Hannah Tennant-Moore - Wreck and Order

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know why I came here.” For half of an instant, I become the person I feel myself to be late at night when I can’t sleep and I’m all alone with the minutes passing, and I’m wide awake with thoughts I want to force the minutes to understand, but the seconds are too fast, they pass and pass, and then pass again. I take Suriya’s hands, cool and pliable, all those necessary, tiny bones. “I love you, Nangi. I love how you are.”

“Okay. I love you also. You have hungry, Akki?”

—

We take bouncing steps through frothy brown water, where women are bathing and washing clothes. They smile and nod, smile and nod. Suriya is the girl who just lost her mother and I am her friend all the way from America. I’m no longer embarrassed by my U.S.A. T-shirt and Nike running shorts. I walk through the soapy canal and then dive beneath opaque stillness, keeping my eyes open. The underwater world is a blue lace curtain billowing over a bright window. When I surface, two women about my age are talking excitedly, pointing to the far edge of the lake, where a small circle of sky rains on green, green paddy fields.

Suriya swims over and stands beside me. She whispers my name. I crane my neck upward: an untroubled pastel dome. “There must be a rainbow,” I say, just as the women nearby smile hugely and point to the other side of the lake. “I never—” I shut my mouth. A thick band of colored light is climbing slowly over our heads, forming a perfect arc that touches down at last on the tall grasses near the mouth of the canal.

A young father carries his baby into the water. The infant gurgles and smacks the surface of the lake with her small palm. The sky takes a huge breath, sucking the heat from the air. Suriya cups her ear. “Heard you that noise?” she says, English failing her. “It’s coming, oh, it’s coming.” And then we are engulfed in raindrops so huge and fast and loud that it feels like my skin is leather stretched taut over the surface of a drum. I shield the rain from my eyes, while everyone around me cups their hands over their ears. Even physical discomfort is cultural. We turn in slow circles, watching drops bounce off the mirrored lake. Suriya hops lightly. The lake water is hot on my thighs. Cool rain pelts my shoulders. “Disaster wind,” she says, beaming, wide-eyed, enjoying her fear. She puts her arm around my waist under the water. Distant thunder grows closer. Gilded daggers cut jags out of the slate sky. “We should get out of the water,” I say. “You can die.”

“Oh no!” But Suriya moves deeper into the lake. She floats on her back, her mouth opened wide. She swims back to me and takes my hand. We hop together back to shore. The sun comes out on the walk home, raising steam from the rain-soaked earth.

—

The next morning, I tell Suriya that I would like to take her to America with me. She’s hanging freshly washed sheets and towels on the line, wearing her purple pajama pants and True Love Forever T-shirt. “Before you get married,” I say. “We can stay with my father. He has a very big house. And travel around.”

She lets the sheet she’s rinsing fall back in the bucket. “I go to U.S.A.?” She lowers herself to the ground, rests her elbows on her crossed legs and her chin in her hands. She looks up at me through the space between her first two fingers. “Akki, this is my dream. But I never risk to ask you.” I finish rinsing the sheet as I tell her that we’ll need to go to Colombo to get her a passport and fill out forms for a visa. We can travel all around the East Coast. Visit the Statue of Liberty. Go to the beach in Florida.

“In your country, I can wear a bikini?”

“Of course. You can wear whatever you want.”

“Wow,” she tells her lap.

But as we’re brushing our teeth at the water pump that night, she says that she has been thinking about the trip to America and she has decided that she must not go. Before she met me, she never thought about leaving her country. Lanka is enough for her. This is the best way. She begs me not to have angry with her. I tried to make her dream come true. But she cannot go to America.

So instead of booking plane tickets and waiting for hours in air-conditioned offices in Colombo, we spend days letting the rain soothe our senses. After the storms exhaust themselves, I stand in the yard and watch the spidery watermarks on Suriya’s concrete house get slowly erased by the sun. I didn’t really want to sit on a Miami beach with Suriya in a bikini. I just wanted to give her something.

“Are you lazy, El Akki?” Suriya asks me one afternoon. I’m resting my head on the chair back, my legs stretched in front of me. I sit upright. Ayya and Suriya stand in front of my chair, gazing at me expectantly. “Lazy?” I say. My head grows stuffy and hot. Ayya raises his arms as far as he can above his head, making a wide V, and then yawns dramatically. “You. Lazy. Here?”

“You mean bored?”

“Lazy?” Ayya says.

“Sitting. Eating. Talking. Gazing.” I pause after each word so Ayya can understand my meaning through cadence. “I love it here.” He smiles, reassured, and heads up the stairs. “But, Nangi, I do need to leave soon.”

“I know. You must go back to your country and make a family.” Suriya taps an imaginary watch on her wrist.

“No, no.” I shake my head vigorously.

“El. I am joking.”

I squeeze her hand. “You have to go back to Kandy soon, anyway, right? How long can you take off school?”

Suriya gives me the look of condescending surprise that means I have failed to grasp some obvious fact of her life. “I will not go back to school. I must stay here and care for my father.”

I drop her hand. “Suriya. Please. Your father is a grown man. You can’t give up your studies. You’ve worked so hard.”

“I do not give up my studies. My success with school gives me power and it makes me brave. Like the first time I spoke to you in Kandy.”

“That’s exactly why you have to finish school. Get a good job.”

“My boyfriend is here soon,” she says, as if I haven’t spoken at all.

“Will be here soon,” I say.

“Will be.” She walks toward the kitchen.

—

I email my father: I’ll be home in a week. I’m coming to stay with him for a little while, before I move back to California. Can he pick me up at the airport? He writes back within minutes. He can’t believe how perfectly I timed my email. He had just been sitting down to write me. He misses me so much, can’t wait to see me, how long will I stay? Just a warning: His accountant has told him that the inheritance money is getting low and the remainder needs to be invested, blah blah blah (my father’s words), he’s not going to worry about it, he’s never agonized over money in his life and he’s never gone hungry. He’s started working as an electrician again, like he used to when he was practically still a kid — I knew that, didn’t I? (I didn’t.) He likes it better than film work, really. No ego. And pretty fucking good pay, considering.

Suriya bikes us home from the house with a computer. Too fast, perfect fast.

—

Suriya insists we visit a highly revered cave temple, to make a fruit offering to the gods in exchange for protecting me on my trip home. We make the two-hour trek by bus on a Saturday. The temple gates are frenzied with pilgrims buying lotus flowers, candles, and fruit platters. Suriya requests the largest platter and asks the harried fruit seller to fill it with rose apples, mangoes, bananas, pineapples. As the young woman deftly slices a pineapple and fans the pieces into floral arrangements, I wish I were buying this food as an offering to Suriya. Her family needs a beautiful plate of fresh produce much more than this famous temple that enjoys the government’s showy patronage. And it seems highly unlikely that any god will concern himself with my personal safety in exchange for a banana in the shape of a tulip.