(Extracted from a novel in progress, Tsunami)

The morning after the barbecue, Abeywickreme sat in the lounge reading the paper and listening to Shiranee preparing lunch in the kitchen it was Sunday. Sunday mornings were lazy mornings which simply meant that they could get up late and eat lunch straightaway, and Shiranee was already busy in the kitchen attacking a large sized chicken rather violently. Abeywickreme could hear the cleaver going tok, thuck, tchuck, as it hit various parts of the chicken and the cutting board and the occasional "clang" when the blade slid off the flesh and banged on the metal sink on which Shiranee always did her chopping. Through the sound of the blade hitting flesh, cutting board and sink came Shiranee's loud mutterings which took the form of castigating poultry farmers for making chicken flesh so fat and tough to make the simple act of cutting a chicken a whole morning's work for housewives. The fact that Abeywickreme was sitting in the lounge reading a newspaper while she grappled with the chicken didn't miss her attention either, but Abeywickreme knew very well that rhetorical questions like "why do I have to do everything in this house" did no1 necessarily mean that Abeywickreme was expected to make a contribution to the mighty struggle that was being waged against the chicken in the kitchen. Shiranee always thought that cooking was a woman's business and that men should stay away from such specialised items as the stove, the cutting board and the spice rack, but such convictions could never hold her back from publicising her struggles in the kitchen.
Smiling to himself, Abeywickreme turned a page in the newspaper he was reading. It was one of the Sri Lankan papers hat Rodney had brought with him yesterday Rodney bought all the Sri Lankan Sunday papers, and even though he did no1 read half of them, distributed them freely to his friend" a habit, some said, he had cultivated as a result of his junk mail distributing career. "The bugger can't help distributing paper," Shehan had once said, after he had been given nearly three kilos of Sri Lankan Sunday papers from several weeks. The papers Rodney brought to the barbecue yesterday were also a couple of weeks old. The news, however, was not That was the beauty of Sri Lankan papers. You could read a paper two and a half years old and then read yesterday's paper and you could be certain that the news was the same. The same charges of corruption against ministers, the same demands for war and peace and the same crusades against poverty You hadn't really missed anything. Hearing soft footsteps coming down the stairs, Abeywickreme folded the paper and looked at the clock. It was almost eleven-thirty, the usual time for Ishara to shower and come down on a Sunday morning. Almost every Friday and Saturday night she went out with friends, returning in the early hours of the morning to sleep in till late. After showering she'd come down to watch TV or to chat to them until she got bored and went out again. Abeywickreme got up and started looking for the remote control, knowing that it was the first thing Ishara looked for in the lounge on Sunday morning. He found it buried under the pile of newspaper Rodney had so generously dumped in his lounge. Picking it up, he held it out to the girl who was now standing near the door. "Here it is," he said, smiling. "It's all yours." "I am a lesbian." Abeywickreme stood still, stunned by his daughter's words, the smile disappearing from his face. He had gone through the same ritual of finding the remote control and offering it to Ishara countless times in the past, but never had his offer been met with such a declaration. And he was not sure of that he heard. He knew she said lesbian but then; he also knew that in this day and age lesbian could mean anything: a woman who slept with other women, a member of a religious cult or even the supporter of a football team. "What do you mean, a lesbian?" he asked, driven by genuine curiosity. "I am a lesbian," Ishara said again, rather impassively. "I mean;a lesbian;you know,;gay" Abeywickreme's eyes which had widened when he heard the declaration the first time now assumed gigantic proportions as the meaning of his daughter's words sank in. He stood there for a few moments, looking sharply at Ishara as if trying to detect signs of lesbianism in her. Then, without saying a word he got up and went out of the lounge, brushing past the girl who was looking at him, bewildered. Then she heard her father speaking to her mother in the kitchen. "Our daughter is lesbian." The chopping and the cursing stopped as Shiranee tried, as her husband had done, to fathom the meaning of that statement. "What do you mean a lesbian?" she asked after a brief pause. "I mean,; a lesbian. You know,;gay" In the lounge Ishara winced and braced herself for the eruption, which she felt was inevitable. But there was no sound from the kitchen. This is unbelievable, she thought, and turned around to see if her parents were silently pulling their hair out, and almost bumped into her mom and dad who seemed to have been transported to her side silently in a flash. She looked at them with eyes filled with fear and uncertainty. "I am a lesbian," she said again, a slight tremor in her voice. Abeywickreme looked almost triumphantly at his wife as if resting his case. There you are. Have it from the horse's mouth. Shiranee looked dumbfounded at her daughter. She looked her up and down, several times, as if she had been confronted by a strange phenomenon. "I am a lesbian," Ishara could not help saying again, her voice now steadily weakening in the face of this bewildering parental reaction. "I know!" Shiranee snapped. She wanted to say "You have already told us," but it came out different. But the girl seemed to take it literally because her eyes suddenly lit up. "You know? Really?" she asked, as if pleasantly surprised and relieved at the possibility that her parents had already been aware of her sexuality. "How?" she asked, excitedly. "How do you know?" "You already told us!" Shiranee finally shouted, frustrated. "You already told us. Several times. Otherwise how the hell are we supposed to know?" Ishara's eyes lost their sparkle. She had begun to get the feeling that her parents might be more accepting than she had imagined and that half her battle was already over, but now all those hopes dashed to pieces on her mother's stony face. I should have known, she thought to herself. "How do you know?" Abeywickreme shot his first question, as if it was not for her to know if she got turned on by girls rather than boys. As if she had to learn that from some higher authority, a teacher or maybe even a specialist. "Yes, how do you know?" her mother also joined in. Suddenly Ishara began to realise the futility of the whole discussion that was about to commence. Her parents were looking at her face, their faces having !he same semi-triumphant expression they always had when they asked "what problems do Tamils have?" Yes, how do you know you are a lesbian. How the hell can you know if you are a lesbian? "I;I just know," Ishara mumbled. "1 have known it for some time;1 was afraid to tell you". Shiranee gasped and her husbands eyes widened in fright. "How long?" Shiranee asked, panic-stricken. The question now was not how she knew it but for how long, as if something could have been done if they had known it in time. And you were damn right to be afraid to tell us, they both thought. We would have skinned you alive. "I don't know;maybe a year or two." "A year or two! My! That long and you didn't tell us!" Shiranee exchanged glances of pure dismay with her husband. Things that happen behind our backs, they both seemed to say. And for so long. "Who else knows about this?" Shiranee continued her questioning. "Do your friends know? What about our friends? Do they know anything?" "I don't know about your friends. My friends all know." Shiranee almost asked why. Why don't their friends know? They knew about everything else. Rodney's wife in particular got to know most things before the press did. But if they didn't, how wonderful! "Good! Very good!" Shiranee said, and grabbing her daughter by the hand, sat on the sofa, followed earnestly by her husband. Ishara again felt somewhat relieved. Maybe they won't be too harsh on her after all. Hope, they say, springs eternal in the human breast. "Listen," Shiranee said. "You don't worry too much about it. There are people who can help, you know," she began to say in a soothing tone. "Yes, specialists," Abeywickreme joined in. He didn't want to say psychiatrists for fear of offending Ishara, but she was offended alright. 'Specialists?" she cried, her voice suddenly finding a defiant tone. "Specialists? You mean psychiatrists? There is nothing wrong with me! What do you think is wrong with me?" She kept shouting, her voice rising with every word. Shiranee clasped her mouth with a hand and struggled to keep her quiet. "Shhhhhh." She whispered. "Don't shout, men. Everybody will hear." "I don't care!" Ishara broke free from her mother's grasp and withdrew to the corner of the room. "I don't care! What is wrong with me to go to a psychiatrist?" she kept asking through tears of anger. In the other corner of the room her parents shook their heads in disbelief. Here was their daughter, eighteen years old and with such a charming face and a good education, saying she is a lesbian and asking what is wrong with her! What is wrong with her? She was a lesbian that is what was wrong with her. "You are a lesbian," Shiranee said bluntly. "That's what is wrong with you" "So what is wrong with lesbians?" Ishara asked this time, and Shiranee was almost beside her with disbelief. What is wrong with lesbians? Didn't she know? Didn't she know what they did? But then she realised that if she had been one for two three years she probably knew what they did. But doesn't she know it was wrong? Instead of asking for their help why is she so confident about it? What did they teach children at school these days? Totally exasperated, Shiranee turned to her husband for help. "1 can't talk to this girl," she said. Abeywickreme looked helplessly at his wife and then at his daughter. It was always like this, he thought. I have to handle all the desperate cases, and there couldn't be a more desperate case than talking to a lesbian daughter about changing her sexual preference. What was he supposed to say? That men are definitely better to sleep with than women? "Listen," he began diffidently. "We mean the best for you. We don't want you to get into trouble" "I am not in trouble," Ishara shouted. "I am not in trouble! What's the trouble with me? Tell me! What's the trouble with me?" "You are a lesbian!" "What is wrong with lesbians?" the girl shouted back Oh god! thought Abeywickreme. Here we go again. The same routine. what's the problem with me? You are a lesbian. What's wrong with lesbians? He looked helplessly at his wife. See, he seemed to be telling her. I also tried and ended up in the same place. Shiranee seemed livid with frustration at her husband's ineptitude. She shook her finger threateningly at her daughter, trying force where reason seemed to have failed. "Shuttup! I won't tell you again, shuttup!" But Ishara did not shut up. Her parents' inability to answer her questions seemed to imbue her with a new confidence. The threatening stance of her mother, far from being a show of strength, seemed like an admission of defeat. She shouted even louder. "I won't shut up. I won't! What is wrong with lesbians?" Shiranee lost her composure completely. She rushed at her daughter and slapped her with all the strength in her body Ishara was thunderstruck. The blow stung, but even more stun- ning was the realisation that she had completely miscalculated her parents. It was like being hit by chemical weapons in a war between two civilised nations. Each knew that the other possessed the deadly concoctions but never expected them to be used. Here she was, a proud general strutting about, having withstood all the attacks of her enemy, who had exhausted all his conventional weaponry, believing that he was finished as a fighting force, when the enemy suddenly hit her with the dreaded mustard gas! She felt completely cheated and humiliated and fell on the sofa, breaking into loud sobs. Shiranee marched triumphantly out of the room. She was still angry but also triumphant. That will teach her what is wrong with lesbians, she thought. Abeywickreme walked after her, looking back now and then to check on his daughter. "Don't you think you hit her a bit too hard?" he asked earnestly. "She is still young, you know." "If she is old enough to be a lesbian she is old enough to be slapped," Shiranee snapped. She started cutting the chicken again, only more vigorously. Abeywickreme looked on helplessly. He knew that despite all her anger she was hurting terribly inside. He was hurting too, and shocked more than anything else. His daughter a lesbian! There had been many characters in the Abeywickreme family, gamblers, swindlers, policemen, directors but never a lesbian. It's only in these countries that such things happened. People calling themselves lesbians. I am a "lesbian, I am a lesbian. Fine thing for a girl to tell her parents on a quiet Sunday morning. In the lounge Ishara had stopped crying. She was not one to feel sorry for herself for too long. She knew that self-pity was not going to get her out of trouble. And she was in trouble. Her parents had proved to be even more intransigent than she had expected, and it was certainly going to take a lot of work to get them to accept her sexuality. She had to plan her next move carefully. For that she needed expert advice, and who else to give expert advice other than Catherine who had been her best friend and confidante long before she became a lesbian? Of course Catherine had not been comfortable with her sexuality at first. As long as you don't try to get into my pants, she had said rather nervously, but when she had realised that Ishara had no intention of fondling her breasts or caressing her buttocks she had become very sympathetic and supportive. Besides, Catherine also had trouble with her parents, her father never growing out of the habit of belting her and her mother steadfastly refusing to intervene, probably for fear of being belted herself. Even though there was a world of difference between being driven from home by a belt-wielding father and being slapped by a staunchly anti-lesbian mother, Ishara felt that at this point she could make common cause with Catherine. She decided to go to Catherine, not just for a few hours but for a few days. She got up from the sofa and without uttering a word to her parents, stepped out of the house. She did not take any clothes. She could always share with Cathy. Outside, Andy was washing his car on his nature strip. He seemed to be struggling with the nozzle in his garden hose, while inside the garden his wife was seen waddling about the bushes. He saw Ishara and put up his hand in greeting. The sight of Andy gave Ishara a wicked urge to hit back at her parents. "Hi Andy," she said, trying to sound as cheerful as possible. "I am a lesbian." "Good on ya," Andy said, still preoccupied with his hose. He turned to his wife among the bushes. "Honey, you know how this shit works?"
