Suncatcher

by Romesh Gunesekera

‘Smart fellow to go for the bat. An unusual wing, the bat wing. A cloak, not a feather. It changes the shape completely, and can hide everything or reveal it all, like a heart with wings. You should learn from that.’

  Mr Ismail bent down and pulled out a thick, squat book, making a sharp creak which might have been his chair, or his spine or the book’s spine cracking. He placed the book on the table and patted it. ‘Pears’ Cyclopaedia. Good place to start for basic facts. Prominent people. Events of world importance. Maybe not our Sufi poets, but it covers some science and philosophy. Maybe even puzzles of nature. Take a look.’ He pushed it forward: a rook on a chessboard.

  I opened it and leafed through, conscious of Mr Ismail’s eyes on me. The thin paper made a whispery sound as I flicked each page over, a rolling surf of words.

  ‘Can’t see nothing about bats.’

  ‘Another lacuna? Check the index. Might be under general information.’

  Sure enough, an entry on bats: L15. Listed under a letter and a number. Could the whole world, and everything known about it, be ordered in this way? They didn’t teach things like that in my school. L15: the right-hand column boasted a two-inch paragraph on bats and their extraordinary ability to navigate in the dark using ultrasonics.

  How did a word so wonderful come into being? Ultrasonics. As mysterious as a boy being born. How is it possible that I am here, alive, with a word like that in my head?

  ‘Mr Ismail, you always come up trumps.’

  ‘If you look, you will see.’

  ‘It doesn’t explain actual flying, but they find their way using ears not eyes. It’s all to do with soundwaves. According to this, fishing bats in Central America can even find fish by detecting the echoes from the ripples that the fish make in the water.’ That, for sure, would surprise Jay. I could see those brown eyes freshen and Jay’s face brighten into an ultrasonic sparkle. ‘Wow.’

  ‘We can all feel ripples, son,’ Mr Ismail mumbled. He rose from his chair and shuffled to the edge of his small veranda, breathing noisily. He squinted as the last tints of the sun darkened his freckles. ‘When a storm is coming, we can all feel the signs.’ All I could see were golden feathery ridges over the rooftops trickling down the lane. I now wonder if Mr Ismail, bigger and older, could see things in the reddening clouds that I could not then: his hopes blistering, sinking, his long-held memories slowly winnowed by the gusts of a failing day.

  The following afternoon, school done, I waited until five before heading to the milk bar again. Turning into Bullers Road, I tore past a succession of old colonial mansions crumbling in their large sad gardens and a half-naked soothsayer bewailing the future on a tree stump, tuning my ears to a higher frequency, hoping to pick up a sound-silhouette of my friend slurping chocolate milk; instead I heard only Mahela’s frothy laugh spilling out. Jay was at the counter teasing him.

  Mahela mopped the zinc counter and leant over it. ‘Good timing, cycle kolla. The ace is back: our maestro catcher.’

  ‘You caught the bird?’

  ‘Yup.’ Jay popped his lips in delight. ‘Sunbeam.’

  Time to be ultra-cool. The information on the sensitivities of bats seemed the best bet. ‘You know, bats hear ultrasonics. They can even catch fish from the sounds of swimming.’

  ‘Not from my fish tank.’ Jay gulped down his milk.

  ‘You have a tank?’

  ‘Aquaria infinita.’

  ‘I’d love one, but my father says it’s a waste of time. A bourgeois hobby, he calls it. He doesn’t approve of anything that’s fun, unless it’s something he likes.’ Even the radio was condemned as a mouthpiece for government propaganda, although he listened to it constantly and advocated state control of everything under the sun.

  ‘You wanna see my fish? Come on, I’ll show you.’ Jay raced ahead.

  Casa Lihiniya, Mahela had called it; a house with a name had to be more special than one with a number. I followed Jay down a zigzag lane until we reached a paved private road – and there it stood: a massive, modern, white house with a parapet protecting a winged roof. Next to the tall iron gates, firmly shut, a small metal door gleamed, tucked into the concrete wall. Jay had rigged it up with a secret wire that he could pull to release the inside bolt and make it chuckle open.

  ‘Nobody knows when I come and go.’

  We pushed our bikes through and stepped into a kingdom guarded by two agave plants with their yellow-bordered swords frozen mid-wave. A small tongue of tarmac split, leading to a tiled porch on one side and a line of whispery bamboo that shadowed the building on the other. An open concrete stairway hugged the outside wall of the house. Jay lodged his bike under the staircase and then leapt up the steps, two at a time. I did the same. At the top, we entered a vast covered balcony, bigger than my room, halfway between a zoo and a shipyard: a jumble of fish tanks big and small, workbenches piled with timber and boards, trays of hammers and saws and screwdrivers and pliers. A broken pane of glass and several sheets of Formica, propped up by a broom, shielded the back section.

  ‘You have tons of tanks.’

  ‘I keep eleven different species. Each aquarium has to be special.’

  I stepped carefully across a wooden frame which had nails pointing up. ‘What’s this? A man-trap?’

  ‘The fish are okay in the tanks. I can keep the Siamese fighters separate and watch them fence. But the birds are the problem. I’m making something better for them.’ The budgies clustered in a blackened square cage in a corner of the balcony. ‘They need protection, but they also need something more. You know, something capacious.’

  He shook some seeds out onto a tray and pushed it in. The small grey, blue and green bundles exploded into a flurry of chirping. Jay crooned soothingly. Next to the budgies hung a separate small bell-shaped birdcage, a yellow orb framed in glistening purple brightened in it: the sunbird from the milk bar puffing up to add its sharp two-pronged whistles.

  In our house we had no pets. I had never been surrounded by so many creatures swimming and fluttering, breathing out their given measure of life. I don’t know why but despite the abundance, I felt we were all in some sense endangered. Jay poured some water from a jug into a saucer in the budgie cage, then he stepped over to the fish tanks.

  ‘You’d think these fish were made especially for glass aquariums, no? Look at them. All the markings are on the side. Who would see those if they were just in a stream? Even that silly bloody tetra has a neon stripe on the side.’

  Sparks swerved in the water.

  ‘Are they your favourites?’

  ‘Tetras you can catch easy-peasy. The ones I really like are my angel fish: this pair from Lumbini’s. I’d like them to breed. That would be really something. They say it’s a doddle but even keeping them alive is hard. See how they move? Sudden acceleration and then everything slows down. That’s the way to live. Sudden motion. Then to be very still.’ He tightened his jaw, moving closer to the water. ‘If reincarnation is true that must be how it works. When you are born, you move. When you die, everything is still… Then, you are born again. Like a heart pumping.’ He opened and closed his fist, repeatedly. ‘The pulse of the universe, you see?’

  Sudden acceleration sounded good, but I did not want time to ever stop. At that age, I did not like the idea of breeding either – whatever that might involve.

  ‘But right now, the birds come first. So, I’m making an aviary in the garden.’

  That was a new one too. I had heard my mother mention ovaries but had not bothered to listen more. ‘Uh-huh. Right.’

  ‘Big ca-pacious space, you know. So they can really fly around and not see bars all the time.’

  The garden was enormous: eagles could fly in it and they’d think they were free. Casa Lihiniya even had coconut trees in the garden. Whatever an aviary was, it could certainly be put in there and no one would notice.

  ‘Wanna help?’

  Something in me accelerated; everything else slowed down. I breathed in, and then out. Angels flew. Swam.<
br />
  ‘Sure. Aviary. I can do that.’

  Jay handed over a bundle of wood strips. All precisely cut to size: six pieces, each as tall as him. ‘Bring these. I’ll show you.’

  He collected a roll of chicken wire and a toolbox and led the way back down.

  Skirting around the house, we ducked under an archway of blue flowers onto a patio. The lawn stretched out ahead: a carpet of creeping broadleaf grass.

  Two men seated on butterfly chairs paused their conversation. While the trimmer one in a tightly buttoned shirt perched uncomfortably, his languid companion clicked his fingers jokingly. ‘How’s tricks, Batman?’

  ‘No tricks today, Uncle Elvin. No bats, only budgies today.’

  ‘But isn’t that Robin with you?’ A dry laugh escaped as if from a puncture in his throat.

  ‘Kairo,’ Jay said.

  I half repeated it, swallowing a syllable, unsure of what to do.

  ‘Very opportune. Add an ‘s’ at the end, and you will always be our providential one. Kairos – good timing, no?’ He gently pinched the skin under his Adam’s apple and pulled it. ‘Your father studies Greek?’

  I stared at the long, lengthening throat. ‘He wanted to call me Nasser, but my mother wouldn’t have it.’

  The other man plucked at his moustaches and burst out,

  ‘Not a bloody socialist, is he?’

  Jay hoisted his roll of wire mesh higher. ‘Come on, let’s go.’

  ‘Those budgies are too damn loud, son.’ Unrestrained, impatient, the buttoned-up man barked, ‘A chap can’t think with that racket. Put them somewhere out of earshot, will you?’

  ‘Will you, will you?’ Jay mocked, already half across the lawn.

  ‘The thing is, Marty,’ Elvin coaxed his agitated companion back to an earlier, less emotive, argument, ‘a drought is a serious matter, but we need meteorologists not astrologers. The buggers in the ministry just don’t know what to do. Never mind the university, there are not enough teachers at any level. No wonder the damn school keeps closing every other day.’

  I made a mental note: no teachers. The tantalising possibility of not having to go to school – any ‘damn’ school at all – edged closer.

  Catching up, I asked Jay, ‘Was that your dad? The one who doesn’t like your birds?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Looks really upset. Is he a teacher?’

  ‘He does business. Makes him a misery guts half the time.’

  ‘Must be tough.’ My father often worked himself up into a froth over private companies. ‘Only one letter away from pirate,’ he’d fume.

  ‘Packaging and paper. Boring as hell. Uncle Elvin is forever trying to get him to do other stuff.’

  ‘Your uncle looks cool. Like a secret agent.’

  ‘He’s a coconut planter.’ Jay laughed. ‘Also likes planting wild ideas in my father’s cerebrum and cerebellum. They’re cousins – Uncle Elvin and Dad, I mean. The only two. No brothers or sisters. Like me.’

  ‘Me too.’ Until then, I had assumed I was the only one.

  At the end of the garden, in a cleared out area big enough to park a car, several posts marked out a rectangle. One side had chicken wire stretched across it; at the far end a row of bird houses stood on individual poles: a toy town on stilts. Jay put his roll of wire mesh down on the ground. A jeery flight of parakeets swooped past; shrikes and koels and fuzzy barbets cheered.

  ‘Today we’ll finish pinning the mesh. Then we have to figure out how to put in a full-size door so we can walk in. Cool, huh?’

  ‘Your budgies are going to be in heaven.’

  ‘I want to have lots of different sorts of birds in here, like my Sunbeam, that pretty yellow bird I caught, and beeeaters and Java sparrows.’ Jay took the wood strips and laid them out in a pattern of squares, constructing the outline of a new world. ‘Trouble is those budgies can be vicious. So, have to see. Buggers need to learn how to live together.’

  Jay knew so much: how to make cages, how to trap birds, how to breed. Stuff you couldn’t learn from books – even an encyclopaedia. Despite the big words Jay sometimes used, he didn’t look like a reader; his hands moved too much: long fingers drumming the air. Not fingers for turning pages, or holding a pen. And now, measuring his sticks against the blueprint in his head, Jay was biting the tip of his tongue.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Okay,’ Jay said. ‘Here’s what to do.’

  He made me stand at one corner with two strips of wood held aloft while he nailed them to the posts, then unroll the chicken wire to pin to the frame. Within an hour, most of the basics were done. Back at the house, Jay’s father and Elvin carried on wreathed in smoke. I wondered if they too, like us, were engaged in drawing up a future for a better world.

  2

  ‘Madness.’ My father tossed the party newspaper onto his cane chair, the first dip on the road to the archival pile. ‘Just when we need to be united, what does our party leadership do? Split, split, split into bloody factions. What next? Another Three Stooges?’

  Mooning over a new-style cashew-studded chocolate bar, I couldn’t care less until he mentioned the Three Stooges.

  ‘Those MP fellows are fascinated by a female in power, no?’ To my mother the errant behaviour of politically driven men hardly amounted to a mystery with the world’s first woman prime minister running the country. ‘Anyone can see they can’t wait to jump into her pocket.’

  ‘Flummoxed, not fascinated. They say now is the beginning of socialism in this country, but I fear it is the end.’

  ‘Isn’t Madam Prime Minister a bona fide socialist?’ A faint tone of incredulity crept into my mother’s voice. ‘And now with your far left joining her too.’

  My father twirled a finger, stirring the air.

  ‘The alliance of our LSSP leaders with her is seen by the purists as collaboration.’ His voice slithered as he tried to control his frustration with orthodoxy. ‘So, now all three – N. M., Cholmondeley and whatshisname – have been expelled from the Fourth International…’ He acted as if he was talking about his Hotel De Buhari buriyani buddies, instead of the oldest left-wing political movement in Ceylon, predating independence, and powerful trade union champions.

  ‘Never mind party politics, what about the language proficiency tests the government has started? Everyone has to pass or resign, no? So, hadn’t you better start doing something to improve your Sinhala, Clarence?’

  ‘How to be learning grammar at my age?’

  I felt for my father. He had been brought up speaking English more than Sinhala; his mother tongue was not his strong point.

  ‘If those posh fellows in parliament can come back from Oxford and speechify in Sinhala, why can’t you learn enough to pass a simple test?’

  ‘Okay, Monica, okay.’ My father used the small blue rag that was kept by the telephone to clean his spectacles. ‘You better learn too. Your English Service broadcast is not exactly the national priority, you know.’

  Ma laughed, light and briefly carefree. ‘We have to be international. Our listeners hear us in Nairobi, in Kabul, in Singapore. Not like your lot who can’t even hear each other in the same room.’ She collected her straw harlequin carryall. ‘I’ve got bridge now. Will you make sure Kairo does his homework?’

  She walked out without waiting for an answer. The hot air slowly settled in the room. Flies prayed drowsily.

  I retrieved the newspaper which had prompted the initial outburst and smoothed out the columns choked with acronyms and ungainly words: hegemony, Stolypin, GCSU, CMU, proletariat.

  ‘Thaththa, why does it say “a proletarian revolution is impossible now; we must build a consensus”? What does that mean?’

  ‘Glad you asked that, son. Always question – how else to learn? You see, our erstwhile party leader says there is no chance of revolutionary action in Ceylon and that the only road to change is through parliamentary reform. So, now he’ll join the government and build consensus.’ He struggled to express his discomfort i
n suitable terms. ‘But I’m not so sure, son. The reason revolutionary action is not possible might be because our leading communists prefer to preserve things as they are – for themselves. Have you read Animal Farm?’

  ‘Farming?’

  ‘You should. Orwell describes this same process. The excuse the pigs use is that they are employing “tactics”. But who benefits?’

  ‘Is he a pig farmer?’

  ‘I tell you, if Trotsky could see what is going on in what is surely the biggest Trotskyite party in the world, he’d be livid. It is a betrayal, he said, when leaders seek to preserve themselves. They become nothing but dried preserves.’ Fingers locked together, leaning forwards, head lowered bullishly, he seemed both enthralled and horrified by the prospect of raisins in the sun. ‘You must understand, son, language is the issue. If you don’t understand the meaning of a word, you are at its mercy. “The fight against unclear language is part of the struggle for purity and beauty,” quote, unquote. Comrade Trotsky again.’

  ‘Are you a communist, Thaththa?’

  ‘Ah, this depends on one’s definition, does it not? The Communist Party is distinct from our LSSP.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I have never been a member of the Communist Party. I do not support the Stalinist route. My creed has always been the abolition of inequality, as in our first manifesto. And for this I believe we must nationalise the means of production, distribution and exchange…’

  ‘Okay then.’ I turned the pages of the newspaper over to muffle the drone: bring it on, the revolution of Neapolitan ice cream.

  ‘What’s wrong? You want to go somewhere?’

  ‘Don’t they do even a single cartoon in your paper?’

  This was not the kind of questioning he had in mind; it made him suspect I was being led astray by forces outside his control. ‘Where do you go on that bike of yours?’

  ‘Just cycling with a friend.’

  ‘You be careful of fair-weather friends, son. Amba yahaluwo. It’s a fickle air we have to breathe these days.’

  He chuckled, briefly pleased to have used the Sinhala phrase ‘amba yahaluwo’ – mango friends – drawing a distinction between a summer pal and a fellow traveller.