The Beach at Galle Road

by Joanna Luloff

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

When rumors of civil war between the ruling Sinhalese and the Tamils in the northern sector of Sri Lanka reach those who live in the south, somehow it seems not to be happening in their own country. At least not until Janaki’s sister, Lakshmi—now a refugee whose husband, a Tamil, has disappeared—comes back to live with her family. And when Sam, an American Peace Corps worker who boards with Janaki’s family, falls in love with one of his students, a young girl from the north, he, too, becomes acutely aware of the dangers that exist for any- one who gets drawn into the conflict, however marginally.

Skillfully weaving together the stories of these and other intersecting lives, The Beach at Galle Road explores themes of memory and identity amid the consequences of the Sri Lankan civil war. From different points of view, across generations and geographies, it pits the destructive power of war against the resilient power of family, individual will, and the act of storytelling itself.

Release date: October 2, 2012

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 288

Sample

COUNTING HOURS

The grandmother stares in the direction of her foot where her big right toe is missing. The doctors have removed it, and in its place is a rounded stump. The past few mornings, she has woken up and pushed her foot against the bedpost, feeling for it—the missing toe; but then she remembers the muted sense of knives cutting through her skin and bone. Since her daughter-in-law invited the foreign boarder into the house, the grandmother gets out of bed later. The English-speaking boarder must be fed first, and only then does the daughter-in-law bring the old woman water and her tea.

Janaki, the old woman’s daughter-in-law, always gentle, always patient, wakes her at seven thirty. Long after the children have moaned their complaints—It’s too early. I’m hungry. Where’s my uniform?—and dressed in preparation for school in the candle half light (there are many power cuts), Janaki brings steaming water from the kitchen to bathe the old woman’s cold limbs. The temperature in her room is over ninety degrees, but she feels chilled each morning, stepping hesitantly into the warm bucket, seeking relief. Janaki offers tea, hot and weak, bitter to her tongue. The doctors forbid her sugar, but occasionally she will sneak to the sweet can in the kitchen and fight with the ants as she tongues a secret spoonful.

At eight o’clock, she sits for breakfast—green graham and coconut, some chili on the side to combat the blandness. The food is heavy in her mouth, healthy but nothing more. Solid, sturdy food, mocking the weak blood and bone that is who she is now, a tired, sick old woman. She offers herself silent counsel: I mustn’t feel too sorry for myself. Her son has no patience for that. Her big, fat, unemployed son whom she named Mohan after her father. Unemployed, he says, because of her, almost four years since he left his job to keep watch over her. Or, the old woman occasionally allows herself to wonder, is he unemployed because of that fight with his superior, and then the refusal to apologize for days, weeks, months? Pride. Then laziness. Though he does work hard in the garden with his young wife. In Janaki’s garden.

The garden is filled with orchids, anthuriums, and a variety of herbs. Janaki sells the anthuriums for weddings and funerals, and often strangers will stop by to admire the spider orchids, praising Janaki for her hard work. The old woman hears these compliments drift in from the front yard, listening to Janaki’s quiet thank-yous and Mohan’s louder laughter. Inside, the house is colorless. The floor is packed brown and dusty with manure and clay, damp under the grandmother’s feet. Ants climb the walls in black streams, dark swimming lines against a crumbling plaster backdrop.

The old woman watches Janaki bring tea to her children before they leave for school. Tea, almost white with powdered milk and three teaspoons of sugar. The girls like their tea sweet. Later, Janaki and Mohan will go to the garden. They will bend over the flowers and laugh together. Janaki steals his presence from the house, his presence and his bustling comfort, his loud laugh and gently mocking reprimands once directed toward the old woman, his mother. She is seventy-two years old, but she guesses she looks older now that the illness has wrapped itself around her. First the half blindness, her eyes covered with thick glass, making her frog-eyed and her face seem shrunken. Then the amputation last month. No circulation. The toe was dead, they said. So now she hobbles and limps, needs a cane or a hand under her arm.

Eight fifteen on the clock. She pats the empty chair next to her where the foreign boarder sits every morning to finish her lesson plans. The two sit close, knees touching, though the table is long and fills up most of the narrow room. School supplies litter the opposite end, melted crayons stuck to the cracked wood. They sit in the formal part of the house, the place reserved for special guests. Here, the floor is covered with glossy linoleum, and the walls are decorated with yellowed photographs of family weddings. The grandmother’s sisters are on the wall, ordered from oldest to youngest, with the grandmother second from the last. The old woman is happy for the boarder’s company, though this young white girl with the ugly freckles can hardly speak her language. But there are the friendly smiles, the simple ohs and nehs that fill the silences between simple questions.

“Do you like the school?”

“Yes.”

“Are the teachers friendly?”

“Yes.”

“Are you working with the older students?”

“No.”

This foreign girl—she is really just a girl, unmarried and twenty-three—doesn’t dress appropriately for teaching. She should be wearing a sari with clean, neat folds and pleats, worn draped over a tight short blouse. When the old woman taught, she wore a different sari every day of the week for two weeks before she would repeat. Ten of the best-quality saris, imported from India to Sri Lanka, in deep blues and purples, soft pinks, and mossy greens. Some were laced with gold stitches, all richly beautiful.

The grandmother sees the boarder wince when Janaki delivers the grandmother’s morning injection. The refrigerated medicine enters her bloodstream with a shock and a pinch and leaves a dull pain all day long in the old woman’s arm. Janaki decided a few months ago that her daughters would benefit from living with an American girl. The foreigner could improve the daughters’ English and teach them about distant places. She hadn’t asked the grandmother what she thought about this plan. She merely mentioned it the week before the stranger arrived. As she shoveled plain rice onto the grandmother’s plate, Janaki had said, “We’re to have a boarder. She is American and will take the front room of the house.”

The foreign girl leaves the table at eight thirty to begin her day outside the house, up at the boys’ school, the same school at which the old woman used to teach. The school, with its whitewashed buildings and cramped classrooms, overlooks the town. From one side, tea fields stretch out, rich green during the monsoon season and dulled yellow during the droughts. From another angle, there is the river bending toward Galle and the coast. If you squint and focus, it is possible from this angle to see the grandmother’s house, a flash of faded pink buried under heavy trees with flat, smothering leaves. A dusty, winding path connects the back end of the school with the town center. The grandmother’s husband’s store used to sit at the base of this road, and she would often take her tea breaks there, sitting in the shade and fanning herself with an old newspaper. She would watch the thick dust blow up from the street as the buses zigzagged between cows and bicycles and groups of women heading toward the market.

The grandmother would like to ask the girl if anyone up the hill inquires about her. She’s sure some of the teachers would remember her; she probably taught many of them. But she doesn’t ask because she doesn’t remember names. The old woman pats the girl’s arm in farewell as she leaves for school, and then she waits for Janaki to help her to the bathroom. Some mornings she feels too weak to do it herself.

Janaki is eating in the kitchen with her two girls. Achala and Rohini. There are no sons. Two daughters for the old woman’s only son. A disappointment. The girls are more comfortable eating in the kitchen away from their grandmother. The old woman fears that the children are a bit frightened to be close to her. Since she has stopped being able to bathe herself, she sometimes notices a musty odor coming from her skin, and she guesses that the girls are afraid of her old-woman smells. The grandmother wonders if they think old age spreads like a disease, ready to trample them and take hold of their youth if they come too close.

The girls bend guiltily at her feet each morning before leaving for school, waiting for her blessing, a slight touch to their heads by an old woman’s hand. The old woman has noticed the younger one, Rohini, grimacing as she places her hand down on the girl’s neatly combed head. The children are well kept, their hair parted and smoothed with coconut oil. Clean white frocks, school ties, buffed shoes. They wear and eat the old woman’s teacher’s pension, but that is for the best. Her pension means that her son can be unemployed, be near her, and still keep his children fed and presentable. The girls rise from their feet, smooth their dresses, and, in a blur of easy motion, disappear, the older one leading the younger with only slight impatience.

And then the house grows still. Mohan leaves the radio on for the old woman, but its loud echoing through the empty house only emphasizes her aloneness. Her son spends the mornings helping Janaki in the garden or he hides himself under the hood of his dead father’s car. At times she hears him riding his bicycle out of the driveway toward the village, where she imagines him drinking tea with a shopkeeper or reading the newspaper. Sometimes the old woman catches herself humming an old song, a melody different from the one playing on the radio. She thinks perhaps she is trying to separate herself from the blaring loneliness, trying to keep herself from drifting into the sounds of the radio, from ceasing to exist altogether, from becoming merely an old body whose mind has wandered off, bored and tired.

She has to remind herself to concentrate. She thinks about her husband, dead six years. A drinker. He stormed and raged and, when sober, led the life of a shopkeeper. He sold breads and soaps, pens and jam, school supplies and cigarettes. He knew how to tell a joke, all hesitation and suspense. Men would gather on his shop stoop, smoking single cigarettes for one rupee, and then buy one or two more while they listened to him talk. He kept bottles of arrack under his bookkeeping desk and took a sip or two during quiet moments. He enjoyed entertaining and encouraged the old woman to be lively and clever when his friends came to visit the house. He liked having an intelligent wife, a science teacher at the boys’ school on the hill. She could have been a doctor, he told his friends, if she had been born in a different time. His praise unsettled her. It only came in the presence of company. When they were alone, he scolded her. With spit collecting in the corners of his mouth, he attacked. She hadn’t laughed at his joke about boar hunting. She acted too proud and aloof. She made people uncomfortable. He would ask, “How difficult is it to make tea properly? Always too cold or too sweet.” After he returned to the shop, the silence of the house enclosed her.

He was gentle with the children, though, always offering smiles and hugs. He prized Mohan and spoiled him with toffees and sweet cakes, while he was shy with his daughter, gently patting her head. From the store, he would bring her dolls and lacy dresses and shiny shoes. He had been a handsome man, broad shouldered with big hands. He wore a pencil-thin mustache that seemed almost as if it wasn’t there—a mustache you had to look at twice, the first time thinking it might be a streak of dirt.

He had been gentle with Janaki, too, when Mohan brought his bride home, thin and pretty with nervous smiles. Janaki’s youth and grace seemed to mock the older woman, whose eyes were tired and beginning to sag. The old woman had worried that the bride would charm her men away from her, so she’d given Janaki jobs to do that kept her from them. Janaki cooked and did the laundry, as was a daughter-in-law’s responsibility. She did these things quietly and dutifully, but with impatience in her shoulders. Mohan, a few weeks after bringing his wife home, had mentioned that Janaki wanted to work outside the house. She had taken courses in typing and stenography and had done well at school. But the old woman hadn’t waited this long for a daughter-in-law just to have her ignore her household duties. What about giving her son children? What about learning the rituals of keeping her husband’s house? The old woman wasn’t going to be around forever. Besides, she worked every day at school. She had looked forward to gaining some rest, to letting someone else do the cooking. And when the grandchildren came, Janaki would not be able to just throw them into the older woman’s lap. She was done with caring for children. Hers had grown up and she wasn’t about to start all over again. No, Janaki would stay at home and look after things, the old woman decided. That should be enough for her.

The year Mohan’s second daughter was born, the old woman’s husband bought a car. It was a used Ford with gentle waves of sleek black metal. On weekends the family would drive to the ocean. The old woman sat proudly in the front seat, watching her husband wave to his friends along the dusty road. Not many families in the village owned cars. They traveled by bicycle or on crowded buses. The old woman would nod occasionally at a fellow staff member in the midst of her shopping, or sometimes lift her index finger slightly from the open window frame as she spotted an acquaintance walking by. The road was paved in some places and only dirt in others, so narrow that when another car or bus approached, her husband would have to angle the car off to the side. As they neared the coast, the road became wider and the buildings taller with little space between them. The air would feel thick with salt and moisture, and the heavy trees thinned to palm trees and dried-out bushes. And then suddenly there was turquoise sea against white sand and the muted sounds of water slapping land.

Janaki had stayed home during these drives. The old woman would watch her daughter-in-law’s half smile and impatient wave from the doorway as the car pulled out of the driveway. The young wife rested the baby on her thin hip, adjusting the child slightly as she turned toward the house. The old woman remembers thinking that this was the way it should be—Janaki at home. The old woman sat in her Ford, in her rightful place, surrounded by her family—her husband, her son, and her older granddaughter. She had felt full and complete. No one mentioned Janaki’s absence; Janaki had to look after the baby. It was understood. She had cooking to do. Laundry. Cleaning. The reasons and excuses piled up around the old woman, protecting her from her son’s guilty shoulders and her husband’s repeated glances into the rearview mirror as in the distance Janaki stepped back into the house.

They would return in time for lunch at two o’clock, bringing the sea air with them in their clothes and tangled, sticky hair. Lunch was always waiting, under the wicker cover, still warm and steaming. The kitchen smelled of burnt wood. They ate noisily, with laughter and the old woman’s husband’s jokes, while Janaki quieted the baby in the bedroom. After lunch, Mohan would leave the table to be with his wife. The old woman listened to their conversations.

“Did you enjoy the beach?”

“Yes, but the sea was too rough for swimming.”

“Achala didn’t eat much of her lunch.”

“Father bought her an ice cream.”

These still conversations made the old woman nervous. She heard accusation in Janaki’s remarks and she was disappointed in Mohan for the apology in his voice. There was no need to feel guilty for enjoying a nice drive to the coast. Her son seemed far away in that bedroom, lost to her, when he was with his pretty wife who still looked like a girl.

The old woman’s husband had died the next year. Liver problems. Over the long months of his illness, her husband’s face lost its upturned smile. His skin grayed and his eyes watered. He joked less and less. His friends slowly stopped coming, and criticisms replaced his previous bragging. He resented his wife for being healthy, and quietly he bullied her, wearing the old woman out. He would push her tea away and say, “You walk like a land monitor.” He asked Janaki to brew it for him instead. “Daughter,” he said, “after all these years, my wife still can’t get my tea right.” He asked Janaki to rub coconut oil into his hair. Janaki carried out these duties as she had done all her previous ones—with a slight smile and quick hands, an impatience that remained gentle and graceful. Her voice was soft and her fingers were strong. Her hair was always worn in a long, thick braid. It tickled her father-in-law’s face while she rubbed his hair. Janaki pushed past the old woman when she brought the tea. She remembers feeling the breeze of her daughter-in-law’s motion, catching the faint smell of laundry soap and curry. Her own hands were dry and cracked from years of using chalk. Her own hair, thinning and gray, was tied into a small bun at the nape of her neck. When she caught her reflection in the mirror, she cringed at how her glasses magnified her eyes, making them big and bulgy. She watched Janaki’s cool hand wipe the stray hairs from her husband’s forehead. When he smiled and sighed, the old woman’s shoulders sank.

When her husband died, what did the old woman feel? Relief? Somewhat. But mostly, she felt old. No longer a wife. Only a mother and grandmother. The man who had connected her with her youth was gone. Mohan took his father’s car to work with him every day. The old woman retired from teaching. Her eyesight was failing and her limbs felt stiff. The doctor prescribed rest and no sugar, weak tea, and bland foods. No meat. Now her days were spent with her daughter-in-law. Janaki acknowledged her in passing. A nod or an “Anything you need?” in the midst of what seemed to the old woman a blur of rustling clothes. Her daughter-in-law’s speed, a balanced child under an arm while she gathered clothes, made the old woman feel even older. Sometimes she would think she saw a fleeting look in Janaki’s eyes, pride coupled with a slight expansion of her chest. A look that seemed to accuse or to remind or to pinch. And then it was gone, as fast as it had appeared, and the old woman was troubled by the calm that replaced it.

As the old woman grew weaker, as her feet and hands grew cold and her vision grayed, she felt her son’s wife reach in and start taking things for herself. The old woman sensed Janaki laying claim to the house, to Mohan, to the old woman’s world. She placed a framed picture of her two daughters next to a picture of the old woman’s husband. She lured Mohan into the garden when she should have been cooking. She sold flowers and welcomed her friends into the house. Friends from some garden club she had begun attending on Tuesdays. And then she invited a foreigner into the house. The old woman felt her world shrinking as Janaki’s expanded, until she inhabited only a shady place among the furniture, so small, so inconsequential, she feared she could be swept up and away by Janaki’s fierce broom.

THE POSTMAN’S BICYCLE ring startles the old woman. She hears Janaki meet him in the driveway. Lately, most of the letters that come are for the foreign girl. Looking down, the old woman notices that her housedress is unbuttoned. She is embarrassed for a moment, fumbling the buttons closed, but she soon realizes that no one has seen her exposed breast.

Now she will wait for the foreign girl’s return. Home at noon. A quick lunch before she heads to her afternoon classes. Then the granddaughters arrive at two, back from school. They will walk around her. They will bring her watery tea with a plain cracker. They will bring the old woman these offerings without really noticing her—a lump on the couch that eats and sleeps, smells sour and wasted, and scares them. They do not know how to talk with her, so they don’t. The older girl, Achala, is fiercely loyal to her mother. She punishes the old woman with her indifference. Rohini follows her sister’s lead, but with less assurance, plagued with a child’s guilt. She offers brief smiles and sometimes a pillow for the old woman’s back. The foreign girl will sit with her because she is separated from this family’s past. Her gestures are amiable because she is a kind girl, but they don’t mean anything. They aren’t a substitute for real affection.

When the girl returns, the grandmother will ask her, “How was school?”

“It was good,” she’ll answer. “But the boys behaved badly.”

“You must discipline them. Haven’t the others given you a caning stick?”

And then there will be a look of confusion. “I don’t understand.”

Janaki’s English is good and she will translate for the girl. The boarder will nod her head. “Yes. But I’d rather not use it.” Janaki will then take the girl into the kitchen with her to shave coconut and boil rice. Their muffled words will travel toward the old woman, incoherent, distant, and unfamiliar. And slowly the evening will come, its darkness bringing comfort, an end to the day.

At night, as she waits for sleep, the old woman counts the things she once had but has lost. She gathers her memories around her like her useless bedsheet, which. . .