Chapter 4

Manjula was so unaccountably cheerful at breakfast the next morning that Tony’s mother looked at her suspiciously. Tony feared he would get questions he didn’t want to answer, but Manjula smoothly diverted her by asking if she could take some Sri Lankan food back to campus. His mother considerately gave Manjula coolers full of it.

Sitting on the bus home, Tony felt a deep sense of contentment. He had a loving, beautiful girlfriend. He had understanding, open-minded parents. His studies were going well. He was even learning Tamil, a dream he’d had for years.

“Manjula,” he asked, “how do you feel?”

“Today I feel wonderful,” she replied. “What we did last night was wonderful. But I am worried.”

“About marriage?”

“Not about us. Something will be worked out. I am worried about school.”

“Why?” Tony found it hard to believe Manjula’s brilliant mind could be fazed by anything.

“I have biology tomorrow. I hate biology. It is just so fluid, and messy. I especially dislike the lab sessions.”

“What other classes are you taking?”

“Chemistry, economics, maths, and English writing.”

“What if you dropped biology, and took something else?”

“I need biology to be a doctor.”

“What if you didn’t need to be a doctor?” He grinned. “Hypothetically.”

She looked at him archly. “Hypothetically, I could be a quantitative analyst like you said. Or an actuary.”

“You can check, but it sounds like your other courses are compatible. Just drop biology and take another class instead.”

“I wish I could do that,” she sighed. “But I cannot.”

“What if you stayed here?” Tony asked.

“In Canada? And marry you, no doubt?” She looked at him with mock outrage. “You would sacrifice my life plans for your cock?”

Tony did not rise to the bait. “Even if we had never met, there is a good case for you to remain here. You would be very wealthy by Sri Lankan standards.”

“And leave behind my family? My friends?”

Tony contemplated this. Immigrants could sometimes bring their parents over, but Manjula could not bring her aunt and uncle, and certainly not her cousins, or friends.

“What is your aunt and uncle’s income?”

“Twenty thousand rupees per month.”

Tony took out his phone and consulted a few websites. “Okay, starting salary for a quant ... after taxes ... monthly ... convert to rupees. That would be five hundred and thirty thousand rupees a month.”

“What?”

“That doesn’t mean you’re rich, since your expenses will also be high. But you could send your aunt and uncle less than five percent of your income, and still double theirs. And your income could double in the first ten years. And in the U.S., quants make even more.”

Manjula was speechless. She had been looking forward to earning a doctor’s salary of sixty thousand rupees a month, which would make her one of the richest people in her village. A specialist could get eighty thousand. And that wasn’t the starting pay, it was the rate after several years of service.

If she moved to Colombo and went into private practice, she could earn double or triple what she could in her village, but it would still barely be a quarter of what she could earn abroad, if Tony’s figures were correct. And she’d have to deal with the high cost of living in the city.

“But what happens to my village?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“How can they manage without a doctor? Poor regions like ours have very few doctors of their own. The Government assigns recent graduates for duty in the rural areas. They do a two-year stint and then they leave. The people never get treated by experienced practitioners. And they cannot see a specialist without travelling many hours to the city.”

“So you feel,” said Tony slowly, “that it’s your duty to go back and help them.”

“Yes,” she said fiercely. “Do you know what we called people like your parents who fled abroad during the war?”

“What?” said Tony, shamefacedly.

“Runaways. We called them runaways. It was your caste, the karaiyar caste, that started the war. It was your caste that had the good schools and wanted the university places and best jobs. And when the Army came, it was people from your caste who were the first to go abroad.

“The rebels did not have enough soldiers. So they wandered into villages, into schools. Child soldiers are the most obedient. They came into my school and demanded I go and fight for them. I was seven years old. Appa begged with them, he pleaded, let her finish her studies, she is too young. Finally, they let me go, but only if he went in my place. So he went to fight.”

Tony felt, suddenly, deeply ashamed of himself.

“Two years later we got a letter. Appa was in hospital. He had lost his leg. Amma was desperate to bring him home. She heard that the Air Force had agreed to let the area around the hospital serve as a safe zone. The Army promised that unarmed civilians who left rebel territory would be allowed to go home. I wanted so much to go with her, to see him again. I missed him so much. Amma said no, it was too dangerous. She went off on foot. It would have taken her two days to get to the safe zone.”

Everyone Tony knew had either gone abroad or was safe in Colombo during the terrible last days of the war. He had never felt more uselessly overprivileged.

“There were hardly any doctors at that hospital. There had not been many in the first place, and most had fled. The Government ordered the Red Cross to leave, they accused them of aiding and abetting terrorists. Appa just stayed there, I don’t know if anyone treated him. All I know for sure is that Amma did make it there.”

“What happened to your father and mother?”

“At least they were together. They ... they...”

Manjula was not crying; she was stone-faced, with a look of grim determination.

“The Air Force bombed the hospital anyway, after they said they would not. They said there were terrorists in the hospital. Appa was a rebel soldier, so they would have counted him as a terrorist. But he never wanted to kill anyone. Everything he did, he did to protect me.”

What can you say to a story like this? Tony thought of the sense of contentment he’d been enjoying just minutes before, now apparently gone forever.

“They cremated all the bodies, right there on the spot. The Government refused to admit Amma had been there. But other people have told me she was going there, they saw her nearby. There were many civilians in that hospital who died. The war ended a few weeks later. They were dancing in the streets in Colombo. I have nothing left of Amma and Appa. Not even their ashes.”

Tony remembered that time — of how crowds of Tamils had protested the massacres, holding demonstrations in London, in Ottawa, in Washington. In Toronto, a gathering of angry Tamils had stormed onto the Gardiner Expressway and blocked it for hours. To this day, some still believed the dead rebel leader was alive and in hiding somewhere, and that the glorious struggle would one day start again. Many denounced the perfidious Sinhalese, but the steady flow of contributions from the West that had financed the rebels dried up after they were gone.

“I am so sorry about what happened to your parents,” he said. It was a hopelessly anodyne thing to say, but he could think of nothing else.

She took his hand in his. “It is not your fault. And I cannot ask you to come back with me to Sri Lanka. I do love you, but I do not believe you could handle the standard of living we have there.”

“I love you too, Manjula,” said Tony robotically, but he felt completely unworthy of her. His dreams were of the acquisition of wealth and status. Hers were of taking care of her family and community.

Manjula had lost both her parents at the age of nine. She had known poverty, had known deprivation, had known cruelty and suffering to a degree he could barely imagine. He, on the other hand, had lived like an emperor, studied at well-furnished schools, driven smooth-running cars on neatly paved roads, never had to worry about bombings or invasions, and didn’t give any more thought to life except to which high-paying job he could get — or whether he could get his girl to suck his cock. What a waste of space, he thought bitterly.

Manjula dozed off as the bus drove on, her head lolling onto his shoulder. Tony thought and thought. Finally, he made some decisions.

When he got home, he spent some time surfing the net, filled in some forms, and drafted a few emails.

He texted Manjula: Can’t do Tamil lesson tomorrow; booked something else.

Her reply came in seconds: Why what is wrong?

Nothing just got somethn to do, he wrote back.

She took a bit longer to reply. Can you come over around 7?

“Why did you try to thaavi our lesson?” she asked, in Tamil, when he arrived the following evening.

“I um, I was volunteering at the student centre lab.”

“Volunteering?”

“You know, guiding students who need computer help. You’d be surprised how many have spent their life on their phone but can’t do squat with a desktop. Some of them don’t even know how to type, or do a Google search, or even print a document.”

“You got a job?”

“No. I volunteered. I did it for free.”

“Why would you do that? Do you know these students?”

Tony was puzzled by her attitude.

“Well no, I just ... I know that I’m very good at computers, and a lot of them aren’t. I can sometimes figure out in a few minutes what would take them an hour. If I can help them get their work done, it takes away their stress, and I felt better after I went.”

“Were you feeling bad?”

“Of course I was feeling bad!” Tony snapped. “After what you said about runaways, I felt awful. I just thought ... maybe you were right, maybe my life should have some kind of meaning.”

“So you decided this just yesterday? After we said good night?”

“That’s right.”

Manjula laughed. “Do you want to know what I was doing last night?”

“What?”

She put her finger in front of her crotch and made a wiggling motion. “You are a very good teacher, you know,” she said playfully. “I wanted it so badly I did it twice more after you left back at your parents’ house. Last night I did it another three times. I cannot seem to get enough.”

Tony would normally have been quite aroused by this, but he found himself getting more upset. He’d been doing deep soul-searching, and she’d just been pleasuring herself?

“But — I was even — I emailed some non-profits, asking if they’d take me on an unpaid internship next summer.”

“What? I thought you said you could probably get an internship with a big famous tech firm, and you needed one to get a permanent job later.”

“I guess I decided some things are more important than money.”

It was now Manjula’s turn to get angry. “Are you throwing your career away just to be noble?”

“Why not? Isn’t that what you’re doing?” Tony shouted back.

There was a silence.

“Why are you angry with me?” asked Manjula in a small voice.

Tony sat down on the chair. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not angry with you, I’m angry with myself.”

“Why, what have you done wrong?”

“The question is what have I done right? And after what you said yesterday, I couldn’t think of anything.”

Manjula squatted down before him and took his hand. “Tony, the past week since I met you has been the happiest of my life. That is what you have done right.”

“I just thought ... you were going to devote your life to taking care of your village, and I—”

“I am sorry, I should not have ranted like that,” she said. “The reason I got so heated was because you made me realize the flaw in my plan.”

“What flaw?”

“I hate biology. I can learn it if I have to, but I do not think I will ever love it the way I love maths.”

“But you said your village needed a doctor—”

“Yes, but you are right too. How can I be a good doctor if I hate biology? I was thinking about that ... um ... in between.” She blushed. “I just miss Amma and Appa so much, I wanted to do something to make their deaths worthwhile.”

He looked down at her. “Their deaths were not worthwhile. It’s their lives that were worthwhile. Because they produced you.”

She smiled. “I am glad you are helping in the lab. Maybe I can do something for maths students in difficulty.”

“I already know what you can do for Tamil students in difficulty.”

She chuckled. “This was our first fight!” she said, in Tamil. “Did you like it?”

He found himself relaxing. “In a way, I did. I think ... I think I needed a jolt like that. It really is a cruel and unjust world out there, and we have to do our part to make it better. Not just drift through life.”

“You can decide on your internship later. I actually asked you over here for a different kind of jolt.”