Ganesh, Buddha and Jesus walk into a bar. Memories of Rushi.
Today I learned that my cousin Rushi died, a woman ruled by her heart not her head, with a penchant for bad boys and trouble. When I was with her, she tangled me in her romantic adventures and when we were oceans apart she listened to mine. She held her head high when she walked into a room flooding with disapproval. I can still her her saying “who the fuck cares what they think?!” I wonder if they’ll put that on her tombstone.
Below is a story I wrote about my first night with her when I arrived in Sri Lanka in my thirties.
Remembering you Akki, my big sister. You will be missed.
Ganesh, Buddha and Jesus walk into a bar
My cousin picked me up from the airport in her tan-coloured van with the brakes that were “good enough”. Her parents had been wealthy socialites and the longed-for daughter was named Tharushi, meaning star, such was her expected trajectory and the brilliance she brought to their lives. Her multitude of aunts and uncles called her Rushi but I called her Akki, big sister.
We drove through the busy night, past street vendors selling roti by the light of kerosene lamps, families of five on motorbikes, a girl riding on the handle bars of her sarong-clad boyfriend’s bike, an elephant slowly carrying his bare-chested mahout whilst dodging elephantine potholes. Rushi’s interrogation was thorough: How was Mum and Dad? The rest of the family? How was her darling son Ravi, who had immigrated to Australia years ago? What was his girlfriend like? What did her family do? Was she fair or dark? Was she pretty? Ravi had given her as little information as possible and she tried to reach across the Indian and Pacific Oceans in the forty minute rattle of the van towards what would be home, at least until I got myself sorted. I tried to protect Ravi as much as possible. He was a grown man now but, as usual for most mothers I suppose, she felt he still needed her protection. The better he did, the more independent he became, the more he created a new life and new identity in Australia, the more she feared some unworthy woman would ‘trap’ him. But at the same time of course, she wanted to him to get married.
‘She’s very smart and funny and warm and she loves him very much.’
‘Yes but is she dark?’
‘She’s Sinhalese so….yes.’
‘Yes but is she too dark?’
I had no idea what too dark was.
‘Um, no, I guess. I don’t know.’
‘What do mean you don’t know?’
‘Maybe you can show me a colour chart when we get home.’
‘You’re a real smart alec aren’t you?’
Rushi rang the doorbell though it was after 11pm. A 5ft high woman in a crushed emerald dress opened the 8-foot high heavy wooden gate. She smiled, nodded her head deferentially, and took my bag with her hands, as small as a child. Though the bag was heavy she quickly shuffled inside with her bare feet, weaving slightly still drunk with sleep.
It was cooler inside, the large helicopter winged fans whirring quietly above and the deep red painted concrete was cool – relatively speaking – underfoot. It was still hot mind you but there seemed some promise that the back of my knees would stop sweating.
Tea was made and put in front of me before there was time to object and Rushi opened a fresh can of sweetened condensed milk, ladling a heaped teaspoon into my cup. I was hypnotized by the languid slow ribbon of silky cream reluctantly falling from the spoon, taking me into a place of literally sweet reverie of my childhood. There had been bread spread with sweetened condensed milk, sweetened tea, little fingers cut by jagged edged cans whilst steeling its sugary goodness, red drops of blood plopping on the pale caramel surface.
‘You’re tired?’ a poorly hidden dollop of disappointment.
‘No. Just a thousand miles away’ and yet I was only two miles and thirty three years away, staying with my aunty on holidays, with sweet sticky little fingers being mopped by dark brown antiseptic, chest still heaving from crying at the sharp smack on my bottom I’d received when caught. Just the anticipation of the taste had transported me to a different point in happiness.
The tea was as hot as the gossip. Rushi started in. About Sita, the girlfriend of her third son Ranji, about the tall dark boy with the dark past that was staying with her, about the highlights of our cousins’ lives, about the things that I should have known had my parents not decided to start a new life in a foreign country. Australia had been their new life and they wanted their daughters, born in a new land, to be just like the other kids. We weren’t of course, too dark, too strange, two sisters holding hands walking down the street, being taunted ‘lesbos’, ‘blackies.’ My parents had decided not to teach us Sinhalese so that we wouldn’t stick out, meaning we would never fit in when we visited Sri Lanka, never understand the punch lines of jokes. The cousins always started the jokes in English, trying to include us, but they always ended in Sinhalese because ‘it just doesn’t translate into English’. All this from a spoonful of condensed milk and a cup of sweet tea. The taste of the past.
Sita came from a good family. Her father was a doctor and her mother had money. There was a bit of domestic violence Rushi suspected but they were a “good family”. Her family were the Radala caste, the highest of the Kandyan caste system, and therefore, rich or poor, were top of the karmic heap. High caste married high-caste, low-caste married low-caste. These things could be got around with money of course but money can’t buy you caste. Hey in Sri Lanka that’s funny.
‘Surely no-one cares about that anymore.’
‘I don’t care but some people care about that. Her parents are high-caste Kandyans, don’t-you-know.’ Rushi said ‘don’t-you-know’ as an interjection rather than a question, with a head wobble. ‘For sure her parents wouldn’t want her marrying Ranji.’
‘Why? What caste are we?’
‘Don’t your parents tell you anything?’
I shrugged. That seemed a fairly broad question.
‘We’re dhobie caste. That’s the lowest of the low. Dhobies are the people who wash your clothes.’
I seemed to remember paying a lot of money to my dry cleaner but things were clearly different here.
‘But when you meet Sita here, doooon’t tell her that. You know how people gossip. If her parents find out that’ll put an end to that!’
There are 18 Sinhala Kandyan castes including Berava, the Tom-tom beaters; 18 Sinhala Southern Castes including Durava, the soldiers, coconut cultivators, toddy (the local alcohol) tappers and confectioners (soldiers, alcohol and chocolate – now that’s a caste that’s appealing); 36 Sinhalese Tamil Northern Castes, including Thurumbar, the washers for the toddy tappers and other low-caste families; 26 Sinhalese Tamil Eastern Castes, including Koviar, temple workers and the Colombo Chetties. One caste trumped another and Rajaka, the dhobies/washermen, was only one up from Rodiya, the outcasts.
It was all so arbitrary and seemed an unnecessary burden to a newborn who might already face poverty, violence or ignorance with their first breath. For the most part that was gone like whiskies between friends, friends who two decades ago would not have been allowed to fraternise, but it remained unspoken, the question that no-one asked, the answer everyone knew.
In the villages these things still mattered and things went on as they had decades ago.
I remember sitting on my cousin’s bed, with the same red concrete floor, as a girl, clustered around one of her friends who was doomed to marry a man she didn’t know and had just come from telling her secret boyfriend. I had suggested that if her parents knew how much she loved her boyfriend they wouldn’t make her marry this man. Her parents didn’t know about her boyfriend “of course!” my cousin had explained patiently, and even as a ten year old it seemed strange that it was harder to tell your parents you had a boyfriend than to marry a stranger they had chosen for you. In Sri Lanka a boy’s parents might approach a girl’s parents and propose ‘a match’ and if pleasing to both fathers and the pairing’s horoscopes aligned, the progeny in question had an ‘arranged marriage’. This isn’t as heartless as it might seem but a girl was really at the mercy of her parent’s good judgment, which might trade her pretty face for a family with money. There were professional matchmakers who knew all the eligible bachelors and girls who were virgins and could make an introduction for a fee. I wondered whether some introductions were rigged in some way, a matchmaker susceptible to bribery. A girl’s parents still paid a dowry to a fiancé’s family, for the burden of taking on their daughter. Thoughtful parents might think to the happiness of their child and seek out a boy of comparable beauty but no parent was going to buy a poor boy as a son-in-law. ‘Love flies out the window when poverty knocks at the door’, my mother warned whenever she came to know that there was a potential boyfriend in the offing. It seemed that here, where she grew up, where poverty meant no food, money could buy you love.
Rushi hadn’t had an arranged marriage. She was raised as a princess. Servants bathed her and washed her. She had a separate towel for her toes. At sixteen, unfathered and unprotected, she was left what was a small fortune and a beautiful face in a poor country. The sheltered near-woman attracted unscrupulous men. The attraction was mutual.
Rushi met Qadri, a dark and mysterious man. An older cousin had him investigated and ‘given a good thrashing’ after finding that his young cousin would be his second wife. Given that her beloved was Muslim and therefore entitled to as many wives as he could afford, she forgave him. She was in love and some suspected that it was too late for her honour to prevent the marriage. The marriage was volatile. Rushi could inflame, inspire, ignite passion and Qadri was a good-looking man with a thriving business. She had too much beauty, he had too many opportunities. There had been lovers creeping out of windows and finally, a passion and kerosene-fuelled burning bed and the marriage was over. He had married again since I last saw her and had two young children and she cursed his freedom to do whatever and whomever he liked whilst she had to be careful of other people’s opinions.
There were so many skeletons in our family that you were afraid to open the closet and yet couldn’t resist. The skeletons came out dancing about, laughing, drinking whisky, sleeping with each other’s wives, marrying cousins, having illegitimate children to servants, kidnapping children, cheating people out of wills. The skeletons never ventured out of the family walls although with over forty cousins there were enough people to tell. How it all stayed within the confines of the family was a miracle. Having affairs, though commonplace, was still frowned upon and those involved were not inclined to air their dirty expensive saris. Better to send them to the other dhobies who would wash them in private.
We shared more tea more secrets.
Religion was always mentioned as a descriptor, like someone’s profession, their family background, their wealth. I was half joking, half curious when I asked
‘So what side of the religious divide are we?’
‘We’re very open-minded. We like whoever’s feet are hidden under our bed.’
I blurted out a laugh and my tea.
It seemed that the Davis shopped around for religions and Rushi would add in parentheses, behind the name of each of my cousins, the current religion of whoever was being talked about.
‘You know that Dilani’s Catholic now after Dilan, her eldest, was brought back from the dead.’
‘What?’
‘Well, Dilan was going to die in hospital. We were all at the hospital waiting for him to die. Your mother came to the hospital and said that, even if we didn’t believe we should come to St Joseph’s with her and pray because there a lot of miracles there. So we went; me, Dilani and Nelun (who was Muslim but became Catholic after she married Chanuka). Anyway, we prayed and we stayed for an hour. And in the morning he woke up, and did this – she gestured a thumbs up sign with the thumb pointing into his mouth – and we gave him water and two days later he was home.’
It seemed a sharp turn around from kidney failure but, having the same blood and same beliefs running through me, I was inclined to believe in miracles. One cousin followed the other to Mum’s benevolent and wrathful God and even Rushi seemed to be channelling my mother at times.
‘So you’re Catholic now?’ I said, trying to be polite but feeling my eyebrows raise.
‘I need saving too’ she stated.
I walked to the shrine in the lounge room to see who was on guard. The hot pink incense sticks were smouldering, the soft smell of sandalwood lingering, the chimneys of ash teetering and collapsing beside the wavering light of the candle. There were eight holies there, amongst them Blue Krishna, happy Buddha and haloed Jesus. Jesus was currently in front.
‘Who’s this one?’ I picked up the seated elephant man, festooned with flowers. His trunk was curled on his rotund naked belly as if he’d eaten too much rice and curry and needed a nap, his legs crossed under a sarong, seated on a bed of flowers.
‘Put Ganesh down.’
‘Isn’t he the God of bachelors? Maybe that’s the problem – he’s the God of people that want to be single.’
‘He’s also the remover of obstacles.’
‘So Ganesh, Jesus and Buddha walk into a bar. There’s a joke in the there somewhere’.
I rubbed Ganesh’s belly for good luck and put him back.
Between the Catholics and the Hindus (who even include Buddha as the incarnation of Vishnu, the god of compassion) there is a saint or god for everything. Lost your keys? Pray to St Anthony patron saint of lost things. Cheating on your neglectful husband? Worship Krishna who rules over sexual pleasures, love and music and is the saviour from sins, which all go together nicely for a god with 180 wives. Got a test? Pray to the goddess Tara or St Joseph of Cupertino, take your pick. Sri Lankans allowed a certain religious latitude and worshipping one god/God seemed a little restrictive, even after Jesus bit them.
I told Rushi about Mum. She cried. I didn’t. She held my hand to her wet cheek and kissed it and pressed her lips to my forehead and we sat silently, two hands holding two hands, for some time. I had left my anguish and my tears behind and there remained only a crush in my chest from too much crying. Billy Joel, Bill Withers and the ubiquitous Bob Marley rubbed shoulders on the radio. It was happy music, nothing past the year 2000 and I wondered if I had time-travelled back to happier times when I’d landed 5 hours before.
It was my fourth cup of tea. The night was lifting. The hours had passed like minutes but, no longer jacked up on condensed milk, I finally felt the aching in my bones from a twenty-hour flight and long layover spent half-sleeping on the cold airport floor in Bangkok. Tomorrow was the first big family gathering and I would get to put faces to the book of names and their stories.
I lay next to Rushi in her queen-sized bed, the fan rhythmically and unsuccessfully pushing against the heat. We talked until I fell asleep, somewhere amongst the tribulations of cousin number thirty, two sisters sharing secrets.
Wishing you love and all good things x
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