The Hungry Ghosts

by Shyam Selvadurai

  In the silence the women could hear the Milk Board van outside the gate, the clink of bottles, a lone scooter passing, its puttering like the call of a lost bird. My mother pressed her folded arms into her stomach, ready for a beating.

  “Why?” my grandmother said. She sank into a dining chair and covered her face with trembling hands. “Oh, God, I am cursed. Rosalind, I am cursed,” she whispered. “Here it is again. My happiness denied. The naked peréthi, I am the naked peréthi.”

  My mother looked at her, not understanding.

  Rosalind, who appeared to get the reference, forgot decorum and rested a hand on her mistress’s shoulder. After a moment, my grandmother pushed her chair back and stood up. She stumbled away, then turned to her daughter. “You don’t know what you’ve destroyed. You don’t know how lucky you were to have this chance to not end up like me.”

  “Don’t worry,” my mother cried, anguished. “Don’t worry, I’ll never end up like you. Because I am not some vesi who throws herself at a man and ruts around with him on a beach, like a bitch in heat.”

  My grandmother stared at her daughter in disbelief, then her face hardened. She drew herself up and walked away, steadying herself on the edges of the furniture as she went.

  For a week my grandmother stayed in her darkened room. Occasionally, my mother caught glimpses of her through the curtained doorway, lying with arm across forehead as if she had a migraine. Then one evening my grandmother got out of bed with great energy. She put on a white sari and left for evening pooja at the nearby temple, a place she had only ever visited at important times like Vesak or the New Year or my grandfather’s death-anniversary dana. This marked the beginning of my grandmother’s religiosity. She had accepted that she would find no happiness in this life and must bear her karma. She would perform many acts of merit to ensure a better future life, doing good deeds for the monks and the temple, which was the highest form of merit. And she instructed Rosalind that her daughter was to eat all her meals on the back verandah.

  In the months that passed, my mother watched her less-intelligent friends get into university. She could have sat the exams again, but she did not dare approach my grandmother for another year of school fees. Other friends started to take cooking classes with the famous Anita Dickman and go to needlepoint and ballroom-dancing classes in preparation for becoming society wives. Some of them, by nineteen, were already engaged or married. No one came forward to find my mother a husband. She began to sever contact with her school friends, unable to bear the pity and concern in their eyes; unable to bear their splendidly appointed new homes, their doting husbands and plump babies; unable particularly, if they were in university, to bear their talk of medical or law school or be introduced to their student friends. Sometimes, when no one was looking, she would open a friend’s medical text and read a page. Then a cry would rise in her: “How have I come to this place? How?” And her throat would swell with rage at her mother. She hated her home, but was trapped by it. Her life would be lived out as a spinster with a mother who never spoke to her. When she thought about this future, often in the middle of the night, she would moan aloud.

  My mother was twenty when she met my father. She was a typist by then at the shipping firm where he worked. He had none of the smart briskness, the arrogance, of the other young executives, and he walked with a slight drag, as if wearing shoes too large for him, his shoulders stooped, his bulbous nose scarred by old acne. He had a nervous crack of a laugh, and instead of flirting with the typists in the entitled manner of the others, he stuttered when asking for anything. My mother sensed that he liked her, and, being desperate for affection, signalled him over when he appeared at the door of the steno pool. They were soon having lunch together and going to films at the Regal Cinema in the evening, or for sunset walks along the Galle Face Green esplanade, or to cheap dinners at Tamil cafés. He proposed to her two months after they met.

  When my mother told my grandmother she was getting married, she replied, “A Tamil and a Christian,” as if such foolishness was exactly what she expected from her daughter. “Are you blind to what is going on in our country? Have you forgotten the 1958 riots, how Tamil people lost their homes and businesses? How Tamil women were raped, the gold earrings ripped from their ears? By marrying this man, you will become one of those women, mistaken for Tamil because of your surname.”

  She said all this with disdain, as if speaking about a servant girl on their street who had got pregnant out of wedlock.

  “I am a fair person,” my grandmother told her. “I will give you a dowry. You can have that house of mine in Nugegoda.”

  “I don’t want a cent from you,” my mother cried, her voice ragged. For she understood my grandmother’s offer came from relief at being finally free of her daughter.

  6

  TO TRULY IMAGINE FREEDOM, one must understand how one might escape. My understanding occurred when I was seventeen. By then, out of sheer loneliness, I had become an even more voracious reader and was the favoured client of a book-man who turned up at our gate once a week, an old wooden tea chest filled with books roped to the rear carrier of his bicycle. He would spread a pink tarpaulin on the verandah floor, then lay out his recent findings, each sun-bleached, monsoon-curled tome handled as if it were the finest glass, that raw-rice odour of pages in the tropics rising up to me as I knelt on the other side of the tarp. I chose what I wanted, then gave back the volumes I had bought the last time. He credited me a certain amount for these returns and I paid the difference. I devoured practically anything. Georgette Heyer, Victoria Holt, Dickens, Thackeray, Austen, Agatha Christie, P.G. Wodehouse, Leon Uris, Tolstoy were all swallowed in great gulps. I also favoured the biographies of old Hollywood stars, whose movies I would never see, there being no market for them in Sri Lanka. I read about the torrid sex lives, the ghastly childhoods, the ruinous marriages, the alcoholism and drug abuse, the sheer madness of the likes of Joan Crawford, Vivien Leigh, Judy Garland and Jean Harlow as if they were spicy potboilers.

  Then one day I chose the biography of Montgomery Clift, moved without fully realizing it by the star’s beauty on the cover. Over the next few days, I read with growing wonder about his love of men; read about where such desire led—the soliciting of sex in dark streets and the backrooms of seedy bars, his body pawed over by rough sailors. The star despaired over his homosexuality (a word I had not encountered before) and became addicted to alcohol and pills, finally crashing his car into a telephone pole and ruining his once-famous beauty. In the last photograph taken before he died of a heart attack, Clift, at forty-six, looked shrivelled and haunted.

  I was repelled by the actor’s life. Yet this aversion was surmounted by the momentous discovery that I, too, was a homosexual. And with this realization, vague sexual desires, dreams and furtive masturbation coalesced around that word. The sheer surge of my suppressed adolescent lust swept away shame or guilt or fear, along with the warnings, revealed by the biography, that my life would be miserable.

  At school, now, I allowed myself to contemplate how beautiful boys’ necks were when they were thrown back in a laugh, the aching, vulnerable knob of their Adam’s apples; the way beads of sweat trembled in the indentation between their noses and lips, the way thin white cotton trousers pulled tight across thighs when they sat. That easy contact with them caused a constant spilling over of warmth within me—brushing against a classmate’s hips when entering a class, the boy with whom I was sharing a textbook unconsciously pressing his leg against mine, his heady smell of sweat and Lifebuoy soap.

  During the interval, I took to standing on the open second-floor corridor watching a rugger game in the quadrangle below, observing the flecks of grass and dried mud on stringy thighs, the glimpse of white underpants when boys were tackled, the sweat that glistened on their collar bones, hair so charmingly slicked across foreheads. I had always been repelled by sports, but now I longed to be down there among my classmates, to grab a boy by the waist and bring him down in a tack
le, to lie on top of him, crotch pressed against his crotch or stomach or buttocks; to embrace a boy who had scored a goal, to stand with my arm around the sweaty hot shoulder of a team mate. I’d lean against the balustrade to hide my erection and my head would grow light with desire. Finally, to distract myself, I would tear my eyes away to the sky or the rooftop or the crows along the gutter.

  Most of the boys in my school were wealthy and would be going abroad for higher education; most of them had chosen America. During the interval they constantly talked about how America, besides offering a superior education, was a Mecca for sexual adventure, the place where women were for the picking.

  The idea of sexual freedom began to take root in me, too. If America offered such opportunity for sex with women, did it not offer similar opportunity for people like me? I was provided with the answer in that random way one often finds answers—in my dentist’s waiting room, where I read a Time magazine article on the gay movement in San Francisco and New York. I smuggled the magazine home and hid it under my mattress, taking it out many nights to read the article again and study the photographs of men holding hands and kissing right there in the street.

  I became a member of the American Center Library, housed in a mansion on Flower Road. The library’s ground floor contained a room largely devoted to periodicals and prospectuses for American universities, along with well-thumbed copies of SAT and TOEFL study books. I often ran into boys from my class there, leafing through booklets and taking down information on where to send applications and what scholarships were being offered. As I looked through the prospectuses, I would pause at pictures of students lying in the grass, sun glinting in their hair, or hunched around a cafeteria table in earnest talk, or walking arm in arm down a corridor. I would gaze particularly at the men. Once in America, I told myself, I would become the person I really knew myself to be. In America, I would be popular, I would be gregarious, I would be witty, I would be handsome. In America, the sun would glint in my hair as I lay on manicured university lawns or strode across campus with my new friends. And I would never return to Sri Lanka. The glistening blond wood of the library floor, the faintly chlorinated smell of air conditioning—always a smell of privilege in the tropics—confirmed this promise.

  Yet when I left the American Center Library—often having hung around until it closed—and cycled home through the rapidly descending dusk, a clogging misery would spread through me. I was not smart enough to get a scholarship, and my grandmother would never allow me to go abroad to study, even though she could afford the fees. My future had already been decided.

  It was at the American Center Library that I first got to know Mili Jayasinghe. I see him, for a moment now, not as the person I would come to know so well, but as the icon he was at that time: captain of the first eleven cricket team, head prefect, son of Tudor Jayasinghe, one of the richest men in Sri Lanka. I see him walking along school corridors with his easy loose-limbed grace, hands in pockets, white shirt and long pants crisply ironed; I see his long, elegant features and his glistening black hair, falling over his forehead to obscure his burnt-caramel eyes, his skin, from his Burgher mother, the tan of unglazed pots. A coterie of boys was always around him, their worship unstinting, because Mili was easy with his friendship. He did not withhold it, like other popular boys, as a privilege to be earned.

  That afternoon at the American Center I was bent over a prospectus for a San Francisco university when I felt someone’s gaze on me. I looked up and saw Mili watching me from across the room. He signalled with two fingers to his lips that he was going outside to smoke and that I should come with him. I gaped, then looked down at the prospectus, sure he must be gesturing to someone else. Though we had been in the same class for years, I had never spoken to him beyond an occasional mumbled greeting. After a moment, his shadow fell across my page. “What, Shivan, are you blind or something? Let’s go out and have a fag.” He smiled with amiable amusement to show he understood my surprise at being selected but thought it silly. I got up and hurried to keep pace with his loping stride, close enough to notice for the first time his scent like sea water.

  Mili led me to the shade of an araliya tree. As he leaned back against the trunk, his arched torso strained the gap between his shirt buttons, revealing his navel and the fanning of hairs around it. He drew out a cigarette, lit it, then offered the pack to me. I shook my head. For a while he was quiet, enjoying his cigarette, eyes hooded as he gazed into the mid-distance and exhaled smoke. I stood before him, right arm rigid across my stomach, hand clutching my left elbow.

  “How is Renu, by the way?”

  “My sister?”

  “Yes, Renu. Don’t you know I volunteer with her?”

  “Volunteer?”

  He grinned at my bewilderment. “At Kantha. You know, the women’s organization.”

  Kantha was headed by Sriyani Karunaratne, Renu’s history professor at the University of Colombo, which she had entered that year. Karunaratne was a feminist, and Renu’s feelings about men and the power they enjoyed over women—the condition of her own mother; the male students who harassed her because she was more intelligent than they were—had found expression through feminism. My sister approached everything with fervour, and she had soon become embroiled in fighting for the rights of women employed in the garment factories in the recently opened up free trade zone.

  “But why on earth do you volunteer for this organization?” I asked, surprise making me bold.

  “Because I want to make a difference in the world. I want Sri Lanka to be a better place.”

  I nodded, but was still baffled at Mili Jayasinghe undertaking such work, which was the province of unpopular, sanctimonious, weak, often religious boys in our school.

  “What are you planning to take in America?” he asked.

  “Um, English literature.” I blushed, caught unawares by his question.

  “I’m going to study international development.” He gave me a long but timid look from under his lashes. “Unlike a lot of buggers who are planning to get the hell out of this country and never return, I want to come back and put something into Sri Lanka. I want to make things better for people who are poor and suffering here. I love Sri Lanka, and I’m not going to desert it. And I’m certainly not taking over my pater’s bloody garment factories and exploiting poor women.”

  I understood he had asked me what I was going to study so he could tell me about his own plans and hear how his ideas sounded out loud. I was probably the first boy in our school he had confessed them to, and no doubt he’d singled me out because he counted me among the poor and downtrodden, being a charity student. I sensed his vulnerability, his shyness about his ambitions.

  “Gosh,” I said, “if you keep this up, you’ll be the Mother Teresa of Sri Lanka.”

  He laughed. “That’s good, machan. The Mother Teresa of Sri Lanka.” He tilted his head to one side. “I didn’t know you were such a wit.”

  “Yes, yes,” I continued, thrilled at this compliment, “when you come off the plane, freshly returned from America, multitudes will line up to garland you and touch your feet.” He laughed again. “Our very own Sri Lankan Gandhi. You will ride in a bullock cart, to show you are a humble man of the people. Women will let down their hair and swoon when you pass.”

  “What else?” He grinned, body tilted back, eyes slightly narrowed, as if appraising an object for purchase.

  “Oh, there will be no stopping you.” I was sweating from my desire to impress him. “Soon your teeth will be stained red from chewing bulath. You will smoke foul-smelling beedies instead of American cigarettes, you will stop using deodorant and be rank with the true odour of Lanka.”

  “And what will I wear?”

  “Hmm, I was going to say the national costume, but realistically that is no longer the outfit of the common man. You certainly don’t want to go about looking like a politician. No, you will wear a loin cloth and walk around with a scythe over your shoulder to show solidarity with the
workers.”

  “A loin cloth! But my arse will be on display for everyone to see.”

  “Yes, that is why I said women will let down their hair and swoon. At the sight of your hairy backside. And of course chief among your admirers will be my dear sister. Our very own goddess Kali, She Who Is Blacker Than the Night,” I said, shamelessly offering up Renu to get another laugh.

  “That is too much, machan,” Mili tittered. He drew on his cigarette and exhaled, dark purple lips parting and pulling down slightly at the corners. He cocked one leg against the tree trunk and his grey jeans pulled tight. I looked away.

  “So, are you finished at the library, Shivan?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why don’t you come back to my house? It’s not far from here. Do you have a bike?”

  I nodded.

  Mili led the way towards Cinnamon Gardens. The Jayasinghes lived on Horton Place in a three-storey Georgian mansion with a long driveway that curved around an oval of lawn. There were square turrets at either end of the house. When we reached the gate, Mili pointed to one of the turrets. “My room is up there. You’ll like the view, machan.” He grinned. “With binoculars, you won’t believe the Cinnamon Gardens titties I have seen.”