Suncatcher

by Romesh Gunesekera

  ‘Why?’ He erupted in a coarse, deep guffaw, letting out a smattering of beer bubbles. ‘Why crazy?’

  ‘He can’t stand even budgies. He won’t use a pillow ’cos he hates feathers.’

  ‘It’s a pukka proposition. Broilers are going to be the thing.’ Elvin amalgamated the romance of a gold rush with the blossoming of poultry farming in Australia featured in the Sunday Observer. ‘This is his chance to come in at the beginning. Can you help me make him see that? Imagine a hundred chickens in your back garden. Money for jam.’

  ‘Chickens outside his bedroom window will drive him nuts. You want to drive him nuts, Uncle?’

  ‘I’m offering him an entrée. We are family, no?’ He pushed a large oval dish of pebbly red rice towards me. ‘Come, come, help yourself, son. You must be starving. Must not let your friend’s lack of commercial perspicacity lead us into malnutrition.’

  ‘Isn’t this the place for chickens, anyway?’ Jay asked. ‘Not in the middle of Colombo?’

  ‘Now you are on the job, son. At last, putting that brain into gear instead of reacting ideologically, which seems très à la mode. Let us pursue this through a proper logical dialogue. You see, it is not only about chickens.’

  ‘Broilers, is it?’

  I couldn’t help asking, ‘What’s a broiler?’

  ‘Good,’ Elvin hummed approvingly. ‘Good, you are learning to ask questions as well. At last, we have hope – a younger generation that might have some intellectual curiosity. Socrates would be pleased. Our Villa Agathon here might yet live up to its name.’

  ‘Kairo is a great one for asking questions, Uncle,’ Jay said proudly before replying to me. ‘Broiler means especially reared for cooking. For eating.’

  ‘Aren’t they all?’ Raising myself, I looked over the halfwall. The doomed future of the two chickens pecking their way around the guava tree seemed obvious.

  ‘No. Those hens, for example, we keep for eggs,’ Elvin said. ‘Their lives are charmed by fecundity.’

  Jay repeated the word, ‘Fecundity,’ and laughed.

  ‘Trouble is these country chickens are not a good business proposition.’ Uncle Elvin considered the bowl of glistening okra. ‘You are right, Jay, the broiler is the thing. Fattened and near to the oven. And where are the new ovens?’ He drew a question mark in the air. ‘In Colombo, of course. Fancy gadgets quickly ordered before our famous socialist government imposed those import restrictions. Now the problem is that our eager Colombo ladies need something decent to roast in their American ovens.’

  ‘But everyone eats chicken already.’ Jay spooned some yellow mush onto my plate. Gerry watched from the back steps, a puckish twitch around the edge of his lips.

  ‘Not tender, succulent, oven-ready cock-a-doodle-dos. These scrawny peckers are only good for a slow-cooked curry.’

  ‘Chicken curry here is always fabuloso. We’ll have it tomorrow, no?’

  ‘Thank you, Jay-baba, thank you.’ Sulaiman bowed. ‘You’ll like this grill-fish also.’ He had wisely not relied on our fishing prowess.

  Elvin used the blade of his knife to lift the flesh off the fishbone in one clean slice. I had never seen anyone do such a delicate operation with such ease. ‘Sulaiman has special ingredients for his pot here that your regular Colombo housewife cannot get hold of, isn’t that so, Sulaiman?’

  The superintendent shuffled back bashfully, eyes locked to his feet.

  ‘Anyway, point is: we’ll have the chicken right there, five minutes from the kitchen. With our plan, Mrs Fernando, or Mrs Kanagarajah, or even blooming Mabel Rastiadu can decide on Sunday morning to make Maryland chicken for lunch if her heart desires, and bloody well do it with the freshest of the fresh!’ He tapped the plate with the knife in his hand.

  ‘Real American fried chicken?’ I asked.

  ‘Roast or Russian. She can do chicken Kiev for Madam Butterbean, I don’t mind, as long as she pays the right price. We’ll even have a VIP capon for those who’ll cough up some of that convertible currency they all hide under the mattress. Foreign exchange: dollars, sterling, francs, lire – anything and everything – except maybe not the rouble.’

  I could see it, even if Jay could not. An expanded version of our aviary and a flock of white chickens slowly turning into black-market dollars.

  ‘And why, Uncle, would Pater be interested in making money out of chickens when he does very nicely out of cardboard and paper? Why are you, Uncle, when you have all this? Land and crops that you understand and love. Isn’t coconut enough?’

  Elvin exchanged glances with Sulaiman.

  ‘Fair point, Jay. But you see one cannot afford to be complacent. You must not put all your eggs in one basket. And your mother and I were thinking, your father needs the diversion.’

  ‘Is she involved? Since when has she had a clue—’

  ‘No, not involved like that. But don’t scoff, she’s a helluva smart lady. A heart of gold too.’ Elvin paused to rearrange his argument. Jay waited nonplussed for the explanation, but Elvin returned to national politics instead, dismissing the domestic. Or pretending to. ‘The point is – there are some highly undesirable plans afoot in the intemperate dash for socialism we see in this country. We must have a strategy to deal with them, son.’

  At the chicken coop Jay poked the wire, testing it. ‘It’s not good. I don’t like it.’

  ‘He did say he’d stock your fish, if you helped him.’

  ‘Yeah, but I can’t be talking to my father.’ Jay cocked his head and listened as a fast, frantic hammering echoed from farther down the hill, piercing the weave of lighter warbles. ‘A woodpecker.’ He pulled a catapult out of his pocket. ‘Let’s go find it.’

  ‘To kill it?’

  He squeezed his eyelids like a crack shot. ‘No, why do you say that?’ His long fingers twanged the catapult. ‘This is to get it to fly. Gotta see it fly, man: the undulation is the thing.’

  We followed a line of plain grey trees, searching the mopheads until we heard the hammering again. I spotted it first – a green bird with a small red tuft on its pointy head attacking a tall cotton tree.

  Jay sank to his haunches. He picked up a small coconut seed the size of a bird’s egg and settled it in the pouch of the catapult. Then, raising his arm, he took aim, drew back and let go; the missile flew and hit the trunk below the bird with a penetrating crack. The bird jumped and seemed to hang for a moment in the air.

  ‘Watch,’ Jay said.

  The bird flew, a swift green line wafted on an invisible wave, dipping and rising, dodging more enemy fire, arcs of green and yellow, arias of friend and foe.

  ‘It’s like it really bounces. You want one in the aviary?’

  Jay’s head tilted, taking in shafts of light and timber. ‘No, actually. He needs miles of space to fly like that. Anyway, I want species you wouldn’t otherwise see.’

  ‘What about Sunbeam?’

  ‘I know.’ He blew out his breath noisily. ‘That’s a problem. I didn’t think at the time. Jus’ wanted him. You live and learn.’

  ‘So, let him go now.’

  ‘Can’t. I’d miss him. And now he’s used to the cage. Domesticated.’

  ‘Is that what it means? My father goes on about “pernicious domestication”.’

  As we talked, we found ourselves drifting towards the main gate.

  ‘Uncle Elvin plans to go into the broiler business like some American tycoon, but look at this – doesn’t even bother to fix a proper gate here.’

  ‘I didn’t realise he’s a businessman too.’

  ‘He should stick to what he understands: coconut, rice, fruit crops. Trouble is people get funny ideas. Like my dumb parents. What is it with them?’

  We climbed over the bamboo poles onto the culvert.

  Jay turned back towards the house, cupped his mouth with both hands and did his whoop.

  The stream flowed heedlessly as tiny fish flickered against the current to keep their place.

  ‘Boat race?’ Jay as
ked.

  We marked twigs with knotted grass and threw them into the stream on one side of the culvert, scattering the fish, and bet madly on which would get through to the other side first; again and again, shifting starting points and finishing lines each time. After a while, Jay did his whoop again.

  This time, Gerry called back. Jay beamed: ‘Watch out.’

  A few minutes later, Gerry appeared carrying a sharkhead wicker basket under his arm.

  ‘What’s that for?’

  ‘Don’t you recognise the kuduwa?’ Jay laughed. ‘It’s our fish-trap.’

  ‘Like that birdcage for the crow?’ Easy to enter, impossible to exit.

  ‘If we go farther up, there’s a stretch where the stream goes wide,’ Jay said. ‘The little fellows all collect there.’ At the point where the paddy fields started, the stream took a sharp turn. ‘You see how it’s channelled? To irrigate the rice fields, they use these really old-fashioned sluices. I reckon there must be a more efficient system.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I’m working on it.’

  We walked single file along the wrinkled mud ridge squaring the paddy. Towards the middle, out of sight of the road, the light purply haze crackled with popping grain and the heated, translucent wings of drowsy dragonflies and gall midges. I believed I was in a stream too, separated from Jay and Gerry by panes of solidified air with someone looming over us lowering a giant invisible cage – a kuduwa – to fish us out and preserve our peculiar childhoods forever.

  At the katchati patch, Gerry knew exactly what to do. Without a word, he took the jar out of the trap and scooped some water into it and placed it on the ground. Then he hitched up his sarong above his knees and stepped quietly into the stream, scarcely disturbing the lazy duckweed. The water came halfway up his shins. He bent down and laid the trap with the large ekel-toothed mouth facing the flow of the water, wedged in where the stream narrowed in a low gurgle and then stood over it on guard. A kingfisher darted behind him, flashing its sharp blue wings.

  Jay slipped in upstream and started wading towards the trap. He gestured for me to join him where the stream was wide enough to walk two abreast. I rolled up the hems of my shorts, unnecessarily, and slipped in, toes curled. Then made my way slowly, stirring the water with my feet as if they were wooden paddles.

  As the stream narrowed and we neared the trap, Gerry lifted it out with a great whoosh. Sure enough, there were half a dozen or more small guppies and fantails flapping inside. He opened the back and gently shook them out into the jar. Then we did the whole operation again.

  After the third time, Jay announced, ‘Mission accomplished.’ The jar was teeming.

  Later in the afternoon, while Gerry fixed up the bedrooms for the night, the two of us strolled back to the wewa. The sun hung lower in the sky, the water darkened promisingly. A light wind plucked at the treetops, rippling the palm fronds.

  ‘Listen,’ Jay cocked his head to one side. ‘For me, that is real music. From our native harps: a thousand coconut lyres hanging in those branches. Uncle Elvin should bring my mother here: then she’d understand what I mean by the songs of the wind. It’s so much better than any instrument. It’s like the sound of our globe itself turning.’

  I was not sure I liked the word ‘native’ but I had to admit the sound in the trees flowed easily in a kind of natural music with a chorus of birdsong threading a hundred different melodies between the rustle and thrum of the leaves.

  We cast our lines in several spots but had no luck anywhere.

  Eventually, Jay reeled his line back and took the bait off the hook. He chucked the fruit in the water. ‘That’s fishing. Sometimes you get lucky, but most of the time you just wait.’ Not wanting to wait any more, we packed up and headed back.

  Near the bungalow, at the well, we found Elvin astride a tiny kitchen stool in his swimming trunks. He had his hands on his bare knees, shoulders hunched, braced for a calamity.

  ‘Hello,’ he bellowed.

  A wiry woman in a damp cloth and blouse was hauling up a bucket at breakneck speed behind him. She hid a red-stained smirk when she saw us. A moment later Elvin yelped, spluttering under a deluge of water. The woman stepped down from her wooden platform and dropped the empty bucket back down the well. The smack of the metal and the splash took long seconds to emerge; she hauled it up again for the second pouring.

  ‘Ah,’ Elvin cried out, this time ready to enjoy it.

  As she went for the third bucket, he asked Jay if we had been out swimming.

  ‘Wading, Uncle, in the stream.’

  ‘Have a well bath then. Pukka thing to revitalise the brain.’

  He got hold of a bar of red soap and started lathering himself, singing Belafonte. The woman soaped his back and beat it with the edges of her lean hands in karate chops; then, when his shoulders eased, poured several more buckets of water on him.

  Surprised at the strength hidden in her small frame, I asked Jay, ‘Who is she?’

  ‘Never mind. Wanna try a well bath? I’ll do you first, and then you can pull the bucket for me.’

  Elvin dried himself. The woman coiled the rope around a peg and melted away through a curtain of flowering ginger and long-leafed turmeric.

  We undressed down to our jocks, in case she came back, and Jay got me on the stool first.

  ‘You like it?’ Elvin asked.

  I managed to splutter, ‘Fantastic,’ before another icy-cold bucketful knocked the breath out of me.

  ‘Have one of these every day and you can live to be a hundred.’

  ‘Is that what you want, Uncle?’ Jay let the rope of the bucket run through his fingers. ‘To live to be a hundred?’

  ‘Good God, no. Otherwise I’d have to be here every damn day, wouldn’t I? Longevity is thoroughly overrated. Give me a good cigar instead any day.’

  After dinner, we lingered out in the garden with only an oil lamp and a string of candles for light. Sulaiman joined but he still did not take a chair, leaning back against a wall instead, lifting one leg and bending it behind him so that his foot was flat to the wall and ready to propel him forward if the need arose. His extended fingertips drummed slowly, measuring the flitter of night insects between his hands before he caught and crushed them.

  Elvin, sprawled on his planter’s chair, gurgled softly between long soporific breaths. Moonlight serrated by coconut fronds whitened his bare feet splayed out on the smooth wood of the leg rests. He took a sip from his whisky-soda and eased back his head in preparation for the kind of lecture men go in for after a glass or two of alcohol. But when Jay went to get his new power lamp, Elvin beckoned me over and spoke quietly and directly – not as if to an audience.

  ‘Look, son, you must get our friend to be a bit more… you know?’

  ‘More what?’

  ‘More…’ He waved his glass, sloshing some drink into the sand, searching for the word. ‘More cooperative, you know. He is too much like his father.’

  ‘Really?’ Jay would not be pleased.

  ‘Same damn foibles, father and son.’

  ‘Foibles?’

  ‘That’s the thing.’ The corner of Elvin’s eye caught some sharp yellowish light. ‘He may not like it, but sometimes he acts just the same. He won’t take the wider view. You have to learn to take the wider view, otherwise you don’t know where the hell you’ll end up with your foibles.’

  ‘Are you talking chickens again, Uncle?’

  ‘No, no.’ He took a long evasive sip. ‘Definitely not. There is a heck of a lot more at stake than poultry, boy.’

  ‘Kairo,’ I reminded him.

  ‘What? Oh, yes. Right. Good. You stick to the point. A sound mind and steadfast. You’d make a good lawyer, son.’

  No one had ever praised my abilities so grandly before. It stuck. A legal eagle. A chink shifted and I saw a future of closely printed papers, words underlined, a hint of theatre. Would I be alone? I wanted to ask more questions, but then that look which I had anticipated earlier se
ttled in his eyes and Elvin started to describe his boyhood, his thwarted ambitions, his recognition of the duty he owed to the land of his birth and the need for perpetual self-interrogation. He stared at his glass as though it were a crystal ball.

  At that point, Jay came back with a large lantern. He trained the powerful beam at the tops of the coconut trees, the yawning silent lyres, and beyond.

  ‘This can reach the stars,’ he said. ‘What d’you think, Uncle?’

  ‘Good. Very good. Where did you get that utterly glorious searchlight?’

  ‘Pater brought it from Bangkok. You should get one for Ivan. Superb for the night watch.’

  ‘That’s just it. That’s why he must come into this business with me, son. He has connections, no? Reaching out to South East Asia, the Far East. He has that entrepreneurial spark, if only he would use it properly.’

  Jay shone the torch on Elvin’s glass. ‘How much of that stuff have you had, Uncle Elvin?’

  ‘The point, as I said, very much is the family, Jay. The chickens are secondary. That empty underused space, doing nothing, is – how shall I put it? – risky. If you don’t use it, you might lose it. The government is obsessed with land use and land reform. They don’t like big gardens – or large private estates. We must get him to take some action. Will you do it?’

  ‘Uncle, if you can’t, how can I?’

  ‘You see, Jay, we are at a crucial moment. Colombo is…’ he paused. ‘Colombo is at a crucial stage of development. Land is at a premium. Only once in a hundred years do you have a moment like this to get it right; we must get it right for us. It is our obligation. Use what we have from the old world to get a proper foothold in the new.’ Putting his glass down, he pressed his thumb against the centre of his forehead, summoning the forces of his formidable ancestry. The rattan chair creaked: softening, stretching. ‘We need to close ranks. It would be good to have your father on side. Good for him – and you too. It’s in the family interest. We need to move with the times. Then, one day, we might even go back into your great-grandfather’s business of producing a firstclass local liquor. Now there was a man who knew how to take advantage of an opportunity. Nothing wrong with that, you know.’