Suncatcher

by Romesh Gunesekera

  The milk bar became our fixed rendezvous. The hub from which we would cycle out in ever-widening circles. Jay never showed any curiosity about my parents, but one afternoon as we rode past the radio station I mentioned that my mother worked there.

  ‘She has a job?’

  ‘On radio shows.’ It gave her a sense of freedom from family and that puzzled most of her friends.

  ‘Amazing.’ But Jay didn’t ask me anything more.

  Over the next few weeks, I became a regular visitor to Casa Lihiniya, sometimes cutting badminton club, or a swimming lesson, and going straight up to Jay’s balcony with him to help clean the tanks, scooping tetras and guppies, tiger moths and mollies, from one to the other. Jay showed me how to siphon the water out, a half-tank at a time, using a short hose. He held one end underwater and handed me the other. ‘Now suck the air but whip it out of your mouth before the water comes.’ I didn’t always get it out in time and preferred scraping the algae off the glass with a razor blade. Jay taped one edge of the blade with electrical tape, so I could use it safely. To polish the outside, I used cotton rags Jay soaked in a solution of vinegar and baking soda.

  The gourami and angel fish, Jay dealt with himself. The cleaning and the feeding needed a special touch, he said, suggesting there might be a nourishment in his fingers that only he could offer. Triumphantly he would produce a tin of fish food and a jam jar filled with roast bread and clink them against each other.

  ‘You crumble it over the water, but you must get it just right.’

  He’d circle his thumb around his fingertips and weave a pattern of fine wheat dust on the surface, drawing the fish up, his hand a fleshly magnet and they shiny metal filings saved temporarily from sinking.

  In each tank, Jay had favourites: fish that stood out, looked different, or listed to one side impeded. He had names for each and called them out, pretending his voice could carry under the water. They came to his finger when he tapped the glass and then he would dip his hand in and separate them from the others and reward them with an extra pinch of breadcrumbs.

  I only saw Jay’s father again on about the fifth visit.

  We slipped in under the archway to the patio and found Marty, this time sunk in his butterfly chair, puffing a cigarette and blowing bluish blooms into the climbers, his face taut as if recovering from another argument he had lost. He had a soft, beige knitted tie on, but somehow it looked tight.

  ‘So, back for more?’ He, too, sounded wary of his son making dubious new pals.

  ‘We’ll be finished on the aviary by the weekend.’ Jay moved across to shield me. ‘Sunday.’

  ‘No more Sunday weekends, son. It’ll be religious holidays to appease the Buddhist vote instead – Poya holidays and pre-Poya days to match the phases of the moon. Those will be our weekends.’ He began to shred a piece of paper meticulously into the large, shallow glass ashtray on the mosaic table next to him. He studied the debris, his face narrowing. ‘I don’t understand it. Those ruddy Marxists in parliament are meant to be anti-religion. What happened to the business of ridding us of the opium of the masses? Can’t they even do that right?’

  Jay hurried me out onto the lawn. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Cool to make every Sunday a moon day.’

  ‘Works the other way.’ Jay strode ahead. ‘Poya day will be our Sunday. Except the fit is not easy. Moon months are not the same as regular months, so it’ll not be the same as the Sunday week. Every month it’ll shift a day apart. That’s the problem.’

  ‘So, we get more holidays?’

  ‘More chaos. We’ll be on a different planet from the rest of the world.’

  As far as I could tell, we already were. The world I saw around me bore no resemblance to the wider world I read about. Everywhere else in the world things worked differently – from star charts to song charts.

  ‘My dad says the trouble is the government’s teeny cabin is too full.’

  ‘Mine says the whole Cabinet is up the creek.’ Jay tested the tension of the wire mesh. ‘This kind of thing needs careful calibration.’

  Soon he had us both focused on right angles and mitre joints, making the final additions to the aviary. The door he had designed – framed chicken wire – was ingenious, sliding sideways instead of being hinged, so that it could be opened unobtrusively.

  ‘Not just lift and push. It should slide like a Japanese paper screen,’ he explained.

  He got me to lay a track for it: two straight pieces of wood – one first, then the other – with a flat waxed strip in the middle.

  ‘Good work, pardner.’

  Is this what growing up was all about? Hard work and feeling good. Two lines forming one track: a road leading from emptiness to fulfilment.

  ‘Those birds need to feel they are out in the wild,’ Jay said.

  ‘Aren’t they your pets?’

  ‘Even we can feel wild.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘In the countryside. Have you never been outstation?’

  ‘I have too. On the school rice-planting trip. And a rubber plantation. My father said our rubber is the thing that China and Cuba are most crazy about, but the Americans are trying to sabotage the business.’

  ‘Rubber is a colonial hang-up.’ Jay tested the movement of the door, too absorbed to notice the severity of the implied judgement. ‘Coconut is the real lifeblood of this country.’

  ‘My dad is not colonial. He’s always complaining that people don’t take control of things.’

  ‘He’s right. You’ve got to take control. You won’t get where you want to go unless you are captain of the ship.’

  After we had measured out the roof sections, Jay said we should stop for the day.

  Back in the house, I met Jay’s mother, Sonya, for the first time.

  ‘Is this your new friend?’ As she spoke, her curved face brimming with expectation, she swayed gently to a music no one but she could hear.

  ‘He has a name. I told you, no? His name is Kairo.’

  She lightly fluffed up her bouffant curls with her fingers.

  ‘Of course you did, darling.’ A bubbly laugh escaped her pink painted lips.

  I stared and tried to say ‘Hello’, but the syllables were too knotted to be audible as my mind raced from the word ‘friend’ to her potent term of endearment – one I associated only with the flickering romances of screen goddesses.

  ‘What happened to that other boy?’ Her large lids fluttered as she returned to a more domestic orbit, shuffling faces and names. ‘Ravi, no?’

  ‘He’s an idiot.’

  ‘Like your father.’ She smiled at me. ‘But this one looks very sweet.’

  I saw that in this special house the rest of the world had only the most precarious of footholds. Any minute one could slip and fall devastatingly out of favour.

  Her caftan – oyster-blue – could have adorned Cleopatra in some Technicolor oasis. She flicked it up at her shoulders, letting air swirl in. ‘I’m so happy you are here, Kairo. Otherwise this darling boy of mine will be just talking to himself like you-know-who.’

  My head spun, not knowing what she meant.

  Then she picked up an elegant, saucer-shaped glass of pale rosé by its stem and started up the stairs. The whole room below darkened in her wake.

  ‘What else to do?’ Jay called after her. ‘You never listen, no, to what anyone says.’

  She stopped at the top and turned. ‘When a man can speak without punching a hole in his hat, then I might listen. But you, my darling, I listen to all the time. So, now you listen to me.’ She took a sip from her glass. Then looked, I thought, directly at me. ‘You must learn to live, and to love, without regret. That is paramount.’

  ‘What’d she mean?’ I asked when she had gone.

  ‘She’s the crazy one. She says, if not for us, she’d be a film star. But if not for Pater, she’d be in some loony bin. Come on, let’s go for a loaf.’

  ‘Pater?’

  ‘You know, Dad.’

&n
bsp; As we wheeled out the bikes, I wondered if I should call my parents pater and mater too. We could both be like college boys then. I looked back and soaked in every ray radiating from Jay’s Casa Lihiniya. A gilded castle complete with secret passages, captured animals and a mesmerising queen. A whole cosmos far, far more thrilling than the one I had been born into.

  I had not mentioned Jay, or Casa Lihiniya, to my parents, afraid my father would disapprove given the apparent wealth of the Alavises. So, when my mother asked where I had been, I dodged the question: ‘Someone is building a really big thing in the middle of the racecourse.’

  My father, pleased at this new interest in construction, let a rare puff of parental pride inflate him around the gills. ‘Building is a sign of progress. The engine of growth.’ He made a podgy block with his short yellow fingers and started to erect an imaginary tower, placing one fist on top of the other. ‘Brezhnev and Johnson both agree on that.’

  My father had never been a practical man. He lived in the hope that good things would happen naturally and was dumbfounded when they didn’t. Dialectical materialism, in his opinion, governed everything – even luck. A win at the bookies, he believed, was inevitable – much to my mother’s dismay.

  Sadly, both thrashed around in the same hole making do – nothing more. A hole I knew I had to escape from. If only I could have spent my whole life in Jay’s house; a place full of mystery where the adults, like his fish, floated in a diaphanous ether, where you made the world in the shape that you wanted it to be, where a screen goddess could walk in a regal gown and pronounce your name making you believe she’d known it from the day you were born; a house so large that no single place offered a view of the full extent of it, no single room gave even a hint of the number of doors that could open and close, and who might be hidden behind them, or any idea of the magnitude of the garden that sang out beyond the patio.

  When I returned to Casa Lihiniya at the end of the week, it had not diminished. I rang my bicycle bell three times – our special signal – but instead of Jay a tiny woman, aged and shrunken by a lifetime of service, creaked open the side door.

  ‘Jay baba na,’ she whined. ‘Eliyata giya.’ Her brittle, sugary eyes crinkled up. ‘Didn’t say, no? Just went on that cycle.’

  A car honked angrily from the porch behind her. She retreated and opened the main gate. A white Daimler growled out with a tight-lipped Marty hunched over the wheel. At the end of the lane, it turned sharply onto the main road and disappeared.

  I took off for the milk bar. No sign of Jay. Not slurping milk. Not racing on the turf. Not monitoring the building site inside the racecourse. A man, working on the concrete tubes, raised his sarong and pointed his thing at me and shook it.

  Ignoring the taunt, I headed towards the upper school that I would be moving to when the day of reckoning came. Tall, imposing, red-faced, it too was undergoing renovations. Thick bamboo poles formed a scaffold at the front and stacks of bricks clogged the darkened colonial cloisters. The bicycle sheds I’d been looking forward to had been demolished to make way for compact new hatcheries.

  Before Jay turned up, the boys I knew all had an uglier side to them that revelled in elbow jabs and a rough craving to cause harm. He, too, could unleash cruelty: pouring boiling water on a termite nest, knocking the knotted spike off a chameleon with his catapult and leaving it bleeding in the hot sun. Those small acts of delinquency troubled me, but they did not poison our friendship. If I wanted to, I reckoned I could stop him. I began to believe that the world could be as you wanted it and nothing bad need ever happen in it.

  We were on the last roll of mesh when Jay stopped: his face sharpened, his hackles rose.

  ‘Thalagoya,’ he whispered.

  He pointed at the jambu tree in the small strip of the Amazon at the end of the garden and got me to fix my eye on the cluster of pink fruit, then slowly brought his finger down the trunk to the ground and, like a pencil drawing the world, led my eye to the clump of brown roots right at the edge of the wall. And there, camouflaged as a root itself, was a large monitor lizard motionless except for the thin black flickering tongue.

  ‘Watch it,’ Jay said and slipped away.

  Hardly daring to breathe, I kept my eyes on the threefoot long lizard. The animal seemed to draw silence into the space between us.

  When Jay returned, he had an air rifle in his hand. Sinking down, he slowly pulled the pump to prime the gun. He cocked the trigger and took aim, but before he could fire a door at the back of the house creaked open and a couple of scoured coconut shells flew out. Instantly the thalagoya was off, scuttling through a hole in the wall.

  Jay lowered the rifle. ‘He’ll be back for the budgies. They won’t have a chance trapped inside the cage.’

  ‘He won’t get in.’

  ‘When he sees them, he’ll find a way.’

  ‘He can’t work that out.’

  ‘Sure. Why not? He can think. Thinking is going on everywhere, all the time.’ He scratched at the ground with his bare toe. ‘We have to stop him.’

  ‘Could you have killed him with that?’ I had seen adverts for his high-powered BSA Meteor, but never one in real life.

  ‘Sure I could. That rubbery skin may be impenetrable, but if you hit the eye the bullet goes straight into the brain. He’s a goner then. Ever shot a rifle?’

  ‘A BB gun. Nothing like that.’

  ‘We’ll do some target practice soon, but first we need to sort out this problem.’ He carefully un-cocked the rifle and placed it upright against a corner of the cage.

  ‘Do we have to kill it?’

  ‘Find a better solution, then. You’ll have to think like a thalagoya.’

  ‘If I was him, I’d dig a tunnel and get in from underneath.’

  ‘Good point. If there is even one weak spot, he’ll find it.’

  The cage, originally designed to stop multicoloured birds from escaping, now had to protect them instead from a flatfooted predator that came from the age of dinosaurs.

  ‘We could put cement on the floor. Make it unbreakable.’

  Jay squeezed his upper lip with his fingers, pulling it and letting it plop. ‘Can’t have concrete. It’s not a prison we are building here.’ He picked up the rifle and started back towards the house.

  ‘If not cement, we could try broken glass bottles like they put on top edges of walls to stop burglars.’

  ‘I have another idea.’ Jay carefully did not say ‘better’ again.

  Upstairs, he pulled out a key he kept on a cord around his neck and opened the cupboard by his bed. A holster hung on a hook on the back of the door; also the bowie knife he had the first time we met, and two shotguns and two handguns on a rack inside. He put away the air rifle and locked the cupboard.

  ‘That’s an armoury.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Where’d you get so many guns? And the knife?’

  ‘Here and there. I’ll give you a demo next time. Right now, we have to fix the visitor problem.’ A long high birdcall pierced the air. ‘That’s the kingfisher from the pond next door eyeing the fish tanks. Better cover them before we go.’

  At the top of the lane, we crossed over the main road and scurried up an alleyway half hidden by a margosa tree. It brought us to a footpath that ran along a drainage cut. We kept single file for a hundred yards before coming to a low broken-down wall marking the boundary of a large untended back garden. Jay jumped across the ditch and clambered over the wall.

  Beyond the mess of thorn bushes, papaw trees and banana lances, three decrepit barns leant on each other. ‘Are we allowed?’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘Is it someone’s estate?’

  ‘Don’t be daft.’ Jay marched ahead. Plum-headed parakeets rose squealing from the fruit trees.

  ‘What’s in those buildings?’

  ‘Cars. Uncle Elvin’s cars. He collects cars.’

  ‘A collector?’ My collection of miniature Dinky cars started on my seventh birthday and was kep
t in my treasure chest along with plastic figurines of Cowboys and Indians with their hats and headdresses and removable tomahawks and carbines. I couldn’t let any of them go even though I had grown out of that kind of thing.

  ‘He has six real stunners in there and a couple of jalopies on the other side of the house.’

  ‘Eight cars! That’s crazy.’

  At the back of the barn, we climbed over broken Dutch tiles, burnt bricks, the rusting remains of a tractor, and bits of machinery embossed with names of a bygone era: Birmingham, Coventry, Nuneaton.

  Jay pulled away some discarded planks. ‘I saw a pile of takarang somewhere here. Corrugated sheets six or seven feet long.’

  ‘Must be inside,’ I said, wanting a peek.

  ‘Let’s have a look at the back of the stables.’

  ‘Horses also?’

  ‘Only two: Pegasus and Hermes.’

  I’d seen horses trot along the shadier roads near the racecourse with smart Colombo riders – men and women in beige jodhpurs and beaked hats – but I had never imagined they were stabled in back gardens.

  We circled a bed of cannas spouting red petals.

  Jay squatted on his heels and studied the stained bluish earth. ‘If you look carefully you’ll see two sets of hoof marks. You can tell the animals apart from the depth of the prints.’

  ‘How come he has horses? Does he collect everything?’

  ‘Pretty much.’ Jay raised his large eyes and grinned. ‘Cars, horses, guns, girls. He calls himself a collector of good taste.’ Dr. No was on at the Savoy cinema and Jay’s uncle billowed from a secret agent to a Bond villain installed in a Colombo lair.

  ‘I’d like to see: horses, girls.’

  ‘Stay focused. One thing at a time. You can do a ride maybe later, but not now. First, we need to find those metal sheets. Wait here, I’ll check the back.’ Jay disappeared down the side of the stables.

  He could have been making it all up. Even in those early days I could tell, Jay had a chronic hunger for dreams. Maybe there were no horses, or cars, or girls; just empty sheds. Then I heard an unmistakeable animal sound: a whinny.