The words were eerily familiar, challenging, but he read on.
The Sri Lankan government has discriminated against Tamil people since the early days of independence. Tamils were denied the rights of citizenship; their language was denied an official status and their religions take second place to the favoured Buddhism. Early as 1957 Tamil people are suffering and dying at the hands of Sinhalese extremists. In 1983 in an unjustified reaction against a minor LTTE ambush, thousands of Tamil people had their homes, their businesses, and even their lives, destroyed.
Today the government says that their soldiers are liberators of the Tamil people, but the people don’t think of the army as their liberators. Mr. Prabhakaran and the LTTE are the liberators. The army arrests and kills innocent people out in the countryside where their government can’t watch over them. My uncle who is living in Trincomalee knows a girl who was attacked by army soldiers. She was walking early in the morning to see her brother to give him money from their father for his journey to Colombo. The girl was fourteen years old and she started to be a woman that month only. She passed a vegetated area and two soldiers pulled her off the road and put a cloth in her mouth so she would not scream. The soldiers did not take the money but they violated the girl. Now my uncle says this girl has no hope for the future. I have a sister who also is fourteen, I would do anything to protect her.
For a moment Rudy stopped reading and looked out the window—a flimsy show of respect for the unnamed girl, who, like the dangers of her country, remained stubbornly foreign to him. He thought uneasily of his own sister—how far would he go to protect her?—then he read the rest of Kanda’s argument: his reasonable claims about the plight of Tamil refugees and the need for cultural and linguistic equality, his more dubious ones about the intentions of the LTTE and their leader, his predictions that the government’s recent military offensive in Jaffna would fall on its face. There was plenty in the boy’s essay that made sense, but when Rudy reached the end he sank into a silent, brooding rebuttal: Do you really think the kind of violence the Tigers use can be justified, Kanda? Is the idea of a homogenous Tamil homeland even realistic? Would you want to live in such a place? And so on. When he next looked out the bus window, the essay was rolled up tightly in his hand, and he’d missed his stop.
He got off at the junction of the rail line and Vaththe Mawatha—Garden Street, as some of the old Burgher residents persisted in calling it. There was still a winding half-kilometre to backtrack, but he went first to the shady front doorway of his aunt’s church, across from the train station, to mop his face and breathe in the cool emptiness of the massive white sanctuary. In a few days the place would be chock full for Easter Mass, but for now it was starkly, marvellously vacant. He considered resting awhile under one of the whirling ceiling fans, clearing his head of Kanda and everything else, but he was already late. He pulled off his tie, undid several buttons, and crossed the street.
Passing the station, he quickened his pace to get away from the mob of taxi drivers hovering around their Bajaj three-wheelers, but one fat-bellied driver stepped into his path immediately.
“Sixty rupees only, sir.”
Rudy deked to the right. “No, thanks. I’ll walk.”
The driver kept pace with him. “Okay, okay. Fifty rupees. Good price.”
“No.”
“Okay, how much you want to pay?”
“Normal price.”
“Fifty rupees is very good price for you, sir, but I’ll give you forty-five. Last price.”
Rudy stopped and sighed. “Look—I’m not a tourist. Give me the same price you’d give my aunt and I’ll go with you. Otherwise forget it.”
The driver held his stare a moment longer then shrugged and ambled back to his three-wheeler, refastening his plaid sarong in a neat fold and tuck. Rudy waved away a few more offers and finally slowed to a stroll. He was glad the taxi ride hadn’t tempted him. There were other people out in the road—people who paid him no particular attention as they went about their business—and in that random, fleeting community, amid the tangled yards and airy bungalows of Vaththe Mawatha, he could believe that he really wasn’t a tourist—that this uncomplicated world, the one he’d shared with his parents and Susie for six years, was still his.
Up the road, he stopped to buy a comb of bananas from the fruit stand. Apart from his own “Ayubowan,” the transaction was conducted in silence, for the old fruit vendor spoke no English, and Rudy’s Sinhala was still awful. He nodded his thanks and carried on to the top of Aunty Mary’s lane, where he lifted a few flyers and envelopes from the mailbox then swung open the wooden gate. As he made his way down the narrow, overgrown path that led to his aunt’s bungalow, he experienced a familiar flash of empathy for those outsiders who ardently insisted that his birthplace was so exotic. The short walk took him past feathery ferns, wide, waxy leaves, and whiffs of jasmine that made his head spin. Overhead, the pawpaw and mango trees were loaded, while underfoot, sticky brown fruit oozed from fallen tamarind pods. It was exotic, he had to admit, though he preferred to believe that his own attraction came from a sense that this tangle of tropical growth was part of him.
Outside the yellow bungalow he peered through the latticed cement wall into the sitting room, where the exoticism of the lane lost its integrity. The rattan and teak settee had cotton throw pillows from Ikea; the painted Sinhalese devil mask with bulging eyes and a hanging tongue looked down on plastic figurines of Jesus and Mary; the old gramophone sat next to the television from Singapore. The floor was polished red cement; the white walls were decorated with school photos and souvenir tea towels.
Faintly Rudy heard his aunt in the kitchen. He let himself in and sorted through the mail. There were two advertisements, a telephone bill, something from the bank, and a single letter, from his brother. He turned it over, looking for Aunty’s name. Adam’s letters were always to the two of them. “To Aunty Mary and Rudy,” the envelopes always said, and inside would be short, chatty updates on his job at the campus bookstore, his swimming, his motorcycle, family goings-on, and other things of that sort. But this letter was addressed simply to “Rudy Vantwest.” Frowning, Rudy folded the envelope in half and stuffed it in his trouser pocket.
In the kitchen, Aunty Mary was dusting Easter cookies with sugar. A kitten with matted orange fur had stationed itself at her feet, while a mob of tiny flies hovered over a jack fruit on the counter. Rudy deposited the bananas next to the jack fruit and kissed his aunt’s cheek. She smoothed her cotton dress and patted the thick twist of silver-black hair at the back of her head.
“You’re home late, son.”
“Yeah. The bus was slow.” He reached above her head for a glass.
“Want tea?”
“No, thanks. Water is fine.”
“Ah, yes. My doctor is telling me I should drink more water. Very good for the health, isn’t it. You’d like chicken for dinner?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll just finish this. It shouldn’t be long.”
“No hurry,” he said distractedly. “I’ll get started on my marking.”
He filled his glass from a pitcher in the fridge, drained it, then went out back to wash at the well. Bathing at the stone well in the pink-gold light of late afternoon was one of those entitlements, like eating rice with his fingers or shitting in the outdoor toilet under a leafy canopy, that Rudy indulged in simply because it was not—could never be—part of his Canadian life. With renewed determination to distance himself from that life, he drew a pail of cool water dotted with dead leaves, emptied it into the plastic washtub, and rolled up his sleeves. A pair of mosquitoes—enormous brutes with long, dangling legs and abdomens—danced threateningly over the tub. He clapped them both dead, pried a bar of soap from the rim of the well, and scrubbed his hands and face. Completing the ritual, he emptied the tub over the dirt and shook his hands.
Adam’s letter weighed heavily in his