Suncatcher

by Romesh Gunesekera

‘We might put it on again next year. Lorca is not exactly the bundle of fun people want right now.’

  My father’s face seemed to lose the joviality he kept for show. ‘Ah, yes. The people.’

  For him, ‘the people’ were a mass of misled victims who needed to be saved from tyranny; for Shaku, they were an audience who mostly needed to be entertained. Their common ground was not unlike mine and Jay’s: an area of bonded hope and unbounded freedom, perhaps best left unexamined at its core.

  ‘What about the new theatre project? Your People’s Palladium?’

  ‘Helluva how-do-you-do, that was. That bugger Tootsie put a spoke in it. You know the chap, don’t you?’ He raked his fingers through his thick, curly hair.

  ‘A real-life Sooty Banda. What’s the joker done now?’

  ‘Hospitality and tourism is the thing, he says. That’s the future for this country. Hotels and sin bins, not amateur dramatics.’

  ‘Does he really expect people from other countries will be tempted to come here?’

  ‘No, men.’ Shaku waggled a hand indicating continuity more than the stated contradiction. He put on the voice of an arch inveigler: ‘From England, Holland, Portugal, all those old imperialist countries, they’ll come rushing – in their bathing costumes instead of their gunboats. This time we will be the ones to plunder them. Stolen enough, no? Now let them come and pay through the nose for sunstroke and malaria.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  The conversation paused as Siripala handed out the drinks. Glasses clinked. Ice cracked. Shaku resumed.

  Face pressed against the uprights like a jailbird, I basked in the baritone flow.

  ‘Seriously, Clarence, fellows like Tootsie not only have plans, they have contingency plans. Plan A, B, C. One for this government, one for the next, and one for anything inbetween. If by some miracle the government survives, he’ll spin socialism into a cup of tea – and if it falls, he’ll make Colombo the capitalist beacon of the East.’

  My father sank deeper into his chair at the prospect. ‘The prime minister is too distracted by foreign issues, so her Press Bill is bound to fail, no? We have no left left.’ He stopped, momentarily stumped by unexpected repetition in his line, jolting me out of a reverie.

  ‘That’s no bad thing, no? Who wants a press gag?’

  ‘I disagree. On this newspaper issue, I have to say, I am with madam PM all the way. Lenin made the same point – to let the bourgeoisie run the press is to aid the enemy. You cannot have one family controlling all our newspapers.’

  ‘But if the government tries to take over the press the agitation will be huge. People prefer a family driven by profit to a bunch of politicians after power.’

  ‘You really think so?’ My father rattled the ice cubes in his glass. Hearing the doubt in his voice, I realised I wanted my father to be right, always right. Not to lose the high ground. Neither man said anything for a while. Then, as another light dimmed in the house, my father asked, ‘Does it not bother you, Shaku, this business about language?’

  ‘Why? On stage we are always speaking somebody else’s words.’

  ‘What about the slogans? Things being whipped up.’

  ‘You mean like Tootsie’s nonsense?’

  ‘Out on the streets. The crowds braying. If you are Tamil, or Muslim…’

  ‘You know, Clarence, maybe it is time to put on Mother Courage and say to hell with the bloody handcart. Permit me to adapt a line, my friend, to our dark days.’ Shaku pulled at the front of his shirt, opening it some more, before declaiming: ‘O unhappy land, where be our true heroes?’

  In war, a city would be choked with sandbags, roads blocked by oil drums and barriers, gun bunkers and security posts. In a state of emergency, there would be curfews and clampdowns. Jay’s balcony, under siege, had sheets pinned from the roof to the railings, all the fish tanks were covered with asbestos boards. I crept in from the outside stairs and found Jay fitting a bolt to his bedroom door.

  ‘The trouble is women. They go mad when they come here. What is it with this fucking house?’ He banged the door shut and secured it.

  Niromi sprang into my mind, but I acted bemused. ‘Who?’

  ‘Mrs P. She wants to fumigate the whole place. One lunatic is pumping smoke into Pater’s room and she’s got two other assholes spraying DDT outside the kitchen. They’ll be up here any minute.’

  ‘Shelltox. We do that.’ I often sprayed it from a pump-can pretending I was wielding a flamethrower, whooshing out an oily mist over the back garden battling the axis powers of cockroaches and mosquitoes.

  ‘You don’t have fish tanks to worry about. Birds. It could kill them all.’

  ‘So, tell her. Maybe she doesn’t understand.’

  ‘She can’t hear reason whatever you shout at her. Can’t she see that fish eat larvae? My system keeps everything in balance. I’ve shown you, no?’

  Hammering started on the other side of the door, followed by a plea. ‘Open up, Jay. Have to purify your room, no?’

  ‘Not with DDT, you don’t.’

  ‘No, aney, special incense. Have to clean the place of all these bad things, putha. Someone put a hooni-pooni, no? Now must do the reverse.’

  A lifetime of childhood battles puckered below Jay’s lip. ‘Stupid woman doesn’t know what she’s talking about.’

  He didn’t let Mrs Peiris in and eventually she retreated to supervise the appeasement of the demons prowling around the garden.

  ‘She’s only trying to help, isn’t she?’

  ‘Uncle Elvin is the one she’s after. Obsessed. Convinced my mother is going to destroy her chances. Haven’t you seen how she juts her front every time his name is mentioned? Now she wants to put a charm in the house, first to neutralise my mother a million miles away, then to trap him. That’s what.’

  ‘Isn’t she married?’

  ‘The husband is a drunk. Stuck in Bandarawela. She’s always preening herself for a knight to come galloping to her rescue. She’s even got the horse saddled for him. Only Uncle Elvin doesn’t see that.’

  Jay sounded like a grown-up again, sketching out the shape of a whole life in a phrase, pinpointing the links that bound one person to another, their frailties; sticking pins mercilessly. This was a different Jay from the one who tickled sloth bears and coddled parrots. This was a Jay accustomed to the fluttering of clipped wings, the cracks of a weakened heart. A boy who was becoming a man I didn’t want to understand.

  The days and the weeks merged; the moon lost its glow and its phases began to collapse into each other. Lancelot, the lamplighter, cycled increasingly shakily with his long teetering pole to flick the switches of the streetlights; electricity began to fluctuate in houses small and large. I returned in my mind to the magic of Elvin’s estate; the night hours sprawled out under the trees talking in that strange, still atmosphere where our words seemed the only human sounds for miles around. Would anywhere ever be like that again? I imagined our slumbering town turning into a metropolis with modern subways and futuristic flyovers, traffic lights at every street corner. Miss Universe and Mr Atlas both on the same stage at the planetarium, in the middle of the racecourse, and no one realising that this was once a playground for a pair of kids – sometimes a trio, potentially a foursome – who had nothing better to do from morning till night than make up stories of gangsters and rustlers, braves and warriors, and hope that their lives would prosper like the celluloid stories of a panoramic screen.

  From time to time, my mother would implore me to study more.

  ‘While your school is in such chaos, you must see your tuition master as your educator. Make sure you do the homework for him.’

  ‘Why do we need a school at all then, Ma? Should be closed down completely if it is so useless that it takes thirty hours a week to do what he does in forty-five minutes.’

  ‘What thirty hours?’

  ‘Six hours a day, five days a week. Isn’t that the new plan for schools? I saw in Thaththa’s newspaper.’
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  ‘Nothing wrong with his maths,’ my father chortled from the dining table. I wondered if the Iroquois were wrong. Perhaps a special bond that linked a son to a single father did exist, hidden deep in the general mess of tribal life and mixed chromosomes.

  ‘The tuition master says you make mistakes all the time with the easiest of things, Kairo. You are not trying to fool him, are you son?’

  ‘Can’t concentrate, Ma. In this house, how to concentrate?’ More approving noises percolated from my father’s throat.

  ‘Well, you better do it anyhow.’ My mother gave him a scornful look before leaving on her round of errands.

  He came over and inspected the Sinhala textbook I had been pretending to read.

  ‘Any good, son?’ he asked.

  ‘Makes me ill.’ I made a face. ‘Smell the paper.’

  ‘Never mind the paper, what about the story? Can you follow?’

  ‘So boring. They should put a detective or outlaw in it. Who wants to read about bullock carts and pumpkins?’

  He screwed up his eyes to track the plump, curvy script.

  ‘Can’t even follow a newspaper in the mother tongue. Wish I could at least do that. It’s not enough to have a dream any more, it has to be dreamt in the right language. Maybe they are right, son; English may not be it. We should try doing this together. Isn’t that how you learnt to ride a bike?’

  ‘But you never rode a bike.’

  ‘I know. but I was there, wasn’t I?’

  ‘Thaththa, this stuff is really boring.’

  Unlike my father, I had no reservations about the language I used; its private uses were more important to me than the shared use at home, or with Jay. I wanted it to keep secrets, provide a lifeline for my thoughts, a page that opens a door into another world whenever I wanted to escape.

  Halfway through my daily ritual with pen and paper, a horn beeped from outside the gate. Jay called out my name.

  I found him bright-eyed and beaming in the driving seat of a poppy-red VW Beetle, his arm hanging out of the wounddown window.

  ‘Come on,’ he drawled. ‘Get in.’

  ‘What are you doing in that?’

  ‘Giving Uncle Elvin’s beasts a run. Come on.’ He gunned the engine, scattering the crows that had gathered pecking at the potholes on the road. ‘Time for another lesson, pardner. I’ve seen just the place for it.’ He did a triple beep, reverting to his old self. ‘Every boy should learn to drive. How else can you be the captain of your destiny?’

  ‘Sure.’ I had feared the chance might never come. I jumped in and stuck my thumb up. ‘Chocks away.’

  The engine whirred, more an aeroplane than a car. We taxied down past the last house.

  ‘Almost brought the jeep. You are big enough, but the gears are tough for a rookie.’ He stopped the car. ‘Right, let’s give it a go then.’ We exchanged places.

  ‘What do I do if another car comes?’

  ‘Nobody comes this way. The road just finishes nowhere.’ Half a mile down the slope the savannah – a scrubland of grass – and the swamp oozing from the canal mingled.

  ‘What about gangsters?’ Siripala’s stories of bootleggers who collected kasippu from the illegal stills by the canal and did devil dances on the graves of their victims swarmed in my head.

  ‘No one can catch us,’ Jay grinned. ‘We could fly in this, if we had to.’

  He made me go over the foot routines and do the gear changes again and soon we were rolling down past a donkey field with me at the controls.

  ‘If you practise, soon we can take two cars out and do a chase like in the movies.’

  ‘I like this Beetle,’ I patted the dash and let my hand dance above the gear stick.

  ‘She loves you, yeah, yeah, machang, but keep both hands on the wheel.’ Jay reached over and steadied it.

  At the end of the road, Jay took over and showed me the first of his repertoire of stunts: a swift three-point turn. Then he got me to time him doing nought-to-sixty back up the road, with his watch up against the speedometer, keen to match the test-drive stats from Autocar. We were out by five seconds. ‘It’s the gradient,’ Jay muttered. ‘We need to find a flatter road.’ He did an emergency stop, nearly snapping my neck. ‘Always be prepared,’ he warned. Then he made me drive again, for hours it seemed, my heart racing as much as the VW engine. Then he announced: ‘Time to try a big road.’

  I gripped the wheel. ‘What about the traffic?’

  ‘Don’t worry. You’ll be fine.’

  We headed back past our house and onto Fife Road. I had to skirt a bicycle first, then a godamba-roti handcart; on the main road, a bus and a tricky yellow-top taxi that couldn’t decide between going left or right. By the time we made it back to Elvin’s garages, the sky had turned dark. Exhausted, I closed my eyes.

  Jay climbed out and delved into the toolboxes on the workshop table, hunting for a timing gauge. He turned on the radio. The tipsy crooner reminded me of Sonya wafting through her airy house in those carefree early days, even though it might have been my own mother who had programmed the show.

  ‘Have you heard from your mother?’ I asked Jay.

  ‘One postcard.’

  ‘From Washington?’

  ‘Her handwriting is like a little girl’s. She says she’s all cut up that Harpo Marx has died – like it matters fuck all.’

  ‘Has your uncle said how she’s doing?’

  ‘He wrote too. Says America is more complicated than he expected. I guess he means the treatment. Says he may be back for a few days before Christmas, but she won’t.’

  ‘He’ll leave her there?’

  ‘For a week, then he’ll go back to America.’

  ‘With you?’ I joked, daring to voice the unthinkable.

  ‘Would you mind?’

  ‘What about your father? If she isn’t here and you are alone, won’t he come back?’

  ‘Luckily there are legal and financial reasons that make it difficult. He has to stay abroad, thank God. Don’t know what I’d do if he showed up now.’

  ‘You prefer to be alone?’

  A neon glow blinked near the gate, pricking the shrouds of a lasiandra bush.

  ‘A firefly is never alone because when he looks up all the stars sparkle with him,’ Jay said solemnly. I believed him, but I wanted my life to be more than a brief dance of sparks.

  When I got home, I hung around the garage examining our old car with a fresh interest. Siripala had dropped my mother and my father at their separate functions earlier and brought the Anglia home to await their next instructions. The procedure on these occasions was for one or the other to call and ask for a pick-up when they were ready. Some nights, like this one, my father was dropped back home by his friend Abey who’d shout out a ‘Cheerio’ even before he had climbed out of the car. Now my father’s arracky breath wafted through the concrete air-bricks of the garage wall as he fumbled for its support, cursing the shoe-flowers in his way and carrying on an argument in his head.

  ‘Siripala,’ he swung for the wall as Abey drove off.

  ‘Kohedtha?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Where? Where is madam?’

  ‘Madam not back yet.’

  My father harrumphed, reeling into the house.

  I heard him bellow down the telephone. ‘I’m in, yes, I am bloody in,’ as if he had broken into a fortress. ‘Count me in.’ Then he clumped up the stairs and Siripala retreated to his quarters to smoke in the dark. A gecko chuck-chucked and the bullfrogs across the road began to croak. Soon the chorus was joined by flamboyant snores from the master bedroom.

  I slipped into the driver’s seat of the Anglia. I did the checklist that Jay had taught me: adjust the mirror, test the pedals, find neutral pumping the clutch. I ran my hands around the steering wheel trying to find the balance between a light touch and confident control and urged the car to silently roll down the slope and run like a trickle of silver towards the adventures that would make me a man. I was determined to
become a real driver, independent and free, an equal partner, sooner than Jay would expect.

  The next Sunday, Jay drove us over to Independence Square in the VW. I took the wheel and did a few fast laps circling the hall. Then Jay wanted to do the road tests again: quarter-mile top speed, nought-to-sixty. He had brought a piece of chalk to mark the starting point on the surface of the road and a stopwatch for precision.

  ‘If we can break the twenty-second barrier, we’ll be ready to put the Austin Healey through its paces. It’ll do it in half the time.’ Jay grinned. ‘Imagine that.’

  ‘Won’t your uncle mind?’

  ‘The race horse is the one for the workout, much more than the cart horse.’

  ‘But he said not to go over fifty.’

  ‘You didn’t complain the other day. Anyway, he’s not here.’ We swapped places. I opened the tiny triangular window and directed the airflow onto my chest, wriggling to keep my bare skin from sticking to the vinyl seat. I didn’t complain because I wanted to go as fast as he did, faster.

  We did three runs but couldn’t reach sixty in under twenty-three seconds.

  ‘I need to tune the engine again. Listen. Doesn’t sound right, does it? You have to get the idle just right.’

  ‘Is it the fuel pipe like on that Landmaster on the estate?’

  ‘It’s the carb. Have to strip it and clean it out, but for now just an adjustment with the fuel mixture might do the trick. I showed you the screw, didn’t I?’

  A black Ford Prefect came around the bend of the sports ground. Mrs Peiris was driving, head held high, eyes firmly on the road ahead. The car wobbled as she used the tail of her sari to swat something on the dashboard, not noticing us.

  ‘A real menace,’ Jay nodded at her car as it picked up speed. ‘You can’t tell what people are up to. Be careful of who you trust.’

  ‘Mrs Peiris?’

  ‘Adults. The whole lot.’

  ‘I can look after myself.’ The words sounded hollow in my soft mouth, but I had to be brave.

  Jay turned the mixture screw right down and asked me to start the engine again. He pulled the throttle cable to race the engine and made another adjustment. I returned to his side.