index finger. “Why do you need a computer, Akki?”

Well, if I get to a computer, it’s theoretically possible that I’ll read emails from Jared claiming to have given up drinking and dealing, begging me to come back and marry him; or telling me he fell off a roof when he was drunk and is paralyzed from the waist down and I need to move back to California and care for him. Or I’ll have an email from a publisher offering me a generous contract for my translation, or telling me this book is crap and my translation is not much better and did I know how easy it is to self-publish on Amazon? Or Brian will have found life unbearable without me and beg me to give it another try. Or my mother will have found her calling as the proprietor of a gluten-free escort service, and would I like in on the enterprise?

“I might have some important letters,” I say. I haven’t checked my email since I left Kandy. It’s nice to be unmoored, but I can’t just float here forever. Suriya retrieves a rusty, heavy bicycle from the field behind their house. I sit on the handlebars, holding my legs out in front of me. My tailbone wobbles on the metal bar. “The wind tastes sweet on my arms,” Suriya says. Her breath tastes sweet on my ear.

We pass a motorbike going the other way. The driver does a U-turn and pulls up in front of our bicycle, blocking the way. The boy is small and unsmiling. He and Suriya chat in soft, withholding tones.

“That boy is my school friend,” she says when we bike away. “He asked me about love one time.”

“He wanted to be your boyfriend?”

“To marry.” She leans over my shoulder to press her weight on the pedals. “Many boys asked me about love in the money season. But when my father lose — losed?”

“Lost.”

“When my father lost his business, the boys all stopped speaking to me. So I hate them.” I smile. Suriya is quietly fierce.

“Do you have any friends who are girls?”

Girls in school say they are her friends. They act in a nice manner to each other. But she doesn’t trust them. They are jealous because she gets good marks in school and she has a boyfriend working abroad. They joke and say her boyfriend is ugly. And one time, her friends told her a lie that their exam was canceled. So she did not study and she did poorly.

“I don’t have many close friends, either,” I say. I’ve always had women I could call up and go out with. I enjoy these interactions, but it would make me sad to characterize them as friendship — unless a given social activity was going to involve drugs or alcohol, I usually preferred to be alone.

My turn to pedal. I love the whir inside my body as the blood rushes to keep up with my legs. “So fast,” Suriya calls over my shoulder. “Fun!” We pass a still, green lake lined with feathery grasses. A duck walks through sticky, black mud toward the water, which makes grace of its clumsy waddle.

Suriya yells to stop and hops off the handlebars as the bike slows. The family that has a computer with Internet is not at home. Someone must have died, Suriya says. The only place they could possibly have gone is a funeral. It takes a few tries to explain to Suriya why I find that funny. Her laugh jostles her whole body. It’s good to be alone with her. I no longer have the urge to flee her village, put on my pack and wait in the dust for a bus to come by, going elsewhere. If I leave, when will we see each other again? And it’s nice to be able to simply imagine Jared’s expressions of raunchy love piling up in my inbox, along with, perhaps, even a kind note about Fifi .