Nayomi Munaweera

Leaving is an act that cannot be undone.

We play hide-and-seek, wade into her ponds to fill jam jars with writhing tadpoles, and cavort with her pack of dogs, named Brandy, Whiskey, Lager, so that just calling the pack makes one feel light-headed and drunk.

In Sri Lanka, when two strangers meet, they ask a series of questions that reveal family, ancestral village, and blood ties until they arrive at a common friend or relative. Then they say, "Those are our people, so you are our people." It's a small place. Everyone knows everyone."But in America, there are no such namings; it is possible to slip and slide here. It is possible to get lost in the nameless multitudes. There are no ropes binding one, holding one to the earth. Unbound by place or name, one is aware that it is possible to drift out into the atmosphere and beyond that, into the solitary darkness where there is no oxygen.

They say that family is the place of safety. But sometimes this is the greatest lie; family is not sanctuary, it is not safety and succour. For some of us, it is the secret wound. Sooner or later we pay for the woundings of our ancestors.

There is silence and then the familiar smack of Beatrice Muriel__ palm against her forehead. __ love marriage,_ she says. In her opinion, love marriages border on the indecent. They signify a breakdown of propriety, a giving in to the base instincts exhibited by the lower castes and foreigners.

She talks in her most sedate voice, attempting to alleviate out fears, soothe our anxiety. She knows that if we are to survive watching this war from a distance, as spectators, we do not have the privilege of indignation or anxiety.

In these myriad ways, we carved out our lives in Los Angeles. Yet falling asleep was often an act of travel, taking me quickly by the hand so that I am instantly surrounded by verdant foliage, the ocean's emerald roar, the voices of Alice, Mala, our grandmother. Those most familiar and beloved of women.But there are also nightmares. Over and over I dream of a small house, a glittering lagoon, a mango tree, and a young girl. She stands before me and her large bruised eyes do not leave mine. When she unpins the sari fold at her shoulder and pulls it away from her, I see sunset-colored bruises on her delicate clavicles. When she undoes her sari blouse, I see the grenades tucked like extra breasts under her own. It is grotesque. I wake trembling, and her eyes stays with me for hours.

The campus spreads around him like the verdant pleasure garden of an ancient king. He is enraptured by the enormous trees that lift branches like cathedral roofs overhead, shoot roots like polished ballroom floors underfoot. In the hot afternoons he leaves the crowded rooms to study under the protection of these spreading giants.

This is the beginning of what we will come to call the Upstairs-Downstairs, Linga-Singha wars.

Farther out beyond the reef, where the coral gives way to the true deep, at a certain time of day a tribe of flat silver fish gather in their thousands. To be there is to be surrounded by living shards of light. At a secret signal, all is chaos, a thousand mirrors shattering about him. Then the school speeds to sea and the boy is left in sedate water, a tug and pull of the body as comfortable as sitting in his father__ outspread sarong being sung to sleep.

It was something I learned then. That you could take the crumpled remains of something destroyed and smooth them into newness. You could pretend certain things weren't happening even if you had seen or felt them. Everything done can be denied.

Then too, motherhood is broken because in this place, to be a good mother is to give yourself completely. It is to erase yourself. This is what I refused to do.

They hate me because I am the worst thing possible. I am the bad mother.But here's a secret: in America there are no good mothers. They simply don't exist. Always, there are a thousand ways to fail at this singularly important job. There are failures of the body and failures of the heart. The woman who is unable to breastfeed is a failure. The woman who screams for the epidural is a failure. The woman who picks up her child late knows from the teacher's cutting glance that she is a failure. The woman who shares her bed with her baby has failed. The woman who steels herself and puts on noise-canceling earphones to erase the screaming of her child the next room has failed just as spectacularly. They must all hang their heads in guilt and shame because they haven't done it perfectly, and motherhood is, if anything, the assumption of perfection.

There is a certain new ferocity in her eyes now. A certain new thing that was not there before. I recognize it as scar tissue. When a bone breaks, it heals stronger in the cracks. I realize this is what is happening to her heart.

Those less fortunate eat dried fish while the truly destitute fight with the spiny shells of crabs or lobsters. Decades later, my father will find it incomprehensible that Americans crave what in his childhood was considered repugnant fare.

On a fulcrum in my chest, grief and relief are balanced in equal measure.