I ask the Scottish lesbian biker aunties if they’ll give me a good rate on a one-month booking. They give me a generous forty day/forty night discount and are grateful to see me front up with cash.
I retreat to my discounted room with cans of beer and the phone book.
While watching a Ranfurly Shield game on Sky, I make myself one promise. If after forty days and thirty-nine visits I have not found him, I will stop looking. I will go home and write my album and cut my hair and never think about Pradeep or Siva or Mathew ever again.
M.S. Pradeep
I get called curry muncher by glue-sniffing skinheads at Kowhai Park. I avoid conversation with the locals and spend my evenings at empty bars. Each day is measured in crossed-off names. Some days I clear two or three, some days none.
I sit outside houses and look for signs, what signs I don’t know. I figure that when I see him I’ll know, even though I have little more than blurry photos from several haircuts ago. It takes me a while to get my bearings, to be able to tell these identical streets apart. To tell which neighbourhood houses pensioners and which shelters the methamphetamine addicts.
Having crossed four Pradeeps off my list, I walk into a narrow lane off Anzac Parade. I have saved this, the juiciest lead, for last. This is the only Pradeep with the right initials.
The houses have locks on their gates and the lawns are filled with the carcasses of cars. A pale long-haired man in tight black jeans walks three Rottweilers on a leash. I stay in my car till they pass. The man’s face is pierced in four places and his dogs are muzzled.
M.S. Pradeep works at the garage at the bottom of the street. I’m greeted by a pink boy in blue overalls holding a spanner.
‘Who you want?’
‘Are you Mr Pradeep?’
‘Yep.’
‘You’re Sri Lankan?’
‘I’m New Zealand.’
‘Your father?’
‘He’s …’ He calls into the house. ‘Ma, what country was the sperm donor from?’
A voice shouts from behind the garage.
‘Eh?’ he shouts back. ‘Indonesia?’
The voice shouts something else that neither of us hear.
‘Malaysia?’
He looks at me with pale eyes. The only thing Asian about this man-boy is his greasy hair.
‘My dad left when I was a kid. He was …’
‘Eurasian,’ says a blonde woman peeping through the window. She also wears overalls and looks just like the boy. ‘He was Eurasian. And don’t you call your father names.’
I look at the lad. ‘Is your first name Mathew?’
‘Nah, mate.’ He turns to his mother. ‘Well, that’s what he was, right? He donated his sperm and fucked off.’
‘Mark Stephen Pradeep, you will not disrespect your …’
I leave them to it and walk back to the rent-a-car. I pass an unkempt man in boots and sunglasses sitting on his lawn smoking a roll-up. ‘Want some oil?’
‘Hash oil?’
‘Nah. Engine oil.’
There is a pause. Then he bursts into laughter. ‘Me mate Skid will bring a tinny and a cap to your car. It’ll cost ya $50.’
He gets up and walks into the house. He comes out with a man in a hood who sits in my passenger seat and empties his pockets into my glove compartment. The man smells of urine and is easy to bargain with. There are three foils, two brown capsules, a lighter with the logo of a political party called McGillicuddy Serious, a carved wooden pipe and some crumpled cigarettes.
I take the pipe and the lighter and just one of the foils and ask him for the shark tooth hanging around his grubby neck. He says it was a gift from his grandfather, but when he sees my money, he hands it over. I sprinkle some cabbage into the pipe and light it up.
Without warning the man puts his hands around my neck, chanting what sounds like a rugby haka. After he ties the shark tooth to my Adam’s apple, he rubs his nose on mine, insisting that it is a traditional Maori greeting. Then he takes my money and exits the car.
Matthew Siva
Day eight. It takes longer than I anticipate to pay surprise visits to thirty-nine suspects. Surprise is important. If Pradeep is hiding, he probably doesn’t want to be found.
While there are no Sivanathans in the entire Wanganui–Manawatu region, there are a disproportionate number of Sivas, most of whom are clustered around Tuatara Lane, a road that smells of cigarettes and fried food.
At the first house Karalea Siva, mother of seven, directs me to her brother-in-law next door. I meet Malini Siva, Visith Siva and Aaron Siva, all of whom tell me they are unemployed.
Matthew Siva is in his fifties and is related to everyone in the neighbourhood. He wears a singlet over his beer belly and is more belligerent than his cousins. I ask him how come they all have an Asian surname. He scratches his head and asks me if I’m from the dole office.
‘I’m looking for an old friend.’
‘Our family name is Siva, bro. You got a problem with that?’
‘Then why does your cuzzie’s letter box say Sivatu?’
The door is slammed.
S.M. Pradeep
Patricia Beatson at Marsellaine Grove has three dogs and has never watched cricket. But her lodger S.M. Pradeep watches it all the time. Her house is painted in rainbow colours. The foundation is violet, the roof is red. The interior starts at blue-green and ends at yellow-orange. She is a retired professor who teaches at the Wanganui Polytechnic.
She describes her lodger as a shy man in his forties who works at the local library. She believes him to be from India or Fiji. She says he is unmarried and obsessed with cricket.
The rainbow house is filled with paintings, mostly figures in garish garments with eyes that follow you around the room. She serves me Dilmah tea while I wait for her lodger to come home.
She tells me she lectured in art till she lost her sight in one eye. Now she lectures in mathematics.
‘That’s a big switch.’
‘Not really. Art is maths. Maths is art.’
She spends all afternoon showing me paintings and talking of numbers. She says that colours have musical frequencies and that if she ever lost the sight in her good eye, she would conjure up paintings through sound.
She speaks with a wonderful lilt and her language is as colourful as her topics. Her tea smells of flowers and tastes like fruit. And when she laughs the whole house sparkles. So when Sanjay Maninda Pradeep turns out to be a geek with a lisp who did not play cricket for Sri Lanka, I do not feel as if I have wasted an afternoon. In fact my thirteenth day was perhaps the one I enjoyed the most.
Peter Plumley Matthew
Adriana calls to say that if I go back to Sri Lanka, she will let me have Jimi for the summer. I tell her my work is not yet done and we get into an argument. She says she is separating from her professor. I ask if she will join us in Sri Lanka over the summer and she says no.
The biker aunties start cooking me breakfast and I start chipping in with groceries. They tell me there is a debate raging over whether Wanganui should be spelled Whanganui. Neo-Nazis have sent hate mail to the Wanganui Chronicle over this. We make fun of a TV soap called Shortland Street and end up watching a show I do not understand called Lost. Denise and Davina still do not ask me where I go during the day, but they offer to pack me sandwiches.
The quest has its moments – not all of it is lawns and picket fences and unhelpful neighbours. I get to take a canoe upriver to a Christian marae called Jerusalem. My oarsman is a Maori with a tattoo on his face, who tells me of pagan worship in the nearby villages. As if on cue, in the ripples before us we see a dead cow surrounded by wasps floating amid the reeds.
Past Ratana we arrive at Jerusalem where Katarina Gray Mathew invites me for a christening. I am given mulled wine and meat baked in an underground pit. We end the evening huddling around a guitar singing sweet songs.
I drive to Gonville and visit three Matthews families, each slightly shabbier than the last and all white-s
kinned pakehas. After that I decide to visit the local asylum.
‘You look like Caine in Kung Fu,’ says Peter Plumley Matthew gazing at my cloth bag. Peter is at the Lake Lewis Mental Hospital, an institution that was investigated for the liberal use of electro-shock therapy in the 1980s.
Peter Plumley Matthew tells me that Gonville used to be filled with swingers and that it destroyed his seven marriages. He is the most well-mannered person I encounter on my travels. I suppose seven wives is enough to drive any man to an asylum.
He tells me that he will become mayor of Wanganui and ban nuns. That he will napalm the Collegiate School. He tells me that everything in the universe rots, especially the human soul. He doesn’t tell me anything about Sri Lankan cricket or about a cricketer who shares his name. On my twenty-first night in Wanganui, Peter Plumley Matthew features in every one of my nightmares.
P.S. Mathew
My final suspect, P.S. Mathew, lives at 93 D Longbeach Drive, Castlecliff.
After this I have no more leads. I may as well hook up with KiwiTour and head for Queenstown and not think for a while. Not think about whether I want to live in Sri Lanka with Adriana.
The fields around Castlecliff are covered in scrub and the streets are sandy. P.S. Mathew’s flat is next to a fish and chip shop. I climb the stairs and am almost mauled by a sheepdog. The dog runs past me into the open doorway and disappears into the street. The steps are rose red and the walls are egg white. The door to 93 D is green and has the words Arnie, Coruba, Leander spelled in letters culled from newspapers cellotaped onto it ransom note style.
I knock and the door opens wide. Inside is dark and cluttered. Dark blue sheets with rune symbols block out the afternoon sunshine, shielding the room from the laser-like, headache-inducing heat that I’m still not used to.
A coffee-coloured lady with a slight moustache looks me down. The only light in the room comes from a TV playing a cricket match. It looks like New Zealand vs Bangladesh. The light falls on two Polynesian women dressed in shorts and T-shirts. One is knitting a wall hanging, the other is chopping up green leaves with scissors.
The one before me wears a housecoat that tugs at her sides.
‘What do you want?’
‘I’m looking for P.S. Mathew.’
‘What for?’
‘I’m a friend from uni.’
The ladies in the room cackle with laughter.
‘What did you do at uni, Coruba? Your PhD?’
‘Hey, I know this guy,’ says the curly-haired one doing the knitting. ‘You used to come to Courtneys on the square.’ She turns to the one wearing glasses. ‘The curry fella, used to sit by himself, we thought he was gay.’
‘Leanne!’ says the one who answered the door. ‘Don’t use that word.’
‘Yeah, Leaky,’ says Glasses. ‘Curry muncher is racialistic. You should say sorry.’
‘I didn’t say curry muncher,’ says Curly. ‘I says curry. Hey bro, do you like curry?’
To my ears, curry muncher sounds less like a racial slur and more like a Looney Tunes character.
‘Yes, I do. You ladies like cricket?’
I have seen these slappers at the empty bars I’ve sat at. They wore too much make-up and clothes ten years too tight. Harmless, middle-aged women who thought they were twenty-three. The apartment is a quagmire of wine bottles, plates, chocolate wrappers and cushions. It smells of incense and stale perfume. There is a poster of the Dalai Lama on the wall.
‘Nah,’ giggles Moustache. ‘Leanne wants to sleep with Chris Cairns. Arnie wants to root Adam Parore.’
‘Don’t be gross, Coruba,’ shouts Curly.
‘You want to have a smoke?’
Something stops me from crossing the threshold.
‘My fella likes cricket,’ says Glasses.
‘Your fella likes fellas,’ says Curly, who gets a cushion thrown in her face.
‘So none of you know a P.S. Mathew?’ I ask from the doorway. Moustache answers. ‘I’m Sandra Mathew. Everyone calls me Coruba.’
‘Do you have a husband, Ms Mathew?’
Her two friends squeal with laughter. On TV, a Kiwi batsman skies a sixer.
‘This fella doesn’t beat around the bush, does he?’ says Curly.
‘Yeah, Coruba’s got a man,’ says Glasses. ‘His name’s Siva.’
They laugh some more.
‘I thought it was Shiva,’ says Curly.
I glance at Moustache and feel my pulse quicken.
‘Ms Mathew, your husband’s name is Siva?’
She blushes while her friends chuckle. ‘We named him Shiva last month, ‘cos we’re all getting into Indian yoga meditation spiritual stuff.’
‘Where is your husband?’
Curly and Glasses do not stop laughing.
‘Here he is,’ says Moustache.
‘Come here, Shiva. Where did you go, boy?’
I watch the sheepdog that almost mauled me run into the arms of the woman with the moustache. ‘Where you been, Shiva boy?’
The dog starts licking her face.
The Big Man
I park at Castlecliff Beach, roll up what’s left of my stash and wait for the sun to set. The beach is nothing short of abysmal. The sand is blacky-brown and the water temperature is a single digit despite it being the height of summer. I sit on the rocks and watch some Maori kids playing touch rugby on the hardened sand. I hear boy racers in the distance revving souped-up Holdens on the open road.
Just like love, karma can wield its club in strange ways. Why have I not been punished for all my cruelty? Why have I not been rewarded for my selfless dedication to my father’s cause? Has the Big Man in the sky lost sight of me since I disappeared Down Under?
That would have to be it, I suppose. I’ve given it my best shot. What more can I do other than head home, clean up the book and try and get it into print? I don’t think Lankan publishers are all that picky about books that ramble and have no conclusion.
As the breeze drops I notice the Maori kids doing something curious. They have abandoned their rugby ball and are hammering sticks into the hard black-brown sand. And then from their bag they pull out the two most beautiful things in the universe. A bat and a ball.
I spark my joint and step towards them. If they are not too skilled, I’ll ask if I can join, it has been years. There are five kids all in their early teens and they all have bad haircuts. Mullets, skinheads and everything in between. I’ll tell them I’m twenty-eight.
Before the first ball, they share a cigarette and eye me with suspicion. I turn and face the ocean and wait for them to begin playing. The tall boy with the mullet bowls quickly, but with little accuracy. The short batsman hammers a full toss to the sea.
‘Good one, Corey, ya fucken meat,’ says the boy in a hoodie at short leg.
‘I reckon that’s out, eh?’ says the shaven-headed boy at mid-off.
‘Get stuffed,’ says the shorty with the bat. ‘Yous are cheating.’
De Saram Road, Mount Lavinia. A flock of seabirds skim the horizon and a gang of cars whiz past at twice the speed limit.
From the other end, a fair boy with a mullet bowls from a shortened run-up. His first ball causes controversy. His second ball causes more controversy. His third ball makes me drop my smoke. I run towards them, the argument getting clearer as I near.
‘That ball is sweet-as,’ says Fair Mullet.
‘It’s a fucken no-ball,’ says Hoodie.
‘Just ‘cos you can’t play it.’
‘You can’t bowl that,’ says Shorty the Batsman.
‘Fuck off, bro. You’re out.’
‘Who taught you that?’ I ask.
They all look at me.
‘Who are you?’
I look at the fair boy with the mullet.
‘Bowl that again.’
I pick up the bat from the beach floor and face up. The others sneer at me as the boy runs in to bowl.
He whacks it short outside off. It bounces, spins to leg, bou
nces again, straightens, and bowls me. It is the ball that bounces and spins twice. I didn’t think it existed. I run up to him and I am screaming.
‘Who taught you to bowl that?’
They mistake my enthusiasm for aggression. Shorty blocks my way.
‘Steady on, bro.’
Hoodie advances, rolling up his sleeves.
‘I invented that,’ says Fair Mullet.
‘Bullshit,’ says the quiet, goggle-eyed one I hadn’t noticed.
‘I did so.’
‘Mr Nathan showed us at practice last week.’
I look at Goggle-eye. ‘Who’s Mr Nathan?’
‘He’s a curry muncher like you,’ says Hoodie and they all laugh.
‘What’s all this?’ The man is scarier than the voice. He is browny-pink, obese, tattooed along his arms and face and wearing leathers. The sort you cross the road to avoid.
‘You making trouble, eh, cuzzy?’
I throw aside the bat and walk up to him. ‘Are you Mr Nathan?’
For the second time I cause the boys to laugh.
‘Not likely, mate.’
‘Where can I find Mr Nathan?’
The man regards me as if to gauge if the contents of my pockets are worth a bullet. I take a breath as he unzips his coat and reaches in. He pulls out a wallet and from it extracts a business card. It is then that I notice his crucifix and his collar.
Castlecliff Cricket Club
Free U-13/U-15 Coaching.
Gonville Grounds. Tues/Thurs 4.00 p.m..
Call S. Nathan 06-345-1614.
Mr Siva Nathan teaches maths and science at Wanganui Collegiate School and has done so since 2003, when he moved to Wanganui with his wife and family. The bursar’s secretary is chatty without being nosey. She says he coached the 2nd XI for three years, but is no longer involved with school sports.
School is not due to open till February and both the headmaster and the bursar are away. She is unable to give out staff details. I thank her and run to the WangaVegas phone book, now permanently in the back seat of my rent-a-car.
The Legend of Pradeep Mathew Page 43
