This Land of Mine

The light leans as shrubs exaggerate their shadows, pouring shade over the stones, the twigs and in-between the bushes and crooks like some raven stream washing out the light. This shade appears almost as a clandestine path and in essence serves as a shortcut through the sultry afternoon.
Sarasi follows one of these very paths with her mother’s slippers slipping from the soles of her feet. Her jagged and assumably gnawed toenails dig into the peeling rubber at the tips of her slippers, barely keeping them on her tiny feet. Yet she walks with a frolic in her step, her knees popping in and out from under the sunflower embroidered dress that hangs low on her gaunt legs. The two plastic bags in her hands swing with each step and almost sound like waves splashing against Arugam Bay as they swipe by her waist. And even her gasps for breath emerge in some familiar melody, with only the occasional sniffle suspending the tune.
This sort of trek is routine for Sarasi. The eroding mud cast footprints she follows are her own, just a few days worn, as she scurried through last week’s showers. Sarasi has a wanderlust and neither scolding nor sharp lashes upon her palms can restrain it. Her mother tries to send her on errands, carrying hoppers or curry to her grandmother at the top of the hill or waddling back from the cricket grounds with her step-father’s laundry. But on most occasions Sarasi walks this path on Old Border Hill as she returns home from the Rabana, the largest grocery store in the city and one of the largest franchises in Sri Lanka. Its meats and produce draws crowds of hundreds to its gliding doors, though it’s eggs and coconuts that weight down Sarasi’s bags today.
A dozen cream colored eggs dissolve into the white of the toilet paper carefully swathed around and between them. The transparent plastic bag would seem to be empty if it wasn’t for her pink umbrella resting on top. In the other bag two dried coconuts knock against each other. That hollow resonance sounds like the tick of a clock, measuring her every step as she nears the summit of the hill.
Your father took you to that hill when you were just four years old, her mother often reminds her. But Sarasi remembers. It’s one of the few memories she has of her father. The feel of his bristling stubble grinding against her cheek as her face and arms dangle over his shoulders, gazing back as he marches forward. And she remembers the smell, not of her father but of the hill. There is this slight hint of something in the fresh air, a scent unique to this hill. It reminds her of him. Not just the man but the feeling that seeped out as he squeezed her tight. She felt secure, precious, like a daughter.
It was raining the night her father disappeared. There was a boy lost on the hill, his mother’s frantic screams seemed to hush the falling rain. A few men agreed to search the hill, one of whom was Sarasi’s father, he knew the hill better than anyone. Old man Sadun and wild boy Kannan recount the night so often that Sarasi has trouble remembering whether the memory was hers or theirs. But what Sarasi does remembered about that night was the argument between her parents.
If you go, don’t bother coming back, her mother shouted, angered that he would risk his own life for another family. Don’t bother coming back, were her last words to him as she slammed the door shut. And he never did. The men returned at dawn the next morning with empty hands and solemn faces. Returning with only the pink umbrella her father carried that night. They didn’t find the boy and lost a man. And every time Sarasi reaches the top of the hill she thinks maybe she’ll see him, maybe.
Light floods into her eyes, awakening Sarasi from her memories. She quickly tosses her head. Her hair looks like a black wave splashing against her face. Placing both bags into a dangle from a few fingers on her left hand, Sarasi snatches her umbrella; her fingers glide down the metal shaft, guiding the ring towards the seven spines that begin to unfold like the limbs of some dying roach. A widening shadow begins to envelope her grimaced expression as the umbrella’s pink hue unfurls above her head. Its spines reach down as it opens up, like a stillborn Sakura.
Her eyes unpeel to a mere squint and the sharp twinge of sunlight, blurring the landscape into a silhouette of haze. Sarasi smiles as she perceives what the other children call, seeing stars, sparkling in her eyes. But what appears to be tiny bubbles of bursting light are actually dying cells cast into a inferno of radiance. None the less her mouth widens to a giggle and her blurred vision eventually merges into focus.
Sarasi looks back the way she came then spins towards the path ahead of her. There is such a view wrapped around her that her legs, neck, and irises turn, twirl, and pirouette in accord. She surveys the hill. Old tires, weathered shirts, and soleless shoes are scattered among the rocks, dust, and bushes along the slopes. The few plastic bags hanging from the brink of certain thorny stems, flapping like sails in the wind, are the only sound. The hill is silent. Sarasi hears nothing but her own breathing and that voice in her head as she thinks: this hill is mine. And it is. For the past seven years no one has stepped foot on the hill. No one would dare to, no one besides the eleven year old Sarasi. And if her mother ever learned that her daughter uses the hundred rupees intended for the bus to buy chocolate and takes this short cut home, Sarasi would thenceforth view her hill from behind the bedroom window, never to leave home again.
Sarasi plods down the other side of her hill, disheartened she could not stay a bit longer. But noticing the time in her imaginative sees, the sun, a clock hanging on the sky and the shadows like its hands pointing towards the approaching evening, Sarasi knows she must return home.
She likes this hill, it’s the only thing she considers her own. Wearing her cousin’s secondhand dress, her sisters’ hand-me-down underwear, and her mother’s slippers, Sarasi walks down the hill with a history of family poverty sewn onto her shoulders. And each feminine attribute is cut from dissimilar eras and trends and mingles on Sarasi’s scrawny body like a shattered puzzle. Her umbrella veils a demure face, her hips swing to some sensual cadence, and her feet step at an austere pace, all together causing Sarasi to stumble now and again.
She’s not a lady yet, her stepfather often declares in a hoarse, patronizing tone. Not yet she isn’t--not yet. He often repeats himself with a cough or grumble wedged between his echoing spiels.
Sarasi’s stepfather is an older man, with traditional tenets and beliefs. Not particularly wealthy, he was able to court Sarasi’s younger mother due to his ownership of a vast plot of land. Sarasi’s mother is his third wife, the other two were lost to death and divorce. He often compares women to shadows, saying they should follow silently behind their men. And Sarasi tries to follow in his footsteps, learning how to lead the sheep and cows out to pasture and stepping carefully around the plowed furrows in the soil. Sarasi tries but her focus often scatters faster than the breeze and farther than the dandelion weeds at her feet. She attention is quickly caught up in the cobwebs, sinking into shallow irrigation puddles, and just simply becoming lost in vastness on the horizon. And the hill, staring at her hill.
Sarasi drags her feet along the rocky track leading down the hill. Her thoughts move to her mother as she kicks loose stones into a juddering skid down the hill. Dirt begins to linger under her toenails, almost blackening the shadows under her feet. The ground hisses as pebbles and dust grind under her sandals. And a light halo of dust orbits her dawdling feet.
Pretend you’re walking on eggs, Sarasi’s mother likes to tell her. If you want to be elegant, pretend you’re walking on eggs. Her mother often speaks above her head and at times forgets Sarasi’s age, telling her daughter that elegance is ninety percent propriety and ten percent seduction. Use your toes not your soles and don’t drag you heels -- don’t bend your knees. And Sarasi follows her mother’s gait and grace along the path to the local grocers, in the kitchen, betweens the swaying clothes lines and she is learning step for step, she knows how but not why. And that why, is something her mother understands all too well.
It has been over thirty years since Sarasi’s mother stood in her daughter’s place, listening to passé axioms like a foreign language. Listening as her mother auctioned her virginity to men nearly twice her age in hopes of seeing grandchildren. But now Sarasi’s mother understands all to well. Each menopausal flash burns a reminiscent yearn for menstruation. And she hopes some approaching month Sarasi too will realize the only eggs she is walking on are her own.
A butterfly catches Sarasi’s attention. Its wings, a unique carmine on one side and violet on the other, reveal and veil themselves as it flutters to the push of the wind. Sarasi stares at it in awe, her lips agape as she poises to say but thinks, a flying rainbow. And lost in that thought Sarasi steps on a loose stone. She looses her footing. Her arms sling upwards pushing her back back. Her tailbone smacks the dirt, her umbrella gets caught in the wind and the white eggs burst into yellow.
Sarasi immediately props herself up on the palms of her hands, searching the encompassing bushes with wide eyes and small pupils, hunting for her umbrella. Holding her tailbone she stands, tip toeing, lurching her neck, inspecting, stout trees and shrubs, stones and dust. It all becomes blurs of green and gray as she swings her head back and forth but her umbrella is no where in sight. Sarasi glances down at the jagged white shells floating and drowning in a pool of viscid yellow and her coconuts cracked yet rolling down the hill. But they’re not as important in her mind.
This is your father’s umbrella! Her mother’s voice screams out from her memory. You take care of it. Panic is now visible on Sarasi’s face. It’s the last thing he bought for you. She step to and fro with no real aim or course, her neck and feet shifting in opposite directions. Then she sees it, the umbrella, her father’s umbrella, just below her, caught between a twig and a stem, rattling in the wind atop a bush. A bush off of her path. Off of the path the father showed her so many years ago.
Old Border Hill was the long standing barrier between the Tamil rebels and the Sri Lankan military. Civil war, the bloodiest in the nation’s history. From modern weapons like grenades and assault rifles to the primitive stones and bare knuckles of desperation, thousands of men and women lost their lives the border of this hill. And though the fighting has resided, there are still ghosts from that war, buried on this hill. Military apparitions that haunt the villagers to this very day. Ghost of mines. Because both side buried the other with mines, thousands and thousands of land mines.
Sarasi steps into a muddle of bushes and tall grass. They scratch her ankles and consume her waist. She lifts her hands to her chest; the tips of the grass and leaves tickle her elbows. Cringing with each step she stares down, trying to see where she’s stepping but her feet are shadowed and shades of green. The greenery recedes in front of her and envelops behind her as if she were walking through water.
She stops a few feet ahead of the umbrella, arching her back, extending her arm, her fingers nails scratching of rubber on the handle. The closer she gets to the umbrella the clearer the memory of her father is in her mind. It’s the scent of this hill, as scent is the principal catalyst of memory. But what she always assumed was her father’s scents, unique to this hill, was the mercury fulminate and the rotting lead azide in the mines.
Sarasi stumbles forward and steps on something hard. She grits her teeth and wrinkles her eyes closed. Nothing happens. She blinks. She sighs. You can go anywhere you like. You’re my daughter. Sarasi smiles. Her father’s words sounds clearer now in the silence of the empty hill. It’s like everything is like it was before. The scent of the summer drifting on that same breeze. It has to be the same breeze. She thinks as she opens the umbrella again, in bursts into shade and Sarasi steps away, still smiling.
There’s a click, light flashes, and Sarasi winces. The flame mushrooms; her cringed eyelids corrode instantly. Her retinas burst. Her hair singes, eyelashes, eyebrows and locks hanging from her head, crumple into a swift puff of seared ash. Her cheeks are torn away, revealing her gums and grit teeth. Her lower jaw snaps in half. Nine teeth lodge into her upper gums. The mucus in her nostrils boils and burns through the bridge of her nose. Her dress splashes into fragments. Her caramel skin wanes to black as her pores split and crack, the oxygen sucked out. Her knees snap and sever from her corpse. And her toenails peel back in a quick fizzle as her feet splinter into nothing at all.
But Sarasi, little Sarasi, doesn’t feel a thing.