Hannah Tennant-Moore - Wreck and Order

At the top of the craggy pathway leading to the temple, Suriya and I join a long line of weary worshippers, also bearing elaborate fruit and flower offerings. At first, the people at the back of the line join their hands in prayer when the chanting from inside the cave drifts back to us. But after some time in this sticky mass of bodies shuffling toward the cave’s narrow passage, waiting becomes just something to get through. Two teenage girls lean against each other’s backs, making ineffectual fans out of their hands. A tiny elderly woman elbows past me, and I nearly elbow her back.

At last it is our turn to duck inside the mouth of the cave, which opens to a candlelit hotbox too small to stand up in. The altar is a mess of coins, flower petals, and melted wax. An infant wearing gold earrings and glass bangles shrieks against the dark and the heat. The shirtless, round-bellied priest makes a signal and we all kneel, our thighs pressed against one another’s and our knees mashing the toes of the person in front of us. The baby keeps wailing and the priest starts chanting in a monotone, wiping sweat from his forehead. Why the hell are we waiting to drop a coin or a pineapple or a wilted flower on this overfull altar so that the exhausted priest will tie a protection string on our wrists with limp fingers while intoning some words he has memorized? Suriya brings her hands together and bows her forehead to her fingertips. I imitate the gesture. Because we want to live well and we don’t know how. I peel my hands apart and let them fall open at my chest, two empty cups.

—

When I wake up the day before my flight, Suriya has already folded her mat and swept our room. I’m going to take an early bus to Colombo and stay in a hostel near the airport. I get dressed, shove my pajamas in the top of my backpack, snap it shut. Then I lie down on the bed like a starfish. An arm of light reaches for my throat and chin. I open my mouth to taste sun. I force myself to stand, carry my packed bag downstairs. A small gray cat sits on the foot of the stairs, a patch of fur missing on his back.

I walk into the kitchen and lean my bag against the doorway. “I make you small eats, for your trip,” Suriya says, aggressively stirring a pot of red rice.

“Oh, Nangi. You are so sweet. I can’t thank you enough for — there’s no way to explain — what you’ve given me — I don’t—”

“No, El.” She begins wrapping the meal in a torn plastic bag and newspaper. She turns her back to me. “Now you leave and I am a frog in a well.” The words tiptoe across a tightrope. She folds each side of the newspaper into a triangle.

I put my hand on her shoulder and try to turn her toward me. “You’ll be okay.” She folds the newspaper into a neat package. “I still think you should go back to school. You could just take some time off, help your—”

“I think my mother was sick because she works too much. So much worries and all the time fighting with my father. And she did it all because of me. She said, I cannot leave your father because you are little, and later, when she was sick the first time, she said, I cannot stop working because you must go to school. But she is always calm and happy. Everyone love her more.”

“Suriya, she would want you to keep studying, become a teacher.” My eyes reach for hers, but she turns her face away.

“No, El. I must not do everything. My mother does everything and she becomes sick.”

“What about money? Can you live off Ayya’s salary?”

“Until my boyfriend comes, I can do something — sell fruits at the bus stand or something. I don’t know. When I look the future, it is like a stone over my head.”

“Look at the future.” I speak to the table, where Suriya has piled up stones she’s sifted out of rice.

“Look at the future,” she repeats in a whisper. “So I must not look at it.”

I hand her an envelope I’ve filled with thousand-rupee notes. She shakes her head and shuts her eyes tight. “Thank you, Akki. Please go now.”

“You know I’m always here for you, right? If you need money or you decide you want to go back to school or you want to visit me, you write me, okay? I’ll help.”

She presses her lips together to steady them. “I know about you, El.”

I spin my ring in circles on my index finger, starting to panic. There must be something I can do. I pull the ring off my finger, lay it on my palm, hold it out to Suriya. “I want you to have this.” She is violently shaking her head, backing away from my outstretched hand.

“Please, it’s no big deal, just something to remember me by.”

But to me the offering is difficult, meaningful. I bought the ring for ten bucks at a flea market, but it’s the only piece of jewelry that I’ve had for years and wear every day. A selfish sacrifice that only emphasizes the distance between us. As if I believe Suriya will be thrilled to have this cheap jewelry that she has never commented on or expressed interest in, just because it’s from America. The Israeli boy on the beach was right to call the ring weird — golden sticks of various lengths piled up inside a ball of resin. Probably Suriya doesn’t even like it and now will have to wear it out of obligation. A selfish gift, not at all demanded of the situation. What is called for is a display of sorrow. But I cannot feel sad, not yet. I am still buoyed by the contentment that comes from easy love, hinging on nothing, expecting nothing. I leave the ring on the table next to the pot of rice and wrap my arms around Suriya. “Thank you,” she whispers. She hands me the package of food and tells me I must go, Colombo bus coming. “Yes, bus coming,” I say and heave my pack onto my shoulders.

NEGOMBO

The bus stop, about a mile from the airport entrance, is crowded with tuk-tuk drivers waiting for an easy fare. “Yes, madam, come, madam.” They nod and gesture to the backs of their rickshaws, which quickly fill up with luggage and tanned limbs. “I walk,” I say, pointing to the block of concrete in the distance. “It’s just right there.”

The street to the airport is a one-lane highway of speeding vans, tour buses, and rickshaws. There is no sidewalk. Barbed-wire fences rise on both sides of the road. The sun quickly turns my clothes heavy, as if I’m draped in blankets drenched in hot water. I slip my hands under the shoulders of my pack to relieve the pressure of the straps. I’m plodding along with my elbows jutting out from my sides like chicken wings and sweat dotting my forehead and upper lip when a soldier in a watchtower calls down to me, “Hello. What happened?”

I stop walking and squint up at him. His camouflaged suit billows around his thin arms. “I guess I’m walking to the airport,” I call up.

The teenage soldier in the watchtower on the other side of the road leans over his own guardrail. “Why you are walking, madam?” I hear the grin in his voice.

“Because I thought I should. Because I’m silly.”

“Walking madam,” the soldiers call after me as I continue toward the airport. “Silly madam.” Their laughter jostles the rifles on their shoulders. Easy camaraderie borne of intractable boundaries. That time I passed a temple with Suriya and the Hindu holy man came toward us, chanting and waving incense about our faces and then smearing red paint on our foreheads with his thumb. When we passed a monk later that day, he peered out at me from under his umbrella and laughed so hard he had to wipe tears from his eyes, pointing at me and tapping his forehead. “White girl with red dot,” Suriya said. “Is funny for monk.” I basked in his inscrutable laughter as Suriya took my wrist in her fingers and continued leading me down the street. My love for Suriya wants nothing more than her presence. But now here I am, walking — without — my God — my Goad, as Suriya says. Her smooth fingers, her huge laugh — stop. Already my memory is turning her into a trinket. Waking up to her tea every morning, falling asleep beside her every night. Oh yes: the problem of sleep. The first time I came back from Sri Lanka, I did not properly lose consciousness for weeks, spent all day in a waking sleep, could barely wait until dusk so that I could get in bed and pass out, which I did, and then woke up two hours later and lay awake until dawn, almost hearing the koel birds and the pirith, almost seeing the enormous, flat, still clouds — holes in the sky whose periphery a person with scissor-feet spent one good, long life walking — almost smelling the curry leaves and jasmine plants, almost feeling the bumpety-bump of the train seat against my back, almost hearing the wide, exuberant Sinhala vowels, almost hearing strangers ask me my country, madam, my name, madam, welcoming me, oppressing me, taking me away from the parts of myself that can’t seem to stop betraying the other parts. The sensual sterility of the U.S. — keep it quiet, don’t talk to strangers, don’t give money to beggars, don’t make eye contact, don’t invade personal space. How lonely. No wonder I need so much sex.