Two years ago, when Sam first arrived in Sri Lanka to start his work as an English teacher, the embassy doctor had given him a one-year supply of antimalarial medication. Two pills every Monday. Chalky and bitter. Whenever Sam took the medication, he would hallucinate. Dinner parties would come out of the jungle and over the river and filter into his humid bedroom. The sounds kept their distance, growing neither louder nor softer, neither more nor less distinct. Glassware clinked and corks popped and Sam listened to the muted whispers. Above the hiss of incoherent sound, Sam could hear his father’s voice murmuring advice or admonition. Put your shoes on, Sam. Go check on your mother. When are you coming home?
During his hallucinations, Sam sometimes wandered out of his room—a small space off the porch of his host family’s house—and would find himself standing alone on the dusty, darkened street, searching out the voices. The street paralleled the river that had once carried the dead until they were claimed by a family member. Sam had been assigned to this village in the south, now that the fighting had diminished, but there were occasional reminders of the unrest despite the cease-fire. And amid the rumors of deserters hidden in the jungle, Sam had often imagined them—the bloated and swollen bodies of the dead—facedown in the river with webs of tangled hair.
Several months ago, his host sister, Rohini, had grabbed his hand and pulled him with her eight-year-old weight. “Come and see, Brother. Come. Look.” She brought him to the river, where the other villagers stood, pointing. And then Sam had seen the body of a man drifting below them, the striped fabric of his sarong gathered around one of his legs. His skin was two shades lighter than it should have been. His back had been scratched by river debris. “A jungle man,” Rohini had said.
Sam knew about the civil war that had haunted Sri Lanka for the past thirteen years. He knew about it in a practical sort of way, having been instructed by his volunteer office to watch out for unattended bags at train stations, to have his passport always on hand in case the government soldiers emptied his bus during a routine search. But when his host family gathered around the radio during the nightly news update, Sam preferred to linger in his bedroom, catching up on lesson plans or rereading a novel his parents had sent in one of their monthly packages.
After he returned from the river, Sam thought about his mother, how much she would hate knowing that he had seen death so closely, or knowing how bitter his mouth had tasted, how his stomach had clenched, and how this floating body and the sourness rising in his mouth had somehow reminded him of her in the hospital those first months while she lay unconscious, the doctors struggling to name the cause of her seizures.
AND NOW HIS parents were coming to visit. When his mother had written, asking him when his summer school holiday was, he had answered without giving much thought: three weeks in August. But a month ago, his father’s postcard had arrived, his words in block letters: “Expect us on August 5. We’ll stay eighteen days. I imagine you can pick us up in Colombo. Love, Dad.” Sam sat at his desk, staring at the postcard—a muted cityscape of Quebec City—and wondered how he had let this happen. Had he even been asked?
He looked out the window over Janaki’s garden and thought how in Sri Lanka you can actually see the heat. Steam rises off the ground and off the leaves when it rains; the air is choked with humidity. Exhaust and diesel fumes hover, floating in your vision, trapped by the damp heat. They’ll never be able to stand it—the hundred-degree nights, the smells that rise out of the gutters, the Eastern toilets. And my father hates snakes, Sam thought, and I won’t be able to get them to see beyond the noise and the overcrowded roads. Sam also felt sure that he wouldn’t be able to get them to understand why he wanted to stay and extend his contract, why he wasn’t absolutely desperate to get home after more than two years in this sweltering heat, in this busy, tumultuous place.
He couldn’t help it; he thought about Nilanthi. He thought about what it would mean to introduce her to his parents.
TWO WEEKENDS A month, Sam taught at a teacher-training college in Colombo. He wasn’t supposed to do this—there were strict rules from the volunteer office about avoiding Colombo, and all of them were forbidden to accept payment for their work. But Sam had a hard time saying no, so when an English teacher in the village had asked Sam if he’d be willing to help out his cousin at the understaffed teachers college, Sam had agreed. He had insisted repeatedly that he couldn’t accept a paycheck, but 1,000 rupees arrived at the end of each month. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it was enough to get him kicked out of the country if anyone at the office ever found out.
During these weekends, he stayed with Melissa, a Scottish VSO volunteer who worked for the British Council. They had met at Unawatuna, a small beach near his village, on a full moon festival weekend. Melissa had red hair and pale skin that burned easily. Over that weekend, she spent a lot of time rubbing lotion onto her skin and would stay in the water for only fifteen minutes at a time. Her laugh was loud and contagious, and when she wore blue, her eyes were enormous.
Melissa had thin, dry lips that tasted like the sea. Sam had kissed her for the first time after they finished off a bottle of arrack together. Melissa had gotten sleepy after they tossed the bottle into the sea, but the drinking had made Sam sad and pensive. “What are you looking so guilty for?” she had asked. “You thinking about kissing me?”
No, Sam had thought. But Melissa leaned in, her lips surprising him. And now they were some sort of couple. He had no intention of telling her that his parents would be arriving in a few days.
During the weeks they were apart, they wrote letters to one another. The notes were playful and sweet and filled with “missing you” and “the next time we meet” and words that sounded nothing like the words they used when they were actually talking to one another. When they met up in larger groups at the beach, they kept their distance. Sam would shuffle a deck of cards, play euchre or chess with some other volunteers. During these games, he watched Melissa across the guesthouse deck. She read in the shade, her thumb and index finger pinching the corner of the page long before she had to turn it. In these moments, Sam wondered how they could still be such strangers to each other. He hadn’t told her much about his life, either here or back at home. She knew nothing about his family or the guilt that tied itself in knots in his stomach.
Melissa also didn’t know that Sam had accidentally fallen in love with one of his students at the teachers college. Her name was Nilanthi and she was a little clumsy, with a pleasantly round face, and unlike the other girls at the school, she had her hair cut close to her head. Her eyes were large and watery and he had seen her crying outside the library from time to time. One afternoon he had offered her a handkerchief, which she had quickly refused. She had seemed offended by his attention, walking away from him in a hurry. Sam had spent several days worrying that he had embarrassed or insulted her, but when he found himself offering the same handkerchief to her again a week later, she accepted it. After several moments of awkward silence, he finally got up the nerve to ask her why she was crying. She told him that a friend had been killed in the east, and she was worried for her family. She feared she’d have to return soon. “Where does your family live?” Sam asked.
“In the northeast, a village called Batticaloa.” Nilanthi avoided his eyes as she spoke to him.
Until that moment, he had assumed she was a Sinhalese girl like most of his students. He recalled reading something about refugee camps that had been set up in the north for displaced Tamils and wondered if Batticaloa was anywhere near these places. Sam put his hand on her shoulder, and this had made her run away again. But after a few days, she had started smiling at him, and then she began to stay after school for English Club. He made excuses to linger at her table as she worked. He helped her navigate the cluttered library. The other faculty members teased him remorselessly about his sudden interest in the chubby Tamil girl. Sam knew he was making a fool of himself, but he felt calm around Nilanthi and he continued to seek her out.
In the weeks that followed, Nilanthi would confess to Sam her guilt at being far from home. She should be helping her mother. She worried about her oldest brother, Manju, who had returned from university against his parents’ wishes. “And here I stay,” she sniffed. “I’m a selfish girl. I’ve abandoned them.”
“You have your own life to consider,” Sam offered. His words sounded useless, even to his own ears.
“You don’t understand.” Nilanthi smiled, but her expression had grown distant.
Sam very much wanted to explain that he did understand, but Nilanthi had a habit of walking away before he found exactly what it was he wanted to say.
SAM COULDN’T STOP thinking about Nilanthi, and before he knew what he was doing, he had asked his supervisor if they could arrange a school observation visit to Baddegama. Sam proposed that he could take four students to the boys’ school where he worked so they could get experience teaching at a rural school with fewer resources than their practicums in Colombo provided. “It would be a real wake-up call for some of them,” Sam explained. “I think it would do them good, since many of them may get rural placements after their exams.”
The supervisor had quickly agreed, and Sam had suddenly found himself helping Janaki prepare the house for the students’ arrival. Sam had purchased new mats in Galle—the students would have to sleep on the floor, the men in Sam’s room, the women in Janaki’s sewing room. Sam had persuaded his principal to allow two students to shadow his classes and two students to observe Mr. Jaya’s classes during a week-long observation. And then Sam had waited, anxiously during the remaining week, for the arrival of the bus that would bring Nilanthi and three of her classmates to his home.
Sam met his students at the bus stall, helped Nilanthi and her classmate Padmini with their bags, and guided them to Janaki and Mohan’s house. Sam hoped Nilanthi would walk alongside him so he could point out the tea estate where Mohan used to work or the market where he thought the best curd and treacle could be purchased, but the women had fallen behind him, and Sam found himself having to listen to the men’s arguments about the national cricket team and how they hoped they would get placements in Kandy or Colombo because their fiancées would never put up with village life.
When they arrived at the house, Rohini greeted them at the door, her small arms holding out a platter with steaming tea, urging them to take a seat on the porch as if she were the lady of the house. Sam took the students’ bags into the appropriate rooms, and when he returned, Rohini and Achala were grilling them about their lives in Colombo, how they liked their school, whether Sam was a good teacher, and what they thought of Baddegama.
“I help Sam with his lesson plans, you know,” Rohini said to Nilanthi and Padmini.
“Is that so?” Nilanthi asked while Padmini sipped her tea and scratched at a mosquito bite on her ankle. “How do you help him?”
Sam had never heard Nilanthi speak Sinhala before, and for a moment he was struck by the hesitation in her voice, but Rohini didn’t seem to notice.
“Why don’t you practice your English with my students, Rohini?” Sam interrupted. “They are all training to teach English, so it will be good practice for all of you.”
By now, Janaki had come out onto the porch and offered her guests some biscuits and mango slices. “Welcome, everyone,” she said. “Is there anything you need after your long journey?”
“Thank you for letting us stay,” Nilanthi answered as she took a biscuit. She was still speaking in Sinhala.
“Might you have some mosquito coils?” Padmini asked in her exaggeratedly formal English, smiling at Sam.
“The mosquitoes are terrible, aren’t they? After the monsoon, they seem to multiply by the day,” Janaki said. “Achala—take Rohini with you to Mr. Pereira’s stand and get us some coils.”
Janaki handed the girls a few rupees and off they flew down the porch. Janaki sat down with Sam and his students as the group looked out over the river in front of them. The students were all very quiet and Sam wondered whether they were all tired from the journey or whether, perhaps, they resented being here. The house suddenly looked shabby to him, the wicker chairs saggy and the plaster peeling from the walls. The students’ neat shoes were lined up in the entranceway, their leather coated with dust, and Sam worried that he had made a terrible mistake. He was embarrassed for Janaki, whom everyone seemed to be ignoring until Nilanthi turned to her and asked her about her garden.
“Are those orchids you are growing under the nets, Miss Janaki?”
Janaki studied Nilanthi with a questioning glance. To Sam, her expression looked severe for a moment, but then it softened into a smile. “Yes, they are. Would you like to see them?”
Nilanthi nodded and Janaki guided her out to the garden. Both women had left their shoes behind and Sam felt relieved by their mutual kindness. He followed them toward the orchids.
“These are spider orchids.” Janaki pointed to the coiling stems of her most prized flowers. “They take more than five years to grow to this stage with just the right mix of sunlight and water. They are my trickiest pets.”
Nilanthi smiled. “They are so beautiful.”
“Does your mother grow flowers?” Janaki asked.
“It is very dry in our village, so we can’t grow many things in our garden. My mother has tried growing araliya flowers, but they are nothing like this.” Nilanthi bent down to get a closer look at the orchids.
Sam squatted down next to Nilanthi. “Janaki is a magician in her garden. She is famous in Baddegama for her wedding flowers.”
“I believe this.” Nilanthi smiled at Sam and then straightened herself up.
Sam was beginning to relax. It was wonderful having Nilanthi here in the garden with Janaki. He let his mind drift to future visits. Nilanthi looked so comfortable here in the garden, in her bare feet, with just a bit of sweat gathering at her temples. She hadn’t swatted at a mosquito once.
Janaki’s voice interrupted his thoughts. “Where is your village, then? Sam had told me you are all coming from Colombo.”
“I am from Batticaloa,” Nilanthi answered. Sam noticed that she had crossed her arms over her chest. “I left my home in order to go to school in the capital, but my family is still in the east.”
“I see,” Janaki said. “You must miss your family very much. It must be hard to be so far away from them.” Her words were kind, but Sam detected a growing coldness in Janaki’s voice. She turned to Sam. “I’m going back inside to get dinner started. When the girls come back, please help them set up the coils so your guests will be more comfortable.” And with that, she left Sam and Nilanthi in the garden, neither of them wishing to speak.
LATER IN THE afternoon, Achala and Rohini offered to take the students on a walk to the nearby tea estate. While they were out, Sam entered the kitchen to see if Janaki needed any help with dinner. He took his seat at the coconut shaver and began grinding.
“So you will take your students to school with you tomorrow?” Janaki asked Sam with her back facing him.
“Yes. The plan is for Nilanthi and Arjuna to work with my classes and Padmini and Banduka will work with Mr. Jaya.”
Janaki turned to face Sam. “You like Nilanthi, don’t you?”
Sam’s face grew hot. He couldn’t tell if Janaki was teasing him. There was something not altogether playful in her voice.
“I do. I like all my students.” Sam turned back to the coconut in his hand.
“She is Tamil, isn’t she?”
Sam nodded. He had never known Janaki or Mohan to speak badly of anyone, and they had always kept their opinions about the Tamil Tigers to themselves.
“Be careful, Samma,” Janaki said. “She seems like a nice girl, but Tamils are tricky ones. You shouldn’t trust them.”
“I don’t think that is a fair thing to say,” Sam answered. He couldn’t believe Janaki was saying this to him—the same Janaki who had welcomed him into her home with warmth and trust when everyone else in the village seemed suspicious of him. He had only known her to be kind and patient.
Janaki shrugged and returned to her steaming pots. Sam left the kitchen without her seeming to notice.
Over the next week, Janaki was pleasant and polite to all of Sam’s students, including Nilanthi. When it was time for them to leave, she walked them all to the main road and gave them all blessings for their return journey. Sam watched her as she said her good-byes to Nilanthi. Janaki had wrapped two anthuriums for Nilanthi and gave her instructions for growing them in Colombo. Sam and Janaki never mentioned that kitchen conversation again.
A WEEK AFTER his students had left, Rohini knocked on Sam’s door. As he sat hunched over student papers, Rohini crawled onto his lap. She picked up the postcard and for the third time that day asked, “When are your parents coming?”
“In five days.” Sam rubbed at his eyes; he had been crying off and on over the course of the evening. He had never been much of a crier, but lately, the smallest things could trigger an overwhelming sadness, deep and unnameable, that sent shudders through his body. He chalked it up to culture shock, fatigue, change of diet, but none of these things quite explained the tight spring of emotion coiled in his gut.
Rohini traced his eyes with her fingers. “You look sleepy.”
She elbowed his belly, and Sam felt immediately calmer. “No, not sleepy.”
“Can I help?”
“You can cut these out.” Sam handed Rohini pieces of construction paper with pictures of fruits and vegetables penciled onto them. Sam worked hard at his job and liked bringing games and pictures to his classes. During his training, he had listened diligently to the advice of his Sri Lankan teaching mentors and education-training directors.
Visual aids foster learning.
Be there for your students but don’t get involved in personal or family affairs.
Most of your students will drop out before their O-levels. Your job is to try to keep as many as you can involved in their education.
His notes and reminders were scattered around the room amid the construction paper, glue sticks, and Magic Markers his mother had sent him from the States.
After the last pineapple had been cut out, Rohini began to fidget. “We should look at the moon.” She sat up and pulled Sam from his chair. They walked to the garden together, Rohini barely as tall as Sam’s hip. He often raised her above his head and sat her on his shoulders, as his father had done with him when he was a boy.
“Why is the word for moon the same as the word for rabbit?” Sam asked.
“Because there is a rabbit on the moon. Look.” She pointed at the sky.
“I don’t see it.”
“Turn your head this way.” Rohini cocked Sam’s head at an angle. “See?”
Sam stared at the moon until his eyes grew foggy. In the blur, he saw two ears, a hunched body, and a tiny round tail. “Ah, all right. Now I see it,” he said, and he thought how strange it was that he could be looking at a different moon from the one hanging over his parents’ house in Vermont. There, he had been used to looking for a man’s face in the sky.
Sam squinted out into the dark. The village center lay beyond the bend in the river where Sam had seen the body. The opposite way were tea fields. And the jungle everywhere else, trees heavy with flat, open leaves, bending and dark. The family he lived with told him stories of the bandits and refugees who used the jungle for hiding places. According to Rohini’s father, Mohan, they fed off the mango and papaya trees and took apart jackfruit to roast the seeds.
Mohan often tried to frighten Sam into keeping his mosquito net tightly wrapped around his bed to protect him from snakes. Mohan teased him with tales of kraits coming in the night to nibble on the hiding men’s legs or ankles as they slept, snakes more venomous than cobras and sneakier with their painless gnawing. The poison would creep with a hidden pain through the blood, and two days later the victim’s legs would swell from within. The only trace of the krait would be the tiny punctures around the ankle, and by then it would be too late. The bandit or the refugee would try to suck out the poison or apply ayurvedic kola juice to the wound. He would die perhaps a week later, pulse racing, eyes swollen. The image terrified Sam, much to Mohan’s pleasure. “You’re easier to scare than the girl who used to board here,” he would scold, and it would be up to Janaki, his wife, to come to Sam’s defense.
“There aren’t snakes in your village, are there, Samma?” she would ask. “If Mohan came to visit you, you would have to warn him about bears and the cold winters.” Sam enjoyed letting them fight over him and felt himself relaxing under Mohan’s teasing and Janaki’s protective affection. Sam tried to picture Mohan in an oversize parka, his balding head covered in a wool cap. Would Sam’s parents welcome Mohan into their home as warmly as Mohan had opened his to Sam? How would his father treat Rohini’s ceaseless curiosity? What would Janaki make of his mother’s cropped hair and shorts that ended above the knee? It was impossible to imagine, and as time went on, he had a more and more difficult time picturing himself draped on his parents’ couch, exchanging sections of the newspaper on a lazy Sunday morning.
Near the village where Sam lived, the police occasionally swept through the jungle. Mohan would join them to hunt wild boar and drink arrack or moonshine kassipu from disguised containers. Before he left, Mohan would strap his rifle across his chest and rub his hands together in expectation. On mornings after the hunt, he would leave the boar carcass on the garden path, and Sam would have to make his way through a swarm of flies, careful not to step on the remains. Just that morning, while rubbing his eyes as he walked to the lat, Sam had stepped on something squishy and wet. He hadn’t dared look down but instead had rushed to the well, where he tried to keep himself from vomiting as he scrubbed the underside of his foot.
Later in the day, he had heard Mohan’s carving knife sawing into the hide and bone of the boar. Janaki was fixing the rest of the meal, tending to three pots bubbling at once. The kitchen always smelled of cinnamon and smoking firewood. When Sam asked if he could help, she offered him a coconut husk, as she always did, and he took his place on the carving stool. The stool was raised only a few inches from the manure-packed floor, and Sam’s knees jutted up almost to his shoulders as he ground the coconut against the serrated blade. A soft, downy pile of shredded pulp gathered beneath the blade, falling into a wooden bowl on the floor. When Mohan entered, carrying the chopped meat, he looked at Sam and laughed. “You look like an old lady, grinding coconut like that.”
“He’s getting better at it,” Janaki said, giggling.
“He should be out there with me,” Mohan said. He liked to poke fun at Sam about all the time he spent in the kitchen. “Don’t you like the smell of meat? Come on outside and help me cut. Get up, Grandma! Get up!” Mohan gripped Sam under his arm and lifted him from the stool.
“You sound like my father,” Sam mumbled.
“I am your father. At least for these months you are here.”
In fact, Mohan was a lot like Sam’s father. Both men hated an argument, or at least they rarely allowed for one. Both were tall, though Mohan had a rounded belly that often dribbled sweat. Mohan liked to tromp around shirtless, a rag draped over his shoulder, which he would occasionally wipe across his forehead. That was the difference: Sam’s father would never be caught with his shirt off.
SAM’S FATHER WROTE to him every couple of weeks. His blue aerograms would often be waiting for Sam on his desk when he returned from school, the block letters large and even, peeking through the thin paper. He knew his father was proud of him, even if he didn’t fully understand Sam’s decision to put off his life to travel to the other side of the world and live with strangers. His letters were inquisitive and hurried, the first half a quick update of recent events in his parents’ lives, the second a series of questions about Sam’s job or his host family. Sometimes he’d slip in a New York Times article about the civil war. Sam hated when his father did this. He wasn’t sure if it was his father’s way of showing concern or if he assumed that Sam didn’t have access to any real news. Either way, the articles seemed manipulative to him.
His mother’s letters came more sporadically but in greater numbers when they did come. Sam wondered if it was the Sri Lankan postal system that created these strange ebbs and flows or if his mother couldn’t keep track of when she had last written. Her letters were longer than his father’s and arrived in real envelopes thick with several sheets of paper. Rather than updates, they were filled with philosophical wanderings about the past, about what Sam had been like as a little boy, and how she wasn’t surprised, not at all, that he had chosen to spend his time helping people. In his mother’s letters, Sam was made heroic. He was altruistic and selfless, or compassionate and brave. Sam tried hard to locate himself in these descriptions, but it always seemed as if he were reading about someone else. As he deciphered the sloping lines of his mother’s unsteady script, he could feel only the selfishness and irresponsibility of his choices. He took a deep breath at the end of his parents’ letters, always signed the same way. He wondered who had copied these closing words from whom: “I love you, come home soon.”
WHEN HIS MOTHER’S seizures had started, her balance had grown bad, and often if she misstepped, her body would simply collapse. She would fall and everything would shake and the next day she would have a gash on her thigh or a bald spot on her head. Once, she had explained that the most difficult thing about the seizures was that she couldn’t tell the person hovering over her that she was fine, to just be patient, that she could already feel it passing. But to Sam, the seizures didn’t just pass; they lingered in his mother’s brain, sucking memory and strength. When she had first left the hospital in Burlington after three months in the ICU, she had looked at Sam, confused. “And you are?” she asked.
“Let it go, Sam,” his father said. “Let’s just get her home. She’ll be more herself tomorrow.”
And his father had been right. The next day, Sam’s mother apologized. “I’ve lost five years,” she said. “It’s like you never graduated from high school, never went away.”
Sam had felt the first buildings of anger then. When his mother explained so simply that five years of his life didn’t exist for her, he felt as if she was resigned to the erasure of his past. He watched her uneasily in those early days back from the hospital, as she took in the not quite familiar sights of her kitchen, her bedroom, her backyard. He worried about his future—maybe it could get swallowed up, too.
THE NEXT DAY, Sam caught the intercity bus to Colombo. As the bus journeyed down Galle Road, zigzagging between bicyclists and trishaws and other oncoming buses, Sam tried to see the landscape as his parents might see it. In a few more days, their eyes would travel over this coastline, the arching palm trees, and the turquoise sea. The food would be too spicy for them, so they would have to eat at those tourist places where busloads of Germans stop. The Germans have a habit of throwing candy bonbons from their bus window down at the local children below, a spectacle that Sam had grown to hate. As the resort villages of Bentota and Kalutara passed by his window, Sam imagined sitting with his parents at a buffet filled with sauerkraut and sausages. This is going to be impossible, he thought as he rested his forehead against the seat in front of him.
Sam had his father’s latest letter in his pocket, with their flight number and the time of their arrival. Just as he arrived at the teachers college, a thunderstorm broke over Colombo, and by the time he got to the faculty lounge, his shirt was soaked through and his father’s letter was bleeding through the pocket of his gray trousers.
“You’re a mess,” Nilanthi teased Sam as he entered their classroom.
It was unusual for Nilanthi to begin conversations with him in front of the other students, and briefly he let himself imagine that maybe she was starting to trust him a little bit more, maybe even like him a bit. “It’s the latest fashion, Nilanthi—the wet look. It’s only a matter of time before I become the next Bollywood star, serenading his lady in the rain.”
“Don’t count on it.” A quick smile passed across her face. She readjusted the bangles on her arms.
Her nervousness surprised Sam. Was she flirting with him? Before he knew exactly what he was doing, he blurted out, “My parents are coming for a visit. Monday. They’re staying for two weeks or so. Perhaps you could meet them.” Immediately, Sam wished he could take his words back, aware that he was betraying too much. In Sri Lanka, a man asking a woman to visit with his parents was almost like proposing to her.
Nilanthi stared at the floor. She twisted and twisted her bangles against her wrists. The other students began entering the room, and Sam didn’t quite know what to do. Should he leave her standing there and just walk to the front of the classroom? Just as he was about to whisper, Forget I even mentioned it, Nilanthi reached out and squeezed Sam’s forearm. She nodded once and went to her seat.
Sam muddled through the one-hour class, confusing his explanations of the passive voice with the simple past tense. With him as their grammar teacher, Sam’s students were doomed, he thought. Nilanthi refused to meet his eyes throughout class, and as the hour wound down, she quickly collected her books and was the first to leave the room. Sam wished he could take it all back, erase both of their embarrassment even as he sat in his chair, wondering what her nod had meant, remembering the gentle pressure of her fingertips on his arm, the surprising coolness of her bracelet.
When Sam came back from his lunch break, there was a note tucked into his faculty mailbox: “You can reach me at this number at my boardinghouse. Call after six. N.”
SAM RETURNED TO Melissa’s house. They made noodles out of Japanese spice packets and watched Armageddon on Melissa’s tiny TV. Sam tried not to notice the time as the evening dragged beyond eight o’clock and then nine. He still hadn’t called Nilanthi.
“The real love story in this movie is between Bruce Willis and Billy Bob Thornton.” Melissa had her legs draped over Sam’s lap. “That scene when Billy Bob tells Bruce that he wished he could go with him, up there into space, to defeat that asteroid? It’s charged.”
Sam just couldn’t picture it—introducing Nilanthi to his parents. His mother would be polite and give her all sorts of compliments that would only embarrass all of them, and his father would read it as just more proof of Sam’s immaturity and selfishness. So this is the reason you want to stay? he could hear his father asking him. And how would Sam answer? Yes, Nilanthi was a part of it, but it was more than her. He had a life here; he could show it to his father. But in the end, all his father would see would be a young Sri Lankan woman. He would see it as a cliché, and there’d be no changing his mind.
“Do you think it’s creepy that in the background of Liv Tyler and Ben Affleck’s love scene, there’s an Aerosmith song playing?” Melissa readjusted her legs. “I mean, that’s her father singing while she’s making out with Affleck.”
Sam reached over Melissa’s legs to grab his beer.
“Well?”
“Well what?” Sam kept his gaze on the TV.
“You’re not listening to me.”
Sam shrugged.
“Why are you drinking so much?”
Sam shrugged again.
Melissa threw her legs up into the air and planted them in front of her. She grabbed her beer and headed into the bedroom and slammed the door, not once looking in Sam’s direction. He didn’t want to come here anymore, but he wanted Melissa to make the decision. He felt that she deserved the satisfaction of being the one to throw him out.
ON MONDAY, SAM met his parents’ plane in Colombo after passing through three checkpoints and having his ID inspected twice. When his mother came off the plane, she walked right by him.
“Mom,” Sam said from behind her.
“Sam? Oh my God, I didn’t recognize you. Were you standing right there? You’re so thin!” She hugged him and he leaned down to kiss her cheek.
“You feel hot, Mom.”
“Well, honey, it’s only what—a hundred degrees outside? Of course I’m hot.” She was still looking Sam up and down, an uncertain smile fixed on her lips.
“I’ll get the bags.” Sam’s father’s voice startled him; Sam hadn’t even felt his father’s approach. He leaned into an awkward hug and then let his father drift off toward the baggage claim.
Sam felt a rising panic in his stomach. This is all wrong, he thought.
IT TURNED OUT that Sam’s mother had a fever after all. When they reached Kandy, the highland capital, she lay in bed for three days straight, refusing to allow Sam to call the embassy doctor.
“Let her be,” his father had argued. “She’d probably be worse off in one of these hospitals anyway.”
“Actually, Dad, they’re not so bad. When I got sick last month—”
“But you’re used to this place. You walk around barefoot. Christ—you eat with your hands, Sam, and squat over a hole in the ground. Of course you don’t mind the hospital.”
But when the seizures began, Sam’s father had no choice but to let Sam take charge. When they arrived at Kandy General, Sam’s mother was put on a gurney and wheeled into a back room. She hadn’t opened her eyes since they called the taxi. Sam watched his mother’s chest rise and fall unevenly and her top row of teeth graze again and again against her chapped bottom lip. An acrid smell was coming from her mouth and under her arms.
Soon his mother had been brought to the ICU and was lying on a bed without sheets—a red, plastic-covered bed, the last bed in a row of beds in a crowded room. The doctors came and pumped antiseizure drugs and prednisone into her arms, but still she didn’t open her eyes.
For days, Sam and his father sat by his mother’s bed. The nurses came and went, checking his mother’s IV or wiping her forehead with a damp cloth. The nurses liked Sam because he spoke Sinhala. They asked him how he liked their country and said wasn’t it beautiful and weren’t the people kind and hospitable and wasn’t it just too bad about the war? Sam only nodded, but his silence seemed to make them even more talkative. They told him about the other patients in the ICU. There was the man dying of a krait bite. There was a twelve-year-old girl who had tried to kill herself by drinking lye. Her parents had been killed during a suicide bombing at the Temple of the Tooth. If she lived, she would probably never speak. There were many girls who had tried the same thing lately, they said. Sam felt himself nodding long after he had stopped listening.
The nurses helped Sam write a letter to Janaki and Mohan. He told them not to worry, that the doctors were taking good care of his mother, that he was making sure he and his father were getting enough to eat. As he narrated, Sam let his imagination drift toward Janaki’s kitchen. He thought about Rohini’s clumsy hands turning his scissors over paper fruits and Mohan’s boisterous friends dropping off their weekly trophy. He wanted to be home with them. He could get on the next intercity bus and just go. He could leave a note for his father with directions for how to get back to Colombo once his mother was well again. There is something wrong with me, Sam thought to himself as he glanced at his mother’s sleeping face.
INSTEAD OF ABANDONING them there, he called Nilanthi. He hadn’t planned to do it, but he needed to talk to someone; he needed some help. She didn’t sound surprised to hear from him. After he said her name into the phone, she had just simply answered, “Yes, it’s me,” as if no time had passed since she had left him her number. “Your parents are here?”
“We’re in Kandy.” Sam’s voice was barely a whisper. “My mother is sick. We’re at the hospital.”
“Let me speak to one of her nurses.”
Over the phone, Nilanthi’s voice had lost all its shyness. Sam found one of the nurses, and then he watched from a distance as the phone was handed from the nurse to one of the doctors and then back to the nurse while the doctor made another call. When the phone was finally handed back to Sam, Nilanthi said, “The doctors think your mother is well enough to be moved. There is a private clinic near our school and they are going to arrange for your mother to be transferred there. You and your father should gather your things.”
Sam wrote down the address of the clinic and hung up the phone. As he went to the waiting room to find his father, he couldn’t be sure if he had even thanked Nilanthi. He remembered, though, that she had said she would come over and check on them after they arrived.
After four days in the hospital, Sam’s father looked haggard. Fear and anxiety had carved circles under his eyes. Sam had been trying to distract him, insisting that they take breaks in the waiting room, playing hand after hand of euchre. The cards were old and soft from humidity, and stuck together when Sam shuffled them. That morning a small crowd had gathered around them in the “visitors’ lounge”—a tiny room of four wooden benches. At first, Sam’s father seemed irritated by the spectators, but he grew used to them eventually, even smiled at one of the strangers every once in a while.
“Looks like we’re celebrities,” he said. “Not too surprising that a country that covets cricket would be mesmerized by a game of cards.”
Sam laughed but couldn’t help feeling offended. From the moment his father had gotten off the plane, his observations had expressed only criticism. I can’t breathe in this heat. This food doesn’t seem clean. Never knew how much you could miss a sidewalk. Eventually the crowd had dispersed, leaving them alone. Though Sam’s back was starting to hurt, he continued to shuffle, deal, sweep up the cards, and shuffle again.
When Sam returned to the waiting room, his father was alone, staring at the floor through his entwined hands. As Sam sat beside him, he looked up and forced a smile. “What’s the word?”
“We’re moving her to a clinic in Colombo. The ambulance van will be ready to go in a few hours.”
Sam’s father jumped to his feet. “Who decided this? What do you mean, we’re moving her? You decided this without me?”
“Dad, please.” Sam put his hand on his father’s shoulder, but his father pushed him away. “My friend and I talked to the doctors. They said she was well enough to be moved—”
His father cut him off. “What the hell do they know? She’s not moving; she’s not going anywhere. Who decided—”
Sam felt all the tension, all the fear and anger of the past several days, draw up inside him. He watched his father pacing the small room, kicking at the benches, and all he could think was that this was his parents’ fault. They had decided to come here. They should have known it was a bad idea. They were the ones who were selfish. “I decided!” he yelled. “I decided. We are going down to Colombo to a clinic where Mom will get good care. She’ll rest and get better and then you’ll both get back on a plane and go the hell back home!”
Sam walked out of the waiting room and out the front door of the hospital. He couldn’t catch his breath. He kept walking until he found a trishaw to take him to their hotel, where he packed their bags and signed his father’s name on the credit card bill. At four o’clock, they were in a hospital van heading south. His mother was strapped into a gurney behind Sam and his father, who sat silent and motionless beside him.
SAM’S MOTHER REMAINED at the private clinic for a week before she insisted on being released. Nilanthi called a couple of times each day, but she seemed to be waiting for Sam to actually invite her to visit before she would come. Each time he thought he would ask her to stop by, he just couldn’t muster the words. He didn’t want her to see them like this, unraveling and tensely polite.
His parents had missed their return flight, and his mother had talked his father into booking them on a departure scheduled for a week later. “I’ve come all this way, I at least want to stick my toe into the Indian Ocean,” she said. If she sensed any tension between Sam and his father, she did her best to ignore it. Sam could tell she felt guilty, and he wished he could just tell her that none of this was her fault; it wasn’t anybody’s fault.
Once they checked into a hotel overlooking the ocean, Sam’s mother pulled him aside. “It was stupid of me thinking I could handle the trip, but I needed to see you. I needed to know you’re all right.”
“I’m all right, Mom.” Sam wondered if his resentment showed on his face. He forced himself to offer her some sort of kindness. “Do you want to head to the beach?”
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, Sam guided his mother to the water. “Go ahead, stick your toe in.” He was holding the underside of his mother’s arm. They had left his father in the hotel.
“It’s like a bathtub. I had no idea it would be so warm.”
While he watched his mother slipping her feet under the wet sand, Sam coupled her presence with her upcoming absence. He knew that the moment he put his parents on their plane, he would feel relief. He would return to school. Rohini would sit in his room and help him with his lesson plans. He would see Nilanthi on the weekends. He imagined his nervousness receding. He imagined sleeping through an entire night. As the sea slapped his feet, he imagined a lot of things he doubted would actually happen. Even in his imagination, he felt that something had been ruined.
AS HE HELPS his mother farther into the water, he knows what’s coming. But he will be stubborn; he will stay. The next day his father will ask him to think about what he is doing. Hasn’t it been long enough? he’ll ask. Every time your mother reads another article about the bombings, she worries. Why don’t you come home, Sam? But Sam won’t give his father an answer; he won’t make any promises.
And next week, instead of taking them to the airport himself, he will put them in a taxi and wave good-bye from the hotel entrance. His father won’t look at him, and his mother will press her palm against the window and wink. He will convince himself that she is telling him that it is all right. He can stay. He can stay as long as he likes.