Chapter 3

The next day, when calling his parents, Tony decided to try talking in Tamil.

“This weekend I am bringing someone home.”

His mother was astonished. “What? You are speaking Tamil?”

“Yes, I am speaking Tamil.”

“How did you learn it? Who is coming?”

“Her name is Manjula. She comes from Sri Lanka.”

At hearing a female name his mother excitedly burst into rapid Tamil far too fast for him to follow. “Slower? Slower ... yes, she taught me ... can she stay Saturday night? ... she likes puttu ... Mullaitivu district, I don’t know the name ... okay, bye.” He felt proud that he hadn’t had to dip into English once, after less than a week of Manjula’s teaching. She was changing his life, in more ways than one.

Unfortunately the amount of time Tony and Manjula had spent with each other had been cutting into study time. They decided to stick to the library for Friday’s classes with each other.

Tony was now learning verb conjugations. As he had taken French in high school, the concept was at least familiar to him, and Manjula felt satisfied at how quickly he picked it up.

When her turn came, Tony reflected that she didn’t, so far, show much interest in slang, except for sexual terms. She really had a dirty mind, he thought. He loved it.

“The vagina in slang is called a ‘pussy’. Why is that?” she asked.

“Most people here don’t know the reason. But I do—”

“—because you know everything,” she interjected teasingly. “Well not everything, but I tend to look up stuff like this. It has to do with cats.”

“Cats?”

“A female cat, when she goes in heat, will mate with a whole bunch of males, one after the other. She’ll chase each one off afterwards and go for the next. So that part of the body is named for the female cat, the pussy.”

“Is that what women are like here? Everyone back home was warning me not to be like them. They say you can have sex with a white girl just by asking, whether you are married or not.”

“Where did they learn that?”

“That is what people say who have watched English television shows.”

“No, girls here usually won’t have sex except with their boyfriends.”

“But ... more than one?”

“Yes. If they break up, she finds another boyfriend, and has sex with him. And so on. Eventually, when she finds one she wants to marry, she does.”

“So a woman might have sex with four or five men in her life? One after another?”

“Yes, that’s probably about average.”

“And if I broke up with you, you would have sex with another woman?”

Tony looked up fearfully.

“Do not worry, I do not want to break up with you. But I am asking ... say, hypothetically.”

“Hypothetically. I would be devastated to lose you. But I would not expect you to remain alone the rest of your life, and I would not want to be alone either.”

“But if you got married, how would you expect your wife to feel, knowing that another woman had had sex with you?”

“Women here don’t mind that, as long as their husbands are faithful to them while they’re together.”

“A Sri Lankan man would definitely mind. I am not even sure about what we did on Wednesday,” she said dully.

His heart sank. “Do you regret it?”

She looked daggers. “Of course not. I loved it. But if you do not marry me, I would not tell my husband about it.”

Tony did not believe that someone should lie to their partner, as a matter of principle. But what if their partner had asked them a question they had no business asking? And how could he tell someone from another country how to live?

He wanted to have sex with Manjula, and she knew that he wanted that, and she was with him anyway. That would have to be good enough for now.

On the bus ride out of town the next morning, Tony found himself disappointed to see Manjula wearing a traditional Sri Lankan outfit, a long dress with long sleeves. She still looked lovely, and he had to admit that the clothes themselves, with gold-coloured thread interleaved in the fabric, and little pieces of jewelry dotting them, were prettier than anything he’d chosen. She looked stylish and elegant. Undoubtedly she was trying to impress his parents.

Instead, he decided to broach the other forbidden subject.

“Manjula, why do you want to be a doctor?”

“I am very intelligent. A very intelligent person should become either a doctor or a lawyer, and there is no demand for lawyers in rural areas.”

“Are those really the only two career options?”

“Yes,” she said bitterly. “Sri Lanka is not a rich country. We do not have loads of skyscrapers with consultants and marketers and executives. We do not have high-tech firms with engineers and investment banks with finance jobs. The civil service is reserved for the Sinhalese. The only options left for an educated Tamil are law and medicine. In rural areas, just medicine.”

She didn’t say the words check your privilege, but this was the equivalent.

Tony reflected on the reams of recruiters found at any career fair. They would have nothing like that in Sri Lanka. He himself had chosen computer science after seeing the mountains of jobs in the field constantly being advertised, but that would not be the case there.

At least she was thinking about careers. That was how Tamils thought about education. Going to university is an obsession since early childhood. The rocky soil and remoteness of the Tamil regions left little work in agriculture, and Tamil parents hungered for their children to get the few professional jobs in the country. When the civil service was made Sinhalese-only, and university places were assigned quotas based on ethnicity, the Tamils had risen in armed rebellion. They were the sort of people who would literally go to war for a chance to get an education.

There were problems with this, of course. Tamils overwhelmingly pushed their children towards science and engineering disciplines. As a result, hardly anyone studied Tamil literature, and the field suffered a serious lack of scholarship. Tamil literature is one of the oldest in the world — of languages still spoken, only Greek and Chinese have as ancient a canon — but few of Tony’s relatives had ever studied it, even those who had gone to school in Sri Lanka. Most knew far more about Shakespeare than Shankara.

Tony grew up with this cultural passion to learn. His favourite activity as a child had been reading books, or news and educational websites. He had been just eight when he started teaching himself to code. It had been, he suspected, the main reason he failed with girls — he was just too much of a nerd, in their eyes. He hadn’t watched most popular TV shows, and didn’t know much about pop music. Nor did he have the good looks that might have made up for that. Manjula’s passion for learning touched his heart. And her skill at teaching language had made him feel so much more connected to his heritage and ancestors.

On the entire bus ride home they did not let go of each other’s hand. He often noticed that she would give him little caresses with her fingers, caresses that felt wonderful.

Tony had feared his parents would embarrass him in front of Manjula, but that turned out not to be an issue. His mother warmly embraced her as soon as she stepped through the door, and dragged her off to tour the house, stopping at every framed photo on the way.

His father was looking at him with approval. “So you finally got yourself a girlfriend, eh?”

Girlfriend. What a beautiful word that was, really. He felt like he would burst with pride.

“What is her surname, son?”

“I ... I don’t know, actually.”

His father frowned. “And what village did you say she was from?”

“I didn’t ask that. She did mention Mullaitivu District.”

His father’s lip curled, but he said nothing further.

Dinner was a surreal experience for Tony. Manjula, relieved to finally have someone to speak Tamil with, was enthusiastically talking entirely in that language to Tony’s parents. Occasionally Tony asked for a translation, but seldom got more than a sentence or two. As far as he could tell, his parents were very interested in the changes in Sri Lanka since they had emigrated decades before.

He found it more amusing to watch Manjula eat. She had eaten like a bird whenever they’d gone to lunch or dinner, but he realized now that was simply because she didn’t like Western food all that much. She was gobbling down his mother’s cooking as if she hadn’t eaten in weeks. In one sense, she hadn’t.

Sri Lankan food was in fact far from being Tony’s favourite. When he was a kid, he used to surreptitiously throw vegetables from his plate in the garbage when his mother wasn’t looking. He’d outgrown that, but if you offered him a choice between an eggplant curry and a hamburger — hell, even a vegetarian burger — he knew what he would choose.

But he did love vattalappam, a dessert dish made with jaggery. From the look on her face, so did Manjula. It made him smile to see her so happy.

After dinner, his father glanced at him, then leaned forward and asked Manjula something in Tamil, with a serious look on his face.

Manjula looked shocked, putting her hand to her lips.

His father repeated the question, quietly.

“What are you saying?” asked Tony, but no one answered.

His father leaned forward and said something else in Tamil. Manjula burst into tears, but she nodded. Both his parents had a pained expression on their faces.

“Manjula — Manjula! What’s wrong?” Tony rose and went towards her, but, burying her face in her hands and sobbing, Manjula scurried from the room.

Tony felt his blood pressure rise. He faced his father. “What did you say to her?” he snarled.

His father didn’t reply, but said something, still in Tamil, to his mother. They seldom spoke Tamil to each other, except when it was something they didn’t want him to understand. She left the room.

“Please sit down,” his father said, in English. “Your mother will talk to Manjula.”

Tony was not satisfied. “What did you say?”

“We do like her, really we do. But there are some things you may not realize—”

“WHAT?” Tony shouted.

“Manjula is a parachi,” his father said, simply.

Parachi, or pariah if applied to a male, was a term his parents often used to tease. Tony thought it meant “twerp”.

“Are you trying to insult her?” He felt his hands start to ball into fists.

“No, I mean that she is, literally, a parachi.” He sighed. “Maybe we should have taught you Tamil after all.”

“Will you get to the point?”

“Manjula is an untouchable.”

An untouchable. Tony had heard of that in India, but not in Sri Lanka. The caste system, where people were born into hereditary occupational groups, with a carefully defined ranking, with intermarriage strictly forbidden, with brutal honour killings to suppress the lower ranks — wasn’t that long past, part of the dustbin of history?

“What ... what? We don’t have untouchables.”

“Manjula’s ancestors were latrine cleaners. It would have been their job to clean up people’s shit — animals’ shit too. No one could touch them — even when they were beaten, it was with sticks. They would live in restricted neighbourhoods. They could not visit the same temples, nor even eat out of the same plates as other castes.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“It is a primitive and barbaric system, yes. But our people believe in it. When I was a boy, your grandfather once pulled me by the ear and smacked me because I had talked to the young man he had hired to clean up after the animals. He told me if I ever polluted the house with the presence of such a man, I would get a severe thrashing.”

“So now you believe that crap?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” his father snapped. “My father was wrong. He was a bigot. But that bigotry has not gone away. Even some of my siblings — if they came here and found out a parachi had been here, they’d walk out, and some of them would want the chair she sat in scrubbed, before they came here again.”

Tony did not know what to make of this. Raji aunty — a bigot? Ponnambalam uncle? So prejudiced against Manjula he’d want a chair scrubbed? These were aunts and uncles he respected, people he loved.

“I know you are young to be thinking of marriage. But if you were to marry a girl like Manjula, I don’t think more than a quarter of our family and friends would attend your wedding.”

“We don’t have to tell them—”

“Manjula’s last name is Alukkuchuttam. Did she tell you that? It literally means ‘cleaner of dirt’. Her village is a poor one with many pariahs. Even if she does not reveal that, we can guess from her accent.”

“She’s not a dirt cleaner! She’s going to be a doctor!”

“I am sure she will be, son. You have not known this because none of the pariahs made it to this country. They never left Sri Lanka. They did not have the connections to emigrate as refugees, nor the education to qualify as skilled immigrants. Manjula is in fact a rare exception. She must indeed be very intelligent and determined to overcome such a background.”

“That’s why I like her so much.”

“If she marries you, be aware of the sacrifice the two of you must make. You will lose many of your relatives and friends. Children you have grown up with. Uncles and aunts who have loved you.”

“How can they still think like that?”

“Believe me, I have had this argument many times. Did you know that pariah is an English word too? It is the only English word of Tamil origin.” Not even the nerd in Tony had made that connection. Pariah in English does indeed mean a despised person, an outcast.

“We are not trying to be cruel to Manjula,” his father added. “Actually we are trying to protect her.”

Tony bristled. “How?” He almost spat the words out.

“Have you been intimate with her?”

Had he? Did their romp the other day count as “intimacy”? Tony genuinely did not know the answer to that question.

“You don’t have to answer that,” his father continued. “My point is this. Throughout history, upper castes have preyed on the low. Sexually.”

Tony started to protest but his father held up a hand. “Nobody in our family will admit to this, but it is true. Traditionally, a karaiyar man, such as us, could have an affair with or even rape a parachi woman, virtually with impunity. Their wives would think of it as masturbation, not infidelity.”

“I will never hurt Manjula,” Tony insisted.

“Be sure that you do not. If you are intimate with her, and then fail to marry her, you will have hurt her deeply, I can promise you that.”

Tony did not know what to say.

“We are not trying to impose another country’s morality on you. But remember, she is from another country,” his father said, a tone of finality in his voice.

Tony felt his stomach churn. He shut his eyes tightly. This could not be happening, this nightmare, this evil blast from the past. He felt like crying...

Crying? Manjula had been crying!

He ran out of the room. Manjula was sitting on the couch on the living room, still sobbing. His mother was sitting beside her, crooning something softly in Tamil, but not, Tony noted, actually touching her.

“Manjula,” Tony said, struggling to keep his voice calm.

She looked up at him, then deferentially gazed at the carpet again.

“Manjula,” Tony repeated. He grabbed her hands.

It did not take long for the significance of that to dawn on her. He caressed her fingers gently. She looked at him in surprise and shock. He lifted his fingers to her face and wiped away her tears. He placed a hand on each of her cheeks.

Gently, he pulled her to her feet and took her in his arms, just holding her, mutely, while her entire body wracked with sobs. Leaning on his toes, he rocked her back and forth, slowly, soothingly, for a long time, waiting as she cried herself out.