THERE ARE ONLY a few people aware of Dinesh’s plans. Mrs. Thiranagama, of course, and her husband. They are his new, closest neighbors and it would have been impossible to keep his recent presence a secret from them anyway. He has asked them to keep his secret to themselves. He has told them he plans to arrange a lavish celebration for Nilanthi’s homecoming, which will be both a celebration of her survival and her strength and a celebration of their wedding day. The Thiranagamas don’t know the details of Nilanthi’s accident. They know that it was Dinesh who found her and took her to the emergency room, but they do not know that she will never speak again; they do not know how determined she was to die.
This is another memory that creeps upon Dinesh and takes hold of him when he rests from his recent tasks or when he drifts into his daydreams. He sees Nilanthi sprawled out on the garden terrace, pinkish foam oozing from her mouth. Her eyes rolling back, white and empty, and a horrible gurgling sound coming from her throat. When he lifted her, she was dead weight, and he was sure she was lost to him. But she survived—she did—he has to keep reminding himself, and in escaping death, she has given them both a second chance.
DINESH HAS MOST of the wedding day planned out. He has done the organizing in Colombo to better keep the festivities a secret. He has hired a Tamil chef who used to work for his cousin’s resort in Tangalle. The chef is planning a feast of dosais and iddli, string hoppers and mutton curry, yogurt salads and stuffed rotis. All the guests will follow Dinesh and Nilanthi, walking in a procession from the temple to the reception hall, whose back doors spill out to the lagoon. They will drink the finest arrack, and the entire village will toast to their happiness. And then and there, Nilanthi will see how happy their lives can be.
On their first night back at the house, Dinesh has decided he will sleep in Manju’s old room. He has already taken it over during these weeks of cleaning and organizing. He packed up Manju’s old things, his university books and pamphlets, his posters and tennis shoes, a badminton racket with broken strings. For now, the room has a placeless feeling to it, an undecorated, impersonal space that has begun to take on Dinesh’s smells. His hair oil. His sweat. The sweetness of his half-drunk glasses of arrack. He sits on Manju’s bed now and pours himself a small drink and then coaxes his sore back, his tired legs, his matted hair, onto the single mattress.
He is extremely tired and feels a soothing, empty exhaustion take hold of him. He has worked hard today; he has earned his rest. If he is lucky, he will have an easy sleep, free from memory and the tugging images that cling while he is awake. The doctors say that Nilanthi will be ready to come home in two more weeks. This house will be ready for her then, and so will he. He will welcome her back to her new old house. He will guide her up the steps. The windows will be open, letting in the breeze. She will recognize this space; she will recognize him as her new home. Dinesh allows himself to imagine a hesitant smile crossing her face. This is the last image he sees as he falls into sleep.
AND NOW HOME AGAIN
In the dusty corner of Nilanthi’s bedroom, her brother Lalith was the first to visit. He brought the smell of earth on his skin and walked with a limp, his left leg dragging, announcing his presence seconds before he came into sight. She teased him about this, how he had once been known for his silence and secrecy, and how these days he walked with the grace of a land monitor, all clunky loudness.
Nilanthi spoke to Lalith with a gurgle in her throat, her voice a half whisper. “Would you like some tea, Brother?” she asked, and Lalith leaned in closer to hear her muted words. “Tea?” she repeated, nearly choking on the tiny word caught in her throat, now a landscape of scar tissue. When she had swallowed the lye, bitter and fiery, she had never expected to be here again, surrounded by the memories of her family’s presence. Her mother’s roti pan hanging from the same rusty nail. Her father’s broken spectacles, long abandoned along the windowsill.
“Yes, please. With milk and three sugars.”
“No milk today.” She gestured to make up for the missing sounds. Her voice was hidden in the past, along with her brother’s alert silences and her mother’s cooking smells. For a moment or two, when Lalith comes to visit, Nilanthi can pretend that this house is still her home, that one day it will be filled again with lively sounds of playful argument between her older brothers: Sri Lanka will win the world cricket title over Australia this year. Champa is the prettiest girl in our A-level study group. No! Kamala is obviously more beautiful. Or from behind the bedroom curtain, the covert whisperings of her parents as they plan family visits to Trinco for a sea bath or a birthday celebration. But as soon as Lalith leaves, Nilanthi will look again around this house and hear its emptiness. She will feel a deep hollow of guilt wedged under her ribs. She has turned her family’s house into matted disarray, where dust buries signs of the past, coating photographs, school medals, and her father’s books. In her attempts at punishing her husband, Dinesh, she shames her family’s memory.
Nilanthi’s kitchen is cluttered. There are armies of ants marching in unstoppable rows. She often grows dizzy and exasperated with their ceaseless progression. When Nilanthi returned from the hospital two months earlier, Dinesh had had the floors polished and buffed with red glaze; he had tidied the shelves, dusted the mats, and bought several new pots and pans and a new electric rice cooker made useless by the island-wide power cuts. Since then the kitchen has grown increasingly dismal, as Nilanthi refuses to play the proper wifely roles even though that is how the entire village sees her now: As Dinesh’s wife. Lucky. Saved.
Dinesh had planted a wedding ring on her finger while her body was still hooked up to buzzing machines in the understaffed hospital. He proposed to her while her throat choked its opposition. As he mopped spit from her lips and chin, Nilanthi saw how he had fooled them all. His gestures were loving and gentle, and his eyes must have seemed kind and loyal to the nurses who watched him. Nilanthi met his glances with glares, willing all the leftover poison in her belly to travel out of her eyes and into his bent frame, his groping, demanding hands, and his bristly chin. She would poison his spirit as he had demolished hers. As the nurses applauded her good luck, rubbed her forehead with coconut oil, and brought lotus and anthurium flowers as blessings, Nilanthi began her revenge. It would be quiet and lengthy and humiliating. Lalith had promised to help, her friend Sunitha, too, and even her mother, who had never before encouraged malice, until Nilanthi was comfortably surrounded by her ghostly army and their commitment to Dinesh’s unraveling.
Dinesh had made their marriage arrangements while Nilanthi slept in a Valium haze, and even now she couldn’t quite recall the details of their wedding day. She had been draped in white, a sash tied neatly around the hole in her neck. Sunitha had come by to paint her nails red and her eyelids blue and called her a peacock as she brushed out her friend’s gnarled hair. “This should have been my wedding, you know,” Sunitha grumbled. She carried the smell of the sea on her breath and in the folds of her skirt. “But I suppose I’ll have my revenge on you both.”
Nilanthi felt the sting of her friend’s accusation. In a brief flush of memory, Nilanthi recalled the muted sounds of Dinesh entering Sunitha’s bed, their overlapping breaths and whispers. With the lingering gossip surrounding Sunitha’s family’s shame, Nilanthi had worried that her friend would be abandoned one day, but she had never expected Dinesh’s sudden visits to her in the night. “It’s your fault I’m still here,” Nilanthi argued with her oldest friend. “You didn’t leave me enough lye, being greedy, as you always were, and here I remain while you come and go as you please.”
Sunitha’s body stiffened alongside her, and for a moment her eyes flashed rage. “Stop moving your head. I can’t get the braids straight.”
Nilanthi leaned back into Sunitha’s hands and remembered the grade ten home science class when Sunitha used Nilanthi as her hair model. Nilanthi had missed her own afternoon biology class for the assignment. After Sunitha had twisted and braided and pinned and tucked, s
he appraised her design. Nilanthi had felt invisible under her friend’s stern and critical gaze. She watched for a sign of approval, and smiled relief when Sunitha finally nodded and stated matter-of-factly, “I can make you pretty if you’d let me do this more often.” Now, instead of seeking praise, Nilanthi silently instructed her friend to weave ugliness into her braids, paint humiliation onto her eyelids, stain her mouth red with shame.
Dinesh paraded his bride from the temple across the dusty low river toward the school’s cricket field, where he showered the crowd with rupees and candies sent up from Colombo. Such gifts had become rare over the recent months as the war swallowed money and family members. Nilanthi stretched her eyes over the crowd and caught sight of Sunitha crouched behind an abandoned scooter. She waved an embroidered handkerchief in Nilanthi’s direction, raised herself in a quick, easy motion, and faded into the dusty landscape, Lalith limping close behind. Even dead, she is less lonely than I am, Nilanthi thought as Dinesh handed out pineapple slices coated in pepper.
When Dinesh came to her that night, she let out a silent shriek that burned her throat. Her husband flinched, a look of disgust forming as the liquid sounds erupted from his wife. She screamed again, an animal-like, low muted groan, sending Dinesh to his feet backing out of the room. He returned to her hours later and she greeted him with the same combination of gurgling and halted screeching. In the shadowed moonlight, Dinesh had suddenly appeared fragile and desperate. His jutting collarbones cast severe shadows onto his thinning frame, and while the rest of his face was swollen with light, the creases beneath his eyes held darkness. It was in this moment when Nilanthi first sensed the power of her disfigurement. She decided then that she would learn how to wield it.
“But what about the bedsheet?” Dinesh’s voice cooed. “If we don’t prove your virginity, you’ll be humiliated. We’ll both be humiliated.”
Nilanthi felt her eyes glassy and wild in the darkness. She hoped the moonlight reflected them, making her seem ghostly and grotesque. Dinesh pulled a kitchen knife from his belt and lifted his sarong. While Nilanthi closed her eyes, waiting for the cold metal against her throat, Dinesh cut a gash along his thigh. When she opened her eyes, she watched her husband drop his own blood onto her bedsheet, wincing as he squeezed patterns onto the fabric. Nilanthi saw desperation in her husband’s actions, the fixed attention to his pain. Here was his weakness, she determined, and here perhaps her freedom. As he craved and wooed their neighbors’ respect and envy, she would unravel it. He could parade his bedsheet and hand out his bonbons, but she could create a very different kind of spectacle.
OVER THE NEXT weeks, Nilanthi listened silently as the village praised her luck. Women who had known her mother rested their palms on her dirty hair and whispered blessings and wishes and called out to the memory of her mother. Nilanthi found it amusing that people treated mutes as if they had lost their ability to hear after their voices disappeared. In her presence, her neighbors said things like, “She used to be such a clean girl.” Or “Cleverness can’t bring luck. Everyone said she’d be a doctor or teacher, and look at her now. Pity. The girl needs her mother.”
Nilanthi had her own conversations in front of the women. Her mother stood behind Nilanthi as she raised the well bucket to her laundry basin. As she smacked her husband’s clothes halfheartedly against a flattened rock, her mother reminded her, “Don’t be so timid. Really strike the rock with it.” Nilanthi closed her eyes as her mother’s voice continued to whisper. “Do you remember Lalith’s school uniform? No matter how gleaming it would be as he left for school, he’d return it smudged and stained. He’d always offer an excuse. A fierce cricket match. Running after a thief who had stolen a friend’s bike. Somehow he always became the hero of these stories. And a hero certainly needs his uniform shining the next day.”
Nilanthi continued her gentle thwacking. Her ankles were caked with mud, partly hardened under the midday sun. She liked the look of her dirty feet, lined with mud crinkles—they reminded her of stone or the roots of trees digging deep into the earth. Strong and resolute. “A hero, yes, deserves such care. But Dinesh will have to make do with his smudges and stains.” Nilanthi dropped the half-clean clothes into her basket. Her neighbors’ words continued to drift her way, the insults emphasized in each sentence. Disgrace. Shame. Dangerous.
“Never mind them, Daughter.” Nilanthi’s mother breathed comfort onto her daughter’s neck. “They need their own distractions from their own disappointments, you know. You are still a young bride married to the only man with money in this place. It is envy, that is all.”
Nilanthi leaned into the sounds of her mother’s tickling voice. “If it is envy, I will turn it into pity and then to scorn. It will be an easy thing to do.” Nilanthi mouthed the silent words.
The women raised their eyes to one another. Mrs. Kumara wiped her brow, leaving a smudge of suds and dirt. “Who are you talking to, my dear?”
Nilanthi shrugged and gestured to her own chest. Let them think I am talking to myself, she counseled. It will fuel their gossip, which will eventually find its way to Dinesh. One day soon he will regret his arrogance. “Do you approve of my plan, Mother?” Nilanthi leaned back toward the place where her mother’s whispers had been, but now there was only silence. Her mother had retreated with the afternoon wind.
LALITH VISITED LESS than Nilanthi’s mother and Sunitha, but he always brought gifts from his wanderings. Some mornings after Dinesh had left for the bank where he had once worked alongside Nilanthi’s father, Lalith brought curd and treacle to his sister’s kitchen. In silence, they scooped large spoonfuls of creamy buffalo milk, blending the sweetened treacle with the sour curd on their tongues. Nilanthi wiped her brother’s sticky chin with the back of her hand as he grinned messy smiles at her. “You look like you’re still a schoolboy, Brother, when you lick your spoon that way.”
At her teasing, Lalith raised himself up, squared his shoulders, and erased the smile from his face. He saluted his sister and kept his weight on his good leg as his chin jutted with pride. In this gesture, Nilanthi imagined all the secrets of her brother’s past. What he had seen and what he had lost. All the stories hidden in his limp and his fine salute. When he had appeared with Sunitha on Nilanthi’s wedding day, she had attempted to piece together the jagged puzzle of his time away as a soldier, which had led him, like Sunitha and her mother before him, to his ghostly freedom to come and go as he pleased.
Nilanthi saluted back. “Finish your food like a good soldier.”
Lalith squatted, eyes even with his sister’s. He smacked a syrupy kiss on her forehead. “I’m off. Enjoy your curd and clean up this kitchen, Sister, or else we will all get trampled by your ants.”
Nilanthi sulked as her brother took his leave. “You are always off to meet Sunitha. I know that is where you go. It makes me jealous.”
“We don’t all have old husbands to look after. We find other ways to keep busy.”
“You always tease. It’s not nice.”
“What? The teasing, or having an old husband to look after?”
“Both. Both are no good. No good at all.”
Lalith pushed the hair out of his sister’s eyes. “Not too much longer, Sister. Patience, and soon you will be free of him. Of the teasing, I make no promises.” Lalith’s voice followed him out of the house. As the door closed, Nilanthi lay in the sudden darkness, her spoon balanced on her nose, her ants creeping through her hair.
Lalith’s gifts lined the kitchen shelves. Grease-stained paper bags of cashews, mango jam, packets of Nescafé. Nilanthi had seen Dinesh eyeing the unexplained riches, but he never questioned her about them. She wondered if his jealousy was roused, if his imagination fluttered around possibilities of secret suitors, of young, uniformed men coming in from the scrubby bushes to woo his young bride. He most likely reassured himself. Nilanthi was his treasure: A mute girl with a hole in her throat and dirt under her fingernails. Desirable to no one but him.
For severa
l weeks following their wedding night, Dinesh would come to Nilanthi as she slept. She would feel his approach, his humid breath on her neck, the sweep of his eyes over her hips, her breasts, her tangled hair. Her limbs stiffened under his gaze, a silent warning against his presence there. She twisted herself into a knot, arms hugging knees, chin buried in her chest.
“If you let me love you, we could be happy,” Dinesh whispered. His breath smelled of arrack rum and garlic.
A gurgle rattled in Nilanthi’s throat as she wrapped herself tighter.
“One day you will see all I have done for you and you will be grateful. You will learn to be my wife. I am all that you have now and you are all that is mine.” Dinesh’s voice was gentle, and Nilanthi understood that he did truly see himself in a noble light, a hero caught in his own fantasy. Rescuer of the suicide. Husband of the unfortunate mute. Nilanthi imagined him keeping himself company with his own smug satisfaction when she refused his embraces.
IT TOOK ALL of Nilanthi’s energy and concentration to construct her own humiliation. Madness was considered an ugly thing, so she would make herself hideous, a grotesque thing tangled up in the village’s pity and repulsion. She stopped washing, letting the damp smells from her underarms, the insides of her legs, cover everything she touched and anything that touched her. If Dinesh wanted to share her smell of shame and disgrace, he was welcome to it.
By their second month of marriage, he began arriving home later and later in the night. Upon entering the house, he was greeted by a heavy, immobile heat that carried the odor of dirt, sweat, and ruin. Dinesh added the tangy sourness of stale arrack; he carried it on his breath and in the dried drips on his clothes. Nilanthi heard him kick off his sandals and lift the wicker lid off the table. Some nights, Nilanthi would leave half a loaf of stale bread dancing with ants under the lid. Three-day-old lentil curry, hardened and cold.
The Beach at Galle Road Page 21
