Read Online Island of a Thousand Mirrors by Nayomi Munaweera - Free Book Online
Authors: Nayomi Munaweera
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slim-limbed boy.
He teaches us to dive, passing on fisherfolk lessons. Teaches us to plunge fearlessly
into the surf, eyes open despite the rushing strength of the water. It sends us tumbling
head over heels, swallowing brine. We emerge spluttering, almost drowned, dizzy. But
in the ensuing years, all three of us learn to negotiate the waters until we are as
agile as otters, as sinuous as eels, delighting in the suspended weightlessness of
liquid.
* * *
In the smoky kitchen of the Wellawatte house, Alice is cooking. Between her fingers,
garlic cloves slip out of their skins, naked and pungent white. Green chilies slit
themselves lengthwise, fat stubs of ginger reduce themselves into paste. Spices perform
fireworks in her frying pan. She teaches the three of us the precise engineering skills
required to construct Christmas cakes, gingerbread houses, cream caramels. She makes
us whip eggs until our forearms are aching and the eggs are transformed into stiff
towers of frothy white. She gives us authority over the sharpest and cruelest of her
tools, the flashing knives, the ridged coconut scraper with its stool. So that from
childhood, we are intimate with these instruments.
Nightly, Alice still unfolds her mat outside Sylvia Sunethra’s door. A small dark
shack made of shabbily aligned walls and a corrugated tin roof behind the house holds
her few possessions. This is also where her son, Dilshan, sleeps.
Some years older than us, he is our greatest playmate and ally. He lives barefoot
and in a checked blue-green sarong. The soles of his feet are thick and black as tire
rubber. He lets us poke at the deep, sunbaked cracks and laughs, “I don’t need Bata
slippers like you, Baby Nona. I have them already on my feet.”
It is always easy to locate Dilshan in the house. The house cats congregate wherever
he goes. Yet he is immune to their persistent mewing ardor and pushes them gently
away with a pointed toe, an impatient foot. He is sinuous himself, winding his way
about the house, fulfilling Sylvia Sunethra’s various dictates for shopping or clearing
the inner courtyard after the monsoon has ravaged the jasmine tree. If he is angry
that his mother, one of our own, is now reduced by the trembling hump and his own
illicit birth to this in-between place between aunt and servant, he does not show
it. In later years, when he joins the army, it is the cats that mourn most openly,
raising their whiskered faces to the sky and yowling outside the opening of his hut,
refusing to eat even the fisherman’s best tidbits for weeks.
* * *
Alice sits sideways on the coconut scraping stool. Her hands push the half coconut
repeatedly over the rounded blade and a steady stream of fragrant whiteness falls
into her bowl. The rhythm of her words matched to the back and forth of her body,
she spins us stories of far-flung villages, mud, wattle, and coconut-thatched huts
in roadless places, where life is ruled by the cycles of moonlight and sunlight, monsoon
and drought. The jungle lies thick on the edges of such villages, and if it were not
tamed daily by machete, it would burst in and reclaim its dominion. The night is always
loud with jungle creatures. The gunshot exclamation of a crocodile’s jaw cracking
through turtle shell, the crash of a musth-dripping bull elephant, the yellow-lit
eyes of a hunting leopard.
She heaves herself off the coconut scraper and inspects the day’s vegetables. We beg
her for more. More stories. We are addicted as if to food. So she tells us of the
demons that stalk these lonely places. The full-lipped Kalu Kumara, who takes on the
aspect of a seductive youth and emerges on moonlit nights, causing usually staid village
damsels to tear at their clothes and utter long, moaning sighs. The other various
demons that come creeping into the villages and cause mischief, illness, bad fortune.
“When one of these
He teaches us to dive, passing on fisherfolk lessons. Teaches us to plunge fearlessly
into the surf, eyes open despite the rushing strength of the water. It sends us tumbling
head over heels, swallowing brine. We emerge spluttering, almost drowned, dizzy. But
in the ensuing years, all three of us learn to negotiate the waters until we are as
agile as otters, as sinuous as eels, delighting in the suspended weightlessness of
liquid.
* * *
In the smoky kitchen of the Wellawatte house, Alice is cooking. Between her fingers,
garlic cloves slip out of their skins, naked and pungent white. Green chilies slit
themselves lengthwise, fat stubs of ginger reduce themselves into paste. Spices perform
fireworks in her frying pan. She teaches the three of us the precise engineering skills
required to construct Christmas cakes, gingerbread houses, cream caramels. She makes
us whip eggs until our forearms are aching and the eggs are transformed into stiff
towers of frothy white. She gives us authority over the sharpest and cruelest of her
tools, the flashing knives, the ridged coconut scraper with its stool. So that from
childhood, we are intimate with these instruments.
Nightly, Alice still unfolds her mat outside Sylvia Sunethra’s door. A small dark
shack made of shabbily aligned walls and a corrugated tin roof behind the house holds
her few possessions. This is also where her son, Dilshan, sleeps.
Some years older than us, he is our greatest playmate and ally. He lives barefoot
and in a checked blue-green sarong. The soles of his feet are thick and black as tire
rubber. He lets us poke at the deep, sunbaked cracks and laughs, “I don’t need Bata
slippers like you, Baby Nona. I have them already on my feet.”
It is always easy to locate Dilshan in the house. The house cats congregate wherever
he goes. Yet he is immune to their persistent mewing ardor and pushes them gently
away with a pointed toe, an impatient foot. He is sinuous himself, winding his way
about the house, fulfilling Sylvia Sunethra’s various dictates for shopping or clearing
the inner courtyard after the monsoon has ravaged the jasmine tree. If he is angry
that his mother, one of our own, is now reduced by the trembling hump and his own
illicit birth to this in-between place between aunt and servant, he does not show
it. In later years, when he joins the army, it is the cats that mourn most openly,
raising their whiskered faces to the sky and yowling outside the opening of his hut,
refusing to eat even the fisherman’s best tidbits for weeks.
* * *
Alice sits sideways on the coconut scraping stool. Her hands push the half coconut
repeatedly over the rounded blade and a steady stream of fragrant whiteness falls
into her bowl. The rhythm of her words matched to the back and forth of her body,
she spins us stories of far-flung villages, mud, wattle, and coconut-thatched huts
in roadless places, where life is ruled by the cycles of moonlight and sunlight, monsoon
and drought. The jungle lies thick on the edges of such villages, and if it were not
tamed daily by machete, it would burst in and reclaim its dominion. The night is always
loud with jungle creatures. The gunshot exclamation of a crocodile’s jaw cracking
through turtle shell, the crash of a musth-dripping bull elephant, the yellow-lit
eyes of a hunting leopard.
She heaves herself off the coconut scraper and inspects the day’s vegetables. We beg
her for more. More stories. We are addicted as if to food. So she tells us of the
demons that stalk these lonely places. The full-lipped Kalu Kumara, who takes on the
aspect of a seductive youth and emerges on moonlit nights, causing usually staid village
damsels to tear at their clothes and utter long, moaning sighs. The other various
demons that come creeping into the villages and cause mischief, illness, bad fortune.
“When one of these
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