The Jam Fruit Tree
Page 23
. . . And on and on and on while the Japanese flew over Colombo and dropped a bomb on the lunatic asylum in Angoda because that place was very big and imposing and one madman died and another escaped in the confusion. The pilot must have thought the asylum a building of some importance. The Royal Air Force rose to meet the raiders and another bomb was dropped in Ratmalana, near the airport and one RAF Flying Boat tried to take off too quickly and careered all over the runway with its controls jammed and there were a few road mishaps as vehicles roaring for cover, tore into each other . . . and then, unaccountably, the Japanese called it a day and flew away, never to return.
Another fifteen minutes passed. Anna was filling in the family on her many clashes with the cookwoman and how Mister Colontota had taken to smoking Sportsman cigarettes. ‘Must see the dance, men,’ she said, ‘taking one cigarette and cutting in half with a blade. Keeping half on the altar and smoking half. Then waiting three hours and smoking the other half. Real fusspot, men. If give a glass of water to drink must see how holding glass to the light. If have tiny speck of anything, saying, Anna, what is that? I ask what, what, and pointing and saying there, and I look and can’t see anything. Have some dirt, he saying and now have to boil and strain the water. One thing, he’s careful. Must see the fuss to eat anything. If too much salt, bad. Too much ginger, bad. And can’t cook any beef also.’
‘So he is Buddhist, no,’ Leah said, ‘So you come for lunch when you want to eat beef. Whole thing is you won’t come out, no? Only coming to church. What you are doing the whole day in that house I don’t know. And no children also.’
‘How to come, men. If leave and come that cookwoman Sumana will finish everything and rob also. Can’t leave that devil for a minute. Last week brought four limes and told to keep in salt pot. Next day no limes. I asked what woman you did with all the limes, and all finished she saying. How to use and finish four limes in one day, men? Must have taken home or given to the nextdoor people. Always going to the wall and talking with the nextdoor servant.’
And the All-Clear sounded and everbody went home and the island of Ceylon had had its first air raid; and that, as every historian will say, was the only time in two World Wars that the island was attacked. A few hours of half-hearted target practice. Only the madhouse suffered. The Japanese planes returned to the carrier and never looked towards the island again. A strange war, to be sure.
In 34th Lane, however, the von Blosses home became the cynosure. For, on reaching home, Sonnaboy found sixteen spent bullets neatly embedded in his front door and the children picked up many more, brass gleaming wickedly, that lay in the road and in the private garden. This was certain evidence of the dogfight that had raged overhead and Phoebus considered the bullet-studded door and said: ‘How if were in the veranda?’ and Sonnaboy smacked a palm and said, ‘Veranda? My God, men, sitting I was on the step. Then when planes coming low I ran to the church.’ Everybody said it was a mercy for, had Sonnaboy remained on his front step he may have been struck by the bullets that had ripped his door.
Hitler, of course, lost, and Japan received an atomic strike and while all Europe and the rest of the world was in post-war ferment, Sonnaboy decided that he was taking no chances about his next baby. ‘Dammit,’ he told Totoboy, who seemed to be pulling boys out of a hat, ‘this one must be a boy.’ He consulted a Tamil guard who said that the Hindu god of a forest shrine in the deep south-east was pretty good at this sort of thing. ‘You go to Kataragama,’ the man advised, ‘and put some money near the statue and tell that you want a boy and you’ll see.’
‘But wife already pregnant, men.’
‘So all the better. You go. Bathe in the river and break a coconut and give about ten rupees and just ask Kataragama god to give a boy baby.’
‘But I’m Catholic, no?’
‘So? You think only Hindus go there? Everybody going. Sinhalese and Christians and Buddhists and even Muslims. if you are thinking like that then go to your church and pray for a boy and ask your god to give a son.’
‘I don’t know men . . . you are sure about this Kataragama?’
‘Sure, I’m sure.’
So Sonnaboy made a pilgrimage to Kataragama—a trip that shocked the family, and on his return he was taken to task by his sisters and Father Grero and stubbornly told them all to go to hell. For one thing, home was not a happy one. There were whispers. Beryl, it was said, was seen too often in the company of a dapper fellow with a thin moustache and heavily pomaded hair. Sonnaboy was a creature who could not relate to situations like this. He took seriously to drink and this made him a menace in his best moments. Soon, he began to have his doubts about the child Beryl bore. Was it his . . . or was it that—who was that fellow people were chinwagging about—Kinno Mottau?
Surly, suspicious, ugly after arrack, he began to look for and find enemies everywhere. Moving out of 34th Lane into Mahadangahawatte Lane, he took savage satisfaction in assailing Beryl with his penis. He used it as a weapon on her, constantly taking, constantly impregnating her. So followed David and Michael (two boys for the price of one Kataragama pilgrimage) and Beverley Annette, and Beryl aborted the next and rushed into Kinno’s bed to voice her sorrows and found herself carrying his child, which scared her stiff. She turned to a neighbour for help and was advised to take a decoction, which she did. This made her bleed tremendously and go poker stiff. She barely lived, but pulled through after the dead foetus was removed and after two weeks in hospital, was sent home to a murderously angry Sonnaboy who dragged her into the bedroom, threw her across the bed and raped her. And this was the nature of their relationship for many more years and she bore him two more boys and a girl while an abandoned infant was also brought into the home— Boniface—who was formally adopted and everybody asked why and Sonnaboy told everybody, grimly, to mind their business. The chronicler has detailed this at the beginning of this chapter so little more needs be said, although it can be said that the scurvy-ridden infant was accepted by Sonnaboy just to burden his wife still more. There was no more love. Just Sonnaboy and his arrack; Beryl and the children.
Leah and George watched their children grow up. Marlene became a journalist, writer and well-known author. Her books are read in Sri Lanka to this day.
Anna and Mister Colontota decided, like Sonnaboy, to adopt a child and accepted into their home the infant son of the cookwoman. They were so proud of their Sunil, who grew up to be the blackest-hearted scoundrel in Wellawatte. He is believed to be wandering the backstreets of Colombo to this day, a vagabond, a syphilitic and a thief.
Totoboy’s children fared well. Fortune married a railway engine driver while Brennan, Winston and Cyril all settled in white-collar jobs, then emigrated to England.
Viva took his brood to Australia; Sonnaboy took his brood to England—all except Carloboy and Marie who remained in Sri Lanka.
Elsie’s children had their ups and downs. Ian became a marine draughtsman and architect. Noella went, everybody said, to the dogs, eventually becoming mistress to a Tamil thug who beat her daily and gave her two bastard daughters. Beulah drifted aimlessly, a gaunt-faced, unlovely harridan. Dorcas shone for a moment. She married, bore a daughter and then cancer claimed her. Thelma married a rich Sinhalese landed proprietor, while Caroline Daisy graduated, taught at a convent, married a legal type and after he had died, went back to being her natural self—a lesbian.
The island, too, saw its traumas. After the war came independence and the need to give the native Sinhalese a place in the sun. In the 1970’s the island was renamed the Republic of Sri Lanka. One Prime Minister decreed that Sinhala had to be the official language of the country and the government. Burghers were told, learn Sinhalese, or else. The age of the favoured English-educated was over. Schools were nationalised. Sinhala was the medium of instruction henceforth. Burghers in their thousands left the island.
Sonnaboy was told to take a qualifying examination in Sinhala.
‘For what? he demanded, ‘to drive an engine?’
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br /> So he quit and emigrated to England.
The 1970s saw a Burgher exodus. Australia accepted the bulk of them, while others went to England and Canada and others found employment and an opportunity to settle in New Zealand, the USA and Western Europe. But many remained, and even those who went away always returned, if only to holiday and see old friends and go to the churches of their youth and kneel at the graves of their fathers and grandparents and think of the old happy days under the jam fruit tree.
Oh, many remained, just as Carloboy did. Sonnaboy died in England but Carloboy’s brothers and sisters would come occasionally to Sri Lanka and talk loud and long of life in Blightly and bring cheap Carnaby Street watches to distribute to all and sundry. His aunts, Elsie, Anna and Leah all passed on and are doubtless gossiping, ninety to a dozen, under the shade of some jam fruit tree in Paradise.
Terry and Totoboy died too and it is said that doctors still wonder how Totoboy had lived for so long with a liver that had shrunk to the size of a postage stamp. Dunnyboy died too and everybody said it was a great mercy. Viva, who went to Australia, was last reported trying out every one of Heinz’s fifty-seven varieties and doubtless praising the Lord with each can he opened.
Oh, there is so much more to record. One cannot consider so many lifetimes and actually reach any satisfactory conclusion. But the Burghers are quite the most unique segment of all the peoples of Sri Lanka. Gloriously, historically unique. The chronicler has failed to record much. Many other luridly colourful vestiges of Burgher life still remain to be written, especially that of the railway community, to which Sonnaboy and his family belonged. This, the writer promises, will be another story. But for now, it is time to write Finis.
As the chronicler lays down his pen, he looks out of his window where, in the garden, a jam fruit tree sighs in the wind. It stands there in enduring memory of the Sonnaboy and the Cecilprins of this story.
Let a line be added: For all the Burghers in Sri Lanka and in their adopted countries the world over, God bless you, everyone. And look me up, drop in, anytime.
We can still ‘put a party’.
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Copyright © Carl Muller 1994
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