Island of a Thousand Mirrors Read Online Free PDF Page A

a hurried letter to her son: “What nonsense is this?
     Aunty Malini says you are going here, there, and everywhere with some unknown, unplanned
     girl.”
    When the reply comes weeks later, her son writes that, yes, he has chosen for himself,
     worse, he is in love, and even that his love is a Burgher, her bloodlines infused
     with who-knows-what distillations of Dutch sailor and Portuguese soldier.
    Sylvia Sunethra fumes and cajoles, writes ponderous letters alternately pleading and
     menacing. But her son will not give up his beloved. She is after all, he says, Sri
     Lankan. What does it matter if some of her ancestors were of the fair-skinned variety?
     He does not believe in the primitive custom of arranged marriage, he says. And if
     Sylvia Sunethra cuts off his allowance, he will wash dishes and sweep floors, immigrate
     to the United States. Nothing will induce him to return to that backward island if
     he cannot bring his love with him.
    Sylvia Sunethra wrings her hands and whispers to her daughter so that her husband
     doesn’t hear, “We sent him to England to become a doctor. And now he is taking a Burgher
     wife and moving to that bang-bang, shoot-shoot country. What am I to do?” She holds
     her head and says, “This will kill your father, I just know it. It will kill him dead.”
    They keep the secret from him, but in the end this effort proves unnecessary. In the
     midst of these chaotic months, the unfolding of further catastrophe. The Judge, lying
     in bed next to his wife, contorts like a marketplace marionette, utters a sound like
     a water pipe bursting, and gasps his last. The family has no time to mourn because
     immediately after the funeral, it is revealed that in order to fund his house-building
     obsession, he has emptied all the accounts, sold all the lands.
    Sylvia Sunethra, who as a bride of fifteen left her mother’s bed for her husband’s,
     whose sole monetary experience has concerned the payment of servants, must find ways
     to spin the empty echoing coffers into gold. Overnight servants are dismissed. Piano
     lessons, tuition, Tuesday elocution classes rendered a dim memory. Ebony furniture
     and previously coveted dowry jewelry are sold on the black market.
    Only Alice remains. “Where is there for us to go?” she asks, the gaunt, large-eyed
     child peering from behind the folds of her sari. And Sylvia Sunethra, moved by this
     example of need so much greater than her own, allows them to stay and share in the
     family’s misfortune. In return, Alice is granted reign over the kitchen, where she
     learns trickeries by which to stretch dhal and rice into all their mouths.
    During these days, Sylvia Sunethra grows even more steely eyed and fierce. Women say,
     “My! How she has changed. So strong and all. If it was me, I would just die.” What
     they do not see: the nights in which Visaka lies in her mother’s bed, arms wrapped
     around the back of the rigid, unmoving woman who does not cry and does not sleep.
     Together they listen to the waves rising in the darkness.
    When the rooster calls before light, Visaka wakes to see her mother, wraith-like in
     her white sleeping sari, rise to sitting, wind the long, thin hair into a bun. The
     mother-ghost rises and walks barefoot across the silent house, making her way through
     the dark with a blind person’s certitude. She slips past Alice asleep on the floor,
     through the front door, past the slumbering dogs on the verandah. She walks across
     the street and the railway tracks, not looking, as she has warned her daughter countless
     times, for the rushing morning train. She walks down to the sand and sea.
    Behind her, the young girl follows, afraid of the mother in her ghostliness, afraid
     of what will happen if she does not follow, sits on her slim, adolescent haunches
     in the sand and watches her mother climb high onto rocks, face oceanward. She knows
     that now the tears are falling, mixing with the salt spray, the sobbing lost