Island of a Thousand Mirrors by Nayomi Munaweera

Author:Nayomi Munaweera
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466842274
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Part Two

eight

Saraswathi, Northern Sri Lanka

It is the dry season here in the northern war zone of Sri Lanka, and the lagoon reflects sunlight like the shards of a thousand broken bottles. The village children used to gather here to play, but I come here alone now. So many of them are gone, whisked away in speeding white army vans or torn from the sides of dead fathers and bleeding mothers by the Tigers. The other, “lucky” ones have run away to the Internally Displaced People’s camps. You can tell where the camps lie from miles away by the smell. Thousands of people without running water or toilets, there is bound to be this terrible smell. So even when the gunfire echoes, I am glad that Amma and Appa refuse to leave, that they keep us here in this small house by the lagoon.

There were seven of us before. Amma; Appa; my brothers, Krishna, Balaram, Kumar; myself; and like a tail at the very end, my sister, Luxshmi, who was named for the goddess with the long and lovely eyes, Luxshmi, who provides all things material, a stream of golden coins pouring from her open palm. Whereas my little sister was named for the butter-skinned goddess of plenty, I was named for Saraswathi, the serious-eyed and studious goddess of learning. When I complain to Amma, she only laughs and says, “Look how wisely we have named you,” and it is true, because there is something in me that loves the glide of pages between my fingers, the stroke of my pencil across paper, the hush of the village classroom. Even now I am studying for the teacher’s certification. Next year when I am seventeen, I will take the exams, and one day maybe I will be the village schoolteacher.

But these are big-big dreams for somebody living inside a war, so I don’t speak of them often. Sometimes I get this breathless feeling that the war is a living creature, something huge, with a pointed tongue and wicked claws. When the tanks rumble past in the far fields, I feel it breathe; when the air strikes start and the blood flows, I feel it lick its lips. I’ve grown up inside this war, so now I can’t imagine what it would be like to live outside it. When Amma and Appa tell stories of before, it is that world with plenty to eat and no air strikes that is alien to me. What would it mean to live without the soldiers in their sandbagged checkpoints? Without the barbed wire? Without the giant photographs of martyred Tigers?

When the war first stroked its nails across the hearts of my brothers Krishna and Balaram, they were older than me, but only little pieces of the men they longed to be. The Tigers had come to our schoolroom. They showed us videos of what the Sinhala do to our people. How they murder and kill us Tamils without mercy. They spoke of the Leader, his lifelong struggle for Eelam, a homeland where we would be safe from the Sinhala.

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