But ten-year-olds are persistent. I brought the photo to her and counted out my uncles. “Him!” I said triumphantly, once we’d eliminated the others. A thin boy with light eyes and ears like open cab doors. “Who is he?”
My mother picked up the photograph and stared at it for just a couple of beats too long. And when she spoke, there was something in her voice. A hesitation cut with sadness. “Must be some cousin… I don’t remember who.”
And that was that. She would say no more. I took the photo to my father and pointed out the extra child. “Do you know who he is, Dad?”
Now, if my father had simply said no, I probably would have forgotten all about it. But he said, “Who does your mother say it is?”
“She says it was some cousin.”
“That must be right, then.”
A ring-in cousin who visited so often he was in a number of different family photographs but whose name was forgotten. I was underwhelmed by the explanation, but it was what it was. If I’d had easy access to other family, I might have kept asking, but I was ten, and I didn’t.
I did think about the boy from time to time. While I accepted my mother’s half-hearted explanation, I never believed it. I wondered occasionally if he was a ghost accidentally caught on film or a criminal child who had been disowned. But mostly I didn’t think about him. He returned to the box of photographs, an unclaimed child with no name.
In the end, it was my mother who told me who the boy was on the day that he died. My sisters and I had arrived home from school in our usual noisy straggle, all schoolbags and bickering. My mother had been crying. She met us with “I have to speak to you girls about something.”
She told us then about the extra boy in the photo, her eldest brother, the first-born son of the little girl in curls and lace and the handsome young man who’d been a communist, the heir to wealth and status from both sides of his family, a future doctor or barrister or prime minister. But it had been a difficult birth, a forceps delivery that somehow damaged the baby, and he had stayed a five-year-old child. Celebration became tragedy. He grew up in a town where his father was the local doctor, surrounded by brothers and sisters in a grand house with many servants. My mother’s family are not demonstrative people, but I do think they loved him. They certainly protected and cared for him, perhaps even indulged him. And then, when he was nineteen, that all changed.
His five-year-old mind, it seemed, was susceptible to the frustrations and rages of that age, which, when expressed with the strength and body of a young man, were becoming difficult to manage. In a fit of temper, he’d flung a pair of scissors that had struck my grandmother and drawn blood. And that was it. It was decided that he could no longer live at home, and he was sent away.
My mother told us of the asylum, which housed patients with all sorts of mental fragility. Where my uncle lived for the rest of his life, sharing a room with a man who believed he was the king of England. She recounted funny conversations, anecdotes that made the asylum seem like a privileged boarding school.
When we asked why we’d never heard of this uncle, she said it was my grandfather’s wish that no one know. My mother, the youngest child, had been barely four when her eldest brother had last lived at home. Her memories of him were few and faded: he would place her on top of cupboards when they fought—she a small child, he a grown man with the mind of a child. Like all my mother’s stories, they were funny and light and beautifully constructed. They made us laugh and think warmly of the uncle we’d never known existed.
Once every couple of months my grandmother would visit the asylum, taking bribes for the staff and treats for her firstborn son. The last time we’d been in Sri Lanka, my mother had gone to see her brother for the first time in many years. Now she told us that he’d recognized her. She narrated the funny exchanges, the innocent honesty, the childlike questions, and then, with an instinctive understanding of pathos, she revealed that before they’d left, he’d warned her not to be naughty lest their father send her there, too.
That was probably the first hint I had that the asylum was not akin to some mythical English boarding school where everything was jolly.
I do remember being deeply troubled by the fact that my uncle had still been alive when last we’d been in Sri Lanka. We could have met him if we’d been allowed to know he existed. And now it was too late. An opportunity missed; a connection never made.
It was we who told our father that our uncle had died. My mother had gone to bed before he came home from work. This method of avoidance wasn’t particularly unusual in my family. My mother was possessive of her family. She would not share them with my father; she barely shared them with her daughters. And, it seemed, she had never told him she had a brother in the Angoda Asylum.
But my father knew. He is six years my mother’s senior, and as a child, he’d lived in the same town in the highlands of Sri Lanka. My grandfather had been the doctor on the hill, an important and wealthy man. Dad’s family was poor, but he attended the same local school as the doctor’s children until they were packed off to elite boarding schools.
In whispers, my father told us what he remembered of our late uncle. The handsomest of the doctor’s brood, he was tall and green-eyed. Both features made him distinctive in Sri Lanka. Dad told us that as a young man, the eldest son of Elizabeth and Darcy would wander the streets in the town that was his home, where everyone knew him, as the people of Maycomb, Alabama, knew Arthur “Boo” Radley. That he would walk casually into people’s houses and request a drink or something to eat, as small children do. That the townspeople all knew he was a “bit silly” but harmless.
Later my father would confess that he’d first raised the subject of my uncle with my mother when they were newlyweds. She had denied having such a brother so absolutely that he’d never mentioned it again… though he knew. He complied with the pretense because it was the cause of such shame, and my mother’s people were very proud.
At the time, I accepted this, though I did wonder whether it was my uncle or where they’d left him that made them ashamed. I desperately wanted to be his champion, but it was too late. Occasionally I would retrieve the pictures from the box in the cupboard and look at the extra boy in the family photos, knowing now that he’d had green eyes, that his mind was that of a five-year-old child, and that he was my uncle. But aside from that, the sadness of him faded.
It wasn’t until well after my sons were born that my thoughts turned again to my late uncle. My eldest son is now eighteen, and while I love the young man he’s become, I do remember, with a sense of bittersweet loss, the five-year-old boy he once was. There is something so beautiful about the mind and heart of a child that age: the honesty, the innocence, the wide-eyed wonder at the world, the beginnings of humor, that fierce, uninhibited love. It was a mind like this that my grandparents had consigned to the Angoda Asylum, an institution that a little Googling reveals had more in common with the sanatorium in Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest than any of my mother’s stories ever revealed, a place that housed the intellectually challenged together with the criminally insane, a place that gained a reputation for brutality.
My uncle lived at Angoda for over thirty years. He died in the body of a man in his fifties, but his mind was still that of a child. He would have been as hurt and scared and confused as a child. His mother went to see him once every two months. My grandfather could not bear it and stayed away entirely. I don’t know how often his brothers and sisters, the other children in those photographs, visited, but I doubt it was more than rarely. He had many nieces and nephews, born to a more accepting generation, but they were not allowed to know of his existence.