“In the Presence of God I Make This Vow,” by Hasanthika Sirisena appears in the May/June 2019 issue of KROnline.
Hasanthika Sirisena’s essay, “In the Presence of God I Make this Vow,” is a compelling mix of history and personal inquiry. Sirisena’s gift lies in her ability to examine her subject from different angles, each section shedding new light as the reader advances through the piece. The overall effect is subtle, surprising, and in the end, completely satisfying even though Sirisena can’t answer the question that launches the essay.
The essay begins in media res with a phone call. The narrator has prepared a packet for her father’s immigration lawyer to submit to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) for her father’s new wife’s application for permanent status. To the lawyer, the marriage looks like a sham. She can see no reasonable explanation for secrecy; Sirisena can’t either. After all, when her father brought her dead mother’s cousin over from Sri Lanka, he told his three daughters that Anoma would be working for him as a caretaker. Instead, he married her. Sirisena learned this only after her father’s recent stroke. “It has humiliated me,” she writes, “to put the package together at all—a nearly three-year history of a marriage I didn’t know existed—and now I’m convinced the lawyer has mistaken my ambivalence for prevarication.”
In the end, the lawyer seems willing to accept that the secrecy is a cultural thing. But even as Sirisena is offering this as an explanation, she recognizes that she knows no “other Sri Lankans who would do what my father has done: marry his wife’s cousin, bring her back to the States, and then lie to his three daughters and both families. My father is a singular construct in that way.”
The lawyer wants to attribute the father’s secrecy to an exotic and foreign culture. Sirisena searches for her explanation elsewhere, specifically in sixteenth-century British history—a case seemingly far removed and disconnected from her father. On a June evening in 1592, Maria Audley and Thomas Thynne met for the first time at an inn in Wiltshire; by the end of the evening, they had married in the presence of a handful of witnesses and a minister. Sirisena goes through the oddities of the situation: the relative youth of the bride and groom, the absence of his family, the fact that the marriage was not consummated.
Like Sirisena’s father’s marriage, the Audley-Thynne marriage remained a secret for three years. When it became publicly known, Thynne’s parents took the couple to court to have the marriage declared invalid. Sirisena uses the case to interrogate marriage as an institution, a public display. As a queer woman, she remains ambivalent about it. New questions drive the essay now. What makes a marriage valid? In other words, what does a valid marriage look like? And how does one talk about those relationships that aren’t marriage?
Sirisena can’t explain her father, and she can’t get inside Anoma’s head, but she can look closely—and unsparingly—at herself. Visiting her father after his stroke, Sirisena writes, “His skin was moist and parchment paper thin and the feel of it sickened me. Anoma, though, found a washcloth and wiped his head and face and then held his hand and spoke softly in Sinhala.” To make the case for the validity of this marriage, the narrator reveals her less-than-best self. She can’t take care of her father; his new wife does, willingly. Here is the proof that the USCIS should accept, the proof no document can provide.
Ultimately, this is what the essay is about: the private and public nature of marriage. It’s about “how suspicious we are as a culture of any intimate relationship that doesn’t look to us, well, like the state of being married.” In becoming the public explanation for one type of intimate relationship, marriage as an institution renders “so many . . . equally important and necessary relationships socially and sexually deviant.” The essay is, finally, a journey through a writer’s mind. The father’s secrecy provides the occasion for Sirisena to work out her understanding of marriage. He and Anoma form the center of a wide circle of inquiry, through which Sirisena digs at the real question: not why her father kept his marriage secret, but why that marriage—or any relationship—should be anyone else’s business at all.