gratitude and resentment.
What they both remember best: the rush and roar of an upcountry waterfall on the drive
back to Colombo. The ferocity with which it poured into the pool so that they were
only able to approach cautiously, slipping into the quiet edges of the water and wading
in slowly. Extending first an arm, then a leg, and then their tentative heads to be
beaten upon like drums, the sarongs tugged from their bodies leaving them half naked
and laughing, exposed to each other for the first time in sunlight. For hours after,
during the long drive toward the city, as the chill of the mountain water turned to
sweat, the crash of falling water and each other’s laughter rang in their ears.
They come together like misaligned planets and yet there must have been passion because
after merely a year of wedded life, while people are still asking the usual questions
about married life, the bride is starting to swell gently in the right areas. Sylvia
Sunethra is delighted. The young engineer outwardly chagrined, but secretly proud.
Visaka, herself, astonished at the rapidity with which her body transforms from that
of an angular schoolgirl into the softness of maternity.
* * *
Upstairs, the wife of Ravan Shivalingam is also pregnant. The two women’s bellies
grow as if they had been inseminated at precisely the same moment. When Visaka sees
her rival, swaying on the arm of her husband, her ire swells and surges so that I,
nestled and suspended in the seas within her, grimace and twist my stubs of fingers
into minuscule fists.
In more peaceful moments, I must have desired specificities because daily she longs
for only one thing, that strangest of fruits, the spiky red rambutan. Every morning
Alice returns from the Wellawatte market, her shopping basket full of every kind of
delicacy. In the kitchen, she sweats over pots of lentils, fish curries, coconut sambal.
Anything to tempt Visaka’s appetite, but she is only interested in one flavor. She
eats rambutan by the heap, splitting the bitter shells between her front teeth, feasting
on the gelatinous white flesh until broken shells lie like shattered sea anemones
at her feet.
And perhaps it is this glut of the scarlet fruit that brings on my birth, because
one afternoon, two weeks before she is due, Visaka, sucking on a rambutan, feels me
twist and turn and begin my headlong journey to light. Her screams summon the household.
Nishan has taken the car to work so Sylvia Sunethra must ask Mr. Shivalingam if he
will drive. In the ensuing commotion, the other pregnant woman, too, perhaps in sympathy
with Visaka’s shouts, goes into labor. The two are driven to the hospital, pain making
them forget enmity so that they grip each other’s hands white and scream in unison.
* * *
Shiva and I are born on adjacent beds in a large white room while the nurses stroke
the thighs of our writhing, crying mothers. We enter the world on waves of our mothers’
iron-flavored blood. First I, secretive and shy. I did not cry, they say, until he,
too, had arrived. Purple faced, I had to be slapped into breathing. And then immediately
after me, Shiva, as if he had been waiting for me to test the terrain. But when he
does arrive, our crying fills the room, makes our tired and torn mothers laugh. Our
fathers come rushing to claim us. They hold us awkwardly along the length of their
hands, rest our slightly furred heads in their palms and look at us with shock while
our mothers, to whom motherhood comes easily, giggle at their uncertainty.
Later we lie like replete kittens on our mothers’ bellies and are taken separately
to be blessed by the appropriate gods. Shiva to the temple of his namesake, where
the pusari smears turmeric across his scrunched forehead. I to the Kelaniya temple, where the
shaven-headed monk ties a white thread around my tiniest of wrists. It is here that
my mother, still
What they both remember best: the rush and roar of an upcountry waterfall on the drive
back to Colombo. The ferocity with which it poured into the pool so that they were
only able to approach cautiously, slipping into the quiet edges of the water and wading
in slowly. Extending first an arm, then a leg, and then their tentative heads to be
beaten upon like drums, the sarongs tugged from their bodies leaving them half naked
and laughing, exposed to each other for the first time in sunlight. For hours after,
during the long drive toward the city, as the chill of the mountain water turned to
sweat, the crash of falling water and each other’s laughter rang in their ears.
They come together like misaligned planets and yet there must have been passion because
after merely a year of wedded life, while people are still asking the usual questions
about married life, the bride is starting to swell gently in the right areas. Sylvia
Sunethra is delighted. The young engineer outwardly chagrined, but secretly proud.
Visaka, herself, astonished at the rapidity with which her body transforms from that
of an angular schoolgirl into the softness of maternity.
* * *
Upstairs, the wife of Ravan Shivalingam is also pregnant. The two women’s bellies
grow as if they had been inseminated at precisely the same moment. When Visaka sees
her rival, swaying on the arm of her husband, her ire swells and surges so that I,
nestled and suspended in the seas within her, grimace and twist my stubs of fingers
into minuscule fists.
In more peaceful moments, I must have desired specificities because daily she longs
for only one thing, that strangest of fruits, the spiky red rambutan. Every morning
Alice returns from the Wellawatte market, her shopping basket full of every kind of
delicacy. In the kitchen, she sweats over pots of lentils, fish curries, coconut sambal.
Anything to tempt Visaka’s appetite, but she is only interested in one flavor. She
eats rambutan by the heap, splitting the bitter shells between her front teeth, feasting
on the gelatinous white flesh until broken shells lie like shattered sea anemones
at her feet.
And perhaps it is this glut of the scarlet fruit that brings on my birth, because
one afternoon, two weeks before she is due, Visaka, sucking on a rambutan, feels me
twist and turn and begin my headlong journey to light. Her screams summon the household.
Nishan has taken the car to work so Sylvia Sunethra must ask Mr. Shivalingam if he
will drive. In the ensuing commotion, the other pregnant woman, too, perhaps in sympathy
with Visaka’s shouts, goes into labor. The two are driven to the hospital, pain making
them forget enmity so that they grip each other’s hands white and scream in unison.
* * *
Shiva and I are born on adjacent beds in a large white room while the nurses stroke
the thighs of our writhing, crying mothers. We enter the world on waves of our mothers’
iron-flavored blood. First I, secretive and shy. I did not cry, they say, until he,
too, had arrived. Purple faced, I had to be slapped into breathing. And then immediately
after me, Shiva, as if he had been waiting for me to test the terrain. But when he
does arrive, our crying fills the room, makes our tired and torn mothers laugh. Our
fathers come rushing to claim us. They hold us awkwardly along the length of their
hands, rest our slightly furred heads in their palms and look at us with shock while
our mothers, to whom motherhood comes easily, giggle at their uncertainty.
Later we lie like replete kittens on our mothers’ bellies and are taken separately
to be blessed by the appropriate gods. Shiva to the temple of his namesake, where
the pusari smears turmeric across his scrunched forehead. I to the Kelaniya temple, where the
shaven-headed monk ties a white thread around my tiniest of wrists. It is here that
my mother, still
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