Below is a section of my memoir, Take the Whole World As Your Husband, which describes one of my experiences when I worked for PBI in Sri Lanka. Dr. S (short for Saravanamuttu) was a mother whose son was murdered by a death squad and who later organized Sri Lanka’s Mothers’ Front on the model of Central America’s Mothers of the Disappeared.



Dr. S wears a summer dress of thin cotton to let in air. I wear the shirt that identifies PBI in Sinhalese, Tamil and English. The role of unarmed bodyguard embodies the nonviolent communion of two people from differing cultures come together to challenge injustice. The hopefulness of that agreement fosters intimacy. We are friends walking down a street lined with small shops and Plumeria trees toward the lawyer’s office. Sri Lankans make leis of the Plumerias’ fragrant ivory white blossoms and lay them around the goddess Kali’s throat. I imagine heaping a bed with these petals and lying down in that perfume.

This is a country where the President, Premadasa himself, will be taken out by a suicide bomber. A country where a Prime Minister climbing out of his swimming pool will be shot by a sniper. But Dr. S and I don’t yet know this. I’m aware of Plumeria scent, of heat rising from pavement, of her body beside me, of the slightly revved pace of my own pulse. Do those men who killed her son imagine the world is better without him? Or were they good cops until the chief said You’re coming along? Do they thrill remembering? Do they regret? Do their children know how they make a living?

“See that kiosk?” she says. “That’s probably where they buy their cigarettes.”

Suddenly I’m uneasy. Is it the thrill of the kill that excites them? And does training your sight on a woman spike you with titillation like spiking every third beer with a shot of whiskey? Why just now is there not a single person strolling toward us?

The air is hot and white like a siren’s scream. They’re ahead of us, I think, watching us walk toward them. Not they but he, a single sniper. He could, he might, he doesn’t know yet, but no one else is on the street, and it’s a clear shot, and the thought of this delicious. It excites him not to know what he’ll do.

The street narrows. I have the perception that those two shops just ahead, one on either side of the street, are a gate we’re about to pass through. I flash on an image of Martin Luther King going about his business the day before he was murdered.

In front of one shop sits a beggar. His left arm above the elbow is a stub. His right hand thrusts out a bowl.

“Let’s not walk so fast,” I say. “I’m scared.”

We pause. Neither of us moves. That’s when she speaks the line I won’t forget.

“God loves our courage and loves our fear. He loves both things.”

The fine, black hairs on the beggar’s arm seem etched. I want to study each hair. Each hair is a crystal glass struck with a spoon. His hand curves round the bowl, holding it out. Before you die, I think, give something away.

I squat down, then kneel. Feel of my knees on sidewalk. My handful of coins falls into his bowl. Courage is a sudden rearrangement of being. Its coming is not my decision. It’s the decision of Eden. What I do now feels slow and deliberate. I stand up inside blossom scent, inside heat, my body beside hers, and step in front of her and embrace her. The sniper can’t shoot her without shooting me.