Light flows our war of mocking words, and yet,
Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet!
I feel a nameless sadness o’er me roll.
Yes, yes, we know that we can jest,
We know, we know that we can smile!
But there’s a something in this breast,
To which thy light words bring no rest,
And thy gay smiles no anodyne.
Give me thy hand, and hush awhile,
And turn those limpid eyes on mine,
And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul.
“Sir,” a plump boy in the front row whispered as Mr. Venkatesan finally stopped for breath.
“What is it now?” snapped Mr. Venkatesan. In his new mood Arnold had touched him with fresh intensity, and he hated the boy for deflating illusion. “If you are wanting to know a synonym for ‘anodyne,’ then look it up in the Oxford Dictionary. You are a lazy donkey wanting me to feed you with a silver spoon. All of you, you are all lazy donkeys.”
“No, sir.” The boy persisted in spoiling the mood.
It was then that Mr. Venkatesan took in the boy’s sweaty face and hair. Even the eyes were fat and sweaty.
“Behold, sir,” the boy said. He dabbed his eyelids with the limp tip of his school tie. “Mine eyes, too, are wet.”
“You are a silly donkey,” Mr. Venkatesan yelled. “You are a beast of burden. You deserve the abuse that you get. It is you emotional types who are selling this country down the river.”
The class snickered, unsure what Mr. Venkatesan wanted of them. The boy let go of his tie and wept openly. Mr. Venkatesan hated himself. Here was a kindred soul, a fellow lover of Matthew Arnold, and what had he done other than indulge in gratuitous cruelty? He blamed the times. He blamed Sri Lanka.
It was as much this classroom incident as the fear of arrest for his part in what turned out to be an out-of-control demonstration that made Mr. Venkatesan look into emigrating. At first, he explored legal channels. He wasted a month’s salary bribing arrogant junior-level clerks in four consulates — he was willing to settle almost anywhere except in the Gulf Emirates — but every country he could see himself being happy and fulfilled in turned him down.
So all through the summer he consoled himself with reading novels. Adventure stories in which fearless young Britons — sailors, soldiers, missionaries — whacked wildernesses into submission. From lending libraries in the city, he checked out books that were so old that they had to be trussed with twine. On the flyleaf of each book, in fading ink, was an inscription by a dead or retired British tea planter. Like the blond heroes of the novels, the colonials must have come to Ceylon chasing dreams of perfect futures. He, too, must sail dark, stormy oceans.
In August, at the close of a staff meeting, Miss Philomena announced coyly that she was leaving the island. A friend in Kalamazoo, Michigan, had agreed to sponsor her as a “domestic.”
“It is a ploy only, man,” Miss Philomena explained. “In the autumn, I am signing up for post-graduate studies in a prestigious educational institution.”
“You are cleaning toilets and whatnot just like a servant girl? Is the meaning of ‘domestic’ not the same as ‘servant’?”
Mr. Venkatesan joined the others in teasing Miss Philomena, but late that night he wrote away to eight American universities for applications. He took great care with the cover letters, which always began with “Dear Respected Sir” and ended with “Humbly but eagerly awaiting your response.” He tried to put down in the allotted blanks what it felt like to be born so heartbreakingly far from New York or London. On this small dead-end island, I feel I am a shadow-man, a nothing. I feel I’m a stranger in my own room. What consoles me is reading. I sink my teeth into fiction by great Englishmen such as G. A. Henty and A. E. W. Mason. I live my life through their imagined lives. And when I put their works down at dawn I ask myself Hath not a Tamil eyes, heart, ears, nose, throat, to adapt the words of the greatest Briton. Yes, I am a Tamil. If you prick me, do I not bleed? If you tickle me, do I not laugh? Then, if I dream, will you not give me a chance, respected Sir, as only you can?
In a second paragraph he politely but firmly indicated the size of scholarship he would require, and indicated the size of apartment he (and his sisters) would require. He preferred close proximity to campus, since he did not intend to drive.
But sometime in late April, the school’s porter brought him, rubber-banded together, eight letters of rejection.
“I am worthless,” Mr. Venkatesan moaned in front of the porter. “I am a donkey.”
The porter offered him aspirins. “You are unwell, sahib.”
The schoolteacher swallowed the tablets, but as soon as the servant left, he snatched a confiscated Zippo lighter from his desk and burned the rejections.
When he got home, his sister’s suitor was on the balcony, painting placards, and though he meant to say nothing to the youth, meant to admit no flaw, no defeat, his body betrayed him with shudders and moans.
“Racism!” the youth spat as he painted over a spelling error that, even in his grief, Mr. Venkatesan couldn’t help pointing out. “Racism is what’s slamming the door in your face, man! You got to improvise your weapons!”
Perhaps the boy was not a totally unworthy suitor. He let the exclamations play in his head, and soon the rejections, and the anxiety that he might be stuck on the futureless island fired him up instead of depressing him. Most nights he lay in bed fully dressed — the police always raided at dawn — and thought up a hundred illegal but feasible ways to outwit immigration officials.
The least wild schemes he talked over with Father van der Haagen. Long ago and in another country, Father van der Haagen had surely given in to similar seductions. The Jesuit usually hooted, “So you want to rot in a freezing, foreign jail? You want your lovely sisters to walk the streets and come to harm?” But, always, the expatriate ended these chats with his boyhood memories of skating on frozen Belgian rivers and ponds. Mr. Venkatesan felt he could visualize snow, but not a whole river so iced up that it was as solid as a grand trunk highway. In his dreams, the Tamil schoolteacher crisscrossed national boundaries on skates that felt as soft and comforting as cushions.
In August his sister’s suitor got himself stupidly involved in a prison break. The sister came to Mr. Venkatesan weeping. She had stuffed clothes and her sewing basket into a camouflage satchel. She was going into the northern hills, she said. The Tigers could count on the tea pickers.
“No way,” Mr. Venkatesan exploded. When he was safely in America’s heartland, with his own wife and car and all accoutrements of New World hearth and home, he wanted to think of his Trinco family (to whom he meant to remit generous monthly sums) as being happy under one roof, too. “You are not going to live with hooligan types in jungles.”
“If you lock me in my room, I’ll call the police. I’ll tell them who threw the axe at the rally.”
“Is that what they teach you in guerrilla camps? To turn on your family?” he demanded.
The sister wept loudly into her sari. It was a pretty lilac sari, and he remembered having bought it for her seventeenth birthday. On her feet were fragile lilac slippers. He couldn’t picture her scrambling up terraced slopes of tea estates in that pretty get-up. “Nobody has to teach me,” she retorted.
In her lilac sari, and with the white fragrant flower wreath in her hair, she didn’t look like a blackmailer. It was the times. She, her boyfriend, he himself, were all fate’s victims.
He gave in. He made her promise, though, that in the hills she would marry her suitor. She touched his feet with her forehead in the traditional farewell. He heard a scooter start up below. So the guerrilla had been waiting. She’d meant to leave home, with or without his permission. She’d freed herself of family duties and bonds.