What Lies Between Us (10 page)

Next to me Dharshi grins, whispers, “See, I told you we've come to take you away.” As if they were rescuing us. Airlifting us from our devastated lives into some new and exhilarating reality.

*   *   *

Amma comes into my room as I'm falling asleep. She sits on the bed and talks about things that don't matter for a while. I wait and then she says, “Darling, listen. Aunty Mallini and Uncle Sarath, they think we should move to America. Live there for some time. Stay with them. What do you think? Shall we do this?”

In the last few hours I've thought about what to tell her when she asks me. I've thought about my father falling through air, about him getting off the train while we travel onward into the unknown future. I've thought about the small urn that held his ashes before Amma took me by the hand and we went down to the riverbank and let the water claim again what it had already taken. I can barely look at the river without imagining the waters closing over my father's head, without reeling with guilt. Everything that has happened is
my fault
. Everything in this place
knows it
. The monsoon, the river, the trees—all the nonspeaking witnesses, they know who my father's true murderer is.

And beyond all this, Samson. He may be anywhere, hiding, waiting. When I let my guard down, he will come, and then I know his punishment will be cruel.

I say, “Yes, Amma, I think we should go.”

“Really?” She has not expected this.

“Yes. Otherwise if we stay, people will keep saying things. If we go, at least we'll be with family.” It's the right thing to say. Her sister is the only family my mother has known. I saw it in the way they embraced.

She hugs me close, kisses me on the forehead. For a moment we clutch each other, panicked. Then she lets me go. I listen to her footsteps through the quiet house.

By the end of that week, it is decided. We will go to them as soon as we can get the proper papers. A new life. It's what we have to carve out now.

*   *   *

Months later, the house is returned to my father's people and our bags are packed. Puime and her mother come, both of them with worried eyes. I haven't seen them in a long time. I've stayed out of school, hidden in the house. Puime's mother sits awkwardly at the edge of the couch while Amma pours tea and tries to make small talk. When my mother releases us to my room, Puime says, “Really? You're going to go to America?”

I nod.

She comes close, tears suddenly welling in her eyes, “I'll miss you … a lot.”

I feel a squeezing in my throat and say, “I'll miss you too. So much. I don't know anyone there. I don't know how they do things. Must be very different, I think…”

My voice trails off and suddenly I am shaking. How can I do this? How can I leave everything known? How can I leave language and belonging and familiar faces, faces that look like mine? How can I leave this patch of earth that has been mine? Samson taught me once that the hydrangea blooms in a range of shades depending on the soil it sinks its roots into. From faintest pink to darkest night blue, the flower reflects the acidity of its patch of earth. How am I different? This person I am, will I be killed in the transition across the planet? What new person will emerge in that other soil?

Puime wipes her face, takes a deep breath, and says, “At least you'll have the right clothes. Not like these old things.” She gestures to the school uniform she's wearing and then her eyes get big, “Maybe you'll see Duran Duran! My god. That could happen there.”

I nod. I hadn't thought of that. They are in America. I'm going there. I could actually see a concert. The thought makes my heart race. The idea of being somewhere new and bright and shiny. A place I have seen in my magazines for so long about to become real. Under the sadness, I feel a razor's edge of excitement. I say, “Anyway, here, these are for you.” I point to a stack of books, folded clothes. Her eyes sparkle. “My god. All this for me?”

“Yes. The jeans that you like, the strawberry-pink blouse. Lots of other things. I don't think I'll need them there.

“I'll keep them for you. For when you come back.” Her fervent words: “You will come back. I know you will. I'll keep everything for you until then.” She hugs me tightly and fiercely and then bends to examine her new cache.

*   *   *

The night before we leave, Punch raises his snout to the sickle moon and howls for hours exactly as Judy had before. The sound of it rocks the house, echoes through the garden. He has never done this before; he had not joined Judy in her funeral lament. Now it is as if he knows exactly what the suitcases in the living room mean. He cannot be stopped; he is determined to give voice to what we cannot.

I shut my door against him. I try to sleep one last night in my own known bed, but I toss and turn until dawn. At some point in that long night I dream that Sita comes into my room, sits on the edge of my bed, smooths my hair, and murmurs words of love and sadness. She will hand the house keys over to my father's relations in a few days, and then she will make her final journey back to the village of her birth. She had expected to die in this house. I had expected to live here all my life. But none of our expectations are to be fulfilled. We have all been tossed up in the air like pieces of confetti.

*   *   *

In the morning the driver comes. I say goodbye to the river and the garden, the house and the dog. I hug and kiss Sita one last time, hold on to her and feel like I will choke until finally she pushes me away, wiping her face with her sari pallu. We get into the car and behind us she waves goodbye, Punch at her side. I watch until they are tiny and then we drive away from Kandy and down into the hot, crowded press of Colombo. A week later we leave the island. Framed in an airplane window, it lies below us, its palm trees waving goodbye, its long white beaches like lit crystal, its bustle and boom forgotten. It turns smaller and smaller until from this distance it is a garden blooming in the sea. I put my forehead on the cold window to say goodbye to both my father's ghost and the threat of Samson. On a fulcrum in my chest, grief and relief are balanced in equal measure. Then we trace a path between the tempest-tossed ocean and the canopy of stars and are carried into a new world.

 

Part Two

 

Eight

We land in Fremont, a suburb in Northern California full of wide-open freeways, a sky that turns plum at dusk. This is a place where life is lived inside houses on silent streets and in strip malls. There are some sari shops, a few “ethnic” restaurants, but the predominance of brown skin, of Afghanis and Pakistanis and Indians that will come to mark this place, is far off in the future. We are few and far between. These are lonely days full of misunderstandings.

In those first few weeks I saw unbelievable sights. A woman walking down the road with a small black dog on a leash, a plastic bag in her hand. At home a dog like this, a mutt, would be left to wander by itself. It might be beloved, but no one would leash it and walk it. It might perhaps follow at its owner's heels, but only a dog of some preciousness, a discernible breed, would be put on a leash and led. But much more than the dog, what catches my attention is that mysterious bag in her hand. Full of what? I watch astounded as she stoops down behind the dog's lowered flanks, the plastic bag spread wide in her hand, and scoops up shit, ties the bag, and walks away. As if the bag is precious, as if the dog has bestowed upon her a treasure that must be carried home and savored. How impossible to imagine, in this richest country of all, that people are saving dog turds?
For what possible purpose?
My imagination boggles at the question until Dharshi, my guide to everything in this new place, explains.

There are other, more serious differences. On the island we were fixed in place from birth. We knew where we fit. You were this person's older sister, that person's second cousin on the father's side, that one's oldest cousin. Names would tell you everything about a person's placement in the complex familial and community matrix. The naming described your destiny from birth to burning.

In Sri Lanka, when two strangers met, they asked a series of questions that revealed family, ancestral village, and blood ties until they arrived at a common friend or relative. Then they said, “Those are our people, so you are also our people.” It's a small place. Everyone knew everyone.

But in America, there are no such namings; it is possible to slip and slide here. It is possible to get lost in the nameless multitudes. There are no ropes binding one, holding one to the earth. Unbound by place or name, one is aware that it is possible to drift out into the atmosphere, and beyond that, into the solitary darkness where there is no oxygen.

*   *   *

But before all this, we stumble off the plane, jet-lagged and dazed, into America. In the arrival lounge are Aunty Mallini, Uncle Sarath, and Dharshi. And my story of America always starts with Dharshi.

We drive a maze of freeways through an alien world, and at the house she says, “You'll share with me,” and leads me to her room. It is a cave, one wall covered floor to ceiling with posters of singers and bands in random jumbled order so that they overlap like a thick, scabbed skin. There are more huge posters on her closet door. It's amazing. None of my friends back home have anything like this. I go close to look, hear her say, “You like music?”

Nodding. Oh yes, I do. I like anything she likes.

She says, “Okay, this is Paula Abdul. This is George Michael. This is—”

“Duran Duran.” There they are, hanging right over my new bed, in their huge-hair and eyelined glory. It feels like a prophecy. I hear Puime's words in my head. Maybe magic things are possible here.

Sweeping her hair from her eyes, she says, “Well, good. I didn't know if you'd know anything.”

We have twin beds next to each other, mine bought when it was clear we were coming. I fall into it and sleep until the next evening, my dreams a tumble of time zones and clouds, and when my eyes open, she's sitting on her bed reading, like a tiny pixie. When she sees I am awake, she says, “Let me see your clothes.” So I stumble out of bed, pull open my suitcase, and take out various things bought at the Colombo shops, some sewn especially for me.

At each piece she wrinkles her nose and grimaces and finally says, “My god, are you really going to wear that stuff?”

I shrug. “I don't have anything else. I can't have new ones. Amma spent so much for these. What's wrong with them?”

She frowns and says, “They're not from here. No one wears things like that here.”

My face falls.

She says, “Okay. Look, why don't you take some of mine. Let me see…” She bounces off her bed and pulls open the door to her closet. It is stuffed full, clothes jumbled in piles on the floor and askew on hangers, hung double and triple. She starts pulling out clothes, throwing them at my feet, a white minidress, a pair of denim overalls, a gray sweatshirt with the neck cut dangerously aslant. I look at the mess falling at my feet. It is the first act of generosity in this new and generous place, but I say, “Amma will never let me wear any of this!”

She turns to look at me and screws up her eyes. “You think
my
parents let me dress like this? Are you crazy? They have no idea. You just wear it under your clothes, then you take the top stuff off just before you get to school.”

I stare at her. “What? You mean, at school? What about uniforms?”

She sits down hard on her bed, a pair of emerald-and-yellow-striped leggings in her hands, and says, “What uniforms? We don't have uniforms here!”

*   *   *

The first day of school. A blur of faces and places. English spoken in an unfamiliar disjointed way. Only weeks later do the syllables come into focus and lock into their proper place.

The English teacher pauses to take me in. The skirt that hangs in folds to my midcalf, the shirt buttoned to my wrists, a pair of white tennis shoes and socks on my feet. I hadn't taken Dharshi's advice on a covert outfit; instead I had let Amma choose my first day's outfit. It has not been a success; no one has talked to me all day. They have looked at me as if I am not just from a different country but from a different planet. He says, “Let's see. So you just arrived?”

“Yes, sir, we came two weeks ago.”

“You don't have to call me sir, you know. And your English is very good.”

“Yes, sir. We speak English in Sri Lanka. The British came and taught us.” It is a cheeky thing to say, but I can't help it.

My mother and I have come armed with English; we have at least that much, unlike so many who have come without it. I can't imagine what it would be to come stripped of the carapace of language. In this one way, history has rendered us lucky.

*   *   *

I am fascinated by the girls. Girls with hair teased into stiff spiders crawling high off their foreheads, girls with eyes magnificently mascaraed and deeply shadowed. Walking into any girls' bathroom is to enter a hissing, stinging cloud of Aqua Net. There are girls standing with their heads between their legs shaking out their layered manes into a storm of spray. There are girls leaning into the mirror to paint their eyes, their lips. Their clothes, their hair—it is all dazzling. How do they go through this ritual of choice every single morning? If I had more than a few clothes, choice would paralyze me.

But I am learning that the rules are different here. These girls don't put their arms around each other as we did at home. Boys do not hold hands. Friendship is prescribed by the rules of separation and space between people's bodies. Instead, it is girls and boys who do these things together, who walk around in couples, their arms linked, or even kiss against the wall of lockers. The first time I see a kissing couple, I look away, sure that a teacher will burst out and slap the two, haul them by their napes to the principal's office, where their parents will be called, thereby bringing shame upon their families. When none of this happens, when nobody around me even notices, I see that I have indeed come into a brand-new place. Then I stare, mesmerized by the ease of it, the way bodies fit together so fluidly. I can't imagine that ease. It is hard enough to get used to the presence of boys. I have never before been around them in this casual, easy way. In class, it is hard to concentrate. There are so many of them everywhere. I sit lower in my seat, hoping no one will notice my accent, my clothes, my overwhelming difference.