Appadurai Muttulingam
One day she had a boyfriend. The next day she did not. He had gone his way, looking for another girl. To date, this was her third boyfriend. She didn’t seem to understand how to attract these boyfriends, leave alone how to hold on to them. She didn’t seem to possess that certain something that they were looking for. Either that or even if she possessed it, she failed to give it away; so much was clear.
She was indeed a beautiful girl, although she neither wore make-up nor adorned herself particularly. She didn’t have time for such things, either. She dressed just like other students, but you couldn’t say she spoke like them. She had come to an American University on a scholarship, directly from Jaffna, Sri Lanka, and so her pronunciation lacked a little in nasal sounds. On the other hand, she used several new words which other American students could not comprehend. She said ‘sweet’ while they said ‘candy’; she said ‘lift’ while they said ‘elevator’; she said ‘torch’ while they said ‘flashlight’. All this, though, was only when she first arrived; she corrected herself very swiftly. She didn’t deploy her fine intelligence exclusively towards pursuing subjects like Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics.
Men were drawn to her, anyway, like swarms of ants, attracted by her long dark hair and her darting black eyes. But then they turned away with the same haste. Or else they abandoned her and fled to other girls. To this day, she would remember with a shocking surprise that the first question was put to her by the very first youth who approached her. ‘Why do you always stand with your head bowed low, as if someone were playing the National Anthem somewhere near?’ How was she to answer this? For seventeen years she walked to school and walked back in that stance, looking down at the earth. She couldn’t change that, all of a sudden. But she liked the boy who posed the question. He came to some of the courses which she attended, and so it became his practice to attach himself to her as she walked to her class.
He invited her to attend a basketball match one day. She had no idea about the rules of the game; she only knew that the ball had to land inside the basket. There were many girls wearing short skirts which showed their thighs, and long red socks, who jumped up and down enthusiastically, cheering as they did. Sometimes they clapped their hands even when the ball did not land in the basket. So she too clapped her hands. On their way back, he bought her an ice-cream. When a tiny bit dripped on to her lower lip, he wiped it away with a finger. On the third day, he invited her to study together with him. She was stunned by the sharpness of his mind. Unlike her, he never learnt anything by rote. He thought things through logically and could work out the most complicated chemical equations instantaneously. Three days later, he told her his roommate was away and invited her to stay the night in his room. When she refused, he vanished and was not to be seen again.
The second boy to come after her was a daring fellow; a bit of a prankster. She knew the atomic structure of Benzene; he did not. That was how their friendship began. One day he appeared suddenly and stood in front of her as she was studying. When his shadow fell on her, and she looked up, he gave her swivel chair a spin. It whirled round three times and came to a stop directly in front of him. He said, ‘Look, I’ve drawn the prize! Now you have to come and have coffee with me.’ She wanted to laugh; she agreed. As they were drinking their coffee, he asked her, ‘Are you a princess in your country?’
‘No,’ she told him, ‘I was actually driven away from there. I have to find a country for myself, hereafter.’
‘You are as beautiful as a princess,’ he assured her, hasty fellow. He asked whether he could stay in her room that very night. After that, he too disappeared.
All these people wanted something from her. But although she lived in America, she remained a Sri Lankan still. No one here knew that even before she left for America, the people of her village used to call her ‘American Girl’. She had even forgotten her own name. Both at home and at school, everyone called her ‘American Girl’. Her mother used to say she was even cleverer than her two elder brothers. She had learnt to speak English at the early age of four. She would read all the American comic books that her brothers brought home and relate the stories to her classmates at school. She’d dream that she had turned into Superman or Archie, and lived in America.
Even as a young child she’d ask her mother, ‘Am I an American Girl, really?’
‘No,’ her mother would reply, ‘You are Sri Lankan.’
‘Then when can I become an American?’
‘You can’t.’
‘If I go to America, will I become an American?’
‘No, you’ll still remain Sri Lankan.’
‘What would happen if I married an American?’
‘Then you’d be a Sri Lankan girl married to an American. Whatever you do, you can never turn yourself into an American.’
She was deeply disappointed on hearing this. She was ten years old at the time.
The third person to fall in love with her was a man of some means. She was, by then, a second-year student. He approached her directly as she was coming out of a class and introduced himself. At once, several girls turned to look at her with jealous eyes. He told her he lived in a student hostel. His parents lived in Portland. Because he had a car, he could visit them every weekend.
He had a novel way of climbing down from his car. Having stopped the car, he’d thrust both legs out at the same time, stand up on both feet together and then step forward. He never seemed to concern himself with the lessons that went on yesterday or today, nor the lessons that were to come tomorrow. He seemed to think that the entire university was a playing field. He kept following her about everywhere. One day he asked her to close her eyes. He usually did this whenever he brought her a present, so she did as she was told. ‘Open your mouth,’ he said. She opened her mouth, thinking he was going to give her a piece of chocolate, or some kind of sweet. She used to open her mouth in exactly the same way when her mother gave her medicine. Instead, he bent down and kissed her open mouth. She didn’t like this one bit.
‘It’s no great deal,’ he said. ‘I’ve kissed your hand. I’ve kissed your forehead. Your mouth is just two inches lower than your forehead. So let’s say this was an error of two inches.’
He invited her home to Thanksgiving dinner. The previous year, she had gone to her friend’s home. She accepted his invitation, since there would be no one at all in the hostel on Thanksgiving Day and travelled for two hours with him, in his car. This was the longest car journey she had done so far, in America.
His parents were very respectable people. Although his father looked just middle-aged, his mother appeared much older. Her face was crisscrossed with lines like a wooden block at the fishmonger. Having found out somehow that her son’s girlfriend was a Sri Lankan, the old lady had collected a number of newspaper clippings, all to do with recent events in Sri Lanka, which she now handed to her. Her heart was touched by this. At the dinner table, the conversation was all about the war in Sri Lanka. It was then two years since the Indian Army had arrived in her country. She told her hosts how her mother had moved to three different places during this time, and how she had to keep changing the addresses to which she wrote her letters. She did not mention that her two brothers had died during the conflict.
When it was night, before he went upstairs, he pulled out the sofa-bed and told her she was to sleep there. She fell into a deep sleep. At around midnight, a soft hand closed her mouth gently. She opened her eyes to see him standing there. She was terrified. She began to shake all over, and her nightdress was soaked through with sweat. Although she managed to drive him away, she did not sleep a wink for the rest of the night. The next day, she spoke no more than two sentences during the entire two hours they travelled together in the car.
It was at the end of her third year that her university life saw a great change. She had allowed two years to pass by without participating in the annual multicultural event. That year, though, she could not avoid it. She was the only student there from Sri Lanka. She named her contribution, ‘A Traditional Dance’. She didn’t have a single sari with her, nor any other appropriate dance costume. She borrowed some clothes from a Panjabi friend, and got ready, making herself up as best as she could. She had decided to dance to a song she had once performed at school, ‘Enna thavam seidanai?’, ‘What penances did you do?’. She had already recorded the song on to a tape. The curtains divided into two and slid away as she stood on the platform. Although she was trembling slightly, she explained the song in a couple of lines, courageously, and proceeded to dance. She didn’t expect the enthusiastic applause that followed, the students cheering and clapping.
Just before her performance, a Vietnamese student sang, accompanying himself on a stringed instrument. When she came out, having washed off her make-up, this boy praised her dancing extravagantly. For the sake of conversation, she, in her turn, said his music had been wonderful. He told her that he had learnt to play that sixteen-stringed instrument, usually reserved only for women, from his dead Vietnamese mother. He said he only played it occasionally, and in memory of her. She was amused by what he wore: a long robe covered in a thousand mirrors, and a round cap on his head. His clothes reflected a thousand tiny images of herself. He was a third-year student of English Literature and said his name was Lan Hing.
The next morning, Lan Hing had somehow managed to seek her out in that university of 27,000 students. ‘You never told me your name yesterday,’ he said.
‘Mathi,’ she replied.
He asked her surname.
In three years, no one had asked what her surname was. She wanted to laugh. She said, ‘I have a very long surname. It will take you half a day to learn it off by heart.’
‘Really? What does “Mathi” mean in your language?’
She told him it had two meanings: ‘intellect’ and ‘moon’.
‘The moon is very sacred to the Vietnamese; it has a special place in all our festivals,’ he said. He went on, ‘Your dance yesterday was very beautiful. The movements were very similar to the Vietnamese style of dancing.’
‘Is that so? Thanks,’ she said.
‘You included some movements like a baby crawling. Why was that?’
She wasn’t sure whether he really wanted to know, or whether he asked it merely to keep the conversation going. All the same, she explained the story contained in the lines, ‘You tied Kannan to the stone mortar and made him plead, handheld to his mouth’.
He had grown up in America. When she explained, he said, ‘Really?’ He added, laughing and displaying his large teeth, ‘Truly, that mother was fortunate she wasn’t born in America. If any mother here were to tie up a three-year-old to a stone mortar, she would be arrested under the Child Protection Laws and put in prison.’ She couldn’t stop laughing at that. He looked at her eyes in surprise, as if seeing them for the first time. Her eyes began to laugh before her mouth did; he could not forget that throughout that day.
After this, they met very often. It was a matter of surprise to her that even after their third or fourth meeting, he didn’t ask to stay the night in her room. This really pleased her. She didn’t know why, but it felt very natural to be with him. She didn’t have to make any sort of effort when she sat with him, or walked about with him, or talked to him. She didn’t have to try in any way to please him. In his presence, somehow, her heartbeat differently.
She used to write to her mother every month. Her mother didn’t have access to a telephone in the village where she lived. So every two or three months she would go to a nearby town, telephone her daughter and speak to her for three minutes. Her call would arrive precisely at six o’clock. The blue aerogrammes that her mother wrote too arrived regularly. That same month the army had slaughtered many people in their home village of Kokkattisolai. The mother didn’t breathe a word about it. When Mathi wrote at the end of that month, she finished with these lines, ‘Amma, I was born your daughter, but I’ve done nothing at all for you. I haven’t even bought you a single thing that you wanted. Yesterday I bought myself some shoes for the winter. They cost me forty dollars. Had I sent you the money, it would have seen you through your household expenses for three months. I was the ‘American Girl’ only while I was there. Here I am a mere Sri Lankan. I have made friends with a man who has a strange name. Lan Hing. There is only one such name in the entire Telephone Directory. He is a good man. I must see you again. Don’t die before I do that.’
A phrase that Lan Hing often used was, ‘Surprise me!’ They would go out to dinner in the evenings. She’d ask him what they should order. ‘Surprise me,’ he’d say. They’d decide to go to the cinema. ‘What picture shall we see,’ she’d ask. ‘Surprise me,’ he’d say.
One day when Lan Hing came looking for her, she was working on her computer and took no notice of him. He watched her at her work for a long time. Her fingers were very narrow and slender. He gazed at them as they played swiftly upon the keyboard. He told her that when they touched the keys, there was still so much space around them. As he said this, he took one of her fingers in his hand and stroked it. Who knows what struck her, but she stood up suddenly and kissed his large toothed mouth.
Another evening after it had rained, she sat in the shade of a birch tree, thinking of her mother. A picture came to her mind of her mother getting ready to teach at her school, shaking out her sari and putting it on, tying up her hair in a knot with a hair-net around it, setting off finally with her umbrella. As she wondered whether it was raining at home, too, Lan Hing appeared, his shoes squelching through the wet earth. When he saw a puddle of water, he leapt across it like an ancient warrior and landed in front of her.
‘Such a big leap to cross such a small puddle?’ asked Mathi. She looked very lovely in a clinging, transparent dress. He bent down to touch her and remarked, ‘Today your skin is even softer than your feather-like dress.’
‘Leave that. Today I’m not going to surprise you. Why don’t you surprise me for a change,’ she asked him.
‘Do you know what I learnt in English Literature today?’
‘I don’t know, you tell me,’ she said.
‘The Russian novelist Tolstoy had thirteen children. Did you know that?’
‘No, I didn’t. I’ve heard about it just now. Tell me more.’
‘The thirteenth child was a boy. Do you know what Tolstoy did when the child was dying? He was learning to cycle. He was sixty years old at the time.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘You told me to surprise you, that’s why.’
Slowly she began to smile.
‘Look, look, your eyes have started to laugh.’
She began to study for a doctorate, while he finished his graduate degree and accepted a teaching post. When he rented a small one-roomed apartment, they decided to live together there. She moved in with him, bringing her bed and her desk, and all her other belongings. When they placed her bed next to his, it was considerably lower in height. ‘Never forget that a man’s place is always higher than a woman’s’, he told her.
They had a registered wedding first, after which he put around her neck the tali her mother had sent, strung on a chain. ‘Aren’t there any appropriate Vietnamese rituals?’ she asked. So on a full moon night, with the old man in the moon as a witness, he bit into a piece of ginger dipped in salt, ate part of it, and she ate the rest. With this, their married life began grandly, blessed by the Moon-man.
From the day they were married, she abandoned the use of a pillow. She became accustomed to sleeping with her head against his upper arm as he lay at a slight height from her. Lan Hing looked after all the household jobs as well as holding down a teaching position. He was a splendid husband. But there was no way he could keep the house tidy, however hard he tried. He was continually surprised by her method of studying. Her reference books, notebooks and scraps of paper on which she had scribbled notes lay scattered everywhere, on the bed, in the kitchen, in the bathroom, on her desk. He never ceased to wonder how on earth she managed to study. He would spend a couple of hours cleaning the house and putting everything away tidily, but within two minutes, she would have filled it up again.
For her Ph. D, she had to spend a long time in the laboratory. Sometimes she worked for twenty hours at a stretch. All the same, she wrote to her mother every month without fail. ‘Amma, do you know something? Even when I was an embryo in your womb, I already had embryos in mine. So any baby that is born to me will actually have come directly from you.’
One Saturday afternoon, she didn’t go to the laboratory. She had finished her research and was at the point of finishing her thesis. Lan Hing came into the bedroom and stood stock-still. The dirty plates from breakfast had not been removed. She was bent over her notebook and writing something into it, a half-drunk mug of coffee held in her lap. Lan Hing pushed away some books from the bed to make a space, sat down and took her hands. ‘You are the finest student in all the world; there is no doubt at all about it. But although we have been married for four years, we still don’t have a child. You should think about that, too. Let us consult a doctor.’
She gazed up at him. His cheekbones were sticking out distinctly; she had not noticed that before.
The doctor subjected both of them to an extensive examination and came to a conclusion which they had not expected at all. Her husband, who had always said, ‘Surprise me, surprise me’, got the biggest surprise of his life on the day they learnt the results of the medical examination. The doctor went inside to fetch the results. As the sound of his shoes retreated, their heart-beats grew louder and louder. In order to conceive a baby, a man should have a sperm count of twenty million per millilitre. His wasn’t even half that. The doctor said that there was no possibility of her becoming pregnant by him.
The two of them, who had thought all these days that it would be pleasant to have a child, now were in a frenzy to have a baby, somehow or other. Mathi’s mother’s letters began to ask, ‘Are you pregnant yet?’
He asked, one morning, as she was lying in her bed at his right side as usual, ‘Ei, Sri Lankan girl, why did you marry me?’
‘A rich girl will marry a rich man; a poor girl seeks a poor man. An educated girl goes for an educated man; those who have nothing marry each other.’ Her mouth smiled, but her expression revealed unbearable grief.
‘Look here, I didn’t tie you to me like a pen chained down in a post office. If you like, I will leave you. Please marry someone else and have a baby.’
She said nothing, but moved swiftly up to his bed, pulled his arm to herself and lay down, pressing her head against it even harder than usual.
Throughout that day, on every channel on the television, the Clinton-Monica affair was being discussed. The same thing was transmitted on the radio. The newspapers lamented, page after page. Nothing caught her attention. At evening, she sat in her room, gazing out of the window at the street outside. She had submitted her thesis three days earlier, so her mind swung about like the last garment left forgotten upon a washing line. A police van raced past; it’s siren sounding. She didn’t know how she would spend all the hours of the day hereafter. Footsteps sounded suddenly, along the street. Students, boys and girls, were coming from a basketball match, in crowds. One young man walked along, carrying a girl on his shoulder. Every one of them looked joyful. She couldn’t make out who had lost and who had won. Inside, in the kitchen, Lan Hing was clattering dishes as he made her a Vietnamese soup. It’s aroma wafted all the way across to her. When Lan Hing came out, bringing a bowl of soup, the loose end of his robe wrapped about it, he found her asleep in her chair.
The next day the two of them discussed the situation and came to a decision. They determined to use the entire savings they had put aside to buy a house, to investigate the chances of conceiving a child through IVF. An African colleague from his school offered to be their sperm donor. The doctor had to do many tests. There were several laws to be checked out and all kinds of forms that the three of them had to sign. It took six months to prepare her. She had to have twenty-eight injections of hormones; one each day. Then, three days after her periods ended, the embryo created in a laboratory was inserted into her. Ten days later, when she was examined at the hospital, her pregnancy was confirmed. That very day she wrote a letter to her mother. ‘I am pregnant. Soon you will have news of the birth of a grandson or granddaughter. Wait.’
She was beset by many doubts. She spoke to the doctor who held the medical examination about her concerns. One day she asked, ‘What exactly will a baby be if it is born to a Sri Lankan and Vietnamese couple through the sperm donated by an African?’
Without an instant’s hesitation, the doctor answered, ‘It will be an American.’
In exactly two hundred and eighty days, a beautiful baby was born to her. It was comfortable childbirth. She took out the paper and pen she had brought in her handbag already and wrote to her mother. ‘I have given birth to an American baby.’ Just that one sentence. She gave it to her husband and asked him to send it immediately.
That letter, with its stamp in the northeast corner of the envelope, would somehow reach her mother who had neither a house number nor a street name just then. That whole day she would walk up and down the entire village, holding up the letter so that its American stamp was clearly visible to everyone.
Twenty days later, exactly at six o’clock, her mother telephoned. It was just as she expected. Her mother would have woken up at five in the morning, in order to make that call. She would have caught the first bus to town, at six o’clock, waited outside the Telephone Office, entered before anyone else, as soon as the doors opened. It would be at seven o’clock there at the time.
The twenty-day old baby lay on her lap. She heard her mother’s voice, ‘Daughter, what sex is the baby, you didn’t write that?’
‘It’s a girl, Amma, a baby girl. Amma, can you hear her crying?’ She lifted up the baby and held her to the phone.
‘Daughter, what have you named her?’ She didn’t hear her mother’s voice, only the sound of her breathing.
‘Amma, she’s an American girl, through and through. You must see her. Don’t die before you do that.’
They both spoke at the same time. Their voices clashed together, somewhere above the Atlantic Ocean.
It seemed to her that the baby lying on her lap had exactly the same features as her mother. Her hair grew in tight curls all over her small head. When she grew older, she too would tie her hair in a knot like her mother and cover it with a hair-net. She’d go to a basketball match with her friends, wearing a short skirt. She would stand up and clap her hands at the right moments. She would not make excuses and run away after one of her boyfriends invited her to sleep with him in his room. At a multicultural get-together, she might dance to the song, ‘What penances did you do?’ Or she might play a sixteen-stringed instrument. At every Thanksgiving Day, she would bring home a new boyfriend and introduce him to her parents. She would make sure, well ahead, that their sperm-count was never lower than twenty million per millilitre.
…………………………….
This story is originally written in Tamil and is translated to English by Lakshmi Holmström.
Lakshmi Holmström was an Indian-British writer, literary critic, and translator of Tamil fiction into English. Her most prominent works were her translations of short stories and novels of the contemporary writers in Tamil. She obtained her undergraduate degree in English literature from the University of Madras and her postgraduate degree from the University of Oxford. Her postgraduate work was on the works of R. K. Narayan. She was the founder-trustee of SALIDAA (South Asian Diaspora Literature and Arts Archive) – an organisation for archiving the works of British writers and artists of South Asian origin. She lived in the United Kingdom.
The story is published by courtesy of Pathmanaba Iyer.
