Wreck and Order by Hannah Tennant-Moore

Author:Hannah Tennant-Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2016-02-08T16:00:00+00:00

GAMBAWELLA

The rush of air on the motorbike is like the spritz of mist from the spray bottle that kept me company on hot summer nights in junior high. I’d stretch out in my underwear, listening to the Violent Femmes and Radiohead and Nirvana, making myself wait between squirts until the heat gathered at the white tufts of baby hair along my forehead, then crept downward and rouged my cheeks, prettily, I hoped. I am sitting on the motorbike between Ayya and Suriya, on our way to their parents’ home in a neighboring village. Suriya insisted I ride in the middle, lest I fall off the back on a fast turn. I take care to sit up straight, gripping the side of the bike, although Suriya keeps shouting over the wind, “El, you must hold to Ayya!” This seems such an intimate position to be in with a Sri Lankan boy that I worry Suriya may be pushing me toward her brother, fantasizing about a romance between us, her brother marrying an American girl, bringing instant success to her family. But the bike is fast and loud and unsteady, and it soon jostles away my concerns about other people’s imagined imaginings.

This is poya, full moon day, and so we stop at an ancient cave temple on our way. The entrance is crowded with pilgrims dressed in airy white skirts and sarongs. Suriya hands me a five-rupee coin to feed to a green-faced wooden man. I place the coin on his thick, curled tongue and watch it roll down his throat into a padlocked box. I try to laugh with Suriya and Ayya, but it’s hard to watch them spend money on gimmicks at a well-endowed temple. We add our sandals to the heap of flip-flops just inside ornate iron gates. The stone pathway is scorching. We run on the balls of our feet toward the gaping mouth of a cave. Women with slack, twiggy arms crowd our faces with lotus flowers to offer inside the temple. Ayya buys us each one. The seller peels back the outer leaves of the thick bud, making a star of deep purple petals.

The statues inside this cave that has been a place of worship for thousands of years remind me of Simpsons characters, their beatific smiles sardonic imitations of beatific smiles. Suriya stops short before a potbellied blue man, covered in coarse gray hair, with fangs like daggers. In one hand, he holds a scythe; in the other, the thin arm of a sexy, bare-chested woman with huge, black teardrops painted on her cheeks—an adulterous woman reborn in the hell realms, at the mercy of this hairy demon about whom Suriya used to have nightmares after she came here to worship with her parents when she was young. Her girlhood fear reminds me of my mother’s stories of growing up Southern Baptist—lying awake at night worrying that she had accidentally committed the Unforgivable Sin of blasphemy and was already doomed to eternal torment. Or worrying

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