The Hungry Ghosts

by Shyam Selvadurai

  ALSO BY SHYAM SELVADURAI

  ADULT FICTION

  Funny Boy

  Cinnamon Gardens

  Story-Wallah! A Celebration of South Asian Fiction (editor)

  FICTION FOR YOUNG ADULTS

  Swimming in the Monsoon Sea

  COPYRIGHT © 2013 SHYAM SELVADURAI

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Selvadurai, Shyam, 1965-

  The hungry ghosts / Shyam Selvadurai.

  eISBN: 978-0-385-67067-8

  I. Title.

  PS8587.E445H85 2012 C813’.54C2011-900112-8

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design: Jennifer Lum

  Cover images: (house) Robert Harding/Robert Harding

  World Imagery/Getty Images; (gate) © Moth/Dreamstime.com; (vine of desire) Andrew Champion

  Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited

  www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  For Andrew,

  who is, to me, “like rain soaking a parched land.”

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part Two

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part Three

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Part Four

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Acknowledgements

  “Destiny is fixed; all doors open onto the future.”

  Kalidasa, Shakuntala

  PART ONE

  1

  ON THE DAY I TURNED THIRTEEN, my grandmother, with whom my mother, my sister and I lived by then, invited me to go for a drive after school. I came into the living room after changing out of my uniform, to find my grandmother standing by the grand piano, frowning with impatience, as our ayah, Rosalind, knelt before her and dabbed prickly-heat powder in the crooks of her mistress’s arms, careful not to leave white marks. When my grandmother saw me, a sparkle of anticipation lit her eyes. Then her frown deepened to mask this delight.

  As we got into the old Bentley, I felt my own anticipation, which had been building through the school day, reach a new peak. Her silence about my present made me certain that the gift was going to be generous—and I had already dropped many hints about an imported Raleigh ten-speed bicycle. I noticed she did not direct our driver, Soma, as she usually did. He already knew the destination, which was certainly the Fort, where the cycle shops were.

  That drive through Colombo comes back to me now, the image of my grandmother as she was then, chin jutted as if holding her own in an argument, back settled confidently into the base of her spine, hands clasped around a lace-edged handkerchief with which she would periodically dab her forehead and chin, releasing a swell of Yardley’s English Lavender perfume. She wore a butter-yellow cotton sari, its pleats starched to a knife edge, a string of pearls around her neck, forearms garrotted in gold bangles. Unlike most women in Sri Lanka, she did not carry a handbag but toted around a small purse woven out of coconut fronds. My grandmother was a woman who had others carry things for her.

  I can picture myself, too, on that ride, thin arms and bony wrists brushed with newly sprouted fuzz, hair cut and styled in the latest feathered fashion, dressed in imported jeans and red short-sleeved polo shirt, my neck straining forward, clavicles shimmering with the effort, nostrils daintily flared as if to some subtle danger, my long eyelashes casting a shadow over my high cheekbones—well aware of the advantages my beauty brought me with my grandmother.

  As we went through the city that day, however, the car did not veer towards the Fort but instead took another route, and we were soon in the wealthy neighbourhood of Colombo 7. I turned to my grandmother, but she would not meet my gaze. After a few detours down elegantly treed streets, the car came to a stop in front of a large two-storey house, much grander than the one we lived in and set in a vast garden. “Come, Puthey,” my grandmother said, referring to me by the affectionate extension of putha, “son,” that she always used with me.

  I opened the door, but did not get out. She nudged me out, then led me up to the gate, her hand on my shoulder, and when we were before it, she waved at the house with its generous pillared verandah at the end of the long driveway. “This is yours, Puthey.”

  She smiled at my astonishment. “When I die, this house and all my other properties will come to you.” She giggled, delighted to have caught me out in this way, but confident I would be pleased with the largesse of the inheritance she intended to give me. She told me that an American couple who worked in the embassy were renting it at a very high cost. “Of course, I’m no fool.” She tossed her head. “They don’t pay me in our useless rupees. That would be like pouring honey into a pot of feces,” she added, using one of those pithy sayings that enlivened the Sinhala language. “No, these suddhas pay their rent in dollars, into a secret account I have in England.” She squeezed my elbow, her breath like mildewed bread as she leaned in to me. “You must never tell anyone that, Puthey, not even your mother.”

  My grandmother began to point out various features of the house, her tone suddenly businesslike, looking keenly at me to make sure I was paying attention. I nodded, but my mind was already in recoil.

  I knew my grandmother owned numerous rental properties, as she was a woman of great restlessness, frequently going out to inspect her houses, get repairs done, evict tenants or see her lawyer about deeds and land transfers. But this was the first time I was seeing them. She was showing me the future mapped out for me.

  Our next stop was her “Pettah property.” As we drove towards that older part of the city, I glanced occasionally at my grandmother, wanting to protest, to beg for release from this future. My apprehension only grew when we arrived.

  The walls of this dilapidated row house were smudged with black and green fungus, its roof patched with rusted takaran where the red tiles had fallen off. The wooden verandah sagged, and its pillars were cracked and leaned precariously.

  My grandmother strode up the front steps, across the creaking floor boards of the verandah and rapped on the front door.

  A child called out from the other side, asking who it was. “Tell your mother the Ariyasinghe Nona is here,” my grandmother replied.

  After a moment the child said, “Amma is not home.”


  My grandmother made a contemptuous sound. “Of course she is. Where would she go, ah? Siriyawathy, let us in.”

  Bolts grated back and the door opened. A woman stood before us, eyes bewildered. Strands of her uncombed hair had sprung into a halo about her face and the red flowers on her dress had bled into the white background. The child, peeking from behind his mother’s legs, was dressed only in a pair of shorts, belly distended from malnutrition.

  “What is this, hiding-hiding from me, ah?” my grandmother said, grimly amused.

  She pushed past the woman and led me down a narrow corridor, rooms on either side like dark groves on a forested path, paint peeling like bark, floors rutted with cracks. All the while, my grandmother complained about how much more money she could make if she rented this property as a chummery for factory girls, which she was thinking of doing. When we finally left, she called out, before shutting the door, “Siriyawathy, you can come out of hiding now,” then gave me another bemused smile.

  As we went down the verandah steps, she took my arm for support. “That Siriyawathy must have done something very bad in her past life, Puthey. Otherwise, look at her, recently widowed with a small child to raise. It’s a terrible thing to be living out the effects of a bad karma, nah?” She sighed and shook her head. “But what is to be done? No one can escape their past actions, not even our Lord Buddha could.”

  That day, my grandmother took me around all her properties in Colombo. There were fifteen, and they varied from the grand house in Colombo 7, to middle-class bungalows, to row houses that were barely more than slum dwellings.

  When we finally arrived back at our house, I left the car, not holding the door open for my grandmother, and hurried up the front steps. I went to my room and sat on the bed, staring at my hands.

  After a moment, my grandmother stood in the doorway, eyes wide with concern. “What is it, Puthey, are you unwell?”

  “I … I’m just tired, Aacho. You know, it’s this heat. It is so hot now, and the walk home from school is difficult in this heat, trudging through the dry pola grounds is awful. And it is frightening, too, because there are stray dogs, and some of them I am sure are rabid, and—”

  My grandmother let out a peal of girlish laughter. She came over to me and tugged teasingly on my earlobe. “This boy, he is so sweet and thoughtful, can’t even ask for something directly, ah. You were in such a big-big hurry to come to your room, didn’t you see what was right there, leaning up against the side of the verandah?”

  I pulled back from her touch, and she nodded to confirm my guess. I leapt up and rushed out to see my new Raleigh bicycle. My grandmother followed, saying to Rosalind, who was waiting for her, “This boy is so funny, but so sweet, too.”

  My birthday gift was the exact red and purple colour I had hinted at, and my grandmother had been even more generous than expected. The bicycle was outfitted with an imported headlamp and pedals that glowed in the dark. I cried out in delight and embraced my grandmother. She patted my arms in a pleased, pushing-away gesture. Knowing just how to make her melt, I knelt and touched her feet in the traditional gesture of veneration. “Ah-ah, Puthey, no need for that, no need,” she murmured in the ritual protest an elder made at such an action, then lifted me by the shoulders.

  A few days after that visit to her properties, my grandmother summoned me to the front verandah. I found her seated in a planter’s chair, feet up on the wooden planks that swivelled out from under the arms. Her cousin, Sunil Maama, who always smelt of mothballs and dusty books, was in attendance, seated in a lower cane chair. He was our family lawyer, a gentle man with a sheepish smile and a nervous habit of pushing greying strands of hair over the bald spot on his head. He was not a great lawyer, but was competent enough, and my grandmother stuck with him because he was family and because she could bend him to her dictates.

  He was passing her documents, which she examined, holding them some distance away, as she was too vain to wear glasses except in the privacy of her bedroom. She signalled me to come and sit at her right on a stool. Sunil Maama gave me an abashed smile, eyes blinking like some night creature caught in daylight.

  My grandmother rustled a document and held it out to Sunil Maama. “Tell them I will not pay more than fifty thousand for the entire property.” The “them” she used was the derogatory “oong.”

  Sunil Maama pressed his hands together. “But Daya, these people are fallen on hard times, nah? We should not exploit them.”

  “Sunil, don’t talk nonsense. Are they going to get a better price than mine?”

  He looked down, stroking his battered briefcase.

  “No,” she continued. “And at least I am honest. I will actually pay them the money up front. Some mudalali will promise-promise and only give half, then take possession and never pay the rest.” She flicked the paper at him. “They are better off with me and they know it. Why, these people are ridiculous in their expectations, like farmers who do not cultivate their fields but then weep because they have no harvest.”

  He took the paper and muttered, “It’s bad karma, very bad karma.”

  My grandmother gave me a wry look, as if we were in cahoots against this weak, pathetic person.

  “Now, on to the Pettah property.” My grandmother waited as Rosalind brought out two cups of tea and some Marie biscuits and put the tray on a table in front of her. She helped herself, but did not offer Sunil Maama anything, though he was eyeing the tea. Her revenge for his comment about karma. “The rent is three months in arrears. We have to evict them.”

  Again Sunil Maama looked pained.

  “What else do you want me to do? How can I keep losing-losing money?” She turned to me. “I have been more generous with that Siriyawathy than the elephant Paraliya was with our Lord Buddha.”

  “But give her a little time more, Daya. After all, she has been your tenant for years now, and the rent is only in arrears because of the husband’s death, nah? I have talked to Siriyawathy, and she tells me her brother is coming from the village with a cousin to stay. They will help her meet the rent when they get jobs. She might even take in a university student.”

  “Look at her, will you!” My grandmother slammed her cup on the saucer, and tea slopped over the edge. “Now she is trying to run a rental business in my property, making it into a chummery and no doubt keeping a tidy-tidy profit.” She shook her head and fiercely nibbled on a biscuit. “That’s it. She must go. Today itself, I must deal with this.”

  Sunil Maama gave her careful look. “You know the laws, Daya, you cannot easily evict a tenant in this country. It will take a decade at least in court.”

  “Court? The laws?” My grandmother appealed to the skies. “Whoever said anything about going to court?”

  “Then what?”

  But I saw that Sunil Maama already knew what my grandmother had in mind.

  She snorted. “The courts and the law are for bloody fools who want to pay out their fortunes to that band of blood-sucking leeches known as lawyers.”

  She gestured to the remaining cup of tea, which was now quite cold. “Come,” she said to Sunil Maama, “drink, drink.”

  Later that afternoon, when I was in bed reading, my grandmother pushed her way through the curtained doorway. “Come, Puthey, we must go somewhere.” She straightened her sari palu, then bustled out. When we were in the car, she ordered the driver to take us to Kotahena.

  Kotahena abutted the Colombo harbour and was the uglier, mundane side that all port cities have beyond the more scenic areas. The road that took us to Kotahena passed alongside the harbour, but its dirty waters were blocked from our view by unpainted, crumbling buildings, jetties and massive cargo containers. There was a smell of tar and lorry grease in the air. Once our car left the main road and turned down one of the narrow side streets, we were in a slum of shacks that were like stalls in some grotesque carnival, constructed from different hued bricks, cement block and billboards for things like Marmite, Kandos chocolates and Milo. From these rust-f
lecked signboards, smug middle-class parents and their plump children in starched white school uniforms beamed at us. An open sewer, green with algae, bubbled along under the raised front steps of the houses. My grandmother’s sari rustled like dry grass as she shifted in her seat. She darted a glance at me, then frowned out the window.

  We made our way through a sharply winding ribbon of a road, so narrow I could have reached out and touched the dwellings on either side. Finally the car came to a stop in front of a well-kept brick bungalow, set back from the street. In the centre of the cemented front garden was a mottled pink marble fountain, plastic flamingos and penguins standing around it like guests at a cocktail party. The bungalow’s windows had heavy bars across them, and the front door was secured by an iron grille with a design of strangled vines.

  My grandmother ordered our driver to blare his horn. A woman stuck her head out of the window. She nodded, smiled, and soon a man rushed out of the house, buttoning up his orange paisley nylon shirt as he hurried down to the gate, his green polyester trousers flapping to the slap-slap of his rubber slippers.

  When he got to the car, he leaned in at the window. “Ah, nona, you bless us with a visit.”

  Up close, I could see that his nose was pitted with acne scars. A folded line of flesh down his right cheek gave that side of his face a sucked-in, disapproving look, which contrasted oddly with his merry expression.

  “How is the business, Chandralal?”

  “Thanks to your generosity, doing very well, nona.”

  “I’m always pleased to hear that, Chandralal. I know how to back a good man.”

  “I would be nothing without your patronage, nona.”

  “Chandralal, I want you to meet my grandson.”

  He had of course seen me, but now that the introduction was made his face lit up as if he had just noticed I was there. “Why, nona, he looks just like you.”

  “No, no, he is much better looking. But really, you think he does look like me? I suppose people say he has my forehead.”