Suncatcher

by Romesh Gunesekera

  Words would not do. I could not find any then.

  ‘Elvin arrived on the flight this morning,’ my father added in a voice of solace tinged with a measure of unexpected respect. ‘He called us straightaway.’

  I held back my tears but when my mother said, ‘Oh, my sweet darling,’ I buried my face in her arms and cried. The sap drained out of me. I wept for the life I had lost. Mine as much as his.

  IV

  FIREFLIES

  7

  December is a cruel month, my father would complain in his later years deploring the commercialisation of religion as a double fault. I, too, have made it a habit to avoid festive gatherings and try to get away from the tinsel, Chinese crackers and false good cheer whenever I can. This year, I have rented a secluded estate bungalow on the slopes overlooking the south coast far from any church. No temple nearby either. No mosque. There will be no carols. No pirith chants. No call of the muezzin.

  Instead, the garden, fringed with low-country tea bushes, is filled with birdsong. The air teeming with invisible cogs and wheels: turning, squeaking, rubbing, creaking. The mechanism of nature’s great timepiece. I can’t but wonder, even now, what Jay would make of this abundance. The woodpeckers, the sunbirds, the flycatchers with their long tail feathers. My notebook is full of sightings; whenever my pen touches the paper the intervening years vanish. A kingfisher dips into the water of the lily pond.

  The lawn is curved and the garden sunlit. The caretaker reminds me of Gerry, the way he rises on his toes to listen to a distant hoot – a signal – holding an ekel broom in his hand.

  ‘You look after the whole place on your own?’ I ask him.

  ‘Mama vitharai.’ I am the only one. He sweeps a few fallen leaves and proudly adds, ‘I planted the flowers and started the spice garden. Before that only three coconut trees and the rest a hopeless jungle. No good for anyone. Now we have even a resident malkoha.’

  All the way along my drive down the coast to the house, I searched for Jay’s cove. I call it Jay’s cove, but after that single visit of ours it became as much mine as his. Or Niromi’s. Several times I thought I had found the turn-off but the beachfront at the end never looked right – everywhere the shoreline crammed with new hastily built guest houses for budget tourists, and flimsy wooden shacks. Between them blackened fishing nets strung out to dry. Fences. Makeshift walls. Even if any of those side roads had led to the beach that had so enraptured us, the birds would not have been there. I could see no trees for sheltering. No roosting places. There was no room for them. No room for a lot of things from that time.

  ‘Is there a place by the sea nearby where lots of small birds come when the sun goes down? Thousands of birds. I saw it once as a boy – a special beach – but I can’t remember exactly where.’

  ‘I know. I can take you, sir.’ The caretaker cranes his neck, lifted by the prospect of the chance to guide. ‘Not far. You cross the main road and then about ten minutes only to walk.’

  ‘Small birds filling the whole sky?’

  ‘Yes, yes. From the sea they come. Evening time.’ I feel immensely relieved.

  I picture Jay as he was that evening, as the red sun softened and clouds of barn swallows appeared, flying in across the blue water and into the trees as if swirling in the refrain of a celestial choir; tiny birds that filled the gilt sky and dropped like small jewels to bead every string of the hundreds of green harps that lined his sanctuary, calling and calling and Jay singing back to them, his face broad and glowing in the last ruffled rays of the sun.

  I don’t now remember much from the days and weeks that followed his death. I wanted the world to stop. For nothing more to ever happen. For the cage of guilt, and pretence, to melt. Channa soon left with his parents for England. I was not allowed to see him again, or he was not allowed to see me. Because he had been in the car with Jay, he was questioned by the police and blamed more than me by people like Mrs Peiris. He never said anything to defend himself. I also said nothing. I did not blurt out: ‘Not Channa’s fault. We were the ones racing, not him.’ I could not say: ‘All for one, one for all.’ We were each on our own. We had been growing further apart each day instead of closer. Each with a story of his own to tell. Stories of hope and freedom, the benevolence of nature – even human nature – faultless friendship, love, genderless love. Or perhaps the reversal of all that.

  Elvin quickly smoothed over the procedures, ensuring a swift verdict of misadventure and arranging a rapid funeral; even securing the brief appearance of Marty tugging clumsily at his tie. At the graveyard, I stayed in the shadows watching them. Iris began a low wail, gathering the tidal force of pentup grief. I saw Sulaiman shuffle away from her with Gerry – his bad eye sewn shut. Our wrongs unrighted.

  Elvin came over and put his arm around me. ‘It was not your fault, Kairo, nor a fault in the world. Jay would be the first to say it.’

  I tried to find something to say in return but couldn’t. I wanted to tell him, ‘Jay taught me to drive’ – as though that might make a difference.

  During the funeral, Niromi had kept her head lowered. I noticed her hair was oiled and tamed. At the end, when filing out, she accosted me. The skin around her mouth, her nose, was coarsened; her eyes rubbed hard. ‘Why did you all do it? Why did you let him do it?’ Fresh small streams of tears, and perspiration, trickled down her swollen cheeks and into the folds around her neck.

  I wished I could put things right. Fix the mess of our shrunken young lives.

  ‘Will I see you again?’ I asked, unaware of the circularity that bends time and shapes survival.

  Inexplicably she yielded then, softened. She clasped my hand and squeezed it as she had done that time on the beach.

  A few days later, Elvin flew back to Sonya in her clinic in Washington. She didn’t want to come back home and Elvin never carried out his business plans. When land reform came, years later, his estate was one of the first to be nationalised. Sulaiman lost his job but by then Gerry had become a pop singer. He ended up as a vocalist in a resort band in Phuket, escaping the fate of many of his rural peers when the troubles came.

  I never visited Elvin’s mansion again, or Casa Lihiniya with its garden and rooftop, the balcony, the fish, the birds, the vale of my blossoming; that whole magical world of discovery shifted out of reach and into a place of permanent impossibilities.

  The lily pond at the bottom of the garden is choked with duckweed. Spindly waterbirds step gingerly from pad to pad, pecking with their long bills at insects skating on the water. The pond is decorative rather than agricultural, there is a concrete path that goes up to it and a curved wooden footbridge over the narrower end. It is not a shortcut but another ornamental feature of the garden. I have walked across it several times since I arrived and watched the tadpoles nipping the brown, murky water. I can’t tell whether it is the water or the bridge that attracts me, or the possibility of being between one place and another, waiting for a signal.

  At five fifteen, the caretaker knocks on my door. He has buttoned up his shirt.

  ‘Ready, sir?’

  ‘Let’s go.’

  He takes me past a dell filled with scarlet heliconia and candy-coloured gandapana. ‘You see, sir, these flowers need light. I had to cut down some of the old trees to allow new things to grow.’

  ‘We used to play with those gandapana seeds.’ I pick a few clusters and squeeze the berries apart, remembering.

  ‘Gandapana is the big challenge. Have to keep in check, otherwise it’ll take over the whole place. Lot of nectar for insects but a real pest if you just let it be. You see, sir, we want it all to look plentiful but to keep it tip-top is hard work. You have to be on the job every day. There’s a lot that has to be done. Not everyone in this country understands that.’

  ‘Are you talking about the future? The political future?’ For some time, my concerns have been more mundane.

  ‘The future feeds on the past, no? And the past comes from what you do today. Can see that in an
y garden.’

  Above us a flight of parakeets shoots past, heading inland, ignoring the mangoes on the trees he has nurtured. I search the branches to see if a green-billed coucal might be hiding: a species now endangered.

  On the lane leading to the main road a bunch of kids are playing cricket with a soft ball. One hits the ball with his bat and a small boy runs after it. In the jingle of childish make-believe I remember again how one thing leads to another and see how much we need to embellish even the smallest life with light more wondrous than we are given. The kids cheer. They are barefoot and could be of any denomination – as we might have been – but they have local heroes. Real ones.

  At the main road, I study the rifts and fissures in the tarmac that has softened through the day. I’d like to understand how that happens: the process by which heat and time disrupts the material world; why surfaces shift, things buckle, break, burn. Why in this world we live with waste and negligence. War. Serial damage. Is it needed to melt us into one?

  My father once asked, ‘How does it compare: the things you have done and the things you have left undone?’ The question was aimed at himself, but I think I should ask it of myself too.

  I notice a lull in the birdsong. Over the years, I have come to believe that for a new song to be heard, the old one has to end.

  A three-wheeler beeps and putters past, the driver smiling in a yellow shirt, his red tuk-tuk packed with Christmassy shopping bags and young children who wave excitedly. It scoots around the bend and disappears in a puff of oily smoke.

  Approaching the beach, we seem to be in no man’s land. The coconut palms are gangly, tousled. The patch of grass leading to the beach is dry. The wind has dropped. The sea is calm. The sand has a rose tinge to it.

  I have seen the sun go down into the sea many times and yet there is nothing familiar about the colour of the sky or the glow in the clouds today.

  ‘Where are they, the birds?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir,’ my guide says, puzzled. ‘This is the place but no sign, no?’

  I’d noticed the bats in Colombo no longer fly in straight lines; their flight paths, too, are in disarray.

  ‘Are we too early?’

  ‘The time is right. Something must have happened somewhere to disrupt things.’

  We wait. There is nothing else to do. The light slowly seeps away undesired.

  ‘Getting dark, sir. Go back?’

  We retrace our steps in silence. I think back and reckon Jay must also have been waiting for the right moment.

  When we reach the garden, the caretaker climbs to the upper terrace to lock the other gates. I take the path to the edge of the pond. The frogs have not started their night chorus yet. The duckweed is motionless. I am not sure where to go next in search of the barn swallows, that lost time. The bird sanctuary near Yala, or the game reserve itself? Then, I see a firefly, a bluish-green flicker above the lantana bushes higher up, on safer ground, illuminating a path from one point of darkness to another, beckoning.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My thanks to sharp-eyed agents, editors, birders, guides, especially Curtis Gillespie, Bill Hamilton, Alexandra Pringle, Faiza Khan, Katherine Ailes, Lauren Whybrow. And Helen, as always, for her forensic lens and steady hand. Also the teams at Bloomsbury, The New Press and A M Heath.

  I am grateful to have had some special breathing places for this book: Ateneo de Manila; Armitage Hill; the Banff Centre in the lands of Treaty 7 territory where the past, present and future generations of Stoney Nakoda, Blackfoot, and Tsuut’ina Nations are acknowledged and honoured; haciendas and gardens of friends, and absent friends. Thanks also to the British Library, the Department of National Archives in Colombo – unsuspecting memories, unexpected bookshelves and other sources. Guiding lights: Shanthi and Tanisa.

  Fiction being what it is, I have taken liberties with the timing of Education Reform Acts, some elections, public events and the flight paths of bats, birds and winged friends.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Romesh Gunesekera is the author of Monkfish Moon, Reef, The Sandglass, The Match, and Noontide Toll (all published by The New Press). He grew up in Sri Lanka and the Philippines and now lives in London.

  Publishing in the Public Interest

  Thank you for reading this book published by The New Press. The New Press is a nonprofit, public interest publisher. New Press books and authors play a crucial role in sparking conversations about the key political and social issues of our day.

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  © 2019 by Romesh Gunesekera

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.

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  Originally published in Great Britain by Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019

  Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2020

  Distributed by Two Rivers Distribution

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Gunesekera, Romesh, author.

  Title: Suncatcher : a novel / Romesh Gunesekera.

  Description: New York : The New Press, 2020. | Summary: “A coming-of-age story set in post-independence Sri Lanka” — Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019051382 | ISBN 9781620975596 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781620975602 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Bildungsromans.

  Classification: LCC PR9440.9.G86 S86 2020 | DDC 823/.914—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019051382

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