My mother keeps a sharp eye on every plate, serves whatever is missing before recipients have realized they are low on rice or curry. It is important that everyone be treated well. She has won over my father’s family with patience and generosity. But she knows their allegiance is paper-thin and she must be solicitous so that they will not go away bearing tales that she is still that girl he met on the bus.
After dinner, chairs are scraped away and a dance floor is created. Music on the stereo. Boney M. or ABBA. Everyone is singing, “Brown girl in the ring, tra la la la la. There’s a brown girl in the ring, tra la la la la la … She looks like a sugar in a plum, plum, plum,” and then inevitably the baila music starts. Sinhala lyrics on top of old creole Portuguese rhythms. Women hitch saris up to their knees, pretend to be the coy Surangani waiting for her fisherman. They sway around men who channel the fisherman with the freshest catch. A shuffling and swaying of hips as they circle each other, arms hooking, skipping and swaying, eyes and hands flirting. My father refuses to join. But he smiles and claps us on. My mother grabs my hands and sways with me around and around in a riotous circle until I am sure that I am that girl, the “brown girl in the ring … like a sugar in the plum.” All of us singing the words to songs as we’ve done hundreds of times.
Later there are long ambling gossips that last through the night. The women stay in the parlor. The men drift out onto the lawn to settle themselves in chairs and nurse their glasses of arrack in the midnight breeze. Their faces are blurred and indistinct in the dark. The smoke rises from mosquito coils. The frogs in the pond sing long and loud. I sit in the hammock-like curve of my father’s sarong at his feet, half asleep but listening as they talk, the ebb and flow of voices washing over me. They discuss the situation in the country, the skyrocketing price of everything, the Tamil trouble gathering in the North.
A sudden plunge into darkness in the house behind us, loud aws and ohs from the women. The electricity has gone off again. Samson is shouted for and comes slowly, his face lit by candles. The talk continues, the darkness pushing closer until we see one another only as silhouettes. Long drowsy hours of half-lit talking and drinking. And then with the suddenness of a threat, the lights jump on. I had been cradled and almost rocked to sleep in the low sling of my father’s sarong.
He says, “Ahaaaa, still here? Go to sleep. Go-go. Quickly before I give you a swift slap.” But his voice is laughing. I leave them then, my hand in Sita’s as she leads me to my bed. Behind me, that close knot of men still talking and laughing as dawn comes.
*
I am ten years old and cast in a school play. It is based on a collection of Kipling’s stories. I am the evil old Crocodile who snaps onto the trunk of the Elephant’s Child and pulls and pulls until the Elephant’s Child’s once tiny piglike snout is long and sinuous. Onstage under the lights I preen in a costume Amma has labored over on her Singer for weeks. It is the most fantastic of her creations, made of a green bodysuit replete with scales, a long swishing tail waggling behind, a row of white teeth through which I look out upon the delectable Elephant’s Child as he approaches my forest pool. I love this. I feel seen. A tingling joy runs through me as I bellow my duplicitous reptilian lines.
Afterward there is applause, and as I come offstage, looking for my parents, Thatha catches me in a bear hug, says, “So good, so good. You were wonderful.”
I say, “Really?”
“Yes! Perfect, excellent.”
He says, “Okay, come, let’s take a photo. Stand here, pose like this. With your friends, now.” We pose, all of us in our costumes. Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, Shere Khan, Kaa, Crocodile, Elephant’s Child. My arms are around Shivanthi and Puime’s shoulders. Thatha is beaming, clicking and clicking. Amma says, “We need to go. Now.” I turn to her, wanting to hear everything he has said, but in her voice. She says nothing.
He says, “Come on. Just a few more. Almost done.”
She walks by him, and with a heart-sickening crash, Thatha’s beloved camera is dashed on the floor, the film curling and exposed, lenses broken, small cogs rolling under women’s saris. People stare and whisper. Thatha’s face breaks and then reassembles even as he bends to pick up the various pieces, muttering, “An accident. That was an accident,” then out loud to anyone who was near and had seen, “An accident, she walked by and it must have caught on her sari. My fault, really. Must be more careful.”
She waits for us in the car. The look on her face, imperial. He says, “What the hell was that?”
“What? The camera?”
“Yes, the bloody camera, of course. What else?”
“Well, you should take pictures of the rest of us too.”
“Why wouldn’t I take pictures of her? It’s a big day for her.”
“The way you treat her. Don’t be sorry when she gets a big head. Spoiled rotten. It’s only a school play. What will you do when she attains age? When she gets married? Rent the bloody Grand Oriental Hotel?”
In the backseat, I peer out from between the rows of white teeth and hold on to the tip of my emerald tail and know that I must be even quieter, even more still.