There are other, more serious differences. On the island we were fixed in place from birth. We knew where we fit. You were this person’s older sister, that person’s second cousin on the father’s side, that one’s oldest cousin. Names would tell you everything about a person’s placement in the complex familial and community matrix. The naming described your destiny from birth to burning.
In Sri Lanka, when two strangers met, they asked a series of questions that revealed family, ancestral village, and blood ties until they arrived at a common friend or relative. Then they said, “Those are our people, so you are also our people.” It’s a small place. Everyone knew everyone.
But in America, there are no such namings; it is possible to slip and slide here. It is possible to get lost in the nameless multitudes. There are no ropes binding one, holding one to the earth. Unbound by place or name, one is aware that it is possible to drift out into the atmosphere, and beyond that, into the solitary darkness where there is no oxygen.
*
But before all this, we stumble off the plane, jet-lagged and dazed, into America. In the arrival lounge are Aunty Mallini, Uncle Sarath, and Dharshi. And my story of America always starts with Dharshi.
We drive a maze of freeways through an alien world, and at the house she says, “You’ll share with me,” and leads me to her room. It is a cave, one wall covered floor to ceiling with posters of singers and bands in random jumbled order so that they overlap like a thick, scabbed skin. There are more huge posters on her closet door. It’s amazing. None of my friends back home have anything like this. I go close to look, hear her say, “You like music?”
Nodding. Oh yes, I do. I like anything she likes.
She says, “Okay, this is Paula Abdul. This is George Michael. This is—”
“Duran Duran.” There they are, hanging right over my new bed, in their huge-hair and eyelined glory. It feels like a prophecy. I hear Puime’s words in my head. Maybe magic things are possible here.
Sweeping her hair from her eyes, she says, “Well, good. I didn’t know if you’d know anything.”
We have twin beds next to each other, mine bought when it was clear we were coming. I fall into it and sleep until the next evening, my dreams a tumble of time zones and clouds, and when my eyes open, she’s sitting on her bed reading, like a tiny pixie. When she sees I am awake, she says, “Let me see your clothes.” So I stumble out of bed, pull open my suitcase, and take out various things bought at the Colombo shops, some sewn especially for me.
At each piece she wrinkles her nose and grimaces and finally says, “My god, are you really going to wear that stuff?”
I shrug. “I don’t have anything else. I can’t have new ones. Amma spent so much for these. What’s wrong with them?”
She frowns and says, “They’re not from here. No one wears things like that here.”
My face falls.
She says, “Okay. Look, why don’t you take some of mine. Let me see…” She bounces off her bed and pulls open the door to her closet. It is stuffed full, clothes jumbled in piles on the floor and askew on hangers, hung double and triple. She starts pulling out clothes, throwing them at my feet, a white minidress, a pair of denim overalls, a gray sweatshirt with the neck cut dangerously aslant. I look at the mess falling at my feet. It is the first act of generosity in this new and generous place, but I say, “Amma will never let me wear any of this!”
She turns to look at me and screws up her eyes. “You think my parents let me dress like this? Are you crazy? They have no idea. You just wear it under your clothes, then you take the top stuff off just before you get to school.”
I stare at her. “What? You mean, at school? What about uniforms?”
She sits down hard on her bed, a pair of emerald-and-yellow-striped leggings in her hands, and says, “What uniforms? We don’t have uniforms here!”
*
The first day of school. A blur of faces and places. English spoken in an unfamiliar disjointed way. Only weeks later do the syllables come into focus and lock into their proper place.
The English teacher pauses to take me in. The skirt that hangs in folds to my midcalf, the shirt buttoned to my wrists, a pair of white tennis shoes and socks on my feet. I hadn’t taken Dharshi’s advice on a covert outfit; instead I had let Amma choose my first day’s outfit. It has not been a success; no one has talked to me all day. They have looked at me as if I am not just from a different country but from a different planet. He says, “Let’s see. So you just arrived?”
“Yes, sir, we came two weeks ago.”
“You don’t have to call me sir, you know. And your English is very good.”
“Yes, sir. We speak English in Sri Lanka. The British came and taught us.” It is a cheeky thing to say, but I can’t help it.
My mother and I have come armed with English; we have at least that much, unlike so many who have come without it. I can’t imagine what it would be to come stripped of the carapace of language. In this one way, history has rendered us lucky.