A Little Dust on the Eyes

By Minoli Salgado

It is the late 1980s in southern Sri Lanka. Bradley Sirisena's father is tortured and abducted in the violent struggle for power between the state and local insurgents. Some fifteen years later, his disappearance remains unresolved.
Savi, a Sri Lankan research student long settled in the UK, has lost her way in both her thesis and her life, when she receives a wedding invitation from the uncle she would rather ignore. Meanwhile in a coastal fort in Sri Lanka, her cousin Renu continues to try to uncover the secret of Bradley's father's disappearance. Reunited on Savi's return to Sri Lanka, the cousins are compelled to confront truths that put them into direct conflict in their understanding of both the past and themselves. As Bradley's story draws to its inevitable end, the tsunami strikes and carries them all into a future that promises to be even more disturbing than the past.
The novel is a haunting evocation of intersecting lives and parallel times that draws upon real historical events. In this richly textured book, myth and magic merge, as the bustle of a seaside city in England gives way to the unreal calm of coastal communities in southern Sri Lanka where thousands disappeared without trace.
This book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peepal Tree Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781845233020

Book preview

1

BRIGHTHELM

small star

One by one, they fell into shade. She watched as Hannah’s retreating form was absorbed into the darkness of stone steps. The last thing she saw: the pale face of the child, slumped over Hannah’s shoulder, and the small star of her hand as she waved goodbye.

Savi drew her scarf around her and braced herself for the sea wind. The distant stalks of esplanade lights flickered into view, coming to her through the spray as a pale shower of young coconut flowers, waxy buds falling from golden wedding urns as she peeled them clean. Here they were again, glowing warm against the sea.

She was used to them now, these once disconcerting slips. They were to be expected in this land of shifted, shifting things, where hills rose and fell in smooth, leafless echoes, undulating like a frozen sea, and the sea itself materialised as solid waves of flint that matched the broken rocks on the shore. Brighthelm was spread between these repeating rolls of grey hills and waves, sometimes as a space of possibility, sometimes ephemeral as a dream. She would move through winding alleys that opened into gardens, pass lights that led to darkness, a pier that drew her over sea. As she walked above the moving water, she felt how much she’d left of herself behind. There were spinning wheels and trains that carried tourists into the clouds, and a language that turned chaotic on the lips. It was a place that shifted time and region, of rain from other shores. At its heart lay a royal dream of Asia – a curved and flowing building affectionately called The Pavilion; a prince’s whim, a sideshow, where turquoise minarets and parasols of palm trees covered writhing dragons of red and gold.

Savi walked through the Lanes with her rucksack on her back, stepping out of the way of the crowds, the men and women who strode out of shops as glossy as airport magazines and dined al fresco in those sea-front hotels made famous in films. She would feel the contact of their holidays in the sun as they brushed past, their bronze against her brown, their smooth oiled skins against her dry arms, the contrast reminding her she was alone.

She was still jostled, for she walked too quickly and her rucksack was weighted with books. ‘Sorry’, she would say, when someone bumped into her. ‘That’s OK’, she would respond on behalf of unsuspecting strangers, ‘Thaht’s OK. Zat’s Okay’, trying out variously a Scottish brogue, an American drawl, some version of Teutonic intonation. ‘I was wondering if you could tell me the way to...? You don’t have the time by any chance?’

But of course they never saw her, never responded. Just moved on as if she wasn’t there.

The cobbled streets were too narrow for the jutting shop signs that festooned her native city, signs that reached out and bickered with one another. She would pause by windows spangled with lights as bright as the sequined silks within, enter the aisle and run her fingers through the skirts, feeling the texture of those places that rose in her mind – saris, shawls, shirts, sarongs that fluttered from the open stalls of the Pettah.

‘How much?’

‘Forty pounds.’

In the Pettah it might have been less than four.

She withdrew her hand, wondering how many people she might have touched, who they were, what form of contact this was.

In the evenings, her work done, she might emerge and step over shapes that stirred into sleeping vagrants and slip into the Greek café. She might hear the laughter of students in their uniform of club leather, light a cigarette and watch the pier illuminate into a skeleton of bright bulbs, as the waves slid into darkness and the sea was reduced to a hiss.

Time was measured in anticipation of the full moon. Savi would strike off the days in her diary, each day a match lighting their separation, her diary empty but for these strokes. She placed her pen by the table, heard it roll and tap the lamp, reached for the switch and turned the light off. In the dark, it came to her that her mother, too, might have willed her into oblivion, that their enforced separation had made this a necessary act.

Her mother had always had the ability to cauterise pain. At the airport departure gate – a memory that might be called false because it was a composite of different events – her mother had turned away with her familiar decisiveness, cleared a path through the crowd with a trolley weighted with buckled cases, and never looked back. On poya days I will think of you – her mother’s words sealed in bright berries of crimson lipstick, uttered just moments before. The words were real but the events that framed them belonged to a different time.

She recalled the saline drip coming from her mother’s arm, a crescent of paleness on the inside of her wrist, the lifeline split and trailing into vagueness. She had sat by her mother’s side, stroking her hand, running her fingers down the length of her mother’s fingers and locking them into hers.

It had been many months – years perhaps – since her mother had been strong enough to rise up and hold her. With their hands locked together she felt the need to be held, gently as her mother had held her, not with the abrupt and crushing need with which her father drew her to him during the last few months of her mother’s life. Even in those rare moments of contact when her mother used to towel her hair dry, drawing Savi to her dimpled belly – her watalappan tummy as they both called it, smelling of sandalwood and talcum – and rolling her wet head in the large, soft folds, her mother had maintained the gentlest touch, her hands losing definition in the tumbling roll of towel that swaddled Savi’s head, laughing at her exaggerated squeals of protest, their laughter frothing into one.

She had run her fingers along the ridges of her mother’s left hand, around the rim of surgical tape, conscious of the looseness between skin and bone. A tight white sheet was drawn about her mother’s form. Only the face shifted a little, drawn into its primary lines. The thin light in her mother’s eyes seemed to be burning through Savi to a point beyond her on the window, the force of her gaze pared down to this bright filament. She was reminded of a cobra, eyes glazed in concentration as it shed its skin in the silver needles of a cactus, caught in the slow and delicate process of casting off an old self.

She had pressed her mother’s hand with the pulse she wished to instill in her, and then pressed it again, more insistently, with a pressure that must have hurt, hating the stillness that had settled over the bed. She had learnt about loss in those slow hospital hours, learnt of it long before she came to England. Aloneness. Her mother’s stillness a disease that threatened them all, when she could have swooped through the lengthening intervals between each breath.

It might have infected her too had not her mother smiled that last time and said the words that unravelled everything: On poya days I will think of you, the eyes fixed on her in the permanence of love, the words leaving her lips slack, open, with the promise of more.

Savi reached forward to kiss her but was pulled back by an attendant and led firmly to the window. Someone held her shoulder as if to stop her turning round. She heard a screen being drawn about the bed where her father had been sitting on the other side.

Plumes of smoke were rising from the glowing buildings below. There were the orange flares of the city riots, the fires smudged into clouds of glowing fingerprints. On poya days I will think of you. Her mother’s poya prayers repeating through her tears. Each full moon held a promise of sorts.

She could hear a woman’s loud boots on the porch, almost certainly her landlady returning from work. She turned towards the window and opened the blind to reveal the night in slats. The railings gleamed wet. The lamp held up its globe of yellow light against a distant satellite dish. It would be a full week before the moon rounded, a full week before her mother might have lit three sticks of incense. She needed her mother now, needed to conjure with the final farewell of airport sliding glass doors, imagine that her mother had made the journey with her to become a part of a larger self that crossed the sky, place her mother there at the time of her own departure so that she might see her calling, calling and waving an arm of shiny bangles, as she turned and walked away in her new, heavy, serious, English shoes.

She was eleven years old when she left the island. By then the past was already a necessary lie.

~

‘How can he remember something wrong? That is like mis-remembering, no? He’s a real boru karaya. All snaky lies coming from his mouth,’ Renu protested as she ran ahead, slipped off her sticky shoes, and scurried into the pantry. The girls were soaked from a sudden downpour after cycling home from tuition, and were eager for the Horlicks held in Josilin’s dimpled arms.

Renu was like that, the one who ran after her but always ended up leading the way, so it sometimes felt to Savi as if someone rushed right through her when Renu sped by.

The girls had been picking over the bones of a notorious family murder that had been spoken of in their history class, a story lightly buried in casual gossip and recently exhumed and dusted off by a national newspaper. Sir Henry De Mel, a man with ancestral links to their own family, had been shot dead during a dispute over pay and working conditions on his vast coconut estate. The murderer had been apprehended and hanged. Uncertainty lay for the girls in De Mel’s exact relationship to his assailant.

‘Well he was treated like a son, so he might as well have been a son,’ Savi reasoned, stirring the heat from her drink and downing a gulp. Did it really matter that the man accused, condemned and executed for the murder was in fact the first-cousin-once- removed of the victim? Did it really matter if their tutor referred to him as a son, as most people – including Josilin – did, when the papers dredged the details into view? It was a matter of degree rather than kind, surely.

‘But he wasn’t a son, he was a poor relation who was being treated as a hanger-on. How can Stiltskin get it so wrong? He talks as if it’s all just a story, not true true people and facts. Anyway, he’s meant to teach proper history, not fat stories about rich men.’ Renu pulled her damp dress off and kicked it in exasperation.

Stiltskin was their name for the private tutor whose real name was tongue-twistingly long and whose body was half its original size from fifty years of leaning over children’s desks. A large-nosed taskmaster who pranced about them, sniffing snuff.

‘It doesn’t matter. It’s finished now and he got most things right. Redley worked for Sir Henry and was family. He was lucky to have the job and all.’ Savi picked the dress up and gave it to Josilin who folded it into the sink. ‘So killing Sir Henry was not just murder, it was,’ she searched for the word, ‘tretch – treacherri. It was as if Redley was a son. Stiltskin is just repeating what everyone else says and thinks. He is telling the story as it is NOW.’ Her mouth expanded with emphasis. She looked to Josilin for support, but Josilin just smiled and chucked her under the chin.

‘You think too much, baba.’ Josilin sniffed as she went to the door. ‘My baby girls both think too much.’

‘It doesn’t matter what is true or not. What matters is what people believe,’ Savi said with a finality that she hoped would win the day.

But Renu, for whom spoken words were slippery fish, who could only find the exact words for her feelings in the quiet of her room with a pen in her hand, would not be silenced. ‘That’s just stupid. Belluddy Stewpid,’ she shouted. ‘You’d believe the moon is a pancake. You’re becoming, you’re becoming’ and Savi could see the words coming and can still hear Renu say them across the years, ‘a lost cause’.

She knew what this meant. She had heard her father speak of lost causes when referring to a difficult case, a case so entangled in the machinery of political power that it was impossible to win. Now, in the basement flat, the words seemed to gather new weight.

The slatted blinds cast shades of light and dark on her night shirt and the foolscap she’d laid on the table. Her thesis was now called The Manticore’s Tale, the original name lost in some filing cabinet at the university. It had begun as a study of parricide in myth and metamorphosed into what her supervisor, Dr Highfield, called a cultural analysis of nationalist discourse in relation to ethnic fratricide – terms which indicated his disapproval of her change of direction and his intention not to engage with her work at anything other than a cursory level.

She had not intended this change, but the study appeared to have evolved of its own accord, metamorphosing over the years as readily as the history it was attempting to reclaim. The Manticore’s Tale. She liked the name. It had bite, like the manticore itself, the mythical man-eating creature from India, half-man, half-lion, with a tail studded with poisoned quills and three rows of teeth. Its quills sprang out and regenerated themselves each time it was attacked. The history of Sri Lanka was like that, she felt, a tale of generative violence protecting the lion men who called themselves the Sinhalese. But only the title felt certain now. The rest of her study was written in a new language with an accent all its own that she was struggling to master.

Theories of belonging, she wrote, work on the premise of a fixed and stable originary culture.

Here it was again, the question of origins, the perpetual problem of where to start. All beginnings were interruptions, lacerations, a tear in the fold of time. If her mother had not died in a hospital bed in central Colombo on a private wing reserved for the terminally ill, on a day when neighbour torched neighbour into bright beacons, burning 300, 400, 500 people, the numbers flaring and accumulating in charred heaps before being swept away along with broken timber, Tamil shop signs and booty, sliding into that historical crease that was marked for her only by her mother’s thin hand on the whiter than white sheet, her father’s tight grief, and the cries of the ambulance men as they called for haste in the corridors below, while her mother looked through the window at a sky spiralling with smoke and white flags of scrap paper; if her mother had not died at this time, the dawn of Black July, had not died at all, there might not have been this sudden collapse, this tumble into darkness between moments that could be remembered and those that could not.

It was a beginning of sorts, her mother’s death. It marked the start of her own new life. She put down the pen, sat back and closed her eyes.

scrolled in black

In the morning, she found a white envelope on the doormat with her name and address scrolled in black. Good, she thought, no junk mail or bills. Even better, a handwritten envelope. She looked at the stamps and ran a finger over the edge. There were four identical images of Kandyan drummers, their hands beating barrelled drums, and a large stamp too smudged by the date print to be distinguishable. The small, neat writing bearing her name was as unfamiliar as the mode of address. Mrs Savi Carter. No friend would call her that.

She used to love getting letters from the old country, would race down the school stairs in clattering English shoes, her feet carried by the rhythm of those drums. At first, she had difficulty opening the single sheet aerogrammes because her father sealed them with gum. A small tear at the top, or along the edge, could leave a gap in a sentence and she’d have to work out the missing words. She found her own way of opening them – a small nick in the corner of the envelope, a hairpin to slit the sheet.

The words inside brought the birdsong back.

The new blue curtains in her bedroom that made the room, he said, more restful and screened out the afternoon glare so she might read more easily when she got back. And the fine thing that happened when Renu fell off her bike on her way to a cricket match, twisting her ankle so that she had to be carried home bellowing on her brother’s back while he became wild, shouting that she should shut up and be grateful that he was there, especially as she had made him miss his chance at playing first spinner and cutting the buggers up. And another fine thing happened when the stray dog they adopted – currently called Fatso, though the name seemed to change every week – chewed her sandals into a pulp as fine as pol sambol (but not as appetising of course) before swimming off into the lagoon. She had never seen the dog but her father’s description of the mongrel with a scar above its eye left her sure she could see it wagging its tail before her. She knew she was unlikely to see it. Strays were notoriously fickle and disappeared without explanation – and those sandals would almost certainly not fit her now.

His letters were full of fine things, his suppressed laughter rippling from the page through the broken words that came to him in the years after her mother died. It was not a language others would understand, so different from the language blown with emotion, sentiment and paternal effusion she knew her friends received in communication with their parents, a language of compensation, thick with terms of endearment that might make up for their frailty of presence. He was not a sentimental man, and he knew better than to open this door. He had contained his grief at his wife’s death in small parcels that he kept hidden from sight. He continued to go to work every day. First the office, then the court, on to the club in the evening, meeting friends as usual and swimming at weekends. There were more telephone calls of course, as experienced lawyers were much in demand at the time, and long lines of inquiry arriving at the back door, plaintiffs carrying identity cards and testimonials seeking his advice on matters that he kept to himself. But these changes seemed only to centre him, drawing him into a sure knot of certainty that seemed to grip Savi too.

He had fielded all the advice that assaulted him after his wife’s death with tact, making his parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, brother and sister-in-law and a host of friends, colleagues and acquaintances, feel that he was taking all their views into consideration. Then he announced a decision that shocked them all. Savi was to be sent to a boarding school in England. He did not discuss his decision with her, and when she asked why she had to go, he just said it was for the best. He said this with such quiet assurance that, despite finding herself falling once more, she felt there might be a safe landing in those words.

And his letters had extended her trust, sealed with Yrs affctly and that delicate x, the words squeezed of vowels so she could almost feel his hug. She would still be clutching one when the corridor burst into noise as the girls rushed out for prep. ‘Savi, come on! The bell has gone!’

She would be left, marooned in time and memory.

Now here was another letter edged by those distant drums. She stared at the alienating ‘Mrs’. She hated being called this. Savi, she would say, just call me Savi. And on those occasions when a surname was required, watch the brief hesitation as her companion searched for a trace of anglo-saxon blanching in her uncompromisingly brown face.

She went to the kitchen and turned on the light, tearing open the envelope with one slice of her knife. Letters from the old country were now a rarity, limited in recent years to the occasional Christmas card. She lifted out a sleek card embossed with pink and silver flowers with Wedding Invitation angled across the middle, and on the back, in silver, Mr and Mrs Eden Rodrigo request the pleasure of the company of... Her gaze slid down to where, in a tidy hand, someone had written, Do come, Savi. Don’t forget us!

This was not Fiona’s hand – Aunt Fiona who had persisted in trying to teach her Scott Joplin tunes on the piano despite the fact that Savi clearly had ten thumbs instead of two, Fiona, whom her grandparents had insisted on referring to as Piano on account of not being able to pronounce f.

‘Son, you must come for dinner with Piano next week,’ her grandmother would call from the deep folds of a starched sari. ‘Uma-Nanda has come down from Berlin. She will be expecting you.’

‘Amma, her name is Fiona,’ Uncle Eden would respond with practised courtesy from his desk. ‘I don’t think we can make it. The accountants are coming to discuss the tax returns. This meeting was delayed already.’

‘What nonsense. Returns can wait,’ her grandmother would say, blowing air between her teeth so Savi could almost see the tax returns scurry away with her breath. ‘And if you can’t come, at least send Piano. Uma will want to see her.’

This foreign aunt, with the unpronounceable name and a smile as soft as hibiscus petals, who had, over the years, been drawn into ancestral order and certified as another piece of family furniture, whose small form had expanded to reach her as her mother had retreated into illness, whose hands would tumble over and call into being the music that Savi’s fingers resisted.

No, this was not Fiona’s hand. Her aunt had large, looped writing that embraced you in its curves and animated words like love and giggle. Her sky-blue envelopes rustling with sheets of wispy paper had arrived steadily after Savi’s father’s death. They had petered to a halt after years of not hearing a word from Savi in return. This was not her aunt’s hand. The script was controlled, tight, urgent.

Do come. Don’t forget.

Savi took the card to her bed and read her scrawled words of the night, the idea that had found her scrambling for a pen under her pillow. Sinhabahu’s father can only be killed when his love for his son turns to anger. Parental love grants immortality of sorts (?)

The idea had potential, but the words made her feel as if she might, at any moment, be exposed, found guilty by Dr Highfield and the entire English department of using academic artifice to paper over the cracks of an impoverished personal life. She drew the duvet about her and watched the note spill to the floor as she reached for a cigarette. She struck a match, lit up, and ran her fingers over the invitation, feeling the ridges that marked to the marriage of their son.

Reviews for A Little Dust on the Eyes

[emmakendon_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I have no idea why it's called what it is, and, just to get this out of the way too, it has one other irritating detail which is that Savi, the central character, refers to "Brighthelm" all the time. If she's meant to be pretentious, then why? Apart from that, it's excellent, brave and beautiful. And when you've finished it, you want to nip back to the beginning and re-read the italicised opening.I'd found it quite annoying to begin with, Savi particularly, but it suddenly improved when her English husband puts her right about what she's seeing in Sri Lanka - more sinister, if she'd only look. From about halfway through - a chapter called "The Leper King", it takes flight. Savi's cousin Renu, seeking truth, explores the issue of story-telling, Savi's father explains Antigone with terrific succinctness from a lawyer's, and loving father's, perspective and we get a bird's eye view of Bradley's extraordinary heartbreaking story wrapped up in the background of the disappearances during the brutal civil war.The cocky and the innocent are swept away together in that leveller that was the tsunami, and Bradley's story is finished seven years later. Story-telling is silenced though, and so for me it was deeply resonant of 1983 when right from the start of the war, we couldn't find out what was happening until we got back to England. The rehab centre, where work is stymied too because of what can and can't be said, resonates bitterly, with the awful euphemisms and, powerfully, the morphing of language of innocence into meanings of violence, torture and abduction.Jus edit the "Brighthelm" nonsense - so simply done - and I'd be able to recommend it to people wholeheartedly.