The Story of a Brief Marriage

by Anuk Arudpragasam

Genres: War & Military; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize

“Brave…Brilliant…This is a book that makes one kneel before the elegance of the human spirit and the yearning that is at the essence of every life.” —The New York Times Book Review

"One of the best books I have read in years." —Colm Toibin

Two and a half decades into a devastating civil war, Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority is pushed inexorably towards the coast by the advancing army. Amongst the evacuees is Dinesh, whose world has contracted to a makeshift camp where time is measured by the shells that fall around him like clockwork. Alienated from family, home, language, and body, he exists in a state of mute acceptance, numb to the violence around him, till he is approached one morning by an old man who makes an unexpected proposal: that Dinesh marry his daughter, Ganga. Marriage, in this world, is an attempt at safety, like the beached fishing boat under which Dinesh huddles during the bombings. As a couple, they would be less likely to be conscripted to fight for the rebels, and less likely to be abused in the case of an army victory. Thrust into this situation of strange intimacy and dependence, Dinesh and Ganga try to come to terms with everything that has happened, hesitantly attempting to awaken to themselves and to one another before the war closes over them once more.

Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage is a feat of extraordinary sensitivity and imagination, a meditation on the fundamental elements of human existence—eating, sleeping, washing, touching, speaking—that give us direction and purpose, even as the world around us collapses. Set over the course of a single day and night, this unflinching debut confronts marriage and war, life and death, bestowing on its subjects the highest dignity, however briefly.

Release date: September 6, 2016

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Print pages: 208

Sample

1
 
MOST CHILDREN HAVE two whole legs and two whole arms but this little six-year-old that Dinesh was carrying had already lost one leg, the right one from the lower thigh down, and was now about to lose his right arm. Shrapnel had dissolved his hand and forearm into a soft, formless mass, spilling to the ground from some parts, congealing in others, and charred everywhere else. Three of the fingers had been fully detached, where they were now it was impossible to tell, and the two remaining still, the index finger and thumb, were dangling from the hand by very slender threads. They swayed uncertainly in the air, tapping each other quietly, till arriving at last in the operating area Dinesh knelt to the ground, and laid the boy out carefully on an empty tarpaulin. His chest, it seemed, was hardly moving. His eyes were closed, and his face was calm, unknowing. That he was not in the best of conditions there could be no doubt, but all that mattered for the time being was that the boy was safe. Soon the doctor would arrive and the operation would be done, and in no time at all the arm would be as nicely healed as the already amputated thigh. Dinesh turned towards this thigh and studied the smooth, strangely well-rounded stump. According to the boy’s sister the injury had come from a land mine explosion four months before, the same accident that killed their parents also. The amputation had been done at a nearby hospital, one of the few still functioning at the time, and there was hardly any scarring on the hairless skin, even the stitch marks were difficult to find. Dinesh had seen dozens of amputees with similar stumps in the last months, in different states of recovery depending on how much time had elapsed since each operation, but he was still somehow unable to believe in the reality of all the truncated limbs. They seemed, in some way, fake, or illusory. To dispel this thought of course he only needed to reach out now and touch the one in front of him, to learn once and for all if the skin around the stump was as smooth as it seemed or actually coarse, if the hardness of bone could be felt underneath, or if true to appearance the thing had the softness of spoiled fruit, but whether for fear of waking the child or something else, Dinesh did not move. He simply sat there with his face inches from the stump, completely still.
When the doctor arrived with one of the nurses close behind he knelt down next to the tarpaulin without a word and studied the mangled forearm. There were no surgical instruments in the clinic, no anesthetics, neither general nor local, no painkillers or antibiotics, but from the look on the doctor’s face it was clear that there was no choice but to go on. He motioned for the nurse to hold down the boy’s left arm and leg, for Dinesh to hold down the head and right shoulder. He raised up the kitchen knife they’d been using for amputations, checked to make sure it was properly clean, and then, nodding at his two assistants, placed its sharp point just below the right elbow. Dinesh readied himself. The doctor pressed down, the point pierced, and the boy, who had remained until then in a state of deep, silent sleep, came to life. His eyes opened, the veins along his neck and temples dilated, and he let out a tender shriek that continued without pause as the doctor, who had started slowly in the hope the boy would remain unconscious during the operation, sawed now firmly through the flesh, without hesitation. Blood trickled onto the tarpaulin and spilled out onto the soil. Dinesh cradled the boy’s little head in his lap, softly caressed his scalp. Whether it was a good thing or bad that he was losing his right arm and not his left, it was hard to tell. Having only a left arm and a left leg would not help the boy’s balance no doubt, but all things considered he might have been worse off with a right arm and a left leg, or a left arm and a right leg, for surely, if you thought about it, those combinations were less evenly weighted. Of course if his two good limbs had been on opposite sides the boy would have been able to use a crutch for walking, for then the crutch could have been held by his good arm, and could therefore have replaced the bad leg. In the end though it depended on what mode of transport the boy would have access to once healed, wheelchair, crutches, or just his single leg, and so whether or not he’d gotten lucky it was probably, at that point, premature to say.
The doctor continued cutting through the flesh, not with quick efficient strokes but with a jagged, sawlike motion. His face remained impassive, even as the knife began to grate against the bone, as if the eyes that looked on at the scene belonged to a different person from the hands that did the cutting. How the doctor kept going on this way, day after day, Dinesh had no idea. It was well known that as the front lines shifted east he had chosen to stay behind in the territory of his own volition, to help those trapped inside instead of moving to the safety of government-held areas. He’d moved from one hospital to another as they continued to be destroyed by the shelling, and when at last the divisional hospital he’d been working at in the camp had been shelled the previous week he’d decided, together with a small number of medical staff there, to convert the abandoned school building nearby into a makeshift clinic, hoping it would be inconspicuous enough to treat injured civilians in safety. They ran the clinic according to a kind of assembly line method: volunteers would first carry the injured to the operating area, where the nurses would clean their wounds, prepare each one so they were as ready as possible for their operation, then the doctor would come, perform the surgery, and move on immediately to the next person, leaving the nurses to stitch up the wounds and do the bandaging, unless a child was involved in which case the doctor insisted on doing everything himself. The injured person would then be moved to the area in front of the clinic, and accompanied there by relations and checked upon every so often by the nurses they either improved and were soon able to leave of their own accord, or died and had to be taken away by volunteers for burial. From morning to night each day the doctor moved in this way from patient to patient, showing no emotion whatsoever as he performed his operations, never wearying and hardly ever resting except when twice daily he stopped to eat, and then for a few hours each night when he tried to sleep. He was a great man Dinesh knew, deserving of endless praise, though looking at his face now it was impossible to tell what had allowed him to continue like this, and whether he was still in possession of any feelings.
The damp sound of the knife through flesh gave way to the scrape of its teeth against the tarpaulin, and at last the cutting stopped. The child’s head was limp on Dinesh’s lap, his face again unknowing. The doctor lifted up what remained of the arm, which terminated now just past the elbow, and used a piece of cloth to absorb the blood still dripping. He dabbed the wound with another cloth, this one boiled in water and soaked in iodine, carefully sutured it shut with the thin flaps of excess skin, then dressed it neatly with one of their last bandages. When everything was done the doctor bore the boy up in his arms and went away with the nurse in search of a quiet place for him to rest. Dinesh, on whom the job of disposal fell, sat staring at the bloody little hand and forearm, wondering what he should do. There were plenty of other naked body parts scattered around the camp of course, fingers and toes, elbows and thighs, so many that nobody would say a thing if he just left the arm under a bush or beside a tree. But while those body parts were anonymous this one had an owner, which meant, he felt, that it had to be disposed of properly. He could bury it perhaps, or burn it, but he was apprehensive of touching it. Not because of the blood, for the child’s blood had already stained his sarong and his hands, but because he didn’t want to feel the softness of freshly amputated flesh between his fingers, the warmth of a limb just recently alive. He would much rather just wait till the blood had drained and the flesh had hardened, when picking the severed arm up would be more like picking up a stick or small branch, not much more perhaps but more so all the same. He was mulling over the issue when a girl with very thin ankles and long, broad feet came walking towards where he sat, her arms wrapped tightly around her chest and her fingers clutching the sides of her dress. She was the boy’s older sister, his only living relative, coming from outside the clinic where she had been made to wait during the operation. Without a word to Dinesh or even a glance, no longer crying but her eyes still swollen and wet, she knelt down in front of the bloody tarpaulin and spread out a torn square of sari fabric over where her brother had just been lying. Picking up the remains carefully, so the hand didn’t fall away from the forearm and the fingers didn’t fall away from the hand, she placed them delicately on one edge of the cloth. She began very gently to roll the flesh up in the fabric, veiling it reverently in several soft layers as though it was a piece of supple gold jewelry, or something perishable that must be preserved for a long journey, and when it was wrapped so fully that nothing could be seen except the sari she stood up slowly, cradling the thing to her breast, and without saying a thing turned and walked away.
*   *   *
It was late afternoon and the day was overcast, devoid of movement. Shifting his weight onto his legs, Dinesh raised himself up. He stood still for a while till the dizziness from standing up dissipated, then fixing his eyes on the ground before him, began to walk east from the clinic. It had rained only a little the night before but the ochre soil between the tarpaulins had been stained maroon, glazed by a layer of smooth red slime. Wary of slipping in the mush or stepping on any of the splayed hands and feet, Dinesh took long, loping strides over the bodies, making sure with each step to set his front foot down properly before raising his back foot up from the ground. He felt slightly bad for leaving, but the urgent operations had more or less been finished, and for the time being at least there wasn’t much work to be done. All day since the shelling he had been helping out around the clinic, the cries of the wounded and grieving flooding every space between his ears, and all he wanted now was a quiet place in which to sit, rest, and think, somewhere he could contemplate in peace the proposal he had received earlier that morning. He had been digging a grave just north of the clinic when a tall, slightly stooped man he recognized from somewhere but was unable to place had grabbed him by the hand, introduced himself as Somasundaram, and pulled him away hurriedly to a corner. The slow and easy rhythm of his shoveling suddenly interrupted, Dinesh had done his best to come out of his daze and make sense of what was happening. He had seen him working in the clinic the day before, the man was saying, and it was obvious he was a good boy, that he’d had some education, that he was responsible, and of the right age. Ganga, his daughter, his only child after her brother had been killed two weeks before, was a good girl too. She was pretty, and smart, and responsible, but most of all, most importantly, she was a good girl. He looked at Dinesh as he said this, his eyes yellow and his hair unkempt, a gray scruff all over his haggard face and neck, then lowered his gaze to the ground. In truth he didn’t want to get her married, he only wanted to keep her safe and close beside him, for now that the rest of his family was gone he could hardly bear to lose her too. He hadn’t given marriage even a moment’s thought till the day before, he said wiping a tear from his cheek with a dirty thumb, but as soon as he’d seen Dinesh in the clinic he’d known it was his responsibility, that it was something he had to do for the sake of his daughter. He was an old man, he was going to die soon, and it was his duty to find someone to take care of her once he’d gone. It didn’t matter whether their horoscopes were compatible, or what day or time was most auspicious, for obviously it was impossible to follow all the customs all the time. Dinesh had some education and he was a good, responsible boy, he said looking up again, and that was all that mattered. There was an Iyer in the camp who could perform the rites, and if he said yes then the Iyer would get them married immediately.
At first Dinesh had just looked back at Mr. Somasundaram blankly, not knowing how to respond. He wasn’t quite sure he’d followed everything that had been said and didn’t really have time to think on it in any case, for the pit he was digging needed to be finished as quickly as possible, in order to free up space in the clinic for all the new arrivals from the morning’s shelling. Seeing his hesitation, Mr. Somasundaram added that there was no hurry, that it was important Dinesh spend some time thinking about his decision. The Iyer had been wounded the day before, it was true, but he was doing well so far, and as long as Dinesh said yes by the afternoon there was no reason the Iyer wouldn’t be fit enough to get them married. Dinesh was silent a little longer, then indicated that he understood. He remained standing where he was for a while after Mr. Somasundaram had gone, then turned back to the grave in order to resume digging. He thrust his spade into the earth, leaned his meager weight into the handle, and lifted out the soil he had loosened, tried to fall back into the rhythm of the shoveling. In a way he shouldn’t really have been surprised by what had happened, of course, for it was obvious why Mr. Somasundaram was trying to marry his daughter, if not to him in particular then to any male of marriageable age he could find. Parents had been trying desperately to get their children married in the past two years, their daughters especially, hoping that once married they’d be less likely conscripted into the movement. By this point the married were just as likely to be recruited for the fighting as the unmarried it was true, but many continued trying to marry their daughters even so, believing that if they ended up in the hands of the government the girls that were married were less likely to be defiled, more likely to be passed over by the soldiers for other spoils. Why the proposal had been made was obvious, therefore, though what exactly it meant for him, and how he should respond to it, Dinesh found much more difficult to say. He should probably have made an effort to think about it sooner, to concentrate his mind on the issue while he was still digging, but perhaps because the work before him was too distracting, or because he didn’t yet know how to approach the matter, or because it was pleasing in some way to postpone dealing with it, he’d resigned himself to waiting until the grave was finished. As soon as the digging was over though he’d been told to begin moving bodies to the grave from the clinic, and then to help carry the injured to the clinic from the camp. In the midst of all the chaos and screaming he’d stopped thinking about the proposal completely and now, having finally been released from his duties, he found his initial lack of comprehension replaced by a quiet, sweeping astonishment. It was as though he’d been moving around, all this time, in a heavy fog, doing whatever he needed to do mindlessly, refusing to register the world outside him, and refusing to let it have any effect on him, so that having been caught off guard by the unexpected proposal, forced to wake up suddenly after how many months of being like this he didn’t know, he was seeing his situation for the very first time now, keenly aware of the multitudes of people around him, and of himself as he navigated uncertainly through the camp.
They had accrued there, many tens of thousands of them, over a period of a few weeks. A few of them had been displaced recently from nearby villages, but most of them were refugees from villages to the north, south and west who had abandoned their homes long before and been on the move for many months, some, like Dinesh, for almost a year. Each time they set up camp somewhere they had hoped it would be the last time before the movement finally pushed back the government, and each time they were forced again by the advancing shelling to pack up and move further east. Stopping and starting they had traveled like this across the breadth of the northern province, herded by the shelling into the increasingly small pocket of territory remaining in the northeast, till hearing about the still-functioning divisional hospital and the camp that had started to form around it, assured by the movement that the area was safe and that the army would never be able to take it, they had come in desperation at last to the camp, followed by more and more every day, each party adding to the settlement of tents around the hospital like a massive temple that was being erected around a small, golden shrine. The first shells had fallen on the camp only two weeks earlier, on the hospital just the week before, and every day since then the shelling had gotten heavier and more sustained. Each bout dotted the densely populated area with dozens of circles of scorched black earth, most of which remained empty for only a while before being taken over by new tenants. Every part of the camp was bombed, even one of the school buildings that housed the makeshift clinic had been hit, despite its small size, and in the last few days probably a seventh or eighth of those living there had been killed. There was talk that the final assault on the area would be made in the next few days, that the divisional hospital would soon stop functioning, that even the doctor and his staff were making plans to abandon the clinic and set up further east, and in response some people had already begun to pack up and leave. A few were trying to cross over to the government side in the hope they would be taken in, though the fighting on the front lines was almost certainly too fierce to get through alive. The movement would shoot if they caught anyone escaping, and even if they made it to the other side, nobody could tell what the soldiers would do to them when they arrived. Most were planning to move further east instead, closer towards the coast and further away from the front lines, though the ones who wanted to stay behind claimed the shelling there was probably just as bad. There was no point moving further east just out of habit, they said, there was only a little bit of land left now, in less than two kilometers they would reach the sea and there would be nowhere left to go. A story had circulated about a week before about a group of twenty-five or thirty who had taken an abandoned fishing boat out in the hope of making it somehow to India. Two days later the boat had washed back up on shore, carrying inside it the bodies of a few adults and several children, riddled with bullets, pale blue and bloated. The best option therefore was just to stay in the camp till the fighting ended, they argued, to stay put in the dugouts whenever the shells fell and hope they would survive unscathed till the end.
That things would work out this way Dinesh was, needless to say, a little skeptical. He didn’t have conclusive evidence that he would die rather than survive, but perhaps because in such conditions it was easier to believe something than to remain unsure, he felt himself tending towards the former possibility. The fighting showed no signs of abating, and it was only a matter of time he felt before he would either be killed in the shelling, or conscripted and then killed in the fighting. And if that was indeed the case, if in fact he had only a few days or weeks left to his credit, a month at most if he was lucky, his guiding consideration in deciding what to do must be to make use of the time remaining as best he could, in which case perhaps it made sense for him to get married. Perhaps it would be good for him to spend the time he had left in the company of another human being. In spite of having been surrounded for most of the past year by countless numbers of people, he couldn’t tell when the last time was that he’d really felt connected to somebody else. He couldn’t even remember what it was like to spend time with another person, to simply be in someone else’s company, and perhaps it would be worthwhile to do so if he could. Didn’t dying in the end mean being separated from other humans, after all, from the sea of human gaits, gestures, noises, and gazes in which for so many years one had floated, didn’t it mean abandoning the possibility of connecting with another human that being among others always afforded? Unless, on the other hand, dying meant being separated from oneself above all, being separated from all the intimate personal details that had come to constitute one’s life. If that was the case then surely he should try instead to be alone, should spend his remaining time committing to memory the shape of his hands and feet, the texture of his hair, fingernails and teeth, appreciating for a last time the sound of his own breathing, the sensation of his chest expanding and contracting. What dying meant there was no way he could really know of course, it was a subject he was not in a position to think about clearly. It depended probably on what living meant, and though he had been alive for some time it was difficult to remember whether it had meant being together with other humans, or being alone with himself above all.
Dinesh noticed that the ground was no longer passing by beneath him. He had come to a stop apparently, though how long he’d been standing there motionless he didn’t know. From the dusty barrenness of the area he could tell he was near the northeastern end of the camp, quite far now from the clinic. Spread out around him and bounded in the distance by dusty brush and tired, drooping trees were a few white tents, the most recent additions to the camp, propped up by sticks no more than three or four feet high. The area around them was scattered with things, with bags, bundles, pots, pans, and cycles, and lying or crouching on the ground beside them were people in groups of three and four, some sleeping, others merely waiting, as far as he could see not a single one of them speaking. Passing a woman who was sitting by herself and eating sand compulsively from the ground—handful after handful, not chewing, since sand can’t be chewed, but mixing the sand with saliva and then simply swallowing—Dinesh walked towards a thin, leafless tree. He fell wearily against its base, let the bark press pleasantly against his back, and stretched out his legs so that the muscles in his thighs, exhausted from all the digging, could finally relax. Leaning forward he buried his face between his hands. He hadn’t slept at all that night, hardly at all that whole week. There was a throbbing deep in the back of his head and his eyes were heavy, as if lead had accumulated along the bottom of his eyelids, stretching them out so much that soon they would become translucent. He let them close and massaged his eyelids thickly with his thumbs, listened to the blood pulse softly through the slender sieves of skin, beating heavily upon his tired eyes. It wasn’t that he hadn’t tried to go to bed, but no matter how tired he was and how much he tried, he could never sleep very long or fully. It was a light sleep he always had, superficial and easily interrupted. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that it was difficult to sleep in an unfamiliar place, as when taking a new bus or train route you would always be slightly afraid that something bad would happen if you dozed off, that your bag might be stolen or that you might miss your stop. Dinesh had been in the camp for almost three weeks though, and if he didn’t feel at home there he was in any case no longer a complete stranger, the little space he had made for himself in the jungle just northeast of the clinic was quiet and comfortable, a place he could rest whenever he liked as if in the safety of his own room. He would go there each night to lie down, but as soon as he closed his eyes and began drifting towards sleep, his consciousness rocking softly back and forth in the direction of dream, he would feel a hesitation or foreboding growing suddenly inside him. It was as if in falling asleep he was exposing himself to a danger that could only be avoided by staying awake, as though upon fully losing awareness the ground would give way beneath him and he would drop backwards through the darkness towards an impact he did not want to face.
There was, always, before the shelling, for the slenderest moment before the earth began shaking, a faraway whispering, as of air hurtling at high speed through a thin tube, a whooshing, which turned, indiscernibly, into a whistling. This whistling lasted for a while, and then, no matter where you stood, there was a tremulous vibration, the trembling of the earth underfoot, followed by a blast of hot air against the skin, and then finally the deafening explosion. It was a loud, unbearably loud explosion, followed immediately by others, so loud that as soon as the first one came the rest could no longer be heard. They could be registered only as the pervasive absence of sound, as a series of voids or vacuums in the sound sphere so great that not even the sound of thinking could be heard. The world became mute, like a silent film, and as a result the bombing often brought about in Dinesh a sense of calm. He wouldn’t jump up or rush to shelter but would first stand still and take a deep breath, look around with amazement and also slight confusion, as though the thread that had guided his movements in the quiet before the shelling had suddenly been cut. He would try to gather his bearings, and would only then begin walking, slowly, and calmly, not to any of the dugouts that had been built throughout the camp but towards the stretch of jungle that separated the camp’s northeast boundary from the coast. Wandering around one day he had found a small wooden fishing boat that someone had hauled inland and turned over, the owner probably, in the hope that it would be safer there than on the beach. Moss had begun to spread over its painted surface but the name, Sahotharaa, was still visible, upside down near the front. The boat’s rim curved upwards towards the bow and stern, and he found that he could squeeze in through the middle section into its shelter, dark and cool and private. The air was slightly stale but the boat was long and there was room inside to stretch out, even to sleep, though for some reason Dinesh couldn’t lie flat while the bombs fell. Instead he sat upright, hunched forward to avoid the low ceiling, legs bent in front of him and arms drawn around his knees. He would sit there for what seemed like hours staring at the ground before him, the wood creaking with each new explosion, gusts of hot air rushing in and then receding through the gaps between boat and ground, slackening his body instead of tightening it so he could feel himself tremble as the earth shook. He felt at such times always strangely disembodied, as though observing himself from the outside, watching as his two hands clasped each other tightly and as his fingers intertwined of their own accord. He listened passively as his chest expanded and contracted, as air went in and out of his mouth, and he stayed that way, breathing in and out, long after the shelling had stopped.
Not everyone reacted this way naturally and neither did Dinesh in the beginning, when his mother was alive still and he was less resigned to all that was happening around him. In the beginning he was inseparable from the general clambering, from the shouting and screaming and the frantic attempts to find friends and relatives before the shelling grew so fierce that everyone had to stop moving. Using wooden boards and bricks from nearby buildings and working together, people in the camp had managed to construct hundreds of dugouts in which to hide during the bombings, some of them as deep as six feet, though most of them were only about four feet deep and just large enough for nine or ten people to sit crouching with their bodies tightly packed together. Coconut and palmyra leaves were kept beside the openings, sheets of corrugated steel if they were lucky, and when it was time to get under they would climb down and draw these covers over their heads. The dugouts didn’t provide protection if a shell landed in the immediate vicinity, and though they did help against the shrapnel, by far the greatest source of injury and death, the most significant benefit they gave their occupants was the comfort of being surrounded by four close walls, a floor, and a ceiling, like ostriches that, in times of great danger, choose not to run away but rather to dig into the earth and bury their heads inside, regardless of how exposed their bodies are. The ground beneath them reverberating with the force of each explosion, the clay soil crumbling bit by bit from the earthen walls, they would si