The Hungry Ghosts

by Shyam Selvadurai

  But I did not need courage. I was at the end of my rope, and there was nowhere to go except to the truth or its alternative, the end of our relationship.

  I walked past him and went into the bedroom. When I unfolded Mili’s obituary, the brittle paper cracked. I laid the article gently on our bed and gazed at Mili’s smudged image for a long moment, as if bidding it goodbye. “Michael,” I called.

  When he appeared in the doorway, he was prepared for the worst, his face impassive. He glanced at the newspaper clipping, then leaned against the doorpost as if needing to keep a distance from it.

  “This is someone I loved. Very much. An old school friend. But there is more. Much more.”

  And so, palm resting on the obituary as if taking an oath, I told Michael my story in a last attempt to keep at bay the death of all that was good in my life.

  At some point, Michael came and sat on the other side of the bed, half turned from me, leaning forward with fingers knotted as he gazed ahead.

  When I was done, he put his head in his hands. “How awful, how awful.”

  I was frightened by the hollow anguish in his voice.

  He stood up. “Thank you for telling me all this.”

  “Michael, I beg you, let’s start again.”

  He folded the duvet, put it on a chair, then began to get ready for bed, taking off his clothes, putting on his boxer shorts and T-shirt. After a while I did the same, both of us following the ritual that had been ours for two years. As always, Michael used the washroom first to brush his teeth, and while he did so, I, as always, filled two glasses with water and put them on our bedside tables.

  Once we were in bed, the lights off, Michael said, as he turned away on his side, “I wish you hadn’t told me. I wish I hadn’t asked. Perhaps I didn’t need to know.”

  “No, you had to know.”

  “So I can find out the last two years of my life was a mirage?”

  “Ah, don’t say that, Michael. It wasn’t a mirage, we love each other.”

  He pushed the top sheet aside and sat on the edge of the bed. Then he gathered his pillows, his water glass, and left. I listened, frightened and helpless, as he prepared the living room couch, going to the linen closet for a spare blanket.

  For the first time, we slept apart in our home.

  In the days that followed, Michael did not ask further about my past, and I knew better than to bring it up. During the nights, when he thought I was asleep, he would steal out of bed and go into the living room. Soon I would hear the careful tearing sound of Kleenex being pulled from a box.

  Some days after I told Michael about Mili, his mother came to the President’s Office. I had by now received another promotion that came with its own office, and I saw her from my desk, making her way down the second-floor corridor towards me, walking in her light, brisk way, linen jacket flapping gently against silk bodice. I stood up when she reached my office and she smiled, pausing outside the door. “Shivan, an office of your own. Certainly moving up the ranks, I’m glad to see.”

  I smiled uneasily and beckoned her to enter. She shut the door and sat across from me, palms together as if in prayer, jewelled rings glistening. “Michael has missed two afternoons of work.”

  I raised my eyebrows, and she lifted hers back to say we both knew this was serious.

  “The chair of the English department told me. He’s an old friend. I confronted Michael this morning. All he will divulge is that he goes to Wreck Beach to walk. Claustrophobia.”

  “Thank you for informing me, Hilda,” I said after a moment.

  “But, Shivan,” she leaned forward and patted my desk, “why is Michael in trouble? Are you two having difficulties? I noticed he seemed out of sorts when he visited recently.”

  I fiddled with the stapler on my desk.

  She stood. “I won’t interfere any further, but you must promise to take care of him. He is our son. Please fix the problem between you. Robert and I would be happy to pay for counselling, anything. We care about you, too, and want you in our life.”

  “Yes, I know,” I said, grateful she had come to see me. “I will take care of him.”

  Hilda lifted her hand briefly at the doorway as if she wanted to say something more. But then, with a slight shake of her head, she walked away down the corridor.

  That evening, as we rode the bus home in silence, I kept glancing at Michael, searching for signs of panic and claustrophobia. We got off on Davie Street and walked down to Harwood. When we were at the corner, I said, “Let’s go to the beach.”

  I nodded firmly at his surprise, lifted the bag off his shoulder, slung it over mine and went ahead, afraid he would refuse. After a while, he followed.

  We reached English Bay, and I sat on the log that was our usual place to watch sunsets. He perched by me.

  “Your mother paid me a visit today.”

  He nodded to say he had figured that out.

  “What is going on, Michael?”

  He cupped his chin and gazed out at the sea.

  “You can’t screw up like this. Apart from everything else, it puts your mother in an awkward position when the department chair is a family friend.”

  He nodded again to say he would not miss further work, then took back his bag. “I bought some parmesan cheese this morning. It needs to go in the fridge.”

  “You’ve been walking around all day with parmesan cheese in your bag?” I laughed. “It’s probably gone off in this heat. Why didn’t you wait to buy it after work?”

  He did not appear to hear me and strolled back up the beach.

  A few evenings later, Michael had a department event after work and was due home late. When I arrived at our apartment, I switched on the light in the hallway, put away my bag, took off my shoes and looked through the mail I had picked up downstairs. As I opened bills and dropped offers for credit cards, insurance, and theatre subscriptions into a wastepaper basket, an uneasy feeling began to prickle through me, as if there was a presence in the apartment. I ignored the feeling for a while, but when it grew I flung the bills on the hallstand and went through the apartment, turning on lights and checking rooms.

  The note on my pillow was weighted down with a celadon porcelain egg that had belonged to Michael’s grandmother: “I have taken some leave and gone for a few days to Vancouver Island. If there is an emergency, here is the number in Tofino where I will be staying.”

  I passed through the next few days living moment to moment, dazed with fear. I wanted to visit Hilda and ask if she knew what Michael had gone to ponder, sure the chair of the English department would have told her he had taken leave. Yet every time I thought I saw her on campus, across the Student Union Building or walking between buildings, panic would peal through me and I’d swerve along another route, breathless.

  On the third evening Michael had been away, I came home to find he had already cleared our mailbox. I went up in the elevator, throat swollen with fear.

  Even before I reached our apartment, I could smell the stewing curry. I came in and shut the door carefully, then turned and stood against it, as if ready for flight.

  Michael was seated on the sofa watching me, head cocked, smiling as if amused at my fear.

  “Hi,” he said softly but with pleasure, and it was then I noticed how he was sitting, slouched with ankle on knee, so his lap dipped to hold something. He beckoned me forward, and when I reached him I saw the kitten curled up asleep. “Our new baby.” He lifted the kitten and it continued to sleep, drooping in a quarter-moon shape from his hand. “Meet Miss Murasaki.” He raised his eyebrows, and I nodded to say I remembered she was the author of The Tale of Genji, a Japanese book he was fond of. The kitten was a tortoiseshell, an orange splotch on its nose and the most delicate little orange sock on one front paw.

  “Take her.” He held the kitten out, looking up at me in that same tender way he did on weekend mornings when he stretched his limbs and watched me pull open the curtains before I came to lie on top of him and slip my ton
gue between his teeth into the wet-moss taste of his mouth. Yet his tenderness frightened me, for it seemed tinged with nostalgia.

  “Don’t worry about waking her up,” he said, still holding out this tangible emblem of some change in him.

  I turned away and went to hang my bag in the closet.

  Later, when we were at the dining table having dinner, I said, “Did I ever tell you the story Chandralal told when explaining what he had done? The one about Siri Sangha Bo?”

  “Chandralal …” Michael helped himself to more curry and chapatis, then batted away Miss Murasaki, who was on her hind legs, gazing into the bowl as if the chunks of chicken and vegetables were goldfish. “He’s your grandmother’s cousin, the lawyer.”

  “How can you forget, Michael? He’s my grandmother’s thug.”

  “Oh, yes, right.”

  “Mistaking him for poor Sunil Maama.”

  “It’s all these names, it’s hard to keep track.”

  “And yet you can remember the names of characters in Japanese tales.”

  “That’s my interest.”

  “Look, if you don’t want me to talk about my past, if you don’t give a damn, just say so and I’ll shut up.”

  “Yes, I want you to shut up.” Michael pushed back his chair and stood. “I don’t want to fucking know, do you hear me? It’s none of my business.”

  “Michael!”

  “You lied to me, you betrayed me, betrayed our love.” He picked up his plate, then put it down. “The fact is, you didn’t respect me enough to be honest. You had nothing but contempt for me.”

  “But Michael, I couldn’t tell you, don’t you understand, I couldn’t.”

  “Why? Did you think lying would make our relationship work?”

  I folded and unfolded my napkin.

  “Your mother had to come here and prick your conscience before you got off your arse and told me the truth.”

  “Do you love me, Michael?”

  “Me? What me would I love? I don’t know you at all. I have been living with a stranger.”

  “Michael! How could you say—”

  “You brought your grandmother, and your fucking lover into my life, into my apartment. You’ve soiled it with these people. I don’t even know what they look like, and I’ve been living with them for the past two years.”

  Michael went into the kitchen and finished his meal leaning against the counter. Miss Murasaki followed him and flicked a plastic wrapper around his feet. He ate furiously, distraught.

  Once he was done, Michael rinsed his plate, put it in the dishwasher and came to stand at the head of the table, hands on top of a chair back. “I’m thinking I would like to begin my master’s in Asian studies next year,” he said, struggling to sound reasonable and pleasant. “I’m going to enrol in fourth-year Japanese. I’ll need it. I want to do my thesis on the Heian period and The Tale of Genji.”

  “It … it’s a great idea,” I replied enthusiastically, wanting to support his decision. “After all,” I added, “who knows better than I that you do love all things Asian.” It was a line I often used to tease him that I was part of his Asian fetish. But this time my line fell flat; he did not respond with his part of the patter: “But you’re the only thing Asian I lust for.”

  Instead, Michael said, “I’ll get a student loan to carry me through, as I won’t be able to work at the university anymore.”

  “Look, Michael, I’m earning a fair amount. I can support us both.”

  “I can’t ask that of you, Shivan.”

  “For fuck’s sake, don’t be silly. We’re a couple. That’s what couples do.”

  He gave me a feeble smile and nodded his thanks.

  That night, when we were in bed, Michael pushed himself against my back, slipped his arms around my chest and whispered, “Thank you.”

  “We love each other,” I said, “no need for thanks.”

  Because I knew he did love me; his love had brought him back. And he was to me like rain soaking a parched land.

  Surely this reconciliation should have been a turning point for us. But a few days later, I had one of my dreams about Mili and the old restlessness returned. This time, wanting to be truthful from now on, I told Michael about the dream and its effect on me. But despite this unburdening, my traitorous mind continued on its way, restive and aggrieved, holding up Michael’s annoying little habits, his messes, the smell of his dirty clothes in the hamper, as if they were failures. And now, because he knew the reason for my brooding, I was naked and exposed, and this produced a greater irritation than usual, a longing for my old concealment.

  Michael tried to be patient, but I could see he found it unbearable to think that, all through our relationship, my moody distance might be because he didn’t measure up to Mili. Soon he was accusing me again of being a liar, of soiling his apartment, his life, and I was yelling at him for being insensitive and uncaring. After this quarrel, there was a period of loving amicability and we took a trip to Salt Spring Island courtesy of his parents. Yet a few days after we returned, some minor disagreement set off the accusations again, only to be followed by another respite before the cycle began once more. Time, I kept telling myself when we were in the midst of the bad phases, will cure everything. We would get past this terrible period if we both clung on.

  And yet little estrangements crept in to stay. Michael began to swim at the university a few evenings a week; I took on an extra project at work and spent part of several weekends at the office. The hour when we had a drink together before dinner became shorter and shorter until we just had our glass of wine with the meal and gazed at the television or out to English Bay. It was as if the dark tide of the ocean had crept up the seawall and gradually submerged any happiness in our lives.

  Then, at the end of January, my mother called me at the office. “Can you talk?” she asked after greeting me.

  I got up, shut the door and came back to my desk.

  “Son, the Immigration Appeal Division has passed my mother. Her papers will arrive in Colombo by April, then I’m hoping to go wrap things up and bring Amma back.”

  I leaned forward, my elbow on the table, hand pressed to forehead, waiting to feel some reaction. Instead, as always, a hollowness opened within me.

  “Son, are you still there?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Did you think she wouldn’t pass?” my mother asked gently. “Were you hoping she wouldn’t?”

  “I … I don’t know what I was hoping.” Burdened as I was with my other problems, I had avoided thinking of this eventuality.

  “Why don’t you mull on it a while and we can talk further, if you need to. I’m always here for you, son.” This was the tender way she spoke to me since her trip to Vancouver, believing I still kept my past hidden from Michael and pitying me.

  After I put down the receiver, I swivelled my chair around and stared out at the leafless trees. I went back to work, a taut tiredness draining me, the light seeming too bright.

  After some time, I glanced out the window at the Ladner Clock Tower in the distance and wondered if I should ask Michael to meet me for a coffee. I decided against it, unable to deal with whatever reaction he might have.

  Rather than get a coffee in the office kitchen, I went down to the street and made my way to the Student Union Building, needing the coldness to pick me up. As I walked along, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched against the wind, I kept saying to myself, “She is coming to Toronto,” but this reality would not sink in.

  Once I had got my coffee and was strolling back, I found I was thinking of that rainy afternoon in Toronto soon after I heard about my grandmother’s first stroke—how I’d stood at the bookstore counter barely able to swallow for the hardness in my throat, understanding I might never again hear her voice calling me “Puthey” in that loving tone, or feel her touch on my arm. I was filled now with that same hard ache of sadness, not for my grandmother, but for my own innocence about what lay ahead that summer in Sri Lanka. I
stopped for a moment on the university’s main mall amid the chaos of students, recalling the smell of the country when I had got off the plane in Sri Lanka; recalling also how small and frail my grandmother had looked sitting in the airport lounge. I found I was also sad for her. She had waited for me with such hope.

  This memory and others followed me throughout the day, and by the end of work I realized I had come to a decision; or rather, it felt like the decision had been with me for some time without my knowing and had gradually sharpened into focus, like those children’s paint books where you ran a wet brush over a blank page and the hidden picture slowly came into view. I would go to Sri Lanka with my mother, close up our house and bring my grandmother back.

  That evening, I went to join Michael at a party thrown by his instructor in fourth-year Japanese, a Ph.D. student named Satomi Tanaka. They had become good friends over the last semester. She often hosted parties for the master’s and Ph.D. students in Asian studies, and he always went early to help prepare food, grateful to be included. I resented and feared this new world Michael had created outside our relationship and generally arrived late, telling myself the parties were dull and that I was always got stuck making stilted conversation with other spouses.

  Satomi lived off East Hastings, in a poorer end of town. Her three-storey, red-brick walk-up had a dark maw of a garage on the ground floor. The building’s occupants were mostly Filipino and they spent their social time in this garage. Even though it was January, the women, bundled up in old coats, were busy around a barbeque while the men tinkered away at their cars. Their cheap white plastic chairs and table had that ingrained dirtiness of furniture exposed to the winter weather. An odour of car grease and oily fishiness followed me up the stairwell. When I reached the first floor, the corridor reverberated with music from Satomi’s apartment and the boom of many voices.

  She opened the door and, seeing it was me, pouted teasingly, “Shivan, why you are always so late for my parties?”

  I mumbled some excuse and she shook her head, tutting as if I were a favourite wayward nephew. “Michael,” she yelled towards the kitchen, taking hold of my arm as if afraid I might bolt.