Island of a Thousand Mirrors (18 page)

At breakfast, heart in my throat, I tell Amma and Thatha that I am ready for them
to start looking. Suddenly all is parental bliss. Amma and Thatha in ecstasy embark
on what La will call The Great Husband Hunt. Whereas before there had not been an
e-mail account between them, now there are multiple accounts, Internet advertisements,
online horoscopes. A digital camera is purchased. I am outfitted in various clothes,
a pink sari, a black suit and heels, a white “party dress.” In these various personas,
I am posed on the front lawn. Thatha takes photos while Amma calls out directions,
fixes the pleats of my sari, the fall of my neckline. “Just a little lower,” she says,
giggling. “Not a bad idea to show a tiny bit of skin for a husband—no?” They are giddy
with anticipation, imagining wedding cake, grandchildren, real estate to be purchased.
Only the face beside mine in the framed wedding photograph remains blurry, a space
to be filled.

They write advertisements using words such as “pretty,” “fair,” and “educated” to
describe me and post these in newspapers in cities around the world where Sri Lankans
congregate. A few weeks of silence, and then envelopes bearing exotic stamps start
arriving. They are thick, thin, and everything in between. Out of them spill horoscopes,
land deeds, resumes, pictures, bank statements, letters from parents, sisters, cousins
looking for “good girls” for their various menfolk. Sometimes there are letters from
young men with no intermediaries to conduct their romances for them. It is daunting,
that capsizing pile of letters. So many lonely men dreaming in Sinhala, moaning in
their chilly beds, wanting American green cards and perfectly cooked eggplant curry.
So much palpable need, such archaeologies of desire, that I am suddenly afraid. I
had started this venture in defiance at my lost lover, but now there is such hope
shining in Amma and Thatha’s eyes that I cannot walk away and let them drown under
the weight of the still arriving letters.

At this time, La is at university, enrolled up north in Berkeley as a business major,
she says, but learning instead the secret language of color, how to wield her brushes
with steady and precise hands, how to mix shades most effectively. She is lost so
deep in these studies that we don’t hear from her for weeks. When she does call, she
cuts off my arranged marriage narratives to tell me about the long, languorous origins
of pigments, duplicitous ochers, poisonous cadmium, murderous scarlet.

She comes home for Christmas and picks up letter after letter saying, “Better than
TV! Look at this one, he wants a ‘homely’ wife.” Her brow furrows, “Why is he calling
Akka ugly?”

Amma shouts, “No, you silly girl, ‘homely.’ He means a good homemaker. Not ‘homely’
like you say here for ‘ugly girl.’ These Americans. They don’t know how to speak English.”
She holds up a picture. “What about this boy?”

“Well … he’s not really a ‘boy,’ is he? Considering the hair loss and paunch the size
of Texas?”

“You girls want everything! He has an engineering degree, a house in San Jose, a good
family. He has to also look like Tom Cruise?”

“Okay, Amma, with that one she can rub his tummy and it will grant her wishes.” They
cackle like witches. The sound of it makes the tight fist of my heart unclench.

Later La comes to my room. She lies on my bed next to me, both of us staring up at
the ceiling, and says, “Why are you doing this?” There is a catch in her voice. I
decide to tell her the truth. “Because it’s safe and now more than anything I want
safety. I can’t go through another heartbreak. I just want to be with somebody safe.
Somebody who won’t leave.” She nods slowly, as if the movement causes her pain. We
fall asleep together, her hair swirling around us like when we were children, her
fingers clasped in mine.

*   *   *

A month later they have found him. A doctor, of course, handsome in his photograph,
something earnest in the eyes. His name is Siddharth. He is named for the Buddha and
I for the Buddha’s wife. The ancient intimacy of our names is impossible to ignore.
Inquiries are made, horoscopes compared, long-distance phone calls placed to his parents
in Sri Lanka.

When we meet, it is disarmingly easy. We go to an Indian restaurant and he breaks
the naan, uses his fingers in the island way, mixing to the second knuckle and no
higher. He talks of Galle Face Green when it was still green, the kite sellers and
peanut men, the spray dashing against slick, mirrored, black rocks, the daredevil
drive up to Kandy through mountain passes in a minuscule bus clinging to the silver-ribboned
road, the granite cliff face rising on one side, falling into clouds on the other,
the sudden startling darkness of tunnels. On the way down, flower boys racing barefoot,
their arms full of upcountry blossoms, scarlet and crimson clutched against their
own flushed and panting faces. A waterfall of words. Forgotten images flaring up like
lit matches in the huge dark space of America. I see that falling into this man could
be as easy as regaining a childhood. How could I not be seduced by my own lost memories?

*   *   *

We are married in a hotel in Los Angeles under a
poruwa
of plastic instead of palm leaf. I wear a white sari with a gold border and hold
a bouquet of white roses trimmed to look like lotus buds. Girls with American accents
attempt to sing the Jaya Mangala Gatha accompanied by a scratchy, much-used tape.
The
kapuwa
hacks a coconut and lets it fall. When the two halves stop spinning and come to rest
right side up, the whole hall breathes a sigh of relief.

*   *   *

I had not expected marriage to be such a homecoming. I am in graduate school now,
slowly working my way up the tortured mountain that will afford me those three treasured
letters at the end of my name. I am going to teach university English, this is the
goal, but I had not expected marriage to be such a boon on this journey, had not expected
to know his scent as well as my own so quickly, to feel such pleasure when he hands
me a cup of tea with the precise measure of milk and sugar that I desire. In the solitary
seclusion of sleep our bodies are in the most perfect unison, turning at the same
moment, his head resting on my shoulder, the tender smoothness of his sole against
the top of my foot. Talking often into the night, I realize that we are unconsciously
tapping our feet against each other, some tender staccato language of the body.

In darkness we learn each other’s contours and textures. The velvet expanse of his
belly, cream to my roving tongue. The shape of him in my mouth luscious and rounded
as fruit. I move above him and he slits his eyes to watch me with the most rapt of
concentrations. I know he is listening for the slightest gasp in my breathing, the
quiver of my wetness holding him. I see the shine in his eyes about to spill, an admission
of the enormity of this thing that is between us, the whisper of his ragged breathing.

Sometimes waking earlier than him, I am startled by this stranger sharing my pillow.
I must look and look into this face and come away with no greater understanding or
knowledge of love. When he goes on his first conference trip, I realize I cannot sleep
without the weight of his thick thigh thrown across my hip, the very thing I had complained
about, and pushed away so many times. It is only in absence that the true weight of
love is felt.

But I also know that this marriage is an intimacy forged in a scarred place. It rests
at least partly on my ability to recognize a certain sort of despair in his eyes.
A despair that I know is caused by reports of bombs, bodies, spilled blood, the only
type of news from that other place that reaches us here on the far edge of the world.
On those nights we make love as if dying, our two bodies rafts in a tumbling, turbulent
midnight sea. The succor of mouths and skin sliding on skin driving away the images.
Each of us climbing a mountain to that single shining moment when the images are shut
out.

*   *   *

While I am falling in love with my husband, La is falling in love with her dreadlocked
art history professor. During the day, she sits in his seminars, arguing her point,
presenting papers and being lectured like any other student. At night she waits for
him outside the dorms, watching for his stealthy black Audi, hoping that friends or
roommates will not happen upon her getting into his car. In his wood-paneled bedroom
in the hills, far above the dorms, they tumble and toss in his large white bed. She
calls me in rapture. “He’s so beautiful. I am in love, love, love.”

Newly legitimized by matrimony, I am scandalized. “What will Amma and Thatha say?”
I ask.

“Nothing if you don’t tell them.” The note of irritation at the edge of her voice
razing my skin.

Six months later she says, “How will I tell Amma and Thatha? He’s African-American.
He’s so much older than me.…”

“But is it permanent? Why tell them at all?”

“Yes, of course it’s permanent. We are in love.” She stresses the word as if speaking
to a child.

She calls me from his house. “We’re going to the wine country. We are going to drink
wine until we fall into a haystack somewhere and make love all afternoon.”

She sends me a photograph. She has taken it in bed, her arm outstretched with the
camera, the sheets pulled up to her chin, her smile open and teasing as if she is
cajoling her partner in crime to pose. The man next to her, heavy limbed, throws an
arm across his eyes, as if he wishes not to have his image captured, but his lips
twist into an exasperated smile. He is annoyed, but he also wants to please my beautiful
sister.

I know it is my duty to warn her, to tell her that such happiness calls forth the
demons, that the very sound of her laughter will draw forth pain. But I cannot find
the words.

Then there are long days on which he does not call. She says, “He must have gotten
mad busy. It’s the end of the quarter, there are papers to grade.” And then, “Maybe
he’s lost my number?” Finally, fury when she sees him flirting with another student,
a nubile Thai girl who gazes at him with devotion and licks her cherry-red lip gloss
with a pink-tipped tongue.

I pick her up at the airport. Her eyes are swollen, red veined but dry. In the arrivals
lounge, she buries her head in my neck and stays there, trembling. I take her bag
and walk her to the car; she is heavy against me, moving slowly and silently. In the
car, the words break free, a torrent. “He doesn’t want me anymore.” There is a note
of incredulity in her voice. “He’s with her now.” She turns to me. “What’s wrong with
me? Why doesn’t he want me?” I feel my heart tumble, I had not wanted her to learn
of the pain that shifts between men and women like a tossed ball in this way. I had
hoped it would be gentle and come in time, but now she is broken, split wide by it.

She lives on our couch. She wears large shapeless clothes and cries so that her long
eyes are constantly swollen, her hair limp as if it, too, were deprived of energy.
I make her help me in the kitchen, put her to work chopping the onions as I prepare
curries and sambals, the foods of our childhood. She cuts slowly, asking unanswerable
questions. She doubts herself now. Sees herself as discarded, unwanted, unlovable,
easily replaced. The fierce strength that I have admired since childhood is gone,
like an animal suddenly spooked into forest darkness. She cuts herself easily, not
noticing the blood that trickles from the side of her thumb onto the eggplant and
onion slices. She keeps talking while I run her fingers under the tap, the water swirling
away, ruby and then pink tinged. “It hurts,” she says, laying her uncut hand on her
chest. “It hurts, here. All the way from my throat to my groin, a constriction. It’s
hard to breathe. I didn’t think that lovesickness would actually hurt. I feel ill.
Literally.” In her voice a tone of discovery.

I come home heavy with grocery bags, she says from the couch, “Should I call him?
Maybe it was just a misunderstanding? Maybe he lost my number here and has been trying
to call. Maybe he misses me. Maybe it was just a whim with her, something forgettable
and he’s sorry.” She looks at me with pleading eyes, willing me to say, “Yes, maybe
that’s it. Why don’t you call him and see?” I can see it in her eyes, the need to
hear his voice on the phone, laughing, talking to her in the low throaty voice he
had two months ago. I feel like the executioner standing by the block. The heavy ax
handle in my gloved hand, waiting for the delicate neck to be lowered onto the slight
sway in the wood.

I shake my head. “No. No calling. It’s over. You have to let him go. He’s with her
now and even if he’s not, he would have called you if he wanted you.” Her face crumbles
like a sand castle kicked by a vindictive child. She cries in gasps as if the wind
has been knocked out of her, as if she is choking.

We give her Siddharth’s office to colonize. She haunts art stores buying up whatever
bargain paint, canvas, crayons, turpentine she can on the remains of her student money.
Back at home she paints copiously, her brushes moving over the canvas in a fury, as
if her life depended on it, as if her pain were dripping away with the flow of scarlet
and turquoise. I don’t understand it, but it must be some way in which she speaks
to herself, battles the love demons that have moved in so swiftly, taken residence
in her skull, taken over her voice. In the evenings she invites me in to look at her
efforts. I am blown away, slowly realizing the extent of her talent, the skill in
those long-digited hands. When I try to tell her she brushes away the compliments,
says, “It’s nothing. I could do so much more. I will do so much more. In time.” There
is a certain new ferocity in her eyes now. A certain new thing that was not there
before. I recognize it as scar tissue. When a bone breaks, it heals stronger in the
cracks. I realize this is what is happening to her heart.

*   *   *