Hippocrates

The car stopped, and the driver came around and opened the door for me. I got out, and my uncle was already up the path of the house, moving deftly around a small, barking dog. A hunched, wrinkled woman at the door took the bag from him and smiled deferentially at me, holding her hand out in a gesture of welcome.

Come, she said.

My uncle vanished into the back. I stood by the door, removing my shoes with unnecessary care. I listened for and then could hear the car pulling out of the driveway.

Sit, sit, the woman said, smiling, and then she, too, disappeared down a side hallway, pulling the suitcase along.

The chair I sat in was very old, with the wooden bones of the frame pushing through the upholstery on the arms. The floor was bare and warm, its boards smoother against my toes than the concrete of my family’s house in Jaffna. The walls were crowded with pictures, and I noticed, finally seeing Colombo for a moment, that some of them were of me. I was so small in some of the pictures that I did not remember being myself in them.

You look all grown up, my grandmother said, and I stood up suddenly, so fast that I almost knocked the tea tray from her hands. She steadied herself and put the tray down on a table next to the chair.

Although my uncle had referred to her, I had almost forgotten she would be here. She looked much older than when she had last visited Jaffna, five years earlier. My mother’s mother was a stunningly ugly woman, with a long, skinny, black birthmark running down the left half of her face, and the milky blue rings of her sclera showing around her eyes. I was old enough now not to be afraid of her ugliness, and to know that later, I could be her, and that in fact the odds were in favour of that. She was the first ugly person I had ever loved, although she would not be the last. At nineteen, I was young enough to value beauty and old enough to know that certain types of it would die, while other kinds would grow stronger.

On this day I saw for the first time that I was taller than her. I was tall for a woman anyway, and she was not short; that height ran in our family. Her face, paler now, told me how I would look when the softness had been stripped from my face. Her hands were still unwrinkled, and when she reached up to pat me on the cheek, I recalled that she coated them with oil every day to keep them that way: her sole vanity. We kissed each other twice, once on each side of the face, the way we had always greeted each other.

She talked to me while I had tea, and gave me supper. Like my uncle, she did not expect me to respond to what she said, but unlike my uncle, she loved me and I liked to listen to her. Afterwards, she put me to bed, as though I were still a small child. I let her; to be treated like a child for an hour comforted me, although even now, I am ashamed to admit that to myself.

When I woke up I could hear the bells of a temple ringing in the distance. I wondered what the temples in Colombo were like. They could not be as big as our temples in Jaffna, I thought; the gods of Colombo must be cramped and noisy, sweaty and smoky, elbow to elbow.

I could hear someone else moving around towards the back of the house, in the kitchen, the sounds of a kettle being settled on to a stove. I had already learned to count on the sounds people make, and to consider them as markings, like fingerprints for the ears. It was not the sound of the servant woman; it was my uncle’s quiet, quick step. I put a housecoat on over my nightdress and went out into the corridor and back towards the kitchen, very slowly so as to not disturb his routine. Halfway there, I heard him turn the radio on. The voice of a news announcer crackled out into the morning. I heard him very clearly. I heard what he said, and then I forgot to be quiet and ran, the pounding of my feet waking up the house.

The voice on the radio said what had happened was this: a pregnant woman had gone to a government office building in Colombo. She had ridden the elevator to the top floor of this building, which was an important building that I did not know, having arrived too recently to understand the whereabouts of importance in the city. At the top floor, she got off and asked to see a man in charge, whose office was very large and had a wooden desk. She told them that she had an appointment; the secretary checked the records and saw that this was true.

The voice on the radio did not say this, but I imagined it to be so: the woman was seated and offered tea, which she accepted, with milk and plenty of sugar. She was from Jaffna; she liked a lot of sugar in her tea. She waited for ten minutes, and then, when the secretary called her, she picked up her bag and rose from the chair to be escorted into the office. The man shook her hand and called her Madam, respectfully, although she was not very old, perhaps no older than her mid­twenties. Her pregnancy was obvious, but this did not desexualize her in his eyes; she was a very beautiful woman, wearing a large green silk tunic and pants that brought out the fairness of her skin and the darkness of her hair. She was wearing a red pottu between her eyebrows, the mark of a married woman, although she was not actually married. She shook his hand back and smiled at him disarmingly.

The voice on the radio only said: She pressed a button to detonate the primary bomb she was carrying.

I suppose that was the part that mattered.

I want you to understand: I was not born to fight for a political cause. I did not feel chosen. And this woman was not born this way. She was not chosen. She was born in a village in Jaffna, and soldiers raided her house, and she was gang­raped, and she watched the men who raped her kill her four brothers. I want you to understand: this is not an excuse, or an explanation. It is a fact. She was not born to walk into an office building on an ordinary day, a day when the sun was shining and three­wheelers cluttered the streets, to try to detonate a bomb. And in fact, later, the forensics said that was what had happened. She tried to detonate a bomb. But she failed, because it had been built improperly. I want you to imagine this, as I did when I heard that: the bomb blew up, but not completely, not enough to kill them quickly as she had intended. The first small, potent blast caught her and the man together, and with her right arm gone and his left leg severed beneath the knee, they looked like one person dancing. Her hair fell out of its pins into his open mouth. Two building security guards burst into the room after only a few moments, and she screamed, and they pointed their guns at her. She held up like a prize the other bomb, the auxiliary fuse and its detonator, and shouted in Tamil. The man reached out to wrestle with her, screaming also but in Sinhalese, and the guards aimed for her. Their training was not good enough for this. If they shot the bomb, it would blow up; if they shot the woman, she would probably manage to detonate it anyway. They aimed for the woman; they fired; they missed. They aimed again, the man shouting again, trying to push her between himself and the guards, and this time one of them hit her in the shoulder. Blood bloomed on the green silk. The other one aimed and shot her again. The bullet pierced her neck, and as she reached up to hold the wound, she let go of the other detonator.

She died and she killed other people and she did not mind, and in this she was different from me forever.