Free Island of a Thousand Mirrors by Nayomi Munaweera Page A

cases in
     which live startlingly striped and painted, finned and ruffled sea creatures amid
     coral and seaweed. When the monsoon comes, the fish tanks overflow, and the water
     gushes out over steps and into the gardens, carrying along the most exotic sea life.
    Walking to market with Alice, our slippers are dragged immediately from our feet,
     our umbrellas are grabbed and thrown by the winds, so that in a few moments we are
     soaked from hair to toe, barefoot and exhilarated. In the churning roadside gutters,
     fluttering sea fish gasp and slowly drown in the onslaught of fresh water.
    During the monsoon months, all distinctions between land and sea are lost and it feels
     as if we are swimming through the air. The cats walk into the house with the kicking
     back legs of frogs hanging from their mouths. They must be given chase and persuaded
     to dislodge their sleepy, disgruntled-looking prey. Ponds form along the back wall
     and soon are crisscrossed in miles of gelatinous strings beaded with ebony seeds that
     burst into a million squirming commas. We fill jam jars with tadpoles, balance them
     on our desk as we do homework by kerosene lamp (electricity goes out often in the
     monsoon). Magnified in the flame, the tadpoles rise and fall, rise and fall while
     we labor over numbers and letters. Outside the rain smashes down. Under the table
     warm, wet canine tongues lick hopefully at our bare soles, impatient for dinner.
    This is our shared childhood then, marred only by certain memorable moments. Once,
     for example, my grandmother’s eye, pulled from her various concerns, fixes on the
     three of us. “Boy, don’t you have a place to go? Huh? A family of your own?” she asks.
     When Shiva, eyes averted, leaves, she puts her twisted hand on my head and says, “Don’t
     get too fond of that one.” And I at that age, bold, say, “But Achi, why not? What
     has he done?”
    She: “He hasn’t done anything. But they are Tamil. Not like us. Different.”
    I ask, “How different?”
    She: “Can’t you see, child? They’re darker. They smell different. They just aren’t
     like us.”
    Her voice, cajoling. But I am already anxious to get back to the kingdom of our friendship,
     and slipping away before she can catch my arm in those tree-rooted fingers, I say,
     “Anyway, he’s not as dark as Mala Aunty, so that dark-skinned thing can’t be right.”
    *   *   *
    I am ten and Shiva is at my window, holding an unlit kerosene lamp. “You won’t believe
     what I’ve found!” he whispers. When I climb out, he pulls me along the side of the
     house, pushes aside jasmine vines to reveal a dark crevice. He jumps down into it
     and in the moment when I am deciding whether or not to panic, his slim wrist appears
     to pull me down into the darkness beside him. I am suddenly blinded, claustrophobia
     clawing at my throat when he fires up the lamp, and blue walls spring up around us.
     Such a color! Cerulean, turquoise, flashes of emerald, like being swept underwater.
     “Look, someone left a radio!” he says. “Do you think it works?” We are laughing with
     the discovery of this secret place.
    It becomes our hideout, of course. A place to shelter from adult whims, taking with
     us the various pleasures of childhood, Asterix comics, packets of biscuits, board
     games, jacks, cushions. It was our retreat and sanctuary.
    *   *   *
    It is around this time that watching our aunt Mala and her husband, Anuradha, La and
     I realize how different they are from the other adults. At parties they don’t part,
     him to drink whiskey in the garden with the men and her to sit in the living room
     with the women sipping tea. Instead we find them in the in-between no-man’s-land of
     darkened hallways, laughing together and touching often.
    When she rejoins them, the women tease Mala, “Can’t leave that handsome husband of
     yours alone for even one minute, no? He must really be something. The way you are
     always