Here in Toronto, I have one more task left, and so I get the vacuum cleaner out of the hallway closet. Before I start down to the basement, I set my watch to Sri Lankan time.
I reach the last step and stand in the dark, reluctant to turn on the light, vacuum cleaner nudged up against my leg as if for comfort. I want to remember this room as I lived in it. When I finally do flick the switch, I see I have forgotten to shut the emptied drawers. They hang open like parched tongues. There is nothing of me here now, nothing. I am effaced.
As I start up the vacuum cleaner and slide it around, I am filled with unexpected nostalgia for that time when I returned from Sri Lanka, those nights I paced this room or sat in one of the cigarette-pocked tub chairs, head in hands, recalling Mili and all the possibilities that could have played out, all the things I might have done, all the paths not taken that could have saved him. I would rage then at my grandmother, at that pious look on her face when I begged her to intervene, at her stupid, stubborn belief that things would work out, even after it was clear they were out of control, at her blind faith in Chandralal, not because she thought him good and right-thinking but because this trust suited her.
In my anger, I would sometimes imagine that quiet conversation between them on the verandah the first day of the riots, when they hatched their plan to keep an eye out for a Tamil family in desperate need. I would imagine the pious way Chandralal might have begun, saying something like, “Nona, it is unbelievable what our Sinhala people are doing to their own countrymen. Women and children are being dragged from their beds and burnt, young girls raped. These are our Tamil brothers and sisters.”
“How can people hate each other so much, Chandralal?” my grandmother would reply, watching him closely, sensing he had something to reveal.
“It’s not just hatred, nona,” he would say reluctantly, as if breaking someone’s confidence. “Many people have a lot to gain by killing off Tamils and burning their businesses, lots of property to be had.” His voice would grow sonorous. “But I will not stand by and let this happen to our Tamil brothers and sisters. Even now, I have told my golayas to help out whomever they can. Why, some of them are guarding the house of one famous Tamil lawyer. That house will not burn.”
My grandmother would understand. “You are doing a good thing, Chandralal. You will be rewarded for this in your future life.”
“And then, of course, nona, unscrupulous people will descend like hawks to offer those people nothing for their lands, their shops.”
“How terrible, Chandralal, how terrible. One thing I can say for myself is I have always offered a fair price.”
“Yes, nona, you are both fair and generous. You will be rewarded, too, in your future life.”
And so in this hideous, sanctimonious way, my grandmother would convince herself of the righteousness of her actions, the blamelessness of her dealings, that if anyone had been wronged it was herself, for giving that family a better price than they would have got otherwise.
I know now that part of my anger is because my own blindness mimics hers. That afternoon, when I went to confront my grandmother and discovered her bent over plans for her bana maduwa, I backed away, telling myself there was nothing to be done about that Tamil family. How easily I gave up my scruples for that penthouse apartment where I could live with Mili and wake up next to him in bed every morning. “No, let it be, Chandralal,” I said when he wanted to tell my grandmother about the suite. “She doesn’t need to know everything.” He had laughed and gently punched my arm, both of us complicit in so much more than deceiving her. “What has been done cannot be reversed,” I told myself after, brushing a hand across my face as if to remove an inconvenient cobweb.
Michael is wrong when he says my greatest challenge will be to win my grandmother’s forgiveness. She will take me back, because I am to her like rain on parched land. The true question is how I will deal with her refusal to admit culpability in Mili’s death, her impenetrable self-righteousness. I don’t know how I am going to bear it, how I am going to keep loving and caring for her. I fear my failure, my anger.
As I unplug the vacuum and go upstairs, I find I am thinking of my grandmother’s cousin Charles, imagining the closed-in, stubborn look on his face, the look of a person driven by blind desperation.
In the living room, I plug the vacuum in again and glance at my watch. It is four thirty in Sri Lanka and the shadows will have lengthened, the light become a deeper golden, everything moving rapidly, as it does in these final hours before sunset. Koels will have begun to call and rattle the branches. The game of cricket will have climbed in intensity, each side intent on winning before dinner, baths and homework, the sound of bat on ball frantic, the patter of feet more rapid, insincere cries of “bowled!” “caught!” “LBW!” “stumped!” immediately contested, voices quarrelsome and querulous. The servant women will have left the fences, and the sounds of cooking will have begun: the thump of pestles in mortars, sharp slice of knives on boards, shattering of coconuts, smoke from frying chilies stinging the eyes. The piano lesson will not be going well, tunes becoming more askew, notes deliberately off key, accompanied by the occasional wail of, “I want to play, I want to play, it’s almost night.”
My time is dwindling here and, going into the kitchen, I begin to move the vacuum rapidly back and forth, picking up rugs, slapping them into place, shoving aside a stool, a garbage pail, shoe trays in the hallway.
What I recall now is a quarrel Mili and I had over a jean jacket I bought him for a trip to Sriyani and her husband’s family tea estate in the hills. When Mili took the jacket out of the bag, he held it away as if it were soiled, his smile lopsided. “Shivan,” he said gently, “why did you go to such trouble? I already have a warm coat.” He cocked his head at me. “My pater, after all, has that house in Nuwara Eliya. I used to spend my Aprils there.”
I glared at him and tried to snatch the jacket back, but he held it out of reach with an easy laugh and said he would accept the gift.
Yet the next day, when the cars carrying Kantha workers arrived to pick me up for the trip, he had made sure to squeeze himself into a vehicle where there was no extra room. On the journey to the estate, I tried to participate in my companions’ singalong to a Tom Jones tape, to laugh at their jokes, but I was seething inside. And when we got out at a higher altitude to look at the view, he, like the other guests, put on a jacket, but not the one I’d bought him.
When we reached the bungalow, Sriyani and her husband were already there to greet us. She had arranged for Mili and me to share a room, and the moment we were alone I rounded on him, whispering fiercely, “You’re so ungrateful, so stupidly proud. It is love that made me buy that jacket for you, not pity. And you reward me with this coldness?”
He stood there, hands hanging by his sides, helpless, caught, as I continued to berate him, telling him how I had sacrificed my life in Canada to be with him, that he didn’t seem to appreciate all I was doing for him, that despite having so much work, running around all day in the heat attending to my grandmother’s affairs, I had made a special trip to numerous stores before I found him a nice jacket. “Well,” I asked, when I was finally finished, “do you have nothing to say?”
He shook his head and kissed me briefly, not meeting my eyes. Then he opened his suitcase and exchanged his old jacket for the one I’d bought.
The memory makes me shudder. I am filled with repulsion at myself for the relentless way I went at him, for my blindness to the fact that everyone had picked up on our discord, my failure to understand that wearing the jacket in front of his friends, who complimented him and asked where he’d got it, was an acknowledgement of our relationship.
And suddenly I picture Mili as if he were alive today, taking his place among all the changes happening this moment in Sri Lanka; imagine him on his way home from work, weaving through the rush-hour traffic on his motorcycle, taking the shortcut that goes by the canal, past a Buddhist temple. Mili now returned from studies abroad, hav
ing capitulated after Ranjini’s death and left the country. Not, however, to Canada, because in this imagining he has never met me. As he weaves his way home, the sea breeze in his hair, he is excited at the new freedoms and possibilities in the changing Sri Lanka, where, despite the current failure of the ceasefire accord, he and others like him will be able to do much good work under the new president. There he rides, back on Galle Road, past the Tamil shops and vegetarian restaurants, the sari shops and Muslim jewellers, Mili grown slightly jowly and paunchy with contentment, as he is in my dreams. It fills me with such pain but also such ridiculous joy to think of him living thus.
It is now five in the evening in Sri Lanka. The crows will have started to return to the neighbourhood trees, the bats to drift out across the city. The piano lesson will have ended and the game of cricket fallen apart in a fight, both sides swearing never to play each other again, though they will reassemble tomorrow to pick new teams, some of today’s enemies ending up on the same side. Cars, motorcycles and taxis will start to bring workers home, the sound of impatient horns blaring on the main road and the revving of engines drifting faintly into my grandmother’s home. Upstairs now with my vacuum cleaner, I glance at my mother’s alarm clock on her bedside table. It is seven thirty, and even though I know it’s only four thirty in Vancouver, I imagine Michael waking up as if it is later in the morning there; I recall how he always kisses me briefly before stumbling out of bed to switch on the kettle he filled the night before, then uses the washroom before calling out “alright” to tell me it is mine.
As I work the vacuum cleaner through my mother’s and sister’s rooms, I am thinking of those early days of our love, how we went to antique stores and flea markets on the weekends to look for things to make our own, how Michael would move an object from place to place in our apartment—“auditioning” it, I teased him. It has been quite a while since we went to those stores, quite a while since Michael brought anything of beauty into our apartment.
The last time was six months ago. One evening, I came into our bedroom to find him, with arms crossed, frowning at the wall, the look on his face as if he had smelt something putrid. “This wallpaper is awful,” he declared. “I can’t believe we’ve lived with it for this long.”
I examined the wallpaper, not understanding his objection, having always liked its white background and restful pastel flowers. When I told him this, he waved his hand dismissively. “We need something less Edwardian, more mid-century modern.”
In the days that followed, he spent hours agonizing over samples, pasting them to the walls in different places, along with paint samples for the trim. They flapped in the breeze and often ended up on the floor, where they stuck to our feet. Finally, he picked a pattern that reminded me of a Miro painting, a white background with whimsical geometric objects done in pen and ink and touched with turquoise. That Saturday, when I left to do the shopping, he looked grim in his overalls, curls tucked severely under a painter’s cap. I returned to find he was not home but had left a note. He’d changed his mind and gone to see Satomi for lunch, as it was a nice sunny day. He would save the wallpapering for a rainy one.
The weekends passed, most of them rainy now, and the rolls continued to sit in a corner of our bedroom, piled there along with pasting brushes, a trough for soaking the wallpaper, large tubs of paste, a cutting guide, trimming knife, plumb line and bob, long-bladed scissors, wallpaper scraper, seam roller, and sponge. The one time I asked about his progress, Michael’s face purpled with rage and he berated me for taking him for granted, listed all the improvements he had brought to the apartment and demanded to know which were mine. If I was so keen to see the paper hung, I was welcome to go ahead and do it. So the pile continued to sit in a corner, and now, added to its clutter, was that sheen objects take on when they are the repository of conflict.
The reason Michael cannot finish that task is because all those changes and beauty he brought to our life were driven by his broad flowing love towards me. He gave me all of himself, but a part of me, as he now knows, has always been absent from him. He resents my past, resents this trip, because he understands that a piece of me will always belong to my past, where he has no place. This disparity between what we can offer each other is intolerable for him, unacceptable, and that broad flowing has choked, backing up and polluting itself.
When I think now of Michael going through his morning routine without me, I know beyond doubt that, even if he cannot admit it to himself, he is relieved I am not there. I imagine him in his day without me, taking the bus across the Burrard Bridge, the sails of yachts trembling below in the sunlight, past the emerald lawns of Kitsilano and Point Grey, and out, out to the edge of the ferocious Pacific Ocean. And I imagine him, in the coming weekend, going to that cluttered corner of our bedroom and falling to his knees, wisps of curls escaping from beneath his painter’s cap. He unfurls the lovely wallpaper to examine its beauty before he begins the task before him.
I am done all my chores and the vacuum cleaner is back in the hallway closet. The kitchen looks so immaculate, so sterile, it is as if people no longer live here. Not a salt shaker on the counter, not a box of cereal or cookies in the cupboards, not a plate or a glass in the draining rack. In the living room, the TV Guide no longer lies splayed on the coffee table, the paper rack is empty. The TV and VCR remotes are carefully lined up beside the television. It looks like the house of someone who has died, displayed for sale. I move towards the stairs, finally ready to enter my grandmother’s room. As I go up, one hand clutches the banister, the other rests on my right knee, as if I need help to raise my leg at each step. What I am thinking of now is that naked peréthi, how, despite knowing better, she would be driven by hunger to reach for the delicious array of dishes at her table—and I can imagine my grandmother’s voice telling that story.
“Ah, Puthey, three times a day, three times, her servants would lay that table. They were peréthayas as well, because of past crimes, reborn as slaves and faceless, as if a wall of flesh had grown over their features, just little holes for breathing, nothing else. These wraiths would drift in three times a day to lay that table, which stretched the length of the room and was covered in an immaculate white cloth. And three times a day the peréthi’s agony would rise to new heights as she walked around the table and looked at the saffron-infused rice cooked in a rich lamb’s broth; vegetables steamed with a paste of almonds and cashews; chunks of mutton and chicken covered in a golden butter sauce; cauliflower cooked in a gravy made from crushed pomegranate seeds; a dish of fresh leaves from a magical plant found only in the Himalayas that when eaten released an inner coolness throughout the day. Then there were the desserts. A creamy curd with pistachios and steamed lemon rind cut into diamond shapes; semolina with honey, cardamom seeds and anise, made into balls and fried; carrot halva with poppy seeds.
“And as the peréthi walked around the table, her hunger would grow, until finally she would reach for one of the dishes with a cry of anguish and like a savage cram her mouth, hoping that just once the curse would be lifted, that just for one minute she might taste the food. But the instant the food was in her mouth, it would turn into the filth of feces and urine. And she would spit out the foulness, maggots wriggling between her teeth.
“And then, Puthey, the nights, oh, how awful those long nights were, for she had to lie on a hard plank of a bed, because, as part of her karma’s curse, any cloth, even sheets, even a mattress, would burn her body. She would lie on that bed and look out her window at the moon, imagining all the people of the world, the gods in the heavens, asleep in their luxurious bedding of soft cotton sheets and down-filled mattresses. At midnight, a cold, cold wind would come off the sea, and she would hug her naked body, trembling. Soon the cold would become unbearable, and she would rise and go to an antechamber where garments hung in rows with enough room between them so she could pass without touching the cloth. She would walk up and down, up and down, looking at those fine Benares silks, those shawls and s
hifts made from the wool of pashmina goats, those cotton gowns so gauzy and light, patterned with tiny flowers and paisleys, those heavier silks woven with real gold thread. And finally her craving for beauty, for warmth, would overcome sense. She would seize a garment and hurriedly slip it on. Now the curse of her karma allowed her a moment in which to feel the soft brush of wool and silk on her skin, this respite of warmth and beauty really a greater punishment when snatched from her. For soon heat rushed through the cloth as if a live thing, and she would hurriedly start to pull the garment off. But every time she touched the cloth her hands would sear. The garment would burn her body like a hot sheet of metal. The peréthi could do nothing but scream until her slaves came to strip her naked again.
“But then, finally, one day, that ship carrying the disciple of our Lord Buddha came drifting, storm-tossed, to her island.”
And I imagine my grandmother leaving the story there so I can finish the tale in my head, and winking at me, a child again, seated on that mat in her bedroom.
The memory of my grandmother’s voice, her gestures, are with me now as I sit on her new bed and watch the grey light come into this room. I think again of her bedroom in Sri Lanka, its teak four-poster bed with mosquito netting that spills down on all sides; her heavy almirahs that release an odour of camphor and cloves when opened; her art deco ebony vanity table that was her husband’s bridal gift and which she keeps polished and oiled; the old chests with their elaborately carved brass handles and locks, their massive oiled keys, each trunk placed, in the traditional way, on a woven red-and-white coconut-frond mat; her lace curtains that rise and fall with a sigh in the sea breeze.
The Hungry Ghosts Page 42
