Lucy had taken the job in Jaffna much to everyone’s worry. In her letters home explaining her decision, she wrote that she wanted to make a difference. Two years as a volunteer in southern Sri Lanka and she had always felt on the outskirts, observing loss from a distance, putting on her teaching sari, conjugating verbs on a battery-acid-blackened chalkboard, feeling useless as the civil war crackled around her. It echoed from the radios and decorated her rice packets in old newspaper clippings. And in more subtle ways, it folded into the faces and stories of her neighbors, in somber funeral processions, in Election Day curfews, in the drought even. In Jaffna, she explained, she could help in more direct ways.
But there was something more selfish in her decision, and she would admit this to herself from time to time, even if these confessions never found their way into her phone calls or letters. Often, when she sat on the guesthouse patio after work, she would ask herself a series of questions. Why did she enjoy hearing her parents’ groans greeting her over an often disconnected telephone call, their pleas for her to come home? Why did she like that her Peace Corps friends wrote scolding letters to her, claiming that she was crazy, that she had a death wish? Why did the Red Cross vans streaming by and the sounds of nearby sirens give her a sense of alertness and presence that had always felt so dulled in Galle? And to every question, she formulated an articulate answer, playing devil’s advocate in her mind. It certainly wasn’t death she was seeking; it was the exact opposite—an extreme feeling of aliveness and participation. Alongside her parents’ groans, she convinced herself that she also heard pride. In some ways, she argued, by looking after the Red Cross staff, she, too, was a part of their purposeful van rides.
Occasionally, when these silent conversations came to a close and she felt satisfied with the arguments she had made, Lucy allowed one final acknowledgment of selfishness. She liked the adventure stories that came from living in the north and from the proximity to the war. These narratives found their way into the letters she wrote home and to her friends south of Colombo. She began each letter with a sense of gravity: “Today the Red Cross opened another vaccination tent for the growing number of refugees.” “Last week the UN patrolled the airport road for undiscovered land mines.” “Tomorrow I’ll fly to Colombo (if we’re cleared) to check in with the embassy.” She didn’t acknowledge her distance from or the infrequency of most of these events. She never mentioned the sweeping and tidying and shopping that filled most of her days, nor the growing disappointment of feeling like a house cleaner in the midst of all this frantic, important activity. Instead she allowed invisible narratives to thread from the little teases of story she was offering. She pictured her parents showing these letters to their friends. She imagined herself being called brave and selfless even though this was, in fact, the opposite of what she had been feeling lately. Still, she couldn’t be held responsible for other people’s imaginations.
WHEN, FOUR MONTHS ago, her embassy friend told Lucy about the UN volunteer position that was opening up in the north—the Peace Corps – forbidden north with its refugees, no-travel zones, and halted ferries—Lucy had seen it as an opportunity to shift from observer to participant. The job would grant her the status of someone willing to take a risk, to have a formed opinion about this war, based on real involvement. In her mind she became part of the mysterious north, its community of scrambling revolutionaries and depleted aid workers.
After her volunteer contract expired, she found herself, with surprisingly little effort, aboard a ten-seat plane bumping through forbidden skies. The plane’s windows carried the dust of the desert north, and its engine grumbled and churned for half an hour before taking off, as if struggling for momentum. The seats looked as if they had been stolen from other transportation devices, mismatched and battered. Lucy rested her feet on the flip seat in front of her, trying to silence the incessant rattling, made worse with the slightest hint of turbulence. The journey between Jaffna and Colombo’s airport was short, but her supervisor had warned her that it was a risky one: there was often sniper fire along their route, and the roadways that stretched far beneath them were a notorious no-man’s-land, at times held by government forces, at others under Tamil Tiger command.
She was traveling with a pediatrician and a surgeon from Doctors Without Borders, three Red Cross volunteers, and a representative from Oxfam who had been sent to document the nutrition and health needs of the new refugee camps. Lucy sat beside her new companions, listening to their stories of starvation, overcrowded orphanages, and the spreading of disease throughout the camps. With her UN passport, Lucy had felt prepared to start making these stories her own, though her assignment seemed unglamorous at best: manager of the International Aid Rest House.
Lucy had memorized the safety briefings, knew the proper procedure for emergency landings, hijackings, and even water landings, though as far as Lucy knew, the land beneath them was dried out, drought-dusty, with only an occasional slow-moving river. With each knock of turbulence or sudden jolt or loss of altitude, Lucy felt her stomach tighten, her grip lock on her armrest, the thud of her heart in her ears. She knew it was morbid, this excitement she craved, linked with the possibility of disaster, but on the plane she felt fully planted in her life. She felt courageous and strong. When the plane eventually bumped along the Jaffna runway, her grip loosened and she wiped the sweat from her upper lip. In that moment, she had felt completely awake.
The landscape that greeted Lucy was unfamiliar. In contrast to the lushness of the southern wetlands, Jaffna Town was a dusty, flat, burnt-out desert. Most of the trees were drooping palmyra palms that lined the finger-like lagoons. Lucy would later see workers hacking at the palmyra fronds in order to make them into rooftops. The palmyra roots were tapped for toddy, later distilled into the arrack Lucy would drink at the few remaining restaurants. When the wind blew, ocher-tinged soot whipped through the air and scraped the inside of Lucy’s ears, nose, and eyes. It was a scruffy landscape, its monochrome yellows interrupted occasionally by farms growing tobacco—an impossible-seeming bright green in neat rectangles.
As she settled in, Lucy tried to explore her new home but found the emptiness and quiet unsettling. The town itself had been made desolate by skeletal neighborhoods and a haunting feeling of disappearance. Lucy was used to chaotic bustle even in the smaller villages in the south, where buses, motorbikes, and bicycles would compete for space on tangled roads. But here, things seemed remarkably calm. Occasional buses would rumble down the streets almost empty. A family of four perched on a single bicycle would head to the fish market. But for much of the day, the roads were empty except for the army jeeps that patrolled town.
In Lucy’s neighborhood, the only intact concrete structure besides the UN guesthouse was the church, which had become a sort of up-for-grabs shrine. She watched both Hindus and Christians praying there, often bringing their own miniature deities. Many of the Jaffna residents were slowly returning to the town, attempting the rebuilding of their homes and workplaces, after months and months spent in refugee camps south of the peninsula. Lucy watched these projects from a distance, observing the optimistic bustle with a sense of wariness. For as many new projects as she witnessed, she saw an equal number of abandoned, half-finished structures. She wondered where the families who had begun these homes had suddenly disappeared to.
AFTER THREE MONTHS in Jaffna, Lucy had begun to reexamine her expectations. Looking back on that first plane ride, of course she recognized her own naïveté, but she didn’t feel she deserved all this humiliation and disappointment. Despite her grandiose notions of adventure and purpose, she found that in reality she had merely shifted from teacher to housekeeper. She mopped and planned meals and organized travel while the real aid workers worked, moving with pace and intention to meetings and refugee camps and makeshift hospital tents. She watched their haggard exhaustion and she envied them.
At first, Lucy had judged some of the aid workers. Their laughter was often raucous and their sociability seemed inappropriate. Often, as a group, they would ignore the 9 p.m. curfews and clamber into their Pajeros, kicking up dust on their way to the local (and only open) public restaurant. As the lights flickered off in the remaining storefronts and homes, the Lucky Bar’s muted lamps would blink at the mercy of its generator’s whim. Lucy would join them because she was bored and lonely. While Lucky’s employees diligently poured Lion lagers and Three Coins brew into the Westerners’ cooled glasses, Lucy noticed them glancing nervously at the clock, most likely wondering how they might safely return home after they collected their healthy tips.
Sometimes Lucy would quietly urge her companions to be quick, drink up, and go, explain that they were keeping the servers from being able to go home safely, but usually she would let herself collapse into their stories, let her eyes lose focus and her thoughts grow pleasantly fuzzy. The specifics of their stories often tugged her out of this dazed pleasantness, though, and in these moments she wished they could all just be quiet and listen to the Hindi pop songs that chirped around them. Maybe dance a bit.
IN THE EVENINGS, if she was lucky, guests would sip tea with her on the porch. Lately a Norwegian doctor had been keeping her company. Isak was young—newly out of medical school—and he had an arrogance that irritated Lucy, but his stories, she had to admit, held her attention. In the evenings, he would stretch out his long legs until they rested under her chair, his bare feet poking out of faded jeans, and he’d take off his round wire glasses. When he rubbed at his eyes and sighed, exaggeratedly, Lucy knew he was about to begin the day’s narrative.
Isak described children with bloated bellies, infections gone black, and fluttering stacks of missing-person reports. He spoke with melancholy and even occasionally with contempt. “It’s incredible what they do to their own people,” he began one night. “The problem is, neither the army nor the Tigers care what happens here.” He leaned forward. “Most of these children have lived their entire lives in temporary camps. The parents have no hope in their eyes.” He sighed. “But we do what we can.”
Lucy tried to visualize the places Isak described. She knew they were miserable places, too small and undersupplied for the amount of people living there. She saw Isak in the middle of all this, purposeful and tall, his blond ponytailed hair so out of place in these scenes. He must tower over his patients, she imagined. He must seem like some kind of heroic giant out of a fable. Even as her mind circled around these cinematic images of pain and heroism, what she held on to the most was the “we” Isak used over and over again. She knew he meant the other doctors, the nutritionists, the human rights observers, the Tamil medical students. He didn’t mean Lucy. She wanted to change that. Since she had arrived, Lucy had been trying to find a way into that “we.”
“Not all of the country is like Jaffna,” she said, interrupting his narrative. “It’s not all hopeless like you describe it. And I doubt this place is either.” She knew her voice sounded defensive, but Isak’s tone of expertise and authority was getting on her nerves. How long has he been here? she asked herself silently. Three weeks? And he’s suddenly an expert? She sat back in her chair and sipped her tea. She kept her gaze on the darkened street.
Isak tapped the underside of Lucy’s chair. She knew if she met his gaze, he’d be grinning. When he starts talking again, she thought, his tone will be playful. He’ll start flirting. But she wanted him to take her seriously. Mostly she wanted to explain that she had seen another side of this country, that she had been taken up by the cricket frenzy, that she thought string hoppers were the most perfect food ever created, and that in Baddegama, families would come together in the evenings to sip tea and watch the latest Hindi teledramas. In Jaffna, the experiences that had always seemed so mundane to Lucy took on the hue of the exotic. She knew that if she offered up these details, Isak would listen politely and even ask a question or two. But she kept her eyes on the flickering streetlamp.
The problem was that Lucy had grown bored with her own anecdotes. The amusing snake stories she had accumulated—the one about the heavy winding tree snake that fell onto her shoulder on her first day of school, much to the entertainment of her students—had lodged itself in her throat, she had told it so many times. And when she had told a previous guest the other stories—her host family’s fondness for illegal boar hunting, the monk who had hidden in her garden late at night begging for English lessons when she knew his real intentions—she felt as if she were talking about a friend, another volunteer maybe, and she began to lose sight of which stories were her own and which she had heard from others. They had become abstract, meant only to entertain, and detached from the real memories that had created them. When eventually the guest had excused himself, explaining that he had to get up early in the morning, Lucy had sat on the darkened porch feeling a growing disgust for her lame attempts at connection. She didn’t want to repeat the experience with Isak now. The truth was, he was the expert here, they all were, everyone staying in this house except for Lucy. She still didn’t know anything about Jaffna. She still hadn’t directly experienced any of the war’s reality, nor was she doing anything to help these people Isak described.
After several moments of silence, Isak pulled his legs back from under Lucy’s chair. “Well, I’m off to write up some reports.”
Lucy glanced up at him as he stretched his arms high over his head. He looked embarrassed and she quickly felt ashamed for being so rude. She offered him a small smile. It wasn’t his fault she was disappointed, she thought to herself, even if he was arrogant and boastful. “Do you want me to bring some more tea later?” She felt as if she should at least extend some gesture of friendliness, but she was disgusted by the subservient sound of her offer.
When he winked and replied, “That would be lovely,” she wished she had just kept her eyes focused on the darkness beyond the porch.
A FEW DAYS later, Lucy found herself in an agitated mood. After she had finished clearing the breakfast room, she heard the postman’s bicycle bell and went to collect the mail as usual. She had received two letters—one from home and one from her friend Lena in the south. She had read Lena’s letter twice now. In it, Lena explained that the Peace Corps was shutting down its program in Sri Lanka. After the bombings of the Galadari Hotel earlier that month, Washington believed that the violence had become too random and unpredictable. They were getting calls from concerned parents. They were sending a team to interview the Peace Corps staff. “But it’s just a formality, really,” Lena wrote. “They’ve already made up their minds. It looks like I’m going to have to find a new job.”
Lena’s tone was matter of fact. She had been a Peace Corps volunteer for three years and had then been hired as a staff trainer. She had been in the country for close to six years now and Lucy trusted her opinion on just about everything. But as she read the letter the second time, Lucy felt an unexpected panic. Although she hadn’t set a concrete date, she had planned to meet up with some friends along the Galle beach, and hearing about their upcoming departure made her feel suddenly abandoned. Why? That’s ridiculous. Things are safe enough where we were living. She argued with the letter. It’s such a waste.
After skimming her mother’s letter and getting the usual updates from home—her grandfather’s health, who among her former classmates had gotten married, the new restaurants that had opened in town—Lucy set about writing her own letter home. With only cryptic hints about bombs and scattered violence, she wrote about the sudden closure of the Peace Corps program because of safety concerns. In the next paragraph, she described her intention to volunteer at a local school or orphanage. As she signed her name, she questioned, briefly, her pleasure in encouraging her parents’ worry, though she quickly sealed the envelope with the plan of dropping it in the post that afternoon. Writing the letter had calmed her a bit. She had regained a sense of control. But the feeling wouldn’t last long.
LATER THAT DAY, when Isak told her about the family that had been buried alive in their bomb shelter, she went to bed with him. It seemed the only way to keep the story a story, distant and removed, another tragedy told over mournful nods. Lucy had known the mother, not well, but she was a relative of Kirina, the woman who came to wash the linens twice a week. Kirina’s family lived a few kilometers outside town, where most people had built bomb shelters under their homes or had shared underground spaces with neighbors in abandoned warehouses. On this particular night, when distant rumblings of fighting shifted the earth, Kirina’s relatives had climbed down into the sandy underground space and were buried there when the earth toppled in over them. It had taken a couple of days for people to realize what had happened, though Kirina hadn’t mentioned it to Lucy when she picked up the bedsheets that week. Instead, Lucy heard it from Isak, who relayed it in his halted, formal English as he rubbed his fingertips along the base of Lucy’s neck. “It seems the land devoured them,” he explained. “And the neighbors knew nothing about it until the child missed two days of schooling.”
Lucy’s mind wandered. She had heard that some of the village women had set up a makeshift school under a tent, close to where the former school had once been. There, they gave grammar lessons and taught simple math problems, but mostly they let the boys play cricket and the girls sew new clothes from discarded scraps of material. Lucy, over the past several weeks, had kept telling herself that she would visit the school and offer to volunteer there for a few hours a day, but she hadn’t yet taken the mile-long walk. The idea that she might return to teaching filled her with a sense of failure. After all, she could just have kept teaching in the south, extending her Peace Corps contract, and living relatively comfortably, speaking fluent Sinhalese and taking regular trips to the sea.
Isak’s fingers released Lucy from her thoughts. They smelled like cigarettes and alcohol pads. They were scratchy and they soothed her because they felt so purposeful. So she let them wander and play along her neck and later across her lips and her breasts. They were confident hands and seemed eerily separate from his voice, which quietly relayed details of the story to her. As Isak meticulously paid attention, evenly and democratically, to every part of her body, Lucy felt herself composing a letter to her friends. He had a particularly Scandinavian regard for order and precision. He offered the same amount of attention, almost to the second, to each eyelid, each toe, each breast. She would embellish this story with the same sense of narrative adventure that her earlier snake stories had offered. Jaffna, as she relayed it to her friends, would continue to be a risky and exciting undertaking.
In the morning, Isak kissed Lucy with a condescending smack in the center of her forehead. He’d be at a remote clinic for a few days, he explained, and Lucy felt a mixture of envy and relief. Matching his tone of nonchalance, Lucy informed him that she’d be busy, too. Although she had only just now decided that this was what she would do, she explained that she would start teaching at the local school after the weekend.
AFTER TWO DAYS of changing linens, unloading bottled water into the fridge, and communicating dinner orders to the cook, Lucy made her way down the footpath to the temporary school. Kirina had given her vague directions, explained that the former school had first been turned into temporary refugee housing, but then, after the army had flooded the streets, it had become an army communication center. “When you see the old school, follow the path to the right,” Kirina had instructed. “You’ll walk another five minutes or so, and you should see the new school on the cricket pitch.”
Lucy’s memories of teaching in the south were of ordered chaos. She had taught at an all-boys school where the students dressed in white ironed shirts and surprisingly bright blue shorts. The teachers governed their classes with caning sticks and fierce gazes, but Lucy had always struggled to win respect without relying on the traditional systems of punishment. She had rarely gained it.
She wasn’t prepared for the school that suddenly appeared on a raked stretch of land just off her path. She didn’t know what she had expected, really, but she had certainly imagined chairs, maybe a few tables, a handful of books. Instead there were three harried women, one attempting to referee a noisy game of cricket, another stapling a piece of tarp to one end of the “classroom’’ frame, which had come loose. And one teacher squatted alongside a group of girls who were sitting in the dust, reciting their math tables. There were no chairs in sight, the children wore mismatched clothes either too big or too small, and dust had settled onto everyone and everything. The thinness of the girls startled Lucy, as did their scabbed skin and closely cropped hair. It took a moment for Lucy to realize she was being watched by the teacher who had finished her stapling. Lucy was immediately embarrassed by her staring and what must have looked like an expression of revulsion.
Lucy approached the woman, who was dressed in a faded yellow sari draped carefully over her forehead. In broken Tamil, Lucy introduced herself and expressed her desire to help out in any way she could and her willingness to bring supplies.
“I am Shrini,” the woman answered in English. “I know who you are. You run the foreigners’ hotel. My brother works at Lucky’s and tells me about your visits there, and Kirina, my friend, works for you. She mentioned you might come.”
Lucy’s face reddened. The woman’s tone was not openly hostile, but it certainly wasn’t welcoming either. “I’ve taught secondary school in the south,” she stammered, suddenly feeling the need to prove her experience.
“The children have no supplies, no books. What do you plan on teaching them?”
Lucy hadn’t really thought about the absurdity of what she was offering until this moment. “I can teach English. Or math. I can probably teach some math.”
Shrini nodded and held out her hand. “Please come tomorrow and bring the supplies you offered. We begin at eight a.m., but you can come whenever best suits your schedule. The students will appreciate your help.”
Lucy left the school slightly bewildered. In her mind she had anticipated a warm welcome, an appreciation for her offer, and maybe an introduction to the students themselves. When she had joined the staff of Christ Church Boys’ College, the principal had made a speech while the boys stood in neatly formed lines under the afternoon sun to welcome her. There had been a tea ceremony and many warm wishes and enthusiastically offered hands and smiles. At the time, she had felt embarrassed by all the attention and ceremony that had greeted her arrival, but in hindsight she certainly preferred it to this half welcome from Shrini.
At the rest house that night, she gathered her supplies and began writing basic lessons on some chart paper. She mapped out the conjugation of the verbs to be and to go in bright red marker. On the next page, she wrote out a dialogue in blues, greens, and orange:
“Hello, Padmini.”
“Hello, Suchinta. How are you?”
“I am fine. And you?”
“I am well, thank you. Where are you going?”
“I am going to the .”
“See you later.”
“Good-bye.”
Lucy observed her lessons and tried to come up with vocabulary words to fill in the blank. Where are you going? Where was there to go around here? Almost everything was closed or transformed from its former identity. The bank was now a clinic run by the Red Cross. The small markets were boarded up. She was starting to have second thoughts about returning to Shrini and her makeshift school. But as she looked around the quiet rest house, the outdated Newsweeks stacked neatly in the common room, the unending stream of dust that collected over the floors, Lucy promised herself that the school would be better; it would at least give her something to do.
The next morning, Lucy left for the cricket pitch at ten o’clock, after she had kept her guests company over breakfast—hard-boiled eggs, toast, and tea—and helped clean up the kitchen. She had thrown most of her supplies into garbage bags and carried them over her shoulders. Eventually the pens and pencils poked holes in the bags, and she spent the last ten minutes of her walk bending down to collect the scattered bits of her lesson plans. When she arrived at the grounds, things seemed much more subdued than on the previous day. There were fewer children, and the play had diminished. Shrini greeted Lucy and quietly took the bags from her. “We don’t have anywhere to keep these things, so you’d better take them back home at the end of the day.” Lucy began to explain the broken bags and the pain in her shoulders, but hesitated and followed Shrini to the “faculty area,” a shaded space under the tarp Shrini had been fixing the day before.
“There’s been talk of the LTTE in the area. Looking for more recruits, it seems.” Shrini talked to Lucy with her back turned. “So many of the parents didn’t send their children today.”
“That’s all right,” Lucy replied, trying to sound cheerful. The only experience she had had with the Tigers was watching them on the news; hearing about them now, it seemed slightly hard to believe they were potentially close by. “I hope my lessons are useful. It’s been a long time since I was in the classroom.” Lucy offered Shrini a smile.
But Shrini ignored her attempts at friendly chatter and instead kept her tone polite and professional. “These notebooks will be useful to the students, and thank you for bringing all these pens. We’ll have to keep our eyes on them.” Shrini pointed to the corner of the shaded area. “You can work here. I’ll gather up your students and you can welcome them to the classroom.”
Lucy glanced at the dust that surrounded her. There was obviously no chalkboard, no place to hang any of the materials she had brought with her, so she set about tacking her chart paper to one of the posts, using the blade of her pocketknife to hold it in place. Soon nine girls approached Lucy and greeted her quietly. “Good morning, miss,” they offered in unison. Lucy guessed the girls ranged in age from seven to about thirteen, though it was hard to say. They all looked so small. They quickly spread their handkerchiefs into perfect squares and carefully sat down on them.
Lucy felt suddenly nervous, but she reassured herself that these girls would at least be better behaved than her last students. “Good morning, girls,” she said, taking a deep breath. “How many of you know a little English?”
The girls gave no response, except for the smallest one, who hesitatingly shrugged her shoulders.
“Inglisi?” Lucy tried again, aiming for the Tamil word but hearing some sort of hybrid Sinhalese-Tamil combination come out of her mouth.
Again silence. Lucy spoke slowly. “We are going to practice English. My name is Lucy. I am your teacher. What is your name?” Lucy squatted next to one of the older girls, who looked suddenly terrified. She pointed to herself. “My name is Lucy. What is your name?”
The girl giggled nervously, and as she bowed her head, Lucy saw a thick scar across her scalp, half-hidden by her hair, that extended almost to her forehead. From behind her, another girl squeaked, “Dhamika, miss. Dhamika!”
Lucy tried to smile. “Good, good,” she said, encouragingly, though she suddenly felt sick. “My name is Lucy. Your name is Dhamika. Try it: My name is Dhamika. My name is Dhamika.” She heard the robotic monotony of her voice and knew she sounded ridiculous. She felt ridiculous. What was the use of teaching English to these girls? What good could possibly come of this? Just at this moment, Shrini walked by, glancing under the tarp. She nodded slightly without speaking and then slowly moved away. Lucy repeated herself again and again until the end of the day, when each girl could introduce herself. My name is Dhamika. My name is Roshani. My name is Deepa. And on and on.
Lucy returned to the rest house, exhausted and depleted. Isak was there with a bandage over his forehead. “Where have you been?” He grinned at her from behind his tea.
“I started teaching at the temporary school.” Lucy hesitated before asking, “What happened to you?” She hated herself for whatever she was feeling. Jealousy? Resentment? Lucy approached Isak’s forehead tentatively. “Does it hurt?”
Isak grabbed Lucy’s wrist and kissed the inside of her arm before she could pull it away. “It was a mistake, really. These guys came into the hospital looking for volunteers to join in the fighting. I tried to explain that all the people at the clinic were too weak to leave.” He took a short sip of tea. “I don’t think the leader liked me approaching him the way I did, or maybe he couldn’t understand my English, but he shouted something, and the next thing I knew, some other guy hit me with the butt of his gun.”
Lucy sank into her chair. She didn’t feel like talking. She had looked forward to Isak’s return so she could tell him stories about the school, to prove that she was participating, too. But here he was with his bandage and bravery, and she suddenly wanted very much to be alone.
“Don’t look so sad, darling. It’s only five stitches. The staff explained that I was a doctor, and the next thing I knew, the leader was offering me his own stash of lemon biscuits.”
While Isak continued his story, Lucy started getting things ready for dinner. She hoped her busy movements would quiet him, but instead he followed her into the kitchen and then out to the dining room, shadowing her closely in order to graze her neck with kisses whenever she paused. She tried to tell him about her day, the girl with the scar on her head, Shrini’s lack of appreciation, her broken garbage bags, but Isak kept nibbling at her ears, or gathering her around the waist, until she wriggled away to her room, leaving him standing there with a confused look on his face.
LATER, LUCY TRIED writing a letter home. If Isak wouldn’t listen to her stories from school, she’d offer them to her family instead. But as she tried to give shape to the school’s tarped classrooms and the girls’ timidness, she grew restless and bored with her own stories. She thought about Isak and his bandaged forehead and she knew she ought to apologize for her rudeness. But as she put on her bathrobe and pinned her hair up off her neck, she knew she was going to his room for other reasons.
When he opened the door, Lucy handed him a plate of biscuits. “I’m sorry about before.” She smiled. “It’s just been a really long day.”
Isak took a biscuit from the plate and popped it into his mouth. He managed a clumsy smile and gestured for Lucy to come in. She sat on the edge of his bed, and he followed behind, eventually standing in front of her. He placed his hands on the top of her head, tousling her hair so it pulled at the bobby pins. She felt herself growing irritated again as she pulled his hands off her head and pulled him down onto the bed so he was sitting alongside her. “Would you take me with you?” she asked. When he looked confused, she added, “To the refugee camp, the next time you go?”
Isak chuckled and kissed her in the middle of her forehead, the same condescending smack as before. “I’m not allowed, darling.” His hands were making their way down her back.
“No one has to know,” Lucy answered. She shifted away from his hands. She hated the pleading in her voice. “I can help.”
“We’ll both get in trouble,” he whispered into her neck. His hands began moving again. “And it’s really not safe.”
“I’m not a baby.” Lucy pulled away from him again. She stared at him hard. She tried to make her face as stern and determined as she could.
Isak looked back at her, serious for a moment, before his good-natured chuckle returned. “Okay, okay,” he said as he massaged Lucy’s shoulders. “So stubborn.” He kissed her chin. “You can come with me next Thursday. I’m visiting the Kuruvalai camp in Alaveddy. You can be my assistant.” He winked at Lucy as he walked back over to the biscuit plate.
She let herself smile back. She could kiss him now, she thought. Now that she had won something.
LUCY HEADED FOR school earlier the next morning, leaving breakfast under a wicker cover. When she arrived at the grounds, there were even fewer students than before and no boys at all. Shrini acknowledged her with a brief nod, and soon the girls had gathered in their semicircle in the dust. If Lucy had been writing a letter home that evening, she probably would have written, The girls came rushing into the classroom, eager to try out their new sentences. I really feel like I’m going to do something useful here. There are so few teachers, and the students are just so eager to return to their studies. But in reality, the girls looked up at her blankly and a bit distractedly. Not having the boys running around or shouting taunts over cricket matches seemed to make everyone uneasy. Lucy wanted to ask them where the boys had gone, but she didn’t know the right words and she was afraid of what they might tell her. Instead she pointed to the chart paper. “Hello, girls. How are you? I’m fine.” Lucy nodded at the silent group with encouragement. “Now you try.”
Each day was more of the same. Lucy arrived at ten o’clock to find fewer and fewer students sitting in front of her monotonous dialogues. In the afternoon the girls and the teachers sat together under the tarp and unwrapped rice packets and sandwiches spread with coconut and chili. At the end of the week, Shrini passed a small banana to Lucy. “So how are you getting on?” she asked.
“I’m fine, thanks.” Lucy was surprised by Shrini’s interest. “The girls are a bit reluctant to talk, though.”
“It shouldn’t surprise you. Most of them are without their families and have lost their homes. They barely speak in their own language. Why should they speak in yours?” Shrini bent over her food, blending the curry and rice with her fingers. There were no more questions.
Lucy was stung by Shrini’s words. She hadn’t meant to criticize the girls. Is that how her words had sounded? Mostly she had meant to point out her own uselessness. But in the end it had been Shrini who had confirmed this without Lucy even having to say it directly. Lucy wondered if she should even bother coming back, but at the end of the day, Shrini nodded in her direction, and called out, “We will see you again on Monday morning.” She offered it as a statement rather than a question, and Lucy saw no room to say no.
ON WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, Lucy explained to Shrini that she wouldn’t be coming to school on Thursday, but she’d be back the day after. And on Thursday morning she jumped into the backseat of Isak’s Pajero. He sat in front alongside his driver, and Lucy sat next to his translator, Rajith, a young man from Jaffna Town who was happy to quiz Lucy on her limited Tamil. The two men didn’t seem surprised to be traveling with an additional passenger, so Lucy sat back and enjoyed the whir of the air conditioner as they made their way north.
Even though Alaveddy was only about fifteen kilometers away, the drive took almost two hours, made longer by the checkpoint along the way. As the four of them handed their passports and identification cards to the soldiers, Lucy worried that someone might ask what she was doing there, but it never happened. After keeping them waiting for almost an hour, the soldiers waved them on, then turned their attention to the next car. When they reached the camp, Lucy’s legs felt stiff, and as she opened the car door, the sudden heat of the late morning stunned her.
She helped Rajith and Jayanda unload several boxes of powdered milk and Ovaltine. As they stacked boxes, Lucy looked up to see a crowd gathering in the camp entranceway, mostly women and children. The women used the edges of their saris to block out the fierce sunlight, and the children gripped at their mothers’ fabric, squinting in the car’s direction. Lucy contemplated her surroundings. The building itself must have been some kind of warehouse before it had suddenly had to house all these people. The windows had all been broken, perhaps to allow the infrequent breezes access to the inside.
As they walked into the building, the crowd followed behind them. Despite the brightness of the day, the warehouse felt dim, and it took several moments for Lucy’s eyes to adjust. Her stomach was lurching from the heavy stench in the air, a smell of too many bodies and not enough space, of decay, of things she couldn’t even guess at. Isak and Rajith had become distant shadows, and Lucy suddenly felt tugging at her arms. The box she had been carrying dropped at her feet.
She was surrounded by bodies and voices. Along with the tugging came pleas she couldn’t understand. One woman held out her child and shoved his arm in Lucy’s face. There was an infection spreading over his skin. It had turned black and the boy wailed in pain. Another woman grabbed Lucy’s hands and pointed to her belly and then to her child’s belly. The woman shook her head and opened her palms to suggest emptiness. Someone was tugging at the hem of Lucy’s skirt. Someone else had grabbed her other hand. But Lucy had stopped seeing anything. She closed her eyes and felt the pushing and pulling hands on her body, until a stronger grip clutched her upper arm and tugged hard. “C’mon,” Isak urged. “We’re setting up down there.”
Lucy held on to his arm as they made their way to the back of the warehouse. Rajith was trying to keep order, attempting some instructions to get people to form a line. “This is Danuja,” Isak said, introducing Lucy to an older woman wearing a white dress. “She is a nurse who will be helping us today.”
Lucy nodded at the woman, who smiled briefly before she began opening several boxes of syringes.
“It would be a big help if you could work with Rajith,” Isak said. Lucy’s head was whirring, but she felt herself nodding at whatever Isak was saying. “If you could help sterilize their arms”—Isak gestured to the growing line—“it’ll make things move faster.” When Lucy gave no obvious response, he added, “We’re giving tetanus and TB jabs today.”
Lucy stood in front of the growing line. She accepted people’s outstretched arms and she rubbed alcohol pads onto their skin. She made a point of looking at the face of each person who passed in front of her, but nothing seemed to be registering in her mind. She couldn’t be sure if she was smiling or grimacing as she met each set of eyes. Her mouth filled with saliva as she willed herself not to throw up. A boy approached her, and without looking, Lucy reached for his right arm. It took a moment before Lucy realized why he was hesitating. His T-shirt flopped emptily on his right side; where there should have been an arm, there was nothing. He shifted, embarrassed, for a moment, grinning up at Lucy, until his mother grabbed his left arm and offered it to Lucy instead. She attempted an apology, but before she could get the right words out, there was another child in front of her. Her throat was burning and she thought she could hear the sound of her own blood rushing against her ears. She wasn’t strong enough for this. She was going to faint. She swallowed hard and rubbed the alcohol onto the next boy’s thin arm.
As the line began to dwindle, Lucy noticed a young man lingering at the end. He would meet Lucy’s gaze and then quickly avert his eyes. She was exhausted, and the man’s passivity was beginning to irritate her. When she motioned for him to come over, he surprised her by speaking perfect English.
“Excuse me, miss,” he said. “My name is Manju and I am looking for my brother. They tell me you go from camp to camp and you document everyone’s name and the medicines you give them, so I am looking for my brother’s name on your lists.”
Lucy was startled by his politeness and was at a loss for words momentarily.
“His name is Lalith and he will be sixteen years old.” The man was standing quite close to her now, and Lucy could smell some old injury festering beneath his shabby clothes. “Miss, if you please, check your lists.”
The heat and the man’s smell were making Lucy dizzy. Luckily, Rajith showed up just at this moment, offering Lucy his canteen. “Are you all right, Miss Lucy?” he asked.
“I’m fine, but this man needs help. Can you bring him to Isak, please?” She tried to smile at the young man, give him a nod of encouragement or something, but mostly she just wanted him to go away. She knew nothing about the lists he was talking about, but she doubted he would ever be able to track down the records he was looking for. Isak would know what to say to him.
SOMEHOW LUCY MADE it through the day. She was now helping Rajith hand out powdered milk and jugs of bottled water. Isak was still inside the warehouse, examining patients with more serious problems—infections, mysterious fevers, dysentery. Before she had left the immunization table, he had winked at her and given her a thumbs-up. She had felt too humiliated to respond. Certainly he could see how scared, disgusted, weak, she had been.
The distribution of supplies was surprisingly orderly—no one was pushing or pulling or forcing his way to the front of the line. Lucy heard different voices whispering thank-yous, but she had stopped seeing anything. She kept her eyes focused on the frayed tomato plants, long abandoned, in the near distance. The boxes were emptied, and soon she was back in the car, the shock of the AC sending shivers through her. Isak was talking to Rajith, who scribbled notes into a brown book. “The well water is undrinkable,” Isak said. “We need to make a recommendation for more regular distributions of bottled water.” He turned to look at Lucy, his grin still intact, a wink crossing his eye. “You did great today, darling.”
How can he look at me like that? she wondered. She turned her gaze to the window and wished very much to fall asleep.
BACK AT THE rest house, Lucy continued to organize the linens and take dinner requests from her guests, but she started to spend more and more time in her room. She drew illustrations for more dialogues, made conjugation graphs, and pasted magazine images onto old pieces of cardboard. She had been very cold to Isak since they returned from the camp; she just couldn’t bear his good-naturedness. She didn’t understand it, how it was possible when he spent his days the way he did. If she had been more honest with herself, she would have acknowledged that seeing him embarrassed her. He reminded her of how weak she had felt, of her fear and revulsion. He didn’t seem too hurt by her distance, though; in fact, he had begun a flirtation with a German nutritionist who would be staying in Jaffna for the next month.
Lucy heard rumors throughout the house that the Tigers were battling with the government on the nearby Colombo Road and that they had once again laid claim to the no-man’s-land. She ignored most of these conversations—it didn’t seem to matter who took over what part of the road. There always seemed to be fighting there and it always remained at a distance. Jaffna Town had no appeal for anyone anymore, she told herself.
LUCY BEGAN THE next month at school with renewed determination. Here was something she could at least have some control over, she told herself. Even if the girls were only capable of prolonged silences and embarrassed giggles, she could still try. And even if Shrini was unwilling to befriend her or even respect her efforts, she could still stand in front of her semicircle, repeating, “I go. You go. She goes. We go. They go.” She could still show up and let the girls know she was acknowledging them, recognizing their right to be in school, to have an education, a childhood.
Over the weeks, she wrote lesson plans and she taught the girls songs. She daydreamed a lot, and her thoughts often traveled to Galle. She was making some progress. The girls were getting more comfortable with her and they seemed to enjoy the songs. The youngest particularly enjoyed “The People on the Bus Go Up and Down.” Lucy always felt embarrassed when she sang along, especially if Shrini passed by during the lesson. But the girls giggled, especially during the verse when the angry bus driver tells his passengers, “Move on back!” At this point in the song, Dhamika would get up and play the role of the stern conductor, pointing her fingers at the seated girls. In these moments, Lucy wondered what her mother would think if she saw Lucy there, leading a song she had taught Lucy as a little girl. It seemed remarkable, even to Lucy, that these girls in Jaffna, sitting on handkerchiefs in a dusty field, could be singing the same songs she had sung in her nursery school.
Lucy felt focused and occasionally productive. Every once in a while, the image of the boy with the missing arm crept into her memory. Irrationally, she looked for his face in the boys playing cricket on those days they showed up for school. And whenever one of the younger girls tugged on Lucy’s skirt to get her attention, she felt her body tense. But mostly she kept the images of the refugee camp at a distance, just as she kept the news of military conflicts slightly outside her consciousness, until, of course, the day the war came up and met her.
IT WAS DURING a lesson about the days of the week when Lucy felt rumbling under her feet. Suddenly, Shrini was in front of her, pulling her toward the opposite end of the pitch. “Hurry,” she instructed.
Lucy imagined she must have looked like one of her students as she scurried behind Shrini, following the teacher’s flowing head scarf, which had come loose during their flight. Shrini crouched down and removed from the ground a wooden plank that Lucy had never noticed before. One by one the girls climbed down into the darkness, Lucy being the last before Shrini replaced the wood overhead. In this hole, the darkness felt infinite. Lucy couldn’t tell where the walls began around her. She would have thought that here, underground, the air would be damp and cool, but the dusty dryness had followed them down. The only interruption to the ongoing sameness of the dark was the feeling of shoulders and knees and elbows pressing into Lucy from all sides. She wondered for a moment if she was feeling the thud of her own heart or the rhythmic beating of someone else’s nearby.
Lucy closed her eyes, creating her own darkness, which somehow felt better. She let herself picture Shrini’s face beside her. Serious and responsible. Shrini would keep them safe. Perhaps it was Dhamika whose arm was pushing into hers. She reached out for it and felt a hand clamp around her own, squeezing tight. This was the least alone she had felt since arriving in Jaffna, she thought, and this thought—its absurdity—made her smile in the darkness. But even as she was smiling, she was also thinking about Kirina’s buried family. She was remembering the dank smell of the refugee camp. She took deep breaths to quiet her heart, push the panic back down into her stomach. In her mind she began to write a letter home. How would she start it? she wondered. For the first time, she wouldn’t have to make up anything at all.