Hannah Tennant-Moore - Wreck and Order

Ayya traces circles in the dirt with his big toe while Suriya speaks. I have an urge to stamp out the delicacy of the motion, make him look at me. What is it that we were supposed to be arguing about? “Did you know these stories?” I ask Suriya.

“Stories like this, yes. We all hear bad things from Jaffna during wartime. But we must not think on these things.”

A young father I spoke to in Jaffna told me he didn’t care whether the Sinhalese soldiers or the Tamil Tigers ruled in Jaffna—“Fifty-fifty badness,” he called it — so long as there was no more fighting. He mentioned some videos on the Internet of Tamil prisoners being tortured, which he assumed some good soldier had posted as a kind of anonymous protest. The father hoped these videos would be destroyed, that the war crimes would be forgotten. “These things just make Tamils want to fight. And we cannot fight. We will not win.” Running around researching an article I believed would open Americans’ eyes to Tamil oppression, I heard the comment as pathetic, the words of someone who has been cowed into silence. Now I have no way to interpret it, no sense of the words beyond the literal.

Ayya tosses his banana peel into the bamboo grove and begins walking toward the house. “Thank you for speaking with me,” I try to call after him, but my voice stays close to my chest.

I spend the rest of the day on my translation, plowing through two chapters with little thought to their meaning.

—

That evening, Suriya suggests the three of us go to a nearby temple to make a water offering. We fill up small plastic bowls from the tap at the entrance and carry them in cupped hands while we walk in circles around the Buddha statue in the courtyard. “Eight circles,” Suriya says. “Lord Buddha’s magic number.” It feels silly to be counting laps with this plastic bowl of tap water, but then pirith begins playing from inside the small temple — a long, one-story structure that looks more like a stable than a house of worship. A monk walks into the courtyard and stands still with his hands clasped behind his back, watching us or the sunset or both. Hard to believe it was the monks who agitated the most for violence against the Tamils, sometimes even leading mobs in ransacking businesses or putting kerosene-doused tires around Tamils’ necks and setting them on fire. Please stop. Just focus on one real, immediate thing. Smooth, warm tiles meet the soles of my feet. There is nothing damaging about this activity, no reason to hold myself aloof and analytical.

On the ride home, a flash of light behind the clouds turns the sky into a sheet of pale pink construction paper stenciled with elaborate branches. “Oh,” Suriya murmurs behind me. Heat lightning. A wall of rain moves across the field toward our bike. We are soaked to the skin. Ayya drives slowly the rest of the way home. Rain eclipses our senses. Impossible to worry about the state of the world when you are moving through black, dense water on a vehicle over which you have no control.

Suriya’s house is dark and silent. Her father is sleeping and her mother is at an Ayurvedic hospital to get medicine for the health problem that Suriya has explained to me only by pointing to her chest. She flicks a light switch in the kitchen. “Have not current.” She tries to open the tap on the side of the house. “Have not water.” Her voice is mischievous and happy. She is freed from cooking and cleaning. Nothing to do but lie on our beds inside the watery air.

“I feel happy with the dark,” Suriya says. On the street, a man makes a kissing noise, the sound men use to attract each other’s attention.

“It’s peaceful, yes.” I stretch out on the bed as Suriya begins her ritual hair brushing. “Nangi,” I say, “you were never hoping that Ayya and I — you know…”

I wait for her to absolve me of the need to go further. “Please explain, El,” she says, putting down her brush.

“Were you ever hoping that Ayya and I would get married?”

She rests her hairbrush on her knee, looking so stunned I’m almost offended. “No, no, El. To Ayya, you are Akki. Big sister. American sister.”

“Oh, good. I only want to be his American sister.”

Suriya resumes tenderizing her hair. “And Ayya is not looking for wife now. He is too sad. He had a girlfriend for some years. He loves her more. But this girl marries another boy while Ayya is away. I told him when he comes home to visit. Oh, Akki, he cried more.” I can’t bring myself to correct Suriya’s emphatic misuse of “more”; it sounds so grave and endless.

Suriya does her best not to ever cry, because if she starts she cannot stop. When I ask how she manages not to cry when hard things happen in her life all the time, she says, “Patience and activeness.”

“You are very smart. But I do think it’s all right to cry from time to time.” I hear a song my mother used to play for me when I was four or five, sometimes singing along in a manner that came across as unhinged and desperate even to a child. It’s all right to cry…Raindrops from your eyes. It’s gonna make you feel better! I was already well aware that tears were acceptable in my family, given how many times I walked into the living room and found my mother lying on the rug with cucumbers over her eyes and a mound of used tissues beside her, blasting Joni Mitchell, in the dry-heaves stage of a long weeping. Or watched my father emerge from the bedroom at noon, eyes red, face slack. There is such a thing as being too permissive with the expression of emotions.

I reach out and touch Suriya’s knee. “Nangi, tell me about your mother’s illness. Is she going to be okay?”

Suriya shakes her head and looks into her lap. “I must not talk about that. I only pray.”

My brain knows this is a sad thing to say. But instead of compassion, I feel defensive and irritated, as if listening to someone complain about something she has no right to be upset about. Suriya’s mom might die, I say to myself, scoldingly. But the appropriate feeling does not come.

—

We swim in the lake most evenings. Sometimes a teenage boy who lost his legs to a land mine bathes with us. His father pushes him to the lake’s edge in his wheelchair and then carries him into the soapy shallows, holding him under the armpits as the boy lathers his face and chest. Once, as we drop our sandals and towels on the sand, we see the boy floating on his back, his father’s palms supporting him underwater. The boy’s closed eyes and upturned lips and sinewy arms stretched wide halt us. “Oh,” Suriya murmurs, intertwining her thin fingers with mine.

—

Ayya will go back to his sentry point in Colombo in two days. This fact rudely alerts me to the passage of time, something I do my best not to keep track of. I’ve been with Suriya for more than a month, the length of time I was hoping it would take me to complete my translation. Five long chapters remain. I need to find a quiet hostel somewhere, sequester myself, and do nothing but work. But first Ayya and Suriya are eager to take me to a festival that is coming to their village. It will be Ayya’s last day of fun before he goes back to work. And Suriya has had so many chores and she fears that her chores became my chores. But tomorrow we will go to a festival and have fun!

She spends an hour braiding her hair with the help of a plastic pocket mirror on the big day, undoing and redoing every strand that betrays the minutest of bumps. Ayya’s motorbike delivers us to a large swath of shadeless sand, imprinted with the crosshatched trails of ice cream carts and the footprints of barefoot kids. Intercoms blare aggressive male voices. Ayya abandons us to join a group of boys who are trying to climb a statue covered in grease, atop of which is a small box that Suriya tells me is filled with money. The boys’ faces flush crimson as they cling to crevices in the stone man’s giant body — the crook of his bent arm, a fold in his robe. They grimace and curse as their fingers slide downward. Those who make it up highest shove at their competitors, some laughing, some horribly serious, punching as if to kill. Ayya is one of the serious boys. He runs and hurls himself as high up the statue as he can, never pausing long enough to let his fingers lose their grip, keeping his gaze fixed on the box atop the statue. He avoids the other boys unless they go for him, and then he is ruthless. When he shoves a younger boy in the forehead, the boy’s neck snaps back as he falls. I cry out as he lands on his butt with his hands behind him. But he raises his fist in the air and shouts at Ayya, grinning.