A Garden of Demons 
A Novel by Edward Hower



Modern terrorism, like ancient beliefs in spirits and ghosts, thrives in lush, beautiful Sri Lanka, the setting of Edward Hower’s sixth novel, A Garden of Demons. Lila, a gifted half-American girl, begins to see her once idyllic world in new ways when her Uncle Richard joins her family on a visit. Though he seeks peace in her parents’ jungle nature sanctuary, Richard must instead help them to confront the dangers which threaten to destroy their home and, with frightening uncertainty, put an end to Lila’s innocence.




Edward Hower is the author of five previous novels, most recently Shadows and Elephants. He lives in Ithaca, New York, and teaches at Cornell and Ithaca College.




“Edward Hower writes in a fine, assured prose with an absolute command of character and setting. Like all the best novelists he creates people whose lives exemplify the pressures of history in a world where certainties, new and old, ruthlessly compete.… Hower is a fine storyteller and a first-rate writer, evoking today’s Sri Lanka in a fast-moving and affecting tale.”—Robert Stone 

“Edward Hower has a powerful sympathetic gift for understanding other cultures, and so captures wonderfully the beauty and menace of modern Sri Lanka. The novel’s point of view, that of the little girl Lila, is perfectly chosen to mirror the reader’s attempt to understand the undercurrents of a troubled and fascinating society.”—Diane Johnson 

“A Garden of Demons is a patient, lavish delineation of a jungle haven in which a visually avid young girl grows up, urgently trying to fathom enigmas both domestic and natural…. The novel’s fusion of the exotic and the universal is both grave and debonair, and Sri Lanka comes to life in extraordinary vignettes.”—Paul West




“Can we open the gate, Papa—just a few inches?” Lila asked, and parted her fingers in the air to show what a tiny, innocent gap she was suggesting.

Derek, her father, looked up from his work on the garden path. “Sorry, pol, the gate has to stay closed.” He called her pol—coconut—because, he’d said, her head was hard like one (the shell) but full of sweetness (the milk), and also because she had a way of crash-landing unexpectedly as if out of a tall tree.

“But what if he comes all this way from America and can’t get in?”

“You’ll hear him, then we can open it.”

Lila tied two palm-frond mats together to form a slanting roof for her lean-to. “But I want to see him come!”

“We’ll be seeing quite a lot of him, if history repeats.”

“I hope so,” Lila said.

Though the dawn air still smelled fresh and green, with whiffs of smoke drifting by from the plantation workers’ cook-fires, the sun had already climbed to the top of a nearby hedge like a red-hot monkey. Beads of sweat glittered in Derek’s bushy beard, and his blue shirt was damp from the heat. Lila watched him unwind a coil of silvery new barbed wire. He was making a trap for terrorists.

“You’re not going to wait here all day, surely.” Derek smiled. “You’ll melt like a piece of toffee and turn into a sticky little puddle.”

Lila laughed. “I won’t!” Then she sighted at him through her fingers again.

Derek couldn’t escape her gaze. Finally he clapped his hands loudly, twice. “Daya!”

Daya, the watchman, stepped smartly into the sunlight wearing a checked sarong, khaki shirt, and rubber beach sandals.

“You can unlock it, just for a short while,” Derek told him.

The wrinkles on the old man’s face bent into a frown. Pulling a key from the pouch strung around his neck, he slowly approached the gate’s huge rusted padlock as if it were an oracle. Derek went back to the spiked wire coils, and Lila crawled into the lean-to. There, sitting on her sketch pad and colored pencils, was her orange cat, Zalie (short for “azalea”), who was already looking restless, about to creep away. For a moment, the cat let out the strange high-pitched mewing that often startled local people when they heard it rising like a wail out of tall weeds, as if from some invisible source. Lila’s mother said Zalie made the strange noise because she was very old and a little cranky. Lila stroked the cat’s neck until she seemed to smile; two tiny, sharp-pointed teeth appeared in the corners of her mouth.

The gate was made of solid steel and was painted bright green. On the outside was stenciled—in square black English letters and rounded Sinhala characters: 

PRIVATE: NATURE SANCTUARY

Derek T.W. Gunasekera and Family

The gate was twice as tall as Daya, and as he tugged it partly open, it swung in with a groan, nearly knocking him backwards. 

Now Lila could look down the shady tunnel made by the road and overhanging tree branches—all the way to the point of light where at any moment her Uncle Richard would arrive.

*

By mid-morning, the heat undulated along the ground, and the air vibrated with the buzz of insects from the jungle that bounded the plantation on three sides. As Lila lay belly-down on a blanket, sun-stripes leaked through the lean-to’s slanting palm roof, making tiny fish-bone patterns on the back of her blue cotton dress. She was sketching an Air Lanka jet landing at the airport with two yakkini—benevolent spirits—perched like green, poppy-eyed parrots on each wing to guide the plane safely toward the terminal.

Toward noon, she dozed with one outstretched hand resting on her cat’s tail. Zalie yawned, showing a sudden pink throat behind her teeth, then slunk off, body low to the ground.

A little later, Sue, Lila’s mother, brought her a plate of coconut rice and pawpaw and some fresh bottled water. She was a thin, wiry American woman of thirty-five, whose caved-in cheeks and thick glasses gave her a tired and puzzled look, though she moved very quickly around the plantation and knew even more about its daily workings than Lila’s father, who had been born in Sri Lanka. Sitting cross-legged before the lean-to in her long skirt and batik blouse, she reached out to feel the hair matting Lila’s forehead. “You’re soaked, dear!”

Lila sat up and rubbed her eyes. “I’m fine, Mum. Richard won’t be much longer.”

“You know, he must have had to catch a bus to the crossroads. The trip might be taking hours and hours.” On Lila’s last trip to Colombo, she remembered, vehicles were stopped at checkpoints for miles, passengers roasting in the sun while soldiers demanded their papers and prodded them with rifle butts. Lila still had a purple bruise on her arm; though it didn’t hurt any longer, she bit her lip in anger whenever she noticed it. “Then he’d need to find a lift all the way out here,” Sue continued. “So why not come into the house to wait for him?”

“I want to be here to meet him, just to make sure he’s okay,” Lila said.

“Of course he will be.”

“D’you think he’ll be upset about the Land Rover?”

Sue sighed, glancing up the path to where Derek was still working with the wire. “I wanted to drive to the airport to meet Richard, too.” She spoke to Lila in a hushed voice. Then she smiled. “But he always finds his way, dear. And he doesn’t get upset about things anymore.”

When Sue’s brother had visited two years ago, and Lila had been nine, everybody had to be careful not to say things that might upset him. He seemed angry that he hadn’t found a job or a home in the States. Then the family got him involved in a project to create a nature sanctuary, planting flowers and trees everywhere. There were three kinds of gardeners, Derek observed. Some saw works of nature as lovely, colorful designs to be reproduced in art (Lila—who rarely left the house without her sketch pad). Others worked as if they were conducting scientific experiments (Derek—who’d always wished he’d finished his PhD in biology). And some treated nature as if  plants were innocent and vulnerable children (Richard—and also Sue—who were re-creating their less-than-idyllic childhoods).

Richard had worked in the sanctuary all day, returning to the house covered in sweat and bug-bites but breathless with reports of his accomplishments. Evenings were hard for him, so Lila brought books into his room so they could read aloud to each other. Eventually they went through over a hundred books, including all twelve volumes of the illustrated Buddhist Janaki tales, with their delicious gore, magic, and noble deeds. She played cards with Richard every night for four months, too. He began to look better: his chopped hair grew out thick and curly; he was tanned and strong and much calmer.

But Lila thought he’d sounded upset in his last letter. Sue read it at the dinner table—“Can’t you get Derek to find someone to fix that Land Rover!” he’d written. From the way her mother’s voice emphasized Richard’s question, Lila could picture him bearing down hard with his pen as he wrote. “It’s insane to be stuck all the way out there without a car these days!” Reading over Sue’s shoulder, her arms wrapped around her neck, Lila noticed the exclamation marks in the letter, and remembered that Richard had two of them shooting up in the middle of his forehead from the bridge of his nose. She used to run her fingertip along the indentations, trying to smooth them away. She loved the way he always let her, and sometimes it worked.

“My darlings, I’ll see to the car absolutely as soon as I can,” Derek promised Sue and Lila, smiling around the table.

But he was terribly busy these days. He had to patrol the grounds, to find workers to tap the rubber trees and harvest the coconuts. Especially he had to help put up wire security fences. There wasn’t any extra cash to hire a mechanic for the car. He did get Hans, a neighbor, to look at it, but “the mad German,” as Sue called him, was so drunk on locally brewed coconut toddy that he left the engine even more of a mess than he’d found it. Since then, the poor old car had huddled beside the house (a sick water buffalo, in Lila’s drawing) with a tarpaulin over its snout. She had petted it this morning on her way down to the gate.

Now she looked up from her sketch of the airplane. “Mum, do you know why Richard’s coming?”

“Just to see us, dear.” Sue smiled.

“But any other reason?”

“Why should there be any?”

“I don’t know.…” Lila’s voice trailed off.

Her mother was squinting up and down the garden path. “Where’s Zalie?” she asked suddenly.

Lila squeezed her pencil. “Oops.”

Sue’s voice fell. “Oh, Lila! Don’t you remember what your father said last time?”

She did. Her father had found a hummingbird lying on one of the paths, its wings iridescent as if it were alive but its head shiny with blood. Then he spotted the cat crouched in some weeds nearby. As soon as Zalie saw the look in his eyes, she sprang away as if scorched. Derek had walked over to Lila. “We live in a sanctuary,” he reminded her, “and if the cat kills again”—he squatted down to hold Lila’s cheeks gently in his cool, soft hands—“she’ll have to be punished, won’t she?”

 “I’ll look for Zalie,” Lila told her mother now. “I don’t want her to do anything bad.”

“Especially not today.” Sue stood up, cleaning her glasses on her blouse but just making them blurrier, Lila thought. “I want you to come to the house soon.”

“All right.” She watched her mother walk up the path, rubber sandals flapping at her heels.

Lila felt alone and impatient. Crawling out from her shelter, she climbed the plank steps to the guard-post behind the tall gate. A month ago her father had directed the workers to build an observation platform on wooden stilts. Now Daya spent much of the day up there on sentry duty in a sagging rattan chair. Lying across his lap was a rifle whose stock was attached to the barrel with rusted wire. Derek didn’t allow guns on the plantation as a rule, but since Daya’s didn’t fire, he let the old man keep it.

“Daya, have you seen Zalie?” Lila asked in Sinhala.

He scratched his bald scalp. “No, Miss. But I am not on watch for pussycats. Only for Tigers.”

Tamil Tigers were guerilla rebels who were fighting the government to get their own separate country in the north. “They aren’t anywhere near here, it’s only poachers we’re keeping out,” Lila said to Daya. This was what her parents had told her many times. They’d also said that since the Tigers were Hindus—Tamil people originally from South India—and the government was mostly Buddhist—run by Sinhalese people who’d come from North India centuries ago—her family was considered neutral. Her father’s people, though Sinhalese, had nominally converted to Christianity during the British colonial era, and most people assumed that Lila’s mother, being a foreigner, was a Christian, too (though in fact she’d been studying Buddhism before leaving America). “Besides, everybody knows the plantation’s a nature sanctuary, a neutral place,” Lila continued. “There’s nothing here to interest any guerillas.”

“Your father told you this,” Daya said. “He believes in the sanctuary.”

“What—don’t you?”

Daya’s jaw worked up and down as if he were chewing on the question. “I think it is a fine and beautiful idea,” he said finally, “but the plantation should be pegged, just in case.”

Many people hammered wooden pegs into the ground around the boundaries of their property to keep bad demons away. Lila had never actually seen a demon—as far as she knew (they could take human or animal shapes)—but she’d often heard them, and she had sensed their presence in and around the house all her life. But she didn’t believe, as Daya and the workers apparently did, that Zalie was sometimes possessed by a demon that wanted to bring trouble onto the plantation. Sometimes she worried that her father believed this, too, though he denied it. As a child, he’d seen plenty of demons, of course, good and bad—“bald and hairy ones, fat and skeletal ones, fanged and toothless ones,” as he reported, shaping them in the air with both hands. Nowadays, though, he only occasionally glimpsed one out of the corner of his eye, he said, and even then it might just be a sunspot or the shadow of a flying fruit bat. Lila’s mother, over the years, had come to accept demons, the way she did the termites that invisibly ate the door frames and the mysterious head-pains that sometimes knocked Derek nearly senseless for days and nights on end.

“What good are pegs against Tigers?” Lila asked Daya. “Tigers are humans, not demons.”

 “Tiger terrorists are worse.” Daya spat a stream of betel juice from the platform onto the dust below. “They are Tamils.”

“No—most Tamils aren’t Tigers,” Lila insisted, frowning. She had several Tamil friends whose families had worked on the plantation for generations. Radha, her best friend at school, was the daughter of a Tamil doctor and nurse who ran the crossroads clinic.

“If you say so, Miss,” Daya said. “I am sure there is nothing for us to worry about.”

“Well…yes, there is.” Lila lowered her voice, glancing around. “Zalie’s gone missing. Will you help me find her?”

“Of course.” Daya pulled a canvas bag onto his lap. He took out a yellow cellular phone, pretended to switch it on, and called into its plastic mouthpiece, “Zalie! Come in, Zalie!” He grinned, showing gaps between his teeth.

His betel-chewing habit had turned them dark red. “Over and out.”

Lila tried not to smile, but she couldn’t help herself. She pointed to the canvas bag. “May I have the glasses, please?” she asked.

“Yes, yes.” Daya pulled out a pair of binoculars and handed them to her.

They were heavy, and Lila had to adjust them to her small face, but she managed them expertly, twisting the eyepiece rings to bring the landscape into focus. Now she felt as if she were soaring over the countryside like a crow in one of her paintings. First she flew up the rutted dirt driveway lined by the trees her father and Richard had planted two years before. Then she hovered over the front garden. White, purple, and red spots flicked up at her—flowers in every shape and size: trumpets and balls and plumes…but no plump orange cat. Veering right, she flew over the sanctuary area, which took up most of the plantation now. Lila swooped low over old vine-covered arbors that tilted like wrecked galleons festooned with seaweeds. Where the land had been reclaimed, some paths were lined with barbed wire. Circles of whitewashed stones surrounded cement fountains where, as yet, no water spouted. More rows of trees wore wooden labels tied around their trunks like shiny bow ties. Near the gate was the false path her father had been working on all morning. Anyone running along it would get trapped between two gradually narrowing barbed-wire fences; the more the intruder thrashed, the tighter he’d be caught.

Hearing the rumble of an approaching engine—Richard, finally?—she raised the binoculars to swoop along the road beyond the gate. Out of the tunnel of tree branches appeared a new but battered red Jeep, its bumper smashed sideways so that the car tilted at a rakish angle. It belonged to a neighbor, Hans the German. His yellow hair streamed behind him; his girlfriend clung to his side like a scared beetle. Lila pressed her hands to her ears as he swerved past.

A Tamil woman in a sari turned away from the Jeep’s swirling dust cloud. A Sinhalese woman in a bodice and cotton skirt joined her on the roadside. Soon Lila would wear a grown-up outfit like this woman’s; only little girls—and Christians—wore Western dresses. Except for the clothes these women had on, you couldn’t tell that they were of different religions or ethnic groups—both were equally dark-skinned, graceful, and muscular.

Lila herself was almost as dark as her father—“a throwback to my royal ancestors,” he said. Her skin was “the lovely color of fresh cinnamon,” Sue said. And her hair was “as smooth as black silk.” After Sue washed it, she and Derek would sit in the garden with Lila, taking turns with the towel and brush—“making you shine,” they said. From the side, Lila looked much like her school-mates, small and lithe, but as soon as she faced anyone with wide-open eyes—as she sometimes did to stare down girls who said nasty things to her—she looked different from everyone in the world. Her eyes were a purply-blue and glowed out of her dark face in such a way that some adults shielded their children from her gaze. Once she’d asked her parents if she had the evil eye.

“Certainly not!” Sue said. “You’ve got the softest, most benign eyes of any of nature’s creatures.”

Derek gazed at her. “Like sambhurs’.” He knew that they—wild deer—were Lila’s favorite animals, though of course their eyes weren’t blue. Nobody in her family had blue eyes except Richard. “And,” Sue said, thrilling her, “your great grandmother.” She’d been a beautiful frontier woman who’d tamed wild horses and started her own school and lived to be ninety-nine.

At 3:20 by Lila’s red plastic watch, she heard the creak of wooden wheels. A bullock cart came into view: the animal plodding along, the driver dozing behind. The cart—when it was equipped with seats and a canvas roof—took Lila and other girls to and from school at the crossroads. As many as twenty girls squashed in together in their uniforms, plaiting each other’s hair and chirping “like an aviary on wheels,” as Lila’s mother described the sound they made. School was closed for the holidays now, so the driver was transporting sacks of rice instead of students. Lila hoped Richard wouldn’t arrive in a cart; she wanted him to get down from a big shiny taxi sedan, or at least one of the black and yellow three-wheeled scooter-taxis that swarmed like hornets around the crossroads market.

Pacing the observation platform, she scanned both sides of the fence. No cat on the right side of it in the plantation. No Richard to her left side, on the road. But out of its shady canopy of branches came a harsh, metallic clunking sound: two men riding on a wobbly black bicycle. The poor man who sat sideways on the back wore a filthy bandage around the stump of his leg where his foot should have been. The stump hung limp in the air beneath him. He blurred in the binoculars as he came closer; Lila dropped the glasses from her face, and he grew sharper than before: young, dark-haired, with big, sad eyes. Raising one hand to his forehead, he gave Lila a silent salute, as if he knew her.

And suddenly it seemed to Lila that he did know her, and that she knew him. She’d seen war-wounded men before, but none had ever saluted her like this. Feeling awkward, standing high above the man, she waved slowly at him. She waved till her arm ached. Then he was gone and the road was empty again. The bicycle’s clatter was gone. Lila’s eyes stung with sweat. She wiped them with her fingers. The emptiness the man left behind made a vibration in the air that seemed to rise up from the land around her—a kind of sound more insistent than the buzz of insects or the hissing of rain at night or gusts of wind crackling in the palm fronds. But when she leaned forward to listen to what it might be saying—it rushed away from her.

She knew that she would draw the sound: a dark ocean of flames spilling across the plain, with high waves and sea monsters splashing, snarling, snapping—a disturbing scene, but hers. Now in her mind she saw the fiery water flow along the paddy fields and wash over the green hills in the distance: waiting there, ready to rush back another time. She was left stranded on the platform with her sweat-drenched dress stuck to her chest and back.

Then, at the same moment, two things happened.

To her right, she saw Zalie burst out of a cluster of flowers, running with quick, dainty steps up the path toward Derek. Clamped in her teeth was something raw, pink, fluffy-tailed…and dead: a baby squirrel.

“Zalie, no!” Lila screamed.

And to her left, she saw an old blue taxi approaching along the road. It screeched to a halt outside the gate. Down the platform’s rickety steps she ran.

Years later, she would wonder what might have happened if she’d chased Zalie into the bushes out of sight before her father had spotted the squirrel in the cat’s mouth. But now she clutched the edge of the heavy steel gate beside Daya and tugged until it swung all the way back. The taxi wobbled toward her over the driveway’s ruts. Its door swung open wide. A familiar figure leaned out from the back seat.

“Uncle Richard!” She flung herself blindly into the car, sure that he would catch her.

ISBN 0-86538-106-2, $22.95, cloth

Note: Edward Hower will be reading from his novel at Three Lives and Co., New York City, May 21, 2003 at 7PM.