Rakesfall

Chapter 5 Stranger to Myself

In a bright December of 2001, dappled morning sun warming my skin but not yet burning, I walk in pain up the tree-shadowed pavement of Horton Place, deep in Colombo’s old money asshole, unimaginatively called Cinnamon Gardens because it was a cinnamon plantation during the Dutch occupation of the eighteenth century. At the start of that century, at the height of the Vereenigde Oost-indische Compagnie’s strength, a little over half of Colombo’s population were slaves, most transported from South India or Southeast Asia. (Slaves from this island, meanwhile, were transported elsewhere, such as South Africa: Dutch policy held that slaves were easier to control when they were strangers in a strange land.) Slaves walking in a public space, like this, on the street, could be whipped for getting in the way of a European. They were not allowed to walk on the pavement, like I am—it is not quite the same pavement, these roads have been widened and rebuilt over the centuries, the ground shifting beneath our feet—unless in attendance on their owners.

The red wheel turns. The perfected translucence of the akashic record is itself a problem, because it necessarily includes all competing bhumic records within itself, earthly histories, commentaries, and interpretations, as well as the truths of events as recorded by every observing mind: these many, many worlds. I have passed through the veil once more.

I was in truth expecting only to die again, or perhaps to be born, my grandmother’s story of dancing and fire slowly fading from my mind as I grew into a fourth, no, fifth childhood. But that’s already behind me. Rather than losing a grandmother, I seem to have only gained another set of grandparents; piling on yet further ancestries while I had not yet solved the riddle of those I was already entangled in.

I am reborn, but not in a womb; I pass into this life midstride, walking on the street. I stumble, trip over myself, nearly faceplant. I am in medias res, trying to swallow what for a moment seemed to choke in my throat. Is that true, or had I forgotten myself until this moment? I catch myself before I fall. Why can’t I stop rubbing this face? My hands are rough, callused. Familiar, unfamiliar. It’s sunny. It’s warmer than it should be. I’m sweating. I smell different to myself.

I look around, trying to see the present through the overwhelming tide of the past. I see police lining the street at regular intervals, a pattern only some of my lives understand. This is not quite a city at war, but it is the city that war comes from. It is a city in a wartime of its own making: the war it extrudes is, mostly, elsewhere. I look at the khaki uniforms of the policemen and say nnn under my breath without knowing why.

In 1835—three years after the Slavery Abolition Act made the purchase or ownership of slaves illegal in the British Empire except here in Ceylon and a few other territories—there was a first imperial attempt at an all-island census. The Dutch slavers had ceded their control of the coastal strip to the British a generation earlier; after the massacres of the eighteen-teens, the British expanded that peripheral control to the centre, the entire island occupied for the first time since Rakesfall. The historian Nira Wickramasinghe writes in Sri Lanka: A Modern History that this British census was the first to break down the population into racialized categories of significance: 9,121 whites; 1,194,482 free blacks, representing the inland population recently acquired after the fall of the mountain kingdom; 27,397 slaves, not illegal given Ceylon’s exemption from abolition; and 10,825 aliens and resident strangers. There was no mention of Sinhala or Tamil at this time. The invention of those categories as races—as distinct from language-speakers or galactic allegiances—would happen over the next few generations. By the time my father’s father was born in 1880, his family, earlier read as free blacks in upcountry Matale, had been translated midstride into Sinhalese, of a sort. They had by then come down from those hills, moved to the flatter northwest country sometime after the Matale Rebellion was violently suppressed by one of the warlords of the occupation, the Viscount Torrington.

There is a street named after Torrington not far from me, about half an hour’s stroll. These are neat, clean streets with expensive addresses and wide pavements today, pleasant to walk in. Climate change will make this city hotter and public space more dangerous as the decades wear on, until it becomes uninhabitable and increasingly abandoned, given over to the feral and the fires for the final time. But for now, these green-canopied streets are lined by massive rain trees and a light breeze is enough to make even late morning comfortable. I sweat only lightly and if I breathe with difficulty from pains both chronic and newly unfurling, that is a discomfort that comes from within, not without.

My father’s father, who was not born free and black like his parents, became Upcountry Sinhalese, an inland race then recently invented to be distinct from the Lowcountry Sinhalese of the coastal strip. The northwest country, for all its flatness, was still part of the Upcountry through a distinction that was political-historical, not geographical-geological: up was the country that had formerly belonged to the mountain king, not to the Dutch. This line between Upcountry and Lowcountry lasted for long enough that when my parents married in the following century—my matrilineal line was Lowcountry, my mother’s mother and her mothers before her coming from one of the coastal towns of the deep south, witches of the oceanic shore—the elders of their respective families considered it that strange technology, a doubled novum, an interracial marriage. The children of such unions, including myself, would have been mixed-race from that perspective, but the obsolescence of that racial line over the intervening generations makes this seem merely ridiculous. The newer racial lines that replaced them are not considered correspondingly quaint; they are matters of life and death. They are war.

I’m waved down by a policeman. The policeman seems suspicious. Perhaps it is because I keep touching my face. I’m not masked, though my face is numb—no, the pandemic is still twenty years away. He leads me to the side of the pavement under a rain tree, so we’re not blocking foot traffic. It’s difficult to lower my hands from my face, but I manage it for a moment as a show of submission. I mumble an excuse about a headache, though in any language this is a vastly inadequate word for what is happening to this body: it feels more like a long stroke, an unending irruption. It’s hard for me to think of this body, the walking body, the body in pain, as mine. I try. I need both hands to extricate my national identity card from my wallet, but after I hand it to him, my left hand finds its way back to my face, kneading it with numb fingertips, pressing with the knuckles. Tugging on my ears. Relearning my shape. Somewhere underneath a distorting film is the understanding that I am trying to reshape my face. I trace the subterranean tightening beneath the cheek when I grind my jaw, the shivering of the long lobes, the curving lip of the eye’s crater, the narrow bridge of the nose, the temple where the pain sits and drums and dances like my grandmother. I don’t know this face. I am a stranger to myself. I don’t know this city, and yet I do. It is not a great city, being easily walkable within the boundaries of space and time that Thoreau defines in his essay “Walking” as the limits of the knowable in a technologically unassisted human life of threescore and ten, i.e., a circle whose radius is ten miles. But I am not one human life; I am many. Perhaps all human lives are many. As race is arbitrary and porous, so are mind and body; so is history; so is the soul. I didn’t know this city, but I do, too well. I see its histories wheel around me. I have walked it many times. I have never seen it before.

The akashic record provides me with books that some version of me (or of someone else whose borders with me are porous) has read, or will someday read, or could have read but didn’t; it feeds me memories that are not my own; it is an ever-rushing onstreaming, a great documentation of human history, eager to teach. I struggle to stand upright in the flood, to keep my eyes, my nose, my mouth out of the water.

I feel old, though I am not and have not yet been; I feel as if the lives I’ve skipped like stones across the water of worlds were added up.

The policeman is about the age I seem to be, but he has a neat moustache where I have a thick, untidy beard. At least I still have a beard: a small familiarity. (Alien, disturbing, dysphoric. I want it off my face. I tug at the hairs and wince.) He studies the photo on my card and looks back at me, then back at the card, then again. The picture is from a few years ago, when I was in my late teens. I learn this life a beat behind the policeman, seeing myself mirrored in his face, tracing through memories like a detective. In the black-and-white photograph, half whited out in the sun, I’m young and surly, clean-shaven, squinting. I remember having that picture taken, grimacing from trying to hold my eyes open in the light. My expression must match, at least. The policeman looks at my eyes; his gaze flicks up momentarily to my forehead. I know I have three horizontal lines on my forehead like a tilaka, early wrinkles from years of grimacing and squinting. Perhaps he imagines them marked in sacred ash. Perhaps it makes him uneasy that I fidget so with my face, like I might pull the flesh and pinch the skin and change its shape before he can make a positive identification.

You don’t look Sinhalese, the policeman says, at last.

I don’t say anything to this. It’s not meant to be responded to; there is no response to make. He’s already read my name off the back of the card, so he knows that I am just that, insofar as anybody is, if it means anything to be that, which it does not except for the privilege of relative safety from him, a tautology of race. I could tell the moment where he realized my Sinhalaness and the heat of his interest cooled. I have already stopped being a target. I’m a young male of the right age and my twitching, bearded face is blood in the water, until he read that name. It’s not manes or stripes that mark lions and tigers, but consonants, a much smaller tell. He checks my identity card again, as if willing that extra consonant to appear at the end of my name and change its meaning. The absence of the tiny little n at the end, which would make it a Tamil name, seems like a thin shield but it has been tested many times and always holds. A ghost nn, like a murmur, means I won’t be harassed, detained, or disappeared. Nnn has for me become something like a prayer, sometimes of thanks, sometimes of guilt, or bargaining.

He hands the card back, and I say nnn. It’s habituated. People take it as a noise of acknowledgement or a grunt without meaning, where in fact it is a compressed history of this country. Like my father, I am a historian. I find and reveal secrets.

Show me, he says. He gestures for my backpack, his hand like a bird taking flight. I open it slowly, unthreateningly. Police react badly to a bird’s nest of mysterious cables spilling out of a bag, so I keep them neatly looped and clipped together, the slab of the laptop behind them.

I explain that I’m in tech support. I’m on a routine visit to do IT maintenance at a client office nearby. Fix the printer, coax email out of hiding, clean out vermin from the intranet. He raises an eyebrow. I open the backpack wider to show my motley collection of field equipment: flat-tip and cross-head screwdrivers; wire strippers, cutters, and crimpers; antistatic bags holding disconnected memories; a jumbled selection of spare connectors of various types, like a puzzle in waiting. I hold one up. This is an RJ11 connector, see? He looks confused. Nobody recognises a phone jack on sight. They are a novelty in this place and time, outside of fancy offices like the one I was walking to.

A childhood chore unfolds in memory: fixing the home phone line when it broke, as it frequently did in the monsoon season when wind or rain dropped branches on the wire. I would find the break, painstakingly gathering up the split ends from the bushes they were entangled in or the ditch they had fallen into, climb the wall with its soft, electric green moss, or a nearby tree, like as not the bamboo grove, avoiding the culm sheaths because it itched horribly if the little black hairs touched my bare skin. There, balanced precariously between heaven and earth, I would twist naked copper back together with my fingers, then wrap the splice in black electrical tape. On my first day doing tech support, they sent me to an office where the phone jack went click into a little RJ11 socket set directly into the wall. Click, unclick, click. I had never seen anything like it: I was expecting thin grey cables in a haphazard jumble, dusty beige splitters with too many mouths… I did not like to think of voices in the walls. I put my finger against the socket and thought that I missed climbing trees. I spent so much of my boyhood off the ground, in bamboo, ambarella, bilimbi, king coconut, or alligator pear, each with its own affordances, each requiring specialized technique, climbing up to the roofs, a barefoot firewalker on asbestos sheets under the noonday sun, moving fast to not feel the burn, breathing in carcinogenic fibres like pollen.

It’s computers, I tell the policeman. Oh, computers, he says. He’s bored already. I should have led with that.

I lean on the rain tree while the policeman rummages halfheartedly through my pack for a suicide bomb. The bark is still black and wet, though the day’s been dry for a few hours in the deteriorating monsoon. My shirt sticks to my back like my dress used to on those hot powercut nights. The great rain trees that line this street are huge and old, shading much of the street in green. In Sinhala they are called mara, like the demon king that tempts Siddhartha before his enlightenment. They seem so powerfully rooted in their places, but this is a tempting illusion, the kind that demon is known for. I’ve seen how easy these trees come down in storms, exposing vast bulbous tangles of roots above the ruptured craters in the earth where they’d once stood. I stop leaning. This is not the kind of tree you can trust to bear your weight.

Wait back there a minute, the policeman says. He gestures to the side of the tree farther from the street, so I step over there. Traffic on Horton Place has emptied out, and pedestrians have been brought to a standstill by police, versions of the interaction I just experienced reduplicated up and down this long unbending street as if in infinitely reflecting mirrors. Everyone watches the street; some, like myself, fidgeting, others still and silent. The police look stiff and solemn. They face the street, not the pavement. That seems wrong, from a security perspective, but quite logical within the feudalistic imaginary. They are unable to turn their back on kings.