Hannah Tennant-Moore - Wreck and Order

I don’t want to be a part of Suriya’s world anymore, this village where the only action available to me is to eat food prepared by poor people. I need to get to a computer — see if the publisher wrote me back, look up other publishers if she didn’t, write to Jared, plan my next move. But I cannot leave without some gesture of real thanks.

I find Suriya sweeping the dirt yard, making a pile of dead leaves and trash. “I’ve been thinking,” I say, “that it’s getting to be time for me to leave. Travel around a bit and then head back to the U.S.”

Suriya rubs her lips together, distracting her mouth from forming unbecoming sounds. “Oh, El, but you can wait to go back to Kandy with me, no? My school starts in two weeks only. We can go back together then, okay?”

Giving a set quantity of time to these days of being nothing but an American witness to Suriya’s life of chores and worship panics me. I have to do something.

“I thought maybe you’d like to travel with me, before I go back.” Suriya looks at me hard, her lips downturned. “I’ll take you on vacation.”

“I take vacation with you?”

“Sure. Why not? You want to stay at a fancy hotel and swim in a pool and meet lots of Europeans?”

Suriya grins, eyebrows raised. “I will take a vacation in my own country!”

“Yes, I will take you. Let’s get your things together. You don’t need much. I can lend you clothes. Or we can buy you new ones.” I’m holding her hands, bending my knees as if preparing to jump, as if it’s the scene in the musical where the crippled boy learns to walk or the prostitute finds true love and gives up the smack and finds a cure for AIDS.

Suriya drops my hand and looks toward the kitchen. “We need to bring food for our trip. How will we take our meals?”

I take my toothbrush off the ledge of the water tank. “At restaurants. I’ll pay. You won’t have to cook.” I spit toothpaste into the cakey dirt. “Your father will let you go, right? You’ll only be gone a few days.”

Suriya’s father is snoring on a cot in the room of rats and abandoned clothes. “Just tell Ayya,” I whisper to her. Ayya is in his room, staring into a half-filled duffel bag open on his bed. I stand beside Suriya while she explains our plan, adding encouraging phrases now and then—“So much practice with English!” “Very nice hotel!” Ayya looks from Suriya’s face to mine. “Go with your friend,” he says in English, adding Sinhala that Suriya translates for me: Do not worry for our father. I will make him not be angry. Have fun.

Suriya puts a couple of skirts and T-shirts in a bag. “This one, El? Or maybe the blue is better?”

“The blue one,” I say without looking, wanting to get on the road before her father wakes up, giddy now that I’m finally making something happen.

She stands in the center of the room, sighing and serious in the way of a final goodbye. What exactly does she believe I’m offering her? “El Akki?” she says. “I promised Rajith we would visit today. He will be lonely without his mother.”

“Let’s take him with us! By the time we get back, his mom will be better.”

Suriya laughs. “You are serious?”

She makes a pot of rice and prepares three plates for her father — food she made for breakfast this morning and dinner last night. She leaves the day’s meals in a neat row on the table, covered by a plastic dome to keep the flies away. Although I insist it’s unnecessary, she wraps up a couple of leftover curries to take with us, in case we get hungry on the bus. She splashes water from the tin jug onto the food-spattered kitchen floor. The water breaks into tiny beads as it hits concrete.

—

Rajith’s home is a one-room cube with an old sari for a front door. Suriya calls out. No one comes. We peer inside. Dusty floor. A table topped by plastic bowls abuzz with flies, drunk on the stench of congealed coconut milk and rotting vegetables. Suriya calls out again. A woman responds from the yard. She wears a long skirt and faded sari blouse, holds a baby in one arm and Rajith’s hand in the other. Rajith points at us, his eyes wide, his hoarse voice urgent.

The woman smiles and draws near. Suriya holds out her hands and takes the baby, who starts crying as soon as his mama releases him. Suriya bounces him forcefully until he quiets. She is so much more confident than I am. Still bouncing, she explains why we’ve come. The woman steps back, stares hard, asks a question full of doubt. Suriya insists. The woman laughs and claps her hands together. She addresses Rajith, who nods his head with dangerous vigor.

THE ROYAL RESORT

Suriya chooses our lodging. I ask if there’s anywhere she’s ever wanted to visit and she names a fancy hotel a few towns away, pronouncing the word as if it’s a disagreeable question. I look it up in my guidebook: a resort and spa in the mountains, seemingly the only tourist attraction in the area. The rooms are six times the price I’d pay for myself. But this is a gift.

At sunset a bus deposits us at the base of a primitive mountain road. Barefoot children and hunched elderly women with broken teeth mill around a small sign advertising THE ROYAL RESORT in pink cursive, their palms extended. A tuk-tuk driver pulls up in front of me and gestures to the back of his car. “Royal Resort, yes, madam? Come, madam.” He looks disappointed when Suriya crowds into the back with me, Rajith on her lap. “Keeyada?” she asks. He answers sullenly, forced to give the local price.

We crawl up the stony mountainside, listing from side to side to avoid the largest troughs and spikiest rocks. Rajith beats his hand on his lap, thumpety-thump-thump. Suriya watches the orange sky rushing over billions of sea-green tea leaves, her back straight and lips pursed, affecting an air of sophistication that makes me nervous. I purposefully fall into Rajith at the largest bumps, making him laugh, trying to put Suriya at ease.

The hotel entrance is a white arbor encircled by tiny, aggressive jasmine flowers. While I pay the tuk-tuk driver, Suriya takes out her handkerchief and pocket mirror, dabs her face, smooths back her hair. Her real self and her reflection compete for solemnity. As we walk into the lobby, brown bodies buttoned into white uniforms pause to look at us, then hurry on, unsure how to address our unusual trio. The man behind the desk looks only at me as I book a double room.

A Sri Lankan woman with enormous eyes and breasts takes us up. Suriya grips Rajith’s hand as we step inside the elevator, whispering fiercely. “They are your friends?” the pretty hotel clerk asks me just before she leaves us. I wish Suriya would answer in Sinhala, but she just stands still and serious, waiting to be identified.

“Yes.” My voice is loud and ugly, feigning comfort. “They are my friends.”

Once we’re alone in our room, Suriya begins to relax. She sits on the edge of the bed and bounces the mattress, looks out the window at the now purpled sky and darkening hills below. “Wow, El,” she says. “Wow.” Rajith burrows under the covers headfirst. Suriya tickles his feet, resting on the pillow, ankles splayed. Then she makes him get up and scrub his feet in the bathroom. She removes the case his feet touched and fluffs the pillow. Clean-toed, Rajith returns to his den and giggles from under the covers. I ask Suriya if she would like to take a bath before dinner.

“Sit in that bowl of water?”

“Yes. Hot water.”

“No, Akki. That is not necessary.” But she spends a long time getting ready. She leaves the bathroom door open at first, knotting a towel around her chest like a sarong. “I’ll take care of Rajith,” I say. “You can have privacy.” I pull the door closed before she can protest.