K. tucks the letter into his pocket and promises himself he’ll reread it later. He has looked it over, allowed the truth of it to sink in, but tries to convince himself it is just like all his mother’s previous letters, that nothing is different. That he should brace himself for several months of silence, but that she will, eventually, make contact with him again, with another offer perhaps, another astrologer’s insistence that he can’t pass on this match. He tells himself this as he burns incense into the corners of the rest house, getting Sunny Beach ready for the slow-to-wake guests tangled in their postdrunk sleep upstairs. He knows, though, that this letter is different and he is running out of time.
The Sunny Beach Hotel is nestled into the sands of Unawatuna. The hotel isn’t K.’s; he is only the live-in manager, but he treats it and his guests as if they belong to him. He is protective of this responsibility, valuing his fatigue as he sweeps sand from the patio floor and orders butterfish for the guests’ dinner later that night. The sky is morphing from early morning pink toward lavender, and soon it will match the turquoise sea. The touts will start strolling the beach, offering batiks and carved sculptures to the few tourists who have risen early for a quick sea bath before the sun brings its late morning heat.
K. has been watching over this tiny stretch of beach since his cousin Suranga found the job for him eight years ago. Suranga worked at the regal Unawatuna Beach Resort several yards away, but now both are long gone, his cousin back to Tangalle, and the resort up the coast to the more prosperous tourist town of Hikkaduwa.
K. remained behind and, after two promotions, became not only Sunny Beach’s head chef and number one maid, but also the manager of the four-room rest house. This tiny hotel that has become K.’s home caters to backpacking tourists who seek a quieter, more tranquil beach holiday than the overcrowded bustle of Hikkaduwa and the expensive resorts just south of Colombo can offer. These aren’t K.’s descriptions—he has never actually been to Hikkaduwa nor to the sprawling expanse of the Bentota Beach Hotel up the coast—but words from a guidebook page K. has proudly taped to his manager’s desk.
At first his mother was pleased to hear of his promotions. He neglected to mention the hotel’s humble size, or that there was only one other employee, now also vanished, but he assumed Suranga explained the modesty of his accomplishments long ago. Although she has always sent him monthly notes written in others’ hands, after Suranga’s return her tone changed significantly to one of impatience.
Suranga tried to counsel K. before he left: “Get out of this forgotten place while you can. Soon you’ll be the only soul on this strip of beach except for the reef walkers.” Suranga was exaggerating, of course, only trying to be helpful, but K. couldn’t help resenting his cousin’s warnings and feels certain that the same judgment has been communicated to his mother. K.’s response to Suranga was simple. “I am happy here,” he explained. Suranga is two years older than K. and has always enjoyed bullying his younger cousin. Now he is married, with three children, and helps look after his father-in-law’s pharmacy. “Suit yourself, Little Brother,” Suranga grumbled in return. “Feel free to disappear, you stubborn buffalo. See if I care.” K. rarely hears from him these days and assumes he has found other people to boss around.
His cousin didn’t mean to be unkind. Everyone is worried these days. With the war and the highly publicized suicide bombings of recent years, the tourist industry is failing. One by one, K. and Suranga watched as the bigger hotels boarded up their windows, then became overrun with stray dogs still searching for the tourists who had once thrown bits of fish over the fences to silence their whines. One of these dogs has taken to sleeping under K.’s tables, despite K.’s charging broom and his shouts of “Get lost!” The American volunteers who often stay at Sunny Beach have adopted this mutt, naming him Bruce, and the name has stuck, as has the dog itself. In the weeks between the Americans’ visits, Bruce bides his time, much as K. does, waiting for the attention and distraction the Americans bring every few weeks or so. When the rest house grows quiet, K. finds, much to his dismay, that he has taken to chatting with Bruce. Just this morning, he caught himself teasing the snoring mutt, tickling its legs with the uneven bristles of his broom. “You lazy boy. Why don’t you make yourself useful like those touts and bring me some tourists?” Bruce responded with a groan, chewed at an old scar on his leg, and then proceeded to go back to sleep. As he works his broom up the stairs, K. leaves Bruce a bowl of water and some day-old fish.
JUST AFTER SURANGA’S departure, K. received a letter from his mother: “Perhaps now is a good time to return, Son. Business is no good and we have found you a bride. She is a good match. Born in September of 1970, an auspicious year. She will bring sons and a lucky life, Madam Daksha promises us.” K. crumpled the letter and then immediately felt sorry. His mother must have paid their neighbor, a local teacher, ten rupees to write it, plus the postage, a cost that didn’t even include the preposterous sum she was probably paying this Daksha person. The letter ended with reminders that K. was already twenty-eight, getting too old for bachelorhood, and—did he remember?—his mother was alone and waiting for her son and a daughter-in-law to look after her in her old age. Underneath the unfamiliar script of a stranger’s hand, K. heard his mother’s voice, her scolding, maybe even a hint of warning.
It wasn’t that K. didn’t miss his mother or his village, but when he looked out on the newly raked sand in front of Sunny Beach, the thought of leaving filled him with such a strong combination of loss and sadness that he began to feel a muted anger developing toward his family. Such exaggerators, such drama! All of them, he thought. How can she possibly claim to be alone? That house is always filled with nosy busybodies, aunts and cousins, to the point of overflowing. When K. thought of all of them gathered there, discussing his life, planning his marriage, his teeth clenched and he swept harder with his broom, wiped the windows with even more vigor. When he didn’t answer this first letter to punish her meddling, his mother countered with four months of silence.
This morning, three of the bedrooms are empty and one is filled with the American and British volunteers—stuffed with them, in fact. Sam came from nearby Baddegama two nights ago, and his friends Melissa and Lena arrived yesterday from Ratnapura with two others, bus-weary and sleepy. This is the way they stayed when they came, sometimes sleeping six to a room despite the vacancies. Boys and girls entwined, layered and crisscrossed, K. imagines them, a maze of bodies. Unlike the other white tourists, these Americans live and work here and claim to have no money. A luxurious thing to believe, K. thinks, as they buy beer or sarongs from the local craftsmen. But he charges them only 100 rupees a night per person and allows them to crowd into the bigger upstairs room. He waits for one of them to figure out the math—a room costs only 300 rupees a night, so they really aren’t saving any money—but he guesses they prefer it this way, cramped together. If the rest house isn’t full, sometimes K. will drag an extra mattress onto their floor while they are out taking a sea bath or a walk to the nearby temple to watch the sunset.
The tourists are friendly. They ask him questions about Sri Lanka; they tell him how it is the most beautiful place they have ever seen. They ask him to pose for pictures with them and sometimes they will send him a snapshot several months later with a kind note: “Thanks for the friendly service! Unawatuna was our favorite stop during our stay on your beautiful island! Your rest house was a perfect escape!” The use of your always pleases K. It makes him feel as if this little stretch of beach, this life and this place, somehow do belong to him.
While these tourists are friendly enough, the volunteers treat K. almost as a friend, the girls especially. They often barge into the kitchen and ask K. to teach them how to grate a coconut properly, or how to make sure rotis don’t stick to the pan. Their boldness always surprises him and sometimes makes him nervous. Unlike the girls in Tangalle, these girls stand close beside him, sometimes in their bathing suits, and even place their hands on his shoulders when they pass him in the small kitchen. He can often feel the heat coming off their reddened skin or smell the fruity scent of their sun lotion, and K. is surprised he feels no longing for them. If I had sisters, he thinks, this is how it would be.
In exchange for his recipes and coaching, they offer to teach him how to make “tourist friendly” food. So far, Melissa has taught him how to make grilled cheese, french toast, and something called guacamole. K. finds the green mush horrible. He is used to eating butter fruit mashed up into a frothy, sweet shake or drizzled with treacle. It’s a dessert, after all. The surprise of onions and chilies in the guacamole made his stomach lurch as he tried to disguise his spitting out the mush into a napkin. When Melissa caught him, she didn’t seem insulted at all. Instead she winked and said, “Just trust me, K. They’ll love it. Serve it with your famous omelettes or maybe with the rice and lentil pancakes I’m going to teach you how to make next time. They’re called burritos.”
WHEN THE VOLUNTEERS wake up, he will ask Melissa if he needs to buy any special ingredients for the burritos. He hopes she remembers her last promise. Much to his surprise, the guacamole has been a big hit and he has heard that other restaurants are trying to copy it. He has even taped a list of “new menu items” onto the old menu cards, including roti pizza, french toast, noodles with tomato sauce, and his favorite: grilled cheese with chilies and tomatoes. It will probably be another hour at least, though, before any of them come downstairs. Last night, the neighboring bar hosted its end-of-season disco, and the music seeped into the early morning hours. This final disco, like many of the preceding weeks’, was meagerly attended. The Western faces were few and far between, while the local boys clustered around the DJ booth, drinking too much and laughing too loudly in an attempt to make the evening feel more festive. K. was long asleep before the Americans staggered home, arrack-filled, with blistered feet from dancing all night long.
K. has watched the movements of these disco nights from a distance over many tourist seasons. From the darkened patio of Sunny Beach, he gazes at the flickering lights of the DJ booth and the sweep of tourists and local boys meandering along the beach. Last night, he watched two sun-splotched middle-aged white women wearing their new batik dresses stroll to the disco. Much later, he saw them returning to their hotel, staggering and accompanied by two local boys. The boys were about sixteen years old, though trying to look older as they escorted their new acquaintances across the sand. The boys had their long hair tied into ponytails and wore expensive watches and Western clothes K. assumed were gifts from other men and women they had escorted in previous weeks. The taller boy found K.’s eyes in the half darkness, offered up a knowing smile as if K. were in on this private joke. At that moment, K. felt disconnected, neither judging nor envying the boys or their foreign dates. Mostly K. felt a vague resignation, even a sadness that he linked to the false look of conquest in the boys’ eyes and to the knowledge that he would see the same look of empty satisfaction again and again in the weekends to come. The boys would eventually get older and more desperate until one day they would no longer walk this stretch of beach anymore.
When K. finally retreated to his room, the disco lights sent waves of red and blue across his mattress. Though he was used to the rumblings of the music next door, he was unable to sleep. He couldn’t get the tall boy’s smile out of his mind, the sense of his inevitable disappearance one day and of how K., too, could experience a similar vanishing. After all, he was as dependent on these disappearing tourists as the disco boys. No matter how many new items lined his menu card, Bruce’s loyalty alone couldn’t keep Sunny Beach open.
As K. struggled toward sleep, he remembered a weekend a few months ago when Melissa had surprised him by staying behind while her friends went to the disco. She sipped a Lion lager as K. drank sweetened tea. She asked him to keep her company for a while; she was tired and told K. that he was good at being quiet without it being uncomfortable. He wasn’t quite sure how to take the compliment, but he sat next to Melissa, feeling slightly awkward in the deliberate silence he was attempting to keep. At some point, Melissa caught sight of one of the ponytailed boys walking arm in arm with an older man. “I see him all the time,” Melissa whispered over her beer. “He hangs out at the Galle bus stop.” K. didn’t respond to her observations, still keeping up the silence. “Doesn’t it make you mad?” she asked, her voice rising. “Seeing these boys used and thrown away every weekend by some overweight tourist asshole?” When K. didn’t respond, she answered her own question. “Well, I think it’s disgusting.” K. would have liked to explain that he didn’t find it disgusting, just sad. All these lonely people searching out some kind of temporary happiness. He thought, briefly, of telling Melissa about his mother’s letters and his astrologically paired brides-to-be. Wasn’t this sad, too? His mother’s hopes of mapped-out love? His inability to answer her letters and embedded wishes and the fact that soon he probably wouldn’t even have the option of going home? But K. didn’t know how to begin this conversation with Melissa and instead kept his gaze fixed on the darkness extending toward the water.
MELISSA IS THE first one to wake and grumbles a request for some eggs and tea. She has been grumpy since she arrived, sequestering herself with a book on the shaded patio while her friends take sea baths and stroll to the temple. K. has noticed this before—Melissa’s tendency to be somehow apart from her American friends. He has seen her wince as her friends barter with local craftsmen in broken Sinhala. He has seen her scolding Sam for drinking too much. Once, when Sam accused her of being uptight, she replied that he had no idea what it was like. “You’re a guy,” she said. “You get to be the same person wherever you go.” Now, as Melissa sips her tea, K. wants to ask her what’s wrong, but he still isn’t sure how to approach this girl with her scrunched-up brow and her tendency to drink too much beer when she’s sad. After a few minutes of playing with her eggs and tugging her fingers through her tangled hair, Melissa asks K. if he still feels like spending some time in the kitchen this morning. Before K. can answer, Melissa explains that they will need onions, lentils, tomatoes, chilies, peppers, and maybe some eggplant if they can find it. “Would it be okay if I came with you to the market?” she asks. K. is used to doing his shopping alone. He worries that the prices will go up if he brings a white girl with him, but he doesn’t know how to explain this to Melissa without angering her. “It may be more expensive,” he starts. “They’ll think I’m buying for you and increase the price.”
“You are buying for me. Don’t worry about it. I’ll handle it.” She winks her usual wink. “Wait until you see my bargaining skills.”
As they walk to the nearby vegetable stand, K. wonders what his mother would make of this sight—K. with a grocery list, walking alongside a young white woman. For a moment he imagines he resembles one of the disco boys, escorting his new white friend on an authentic trip to the local market, watching as she pays for the groceries and perhaps picks out a new sarong for her weekend date. He suddenly feels ashamed and reaches for the twenty-rupee note he has tucked into his pocket. He will pay for the groceries so there will be no confusion.
When they arrive at the stall, the owner recites inflated prices for each ingredient. K. also notices that the shopkeeper is resting his thumb on the scale as he weighs the tomatoes for Melissa. Before he decides how he will negotiate this awkward terrain—protecting Melissa from the lofty prices while not angering his neighbor—Melissa launches into sarcastic scolding, all in Sinhala. “Ahh nay, see-ya.” She rolls her eyes. “Gonna vedi!” She laughingly calls the shopkeeper Grandfather and urges him to lower the price. Briefly the old man and K. exchange confused glances as this sunburnt foreigner blurts out somewhat faulty but otherwise fluent Sinhala. By the time they leave, the shopkeeper has included an extra eggplant and a pot of curd and treacle at no extra charge. K. and Melissa split the cost of the groceries. “Come back again, Daughter!” the shopkeeper shouts after them. “See?” Melissa giggles as they make their way back to Sunny Beach. “I told you I’m an expert bargainer.”
“You’ve never spoken Sinhala to me before. You surprised me.”
“Your English is perfect, K. You give me a much-needed break from feeling like a two-year-old.”
WHEN THEY RETURN to the rest house, Melissa’s friends are still asleep. Before they get to work in the kitchen, K. brews some tea and coffee, leaving the full pots on the patio for the late sleepers. He feels the heat rising out of the white sand, now pocked with footprints and discarded drinking coconuts. Before returning to the kitchen, he waves to old Hewage, the roaming masseur, weighed down with aloe plants. Dutifully, Hewage stumbles up and down the beach daily, though K. has rarely seen a tourist buy a massage from the old man.
Now that Melissa’s secret is out, she won’t stop speaking Sinhala, ordering K. to chop up the onions while she gets the rice and lentils cooking and starts working on the eggplants. “We’ll eventually fry up all the ingredients with some vegetable oil and roll them into the roti.”
K. follows her instructions, occasionally wiping the onion tears from his eyes. He continues speaking in English and can’t understand why listening to Melissa speak Sinhala irritates him so much. All these years at Sunny Beach, he has worked hard to keep the familiar things in his life separated into two distinct worlds. There is Tangalle, the home of his past, of his family and language. And then there is Unawatuna, a tourist place he initially located somewhere between home and some foreign land. It is in Unawatuna that he learned to speak English, German, and some French. He even grew used to speaking English with Suranga on this beach as they helped each other practice useful phrases. But sometime over the years, Unawatuna replaced Tangalle as home. This in-between place where the rules are somehow different allowed K. to be both insider and outsider, comfortable in his own privacy as he allowed these foreign visitors theirs. And now Melissa is confusing everything with her fumbling Sinhala. She seems like an impostor, making him wonder if he, too, appears like this to the tourists with his less-than-perfect English. His mother would certainly see him in this light, surrounded by beer and exposed skin and butter fruit mixed with chilies.
While he is thinking these things over, how places and people can bend and blur with time, Melissa’s voice starts to grow louder. He realizes he has been ignoring her, though he has caught a few references to students and problem textbooks and frustration with school rules. But he realizes that Melissa is talking about something else now that is making her angry.
“Why are the men in this country so . . . so . . . horrible?” She slashes at the peppers in front of her. “It’s so disgusting. Why do they do these things?”
K. stares at her blankly for a moment. He has no idea what she is talking about. “I don’t know,” he murmurs, hoping she will move on to another topic soon.
“At first, I thought it was just this thing they told us, to make us alert. To keep up our defenses or something. And it made me angry, you know, that our trainers would categorize Sri Lankan men as these sexual deviants or something.”
K. glances up. Had she meant to use these words? He is beginning to feel embarrassed for them both.
“But it’s true. They rub up against you on the buses. They rub their—you know”—and here she gestures to her crotch—“as you walk by. They shout things like ‘Free sex!’ or ‘We are having intercourse!’ and for a second, I want to stop and tell them that they should be using the future tense, and treat it like it’s all some kind of joke, but . . .” Melissa pauses for a second and looks up at K., who quickly turns his gaze to the onions. “And so you remind yourself that this is a society where people can’t be honest with each other, that there are certain rules and the Sri Lankan men have no way to express their desire.”
K. glances up at Melissa and sees that she has stopped chopping. He wants to say something that could turn this conversation into a joke, to make her wink again and resume their familiar cooking-lesson routine. But instead he feels silent with anger. He wants to walk out of this kitchen, away from this conversation, but there is nowhere to go. Outside, the other volunteers are probably sipping their tea and coffee, rubbing away their hangovers, ready with breakfast requests that would just send him right back into the kitchen, where Melissa would still be working out her arguments against the silence of the walls.
“So they corner you, and they make you feel like you’ve brought this on, throwing their sleazy smiles at you, making you feel like a prostitute. That because you’re white, somehow you want sex all the time, from any Sri Lankan man offering it.” Melissa is wiping sweat from her forehead as she continues her tirade.
K. suddenly feels accused. He feels judged and angry and confused all at once. He pictures the disco tourists strolling up and down the beach, and he wants to shout, Why do you think this is? But he knows it is more complicated than that. Part of what Melissa is saying is true. But she’s ignoring other parts, things she herself has seen.
Melissa begins to chop the chilies. “Sri Lankan men—”
“Who do you think you are talking to?” K. interrupts her. He hears Melissa stop her chopping. “When you look at me, what do you see?” he whispers in the silent kitchen. His voice sounds like a hiss. He feels so overwhelmingly angry, he puts down his knife.
Melissa remains silent, and K. briefly wants to help them both out of this uncomfortable exchange. But he can’t. “Aren’t I a Sri Lankan man?”
“Look, K., I didn’t mean you. You’re different.” Melissa brings a frying pan to the stove top and pours oil into the dented metal. She looks at him and shrugs, offering him a smile.
It would be easy for K. to offer a smile back, to diffuse this awkwardness, to push his anger somewhere deep, but he doesn’t. He stands there silently, a skill Melissa once complimented him for.
Melissa retreats back to English. “Look, K., I’m sorry if I offended you. I didn’t mean you; you’re my friend. I was just venting, that’s all.” She smiles and tosses him a clean towel. “It’s just exhausting, pretending all the time, following the rules, wearing a damn sari every day, and still—still being treated like some white tourist.”
K. wants to tell her that he doesn’t feel like he is Melissa’s friend. She has never asked about his life; she doesn’t know where he’s from. She doesn’t know about his mother’s letter and that he must decide by next week if he will agree to marry a girl named Deepika whom he has never met or he will never be allowed to return to his mother’s house. That unless he gives up Sunny Beach, his broom, his shaded corners overlooking this in-between place of calm and sea and anonymity, his widowed mother will move in with Suranga’s mother, her older sister, and live the rest of her life as little more than their maid. That she will no longer call him Son because he has turned his back on her and cut himself out of her life.
He starts slowly. “I know what you mean,” he offers in Sinhala. “We’re both pretending all the time.”
“Come here with those onions.” Melissa smiles at him. She looks relieved, but K. doesn’t want to let her out of this conversation so easily now.
“You are more than willing to judge Sri Lankan men or your friends, but there’s dishonesty and selfishness in this, in all of us. You and me, too.” K. keeps his head down as he speaks, and now Melissa is the one who is silent. “It is easy to pretend that you are the one who is different, or better, but it gets lonely.” Is this how you talk with a friend? he wonders. K. approaches the stove. He waits for Melissa to defend herself, to get angry again, but instead she rests her hand on his shoulder and gestures to the pan. As she attempts a smile, K. knows that he has hurt her feelings, has made her embarrassed. He hopes, though, that she has also heard what he wants her to understand. Theirs is a shared predicament, this in-betweenness—can’t she see it, too?
“Once these are fried up together, we’ll add the lentils and throw them into the rotis.” Melissa keeps her eyes fixed on the pan. “Can you try to make them thinner than usual?”
K. nods and gets to work on the rice-flour paste, adding more water to the coconut mixture.
WHEN THEY BRING the burritos out to the patio, Sam and Lena are returning from a sea bath. They are dripping water onto K.’s floor and onto Bruce’s wagging tail. They are smiling, and all traces of last night’s exhaustion seem to have disappeared into the ocean. “Are those burritos?” Lena gasps theatrically. “I can’t believe it! K.—you’re our hero!”
K. feels sheepish as Melissa clangs the plates onto the table and sits on Sam’s lap. Sam gives her a quick kiss on the cheek before maneuvering her onto the next seat. K. tries to meet Melissa’s eyes as Lena begins to arrange the plates and napkins around the table. “It’s just like home,” Lena says as she spins her plate around, eyeing the burrito. “Well, almost,” she mumbles as she takes a bite.
“Come, sit with us, K. Sample your new creation,” Melissa offers without meeting his eyes. K. feels his remaining anger start to drift away. He knows that she is trying to tell him that it’s going to be all right, that they will be okay. He even allows himself to imagine showing Melissa his crumpled letter, explaining the silence it holds.
K. sits for a moment and bites into the burrito. It is filled with familiar tastes in unexpected combination. He likes it more than the guacamole but still prefers his lentils separate from eggplant, and the tomato salsa doesn’t seem spicy enough. After a few tastes, K. excuses himself, picks up his rake, and enters the sunshine in front of Sunny Beach. It is a bright day and the white sand is blinding. He begins the rhythmic tracings of bristles over sand, covering up the morning’s footprints, even lines extending from his rest house to the curl of the sea. For this brief moment, there is no evidence of movement, no trace of past or future. If he could, K. would choose to remain right here under the bright midday sun forever. This is, in fact, what K. knows he will always choose. He looks up and down the coastline at the shabby patios of his competition and imagines that if a tourist happened to stroll along this stretch of coastline, he would look up and smell K.’s incense and see the Americans laughing and know that this was the best spot at Unawatuna. K. would welcome him and offer him the latest addition to the Sunny Beach menu and watch with satisfaction as this new stranger-friend bit into his burrito with guacamole on the side.