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Other days I am the watcher and he the worker. I squat on the bank with a bucket as Samson wades in. He spreads his fingers wide to catch yards of gelatinous strands studded with shiny beadlike eggs, then returns to deposit these offerings in the bucket, which turn quickly into a shuddering viscous mass. Waist-high in the deepest part of the pond, he says, "Bloody buggers. Laying eggs everywhere. Pond is chockablock full already."
I say, "In France people eat them."
Astonishment on his face. "What? No, Baby Madame, don't tell lies. Who would eat these ugly buggers? What is there to eat?"
"Yes they do. Our teacher said. They eat the legs."
He stares at the water between his own legs and says, "No. Can't be. Legs are so thin. Nothing there to eat … Maybe the fat stomach, no?"
"No. The legs. She said."
He shakes his head. "Those people must be very poor. I might be poor like that if I wasn't with your family." A little nod acknowledges all the years he has lived with us—all my life, all his much longer life. "But even if I was on the street I wouldn't eat these buggers."
"But they are a delicacy there. In France."
"Shall we try, Baby Madame? We can catch them and give Sita to make a badum. Badum of frog."
"No!"
"That's what Baby will eat tonight. Just like the people in Fran-see. Fried frog curry with rice." He raises his arms, trailing streams of jelly in the air; he looks like a tentacled creature rising from the depths and shakes his fists so the water sparkles, lands on my bare thighs. Our laughter echoes across the pond.
In the monsoon months, the gardens are a different place, the ground sodden, the pond swollen. The sky lights up in the midst of dark stormy days as if a mighty photographer is taking pictures of our little piece of earth. It isn't unusual to come upon a flash of silver and gold, a koi flapping on the wet grass, swept out of the pond by the onslaught of rain. The river is dangerous at this time. It rushes by, carrying all manner of things—furniture, quickly rolling trees with beseeching arms held out to the sky, drowned animals. It is a boiling, heaving mass. The banks could crumble inward, the ground falling away under your feet. We all know this; in these months we keep away from the garden and the river.
* * *
Evenings in the living room, the brass cutwork lamp throws a parade of shadows on every surface. My father reads student papers; he is a professor of history at the University of Peradeniya and always has this stack of work to bury himself in. I read books in English. Stories of boarding schools and midnight feasts featuring foods I've never tasted, but yearn desperately for. I read about children who have to put on scarves and mittens and hats to go outside and wish I too had a pair of mittens. What would they look like covering my small hands? What would they feel like? How exciting to live in a snowy place and eat crunchy red apples and chocolate digestive biscuits. How exotic, how enticing. How boring my life is in comparison.
Here then are my father and I, each of us wrapped in these other worlds. My father is reading about some atrocity of the raj, shaking his head now and then, sharing out bits and pieces with us. This is how, of course, I first heard of the Lankan lady mashing up her children's heads. My father is denouncing colonialization and the history of imperialism while I, thoroughly colonialized by the very books he had approved for me, secretly dream of some other more desirable and colder childhood. But a third person is with us, and it is her presence that brings us all together.
My mother sits and stares at a page in a Mills & Boon novel. Sometimes she sighs loudly, declaratively. Sometimes she leaps up, puts on music, grabs my hands, sends my book flying, says, "Come, child! Dance." Anxiety and joy flood through me in equal measure. Joy at her closeness, anxiety at the thought of what my ungraceful feet are doing under me.
Excerpted from What Lies Between Us by Nayomi Munaweera. Copyright © 2016 by Nayomi Munaweera. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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