The Hungry Ghosts

by Shyam Selvadurai

  “I certainly would not have introduced you if I’d known what would happen,” Hilda continued.

  “Don’t worry, mother,” Michael said with a laugh, and touched her wrist, “I am over my old-man phase.”

  “You and your phases and passions, kiddo.” Robert aimed a fork at Michael as if it were a gun.

  Michael’s parents elaborated on his “phases and passions,” how he had sported a white umbrella in all weathers when he was ten, attempted to master Sanskrit at sixteen, taken up Irish dancing because of a boyfriend, even going to university in Dublin for a year because of him. I also learnt that for the longest time Michael had been interested in Japanese culture and had studied the language at university. “A Japanophile,” his parents kept calling him.

  Michael enjoyed his parents’ teasing, shaking his head at me as if disavowing what they said.

  When we parted that evening, I proposed he come over to my apartment for dinner the next night. “After all,” I said, gesturing to my too-large T-shirt and rolled-up jeans, “I have to return these to you.”

  He took me by the elbow, kissed me chastely on the cheek and whispered, “Thank you for a really nice time.” Then he added, “About Bill. I didn’t bring him up over the weekend because I didn’t want his ghost hanging around and spoiling our time together. You work with him, after all … and, well, he’s a nice guy. I genuinely liked him, but nothing more. I was clear with him about that. Not in love, you understand. Not bowled over.”

  He looked hard at me to say that I, however, bowled him over.

  As the bus took me home from Point Grey to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, where I was subletting an apartment, the neighbourhoods grew treeless and shabby. I felt all the goodness of the weekend leaking out of me, and by the time I arrived at my apartment, the feelings of despair and grief and rage that periodically engulfed me had come back with renewed vigour. Driven by a familiar compulsion, I kicked off my shoes, went into the bedroom, knelt before the dresser and pulled open the bottom drawer. At the back was a faded biscuit tin in which I kept important documents. From a white envelope, whose aging paper had browned in concentric rings, as if successive teacups had been placed on it, I drew out the newspaper article that had appeared after Mili’s abduction, along with the obituary Sriyani had sent. Spreading them out on the carpet, I stared at the faded images: Mili holding aloft a cricket trophy, grinning in his easy, confident way; Mili dressed in our school blazer and tie, looking sombrely at the camera. I sat back on my haunches, eyes closed, wretched.

  I didn’t sleep much that night. When Michael arrived at my apartment the next evening, I held him fiercely, then pushed him up against the hallway wall and kissed him, pulling at his shirt buttons. “Whoa,” he said, laughing but disconcerted, “doesn’t a person even get to take his shoes off?”

  “We’ll deal with the shoes later.” I pressed my mouth against his.

  After we made love, the restlessness was still with me. When we were done dinner, I suggested a stroll along the beach; walking until exhausted might numb my agitation. Michael had been looking at me quizzically all evening, sensing my distraction, and now I felt him watching me as he struggled to keep up with my brisk pace. Finally, he touched my arm to stop me.

  “Everything alright?” He cocked his head.

  I was still for a long moment, then blurted out, “I’m sorry, Michael. I haven’t told you the whole story of my life … I … You see, I don’t know how much you understand about Sri Lanka, it’s recent history. The horror of it.” Then I told Michael about the 1983 riots, brushing over my family’s personal experience by saying, “We were lucky because Sinhala friends hid us.” I described instead, to an aghast Michael, what had happened to Tamil people, my voice ringing with the real anger I felt towards my country and all that had occurred to me there, but also hoping that the tide of my angry words would carry me to a place where I was able to tell the full truth. It didn’t. Instead, I found myself telling him of my mother’s unhappiness and widowhood in Sri Lanka, implying it carried the same social taboo as in India, saying that she had struggled in relative poverty to raise us, and that this had soured her. I relayed all this in terse sentences. Then, in greater detail, I elaborated on my mother’s attempted suicide, her rages at me and my sister, what she had said when I told her I was gay.

  I spoke rapidly, my words carrying me breathless, beyond thought, beyond conscience, desperate to share my unhappiness with Michael in the only way I seemed able, drawing comfort from his sympathy, from the way he took my hand and pressed it as we walked along. My bewilderment at my failure turned to rage as I spoke of my mother, so that when I ended my story at last, I cried to him, “Can you imagine, Michael, she said she would rather have aborted me, rather strangled me at birth, than have a gay son? Can you imagine a mother saying something so awful, a mother being such a bitch?”

  By the time I finished, we were seated on a promontory, waves crashing close to our feet.

  “Well, I do attract them,” Michael said with a rueful laugh. “That old boyfriend I followed to Dublin spent his teenage years in foster care. I suppose it’s because I come from a stable home.” He said this reflectively, but I detected the faintest trace of smugness in his voice.

  “So, you don’t mind, then, that I’m fucked up?”

  He put his arm around my shoulder. “I’m afraid it’s too late to mind.” He gave me that same hard look he had used to say he was bowled over by me. “You were right to choose Vancouver, Shivan, to make a life for yourself away from all that pain. And I’m glad you did, because now, see, I have you.”

  “I … I don’t want you to think my mother is some truly horrid person,” I said, wanting to distance myself now from my impulsive confession. “She has come around to accepting who I am.”

  “No, no, Shivan,” he assured me, “she’s just human.”

  After that, Michael and I spent every evening together, and within a month I moved into his apartment on Harwood Street. I came with nothing but my clothing and a few books. Even after three and a half years in Vancouver, I had still been subletting, the very thought of buying furniture, pots, pans, plates, cutlery seeming an impossible task.

  Michael had bought his apartment the previous year with a down payment from his parents. It was a one-bedroom in an older block. I knew his parents could have afforded one of the fancier condos being built on the peninsula’s other side, overlooking the harbour. This, however, was what they were willing to give their son, and such moderation pointed to the soundness of their family relations. Michael’s furniture was what he called “basement rejects,” pieces that had, over the years, fallen obsolete at his parents’ house. The couch and wing chairs were slightly worn around the arms, the upholstery a bit faded, but they were firm and comfortable; the rugs on the floors, though frayed, were subdued Persian ones that spoke of expense.

  Michael loved to browse through antique stores and flea markets, and we often went to them on weekends. He would excitedly examine a piece of china or a painting which he felt was a steal, then later move the picture or antique plate to various places around our apartment before deciding on the perfect spot. Watching him, I would be filled with awe and gratitude, as if he spoke a foreign language that allowed him to navigate me through an alien land.

  I had never been with a man long enough to know what happened once the initial edge of physical passion wore off, and I was surprised, then delighted, to experience how that sharpness of early desire softened and spread its goodness through every part of our lives so that I floated through the routine of my days in a warm haze of well-being.

  Except when it was raining, we had our morning coffees out on the balcony, bundled up in blankets, a heater pumping away as we shared the Globe and Mail, trying to trick each other into taking the sports or business sections. This joke, which would have grown tedious between strangers or friends, was fondly amusing to us, because it was part of our history of intimacy, each repetition, like all rituals
, deepening our life together. As I sipped my coffee in its Thermos mug, I marvelled at English Bay, with its ships drifting along the horizon, the view always a reminder of my good fortune. Then there was our commute to the university, where Michael now worked too, as a secretary in the English department. I always waited for that moment when the bus crossed the Burrard Bridge, craning to look at the glittering sea below, sunlight trembling on passing sails. Soon our bus left downtown behind and passed along 4th Avenue, through the neighbourhoods of Kitsilano and Point Grey with their expensive grocery stores, restaurants and clothing shops. I would occasionally glimpse down one of the streets off the avenue, the lovely bungalows with their emerald lawns inlaid with the dew-glistened gems of abandoned toys. In the last stretch of our journey, we were in the Pacific Spirit Regional Park, a mist hanging over the cedars and firs, the bus speeding towards the university at the edge of the Pacific Ocean.

  Michael would join me on my occasional lunch-hour visits to Wreck Beach, and we’d stroll along, chuckling at the nicknames we invented for those hardy regulars who lay around naked in all seasons—Our Lady of the Pacific, Knotty Beard, Blond Rasta, Mouldy Bo Derek—names that were added to the private language that existed only between us.

  In the evening, we often stopped off at Safeway on Davie Street to get groceries, nudging each other at the old queens who lined up for the cashier we had nicknamed Jail Bait, a blond boy with tanned skin and sun-whitened hair who kept his shirt open to belly button, smooth torso on display, his lips twisted with casual disdain. Then there was the solitude of our apartment, that sense of being in the centre of our life together after a day of administering to demanding faculty and students. Sounds and smells from the apartments around us formed a comforting cocoon in which we passed our evenings: the muted cadence of harp music from the French couple on one side; rolling and thumping in the kitchen of our neighbour on the other side, the smell of the baking bread she made to earn a little extra money seeping through our wall; the lilting calls of children racing each other down the corridor.

  Whenever I had to go away for a conference, I missed Michael in bed, the day’s last sleepy words between us. On the flight or bus home, I’d think of some joke or anecdote that would amuse him, just for the pleasure of seeing Michael laugh in his nerdy way. And this quirk, which many might consider the least attractive trait about him, made me lightheaded with affection because it was uniquely his.

  Two years passed in this way, and still I dreamt periodically of Mili. I would run into him on the street in Vancouver or Toronto—a Mili now grown slightly jowly and paunchy, like so many Sri Lankan men in their late twenties. Our conversations in my dreams were friendly but stilted in that way of old school friends who had lost touch. I was aware, as we chatted, that there had been some embarrassing or hostile incident between us in school. I couldn’t, however, remember its particulars, and the thought that he might be recalling it as we chatted made me self-conscious and eager to be on my way.

  After waking from these dreams, my old restlessness would take hold of me, making it difficult to get through a day, and causing me to feel distracted and irritated by Michael’s presence. I felt guilty because his little annoying habits, his tiny failures, made him less than Mili. I was aware this comparison was unfair, but had no control over the feeling, and this only increased my distress.

  My brooding and inaccessibility made Michael anxious. His smile would grow fixed, and his voice would take on a tight politeness when he addressed me. The tension would boil over into an argument sparked by one of us over something minor. We would follow each other from room to room, quarrelling, refusing to give in, sulking, even as we went through the rituals and tasks that bonded us. Eventually, one or both of us would capitulate and a renewed sweetness flooded our lives.

  But for me an invisible residue remained. These quarrels were a warning that our relationship might not withstand the entry of my past into it; that Michael might not be able to tolerate knowing about my dreams of Mili.

  In the years that passed, my mother and I developed the habit of speaking about once a month. Our conversations were pleasant but careful because of the subject we were avoiding. To hide her unease, she adopted a brisk tone, as if she could only speak for a short time and had somewhere to go, even though it was generally she who telephoned me. She had told me about David, and I wasn’t surprised when, about a year after her first visit to Sri Lanka, my mother informed me they were not merely friends anymore, saying, to hide her embarrassment, “Oh, he was making such a nuisance of himself, I finally gave in to his badgering and agreed.” She often spoke of David in this way, as a sort of loveable nuisance, calling him Mahadana Muttha. Yet I could tell she loved him, and if she thought she had gone too far in belittling him, she would say, “But he is a good man. Very kind to me. I am lucky, son. Yes, very lucky.” I knew, through my sister, that David wanted to marry my mother and have her move into his house, but my mother preferred her independence, preferred, as my sister said, “to live in sin with a white man.” My mother and David were deeply involved in the Buddhist centre’s activities, organizing retreats and fundraisers, providing refreshments during the breaks.

  About a year after that first visit to Sri Lanka, my mother also started a part-time degree in history at York University. She would tell me in detail about the courses she was taking, the books she was reading, complaining that young people these days were “catatonically stupid,” smug because she was top of her class and enjoyed besting the younger students.

  Very soon into our relationship, Michael had an opportunity to talk with my mother. He answered the phone one day when I was out. My mother, who knew about Michael by then, was gracious, saying she was happy to speak to him at last, inquiring about his job at the university and saying she looked forward to meeting him one day. “She’s very nice,” Michael said, once he had relayed all this to me. This little statement set me off. “Of course she’s ‘nice,’ ” I cried, “She’s a well-bred woman who knows to be polite with strangers. And, anyway, I never painted her as a demon.”

  “Whoa, Shivan, I’m not taking her side against you.”

  I glared at him to say that was exactly my accusation, and stomped away.

  After that, if he happened to answer the phone first while I was home, he would spend a few moments chatting politely before passing the receiver, his tone slightly formal because he did not want me to think he was on my mother’s side. She always mailed him tea when she returned from her now-regular visits to Sri Lanka. The first time the tea arrived, he asked if I even knew she had gone back. “Why would I care who comes and goes from that hellhole,” I retorted, in a way that warned him I did not want to discuss her trip any further. The truth was, I couldn’t have discussed her trips. Whenever she left for Sri Lanka, my mother, still afraid of losing me, would call my office early in the morning before I got to work and leave a message to say she was going. After she returned, she would telephone so I knew she was back, but never speak about the trip.

  I talked to my sister too, about once a month. I would tell her about my work and my life with Michael, and she told me how her Ph.D. was progressing, her conflicts with other grad students and what she called “Ivy League racism.” Sometimes she would make me laugh with her descriptions of homecoming, the vapid sorority types and jocks in the first-year courses she taught, the appalling ignorance of young Americans when it came to the world. Her favourite new term was “blond,” which she used for anything or anyone stupid. Renu and Michael got on well, and if he picked up before I did, or I was out, Renu would make him chuckle with her descriptions of “American insanity” at the university—always a good way, as my sister knew, to charm a Canadian.

  Though my conversations with Renu were easier than with my mother, she, too, understood she must keep silent about my grandmother. Despite her earlier impulse to escape our family and Canada, she now often went to Toronto, and my mother also frequently took the bus to Ithaca and spent weekends wit
h her daughter. Renu’s recountings of their visits, of her little squabbles with my mother, her growing relationship with David, were not meant as an accusation against me, and yet we both knew that it was my estrangement from them that had curiously drawn mother and daughter closer together. After I spoke to either of them, I was often gloomy and a feeling from my adolescence would surface—that their progress had been won at my cost, that I was stranded, watching my sister and mother in all their happiness moving farther and farther from me.

  It is interesting to think now that Michael accepted without much argument these boundaries of silence around my family; interesting to note that, after the one time I told him of my past, he never questioned me more about it. Terms like “your mother’s issues,” or “1983,” became a shorthand between us for that history, and he explored no further. I think he understood, without daring to articulate it to himself, that to press for more information, to look more keenly at my odd family relations, would be to confront the disparities in my story—and that the truth, once revealed, would take us where, in the end, it did.

  27

  MY SISTER’S ROOM, WHICH I HAVE FINISHED dusting and tidying, has its old furniture still in place. Many of her books are on the shelves, her white duvet, with its whimsical pattern of rainbows and sunbursts, still on her bed. In the closet she has left some summer clothes. A new robe and pyjamas hang from a hook, new Bata slippers sit by her bed, a jar filled with American coins waits on the desk. When I leave, I stop to gaze across the landing at what will be my grandmother’s bedroom, recalling how my mother, the first time she took me around the house to show off the renovations, hurried ahead and closed that door.

  As I start downstairs to continue my cleaning, a line from the blind monk Chakkupala’s tale is with me: Like a leopard stalking its prey through tall grass, a man’s past life pursues him, waiting for the right moment to pounce.