Homesick Read online

  Preethi started to scream. Her eyes tried to open, but they could not. Her mouth moved, and her father and her mother and her brothers stood traumatised and scared of the screams, and of their own part in her suicide attempt, Victor clutching her bandaged hands, Rohan pressing a button to summon a nurse, Nandini leaning heavily against Gehan.

  In her dream she was dressed in a white cotton shift belted with rope. Her hair was braided around her head, and her feet were bare. Wound around her arms were golden cloths. In her dream she walked around the party looking for Rohan, and when she saw him, beyond the fence of the garden, she knew he was dead, and no one would bury him. She looked back at the party, where people still laughed, and climbed over the fence and ran across a field to where the body lay. She took the bandages from her arms and lay them, bloodied and disintegrating, onto his already decomposing body. She dug at the ground, trying to cover the body with crumbling earth. The whole party turned to her at once; she could see they were all chanting, and finally it was a sympathetic chant, but grudgingly so. Some pointed, some shook their heads. She lay down next to him, her lovely brother. Lay down, and then, as if this part of the dream had been the only reality, she woke up.

  Nil’s Wedding

  On the morning of her wedding, Nil lay in bed and listened to the noise of the family, the harmonies they sang, the melodies which struck each other awry, until she could hear shouts and laughter. She heard Mohan calling for Vita, Vita answering, “What?” She heard her mother, Siro, in the kitchen, her father, Wesley, in the garden. She listened to his voice. She could see him in her mind’s eye with his two brothers. They would be sitting in the shade of the pear tree, Wesley’s arm carelessly around the back of a grey-tinged plastic chair, telling a quiet story, sipping tea from his old brown mug. She thought of them all as she stretched, thought of her family walking down the aisle with her, a gang of De Silvas laughing and playing as they strutted toward Ian’s more dignified family, waistcoated and behatted, like a set of Etonesque sixth-formers. She lay still and listened again, and heard her two aunts in the kitchen singing with their high voices, and Vita laughing. She heard her mother’s voice on the stairs talking quietly to Mohan, and Mo saying, “Don’t stress, Ma, it’s fine.”

  She could hear Mo’s feet coming up the stairs. Nil closed her eyes, holding herself still. He walked into her room, opened the curtains, looked down at the garden, knocked at the open window. She lay quiet. She knew he had turned to watch her. He laughed.

  “I know when you’re awake, we shared a room for long enough,” he said, and he pulled the covers from her. She yelped, pulling them back.

  “Go away, Mo.”

  “Dum dum de dum,” he sang loudly, “dum dum de dum. Ian’s getting lucky tooo-night …”

  “Ah, shut up, would yer?”

  She heard her father shout, “Mohan! Leave the child alone!”

  Mohan started to leave. Then he came back and sat on the bed. He tousled Nil’s hair. “Are you nervous?” he asked.

  “No. Why?”

  “I would be. Marriage. New house, new life. No Mum to come home to. I don’t know. You’re very young.”

  “I’m twenty-three. Mum was married a year by my age.”

  “Yeah. Well. Aren’t you worried about all the other ones?”

  “I’ve had enough of other ones. Ian’s good enough for me,” she said.

  They sat in a steady silence, and then Mohan lay back, his hands tucked under his head, next to her on the pillow. They had shared a bed until she was six. He listened with her to the voices, the singing in the garden, laughter from the kitchen.

  “Mum’s stressing,” he said, as commentary. They could hear their mother shouting into the garden: “Wesley! The flowers!”

  Nil turned on her side and looked at Mohan in profile.

  “I’ll miss you guys,” she said.

  “Will you?” he asked, but he didn’t seem to be interested, a little smile on his face as he stared at the ceiling.

  After Mo left, Nil lay in her bed for another half an hour and tried to answer his question. She wondered why on earth marriage was so important at this stage, when men were practically falling into her lap from every angle. She heard another wave of laughter from downstairs. She realised that she took comfort from the knowledge that that other life—of dark crawls across hotel room floors at two in the morning to find her clothes before she made her way drunkenly back down the corridor to her own room—was over. Ian was a good bet. Ian was a freedom, and a shutting-off. He was the groundwork for everything else. But was he love, she wondered? Was he the love that creates laughter, and home, and the tenderness of all of this? And she knelt up in her bed and looked down into the garden, where she saw her father reach out for her mother’s hand as she hurriedly walked past him, clutching Nil’s bouquet.

  •

  Nil went for a walk. The front door was open, and the hallway lined with flowers, small Oasis-filled plastic plates poked through with froths of gypsophila, prongs of creamy freesias, plump mauve roses, pinewood-smelling greenery. She stopped short when she glanced into the shady green dining room, where she saw her own large bouquet on the table, leaning up on its handle, the ivy and stephanotis trails artfully falling off the edge. Why is it all so necessary, she thought?

  Nil could hear Siro in the kitchen. “No, Wesley,” she was saying forcefully. “We must have someone in the house at all times. Who will pour the champagne, take the clingfilm off the platters?”

  Wesley, replying, “This one, this woman, what is her name?”

  “Margaret?”

  “Yes, the cleaning woman. She said she would come.”

  “But she is a cleaning woman, Wesley! What if one of the guests doesn’t know where the church is and comes to the house?”

  “So Margaret will tell them.”

  “A cleaning woman cannot direct guests to my daughter’s wedding, nayther?” she asked, and Nil knew her mother was looking around at her husband’s sisters, who for the past week had sat at her elbow from morning till evening, giving credence to Siro’s interpretation of the ancient laws of Sri Lankan wedding etiquette.

  Nil walked down the hill she had lived on since she was five. She strolled past Molly-the-widow’s house, stopping to peek through the perfect round hole in the fence she had discovered as a teenager, which gave her a small view of the magnificent garden of hollyhocks and delphiniums, fuchsias and honeysuckle. This was beauty, she thought. A glorious England, a place of history. She walked past Debbie’s house, her friend and constant companion when she was a teenager.

  She walked on down and stopped outside Rosemary-the-dinnerlady’s house, the last one on the road. Its front path was terraced up through a rockery, which Nil knew and loved. Rosemary had always allowed them to go in and search for snails, ladybirds, butterflies. If I find a ladybird, I will count its dots, and multiply them by my age and then by Ian’s age, and then I’ll find the mean of our ages and divide the answer by that, and that will be how long we’ll be married. She found a ladybird with one spot. This had never happened before, and she took it as an omen. A good omen or a bad omen, she wondered?

  Nil walked into town, went into Boots, and bought hairpins. She looked at the front cover of The Guardian in Smiths. Thought seriously about buying it. The first “civilian” in space, a teacher, Christa McAuliffe, had been announced. Nil thought about the first moon landing, which she and Mohan watched on the little black-and-white TV in the dining room. They took Mamma’s Hoover apart so they could attach the hose to the tea chests, which had just been unpacked after they moved into the house to make an impromptu rocket. Christa and me launching into new territory, she thought.

  Walking back up the hill, she saw the dogs with their people, children on bikes, a normal July day. The oppression she had felt before had lifted, but when she looked into the park, she felt it again, this weight, as if the wedding were a story and the real world, going on its way in and out of the park, was an admonition to h
er family and its fantasies of equality, acceptance, normality.

  •

  The doorbell rang and rang. Nil showered, then had to wet her hair again so the hairdresser could tease it into a French knot, and then they realised they had done everything in the wrong order, because how was the hairdresser to pin the veil into her hair while she still sat in her knickers? So Siro had to be called up to dress her, because Nil had never put a sari on by herself. She’d only ever put one on—with her mother’s help—for a fashion show in the sixth form, and even that she had resented, because she didn’t want people thinking that she was, well, ethnic.

  Nil stood in her parents’ bedroom in front of the only full-length mirror in the house. The bedroom was dark, large but full of furniture: a simple double bed with no headboard, a dressing table, wardrobes, cupboards, a chair. Nil looked at it all through her nearly married eyes and thought about the house she would move to at the end of this week. She saw its large windows all opened, the whiteness of the walls swallowing her up in their space, taking her into their blankness, shaping her into something different.

  Aunty Marjie and Aunty Ivy watched from the bed. Aunty Dorothy stood by Siro’s elbow holding the pins. Marjie’s straight back and thin arms did not disguise her tenseness—Siro often told Wesley that Marjie would die, of a heart attack, if she did not learn to relax. Ivy, her opposite, sat slouched into the amalgamation of her chest and tummy, and Nil giggled and looked away. Both aunts fiddled with their hair, and sometimes with each other’s. They had lived together for most of their lives; Marjie had once made a foray into married life, which had been short-lived and was never talked of. The fourth aunt, Siro’s sister Prema Aunty, the younger, light-skinned double of her elder sibling, remained quiet and undisturbed, not allowing any infringement on her sister. She was Nil’s favourite aunt by far. She laughed easily, fitted into plans and escapades, made no judgments but only small sounds of approval at times when they were needed. She pressed the white sari as Siro lifted it gently from the ironing board, fold by precious fold, onto the floor. Then, tucking, pinning, creasing, she carefully manoeuvred it about Nil’s body. Siro walked the material around Nil, and Nil stood still, watching herself, watching her aunts and her mother in the savouring of their duty. Vita had slipped into the room and stood by the door, her small, dark face showing its sixteen-year-old innocence. Her almond-shaped eyes hooded over with apprehension and what seemed to Nil like distaste.

  “What’s the matter, dar-ling,” Aunty Ivy said, stretching her hand out and stroking back Vita’s hair.

  Siro stopped what she was doing and appraised her other daughter, with her head to one side.

  “Have you showered?”

  “No.”

  “Well?”

  “I wanted to watch.”

  “Hmm …,” and Siro continued to walk the sari about Nil. Nil looked at Vita in the mirror and winked. She waited to see that Vita smiled back, but the small face was intense, following their mother’s movements. She seems afraid, Nil thought. Siro pleated the sari and tucked it into the front of Nil’s underskirt. Nil looked at her mother’s hands, and somehow a prick of anger came to her: the rough fingers that overwrought the simplest of tasks—even this putting-on of her sari was an act of Sri Lankan drama. It was as if she, Nil, were unimportant within it all, simply a vessel to carry the rectitude of the Sri Lankan methodology.

  “It is a very fine silk, nayther?” Prema asked.

  “It was a bargain,” Siro said.

  “Rea-ea-lly?” the aunts chorused. Vita took a step back toward the door. Nil said nothing.

  Siro took the final part of the sari, walked it about Nil once more, then pulled it up onto her shoulder. The pallu, the embroidered panel at the end, lay splendidly down her back. Her mother looked appraisingly at it, then undid it, pulled one of the pleats from Nil’s middle, and redraped it. She squinted at her daughter’s back. Nil balanced her head, with its large hairpiece curled into a French knot and stuck tight to her scalp. She tried not to laugh.

  “Longer?” Siro asked Dorothy. Dorothy and Prema both walked to Nil’s back and looked. Dorothy reached her hand forward, but Siro gave it a stinging look, and the hand was quickly withdrawn.

  “Are you pleating it or leaving it?” Prema asked.

  “What do you think?” Siro asked Nil in the mirror.

  “How am I supposed to know, Ma?”

  Wesley was called for an opinion. She heard her father’s voice on the stairs, wondered if Ian would ever care about the way their own daughter should be dressed on her wedding day. Would they even get so far as having a daughter?

  “Pleat the pallu,” Wesley said, straight away.

  “Hmm,” Siro said.

  “No?” he asked.

  “All right,” she snapped.

  Wesley looked at his wife in amusement. He put his hand on her arm, then, reaching to her head, stroked back her hair. “Why, darling?”

  Nil watched her mother adjusting, pinning and unpinning, her father watching her mother, in love.

  •

  Nil wore her mother’s wedding diamonds. It was the first time she had seen them out of the box. But when Siro put them around her neck, they realised the catch was broken. They pinned the two ends of the necklace under her blouse at the back.

  “Cummak na, nayther?” Siro said uncertainly to the aunts. She patted the blouse down over the bump.

  “Ekka nena,” her aunts muttered, smiling at Nil but looking at each other uneasily. Nil knew her mother had said it doesn’t matter, does it? And her aunts had answered, of course not, but she looked at them and wondered why it would matter at all? It’s just a necklace, just a wedding.

  Vita was the bridesmaid in a mauve sari, her shorter hair dressed with lilac freesias. Mohan wore a suit that matched his father’s. They had both bought expensive black suits that were more fashionable than anything Ian’s side would wear, Nil knew straight away. She wondered if they would be seen as what they were—two men with flair—or as jumped-up immigrants. She thought of Ian’s father, his mother. They wouldn’t understand this pageant, her family. They would parade like a tribe in full costume, her parents, Mohan, Vita, her aunts and uncles and cousins, in their brightly coloured silks, their shining jewellery, their polished shoes and silver and gold slippers, and it would be their best day. The day their family shone, she thought, and she looked at them all warily, sizing them up with one eye, the eye that looked through Ian’s eyes, then balanced the image with the other eye, full of pride. She wondered—why am I marrying him, when I hate so much about him?

  •

  It was an inevitable rush to the church. Who was going with whom, not enough cars, and too many ladies in saris; and then Vita, who would she go with? Nil walked down the stairs in all her finery, and the crowd in the hall turned as one to stare and smile. Prema in a pale pink sari, Dorothy in beige silk, their hair tied in knots on top of their heads. A stolen sprig of freesias in her hair decorated the side of Marjie’s head, and Nil saw that Siro had noticed and scowled. Nil and her father and mother paused for photographs, and then she entered into the rituals: eating a morsel of milk rice; drinking fragrant flowered water; being blessed by her parents; aunts dabbing at their eyes; uncles, cousins, tiny children kissing her through her veil. The routines she had seen at weddings in Sri Lanka, uprooted and replanted in London. They seemed odd, out of step with the day-to-day living of an hour before. I am an astronaut, saying my goodbyes, eating and drinking my strange last meal.

  Nil and Wesley drove to the church in the hired Mercedes in silence. Nil tried to erupt from the car, because she was already fifteen minutes late. Wesley held her back.

  “It’s all right. He’ll wait a little longer. Let us catch our breath.”

  She sat back and looked at him as he bowed his head and said a silent prayer. He looked up and saw her and offered her his prayer, as if offering a refreshment. She refused quickly, smiling encouragement as if he were a little boy.


  They walked slowly along the south circular to the church. It had been their church for the whole of their lives, a place of familiar stained-glass windows and thirties architecture that all three children knew intimately from playing there after service; from Guides, Scouts, Junior Church, Youth Services; until Nil and Mohan turned eighteen and refused to go back. Nil did not want to marry here. If she had really had a choice, she would have married in the chapel of New College in Oxford. “But how on earth will all the Sri Lankans get to Oxford?” her mother had asked. Wesley held the huge train from her veil in his hands, and she lifted the skirts of the sari.

  Nil began to shake, a small tremor but detectable by her father. She had only now realised that she was about to get married. She looked at Wesley and smiled wanly.

  “What is it, darling?” Wesley asked.

  She stopped short of the door, feeling her legs begin to shudder. Now he had asked, she realised: “Dad, can we go back?”

  “Where do you want to go?” He had her elbow and was pushing her gently forward toward the church door. They could hear the organ playing. A couple tiptoed past them, a lady in a fuchsia sari, the man in a dark suit and pink tie. They smiled, waved. Nil did not recognise them. Wesley nodded at them.