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CHAPTER 1

Beauty Queen

WHEN I SAW Suja waiting for me at the airport, I had reason to hope that Dr. Aronson had been right. We were different people. Suja was the beauty now. She was wearing a milky blouse with an elaborately embroidered neckline, and her hair was like a black silk veil against it, falling almost to her waist. I remembered her fingering my hair. How much time had she spent brushing with her head upside down, trying to make her hair wavy like mine? Now there was no need for that.

Two girls in their early teens were gawking at her and whispering. When Suja turned around, they waved, giggling. She waved back, looking amused. I had forgotten she was a celebrity.

When she embraced me, I noticed that she also smelled different. When we were kids, she had always smelled of Pond's talcum powder. She used to cover her face and arms with it. She thought it made her skin look fairer. I had never wanted to tell her that it only made her look ashy. Now she smelled of a musky perfume. This was progress, I thought.

We fell easily into conversation, as if we had not changed, as if seven years had not passed, as if the banner-carrying incident had never happened.

Sri Lanka had changed too, I thought. My plane landed after midnight, so I could not see much of the countryside on the way to Colombo. But even in the dark, I noticed that the roadside shops were different. The familiar thatch-and tin-roofed shacks filled with biscuit tins, powdered milk, and soap had given way to glass-fronted two-story structures selling ladies' garments and ceramic tiles. I remembered that the shacks had been set back from the road, their ramshackle doors open in a way that was welcoming but not pushy. These modern-looking shops were pressed up against the road as if they were too eager for business. There were few stretches of road with no shops; I saw hardly any open fields and wild lantana bushes. The airport road was better, though. It was wider, and the ruts were no longer deep enough to throw us up against the car roof.

"Remember what a hoot it was, going to the airport? How we used to shriek," Suja said. "All those holes in the road, and the lorries thudding over them. Your father muttering at the pedestrians. Remember how irritated he used to get?"

"Donkey! Goat! Bloody cattle!" I said, laughing, mimicking my father's growl. "He still does that. Even in Berkeley, he mutters at the SUVs that cut him off."

"And your mother still gets that martyred look?" Suja said. Her laugh was still the indelicate snort I remembered.

"Plus she gives him the cold shoulder until he apologizes. Then she goes on about how she doesn't want to put up with road rage." Suja understood my parents almost as well as I did. Until the banner incident, there had not been a day when she had not spent time at my house. "Nothing's changed with them," I said. Unlike with us, I thought, hoping that Dr. Aronson had been right. "But around here, things look different."

We talked companionably about the traffic on the road and the shops full of export surplus clothes until we passed a billboard showing a beige-skinned young man entering a Land Rover. His dark suit, which was unsuitable for the heat, looked crisp. He was wearing a felt hat, oblivious to being in a country of bare-headed, umbrella-carrying people. "Look at that man," I said. "Some things don't change. Remember that crayon color we used to call 'flesh color'? That pinkish-beige? Wasn't it weird that we colored all the people we drew with that? Didn't we realize we were brown?"

I thought I saw her flinch and realized I had let my guilt steer me to a topic that was too close to trouble. But she started talking about Miss Matilda, our grade five teacher, who had always wanted us, inexplicably, to draw feet and shoes in art class. It was only then that I realized how tense I had been. The banner incident was so far in the past, I reminded myself. From an adult's point of view, it should have seemed trivial. But the guilt I had held for seven years was still there. Although it had got smaller, it had enough weight to influence my interactions with people. Dr. Aronson said childhood experiences could leave a long trail. But he had pointed out that Suja and I were grown-ups now. I believed him when he said we could leave our childhoods behind. That was why I had come to Sri Lanka: to forge a new adult relationship with Suja.

We went to St. Catherine's the next afternoon to look around. It was the August holidays, so school was not in session. The metal gate looked smaller than I remembered. When we banged on it, the gatekeeper who peered out was Jamis. His face had shrunk, and he had a bald spot, but otherwise, he looked the same as when I had last seen him, when I had been in grade six.

New multistory buildings stood in the school compound, and a concrete walkway circled its perimeter. I felt as if I were in a dream, the kind where you are in a strange place that seems oddly familiar. The sun was merciless, and I was groggy, maybe from jet lag or maybe because my memories were weighing me down. I looked past the recently tarred basketball courts to the playing field. It had not changed. Around it was the hard-beaten dirt of the track where we had held the march-past.

In grade six, Suja's dream had been to carry the Aloysius House banner for the march-past at the school's annual sports meet. She wanted to start practicing early, months before the meet. She insisted that it was the only way to ensure success. We were both in Aloysius House, but she knew I had no interest in being the banner carrier. She persuaded me to practice with her so that she could learn to synchronize perfectly. We marched around each other's gardens after school, our backs straight as broom handles, our arms swinging stiffly, yelling, "Laaayft, right. Left right left!" Suja carried a broom with its business end in the air, raining dust on our heads, to simulate the banner. During these sessions, I giggled and horsed around, kicking my legs in random directions, or pretended to be other people: Saddam Hussein, Charlie Chaplin, the army guards outside the prime minister's residence. But Suja was deadly serious. Sometimes I saw her practicing marching on the spot before the full-length mirror in the dining room of her house, her face set in fierce concentration. By the time we began doing synchronized marching in our physical training classes, she had perfected it.

Five days before the sports meet, the three prefects in charge of picking the banner carriers had all of us girls march past them. Suja and I, with our hours of practice, were the finalists for Aloysius House. I misstepped on purpose and lifted my knees lackadaisically when the prefects shouted, "Maa-ark time!" At least, that was how I seemed to remember the scene, although much later I began to doubt myself and wonder whether I misremembered what I had really done. The prefects had us stand at ease while they debated our merits. They were in grade twelve. They must have been a foot taller than us, and they had plucked eyebrows and fashionably cut hair. They were whispering, but we heard them clearly.

"Not that one. The other one can practice and then she'll be fine," one prefect said. I remembered how she kept pinching a raised black beauty mark on her cheek.

"Like milk and molasses," another said, snickering.

"No question," the third said.

"Beauty and the beast," the snickering one said, pulling at a dangling earring that had somehow escaped Sister Bernadine's censuring eyes.

That was how I ended up carrying the banner for Aloysius House. Suja said hardly anything to me the rest of the school day. She was silent during our drive home together too. I could not recall what I said to her. Maybe I did not say anything at all. I was only twelve.

Because we were next-door neighbors in addition to being first cousins, we usually had our after-school eats together, either at her house or mine. But that day, I had my snack alone; I remembered trying to eat a roti with fish curry and having no appetite. Suja refused to play afterward. I sat on my garden swing and read the same page of my Tintin book, The Prisoners of the Sun, over and over again.

The next day, Suja stayed at home with a stomach pain. Over the years, there must have been other days when she had been sick and missed school, but that was the first time I could remember it happening. When I got back home, I found out that she had been hospitalized for appendicitis. For years afterward, I believed I had been the cause of it. Children do not think in terms of coincidences.

Suja did not come to the sports meet. She needed to recover from the operation, my aunt said. Neither my aunt nor my mother knew that I had been chosen over Suja. I never said anything to them, and apparently, neither did Suja.

I remembered a few things about the sports meet. It was one of those cloudy days, not too hot to enjoy. The place was teeming with all of us in our starched white divided skirts. It was noisy. You had to shout to be heard. The Aloysius House tent was decorated in yellow, our house color, with nylon ribbons, crepe-paper streamers, and masses of araliya flowers. Some of the flowers had fallen onto the grassy ground and got crushed. Their thick smell was in the air. I sat with a group of other girls on the grass inside the floorless tent, watching the track-and-field events. Clouds of dust fogged the track every time girls ran a race. The cheering inside the tent sometimes turned into screaming. Whether the girls came back to the tent triumphant or dejected, they streamed sweat, their uniforms dusty and plastered to their backs.

By the time of the march-past, I had finished the Necto in my drink bottle and eaten two of the small boxes of powdery glucose that girls were passing around for energy. That might have accounted for the excitement I felt. The Aloysius House girls selected for the marching squad lined up behind me. Someone handed me the banner, a yellow satin flag embroidered with the house crest and mounted on a wooden pole that had been planed smooth. Because Aloysius House came first in the alphabet, we were the first squad to step onto the track. Silence descended, and then the marching band began playing. I followed the band, feeling the ground vibrating with the stamping of our feet and the thudding of the big drum in front of me. For the four minutes it took to march around the field and past the guests of honor, I forgot everything else. I was lost in the experience: the dust and the sticky air, the rumbling music and the rhythmic pounding of our feet, the landscape of watching faces, the taste of left-over sugar on my lips, and my hands clutching the banner pole. I loved it.

Later, when I got home, I found out that an infection had ambushed Suja. My mother and my aunt had rushed her back to the hospital. Then I remembered how Suja had cried silently when the prefects had picked me. She had stepped to the side, the tennis shoes that she had painstakingly whitened the day before soiled with dust from the track, her face wet with tears that smeared messily across her face as she rubbed her cheeks. I thought about what I could have done differently. I could have refused the honor for which I had been chosen. Even if I had not done that, at least I could have not enjoyed the march-past.

After she recovered, Suja and I stopped hanging around together in and out of school. I could not remember whether and how much I tried to talk to her about other things. I knew I did not bring up the sports meet. There was no big confrontation. Our time together just petered out. After school, I sat for endless, friendless hours on my swing, reading or staring at the squirrels chasing each other on the cocoplum tree.

"Ready to go?" Suja said, turning back toward the basketball courts. I must have started, because she said, "Were you dreaming? You must be sleepy still from the flight."

That was when I realized she had put the incident behind her. Maybe she did not even remember it. That seemed strange when the incident and its aftermath had affected me in so many ways. At the end of grade six, my parents and I had emigrated to the US. In school, I did well in my classes but poorly at any big exam. The only prize I ever won was for an essay I had written in my tenth grade history class, not knowing that it was going to be entered into a contest. I scored low on the SAT although the tutor my parents had hired predicted an excellent performance. My teachers had said I was Stanford material, but I ended up at a modestly ranked state university. In university, I joined the debate club to get over my fear of public speaking. I was always afraid I would talk too much. At a debate on stem cell research, I froze up at the podium and let my team down. I abandoned the debate club after that. I joined the drama club and got a star role in the season's play. But I lost my voice on the day of the show; my understudy, who was one of my good friends, got her chance in the limelight. That was when I had first gone to see Dr. Marcus Aronson. In the course of months of talking to him, he had pointed out the many other incidents involving Suja that had affected me, but the only one that I could not get out of my mind was the march-past.

It seemed unfair that Suja had been unaffected, although, of course, I was happy for her. All she talked about on the way to tea was her hope that she would get picked to model for the new Neemia Shampoo advertising campaign.

* * *

The days flew by. The term paper I had to email to my Asian studies professor was overdue, but Suja liked to shop, so we went to the Liberty Plaza and Majestic City shopping arcades instead. I craved the pastries from Sena & Sons, the bakery near St. Catherine's that we had haunted during our school days. Modern chrome furniture had replaced the old wooden chairs and tables, and ceramic tiles now covered the cement floor. The glass cases looked new, but there were still a few flies flitting around inside, as if for old times' sake. The pastries had not changed: Cornish pasties, steak and kidney pies, bacon and egg rolls, mince pies, and the sugar-topped cakes I especially liked. Suja insisted on paying, but she did not eat much; she had to keep her figure, she said.

Once, when we were lounging over a table littered with pastry crumbs, a round-faced lady stopped near us, clutching the end of her sari to her chest.

"Rupa, no? Still so lovely!" she said in a voice that could have carried to the road.

It was only when Suja said, "Hello, Beryl Aunty," that I remembered her. She had lived down the lane when Suja and I had been neighbors. Climbing her jambu tree had been one of our pastimes. She had appeared so suddenly from her kitchen once, bellowing at us, that Suja had fallen off a branch and sprained her wrist.

"Beryl Aunty, how are you?" I said, rising.

Beryl Aunty patted my cheek with her plump fingers. "Good, good, but how are you, Rupa? I ran into your aunty and she said you are visiting for only two weeks."

"I have to get back home to California," I said, wiping flakes of pastry off my hands. "My fall semester classes start soon."

"Already in university! My, can't even believe," Beryl Aunty said, as if she had expected me to be twelve still. "Growing up to be a beauty. Even fairer now that you are living in the States." She laughed. "Not so much sun there to make you black, no?" I thought I saw Suja's back stiffen against her chair.

"Only because I've been inside the library studying," I said. "But this is the beauty queen." I nudged Suja's chair forward.

"Of course, of course," Beryl Aunty said. "We were all so proud when she won."

Suja smiled, but her back still looked stiff.

There were times when people we did not know recognized Suja. They would stare until Suja smiled at them. Sometimes she pretended not to notice, but I could tell how much the recognition pleased her.

I was ten days into my stay when I found the Lanka Chitchat website. Suja and I had been lolling on the sitting-room sofa. It was overcast outside. The sitting room was dim although it was midafternoon, so we had turned on the glass-shaded lamp that sat on the side table. We were Googling ourselves on my laptop computer. The only hit I had was about the essay prize I had won in high school. Suja, on the other hand, had dozens of hits, all having to do with her Miss Green Sri Lanka status and her participation in the Miss Planet Earth pageant. There were pictures of her with other semifinalists in newspapers from India, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Sweden, Indonesia, the UK, and the US. One picture had her in a modest one-piece swimsuit going down a waterslide with some of the other contestants. There were also pictures taken during the pageant's swimsuit and evening gown competitions. The Los Angeles Post had interviewed several of the semifinalists on the day of the pageant. The newspaper quoted Suja saying, "I've always dreamed of this." Clearly, being a national beauty queen was much better than being the Aloysius House banner carrier. I thought of saying that out loud, to confirm my absolution. But I did not.

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Excerpted from "The Water Diviner and Other Stories"
by .
Copyright © 2018 University of Iowa Press.
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