Janaki strolled into the kitchen, looking for her sister, whom she had left preparing the evening curry. The kitchen was empty, as was the dining room, the washroom, and the well area. Janaki put on her sandals and a newly ironed shirt and headed into town, forcing herself to take slow, deliberate breaths. From what she could determine, Lakshmi had followed the river’s bend out of the village. The indentation of her sister’s sharp heels was deeper on the right side, the side on which she must have carried her suitcase. Janaki followed Lakshmi’s trail to the pavement, where her heels must have started their loud clicking. She questioned the tea stall owner, the tobacco vendor, but they hadn’t seen her. The dairy merchant speculated that she might have taken the recent bus to Galle. The postman seemed disappointed that Lakshmi might have left town. Janaki asked the washerwomen and the bank clerk and the police officer spitting betel. She walked until she had left Baddegama and entered Poddala and then the bustle of Galle. She had walked the whole afternoon away, listening for Lakshmi’s clicks among the hurrying strangers. At one point she thought she saw her sister’s face in the window of a bus that passed, but this woman had her hair piled into a bun. She even chased down a glimmer of red that turned out to be a schoolgirl and placed her hand on the back of a woman with Lakshmi’s narrow shoulders.
When she reached Galle Road, the sun was low in the sky and the last buses for Colombo were leaving as the late buses into Galle were arriving. She saw businessmen returning, and young women with neatly tied parcels, and fishermen. In the swirl of the crowd, Janaki reached out for Lakshmi’s arm. Which way are you headed on Galle Road, Lakshmi? What stories will you tell me about the journeys you will take?
I LOVE YOU, COME HOME SOON
Two years ago, when Sam first arrived in Sri Lanka to start his work as an English teacher, the embassy doctor had given him a one-year supply of antimalarial medication. Two pills every Monday. Chalky and bitter. Whenever Sam took the medication, he would hallucinate. Dinner parties would come out of the jungle and over the river and filter into his humid bedroom. The sounds kept their distance, growing neither louder nor softer, neither more nor less distinct. Glassware clinked and corks popped and Sam listened to the muted whispers. Above the hiss of incoherent sound, Sam could hear his father’s voice murmuring advice or admonition. Put your shoes on, Sam. Go check on your mother. When are you coming home?
During his hallucinations, Sam sometimes wandered out of his room—a small space off the porch of his host family’s house—and would find himself standing alone on the dusty, darkened street, searching out the voices. The street paralleled the river that had once carried the dead until they were claimed by a family member. Sam had been assigned to this village in the south, now that the fighting had diminished, but there were occasional reminders of the unrest despite the cease-fire. And amid the rumors of deserters hidden in the jungle, Sam had often imagined them—the bloated and swollen bodies of the dead—facedown in the river with webs of tangled hair.
Several months ago, his host sister, Rohini, had grabbed his hand and pulled him with her eight-year-old weight. “Come and see, Brother. Come. Look.” She brought him to the river, where the other villagers stood, pointing. And then Sam had seen the body of a man drifting below them, the striped fabric of his sarong gathered around one of his legs. His skin was two shades lighter than it should have been. His back had been scratched by river debris. “A jungle man,” Rohini had said.
Sam knew about the civil war that had haunted Sri Lanka for the past thirteen years. He knew about it in a practical sort of way, having been instructed by his volunteer office to watch out for unattended bags at train stations, to have his passport always on hand in case the government soldiers emptied his bus during a routine search. But when his host family gathered around the radio during the nightly news update, Sam preferred to linger in his bedroom, catching up on lesson plans or rereading a novel his parents had sent in one of their monthly packages.
After he returned from the river, Sam thought about his mother, how much she would hate knowing that he had seen death so closely, or knowing how bitter his mouth had tasted, how his stomach had clenched, and how this floating body and the sourness rising in his mouth had somehow reminded him of her in the hospital those first months while she lay unconscious, the doctors struggling to name the cause of her seizures.
AND NOW HIS parents were coming to visit. When his mother had written, asking him when his summer school holiday was, he had answered without giving much thought: three weeks in August. But a month ago, his father’s postcard had arrived, his words in block letters: “Expect us on August 5. We’ll stay eighteen days. I imagine you can pick us up in Colombo. Love, Dad.” Sam sat at his desk, staring at the postcard—a muted cityscape of Quebec City—and wondered how he had let this happen. Had he even been asked?
He looked out the window over Janaki’s garden and thought how in Sri Lanka you can actually see the heat. Steam rises off the ground and off the leaves when it rains; the air is choked with humidity. Exhaust and diesel fumes hover, floating in your vision, trapped by the damp heat. They’ll never be able to stand it—the hundred-degree nights, the smells that rise out of the gutters, the Eastern toilets. And my father hates snakes, Sam thought, and I won’t be able to get them to see beyond the noise and the overcrowded roads. Sam also felt sure that he wouldn’t be able to get them to understand why he wanted to stay and extend his contract, why he wasn’t absolutely desperate to get home after more than two years in this sweltering heat, in this busy, tumultuous place.
He couldn’t help it; he thought about Nilanthi. He thought about what it would mean to introduce her to his parents.
TWO WEEKENDS A month, Sam taught at a teacher-training college in Colombo. He wasn’t supposed to do this—there were strict rules from the volunteer office about avoiding Colombo, and all of them were forbidden to accept payment for their work. But Sam had a hard time saying no, so when an English teacher in the village had asked Sam if he’d be willing to help out his cousin at the understaffed teachers college, Sam had agreed. He had insisted repeatedly that he couldn’t accept a paycheck, but 1,000 rupees arrived at the end of each month. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it was enough to get him kicked out of the country if anyone at the office ever found out.
During these weekends, he stayed with Melissa, a Scottish VSO volunteer who worked for the British Council. They had met at Unawatuna, a small beach near his village, on a full moon festival weekend. Melissa had red hair and pale skin that burned easily. Over that weekend, she spent a lot of time rubbing lotion onto her skin and would stay in the water for only fifteen minutes at a time. Her laugh was loud and contagious, and when she wore blue, her eyes were enormous.
Melissa had thin, dry lips that tasted like the sea. Sam had kissed her for the first time after they finished off a bottle of arrack together. Melissa had gotten sleepy after they tossed the bottle into the sea, but the drinking had made Sam sad and pensive. “What are you looking so guilty for?” she had asked. “You thinking about kissing me?”
No, Sam had thought. But Melissa leaned in, her lips surprising him. And now they were some sort of couple. He had no intention of telling her that his parents would be arriving in a few days.
During the weeks they were apart, they wrote letters to one another. The notes were playful and sweet and filled with “missing you” and “the next time we meet” and words that sounded nothing like the words they used when they were actually talking to one another. When they met up in larger groups at the beach, they kept their distance. Sam would shuffle a deck of cards, play euchre or chess with some other volunteers. During these games, he watched Melissa across the guesthouse deck. She read in the shade, her thumb and index finger pinching the corner of the page long before she had to turn it. In these moments, Sam wondered how they could still be such strangers to each other. He hadn’t told her much about his life, either here or back at home. She knew nothing about his family or the guilt that t
ied itself in knots in his stomach.
Melissa also didn’t know that Sam had accidentally fallen in love with one of his students at the teachers college. Her name was Nilanthi and she was a little clumsy, with a pleasantly round face, and unlike the other girls at the school, she had her hair cut close to her head. Her eyes were large and watery and he had seen her crying outside the library from time to time. One afternoon he had offered her a handkerchief, which she had quickly refused. She had seemed offended by his attention, walking away from him in a hurry. Sam had spent several days worrying that he had embarrassed or insulted her, but when he found himself offering the same handkerchief to her again a week later, she accepted it. After several moments of awkward silence, he finally got up the nerve to ask her why she was crying. She told him that a friend had been killed in the east, and she was worried for her family. She feared she’d have to return soon. “Where does your family live?” Sam asked.
“In the northeast, a village called Batticaloa.” Nilanthi avoided his eyes as she spoke to him.
Until that moment, he had assumed she was a Sinhalese girl like most of his students. He recalled reading something about refugee camps that had been set up in the north for displaced Tamils and wondered if Batticaloa was anywhere near these places. Sam put his hand on her shoulder, and this had made her run away again. But after a few days, she had started smiling at him, and then she began to stay after school for English Club. He made excuses to linger at her table as she worked. He helped her navigate the cluttered library. The other faculty members teased him remorselessly about his sudden interest in the chubby Tamil girl. Sam knew he was making a fool of himself, but he felt calm around Nilanthi and he continued to seek her out.
In the weeks that followed, Nilanthi would confess to Sam her guilt at being far from home. She should be helping her mother. She worried about her oldest brother, Manju, who had returned from university against his parents’ wishes. “And here I stay,” she sniffed. “I’m a selfish girl. I’ve abandoned them.”
“You have your own life to consider,” Sam offered. His words sounded useless, even to his own ears.
“You don’t understand.” Nilanthi smiled, but her expression had grown distant.
Sam very much wanted to explain that he did understand, but Nilanthi had a habit of walking away before he found exactly what it was he wanted to say.
SAM COULDN’T STOP thinking about Nilanthi, and before he knew what he was doing, he had asked his supervisor if they could arrange a school observation visit to Baddegama. Sam proposed that he could take four students to the boys’ school where he worked so they could get experience teaching at a rural school with fewer resources than their practicums in Colombo provided. “It would be a real wake-up call for some of them,” Sam explained. “I think it would do them good, since many of them may get rural placements after their exams.”
The supervisor had quickly agreed, and Sam had suddenly found himself helping Janaki prepare the house for the students’ arrival. Sam had purchased new mats in Galle—the students would have to sleep on the floor, the men in Sam’s room, the women in Janaki’s sewing room. Sam had persuaded his principal to allow two students to shadow his classes and two students to observe Mr. Jaya’s classes during a week-long observation. And then Sam had waited, anxiously during the remaining week, for the arrival of the bus that would bring Nilanthi and three of her classmates to his home.
Sam met his students at the bus stall, helped Nilanthi and her classmate Padmini with their bags, and guided them to Janaki and Mohan’s house. Sam hoped Nilanthi would walk alongside him so he could point out the tea estate where Mohan used to work or the market where he thought the best curd and treacle could be purchased, but the women had fallen behind him, and Sam found himself having to listen to the men’s arguments about the national cricket team and how they hoped they would get placements in Kandy or Colombo because their fiancées would never put up with village life.
When they arrived at the house, Rohini greeted them at the door, her small arms holding out a platter with steaming tea, urging them to take a seat on the porch as if she were the lady of the house. Sam took the students’ bags into the appropriate rooms, and when he returned, Rohini and Achala were grilling them about their lives in Colombo, how they liked their school, whether Sam was a good teacher, and what they thought of Baddegama.
“I help Sam with his lesson plans, you know,” Rohini said to Nilanthi and Padmini.
“Is that so?” Nilanthi asked while Padmini sipped her tea and scratched at a mosquito bite on her ankle. “How do you help him?”
Sam had never heard Nilanthi speak Sinhala before, and for a moment he was struck by the hesitation in her voice, but Rohini didn’t seem to notice.
“Why don’t you practice your English with my students, Rohini?” Sam interrupted. “They are all training to teach English, so it will be good practice for all of you.”
By now, Janaki had come out onto the porch and offered her guests some biscuits and mango slices. “Welcome, everyone,” she said. “Is there anything you need after your long journey?”
“Thank you for letting us stay,” Nilanthi answered as she took a biscuit. She was still speaking in Sinhala.
“Might you have some mosquito coils?” Padmini asked in her exaggeratedly formal English, smiling at Sam.
“The mosquitoes are terrible, aren’t they? After the monsoon, they seem to multiply by the day,” Janaki said. “Achala—take Rohini with you to Mr. Pereira’s stand and get us some coils.”
Janaki handed the girls a few rupees and off they flew down the porch. Janaki sat down with Sam and his students as the group looked out over the river in front of them. The students were all very quiet and Sam wondered whether they were all tired from the journey or whether, perhaps, they resented being here. The house suddenly looked shabby to him, the wicker chairs saggy and the plaster peeling from the walls. The students’ neat shoes were lined up in the entranceway, their leather coated with dust, and Sam worried that he had made a terrible mistake. He was embarrassed for Janaki, whom everyone seemed to be ignoring until Nilanthi turned to her and asked her about her garden.
“Are those orchids you are growing under the nets, Miss Janaki?”
Janaki studied Nilanthi with a questioning glance. To Sam, her expression looked severe for a moment, but then it softened into a smile. “Yes, they are. Would you like to see them?”
Nilanthi nodded and Janaki guided her out to the garden. Both women had left their shoes behind and Sam felt relieved by their mutual kindness. He followed them toward the orchids.
“These are spider orchids.” Janaki pointed to the coiling stems of her most prized flowers. “They take more than five years to grow to this stage with just the right mix of sunlight and water. They are my trickiest pets.”
Nilanthi smiled. “They are so beautiful.”
“Does your mother grow flowers?” Janaki asked.
“It is very dry in our village, so we can’t grow many things in our garden. My mother has tried growing araliya flowers, but they are nothing like this.” Nilanthi bent down to get a closer look at the orchids.
Sam squatted down next to Nilanthi. “Janaki is a magician in her garden. She is famous in Baddegama for her wedding flowers.”
“I believe this.” Nilanthi smiled at Sam and then straightened herself up.
Sam was beginning to relax. It was wonderful having Nilanthi here in the garden with Janaki. He let his mind drift to future visits. Nilanthi looked so comfortable here in the garden, in her bare feet, with just a bit of sweat gathering at her temples. She hadn’t swatted at a mosquito once.
Janaki’s voice interrupted his thoughts. “Where is your village, then? Sam had told me you are all coming from Colombo.”
“I am from Batticaloa,” Nilanthi answered. Sam noticed that she had crossed her arms over her chest. “I left my home in order to go to school in the capital, but my family is still in the east.”
“I see,” Janaki said. “You must miss your family very much. It must be hard to be so far away from them.” Her words were kind, but Sam detected a growing coldness in Janaki’s voice. She turned to Sam. “I’m going back inside to get dinner started. When the girls come back, please help them set up the coils so your guests will be more comfortable.” And with that, she left Sam and Nilanthi in the garden, neither of them wishing to speak.
LATER IN THE afternoon, Achala and Rohini offered to take the students on a walk to the nearby tea estate. While they were out, Sam entered the kitchen to see if Janaki needed any help with dinner. He took his seat at the coconut shaver and began grinding.
“So you will take your students to school with you tomorrow?” Janaki asked Sam with her back facing him.
“Yes. The plan is for Nilanthi and Arjuna to work with my classes and Padmini and Banduka will work with Mr. Jaya.”
Janaki turned to face Sam. “You like Nilanthi, don’t you?”
Sam’s face grew hot. He couldn’t tell if Janaki was teasing him. There was something not altogether playful in her voice.
“I do. I like all my students.” Sam turned back to the coconut in his hand.
“She is Tamil, isn’t she?”
Sam nodded. He had never known Janaki or Mohan to speak badly of anyone, and they had always kept their opinions about the Tamil Tigers to themselves.
“Be careful, Samma,” Janaki said. “She seems like a nice girl, but Tamils are tricky ones. You shouldn’t trust them.”
“I don’t think that is a fair thing to say,” Sam answered. He couldn’t believe Janaki was saying this to him—the same Janaki who had welcomed him into her home with warmth and trust when everyone else in the village seemed suspicious of him. He had only known her to be kind and patient.
The Beach at Galle Road Page 4
