ABSTRACT

SURGING SEA AND OTHER STORIES

by Sammani Kaushalya Perera

An island-nation in the Indian Ocean, Sri Lanka, was among the fourteen countries devastated by the 2004 Asian Tsunami. On 26 December, Sri Lankans were still celebrating Christmas, observing sil for it was also a full moon poya day, and preparing for the new year when the Indian Ocean flooded the coastline of the island killing 35,399 and victimizing 1,019,306 people. Within minutes following the first tidal wave, tsunami, a word and a phenomenon hitherto unknown to a majority of Sri Lankans, became a hot button topic on the media. Television channels broadcast video footage of the tsunami, many of them recorded by victims with their mobile phones. One such video captured a group of young girls who were struggling to cling to concrete poles of the bus station in Galle, but were soon swept away by the rapid currents. The video went viral and came to connote the tragedy the 2004 Asian Tsunami caused; ten years later, it still haunts news as Sri Lankans commemorate the tsunami victims on 26 December every year. Against this backdrop, my collection of short stories titled Surging Sea and Other Stories revolves around the Sri Lankan experience of the 2004 Asian Tsunami.

 

   

SURGING SEA AND OTHER STORIES

A Thesis

Submitted to the

Faculty of Miami University

in partial fulfillment of

the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

by

Sammani Kaushalya Perera

Miami University

Oxford, Ohio

2016

Advisor: Dr. Brian Roley

Reader: Dr. Daisy Hernandez

Reader: Dr. Nalin Jayasena

©2016 Sammani Kaushalya Perera

 

   

This Thesis titled

SURGING SEA AND OTHER STORIES  

by

Sammani Kaushalya Perera

has been approved for publication by

The College of Arts and Science

and

Department of English

____________________________________________________ Dr. Brian Roley

______________________________________________________ Dr. Daisy Hernandez

_______________________________________________________ Dr. Nalin Jayasena

 

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Table of Contents Fractured Moments 1 A Trekker’s Tale 7 A Dumbshow 14 Looking for Hanuman 17 Surging Sea 31 The Princess who Floated in the Sea 45 The House that Once Was 47

 

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Acknowledgments

Thank you most of all to Dr. Brian Roley, my thesis committee chair and mentor. This project might not have been possible if not for his encouragement and guidance. His constant appreciation of this project gave me immense self-confidence and helped me become a better writer. My profound thanks to Dr. Daisy Hernandez and Dr. Nalin Jayasena, my thesis committee readers, for sacrificing their summer to my thesis defense and offering me much valued feedback. I am grateful to Dr. Catherine Wagner, the director of the Miami University Creative Writing Program, whose words always soothed my troubled spirits. Many thanks to Dr. Margaret Luongo, Dr. Joseph Bates, and Dr. TaraShea Nesbit for welcoming the stories of this project to their workshops. My heartiest thanks also go to my fellow workshoppers for engaging with my stories with all their heart. A big thank you to all faculty members and staff of the Department of English, Miami University, for being wonderful human beings, making my graduate career a memorable experience. Thank you, Dinidu Karunanayake, my beloved husband, for bearing with my writer’s block tantrums and reading the very first drafts of the stories in this project.

 

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Fractured Moments 18 January 2005, Thalpe: Southwest of Sri Lanka

I am not fully recovered yet. My right leg, from the toes to below the knee, is still in a cast and outstretched on a chair to hinder the swelling. It is a cast of plaster, paradoxically white and stiff and heavy. Two weeks into it, it has already begun to discolor with dust brown fingerprints and ballpoint ink stains. It has also become less heavy, the coating of plaster at the edges bone dry and crumbling to powder at the touch.

At the rare times I walk, I hopscotch on my crutches, the crutch pads underneath my arms, my left leg on the ground while my right leg dangles in the air, the crutch tip a short step ahead of me, my weight shifting from my left leg to the crutch handgrips as I repeatedly halt and swing my body forward. Sometimes I wonder if it is the cast that had become light or if it is me who had gotten used to carrying it.

* * *

After the tsunami, everything was in chaos. As I lay shivering under a wetakeiya palm, my body bruised and sore, my right leg numb and useless, a few men found me. They helped me get on my feet and the youngest of them wrapped me in a green and white striped bed sheet. It reminded me of home, the sheet on my bed with its orange and white lines, the one I often wetted as a child and years later, informed my mother when I came of age. I felt safe.

The men asked me if I could walk and I shook my head. At that, the youngest pocketed the water bottle he had in his hands and cradled me in his arms. He immediately started towards a white van stopped amidst debris, taking quick but careful strides. The other two men fell behind, scanning the area and halting at piles of rubble whenever they saw fabric entangled in them.

There were men, women, and children in the van. They shifted on their seats to make space for me, looking at me through eyes dimmed with horror, confusion, and unspeakable sorrows. Were I to look in a mirror, I wondered if I would have looked the same, gashes and scrapes, knotted wet hair, grains of sand and sticks, torn garments, devastated face and exhausted body. I swept over them lest my father or mother or brother would happen to be there, but no. Steering through the havoc the waves had caused, the men drove us to less wrecked premises.

The shelter was a rectangular building with two broken doors on either end and a row of shattered windows in between, its walls damp, a brown waterline over its cream paint. It had a small room at its rear, curtained in the absence of a door, and a large hall arranged with mismatched furniture, chairs and benches, desks and tables, cupboards against two walls, books on their lower shelves soaked to pulp. It stank of Dettol, its foam drying in streaks on the cement floor like the impressions on the surface of dead coral.

There were only four doctors and a handful of people to help them tend some hundred and fifty injured. Every time the van pulled in beside the building, a few of those people hurried out to meet the newcomers. They fetched them in, made them sit, and asked them about their

 

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injuries. They said a doctor would check them up and gave them water, biscuits, and dry clothes to change into.

Later that evening, the youngest of the three men who found me in the morning sat with me till a doctor could finally get to me. He said his name was Kavinda and he was the son of a doctor. He lived in Peraliya, but their house was away from the sea, so they were not touched by the waves. When the water receded, his father and three of his friends, also doctors, had gathered their families and neighbors–first aid and provisions for the injured, got into a van, and driven in search of a building to set up a shelter. They had found the library of a local school, the only standing building in the area, and that too had been in bad shape. They had removed rubble from the floor, rescued the least damaged furniture, and disinfected them. This done, Kavinda and two other men had got back into the van and made rounds in the area, looking for injured. It had been during their sixth round that they found me.

Closer to midnight, a doctor took me to the curtained room, divided into four cubicles with saris and lit brighter than the hall. Over the hum of the electric generator, I could hear the three other doctors and their patients in the adjoining cubicles. The station of my doctor had a steel office table covered with a few bedsheets, and a glass-paned cupboard with a “Reference Only” sign sellotaped to its frame and a nameplate reading “Susil Rathnayake, Librarian” placed on its top.

He poured distilled water over my wound, cleaned it with cotton, covered it with Betadine-soaked gauze, and bandaged my leg to a fiberglass mold like a split bamboo stalk. While he did all this, I sat on the table with my leg outstretched before me, staring silently at the yellowish pink morsel of flesh sticking out from my wound. I was too tired to cringe or cry at the pain. Maybe it was not painful at all because I could no longer feel my leg. Afterwards, he asked me whom he should contact for me and I gave him our home telephone and my father’s cellphone numbers. He promised to make a call as soon as communication was restored.

Watching him work on my leg, I thought of when I used to play with a doctor’s set my parents had bought me at an annual feast of the St. Mary’s Church in Galle, visiting my patient father, mother, and brother. My father caught colds, coughs, and fevers, and I put the stethoscope to his chest and the thermometer to his armpit. While she cooked, my mother often cut her fingers and I treated her with the forceps, kidney dish, and dressing. My brother got shots from the syringe like he actually did every other month as a baby. Whatever the sickness was, I always prescribed medicine for them in a mix of the few Sinhalese and English letters I knew, and gave them the miniature medicine bottles. My father and mother then paid me in colorful lottery tickets as my brother reached out for the chestpiece of the stethoscope. The doctor’s set also had a microscope I never played with because I did not understand what it did, not even when my mother said it could enlarge small objects. It was the only instrument now left of the set.

Where can my parents and brother be? Did they survive the waves? Will I see them again? Will they find me? Will the doctor be able to reach my family? I fought back my tears.

* * *

The following day, Kavinda and another man drove a few of us in need of surgery to the nearest hospital. It was the busiest and the most crowded I had seen a hospital get. People were streaming in and out of the hospital gates, zigzagging through two lines of vehicles waiting for

 

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their turn to pull up to the emergency unit, and we rode past them for almost a kilometer before we could join one of the lines. Ahead of us were all kinds of vehicles, jeeps, cars, vans, three-wheelers, ambulances and trucks blending in without their wailing sirens and flashing beacons. The trucks, I overheard Kavinda and the other man say, were full of dead bodies, passing through the morgue into mass graves.

When we were four vehicles away from the emergency unit, an attendant walking from one vehicle to the other asked us if anyone needed a stretcher or wheelchair. Kavinda replied and the attendant signaled the front of the line. As our van came to a stop under the porch of the emergency unit, a female attendant stepped forward with a stainless steel stretcher. At once, a group of people standing beside the driveway stirred, craning their necks to look closely at the van. By the ray of hope that lit their faces momentarily and the cloud of disheartenment that shrouded them the next moment, I guessed they were awaiting their missing loved ones. The attendant moved me to the stretcher and wheeled me into the hospital. I could not even thank Kavinda and the other man.

The stretcher rolled along wide corridors, the attendant slowing it down at humps and reading my face to see if I was alright. She asked me if I was alone, a question Kavinda nor the doctor at the shelter had asked me, and I could only manage to nod my head. She patted my arm and reassuringly said my family would find me soon. We stopped at the Emergency Treatment Unit where a doctor, judging by the fiberglass mold, concluded my right leg was fractured. He asked me not to eat or drink anything from then on and the attendant to take me through the X-ray Room to the queue in front of the OPD Theatre.

Hours later, I regained my consciousness on a stretcher hauled up in a corridor of the OPD Ward. A nurse was standing over me, staring at my face and talking to me. She offered to bring me something to eat, but I said I was only thirsty. With a glass of water, she gave me a pill which she told would reduce the pain and make me sleep.

When the nurse was gone, I weakly raised my head and looked around. The file from earlier still lay by my side, a sickly yellow cardboard folded in half; a carbon blue x-ray sticking out from it, two light bones against less light flesh, the larger bone broken in the middle in a straight line; and a doctor’s diagnosis card of which I could decipher only a few decimal numerals and the words, “tibia” and “fibula.” Beyond the file, my right leg was brilliant white in a cast, from my toes to above the knee unreasonably warm. Across the corridor, the ward was full of patients, almost all of them in casts, some of their plastered legs supported by slings hanging from hooks on the ceiling. On every bed, there were at least two patients, one occupying the head and the other the foot, their families surrounding them. I wished my father, mother, and brother were there too. Tears rolled down my face.

In my sleep, I heard a man murmur and a woman sniffle, but I could not open my eyes even though I tried to. The man told he had to carve out the wound to discourage infection and the wound should heal to fix the broken bone. He advised to consult an orthopedist at The National Hospital in Colombo about fixing the bone because, if the plate was not properly

 

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attached to it, it could result in a walking disability. After a while, I opened my eyes to three people, but I could not see their faces clearly as the light overhead cast them in shadow and blinded me. Akki, a voice then said in the singsong way my brother calls me. There was my family standing by my stretcher.

It was a happily sad moment. They bombarded me with questions, all three speaking at once, what happened to me, if the leg hurt, and if I had other injuries. In between the questions, I found out that they had been to the Kande Viharaya early Sunday morning and on their way to the Hikkaduwa Railway Station, they had taken a shortcut on the landside because they thought Christmas, Poya, and New Year traffic on the Galle Road would make them late to pick me up. They had been just outside of Hikkaduwa when they heard about the waves and the train on the radio. Since then, driving between our house and my maternal grandmother’s house, the two places they thought I was likely to go, they had searched for me in hospitals until, that evening, the doctor at the shelter had contacted my father. While I was still in the shelter, they had looked for me in this hospital too.

The next morning, the doctor agreed to send me home because the hospital was overcrowded. He asked my parents to give me the medicine on time, feed me food high in protein, make sure the cast did not get wet, and to try find a wheelchair or crutches to move me around.

An attendant helped us get me into the car, a task that would not have been possible if not for him. He asked my father to open both the back doors, lift me under my armpits, and get in. Once I was seated, my father got out of the other door and closed it behind him. I slid back till I was leaning against the closed door, putting my weight on my hands and left leg. The attendant placed my right leg on the seat and recommended keeping it on a pillow the next time so that it would shake and hurt less. Eventually, my father settled into the driver seat, my brother into the passenger seat, and my mother into the back seat with me, half sitting-half kneeling to give space for my leg. They said we were staying at my maternal grandmother’s house because our house was damaged by the waves.

* * *

While we waited for my wound to flesh up, one day, the inner side of my lower thigh started to itch. At first, I tried to ignore the want to scratch. I tapped the spot over the plaster and pressed the plaster down on the spot. It still itched and I could no longer bare the uncomfortable feeling. I wedged my index finger between the plaster and the skin, but the layers of cotton inside the cast barricaded it from going any further than the first joint. Desperately, I resolved to use a thinner and longer object. I slid in a foot ruler and moved it in and out. It was relieving.

On the day of my second surgery early this month in The National Hospital, a nurse shaving my leg noticed a reddish pink scar on the inner side of my lower thigh. What I had scratched was a blister and the ruler had peeled off its skin. Three days after the surgery, when my doctor saw me for a final examination and approve discharge, he strongly advised me and my parents to care for the new cast. He said I will be wearing it for six to eight months, so not to put anything in it and keep it dry. He suggested that my parents cover the cast with a large polythene

 

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bag, secure its mouth with a piece of cloth, and keep my leg elevated while I wash. We nodded our heads.

* * *

The new cast did not bother my skin, it caused more serious trouble. About two days after I came home from the hospital, I was propped against the headboard of my bed, looking out of the half-open window at dark clouds, heavy with thunder and lightning, but not a drop of rain. Every time neon blue lit up the air, a dull ache throbbed my right leg, as if something was trying to tear through my skin. It was queer because I had taken a dose of Tylenol and Advil in the past hour and they usually wore off only five solid hours later. Supposing it was the cold air cramping my leg, I asked my brother to pull the window shut.

As the ache persisted, I riveted my mind on the lightning, some split the sky in giant roots, a few came to earth in quivering lines, and others brightened the clouds in laser sheets. Between flashes of lightning, claps of thunder, and rattle of window grilles, I wondered if the ache was my stainless steel and titanium alloy plate reacting to the electrical discharges. On the spur of the moment, I put a folded bed sheet over my right leg, followed by a pillow. It did not ache anymore.

On the Thai Pongal Day, there was another misadventure. My mother woke us all up to an army of fire ants marching up and down my right leg. She plucked the ants closest to the two openings of the cast and moved me to a chair. While she and my father carried out the mattress to lay it on the low roof of the garage to sundry, my brother and I pinched the rest of the ants. My grandmother then swept the room inch by inch with a coir broom, whisking away ants, those my brother and I squeezed between our fingers, some dead but mostly crippled, and those bravely swarming into the room. This done, my father, mother, brother, and grandmother wiped the bed frame with a damp cloth, slid metal lids under the legs of the bed, and filled them with salty water. Thereafter, ants kept their distance from my cast.

The incident reminded me of my childhood when my grandmother used to comb my hair for lice, spreading a page of a calendar white side up on the floor, running the brush through my hair pouring over it, and pressing the falling lice against it with the nail of the thumb. Plump lice squirted my blood with a “tick” and meager lice mutedly let out their colorless juices, leaving the page like a rock of fossils. My grandmother still has that curious comb, a yellow plastic rectangle with close teeth on one long side and gapped teeth on the other.

* * *

It was around this time that my nightmares returned. Until then, I did not even notice that I slept peacefully for some time, that having dreamt of the train, the wave, and the dead bodies, I did not jerk awake, abrupt movement sending a pain searing through my right leg as if my fractured bone somehow unhinged from the plate.

The nightmare is not the same now. It begins with fire ants threading their way through wisps of cotton inside my cast and biting into my stitched, raw red wound, but suddenly, changes into a murder of crows cawing the way they call when they find food and are pecking at a

 

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swollen, blighted blue corpse. It is a woman, a woman I do not recognize. Every time her face comes into focus, I wake up with a shudder.

Over the next few hours, I keep vigil afraid that the nightmare will resume. I draw up my stretched out legs at the thought that the woman would rise from the dead and grab me. I look hard at the ceiling illuminated by the incandescent lamp that has been faking daylight for me every single night I spent at my grandmother’s house. I strain my eyes from wandering to dark parts of the room and when I still see them in my peripheral vision, I wall them out with my hands held at the outer corners of my eyes.

Towards dawn, sleep overtakes my exhausted self. Just before my eyes close, all the faces I used to know—relatives, friends, neighbors, relatives’ relatives, friends’ friends, neighbors’ neighbors—flash in my mind: faces of those who were snatched away by the wave.

 

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A Trekker’s Tale 24 December 2004, Yala National Park: Southeast of Sri Lanka

The wheels of the safari jeep screeched as they spun to get off the waterhole thick with mud. With no trouble at all, the four-wheel drive made it across the Menik River, pregnant by the northeast monsoon in the Uva Mountains, that Piyal was just beginning to take pride in the vehicle he drove and his skillful driving. It was still morning and with the jeep stuck in fender-deep mud, he could not help but wonder what obstacles he might have to overcome ahead during this journey.

Piyal stamped on the gas pedal and the engine revved, roaring like the gush of water that burst through the spillways of the Udawalawe Dam, but the wheels refused to budge. They dug further in and fresh water started to stream into the hole like the veins of water that feed the paddy grass when the rain-awaited farmers, now smiling from ear to ear, open the sluices into the fields. The turning wheels churned the mud with water and, like the spray of waves that crash and coil around rocks and tree trunks standing in their way, spattered the chocolaty substance on the forest green metal of the jeep.

“I’m so sorry, sir!” Piyal apologized, turning around to face the family seated at the back of the jeep.

“No worries, young man!” Mr. Charbonneau dismissed the apology. “What is a safari without some adventure? Quelle aventure!” He laughed as he wiped a spot of mud on his left cheek with the back of his hand.

“I try again, sir,” Piyal said determinedly. Nevertheless, searching his brain for the lines his superiors had made him memorize when he took up the job as a trekker at the Department of Wildlife Conservation early this month, he continued, “I ring up the park office for assistance if I can’t, sir . . . The officers will then contact a safari jeep . . . near to us or send a . . . a rescue team to pull us from here.” At that, he stopped briefly to test the emotional climate in the jeep and when he was convinced that the tourists were collected, he added, “Meantime please remain seated in the jeep. When a danger, please stay calm and follow me . . . my instructions.”

“Take your time! Take your time! We’re in no hurry. Pas du tout!” Mr. Charbonneau coolly replied.

Piyal explained the emergency procedure as best as he could and turned around to face the windscreen which was now a camouflage of the brown of the mud and the green of the tree line beyond. Even though he assured the family that he would call the officials if he fails, he hoped wholeheartedly that he would not have to do so. For the first time in his trekker career, he wanted to break through a nature’s barrier on his own because he liked the Charbonneau family—Mr. and Mrs. Charbonneau and their son.

That morning, walking to Piyal’s safari jeep that had been idling at the park entrance, Mr. Charbonneau had asked him whether he could first take them to the Yala Safari Game Lodge where they were to spend three nights, and drive them around the park during the length of their stay. Since the family had got out of a rental car belonging to the Mandara Rosen, Katharagama,

 

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Piyal had been keeping tabs of them. He had noticed that Mr. Charbonneau, unlike other foreign tourists, had not talked to a dozen trekkers to choose the cheapest option available. Nor had he bargained with Piyal to lower the rate like local tourists always do. Piyal had thus concluded that the Charbonneau family was rich and promised less to zero hassle. He would receive a chunk of money—in total 36, 000 rupees for the trekker fee was 9, 000 a day, he had mentally calculated—and a handsome tip of who-knows-how-much. He would also be able to enjoy the tour as much as the Charbonneaus without having to worry about what fuss they would kick up in the jungle.

Piyal had his reasons to learn to observe and judge tourists before he agreed to a tour, like a chital deer that sniffs the air for mugger crocodiles before he lowers his neck to sip water from a park’s lake. It had been his sixth tour as a trekker and he had had seven German highschoolers—four boys and three girls—seated at the back of the jeep. A couple of miles into the journey, thick dark jungle had encroached upon them in all directions. The only clearing had been the strip of dirt road which had been a monochrome collage of shadow and light cast by arches of leafy branches and rays of the sun that descended to earth through them. Reflected on the rearview mirror, Piyal had accidently caught one of the boys wink at the others before he had started to pass around a flask. Even though Piyal had had misgivings about the boy’s gesture, he had been obliged to look ahead as a tusker in must had been rumored to roam around the area.

After an hour and half of driving, Piyal had pulled in at the Pathanangala Beach where tourists were allowed to walk about. Before he could even shut down the engine, the German boys had jumped over the tailgate of the jeep and run into the waves, stripping and leaving their clothes along their footprints on the straw yellow sand. The girls had stared after them for a moment and hurried towards the sea, shouting anxiously, “Vorsicht! Vorsicht!”

Alone in the jeep, Piyal had by habit looked at its back to assess the amount of cleaning he would have to do when he returns to the trekkers’ quarters for the night. Lying on one of the seats, he had noticed the flask, a maroon brown liquid dripping out of its open cap. Alcohol! That had explained everything to him: the boy’s wink, their animated behavior and the girls’ panic-stricken voices. For the rest of the tour, he had been imagining the worst: the boys drowning in the shallow sea, the girls getting mangled by a sloth bear that they had reached out to touch, and the unfair end result . . . him being fired.

At all three entrances to the park, visitor information displays stated in bold, “Alcohol consumption is strictly prohibited within the park.” Yet, when a foreign tourist’s life was endangered, even if it was due to his disrespect for regulations, the officials took his side, because he was European and white. If a local tourist committed the same violation, he was conditioned to a fine of up to 1, 000, 000 rupees or up to five years in jail. So much for a Third World country! Fortunately for Piyal, he had wrapped up the tour with no mishaps and learnt an invaluable lesson that he would keep in mind for as long as he would be a trekker.

Bogged down in the mud, Piyal now turned off the engine to prevent it from overheating. Silence settled over the jungle like after a rain; only the river gurgled, birds chirped, and the Charbonneaus babbled. In that moment of calm, he realized that his judgment of the family was

 

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correct. They were ‘good’ tourists. The bits and pieces of conversation he overheard and glimpses of interaction he caught were his proof—

“Papa,” the little boy looked at his father, his small grey eyes twinkling with curiosity, “pourquoi on va à la plage très soudainement?”

“Mais, mon cher, tu n’aimes la plage?” Mr. Charbonneau pretended to be sad, forcing the corners of his mouth to turn down.

“Non, je l’aime! Beaucoup, beaucoup!”

“Voilà! C’est ton cadeau d’anniversaire!”

“Pour ton huitième anniversaire!” Mrs. Charbonneau bundled her son into a hug and kissed him on his head.

“Et aussi . . ,” Mr. Charbonneau said, putting his hand around his wife’s shoulder and squeezing her against his chest, “pour l’anniversaire de marriage de ta mère et moi.”

“Wow!” the little boy rejoiced. “Ça sera les meilleures vacances jamais!”

“D’accord!” Mr. and Mrs. Charbonneau smiled at their son.

From their talk scattered with “maiss” and “beaucoups,” “voilàs” and “aussis” which Piyal could recall from his unsuccessful attempt at learning French at Alliance Franҫaise de Matara, he figured that the family was from France. He suppressed a smile at the memory of how he used to memorize certain words—‘beaucoup’ as in ‘intestines’ and ‘voilà’ as in ‘perv’ in Sinhala. Piyal also guessed that they were vacationing in Sri Lanka to celebrate Mr. and Mrs. Charbonneau’s wedding anniversary and their son’s birthday for he could faintly recollect that the French used ‘anniversaire’ interchangeably with birthday and anniversary.

A family of a caring father, and a loving wife and son! Piyal felt a strange affinity with them, an urge to escort them safely to their destination, the Yala Safari Game Lodge.

On his seat, Piyal turned slightly towards the northeast where the Kebiliththa Dewalaya, the spiritual residence of the Katharagama deviyo, was located. Bringing his palms together at the forehead, he prayed to the god to help him in his need. In return, he vowed to smash a coconut, washed in turmeric water and fragranced with a slice of camphor ablaze on it, on his next visit to the Katharagama Dewalaya, another abode of the god. On second thought, he promised a pooja wattiya too as he had not yet paid his gratitude to the god for blessing him with a job. Since he had been required to report to work immediately, his mother had worshiped the god in his stead and brought him a charm, a string of seven chilies and a lemon, which was tied to the front bumper of the jeep to ward off evil. But Piyal wished to personally pay his respects to the god before his wrath fell on him and this morning seemed to be a good time to make plans.

* * *

 

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On a fine morning during his leave, he walks to the Kiri Vehera with his parents and younger sister, all dressed in clean clothes, pure white if not for the patches of violet left by the Robin washing blue. He notices his mother’s head move from her attire to his father’s, and his sister’s to his, her expression changing from doubtful to accomplished. He smiles to himself when he remembers that she is preoccupied with the whiteness of the clothes they wore to temple. He knows that she takes special care of them: soaking them in washing blue and wrapping them in blue tissue paper from last year’s Vesak lanterns. “To prevent the clothes from absorbing the yellow of the wood,” he has often heard her impart the knowledge to his sister as she stacks the small blue parcels neatly in the almirah made of a jackfruit tree trunk.

It is a one-mile promenade from their house to the Katharagama religious sanctuary and the dirt road winds through na trees and dhan trees, kohomba trees and maara trees, forming a leafy parasol overhead. They are lucky, for in the thorny shrubs underneath the trees, they spot a peacock at dance, its train spread behind it like the watapatha fan of a Buddhist monk. “A very good sign! Especially because we go regarding a vehicle and a driver job,” his father remarks, reminding the family that the peacock is the god’s conveyance. “It welcomes us to the realm of the Katharagama deviyo!”

By and by, he and his family arrive at the Kiri Vehera, as always, halting at the flight of stone steps to take in the ethereal beauty of the dagoba: the eastern surface of its dorm glowing milky white under the first rays of the day while the west is still a grey shadow. Overcome by devotion, his mother prostrates on the moonstone at the bottom of the steps and murmur, “Sadhu, sadhu, sadhu.” When she gets herself up, clinging to the guardstone on one side and her husband on the other, they walk up to the vehera maluwa where they free themselves of the heavy packages containing the essentials for the day’s religious observances. Then they offer dew-dripping rukaththana flowers to Lord Buddha at the dagoba; light oil lamps and incense sticks at its base; and chant gatha, piercing the serenity that envelopes the atmosphere.

Namo thassa bhagavatho arahatho samma sambuddhassa Namo thassa bhagavatho arahatho samma sambuddhassa Namo thassa bhagavatho arahatho samma sambuddhassa Buddhan saranan gachchami . . .

Caught in the breeze, the flames of the oil lamps flutter from side to side with a “hoo hoo hoo” like the “whoosh” of whips before they “crack” on the street during the Esala Perahera. His mother adjusts the wicks in the lamps and wipes her coconut oil-glazed-fingers in the hair.

Dhamman saranan gachchami Sanghan saranan gachchami

Duthiyampi buddhan saranan gachchami Duthiyampi dhamman saranan gachchami Duthiyampi sanghan saranan gachchami . . .

Olu, nelum and manel flowers from a previous day spread their petals as if they had not worshiped the dagoba enough. Bees who had been trapped in the flowers for the night, zigzag

 

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among the stamens and seed heads, confused, restless and still intoxicated by the nectar in abundance. After flapping its wings for several times unable to carry its nectar belly, one finally takes flight, loses balance and flies in his sister’s direction. His father quickly waves it away before she could let out a shriek and break into a run.

Thathiyampi buddhan saranan gachchami Thathiyampi dhamman saranan gachchami Thathiyampi sanghan saranan gachchami . . .

The chanting weaves into the air as naturally as milk mixes with water. They become tranquility.

After the observances at the Kiri Vehera, the four of them leave the temple by its southern stairway to take the path that leads to the backyard of the Katharagama Dewalaya. Under the maturing sun, the sand burns their naked feet that his sister starts to walk on tiptoes. “Just imagine how Hindu people walk on fire,” he murmurs to her and she replies with a shrug of her shoulders.

Rituals of self-mortification surround the Hindu worship of the Katharagama deviyo. The legend goes that, upon his arrival in Sri Lanka, the god had sought the help of the Tamils to find a place to live. When they had turned him away, he had gone to the Sinhalese who had built him a shelter of kohomba leaves. In punishment of the Tamils, the god had decreed that they visit Katharagama yearly and mortify their flesh to receive pardon. Since then, for two thousand years, Tamils from all over the island had been pouring to the city, some through padayathra, the several-months-long-foot pilgrimage across Kumana and Yala National Parks, to worship the god during the annual festivities of the shrine. Clad in white sarongs raised to their knees, they walk bare feet on embers; roll on the ground wearing nothing but a loincloth; hang them by the flesh on their back to hooks mounted on lorries; pierce their cheeks and tongues with metal pins, a trishula on one end and a bo leaf on the other; pull carts by ropes tied around their torso; and dance kawadi, a wooden arch wrapped in red cloth and decorated with the covert feathers of a peacock which the dancers carry on their shoulders.

These delights and horrors, happiness and pain last from July to August every year. In the off-season, Katharagama falls into a half sleep and the god retreats to his jungle abode, Kebiliththa Dewalaya. The only vibrancy within the religious sanctuary is then provided by the flower stalls whose shelves “creak” under bunches of aquatic flowers in water-filled paint buckets, coconut oil refilled DCSL Arrack bottles, packets of camphor heaped up in the shape of dagobas, and stripes of wicker sachets hung from beams of the stalls’ roofs. Standing by the huts, lasses in floral-printed frocks and plaited hair cry out, “Ane, buy some flowers from us too!” at the passing by few dozens of locals and the couple of foreigners.

Yet, in the outskirts of the sanctuary, it is an eternal hustle and bustle. The area spreads in a rectangular space and two lines of pooja bhanda shops abundant with fruits in piles and baskets, bottles of milk, and garlands run the length of it. In the center is a scatter of sweetmeat shops engrossed in the sweetness of cashew-sprinkled, mushy dodol and muscat, boondi and

 

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puhul dosi, kotta kilangu and thal hakuru; and thorombal shops engulfed in plastic toys and clay statuettes, imitation jewelry and dyed threads, especially ones with a miniature plaster carving of Gana deviyo, the elephant-headed brother of the Katharagama deviyo. These boutiques are permanently in a flurry of activity: their owners arrange goods and place orders for what they had run out of, moneylenders grumpily walk in but happily walk out when their money is returned, and customers stop off to buy offerings to the god, greedily gulp down sweetmeats and ogle the shiny goods.

In finding the pirith mandapaya at the end of the path unoccupied, he and his family clean one of its four concrete benches and unpack the articles in the packages. After washing their hands at the adjoining tap post, they begin to arrange the pooja wattiya, a shallow basket woven with reed which they floor with a layer of crisp beetle leaves and crowd with seven kinds of tropical fruits—a king coconut, a comb of bananas, a pineapple, a divul fruit, a mango, a belli fruit, and a stick of sugar cane—all washed in turmeric water. Into the spaces between the fruits, they wedge a dozen incense sticks, a packet of camphor slices, a beetle leaf folded in the shape of a cone, and embellish the basket with a handful of wathusudu flowers and a red garland. He then keeps a folded 500 rupee note in the beetle cornet, covers the pooja wattiya with a red piece of cloth, and lifts it to his head to close the last few meters of their long walk to the shrine.

Katharagama Dewalaya is a plain structure of four whitewashed walls and a thatched roof. As the four of them step in through its wooden doors, his father utters “om,” bringing his palms together at the chest and bowing his head to the curtain on which Katharagama deviyo is printed, thousands of colored sequins sewed to adorn his garments, jewelry and the peacock. Unlike the outside, the inside of the shrine glows of color: brass of the two vertical lines of standing oil lamps; bronze of the two rows of bells that hang parallel to them; gold of the light that reflects on brass and bronze ware; ivory of the roof-high elephant tusks; and the reds, greens, yellows and blues of the paintings of the god. Against the splash of color, on a platform under the curtain, stand three men in white sarongs and shirts—the kapu mahaththayas in charge of the dewalaya rituals. One of them gestures to the family to move forward, accepts the pooja wattiya, and carries it to an inner room behind the curtain. Positioning themselves at the edge of the platform, the other two kapu mahaththayas burst into gatha,

Sambuddha sasana varan idha rohanasmin Sampalanaya patiladda varo mahiddhi . . .

A bundle of peacock feathers tied together with red string hovers over the family, bouncing from head to head. Its barbs touch one of his father’s ears and he instinctively scratches it to recover from the tickle.

Punyanumodiya salathana deva raja Palethu man saththasatha hitha vahanthu . . .

A silver bell peals ceaselessly through the dewalaya, supplying a tuneless music to the hymns. In graceful dance, swirls of incense smoke curl upwards, first lingering on the god, then clouding the ceiling with a hazy cumulus.

Just when the prayer and the ringing wrap up, the first kapu mahaththaya emerges from behind the curtain and hands the pooja wattiya back to the family, all fruits cut in half—a

 

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symbolic gesture of having offered them to the god. As they contentedly leave the shrine, the other two kapu mahaththayas smear their foreheads with vibhuti, the holy ash, and draw a red tilaka above their noses.

Afterwards, he and his family gather under the shade of the neighboring bo tree and take turns to sip the king coconut and gnaw at the belli fruit. They feed the mango to a rilawa monkey who carries it to a tree to enjoy leisurely, the divul fruit and the stick of sugarcane to the dewalaya elephant who swallows them whole, the pineapple to a cow who generously shares it with a murder of crows, and save the comb of bananas for the beggars who sit on either side of the road beyond the Menik River.

As such, the religious observances come to an end, uninterrupted and successful.

* * *

In the jeep, Piyal took a deep breath. The very thought of the worship of the Buddha and the Katharagama deviyo had cast an aura of peace about him. Hoping for the best, he slowly turned the key in the hole and put his foot on the accelerator. Finally, with many jolts and jostles it climbed the steep bank of mud and was back on even land.

“Good job, my lad,” Mr. Charbonneau patted Piyal on the shoulder.

“All with the blessings of the god, Sir.”

Without more ado, Piyal eventually reached the Charbonneaus’ destination, the Yala Safari Game Lodge. He unlatched the tailgate of the jeep, helped them get down, and was about to drive away to the hotel’s driver quarters when Mr. Charbonneau asked, “Piyal, when is it best to spot animals? We didn’t see any on our way here.”

“I’m afraid, Sir. Starting yesterday, a lot of animals went that way,” he pointed inland.

“Why is that? Will they be back?”

“I don’t know, Sir. Er . . . Er . . . Birds also went that way.” Piyal hesitated, unable to explain to Mr. Charbonneau about the strange behavior of animals; about the herds of elephants who rounded up their calves and stampeded inland, raising dust and quaking the ground; about the flocks of birds who hastily taught their young ones to fledge and flew inland, chirping endlessly and speckling the sky with dark dots; about how they left nothing but miniature meteor-crater-like footprints and coconut-husk-like nests. As always, words failed him and he felt desperate.

“That’s okay, Piyal,” Mr. Charbonneau cut into Piyal’s frustration. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Okay, Sir,” Piyal said and retired to the driver quarters.

 

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A Dumbshow 25 December 2004, Fortified City of Galle: Southwest of Sri Lanka

Whoo! He leaped into the air at the brink of the Flag Rock, his hands spread on either side of him, his legs bent at the knees. A Brahminy Kite descended from its cool blue sky to hover over the peacock blue-green waters of the Indian Ocean beyond Galle, its eyes locked on the trace of a mocking fish.

Oh my God! OH MY GOD! He heard the crowd on the rock exclaim, their voices a chorus of wonder and fear in the crescendo of gusts of wind.

By habit, he spun once in midair, a cartwheel on the cobblestoned streets of the fortified city, before he let gravity pull him down. As he fell, visions flashed by in his eyes—

the sky,

ndsᴉpǝ poʍu oulooʞǝɹs,

water and rock. He squeezed his eyes shut.

Splash. He cut through the surface of water, hands first, head, body, and legs. The cleaver knife that slices thalapath at the fish stall under the mudilla tree.

Bllgh blllgggh blllllgggghh. The disturber of peace he was, he guiltily listened to the complaints of a thousand air bubbles. Afraid that even the slightest of movements would add to the chaos, he held his breath and stayed suspended in the water. Seated on an invisible chair on the seabed, his hands outstretched before him to rest on an invisible table, his legs dangling above the sandy floor.

One . . . two . . . three . . . He mentally counted to thirty-two before he wrenched his eyes open. By experience, he knew that the bubbles calmed down at twenty-six, but he always counted six more to make sure that they did not obstruct his view. From the corners of his eyes he saw his dreadlocks stick out. The needles of Ravana’s moustache bush.

He looked down at himself. A few dozens of bubbles still clung to the dirt brown skin of his naked chest, stomach, arms, and legs. Below the waist, his audacious red shorts with a fervent yellow floral print swayed to the rhythm of ocean currents. A starfish reposing on a coral reef.

He raised his head and looked around. A thin puff of hay yellow dust surrounded him, rendering the water a murky blue-green. Towards the shore where waves broke, serene white foam was a façade that disguised the hypocrite brown of rolling sand. Behind him rose the rampart of the fort and in front of him laid the Elephant Rock, both masses eerie black shadows under the sea. Yonder, a never-ending stretch of menacing blue.

He felt claustrophobic. Trapped in a vertical coffin, sand at the bottom, water on all other sides.

* * *

 

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The boat inched towards the far bank of the river and he sang in his mind, Malē Malē oya nāmala nelā waren . . ., along the ferryman.

Aththa bidei paya burulen thabā waren

Kelani gangē oru yanawa balā waren

Sādhukara dī oruwaka negi waren . . .

He marveled at how appropriate the folk ballad was—he was crossing the Kelani River on a pāruwa, surrounded by the extended family and friends of his Buddhist neighbor, Nanda, all of whom murmured “Sadhu, Sadhu, Sadhu” the moment the ferryman started to pull them forward with a coir rope tied to two trees on either bank. Tug of war during the Sinhala and Tamil New Year festivities.

A cold wind blew across the crocodile green surface of the river and he wrapped his arms around his torso. A nidikumba creeper whose leaves shrink at sudden movement. Then, a few watery tips landed on his folded arms, reforming into transparent droplets. The morning dew that collects on the fur of a newborn calf as it frolics among the bulrush on a fallow. Looking about him, he realized that the stretch of water was patterned with circular ripples. The bulbs that flash from center to circumference on the Buddha’s halo on a Vesak pandol. It was a sunshower.

Ah! A foxes’ wedding! He heard someone exclaim behind him.

As the rain picked up, the pāruwa berthed and, together with Nanda, he ran all the way to the shrine room of the Kelani Viharaya. A pair of weaver ants fleeing to their nest to escape the pointed bill of a golden-backed woodpecker. Breathless and wet, they doubled up in the outer chamber. Two banana plants blown down by strong winds in the dead of night.

Straightening up, his eyes fell on the mural of sea-flooded Kelaniya. Angry gods genuflecting in prayer amidst Heaven’s clouds, summoning the ocean to flow inland. Houses and clumps of trees half under the water, their clay tiled-roofs and crowns forming a scatter of islands. A Buddha statue untouched by the waves, overlooking the disaster from under the shade of a parasol that a god holds.

* * *

He was at the wooden desk at his parents’ house, eight again and bent over the homework for the Religion period. His grandmother’s Bible was turned to Genesis Chapter Six from which he was carefully copying verses to a SPC double rule exercise book.

13. And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.

14. Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch.

 

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Near the verse, he drew a trapezoid and a wedge on it. A ruwal oruwa anchored at sea while fishermen cast nets for shallow water fish, schools of hālmasso, sālayo, and hurullo.

15. And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits.

16. A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above; and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it.

This time, he sketched a trapezoid first, two baseless rectangles on top of each other, and a bottomless square to top them all. On the square, he painted a circle for a window and a small baseless rectangle for a door. A shadow of a ship snailing along the horizontal line that separated the hushed grey of the evening sky and the languid grey of the sleeping ocean.

17. And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and everything that is in the earth shall die.

He etched on his book a series of lines, each of them curved in at one end. The waves that struggle to hold onto Earth on a full moon poya day.

Just then, under the pressure he put on his pencil, its graphite tip split into pieces.

* * *

The waves did not break on the shore as usual, disintegrating to foam. A bride’s veil that sweeps behind her as she walks from altar to door, clinging to the arm of the groom. Instead, they transformed into a thousand hands, black, grey, and brown. A colony of centipedes in a betel plot scurrying away at the squelch of a hoe.

The hands clawed at the beach, pulling up the barrier of coral reef and the fringe of coconut palms. A rake scraping the land as it gathers fallen leaves. They spidered-up the walls of houses and pounded on their doors, windows, and roofs. The Sinhalese mobs that looted Tamil-owned property before they set them on fire during the Black July of 1983.

Unsatisfied by the violence, the hands then reached inland for men, women, children, and vehicles. Everything in their way.

Him.

* * *

He sat up on his bed, the pebble that the eleven-year-old he catapulted towards a squirrel in the nuga tree at the Court Square. Overcome with confusion, he fell back on the pillow, a dead fish, eyes wide open, mouth agape, only he was panting and drenched in cold sweat.

 

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Looking for Hanuman 20 December 2004, Koggala: south of Sri Lanka

She emerged from the thicket surrounding the house, her curly hair atousled by leaves on low-hanging branches, her large eyes ablaze against her dark complexion, her full lips aripple with an inaudible song. She was in a sleeveless white t-shirt and a knee-length floral-printed skirt, her bare skin on arms and legs agrazed here and there by twigs and thorns, some on the surface in white lines and others a little deeper in beads of blood. On the cold granite slab at the garden tap under the sepālika fold, she rubbed her mud-caked feet, flicking her fingers at the falling water and smiling at the airborne drops.

“Samadhi, is that you? Where have you been all this time? Come here this minute!” her mother called out from the kitchen.

She skipped across the grassy front yard, along the gravel path leading to the back of the house, and entered the kitchen. Sitting on a reed mat they had unrolled on the floor, her mother was wiping handfuls of dried red chilies in a damp cloth and Hansi, her sister-in-law, was deseeding tamarind. Around them were shallow reed baskets brimming with black pepper and fennel seeds, brindleberry and fenugreek, set to sit under the sun. From the storeroom adjoining the kitchen, her cat came running to her, abandoning the watch over its newly-born kitten and sneezing at the strong aroma of spices.

“How many times did I have to shout your name? Wandering in the garden when there is so much work,” her mother chided her.

She remained silent, looking down at the cat who was brushing against her. Standing on one leg, she stroked its back with the other, and the cat rubbed its head in the arch of her foot. Suddenly, she darted to the kitchen table where her mother kept tea and coffee, milk powder and sugar, strainers and tumblers. Bringing each container to her ear and shaking slightly, she felt for the one with crackers. The cat inched towards its plastic plate under the protruding roof of the kitchen, staring at her hopefully, purring softly, and twitching its tail. She opened a Krisco biscuit tin, took out two cream crackers, broke them into pieces, and put them on the cat’s plate.

“Samadhi, stop fooling around! Thaththa went to the back garden to dig up some turmeric roots. Find him and go with him to town to buy the lime and oils!” her mother ordered.

She walked down the trail left by footprints, appearing and disappearing amidst the trees every now and then. She stood still at the clump of banana trees lest she would scare away a squirrel, hanging upside down and nibbling on a ripe fruit. A few steps further, she halted at the old well, leaned over its edge, and penetrated the clear stiletto gray waters all the way to its bottom littered with months-old rotting leafs. She also stopped near the line of bamboo trees, picked up a fallen sheath, and floated it in the streamlet between the trees and the paddy field. Then she was no more, vanished into the thicket again.

* * *

In the turmeric plot at the far corner of the garden, he pulled out a few bushes, their oblong leaves a glossy green and their thin rhizomes a matte yellow. He separated the rhizomes from the leaves, plucked their hairs, and spread them on a gunny sack in the shade of the

 

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cardamom tree. Dusting off his hands and wiping his feet on the coir carpet outside the dining room, he went into the kitchen, anticipating a hot cup of ginger tea, a habit his wife had got him into during the thirty years of their marriage. He sat in the rattan chair beside the kitchen table, picked up his cup, and started to sip the tea.

“Hansi,” he addressed his daughter-in-law. He disliked calling her by the name because she was now part of the family, no more different than his own daughter, but a month since his son and Hansi had their wedding, he had not still figured what to call her. “Do you remember the details on your horoscope?”

“I only remember my astrological sign, thaththa,” she answered.

“What is it?”

“Pisces.”

“I wonder if you would be able to read the anduna,” he spoke more to himself. Then raising his voice, “Have you been bitten by a dog?”

“Thankfully, no,” she smiled, confusedly. “But why, thaththa?”

“Because not everyone can read an anduna. There are certain conditions you have to meet to be able to do so. You have to be born under a human astrological sign like Virgo, Gemini, or Sagittarius. Your gana or the temperament should not be rāksha and you should not be bitten by a dog. However, even if you do not meet these conditions, if your yōni or the sex is of a monkey, you will be able to read an anduna without question.”

“How come?” his daughter, Samadhi, barged in.

“This girl! Go get ready! Thaththa will leave as soon as he finishes his tea,” his wife said, a reminder for him and Samadhi that they should start out to town.

“There is enough time. Ah thaththa, how come?” Samadhi pushed him.

“Why, because Hanuman is a monkey!”

“Hanuman? As in “pombulē mage pombulē”?” Hansi exclaimed, referring to a song from the stage drama, Sakvithi Ravana.

“Yes. That Hanuman is the god of andunas. Even though he looks like a playful monkey in that song, he is actually a mighty powerful one. Why, have you not read The Ramayana?”

“No, I have only heard about it, the Rama-Sita love story,” Hansi replied.

“There is more to it, child, a lot more. In an age when humans still lived according to the dharma, disturbing the order of the three worlds, Ravana kidnapped Sita,” he began, going back in time to when he read a Sinhala translation of The Ramayana as a teenager.

 

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Ravana was the rāksha king of the demon tribe of Lanka and the great grandson of Brahma, the creator god. He was a fierce devotee of God Siva and his great grandfather himself, but it was for his own gain. Cutting off his ten heads, one each thousand years, he beseeched God Siva to give him superior strength. Cutting them off again, for they grew back as hair or nails do, he entreated Brahma to make him indestructible. So he became a powerful ruler, unleashing his evil and tyranny on the world. Away in Bharata was Rama, the seventh avatar of God Vishnu, the ultimate embodiment of virtue, compassionate and wise. He was also the rightful successor to the throne of Ayodhya, living in temporary exile with Sita, his consort, and Lakshmana, his brother. In the wild, they led a blissfully simple life, but their peaceful days were numbered. Ravana was a collector of women. He had a wife called Mandodari, a rāksha woman, and a great many concubines in his antappura, all beautiful in their own way as they were from different tribes—gāndharvi, apsara, kinnari, siddhi, asuri, nāga. Though attractive, those women could not stop him from wanting Sita because she was the epitome of beauty, noble and pure.

Rama and Lakshmana were away during this mishap and did not know what became of Sita, so they sought the help of Sugriva, the monkey king of the vānara tribe. Sugriva and his fellow monkeys were not ordinary apes who leaped from one branch to the other in forests. They had the blood of gods in them, they were an evolved and enlightened race of ancient jungle beings. Hanuman, Sugriva’s brother, was the wisest of them all. He was the son of Vayu, the wind god, and Anjana, a woman of Heaven. He had many admirable powers—he could not be harmed by any weapon, he could change his form as he chose and summon his death when he wished. His name aptly meant the Invincible One.

At Rama’s request for help, Sugriva sent four groups of monkeys to the four corners of the world to find the whereabouts of Sita. Hanuman’s group went south. They searched for her in every field and jungle and cave, but there was no sign of her. They went as far as the sea. Finally, they heard from Sampati, the great eagle, that he had seen Ravana take Sita across the sea to Lanka. Though the news was good, it posed a question—who was going to leap over the sea? After much coaxing by his uncle, Hanuman agreed to be Sita’s heroic savior. He was a humble monkey, he did not know yet what great things he could do. The next morning, Hanuman prepared to make the leap. He grew and grew to a monstrous big monkey and his head touched the clouds. He walked and walked till he found stable ground and the earth shook. Then he soared and soared in the sky and landed on Lanka without any difficulty.

On the shore, Hanuman shrank to his original size and entered Ravana’s walled kingdom. He shrank still and combed Ravana’s antappura, twice, but he could not find Sita. When he was about to give up hope, by the soft light of the moon, he spotted a secret garden, the Asokavana. He stole down to the garden, listening to the night around him. He approached a temple at its center, following heavy breathing. There Sita was, sobbing, surrounded by a mob of rāksha women who were keeping an eye on her till she decided to become Ravana’s queen. Hanuman was moved to tears. He was tempted to immediately console her, but he suppressed the urge because he could not risk being captured. He hid himself amidst the leaves of a tree till fate brought Sita to the tree the next day. He revealed to her that he was sent to her by Rama and bade her to patiently wait as Rama was preparing to rescue her.

Having delivered the message, Hanuman was about to leave Lanka when a thought came to him. He had to punish Ravana for stealing Sita, he had to destroy Ravana’s kingdom. In his

 

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palace, Ravana heard that a monkey was wreaking havoc in the Asokavana. He sent two of his sons to capture him and one son died during the battle, but the other captured him and took him to his father. Ravana ordered Hanuman’s death, but his brother, Vibheeshana, intervened. He reminded Ravana that it was unethical to kill an enemy’s messenger. He suggested that Ravana punish the messenger and set him free, so poor Hanuman’s tail was set on fire. That was as foolish of Ravana as kidnapping Sita. Remember, Hanuman cannot be hurt by any weapon, not even by fire? Jumping from one street to the other, one tree to the other, one roof to the other, he set Lanka on fire before he leaped back to Bharata.

At long last, Rama went to battle with Ravana, accompanied by Lakshmana, Hanuman, and the vānara army. It was a strong alliance, but Ravana was stronger, what with his rāksha mobs and his seven sons, specially that Indrajit who had magical powers. War began and soon enough, many monkey warriors were wounded and Rama-Lakshmana were tired. Someone who saw this—I forget who it was—asked Hanuman to go to Bharata and find a mountain called Oshadhiparvata in the Himalaya range. “Hanuman, it is the mountain between Kailasa, God Siva’s abode, and Rishabha, brilliant as gold. The herbal plants growing on the slopes of that mountain emit a soft green light at night like hundreds and thousands of fireflies. We need four plants to revive our army—mritasanjivini that can awaken the dead, and vishalyakarani, savarnyakarani, santanakarani that can heal any wound. Bring them to me,” he said.

At that, Hanuman took to the sky, leaped from cloud to cloud, and reached the Himalaya range by nightfall. He found Oshadhiparvata. As he was told, it was between Kailasa and Rishabha, and was gleaming in green. From his perch on a cloud, he dived down at the mountain, but the green light disappeared as he neared it. He flew back to the cloud and looked down, it was lit up again. He dived down for a second time and the green light re-disappeared. He was angered that he could not find a place to land, so with his powers, he grew into his monstrous big self, put his hands around the mountain, plucked it from earth, and carried it all the way to Lanka.

The moment Hanuman arrived with Oshadhiparvata at the battlefield outside Ravana’s palace, the vānara army resurrected and Rama-Lakshmana regained their strength. When they were all on their feet, the same person who sent Hanuman in search of the herbal plants now asked him to take back the mountain to where it belonged. “In case there arises a need for some other hero to look for the plants,” he said. With revived spirits, Rama, Lakshmana, Hanuman, and the vānara army fought the mobs of rākshas. Finally, Rama summoned the brahmastra, a lethal arrow created by Brahma himself, shot it at Ravana, and killed him. Rama and Sita, Lakshmana, Hanuman and the vānara army then returned triumphantly to Bharata.

“If not for Hanuman, Rama would have died in war and Ravana would have claimed Sita. Have you been to Rumassala? It is a hillock with non-native, rare herbal plants. It is believed to be a piece of Oshadhiparvata Hanuman accidently dropped on Sri Lanka as he was taking it back to India,” he concluded, sipping the tea for one last time and placing the cup on the table.

His wife wiped her hands in coconut meal, turning the white flakes to grey. While he was telling the story, she had finished cleaning the dried red chilies. “Enough lingering now, it is high

 

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time you went to town. Otherwise, we will still be putting things together when Mahaththaya comes,” she warned.

He rose from the chair and walked out of the kitchen, followed by his daughter. Within the next quarter hour, they changed into their outdoor clothing, took the list of ingredients Mahaththaya wrote down for them to buy, and were bound for the town.

* * *

She looked at the sky, its blue expanse, cloudless and swallow-less. It was an ideal day to sundry her spices, grind them in the vangediya and mōlgaha, the mortar and pestle her husband had carved out for her from a jackfruit tree root, and bottle them. Picking up a fallen coconut frond, she held it horizontally across her knees and pulled it inward. Crack, it broke in two, unsettling dust and crumbles of dried leaf, frightening a moth to flight. With her feet, she pressed one half of the frond to the ground and with her hands, she straightened its leaves till it resembled a kulla, a cane fan winnowing the husk from whole rice grains.

“Hansi, can you get me the chilies?” She nodded toward the four baskets she had kept under the porch. Even before her words mixed with the air, Hansi brought the baskets to her, two at a time.

“What are you thinking about? Is something wrong?” she inquired, concerned because Hansi had been deep in thought for a while, gnawing her lower lip, her eyebrows raised. She wanted to make sure Hansi was not excluded, uncomfortable, or lonely, the same way her husband’s mother had treated her, not being domineering and watchful, but making her feel at home.

“Nothing, amma. I was trying to imagine what would happen in the evening,” Hansi answered, drawing back her teeth from her lip. “Will Mahaththaya be able to . . . make things alright for akka?”

“Mahaththaya is a skilled kattadiya, well-versed in the occult. More than that, he has morals, he refuses to use his knowledge to harm anyone. If only we could read the anduna! Then, it will show us what is stopping akka from getting married and Mahaththaya will be able to counter that obstacle. If not, he will still do the dehi kepilla to ward off any aswaha katawaha dōsa or evil eyes and mouth, even though it is not the correct remedy.”

“What is an anduna like? Have you seen one?”

“No. All I know is, if you are the right person, it will show you what you want to see, if you have a problem, it will show you a solution,” she said, running her fingers through the dried red chilies, spreading them evenly in the four baskets she had placed on the coconut frond.

Sometime last year, Rukmani—akka’s best friend—lost her wedding ring. She had realized it only when she had been getting ready to go to school on Monday—she had cooked and packed food in a lunchbox, draped her sāree, combed her hair, and had been looking for her

 

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brooch, wrist watch, and ring. In her distress, she had called in a sick day and stayed home to search for it.

The day before Rukmani lost her ring, they had an almsgiving at their place. We were also invited to participate in it—thaththa and I went there early in the morning to help them with preparations—akka came late because she had to draft a lesson plan for school the next day. Rukmani guessed the ring was stolen by someone who attended the almsgiving. You know, it is dangerous to keep your valuables in open spaces for outsiders to see, even in your own house, especially on days you expect guests—you are the host, you have to talk to everyone, make them comfortable, run errands between the dining table and the kitchen—you have no time nor peace of mind to keep track of your valuables.

That was not the first time Rukmani complained about a lost item following an event they had at their place—one time it was Kapila’s wristwatch he had removed in the bathroom, another time it was Rukmani’s hand phone she had left wedged between the cushions of the settee, some money their son had hidden behind a photo frame on the cabinet, an alarm clock Rukmani’s mother had kept on the table in the veranda, so goes the list. On top of being stolen, they never get back the plates and bowls and containers to which they serve food for the guests to take with them. They have very bad luck with items, it is always a loss for them.

Anyway, this time, Rukmani would not stay put—she wanted to see this woman who could read an anduna and catch the thief. I do not blame her—it was her wedding ring after all. Towards the evening, she phoned me to see if I could accompany her and I agreed.

The next morning, after I prepared the meals and sent off akka to school, thaththa drove me to Kapila and Rukmani’s house in the three-wheeler. He did not want me to walk there because if I tired myself too much, my ankles swelled by the evening. You know, every night before going to bed, akka applies Siddhartha Oil around my ankles—during the night, the swell subsides, but returns the following evening.

Kapila and Rukmani’s house is quite close by, a five-minute walk if we were to cut across Nilame’s land and a ten-minute walk if we were to take the cart road. Nilame is not on good terms with us—not that he openly showed any hard feelings, but it has become obvious in his interactions with us. As children, his daughter and two sons used to play with Samadhi and Daham—they shared their toys, took care of each other, and never quarreled. The rift began only when Samadhi and Daham started school—once I asked Nilame’s wife where she sent her three children for English and Scholarship Examination preparation classes, but she refused to tell me. You know, Nilame’s deceased father was one of the two veda mahaththayas in the village, very knowledgeable about ayurvedic medicine, rich, and owned much land—he thought it would disgrace his family if other children went to school and beat his children in studies.

Then there is the cart road, shady with its trees and histories. It is hedged with massive trees on both sides and crisscrossed with gnarled roots and littered with fallen leaves. Long ago, Nanda’s mother came to be possessed by her dead husband—she suddenly fell sick and took to home—she was not herself, she did not comb her hair or change her clothes. When doctors could not diagnose her, the family decided to perform a thovil—it was an elaborate ceremony, all of the village gathered in their garden to witness it. Around dawn, as devil-masked kattadi swirled to the rhythm of yak bera drums, Nanda’s mother let out a loud manly “hoo” and began to dance

 

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herself. Mind you, she walked backwards on that road all the way to the village cemetery before her husband’s spirit left her. Also, a couple of years ago, a man hanged himself there. He was in his fifties, happily married, had two children, drank out of contentment in life. He seemed to be the last person to have a reason to commit suicide, but a man’s face does not always give away his mind, it is a fine mask. At his funeral, I heard from the villagers that suicide runs in his family—his father and an uncle had also hanged themselves to death before I married thaththa and came to live here.

Anyway, we picked up Rukmani at her place and drove to the house where the woman who reads the anduna lives. As Rukmani and I got out of the three-wheeler, a woman showed us into an outer room of the house. Inside was another woman, seated on a mat, her back towards us. She was in a white sāree and her long hair fell loose over her shoulders. Behind her was a halo, probably the light of the oil lamp placed before the anduna, and on the wall above her, a framed painting of Hanuman. “Can you stay out?” she demanded without looking our way. I did not see her face—nobody does—not while she is in that room. Assuming she addressed me, I stepped out, but I was within hearing distance.

“You have lost something, something gold, a ring,” the woman spoke before Rukmani could explain the situation.

“How do you know that?” Rukmani burst out. I was taken aback too.

“Even though you are here, you do not believe in the occult, do you? Do not underestimate these practices, they are hallowed in ancient tradition,” the woman rebuked Rukmani. “I know everything, I see everything. Not even your husband knows that the ring is gone missing. It is just you, me, and the elderly couple outside.”

“Yes, you are right.” That was news for me too, I thought Kapila knew about the ring.

“It is not lost. It is there. A room full of books, a yellow covered book in a foreign language, letters like orderly arranged sticks, among the pages is the ring.”

“Thank you, thank you very much.” Rukmani came out, baffled and impatient to get home to see if the woman spoke the truth. We dropped her home and returned home ourselves.

Later that evening, Rukmani phoned me to say she had not found the ring—the woman was a fraud. I did not know what to think of the woman—I did not want to come to conclusions about her. You know, even more than the woman being a fake, my greater shock would have been if Rukmani found the ring so soon—their house is a mess—they rarely clean it—both of them go to work during the weekdays and take their son to tuition classes during the weekend.

Anyway, days passed and about a week later, Rukmani phoned me again. “Aunty, I found the ring, Kapila found it for me! He was rearranging the storeroom and had felt a lump in a book. There it was!” she rejoiced. “What the woman predicted was right! The ring was in a yellow color book, a feng-shui one with Chinese characters!”

 

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“That is when thaththa and I changed our opinion about the occult. Until then, we thought it was only a gimmick, but no, there is some mysteriously inexplicable truth in it,” she said. “Akka is already thirty-two, for the past ten years she has pined away from love right in front of our eyes. We did everything humanly and religiously possible to console her, but nothing worked. The occult is our last hope.”

Picking up the other half of the coconut frond, she stood it against a coconut palm, hiding away her silent tears from Hansi.

* * *

She sat on the raised garden bed of the ranawarā tree, making patterns with the yellowed leaflets strewn at her feet. She wondered if Daham was still on the bus en route to Jaffna. The last time she phoned him, a recording informed her that he was in a low reception area. Tilting her head sideways, she puffed away a spider swinging on a thread from an overhead branch till it hurriedly landed on the grass and scuttled away. She then picked two final leaflets between her fingertips on either hand and placed them at the end of two curved stems, completing the ringed butterfly she was making. By her side, breaking the silence under the tree, her sister-in-law, Samadhi, snickered.

“What is it, akka?” she asked Samadhi, curious about what amused her so.

“Just . . . Do you see those silhouettes up there?” Samadhi nodded toward the sky.

“You mean that pair of eagles?”

“No, at the top of the rambutan tree.”

“Hmm. I don’t see anything there.”

“You don’t?”

“No, what is it? Is it the lost rilawa monkey family?”

“They are long gone. Look closely.”

She scrutinized the rambutan tree, bathing in the afternoon sun. It was past the season and the tree was all woodgrove green leaves if not for a few blackened and shriveled fruits her father-in-law had not been able to reach with the tallest of his kekkas, a long and thin bamboo stem with a knife tied to one end, and the fruit bats had spared.

“There’s nothing out of the ordinary.”

“I don’t know what exactly they are. Probably gods, at least that’s how I like to think of them. They are sitting amidst the leaves and watching us.”

“You’re joking, no?”

“I’m not! Look, in between those highest two branches!”

“There’s nothing there, just leaves and rotting fruits! Stop joking, akka!”

 

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“Never mind. I sometimes see things no one else can see. Let’s go in, Mahaththaya will be here any moment now.”

She stood up. Part of her thought Samadhi was joking, but the other part believed Samadhi actually saw something. Samadhi was not good at putting on acts for more than a few seconds, she fidgeted and burst into laughter. Besides, Samadhi pointed to the top of the tree, drawing an invisible arc between the two highest branches where she said the silhouettes were, and she was composed all the time with no trace of surprise or fear, as if the situation was déjà vu. She often wondered if Samadhi had a sixth sense because she was devoutly religious, abstained from all animal products, and was close to nature. Whether Samadhi was joking or not, she did not want to linger in the garden any longer.

* * *

He rode his Honda C90 to the Samaranayake house, winding through sunshiny pineapple fields. It was the minor season and farmers were out working, a few spraying pesticides and weedicides from tanks strapped to their backs, some reaping the harvest, and others loading lorries. Looking up from their work, many of them waved to him and he sounded an acknowledging horn. In the grocery shop at the T junction, on a skeletal wooden rack stood pineapples, small, medium, and big ones, hard green, pulpy yellow, and juicy orange ones while from a beam of its roof hung bags of pineapple chunks spiced with red chili powder and salt.

He knew the family since Nimal and Chandra came to him for two sura to protect Samadhi and Daham from aswaha katawaha dōsa. He still remembered putting on the ornamental cases around the children’s necks, both enclosing a bronze talisman strung on a black cord. Over the years, as the family continued to seek his exorcist advice, he grew close to them. He was particularly fond of Samadhi as she always entertained him with her imagination. He watched her grow up, succeeding at school, falling in love, breaking up because her father did not approve of the relationship, and turning down every proposal her parents made thereafter. In the later years, he knew Nimal asked around for the boy to get him and Samadhi married, but he was too late. Having gone almost mad after the breakup, the boy had married some other girl and lost their first child.

“Come in, Mahaththaya, take a seat,” Nimal greeted him the moment he parked the motorcycle under the rambutan tree. “Did you have trouble finding the house?”

“No, I found it alright. I am surprised evil spirits did not try to stop me from getting here which will make my return trip a challenge. You know what it is like.” He referred to the last time he came to the Samaranayake house to do an ārakshawa when, on his way to the ritual, evil spirits conspired against him to miss a turn, ending him up in the next village, and on his way back from the ritual, to pull his bicycle against its forward motion, breaking it. It had been one of those days evil spirits had almost claimed him. Before the final mantra, giving a strand of his hair, he instructed Nimal to burn it in the flame of the coconut oil lamp at his signal. The flame nearly died on that breathless night, delaying Nimal by a couple of seconds. He was thrown back as if zapped by electricity, making him momentarily lose his consciousness.

“Yes, yes. Let us first have a cup of tea. You should be tired after the ride.”

 

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“That is a good idea. At the same time, I would like to start right away, we have to finish our work with the anduna before twilight. So why not I set it up while you make tea?” he suggested, removing his sandals at the door and entering the house. As much as it was ill-omened to consult an anduna at dusk, he was anxious to get home before midnight because travelling alone after dark following occult rituals frightened him out of his wits.

“Do what you see fit, Mahaththaya. Everything you wanted us to prepare is here,” Nimal pointed to a table laden with mini glass bottles, polythene bags, and reed baskets.

“Excellent! Excellent!” he uttered, running his eye over the living room and locating what he needed to set up the anduna.

He reached for the mat leaning against the settee and spread it on the floor. There was ample space in the middle of the living room as all the furniture had been pushed to the wall and clumped together in preparation for the rituals. He then placed a high-backed wicker chair on the mat and dressed it in a white cloth.

“Samadhi, Hansi, will you take this to Mahaththaya? I have to burn a few coconut shells for the dum kabala,” he heard a voice somewhere in the house.

Seconds later, Samadhi and another girl came into the living room, both carrying trays in their hands, taking careful steps. Samadhi served him a comb of ambul bananas and a packet of Maliban Biscuits Gift Selections while the other girl put down her tray on a stool and covered a steaming cup of tea with a saucer.

“You have not met Hansi before, no? This is the new member of our family, our daughter-in-law,” Nimal introduced the other girl.

“So this is Daham’s wife? Welcome to the family, child, welcome!” he answered Hansi’s smile.

Turning back to Samadhi’s tray, he pondered what biscuit he should pick, cream-trapped thick Chocolate or Custard, cream-sandwiched airy Wafers, or the cream-less thin variety, and settled for the sugar-sprinkled moist Nice. At Samadhi’s coaxing that her father cut the comb just that morning, he plucked a banana in his left hand. Between bites out of the biscuit and the banana, he drank the ginger tea, enjoying the tickle of sweetness, sourness, and savory on his taste buds.

He then resumed setting up the anduna, emptying his mind of all other thought and lapsing into a silent devotion. On the white-clothed chair, he arranged nine betel leaves pointed side out and flowers of nine colors pedicel side out in two neat rows. From his fanny pack, he finally took out the anduna, a small cube with a polished black granite face, stood it against a pocket knife on the betel leaves behind the flowers, and lit a clay oil lamp before it. Asking Samadhi to sit on the mat, he slid the dum kabala under the chair and threw in a handful of sambrani powder in the long-handled shallow metallic cup Chandra had filled with burning coconut shells. As the powder fell on the flameless fire and enveloped the living room in an aromatic smoke, he began to chant gāthā, first in worship of the Buddha, and second in invitation of Anjana and Hanuman to show a solution to the family’s problem.

 

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“Now you may see if you can read it,” he told Samadhi, dipping one of his fingers in the lamp and applying some oil on the face of the anduna. “You see the reflection of the oil lamp’s flame on it? That is where you have to look.”

He stared at Samadhi, her still face, half-open mouth, creased forehead, the light of the oil lamp and its reflection on the anduna mirrored in Samadhi’s two unblinking eyes. He wondered if Samadhi was actually keen on overcoming any obstacle to marriage or if she was going along with the ritual because the mystery of the anduna fascinated her.

“I see nothing. What am I expecting to see?” Samadhi asked, the lights in her eyes exiting at the corner of her right eye.

“A solution to your problem. What is stopping you from getting married?” he replied, pretending to concentrate on Hansi who knelt beside her sister-in-law. He felt thankful to her for being reason for him to avoid what expression may cross Samadhi’s face.

“There is a shape on the anduna like a tree,” Hansi observed, her face dimly brightening in doubtful hope.

He knew it was only a shadow, the way a wrinkle on the black granite caught light, nonetheless he prompted, “What more do you see?”

“Nothing else, but how would I know if I really see something?”

“It will be as if you are watching the television. You will see a sequence of images one after the other like in a drama or film.”

“Can you read an anduna?” Hansi was curious.

“Not me, I was bitten by a dog when I was a boy. My child, how many of us win a lottery in our lives? Being able to read an anduna is like that, it is a gift bestowed upon a select few. There is this one situation which still gives me goosebumps,” he said, his eyes focused on an incident his memory had projected on the blank wall opposite him. Almost unconsciously, he worked his fingers to fold a betel leaf into a package and placed it in his mouth.

Not so long ago, a young man—in his mid-thirties, I suppose—came to see me at home. I had just finished the morning rituals of the shrine adjoining the house and was about to pick up the daily newspaper; I do not feel any inclination to take to heart what the media says nowadays—what with their elusiveness about the eight bodies the police found in the outskirts of Colombo early this year—but out of habit, I want to flick through the paper before breakfast if not read it; old habits die hard, do they not? Back to the young man. “Mahaththaya, I come from Melsiripura. I have a wife and a daughter back home,” he began as soon as I reclined in the armchair on the veranda. Now, I have met many a people in my life, too many that I can read anyone by just looking at them; the young man spoke fast enough for me to realize that he had come regarding an urgent matter, so I encouraged him to go on with an occasional nod and a hmm. “There is this well closer to our house from which we draw water to drink and cook and clean, but since recently, its water stings like kochchi chili. We drained the well twice thinking

 

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that some animal, probably a civet or a squirrel or a mouse, had fallen into it and died, still the water stings. When I told this to my relatives in Kimbulapitiya, they said it could be the work of a demon which had come to reside in the well and suggested I talk to you. Mahaththaya, is it truly a demon? Will he hurt my wife and daughter?” he continued desperately. Now, I had learned from my late father—who passed this profession to me—that demons do such notorious work; what my father had said matched the young man’s narrative; even without seeing the well, I could tell I was about to deal with a demon, but I did not want to frighten him more, did I? I asked him not to worry because I will go with him to treat the well and invited him to take a seat while I got dressed and locked up the house—my wife had gone to the village pola that day to get our weekly supply of fruits and vegetables.

It was a solid six and a half hour-journey from my house to his—we took the train from Koggala to Maradana, Maradana to Ganewela, thence a bus to Melsiripura. By the time we reached his house, I was dog-tired; I cannot work as actively as once; I am an old man now, am I not? After politely declining the young man’s wife’s invitation to come into their house—yes, his wife and daughter were home—I inquired of them where the well was as I wished to return to Koggala before nightfall. Now, it was as ordinary as a well could be—the cement outer wall was a newly-built and a tin pail sat on it, the inner earthen wall was level and uninvaded by ferns; I was surprised; it was the first time I was dealing with a demon residing in a well and not knowing what to expect, I imagined the well in ruins—ancient, bricks of the broken outer wall scattered around its mouth, earth of the inner wall crumbling into the waters below, dark as hell, a fold of ferns blocking the sunlight from falling in, but no, this was no haunted well. Relieved, I went directly to work; I drew a pail full of water from the well—out of curiosity, I cupped some in my hands; surely it stung like kochchi chili—cast a mantra over it, poured it back into the well, and assured the young man and his wife that the water will now not sting. I left Melsiripura by the five thirty-bus and got home way past midnight—I always carry with me a key to the house because when I go to work, I do not know when I would come back; it is often in the dead of night and I do not feel like waking up my wife to open the door for me; that day too, she had left a light shining on the veranda, dinner served on the dining table, and gone to sleep.

Time passed—for two days following my journey to Melsiripura, I was confined to home as I developed a mild fever—and on the third day, the same young man appeared at my doorstep. “Mahaththaya, the mantra did not work, the water stings as ever,” he complained. Now that was strange, I thought; as ordinary as the well was, the demon in it seemed to be a monstrous artful one; I was no match for him, defeating him was not within my capacity; I needed support, I had to summon a more powerful spirit and I could only think of one—Hanuman. I promised the young man that I would come to Melsiripura the next day with six more men and asked him to return home for the day.

So, we made the six and a half hour-journey—myself, my nephew, two friends who were also kattadi, and three neighbors. I set up the anduna just like this—of course, that is how I was going to summon Hanuman; my late father had advised me never to evoke the deceased with this shastra he bequeathed to me because they could cause trouble—and instructed the young man to look to it. Kneeling on the floor, he gazed and gazed but saw nothing; his wife sat beside him but she too saw nothing; then suddenly, “I see something . . . a figure . . . walking towards us,” said the little girl—she was standing on tiptoes behind her parents and looking to the anduna over their heads; we were shocked. It was good that she could see; my question was though how I

 

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could communicate with Hanuman through her; she was too young, about three years of age. Maybe, I thought, she could simply repeat what I say.

First things first, I had to know who the figure was; I asked the little girl to describe what she saw; we do not want malevolent spirits—especially hungry ghosts—to get involved, do we?

“It’s . . . a walking monkey.” She squinted through the flame of the clay oil lamp to its reflection on the anduna. “He’s wearing clothes . . . and carrying a mace in one of his hands.” That was unmistakably the monkey god; just to confirm, I told her to ask him to wave a white flag if he was truly Hanuman.

“Oh, he produced a white flag out of thin air . . . he’s waving it!” she replied amusedly. It was now safe to talk about the matter; I told her to ask him who had taken control over the well.

“He says it’s a . . . demon.” At the mention of the demon, her initial excitement wore off, she was frightened; I bade her not to worry because Hanuman was there and told her to ask him why the demon did not bend to the mantra.

“He says the demon demands a sacrifice,” she replied confusedly, not knowing what a horrendous thing a sacrifice was. At this, I flew into a temper as if I was speaking directly to the demon; I give no sacrifice, I never have and never will. When I cooled down, I told the little girl to ask him if he could chase away the demon.

“He says he can!” Her face lit up. “He’s at a well now . . . it’s our well! Oh no, he jumped into it . . . but he’s out again . . . with another figure . . . a big, black demon with red lips and long teeth . . . Hanuman is dragging the demon by his hair!” she replied, impressed by the monkey god’s heroic act. “They’re on the top of a cliff now! Oh, Hanuman kicked the demon in his back . . . the demon is falling off the cliff . . . I can’t see the demon anymore!” She gave a triumphant glance at me. Sighing with relief, I told her to ask him if the demon would return.

“No never, he says, the demon is dead!” she replied, smiling from ear to ear. I asked her to thank him for driving away the demon.

“He’s leaving.” Her tone was sad. “He’s walking away.” I snuffed out the flame with a wave of my hand and tied a pirith noola around the little girl’s right wrist—it will protect her from her own wandering mind and keep away nightmares, I thought.

With that, the demon was gone, but Hanuman was gone too; this meant the young man’s house was vulnerable, another spirit could come to reside there or worse still, harm him, his wife, and daughter any time. That is why I went along with six more men, to do an ārakshawa to keep evil spirits away from the family. By the light of a torch, we dug eight holes on the young man’s property—four at the corners of his house and another four at the corners of his garden; I then buried in each hole a miniature clay pot holding a piece of quartz, a handful of sea sand, and a copper coin, all bound by a mantra—just the way I did an ārakshawa to this very house years ago.

 

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“Last month, I went to Kahawatta for a kodivina kepilla. A rich gem dealer had done black magic to make a poor farmer leave his ancestral home so that he can dig up a gem mine on the farmer’s land. The farmer had got to know about me through the young man from Melsiripura. I heard from him that the young man had not had any trouble from evil spirits since.” He woke from his trance to Samadhi and Hansi’s awed faces.

“Mahaththaya, it is already past six o’clock,” Chandra reminded him. “Should we prepare for the dehi kepilla now?”

“Yes, yes! Samadhi, take a mat outside and unroll it under the ranawarā tree,” he said, getting up from his low stool.

On the porch, he placed another high-backed chair, dressed it in a white cloth, arranged on it nine bulath leaves-nine types of flowers-nine coins-nine limes-a giraya-incense sticks-a clay oil lamp, and recited the relevant mantra. He then instructed Samadhi to sit or lie comfortably on the mat, Chandra to gather the limes in her hands and keep an eye on any flying halves, Nimal to make him loosen his grip on the giraya if his body uncontrollably stiffens and make him drink water if he unnaturally sweats. In return, Chandra and Nimal advised Hansi to stay near the door.

It was an eerie night, the celestial lights mere outlines of yellow and blue under thick clouds, the only glow in the front part of the house being the flame of the oil lamp and the tips of the incense sticks. He sat on his haunches on the mat, a posture he had realized over the years to be both strong and vulnerable in the face of evil spirits. Muttering a mantra, he held a lime in between the jaws of the giraya over Samadhi’s head, cut it, and dumped the two halves in a water-filled bucket. A second and a third followed over her right and left shoulders, spraying her face with their juice and filling the air with their fresh smell. At the end of the ritual, all the lime halves would be dropped into a mixture of five medicinal oils boiled over a fire made of wood from five citrus trees.

At the fourth lime over her right hand, she slightly coughed and at the fifth over her left hand, she went from sitting to lying. His hands stiffened and Samadhi’s body writhed in a phlegm-retching fit. Gathering his strength, he cut a sixth and a seventh over her right and left knees, but from then on, Nimal had to remove the giraya from his grip and make him drink water after each lime. By the last two limes over her feet, she lay unconscious, her face peaceful, her breathing steady. The evil spirit had left her.

* * *

She gazed at the kanappuwa, its octagonal table top with carved panels on all eight sides, the same flower and leaves pattern flowing into one another, its four slender legs with curved out feet. Her father did not chew betel, but a brass bulath heppuwa stood on it for as long as she could remember, stacks of crisp betel leaves, dried tobacco leaves, areca nuts, a packet of lime paste, and a giraya in the shape of a swan arranged atop of it. Time and again, during the past five years, she had served the bulath heppuwa to potential bride grooms and their parents, knowing all the time that her heart would not open again.

Her eyes wandered to Guru Geethaya, a translation of Chingiz Aitmatov’s Duishen she had let lie on the kanappuwa for the past two days, its dreary cover of Duishen leading the horse-

 

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backed Altynai into the dusk. She thought of the many times she had read it, on her bed as sepālika buds opened beyond her window panes shut against the night, a candle light fluttering on its pages and shadows of moths dancing on the wall, feeling her heart leap when Duishen and Altynai are together, ache when child marriage and war tear them apart. It had been Saminda’s present to her, the only souvenir she had of him.

Then it began to rain, digging a thousand small craters in the courtyard like the holes sea mollusks burrowed themselves in before the night’s tide ebbed. It scattered grains of sand around the outer edge of the veranda like dried up salt stains above a ship’s waterline. The wind littered the courtyard with leaves, green, separated from tress before they lived their full course. It tore along the veranda, knocking on closed doors and howling when not let in.

On the kanappuwa, the pages of Guru Geethaya riffled and came to a rest. Whips of rain and wind freckled it with dots which soon merged with each other to become a shapeless moist patch. Dampness clung to it, making pages stick together and letters blur. She picked up the book and held it to her heart. “But I never went back to Kurkureu, I had no news of Duishen, and with time his image became for me a precious relic kept in the silence of a museum,” she murmured through tears, the words she would never find in the book again.

 

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Surging Sea 26 December 2004, Coastal Railroad: Southwest of Sri Lanka

Whoosh-uh-whush-uh-whoosh-uh-whush. Chooga-chooga, chooga-chooga, chooga-chooga, chooga-chooga.

Piumi woke up from her nap to a net of white zigzagging iron bars. Sleepily, she looked around, trying to figure out where she was. Kalutara North. She was on the first truss over the Kalu River. In between the light and darkness of her drooping eyelids, she recalled she was on the Samudra Devi, the Matara-bound train from Colombo. Her compartment was still closely packed and the seat beside her was still occupied by the woman with a mound of saree boxes from Apsaras, Ganesh, and Sarita, the textile emporiums in Pettah.

It was one of the busiest holiday seasons, Unduvap Poya and a weekend adding to the yearly hullabaloo over Christmas and New Year. Foreseeing the crowd of people waiting to retreat to their hometowns from the city on the many trains transiting at the Fort Railway Station, she had boarded the train in Maradana at 6.40am with only a few scores of passengers. By 7.12am when it had left Fort, the train had been overflowing with thousands of people, some of them sitting on seats with their children and shopping heaped on their laps, and more of them standing in aisles and footboards with their parcels squeezed into the overhead luggage racks.

Piumi stretched herself and sat up straight, tiding her hair with the right hand while concealing a train of yawns behind the left. She was then wide awake, determined not to doze off once more. She had to drink in the view of the sea for she had stayed away from it six full months. If possible, she had to commit it to memory because, upon her return to Kelaniya at the end of the three-week vacation, she would miss it again for an uncertain period of time.

She looked forward to going home, but since her mother phoned her at her bordering place two days ago, she had been feeling anxious. Her mother told her that a friend of her father had proposed her his son. “You’re already in your third year at university,” she said. “Just meet the boy and see if you like him. If you do, we can match the horoscopes and accept the proposal, but if you don’t, no one will force you to marry him,” she promised. What will happen? Will I like him? Will he like me? What if I like him but he doesn’t like me back? She had been thinking about all the possibilities.

Whoosh-uh-whush-uh-whoosh-uh-whush. Chooga-chooga, chooga-chooga, chooga-chooga, chooga-chooga.

Breaking Piumi’s preoccupation, the train pierced through the wind that whistled in and out of the iron railing of the second truss. On two rusty and rickety stays brazed to the frame, the rolled-up sash shuddered with a familiar clatter. Instinctively, she turned away from the currents of air that blew through the window like a harmattan that stirs up crumbs of rust in place of sand while her hands flitted about to catch the tufts of hair that whipped her face.

From the window across the aisle, she imagined she could see the dagoba of the Kalutara Bodhiya on the far bank of the Kalu River. White like fossilized branch coral and round like a coconut half-buried in sand, it was gazing at the waters below in an eternal meditation. As a

 

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toddler, she had often worshipped the Bodhiya with her parents on their way home from her uncle’s house in Thebuwana. During the first few visits, she had been awestruck, grappling with the unusual. The dagoba was so vast that when she stood at its platform she could not see its pinnacle like how she could not discern an end to the sea from the shore. Besides, people could enter its dome, hollow like an oyster if not for the miniature dagoba that sat at its center like a pearl. Inside, there was rarely a moment of silence; pitter-patter, pitter-patter, pitter-patter and hoo, hoo, hoo, children ran and shouted, excited about something she could not fathom. On another day, she had spotted a pigeon squeeze into the dome through a space in a ventilator window and walk on the sill to its nest. “Thaththa,” she had called out to her father to share her discovery with when she had heard her own voice reverberate, thaththa, thaththa, thaththa. It had been her first lesson in echo.

I’m finally going home, she murmured to herself, overcome with a feeling of nostalgia for the years she spent in the embrace of her parents in their house on the beach and the sea whose waves broke in their backyard. Under the weight of the memories that the familiar environment stirred in her, she sank into the seat, sniffling her nose and widening her eyes to contain the liquid emotions that threatened to escape her.

* * *

Kalutara South. Beyond the thick hedge of kaduru trees and ging pol palms, the Kalu River was playing hide and seek with the train as it flowed parallel to the railroad on its left and the strip of land which prolonged its course on its right. When it finally revealed itself, it was already at the estuary—ripples where it became the sea, its deep black waters disturbed to muddy brown by streaks of agitated sand; two rose gold peninsulas, one covered spring-vigor green with taccada bushes and the other capped sun-glint white with hotel buildings; the sea a mirror for the sky, the heavenly light of the rising sun and the grey blue of the cumulus. She took in a deep breath, filling her lungs with the estuary air, the smell of marine mollusks washed ashore while they were still dying within their shells.

* * *

Katukurunda. The 1928 railroad disaster. Piumi had often heard about the head-on collision of the Matara-Maradana express train with the Colombo-Aluthgama slow train from her paternal grandmother who had lost her twin sister in the accident. “Nangi was born a little later than me, but she was ahead of me in everything else, she was the first to walk, first to talk. In appearance, we were very much alike, but in character, we were opposites. She was outgoing and adventurous where I was shy and timid,” her grandmother would begin. “Nangi loved to ride train engines and said she wanted to become an engine driver when she grew up. Our father had a close friend, a Burgher, by the name of David Henry Crowe. He drove the express train from Matara to Maradana and once in a while, our father asked him to take nangi in the engine. It happened to be one of those days. You have her smile. Every time I see you, I can’t help but think of her,” her grandmother would conclude, wiping away tears with one of her many flower-printed white handkerchiefs.

Piumi looked down at her wrist watch, a present from her grandmother for getting into a state university. That morning as she was putting it on, it slipped between her fingers and cracked its crystal like the aerial view of a hurricane. Reflected in the glass, she caught sight of

 

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herself, only her mouth appeared familiar, the other features distorted, not her. Maybe she did have the smile of the grandmother she never knew.

* * *

Payagala North. The train was passing through a coconut grove, coconut husks secured to the trunks with coir rope, foot to top of every palm. An elderly man in a sarong tied above his knees was climbing a tree, gracefully, keeping his hands and feet left after right on the husky rungs. Strapped around his waist were a carved out and tanned bottle gourd labu ketē, a wooden box, and a coil of coir rope. He was a toddy tapper.

At the top of the trees, men were at work, walking cautiously on leaf stalks. With the thalanayas they carried in their wooden boxes, some were beating the inflorescence, raining down flowers on the patch of grass below. Others were emptying the sap collected in clay pots left overnight into their labu ketēs and lowering them to the ground with their coils of coir rope. This done, they walked to another tree on the athuras, two-rope bridges connecting all palms in the grove, patterning the sky with checks.

Payagala South. The toddy tappers were back on the ground, fetching the labu ketēs to large wooden barrels placed closer to a dirt road. A group of them was pouring the pale liquid into the barrels, slowly because the froth often blocked their mouths. Another group tied the filled barrels to a few bicycles standing against coconut palms and a third group started cycling along the road.

Maggona. In front of a shed made of clay and thatched with coconut fronds was a line of bicycles loaded with barrels of toddy. A few men were carrying them inside, spilling slightly, leaving a path of foam behind them. It was a kōpi kadē, a boutique selling beetle leaves and confectionaries, bananas and king coconuts, bread and sugar buns, tea and coffee. A sign by the road said, “Rā bomu,” an invitation for passersby to step into the boutique for a coconut shell cup of toddy.

* * *

Beruwala. When Piumi was in grade two, one of her father’s friends had proposed that the two families make a trip to the Barberyn Lighthouse as he had got a few passes. At first, her mother had objected because she thought it was too dangerous to take children to high places, but her father had managed to persuade her with the promise that he would help take care of them.

She did not recall climbing the spiral staircase to get to the top of the lighthouse. Nor did she recall if the lantern room was lit. She remembered how strong the wind was on the widow’s walk and how it threatened to rip off the coconut fronds. She also remembered that her mother held her by her hand while her father carried her brother in his arms till the moment they were back on the ground.

* * *

Hettimulla. Rope makers. A pungent smell hung in the air, coconut husks rotting in square pools of murky water laying in pinnate shadows. A woman was husking coconuts by one

 

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of the pools: picking a coconut at a time from a pile standing against a palm, bringing it down several times with force on the pointed edge of a pol ula stuck into the ground, and throwing the separated husks into the pool. By another pool was an old woman, placing soaked-to-grey husks on a log and beating them with a stone rod. A husk flew in her way as a young woman straightened up in the pool and started to wade in the waist-deep waters. At the final stage of rope making, on the grass lawn away from the coconut palms and the pools, two women were feeding fiber into a bicycle-like machine, walking backwards as the rope lengthened, while another woman turned its handle, keeping its wheel incessantly spinning.

* * *

Aluthgama. Growing up, Piumi had always liked the Kande Viharaya because it was located on a hillock, unusual for the coastal belt. This liking, later on, had turned to curiosity, then to mystery, unsolved to this day.

Two days before the Ordinary Level Examination of grade eleven, she went to temple with her parents and brother to solicit Lord Buddha’s and God Ganesha’s blessings for her success in the exam. After worshipping the Buddha, they were walking towards the edifice that housed the shrine rooms of the gods and goddesses when she stopped to look closely at its peculiar architecture.

For the one-storied building, its main entrance with three archways leading to inner chambers was exaggeratedly tall, giving it the appearance of a church. It was painted white, but the hollows in its engravings were blackening with dust and moss. The sculpture that adorned the main entrance gave the building make-believe stories—a second with three unopenable doorways and a third with an ornate pediment. Over the three archways and in the center of the pediment was the same statuette, a lion and a horse standing on their hind legs and holding a shield with their front paws, the British coat of arms.

For days following this observation, she had been troubled by the oddity of finding colonial architecture at a Buddhist temple. It had bothered her more as the temple was away from Colombo, Galle, and Kandy, the strongholds of the colonists. She had wondered where else they spread their tentacles to, unnoticed in day-to-day life.

* * *

Bentota. The train traversed the Bentota River on a truss to the left while the Galle Road ran on a truss to the right. Once on land, it crossed the road through traffic and hotel buildings to rattle by the sea.

On her fifth birthday, Piumi had been to Club Bentota with her parents for a wedding ceremony, leaving her mischievous two-year-old brother with her maternal grandparents. In a navy blue satin dress with a powder white lace color and a pair of black court shoes with colorful rings on its vamp, there was a photograph of her in an album at home, seated on a wooden stool, one leg over the other, fingers wrapped around the stem of a rose. Every time her parents came upon it, they remarked, “Chooty duwa, you looked like a Japanese girl back then.” In the first year of university, when she banged her hair and her narrow eyes drowned in the fringe, her parents joked in earnest, “Chooty duwa, you’re not our biological child. We adopted you. Your real parents were from Japan.”

 

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She did not recall the hotel or the sea town from the wedding ceremony. In the later years, she pictured them through a Juergen Schreiber postcard: the river flowing to the ocean along a chasm its currents had carved on the earth’s surface, the hotel’s restaurant jutting out into the waters, and the waves of the sea thrashing the armor of rocks of the islet at the river’s mouth.

* * *

Induruwa. “Mālu, mālu. Isso, dello, thalapath, kelawallo, hālmesso,” a fishmonger was calling, announcing his presence in the neighborhood. He had stopped his thepel ninety bike in front of a house, opened the lid of the wooden box tied to its rear rack, and put down the cutting board on the edge of the road. Taking out a fish from the box, he chopped off its head, tail, and fins with a manna knife and cut the rest into chunks, weighing the pieces on a hand scale hanging from the box. He wrapped the chunks in a page of newspaper, bleeding with the butchery and the blood on his hands. Then he handed the parcel to a woman, making the sign of the cross with the pay clenched in his hand before he placed the money in a knot on his sarong. As he rode away, a pariah dog began to devour the left-behind head, tail, and fins of the fish, greedily, morsels of gut flying out of its snapping mouth.

Maha Induruwa. The way the fishmonger made the sign of the cross, Piumi knew that it was his first business of the day and that a fishing boat had returned to a nearby shore with a rich harvest of fish. She pictured a group of bare-chested men heave the boat up on the beach while another group hauled the mādela net. Insensitive to the flitting and flopping of the fish, they pulled the mādela away from the water, leaving a trail of scales shimmering in the sunlight, alluring a murder of crows to swoop down. Some men unloaded the big fish in the boat, carrying them by their tails and laying them on the sand. Others picked the small fish entangled in the mādela and put them in separate baskets. So began the lellama market where the fishmonger might have purchased his fish.

* * *

Kosgoda. The Sea Turtle Conservation Project on the beach bordering the Galle Road. Piumi could not see it from the train, but she was almost certain that its low, long building looked the same as ever because over the past thirteen years she could recall, only its paint had changed from chalk white to escapade green and its roof from woven coconut fronds to asbestos sheets.

During twelfth grade, when all students had been required to do individual projects, she had chosen to research into sea turtles in Sri Lanka. She had decided on the topic by accident: one weekend, she had been putting away some books from a previous grade when she had found among their pages a photograph of her kindergarten-self standing against a wall that read “Kosgoda Sea Turtle Conservation Project.” The next day, she had confirmed her class teacher her topic.

She was then a regular visitor at the conservatory, observing the turtles, making notes, taking photographs, and volunteering. Kingdom: Animalia, phylum: Chordata, class: Reptilia, order: Testudines, suborder: Cryptodira, clade: Panchelonioidea, superfamily: Chelonioidea. She used to often wonder how these four-legged, shelled, beautiful creatures compared with the spineless, disgusting slytherins of the Reptilia class.

 

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In the semi-darkness of the building were a dozen water-filled cement tanks, each of them home to turtles of different species and sizes—

Chelonia mydas. Green Turtle. Kola kesbewa. Named after the shy green fat underneath its carapace, a result of its diet of sea grasses. Its flesh is used to cook turtle soup in haute cuisine. The most common of the five turtles found on the island as they lay eggs several times a season.

Eretmochelys imbricata. Hawksbill Turtle. Pothu kesbewa. Derives the name from its curved beak. The shell is coffee brown and patterned with sandstorm yellow rays. Poached for its shell with which combs and a variety of decorative items are made, it is identified as a critically endangered species of turtles.

Caretta caretta. Loggerhead Turtle. Olugedi kesbewa. As the name suggests, it is large-headed which makes it the most easily recognizable turtle around the world. Rarely found on the island as it often nests on the East Coast of America. Has a mahogany brown carapace.

Lepidochelys olivacea. Olive Ridley Turtle. Batu kesbewa. Named after its olive green shell, it is hunted for its meat and hide. The most abundant turtle of all five oceans, it visits the island yearly as it is one of the few countries it lays eggs on.

Dermochelys coriacea. Leatherback Turtle. Dara kesbewa. The largest living turtle and the only species with a thin but tough rubbery skin—black with white spots and raised into seven vertical ridges—instead of a carapace. In the brink of extinction due to environmental pollution and fishing activity.

Those days, there was no greater bliss for Piumi than caring for the turtles at the conservatory. They were often disabled adults or adapting young ones and, together with the volunteers, she cleaned their tanks and fed them with small fish or sea weed. Once in a while, they found a turtle’s track on the beach leading to a nest from the previous night. Carefully, they dug the sand, collected the eggs, and reburied them in the netted hatchery of the conservatory so that they would be safe from poachers and predators. After about two months, when the eggs hatched and baby turtles were ready to tend to themselves, they sent them off to sea, watching over them till they disappeared among the waves. She still remembered the softness of the creamy white, ping pong ball-sized eggs and the roughness of the baby turtles’ flippers as they took their first steps on her outstretched palms.

* * *

Ahungalla. During elementary school, Piumi had occasionally gotten off this station, every time to go to the same place, the mini zoological garden. She had first visited it as a third grader when her class teacher had assigned the students with a scrapbooking project about commonly seen birds and her mother had suggested that, along with a description, she included an image and a feather of each bird which she could collect at the zoo.

The following Saturday, walking from one aviary to the other, she and her parents gathered feathers that the flapping of birds had swept towards the plastic nets. Luminous green plumage of budgerigars, shimmering purple of jungle fowls, white-spotted on black of guinea fowls, iridescent copper of wild turkeys. Then they came upon the ducks waddling in a corral

 

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fenced with a low iron railing. Scores of feathers littered the area, dozens on the ground, dozens in the pond, all of them smeared with droppings.

“Look there! It just shed a new feather!” Her father pointed at a duck preening at the edge of the pond.

“That’s far away. How are we going to reach it? If we can find a stick . . . ,” her mother trailed off.

“Thaththa, can’t I go get it? Will the ducks peck me?” She was both enthusiastic and fearful.

At that moment, a young man in a yellowing white t-shirt and a pair of shorts interrupted them. “What do you need the feather for, sir? I might be able to help. I work here,” he introduced himself.

“That’s great, thank you! My daughter here needs some feathers for school. We collected a few, but we need more,” her father explained.

“I have a lot of them in my office. Would you like to take a look, sir?” the young man asked her father who readily accepted his offer.

Led by the young man, they walked to his office, a small rectangular building with moss-infested brick walls. He pushed its door open, switched on a light, hurried inside, and parted a curtain hanging over a window at the opposite end of the room. “I wish I could open it, but if I do, we will smell lion and tiger feces,” he apologized. “Please come in.” He paced across his office and took out a large brown paper bag from a cupboard ghosting over a desk and a chair, the only other furniture in the room. “This has all the feathers I collected since I began work here. You can pick what you like,” he told her, emptying its contents onto the desk. He then picked up a newspaper laying on the chair, turned to its middle page, tore it along the crease, folded one sheet of paper the way an origami fan is made, and fished out a stub of a pencil from his trouser pocket. “Pass me what you like. I will sort them out for you in case you forget which is which by the time you get home,” he said.

The young man held up three luscious bicolor contours—a green and red, a blue and yellow, a red and blue. “These are macaws’. The green-winged macaw, blue and yellow macaw, scarlet macaw,” he spelled out as he placed them inside the first fold and scribbled the names amidst the black print of the newspaper.

“Paradise fly-catchers’. This comes from a siwuru hora and that from a suduredi hora,” he gestured to two feathers, one a monk’s robe-colored and the other a disciple’s cloth-colored. He slid them into the second fold and wrote down the names.

Eagles’—rust brown of brahminy kites, chocolate brown of crested serpent eagles, and beige-streaked of mountain hawk-eagles—cream yellow of cockatoos, deep blue of kingfishers, brilliant yellow of black-headed orioles. He continued to arrange the feathers.

Since then, she had been to the zoo twice with her classmates in primary school, discovering the lions, tigers, and cheetahs who her parents seemed to have avoided when they

 

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had taken her there. For an ungraspable reason, she vividly remembered her first trip while her memory of the next two waned with the passing of time. On the book shelf in her bedroom at home, the scrapbook she had made about commonly seen birds still sat: pink-covered; a patchwork of two ducks swimming on hand-drawn blue ripples; for each bird, an image and a feather side by side, a description below.

* * *

Pathegamgoda. On a plot of land bordering the railroad was a scatter of oruwas and motor boats, some standing against logs for support, others overturned. The ground beneath them was littered with anchors, engines, and propellers; bamboo and wood; fishing nets, marine ropes, and sails; all going to waste, corroding, decaying, and crumbling. A metal plate on the top of a shack in a corner read, “Antony’s Boat Repair” in fading paint, speaking of a time when the workshop sounded of hammers to nails and reeked of grease, oil, and wax.

* * *

Balapitiya. In grade nine, Piumi’s parents had taken her and her brother on an excursion to the Madu River Lake. At the dock, her father had negotiated the fee with a boatman and asked him to steer safe, a request made on behalf of her mother who dreaded large bodies of water.

Dawn was breaking over the wetland, breathing life into its beings. A trailing pink hue veiled the panorama, disrupted only by the orange lantern of the rising sun in the sky and the silver mist of the silhouetting trees in the horizon. A gentle breeze stirred ripples in the lake, hiding and unhiding the branches of a fallen tree. Somewhere in the mangrove forest, a dandu lena squirrel leaped a branch, sending a pair of egrets soaring into the air.

“Sir,” the boatman broke the awestruck silence in the boat. “It is too dark yet to see the mangroves. Would you mind visiting the Kothdoowa Island first?”

“Sure, but we will still see the mangroves, no?”

“Yes. What I’m saying is, sir, that we start the tour at the Kothdoowa and end at the mangrove swamps,” the boatman explained.

“Ah! That sounds good!” So began their boat trip on the lake.

With its whitewashed temple buildings and overarching trees, the Kothdoowa rose above the waters, steeped in the history of Buddhism in Sri Lanka. During King Sirimeghvamma’s reign, the temple is believed to have sheltered Lord Buddha’s tooth relic while the Indian Princess Hemamalā and Prince Dantha waited to hear from the king. In the later years, it had been blessed by one of the thirty-two saplings of the Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi in India, brought to Sri Lanka by King Parakramabāhu the Fourth.

On another island, the Sathapahedoowa as small as a five-cent coin, was a two hundred-year-old Hindu temple. Teaching of simplicity, an unknown god resided in the shrine, a single structure of four cement-plastered walls and a combination-style roof, unusually plain and colorless for a Hindu temple.

 

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The Kurundudoowa Island famous for cinnamon. It was home to a family belonging to the Salagama caste, assigned for generations with the cultivation of cinnamon. They diligently practiced their profession—cutting down cinnamon trees and shaving their barks, extracting the inner layers and wrapping them around each other, preserving the quills until they were dried to brown, and taking them to the mainland to be sold.

The boatman then started to steer towards the right bank of the lake, avoiding the stick formations cropping out of the water, isso kotu where fishermen laid nets for prawns. As the boat edged closer to the bank, the family saw scores of waterways leading into the mangrove forest and the next moment, they were sailing along one, barely wide enough for the boat to pass, prop roots on either side, leaves overhead.

At the end of the day, they had returned to the dock, sailing down the sun glitter that stretched before them like a pleated zesty orange pallu of a saree. Ten years after the excursion, two images now flashed across Piumi’s mind: Kothdoowa Island like the Solias Mendis mural of sea-flooded Kelaniya and the waterway like arches of gokkola decorations at a burial ground.

* * *

Andadola. Swaying under the breezy shade of a kadju tree were a palette of colors and a collection of patterns—batik clothes and wall decorations pegged to lines of coir rope. Peraheras, tuskers carrying the tooth relic of Lord Buddha, and Kandyan dancers; elephants, leopards, and peacocks; the Sigiriya maidens, the Isurumuniya lovers, and Sanghamittā Thero with the bō sapling; floral, geometric, and abstract designs in shades of red, purple, blue, green, yellow, and orange.

Kandegoda. In an open shed adjoining a house, a dozen people were busy making batiks. With wax-oozing tjantings in hand, a pair of them were drawing shapes on cloth spread on tables while a few more were tying garments into knots with string and polythene. They then dropped their work in large basins of dye sitting on the veranda, making the others resume their duties. A couple of them took the dyed work out of the basins and hung them on lines of coir rope. The rest dipped the air-dried cloths in a barrel of steaming water and, once free of wax, hung them back on the lines of coir rope.

* * *

Ambalangoda. Wooden masks and puppets. From behind the floor-to-ceiling display windows of mask galleries alongside the town’s narrow street, a host of demons stared at Piumi with their swollen, red-rimmed eyes. She felt something awaken in her, a strange excitement, the same way it did when she first learned about masks as a four-year-old.

One morning, she had been at play in the playhouse her father had built for her in the backyard, draped loosely in a saree her mother no longer wore, a doll put to sleep on a bed she had made out of a cardboard box. She was cooking kompittu, filling one half of a coconut shell with wet sand, turning it upside down on a plank of wood, beating it gently with the other half of the shell, and lifting up the first to find a semicircular heap of sand underneath. She made a few kompittus—one for her, another for her doll, two each for her parents—singing at the top of her voice, “kompittu idiyō, kompittu idiyō, rēta apita bathata kanna, kompittu idiyō.” She was

 

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scooping sand for the last two kompittus for her aunt when she heard a tap, thud thudding, thud thudding, thud thudding.

“Red!” she got up from the squat and tiptoed around the house to the front garden to spy on the red-backed woodpecker who had been hammering a cavity in the thunder-struck coconut palm for the past couple of days. As she rounded the corner, she saw her mother standing at the foot of a ladder, her father on top, nailing a demon’s face to a wall of their unfinished house. It was not Red. “Chooty duwa, what’re you doing here?” her father asked. He and his wife had planned to hang the wooden mask discretely, thinking that it would scare their daughter. “Don’t be frightened, chooty duwa. It is to keep evil eyes and mouth away from the house like this pottu that protects you,” her mother hastily explained, touching the black dot on her forehead. Far from fear, she was fascinated by the mask’s bright colors, pronounced features, and intricate curves. “It’s beautiful,” she said.

That evening, she was seated at her desk, rolling pinches of clay into small balls and strips in between her palms and fingers. “What are you making, my little artist?” her aunt who had come home from work asked her and she showed her the mask she had been molding. “My! What’s this?” her aunt exclaimed, her eyes dilating with horror. “Aiyo nendi, you’re like a kid! It’s the mask that’s hanging outside!” she replied mockingly. “Mask? What mask? Oh . . . the mask!” Her aunt burst into laughter, part at the unpredictability of her niece, part in relief that the child was not possessed. “Do you like masks that much? Would you like to visit a mask workshop? You know, a place where masks are made?” her aunt asked and she was thrilled beyond words. After she promised her mother that she would not break anything or touch any tools or trouble her aunt, she was allowed to visit the Ariyapala & Sons Mask Museum in Ambalangoda. Back then, she could not even neatly write the Sinhalese alphabet, but she learned the names of all the masks—the eighteen sanni masks used in the treatment of diseases by causing a counteractive illness; the twelve kolam masks worn in the traditional theater; and the rāksha masks caricaturing the demon tribe of ancient Sri Lanka. From the train, she now saw the most popular of the lot.

Gini rāksha. His face chili red, eyebrows and ears—like leaflets of the palāpethi Sinhalese ornament—coriander brown, tinged with lime green. He bore his fangs, two in the front between which his tongue hung out, and two on either corner of his mouth. A throng of crackling fire about his head, its flames flickering in turmeric yellow and saffron orange.

Nāga rāksha. Crowned with a quiver of entangled cobras, a large snake in the middle, six medium ones on its flanks, and three small ones beneath. On his fiery red face his nostrils flared—like a sambar deer in combat with a trespasser on its territory. Tongue out, two fangs at the ends of his otherwise even rows of teeth.

Mayura rāksha. His sandalwood orange eyebrows—like two olinda seeds—against his henna green face. His mouth wide open to stick out his tongue between his straight teeth hedged with two fangs. A peacock perched on his head while two others flocked beside the first, all on display of the eyes on their trains.

Garā rāksha. Coronated with three cobras ready to strike, at their sides, two others coiling around withering sal flowers. His oval-shaped face, part raw green, part soft yellow—like

 

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a wetakeiya fruit plucked before ripening. Under his bulbous nose, his lips stretched into a crooked smile, exposing his two long, curved fangs.

Gurulu rāksha. He was a mythical bird, the garuda, with a wood red curved beak, downy and a tuft of two feathers on his face—like a crested hawk eagle, only more colorful. Winding around his bill, a distressed cobra, his sworn enemy and prey. On his head, a four-tiered crown adorned with folds of flowers and leaves as befitting the king of birds.

Maru rāksha. A black dwarf in a turban and dhoti stood on his head, holding to a downward vine. His face with two Sinhalese ornamental lotuses horizontally and vertically symmetrical—like japan jabara flowers afloat in a waterway. A sneer on his lips to show off his tongue, teeth and two fangs. He waved at her.

Piumi sat in a trance, locked in an inner struggle to match her slow brainwaves to the speed at which the visions passed. When she finally caught up, she put her head out of the sash to locate the absurd mask, but she was too late, the gallery was already behind her. A waving mask? Why would it wave? How could it wave? Her head swam with questions. It was the first time ever she was frightened by a mask.

9.18 am. Past the town, the train slowed down and came to a halt at the Ambalangoda Railway Station. The terminal was thrown into mayhem: a gang of porters standing on the platform rushed towards the front of the train and the station master, accompanied by his deputy, stormed out of the control room commanding, “Hurry up now! We haven’t got all day to unload the carriage!” Amidst the chaos of voices that shouted, “Catch this!” “Be careful there!” “Pull that cart over here!” and the clank of metal and the rumble of wheels, Piumi heard the phone in the control room ring several times. 9.22 am. The train jolted into motion and started to pull out of the station. As it chugged along the platform, she saw a cart, wooden except for the two van tires that supported its weight, stacked with an overload of clay pots of curd.

Did I actually see what I think I saw? Maybe not. Maybe I imagined it. Her mind lapsed into quandary again.

* * *

Akurala. Piumi knew that the Maru rāksha stood for the fear of death and death itself. What does that mean? Does he make people die? Or does he warn people of impending death? she puzzled. Am I going to die? No, that can’t be. I shouldn’t let my mind wander, she resolved, first shaking, then nodding her head.

Kahawa. I have to think about this logically. Let me see, she talked to herself in her mind. In ancient times, people believed that they fell sick when demons entered their bodies. The Maru rāksha causes the fear of death and death, but the Maru rāksha mask is used in the Sanni Yakuma to cure patients afflicted with these two maladies. A kattadiya, an occult practitioner with the knowledge of the workings of demons, summons the Maru rāksha to where the patient is, makes offerings to him, and holds him to the promise that he would leave the patient’s body. In return, the demon performs his dance, keeps his promise, and leaves the patient’s body. Technically, the Maru rāksha is a bad sign while the Maru rāksha mask is a good sign. Is that right? I don’t know. Even with the facts, she was not sure if her reading of the waving mask was accurate.

 

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* * *

Thelwatta. I’m getting off at the next station. Thaththa or malli will be there to pick me up. Everything will be alright. I opened my backpack, fished out the water bottle, and gulped down three quarters of it, realizing for the first time how thirsty and hungry I was. As I capped the bottle while drinking small amounts of the water I had tanked in my mouth, I looked around, noticing for the first time, that all seats in the compartment were occupied.

The train braked and came to an unexpected stop. Strange. We can’t have reached Hikkaduwa yet, we should be around Peraliya. The train doesn’t usually stop here unless an emergency. I knitted my brows in confusion. I stored the water bottle back in my bag and craned out of the sash to see what was wrong. On the signal post by the railroad, the red light was on and people were running across the track in front of the train. Is it an accident?

The passengers grew restless as the train sat motionless for minutes. Those in window seats pressed their faces against closed sashes or squeezed themselves through open sashes to get the view beyond the engine. “What do you see? Is it an accident? Is someone dead?” those seated next to them questioned. “No, just lots of people running across the railway line.” A young man in the front stood up followed by many others in the carriage. They went to the door, scanned about, and inquired what was going on. “It’s the sea, it’s coming in!” a voice answered. The direction the men looked and the voice drifted, it seemed someone was standing to the left, immediately outside the compartment. “What do you mean?” the men asked in shock. “This morning the sea receded, but now it’s coming back, it’s coming inland! Hey, hey, it’s pointless running! Stand against the train, it’s strong! We’ll be safe here!” the voice called out. What is he talking about?

Before I saw it, I heard it. SshhhhSHHHH. One moment, a muddy wave as high as four feet was rolling towards the train and the next moment, it swept over the compartment deck, leaving sand and coconut leaves on the uneven floor like eels in a tide pool. “What’s happening? Is it truly the sea? But how come waves rise on land?” everyone in the carriage exploded into talk. “That’s what I told you! Get into the train! Hurry!” the voice from before shouted. At that, children, women, and men drenched in water started to clamber up to the compartment, making the men standing at the door retreat to their seats. What is going on?

Over the nervous chatter of adults and piercing cries of children, I heard another noise. HooooHOOOO. A wall of water, grey and black, was scudding across the land. I did not know what happened first, me flinging off the seat and landing on my right leg, or water filling into the carriage, or the train toppling. The pressure of water pushed me upward and I gasped for breath while my hands searched for something to grab onto. The compartment was not fully flooded; it was floating in the water, like corpses, like debris, like me.

I held on for dear life to a handrail. My hands were becoming useless. A burning pain was shooting through them of having to clasp the handrail to keep myself from drowning. Under the water, my right leg was limp and my left leg felt in vain for a foothold. I suspected that the fall had broken my right leg. When something fleshy brushed against me, I quickly moved away from it lest it was a corpse and tried to stay as still as I could.

 

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Time froze. My strength was waning and with it, my determination to live and my hope of life. I knew the darkness between the roof of the train and the surface of the water would soon engulf me.

 

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The Princess who Floated in the Sea 200 BC, Kelaniya, Capital of Māya Rata: Thambapanni

The darkness was soothing like the shade of the nā tree that once sheltered Devi from the first rain of the monsoon season. Under the weight of the raindrops, its crown drooped like the pendent inflorescences of a kithul palm. Its aged silver boughs covered thick with powder blue to moss green leaves often gave way to waterlily pink to clay brown flushes like the color palate of a mural painter in a viharaya. Where the foliage thinned, misty silver twigs bore cream yellow fruits and floral white blossoms like the ornaments the painter filled monochrome backgrounds with. Pouring down the tree’s lowest layer of leaves in a thousand vertical streamlets, the rain enclosed Devi in a cascade.

A gust of wind blew through the curtain of water that poured before Devi. It curled around her like her pet fawn, sending a shiver through her body. Instinctively, she shrank and bundled herself up with her hands to keep away the cold. For the first time in her life, she felt lonely despite the luxuries that surrounded her day after day. She wished there was someone who loved her with his life. Someone who would protect her from the rain. Someone who would try to screen its spray with the back of his hand and in failing, would put his arms around her to keep her warm. She let out a sigh.

Devi wondered if it was the same feeling of loneliness that made her queen mother turn her affections towards her paternal uncle, Ayya-Uttika. Was it love? Did they yearn for each other so much that they put their status and reputation in jeopardy? Did they want to be with each other so much that she betrayed her husband, he his brother, and both of them their king? Was it a love so deep that they even risked their lives for it? The stranger to love Devi was, she could not understand the relationship between her mother and uncle.

It was the month of Bak, the most plentiful time of the year. Just that morning, having halted on its way from the Meena Rashiya to the Mesha Rashiya, a golden yellow sun shone in the middle of a cerulean blue sky like a blazing hulu aththa that illuminate the morning mist. A soft breeze combed the copper brown stubble of reaped paddy fields, making them sway like the ripples on the surface of a rock pool. Strewn with amethyst purple bo witiya flowers around which wasps hummed, meadows glowed grasshopper green like the velvety moss that cling to the rocky bottom of the pool.

Atop the trees, squirrels wandered from bloom to bloom, fruit to fruit, and nut to nut, weaving an invisible web. Perched on the tips of cardinal red erabadu flowers, raven black male koha birds wooed the auburn brown females with a chorus of “koho koho koho” like the ballads palace wandi battas sing in praise of the king. A pair of kaha kurulla birds, aureolin yellow in the plumage and jet black in the head, wings and tail, searched for termites in the lemon yellow ahala flowers that dangled like the nest colonies of wadu birds. Amidst the late-ripened coral orange to vermillion red kaju fruits, swarms of butterflies reposed on their journey to Sri Pada mountain to worship the footprint of the Buddha.

Then the rain poured down, thick and heavy, interrupting the celebrations of nature and hailing the end of the season of abundance. A blanket of charcoal grey clouds palled the earth like the smoke that hung in the air when farmers set fire to their harvested henas. Across the sky, cyan blue lightning flashed like the cracks on the bed of a dried-up water tank and thunder

 

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rumbled like the “boom” of the geta beraya drum that the royal messenger hits before he delivers news from the palace to assembled villagers. Between the streaks of lightning, a few raindrops reached ground with a “pat pat pat” like the dew on the grass that gracefully slides from one blade to the other. It soon picked up though with an interminable “hooooo” like a shower of mora flowers that falls as rilawa mammals leap from tree to tree.

When Devi had first learned about her queen mother and uncle’s affair from palace maids who had been gossiping in the corridor outside her chambers, fear had washed through her. Did my uncle wish to usurp the throne? Was he planning to assassinate my father, marry my mother and become king? Was he using my mother to claim the throne? What would then become of my mother? What would happen to me? On a whim, she had asked Rathi to secretively find out the whereabouts of her uncle. Yet later she had reflected, what can I possibly do even if I get to know where he is? Warn my father? Maybe he already knows about everything and is taking precautions. Maybe he had already killed my uncle.

Taken over by loneliness, Devi now thought, Did my mother ever love my father and me, her only daughter? Her eyes burned with tears. She knew that she will never find answers to her questions and she was not sure if she wanted to know them either. She imagined her mother standing at the only window in the room where she was held prisoner, looking out at the rain and hoping that her lover would come rescue her. Devi shook her head to dispel her train of thought like a wet bird that shakes off the water from its feathers before it takes flight.

“Princess, is something bothering you?”

Devi started at the sudden voice. She had forgotten that Rathi, her maid, was there with her. “No Rathi, I’m alright,” she replied.

“It is a relief to hear that, princess.”

Absentmindedly, Devi reached out for the mass of na leaves before her. She caught a salmon pink flush between her fingers, plucked it and in putting it on her lips, blew a stream of air. “Plffffffffff,” the leaf vibrated as it whistled.

“Princess, forgive me for my boldness. But it is not proper . . .” Rathi said slightly bowing her head.

“There are many other deeds in this world that are not proper, Rathi.”

“Princess!” Rathi exclaimed in despair.

“Rathi, this will not do. We’re getting wet anyway. Let’s run to the palace.”

“As you wish, princess.”

 

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The House that Once Was 04 January 2005, Matara: deep south of Sri Lanka

Memory, that glitchy faculty of the mind,

that slave of

Time, Disease, Mood, Disaster—Tsunami.

Memories etched on the mind,

even with additions and omissions

Prevail till the last draw of breath.

Before memory becomes non-memory

and

Memories become creations of the mind . . .

 

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Floor map: Downstairs

Kitchen  

Bathroom  

Bedroom  

Pantry  

Living  Room  

Stairs  

Passage  

Living  Room  

Lavatory  

Kitchen  Garden  

Recyclable  Garbage  Dump  

Garage  

Indoor  Garden  

Well  

Pond  

Gate  

Flower  Beds  

Flower  

Beds  

Bird  Bath  

Flow

er  Pots  

Flower  Beds  

Flower  Beds  

Bird  Bath  

 

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Floor map: Upstairs

Bathroom  and  Kitchen  Roof  

Bedroom  Roof  

Bedroom   Bedroom  

Stairs  

Stairs  

Balcony  

Bathroom  

Balcony  

Chimney  and  Water  Tank