The Hungry Ghosts

by Shyam Selvadurai

  We took our time undressing each other as we lay face to face on his bed, stopping to gaze and touch and run our tongues over every part that came exposed. I could feel Mili’s muscles slide under his skin as he moved. The hair on his chest, arms and legs was fine and very black against his lighter skin. His cock was pulsing against the white fabric of his briefs, and when I drew his underpants down, his erection slipped sideways across the V of his groin, the shaft a smooth satiny brown, the head a dark purple. The baby powder, which he used to absorb the sweat in his groin and underarms, gave him a familiar musky smell. We spent long periods just kissing and holding each other, then we would resume making love again.

  Those early weeks with Mili were glorious and we saw each other every evening. When my grandmother found out he was the son of Tudor Jayasinghe, she was delighted I had a friend from such a prestigious family. She urged him to treat our house as if it were his, saying she was happy he was looking out for her grandson and that I had been thoroughly bored in the company of “two old women.” On her instruction, Rosalind began to set an extra place for Mili at dinner. Afterwards, I would sit with him on the verandah and listen to the crickets and birds while he smoked. When we talked about our school days or Mili told me what had happened to the boys in our class and various teachers, I would think of all the Canadian men I’d had affairs with and the strain of having to explain myself and Sri Lanka to them. With Mili it felt so peaceful, this shared history, this elliptical way of talking, because we both understood the same world and its idioms. Mili was always delighted with my quips and sarcasm and he would encourage me by protesting, “that’s too far, Shivan, that’s too far,” then laughing as I continued to skewer some boy or teacher or a person we were observing on the street.

  Mili’s social world consisted of three couples he worked with at Kantha, and I soon got to know them well. Dharshini was second-in-command under Sriyani, and her husband, Jagath, looked after the organization’s finances. They came from upper-class Kandyan Sinhalese families and had that slow ease born from generations of wealth. Though their salary was paltry, they lived in a nice Cinnamon Gardens house that was Dharshini’s dowry. Dilan and Avanthi were from the US and spoke with American accents, having lived there since childhood. They had met at the University of Chicago, where they were both doing their Ph.D. theses on Sri Lanka’s ethnic problem. They were intense in that way of returning expatriates, anxious to assimilate into Sri Lankan culture.

  The last couple was Ranjini and Sri, the man with the bushy beard who had hung around us at the party. Their relationship had been forbidden by Ranjini’s parents because Sri was Tamil. She had acquiesced to parental pressure and was betrothed to a distant cousin. Yet she and Sri kept their love affair going in secret. The others were constantly urging Ranjini to assert herself, teasing her about working in human rights and not standing up for its principles in her private life. She was good natured about this, letting out little squeals of laughter and wiping tears of mirth with a frilly-edged handkerchief. Her time in jail—where she would still have been but for the intervention of Sriyani’s husband, who had high-level connections in the government—gave her hallowed status among her colleagues. Also, her demure manner was an advantage with village women, who opened up to her in a way they didn’t to others.

  Ranjini regarded me as a younger brother and called me Shivan-malli. I would often find her watching me, head to one side, eyes merry with some knowledge. She did not speak English fluently and would ask me the meaning of a word or if she had said something correctly. She would unconsciously take my hand as we talked, in the way Sri Lankan girls did with each other.

  Mili’s friends treated me as one of his school chums visiting from abroad. I was sure they never suspected Mili—cricket captain, motorbike fanatic—of being gay. But then, there was his ongoing single state. Since they never questioned this or tried to set him up with a woman friend, I formed the theory that to them Mili was so hardily male he could not fit into the domestic routine of women or bend to the softness of loving one. I felt the other men greatly admired him for not succumbing to domesticity.

  The bars and restaurants we went to with Mili’s friends were bare-walled rooms that looked like canteens, with metal chairs and tables and fluorescent lighting; not the opulent hotel lobbies our former classmates frequented. We would spend entire Saturdays and Sundays at the cabanas on Mount Lavinia beach, sending one of the cabana boys for kotthu rotis and hoppers from the local Muslim restaurant or a trishaw driver to The Great Wall for Chinese food.

  One weekend at Mount Lavinia, Ranjini and I went in search of the pineapple vendor who patrolled the beach. As we walked along the water’s edge to keep our feet cool from the burning sand, we fell into talking about Buddhist stories. I had told her earlier that my grandmother often used to narrate them to me. Ranjini, having studied Buddhist literature, knew many more tales than I did. “But have you heard the Rupananda story, Shivan-malli?” she asked, and when I shook my head she told the story of how Lord Buddha had created a phantom, a very beautiful sixteen-year-old girl, to teach his vain cousin Rupananda a lesson on beauty. The phantom was visible only to Rupananda, who saw it when she came to hear her cousin preach. She fell immediately in love and could not stop gazing at the phantom’s beauty, consumed with desire for this girl. The next day, she rushed back to see the object of her love. But this time the phantom appeared as a twenty-five-year-old, and Rupananda felt her love diminish a little. Still, she returned again and again, and on each successive visit Lord Buddha aged the phantom to a middle-aged woman, an old woman, and finally into a sick crone who fell dead at his feet and began to decay and suppurate, worms crawling out of her body. Rupananda was cured of her attachment to her beauty. She cut her hair, removed all her lovely garments and put on the robes of a nun.

  “It is a good story, no, Shivan-malli?” Ranjini said, smiling at me sweetly, yet holding my gaze. “Yes-yes, I knew you would especially like that story.” I nodded, looking towards the horizon to hide my consternation. She had guessed we were lovers. I was sure Ranjini, like my grandmother, had rendered an altered version of the original, to get her point across.

  The most splendid time of Mili’s and my first weeks together was a visit to Sriyani’s beach house.

  The bungalow was on the south coast, and Sriyani, ever the communist man’s daughter, lent it to anyone who asked. The house had verandahs all around, and airy rooms that were sparse but tastefully furnished, concrete beds and divans built into the floor and painted white, their mattress covers and cushions an aquamarine-and-emerald stripe. From the front verandah the garden sloped down to the sand and turquoise sea glittering with shards of light, a mist trembling where the waves crashed against the beach. The bungalow was in a grove of coconut trees that kept the building cool and shady. The rustle of palm fronds, as they bowed and reared in the wind, was like the sound of a second sea. An amiable old man named Piyasena served as cook, cleaner and watchman. He had a family in the village nearby and was pleased when Sriyani had guests because he could return home for the night and not guard the place.

  The sea was a little rough, but Mili and I went in, as far as we dared, and spent the morning in the water. When we came back to the bungalow, lunch was laid out—nutty brown rice, fresh fried fish, huge prawns in a red coconut curry and local village vegetables like batu, pathola and kathurumurunga.

  After we had eaten, the man left, saying he would be back to cook dinner. We locked the gate, raced each other to the bedroom and made love, chuckling as we pulled each other’s clothes off as if this was a gleeful, forbidden treat, tasting the sea salt on each other’s skins. Once we had slept, we made love again more languorously under the mosquito net, the smell of salt mingled now with our dried sweat.

  In the evening, we told Piyasena not to wait and serve us, that we would wash up after we had eaten. We sat on the front verandah in planter’s chairs, our feet up on the leg rests, sarongs wound tight around our shins, sippin
g beer. The sun was setting in that rapid way it does in the tropics, going under the horizon suddenly, with a burst of pink, orange and purple. The sea changed to bottle green, glowing as if light pulsed upwards from the seabed. Looking over at Mili, I longed to slip into his chair and hold him, yet the ache of his distance filled me with pleasure.

  Those early weeks were magical, but the impossibility of our love was already between us. When Mili visited my grandmother’s house in the evening, there was often an unspoken sexual frustration between us. Sometimes I would invite him to my room and we would kiss, but always with an eye on the curtain in the doorway, our bodies barely brushing. As in a lot of Sri Lankan homes, we left our doors open for ventilation. Shutting mine would raise questions. As time passed, Mili had less to say as we sat on the verandah. He would often stare out at the garden, smoking. Or he would speak moodily about the rising violence of the JVP in the south, that more and more bodies were being found by the main roads, some killed by the government, some by the JVP. The thing he dwelt on most was the recent murder of a prominent human rights lawyer who was falsely arrested by the police for the death of the actor-turned-politician Vijaya Kumaratunga. A government press release had claimed the lawyer was a high-ranking member of the JVP and responsible for this assassination. He had died in a Colombo hospital, the post-mortem revealing that his body bore more than a hundred wounds and that his death had been caused by bludgeoning with a blunt instrument. “The cord is getting tighter and tighter, Shivan,” he would say, “tighter and tighter.” While I believed that this rising violence truly troubled him, at the same time, I felt he sensed my dislike for talking about such things as they spoilt our time together, and he was doing it to thwart and irritate me.

  He would never tell me about the other men he had been with and where he had met them. For some reason, I was frightened to inquire directly and tried to probe by asking how he had figured out I was gay. He always laughed in reply, and when pressed would say, “I just knew, I just knew.” There was something about the way he said this that put up a barrier. Driven by my greed for him, I would push, saying jokingly, “You must be a truly experienced bugger to know just like that, ah?” or, “Yes, yes, I am not surprised you could tell. I bet you used to zip around Colombo on your motorbike, servicing all and sundry, didn’t you?” He continued to evade with laughter and grins. If I got too persistent, he would change the subject or look at his watch and declare, “Look at the time! My mater will begin to worry.”

  Once, I asked him about that encounter between us at the American Center, if he’d invited me to his home hoping we would have sex.

  “Of course not,” he replied, grinning teasingly. “I asked you back so we could look at Cinnamon Gardens’ titties through my binoculars. Remember, I am the Sex Fiend of Cinnamon Gardens.”

  I punched him lightly in the side. “But would you have made love to me?” I persisted.

  “Would you have?” he countered, an edge to his voice.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Rubbish.”

  “I would have. The moment we got to your room.”

  Mili shrugged and lit a cigarette.

  After he left, I would often curse myself for having driven him away and vow that the next time I would not ask about his sexual past. But the need to know would writhe in me until I found myself blurting out some question. Then once again we would be sparring and dodging, our tone light to hide the darker currents below.

  16

  ONE MORNING MY GRANDMOTHER PAID ME A VISIT while I was putting away some clothes Rosalind had washed, ironed, folded and left on my desk. She sat on my bed and watched as I went about the task. “Don’t think I, too, have not been sad, Puthey, at how little time is left.” She nodded at my surprise. I hadn’t realized she’d noticed my recent melancholy. There was only one week left to my holiday.

  “Puthey, why don’t you stay on?”

  “Forever?” I blushed at my involuntary reply.

  She gave me a keen look. “Well, just a few months. It would mean so much to me.”

  “But Aacho, what about my getting a job? I have a student loan to pay.”

  “How much?”

  I told her, and she snorted. “That is all? I can easily pay it off.”

  “You can?”

  “Of course, from my London account.”

  I thought of Mili and the way he would press his lips together in suppressed delight when he came to visit in the evening and found me waiting on the verandah, as if I was the thing he had been contemplating all day; thought of the slow comfort of my days here, getting up late, having a leisurely breakfast, a nap after lunch, no scramble to find work and pay my loan, no evenings in that basement with its musty smell, fake wood veneer and lumpy mattress.

  “So, Puthey?”

  “I can’t take money from you, Aacho.”

  “Why not?” she cried indignantly. “You are my grandson. Who else is the money for?”

  Then a thought struck me. “What about Amma and Renu?”

  She gave me a sharp look, taking in my dismay. “This doesn’t concern anybody else.”

  “Aacho, it does. They are my mother and sister. They need to at least be asked.”

  This was the first time I had raised my mother and sister with her. From the few comments she had made and her look of distaste when a letter came for me from Canada, I knew she was not interested in mending the breach with her daughter. I remained silent on the subject of my mother as well, telling myself I should not reveal anything about her plight which would allow my grandmother to gloat at her mistakes and failures.

  My grandmother straightened the pleats of her sari. “Very well, you must call your mother and ask her permission.” A coy, almost sly, expression came over her face. “But you do want to stay, don’t you?”

  “Yes, yes, of course.”

  She clapped her hands. “Good!” She called Rosalind to tell her the news and the ayah wept predictable tears of joy.

  I felt I had been bested in some way I could not explain.

  In the last week, Mili and I had become more distant, hardly speaking as we sipped beers on my front verandah, drifting apart when swimming at Mount Lavinia. Yet we spent all our free time together. We never mentioned the dwindling days, but his friends would bring it up, saying they had got so used to having me around and would miss me. When they said these things, Mili and I would not look at each other, but later we would embrace fiercely in my bedroom or be reckless and kiss outside our gate at night.

  I waited until after dinner when we were seated on the verandah to announce my news. Mili was silent after I told him, legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles. A man selling lottery tickets passed by on a bicycle, calling out the dates and prizes into a cheap microphone he held in one hand, his voice chirping hoarsely, like a frog in the grass.

  “Mili?” I could not see his face in the shadows.

  He straightened up in his chair. “That’s great, Shivan.”

  “You don’t sound happy about it.”

  “No, no, I’m really happy.”

  “You’re not.” I went to sit on the balustrade, looking out at the garden. He came to stand behind me, running a finger up my back. “It’s just that, you know, you must go back to Canada at some point.”

  “Only temporarily. I want to return for good, like a lot of people do.”

  “But things are getting worse here, don’t you see? Sri Lanka is really heading into a time that will make the ’83 riots seem like nothing. It’s going to be a bloodbath here, what with the Indians, the Tigers and the JVP all increasing their violence, all vying for power. The bodies on the sides of roads, floating down rivers, on the beach, keep increasing. If the JVP succeed in gaining control of the country, we English-speaking Cinnamon Gardens types are finished. They’ll hang us from trees. Sri Lanka could end up like Pol Pot’s Cambodia. And don’t forget you’re Tamil. They despise the Tamils. Then there is the murder of that lawyer, the ridiculous way the go
vernment is still trying to tarnish his name by accusing him of murdering Vijaya Kumaratunga. It’s a frightening time.

  “What about us, Shivan?” he continued into my silence, dropping his voice to a murmur. “You know the rules here. We can’t set up house like people do in Canada. Always and eternally we will be two bachelors living with our mother and grandmother. I accept the situation because I have no choice. But are you willing to?”

  “You think I haven’t considered that?” I demanded in a fierce whisper. “Don’t patronize me. Yes, I am willing to make that compromise.”

  “But Shivan,” Mili said in a low voice, holding out his hands in appeal, “to always live with your grandmother? To rarely sleep with me?”

  “Here I am, doing this so we can be together, and this is how you treat me? With all these silly objections?”

  My voice was trembling with anger, but he must have thought I was close to tears, because he touched my hand, saying, “Shh, shh.” After a glance around, he drew me back against his chest. “I’m sorry, I’m a terrible bugger.” He kissed the back of my neck, then released me. “I … I love you, Shivan, I know I do, and I have never said that to anyone else.”

  “I love you too,” I replied, my voice husky from having to hold back my emotions and speak softly. “I have been with so many men and never felt this. I want it, Mili, I want it no matter what.”

  I led him to my bedroom, closed the door and locked it. I did not care anymore. With our shirts on, our pants around our knees, we made love as best we could, Mili’s body trembling, half with desire, half with fear.

  The next evening, when my grandmother was at the temple, I called my mother. As I waited for the operator to put the trunk call through, I was nervous. Soon after arriving, I had called to leave a message that I had arrived safely, timing it for mid-morning when everyone would be out of the house. Since then, I had written a brief aerogram with little bits of bland news, leaving out all the interesting developments during my visit.