Writing in Displacement
April 4th 2025, Foster Auditorium
Representative Texts of the Invited Authors
You can download a pdf of these texts here: https://migrationstudiesproject.la.psu.edu/files/2025/02/Writing-by-SL-Authors2.pdf
Return to the Event Page: https://migrationstudiesproject.la.psu.edu/writing-in-displacement/writing-in-displacement-event-1/
- Indran Amirthanayagam
For author information: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/indran-amirthanayagam
For more poems: https://groundviews.org/author/indran-amirthanayagam/
- The Migrant’s Reply
We have been running for so long. We are tired. We want to rest.
We don’t want
to wake up tomorrow and pack our bags. We have gone 10,000 miles.
We have
boarded a row boat, tug boat, bus, freight train. We have a cell phone
and some bread.
Our eyes are dry. Our breath needs washing. What next? You are
putting up
a wall on your Southern flank? What an irony. The country that
accepts refugees
does not want us. We qualify. We have scars and our host
governments hunted
at least some of us. The rest fled in fear. Gangs do not spare
even the children.
White vans took away our uncles, our cousins. Do you think they
have been made
into plowshares? Ay, what are you saying? Too easy. Too easy to
wear our hearts
in these words, in slings, on our faces, furrowed, perplexed.
What happened
in kindness to strangers? Why do we have to be herded like prisoners, held
in a holding camp? We are human beings and, like you, in safer countries,
we have the same obligation to save ourselves and our children.
Oh, the children.
Look at them. Give them food and school and a new set of clothes.
Give them
a chance. Whether you are red or blue the eye of the hurricane does not
discriminate. We are your tumbling weeds, hurling cars,
flooding banks. And
we are diggers of the dikes. We can teach you so many languages
and visions.
You would learn so much: you would never ever say lock us up.
- Words for the Sri Lanka Tourist Office
The King Cobra slides
through our jungles,
and tucked in bushes
by the riverbanks
the grand Kabaragoya
holds court among lizards—
but if you want to swim
at Mount Lavinia, or fly kites
on Galle Face Green, or ride
horse carts in the Jaffna peninsula
of your ancestors, or bear a child
in Colombo General Hospital,
or sleep in Cinnamon Gardens
under a mango tree,
or beg in the Borella Market,
or ride for historical reasons
on patrol boats in the Bay,
or stilt-fish off Matara down South,
just remember here everywhere
there is only man burning
and woman burning
here everywhere
in shallow graves
in deep graves
floating out of salt water
washing down the sands
the dead have tongues
the dead have ears
tongues are speaking to ears
What are they saying?
What are they saying?
Tell us, brown bear
bolting out of your cave.
Tell us, leopard
leaning on your branch.
Tell us, flamingos.
Bend your necks
and pour wine pour wine
Hoopoes, kingfishers,
cranes, have you got your messages
on the bill, are you ready
to sing? Are you going to sing?
Monsoon.
Are you going to sing?
Monsoon.
Are you going to sing?
Monsoon. Monsoon.
- Kiss
Kissing your lips
I try to forget roses
or the fruit of palmyra trees
sweet and strong
Tongue lolling upon tongue
heart beating
against heart beating,
these are my words
signifying our human bodies
which poetry does not capture,
the absolute desire I have
to kiss your lips
on this hot and sunny afternoon.
I do not know how much longer
I can walk about the garden
kissing roses,
or perambulate the toddy tavern of my dreams
where black faces and white toddy mix
in black and white memories
of Jaffna, Sri Lanka,
my Tamil countrymen
far away on an island across the sea.
Far away and far away
the palmyra fruit and your lips.
To drink toddy now.
To kiss your rosy lips now.
To uproot the roses in my garden
and offer them upon my tongue now.
To fly to Sri Lanka
and grab the last fruit on the tree
before history throws the Tamils into the sea
as is said it will do;
before all this and everything else,
before the apocalypse,
I do so sincerely wish,
though my words may not fit,
to rest my head in your hair
and kiss your lips.
- The City, with Elephants
The elephants of reckoning
are bunches of scruff
men and women picking up
thrown out antennae
from the rubbish
bins of the city
to fix on their tubular
bells and horn about
by oil can fires
in the freezing midnight
of the old new year
We ride by their music
every hour in cabs on trains
hearing the pit pat
of our grown-wise pulse
shut in shut out
from the animals
of the dry season
the losers and boozers,
we must not admit our eyes
into the courtyard
the whimsy of chance
and our other excuses—
dollars in pocket—
to write beautiful songs
is all I ask, God
to do right with friends
and love a woman
and live to eighty
have people listen
to the story of my trip to America
The elephants of reckoning
are beaten and hungry
and walk their solitary horrors
out every sunrise slurping
coffee bought with change
while in some houses
freedom-bound lovers
embrace late and read Tagore
about the people working
underneath the falling of empires.
2. Cheran Rudramoorthy:
For Author information: https://www.beltwaypoetry.com/poetry/poets/names/r-cheran/
Translation of poems from original Tamil.
- My Land [1981]
Nets spread like wings across the wide sea.
Above, the fierce breath of the wind.
From the sea, looking up,
fingers pressed against your flying hair,
you can see the shore,
palmyra palms, and tiled roofs here and there.
The waves, the sea-spray
as the engine roars!
How did such an hour and a half
come to an end?
Later, the wide expanse
with palmyras planted there,
each rising to a man’s height
from the virgin sands.
As for the sand,
it is all golden specks,
seeded mirrors, inhabited by the sun.
Beneath the sand, the land extends
where, two thousand years ago,
my ancestors walked.
Our roots go deep:
one footstep, a thousand years.
Upon the jewels of bare-breasted women –
one, perhaps, standing sleepless by this shore,
watching and lamenting as stars scatter
and fall into the sea –
or another, waiting for a boat
to plunge through the horizon
and come safe ashore —
or upon footsteps buried deep in the sand
one late evening, perhaps, under cover of dusk,
here where the coconut-fronds sway –
my ancestors have left me a message.
I stand on a hundred thousand shoulders
and proclaim aloud: This is my land.
Across the seven seas,
overcoming the rising waves,
the wind shouts it everywhere:
My land
My land
- I Could Forget All This
I could forget all this
forget the flight
headlong through Galle Road
clutching an instant’s spark of hope,
refusing to abandon this wretched
vulnerable life
even though the very earth shuddered
– and so too, my heart –
forget the sight
of a thigh-bone protruding
from an upturned, burnt-out car
a single eye fixed in its staring
somewhere between earth and sky
empty of its eye
a socket, caked in blood
on Dickman’s Road, six men dead
heads split open
black hair turned red
a fragment of a sari
that escaped burning
bereft of its partner
a lone left hand
the wristwatch wrenched off
a Sinhala woman, pregnant,
bearing, unbearably,
a cradle from a burning house
I could forget all this
forget it all, forget everything.
But you, my girl,
snatched up and flung away
one late afternoon
as you waited in secret
while the handful of rice
– found after so many days –
cooked in its pot,
your children hidden beneath the tea bushes
low-lying clouds shielding them above –
how shall I forget the broken shards
and the scattered rice
lying parched upon the earth?
- Apocalypse
In our own time we have seen
the Apocalypse. The earth
trembled to the dance of the dead;
bodies burst apart in the wild storm;
darkness screamed as everything caught fire
inside and out.
The last flood dragged out children and men
and threw them on the flames.
We died in an untimely hour.
Glancing sidelong with our dying eyes
at the helplessness
of those who surrounded us, watching,
we smouldered and smouldered
then rose up in a smoke cloud.
Kafka was denied the chance
to set fire to his works.
But Sivaramani burnt hers.
Poetry is destroyed in mid-air.
What others write now
refuses to live.
We have all gone away;
there is no one to tell our story.
Now there is only left
a great land, wounded.
No bird may fly above it
until our return.
- Colour
In the street, dry now after a fall of snow,
beneath the street-lamp with its dim light,
the tip of his nose frozen and red,
a small Canadian flag pinned carelessly
upon his ragged, drooping overcoat,
centuries of dirt and stains and beer-froth
on his long, dense brown beard,
a forest-green army cap on his head
now shapeless,
buffeted by snow, wind and rain,
with hunched back, crooked nails and
long, curly, tangled hair, he lies huddled,
his blue eyes blinking frequently,
part sunken in darkness
part crazed. He begs for money
and thanks those who fling him coins.
I refused.
‘Fuck you, Paki,’ he said
turning his face away.
3. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
For author information and more of their writing: https://brownstargirl.org/
- xoxox your messy nasty crip house
my garbage can is stuffed with bloody pads. there’s a
double half moon shaped ass smear of blood crocus
on my toilet seat. the tub needs a scrub. there’s a cat tree
i’ve needed someone to come pick up for two weeks now.
riding shotgun in my hallways. no one may be coming.
there’s rubble on the floor, yes, rubble.
used napkins crumpled everywhere. yes the
recycling is full again. what a scandal. it looks
like a crazy person lives here. survey says they do.
also a sick person. you know that cycle where your
house is gross and you need help but you won’t let anyone over your house
because it’s gross? that one. maybe i’ll be on the news.
i’m seeing spots in front of my eyes from blood loss
so yay, that means I can’t see all the way what a shame my house is
i don’t seem like an “adult”. that’s fine.
I’m a cripple adult maybe slowly bleeding to death
because the next new patient opening is in june
and the hospitals are stuffed full of dying people in hallways
as bombs rain down on the rest of the world, paid in full.
this is me saying, wherever you are feeling like an embarrassed loser
i love you and your dirty-ass house
even if we die here, we are not the shame.
- Adaptive Joy
December 19, 2021
Disabled people aren’t supposed to be anywhere—let alone the woods—having a great time, as evinced by the tiny blonde girl who screams as I speed by on my racing recumbent trike. “But why is she riding that, Mommy? Why is she riding that thing?”
“Because it feels amazing!” I yell at her over my shoulder. I have upset the entire orientation of her universe just by being me, in public, completely shredding the hell out of the Magnuson Park trail network in this adaptive trike that weighs maybe eighteen pounds. The girl is still bellowing “Why?” while her no doubt embarrassed parents shush her. But I’m already a half mile away.
Michel Foucault said “visibility is a trap,” a sentiment echoed by Black trans disabled scholars like Tourmaline. Trans visibility doesn’t equal fewer trans murders or more trans justice. I agree. Ads featuring Paralympians don’t help raise Social Security Disability Insurance rates from below the sub-sub poverty line, raise caregiver wages above the subminimum wage, or end police violence against disabled Black, Indigenous, and people of color, who are 50 percent of all people killed by the cops every year—organizing does that.
It’s also true that enjoying ourselves (in ways the abled many never have conceived of) in our vibrant, weird, improbable crip body-minds has the power to shock the abled and upend their ideas of the way things—bodies, movement, life—are supposed to be.
However, I didn’t come here to be a teachable moment for this tiny white kid. I’m here because my current town of Seattle is the home of Outdoors for All, a truly incredible adaptive sports center that has a warehouse of handcycles and trikes and quadracycles. Anyone disabled can just show up and borrow them for free.
I was a disabled autistic kid whose dad raged at me. Bikes weren’t accessible to my body, and my lack of ability to ride one was a huge shame to him. Then I was a disabled autistic twenty-three-year-old who bought a used Pashley trike from a bike place called Parts Unknown, down an alley in Kensington Market, Toronto. I started speeding all over the city: triking standing up on my pedals and looking like the Road Warrior, beating my friends who took the bus to work, and just having massive crip body joy all the time.
It’s been a minute though. I’ve mostly been hanging out in my crip home space for a year and a half, and it’s been a terrible year and a half. My friend Stacey died, my friend LL died, my dad died—more people than I can count who I knew a little bit or were friends or relatives of loved ones died. And like every disabled person I know, I spent the year terrified that everyone I love—because my whole beloved community is disabled—was going to be murdered by a virus plus care rationing. I wore a hole in my couch crying out my grief and mostly didn’t get that far from my house in the Cheasty Greenspace, the forty-five-acre urban forest I live in. I went for slow cane walks by the blackberry vines, western red cedars, bigleaf maples, and trickling urban streams of my neighborhood. When I was terrified, I visited the ring of cedars by the mailboxes to breathe and pray.
I went to an incredible QTBIPOC grief workshop after Stacey passed, held by friends in T’karonto (Toronto). They asked us to pay attention to the land we were on as we began to write and meditate on grief—emphasizing that we could do this even if we could just see the land outside our window from bed, centering disabled realities. Grief is held by land, not separately, they said. And working with our grief has everything to do with our rights and responsibilities to the Indigenous lands we’re on—as Indigenous people, uninvited guests, or people brought here by force—and the relationship we build with that land.
Grief lives in the body; crip grief lives in the crip body. And I am working out my crip grief by moving in a crip way on this land, on this trike. I am luxuriating in my ride, inches from the ground. I am whipping by everyone and also easing off the gears and moving slow. I am leaning back, pedaling through all the ecosystems of this 350-acre park: the lake, wetlands, grasslands, the many sports fields with kicking children and picnicking adults, all of us looking to this land to hold our hearts. I have a map, but it’s not the world’s greatest and it’s not the point. The point is to enjoy going whichever way my body wants to go, to get lost and figure my way back, with my brain and my muscles, my felt sense of what direction I want to stretch into.
At one point I’m reclining and pedaling opulently through a long wetland boardwalk path, the boards quietly clanking under my wheels. The blackberries are at eye level, and I cruise, picking them and throwing them in my mouth as I ride in a delicious slow. I get to see all the wheel-height things walkies miss because most of them are five or six feet up, not two.
Three or four miles later, I pull up by a pebbly Lake Washington beach. My trike is my chair. I lean back and watch the lake’s waves, her giant inland ocean. I think of all the stores she holds. I bring my grief to her, and my leaning-back adaptive joy, and she accepts it with wide-open hands.
4. V. Ganeshananthan
For author information and more writings: https://vvganeshananthan.com/about
- The Five-Year Tongue Twisters
[five times five things to try to say quickly]
1.
The misters assisted in shelling these shells on the seashore war,
The shells they shelled were not sea-shells, I’m sure.
Some of the people they shelled aren’t there any more.
And if they shelled the seashore during the war
Then I’m sure that whoever sells them the shells has more.
Hard to say. Hard to ring any bells. What are tongue-twisters for?
The terrorists failed to resist state terror and in fact assisted
In placing the targets that were shelled in the seashore war,
When people tried to flee to the sea they decreed
Give us one child, another, more—
And as the misters shelled the seashore during the war
The terrorists held the people as shell-shields before—
Hard to say. Hard to ring any bells. What are tongue-twisters for?
2.
The mighty military mounted a magnificent Mullivaikkal monument to most magnanimous majesty Mahinda. Mahinda manages most magnificently militarily!
3.
The soldiers’ shoulders share the shops. How many shops should the soldiers’ shoulders shoulder?
4.
The port supports many resorts.
How many forts does the port sport?
Who did those who run the fort thwart
In order to run the port’s resorts?
5.
Tourism (terrorism) terrorism (tourism) tourism (terrorism) terrorism (tourism)!
6.
Militarization of the nation needn’t ruin your vacation, even if it effaces reconciliation.
A bonny economy depends on your bonhomie.
7.
How much land would a land-grabber land
If a land-grabber could grab land?
He would land, he would, as much land as he could,
And grab as much as a land-grabber would
If a land-grabber could land land.
8.
The fishing permits admit mostly those who submitted in Sinhala.
9.
Smugglers smell money to be made from fragile fears and freedoms.
The boy brought by boat bellowed, broke.
10.
The torturers took Thambi’s thumbs.
11.
Who’s the braver, the grave-saver, or he who gave the waiver for the saver of the grave?
Whose fate is graver, the grave-saver, or he who gave the waiver for the saver of the grave?
12.
Our ūr, your ūr. Your ūr, our ūr.
13.
The widowed women wandered, wondering whether they were widowed.
14.
Seeing soldiers, she shivered, and stayed still and silent.
15.
White van white flag white van white flag white van white flag white van white flag
16.
The grease devil’s vile and violent behaviors bedevilled the villagers.
17.
A fishy new fashion for bashing the Fashion Bug.
18.
Putting the press under duress impresses upon them the import of writing reports of a sort of success.
The pressure of self-censure and colleagues in absentia leave much of the Fourth with much to express.
19.
What kind of incredible or traumatic cataclysm would result in a credible domestic mechanism?
20.
Professor Peiris protested a peck of prominent panels—
How many prominent panels did Professor Peiris protest?
21.
The international community’s relative immunity is another form of disingenuous impunity.
22.
Abroad, a brooding, tired Tiger turns, and tries, struggling, to strip his separatist stripes.
(Separatists from abroad funded separatists from within
with dollars, determined to never give in.)
23.
Majoritarianism authoritarianism majoritarianism authoritarianism
24.
Someone still insists on singing the song in Sinhala.
The same song should be sung in three tongues.
25.
The tongues twisted
together the tongues
twisted together the
tongues twisted together
- The Missing Are Considered Dead
When my husband disappeared, my closest neighbor, Sarojini, hurried over from her house across our Batticaloa lane to tell me she had seen him being picked up and taken away. That is how we Tamil women talk about disappearing in my village, which is still my village after all this time, even though it has been stripped to its bones: we say disappearing when we mean kidnapped, and being picked up and taken away when we mean probably on the way to be killed. Sarojini had always liked to feel important, and although Ranjan was not standing next to me, smiling in the quiet way he had of letting me know he shared the joke of considering her a gossip, I saw no reason to stop her from telling me her version of the story. I didn’t listen to her; I thought about Ranjan. Where was he? I was at the very beginning of a kind of wondering that would later become like breathing to me, if my own breathing could be not only necessary but also intolerable.
When Sarojini came in, shouting for me and shaking a rag in her fist, I was burning some things of his that he had left behind. She didn’t say anything about the rubbish fire I had made in the courtyard behind my kitchen. Perhaps she didn’t notice what was melting there, the acrid smell filling the air.
“I saw them!” she exclaimed. “The STF boys came and took him.”
The army, which was not the Special Task Force, had come three times before taking Ranjan. I did not correct her.
“What did you see?” I asked her, because she wanted to be included in my loss.
“The one who likes to drink was the one who came to take Ranjan,” Sarojini said.
That was true. The soldier who had come to take Ranjan had visited our house regularly, and my husband, who had once been with Karuna, who had once been with the Tigers, did drink now. Because he had been well liked and trusted in our neighborhood, after his return, our neighbors had kept him well supplied. The soldiers knew this and liked to invite themselves in to talk to Ranjan, who also spoke perfect Sinhala.
Hearing Sarojini but not listening to her, I went to the cupboard and poured myself a drink. The man who had taken my husband might come back, but I would no longer serve him whiskey. I had always known where Ranjan kept the liquor, so now that he was gone, what remained belonged to me.
//
To account for the gap of thirty days between the actual and official dates of disappearance, I can only tell you that even though I had seen Ranjan being taken away, even though Sarojini, too, had come to verify it, it took me a week to believe. And then I did not officially report that he was gone for another three weeks, because I could not bring myself to leave the house. My husband had left the house, and he had not come back. I wanted to plant my feet firmly in front of my household shrine and stay there. Later, the people on the lane asked how Ranjan could have been taken, why I had waited that long to tell anyone. The gossips whispered to each other, asking what was wrong with me. I heard them, and wondered too, which was what they wanted.
When at last I managed to file a claim, to walk out my own door without falling to my knees, the first person I told was Thushara, who had been at the Army sentry point set off from the corner of the lane for as long as Ranjan and I had been married. Thushara frowned when I told him, as though he were going through a mental phone book to see if he could guess who was responsible. But he didn’t say anything; even when I cried a little bit, he pretended, kindly, not to notice, except for handing me the handkerchief he kept in his uniform pocket. After that, when he passed my house, he let his chin fall to his chest respectfully. A short while later he brought a colonel to my house to hear the details of the case. I invited them into our musty parlor and gave them tea as I related my story. The colonel took notes while Thushara stood behind him, looking both young and stern. Krishan was only a baby then, and cried behind me, and when the colonel heard his gulps and hiccups, he got up and went over and lifted him up, and Krishan was immediately quiet, as though Ranjan were there too, as though my child didn’t know the difference between being held by one man or another.
And then, when I was done talking, when he was done listening, the colonel told me the rule. They had, he said, no record of my husband being taken in, so he was missing. He might turn up again at any moment. Three years would have to elapse before they would give me anything for losing him. I can only imagine that I looked stricken. Krishan was small and I hadn’t worked outside my home since my confinement. I didn’t have any money. What will you do? the colonel asked me, too solicitously, and then Thushara said, Sir, perhaps we can ask at the school if they have work for her.
That was how I began cleaning at the school where I had once been a student. There were so few other jobs in our town—nothing that I was qualified for, really, and I liked the walk to the building because it took me past the beautiful resort the soldiers were constructing on land that had once belonged to some of us. I could see where my father’s old house had stood, and the well at which my grandmother had bathed. The well had not yet been completely destroyed and at first, if I went right up to the barrier wire, I could see the circle of broken cement. Thushara always waved to me as I went up the road with Krishan in my arms, and then later still, when he was old enough to walk himself, holding my hand. Hello, little man, the soldiers said, smiling at my fatherless boy, and I felt a little sick at the easy sweetness in their eyes, which reminded me of my husband. Of course I thought of their mothers, too, and held Krishan closer.
Three years seemed a long time to me, a woman without a husband, a mother without any money. I rubbed the floor in circles with a rag and washed the chalkboards. I reshelved the books that the students left on the desk; I wiped the tables where they ate their lunch, and remembered studying there myself. The students were kind to me, and the teachers ignored me, which was also a kindness; I think they knew that I was humiliated, working there, when I had once been good at maths, and even better at English, so good at English that some people thought I might go abroad, to the Middle East or even Europe. Now when there was a concert or special event at the school, I stood in the back with my broom, and everyone acted as though I were not there, so that I could also watch and feel that I was a part of the world, although I was less than a wife and less than a widow, and had never even been a Tiger. Even then, I imagined Ranjan next to me, his width and breadth, the space his body would have taken up. His untidy mustache, his smile. Your son will study here someday, someone said to me generously, and I hated that I was supposed to be grateful.
//
During the first year, I went to talk to Thushara and the colonel once a week, to ask them what they had heard, if there was any news of Ranjan. I began in earnest. You know me, I said helplessly; you see me every day and you know me. I just want him back; if the army took him I won’t tell anyone, I don’t have to tell anyone, but he is not with the Tigers. He is just Krishan’s father, and please, please, won’t you tell me where he is? The colonel, who I think was not a bad man, and who was even farther from his village than Thushara was from his, stared at me and was silent. In the second year, when I had more work for less money than I could have dreamed possible, I went only once a month, even though every morning I woke up thinking Ranjan was next to me. Every once in a while Sarojini would wander across the road and tell me that she had heard a rumour about where he was being held. Your husband. I would have talked to her for any length of time to hear that phrase. But after some time even she stopped coming; perhaps my loneliness embarrassed her. Other neighbors who had visited me when my husband was home ignored me, averting their eyes when they saw me on the street. And then, at last, in the third year, my exchanges with the colonel became a formality. I asked him if there had been any progress, and showed him copies of letters I had written to various authorities, but when he nodded absently, I understood that there might never be any news. The only people who smiled at me, who could stand to smile at me, were Thushara and his friends, their faces bright with sweat as they poured concrete for the new military hotel, which rose like a growing child behind the barrier wire, in the place where some of our homes had been.
//
Every month on the seventh day I looked at the calendar and ticked the time away. I have told you that I was poor. By the end of the first year Krishan had no shoes; by the end of the second, his clothes no longer fit him; by the last days of the third year, my boy resembled Ranjan at the worst moments of his life, or at least his life as I had seen it, when his time with the Tigers had worn him thin and impatient. Krishan was still my sweet Ranjan-faced baby, still quiet, but every day he seemed to get smaller instead of bigger. He was only four.
Around that time, the new headmaster who had come to the school began asking me to stay late. He was also friends with the soldiers and knew how I had come to work there. You understand what I’m saying—he had his own things he needed cleaned and done and taken care of. Mending, sewing, filing, odd tasks—chores that other people wouldn’t have been willing to do. What he wanted was a young and efficient woman who wouldn’t complain, who wouldn’t say anything, who needed the money. During the day Krishan went to a nursery run by the nuns, but in the evenings they had their own services and did not take care of children. I had no one to watch my child then, perhaps because the only people who visited my house now were the soldiers, checking on me. Could I take Krishan with me? He was unobtrusive; surely the headmaster wouldn’t mind, and if he needed me to come somewhere that Krishan couldn’t follow, my baby could wait quietly. He knew how to do that.
I had just decided to bring Krishan along when Thushara stopped by for a cup of tea, as he sometimes did. I could never refuse him, either. He, too, was starting to look older—his neck thicker, like a man’s neck, his arms and shoulders filled out by the hard construction work the army did. I gave him the last biscuits I had, and told him that I would have to leave soon to go back to work. He had just come to see my son, he said, gazing at Krishan, who was playing with the dog that lived on our lane. You’re going to work again? Thushara asked, confused. It’s evening time, isn’t it? I’ll watch him.
I looked at Thushara, who even being a soldier was still a boy, and at my son, who would never be a Tiger like Ranjan, and I didn’t wish that either of those facts were different. I left Krishan with Thushara, who, unlike some of the other soldiers I had met, thought he was my friend, and walked to work, where the headmaster was waiting for me in his office.
//
One month before my time—Ranjan’s time—was up, a government man came to speak at the school where I worked. They hired more people to help clean the school for the special occasion, and the schoolchildren practiced singing the national anthem. I was given a new work uniform; as usual, I would be permitted to stand in the back. I was not too troubled about the visit, although I knew Thushara and the other soldiers in Batticaloa were excited to see this man, who was new and also old, having been in several earlier governments also. The soldiers came and stood near the front to receive him, as part of the military honor they usually performed for such visitors.
I watched the speech and thought of Ranjan, who had loved politics. I held my broom tight, my back against the wall at the back of the lecture hall. Even from that distance I could see the government man. He had a weak face, his jaw lost in the fleshy peace he had enjoyed for years while the husbands of my village left or were taken away, while the Thusharas and their colonel left their villages to occupy ours. The government man spoke in Sinhala, and I, who for so long had had no energy for anger, only sadness, tried to listen. I don’t speak Sinhala well, even now. When he said the line that made people begin to murmur, I thought I hadn’t heard properly. I didn’t understand. I said, what? I wasn’t sure. First I said it to myself and then again to the temporary worker next to me, but she also did not speak Sinhala, or had not heard properly, and the two of us craned our necks and stared at the government man as though he were going to repeat himself, as so many of the most important men do to emphasize how important they are.
But he did not.
I’ll ask Thushara later, I told myself. Three years earlier, I would have asked Ranjan. The soldiers had liked to visit my husband in part because they could make him uncomfortable without translation.
//
What the government man said was that now, all the people who are missing are considered dead, Thushara said softly, and that we all know this. You could see from the fact that he was nearly crying—and that I was not—what a gentle young man he was. He had Krishan on his lap as he told me. I had given him whiskey instead of tea, and to hide his hurt from my son he turned Krishan around and made a horse of his knee. He let his own forelock fall over his forehead and into his eyes.
Amma, horse! Krishan said in Tamil. Horse, I said in English. And then, to Thushara: say it again. Say that sentence again in Sinhala.
On Thushara’s lap, Krishan looked like a smaller version of him, and a smaller version of my husband, and a smaller version of the headmaster for whom I worked, and I couldn’t tell any more which of the men I had known were real—whether I wanted time to pass, or rewind, or simply stop.
//
Three years after they take your husband they will pay you for him. They will give you a certificate that says you are entitled to certain monies. I waited for Ranjan, and one week before the third anniversary of my husband’s disappearance they brought me another man.
He was in handcuffs, that man, his face so swollen that I didn’t know what to do or how to talk to him. I could have fit his face into my palm, the way I had held Ranjan when it was just the two of us, and not known where his bones were under all that bruising. Thushara, beside him, turned his own eyes toward me with a hopeful look. I thought I heard the bound man mutter, Tell them it’s me, darling, tell them, sweetheart, in the Tamil word we use for that endearment, but his mouth was not the mouth I had known, and the tongue was clumsy and fat with dehydration, the cheek ripe like old fruit. I thought of giving him a drink of water and whiskey and tea, and I didn’t know if I was allowed to speak to him in Tamil, or if I should say to him in Sinhala the one sentence I had learned from the government man: The missing are considered dead.
This man is saying that he is your husband, the colonel said. You have been to see us every month. We wanted to bring him to you, so you would know that we are fair. If this is your husband, you should take him far from here. There is some land in the next village, which we can give you in exchange for yours.
Should. Have to. Can. These words translate differently. The missing should be considered dead. You have to consider them dead. You can consider them dead, the government man had meant. Had he thought he was freeing us? Should, have to, can—these words live everywhere. But no matter which words they used, I didn’t want to leave my home with this stranger. I wished I could tell Ranjan about the burned LTTE ID card in its melted puddle in the courtyard. The plastic had hardened now into a different shape. I wished I could ask the stranger where he had been, what had been done to him, what would happen to him if I said no, what would happen if I took him in. If I walked out of my house with this beaten man, even to save him, my husband would never walk back in. The door would close behind me. But this strange man, too, was a man, and belonged to someone, and if I did not claim him now, it was possible that no one ever would, and that I would send him back only into the darkest kind of dark.
I don’t know how long I stood there, wondering who I was and how much I had, before I heard Krishan’s voice behind me. He put his little hand into mine.
Amma, is that my father? he asked.
The missing are considered dead, the government man had said, but he had forgotten to say: except by those who love them.
Is it? Krishan said. My father?
No, baby, I said. No. No, it’s not, I said to the colonel, who nodded, slowly at first and then more firmly, as I said again, it’s not him. Are you sure? Yes, I’m sure, I said, and although by then nothing could have made me change my mind, I also knew that I would never be sure that what I had done was right. I would have been afraid of looking at the stranger again, but he seemed just then to have no face, and they took him away.
When they were gone, I went once more to the calendar and thought not of rupees, but of the feeling around my chest someday loosening. They had told me the number of days left until the government would call me a widow, but no one could measure the many years stretching ahead of me still, the whole long life I could wait.