Free Island of a Thousand Mirrors by Nayomi Munaweera Page B

after him like a puppy dog.” And, “My God, married for so long and still so
     much hot hot passion.” They smooth the knife-sharp pleats on their saris, balance
     teacups on their knees, and pat their carefully elegant heads. Behind the good-humored
     teasing, we sense the jagged edge of jealousy. Lanka grasps my hand. “Big, fat, stupid
     aunties,” she whispers, “why are they so bad to her?” And I, with the infinite wisdom
     of thirteen, am able to hit it exactly on the head. “Because she had a love marriage.
     But they had to marry whatever smelly uncle was chosen for them.”
    But despite their gnawing jealousy, there is one matter in which the aunties may legitimately
     pity Mala and for which she must endure the barely concealed glee of women who say,
     “Oh, poor thing. No matter. You can’t imagine how annoying it is to blow up like a
     balloon and then always have children crying and pulling at you.” Because, despite
     more than a decade of happy matrimony, her belly remains as stubbornly flat as on
     her wedding day.
    Unable to conceive, my aunt delves into the sex lives of plants. Pulling apart tender
     flower lips with pollen-dusted fingers, she exposes fleshy stamens, produces hybrids
     and variations never before seen on the island. Her dahlias are as big as our heads,
     her orchids monstrous in their size and hue. Every year, she walks away from the Colombo
     Garden Show with the biggest trophies and the envy of other horticulturally minded
     ladies.
    Across town, Anuradha’s mother, a lady we take pains to rarely encounter, smites her
     forehead. “All this nonsense! Prize, schmize! What is the point of making plants grow
     when nothing is growing inside of her?” Refusing to be consoled, she repeats these
     words in the presence of the most surefire gossips, ensuring their passage through
     an intricate web of mouths into Mala’s burning ears.
    *   *   *
    In 1981, in the northern city of Jaffna, Sinhala policemen and paramilitaries storm
     the old Tamil library, rip books from the shelves, set fire to the mountains of paper.
     The conflagration shoots high into the sky, a funeral pyre visible for miles, a warning
     to all who can see. For weeks afterward, torn, blackened pages fly over the lagoons
     and salt marshes, the onion and chili fields. They lodge in the branches of palmyra
     trees, float into houses and buildings, entangle in the barbed wire fences and the
     limbs of gods soaring over the kovils . The storm of words finds its way into cooking pots and outhouses. The ground is
     littered with fragments of angular Tamil.
    In Colombo on television we watch a Sinhala politician. He shakes his head to and
     fro, his double chin swaying. He says, “If there is discrimination in this land which
     is not their Tamil homeland, then why try to stay here? Why not go back to India where
     there would be no discrimination? There are your kovils and gods. There you have your
     culture, education, universities. There you are masters of your own fate.” From upstairs
     we hear nothing but silence. When I see him next, Shiva is brusque, his usual high
     spirits deflated. When I ask him what is wrong, his voice is cold. “They burnt ninety-five
     thousand manuscripts,” he says. “Your people burnt up our history.” I stare at him,
     not knowing what to say, but already he has turned from me and is running up the staircase.

 
    six
    It is January 1983 when an impossibility occurs. Mala’s perfectly synchronized body
     refuses to bleed. Mystified, she waits and wonders if she has hit some early menopause,
     her body rejecting even the charade of fertility.
    In his examining room, as she repins her sari, the doctor waves flippant fingers.
     “What nonsense, of course it is not menopause. Young, healthy thing like you. It is
     only the most obvious thing. You have conceived. You are expecting.”
    “But, Doctor, this is impossible.”
    “Why impossible? Are you not having relations