Mosquito
Mosquito
Roma Tearne
A lyrical and profoundly moving story of love, loss and civil war, set in Sri Lanka, London and Venice.When author Theo Samarajeeva returns to his native Sri Lanka after his wife’s death, he hopes to escape his gnawing loss amid the lush landscape of his increasingly war-torn country. But as he sinks into life in this beautiful, tortured land, he also finds himself slipping into friendship with an artistic young girl, Nulani, whose family is caught up in the growing turmoil. Soon friendship blossoms into love. Under the threat of civil war, their affair offers a glimmer of hope to a country on the brink of destruction…But all too soon, the violence which has cast an ominous shadow over their love story explodes, tearing them apart. Betrayed, imprisoned and tortured, Theo is gradually stripped of everything he once held dear – his writing, his humanity and, eventually, his love. Broken by the belief her lover is dead, Nulani flees Sri Lanka to a cold and lonely life of exile. As the years pass and the country descends into a morass of violence and hatred, the tragedy of Theo and Nulani's failed love spreads like a poison among friends sickened by the face of civil war, and the lovers must struggle to recover some of what they have lost and to resurrect, from the wreckage of their lives, a fragile belief in the possibility of redemption.Beautifully written, by turns heartbreaking and uplifting, `Mosquito’ is a first novel of remarkable and compelling power.
MOSQUITO
ROMA TEARNE
For Barrie, who understood,
and for Oliver and Alistair and Mollie
… they are places that don#x2019t belong to geography but to time.
SAUL STEINBERG, Reflections and Shadows
Table of Contents
Cover (#u0f674640-08dd-58db-9976-f727bcdfa239)
Title Page (#uafc5bb6d-005b-5de5-8a52-8419913093a7)
Dedication (#uc78be1d3-8731-5080-a9b7-9cd4a5316bc9)
Epigraph (#u0ddc21d9-42ce-5b78-82fe-54d273d76b1c)
Chapter One (#u9925ce48-17a8-5782-85e5-9d3a2798c61d)
Chapter Two (#u1a33b764-a754-5b99-9f50-4d9010263a18)
Chapter Three (#ubf8b3b5d-01b9-5f24-84d9-706adc18e7c5)
Chapter Four (#uef8cac8d-a823-569b-8125-f5277662dd49)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Read On … (#litres_trial_promo)
Literary Corner (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_44f74c68-abeb-5bf0-a9f5-88c2e45730ae)
THE CATAMARAN, ITS BLUE-PATCHED SAILS no longer flapping, its nets full of glistening catch, came in after the night’s fishing. The breeze had died down, the air had cooled, and the fishermen’s sarongs slapped wet against their legs as they swung the boat above the water, to and fro, and up and along the empty beach, scoring a dark, deep ridge in the sand. Often, before the monsoon broke, the sea was like a mirror. The sky appeared joined to it with barely a seam, there was a faint vibration of thunder and along the shoreline the air hung in hazy folds, suspended between land, and sea, and sky. In a few hours the heat would spread insidiously, hovering with the mosquitoes and the spiders that waited motionless and lethargic, trapped by their own clammy inertia. But still there was no storm. Every year it was like this, before the monsoon, for three or four days, sometimes even longer. Every year, around the third week in June, a yellowing stickiness, a blistering oppression clung everywhere, so that even the bougainvillea lost its radiance.
Theo Samarajeeva walked back from the beach with fresh fish for lunch. It was still early. The manservant, Sugi, had brought breakfast out on to the veranda. A black-and-gold lacquered tray with a white cloth was placed on the cane table. There was a silver teapot, a jug of boiled milk, one cup and a saucer. There was some freshly cut pineapple and some curd and roti.
‘You had better get the lime juice ready, Sugi,’ said Theo Samarajeeva wryly, hearing the gate click shut. The manservant grinned and went inside.
‘You see, by a process of elimination I knew you would be coming here,’ Theo said, turning towards the gate by way of greeting.
‘How?’ asked Nulani Mendis, appearing, sitting down opposite him, and helping herself to the glass the manservant held out to her. Theo Samarajeeva watched as she drank. He watched her gasp as the cool, sharp liquid caught in her throat. He noticed that her fingernails had small slivers of paint under them. She wore a green skirt wrapped tightly around her waist, and a soft faded white blouse of some thin opaque fabric. The skirt was old, and almost exactly the colour of the lime juice.
‘How did you know I would come today?’ she demanded again when she had finished drinking.
‘Well,’ said Theo, ‘I saw you walking on the beach earlier, and as I hadn’t seen you for at least twenty-four hours I told Sugi: Ah! Miss Nulani will be here later so don’t forget her lime.’
Nulani smiled guiltily, remembering she was meant to go straight home.
‘So, poor Mrs Mendis still waits for her daughter, no?’ he guessed.
Inside, in the dark interior of the house, music was playing on the radiogram. It floated out through the open windows, tripping effortlessly down the steps from the veranda before dispersing into the trees.
‘I’ve been drawing,’ said Nulani, taking out a small notebook from her satchel. ‘Look!’
She moved her chair closer to his, giving him the book. Images rose out of it, they fell hither and thither, marvellously, on to his knees. A man sat under a tamarind tree, another squatted in the narrow spit of shade afforded by a house. A woman stretched out on a makeshift bed staring at the rough edges of a palm roof through the bars of the window. Someone, a middle-aged man, lean legs stretched in front of him, was writing, head bent at a table. He had a cigarette in his left hand and behind him was the blur of tropical trees.
‘This is me, no? When did you do this one?’
‘Yesterday,’ said Nulani, laughing. ‘I was hiding over there, you didn’t see me.’
‘You little pest! Why didn’t you make yourself known? Sugi had made a fine red mullet curry. You could have eaten with me.’
‘You are not angry?’
‘I feel the bushes have eyes,’ he teased her. ‘I shall have to watch everything from now on. No talking to myself any more! But seriously, these are good. Are you going to use them in a painting?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Nulani, frowning. ‘Do you really like them?’ And boldly, ‘I want to paint you. But …’
Theo considered her. For a moment he felt lost for words. Nulani Mendis had been visiting him for nearly three months now. It had begun when he had first moved to this part of the island. The convent school had invited him to give a talk on his latest book. He had not long been back from the UK, some perversity making him give up the modest success he enjoyed there. People thought him mad. The Liberation Tigers had been demanding a separate Tamil state for years with no success. Civil unrest grew daily. Then, after Singhala was made the national language, discrimination against the Tamils became commonplace. A potential guerrilla war was simmering. Why did he want to go back to that hell? they asked. Was he off his head? An established writer, with a comfortable life in London, his own flat, his work, what could he want with Colombo? Was it not enough writing books on the impending violence, did he want to live it too? But, he had no ties. Perhaps it was sentimentality in early middle age? Perhaps the terrible events from the past had finally got to him, they said.
Theo could not explain. He himself barely understood this sudden compulsion, this urgency to go home. It was a time when everyone who could was escaping. Perhaps simply because he no longer had anything to escape from, going back was not a problem. So he told his agent he would work better if he had some sun and, putting his flat on the market, he left. The agent said nothing, thinking privately that what Theo really needed was some distraction, danger even. Do him good, thought the agent; add richness to this next book. Other men might have given up writing altogether after what he had been through, but Theo had carried on. He probably needed a complete change of scene, needed to put the past finally behind him. So, with this in mind, the agent encouraged him to go back, for a time at least.
It was 1996. While he had been away Sri Lanka had changed. The change confused Theo. He found himself remembering the liberal atmosphere of his youth. Where was it? In England, whatever corruption there was, was kept discreetly out of sight. Or maybe he was less critical because the British were not his own people. It was a different matter in Colombo where every small injustice, every appalling act of violence seemed a personal affront. The civil unrest he had predicted in his books, the beginnings of rage seemed to have been nurtured in his absence, and spread, like a newly germinated paddy field. He left Colombo, moved to a backwater, and began writing his fourth novel. His second book was being made into a film and an article about him appeared in one of the papers. The local schools, having noticed it and having registered his arrival in the town, asked him to speak to the pupils. At first he had hesitated, worrying. But what was there worth worrying about in these troubled times? People had been garrotted for less outspoken views, so why did he care? His life would go on for as long as it would, or it simply would cease. Why worry? He was no longer a Buddhist, but Buddhism had worked on him like milk and honey nonetheless. He agreed to give two talks, one at the boys’ school and the other at the convent. Nulani Mendis had been one of the students. She had held her hand up and asked him several questions.
‘The girl hardly speaks,’ the teacher had told him afterwards. ‘Since her father was murdered she has become silent. The mother has given up trying to make her talk. All she does is draw, draw, draw.’
But on that day she had spoken to Theo and later, on one of his early-evening walks along the narrow strip of beach behind the house, he saw her again. He had smiled slightly, registering her good looks, and remembering the story of her father, he waved. But she seemed to vanish into the darkness. After that he kept seeing her and he guessed she lived nearby. Then Sugi caught her in the garden. She was drawing his stone lions. Sugi began complaining loudly.
‘Sir, sir, these local children are pests. They’ve started coming into the garden again. We need to get rid of them or they will multiply!’
Surprised, Theo came out and, recognising her, asked her name. Then he invited her, in spite of Sugi’s protest, to come over at any time and draw. This had been nearly three months ago. She never called him anything except Mr Samarajeeva. He supposed, wryly, that this was out of a sense of respect for his age. But she came back, again and again, and, if she did not appear for a few days, he became inclined to drift into bad temper.
‘Can I go now?’ she asked, breaking into his reverie. ‘I want to draw the house from over there.’
She had been with him since breakfast.
‘Won’t you be late for school?’ he asked. ‘Does your mother know you are here?’
‘No,’ she said, disappearing around the side of the house. Her voice reached him from another part of the garden, vague and indistinct. ‘No, she’s out. And I’ve finished the jobs she gave me so I can go straight to school from here.’
Theo shook his head, amused in spite of himself. The manservant gave him a look that said clearly, ‘I told you, these local children are pests.’ But she’s different, thought Theo.
At first she came only once a week, barely speaking, staying further back in the garden. But as she grew bolder she seemed to be there all the time. Then, one day, out of the blue, she showed him her notebook for the first time. The sketches were all of him, delicate, and with a clear unwavering likeness. Startled, he took down his book of Picasso drawings and talked to her about the artist. After that she began to talk to him.
‘I will be seventeen in three months,’ she said.
On another afternoon she told him about her brother Jim. He was only eighteen months younger. She told him, they were not close.
‘It is our karma,’ she said solemnly. ‘We have brought it into this life.’
Their father, she said, had known most of this long before the astrologer came to visit. He told their mother, soon after the birth of Jim, he had seen it in a dream; the children would never be close. He could see it written on their faces, he had said, the girl child, and his infant son. Their mother, hearing this pronouncement, had begun wailing. After all her labours was this the future? But their father told his wife sternly to stop her noise. Be thankful, he said, for the fact that both children were healthy. After puberty, he suspected, after they came of age, they would cross a great expanse of water, leave Sri Lanka. Go to mainland India even. It would be a good thing, he had said, for peace in this country was always uncertain. Thus had her father predicted, long before the astrologer came to plot their horoscopes, walking up the steps of the house. With his saffron robes and his sandals dusty with beach sand, and his black umbrella faded with the heat. Their father, not foreseeing his own death in the riots of the following June, felt the future of his children grow large in his own mind.
How long was it before she realised the strange masculine world inhabited by her brother was not for her, wondered Theo. Was it when she was still small? Did her understanding come, as all unshakeable beliefs do, not at any given moment but slowly, like seawater seeping into a hole dug on a beach? Lucky Jim could pace his domain freely, marking his undisputed territory, certain of his own image of the future. But what of Nulani?
Sometimes while her brother slept, before the father’s unpredicted death, when they were younger, Nulani told Theo, she would bend over Jim and smell the sugar-sweet baby scent of greenness on his skin, run her finger across an old scar that straddled the rounded grubbiness of his brown leg. Later when she was older, she told Theo, she stole a box of Venus B pencils (Made in Great Britain) from the house of their English neighbour, to draw her sleeping brother. But the neighbour found out and demanded she be punished for stealing. She returned the pencils; two of them were used and broken.
‘All right, Mrs Mendis,’ the neighbour, the Englishman, told her mother angrily, ‘I know it must be hard for you, with your husband dead. But “ render unto Caesar ” and all that!’
He had laughed, without rhythm. Nulani had wondered if that was how the English laughed. She knew she would not be allowed into the Englishman’s house again. She would not be able to play with his daughter Carol any more; she would never be able to touch her shining golden hair.
‘Why did you take them?’ her brother had demanded. ‘Render unto Caesar,’ he had said, sounding like the Englishman.
Nulani’s uncle came. Because her father was no longer alive, it was his duty to beat her with an ekel stick.
‘Render unto Caesar,’ he had said. They were ashamed of her. The whole family avoided the neighbours now, eyes cast down whenever the jeep drove them about, into the city, to the beach, shopping.
‘See what you’ve done to us.’
Nulani could see. She stopped drawing her brother when he slept. She just looked at him. Her little brother. She was his loku akka, his big sister. Her father had said they would not be close. But no one, she told Mr Samarajeeva, not even the astrologer, had said she would not love him.
And now she came here to draw. Arriving early, leaving late. Always talking. Transformed.
‘Child,’ Theo said suddenly now, drifting back from his thoughts and realising the time, ‘you’ll be late for school.’
When there was no answer he went to look for her at the back of the garden, but then he heard the gate click again.
‘I’m late,’ she called, grinning at him, hurrying off. ‘But I’m coming back!’
And she disappeared up the hill with a wave of her hand.
They swarmed so thickly that they might easily have been mistaken for smoke. Rising swiftly from the water-filled holes dug by the gem miners in their search for sapphire, the mosquitoes seemed suspended in reflected light. For a moment the holes appeared asmirrored surfaces, blue as the sky. Further out towards the coast the rainwater filled the upturned coconut shells, as they lay scattered across the groves. Here the beautiful female anopheles mosquitoes, graceful wings glinting in the sun, landed lightly and prepared to create a canoe of death for their cargo of eggs. The Ministry of Health sprayed the coconut groves with DDT to prevent outbreaks of malaria. The metallic smell drifted and mixed heavily with the scent of frangipani and hibiscus. There had been no epidemic for nearly five years.
Theo liked to spend the morning writing, but lately it had been difficult to concentrate with the girl present. She sat against a wall, almost in the bushes, drawing him. He had tried to make her come inside but she was stubborn and stayed where she was, far back along the veranda, crouching beside the lilies and the ferns.
‘How can you draw like this? You can’t see me,’ he had protested. ‘Why do you want to crouch so low?’
She had refused his invitation and in the end he had just shrugged, leaving her alone, going back to his typewriter in the cool of his study. It was hot. For some reason the fans had all stopped working. Perhaps the generator had broken down again. He would have to get Sugi to look at it. Every now and then as he worked he would look up and catch a glimpse of her faded lime-green skirt translucent against the extraordinary light of the untamed garden. She folded and rearranged herself until from where he sat she was a smudge of green and white and black. He could not see her face; it was hidden by her dark hair. He found her presence disturbing. How was he supposed to work? Surely it must be lunchtime? He half hoped she would stay to eat with him. Sometimes she did; at other times, although she hesitated, an inner tempo seemed to call her, guilt perhaps, a sudden memory of an uncompleted errand for her long-suffering mother. Every time Theo asked her to stay for lunch. He waited, unaware that his breath was bated, for her reply, knowing only his irrational disappointment if she went home.
He had decided then, the best thing to do was to commission her to paint him. It was clear that, once voiced, she would not give up the idea, so one evening he strolled over to Mrs Mendis with the suggestion. Mrs Mendis welcomed him with some aluva and coffee. He told her he wanted to commission Nulani to paint his portrait. He would like to pay her if Mrs Mendis did not mind. Mrs Mendis did not mind. Mr Samarajeeva was extremely kind. She just hoped Nulani would do a proper job.
‘The girl is a dreamer,’ said Mrs Mendis. ‘She does not talk much and she is stubborn. If you can get her to do anything it will be a miracle. Most of the time, if there is any work to be done, she disappears. She won’t help in the house or with any of my sewing. How am I to make a living, with no one to help me?’
Having started her complaints, Mrs Mendis found it curiously difficult to stop. Her thin, high voice rose like the smoke from a mosquito coil.
‘I am a widow,’ she said. ‘Has Nulani told you? Has she told you my husband was set fire to during the rioting in the seventies? They threw a petrol bomb at him. Aiyo, we watched as he went screaming down the Old Tissa Road. Fear kept all the people hidden behind closed doors.’ Mrs Mendis waved her hands about in distress. ‘Everyone watched through the shutters of their houses,’ she said. ‘But no one came to help.’
Harsh sunlight had pressed itself on the edges of the house and then Mrs Mendis had run screaming into the street, chasing hopelessly after her husband, but it was too late. He lay blackened and burnt; clear liquid oozing out from his staring eyes, his body charred, the stench of flesh filling her open-mouthed screams.
‘The neighbours came out of the houses then and pulled me away,’ she said.
They had been fearful she might throw herself on to the flames. By the time the ambulance came he was beyond help.
‘Luckily,’ said Mrs Mendis, lowering her voice, ‘my son Jim was somewhere else and did not see his father’s life as it left this world.’
Lucky Jim. ‘He had been so close to his father,’ she said. ‘The shock is still with him.’
Only the girl had been at home. Mrs Mendis wasn’t sure how much she had seen. Always quiet, she became mute after that.
‘She’s difficult,’ said Mrs Mendis, ‘obstinate and odd.’
Theo Samarajeeva, who had not meant to stay for long, looked around for escape. There was no sign of Nulani, but something about the stillness of the air made him certain she was listening.
Walking home he turned several times, convinced he was being followed. But the road was empty. The air was choked with the heavy scent of frangipani. As he entered his house he noticed Sugi had lit some oil lamps. Theo could see him fixing a few cheap Chinese lanterns to the trees. He poured himself a whisky, and was still listening to the ice crackling in the glass when he saw her. Standing in his doorway holding out a branch of blossom, the rich scent filling the room, her smile wide, her eyes as bright as the new moon.
She came almost daily after that, before school, after her evening meal, at odd unexpected hours, nearly every weekend. A notebook was filling up with small studies of him. Sometimes she showed him what she had done. She seemed to be trying to record every slight movement of his face, he thought, amused. Such was the minute detail of the drawings. He was astonished by her perception. Thin pencils, stubs of charcoal, delicate brushstrokes, whatever she used, all had the same fluid quality, the same effortless logic as they moved across the page. Each time she showed him what she had done, he was astonished all over again.
‘Nulani,’ he asked once, after looking at these drawings for a long time. ‘Why me? Why draw me? Why not someone younger, your brother’s friends perhaps?’
He was genuinely puzzled. But she had only laughed.
‘Wait till you see the painting!’ she promised.
Now he watched her as she drew him from the corner of the veranda.
‘Why don’t you sit somewhere better, child?’ he asked again. ‘You can’t possibly see me clearly from where you are!’
‘I don’t want to see you, Mr Samarajeeva. I’m learning to draw you from memory.’
‘Will you please stop calling me Mr Samarajeeva.’
‘OK, Mr Samarajeeva.’
He never knew if she was teasing him. He had a feeling she could read his mind, that she liked to make him feel older than he felt already, because it amused her, because in fact his age made no difference whatsoever to her.
‘I want to be able to draw you from memory, with my eyes closed,’ she said, ‘so I will never forget you.’
Startled, he stood up. Sugi came in to announce lunch was ready. Lunch was some fresh thora-malu, seer fish, from today’s catch.
‘When will you start painting?’ he asked while they ate. A small beam of sunlight fell on her face. Her skin glowed with a sheen of youthfulness. Through the curtain of thick hair her eyes were as bright as a pair of black cherries. He thought of all the years of living that lay between them, as heavy and as sweet as a piece of sugared coconut jaggery, irreplaceable, unexchangeable, for ever between them.
‘I have already started the painting, but I must draw more. Can I come here and paint?’
Theo laughed. ‘At this rate you will always be here. What will your mother say? She won’t be happy with that idea. She must want to see her daughter sometimes.’
‘I want to be here all the time,’ she said.
Theo looked at her. The beam of sunlight had moved and rested on the top of her head. Her hair was a sleek smoky black; it reminded him of the blue-black cat he and Anna had once had, in that other life. But all he said was: ‘I have to go to Colombo tomorrow, is there anything you need? Any paints I can try to get you?’
He did not tell her that he had done no work since she had been drawing him; he did not tell her that her presence in his house, like a beautiful injured bird, was distraction enough without the drawing. London seemed far away.
‘Has your mother seen the painting?’
‘No. Amma, my mother, worries too much all the time. She doesn’t have time to look.’ She seemed to hesitate. ‘Her worry is because she hopes.’
‘She hopes?’
‘She hopes things will not get worse than they already are. She hopes my brother does not leave, go to England. But she also hopes he does go because he will have a better life there. She hopes she will never see the things she saw once. So she does not look.’
It was the first time she had made reference to her father’s murder.
‘We are not like you,’ she said.
‘But you paint,’ said Theo, ‘you still look.’ And he thought how it was, that this beautiful place, with its idyllic landscape of sea and sky and glorious weather, had lost its way. Both through the lack of human intervention and, also, because of it. How many generations did it take before all the wondrous things of the island could be described again? Twenty years? Fifty years? Would a whole generation have to grow and be replaced before that could happen?
‘You must never stop looking,’ he said firmly. ‘Never. Even when it becomes hard you must never stop. Also, you are a woman. It is important for women to do something about what they see. Only then will there be change. My wife was like that, she would have loved your drawings.’
‘Your wife? Where is she?’
‘She’s dead,’ said Theo.
He kept his voice steady; surprisingly he did not feel the usual sharp stab of bitterness. The beam of sunlight had moved and now shone against the edge of the huge mirror that stood above the Dutch sideboard, reflecting the fine golden sea dust that foxed its surface. Sugi came in with some mangoes. The afternoon heat, dazzling and yellow, was at its worst. It stood in abeyance outside the open door.
‘What was her name?’ asked Nulani, after Sugi had gone.
‘She was called Anna.’
He noticed they had both slipped into their native Singhalese. Was pain easier to deal with in one’s mother tongue? Nulani was thinking too.
‘My brother has a long scar on his leg,’ she said.
When he cut it he had cried. She could remember how his leg had bled, she told Theo. The blood had poured out like rain.
‘There was no blood when Father died. After the ambulance took him away to the mortuary I went back to look at the road. I wanted to see the black dust. It was his dust, his body dust. That was all there was of him.’
She had rubbed the palm of her hand in it, she told Theo, until someone, some neighbour, had pulled her away. She still knew the exact spot where it was. There was a traffic island there now. It was her father’s headstone. It was her scar.
‘You have a scar, no?’ she said. ‘While I have been drawing you I have felt it. It is all over you, no?’ She traced the shape of his spine in the air. ‘It is under your skin, between the backbones,’ she said.
‘It was a long time ago now.’
‘Is that why you came back?’
‘No, yes … partly.’
‘It will get better here,’ said Nulani softly.
She was too young to give him firm comfort but her certainty, though fragile, comforted him anyway. He was twenty-eight years older than her. Mango juice ran down her arm as she ate. Her lips were moist. Anna would have loved a child, he thought. Her generosity would have rushed in like waves, enveloping Nulani. Why had they never come here when Anna was still with him? Fleetingly, he thought of his old home in London, with its books and rugs and old French mirrors that filled the apartment with the light that was always in short supply. How different it was now, where they shuttered out the light instead.
The sun had moved away from the glass as they finished their meal and Theo lit a cigar. Nulani was fidgeting, wanting to get on. She remembered she had to go home. Her uncle, her mother’s brother, was coming to see how his niece and nephew were. He was all they had for a father these days.
‘Sugi will clear the space at the back for you to paint,’ said Theo finally. ‘You can come any time you like, but I shall be in Colombo tomorrow.’
He waved, watching her walk away, the dust from the garden washing brown against her open-toed sandals.
* * *
After he had cleared the room Sugi polished the floor with coconut scrapings. He rubbed as hard as he could, using first his left and then his right foot until the house smelt of it and the floor shone like marble. Then he went outside into the backyard and chopped open a thambili, an orange king coconut, and drank from it. After that he went back to work. There were several jobs he hoped to finish before Mr Samarajeeva returned from Colombo. He liked to surprise him with some small task or other well done. Last time it had been the fixing of the stone lions to the garden wall. The time before that he had painted the shutters.
Mr Samarajeeva was always weary when he returned from Colombo. He looked as he did when Sugi had first seen him, on the day he came to live here, walking from the station with his bags, a piece of paper in his hand, the address of the beach house on it. He had asked for directions and Sugi had brought him to the house, and stayed ever since. At the time he thought Mr Samarajeeva was a foreigner, in his fine tropical suit, with his leather suitcases and his hat. But then Theo had spoken to him in their mother tongue with such fluency that Sugi had grinned.
‘I have been away a long time,’ said Mr Samarajeeva. ‘But my Singhala isn’t bad, is it?’
He had wanted Sugi to work with him, help him set up his life here in the house. He would need some cooking, some domestic chores and some house maintenance. Could Sugi manage all that? Sugi could. As there was no one else to talk to, Mr Samarajeeva talked to Sugi. When his things arrived from London he unpacked them with Sugi and talked about his life there. He unpacked several framed photographs. They were of the same woman, blonde, curly-haired, smiling at the camera.
‘My wife Anna,’ he told Sugi.
Then he unpacked his books. There seemed to be hundreds of books. There were other things from his old life. Later Sugi found out more about his wife. He tried to imagine the type of woman who had collected all these things. The mirrors, the plates, the cutlery. She must have been a fine woman, thought Sugi. When he found out Mr Samarajeeva was famous, the books he had written, and soon the film, he felt it his duty to warn him. These were troubled times. Envy and poverty went hand in hand with the ravaged land, he said. Even though he was a Singhalese, Mr Samarajeeva should be careful. His sympathy for the Tamil children was too well known. The house should be made more secure. Locks were needed for the shutters and the doors. The garden wall needed to be repaired in order to keep intruders out. Sugi made a list. Theo smiled lazily. He did not stop Sugi but he did not care much either.
‘Sir,’ said Sugi genuinely puzzled, ‘you don’t understand. There can be sudden outbreaks of trouble here. When you least expect it. You must be careful. People know who you are and they talk too much in these parts. It’s not as you remember, no?’
All this was before the Mendis girl started visiting. Sugi knew the family.
‘The boy is the only son, Sir,’ he said. ‘He is arrogant, and clever. There is talk of him getting a British Council scholarship in spite of what happened to the father. The father was warned several times, you know. Before they killed him, they warned him. But he was a fearless man who spoke out against the injustice done to the Tamils long ago. So, even though he was warned, he ignored the warnings.’
He paused, remembering.
‘He was an educated man, too. He wasn’t a fool. But in the end it did him no good. He was very handsome, and he had strong principles. Always campaigning for the Tamil underdog. What they did to him was a terrible thing. But you know, Sir, he should have been more careful. Someone should have advised him. That silly wife of his, someone.’
‘And the girl?’ asked Theo.
‘Oh, the girl looks just like him,’ said Sugi, misunderstanding. ‘But you know the whole family is being watched now. They were never popular. And the boy is very selfish. He is only interested in himself.’
It was clear Mr Samarajeeva was not interested in the boy, thought Sugi, disapproving of the girl’s visits.
‘She comes here too often, Sir, now,’ he warned. ‘There are certain people in this town who are very interested in that family.’
She was friendly enough, thought Sugi, but still, she might bring trouble with her. Someone had once told him she had stopped talking after her father died, but from what he could hear she never stopped when she was with Theo. Her drawings, he reluctantly admitted, were another matter. They were good. Sir had them scattered all over the house and now, in this latest development, the girl was going to work on Mr Samarajeeva’s portrait in the house. Sugi shook his head. He could not understand how the mother could care so little that she let her daughter wander around in this way. How could a respectable Singhalese woman be so negligent? Rumour was that Mrs Mendis had become unhinged since the tragedy. But then, thought Sugi, going off on another track, everyone is strange nowadays. The things that had happened in this place were turning people mad. It was not possible to have normal lives any longer. It was not possible to walk without looking over your shoulder at all times. Without wondering who was a friend and who a new enemy. Fear and suspicion was the thing they lived off, it was the only diet they had had for years. Almost every family he knew was touched in some way by the troubles, living with the things they were too frightened to talk about. There was no point, no point to anything. One just waited, hoping. Dodging the curfew. Hoping not to put a foot wrong, thought Sugi, hoping not to tread the rusty barbed wire hidden in the sea sand.
A few nights previously Sugi had cautioned Theo again. Not that it was any use, but he had tried.
‘You must not walk on the beach when there is a curfew. The army is watching. Or if they are not, then there are thugs who will watch for them. Believe me, Sir. And another thing, you shouldn’t have given your talk about your book at the schools. They won’t like that.’
‘It is no way to live,’ said Theo Samarajeeva frowning. ‘No one owns the beach. Sugi, there are many countries all over the world that have trouble like this. We must not give in to the bullies.’
‘Ours is a very small country,’ Sugi said, shaking his head. ‘No one cares about us. Why should they? Only we care about the differences between the Singhalese and the Tamils. No one understands what this fight is about. We hardly understand ourselves any more.’
Theo nodded. He brought out his pipe and began tapping it.
‘When the British brought the Tamils here from India, some people thought they brought trouble to this island,’ Sugi said.
Theo was trying to light his pipe but the breeze kept whipping the flame so that he had to turn away. Sugi continued to stare into space. When he spoke at last he sounded agitated.
‘What is wrong with us that we behave in this way?’ He watched as Theo struggled to relight his pipe. ‘Isn’t it possible for us to solve this thing peacefully?’
‘It will take longer than we think,’ Theo said, He put his match into the ashtray Sugi handed him. ‘Why should the world care, Sugi?’ he asked gently. ‘We aren’t important enough for the British any more. And unlike the Middle East, we have no oil. So we can kill each other and no one will notice. That’s why things will take longer than we think.’
He knew from his life in England, people thought Sri Lanka was a place spiralling into madness; and yes, he thought, it was true, no one cared.
They had taken to having these conversations in the evening when the curfew was on. The girl never came after the curfew. Sugi was thankful that at least her mother had the sense to keep her in at night. So Theo had only Sugi to talk to. Sugi was always careful to keep a respectful distance from Mr Samarajeeva during these discussions. Occasionally he accepted a cigarette or a beer but never anything else. He stood a little away from the chairs; he would never accept a seat. Sometimes he squatted on the step, the end of his cigarette glowing in the dark.
‘I would like to see England,’ he said one night. ‘I think the people there are not like us.’
‘No, they’re not. But they have their own problems, Sugi, their own battles. Just as pointless in their different ways. And I never really felt I belonged there.’
‘Even after all that time, Sir?’
‘No,’ said Theo with certainty. ‘These are my people. This is where I belong.’
But Sugi was doubtful.
‘Don’t mistake our friendliness, Sir. We are Buddhists but these days we have forgotten this,’ said Sugi. ‘We are quite capable of killing. It isn’t like before. When you were last here. Things are complicated now. These days we don’t know who we are.’
Theo nodded in agreement. ‘They should have known it wouldn’t end simply,’ he murmured.
‘Who? The Tamils?’
‘No, Sugi,’ Theo said. He sounded sad. ‘I mean those who conquered us. I mean the British. Their presence casts its shadow on this island. Still.
‘Cause and effect, Sir. Just as the Buddha said.’
But Theo was following his own thoughts.
‘Why are we surprised by this war, Sugi? Has there ever been a country that, once colonised, avoided civil war? Africa? India? Burma?’
Night flowers appeared everywhere in the garden, blooming in ghostly clusters, their branches pouring scent into the air. Frogs croaked, small bats moved silently in the trees, and here and there, in the dull light of the lamp, silvery insects darted about. On one occasion Sugi shone a torch into the undergrowth, convinced a nest of snakes lurked close by. He advanced with his axe but then the moon had gone behind a cloud and he could not find a single one. At other times, on certain nights, suddenly there were no sounds at all. No drums, no radios, no sirens. Nothing moved in the darkness and at such moments Sugi’s nervousness would increase. The silence, he complained, was worse than all the noise, the atmosphere created by it, terrifying in a different way. Suspense hung heavily in the air; at such moments anything could happen. For in Sugi’s experience, most murders were committed in the lull before the full moon. Whispers alighted as softly as mosquitoes on unsuspecting flesh; whispers of torture. And the smell of death brought the snakes out. Theo listened to Sugi’s fears without speaking. But then, sometimes, on these faceless nights, as they sat talking in the garden, they would catch the unmistakable sigh of the great ocean drifting towards them. They would hear it very clearly, rushing and tugging, to and fro and across, in an endless cycle as it washed and rewashed the bone-white shore. And as always, as they listened, the sound of it comforted them both.
By the time Theo Samarajeeva returned from Colombo the back room of his house had been cleared, the walls lime-washed, and Nulani Mendis was installed with her canvases, her paints and her cheap thinners. The house smelt of coconuts and linseed oil. He knew she was there even as he approached, even as the bougainvillea cascaded into view over the new garden wall. The light from the mirrors in this hastily devised studio flickered in a dazzling way, casting intermittent reflections on everything in the room. Theo watched through the open window as Nulani crouched on the ground working on the painting. She used rags to mix the paint, and rags to layer it smoothly on to the canvas. All around were her pencil drawings of him. He could not see her face. Slivers of light danced on her hair. He did not know how long he stood watching her. Time stood still.
After a while she moved, placing the painting against the wall beside a chair where the reflections continued to tremble, uninterrupted. There was an old jug made of thin dusty glass nearby on a shelf. Shadows poured endlessly into it where once it must have held liquid. The heat was impossible. Before he could say anything she turned suddenly and saw him. Her instantaneous smile caught them both unawares. It must have been a trick of the light, thought Theo surprised, but the day seemed exceptionally pierced by the sun.
‘So you are back,’ she said. ‘Sugi said you wouldn’t be back till later.’
How to tell her that Colombo seemed unbearably hot and crowded? That what he thought he had needed to look up in the university library had in fact been irrelevant? That he knew, if he hurried, he would be able to catch an earlier train and be back before she went home, thereby seeing her a day sooner? How to tell her all this when he was unable to understand these thoughts himself?
‘I have brought you a present,’ he said instead, handing her a paper bag. Inside were all the colours she wanted but did not have. Cobalt blue, crimson lake, Venetian red. A bottle of pure turpentine, refined linseed oil. The paints were good-quality pigments, made in England, of the sort she had seen long ago in the English neighbour’s house when she had stolen the pencils. The tubes were clean and uncrushed by use. She opened them and watched as traces of oil oozed slowly out; the colour was not far behind. They looked good enough to eat. Her bright red dress was new.
‘It’s my birthday today,’ she said delighted, seeing him look at her dress. ‘I was hoping you would come back today.’
‘I know!’ he said. ‘Happy seventeenth birthday!’
Again the day seemed suffused by an inexplicable green lightness, of the kind he remembered in other times, in other places. Maybe there will be rain later, thought Theo, confused.
She had begun to paint him against a curtain of foliage. There were creases in his white shirt, purple shadows along one arm. She had given his eyes a reflective quality that hinted at other colours beyond the darkness of the pupils. Was this him, really? Was this what she saw? In the painting he paused as he wrote, looking into the distance. Aspects of him emerged from the canvas, making certain things crystal clear.
‘You were looking at me,’ she said laughing, pointing to one of the drawings.
He did not know what to say. Her directness left him helpless. Perhaps it was this simplicity that he needed in his new book. Once he had been able to deal with all kinds of issues swiftly, cut to the heart of the matter. Now for some reason it seemed impossible for him to think in this way. Had fear and hurt and self-pity done all this to him? Or was this the uncertainty of middle age? Suddenly he felt small and ashamed. He stood looking at the painting and at the girl framed by the curtain of green light, aware vaguely that she was still smiling at him. He stood staring at her until Sugi called out that lunch was ready.
‘Tell me about Anna,’ she demanded, over lunch. ‘I have been looking at all the pictures of her. They are very beautiful.’
So he told her something about Anna.
‘I used to see her every morning in a little café where I went for breakfast.’
‘In London?’
‘No, in Venice. She was Italian. We used to glance at each other without speaking. It was bitterly cold that winter. The apartment I was renting was so cold that I would go to this little dark café for breakfast. And I would drink a grappa,’ he said smiling, remembering.
‘What happened then?’
‘One day she came in with some other people. Two women and a man. The man was clearly interested in her.’
‘So what did you do?’
Theo smiled, shaking his head. ‘Nothing. What could I do? My Italian was not very good in those days. But then she turned and waved at me. Asked me if I would like to join them. I was astonished, astonished that she should notice me.’
‘But you said you used to look at each other every morning.’
‘Yes,’ said Theo. ‘I suppose I mean I was surprised she noticed me enough to want to talk to me.’
He was silent again, thinking of the fluidity of their lives afterwards, the passion that never seemed to diminish as they travelled through Europe. Then he described the high tall house in London with the mirrors and the blousy crimson peonies she loved to buy. He spoke of the books they had both written, so different yet one feeding off the other.
‘She was very beautiful,’ he said, unaware of the change in his voice. ‘Now she was someone you should have drawn.’
Nulani was listening intensely. He became aware of her curious dark eyes fixed on him. He did not know how much she understood. What could Europe mean to her?
‘My brother Jim wants to go to Europe,’ she said at last. ‘He says, when he is in England studying it will be easy to travel.’
‘And you? What about you?’
But he knew the answer even before she told him. Who would take her? What would she make of Paris. And Venice?
‘I will go one day,’ she said as though reading his mind. ‘Maybe we will go together.’
He felt his chest tighten unaccountably, and he wondered what her father had been like. What would he have made of this beautiful daughter of his, had he lived? Nulani had told him he had been a poet. She remembered him, she told Theo, but only as a dreamer. Always making her mother angry as she, Nulani, did now. What fragile balance in their family had been upset by his death? The afternoon had moved on but the heat showed no sign of letting up. The sun had moved to another place.
‘You should go home,’ he said, suddenly anxious, not wishing to keep her out too late. ‘I’ll get Sugi to walk you home.’
But she would have none of it; standing close to him holding her paints, so close he could smell the faint perfume that was her skin, mixing with the oils.
‘Thank you,’ she said and she went, a splash of red against the sea-faded blue gate, and then through the trees, and then taking in glimpses of road and bougainvillea before she disappeared from view around the bend of the hot empty road. Taking with her all the myriad, unresolved hues of the day, shimmering into the distance.
Chapter 2 (#ulink_f7890486-09ed-5d96-8fc0-585583942d2e)
THEO HAD NOT SEEN THE GIRL for five days. He waited, watching the geckos climbing haltingly across the lime-washed walls. He walked on the beach most evenings, much to Sugi’s alarm, ignoring the curfews, hoping she might be doing the same. He sat on the veranda smoking; he wandered into the room strewn with her paints. The smell of turpentine and oil remained as strong as ever. It was the way of smells, he knew. It had been this way when Anna had died. All the smells of beeswax and red peonies, of lavender-washed cotton and typewriter ribbon had gathered together, bringing her back to him in small concentrated fragments. So he knew about smells, the way they tumbled into the air, falling softly again, here and there, like confetti without the bride. The sunlight seemed suddenly to have lost its brilliance. His old anger returned. He had thought he was over it, but bitterness attacked him in waves. Ugliness remembered. Sugi watched him surreptitiously, serving his meals, bringing a tray of morning tea, cooking a redfish curry in the way he liked it. The fans had stopped working again and the lights often failed at night. Sugi watched him in the light of the coconut-oil lamps. There did not seem to be much evidence of Sir working. Across the garden Theo felt the silence stretch into eternity. The leaves on the pawpaw tree looked large and malevolent.
‘Sir,’ said Sugi finally, ‘Sir, why are you not writing?’
Beyond the light from the veranda the undergrowth rustled vaguely. Two mosquito coils burned into insubstantial columns. A black-spotted moth circled the lamps, mesmerised. Sugi looked at Theo. This is a fine state of affairs, he thought. It was as well he was here.
‘Maybe there is trouble at her house, no?’ he ventured tentatively. ‘Shall I go and find out?’
‘No,’ said Theo quickly.
Such an intrusion was unbearable and he could not allow it. Sugi fell silent again. Maybe he should talk about something else instead. Sir was a grown man after all. He had lived all over the world. Given the things he had been through, his innocence was surprising.
‘There is a shortage of food in the market this week,’ Sugi said. ‘I don’t know why. I could only get river cress, a coconut and a bunch of shrivelled radishes.’
It was true. The rice was appalling too, and there were no fresh vegetables to be had.
‘Of all the places on this island,’ he continued, complaining loudly, hoping to distract Theo, ‘this should be the place for fresh fish. But the day’s catch had vanished by the time I got into the town. There’s been some kind of trouble further along the coast; maybe that’s got something to do with it. Someone told me the army drove their jeeps on to the sands, chasing a group of men. And then they shot them. They were all young, Sir. Nobody knows what they had done.’
He spread his hands helplessly in front of him.
‘The army left the bodies on the beach, and the local people cleared up the mess. There is always someone prepared to clean up after them. Either a Buddhist or a Christian. They will always find someone to do the dirty work.’
Theo shifted uneasily in his chair. Sugi’s anxiety was different from his.
On the fifth evening of Nulani’s absence, in spite of Sugi’s entreaties, Theo decided to walk along the beach again.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘nothing can happen to me. It’s not people like me that interest them. I’m too well known. I’m safe.’
And he went out. A full moon spilled a continuous stream of silver on to the water. An express train hooted its way along the coast, rushing towards Colombo. But there was no sign of the girl on the empty beach. What is the matter with me, he thought, exasperated. Am I going mad? She’s probably busy, helping her mother, sewing, being seventeen. And she never said when she would be back, he reasoned silently. He was puzzled by this disturbance to his equilibrium. Time was passing, in a few months it would be winter in England. His agent would not wait for ever. He had not written much. As he watched, the moon spread its phosphorescent glow into the sea.
‘Look,’ Sugi said when he returned.
He held out a piece of paper. Thick heady blossoms glowed white under the lamplight while Theo unfolded it quickly. It was from the girl. She had drawn a picture of a man. The man was sitting on one of the cane chairs on her veranda. There was a cup of tea on the table beside him; it was placed on a heavily embroidered cloth. The man’s face was in profile, but still, it was possible to see the fine lines of dissatisfaction and anger and suppressed cruelty. It was possible to see all this on the small piece of paper, clearly marked by the stub of a pencil.
‘It’s her uncle, Sir,’ said Sugi when Theo showed him. ‘I know this man. He is a bad man. The talk is he betrayed Mr Mendis. That it was because of him, the thugs came. He never liked his sister’s choice of husband. There are seven brothers in that family, you know, and they like their women to do as they are told.’
Theo felt anger tighten its belt around him. His anxiety for the girl intensified.
‘I think I’ll take a walk over to Mrs Mendis’s house,’ he said.
But Sugi was alarmed. He would not let Theo be so foolish.
‘Are you crazy, Sir? Leave that family alone, for God’s sake. I’m telling you, you don’t understand the people here. You must not meddle with things in this place. Please, Mr Samarajeeva, this isn’t England. The girl will be OK. It’s her family, and she is no fool. She will come here, tomorrow or the next day, you’ll see.’
He sounded like a parent, quietening a restless child. In spite of his anger another part of Theo saw this and felt glad. He was amazed at the easy affection between them. They had slipped into a friendship, Sugi and he, in spite of the rising tide of anxiety around them, perhaps because of it.
‘Sugi,’ he said softly into the darkness, feeling a sudden sharp sense of belonging. ‘You are my good friend, you know. I feel as if I have known you for ever.’
He hesitated. He would have liked to say something more. Moved by their growing affection for each other, he would have liked to speak of it. But he could not think of the right way to express himself. Sugi, too, seemed to hesitate, as though he understood. So Theo said nothing and instead poured them both a beer. But the warmth between them would not go away, settling down quietly, curling up like a contented animal. He looked at the note again. Underneath the drawing Nulani had captioned it with two exclamation marks. What did that mean?
‘I told you, Sir, the girl understands her family better than you. She is probably laughing at her uncle right now. You must not worry so much. She’ll be able to take care of herself. And tomorrow she will be back, you’ll see,’ he added, cheerfully, for he could see that Theo was less worried now. ‘I’ll squeeze some limes and make a redfish curry. Tomorrow.’
‘I would have liked children, Sugi,’ Theo said later on, calmer now than he had been for days.
Sugi nodded, serious. ‘Children are a blessing, Sir, but they are endless trouble as well. In this country we seem to have children only to carry on our suffering. In this country it’s only one endless cycle of pain for us. Some terrible curse has fallen on us since we became greedy.’
Startled, Theo looked sharply at him. He had forgotten the slow and inevitable philosophy of his countrymen. But before he could speak, Sugi put his hand out to silence him. The moon had retreated behind a cloud and a slight breeze moved the leaves. It reminded Theo of other balmy nights long ago with Anna, spent in the fishing ports along the South of France. Something rustled in the undergrowth; Sugi disappeared silently along the side of the house. Thinking he heard the gate creak Theo stood up. A moment later there was a muffled grunt, the sound of a scuffle and Sugi reappeared, emerging through the bushes, pushing a boy of about fourteen in front of him. He had twisted the boy’s arm behind his back and was gripping him hard. In the light of the returning moon a knife glinted in his hand.
‘He was trying to break in, Sir, from the back. With this,’ he added grimly.
And he held up the knife. He pushed the boy roughly towards Theo, speaking to him in Singhalese.
‘He says he was only doing what he was told.’
‘What were you trying to steal?’ Theo asked him, also in Singhalese.
But the boy would not reply. In another moment, with a swift jerk of his elbow he broke free and vaulted over the garden wall, vanishing into the night. And although they ran out into the darkened road there was no sign of him anywhere. Sugi began bolting the windows and checking the side of the house, shining a torch on the dense mass of vegetation.
‘Tomorrow,’ he said, shaking his head, looking worried, ‘I will cut some of it back.’
Tomorrow he would rig up a garden light to surprise any further intruders. The boy was probably just a petty thief, stealing things to sell in order to buy drugs. But still, one could not be too careful. Tomorrow he would make some enquiries in the town. Meanwhile, Sir should go to bed.
After he had lit another mosquito coil and closed the net around himself, just at the point of sleep, Theo realised he had forgotten to ask Sugi who had delivered the drawing from the girl. And he thought with certainty, Sugi was probably right; the girl would reappear in the morning.
She was waiting for him the next morning in her usual spot on the veranda, drawing his lounge-backed cane chair.
‘So,’ he said sitting down, filling her view, smiling, ‘so, welcome back!’
And he seemed to hear the faintest flutter of wings. Small banana-green parrots hopped restlessly in the trees, music floated out from the house, and the air was filled with beginnings and murmurings. Last night seemed not to have happened at all. Her uncle had just left, she said. It was Saturday; there was no school so she had escaped from home. She wanted to work on the painting. Too much time had been wasted by her uncle’s visit. He had come to discuss Jim’s future. The days had been filled with squabbling and the thin raised voice of her mother. Her uncle had not cared about his sister’s distress. He merely wanted Jim to join the organisation he ran.
‘It’s something to do with the military,’ Nulani said scornfully. ‘I think they spy on people, for the army. My uncle said Jim is old enough and it was time for him to give up his studies. He said there’s no time for studying right now, when Sri Lanka needs him.’
‘What?’ said Theo. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Yes, but Amma does not want this kind of future for her son. She is frightened, she has lost my father, she does not want to lose a son as well.’
Sooner or later, Nulani’s uncle had told them, sooner or later Lucky Jim’s luck would run out. Then what would he do? Better to start now, show which side of the fence he was on. Before questions were asked.
‘So he was threatening your brother?’ Theo asked.
‘Yes, but Amma will not allow it. So they were fighting.’
Sugi brought out a dish of pawpaw. He had been preparing the table for breakfast. He covered it with an indigo cloth. Then he brought out some freshly made egg hoppers and some seeni sambol. And a small jug of boiled milk with the tea. A band of sunlight had escaped from the roof and bent across the table, stretching across the floor. Theo went inside to turn the record over.
‘And you? What did your uncle have to say to you,’ he asked, coming back.
Nulani pulled a face, laughing up at him. ‘I dropped two dishes yesterday,’ she said. ‘I was in a hurry. I thought if I cleared up quickly I might be able to come here. But then I dropped the dishes and Amma shouted at me. So I couldn’t escape.’
‘What happened then? Were you punished or something?’ It all sounded ludicrous.
Nulani shrugged. ‘No. Amma just said, “ What’s wrong with the girl? ” and that started my uncle off again, only this time he began to shout at me. He said I hadn’t been trained properly and I needed a husband!’
‘What?’ asked Theo in alarm.
‘Oh, he’s full of talk,’ Nulani said dismissively. ‘He can’t do anything. And I just ignore him anyway. He told Amma he would find someone suitable for me to marry, but Amma was too angry about what he had said to Jim to worry about me.’
The sky seemed cloudless and suddenly overbright.
‘I don’t have to do what he tells me,’ said Nulani. ‘My father hated him.’
But her father could no longer help her, Theo thought uneasily. Thinking also, in spite of this new threat from the uncle, how glad he was she was here now, and how empty the days had been while she had stayed away, wondering too, what he might do that would be of any help to her. Wondering if the chasm of age and life and experience left room for giving her anything on his part.
‘I haven’t seen you for five days,’ she said, suddenly, and in that moment, it seemed to Theo, the sky had changed and was now the timeless blue of the tea-country lakes.
‘But I have been drawing you from memory. Look, they’re nearly perfect,’ she told him, moving her chair closer and handing him her book. Once again images rose from the pages, tossed carelessly out, those aspects of himself that he barely intuited. There he was smiling, pensive, staring owlishly into the distance, cleaning his glasses. Oh Christ, he thought, Christ! What was this? He looked at the drawings helplessly, feeling his heart contract painfully. Lighting his pipe he drank his tea in silence. Then he stood up and held the door of her new studio open, smiling down at her.
‘Work,’ he said firmly, wanting for some aching, unaccountable reason to touch her long dark hair.
What remained of the morning was spent in this way. Nulani worked on the two canvases that would eventually be the portraits of Theo. The smell of her colours, mixed with the turpentine, filling the house. Outside a monkey screamed and screamed again. The heat draped itself like a heavy leaded curtain across the veranda. They would have to take their lunch indoors. Somewhere in the kitchen Sugi was scraping coconuts. Theo had so far written two sentences towards his new book. The image of the girl wove into his thoughts; it ran with the sound of the piano music from the record, it merged confusingly with the heat outside. Why had he ever imagined he could work in this place? I need the cold, he thought, restlessness stirring in him. He thought of the muffled noise of traffic rising up towards the tops of the plane trees in Kensington. A memory of his wide airy flat returned to him with the mirrors and the pale duck-egg walls, broken by patches of Kandyan red and orange cloth. Once he had been able to work among all that elegance, once he had had another life. Perhaps, thought Theo, perhaps I have no more to say; perhaps this latest book is doomed? Perhaps the sun has sapped my inspiration?
But then he went to get the girl, for the lunch was ready, and he saw the light flickering against the walls of the room where she worked. Her small face was smudged with paint, and it struck him forcefully that no, his book was not doomed at all. For the early-afternoon sun seemed to turn and pivot on a new axis of optimism. Sugi too seemed to have excelled himself with the lunch. All he said was that the market had been good as he set the jug of lime juice down and brought in the curries; murunga, bitter-gourd, brinjal, fish and boiled rice. He was smiling broadly and his previous disapproval of the girl seemed to have evaporated. Nulani, unaware of any difference, chattered happily with him as he brought in the food. But he would not stay while they ate, shyly asking instead if he might take a look at the painting of Sir.
‘Yes, yes,’ the girl said delighted. ‘But Mr Samarajeeva must not see it yet.’
‘Will you stop calling me that!’ Theo laughed. ‘Come back and tell me what you think.’
But Sugi could not be persuaded. He had work to do, he said. He was going to put barbed wire over the back-garden wall, whether Sir liked it or not.
So that it wasn’t until much later, when they were alone and he smoked his cigarette on the veranda with Theo, that he said, ‘She is very talented, Sir.’
They sat for a moment in companiable silence.
‘And she has become too attached to you,’ Sugi said.
All afternoon he had been working on the garden. The heat had eased off slightly, and then the girl, having cleared up her paints, had gone home. Huge tropical stars appeared between the leaves of the plantain trees. The garden was as secure as it was possible to make it, he told Theo. It had not been easy to get barbed wire; in the end, hoping no one had seen him, Sugi had picked up what had been lying around the beach. He was still worried about the boy from the night before, he told Theo.
‘You worry too much,’ said Theo, smiling at him. His affection felt clumsy. Again he recognised his own inability to speak of the growing bond between them.
He is like a brother to me, he thought with amazement. If I believed in it, I would say we had known one another in a previous life. It occurred to him that he would like to give Sugi something to mark his feelings, some tangible thing, a talisman for the future that was nothing to do with payments or employment. But he did not know how, or even what. And then, once more, he found himself thinking of the girl and her extraordinary quiet ability to make sense of all she saw, with delicate pencil lines overlaying more lines. The evening, and the night ahead, seemed suddenly interminably long until the morning. He hoped she had reached her home safely. He worried that she let neither Sugi nor him walk her back. He worried that her uncle was waiting for her. What on earth is wrong with me, he muttered, half exasperated, half amused at himself. I’m acting like her mother. And then he thought, Am I simply being sentimental? Perhaps this is what middle age is about. As he lit the mosquito coil, before he got under the net, he remembered again that he had forgotten to ask Sugi who had delivered Nulani’s drawing the night before.
One morning, some weeks later, Theo decided to visit the temple on the hill. The girl had told him it was very beautiful.
‘You should go,’ she had said. ‘We held my father’s funeral there.’
He had sensed she wanted him to go for this reason and he thought of the irony of it. Burning the man who had already been burned. Mrs Mendis was leaving the temple as he entered. He heard her calling him and looked around for an escape but there was none.
‘I have brought an offering for my son,’ she said. ‘He sits his scholarship exam this morning. I think his karma is good but I want to be sure he passes. I don’t want him to join the army. I don’t want him to die like my husband,’ she said, talking too loudly.
Theo looked at the woman with dislike. She had not mentioned her daughter once. Inside the temple it was cool and dark, and further back, out of sight, the monks sat in rows, their chants rising and falling in slow, low folds. The air was crowded with sounds, like the hum of hundreds of invisible birds. It reminded him of his childhood, of his mother. He had not been in a temple for many years. He stood in the coolness, thinking of Mr Mendis, wondering what he might have been like. And then he thought of the girl, wishing he had known her as a small child. Thinking how fleeting glimpses of that lost time often emerged in her mischievous laugh. Certain, too, that her father would always remain within her, however long she lived.
That afternoon, Nulani talked about her brother’s probable departure.
‘I think he will be happier in England,’ she told Theo. ‘And maybe he will come back to see us when the trouble is over.’
By now she was working on the larger portrait. She wanted it to be a surprise, she said. But she was less happy, he saw. Something was ebbing out of her, some vitality moved away leaving her drawn and hurt. Watching this, Theo felt unaccountably depressed.
‘That boy will never come back,’ Sugi said quietly, when he heard. ‘He only thinks about himself. Once he leaves he will forget about them.’
Sugi watched Theo. Although he said very little he knew all the signs were there. If he is not careful, he worried, Sir will get hurt. Why doesn’t he see this? Why, after all he has been through, is he not more careful? He’s a clever man, but … And Sugi shook his head.
‘Maybe,’ Theo said, ‘things will be easier for her when Jim goes. Maybe the mother will care more.’
‘The Mendis woman has only ever cared about the son, I tell you, Sir,’ Sugi said. ‘I know all about her. After the father was murdered, she used to talk to my friend who works in Sumaner House. And it was always the boy she worried about. Lucky Jim! That’s her name for him. She hardly notices her daughter.’
They were sitting on the veranda once again. It was late and the heat had finally moved a little distance away. Most nights now Theo listened to the menace of the garden, the rustlings and unknown creepings that scratched against the trees. He was hardly aware of doing so, but since the intruder, both he and Sugi were watchful.
‘And her father?’ he asked. ‘What was he like?’
‘People used to watch them,’ Sugi remembered. ‘Mr Mendis used to walk with his daughter every evening, up and down the beach. They used to say you could set your clocks watching those two. They always walked at five o’clock, every day, except when the monsoons came. He used to hold her hand. She was devoted to him.’ Sugi’s eyes moved restlessly across the garden. ‘It must have been terrible for her after he died. She must have felt so alone.’
They were both silent. Then Sugi went off for his nightly surveillance of the perimeter walls and gate, testing his barbed wire, wandering silently through the undergrowth. When he was satisfied that everything was in order, he came back and accepted a beer.
‘She needs to go from this place,’ he continued. ‘There is nothing here for her. Her uncle is a very unpleasant man. And, Sir, I know I’ve said it before, but you should be careful with this family. The girl is good but you are a stranger to these parts. Please don’t forget this.’
The night, once again, was quiet. There were no sounds of gunshots or sirens. Nor were there street lights here, for it was too far away from the other houses. The scent of blossom drifted in waves towards them. Occasionally the plaintive, lonely hoot of a train could be heard in the distance, but that was all.
‘You can’t change anything,’ said Sugi. He sounded sad. ‘You are right, things will take longer than we expect. Life is just a continuous cycle. Eventually, of course, at the right time there will be change. But however hard we try to alter things ourselves, what must be will be. Who knows how long it will take, Sir. Sri Lanka is an ancient island. It cannot be hurried.’
Theo watched the headlights of a car disappeared from view. The yellow beam stretched through the trees, bending with the road, piercing the darkness, searching the night. Then it was gone. It occurred to him there had been no car along that particular stretch of road for weeks.
Someone had thrown a plucked chicken over the wall into the garden. They had tossed it over, cleverly missing the barbed wire. It was trussed; legs together, smeared with yellowish powder, a thin red thread wound tightly round its neck. Even though death had come swiftly, leaving traces of blood, staring at it Theo imagined the frenzy of anger that had brought it to this state. A whole pageant of slaughter lay here, he thought, in this one small carcass. Mesmerised, he gazed at a half-remembered history, of sacrifice both ancient and bloodied. The turmeric had given the chicken’s skin the appearance of a threadbare carpet. He touched the bird with his foot; it was so long since he had seen something like this he had almost forgotten what it was meant for. And as he stood gazing at it, he remembered, in a rush of forgotten irritation, the reasons he had never made this country his home. Impatiently, for the waste of energy angered him, he kicked the chicken across the garden, and in doing so crossed a hidden boundary. For in that moment, it seemed to the horrified Sugi looking on, he did what no man should ever do: he tampered with those laws that could not be argued with.
‘Don’t touch it, Sir, for God’s sake,’ implored Sugi, but he was too late. The deed was done.
‘Don’t touch it, Sir, please. I will see to it. Someone is trying to put a curse on this place.’
Theo grinned. He has been away too long, thought Sugi, distressed. He questioned, instead of accepting. Twenty-odd years living away had made Theo forget. He was trying to single-handedly alter the inner structure of life. And seeing this, Sugi was frightened. His fear clung to the barbed wire that was pressed against the garden wall. Fear had been stalking Sugi daily for years.
‘This town is not as it used to be,’ he said. ‘We used to know everyone who lived here. We knew their fathers and their grandfathers too. We knew all the relatives, Sir. Many people have moved into this area, thinking it is safer here. But the trouble is, this has made it less safe. There are thugs in the pay of the authority, and there are thugs working for those who would like to be rid of the authority. Singhalese, Tamils, what does it matter who they are, everyone spies on everyone else.’ A nation’s hatred has split open, he said, like two halves of a coconut. ‘People are angry, Sir. They can barely hide it.’
Theo was silenced. Other people’s jealousies spilled out around him, dismembered bodies, here and there they scattered randomly, saffron yellow and cochineal. He could say nothing in the face of Sugi’s certainty. He did not want to hurt his feelings. Only the girl, arriving soon afterwards, expressed contempt. The dead chicken did not bother her, she said; she had seen so many before. Her father, she told Theo, had laughed at such nonsense. Her father had been full of peace, she told him. He did not believe violence answered anything, and so Nulani Mendis believed this too. She drank the lime juice Sugi had made for her and it was she who tried to reassure him. She was wearing her faded green skirt wrapped even more tightly around her slender waist and her skin appeared flawless through the thin cotton blouse. Sunlight fell in straight sheets behind her, darkening her hair, shadowing her face, making it difficult to read her expression. For a moment she seemed no longer a child. Had she changed since yesterday? puzzled Theo.
When she finished working on her painting she discarded her overall. There were still some slivers of paint in her fingernails. Today they were of a different colour. However hard she scrubbed her hands there was still some paint left, thought Theo amused. The day righted itself. The soft smell of colour still clung to her and seemed to Theo sweeter than all the scent of the frangipani blossoms. The picture was nearly finished, she told him, and she wanted to do another one. She needed one more sketch of him. Would Theo be able to sit still, please? He hid his amusement, noticing she had become a little bossy. Her notebook of drawings had grown and she wanted to use them in one more painting. She wanted to paint Theo in his dining room with its foxed mirrors, its beautiful water glasses, its jugs. She wanted to paint him surrounded by mirror-reflected light. Light that moved, she said. This was what interested her, not the trussed chicken. And no, she did not want him to sneak a look at the portrait, she added, laughing at him.
‘You can see it soon,’ she promised, as though he was the child. ‘When it’s finished.’
For now, she told Theo, he could look at her sketchbook instead. Once again she gave him the fragmented stories she had collected. And again they fell from the pages in a jumble of images.
‘Look,’ she said laughing, ‘my uncle!’
She stood too close, confusing him, making him want to touch her hair. Their conversations were a running stitch across her notebook, holding together all that he could not say.
‘There’s no one at home,’ she volunteered. ‘Jim has gone to Colombo with his teacher and Amma is visiting a friend. So I’m all on my own.’
She did not say it, but it was clear she was free to do what she pleased. How can I encourage her to defy her mother in this way? wondered Theo.
‘Jim has to get all the documents he needs to leave.’ Her brother’s departure was never far from her thoughts.
‘Doesn’t he want to wait?’ asked Theo. ‘Doesn’t he want to be sure he has passed the exam first?’
But, Nulani told him, Jim was certain. His teacher too believed he would pass the examination and be awarded the British Council scholarship. Such certainty, thought Theo, raising an eyebrow. He said nothing, watching as the thought of Jim’s certain departure darted and fluttered across her face.
‘He wants to leave Sri Lanka by October,’ Nulani said. She dared not think what that would mean for her.
For the moment, though, with the absence of her family, something, some unspecified tension seemed to ease up. She would stay late and the mornings were fresh and unhampered by the heat. The days stretched deliciously before them, slipping into an invisible rhythm of its own. By now Theo had become used to her presence, and he worked steadily on his manuscript, distracted only occasionally. Perhaps, he thought, Anna had been right. She had always insisted they needed a child to give purpose to their lives. A child was an anchor. It brought with it the kind of love that settles one, she used to say. When she had died Theo had remembered this, thinking, too, how useless a child would have been when all he wanted had been her. Now he wondered if Anna, wise, lovely Anna, had been right after all.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_b8bb580c-bc5b-5623-be45-bc5b78cae39d)
THERE WERE FLEETS OF ENORMOUS ORANGE MOTHS in Sumaner House where Vikram lived. Moths and antique dust that piled up in small hills behind the coloured-glass doors. The beetles had drilled holes in the fretwork of the frames and sawdust had gathered in small mounds on the ground. It was a useless house really, everything was broken or badly mended, everything was covered in fine sea sand, caked in old sweat and unhappiness. Objectively, it might have made a better relic than a house, but relics were plentiful and houses of this size not easily found. The fact was Sumaner House was huge. Once it must have been splendid. Once, rich Dutch people would have lived in it and crossed the Indian Ocean in big sailing ships, carrying spices and ivory and gold back to their home. Once, too, the filigree shutters, and the newly built verandas, and the black-and-white-tiled floors must have looked splendid. The green glass skylight would have filtered the sun down into the dark interior. But what was the use? Time had passed with steady inevitability, washing away the details of all that had gone before, leaving only small traces of glory. Now the furniture was scratched and full of decay. These days only Vikram and his guardian and the servant woman lived here. Most of the time it was only Vikram and the servant woman who were in the house. She stayed in her quarters, cooking or cleaning, and Vikram came and went as he pleased. There was no one to stop him. No one to ask him questions or argue with him, for Mr Gunadeen, his guardian, was hardly ever present. He was in Malaysia. Why he had ever wanted to be Vikram’s guardian was a mystery. Perhaps he had wanted to protest against the exploitation of child soldiers. Perhaps, he had hoped, that by adopting a Waterlily House orphan he would build up good karma. No one knew, because after that one act of enigmatic charity, Vikram’s guardian went off to work, first in the Middle East and then in Malaysia. Supervising telecommunications systems in other developing countries. Perhaps the war had made him restless, the people in the town said. At least by adopting Vikram he had done something to counteract the work of those murderous Tamil bastards. For, it was said, he was a good Singhala man.
Having picked Vikram more or less randomly from the Waterlily orphanage, Mr Gunadeen put him in the local boys’ school.
‘He needs a good education,’ he told the headmaster privately, without noticing the irony of his words.
The headmaster knew, but chose to forget, that in the wake of independence the Singhalese had slowly denied the Tamils any chance of a decent education. Well, things had changed and these were desperate times. The headmaster knew nothing about child soldiers or their psychological scars. He thought Vikram was an orphan without complications. He knew nothing of his soldiering past.
‘I shall be gone for a few months,’ Vikram’s guardian had said.
‘Don’t worry,’ said the head. ‘He’ll be fine. You’ll notice a change in him when you return, I promise.’
Vikram’s guardian paid him handsomely. Next, Mr Gunadeen instructed the servant woman, Thercy.
‘You know what to do,’ he said. ‘The boy’s a little restless, but just feed him well and make sure he goes to school. I’ll be back in a few months or so.’
And then he went, giving Vikram a contact address and a phone number. He did not think things needed to be any more complicated than that. So Vikram had a home now, a new school and plenty of food. What more could an orphan boy expect? He was far away from the brutal place where they recruited underage children into the military. What more could be done? The people in the town shook their heads in disbelief. What a good man Mr Gunadeen was, they said again, hoping Vikram would be worth the effort put into him. That had been four years ago.
But Vikram seemed not to realise the significance of his good fortune. Right from the very beginning he did not appear to care about anything. At first, when he came to live in Sumaner House, he used to kick the walls, treating the house as though it were a person, scuffing the furniture slyly, gouging holes in the doors when no one was looking, and cracking the fine-coloured glass into as many lines as he could, without breaking it completely. Torturing the house. Only the servant woman knew what he was up to. Thercy the servant woman saw everything that went on.
Then later, as he grew into adolescence, Vikram quietened down. The servant woman noticed this too. Almost overnight Vikram became monosyllabic and secretive. Whenever Thercy looked at him she noticed how expressionless his face was. In the last four years, since the random killings here in the south, the troubles had worsened. Nothing was certain any more but Thercy had learned to keep silent. Privately, she thought Vikram was disturbed. His disturbance, she was certain, lurked, waiting to pounce.
The only person the servant woman trusted in the whole town was Sugi. She knew Sugi was a good man. Often when they met at the market they would walk a little way together (not so far or so often as to attract attention) and exchange news. Thercy often talked to Sugi about the orphan from Waterlily House.
‘He has everything he needs and nothing he wants,’ she liked to say. ‘It’s his karma. To be saved from his fate in the orphanage, and given another sort of fate! But it won’t work,’ she added gloomily.
Sugi would listen, nodding his head worriedly. He had heard all this before. Vikram hadn’t been a child soldier for long but Sugi knew: once a child soldier always a soldier. Why had Vikram’s guardian tampered with the unwritten laws of the universe? What had happened to him was unimaginable and because of this he should have been left alone, in Sugi’s opinion. Thercy had told Sugi the whole sorry story many times and each time Sugi had been convinced, Vikram should not have been brought here. The army entered Vikram’s home in Batticaloa and raped his mother and his sister. They raped them many, many times, Thercy had said, beating the palm of her hand against her forehead as she talked.
‘Then they took them away,’ she had said. ‘The army never thought to look under the bed. Vikram was hiding there. His father was away at the time. Someone went to find the poor man, bring him the news. They told him, his whole family had been wiped out.’ Thercy had sliced the air with her hand. ‘Just like that,’ she had said. ‘Gone! What could the man do? His grief must have been a terrible thing. He found some poison and, God forgive him, he swallowed it. It was only afterwards, when it was too late, that the people in the village thought of looking under the bed.’
She shook her head recalling the story. Sugi had heard it many times. Each time he was shocked. So much for our wonderful army, he thought each time.
‘So much for our wonderful army,’ he said again today, when they talked. ‘What d’you expect?’
‘We’d better go,’ Thercy said, noticing how long they had been standing together and suddenly becoming nervous. ‘There he is, over there. I don’t want him to see us talking together.’
‘Who’s that man he’s with?’ asked Sugi, looking at Vikram, stealthily.
The boy was standing with an older man at the kade, the roadside shop. They were both drinking. Sugi had heard other rumours about Vikram. After his parents had died the Tigers were supposed to have got hold of him. But then, as luck would have it, the Singhalese army rounded up some of the Tiger cubs and handed them over to the orphanages a few months later. Vikram was one of them. He was only seven. He had already been carrying equipment for the guerrillas. Sugi could hardly believe that. A boy of seven, being a runner for the Tigers.
‘And what would all that have done to him?’ asked Sugi, watching Vikram now.
How could his past be changed? How could he be given new thoughts simply by being adopted? Thercy agreed.
‘Aiyo!’ she said, remembering. ‘You should have seen him when he first came here. Mr Gunadeen wasn’t around of course. He just went off and left me with the boy. I had to deal with everything all alone. Vikram used to run riot in the house. He’s calmed down a lot now. In fact …’ She paused.
‘What?’ asked Sugi.
‘Well …’
Thercy hesitated. The truth was, there was a kind of emptiness to the boy. He seemed such a strange, mysterious creature, silent and friendless. Well, almost. Today she had some new information for Sugi.
‘You know he’s made friends with the Mendis girl?’
‘What?’ cried Sugi in alarm.
Thercy shook her head quickly. She hadn’t wanted to alarm Sugi.
‘No, no, I didn’t mean to worry you. I know what you’re thinking. He’s not likely to visit you. And anyway the girl doesn’t speak to many people either, and I only saw her talking to him once. I shouldn’t have said anything.’
Sugi relaxed slightly, although he still looked distracted.
‘It isn’t good,’ was all he said, not knowing how to express his disquiet. How much would Nulani Mendis tell Vikram about her visits? About Theo?
‘His Singhalese is faultless, you know,’ continued Thercy. ‘Not many people around here realise he’s a Tamil. Mr Gunadeen didn’t want that to be common knowledge. For his own safety.’
‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ said Sugi, uneasily. ‘He could be working for the Tigers, couldn’t he, for all we know?’
‘Who, Vikram?’ Thercy laughed. ‘Is that what you’re worrying about? No, no, Sugi, he’s harmless really, I promise you. In that way, anyway. He’s just a little strange, that’s all. I can’t explain it …’ Again she hesitated. ‘And he has a temper. To tell you the truth, of late I feel sorry for him. What chance is there for him to ever have a normal life?’ she said, adding, ‘He’s so disturbed.’
Vikram had no idea that people were talking about him. Even had he known he would not have cared much, for Vikram lived in a world without people. The space inside his head was so empty that it almost echoed. Long ago, when he was at Waterlily House, he had begun to cultivate indifference. Nobody knew of course, but indifference had become a way of life for him. By the time he was twelve, before his guardian had arrived on the scene, he had learned not to make a fuss. What was the point? He could manage his life with ease without noise or fuss. He did whatever random thing he wanted, took what he liked the look of, unrestrained by anyone, neglected and unloved. By the time he reached the age of sixteen, he had grown enormously, was not bad-looking and was more or less friendless.
Sumaner House stood on the crest of a rise away from the immediate town; there were no other houses nearby. The view of the sea was uninterrupted. Vikram had his own room in the house. For nearly four years he had lived like this. He went to school and worked hard. For four years, while his guardian dipped in and out of his life, he studied. He soaked up knowledge like a sponge. The head was pleased. He wrote to Mr Gunadeen.
‘It’s been a success,’ he wrote. ‘And, it proves these children can be rehabilitated,’ he added triumphantly.
So Vikram was a success story. He was good at English and his Singhalese was brilliant.
‘He writes beautifully too,’ his teachers said.
In this way they continued to encourage Vikram. For, as everyone knew, whichever way you looked at it, the boy had had a bad start to life.
Every morning Vikram walked to school. It was the same school that Jim Mendis attended. It was generally expected that Lucky Jim, in spite of having no father, would one day go to the UK because he was so clever. And so, because of his luck, and quite possibly also his loss, the boys all wanted to be Jim Mendis’s friend. All except Vikram, that is. Vikram watched the Mendis boy quietly. Nobody noticed, because he was so quiet, but Vikram watched him idly, wondering if there was a chink in Jim’s luck. But it seemed Lucky Jim was luck-tight. Soon after this, Vikram began to notice Jim Mendis’s sister. She too walked to school and now Vikram noticed with some surprise that she was sweetly pretty. Something about her puzzled him. Then one day, as they stood at the crossroads, she turned and smiled absent-mindedly at him. Startled, he stared at her, his uneasiness growing. And then, because he couldn’t think of anything to say, he looked quickly away. His heart was pounding as though he had been running. The Mendis girl reminded him vaguely of someone else. He could not think who it might be. After that he began to hear little things about her, little bits of gossip.
People said she did not talk. And she had no friends. All she did was draw, draw, draw. Vikram began to watch her secretly and with new interest. One day he saw her go over to the road island on the Old Tissa Road. He saw her touch the ground, rubbing her hand slowly in the dust. And then she looked up and down the road. Vikram hid behind a tree. What on earth was she doing? he wondered curiously. Again the girl reminded him of someone but he could not be sure whom. He felt an unaccountable fear bubble up in him. He did not see her again for a long while after that. He was busy doing other things. Having discovered furtive sex with the daughter of a local shopkeeper, he was often occupied. The shopkeeper’s daughter had not wanted his advances, but Vikram had told her calmly, he would kill her if she told anyone. He had only meant it as a joke but she took him at his word. Pleased with his success, he took her to the back of the garages, close by the railway line. After a while she stopped struggling and accepted the inevitable, crying silently and allowing him to do whatever he wanted. Once, he brought her to Sumaner House, but the servant woman had stared meaningfully at him and although he behaved as though he did not care, the woman’s look had put him off. He took the girl back to the garages after that.
Then, as Vikram approached his sixteenth birthday, he met Gerard.
Gerard was not his real name, he was really Rajah Buka, but no one knew this. He owned a gem store in the high street, and although there was an intermittent war on, he did good business with the foreigners who occasionally passed through. Gerard had seen Vikram on several occasions, loitering at the junction buying cheap alcohol. He had struck up a conversation with the boy. He appeared interested in everything Vikram had to say. How well he was doing at school, whether he had any friends. He found out that Vikram talked to no one, and so he invited Vikram to his rooms above the shop and he gave him some vadi, a special Tamil sweetmeat. Vikram was pleasantly surprised.
‘Where did you get this from?’ he asked.
Gerard laughed and gave him a Jaffna mango by way of answer. Vikram was amazed.
‘How did you get to Jaffna?’ he asked. ‘Isn’t it impossible to cross Elephant Pass because of the army blocks?’
‘Nothing is impossible,’ said Gerard meaningfully.
He paused and lit a cigarette.
‘How do you feel about being adopted by a Singhala?’ he asked casually. ‘They killed your family, I heard. And they hate the Tamils, don’t they?’
Gerard flicked ash on the floor and waited.
‘How d’you feel about that?’
Vikram said nothing. He had been told by his guardian never to mention the fact he was Tamil. So how did Gerard know? Gerard watched the boy’s face and he laughed, finding it hugely funny.
‘Don’t you want to avenge your family, then?’ he asked softly, easily.
Still Vikram said nothing. He felt as though a large cloven-hoofed animal had clambered on his back. The feeling sent a small shiver running up and down his spine. He felt as though his back might break under the strain. The palms of his hands became moist. An image of a young girl pounding spices flashed past him. Gerard smoked his cigarette and continued watching the boy with interest. There was the faintest hint of a smile on his face. When he had finished his cigarette, he went over to a desk and took out a key.
‘Come,’ he said. ‘I want to show you something. Don’t worry,’ he added, seeing Vikram’s wary look. ‘We’re on the same side.’
Gerard knew he had been right all along. He had told them many times at headquarters, the advantage of boys like Vikram were that they were halfway to being recruited already. Lupus, of course, had been sceptical. He was sceptical of everything Gerard proposed. Naturally he saw Gerard as a threat. Naturally anyone with independent thoughts worried Lupus. Which was precisely why Gerard did not want to operate from the north. There were terrorists and terrorists, Gerard knew. Not all of them were bright. Not all of them had had the kind of university education that Gerard had, or his never-ending passion and capacity for rhetoric. Not everyone had his vision, he decided regretfully. Having declared war on the Singhalese government, Lupus and his guerrilla organisation wanted a separate Tamil state. But they have no plan, thought Gerard, inclined to laugh, no strategy. Except to blow up as many people, and make as many enemies as possible in the international community. No diplomatic skills, sneered Gerard, whose own plans were far more ambitious. His plan was about unity. Of course he wanted a different government, what Tamil didn’t. But the difference was that Gerard wanted the new government to be central, not separate. And he wanted the Singhalese out! He wanted a single, powerful Tamil government for the entire island. He wanted majority rule for the minority. Actually, what he really wanted was to be Prime Minister! But first things first, thought Gerard. He was a patient man and he was prepared to wait. There was a little groundwork to be completed, a government to be destabilised. It was work that needed a certain amount of brute force. Which was where the likes of Lupus came in, Gerard believed.
Long ago, when he had been on one of his recruiting visits to Waterlily House, Gerard had noticed Vikram. The boy had been small then, traumatised, but bright. On his next visit to the orphanage he had seen Vikram’s guardian-to-be. And that was when he had laid his plan. For as he had noticed instantly, most of the spadework had already been done for Gerard on that memorable afternoon when the Palmyra toddy was on the kitchen table and the red dhal was in the clay pot. Later he heard about the day that Vikram had played hide-and-survive while the sunlight mingled with the screams of his mother and his big sister. The day the sky had boiled and the light had fallen, harsh and green and terrible, down through the rattan roof, and Vikram’s sister prepared an offering of pawpaw and king coconut washed with saffron water. On the fateful day when his sister had never made it to the temple, what had to happen, happened. So now, guessing correctly, fully understanding, Gerard earmarked Vikram for greater things. He knew he had picked a winner. Backed by Gerard, Vikram would go far.
Gerard unlocked the drawer and watched Vikram’s face.
‘Well,’ he said very gently. ‘Don’t tell me you’re scared? Don’t tell me you won’t avenge your family, given a chance?’
‘Will you teach me to use it?’ asked Vikram, startled from his usual reverie, staring at the gun.
‘Patience, patience,’ Gerard laughed, closing the drawer, amused by Vikram’s sudden interest, preferring it to the boy’s usual indifference.
‘All things come to those who wait. You must learn to clean it first.’
It was the best way to start; it would keep Vikram’s interest alive. Cleanliness was next to godliness, he told the boy, and God was the gun. Vikram liked the idea of the power of God. He liked the mantras Gerard was always reciting. For a moment he felt as though he had a purpose in life. Most of the time the empty, shut-down feeling in his head made him lethargic. But now, for the first time in ages, he felt a stirring within him. A new energy. Avenge your family, Gerard had said. Vikram looked at him and thought, Gerard likes me. The notion was oddly pleasing.
One morning soon after all this happened, having decided he had no need for school, Vikram was on his way to Gerard’s gem store when he saw the Mendis girl again. He had forgotten all about her. But she stopped and began to speak to him.
‘Don’t you go to school any more?’ she asked.
Vikram was confused. He thought she didn’t speak. And how did she know he was not at school? He stared at her.
‘I’m Jim’s sister, Nulani, remember?’ she said, clearly thinking he did not recognise her. ‘You live at Sumaner House, don’t you?’
Vikram nodded. Nulani Mendis fumbled in her satchel. She took out a small battered notebook.
‘Look,’ she said, showing him a drawing.
She was laughing. He could see her teeth, white and very even. Vikram took the book reluctantly. Then, in spite of himself, he too grinned. It was a picture of a teacher no one liked. Nulani Mendis had drawn a caricature, catching his likeness perfectly. Suddenly, Vikram felt shy. The girl was standing close to him. He could smell a faint perfume.
‘You’re good,’ he ventured at last, hesitantly.
For some reason she scared him. There was an air of determination, a certainty about her that confused him. He felt as though she might ask him for something he could not give. He saw she was still smiling at him and again he felt an urge to run away. Then he noticed that close up she was even prettier than she had appeared from a distance. Tongue-tied, he continued to stare at her, hardly aware she was still speaking.
‘Has your brother gone to the UK?’ he asked finally, with some difficulty, not understanding and wanting to distract her.
The girl shook her head. ‘Not yet,’ she said.
She smiled again, but this time it was she who hesitated. Then she seemed to withdraw slightly. He thought she appeared older than he remembered, and he saw her eyes were very dark and deep and sad. They seemed full of other puzzling and unnamed things. He stared at her for a moment longer and nodded. Then, making up his mind, he loped off.
That afternoon, after he had finished his target practice with the silencer on the gun, Gerard told Vikram he had something important to say.
‘First,’ he said, ‘well done!’ He took the gun from Vikram. ‘Congratulations! You’ve worked hard and as a reward I shall take you on a little operation with me at the end of the month. If you do well at that, there will be bigger and more interesting assignments ahead, OK? And then, in a few months’ time you will go to the Eastern province for something extremely important.’
‘What?’ asked Vikram. ‘The Eastern province? Isn’t that where the Tigers are trained?’
‘Vikram,’ said Gerard, ‘you must learn not to ask too many questions. You’ll be told everything. But, all in good time. Don’t ask questions. You aren’t going to be an ordinary member of the Tigers, believe me. You are both intelligent and a good shot. So now you’re going to be trained for something top class. Trust me, men.’
‘When?’ demanded Vikram.
‘Patience, patience,’ said Gerard, holding up his hands mockingly, shaking his head. ‘Patience is what’s required now. We’ve both waited a long time to prepare you for this. Don’t ruin things. I promise you the time is coming when you will avenge your family. I fully understand how you must feel. Just wait a little longer. And for heaven’s sake, Vikram,’ he added, ‘do me a favour. Go back to school for your exams. You don’t want to attract any notice at this stage. If the Mendis girl knows you’re absent, then others will too.’
Vikram picked up the gun and held it below his crotch. He stroked the tip of the barrel. He laughed, a high-pitched out-of-control scurrilous screech.
‘That’s enough,’ said Gerard sharply. ‘Put it down. It’s not a toy. You can have all the things you want if you show restraint. You’ve been earmarked for great things. Now, go back to school.’
Gerard was aware that underneath his silent exterior Vikram was coiled like a spring. He knew whatever simmered in Vikram was dangerously near the surface. And that it was best to keep a tight control over him. Just in case.
A few days after his exams, Vikram saw the Mendis girl once more. She did not see him. She was hurrying in the direction of the beach. Interested, he decided to follow her. He watched her body move darkly beneath the lime-green skirt, in the sunlight. Her hair was tied up and it swung to and fro as she walked. Where is she going? Vikram wondered curiously.
The road went nowhere in particular. In fact, it was not possible to reach the beach this way without scrambling over the giant cacti. Then the road curved, and suddenly it was possible to see the sea. The beach was completely empty and scorched. Just before the road came to an end, there appeared a long, low house, surrounded by a flower-laden wall and flanked by two stone lions. The top of the wall was covered in barbed wire. Vikram remembered now. It was the house where the UK-returned writer lived. He had seen the man once when he had come to the school. The teachers had shaken their heads, saying he was a Singhalese who was pro the wretched Tamils. What kind of a Singhalese was he? they asked. Still, they had said, he was famous. Misguided, but famous. So they had invited him because of that.
A large jackfruit tree overhung Theo Samarajeeva’s garden wall. Its leaves were thick and succulent, and the girl, stopping outside the gate, began to draw in her notebook. She had no idea she was being followed. Nor did she seem to notice there was no shade. Nulani Mendis sat on the withered grass verge absorbed in her drawing, as the low hum of mosquitoes and the drowsy buzz of other, more benign, insects slowed to a halt in the baking air. Across the sun-drenched garden Vikram could just make out the writer, in his pale linen trousers and his white shirt, working at a table on the veranda. The veranda had been bleached white by the sun and appeared dusty in the dazzling light. Then the manservant came out to fetch the girl in for lunch, and shut the gate. And that was all Vikram saw of any of them that day.
* * *
Nulani had almost finished the portrait. In a week she would be ready to show both Theo and Sugi.
‘I will cook kiribath, some milk rice, ‘Sugi said. ‘And buy the best fish.’
‘I shall decide where it must be hung!’ said Theo.
An air of gaiety descended. Sugi replaced the lanterns in the trees. And Theo declared the day of the unveiling a holiday from his writing. His work was progressing slowly. In October the film of his second book would be out. He would have to go to London for the premiere.
‘For how long will you be gone?’ asked Nulani, her eyes suddenly anxious. ‘Will they let you come back?’
Her hair was coiled against the back of her neck and a frangipani blossom quivered just above her ear. Theo watched it shake as she moved her head, wondering when it would fall. Once, he nearly put his hand out to catch it. How could he explain to her that no one could stop him coming home? When had he started to call this place home again?
His agent had rung him complaining. It was impossible to get a call through to him, did he know that? The lines were always down. How could he live in a place with no access to the outside world, where the lines were always down? The agent hoped he was working. Through the crackle on the line the agent sounded like a peevish nanny. The summer in London, he told Theo, was disappointing. Wet, cold and miserable. The only consolation, he supposed, was that the telephones worked!
Because the curfew was not in operation just now Theo walked openly on the beach. The sand, ivory and unblemished, seemed to stretch for ever, smooth and interrupted only by his footsteps. One evening Nulani went with him. She had told her mother she was working late on the painting. They walked the wide sweep of beach without seeing anyone, with only the slight breeze and the waves for company. It felt as though they had walked this same beach for an eternity. She walked close to him, like a child, her hand brushing against his arm. He felt her skin, warm against him. He had an urge to take her hand and cradle it in his two hands. He knew she was worrying and he wanted to tell her to stop. But he felt helplessly that he had no right to intrude.
‘I feel as if I have known you for ever,’ the girl said suddenly. ‘D’you think we knew each other in our last birth?’
He swallowed. Her eyes were large and clear. They seemed to mirror the sky. Looking at her he could not think of a single thing to say. Twenty-eight years between them and still he was lost for words, he thought, amazed. They walked the length of the beach and he watched the frangipani in her hair, marvelling that it did not fall; half hoping it would, so that he might catch it.
Chapter 4 (#ulink_5a2067a1-088e-5fe1-a8a0-224171e0ec99)
‘WHEN CAN I SEE WHAT YOU’VE DONE?’ asked Theo impatiently. He sat squinting at the sun. His white shirt was crumpled and the light cast purple shadows against the creases of the cloth.
The girl smiled. ‘What if you don’t like the painting?’ she asked, teasingly. ‘What if the money you are paying my mother is wasted?’
‘I will love it,’ he said, certain. ‘No question. I can’t wait. Don’t forget, I saw it when you began. And another thing, while I remember, I want the money to be kept for your work only. Should I tell your mother that?’
She laughed. What did she need the money for? She had wanted only to paint him. It will soon be October, thought Theo. The rains would come then, he knew. When they broke he would be in London. He did not tell her but he no longer wanted to go. The film had no significance for him. It was all part of another life. A life he seemed to have discarded with alarming ease. Living among his own people, here in this amorphous heat, seeing the mysterious and uneasy ways in which one day flowed into another, he felt as though he had never left.
The girl was sitting close to him on the veranda, staring dreamily at the garden. She was so close her arm brushed against his. She had the ways of the very young, he mused. Physical closeness came naturally. He could see the shadows of her breasts, small dark smudges, rising and falling through her thin white blouse. She looked very cool and self-possessed. And she seemed happier. He realised with shock that loneliness had clung to her like fine sea dust when he had first met her. But now she’s content, he thought. Now she is happier.
He wanted to think he had given her something, some comfort for the loss of her father. Even if all he did was offer her a space and encouragement to paint, surely that was better than nothing? He felt a growing certainty in his desire to help her. He felt it rise above the anxieties of this place.
‘You must work here when I am in London,’ he said.
An idea was forming in his mind. He did not know whether to tell her. He wanted to organise an exhibition of her paintings. But she had opened her notebook and was drawing again, her eyes half shut against the glare. Green and red splashed against him, other stories unfolded. He saw she was drawing his outstretched foot.
‘You can’t keep drawing me!’ he said laughing, moving his foot out of sight. ‘Now look, I’ve been thinking, I want to organise an exhibition of your paintings. I can’t do that if you only draw me!’
‘Where? Colombo?’ Her head was bent over her notebook.
‘Yes, maybe,’ he said, suddenly wanting to take her to London with him in October.
Thinking, what was wrong with him that he could not bear to be parted from her? He knew nothing about art but even he could see the astonishing things that were conjured up by her hands. They were the hands of a magician. Like shadow puppets they illuminated other dimensions of the world, probing the edges of things and those corners where drifts of light revealed all that had been concealed from him until now.
‘You must work hard until I get back,’ he said instead, trying to look stern.
So that she threw her head back and burst out laughing. And he saw, how in spite of everything she had been through, her youth could not be contained but was mirrored in her laugh. It was low and filled with happiness. October is still a long way off, he reassured himself. I’ll feel differently then.
The hot season was coming to an end and the full moon was ten days away. Twenty kilometres from the town was a sacred site where the festivities were beginning. It had been at the time of the festival that her father had been murdered, Nulani told him. Just before the water-cutting ceremony, in the build-up to poya, the religious festival on the night of the full moon. All across the town fear mushroomed in polluted clouds, hanging over two thousand years of faith. Fear seemed inseparable from belief. Men with bare feet walked over red-hot coals or swung themselves on metal hooks across the coconut trees. And all the while, interwoven with the sounds of drums and conch shells, the nada filled the air.
‘You must be careful,’ said Sugi. ‘Not everyone is a believer. These are troubled times. And even if,’ he added, ‘even if they are believers, some people still have evil intent.’
Every year Sugi went to the festival. He always met his family there; he had done this for as long as he could remember. But this year he was worried about leaving Theo on his own.
‘This is the time when some people try to put curses on their enemies.’
‘Sugi, for heaven’s sake, what d’you think is going to happen? No one’s interested in me. I’ll be perfectly fine.’
‘But the girl won’t be here either,’ said Sugi worriedly.
Theo laughed. The girl was going with her mother to the festival. They were going to pray for her brother Jim. To be certain he would get the scholarship.
‘Well, I thought you’d be pleased about that,’ he teased, giving Sugi a sly look.
‘Sir!’ said Sugi reproachfully.
‘Oh, Sugi, I’m only pulling your leg. I’m going to work like mad while you’re away. No distractions, no chatting, you know. No stopping for tea. Just work. I shall have most of this next chapter finished by the time you both get back. You’ll see.’
In the now skeleton-staffed Department of Tropical Diseases, a conference, planned two years previously, had to be cancelled because of lack of funds and resources. Many eminent scientists from all over the world, having been invited to give papers, were now told the unstable situation on the island made it impossible to guarantee the safety of their stay. It was a disappointment for all those who had worked tirelessly to eradicate the threat of an epidemic. An article appeared in a scientific journal. ‘No animal on earth has touched so directly and profoundly the lives of so many human beings. For all of history and all over the globe the mosquito has been a nuisance, a pain and the angel of death.’
Deep within the jungle the festival was in progress. A god with many hands sat inside the dagoba. The monks had placed him there, hoping he would give an audience to the crowds. This happened every year; it was the highlight of the festival. People came from far and wide to pray to him. The hands of this many-handed god were empty apart from his spear. He looked neither right nor left. If he heard the prayers of the tormented he gave no sign. There were peacocks at his side and sunlight shone on his burnished anklets. Young girls brought him armfuls of offerings, walking miles in the boiling heat. Young men came carrying hope. He received each of them without a word. All day long the drumming and the sounds of elephant bells filled the air in a frenzy of noise and movement. Trumpeters and acrobats walked the roadsides while men with tridents chalked on their foreheads paid penance for ancient inexplicable sins. Elsewhere the ground was strewn with red and yellow flowers and the heavy smell of cinnamon was underfoot. There were giant mounds of sherbet-pink powders and uncut limes piled up on silver platters everywhere.
The many-handed god watched them all. He watched the backs of the women bent in devotion. Who knew what they prayed for? Was it for abundance in their wombs? Or was it simply peace for the fruits of these same wombs that they desired? The crowds came with their coins tied in cloth, with their ribbons of desires, their cotton-white grief and their food. As night approached a full moon arose across the neon sky silhouetting the dagoba, white and round, with a single spike pointing at the stars. Hundreds of coconut flames fanned an unrelenting heat.
Midnight approached and the temple drums grew louder, announcing the arrival of the Kathakali Man of Dance. The crowds gasped. With his pleated trousers and beaded breastplates, the Kathakali Man pointed his fingers skywards. He seemed to be reaching for the stars. With ancient gesture and sandstone smile, he danced for the gaping, amazed gathering. The Kathakali Man had a many-faceted jewel that gleamed in his navel and a peacock’s cry deep in his throat. His drum tattooed yet another ancient tale, telling of those things which were allowed and those which were forbidden. His was a dance of warning. History ran through his veins, giving him authority. Everyone heard him in the neon-green night but not everyone was capable of interpreting what he said. Those who ignored him did so at their peril, he warned.
Long ago, in the days before the trouble, people from England used to come to see him. They came simply because they knew they could find native colour and because, in this sacred place, even the statues smiled. They did not understand the real meaning of a sacred site. They came for rest, for healing herbs and pungent oils. And sometimes the many-handed god welcomed them, and sometimes he did not. Now that the troubles were here no one came from England. Nothing but a steady stream of hope walked through the jungle to the dagoba. Nothing but despair showed through the brave colours of the processions.
Sugi stood in the crowds watching the festival. He was waiting for his relatives. While he waited he looked around him to see if there were others he knew. He noticed Mrs Mendis. Ah, observed Sugi, she is here for her son Lucky Jim. Born with the kernel of luck that Mrs Mendis protected with the husk of her own life. No doubt she wanted the kernel to grow. She’s a true believer and so she knows, true believers had a better chance. She wants nothing for herself, thought Sugi. But then, he noticed, Mrs Mendis had forgotten about her daughter. Sorrow, like too much sun, has blinded her. Mrs Mendis left her clay curd pots, her crimson flowering pineapple and her kiribath, milk rice, at the feet of the god. Without a doubt, thought Sugi, watching silently, the god will grant her wish. For it must surely have been decided in another life that Jim’s luck could only grow. Then Sugi glanced at Nulani Mendis. The child was lost in thought. What future will she have? he wondered, pity flooding his heart. With a mother like this! Sugi had been watching the girl for months. He was astonished at how she had changed. When she had first come to the beach house she had been silent and unhappy. Then slowly she had begun to blossom. In the beginning, he remembered, her unhappiness had blotted out her light. But gradually she changed. Her eyes shone, she laughed. And she talked all the time. Sometimes she drove Sir mad, Sugi knew. Sometimes they would exchange looks of amusement. And recently, thought Sugi, pensive now, Sir had a different look in his eyes. But Sir himself seemed unaware of this. Only Sugi knew.
A sudden harsh sound in the trees sent a flock of iridescent blue magpies bursting into the sky as though being lifted by a gust of wind. Several people threw themselves to the ground, crying. Was this an ill omen? Sugi looked uneasily around him. There was no wind. Ancient laws were written all over this sacred site. Sugi was a man of simplicity. And he was afraid. He saw the girl ahead of him in the procession look up at the magpies. She was smiling at some secret thought of her own. Yesterday she had let Sugi look at her latest painting. It was nearly finished and was a remarkable painting, of glossy greens and quiet violets. It was full of something else as well, Sugi saw. Something Nulani Mendis had no idea of. Painting was what she had brought into this life, Sugi told himself, watching her now. It was her fate. He knew her talent would never leave her. He watched as she bent her head and prayed. He knew she was praying for her brother. And he knew there were other undiscovered longings in her heart.
The procession had brought all sorts of people out. Some of them were not the kind of people who usually went on pilgrimages. One of the people in the crowd was Vikram. Gerard had told him about the sacred site.
‘Go and see it,’ he had said. ‘Mingle, learn what goes on there. Watch the Buddhist monks and look out for the army checkpoints. You should always talk to the army. Get them used to your face. Could be useful for the future.’
And he winked at Vikram. Then he put his hand on the boy’s shoulders, never noticing how he winced, not realising Vikram did not like being touched.
So Vikram went to the festival. The anniversary of the massacre of his family was approaching. Every year around this time he had nightmares. He would wake up to the sound of grinding teeth and discover they were his own. He would wake with an erection or with his sheet wet. And, always, he would wake with a skullful of anger punctured as though by knives. In the morning he was fine again, back to his usual indifferent self, with all disturbance forgotten. But for a couple of nights, close to the anniversary of the deaths, things were bad. On these occasions, Vikram heard, quite clearly, as if from a distant part of Sumaner House, his mother’s muffled screams, his sister’s voice crying out in Tamil. Why had they cried so much? What had they hoped to achieve? Mercy, perhaps? Had they not realised they were about to die? That no amount of crying would help them in the long dark place they had reached? From where he crouched, rigid under the bed, all Vikram had seen were their hands waving in a gesture of helplessness. The hands that had held him moments before, and had stroked his head, were now waving their goodbye. From his hiding place he could see fingers threshing and flaying the air, engaged in some ancient struggle, and in his dreams, so many years later, it was this image, of those hands forever beating the air, that he still saw. Gerard had reminded Vikram that his family needed to be avenged. They were waiting for the day, Gerard said, when, like a half-finished jigsaw, they would be made whole again.
So Vikram walked through the jungle, following the sound of the drums like everyone else. Thinking his own thoughts. On the way he passed a Coca-Cola lorry and a black Morris Minor. They were tangled and smashed together in a crash. Curious, he stopped to investigate. Bodies were tossed carelessly across the overgrown path, reddish-brown liquid frothed from under the lorry. Just looking at it made Vikram thirsty. Other people had visited the site of the crash before him. They had plundered the victims, taken their money and their jewellery. There was nothing left to take. Vikram stared. One of the bodies was that of a woman. A long deep ridge exposed the tendons and muscles across one part of her face. Bone jutted out. A fountain of blood flowed from her mouth. Her hands moved feebly like an ant on its back, clawing the air. Vikram looked at her impassively. She was beginning to bloat and her lips reminded him of the blood-swollen bellies of mosquitoes he was forever swiping. But, thought Vikram walking on, she did not look in so much pain. How long would it take for her to die? he wondered idly. Would she be dead by the time he had walked two dozen steps, or half a mile? Would she be dead by the time he reached the sacred site? Vikram continued on his way, following the distant noise of drums and the monkeys that swung in front of him from tree to tree. He could hear the bells of the Kathakali dancers somewhere in the distance.
He came to a reservoir. When he had been quite small, his mother had taken him back to the village where she had been born. There had been a reservoir there too. It was so large that Vikram had thought it was the sea. In those days Vikram had not yet seen the sea. There were trees all around the banks of this great stretch of water, frightening jungle vegetation, tangled and ugly. Branches and creepers trailed succulently along the forest floor. Small emerald birds flew harshly about. Vikram was three years old and he had been frightened. His aunt or his sister, he could not remember which, held him up in the water, someone else bathed him. Vikram had cried out. They told him the water was pure and clean. Later, sitting on the steps of a now forgotten house, the same girl, whoever she was, taught him to knit. Knit one, purl one.
‘See,’ she had said, laughing. ‘Look, he has learned to knit. Baby is very clever.’
The sun had beaten down on his head as he sat on the step of the house.
‘I’m thirsty,’ he had said in Tamil and instantly they had brought him a green plastic cup of king coconut juice and held it while he drank thirstily.
They had called him Baby; it was the only word of English they knew and they were proud they too could speak English, even though they had not been to school. Vikram knew they had loved him. Their excited voices had encircled him, round and round, picking him up and kissing him until he laughed with pleasure. He supposed it was pleasure.
The reservoir near his mother’s house was smooth and clean, and aquamarine. A mirror reflecting the sky. The one he was passing now was brown and mostly clogged with weed. There had been no rain here for a long time.
After he had prayed for his sister’s family and for his mother’s health, Sugi took his leave of them. He needed to get back home. His mother, who was old and frailer since he saw her last, kissed him goodbye. She was glad her son was doing so well, working for Theo Samarajeeva. A decent man, she said, a man for the Sri Lankan people, the kind of man that was desperately needed. They had heard all about his books and now there was to be a film too, about the terrible troubles in this place. It was good, she told her son, the world needed to hear about their suffering.
‘But you must be careful, no?’ Sugi’s brother-in-law asked him privately. ‘This man will make enemies too. You must advise him, he will have forgotten how it is here. He has lived in the UK. They are honourable there. And you must be careful. You too will be watched.’
Sugi knew all this. He left his red and silver offerings and his temple blossom for the many-handed god and just as he was about to leave a monk gave him a lighted lamp to carry back in. Perhaps, thought Sugi trustingly, this was a good omen.
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Roma Tearne
A lyrical and profoundly moving story of love, loss and civil war, set in Sri Lanka, London and Venice.When author Theo Samarajeeva returns to his native Sri Lanka after his wife’s death, he hopes to escape his gnawing loss amid the lush landscape of his increasingly war-torn country. But as he sinks into life in this beautiful, tortured land, he also finds himself slipping into friendship with an artistic young girl, Nulani, whose family is caught up in the growing turmoil. Soon friendship blossoms into love. Under the threat of civil war, their affair offers a glimmer of hope to a country on the brink of destruction…But all too soon, the violence which has cast an ominous shadow over their love story explodes, tearing them apart. Betrayed, imprisoned and tortured, Theo is gradually stripped of everything he once held dear – his writing, his humanity and, eventually, his love. Broken by the belief her lover is dead, Nulani flees Sri Lanka to a cold and lonely life of exile. As the years pass and the country descends into a morass of violence and hatred, the tragedy of Theo and Nulani's failed love spreads like a poison among friends sickened by the face of civil war, and the lovers must struggle to recover some of what they have lost and to resurrect, from the wreckage of their lives, a fragile belief in the possibility of redemption.Beautifully written, by turns heartbreaking and uplifting, `Mosquito’ is a first novel of remarkable and compelling power.
MOSQUITO
ROMA TEARNE
For Barrie, who understood,
and for Oliver and Alistair and Mollie
… they are places that don#x2019t belong to geography but to time.
SAUL STEINBERG, Reflections and Shadows
Table of Contents
Cover (#u0f674640-08dd-58db-9976-f727bcdfa239)
Title Page (#uafc5bb6d-005b-5de5-8a52-8419913093a7)
Dedication (#uc78be1d3-8731-5080-a9b7-9cd4a5316bc9)
Epigraph (#u0ddc21d9-42ce-5b78-82fe-54d273d76b1c)
Chapter One (#u9925ce48-17a8-5782-85e5-9d3a2798c61d)
Chapter Two (#u1a33b764-a754-5b99-9f50-4d9010263a18)
Chapter Three (#ubf8b3b5d-01b9-5f24-84d9-706adc18e7c5)
Chapter Four (#uef8cac8d-a823-569b-8125-f5277662dd49)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Read On … (#litres_trial_promo)
Literary Corner (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_44f74c68-abeb-5bf0-a9f5-88c2e45730ae)
THE CATAMARAN, ITS BLUE-PATCHED SAILS no longer flapping, its nets full of glistening catch, came in after the night’s fishing. The breeze had died down, the air had cooled, and the fishermen’s sarongs slapped wet against their legs as they swung the boat above the water, to and fro, and up and along the empty beach, scoring a dark, deep ridge in the sand. Often, before the monsoon broke, the sea was like a mirror. The sky appeared joined to it with barely a seam, there was a faint vibration of thunder and along the shoreline the air hung in hazy folds, suspended between land, and sea, and sky. In a few hours the heat would spread insidiously, hovering with the mosquitoes and the spiders that waited motionless and lethargic, trapped by their own clammy inertia. But still there was no storm. Every year it was like this, before the monsoon, for three or four days, sometimes even longer. Every year, around the third week in June, a yellowing stickiness, a blistering oppression clung everywhere, so that even the bougainvillea lost its radiance.
Theo Samarajeeva walked back from the beach with fresh fish for lunch. It was still early. The manservant, Sugi, had brought breakfast out on to the veranda. A black-and-gold lacquered tray with a white cloth was placed on the cane table. There was a silver teapot, a jug of boiled milk, one cup and a saucer. There was some freshly cut pineapple and some curd and roti.
‘You had better get the lime juice ready, Sugi,’ said Theo Samarajeeva wryly, hearing the gate click shut. The manservant grinned and went inside.
‘You see, by a process of elimination I knew you would be coming here,’ Theo said, turning towards the gate by way of greeting.
‘How?’ asked Nulani Mendis, appearing, sitting down opposite him, and helping herself to the glass the manservant held out to her. Theo Samarajeeva watched as she drank. He watched her gasp as the cool, sharp liquid caught in her throat. He noticed that her fingernails had small slivers of paint under them. She wore a green skirt wrapped tightly around her waist, and a soft faded white blouse of some thin opaque fabric. The skirt was old, and almost exactly the colour of the lime juice.
‘How did you know I would come today?’ she demanded again when she had finished drinking.
‘Well,’ said Theo, ‘I saw you walking on the beach earlier, and as I hadn’t seen you for at least twenty-four hours I told Sugi: Ah! Miss Nulani will be here later so don’t forget her lime.’
Nulani smiled guiltily, remembering she was meant to go straight home.
‘So, poor Mrs Mendis still waits for her daughter, no?’ he guessed.
Inside, in the dark interior of the house, music was playing on the radiogram. It floated out through the open windows, tripping effortlessly down the steps from the veranda before dispersing into the trees.
‘I’ve been drawing,’ said Nulani, taking out a small notebook from her satchel. ‘Look!’
She moved her chair closer to his, giving him the book. Images rose out of it, they fell hither and thither, marvellously, on to his knees. A man sat under a tamarind tree, another squatted in the narrow spit of shade afforded by a house. A woman stretched out on a makeshift bed staring at the rough edges of a palm roof through the bars of the window. Someone, a middle-aged man, lean legs stretched in front of him, was writing, head bent at a table. He had a cigarette in his left hand and behind him was the blur of tropical trees.
‘This is me, no? When did you do this one?’
‘Yesterday,’ said Nulani, laughing. ‘I was hiding over there, you didn’t see me.’
‘You little pest! Why didn’t you make yourself known? Sugi had made a fine red mullet curry. You could have eaten with me.’
‘You are not angry?’
‘I feel the bushes have eyes,’ he teased her. ‘I shall have to watch everything from now on. No talking to myself any more! But seriously, these are good. Are you going to use them in a painting?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Nulani, frowning. ‘Do you really like them?’ And boldly, ‘I want to paint you. But …’
Theo considered her. For a moment he felt lost for words. Nulani Mendis had been visiting him for nearly three months now. It had begun when he had first moved to this part of the island. The convent school had invited him to give a talk on his latest book. He had not long been back from the UK, some perversity making him give up the modest success he enjoyed there. People thought him mad. The Liberation Tigers had been demanding a separate Tamil state for years with no success. Civil unrest grew daily. Then, after Singhala was made the national language, discrimination against the Tamils became commonplace. A potential guerrilla war was simmering. Why did he want to go back to that hell? they asked. Was he off his head? An established writer, with a comfortable life in London, his own flat, his work, what could he want with Colombo? Was it not enough writing books on the impending violence, did he want to live it too? But, he had no ties. Perhaps it was sentimentality in early middle age? Perhaps the terrible events from the past had finally got to him, they said.
Theo could not explain. He himself barely understood this sudden compulsion, this urgency to go home. It was a time when everyone who could was escaping. Perhaps simply because he no longer had anything to escape from, going back was not a problem. So he told his agent he would work better if he had some sun and, putting his flat on the market, he left. The agent said nothing, thinking privately that what Theo really needed was some distraction, danger even. Do him good, thought the agent; add richness to this next book. Other men might have given up writing altogether after what he had been through, but Theo had carried on. He probably needed a complete change of scene, needed to put the past finally behind him. So, with this in mind, the agent encouraged him to go back, for a time at least.
It was 1996. While he had been away Sri Lanka had changed. The change confused Theo. He found himself remembering the liberal atmosphere of his youth. Where was it? In England, whatever corruption there was, was kept discreetly out of sight. Or maybe he was less critical because the British were not his own people. It was a different matter in Colombo where every small injustice, every appalling act of violence seemed a personal affront. The civil unrest he had predicted in his books, the beginnings of rage seemed to have been nurtured in his absence, and spread, like a newly germinated paddy field. He left Colombo, moved to a backwater, and began writing his fourth novel. His second book was being made into a film and an article about him appeared in one of the papers. The local schools, having noticed it and having registered his arrival in the town, asked him to speak to the pupils. At first he had hesitated, worrying. But what was there worth worrying about in these troubled times? People had been garrotted for less outspoken views, so why did he care? His life would go on for as long as it would, or it simply would cease. Why worry? He was no longer a Buddhist, but Buddhism had worked on him like milk and honey nonetheless. He agreed to give two talks, one at the boys’ school and the other at the convent. Nulani Mendis had been one of the students. She had held her hand up and asked him several questions.
‘The girl hardly speaks,’ the teacher had told him afterwards. ‘Since her father was murdered she has become silent. The mother has given up trying to make her talk. All she does is draw, draw, draw.’
But on that day she had spoken to Theo and later, on one of his early-evening walks along the narrow strip of beach behind the house, he saw her again. He had smiled slightly, registering her good looks, and remembering the story of her father, he waved. But she seemed to vanish into the darkness. After that he kept seeing her and he guessed she lived nearby. Then Sugi caught her in the garden. She was drawing his stone lions. Sugi began complaining loudly.
‘Sir, sir, these local children are pests. They’ve started coming into the garden again. We need to get rid of them or they will multiply!’
Surprised, Theo came out and, recognising her, asked her name. Then he invited her, in spite of Sugi’s protest, to come over at any time and draw. This had been nearly three months ago. She never called him anything except Mr Samarajeeva. He supposed, wryly, that this was out of a sense of respect for his age. But she came back, again and again, and, if she did not appear for a few days, he became inclined to drift into bad temper.
‘Can I go now?’ she asked, breaking into his reverie. ‘I want to draw the house from over there.’
She had been with him since breakfast.
‘Won’t you be late for school?’ he asked. ‘Does your mother know you are here?’
‘No,’ she said, disappearing around the side of the house. Her voice reached him from another part of the garden, vague and indistinct. ‘No, she’s out. And I’ve finished the jobs she gave me so I can go straight to school from here.’
Theo shook his head, amused in spite of himself. The manservant gave him a look that said clearly, ‘I told you, these local children are pests.’ But she’s different, thought Theo.
At first she came only once a week, barely speaking, staying further back in the garden. But as she grew bolder she seemed to be there all the time. Then, one day, out of the blue, she showed him her notebook for the first time. The sketches were all of him, delicate, and with a clear unwavering likeness. Startled, he took down his book of Picasso drawings and talked to her about the artist. After that she began to talk to him.
‘I will be seventeen in three months,’ she said.
On another afternoon she told him about her brother Jim. He was only eighteen months younger. She told him, they were not close.
‘It is our karma,’ she said solemnly. ‘We have brought it into this life.’
Their father, she said, had known most of this long before the astrologer came to visit. He told their mother, soon after the birth of Jim, he had seen it in a dream; the children would never be close. He could see it written on their faces, he had said, the girl child, and his infant son. Their mother, hearing this pronouncement, had begun wailing. After all her labours was this the future? But their father told his wife sternly to stop her noise. Be thankful, he said, for the fact that both children were healthy. After puberty, he suspected, after they came of age, they would cross a great expanse of water, leave Sri Lanka. Go to mainland India even. It would be a good thing, he had said, for peace in this country was always uncertain. Thus had her father predicted, long before the astrologer came to plot their horoscopes, walking up the steps of the house. With his saffron robes and his sandals dusty with beach sand, and his black umbrella faded with the heat. Their father, not foreseeing his own death in the riots of the following June, felt the future of his children grow large in his own mind.
How long was it before she realised the strange masculine world inhabited by her brother was not for her, wondered Theo. Was it when she was still small? Did her understanding come, as all unshakeable beliefs do, not at any given moment but slowly, like seawater seeping into a hole dug on a beach? Lucky Jim could pace his domain freely, marking his undisputed territory, certain of his own image of the future. But what of Nulani?
Sometimes while her brother slept, before the father’s unpredicted death, when they were younger, Nulani told Theo, she would bend over Jim and smell the sugar-sweet baby scent of greenness on his skin, run her finger across an old scar that straddled the rounded grubbiness of his brown leg. Later when she was older, she told Theo, she stole a box of Venus B pencils (Made in Great Britain) from the house of their English neighbour, to draw her sleeping brother. But the neighbour found out and demanded she be punished for stealing. She returned the pencils; two of them were used and broken.
‘All right, Mrs Mendis,’ the neighbour, the Englishman, told her mother angrily, ‘I know it must be hard for you, with your husband dead. But “ render unto Caesar ” and all that!’
He had laughed, without rhythm. Nulani had wondered if that was how the English laughed. She knew she would not be allowed into the Englishman’s house again. She would not be able to play with his daughter Carol any more; she would never be able to touch her shining golden hair.
‘Why did you take them?’ her brother had demanded. ‘Render unto Caesar,’ he had said, sounding like the Englishman.
Nulani’s uncle came. Because her father was no longer alive, it was his duty to beat her with an ekel stick.
‘Render unto Caesar,’ he had said. They were ashamed of her. The whole family avoided the neighbours now, eyes cast down whenever the jeep drove them about, into the city, to the beach, shopping.
‘See what you’ve done to us.’
Nulani could see. She stopped drawing her brother when he slept. She just looked at him. Her little brother. She was his loku akka, his big sister. Her father had said they would not be close. But no one, she told Mr Samarajeeva, not even the astrologer, had said she would not love him.
And now she came here to draw. Arriving early, leaving late. Always talking. Transformed.
‘Child,’ Theo said suddenly now, drifting back from his thoughts and realising the time, ‘you’ll be late for school.’
When there was no answer he went to look for her at the back of the garden, but then he heard the gate click again.
‘I’m late,’ she called, grinning at him, hurrying off. ‘But I’m coming back!’
And she disappeared up the hill with a wave of her hand.
They swarmed so thickly that they might easily have been mistaken for smoke. Rising swiftly from the water-filled holes dug by the gem miners in their search for sapphire, the mosquitoes seemed suspended in reflected light. For a moment the holes appeared asmirrored surfaces, blue as the sky. Further out towards the coast the rainwater filled the upturned coconut shells, as they lay scattered across the groves. Here the beautiful female anopheles mosquitoes, graceful wings glinting in the sun, landed lightly and prepared to create a canoe of death for their cargo of eggs. The Ministry of Health sprayed the coconut groves with DDT to prevent outbreaks of malaria. The metallic smell drifted and mixed heavily with the scent of frangipani and hibiscus. There had been no epidemic for nearly five years.
Theo liked to spend the morning writing, but lately it had been difficult to concentrate with the girl present. She sat against a wall, almost in the bushes, drawing him. He had tried to make her come inside but she was stubborn and stayed where she was, far back along the veranda, crouching beside the lilies and the ferns.
‘How can you draw like this? You can’t see me,’ he had protested. ‘Why do you want to crouch so low?’
She had refused his invitation and in the end he had just shrugged, leaving her alone, going back to his typewriter in the cool of his study. It was hot. For some reason the fans had all stopped working. Perhaps the generator had broken down again. He would have to get Sugi to look at it. Every now and then as he worked he would look up and catch a glimpse of her faded lime-green skirt translucent against the extraordinary light of the untamed garden. She folded and rearranged herself until from where he sat she was a smudge of green and white and black. He could not see her face; it was hidden by her dark hair. He found her presence disturbing. How was he supposed to work? Surely it must be lunchtime? He half hoped she would stay to eat with him. Sometimes she did; at other times, although she hesitated, an inner tempo seemed to call her, guilt perhaps, a sudden memory of an uncompleted errand for her long-suffering mother. Every time Theo asked her to stay for lunch. He waited, unaware that his breath was bated, for her reply, knowing only his irrational disappointment if she went home.
He had decided then, the best thing to do was to commission her to paint him. It was clear that, once voiced, she would not give up the idea, so one evening he strolled over to Mrs Mendis with the suggestion. Mrs Mendis welcomed him with some aluva and coffee. He told her he wanted to commission Nulani to paint his portrait. He would like to pay her if Mrs Mendis did not mind. Mrs Mendis did not mind. Mr Samarajeeva was extremely kind. She just hoped Nulani would do a proper job.
‘The girl is a dreamer,’ said Mrs Mendis. ‘She does not talk much and she is stubborn. If you can get her to do anything it will be a miracle. Most of the time, if there is any work to be done, she disappears. She won’t help in the house or with any of my sewing. How am I to make a living, with no one to help me?’
Having started her complaints, Mrs Mendis found it curiously difficult to stop. Her thin, high voice rose like the smoke from a mosquito coil.
‘I am a widow,’ she said. ‘Has Nulani told you? Has she told you my husband was set fire to during the rioting in the seventies? They threw a petrol bomb at him. Aiyo, we watched as he went screaming down the Old Tissa Road. Fear kept all the people hidden behind closed doors.’ Mrs Mendis waved her hands about in distress. ‘Everyone watched through the shutters of their houses,’ she said. ‘But no one came to help.’
Harsh sunlight had pressed itself on the edges of the house and then Mrs Mendis had run screaming into the street, chasing hopelessly after her husband, but it was too late. He lay blackened and burnt; clear liquid oozing out from his staring eyes, his body charred, the stench of flesh filling her open-mouthed screams.
‘The neighbours came out of the houses then and pulled me away,’ she said.
They had been fearful she might throw herself on to the flames. By the time the ambulance came he was beyond help.
‘Luckily,’ said Mrs Mendis, lowering her voice, ‘my son Jim was somewhere else and did not see his father’s life as it left this world.’
Lucky Jim. ‘He had been so close to his father,’ she said. ‘The shock is still with him.’
Only the girl had been at home. Mrs Mendis wasn’t sure how much she had seen. Always quiet, she became mute after that.
‘She’s difficult,’ said Mrs Mendis, ‘obstinate and odd.’
Theo Samarajeeva, who had not meant to stay for long, looked around for escape. There was no sign of Nulani, but something about the stillness of the air made him certain she was listening.
Walking home he turned several times, convinced he was being followed. But the road was empty. The air was choked with the heavy scent of frangipani. As he entered his house he noticed Sugi had lit some oil lamps. Theo could see him fixing a few cheap Chinese lanterns to the trees. He poured himself a whisky, and was still listening to the ice crackling in the glass when he saw her. Standing in his doorway holding out a branch of blossom, the rich scent filling the room, her smile wide, her eyes as bright as the new moon.
She came almost daily after that, before school, after her evening meal, at odd unexpected hours, nearly every weekend. A notebook was filling up with small studies of him. Sometimes she showed him what she had done. She seemed to be trying to record every slight movement of his face, he thought, amused. Such was the minute detail of the drawings. He was astonished by her perception. Thin pencils, stubs of charcoal, delicate brushstrokes, whatever she used, all had the same fluid quality, the same effortless logic as they moved across the page. Each time she showed him what she had done, he was astonished all over again.
‘Nulani,’ he asked once, after looking at these drawings for a long time. ‘Why me? Why draw me? Why not someone younger, your brother’s friends perhaps?’
He was genuinely puzzled. But she had only laughed.
‘Wait till you see the painting!’ she promised.
Now he watched her as she drew him from the corner of the veranda.
‘Why don’t you sit somewhere better, child?’ he asked again. ‘You can’t possibly see me clearly from where you are!’
‘I don’t want to see you, Mr Samarajeeva. I’m learning to draw you from memory.’
‘Will you please stop calling me Mr Samarajeeva.’
‘OK, Mr Samarajeeva.’
He never knew if she was teasing him. He had a feeling she could read his mind, that she liked to make him feel older than he felt already, because it amused her, because in fact his age made no difference whatsoever to her.
‘I want to be able to draw you from memory, with my eyes closed,’ she said, ‘so I will never forget you.’
Startled, he stood up. Sugi came in to announce lunch was ready. Lunch was some fresh thora-malu, seer fish, from today’s catch.
‘When will you start painting?’ he asked while they ate. A small beam of sunlight fell on her face. Her skin glowed with a sheen of youthfulness. Through the curtain of thick hair her eyes were as bright as a pair of black cherries. He thought of all the years of living that lay between them, as heavy and as sweet as a piece of sugared coconut jaggery, irreplaceable, unexchangeable, for ever between them.
‘I have already started the painting, but I must draw more. Can I come here and paint?’
Theo laughed. ‘At this rate you will always be here. What will your mother say? She won’t be happy with that idea. She must want to see her daughter sometimes.’
‘I want to be here all the time,’ she said.
Theo looked at her. The beam of sunlight had moved and rested on the top of her head. Her hair was a sleek smoky black; it reminded him of the blue-black cat he and Anna had once had, in that other life. But all he said was: ‘I have to go to Colombo tomorrow, is there anything you need? Any paints I can try to get you?’
He did not tell her that he had done no work since she had been drawing him; he did not tell her that her presence in his house, like a beautiful injured bird, was distraction enough without the drawing. London seemed far away.
‘Has your mother seen the painting?’
‘No. Amma, my mother, worries too much all the time. She doesn’t have time to look.’ She seemed to hesitate. ‘Her worry is because she hopes.’
‘She hopes?’
‘She hopes things will not get worse than they already are. She hopes my brother does not leave, go to England. But she also hopes he does go because he will have a better life there. She hopes she will never see the things she saw once. So she does not look.’
It was the first time she had made reference to her father’s murder.
‘We are not like you,’ she said.
‘But you paint,’ said Theo, ‘you still look.’ And he thought how it was, that this beautiful place, with its idyllic landscape of sea and sky and glorious weather, had lost its way. Both through the lack of human intervention and, also, because of it. How many generations did it take before all the wondrous things of the island could be described again? Twenty years? Fifty years? Would a whole generation have to grow and be replaced before that could happen?
‘You must never stop looking,’ he said firmly. ‘Never. Even when it becomes hard you must never stop. Also, you are a woman. It is important for women to do something about what they see. Only then will there be change. My wife was like that, she would have loved your drawings.’
‘Your wife? Where is she?’
‘She’s dead,’ said Theo.
He kept his voice steady; surprisingly he did not feel the usual sharp stab of bitterness. The beam of sunlight had moved and now shone against the edge of the huge mirror that stood above the Dutch sideboard, reflecting the fine golden sea dust that foxed its surface. Sugi came in with some mangoes. The afternoon heat, dazzling and yellow, was at its worst. It stood in abeyance outside the open door.
‘What was her name?’ asked Nulani, after Sugi had gone.
‘She was called Anna.’
He noticed they had both slipped into their native Singhalese. Was pain easier to deal with in one’s mother tongue? Nulani was thinking too.
‘My brother has a long scar on his leg,’ she said.
When he cut it he had cried. She could remember how his leg had bled, she told Theo. The blood had poured out like rain.
‘There was no blood when Father died. After the ambulance took him away to the mortuary I went back to look at the road. I wanted to see the black dust. It was his dust, his body dust. That was all there was of him.’
She had rubbed the palm of her hand in it, she told Theo, until someone, some neighbour, had pulled her away. She still knew the exact spot where it was. There was a traffic island there now. It was her father’s headstone. It was her scar.
‘You have a scar, no?’ she said. ‘While I have been drawing you I have felt it. It is all over you, no?’ She traced the shape of his spine in the air. ‘It is under your skin, between the backbones,’ she said.
‘It was a long time ago now.’
‘Is that why you came back?’
‘No, yes … partly.’
‘It will get better here,’ said Nulani softly.
She was too young to give him firm comfort but her certainty, though fragile, comforted him anyway. He was twenty-eight years older than her. Mango juice ran down her arm as she ate. Her lips were moist. Anna would have loved a child, he thought. Her generosity would have rushed in like waves, enveloping Nulani. Why had they never come here when Anna was still with him? Fleetingly, he thought of his old home in London, with its books and rugs and old French mirrors that filled the apartment with the light that was always in short supply. How different it was now, where they shuttered out the light instead.
The sun had moved away from the glass as they finished their meal and Theo lit a cigar. Nulani was fidgeting, wanting to get on. She remembered she had to go home. Her uncle, her mother’s brother, was coming to see how his niece and nephew were. He was all they had for a father these days.
‘Sugi will clear the space at the back for you to paint,’ said Theo finally. ‘You can come any time you like, but I shall be in Colombo tomorrow.’
He waved, watching her walk away, the dust from the garden washing brown against her open-toed sandals.
* * *
After he had cleared the room Sugi polished the floor with coconut scrapings. He rubbed as hard as he could, using first his left and then his right foot until the house smelt of it and the floor shone like marble. Then he went outside into the backyard and chopped open a thambili, an orange king coconut, and drank from it. After that he went back to work. There were several jobs he hoped to finish before Mr Samarajeeva returned from Colombo. He liked to surprise him with some small task or other well done. Last time it had been the fixing of the stone lions to the garden wall. The time before that he had painted the shutters.
Mr Samarajeeva was always weary when he returned from Colombo. He looked as he did when Sugi had first seen him, on the day he came to live here, walking from the station with his bags, a piece of paper in his hand, the address of the beach house on it. He had asked for directions and Sugi had brought him to the house, and stayed ever since. At the time he thought Mr Samarajeeva was a foreigner, in his fine tropical suit, with his leather suitcases and his hat. But then Theo had spoken to him in their mother tongue with such fluency that Sugi had grinned.
‘I have been away a long time,’ said Mr Samarajeeva. ‘But my Singhala isn’t bad, is it?’
He had wanted Sugi to work with him, help him set up his life here in the house. He would need some cooking, some domestic chores and some house maintenance. Could Sugi manage all that? Sugi could. As there was no one else to talk to, Mr Samarajeeva talked to Sugi. When his things arrived from London he unpacked them with Sugi and talked about his life there. He unpacked several framed photographs. They were of the same woman, blonde, curly-haired, smiling at the camera.
‘My wife Anna,’ he told Sugi.
Then he unpacked his books. There seemed to be hundreds of books. There were other things from his old life. Later Sugi found out more about his wife. He tried to imagine the type of woman who had collected all these things. The mirrors, the plates, the cutlery. She must have been a fine woman, thought Sugi. When he found out Mr Samarajeeva was famous, the books he had written, and soon the film, he felt it his duty to warn him. These were troubled times. Envy and poverty went hand in hand with the ravaged land, he said. Even though he was a Singhalese, Mr Samarajeeva should be careful. His sympathy for the Tamil children was too well known. The house should be made more secure. Locks were needed for the shutters and the doors. The garden wall needed to be repaired in order to keep intruders out. Sugi made a list. Theo smiled lazily. He did not stop Sugi but he did not care much either.
‘Sir,’ said Sugi genuinely puzzled, ‘you don’t understand. There can be sudden outbreaks of trouble here. When you least expect it. You must be careful. People know who you are and they talk too much in these parts. It’s not as you remember, no?’
All this was before the Mendis girl started visiting. Sugi knew the family.
‘The boy is the only son, Sir,’ he said. ‘He is arrogant, and clever. There is talk of him getting a British Council scholarship in spite of what happened to the father. The father was warned several times, you know. Before they killed him, they warned him. But he was a fearless man who spoke out against the injustice done to the Tamils long ago. So, even though he was warned, he ignored the warnings.’
He paused, remembering.
‘He was an educated man, too. He wasn’t a fool. But in the end it did him no good. He was very handsome, and he had strong principles. Always campaigning for the Tamil underdog. What they did to him was a terrible thing. But you know, Sir, he should have been more careful. Someone should have advised him. That silly wife of his, someone.’
‘And the girl?’ asked Theo.
‘Oh, the girl looks just like him,’ said Sugi, misunderstanding. ‘But you know the whole family is being watched now. They were never popular. And the boy is very selfish. He is only interested in himself.’
It was clear Mr Samarajeeva was not interested in the boy, thought Sugi, disapproving of the girl’s visits.
‘She comes here too often, Sir, now,’ he warned. ‘There are certain people in this town who are very interested in that family.’
She was friendly enough, thought Sugi, but still, she might bring trouble with her. Someone had once told him she had stopped talking after her father died, but from what he could hear she never stopped when she was with Theo. Her drawings, he reluctantly admitted, were another matter. They were good. Sir had them scattered all over the house and now, in this latest development, the girl was going to work on Mr Samarajeeva’s portrait in the house. Sugi shook his head. He could not understand how the mother could care so little that she let her daughter wander around in this way. How could a respectable Singhalese woman be so negligent? Rumour was that Mrs Mendis had become unhinged since the tragedy. But then, thought Sugi, going off on another track, everyone is strange nowadays. The things that had happened in this place were turning people mad. It was not possible to have normal lives any longer. It was not possible to walk without looking over your shoulder at all times. Without wondering who was a friend and who a new enemy. Fear and suspicion was the thing they lived off, it was the only diet they had had for years. Almost every family he knew was touched in some way by the troubles, living with the things they were too frightened to talk about. There was no point, no point to anything. One just waited, hoping. Dodging the curfew. Hoping not to put a foot wrong, thought Sugi, hoping not to tread the rusty barbed wire hidden in the sea sand.
A few nights previously Sugi had cautioned Theo again. Not that it was any use, but he had tried.
‘You must not walk on the beach when there is a curfew. The army is watching. Or if they are not, then there are thugs who will watch for them. Believe me, Sir. And another thing, you shouldn’t have given your talk about your book at the schools. They won’t like that.’
‘It is no way to live,’ said Theo Samarajeeva frowning. ‘No one owns the beach. Sugi, there are many countries all over the world that have trouble like this. We must not give in to the bullies.’
‘Ours is a very small country,’ Sugi said, shaking his head. ‘No one cares about us. Why should they? Only we care about the differences between the Singhalese and the Tamils. No one understands what this fight is about. We hardly understand ourselves any more.’
Theo nodded. He brought out his pipe and began tapping it.
‘When the British brought the Tamils here from India, some people thought they brought trouble to this island,’ Sugi said.
Theo was trying to light his pipe but the breeze kept whipping the flame so that he had to turn away. Sugi continued to stare into space. When he spoke at last he sounded agitated.
‘What is wrong with us that we behave in this way?’ He watched as Theo struggled to relight his pipe. ‘Isn’t it possible for us to solve this thing peacefully?’
‘It will take longer than we think,’ Theo said, He put his match into the ashtray Sugi handed him. ‘Why should the world care, Sugi?’ he asked gently. ‘We aren’t important enough for the British any more. And unlike the Middle East, we have no oil. So we can kill each other and no one will notice. That’s why things will take longer than we think.’
He knew from his life in England, people thought Sri Lanka was a place spiralling into madness; and yes, he thought, it was true, no one cared.
They had taken to having these conversations in the evening when the curfew was on. The girl never came after the curfew. Sugi was thankful that at least her mother had the sense to keep her in at night. So Theo had only Sugi to talk to. Sugi was always careful to keep a respectful distance from Mr Samarajeeva during these discussions. Occasionally he accepted a cigarette or a beer but never anything else. He stood a little away from the chairs; he would never accept a seat. Sometimes he squatted on the step, the end of his cigarette glowing in the dark.
‘I would like to see England,’ he said one night. ‘I think the people there are not like us.’
‘No, they’re not. But they have their own problems, Sugi, their own battles. Just as pointless in their different ways. And I never really felt I belonged there.’
‘Even after all that time, Sir?’
‘No,’ said Theo with certainty. ‘These are my people. This is where I belong.’
But Sugi was doubtful.
‘Don’t mistake our friendliness, Sir. We are Buddhists but these days we have forgotten this,’ said Sugi. ‘We are quite capable of killing. It isn’t like before. When you were last here. Things are complicated now. These days we don’t know who we are.’
Theo nodded in agreement. ‘They should have known it wouldn’t end simply,’ he murmured.
‘Who? The Tamils?’
‘No, Sugi,’ Theo said. He sounded sad. ‘I mean those who conquered us. I mean the British. Their presence casts its shadow on this island. Still.
‘Cause and effect, Sir. Just as the Buddha said.’
But Theo was following his own thoughts.
‘Why are we surprised by this war, Sugi? Has there ever been a country that, once colonised, avoided civil war? Africa? India? Burma?’
Night flowers appeared everywhere in the garden, blooming in ghostly clusters, their branches pouring scent into the air. Frogs croaked, small bats moved silently in the trees, and here and there, in the dull light of the lamp, silvery insects darted about. On one occasion Sugi shone a torch into the undergrowth, convinced a nest of snakes lurked close by. He advanced with his axe but then the moon had gone behind a cloud and he could not find a single one. At other times, on certain nights, suddenly there were no sounds at all. No drums, no radios, no sirens. Nothing moved in the darkness and at such moments Sugi’s nervousness would increase. The silence, he complained, was worse than all the noise, the atmosphere created by it, terrifying in a different way. Suspense hung heavily in the air; at such moments anything could happen. For in Sugi’s experience, most murders were committed in the lull before the full moon. Whispers alighted as softly as mosquitoes on unsuspecting flesh; whispers of torture. And the smell of death brought the snakes out. Theo listened to Sugi’s fears without speaking. But then, sometimes, on these faceless nights, as they sat talking in the garden, they would catch the unmistakable sigh of the great ocean drifting towards them. They would hear it very clearly, rushing and tugging, to and fro and across, in an endless cycle as it washed and rewashed the bone-white shore. And as always, as they listened, the sound of it comforted them both.
By the time Theo Samarajeeva returned from Colombo the back room of his house had been cleared, the walls lime-washed, and Nulani Mendis was installed with her canvases, her paints and her cheap thinners. The house smelt of coconuts and linseed oil. He knew she was there even as he approached, even as the bougainvillea cascaded into view over the new garden wall. The light from the mirrors in this hastily devised studio flickered in a dazzling way, casting intermittent reflections on everything in the room. Theo watched through the open window as Nulani crouched on the ground working on the painting. She used rags to mix the paint, and rags to layer it smoothly on to the canvas. All around were her pencil drawings of him. He could not see her face. Slivers of light danced on her hair. He did not know how long he stood watching her. Time stood still.
After a while she moved, placing the painting against the wall beside a chair where the reflections continued to tremble, uninterrupted. There was an old jug made of thin dusty glass nearby on a shelf. Shadows poured endlessly into it where once it must have held liquid. The heat was impossible. Before he could say anything she turned suddenly and saw him. Her instantaneous smile caught them both unawares. It must have been a trick of the light, thought Theo surprised, but the day seemed exceptionally pierced by the sun.
‘So you are back,’ she said. ‘Sugi said you wouldn’t be back till later.’
How to tell her that Colombo seemed unbearably hot and crowded? That what he thought he had needed to look up in the university library had in fact been irrelevant? That he knew, if he hurried, he would be able to catch an earlier train and be back before she went home, thereby seeing her a day sooner? How to tell her all this when he was unable to understand these thoughts himself?
‘I have brought you a present,’ he said instead, handing her a paper bag. Inside were all the colours she wanted but did not have. Cobalt blue, crimson lake, Venetian red. A bottle of pure turpentine, refined linseed oil. The paints were good-quality pigments, made in England, of the sort she had seen long ago in the English neighbour’s house when she had stolen the pencils. The tubes were clean and uncrushed by use. She opened them and watched as traces of oil oozed slowly out; the colour was not far behind. They looked good enough to eat. Her bright red dress was new.
‘It’s my birthday today,’ she said delighted, seeing him look at her dress. ‘I was hoping you would come back today.’
‘I know!’ he said. ‘Happy seventeenth birthday!’
Again the day seemed suffused by an inexplicable green lightness, of the kind he remembered in other times, in other places. Maybe there will be rain later, thought Theo, confused.
She had begun to paint him against a curtain of foliage. There were creases in his white shirt, purple shadows along one arm. She had given his eyes a reflective quality that hinted at other colours beyond the darkness of the pupils. Was this him, really? Was this what she saw? In the painting he paused as he wrote, looking into the distance. Aspects of him emerged from the canvas, making certain things crystal clear.
‘You were looking at me,’ she said laughing, pointing to one of the drawings.
He did not know what to say. Her directness left him helpless. Perhaps it was this simplicity that he needed in his new book. Once he had been able to deal with all kinds of issues swiftly, cut to the heart of the matter. Now for some reason it seemed impossible for him to think in this way. Had fear and hurt and self-pity done all this to him? Or was this the uncertainty of middle age? Suddenly he felt small and ashamed. He stood looking at the painting and at the girl framed by the curtain of green light, aware vaguely that she was still smiling at him. He stood staring at her until Sugi called out that lunch was ready.
‘Tell me about Anna,’ she demanded, over lunch. ‘I have been looking at all the pictures of her. They are very beautiful.’
So he told her something about Anna.
‘I used to see her every morning in a little café where I went for breakfast.’
‘In London?’
‘No, in Venice. She was Italian. We used to glance at each other without speaking. It was bitterly cold that winter. The apartment I was renting was so cold that I would go to this little dark café for breakfast. And I would drink a grappa,’ he said smiling, remembering.
‘What happened then?’
‘One day she came in with some other people. Two women and a man. The man was clearly interested in her.’
‘So what did you do?’
Theo smiled, shaking his head. ‘Nothing. What could I do? My Italian was not very good in those days. But then she turned and waved at me. Asked me if I would like to join them. I was astonished, astonished that she should notice me.’
‘But you said you used to look at each other every morning.’
‘Yes,’ said Theo. ‘I suppose I mean I was surprised she noticed me enough to want to talk to me.’
He was silent again, thinking of the fluidity of their lives afterwards, the passion that never seemed to diminish as they travelled through Europe. Then he described the high tall house in London with the mirrors and the blousy crimson peonies she loved to buy. He spoke of the books they had both written, so different yet one feeding off the other.
‘She was very beautiful,’ he said, unaware of the change in his voice. ‘Now she was someone you should have drawn.’
Nulani was listening intensely. He became aware of her curious dark eyes fixed on him. He did not know how much she understood. What could Europe mean to her?
‘My brother Jim wants to go to Europe,’ she said at last. ‘He says, when he is in England studying it will be easy to travel.’
‘And you? What about you?’
But he knew the answer even before she told him. Who would take her? What would she make of Paris. And Venice?
‘I will go one day,’ she said as though reading his mind. ‘Maybe we will go together.’
He felt his chest tighten unaccountably, and he wondered what her father had been like. What would he have made of this beautiful daughter of his, had he lived? Nulani had told him he had been a poet. She remembered him, she told Theo, but only as a dreamer. Always making her mother angry as she, Nulani, did now. What fragile balance in their family had been upset by his death? The afternoon had moved on but the heat showed no sign of letting up. The sun had moved to another place.
‘You should go home,’ he said, suddenly anxious, not wishing to keep her out too late. ‘I’ll get Sugi to walk you home.’
But she would have none of it; standing close to him holding her paints, so close he could smell the faint perfume that was her skin, mixing with the oils.
‘Thank you,’ she said and she went, a splash of red against the sea-faded blue gate, and then through the trees, and then taking in glimpses of road and bougainvillea before she disappeared from view around the bend of the hot empty road. Taking with her all the myriad, unresolved hues of the day, shimmering into the distance.
Chapter 2 (#ulink_f7890486-09ed-5d96-8fc0-585583942d2e)
THEO HAD NOT SEEN THE GIRL for five days. He waited, watching the geckos climbing haltingly across the lime-washed walls. He walked on the beach most evenings, much to Sugi’s alarm, ignoring the curfews, hoping she might be doing the same. He sat on the veranda smoking; he wandered into the room strewn with her paints. The smell of turpentine and oil remained as strong as ever. It was the way of smells, he knew. It had been this way when Anna had died. All the smells of beeswax and red peonies, of lavender-washed cotton and typewriter ribbon had gathered together, bringing her back to him in small concentrated fragments. So he knew about smells, the way they tumbled into the air, falling softly again, here and there, like confetti without the bride. The sunlight seemed suddenly to have lost its brilliance. His old anger returned. He had thought he was over it, but bitterness attacked him in waves. Ugliness remembered. Sugi watched him surreptitiously, serving his meals, bringing a tray of morning tea, cooking a redfish curry in the way he liked it. The fans had stopped working again and the lights often failed at night. Sugi watched him in the light of the coconut-oil lamps. There did not seem to be much evidence of Sir working. Across the garden Theo felt the silence stretch into eternity. The leaves on the pawpaw tree looked large and malevolent.
‘Sir,’ said Sugi finally, ‘Sir, why are you not writing?’
Beyond the light from the veranda the undergrowth rustled vaguely. Two mosquito coils burned into insubstantial columns. A black-spotted moth circled the lamps, mesmerised. Sugi looked at Theo. This is a fine state of affairs, he thought. It was as well he was here.
‘Maybe there is trouble at her house, no?’ he ventured tentatively. ‘Shall I go and find out?’
‘No,’ said Theo quickly.
Such an intrusion was unbearable and he could not allow it. Sugi fell silent again. Maybe he should talk about something else instead. Sir was a grown man after all. He had lived all over the world. Given the things he had been through, his innocence was surprising.
‘There is a shortage of food in the market this week,’ Sugi said. ‘I don’t know why. I could only get river cress, a coconut and a bunch of shrivelled radishes.’
It was true. The rice was appalling too, and there were no fresh vegetables to be had.
‘Of all the places on this island,’ he continued, complaining loudly, hoping to distract Theo, ‘this should be the place for fresh fish. But the day’s catch had vanished by the time I got into the town. There’s been some kind of trouble further along the coast; maybe that’s got something to do with it. Someone told me the army drove their jeeps on to the sands, chasing a group of men. And then they shot them. They were all young, Sir. Nobody knows what they had done.’
He spread his hands helplessly in front of him.
‘The army left the bodies on the beach, and the local people cleared up the mess. There is always someone prepared to clean up after them. Either a Buddhist or a Christian. They will always find someone to do the dirty work.’
Theo shifted uneasily in his chair. Sugi’s anxiety was different from his.
On the fifth evening of Nulani’s absence, in spite of Sugi’s entreaties, Theo decided to walk along the beach again.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘nothing can happen to me. It’s not people like me that interest them. I’m too well known. I’m safe.’
And he went out. A full moon spilled a continuous stream of silver on to the water. An express train hooted its way along the coast, rushing towards Colombo. But there was no sign of the girl on the empty beach. What is the matter with me, he thought, exasperated. Am I going mad? She’s probably busy, helping her mother, sewing, being seventeen. And she never said when she would be back, he reasoned silently. He was puzzled by this disturbance to his equilibrium. Time was passing, in a few months it would be winter in England. His agent would not wait for ever. He had not written much. As he watched, the moon spread its phosphorescent glow into the sea.
‘Look,’ Sugi said when he returned.
He held out a piece of paper. Thick heady blossoms glowed white under the lamplight while Theo unfolded it quickly. It was from the girl. She had drawn a picture of a man. The man was sitting on one of the cane chairs on her veranda. There was a cup of tea on the table beside him; it was placed on a heavily embroidered cloth. The man’s face was in profile, but still, it was possible to see the fine lines of dissatisfaction and anger and suppressed cruelty. It was possible to see all this on the small piece of paper, clearly marked by the stub of a pencil.
‘It’s her uncle, Sir,’ said Sugi when Theo showed him. ‘I know this man. He is a bad man. The talk is he betrayed Mr Mendis. That it was because of him, the thugs came. He never liked his sister’s choice of husband. There are seven brothers in that family, you know, and they like their women to do as they are told.’
Theo felt anger tighten its belt around him. His anxiety for the girl intensified.
‘I think I’ll take a walk over to Mrs Mendis’s house,’ he said.
But Sugi was alarmed. He would not let Theo be so foolish.
‘Are you crazy, Sir? Leave that family alone, for God’s sake. I’m telling you, you don’t understand the people here. You must not meddle with things in this place. Please, Mr Samarajeeva, this isn’t England. The girl will be OK. It’s her family, and she is no fool. She will come here, tomorrow or the next day, you’ll see.’
He sounded like a parent, quietening a restless child. In spite of his anger another part of Theo saw this and felt glad. He was amazed at the easy affection between them. They had slipped into a friendship, Sugi and he, in spite of the rising tide of anxiety around them, perhaps because of it.
‘Sugi,’ he said softly into the darkness, feeling a sudden sharp sense of belonging. ‘You are my good friend, you know. I feel as if I have known you for ever.’
He hesitated. He would have liked to say something more. Moved by their growing affection for each other, he would have liked to speak of it. But he could not think of the right way to express himself. Sugi, too, seemed to hesitate, as though he understood. So Theo said nothing and instead poured them both a beer. But the warmth between them would not go away, settling down quietly, curling up like a contented animal. He looked at the note again. Underneath the drawing Nulani had captioned it with two exclamation marks. What did that mean?
‘I told you, Sir, the girl understands her family better than you. She is probably laughing at her uncle right now. You must not worry so much. She’ll be able to take care of herself. And tomorrow she will be back, you’ll see,’ he added, cheerfully, for he could see that Theo was less worried now. ‘I’ll squeeze some limes and make a redfish curry. Tomorrow.’
‘I would have liked children, Sugi,’ Theo said later on, calmer now than he had been for days.
Sugi nodded, serious. ‘Children are a blessing, Sir, but they are endless trouble as well. In this country we seem to have children only to carry on our suffering. In this country it’s only one endless cycle of pain for us. Some terrible curse has fallen on us since we became greedy.’
Startled, Theo looked sharply at him. He had forgotten the slow and inevitable philosophy of his countrymen. But before he could speak, Sugi put his hand out to silence him. The moon had retreated behind a cloud and a slight breeze moved the leaves. It reminded Theo of other balmy nights long ago with Anna, spent in the fishing ports along the South of France. Something rustled in the undergrowth; Sugi disappeared silently along the side of the house. Thinking he heard the gate creak Theo stood up. A moment later there was a muffled grunt, the sound of a scuffle and Sugi reappeared, emerging through the bushes, pushing a boy of about fourteen in front of him. He had twisted the boy’s arm behind his back and was gripping him hard. In the light of the returning moon a knife glinted in his hand.
‘He was trying to break in, Sir, from the back. With this,’ he added grimly.
And he held up the knife. He pushed the boy roughly towards Theo, speaking to him in Singhalese.
‘He says he was only doing what he was told.’
‘What were you trying to steal?’ Theo asked him, also in Singhalese.
But the boy would not reply. In another moment, with a swift jerk of his elbow he broke free and vaulted over the garden wall, vanishing into the night. And although they ran out into the darkened road there was no sign of him anywhere. Sugi began bolting the windows and checking the side of the house, shining a torch on the dense mass of vegetation.
‘Tomorrow,’ he said, shaking his head, looking worried, ‘I will cut some of it back.’
Tomorrow he would rig up a garden light to surprise any further intruders. The boy was probably just a petty thief, stealing things to sell in order to buy drugs. But still, one could not be too careful. Tomorrow he would make some enquiries in the town. Meanwhile, Sir should go to bed.
After he had lit another mosquito coil and closed the net around himself, just at the point of sleep, Theo realised he had forgotten to ask Sugi who had delivered the drawing from the girl. And he thought with certainty, Sugi was probably right; the girl would reappear in the morning.
She was waiting for him the next morning in her usual spot on the veranda, drawing his lounge-backed cane chair.
‘So,’ he said sitting down, filling her view, smiling, ‘so, welcome back!’
And he seemed to hear the faintest flutter of wings. Small banana-green parrots hopped restlessly in the trees, music floated out from the house, and the air was filled with beginnings and murmurings. Last night seemed not to have happened at all. Her uncle had just left, she said. It was Saturday; there was no school so she had escaped from home. She wanted to work on the painting. Too much time had been wasted by her uncle’s visit. He had come to discuss Jim’s future. The days had been filled with squabbling and the thin raised voice of her mother. Her uncle had not cared about his sister’s distress. He merely wanted Jim to join the organisation he ran.
‘It’s something to do with the military,’ Nulani said scornfully. ‘I think they spy on people, for the army. My uncle said Jim is old enough and it was time for him to give up his studies. He said there’s no time for studying right now, when Sri Lanka needs him.’
‘What?’ said Theo. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Yes, but Amma does not want this kind of future for her son. She is frightened, she has lost my father, she does not want to lose a son as well.’
Sooner or later, Nulani’s uncle had told them, sooner or later Lucky Jim’s luck would run out. Then what would he do? Better to start now, show which side of the fence he was on. Before questions were asked.
‘So he was threatening your brother?’ Theo asked.
‘Yes, but Amma will not allow it. So they were fighting.’
Sugi brought out a dish of pawpaw. He had been preparing the table for breakfast. He covered it with an indigo cloth. Then he brought out some freshly made egg hoppers and some seeni sambol. And a small jug of boiled milk with the tea. A band of sunlight had escaped from the roof and bent across the table, stretching across the floor. Theo went inside to turn the record over.
‘And you? What did your uncle have to say to you,’ he asked, coming back.
Nulani pulled a face, laughing up at him. ‘I dropped two dishes yesterday,’ she said. ‘I was in a hurry. I thought if I cleared up quickly I might be able to come here. But then I dropped the dishes and Amma shouted at me. So I couldn’t escape.’
‘What happened then? Were you punished or something?’ It all sounded ludicrous.
Nulani shrugged. ‘No. Amma just said, “ What’s wrong with the girl? ” and that started my uncle off again, only this time he began to shout at me. He said I hadn’t been trained properly and I needed a husband!’
‘What?’ asked Theo in alarm.
‘Oh, he’s full of talk,’ Nulani said dismissively. ‘He can’t do anything. And I just ignore him anyway. He told Amma he would find someone suitable for me to marry, but Amma was too angry about what he had said to Jim to worry about me.’
The sky seemed cloudless and suddenly overbright.
‘I don’t have to do what he tells me,’ said Nulani. ‘My father hated him.’
But her father could no longer help her, Theo thought uneasily. Thinking also, in spite of this new threat from the uncle, how glad he was she was here now, and how empty the days had been while she had stayed away, wondering too, what he might do that would be of any help to her. Wondering if the chasm of age and life and experience left room for giving her anything on his part.
‘I haven’t seen you for five days,’ she said, suddenly, and in that moment, it seemed to Theo, the sky had changed and was now the timeless blue of the tea-country lakes.
‘But I have been drawing you from memory. Look, they’re nearly perfect,’ she told him, moving her chair closer and handing him her book. Once again images rose from the pages, tossed carelessly out, those aspects of himself that he barely intuited. There he was smiling, pensive, staring owlishly into the distance, cleaning his glasses. Oh Christ, he thought, Christ! What was this? He looked at the drawings helplessly, feeling his heart contract painfully. Lighting his pipe he drank his tea in silence. Then he stood up and held the door of her new studio open, smiling down at her.
‘Work,’ he said firmly, wanting for some aching, unaccountable reason to touch her long dark hair.
What remained of the morning was spent in this way. Nulani worked on the two canvases that would eventually be the portraits of Theo. The smell of her colours, mixed with the turpentine, filling the house. Outside a monkey screamed and screamed again. The heat draped itself like a heavy leaded curtain across the veranda. They would have to take their lunch indoors. Somewhere in the kitchen Sugi was scraping coconuts. Theo had so far written two sentences towards his new book. The image of the girl wove into his thoughts; it ran with the sound of the piano music from the record, it merged confusingly with the heat outside. Why had he ever imagined he could work in this place? I need the cold, he thought, restlessness stirring in him. He thought of the muffled noise of traffic rising up towards the tops of the plane trees in Kensington. A memory of his wide airy flat returned to him with the mirrors and the pale duck-egg walls, broken by patches of Kandyan red and orange cloth. Once he had been able to work among all that elegance, once he had had another life. Perhaps, thought Theo, perhaps I have no more to say; perhaps this latest book is doomed? Perhaps the sun has sapped my inspiration?
But then he went to get the girl, for the lunch was ready, and he saw the light flickering against the walls of the room where she worked. Her small face was smudged with paint, and it struck him forcefully that no, his book was not doomed at all. For the early-afternoon sun seemed to turn and pivot on a new axis of optimism. Sugi too seemed to have excelled himself with the lunch. All he said was that the market had been good as he set the jug of lime juice down and brought in the curries; murunga, bitter-gourd, brinjal, fish and boiled rice. He was smiling broadly and his previous disapproval of the girl seemed to have evaporated. Nulani, unaware of any difference, chattered happily with him as he brought in the food. But he would not stay while they ate, shyly asking instead if he might take a look at the painting of Sir.
‘Yes, yes,’ the girl said delighted. ‘But Mr Samarajeeva must not see it yet.’
‘Will you stop calling me that!’ Theo laughed. ‘Come back and tell me what you think.’
But Sugi could not be persuaded. He had work to do, he said. He was going to put barbed wire over the back-garden wall, whether Sir liked it or not.
So that it wasn’t until much later, when they were alone and he smoked his cigarette on the veranda with Theo, that he said, ‘She is very talented, Sir.’
They sat for a moment in companiable silence.
‘And she has become too attached to you,’ Sugi said.
All afternoon he had been working on the garden. The heat had eased off slightly, and then the girl, having cleared up her paints, had gone home. Huge tropical stars appeared between the leaves of the plantain trees. The garden was as secure as it was possible to make it, he told Theo. It had not been easy to get barbed wire; in the end, hoping no one had seen him, Sugi had picked up what had been lying around the beach. He was still worried about the boy from the night before, he told Theo.
‘You worry too much,’ said Theo, smiling at him. His affection felt clumsy. Again he recognised his own inability to speak of the growing bond between them.
He is like a brother to me, he thought with amazement. If I believed in it, I would say we had known one another in a previous life. It occurred to him that he would like to give Sugi something to mark his feelings, some tangible thing, a talisman for the future that was nothing to do with payments or employment. But he did not know how, or even what. And then, once more, he found himself thinking of the girl and her extraordinary quiet ability to make sense of all she saw, with delicate pencil lines overlaying more lines. The evening, and the night ahead, seemed suddenly interminably long until the morning. He hoped she had reached her home safely. He worried that she let neither Sugi nor him walk her back. He worried that her uncle was waiting for her. What on earth is wrong with me, he muttered, half exasperated, half amused at himself. I’m acting like her mother. And then he thought, Am I simply being sentimental? Perhaps this is what middle age is about. As he lit the mosquito coil, before he got under the net, he remembered again that he had forgotten to ask Sugi who had delivered Nulani’s drawing the night before.
One morning, some weeks later, Theo decided to visit the temple on the hill. The girl had told him it was very beautiful.
‘You should go,’ she had said. ‘We held my father’s funeral there.’
He had sensed she wanted him to go for this reason and he thought of the irony of it. Burning the man who had already been burned. Mrs Mendis was leaving the temple as he entered. He heard her calling him and looked around for an escape but there was none.
‘I have brought an offering for my son,’ she said. ‘He sits his scholarship exam this morning. I think his karma is good but I want to be sure he passes. I don’t want him to join the army. I don’t want him to die like my husband,’ she said, talking too loudly.
Theo looked at the woman with dislike. She had not mentioned her daughter once. Inside the temple it was cool and dark, and further back, out of sight, the monks sat in rows, their chants rising and falling in slow, low folds. The air was crowded with sounds, like the hum of hundreds of invisible birds. It reminded him of his childhood, of his mother. He had not been in a temple for many years. He stood in the coolness, thinking of Mr Mendis, wondering what he might have been like. And then he thought of the girl, wishing he had known her as a small child. Thinking how fleeting glimpses of that lost time often emerged in her mischievous laugh. Certain, too, that her father would always remain within her, however long she lived.
That afternoon, Nulani talked about her brother’s probable departure.
‘I think he will be happier in England,’ she told Theo. ‘And maybe he will come back to see us when the trouble is over.’
By now she was working on the larger portrait. She wanted it to be a surprise, she said. But she was less happy, he saw. Something was ebbing out of her, some vitality moved away leaving her drawn and hurt. Watching this, Theo felt unaccountably depressed.
‘That boy will never come back,’ Sugi said quietly, when he heard. ‘He only thinks about himself. Once he leaves he will forget about them.’
Sugi watched Theo. Although he said very little he knew all the signs were there. If he is not careful, he worried, Sir will get hurt. Why doesn’t he see this? Why, after all he has been through, is he not more careful? He’s a clever man, but … And Sugi shook his head.
‘Maybe,’ Theo said, ‘things will be easier for her when Jim goes. Maybe the mother will care more.’
‘The Mendis woman has only ever cared about the son, I tell you, Sir,’ Sugi said. ‘I know all about her. After the father was murdered, she used to talk to my friend who works in Sumaner House. And it was always the boy she worried about. Lucky Jim! That’s her name for him. She hardly notices her daughter.’
They were sitting on the veranda once again. It was late and the heat had finally moved a little distance away. Most nights now Theo listened to the menace of the garden, the rustlings and unknown creepings that scratched against the trees. He was hardly aware of doing so, but since the intruder, both he and Sugi were watchful.
‘And her father?’ he asked. ‘What was he like?’
‘People used to watch them,’ Sugi remembered. ‘Mr Mendis used to walk with his daughter every evening, up and down the beach. They used to say you could set your clocks watching those two. They always walked at five o’clock, every day, except when the monsoons came. He used to hold her hand. She was devoted to him.’ Sugi’s eyes moved restlessly across the garden. ‘It must have been terrible for her after he died. She must have felt so alone.’
They were both silent. Then Sugi went off for his nightly surveillance of the perimeter walls and gate, testing his barbed wire, wandering silently through the undergrowth. When he was satisfied that everything was in order, he came back and accepted a beer.
‘She needs to go from this place,’ he continued. ‘There is nothing here for her. Her uncle is a very unpleasant man. And, Sir, I know I’ve said it before, but you should be careful with this family. The girl is good but you are a stranger to these parts. Please don’t forget this.’
The night, once again, was quiet. There were no sounds of gunshots or sirens. Nor were there street lights here, for it was too far away from the other houses. The scent of blossom drifted in waves towards them. Occasionally the plaintive, lonely hoot of a train could be heard in the distance, but that was all.
‘You can’t change anything,’ said Sugi. He sounded sad. ‘You are right, things will take longer than we expect. Life is just a continuous cycle. Eventually, of course, at the right time there will be change. But however hard we try to alter things ourselves, what must be will be. Who knows how long it will take, Sir. Sri Lanka is an ancient island. It cannot be hurried.’
Theo watched the headlights of a car disappeared from view. The yellow beam stretched through the trees, bending with the road, piercing the darkness, searching the night. Then it was gone. It occurred to him there had been no car along that particular stretch of road for weeks.
Someone had thrown a plucked chicken over the wall into the garden. They had tossed it over, cleverly missing the barbed wire. It was trussed; legs together, smeared with yellowish powder, a thin red thread wound tightly round its neck. Even though death had come swiftly, leaving traces of blood, staring at it Theo imagined the frenzy of anger that had brought it to this state. A whole pageant of slaughter lay here, he thought, in this one small carcass. Mesmerised, he gazed at a half-remembered history, of sacrifice both ancient and bloodied. The turmeric had given the chicken’s skin the appearance of a threadbare carpet. He touched the bird with his foot; it was so long since he had seen something like this he had almost forgotten what it was meant for. And as he stood gazing at it, he remembered, in a rush of forgotten irritation, the reasons he had never made this country his home. Impatiently, for the waste of energy angered him, he kicked the chicken across the garden, and in doing so crossed a hidden boundary. For in that moment, it seemed to the horrified Sugi looking on, he did what no man should ever do: he tampered with those laws that could not be argued with.
‘Don’t touch it, Sir, for God’s sake,’ implored Sugi, but he was too late. The deed was done.
‘Don’t touch it, Sir, please. I will see to it. Someone is trying to put a curse on this place.’
Theo grinned. He has been away too long, thought Sugi, distressed. He questioned, instead of accepting. Twenty-odd years living away had made Theo forget. He was trying to single-handedly alter the inner structure of life. And seeing this, Sugi was frightened. His fear clung to the barbed wire that was pressed against the garden wall. Fear had been stalking Sugi daily for years.
‘This town is not as it used to be,’ he said. ‘We used to know everyone who lived here. We knew their fathers and their grandfathers too. We knew all the relatives, Sir. Many people have moved into this area, thinking it is safer here. But the trouble is, this has made it less safe. There are thugs in the pay of the authority, and there are thugs working for those who would like to be rid of the authority. Singhalese, Tamils, what does it matter who they are, everyone spies on everyone else.’ A nation’s hatred has split open, he said, like two halves of a coconut. ‘People are angry, Sir. They can barely hide it.’
Theo was silenced. Other people’s jealousies spilled out around him, dismembered bodies, here and there they scattered randomly, saffron yellow and cochineal. He could say nothing in the face of Sugi’s certainty. He did not want to hurt his feelings. Only the girl, arriving soon afterwards, expressed contempt. The dead chicken did not bother her, she said; she had seen so many before. Her father, she told Theo, had laughed at such nonsense. Her father had been full of peace, she told him. He did not believe violence answered anything, and so Nulani Mendis believed this too. She drank the lime juice Sugi had made for her and it was she who tried to reassure him. She was wearing her faded green skirt wrapped even more tightly around her slender waist and her skin appeared flawless through the thin cotton blouse. Sunlight fell in straight sheets behind her, darkening her hair, shadowing her face, making it difficult to read her expression. For a moment she seemed no longer a child. Had she changed since yesterday? puzzled Theo.
When she finished working on her painting she discarded her overall. There were still some slivers of paint in her fingernails. Today they were of a different colour. However hard she scrubbed her hands there was still some paint left, thought Theo amused. The day righted itself. The soft smell of colour still clung to her and seemed to Theo sweeter than all the scent of the frangipani blossoms. The picture was nearly finished, she told him, and she wanted to do another one. She needed one more sketch of him. Would Theo be able to sit still, please? He hid his amusement, noticing she had become a little bossy. Her notebook of drawings had grown and she wanted to use them in one more painting. She wanted to paint Theo in his dining room with its foxed mirrors, its beautiful water glasses, its jugs. She wanted to paint him surrounded by mirror-reflected light. Light that moved, she said. This was what interested her, not the trussed chicken. And no, she did not want him to sneak a look at the portrait, she added, laughing at him.
‘You can see it soon,’ she promised, as though he was the child. ‘When it’s finished.’
For now, she told Theo, he could look at her sketchbook instead. Once again she gave him the fragmented stories she had collected. And again they fell from the pages in a jumble of images.
‘Look,’ she said laughing, ‘my uncle!’
She stood too close, confusing him, making him want to touch her hair. Their conversations were a running stitch across her notebook, holding together all that he could not say.
‘There’s no one at home,’ she volunteered. ‘Jim has gone to Colombo with his teacher and Amma is visiting a friend. So I’m all on my own.’
She did not say it, but it was clear she was free to do what she pleased. How can I encourage her to defy her mother in this way? wondered Theo.
‘Jim has to get all the documents he needs to leave.’ Her brother’s departure was never far from her thoughts.
‘Doesn’t he want to wait?’ asked Theo. ‘Doesn’t he want to be sure he has passed the exam first?’
But, Nulani told him, Jim was certain. His teacher too believed he would pass the examination and be awarded the British Council scholarship. Such certainty, thought Theo, raising an eyebrow. He said nothing, watching as the thought of Jim’s certain departure darted and fluttered across her face.
‘He wants to leave Sri Lanka by October,’ Nulani said. She dared not think what that would mean for her.
For the moment, though, with the absence of her family, something, some unspecified tension seemed to ease up. She would stay late and the mornings were fresh and unhampered by the heat. The days stretched deliciously before them, slipping into an invisible rhythm of its own. By now Theo had become used to her presence, and he worked steadily on his manuscript, distracted only occasionally. Perhaps, he thought, Anna had been right. She had always insisted they needed a child to give purpose to their lives. A child was an anchor. It brought with it the kind of love that settles one, she used to say. When she had died Theo had remembered this, thinking, too, how useless a child would have been when all he wanted had been her. Now he wondered if Anna, wise, lovely Anna, had been right after all.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_b8bb580c-bc5b-5623-be45-bc5b78cae39d)
THERE WERE FLEETS OF ENORMOUS ORANGE MOTHS in Sumaner House where Vikram lived. Moths and antique dust that piled up in small hills behind the coloured-glass doors. The beetles had drilled holes in the fretwork of the frames and sawdust had gathered in small mounds on the ground. It was a useless house really, everything was broken or badly mended, everything was covered in fine sea sand, caked in old sweat and unhappiness. Objectively, it might have made a better relic than a house, but relics were plentiful and houses of this size not easily found. The fact was Sumaner House was huge. Once it must have been splendid. Once, rich Dutch people would have lived in it and crossed the Indian Ocean in big sailing ships, carrying spices and ivory and gold back to their home. Once, too, the filigree shutters, and the newly built verandas, and the black-and-white-tiled floors must have looked splendid. The green glass skylight would have filtered the sun down into the dark interior. But what was the use? Time had passed with steady inevitability, washing away the details of all that had gone before, leaving only small traces of glory. Now the furniture was scratched and full of decay. These days only Vikram and his guardian and the servant woman lived here. Most of the time it was only Vikram and the servant woman who were in the house. She stayed in her quarters, cooking or cleaning, and Vikram came and went as he pleased. There was no one to stop him. No one to ask him questions or argue with him, for Mr Gunadeen, his guardian, was hardly ever present. He was in Malaysia. Why he had ever wanted to be Vikram’s guardian was a mystery. Perhaps he had wanted to protest against the exploitation of child soldiers. Perhaps, he had hoped, that by adopting a Waterlily House orphan he would build up good karma. No one knew, because after that one act of enigmatic charity, Vikram’s guardian went off to work, first in the Middle East and then in Malaysia. Supervising telecommunications systems in other developing countries. Perhaps the war had made him restless, the people in the town said. At least by adopting Vikram he had done something to counteract the work of those murderous Tamil bastards. For, it was said, he was a good Singhala man.
Having picked Vikram more or less randomly from the Waterlily orphanage, Mr Gunadeen put him in the local boys’ school.
‘He needs a good education,’ he told the headmaster privately, without noticing the irony of his words.
The headmaster knew, but chose to forget, that in the wake of independence the Singhalese had slowly denied the Tamils any chance of a decent education. Well, things had changed and these were desperate times. The headmaster knew nothing about child soldiers or their psychological scars. He thought Vikram was an orphan without complications. He knew nothing of his soldiering past.
‘I shall be gone for a few months,’ Vikram’s guardian had said.
‘Don’t worry,’ said the head. ‘He’ll be fine. You’ll notice a change in him when you return, I promise.’
Vikram’s guardian paid him handsomely. Next, Mr Gunadeen instructed the servant woman, Thercy.
‘You know what to do,’ he said. ‘The boy’s a little restless, but just feed him well and make sure he goes to school. I’ll be back in a few months or so.’
And then he went, giving Vikram a contact address and a phone number. He did not think things needed to be any more complicated than that. So Vikram had a home now, a new school and plenty of food. What more could an orphan boy expect? He was far away from the brutal place where they recruited underage children into the military. What more could be done? The people in the town shook their heads in disbelief. What a good man Mr Gunadeen was, they said again, hoping Vikram would be worth the effort put into him. That had been four years ago.
But Vikram seemed not to realise the significance of his good fortune. Right from the very beginning he did not appear to care about anything. At first, when he came to live in Sumaner House, he used to kick the walls, treating the house as though it were a person, scuffing the furniture slyly, gouging holes in the doors when no one was looking, and cracking the fine-coloured glass into as many lines as he could, without breaking it completely. Torturing the house. Only the servant woman knew what he was up to. Thercy the servant woman saw everything that went on.
Then later, as he grew into adolescence, Vikram quietened down. The servant woman noticed this too. Almost overnight Vikram became monosyllabic and secretive. Whenever Thercy looked at him she noticed how expressionless his face was. In the last four years, since the random killings here in the south, the troubles had worsened. Nothing was certain any more but Thercy had learned to keep silent. Privately, she thought Vikram was disturbed. His disturbance, she was certain, lurked, waiting to pounce.
The only person the servant woman trusted in the whole town was Sugi. She knew Sugi was a good man. Often when they met at the market they would walk a little way together (not so far or so often as to attract attention) and exchange news. Thercy often talked to Sugi about the orphan from Waterlily House.
‘He has everything he needs and nothing he wants,’ she liked to say. ‘It’s his karma. To be saved from his fate in the orphanage, and given another sort of fate! But it won’t work,’ she added gloomily.
Sugi would listen, nodding his head worriedly. He had heard all this before. Vikram hadn’t been a child soldier for long but Sugi knew: once a child soldier always a soldier. Why had Vikram’s guardian tampered with the unwritten laws of the universe? What had happened to him was unimaginable and because of this he should have been left alone, in Sugi’s opinion. Thercy had told Sugi the whole sorry story many times and each time Sugi had been convinced, Vikram should not have been brought here. The army entered Vikram’s home in Batticaloa and raped his mother and his sister. They raped them many, many times, Thercy had said, beating the palm of her hand against her forehead as she talked.
‘Then they took them away,’ she had said. ‘The army never thought to look under the bed. Vikram was hiding there. His father was away at the time. Someone went to find the poor man, bring him the news. They told him, his whole family had been wiped out.’ Thercy had sliced the air with her hand. ‘Just like that,’ she had said. ‘Gone! What could the man do? His grief must have been a terrible thing. He found some poison and, God forgive him, he swallowed it. It was only afterwards, when it was too late, that the people in the village thought of looking under the bed.’
She shook her head recalling the story. Sugi had heard it many times. Each time he was shocked. So much for our wonderful army, he thought each time.
‘So much for our wonderful army,’ he said again today, when they talked. ‘What d’you expect?’
‘We’d better go,’ Thercy said, noticing how long they had been standing together and suddenly becoming nervous. ‘There he is, over there. I don’t want him to see us talking together.’
‘Who’s that man he’s with?’ asked Sugi, looking at Vikram, stealthily.
The boy was standing with an older man at the kade, the roadside shop. They were both drinking. Sugi had heard other rumours about Vikram. After his parents had died the Tigers were supposed to have got hold of him. But then, as luck would have it, the Singhalese army rounded up some of the Tiger cubs and handed them over to the orphanages a few months later. Vikram was one of them. He was only seven. He had already been carrying equipment for the guerrillas. Sugi could hardly believe that. A boy of seven, being a runner for the Tigers.
‘And what would all that have done to him?’ asked Sugi, watching Vikram now.
How could his past be changed? How could he be given new thoughts simply by being adopted? Thercy agreed.
‘Aiyo!’ she said, remembering. ‘You should have seen him when he first came here. Mr Gunadeen wasn’t around of course. He just went off and left me with the boy. I had to deal with everything all alone. Vikram used to run riot in the house. He’s calmed down a lot now. In fact …’ She paused.
‘What?’ asked Sugi.
‘Well …’
Thercy hesitated. The truth was, there was a kind of emptiness to the boy. He seemed such a strange, mysterious creature, silent and friendless. Well, almost. Today she had some new information for Sugi.
‘You know he’s made friends with the Mendis girl?’
‘What?’ cried Sugi in alarm.
Thercy shook her head quickly. She hadn’t wanted to alarm Sugi.
‘No, no, I didn’t mean to worry you. I know what you’re thinking. He’s not likely to visit you. And anyway the girl doesn’t speak to many people either, and I only saw her talking to him once. I shouldn’t have said anything.’
Sugi relaxed slightly, although he still looked distracted.
‘It isn’t good,’ was all he said, not knowing how to express his disquiet. How much would Nulani Mendis tell Vikram about her visits? About Theo?
‘His Singhalese is faultless, you know,’ continued Thercy. ‘Not many people around here realise he’s a Tamil. Mr Gunadeen didn’t want that to be common knowledge. For his own safety.’
‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ said Sugi, uneasily. ‘He could be working for the Tigers, couldn’t he, for all we know?’
‘Who, Vikram?’ Thercy laughed. ‘Is that what you’re worrying about? No, no, Sugi, he’s harmless really, I promise you. In that way, anyway. He’s just a little strange, that’s all. I can’t explain it …’ Again she hesitated. ‘And he has a temper. To tell you the truth, of late I feel sorry for him. What chance is there for him to ever have a normal life?’ she said, adding, ‘He’s so disturbed.’
Vikram had no idea that people were talking about him. Even had he known he would not have cared much, for Vikram lived in a world without people. The space inside his head was so empty that it almost echoed. Long ago, when he was at Waterlily House, he had begun to cultivate indifference. Nobody knew of course, but indifference had become a way of life for him. By the time he was twelve, before his guardian had arrived on the scene, he had learned not to make a fuss. What was the point? He could manage his life with ease without noise or fuss. He did whatever random thing he wanted, took what he liked the look of, unrestrained by anyone, neglected and unloved. By the time he reached the age of sixteen, he had grown enormously, was not bad-looking and was more or less friendless.
Sumaner House stood on the crest of a rise away from the immediate town; there were no other houses nearby. The view of the sea was uninterrupted. Vikram had his own room in the house. For nearly four years he had lived like this. He went to school and worked hard. For four years, while his guardian dipped in and out of his life, he studied. He soaked up knowledge like a sponge. The head was pleased. He wrote to Mr Gunadeen.
‘It’s been a success,’ he wrote. ‘And, it proves these children can be rehabilitated,’ he added triumphantly.
So Vikram was a success story. He was good at English and his Singhalese was brilliant.
‘He writes beautifully too,’ his teachers said.
In this way they continued to encourage Vikram. For, as everyone knew, whichever way you looked at it, the boy had had a bad start to life.
Every morning Vikram walked to school. It was the same school that Jim Mendis attended. It was generally expected that Lucky Jim, in spite of having no father, would one day go to the UK because he was so clever. And so, because of his luck, and quite possibly also his loss, the boys all wanted to be Jim Mendis’s friend. All except Vikram, that is. Vikram watched the Mendis boy quietly. Nobody noticed, because he was so quiet, but Vikram watched him idly, wondering if there was a chink in Jim’s luck. But it seemed Lucky Jim was luck-tight. Soon after this, Vikram began to notice Jim Mendis’s sister. She too walked to school and now Vikram noticed with some surprise that she was sweetly pretty. Something about her puzzled him. Then one day, as they stood at the crossroads, she turned and smiled absent-mindedly at him. Startled, he stared at her, his uneasiness growing. And then, because he couldn’t think of anything to say, he looked quickly away. His heart was pounding as though he had been running. The Mendis girl reminded him vaguely of someone else. He could not think who it might be. After that he began to hear little things about her, little bits of gossip.
People said she did not talk. And she had no friends. All she did was draw, draw, draw. Vikram began to watch her secretly and with new interest. One day he saw her go over to the road island on the Old Tissa Road. He saw her touch the ground, rubbing her hand slowly in the dust. And then she looked up and down the road. Vikram hid behind a tree. What on earth was she doing? he wondered curiously. Again the girl reminded him of someone but he could not be sure whom. He felt an unaccountable fear bubble up in him. He did not see her again for a long while after that. He was busy doing other things. Having discovered furtive sex with the daughter of a local shopkeeper, he was often occupied. The shopkeeper’s daughter had not wanted his advances, but Vikram had told her calmly, he would kill her if she told anyone. He had only meant it as a joke but she took him at his word. Pleased with his success, he took her to the back of the garages, close by the railway line. After a while she stopped struggling and accepted the inevitable, crying silently and allowing him to do whatever he wanted. Once, he brought her to Sumaner House, but the servant woman had stared meaningfully at him and although he behaved as though he did not care, the woman’s look had put him off. He took the girl back to the garages after that.
Then, as Vikram approached his sixteenth birthday, he met Gerard.
Gerard was not his real name, he was really Rajah Buka, but no one knew this. He owned a gem store in the high street, and although there was an intermittent war on, he did good business with the foreigners who occasionally passed through. Gerard had seen Vikram on several occasions, loitering at the junction buying cheap alcohol. He had struck up a conversation with the boy. He appeared interested in everything Vikram had to say. How well he was doing at school, whether he had any friends. He found out that Vikram talked to no one, and so he invited Vikram to his rooms above the shop and he gave him some vadi, a special Tamil sweetmeat. Vikram was pleasantly surprised.
‘Where did you get this from?’ he asked.
Gerard laughed and gave him a Jaffna mango by way of answer. Vikram was amazed.
‘How did you get to Jaffna?’ he asked. ‘Isn’t it impossible to cross Elephant Pass because of the army blocks?’
‘Nothing is impossible,’ said Gerard meaningfully.
He paused and lit a cigarette.
‘How do you feel about being adopted by a Singhala?’ he asked casually. ‘They killed your family, I heard. And they hate the Tamils, don’t they?’
Gerard flicked ash on the floor and waited.
‘How d’you feel about that?’
Vikram said nothing. He had been told by his guardian never to mention the fact he was Tamil. So how did Gerard know? Gerard watched the boy’s face and he laughed, finding it hugely funny.
‘Don’t you want to avenge your family, then?’ he asked softly, easily.
Still Vikram said nothing. He felt as though a large cloven-hoofed animal had clambered on his back. The feeling sent a small shiver running up and down his spine. He felt as though his back might break under the strain. The palms of his hands became moist. An image of a young girl pounding spices flashed past him. Gerard smoked his cigarette and continued watching the boy with interest. There was the faintest hint of a smile on his face. When he had finished his cigarette, he went over to a desk and took out a key.
‘Come,’ he said. ‘I want to show you something. Don’t worry,’ he added, seeing Vikram’s wary look. ‘We’re on the same side.’
Gerard knew he had been right all along. He had told them many times at headquarters, the advantage of boys like Vikram were that they were halfway to being recruited already. Lupus, of course, had been sceptical. He was sceptical of everything Gerard proposed. Naturally he saw Gerard as a threat. Naturally anyone with independent thoughts worried Lupus. Which was precisely why Gerard did not want to operate from the north. There were terrorists and terrorists, Gerard knew. Not all of them were bright. Not all of them had had the kind of university education that Gerard had, or his never-ending passion and capacity for rhetoric. Not everyone had his vision, he decided regretfully. Having declared war on the Singhalese government, Lupus and his guerrilla organisation wanted a separate Tamil state. But they have no plan, thought Gerard, inclined to laugh, no strategy. Except to blow up as many people, and make as many enemies as possible in the international community. No diplomatic skills, sneered Gerard, whose own plans were far more ambitious. His plan was about unity. Of course he wanted a different government, what Tamil didn’t. But the difference was that Gerard wanted the new government to be central, not separate. And he wanted the Singhalese out! He wanted a single, powerful Tamil government for the entire island. He wanted majority rule for the minority. Actually, what he really wanted was to be Prime Minister! But first things first, thought Gerard. He was a patient man and he was prepared to wait. There was a little groundwork to be completed, a government to be destabilised. It was work that needed a certain amount of brute force. Which was where the likes of Lupus came in, Gerard believed.
Long ago, when he had been on one of his recruiting visits to Waterlily House, Gerard had noticed Vikram. The boy had been small then, traumatised, but bright. On his next visit to the orphanage he had seen Vikram’s guardian-to-be. And that was when he had laid his plan. For as he had noticed instantly, most of the spadework had already been done for Gerard on that memorable afternoon when the Palmyra toddy was on the kitchen table and the red dhal was in the clay pot. Later he heard about the day that Vikram had played hide-and-survive while the sunlight mingled with the screams of his mother and his big sister. The day the sky had boiled and the light had fallen, harsh and green and terrible, down through the rattan roof, and Vikram’s sister prepared an offering of pawpaw and king coconut washed with saffron water. On the fateful day when his sister had never made it to the temple, what had to happen, happened. So now, guessing correctly, fully understanding, Gerard earmarked Vikram for greater things. He knew he had picked a winner. Backed by Gerard, Vikram would go far.
Gerard unlocked the drawer and watched Vikram’s face.
‘Well,’ he said very gently. ‘Don’t tell me you’re scared? Don’t tell me you won’t avenge your family, given a chance?’
‘Will you teach me to use it?’ asked Vikram, startled from his usual reverie, staring at the gun.
‘Patience, patience,’ Gerard laughed, closing the drawer, amused by Vikram’s sudden interest, preferring it to the boy’s usual indifference.
‘All things come to those who wait. You must learn to clean it first.’
It was the best way to start; it would keep Vikram’s interest alive. Cleanliness was next to godliness, he told the boy, and God was the gun. Vikram liked the idea of the power of God. He liked the mantras Gerard was always reciting. For a moment he felt as though he had a purpose in life. Most of the time the empty, shut-down feeling in his head made him lethargic. But now, for the first time in ages, he felt a stirring within him. A new energy. Avenge your family, Gerard had said. Vikram looked at him and thought, Gerard likes me. The notion was oddly pleasing.
One morning soon after all this happened, having decided he had no need for school, Vikram was on his way to Gerard’s gem store when he saw the Mendis girl again. He had forgotten all about her. But she stopped and began to speak to him.
‘Don’t you go to school any more?’ she asked.
Vikram was confused. He thought she didn’t speak. And how did she know he was not at school? He stared at her.
‘I’m Jim’s sister, Nulani, remember?’ she said, clearly thinking he did not recognise her. ‘You live at Sumaner House, don’t you?’
Vikram nodded. Nulani Mendis fumbled in her satchel. She took out a small battered notebook.
‘Look,’ she said, showing him a drawing.
She was laughing. He could see her teeth, white and very even. Vikram took the book reluctantly. Then, in spite of himself, he too grinned. It was a picture of a teacher no one liked. Nulani Mendis had drawn a caricature, catching his likeness perfectly. Suddenly, Vikram felt shy. The girl was standing close to him. He could smell a faint perfume.
‘You’re good,’ he ventured at last, hesitantly.
For some reason she scared him. There was an air of determination, a certainty about her that confused him. He felt as though she might ask him for something he could not give. He saw she was still smiling at him and again he felt an urge to run away. Then he noticed that close up she was even prettier than she had appeared from a distance. Tongue-tied, he continued to stare at her, hardly aware she was still speaking.
‘Has your brother gone to the UK?’ he asked finally, with some difficulty, not understanding and wanting to distract her.
The girl shook her head. ‘Not yet,’ she said.
She smiled again, but this time it was she who hesitated. Then she seemed to withdraw slightly. He thought she appeared older than he remembered, and he saw her eyes were very dark and deep and sad. They seemed full of other puzzling and unnamed things. He stared at her for a moment longer and nodded. Then, making up his mind, he loped off.
That afternoon, after he had finished his target practice with the silencer on the gun, Gerard told Vikram he had something important to say.
‘First,’ he said, ‘well done!’ He took the gun from Vikram. ‘Congratulations! You’ve worked hard and as a reward I shall take you on a little operation with me at the end of the month. If you do well at that, there will be bigger and more interesting assignments ahead, OK? And then, in a few months’ time you will go to the Eastern province for something extremely important.’
‘What?’ asked Vikram. ‘The Eastern province? Isn’t that where the Tigers are trained?’
‘Vikram,’ said Gerard, ‘you must learn not to ask too many questions. You’ll be told everything. But, all in good time. Don’t ask questions. You aren’t going to be an ordinary member of the Tigers, believe me. You are both intelligent and a good shot. So now you’re going to be trained for something top class. Trust me, men.’
‘When?’ demanded Vikram.
‘Patience, patience,’ said Gerard, holding up his hands mockingly, shaking his head. ‘Patience is what’s required now. We’ve both waited a long time to prepare you for this. Don’t ruin things. I promise you the time is coming when you will avenge your family. I fully understand how you must feel. Just wait a little longer. And for heaven’s sake, Vikram,’ he added, ‘do me a favour. Go back to school for your exams. You don’t want to attract any notice at this stage. If the Mendis girl knows you’re absent, then others will too.’
Vikram picked up the gun and held it below his crotch. He stroked the tip of the barrel. He laughed, a high-pitched out-of-control scurrilous screech.
‘That’s enough,’ said Gerard sharply. ‘Put it down. It’s not a toy. You can have all the things you want if you show restraint. You’ve been earmarked for great things. Now, go back to school.’
Gerard was aware that underneath his silent exterior Vikram was coiled like a spring. He knew whatever simmered in Vikram was dangerously near the surface. And that it was best to keep a tight control over him. Just in case.
A few days after his exams, Vikram saw the Mendis girl once more. She did not see him. She was hurrying in the direction of the beach. Interested, he decided to follow her. He watched her body move darkly beneath the lime-green skirt, in the sunlight. Her hair was tied up and it swung to and fro as she walked. Where is she going? Vikram wondered curiously.
The road went nowhere in particular. In fact, it was not possible to reach the beach this way without scrambling over the giant cacti. Then the road curved, and suddenly it was possible to see the sea. The beach was completely empty and scorched. Just before the road came to an end, there appeared a long, low house, surrounded by a flower-laden wall and flanked by two stone lions. The top of the wall was covered in barbed wire. Vikram remembered now. It was the house where the UK-returned writer lived. He had seen the man once when he had come to the school. The teachers had shaken their heads, saying he was a Singhalese who was pro the wretched Tamils. What kind of a Singhalese was he? they asked. Still, they had said, he was famous. Misguided, but famous. So they had invited him because of that.
A large jackfruit tree overhung Theo Samarajeeva’s garden wall. Its leaves were thick and succulent, and the girl, stopping outside the gate, began to draw in her notebook. She had no idea she was being followed. Nor did she seem to notice there was no shade. Nulani Mendis sat on the withered grass verge absorbed in her drawing, as the low hum of mosquitoes and the drowsy buzz of other, more benign, insects slowed to a halt in the baking air. Across the sun-drenched garden Vikram could just make out the writer, in his pale linen trousers and his white shirt, working at a table on the veranda. The veranda had been bleached white by the sun and appeared dusty in the dazzling light. Then the manservant came out to fetch the girl in for lunch, and shut the gate. And that was all Vikram saw of any of them that day.
* * *
Nulani had almost finished the portrait. In a week she would be ready to show both Theo and Sugi.
‘I will cook kiribath, some milk rice, ‘Sugi said. ‘And buy the best fish.’
‘I shall decide where it must be hung!’ said Theo.
An air of gaiety descended. Sugi replaced the lanterns in the trees. And Theo declared the day of the unveiling a holiday from his writing. His work was progressing slowly. In October the film of his second book would be out. He would have to go to London for the premiere.
‘For how long will you be gone?’ asked Nulani, her eyes suddenly anxious. ‘Will they let you come back?’
Her hair was coiled against the back of her neck and a frangipani blossom quivered just above her ear. Theo watched it shake as she moved her head, wondering when it would fall. Once, he nearly put his hand out to catch it. How could he explain to her that no one could stop him coming home? When had he started to call this place home again?
His agent had rung him complaining. It was impossible to get a call through to him, did he know that? The lines were always down. How could he live in a place with no access to the outside world, where the lines were always down? The agent hoped he was working. Through the crackle on the line the agent sounded like a peevish nanny. The summer in London, he told Theo, was disappointing. Wet, cold and miserable. The only consolation, he supposed, was that the telephones worked!
Because the curfew was not in operation just now Theo walked openly on the beach. The sand, ivory and unblemished, seemed to stretch for ever, smooth and interrupted only by his footsteps. One evening Nulani went with him. She had told her mother she was working late on the painting. They walked the wide sweep of beach without seeing anyone, with only the slight breeze and the waves for company. It felt as though they had walked this same beach for an eternity. She walked close to him, like a child, her hand brushing against his arm. He felt her skin, warm against him. He had an urge to take her hand and cradle it in his two hands. He knew she was worrying and he wanted to tell her to stop. But he felt helplessly that he had no right to intrude.
‘I feel as if I have known you for ever,’ the girl said suddenly. ‘D’you think we knew each other in our last birth?’
He swallowed. Her eyes were large and clear. They seemed to mirror the sky. Looking at her he could not think of a single thing to say. Twenty-eight years between them and still he was lost for words, he thought, amazed. They walked the length of the beach and he watched the frangipani in her hair, marvelling that it did not fall; half hoping it would, so that he might catch it.
Chapter 4 (#ulink_5a2067a1-088e-5fe1-a8a0-224171e0ec99)
‘WHEN CAN I SEE WHAT YOU’VE DONE?’ asked Theo impatiently. He sat squinting at the sun. His white shirt was crumpled and the light cast purple shadows against the creases of the cloth.
The girl smiled. ‘What if you don’t like the painting?’ she asked, teasingly. ‘What if the money you are paying my mother is wasted?’
‘I will love it,’ he said, certain. ‘No question. I can’t wait. Don’t forget, I saw it when you began. And another thing, while I remember, I want the money to be kept for your work only. Should I tell your mother that?’
She laughed. What did she need the money for? She had wanted only to paint him. It will soon be October, thought Theo. The rains would come then, he knew. When they broke he would be in London. He did not tell her but he no longer wanted to go. The film had no significance for him. It was all part of another life. A life he seemed to have discarded with alarming ease. Living among his own people, here in this amorphous heat, seeing the mysterious and uneasy ways in which one day flowed into another, he felt as though he had never left.
The girl was sitting close to him on the veranda, staring dreamily at the garden. She was so close her arm brushed against his. She had the ways of the very young, he mused. Physical closeness came naturally. He could see the shadows of her breasts, small dark smudges, rising and falling through her thin white blouse. She looked very cool and self-possessed. And she seemed happier. He realised with shock that loneliness had clung to her like fine sea dust when he had first met her. But now she’s content, he thought. Now she is happier.
He wanted to think he had given her something, some comfort for the loss of her father. Even if all he did was offer her a space and encouragement to paint, surely that was better than nothing? He felt a growing certainty in his desire to help her. He felt it rise above the anxieties of this place.
‘You must work here when I am in London,’ he said.
An idea was forming in his mind. He did not know whether to tell her. He wanted to organise an exhibition of her paintings. But she had opened her notebook and was drawing again, her eyes half shut against the glare. Green and red splashed against him, other stories unfolded. He saw she was drawing his outstretched foot.
‘You can’t keep drawing me!’ he said laughing, moving his foot out of sight. ‘Now look, I’ve been thinking, I want to organise an exhibition of your paintings. I can’t do that if you only draw me!’
‘Where? Colombo?’ Her head was bent over her notebook.
‘Yes, maybe,’ he said, suddenly wanting to take her to London with him in October.
Thinking, what was wrong with him that he could not bear to be parted from her? He knew nothing about art but even he could see the astonishing things that were conjured up by her hands. They were the hands of a magician. Like shadow puppets they illuminated other dimensions of the world, probing the edges of things and those corners where drifts of light revealed all that had been concealed from him until now.
‘You must work hard until I get back,’ he said instead, trying to look stern.
So that she threw her head back and burst out laughing. And he saw, how in spite of everything she had been through, her youth could not be contained but was mirrored in her laugh. It was low and filled with happiness. October is still a long way off, he reassured himself. I’ll feel differently then.
The hot season was coming to an end and the full moon was ten days away. Twenty kilometres from the town was a sacred site where the festivities were beginning. It had been at the time of the festival that her father had been murdered, Nulani told him. Just before the water-cutting ceremony, in the build-up to poya, the religious festival on the night of the full moon. All across the town fear mushroomed in polluted clouds, hanging over two thousand years of faith. Fear seemed inseparable from belief. Men with bare feet walked over red-hot coals or swung themselves on metal hooks across the coconut trees. And all the while, interwoven with the sounds of drums and conch shells, the nada filled the air.
‘You must be careful,’ said Sugi. ‘Not everyone is a believer. These are troubled times. And even if,’ he added, ‘even if they are believers, some people still have evil intent.’
Every year Sugi went to the festival. He always met his family there; he had done this for as long as he could remember. But this year he was worried about leaving Theo on his own.
‘This is the time when some people try to put curses on their enemies.’
‘Sugi, for heaven’s sake, what d’you think is going to happen? No one’s interested in me. I’ll be perfectly fine.’
‘But the girl won’t be here either,’ said Sugi worriedly.
Theo laughed. The girl was going with her mother to the festival. They were going to pray for her brother Jim. To be certain he would get the scholarship.
‘Well, I thought you’d be pleased about that,’ he teased, giving Sugi a sly look.
‘Sir!’ said Sugi reproachfully.
‘Oh, Sugi, I’m only pulling your leg. I’m going to work like mad while you’re away. No distractions, no chatting, you know. No stopping for tea. Just work. I shall have most of this next chapter finished by the time you both get back. You’ll see.’
In the now skeleton-staffed Department of Tropical Diseases, a conference, planned two years previously, had to be cancelled because of lack of funds and resources. Many eminent scientists from all over the world, having been invited to give papers, were now told the unstable situation on the island made it impossible to guarantee the safety of their stay. It was a disappointment for all those who had worked tirelessly to eradicate the threat of an epidemic. An article appeared in a scientific journal. ‘No animal on earth has touched so directly and profoundly the lives of so many human beings. For all of history and all over the globe the mosquito has been a nuisance, a pain and the angel of death.’
Deep within the jungle the festival was in progress. A god with many hands sat inside the dagoba. The monks had placed him there, hoping he would give an audience to the crowds. This happened every year; it was the highlight of the festival. People came from far and wide to pray to him. The hands of this many-handed god were empty apart from his spear. He looked neither right nor left. If he heard the prayers of the tormented he gave no sign. There were peacocks at his side and sunlight shone on his burnished anklets. Young girls brought him armfuls of offerings, walking miles in the boiling heat. Young men came carrying hope. He received each of them without a word. All day long the drumming and the sounds of elephant bells filled the air in a frenzy of noise and movement. Trumpeters and acrobats walked the roadsides while men with tridents chalked on their foreheads paid penance for ancient inexplicable sins. Elsewhere the ground was strewn with red and yellow flowers and the heavy smell of cinnamon was underfoot. There were giant mounds of sherbet-pink powders and uncut limes piled up on silver platters everywhere.
The many-handed god watched them all. He watched the backs of the women bent in devotion. Who knew what they prayed for? Was it for abundance in their wombs? Or was it simply peace for the fruits of these same wombs that they desired? The crowds came with their coins tied in cloth, with their ribbons of desires, their cotton-white grief and their food. As night approached a full moon arose across the neon sky silhouetting the dagoba, white and round, with a single spike pointing at the stars. Hundreds of coconut flames fanned an unrelenting heat.
Midnight approached and the temple drums grew louder, announcing the arrival of the Kathakali Man of Dance. The crowds gasped. With his pleated trousers and beaded breastplates, the Kathakali Man pointed his fingers skywards. He seemed to be reaching for the stars. With ancient gesture and sandstone smile, he danced for the gaping, amazed gathering. The Kathakali Man had a many-faceted jewel that gleamed in his navel and a peacock’s cry deep in his throat. His drum tattooed yet another ancient tale, telling of those things which were allowed and those which were forbidden. His was a dance of warning. History ran through his veins, giving him authority. Everyone heard him in the neon-green night but not everyone was capable of interpreting what he said. Those who ignored him did so at their peril, he warned.
Long ago, in the days before the trouble, people from England used to come to see him. They came simply because they knew they could find native colour and because, in this sacred place, even the statues smiled. They did not understand the real meaning of a sacred site. They came for rest, for healing herbs and pungent oils. And sometimes the many-handed god welcomed them, and sometimes he did not. Now that the troubles were here no one came from England. Nothing but a steady stream of hope walked through the jungle to the dagoba. Nothing but despair showed through the brave colours of the processions.
Sugi stood in the crowds watching the festival. He was waiting for his relatives. While he waited he looked around him to see if there were others he knew. He noticed Mrs Mendis. Ah, observed Sugi, she is here for her son Lucky Jim. Born with the kernel of luck that Mrs Mendis protected with the husk of her own life. No doubt she wanted the kernel to grow. She’s a true believer and so she knows, true believers had a better chance. She wants nothing for herself, thought Sugi. But then, he noticed, Mrs Mendis had forgotten about her daughter. Sorrow, like too much sun, has blinded her. Mrs Mendis left her clay curd pots, her crimson flowering pineapple and her kiribath, milk rice, at the feet of the god. Without a doubt, thought Sugi, watching silently, the god will grant her wish. For it must surely have been decided in another life that Jim’s luck could only grow. Then Sugi glanced at Nulani Mendis. The child was lost in thought. What future will she have? he wondered, pity flooding his heart. With a mother like this! Sugi had been watching the girl for months. He was astonished at how she had changed. When she had first come to the beach house she had been silent and unhappy. Then slowly she had begun to blossom. In the beginning, he remembered, her unhappiness had blotted out her light. But gradually she changed. Her eyes shone, she laughed. And she talked all the time. Sometimes she drove Sir mad, Sugi knew. Sometimes they would exchange looks of amusement. And recently, thought Sugi, pensive now, Sir had a different look in his eyes. But Sir himself seemed unaware of this. Only Sugi knew.
A sudden harsh sound in the trees sent a flock of iridescent blue magpies bursting into the sky as though being lifted by a gust of wind. Several people threw themselves to the ground, crying. Was this an ill omen? Sugi looked uneasily around him. There was no wind. Ancient laws were written all over this sacred site. Sugi was a man of simplicity. And he was afraid. He saw the girl ahead of him in the procession look up at the magpies. She was smiling at some secret thought of her own. Yesterday she had let Sugi look at her latest painting. It was nearly finished and was a remarkable painting, of glossy greens and quiet violets. It was full of something else as well, Sugi saw. Something Nulani Mendis had no idea of. Painting was what she had brought into this life, Sugi told himself, watching her now. It was her fate. He knew her talent would never leave her. He watched as she bent her head and prayed. He knew she was praying for her brother. And he knew there were other undiscovered longings in her heart.
The procession had brought all sorts of people out. Some of them were not the kind of people who usually went on pilgrimages. One of the people in the crowd was Vikram. Gerard had told him about the sacred site.
‘Go and see it,’ he had said. ‘Mingle, learn what goes on there. Watch the Buddhist monks and look out for the army checkpoints. You should always talk to the army. Get them used to your face. Could be useful for the future.’
And he winked at Vikram. Then he put his hand on the boy’s shoulders, never noticing how he winced, not realising Vikram did not like being touched.
So Vikram went to the festival. The anniversary of the massacre of his family was approaching. Every year around this time he had nightmares. He would wake up to the sound of grinding teeth and discover they were his own. He would wake with an erection or with his sheet wet. And, always, he would wake with a skullful of anger punctured as though by knives. In the morning he was fine again, back to his usual indifferent self, with all disturbance forgotten. But for a couple of nights, close to the anniversary of the deaths, things were bad. On these occasions, Vikram heard, quite clearly, as if from a distant part of Sumaner House, his mother’s muffled screams, his sister’s voice crying out in Tamil. Why had they cried so much? What had they hoped to achieve? Mercy, perhaps? Had they not realised they were about to die? That no amount of crying would help them in the long dark place they had reached? From where he crouched, rigid under the bed, all Vikram had seen were their hands waving in a gesture of helplessness. The hands that had held him moments before, and had stroked his head, were now waving their goodbye. From his hiding place he could see fingers threshing and flaying the air, engaged in some ancient struggle, and in his dreams, so many years later, it was this image, of those hands forever beating the air, that he still saw. Gerard had reminded Vikram that his family needed to be avenged. They were waiting for the day, Gerard said, when, like a half-finished jigsaw, they would be made whole again.
So Vikram walked through the jungle, following the sound of the drums like everyone else. Thinking his own thoughts. On the way he passed a Coca-Cola lorry and a black Morris Minor. They were tangled and smashed together in a crash. Curious, he stopped to investigate. Bodies were tossed carelessly across the overgrown path, reddish-brown liquid frothed from under the lorry. Just looking at it made Vikram thirsty. Other people had visited the site of the crash before him. They had plundered the victims, taken their money and their jewellery. There was nothing left to take. Vikram stared. One of the bodies was that of a woman. A long deep ridge exposed the tendons and muscles across one part of her face. Bone jutted out. A fountain of blood flowed from her mouth. Her hands moved feebly like an ant on its back, clawing the air. Vikram looked at her impassively. She was beginning to bloat and her lips reminded him of the blood-swollen bellies of mosquitoes he was forever swiping. But, thought Vikram walking on, she did not look in so much pain. How long would it take for her to die? he wondered idly. Would she be dead by the time he had walked two dozen steps, or half a mile? Would she be dead by the time he reached the sacred site? Vikram continued on his way, following the distant noise of drums and the monkeys that swung in front of him from tree to tree. He could hear the bells of the Kathakali dancers somewhere in the distance.
He came to a reservoir. When he had been quite small, his mother had taken him back to the village where she had been born. There had been a reservoir there too. It was so large that Vikram had thought it was the sea. In those days Vikram had not yet seen the sea. There were trees all around the banks of this great stretch of water, frightening jungle vegetation, tangled and ugly. Branches and creepers trailed succulently along the forest floor. Small emerald birds flew harshly about. Vikram was three years old and he had been frightened. His aunt or his sister, he could not remember which, held him up in the water, someone else bathed him. Vikram had cried out. They told him the water was pure and clean. Later, sitting on the steps of a now forgotten house, the same girl, whoever she was, taught him to knit. Knit one, purl one.
‘See,’ she had said, laughing. ‘Look, he has learned to knit. Baby is very clever.’
The sun had beaten down on his head as he sat on the step of the house.
‘I’m thirsty,’ he had said in Tamil and instantly they had brought him a green plastic cup of king coconut juice and held it while he drank thirstily.
They had called him Baby; it was the only word of English they knew and they were proud they too could speak English, even though they had not been to school. Vikram knew they had loved him. Their excited voices had encircled him, round and round, picking him up and kissing him until he laughed with pleasure. He supposed it was pleasure.
The reservoir near his mother’s house was smooth and clean, and aquamarine. A mirror reflecting the sky. The one he was passing now was brown and mostly clogged with weed. There had been no rain here for a long time.
After he had prayed for his sister’s family and for his mother’s health, Sugi took his leave of them. He needed to get back home. His mother, who was old and frailer since he saw her last, kissed him goodbye. She was glad her son was doing so well, working for Theo Samarajeeva. A decent man, she said, a man for the Sri Lankan people, the kind of man that was desperately needed. They had heard all about his books and now there was to be a film too, about the terrible troubles in this place. It was good, she told her son, the world needed to hear about their suffering.
‘But you must be careful, no?’ Sugi’s brother-in-law asked him privately. ‘This man will make enemies too. You must advise him, he will have forgotten how it is here. He has lived in the UK. They are honourable there. And you must be careful. You too will be watched.’
Sugi knew all this. He left his red and silver offerings and his temple blossom for the many-handed god and just as he was about to leave a monk gave him a lighted lamp to carry back in. Perhaps, thought Sugi trustingly, this was a good omen.
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Roma Tearne
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A lyrical and profoundly moving story of love, loss and civil war, set in Sri Lanka, London and Venice.When author Theo Samarajeeva returns to his native Sri Lanka after his wife’s death, he hopes to escape his gnawing loss amid the lush landscape of his increasingly war-torn country. But as he sinks into life in this beautiful, tortured land, he also finds himself slipping into friendship with an artistic young girl, Nulani, whose family is caught up in the growing turmoil. Soon friendship blossoms into love. Under the threat of civil war, their affair offers a glimmer of hope to a country on the brink of destruction…But all too soon, the violence which has cast an ominous shadow over their love story explodes, tearing them apart. Betrayed, imprisoned and tortured, Theo is gradually stripped of everything he once held dear – his writing, his humanity and, eventually, his love. Broken by the belief her lover is dead, Nulani flees Sri Lanka to a cold and lonely life of exile. As the years pass and the country descends into a morass of violence and hatred, the tragedy of Theo and Nulani′s failed love spreads like a poison among friends sickened by the face of civil war, and the lovers must struggle to recover some of what they have lost and to resurrect, from the wreckage of their lives, a fragile belief in the possibility of redemption.Beautifully written, by turns heartbreaking and uplifting, `Mosquito’ is a first novel of remarkable and compelling power.