Naru Dames Sundar
With signs of a major second quake imminent, government emergency services started an airlift operation to save the countless lives in the northern district. Were it not for this effort, the casualties from the second tremor would have been far higher.
2076 Earthquake, Sri Lanka
—Nilaveli Beach Airlift
A rickety jeep bounced over the broken asphalt crags of roads turned into hillocks. Water seeped around us. The public channels were already speaking of severe aftershocks. My father struggled with the juddering steering wheel while my mother spoke to her cousins at the evacuation site at Nilaveli Beach. The implant glowed behind her ear as it carried her words many miles to the east. The jeep barely had room for the three of us and our neighbours and their son. As I clung to my mother’s sari, I heard her gasp.
“Kamala? What is it?” Worry creased my father’s eyes.
“Anilan, he said they looked past him. As if he wasn’t even there! And the crowds just pushed past him!”
My father pulled the jeep to the side of the road, waiting for my mother to say more.
“It’s like that time we visited Kandy, Anilan. Didn’t you hear the stories? Implant modifications. Adjusted vision. First, they don’t want to see the beggars. Then, they don’t want to see us.”
Us, them. Before the war, after the war. Even seventy years after the war, it was us and them. You see, conflict has roots, and even when the victor cuts the tree down, the roots remain, buried deep. Sometimes subtle, sometimes not so subtle.
“Kamala. The children aren’t implanted yet. We can send them. Their features aren’t so distinct that someone will notice.”
“No.” My mother’s voice was firm.
“If the crowds thicken, do you think they’ll make room for us? There are always enough vacationers from the south in the Trincomalee resorts to fill the lifters. But the children without their implants, no one could say for sure that they were Tamil or Sinhalese.”
“Absolutely not.”
But I could tell from the wavering of her voice that she was already thinking yes. Because sometimes when you had to choose between your life and your child’s, between a large risk and a small risk, you made the choices you never wanted to make. Even at six, I understood enough.
“No, Amma, no, I don’t want to go. Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me, Amma!”
“Hush, Kartik, hush.”
My parents pulled me into their arms and held me, and I smelled sweat on their skin, salt in their tears, turmeric and ash on their foreheads—these smells would never leave me. I wailed at Nilaveli when they handed me to my neighbour’s eight-year-old son, Ayngharan, my newly adopted older brother.
Hours later, I sobbed, my face pressed against the glass window, the lifter leaving behind the white sand covered by a sea of people and heading over the churning waters. I saw the aftershock ripple through the beach, sand spray booming in large dust clouds. I screamed for my parents, like the other orphans on the craft. Ayngharan put his hands over my eyes and pulled me close: his hands, his chest, his smell—all unfamiliar. He too was experiencing that singular agony, but his tears lay buried.
A moderately wealthy family in Kandy took us in. Marble floors and large, expensive batik hangings across the entry and throughout the house. Ayngharan knew some Sinhala because even in the remote northern schools, government strictures imposed what were taught. I was young and knew little, and as my adopted parents put it, I was affected. They didn’t like to talk about it, as if it was some distant dirty thing they didn’t want to touch. Ayngharan was angrier than I was. He understood, you see—he knew enough to know the reason our parents could not have accompanied us on the lifter. Why they could not have gotten past the evacuation officials. For me, the why was more ephemeral, something I did not yet grasp.
Years later, Ayngharan shouted and screamed when they installed his implant. He fought so hard they had to sedate him before the medical attendant could install the silver conch shell behind his ear. When our adopted parents told him what software was being loaded onto it, his rage transcended into something else. Because he had learned enough to know what each piece of software could do—and he knew that without words, our parents were slowly trying to pull us into their world of unseeing. They argued, and finally our parents simply put their foot down, asserting their parental rights. We had no choice, but to obey. So, Ayngharan did as they asked, but it was not long before he discovered illegal patches in dark corners. He quietly removed the software from his implant.
I think what hurt Ayngharan the most happened when it was my turn. Not because I didn’t apply his illegal patches afterward, but because I acquiesced quietly. That day our paths diverged.
Ayngharan dropped out of secondary school while I passed the university entrance exams. I recalled vividly one night at the campus bar, slightly warm from a touch of Arak, the smell of anise still pungent in my throat. Henry and Vijaya, friends of sorts, accompanied me at the table we occupied most Friday nights. Henry spotted them first.
“Eh, mate, there’re two young ladies over there and three of us. Which one of us gets to stay behind and order more drinks?”
Vijaya, the most argumentative among us, bickered over which one of the girls was prettier. I was alarmed; there were clearly three girls at the bar. Three saris: pink and gold, and a few seats away, a solitary green.
“But there’re three of them.”
The jovial banter stopped. Vijaya squinted at the bar and then looked at me quizzically. There, I finally understood. He only saw two girls. That he was just like my adopted parents. Just like the unnamed evacuation coordinator on the beach that day in Nilaveli.
“What do you mean, three? Too much arak perhaps, friend?”
Henry gave me a different look. Uncomfortable. Annoyed.
“That one’s not my type, man.”
Vijaya still didn’t understand. He would never understand until he turned off his ubiquitous implant modification. Henry grabbed his shoulder and scuttled over toward the bar, glossing over Vijaya’s confusion. He turned back and shouted, “Drinks on you, Guna!”
But his eyes told me something different. Don’t push this. Don’t ask more questions. Go along with it. Who was worse? Vijaya, who did not see this unnamed Tamil girl, painted out of his vision by a chunk of code and the silver behind his ear? Henry, who saw her but feigned an incompatible type because type included blood and history and a thousand lines of division scratched into the country’s bedrock for hundreds of years? Or me, who answered to my adopted name, Guna? Me, who said nothing, who went along with it, even as it rankled. We were all terrible people in different ways.
Ayngharan’s rage consumed him. I learned of his death from my adopted mother. No details, just that he was gone. I found out from other sources. Publicly there was no mention of a protest. Publicly there was no mention of a lone protestor who set himself aflame. And what did the bystanders see, I wondered? Did they see no one? The burning man, the protestors, all of them written out of the bystander’s vision by a piece of computer software. An unseen protest, marked only by the shape the crowd of angry youths had carved out on the street, marked only by the scorch mark left on the asphalt.
And so I arrived at this: my first act of rebellion. The small revolt I finally permitted myself to do, in remembrance of all the unseen, of all the things hidden from public eyes. I stand now on the tour-boat looking out at the ruins on a stretch of beach in Trincomalee, the gopuram of the old Koneswaram temple still half reaching out of the water. Some miles north, there exists an unseen, unmarked stretch of sunken beach in which my parents lie buried. I find the entry on the earthquake in the public database, and I edit it. I write in there the story you are reading now. My story. Perhaps in an hour, or even a few minutes, someone will edit it back. Someone will reduce my story to an invisible footnote to a single line. But for this moment, I am here. My story is here, unfiltered and visible. My real name is Kartik, and I do exist.