A Little Dust on the Eyes E-Book

Minoli Salgado

• Herausgeber: Peepal Tree Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 403

Beschreibung

It is the late 1980s in southern Sri Lanka. Bradley Sirisena's father is tortured and abducted in the violent struggle for power between the state and local insurgents. Some fifteen years later, his disappearance remains unresolved. Savi, a Sri Lankan research student long settled in the UK, has lost her way in both her thesis and her life, when she receives a wedding invitation from the uncle she would rather ignore. Meanwhile in a coastal fort in Sri Lanka, her cousin Renu continues to try to uncover the secret of Bradley's father's disappearance. Reunited on Savi's return to Sri Lanka, the cousins are compelled to confront truths that put them into direct conflict in their understanding of both the past and themselves. As Bradley's story draws to its inevitable end, the tsunami strikes and carries them all into a future that promises to be even more disturbing than the past. The novel is a haunting evocation of intersecting lives and parallel times that draws upon real historical events. In this richly textured book, myth and magic merge, as the bustle of a seaside city in England gives way to the unreal calm of coastal communities in southern Sri Lanka where thousands disappeared without trace. This book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here.

Leseprobe

A LITTLE DUST ON THE EYES

MINOLI SALGADO

First published in Great Britain in 2014

Peepal Tree Press Ltd

17 King’s Avenue

Leeds LS6 1QS

England

© 2014 Minoli Salgado

ISBN (EPUB): 9781845233020

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be

reproduced or transmitted in any form

without permission

for Shaun

Close both eyes

to see with the other eye

Open your hands,

if you want to be held.

RUMI

CONTENTS

I    BRIGHTHELM

II   DOLMEN HOUSE

III  THE LEPER KING

IV  THE BLUFFING TREE

V   TEL

Seven years before Renu Rodrigo’s A Postscript to The Years of Terror was published, the man upon whom much of the study was based disappeared in circumstances that gained global attention. Every available detail about the life and habits of Bradley Sirisena had been carefully catalogued in Rodrigo’s study: his lineage as a descendent of ninth century mercenaries who settled on the southern tip of the island, having set to sea from the Coromandel coast, his scant education at the local village school that had been subject to increasingly lengthy closure under pain of death from the local insurgents, his linguistic tic that compelled him to suck air through tightened lips at intervals while speaking, and his enduring insistence that his arms did not exist, that they had, in fact, been stolen in his sleep along with his father who had disappeared on a full moon night in May.

This apparent loss of his limbs first alarmed then infuriated his mother. She had been left without a husband and now had a son incapable of helping her earn an income. Her decision to leave the boy in the care of her elderly parents was seen by many as understandable and inevitable. The effect it had on her son, who now swayed and swung his dead arms on account of their weightlessness, was difficult to measure. Rodrigo found herself increasingly unable to distinguish between the facts relating to the disappearance of Sirisena senior and the ones relating to his son’s disabilities. In a land that did not officially recognise the abduction of its less prominent citizens, bereavement slipped into the only home that could accommodate it: the private self. Exorcism rites abounded, with fires burning until dawn. For the boy there was no such release. His body registered the impact of the loss in the sheer uselessness of his arms. He could not hold anyone. He would lose the ability to write.

It was fitting, therefore, that the study of his life should lack resolution. His disappearance in the catastrophe that the international media called the ‘South Asian Tsunami’ could not be regarded as certain. Rodrigo could only record that he had disappeared on the morning of 26 December while on his way to see a friend. His friend had disappeared too. Weeks later, when the road on which the young man had last been seen walking had been cleared of the detritus that remained of people’s homes, lives and livelihoods, Rodrigo noted that Bradley’s mother had resigned herself to the fact that she would only find her missing husband and son in the more fordable reaches of her heart.

1

BRIGHTHELM

small star

One by one, they fell into shade. She watched as Hannah’s retreating form was absorbed into the darkness of stone steps. The last thing she saw: the pale face of the child, slumped over Hannah’s shoulder, and the small star of her hand as she waved goodbye.

Savi drew her scarf around her and braced herself for the sea wind. The distant stalks of esplanade lights flickered into view, coming to her through the spray as a pale shower of young coconut flowers, waxy buds falling from golden wedding urns as she peeled them clean. Here they were again, glowing warm against the sea.

She was used to them now, these once disconcerting slips. They were to be expected in this land of shifted, shifting things, where hills rose and fell in smooth, leafless echoes, undulating like a frozen sea, and the sea itself materialised as solid waves of flint that matched the broken rocks on the shore. Brighthelm was spread between these repeating rolls of grey hills and waves, sometimes as a space of possibility, sometimes ephemeral as a dream. She would move through winding alleys that opened into gardens, pass lights that led to darkness, a pier that drew her over sea. As she walked above the moving water, she felt how much she’d left of herself behind. There were spinning wheels and trains that carried tourists into the clouds, and a language that turned chaotic on the lips. It was a place that shifted time and region, of rain from other shores. At its heart lay a royal dream of Asia – a curved and flowing building affectionately called The Pavilion; a prince’s whim, a sideshow, where turquoise minarets and parasols of palm trees covered writhing dragons of red and gold.

Savi walked through the Lanes with her rucksack on her back, stepping out of the way of the crowds, the men and women who strode out of shops as glossy as airport magazines and dined al fresco in those sea-front hotels made famous in films. She would feel the contact of their holidays in the sun as they brushed past, their bronze against her brown, their smooth oiled skins against her dry arms, the contrast reminding her she was alone.

She was still jostled, for she walked too quickly and her rucksack was weighted with books. ‘Sorry’, she would say, when someone bumped into her. ‘That’s OK’, she would respond on behalf of unsuspecting strangers, ‘Thaht’s OK. Zat’s Okay’, trying out variously a Scottish brogue, an American drawl, some version of Teutonic intonation. ‘I was wondering if you could tell me the way to...? You don’t have the time by any chance?’

But of course they never saw her, never responded. Just moved on as if she wasn’t there.

The cobbled streets were too narrow for the jutting shop signs that festooned her native city, signs that reached out and bickered with one another. She would pause by windows spangled with lights as bright as the sequined silks within, enter the aisle and run her fingers through the skirts, feeling the texture of those places that rose in her mind – saris, shawls, shirts, sarongs that fluttered from the open stalls of the Pettah.

‘How much?’

‘Forty pounds.’

In the Pettah it might have been less than four.

She withdrew her hand, wondering how many people she might have touched, who they were, what form of contact this was.

In the evenings, her work done, she might emerge and step over shapes that stirred into sleeping vagrants and slip into the Greek café. She might hear the laughter of students in their uniform of club leather, light a cigarette and watch the pier illuminate into a skeleton of bright bulbs, as the waves slid into darkness and the sea was reduced to a hiss.

Time was measured in anticipation of the full moon. Savi would strike off the days in her diary, each day a match lighting their separation, her diary empty but for these strokes. She placed her pen by the table, heard it roll and tap the lamp, reached for the switch and turned the light off. In the dark, it came to her that her mother, too, might have willed her into oblivion, that their enforced separation had made this a necessary act.

Her mother had always had the ability to cauterise pain. At the airport departure gate – a memory that might be called false because it was a composite of different events – her mother had turned away with her familiar decisiveness, cleared a path through the crowd with a trolley weighted with buckled cases, and never looked back. On poya days I will think of you – her mother’s words sealed in bright berries of crimson lipstick, uttered just moments before. The words were real but the events that framed them belonged to a different time.

She recalled the saline drip coming from her mother’s arm, a crescent of paleness on the inside of her wrist, the lifeline split and trailing into vagueness. She had sat by her mother’s side, stroking her hand, running her fingers down the length of her mother’s fingers and locking them into hers.

It had been many months – years perhaps – since her mother had been strong enough to rise up and hold her. With their hands locked together she felt the need to be held, gently as her mother had held her, not with the abrupt and crushing need with which her father drew her to him during the last few months of her mother’s life. Even in those rare moments of contact when her mother used to towel her hair dry, drawing Savi to her dimpled belly – her watalappan tummy as they both called it, smelling of sandalwood and talcum – and rolling her wet head in the large, soft folds, her mother had maintained the gentlest touch, her hands losing definition in the tumbling roll of towel that swaddled Savi’s head, laughing at her exaggerated squeals of protest, their laughter frothing into one.

She had run her fingers along the ridges of her mother’s left hand, around the rim of surgical tape, conscious of the looseness between skin and bone. A tight white sheet was drawn about her mother’s form. Only the face shifted a little, drawn into its primary lines. The thin light in her mother’s eyes seemed to be burning through Savi to a point beyond her on the window, the force of her gaze pared down to this bright filament. She was reminded of a cobra, eyes glazed in concentration as it shed its skin in the silver needles of a cactus, caught in the slow and delicate process of casting off an old self.

She had pressed her mother’s hand with the pulse she wished to instill in her, and then pressed it again, more insistently, with a pressure that must have hurt, hating the stillness that had settled over the bed. She had learnt about loss in those slow hospital hours, learnt of it long before she came to England. Aloneness. Her mother’s stillness a disease that threatened them all, when she could have swooped through the lengthening intervals between each breath.

It might have infected her too had not her mother smiled that last time and said the words that unravelled everything: On poya days I will think of you, the eyes fixed on her in the permanence of love, the words leaving her lips slack, open, with the promise of more.

Savi reached forward to kiss her but was pulled back by an attendant and led firmly to the window. Someone held her shoulder as if to stop her turning round. She heard a screen being drawn about the bed where her father had been sitting on the other side.

Plumes of smoke were rising from the glowing buildings below. There were the orange flares of the city riots, the fires smudged into clouds of glowing fingerprints. On poya days I will think of you. Her mother’s poya prayers repeating through her tears. Each full moon held a promise of sorts.

She could hear a woman’s loud boots on the porch, almost certainly her landlady returning from work. She turned towards the window and opened the blind to reveal the night in slats. The railings gleamed wet. The lamp held up its globe of yellow light against a distant satellite dish. It would be a full week before the moon rounded, a full week before her mother might have lit three sticks of incense. She needed her mother now, needed to conjure with the final farewell of airport sliding glass doors, imagine that her mother had made the journey with her to become a part of a larger self that crossed the sky, place her mother there at the time of her own departure so that she might see her calling, calling and waving an arm of shiny bangles, as she turned and walked away in her new, heavy, serious, English shoes.

She was eleven years old when she left the island. By then the past was already a necessary lie.

~

‘How can he remember something wrong? That is like mis-remembering, no? He’s a real boru karaya. All snaky lies coming from his mouth,’ Renu protested as she ran ahead, slipped off her sticky shoes, and scurried into the pantry. The girls were soaked from a sudden downpour after cycling home from tuition, and were eager for the Horlicks held in Josilin’s dimpled arms.

Renu was like that, the one who ran after her but always ended up leading the way, so it sometimes felt to Savi as if someone rushed right through her when Renu sped by.

The girls had been picking over the bones of a notorious family murder that had been spoken of in their history class, a story lightly buried in casual gossip and recently exhumed and dusted off by a national newspaper. Sir Henry De Mel, a man with ancestral links to their own family, had been shot dead during a dispute over pay and working conditions on his vast coconut estate. The murderer had been apprehended and hanged. Uncertainty lay for the girls in De Mel’s exact relationship to his assailant.

‘Well he was treated like a son, so he might as well have been a son,’ Savi reasoned, stirring the heat from her drink and downing a gulp. Did it really matter that the man accused, condemned and executed for the murder was in fact the first-cousin-once- removed of the victim? Did it really matter if their tutor referred to him as a son, as most people – including Josilin – did, when the papers dredged the details into view? It was a matter of degree rather than kind, surely.

‘But he wasn’t a son, he was a poor relation who was being treated as a hanger-on. How can Stiltskin get it so wrong? He talks as if it’s all just a story, not true true people and facts. Anyway, he’s meant to teach proper history, not fat stories about rich men.’ Renu pulled her damp dress off and kicked it in exasperation.

Stiltskin was their name for the private tutor whose real name was tongue-twistingly long and whose body was half its original size from fifty years of leaning over children’s desks. A large-nosed taskmaster who pranced about them, sniffing snuff.

‘It doesn’t matter. It’s finished now and he got most things right. Redley worked for Sir Henry and was family. He was lucky to have the job and all.’ Savi picked the dress up and gave it to Josilin who folded it into the sink. ‘So killing Sir Henry was not just murder, it was,’ she searched for the word, ‘tretch – treacherri. It was as if Redley was a son. Stiltskin is just repeating what everyone else says and thinks. He is telling the story as it is NOW.’ Her mouth expanded with emphasis. She looked to Josilin for support, but Josilin just smiled and chucked her under the chin.

‘You think too much, baba.’ Josilin sniffed as she went to the door. ‘My baby girls both think too much.’

‘It doesn’t matter what is true or not. What matters is what people believe,’ Savi said with a finality that she hoped would win the day.

But Renu, for whom spoken words were slippery fish, who could only find the exact words for her feelings in the quiet of her room with a pen in her hand, would not be silenced. ‘That’s just stupid. Belluddy Stewpid,’ she shouted. ‘You’d believe the moon is a pancake. You’re becoming, you’re becoming’ and Savi could see the words coming and can still hear Renu say them across the years, ‘a lost cause’.

She knew what this meant. She had heard her father speak of lost causes when referring to a difficult case, a case so entangled in the machinery of political power that it was impossible to win. Now, in the basement flat, the words seemed to gather new weight.

The slatted blinds cast shades of light and dark on her night shirt and the foolscap she’d laid on the table. Her thesis was now called The Manticore’s Tale, the original name lost in some filing cabinet at the university. It had begun as a study of parricide in myth and metamorphosed into what her supervisor, Dr Highfield, called a cultural analysis of nationalist discourse in relation to ethnic fratricide – terms which indicated his disapproval of her change of direction and his intention not to engage with her work at anything other than a cursory level.

She had not intended this change, but the study appeared to have evolved of its own accord, metamorphosing over the years as readily as the history it was attempting to reclaim. The Manticore’s Tale. She liked the name. It had bite, like the manticore itself, the mythical man-eating creature from India, half-man, half-lion, with a tail studded with poisoned quills and three rows of teeth. Its quills sprang out and regenerated themselves each time it was attacked. The history of Sri Lanka was like that, she felt, a tale of generative violence protecting the lion men who called themselves the Sinhalese. But only the title felt certain now. The rest of her study was written in a new language with an accent all its own that she was struggling to master.

Theories of belonging, she wrote, work on the premise of a fixed and stable originary culture.

Here it was again, the question of origins, the perpetual problem of where to start. All beginnings were interruptions, lacerations, a tear in the fold of time. If her mother had not died in a hospital bed in central Colombo on a private wing reserved for the terminally ill, on a day when neighbour torched neighbour into bright beacons, burning 300, 400, 500 people, the numbers flaring and accumulating in charred heaps before being swept away along with broken timber, Tamil shop signs and booty, sliding into that historical crease that was marked for her only by her mother’s thin hand on the whiter than white sheet, her father’s tight grief, and the cries of the ambulance men as they called for haste in the corridors below, while her mother looked through the window at a sky spiralling with smoke and white flags of scrap paper; if her mother had not died at this time, the dawn of Black July, had not died at all, there might not have been this sudden collapse, this tumble into darkness between moments that could be remembered and those that could not.

It was a beginning of sorts, her mother’s death. It marked the start of her own new life. She put down the pen, sat back and closed her eyes.

scrolled in black

In the morning, she found a white envelope on the doormat with her name and address scrolled in black. Good, she thought, no junk mail or bills. Even better, a handwritten envelope. She looked at the stamps and ran a finger over the edge. There were four identical images of Kandyan drummers, their hands beating barrelled drums, and a large stamp too smudged by the date print to be distinguishable. The small, neat writing bearing her name was as unfamiliar as the mode of address. Mrs Savi Carter. No friend would call her that.

She used to love getting letters from the old country, would race down the school stairs in clattering English shoes, her feet carried by the rhythm of those drums. At first, she had difficulty opening the single sheet aerogrammes because her father sealed them with gum. A small tear at the top, or along the edge, could leave a gap in a sentence and she’d have to work out the missing words. She found her own way of opening them – a small nick in the corner of the envelope, a hairpin to slit the sheet.

The words inside brought the birdsong back.

The new blue curtains in her bedroom that made the room, he said, more restful and screened out the afternoon glare so she might read more easily when she got back. And the fine thing that happened when Renu fell off her bike on her way to a cricket match, twisting her ankle so that she had to be carried home bellowing on her brother’s back while he became wild, shouting that she should shut up and be grateful that he was there, especially as she had made him miss his chance at playing first spinner and cutting the buggers up. And another fine thing happened when the stray dog they adopted – currently called Fatso, though the name seemed to change every week – chewed her sandals into a pulp as fine as pol sambol (but not as appetising of course) before swimming off into the lagoon. She had never seen the dog but her father’s description of the mongrel with a scar above its eye left her sure she could see it wagging its tail before her. She knew she was unlikely to see it. Strays were notoriously fickle and disappeared without explanation – and those sandals would almost certainly not fit her now.

His letters were full of fine things, his suppressed laughter rippling from the page through the broken words that came to him in the years after her mother died. It was not a language others would understand, so different from the language blown with emotion, sentiment and paternal effusion she knew her friends received in communication with their parents, a language of compensation, thick with terms of endearment that might make up for their frailty of presence. He was not a sentimental man, and he knew better than to open this door. He had contained his grief at his wife’s death in small parcels that he kept hidden from sight. He continued to go to work every day. First the office, then the court, on to the club in the evening, meeting friends as usual and swimming at weekends. There were more telephone calls of course, as experienced lawyers were much in demand at the time, and long lines of inquiry arriving at the back door, plaintiffs carrying identity cards and testimonials seeking his advice on matters that he kept to himself. But these changes seemed only to centre him, drawing him into a sure knot of certainty that seemed to grip Savi too.

He had fielded all the advice that assaulted him after his wife’s death with tact, making his parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, brother and sister-in-law and a host of friends, colleagues and acquaintances, feel that he was taking all their views into consideration. Then he announced a decision that shocked them all. Savi was to be sent to a boarding school in England. He did not discuss his decision with her, and when she asked why she had to go, he just said it was for the best. He said this with such quiet assurance that, despite finding herself falling once more, she felt there might be a safe landing in those words.

And his letters had extended her trust, sealed with Yrs affctly and that delicate x, the words squeezed of vowels so she could almost feel his hug. She would still be clutching one when the corridor burst into noise as the girls rushed out for prep. ‘Savi, come on! The bell has gone!’

She would be left, marooned in time and memory.

Now here was another letter edged by those distant drums. She stared at the alienating ‘Mrs’. She hated being called this. Savi, she would say, just call me Savi. And on those occasions when a surname was required, watch the brief hesitation as her companion searched for a trace of anglo-saxon blanching in her uncompromisingly brown face.

She went to the kitchen and turned on the light, tearing open the envelope with one slice of her knife. Letters from the old country were now a rarity, limited in recent years to the occasional Christmas card. She lifted out a sleek card embossed with pink and silver flowers with Wedding Invitation angled across the middle, and on the back, in silver, Mr and Mrs Eden Rodrigo request the pleasure of the company of... Her gaze slid down to where, in a tidy hand, someone had written, Do come, Savi. Don’t forget us!

This was not Fiona’s hand – Aunt Fiona who had persisted in trying to teach her Scott Joplin tunes on the piano despite the fact that Savi clearly had ten thumbs instead of two, Fiona, whom her grandparents had insisted on referring to as Piano on account of not being able to pronounce f.

‘Son, you must come for dinner with Piano next week,’ her grandmother would call from the deep folds of a starched sari. ‘Uma-Nanda has come down from Berlin. She will be expecting you.’

‘Amma, her name is Fiona,’ Uncle Eden would respond with practised courtesy from his desk. ‘I don’t think we can make it. The accountants are coming to discuss the tax returns. This meeting was delayed already.’

‘What nonsense. Returns can wait,’ her grandmother would say, blowing air between her teeth so Savi could almost see the tax returns scurry away with her breath. ‘And if you can’t come, at least send Piano. Uma will want to see her.’

This foreign aunt, with the unpronounceable name and a smile as soft as hibiscus petals, who had, over the years, been drawn into ancestral order and certified as another piece of family furniture, whose small form had expanded to reach her as her mother had retreated into illness, whose hands would tumble over and call into being the music that Savi’s fingers resisted.

No, this was not Fiona’s hand. Her aunt had large, looped writing that embraced you in its curves and animated words like love and giggle. Her sky-blue envelopes rustling with sheets of wispy paper had arrived steadily after Savi’s father’s death. They had petered to a halt after years of not hearing a word from Savi in return. This was not her aunt’s hand. The script was controlled, tight, urgent.

Do come. Don’t forget.

Savi took the card to her bed and read her scrawled words of the night, the idea that had found her scrambling for a pen under her pillow. Sinhabahu’s father can only be killed when his love for his son turns to anger. Parental love grants immortality of sorts (?)

The idea had potential, but the words made her feel as if she might, at any moment, be exposed, found guilty by Dr Highfield and the entire English department of using academic artifice to paper over the cracks of an impoverished personal life. She drew the duvet about her and watched the note spill to the floor as she reached for a cigarette. She struck a match, lit up, and ran her fingers over the invitation, feeling the ridges that marked to the marriage of their son.

Her cousin Romesh. A boy with a tongue as sharp as his eyes, who had tugged her unruly hair, You look like a Scarecrow! Scarecrow! From then on she had insisted on drawing her hair back into a matronly bun until Rob had told her he loved the way the curls framed her face. She had cut it short since then.

And Renu, Romesh’s sister, full-skirted as always, running along the beach like an overweight hen, her petticoats gathered and tucked behind her waist, making her bottom look enormous and her legs skinnier than ever.

Renu, Renu Nangi, the cousin she once called sister.

She wondered what they looked like now. Imagined Romesh taller and sobered by the years, dressed up as a groom posing for the camera with his family about him. Renu tamed into a sleek sari with jasmine cascading down her hair. ‘Go on!’ Renu’s whisper nudged her from behind, ‘Tell them you’ll stay on.’

And in that company she could see Rob slipping in, joining the family as if he belonged there – Rob, the laid-back student who had been casual even in his pinstripe at the Register Office as he proffered the ring they’d bought from an antique shop in the Lanes the day before – the Rob who’d sizzled into an atom of irritability by the end of that last trip back, the trip that made her sure it was unwise to return and stir up the ashes of the past. She felt herself enter that world again as if there had been no interruption at all, no interruption at all.

the cases are falling

‘Savi, for God’s sake tell him to slow down. The cases are falling and the tripod’s gone.’

‘OK. Wait. Heming,’ she cried, peering over the seat, trying to catch the driver’s attention.

He continued to steer a jolting course through the traffic with one hand on the wheel, the other holding a phone to his ear, his head angled towards the cassette tapes that were sliding across the dashboard out of his reach.

‘Heming. Heming. Lord, I don’t know if that’s the word. It’s been so long. And he’s not listening anyway.’ She held onto the partition that separated them from Lakshman and turned, swaying, towards her seat while he carried on shouting into the phone. Now even ordinary conversations in the language sounded like an argument, and not just because of the volume at which they were conducted.

‘This is crazy. He’ll kill us all.’

‘Everyone drives like this here. I’d forgotten it was so bad.’

The van lurched. Savi fell onto the front seat. ‘Are you OK back there?’

Rob had positioned himself in the corner at the back and was holding onto the strap swinging by the window, an arm about his precious grey holdall containing the camera equipment. His view was obscured by a pleated curtain that refused to slide back.

‘I think it’s better we sit apart, don’t you?’ she found herself shouting, without meaning to. ‘More room.’

The honeymoon in Sri Lanka had been entirely his idea.

‘I want to see the place where you come from.’

‘I told you. I don’t come from one place but many. Weligama, Matara, Monschau, Brighthelm beach, the Jolly Sportsman pub...’ – some of the places where she had been happiest.

‘Yes. I know I’m marrying a woman of the world. But, given the fact that I am marrying her after all, it would be nice to pin her down a bit.’

‘You try and you’ll be sorry,’ she teased, nudging him along the sofa where the travel brochures lay.

‘Look, there are some good deals here,’ he said, flicking to a section marked Simply Paradise. ‘One week touring some cultural sites followed by one week on the beach free of charge. What do you say? Come on, it would be fun. You could visit some of those aunts and uncles you keep talking about and introduce me – your dashing English husband.’

‘Mmm.’

‘Savi?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know if it’s such a good idea to go back.’

‘Don’t you want to?’

‘I do. In a way. But it will change things.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know. It just will, that’s all. And Rob?’

‘Yep?’

‘You’re not my dashing English husband.’

‘No?’

‘You’re just dashing.’

‘Got it in one.’

They had arrived at Sigiriya Village in the early evening, opening the van door to a chorus of nesting birds and amber sunlight that made the red soil incandescent. Rob looked straight towards the Rock, a grey slab streaked with the colours of the setting sun. He had been watching it appear and disappear from view for some time on the winding route to the hotel. It was impossible to get a sense of exactly how large the Rock was. With only trees and shrubs at its base and broken clouds above as points of contrast, it resisted ordinary scales of measurement.

An hour later, darkness fell. He understood the metaphor now. It fell, fast, clean, like a blade.

That night they slept together on a bed strewn with flowers left by an unseen hand.

In the dark, under a mosquito net that blurred their forms together, they could slip out of the light of those who locked them into colour, those who saw nothing more than their suitcases and sunglasses and the stark visual contrast between them, and slide into oneness in the anonymity of the dark, flowers crushed against their skin.

She peeled a petal off his back and licked it. It tasted of him.

‘I wish,’ she said, feeling her breath return from him to reach her, ‘I wish I could meet the person who put these flowers here.’

‘Why?’

‘Because they are part of this.’

‘Madam,’ he said hoarsely in a voice that seemed natural in the dark, ‘you want threesome?’

She smiled despite herself, smiled at the Sri Lankan lover he had conjured into being, then pursed her lips and blew across him to the moon that lay angled and fretted by the mosquito net somewhere near his left ear.

Together they had read the books, watched the TV stills, and successfully condensed a century of Rock history into their list of ‘things to do in Sri Lanka’. Everyone who had been to Sigiriya mentioned it as the place to which they would like to return if they could – there was so much more to be discovered than they had time to see.

She had been just once before, with both her parents when she was about seven years old. They had taken advantage of the tourist expansion of the late 1970s that had set the country blasting its way towards a new economy, creating thousands of entrepreneurs and factories the size of football fields in the free trade zones. It had oiled the wheels that allowed her Uncle Eden to transfer money made from the sale of land before nationalization into the solid certainty of real estate.

‘Sigiriya,’ her uncle had said, when he knew her parents planned to take her there. ‘Watch you don’t fall’.

All she could really remember of the place were the interminable steps, one stone slab after another, each step seeming more solid at each gasp. Then the metal spiral staircase with the fretted base which you could see through if you let your gaze plunge beyond the grid, a terrifying collapse into emptiness. The climb led to the frescoes, upper torsos of women outlined in black, the slants of their eyes so fresh they might have been drawn by her felt tips, and etched in pastels the colour of the earth scuffed on her sandals. She had been jostled forward by the insistence of other visitors and had just caught a glimpse of eyes, palm, flower, bracelet, before being pulled on by her mother. Her mother holding her hand, their arms an unbroken line.

The site had now become another must-see venue on an established tourist route. Coaches were arriving and spilling their passengers into the heat – tourists in sun hats and shorts followed by groups of schoolchildren carrying water-bottles and notepads, and saffron-robed priests who screened their faces with black umbrellas. They were gathering into discrete groups in the shade of the trees. There was no queue yet.

‘Come, I’ll get the tickets.’

She regretted not buying the all-inclusive Cultural Triangle tickets that permitted them entry to all the historical sites in the area. It was a decision she had made against the advice of the travel agents, on the assumption that it might save money and grant them flexibility. Later she realized that her reasons were more personal. She wished to resist the tourist trail.

Rob had agreed, too preoccupied with planning his photographic tour and selecting film according to the anticipated saturation of light. It seemed to her that it was difficult for him to absorb any more of the country than his camera lens would allow, the trip fast becoming a spectator sport in which he could relinquish responsibility and leave practical details to her. The decision meant new tickets at every stop. It meant negotiation.

She reached into the bag slung over his shoulder and went towards the ticket barrier where two men in military green stood, one inside the barrier, the other in a small booth. They looked at her and sized her up. She was conscious of Rob zipping the bag behind her.

Perhaps it was some instinct of resistance to this unwanted scrutiny or some desire to test the limits, but she found herself using the accent that came automatically when speaking to people here. ‘Two tickets please. One foreign, one local.’

She had no idea that locals went free of charge.

‘Passport.’ The man in the booth flicked a finger towards her purse while the other looked on.

‘Give me your passport, Rob.’

Rob was silent as she took it from him.

‘Here’, she pushed it forward. ‘I forgot mine. Left it in Colombo.’

The man was nonchalant. She was of no interest to him. Just another woman with a white man who was avoiding paying up.

‘Identity card.’

‘I am sorry. I forgot that too.’

The man was getting restive. He was tired of these expatriates with their polkatu accents. Some German tourists were approaching.

‘You pay foreign rate,’ the man said to the trees beyond her.

‘I told you I left them in Colombo. I am local. I was born here.’

‘Foreign rate.’

He hadn’t bothered to look at her – she was a nuisance. And in that small interval of his lapsed gaze she said her first proper sentence in the language that had once been hers. It came to her instinctively.

‘Mama mehe ipaduna.’

I was born here.

He looked up. Contact of sorts. His eyes reached and steadied her.

Then he spoke slowly, pausing between words, as English tourists do when speaking to those unfamiliar with their language: ‘You. Pay. Foreign. Rate.’

~

‘If I had the chance I’d go back.’ Hannah shook her hair loose from the towel and rubbed it back and forth behind her neck. ‘I’ve never been further than Gibraltar. All monkeys and rock. I’d love to go somewhere with guaranteed sunshine. Lie on the beach all day with waves lapping around. Get away from this rotten cold and rain.’

Savi loved Hannah’s directness. It seemed to her that her friend had inherited the western capacity to pass judgement on whole areas of experience of which she was blissfully ignorant. Some of her peers at university were similarly inclined but their claims on her were different. She would find herself listening to an animated discussion and reluctantly nodding in agreement as they magnified her experience into a regrettable part of the postcolonial condition for which they felt they were responsible. With Hannah there was no such danger. The differences between them were clearly exposed. Communication free.

‘It’s not that simple. I have family there. And Sri Lanka is all monkeys and rock too. The waves don’t lap.’

Savi slipped off her costume and looked over her shoulder. Natalie was changing behind her.

‘You seem to remember a lot even though you’ve not been back in a while.’ Hannah bent down to steady her daughter as the little girl pulled on her skirt and twisted it into shape.

But her memories were as faded and fragmented as the images on some of Rob’s old slides. Her father’s voice. Her mother’s hand. Renu’s red skirt. Images that came unsolicited and without order. She was at her most certain when tested on some element of detail – she had an absentee’s sense of what the land was not. Such negations helped lead her back to a more a tangible truth than if she had direct access. For example she knew, for certain, that there the sea did not lap. And in the space created by this lack, the roar of churning water reached her ears. Her head began to ache.

‘Here’, Hannah handed her the hairdryer. ‘Your turn.’

Swimming on Sundays with Hannah and Natalie was the social highlight of her life. Their relationship had been sealed when they had done a life-saving course together and learnt to resuscitate a body by applying fifteen pulses with their palms on the chest of a life-size model that lifted with a satisfying puff each time they pressed down. They had been told to pulse to the count of the opening lines of ‘Nellie The Elephant’.

Natalie had sung with metronomic precision as Savi and her mother pumped away at the plastic dummies and tried not to laugh, steering clear of the temptation to compare their dummies to lovers of the past.

‘I just know I’ll be thinking of circus elephants when saving someone’s life,’ Hannah gasped, unfolding and relocking her palms as she continued pulsing. ‘Look. We’re even resuscitating a trunk. Trunk, get it?’ she said bending forwards again.

Savi paused and rubbed the stiffness from her arms, then drew her hands to her lap, observing Hannah who continued to pulse, pulse, pulse and blow, pulse and blow as if she were engaged in an endurance test, as the torso below her appeared to judder into life.

An involuntary gasp and sudden release, and she knew at once the precise angle of the tilted head, the inflexibility of the swollen tongue. She’d had this knowledge in her hands since she was fifteen years old.

‘You must remember to open the jaw properly, first,’ she said quietly.

Natalie spun round to her mother.

‘Mummy does this mean that Nellie the elephant can make a dead person wake up?’

Savi glanced at Natalie. The child became quite still, then smiled directly back at her in a way that made the fluorescent lights glow warm.

The seasons were absorbed in reading and writing, balancing ideas, looking for hidden meanings and forging connections between books. At intervals, when the words on the page seemed to resist scrutiny, she would slip on a denim jacket and go scouring the second-hand bookshops in the North Lanes, before dropping in for a cappuccino and toasted doughnut at the Arcade café. Later she might brace herself for a walk along Marine Drive where her pace would be quickened by the wind pushing her from behind.

She had first seen Hannah through the rush of water that came as Natalie slipped into the pool, falling straight into her steadying arms. That sudden contact presaged Natalie’s unprompted claims upon her body when she least expected it. The girl would clamber on to her regardless of whether she was reading in the public library or lying on the beach.

It was an acceptance that was displaced like so much water onto her friendship with Natalie’s mother. Hannah asked no questions and Savi felt free to speak in the verbal shorthand that others found frustrating; and Hannah would respond from the centre of her knowledge of a world in which all relationships were finite – with the exception of her relationship with her child.

Hannah’s love for Natalie was limitless, and the girl carried this gift into the arms of others, nestling on Savi’s lap and pulling at the earrings which dangled against her cheek.

‘Go back,’ Natalie breathed in her ear.

‘Mmm?’ She could remember the pain swelling as the earring was pulled, Natalie’s cheek against hers, the child blowing words that came cold and timeless in her burning ear.

‘You should go back.’

The second week of their honeymoon had been designated a ‘free week’. It was literally free, in that they did not have to pay for it. It was also a week set aside for the purposes of relaxation. After a week engaged in a cultural tour of the island, they were now free to indulge in swimming, snacking and lying in the sun.

But the touring had carried them beyond the need for respite. Having made their way through the Insight Guide, zig-zagging their way across the country in a logic that collapsed the centuries, they were hot, tired and restless. They needed to touch some of the history they had driven through.

Lakshman was hurtling down a bend that brought them their first direct view of the sea when something snapped into place. The sudden sea. Her parents used to stop here to buy wine biscuits that were as smooth and dimpled brown as the beach.

‘Monis biscuits.’ She had not realized that she still knew the name and enjoyed the familiar taste of the words on her tongue. ‘Is the Monis Bakery still here?’

Lakshman did not respond.

‘Monis. Monis Bakery,’ she repeated, aware of the slight imperiousness that had begun to pressure her voice.

Lakshman accelerated, took a hand off the wheel, adjusted the gear, swung round to the left and pulled up with a start outside it. She had to put a hand out to stop herself from falling.

Rob had prepared for the trip, his first outside Europe, with the same haphazard single-mindedness with which he approached his first job interviews, balancing a caution that enabled him to anticipate and negotiate unforeseen obstacles, with a natural delight in dealing with the unknown. He had studied the internet images of the region and taken account of the fact that the weather was becoming increasingly unpredictable – droughts and driving rains coming unseasonably early or late – so that the clear skies of tourist brochures, which indicated the harshest light of all, were thankfully less likely than before.

During the early months, when they still found pleasure in exploring the differences between them, she had seen his ability to adapt to change as a sign of an impetuous nature, admiring his openness and availability to the outside world, his capacity to drop everything to accommodate the fleeting moment. She would delight in the unpredictability of a day that could turn on a sudden spear of light through cloud as they paused to watch a pheasant lifting free from a field of broken wheat, its tail arcing golden in flight, Rob removing his arm from her waist and taking a photograph that froze the world about them. But later, when he gave her the picture, she found she only remembered what the image seemed to miss. She would recall not what he saw in that instant when the shutter closed, but the smell of that autumn afternoon, the chill of her cheek against the Arran sweater thrown across his shoulders, the damp tingling her toes.

He was cleaning the polarizer when she came in. She sat on the bed and covered the plastic casing with her palm, gripping it with her fingers.

‘My uncle’s home is not far from here.’

‘I know.’

She moved from the bed and on to the balcony, her back to the sea. He twisted the lens cap on and slipped the camera back in the case, then stood up and lifted the suitcase onto the luggage rack beyond the bed, leaving the straps dangling. Then he sat down with a sigh and began to adjust the screws on the damaged tripod. She was now outside his field of vision.

She turned and let her eyes follow the stretch of beach to a promontory where the thin stands of the stilt fishermen stood unused. As a child, she used to watch the men with their dark, glistening bodies standing above the waves against the horizon, one leg extending the length of a wooden pole, the other crooked into a triangle so they looked like disjointed marionettes. She wondered if Rob would get to see them or whether she would have to conjure them into being for him from these empty stands.

In England she had shown him the photographs she dreaded looking at – her parents, arm in arm, outside a house that she only knew from this picture; herself at five years old, retreating from the camera as her mother held her, looking up, pointing towards the lens which was about to flash and blind her for a few seconds – her mother giving the smile she could not win from her daughter while her father leant against the bonnet of the new Chrysler, arms folded with pride; her cousins, after cricket on the beach, Romesh aiming the bat at Renu who held up her hands in mock surrender, her shriek of laughter burning the sky white.

She could only look at these pictures in company, when there was someone with her to talk them into narrative. She had not looked at them in years.

Rob had stayed quiet and listened hard to what she had to say because she was speaking without order or connection. All he could see were faded photographs taken on an old Instamatic, blemished by the Kodachrome colour of green-tinted skies. Some prints were out of focus, others angled so that the horizon and the human subject appeared to occupy the same spatial plane. All seemed to point to a wasted opportunity for catching things as they really were.