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Not Singlish Either Dilukshi Jayawickrema |
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So over the next four years, for every three science courses that Anil took at Pace Community College, he took one creative writing class. In his second semester, Anil met an Irish girl in his Intermediate Creative Writing seminar who said that his writing was captivating and sensual. Anil’s personal experience with sensuality had been limited to furtive fumbling under his high-school girlfriend’s uniformed skirt, beneath the shadows of a big mango tree behind the rough brick wall of their school, until the bus came to pick them up. He was disappointed when he eventually found out that real female nudity harbored nothing of the melon-breasted, taut-stomached perfection of the porn stars that he was used to, but America had taught him to adjust swiftly. When he told Lara that he had never had sex before, her swift ‘Oh’ contained such suppressed eagerness that he realized conquest was something women craved as much as men. Suranga scoffed when Anil told him that he was a virgin, informing Anil that he, Suranga, had been having sex since he was fourteen years old and that he had fucked fifteen chicks to date. ‘ Fifteen, man. Time’s a-ticking,’ Suranga said, tapping his watch-less wrist. Worried about this ticking time, Anil managed to get Lara’s clothes off as soon as humanly possible. He was relieved that she didn’t seem as bored as his old neighbor’s maid. ‘I love your skin,’ Lara said afterwards, running a pale forefinger across his chest, as they lay together in her cramped, lumpy dorm-room bed. ‘It’s like the color of ripe wheat.’ Anil turned away. Writers, he thought with exasperation. He wondered if Lara had ever seen more than a picture of wheat. He tried to hold the green paddy fields behind his grandmother’s house in his mind. He remembered the flash of the silver sickle as the reaper harvested the long grains. Anil’s skin was at least two shades darker than wheat, and nothing was the color of ripe wheat unless it was ripe wheat. At that moment, he hated Lara a little bit.When Anil had met Lara she had asked him if he was Indian, her voice harboring the same contained excitement that it would later have as she reached for the zipper of his jeans. ‘I’m Sri Lankan,’ he had said. ‘Really? What part of India is that?’ He had gazed at the golden brown flecks in her grey-green eyes, the way that her caramel hair fell in soft waves around her translucent cheeks, and decided to overlook the question. He was so used to being mistaken for Indian that he sometimes forgot that he wasn’t. Ranil had smacked his wide hand on the countertop the day that Anil nodded absently when a customer asked if he was a Hindu. ‘He is Sinhalese, from Sri Lanka. And Hindu is religion, not race,’ Ranil had snapped. ‘Here is your porno, buh-bye.’ ‘Sorry,’ Anil had muttered, when the man had shuffled out, shooting dark glances at the belligerent Hindus. ‘Nothing to be sorry,’ Ranil had said gruffly. ‘Even people in Sri Lanka forget they are Sri Lankan, all watching the Bollywoodmovies and obsessed with the fair-skinned Punjabi girls. How would you remember what you are? ’As Anil watched the morning light fall across Lara’s milky back, he wondered if he had chosen her because of a taught obsession with lightness. He wondered, with a ripple of anger, who had instilled in them this love of fairness? He remembered that his mother’s first question at the birth of her niece had been if the baby was light-skinned. As Lara pressed herself against his body, as if she wanted to absorb him, he wondered who had taught her tocrave darkness.
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