A deeply charged narrative

The book ‘Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist’, by Sunil Yapa is set during the World Trade Organization protests. The novel showcases a distinct and new literary voice

Dr. Charles Wickramsinghe stepped from the noise of the terminal into the quiet of the cabin. A tall man, he bowed slightly to clear the door, gave a small smile to the business-class stewards. He was shy at times with the luxuries of importance, and so carried only his usual briefcase and overcoat.

Uncomfortable with the insulation his diplomatic status conferred upon him, he refused to travel with staff, not even an assistant. “When I get too old to carry my own cases," he had said five years ago when the negotiations began, “then it`s time to surrender."

And yet, this year, turning severity, the weight of the travel had begun to register somewhere beneath his skin, the negotiations softening the tough muscle of his heart, pulling on his bones with a whisper. Just once he would like to perform a miracle on a par with Gandhi’s.

He will swim the island’s length and width, circumnavigate the coast, keep going until they all sign the bloody TRQs, the subsidy reductions, and then the final document itself. At a steady pace he will swim the sun down, he will swim the sun up, until they grant Sri Lanka’s entry to the WTO.

A stewardess stood at his elbow.
“Welcome, Minister," she said. “Can I get you anything?"
“Just a cup of tea, please.”

Of course he was fantasizing about the swim: Sri Lanka's coast was more than a thousand and a half kilometers. An island nation the size of Maine. He would not ever be swimming its length and breadth. The stewardess took his overcoat and slid his briefcase into the closet. With the help of her outstretched arm, he lowered himself slowly to the seat.

"We'll be in the air soon, Minister?
Good. Still so much work to be done, even here so close to the final leg. Five long years he had been at this, taking the meetings, slowly gathering the signatures. Forty countries in five years. Thirty-nine signatures. He wouldn’t have believed it himself had he not been there to witness.

To live it. To survive it. The flights close to three times a week for five years straight; the memories still humming through his body like a running river. He felt sometimes as if he had lived enough in the intervening years to account for another life, a second go-round. At his age a small miracle. The world, it seemed, was full of them. His life included. From colonial subject to globe—trotting minister.

The tall brown man with mahogany skin and snow-white hair—he was recognised and welcomed by presidents and prime ministers. Chirac, Yeltsin, Blair. Juan Carlos the King of Spain, and his prime minister, Maria Aznar. He knew their faces all too well. The food-flecked chins, the jowls, the tired eye. Like a tribe of people capable of manufacturing charm at will. And their leader, the elder brother of the toothy clan—Clinton, who he was set to meet tomorrow afternoon in Seattle. President Clinton—the very last signature he needed.

But god he feared that "no." Export and trade. Making things to sell to the West. This was how Sri Lanka would feed its people in the new century, in the bright new age of the global economy.They must open that door. Or I fear we will end up starving on its doorstep. He sighed and warmed his hands on the tea the stewardess had brought him.

He sipped from the cup and settled into the most recent batch of reports with a kind of tired, worried excitement: something about fuel oil tariffs from the Dutch. Another from the American State Department warning of possible protests. He scanned it and moved on, idly puzzling why anybody would want to protest the millennial meetings of the WTO.

Thirty thousand feet above the Pacific, finished with his reports for now, he was flipping the pages of a magazine, not really looking, just killing time, when he realized the woman he was looking at in the pages of the magazine was the same as the woman--seated next to him.

He almost spilled his fourth cup of tea.
He couldn’t look at her. He wouldn’t look at her.
He looked at her.

She was asleep, or feigning sleep, beneath a blue blanket embossed with gold feathers and an eye mask of the same.
He tried to recline his seat, turn it into a bed of his own. He’d take a nap. Close his eyes and avoid the embarrassment. There was a panel of control buttons to his right, but he couldn't get the thing to go back even an inch. He fumbled. He didn't get where he was by being flummoxed by every beautiful woman that ever sat down next to him.

Goddamn it, man, why won’t this thing go back?
He glanced again. Still asleep.
Don’t make a bloody fool of yourself.
He could smell her.

He looked again at his magazine. Devouring the details. She was an actress, young but not in her first youth. A string of romantic comedies. A failed action flick. A failed marriage to a Hollywood star.
She stared at him from the pages with a clear-eyed gaze.
You are the Deputy Minister of Finance and Planning. Get ahold of yourself.