“Even better, you should have said you’d find the blackest boy.”
We giggle, imagining my aunt’s face if Dharshi ever said this. We are both well informed about our parents’ hierarchy of desirable husbands, a perfect portrait of the recent immigrant’s inherent racism. At the very mucky bottom layer of this pyramid and completely undesirable is a boy of the “duskier races.” To bring home a black or Latin man would be to risk forced smiles in the living room and a great deal of screaming after said male had departed. Directly above this layer is another, smaller layer made up of respectable, educated white boys with old families and lots of money. Not really acceptable, but less horror inducing than the darker Americans. Above the white guys, an even thinner stratum of other kinds of South Asians: Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis. Higher still would be other kinds of Lankans: Christian Sinhalese, Burghers, or god forbid, Muslims or Tamils. They weren’t “our people,” but they were as close as possible to the zenith. And there, poised teetering on a glorious throne at the very top of this pyramid, is the prize, that almost mythic being: a Buddhist Sinhala boy of a “good old family” with “excellent earning potential.”
She says, “What I really told her was that if she made me do it, I’d kill myself.”
I’m silent for a moment, some sharp knife point of panic breaking my skin, and then she starts laughing. “Don’t be an idiot. This is all stupid. She’ll forget about it soon. She’ll have to.”
*
I hang up ten minutes later, go back to my studies, and forget all about this. There is so much on campus to catch my love. The old, venerable buildings so different from the suburbs I grew up in, the miniature redwood forest in the middle of campus, the fat gray squirrels that come up and chatter like old friends, the color and hustle of Telegraph Street, with its marijuana haze and dreadlocked denizens. There are lectures in gorgeous brick and ivy buildings. There are new friends and beers in the evenings, plays and films and books. All of it alive, all of it exciting.
*
In our junior year, this happens. In the middle of the monsoon season on the island, Uncle Sarath goes back for the wedding of his cousin’s daughter. Aunty Mallini refuses to go, claiming she is too tired for the two-day crossing of the planet, the checkpoints, and the curfews. So she sends Uncle Sarath with a suitcase full of presents and he goes alone to Colombo.
It is a year of a merciless monsoon. Rain smashes down until the roads are flooded, cars stuck tire deep in the mire of Galle Road. The power is cut daily. When the rain stops momentarily, people wade through knee-deep water to get their necessities before the deluge returns. The family of the bride whom Uncle Sarath is staying with are disheartened. How to have a wedding in the midst of this monsoon madness? The hall has been booked for months, the flower girls and poruwa makers are all sorted, but what if it floods on the day? What if the guests can’t make it to the hotel? What will happen to the fancy saris and expensive hairdos in the onslaught? The father of the bride seeing his investments—the costs of the hall, the caterer, the dowry—swept away in the flood walks about with a stormy face. The bride breaks into tears at every opportunity. The mother of the bride has even wetter, more thunderous breakdowns.
Uncle Sarath remains in his room and tries not to get in their way. They have exclaimed over his presents, Mallini’s cast-off clothes and handbags and his own old shirts and trousers, but now they seem to have forgotten him in the fervor of their wedding-day anxieties. He stays in the house for a week, and then perhaps deciding that he has had enough, he decides to go out into the street, face the rush of water head on. I imagine him excited at the prospect. Looking forward to being showered in the monsoon, as surely he must have been while growing up in this city. He must have decided to walk somewhere, perhaps to the Vijitha Yapa bookshop or to the Saraswathi Lodge for one of their legendary thosai. His destination will remain one of those little unanswered mysteries in our lives.