CBC Literary Awards

The American Girl

Second Prize, Short Story

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One piece followed another in quick succession. The audience loved her, the white girl who played their music so well and had beautiful breasts. The master was doing everything in his power to showcase her gifts, so that his own solos led into her next star turn. But at one point it seemed as if he could no longer contain his joy at her sensuous presence there beside him.

He was playing a long improvised section, called Ragam Tanam Pallavi. With extraordinary breath control, he unloosed exquisite patterns of swaras soaring into the higher octave. Sometimes his sangatis were intricate; at other times he expressed the purity of a single held note – the sound of breath at the beginning, the resonance of overtones as it reaches fullness and the sigh of its dissolution into silence.

The American girl had stopped playing, unable to follow him there, and since this was a section without rhythmic accompaniment, the drummer also sat silent. Only the one flute played against the steady repeating four notes of the drone. It was hard to believe that his medium was air, only air.

The music shimmered in the space around us. When the Pallavi section started, the audience began to mark the tala, the underlying endless cycle of beats, eight and again eight and again eight, forever. The American girl and the drummer joined in, caught up in the current of unfurling patterns. I was being given something beyond my capacity to comprehend, the sound pouring in like water spilling through my fingers as I tried to drink.

Back at the hotel, all agreed that it was a good concert. The men sat outside and drank rum from a bottle in a brown paper bag. We retired to our room. Two ceiling fans encrusted with grime turned the air, and around the bare light bulbs the flying insects circled, attracting geckos like pieces of raw chicken skin. There were eight beds in a row. The American girl had taken a bed near the middle, so I lay down on the one next to her. The master’s wife turned off the light and took the bed next to me.

I woke to the sound of a voice in the dark room. The master was speaking, not loud, but wanting to be heard by the American girl. He was sitting at the head of her bed. He said, in Tamil, “You cannot go. I will not let you go. Do not go. Please do not go. Why must you go? Don’t leave me. How can you leave now?” The pleading was insistent and continuous. The American girl had turned her head away and was trying to ignore him. As I became more fully conscious, I saw that the master’s wife was sitting on the floor near his feet, knees drawn up and leaning on the bed. She spoke only once in a while. “Don’t beg. You are a great man; she is only a girl. Don’t beg.”

The American girl had turned her face the other way, so the master moved, trying to stroke her cheek, her hair. The insistent pleading went on and on. The American girl said nothing. Finally she went into the bathroom and locked the door. The master continued to plead with her through the closed door. Every once in a while his wife said, “Don’t beg. You are a great musician. She is only a girl.”

I had the idea, from books and movies, that love was a disease that afflicted only the young and the beautiful, and this was something I needn’t fear because I was too thin, too dark. But now I realized I would never be free of its dangers, that I might make a fool of myself for love at any time, from now into the distant future. I listened to the master’s voice and his wife’s until, without knowing it, I fell asleep. I was the last to wake up. In the morning, everyone behaved so normally that I wondered if I had dreamed the whole scene.

I asked the American girl, “Are you really leaving?”

“Yes,” she said. “And don’t forget. One day, you’ll leave too.”

Jurors

Shyam Selvadurai was born in Sri Lanka and moved to Canada at 19. Funny Boy, his first novel, won the Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Lambda Literary Award. He’s the author of Cinnamon Gardens and Swimming in the Monsoon Sea and the editor of the anthology Story-wallah! A Celebration of South Asian Fiction.

David Bergen’s 2006 novel, The Time in Between,won the Giller Prize, the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction and the McNally Robinson Book of the Year and was longlisted for the Impac Dublin Literary Award. His other novels include A Year of Lesser, See the Child, The Case of Lena S. and The Retreat.

Heather O’Neill is the bestselling author of Lullabies for Little Criminals, which won CBC Radio One’s Canada Reads competition and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award. She is a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, NPR’s This American Life and CBC Radio.

The views expressed by the writer do not represent the views of enRoute, Spafax, or Air Canada. Certain readers may be offended by the contents.

enRoute is a strong supporter of Canadian arts and is proud to be a sponsor of the CBC Literary Awards. This month, we present the final two winning works of fiction from the country’s leading established and up-and-coming writers.

Photo: Angus McRitchie (Heather O’Neill)

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