Free Wreck and Order by Hannah Tennant-Moore Page B

fighting and making up about it? I could just feel his absence, like the millions of other people feeling the pain of absence at that very second. Giving one’s life over to meditation explicitly was a kind of rejection, I told myself. I could have both Jared and a meditative life, I reasoned; I need not give up anything.
    —
    I spent the next morning wandering the city center, stunned by noise and motion. Auto rickshaws swerved around mangy dogs and women carrying baskets of mangoes on their heads. The bleat of truck horns offered bicyclists a second’s warning to move to the side of the narrow road. Sinhalese soldiers stood on the edge of a field where Tamil boys played cricket, sweating in their leather boots, shifting their rifles from shoulder to shoulder, perking up when the white girl walked past. A pudgy-faced man with thick black curls fell into step alongside me. He asked where I was from, with whom I was traveling, what I thought of Jaffna. His flawless English disarmed me. I answered his questions, asked my own. Dhit worked as a translator for NGOs—when there were any around, he laughed. But he didn’t get to meet many native English speakers. Would I like to come to his home for lunch? His mother and brother would be so happy to meet an American. I hopped on the back of his motorbike.
    Dhit’s parents’ small brick house was shuttered and locked, the curtains backlit by the green glow of a TV. Dhit banged on the door, calling out his name. “My mother is afraid of the Tree Demon,” he said, just as she opened the door. He introduced me in Tamil. She wiped flour on her skirt and took my hands. Dhit’s brother clapped his hands and declared his joy to meet an American lady. Was I from Hollywood? Maari was hoping to move there someday and become a famous actor. He was large-eyed, long-limbed, twenty years old. While their mother made pittu—a steamed mash, I learned, of roasted flour and coconut—I asked Dhit and Maari what the Tree Demon was.
    Maari stabbed the air with his index finger. “The slavism has come to us!” Dhit glanced through the open door and shushed his brother, but Maari continued speaking with loud insistence. The Tree Demon hid in the branches, waiting to pounce on women drawing well water or children using the outhouse. Some people said he had knives for fingers and metallic armor for skin. Dhit gestured away the horror story, saying the Tree Demon was probably just a normal person who jumped out of trees to scare people. He lowered his voice. “What is certain is that the Tree Demon is protected by the government,” he said.
    Maari leaned toward me so that the back legs of his chair raised off the concrete floor. “Yes, of course. There is a sentry point on every corner. How is it that the soldiers do not stop the Tree Demon from entering the villages?”
    I looked out the door, trying to calm my uneasy excitement. A hairless dog sat in the road outside their house, picking at fleas. “Could you help me?” I asked Dhit. “I’d like to write about the Tree Demon for an American newspaper. Do you know people I could talk with?”
    “Of course, Elsie.” Dhit adjusted the collar of his shirt. He and Maari exchanged grins.
    —
    So my intention to sit for thirty minutes every morning and evening was quickly overshadowed by my pursuit of a story that was too awful—and too compelling—not to be shared; I worked for a newspaper, after all. I’d meet Dhit outside my guesthouse in the mornings. He’d take me on his motorbike to meet Tamil scholars, reporters, and friends who had heard of Tree Demon attacks. Dhit acted as translator. I tried to pay him, but he turned away from the money, seeming offended. I supposed he wanted to help a foreign journalist—“the international media is our only hope,” I heard from so many people. Then I better not be the international media, I did not say out loud. But after a few days of reporting, I allowed myself to suspend my disbelief