She flips delicate pancake-like hoppers with the bright yellow egg onto the middle of our plates, the edges delicate, the middle thick and slightly sour sweet. We break off the crispy lace ends to scoop up the sweet, burning onion sambol.
She says, “So … how was school today?” in a singsong voice.
“Ammie, the same, school is always the same.”
“Come on, can’t be exactly the same.”
She turns her attention to me. “What about you? How was school for you? Since my one won’t tell her mother a single word.”
“Good. Aunty, it was good. We had a speaker at assembly today.”
“Ah, see, something happened. At least you can talk, unlike my one. Takes a hundred and one times before she tells me anything.”
I nod along to her chatter. I wish my mother did these things. I can’t imagine her in the kitchen making hoppers, barefoot in a sarong and a sari blouse. Even when she makes pancakes for me, it is different. She’s tighter, contained and serious.
Later, in her room, both of us lying on her bed, our braids falling off the edge, Puime says, “My god. My mother is such a disaster. I wish she was like yours, always so elegant and polished, no?”
“Mmm-hmmm. But yours makes the best hoppers. I wish mine did that.”
“Why do you need her to make hoppers? You have Sita for that. A mother should be cool, calm, and collected like yours. That’s how I’m going to be when I’m a mother. Not sweating and wearing my husband’s old sarongs.”
“No way. When I’m a mother, I’ll be just like yours.” The words leap through my mouth, and with them an instant flush of guilt. How Amma would hate to hear me say this. What an ungrateful daughter I am. And maybe Puime feels a like guilt because we go quiet, both of us staring up at the ceiling fan doing its slow revolutions.
*
I have a childhood brimful of river swimming and schoolgirl friendship. We eat papayas split open to reveal ruby flesh and small black seeds like obsidian pearls. I pick anthuriums, like flattened red hearts spiked by golden stamens; masses of frangipani, like bridal bouquets spreading their luxuriant perfume; small bell-shaped pink bougainvillea flowers frothing over the garden walls. The monsoon breaks over our heads and makes us splash in the street, joyous at the swift scent of wetted earth. Our uniform hems, shoes, and socks are soaked before the three-wheeler man rushes up and waves us in, drives us pell-mell through the suddenly flooded streets toward home. Carved jade geckos on the tops of doors bob up and down like miniature dinosaurs doing push-ups, darting out their heads for the grains of rice we hold stuck on the ends of sticks for them. In August, elephants trudge up the roads that lead to Kandy, a mountain of grass on their backs for their lunches, mahouts at their sides. They gather in the city for the annual Perahera, the procession of the Buddha’s tooth through the streets that grants the city its sacred stature. We have the beauty of Kandy Lake and the royal palaces and the Temple of the Tooth. I have friends, school, books, and cousins; it is a childhood brimming over. But also here are some things you should know about this place in these years.
A civil war rages in the North and the East. These are the years when the military and the Tamil Tigers fight over ownership and land and belonging. These are the years of burning in the streets, when crowded buses are blown up by suicide bombers, when people necklace others in tires and set them alight. When driving in the night a family can be stopped and asked if they are Tamil or Sinhala. If they give the wrong answer, if they are Tamil facing a Sinhala mob or Sinhala facing Tiger cadres, they can be pulled out of their car and dragged in the dust by the back of their shirts, the women hauled away into darker corners.
Now here, in this other place so many years later, where I am locked up in my white cell, they ask me about it, my various doctors and lawyers. They think that maybe growing up in a war-torn land planted this splinter of rage in me, like a needle hidden in my bloodstream. They think that all these years later, it was this long-embedded splinter of repressed trauma that pierced the muscle of my heart and made me do this thing. “PTSD,” they say.
I remember walking to school with Puime once, seeing schoolboys rushing by, going the wrong way, away from school. She calls out, “What happened?”
A tall boy says, “The Tigers have closed the university. There are signs hanging up on the gates. If anyone goes, they will be killed.” We see stricken faces hurrying home.
She says, “We should go home.”