*
Some nights I wake to Dharshi shaking me hard, her fingers tight around my upper arms. I am startled awake, breathing furiously, the beast that sits on my chest slipping away reluctantly. She says, “Shh, shh.” When I’m quiet, she says, “You were dreaming. You cried out. Your dad, I think.”
I nod. She says, “You said a name … Someone else.”
My voice is rusty. “What name?”
“You said Samson, like that guy in the Bible. You said it very clearly. You were saying no, over and over.”
I say, “I don’t know anyone like that.”
“Okay.” But she doesn’t believe me. It is clear in her eyes as she turns away. It lies between us now, the first secret.
*
One day while both of us are lying on our beds reading, she says, “So what’s it like?”
“What?”
“You know. Sri Lanka, the motherland, our ancestral place?” She says it with a roll of the eyes, but I realize that here is something I can give her. Here is something lacking for her. She had been there only once, in the nightmare after my father died, but she is asking me something else—not how it is to be there for two weeks as an outsider, a tourist, but what it is like to live and belong there.
“It was beautiful. We swam in the river and I had a best friend, Puime, she and I, we were so close. And I miss speaking Sinhala. And Sita’s cooking. She could make the best moju.” I stop, guilty for evoking all these lost and buried treasures.
“Whose cooking?”
A vision of Sita at the gate as we left, small and tired, waving as if her arm would fall off. Punch at her side. A sharp stab through my heart. But also the realization that I was not the only one who had lost home and gained America. Dharshi too had lost certain things, and for her, these are losses she doesn’t even know she has sustained. I try to explain it all to her. But I know it is futile. She grew up in this soil; her shade of flower has taken on the colder tint of this air. Leaving is an act that cannot be undone.
*
We sit on the couch, watching Gilligan’s Island, our feet resting on each other. She teaches me the joys of afternoon cartoons and how to eat Oreos. “Like this,” twisting apart the cookies, her tongue languid in its swirl across the cream center. We walk to the drugstore for rainbow-flavored ice cream, delicious synthetic sweetness. We sit, heads close together over a single cassette tape recorded off the radio. We play and rewind and play and rewind, all the while our pencils scribbling like crazy to write down the lyrics, to penetrate the mystery exactly. We fill notebooks with lyrics. We transcribe parts of our favorite Wham! song so that we can reenact the video: “Young guns, having some fun/Crazy ladies keep ’em on the run.” In those days she was the whole of the continent for me. “One, two, take a look at you/Death by matrimony.” She is George and I am Andrew and we strut through the living room feeling dangerous and free. She twirls and glitters and I, star-struck, emulate her every move.
*
I hear Dharshi and my mother talking in the kitchen. Usually they just tolerate each other as if my mother can’t deal with having another daughter and Dharshi can’t abide the idea of a second mother. But now I listen and hear Dharshi say, “Aunty, who is Samson?”
My mother says, “Why, Dharshi?”
There’s a pause that Dharshi doesn’t fill, so my mother says, “That’s the name of our servant back in the old house. Why do you want to know?”
Dharshi says, “No reason.”
I wait for her to tell my mother that this is the name I cry out in my sleep. Sometimes in horror, sometimes in something far from horror. But she doesn’t say it and I walk into the room and they both look at me. My mother with steely eyes asking whether I have revealed the secrets that will destroy us. In Dharshi’s eyes is knowledge, as if now, without my saying anything, she knows everything.
Nine
The white man opens the door with a flourish and my mother and I walk through the two-bedroom apartment, noting the worn magenta carpet, the windowless bathroom, the chilly rooms. He says, “It’s not much, but the rent is good and your daughter’s school is close enough.”
And then we are alone, Amma and I. We have never been alone together in this way before. As if set adrift on an ice floe in this enormous new continent. We live together, both of us haunted by a place, absent people we must never speak of.
*
America: It is like being reborn as a blank, like being outside history. People look at me and then look past me because they cannot place me. They think I am Indian or Mexican. Innumerable conversations invariably follow this precise trajectory:
Person: Where are you from?
Me: Sri Lanka.
Person (confused and incredulous, sure he/she has misheard): Where?