Perhaps my father sensed that the threads that connected us to the country of our birth were snapping one by one. The summer I was eight, he flew the whole family back to Sri Lanka. He rented a van, and in the weeks we were there, he took us to see every temple, monument, and ruin on the island—and Sri Lanka is not short of temples, monuments, and ruins. He was a man on a mission, taking his daughters on a cultural boot camp, fertilizing our shallow roots in this place with a grand tour of the old country. How enthusiastically he would point to ancient statues of Sri Lankan kings and remind us that there was our mother’s multiple-great-grandfather, our lofty heritage. Even as an eight-year-old, I could hear a kind of awe in his voice as he spoke of my mother’s bloodline. I found it curious. I was fiercely egalitarian by then, but the idea of being some kind of princess had an undeniable and sparkly appeal. But it was fleeting. I was too much a tomboy to be mesmerized by a metaphorical tiara for long.
We called upon all the uncles and aunts, the cousins, the second cousins, the people who were somehow related, though no one was quite sure how. The vast estates of my mother’s people—houses large enough to seem empty—and the humbler homes of my father’s family. I was probably too young to entirely comprehend who my mother’s family was in the context of the country I’d left as an infant. The descendants of kings, they were the guardians of religion, and from their ranks had come Sri Lanka’s first prime ministers, governors, diplomats, and generals. Their sons were educated abroad, and their daughters were accomplished; they were patriots and leaders. Most impressive to eight-year-old me was a more recent ancestor whose head resided in the Tower of London, where it had been taken after he had been beheaded for leading a revolt against the British. Sri Lanka was a country in which who your family was mattered, where lines could be traced back thousands of years. As far as cultural baptisms went, it was not a mere sprinkling but an absolute dunking, undertaken in the hope that it would be enough to keep us at heart Sri Lankan, or at least keep Sri Lanka in our hearts; that our roots would be strong enough to survive in transplantation.
Six weeks later, we returned to Australia, a Western democracy whose kings and queens were foreign and relatively unremarked unless there was a royal wedding in the offing. Sri Lanka receded into a memory of our last grand exotic holiday, and the relatives we had met and embraced became stories again as we returned to the business of school and friends and suburban survival.
There were photos of that holiday, of course, printed and placed in an album specially bought. But it was not that collection, the images of us on beaches, in front of temples, with various groups of relatives, to which we were drawn. Perhaps it was because they were photos of foreigners on holiday, tourists… and we knew about the box.
It contained old photographs. Black-and-white, printed in smaller format and in different shapes from the standard four-by-six-inch prints of the day. Taken on box Brownies and in studios, long before we were born, they gave us a glimpse of our parents when they were not our parents.
The photos of my dad’s family were taken with a borrowed camera when he was a young man. Posed photographs of his sisters in their best saris, my grandmother when her hair was gray rather than white, and my father smiling, confident, a brown-skinned Elvis on a tropical island.
The photographs from my mother’s side were taken over a much greater span of time. Her family was wealthy enough to own cameras, to use them for more than special occasions. Pictures of Victorian children, my grandmother in curls and bows holding a hoop in front of the painted backdrop of an English garden. We were mesmerized by that photograph—the camera had caught something wistful and sad about that little girl. There was a studio photo of my grandfather inscribed to his then fiancée, hair slicked back, movie-star handsome. My grandmother as a young woman, bespectacled, unsmiling. Formal wedding photographs, a 1920s honeymoon in Egypt. Then a tribe of children on the family estate.
The story of our grandparents laid out before us.
These photographs invited our imaginations into their younger lives, into their stories, in a way that knowing them as our grandparents never did.
We spent many hours with these old photographs, demanding details from our mother as to their subjects and locations and occasions. In my family, my mother was the storyteller. She had an innate understanding of structure and pace, the ability to make the most mundane events sound exciting and magical. She was a spinner of drama, a master of the reveal, and so we would pester her for stories, and she became a kind of verbal text to the picture book we found in that box. She told us that the little girl in curls and bows had a younger sister she had loved dearly who was killed in an accident when the family chauffeur was drunk, that later her engagement to the devastatingly handsome young man in the portrait was broken off when he became a communist while studying in Edinburgh. That the two were eventually reconciled and married in a spectacular wedding that united two of the great houses of Sri Lanka. She allowed us to play with the exquisite dressing-table set that the then prime minister of Sri Lanka had given them as a wedding present and described the other riches gifted by foreign dignitaries and grand guests.
We knew that little girl, of course. She was our grandmother. Small, quiet, distant. She had traveled with us for part of our grand tour, and though we had become accustomed to her presence, to us she remained enigmatic. We had only snippets of memories of our grandfather, still handsome in old age. He smoked a pipe and seemed vaguely English, though he wore a sarong. Perhaps because we didn’t really know them, it was easy to imagine them as young, the hero and heroine of a story to rival that of Elizabeth Bennet and her Mr. Darcy.
And then there were the photographs of the children. Girls in white dresses, boys in oversized shorts and collared shirts. Pictures taken on the estate, posing with bicycles, sitting in banyan trees, walking by the lake, and formal photos of the children together, direct, unsmiling gazes. My mother was the youngest by a long way, so she was not in all these group sittings, which is probably why it took me so long to notice that the numbers didn’t add up. I knew I had two aunts and three uncles, one of whom had died as a teenager. That made six children born to the union of Elizabeth and Darcy. And, indeed, the group photos always had six. Even when my mother was not among them. I must have been about ten when I realized that in some of these photographs there was an extra child. A boy. Now, these were pictures of children I knew only as middle-aged men and women, and so I could not tell which of the four boys was the extra child.
There were many plausible reasons why there might be an extra child in a photograph. The pictures of my father’s family often included cousins or friends or servants. And so, when I asked my mother, I was not particularly intrigued. I might have thought no more about it if she hadn’t flat-out denied what was before me in black-and-white. “There’s no extra child—you miscounted.”
“No, Mum; you aren’t in that photo, but there are still six kids.”
“One of my brothers died when he was young. It must be him.”
“No… there are four boys. I’ve only ever had three uncles.”
“You must be making a mistake.… I hope you haven’t been pulling out photos and not putting them back. Clean your room, by the way… and can you walk to the shops and get some milk?”