The Beach at Galle Road

by Joanna Luloff

  SUNITHA DRANK THE lye after the government soldiers came into their village the third time, a year after Nilanthi carried her mother’s body home. These men were not part of the government troops, but members of the nationalist youth. With the government’s silent approval, they searched for rebel supporters in the northern villages. If they suspected a family of Tiger loyalty, they would burn down their home, shoot the suspects in the village center while the rest of the family watched, and then move on to the next village. Boys began disappearing. By then, Nilanthi’s brothers had left home, each without saying good-bye.

  Nilanthi watched as Sunitha grew more and more anxious. There were no boys her age left in the village, no prospective husbands, no one to come visiting, offering flowers or perfume or nail polish from town. Sunitha had begun chewing her fingers, leaving them red and streaked with infections. She stayed at Nilanthi’s house a few nights a week; the other nights, Nilanthi wasn’t sure where she went. Sunitha’s grandmother no longer allowed her granddaughter in her home. There were rumors that Sunitha gave herself to the soldiers, that she had become a cadju girl, selling cashews along the field roads and then disappearing with men into the fishing shacks or abandoned schoolhouses. Sunitha never mentioned these rumors, and Nilanthi kept up her end of the silence, leaving out extra portions of rice every night in case Sunitha turned up after Nilanthi had gone to bed.

  Nilanthi lived in an empty house. After her mother’s death, her father seemed to shrink, and he rubbed and rubbed at his eyes until they were permanently red. One month after her mother’s body had floated into her arms, Nilanthi’s father organized a mourning parade through the village in honor of the river dead. He was fired from the bank after the parade. His boss told him that he was drawing too much attention to himself, that he was a walking corpse and death surrounded him. The night before he disappeared, Nilanthi’s father told her that the smell of dying had replaced the smell of the sea in Batticaloa. “I used to think our land smelled of fish and how unlucky that was. Rotten and sharp. The air full of flies and scavengers picking at the fishermen’s rejects. That smell isn’t unlucky, not compared to this.” As her father slept, Nilanthi wandered through their house, smelling the kitchen, the laundry hanging on the outside line, her own skin. She agreed with her father. She and the entire house had taken on the smell of loss—stale, musty, and sour.

  THERE WAS NO money; Nilanthi had spent almost the last rupee in her father’s account. She had tried working at the tea estates, but she wasn’t a fast enough picker. She did laundry instead—for the soldiers, mostly, and the estate owner. She kept all her nice frocks in her mother’s old dressing table and walked around in her old school uniform, now gray rather than starched white. People didn’t seem to mind that such a shabby girl was doing their laundry. And Nilanthi didn’t feel dirty, only tired and hopeless. She chewed at the inside of her cheek, leaving small indentations there, places she could stick her tongue while she worked. She liked the familiar taste of blood in her mouth, even though it made her stomach lurch. The laundry jobs provided enough rice for her and Sunitha when she came, and coconuts and fish were still cheap.

  Men who had known her father and whom she had called Uncle came to check on her occasionally. Ranjan Uncle brought pineapples or damp ten-rupee notes. He would invite her to his family’s home for dinner, but she preferred to stay home. Lakmal Uncle brought books from time to time—he was the librarian, but the library had been closed for months. Together, she and Lakmal took turns reading the books out loud—The Wind in the Willows, A Tale of Two Cities, Sunil’s Journey, books she had read while in grade school—and then they would talk about what they liked best about the stories. Madame Defarge’s mysterious and violent knitting, betrayal, dying for true love. Lakmal conducted these discussions as if he were Nilanthi’s teacher. She had even started writing notes and impressions in her father’s old record book. The fact that Lakmal still saw her as a child soothed her.

  Dinesh Uncle offered to stay with her. He had lost his family, too—his daughter long ago to a marriage that brought her to the south, his sons to the anonymity of the Tamil rebels, his wife to the river, dumped there by the JVP, just as Nilanthi’s mother had been. Nilanthi thought of Dinesh’s wife as her mother’s ghost neighbor.

  The Tiger soldiers were instructed not to make contact with their families, so Dinesh did not know whether his sons were living or dead, nor did Nilanthi know the fate of her brothers. She offered Dinesh rice and curry, and weak tea with no milk and little sugar, and then she would turn him away. On the nights Sunitha stayed at the house, Nilanthi would smell Dinesh’s return, a mixture of arrack and tobacco carried in the damp air. She would listen to the struggle of their bodies, Sunitha’s giggles and cries, Dinesh’s low grunting. And then she would fall asleep to their sudden silence. Early one morning, Nilanthi awoke to Sunitha’s whispers. Again and again, Sunitha pleaded, “Make me a wife.” And then came the sluggish sound of Dinesh leaving, his sandals making a shushing sound against the floor.

  AFTER SUNITHA DRANK the lye and was taken away in the police van, Nilanthi was lonelier than she had ever been. The lonelier she felt, the less she wanted to see people. Kapila left books at her door rather than coming inside when she refused to answer the door. Ranjan Uncle’s wife left her breads wrapped in paper bags. By the time Nilanthi returned from the wash, the ants had usually taken over the bag. She smacked the bread a few times, good and hard, against the kitchen table, but usually they had already gotten deep inside. She ate ants in her bread and drank them in her tea. She tasted nothing and never stopped feeling hungry.

  At night, Nilanthi wrapped herself up in her father’s sarongs and waited for Dinesh. She had stopped fighting him after the first few times. She curled herself into a ball and pretended to sleep when he came into the room. He pushed the sarong away from her chest and held her breasts in his hands while he rubbed himself up and down her back, and when he was finished, he would rest his scratchy gray beard against her shoulder and whisper into her ear. “Some day your pride will wear thin and you will agree to marry me. We can put an end to each other’s loneliness.” He emphasized his patience, his respect for her virginity. “I do not force you to have sex with me. That way you will still be a virgin when we are married.” He fell asleep against her, the fat of his stomach creating a blanket of sweat between them. If she was quiet, he would fall asleep quickly and she could shift away from his rising and falling belly. So she learned to be silent—so silent that one day she woke up to find that she could no longer speak at all.

  Instead, Nilanthi began having conversations with her favorite ghosts. Her mother gave her advice on how to keep white cloth as bright as can be: “Use the Sunlight soap. No, not that rock—it’s too uneven and rough.” Her father reminded her to boil the well water before drinking it: “That way your belly won’t get so upset.” Nilanthi believed that her brothers didn’t speak to her either because they weren’t ghosts yet or because the soldiers’ vow of separation from family carried into the afterlife. Sunitha was the chattiest of all: “Don’t you hate the sound of Dinesh’s groans? He is such a fat cow and so old, too! You’ve got old-woman hands, Nilanthi—you should rub some Fair and Lovely on them. The lye is still under the bucket by the well. Drink some and we can dance here together in circles until we are dizzy with spinning.”

  NILANTHI NOW HAD a hole in her throat; the lye had burned through her. Her inability to swallow caused a sensation of such frustration that she thrashed in her hospital bed and had to be restrained. She felt claustrophobic in her own body. The nurses explained that she would never be able to speak, but there were ways they could repair her esophagus. For now, she would breathe and eat through tubes. She gazed across the room at a man who was squirming in a sweaty half sleep. His monitor beeped rapidly and his eyes rolled under their lids. Nilanthi heard the nurses discussing his fate. He will die soon. Krait bites are the fastest killers. Nilanthi listened for the dying man’s voice. She wanted to tel
l him that she envied him; she wanted to ask if they could trade bodies, or if they could be ghost neighbors, his spirit helping hers along, out of her bed and toward Sunitha. Sunitha had abandoned her in the hospital. Perhaps she was disappointed that Nilanthi had failed her. Nilanthi hoped when Sunitha’s anger wore off she would come visiting again, bringing promises of clean fingernails, silver-laced saris, and rain.

  When Dinesh came to visit, the nurses propped Nilanthi up. She felt his whispers against her cheeks. You silly girl, what were you hoping to accomplish? He stroked her hands and sang old-fashioned songs under his breath. When he rested his head on her belly, the nurses smiled at him, and Nilanthi could tell they thought he was charming in his old-man ways. They called her lucky—lucky to have such a loyal visitor. Most of the patients here spent days and days alone.

  Nilanthi wanted to argue with the nurses, to explain that she was an unlucky girl, that the smell of death was everywhere around her, that she could smell unluckiness rising from her body. Her father had been mistaken: He hadn’t been breathing in the unlucky smell of fish all those years, or later the unlucky smell of death. He had been smelling Nilanthi. Her unlucky scent had filled the house and then the entire village. That was why she talked with ghosts and why she couldn’t die like the others. She wondered how Dinesh could stand it—being so close to her, smelling her, while kissing her forehead and breathing smiles onto her face.

  CHILDREN’S GAMES

  Lalith had once seen his sister’s friend Sunitha dance in the back room of their house. He had stood, half-hidden by the room’s curtain, as Sunitha swirled in a green sari borrowed from his mother, the jingle of her anklets keeping time with the music. He had seen in his sister’s face then an awe and possessiveness that he, too, had come to feel. Now that Sunitha performed dances only for him, he took pride in being her only audience. Though he was often drawn, heavier and heavier, toward a seemingly drugged sleep, he willed himself to stay alert, to show his appreciation for her sweeping turns. As Sunitha swayed to remembered melodies in this hidden place far from their village, her green sari melted into the lush jungle thickness.

  Of course part of him realized that Sunitha wasn’t really there. Lalith had been in the jungle outside Ratnapura for several weeks now, alone and huddled in a shallow hole of warm earth, his sixteenth birthday just past. The central lowlands were a striking contrast to his own village. Slow-moving creeks cut their way through the thick trees that hid him, filling the air with the ongoing sound of movement. Here, the earth was damp and seemed to slither with leeches. He often awoke with a leech or two fastened to a calf or the underside of his arm, where his skin was the softest, and he kept a jar of saltwater to pour over the flat black worms. As the drowning leeches retreated, Lalith watched his blood mix with the cloudy saltwater and the night’s soot still on his skin.

  The landscape of his skin had begun to change where mosquitoes feasted and where he later picked and scratched, leaving bumps, swells, craters. He could drive himself crazy with his constant scratching, so when Sunitha had first appeared, her muted laughter folding into her eyes, he had welcomed his memory’s ghost. Now he looked forward to her company. He spoke with her in the early evenings, when the sky fell over the trees in an electric fuchsia and the bats readied themselves for night hunting. He told her tales of bravery and stoic courage, casting himself and his brothers in the most favorable light and telling very little of the truth.

  He told her these stories partly because he was ashamed of his own weakness, but also because he hoped Sunitha would carry the tales back to his sister, Nilanthi, who surely was as alone and frightened as he was. Sunitha was a good listener. She moved in silence and, after dancing, squatted easily across from Lalith, elbows resting on her knees, her chin cupped in her palm. “Tell me a story, Lalith,” she whispered, knowing she had to keep her voice down. “Tell me how you raided the Jaffna pass and turned the army trucks upside down in fiery blazes.”

  “It’s true, Sunitha, we did those things,” Lalith answered. “We watched the front tires of the lead truck hit the mine and arc in the air, wheels spinning. The fire sounded like rushing water; we ran and ran away from it, as fast as we could.” What Lalith didn’t tell Sunitha was how he and his brothers, along with friends and strangers from the surrounding villages of Batticaloa, watched from a comfortable distance as a jeep driven by two teenage girls exploded on impact as it rammed into the army truck. How there were no mines set and how the girls wore cyanide necklaces in case the bomb failed to explode. Lalith didn’t explain how the smell of burning flesh made his stomach heave and his nose twitch, how he threw up on the dried-out earth and realized that these young girls were braver and stronger than he could ever be. Sunitha listened and didn’t ask questions, and sometimes, if Lalith looked away for too long, she would disappear into the early night, taking away the silence and allowing the sounds of the jungle to return.

  LALITH HAD LEARNED how to find his way in the darkness during his soldier’s training. Now he kept himself hidden only two kilometers from a small farming village. If he was patient and waited for the night to sink low and heavy in the sky, it was easy to steal eggs and bread, slap the cool water of an abandoned well over his muddied skin without being noticed. He had even found a farmer’s secret stash of kassipu moonshine, which tasted of gasoline but created an enjoyably colorful dizziness in his mind. He could continue like this for months—alive yet not quite living—and this idea of extended invisibility frightened him almost as much as the war.

  Because he was good at these jungle games—night navigating, sneaking and stealing, staying invisible—his superiors had taken an interest in him. At the rebel camp, when fighting was slow, they played a kind of hide-and-seek for money. Lalith was always the seeker, and he won praise from the commanders. It was hard to enjoy it, though, as his oldest brother, Manju, was always voicing concern about the sudden attention the experienced soldiers were giving Lalith. Manju and his middle brother, Rajit, constantly argued over his participation in the games.

  “It may not be such a good idea for him to gain too much notice,” Manju worried after one of Lalith’s victories.

  “You should be proud of him,” Rajit countered. “He is winning praise for his family; we will all benefit.”

  “They’ll think of him first when they need soldiers for jungle ambush. How proud we’ll all be when he disappears along with the others.” Manju dug at the earth with a gnarled stick.

  “You’re just jealous that the youngest is gaining the attention usually reserved for the oldest.” Rajit winked at Lalith while their older brother smoothed over the hole he had just created.

  “And you’re mistaking praise for respect and nobility, neither of which will ever be possible in this war.” Manju kept his eyes focused on the ground.

  “You sound like Father.”

  Lalith always grew uncomfortable with the mention of his father, who had stamped loans at the Bank of Ceylon, who in Lalith’s mind was linked with memories of home, his mother, Nilanthi, his cricket bat, and other familiar things he missed with an ache and constant emptiness in his gut. He interrupted the argument by saying that both of his brothers were like their father. Manju was wise and Rajit was proud. They were both brave. And to himself, he added, “And I am neither wise nor brave. I’m just a boy treating the war as if it were a children’s game.”

  Ghostlike and silent, Lalith played hide-and-seek with his superiors, wandering through brush and dirt, creeping and crouching so as not to spook the hidden men. Sometimes he would watch from a distance as these large, bulky soldiers leapt like frogs from their hiding places, searching out more substantial cover but only succeeding at exposing themselves to the enemy. By watching his superiors’ jumpy mistakes, Lalith learned the importance of patience and commitment to one’s choices. Distrusting oneself led to discovery and capture. He squatted in the darkness long enough not to cause anyone embarrassment, and then he would silently approach a nervous hider, whistle
twice to signify capture, and suppress his laughter as the man shook his head in disbelief.

  As money changed hands with jests and teasing, the men would ask Lalith how he kept so quiet, how he always captured his man. Lalith answered in ways he thought were soldierly and wise. “I sense heat coming off bodies and I follow it.” Or “I can feel the imprint of your boots as I move over the soft ground.” The truth was impossible to disclose, and remained hidden in Lalith’s mind. I wait until the waiting becomes too much for you, until your own fear makes you weak and susceptible to misjudgment. Lalith never saw any of the money. Instead the superiors would give him extra curd and treacle after the evening meal or provide him with an additional pair of socks.

  EVENTUALLY THE PERPETUAL waiting at the rebel camp became too much for Lalith, and the weight of what he had seen and heard dropped like a heavy stone onto his feet. His self-loathing became so strong and paralyzing that he feared if he didn’t leave, some of his fellow soldiers might have to shoot him themselves. So before his suddenly clumsy limbs betrayed him and the others, he decided to run away from the war.

  Now Lalith wanted to tell Sunitha all his reasons for leaving his brothers and the other soldiers behind. He would ask her not to tell Nilanthi, because he wanted his sister to be able to imagine courageous things about her brothers, how they were avenging their mother’s death, fighting nobly and honorably. As he waited for Sunitha to arrive, he boiled two eggs in a stolen pot and laid out two flat palm leaves on either side of the hole. Earlier, he had climbed trees, bringing down a bunch of slightly underripe plantains, spiky jackfruit, and a mango. He had washed his hunting knife several times until all traces of blood had been removed, and then sliced the fruit into fractured squares and circles until they looked like the missing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. He had bathed the previous night, stealing some extra moments to scrub his growing beard, behind his ears, between his toes. He closed his eyes and listened for the silence to return to the jungle.