by Roma Tearne
‘I’ll get some scales from Aruguna,’ he said, picking up the cup of tea she held out to him. ‘I’ve got to go over there anyway, to say good-bye.’
After Stanley had gone to get the scales, Sita closed up the house. She had two errands. One was to pick up a sari for her sister, and the other was to go to the spice mill for her mother to have some chillies ground into powder. She called to Alice to put her shoes on and they went out. Sita felt desolation walk beside her. The reasons were so many she could not decide which pained her most. There was the ghost of the baby, lying in her arms. Sometimes she felt this was the greatest ache, but then she would decide the child and all she had suffered was a thing apart. So what was it, she wondered dully, for it wasn’t the thought of Stanley’s departure that bothered her. Last night when he had thrown his indifference at her, taunting her, turning all she had suffered into useless mockery, she had realised that his leaving mattered less and less. She did not care about the new life he kept talking about because she had no life left in her to start. The real problem she felt was that she no longer had the will to go on. This morning she had noticed a rope at the back of the kitchen yard. She had no idea where it had come from, but it was dark and heavily coiled. She imagined it hanging neatly from the rafters, turned into a knot, a noose, a gallows.
‘Why do people say “a bolt of silk,” Mama?’ Alice asked, tugging at her hand, breaking into her thoughts. ‘Why do thunder and silk come in bolts?’
Sita didn’t reply and Alice’s chatter continued. Why, why, why? thought Sita bitterly. The ordinariness of every single day was more than she could stand.
First, they headed for Pettar and the sari shop. The sun was beginning to dry the mud as they dodged the garbage spilling out on to the roadside. Sita held her sari above her ankles with one hand and Alice with the other. Overhead the trees were alive with whistling bulbuls; bright yellow sunbirds. Alice stared upwards as she walked. Always after it rained she noticed the colours glowed more vividly and the air became scented with the smell of temple flowers.
‘Anay, look where you’re walking, Alice, please,’ her mother said, tugging at her hand. ‘There’s filth everywhere.’
The shops were opening their shutters again. Men in sarongs squatted on the ground, their bodies curved in long bent question marks; street sellers and beggars rubbed shoulders as the tiffin boys ran back to their kitchens with empty curry tins.
They turned towards the railway station, going deeper into Pettar where the silk merchants had their emporiums. May’s going-away sari was ready to be collected. Guilt filled Sita’s head, it stopped up her ears and filled her nose with its sweet sad scent. In spite of the disgrace Sita had brought to her family, May was getting married. No thanks to me, thought Sita, with a bitter smile. I’m being punished, she decided, this is my fate. All around the tropics teemed with life and colour; with the frantic hurry of rickshaw men’s feet, the grating sound of gears on antiquated London buses and the intermittent cries of the streets, while never far off, like a steady heartbeat, was the soft sound of the ocean. Sita heard none of it. A slow refrain played in her head: I should have died, I should have died, I should have died. Taking my shame with me. Removed myself from this place.
At Lukesman’s sari shop she handed the assistant her receipt. Bee had insisted he pay for her sari as well as the bride’s trousseau.
‘I’ve not bought you any clothes in a long while,’ he had said gruffly, his face inscrutable.
No one had commented, but they all knew that he was thinking of the wedding he had never been able to give her. Sita had not wanted to accept until Kamala, for the one and only time, had rebuked her privately.
‘Do it,’ she had said. ‘Don’t hurt your father.’
Any more than you have already, was what she meant, Sita decided.
‘Would you like to see them first?’ the assistant asked, opening the brown-paper wrapping.
‘Oh yes, yes,’ Alice said, peering over the counter.
The shop was dark and lined with shelves all the way up to the ceiling. It rustled with new cloth and tissue paper; it glowed gently with lavish silk colours. May’s going-away sari was crimson and magenta embroidered with small gold birds. Six and a half yards of the finest Kashmir silk. With half a yard to be cut off for the jacket.
‘Yes?’ asked the assistant, watching their faces.
The silk draped itself and spilled across the counter, catching the light as if it had an amorphous life all of its own.
‘A bolt of silk,’ Alice said experimentally, and the shop assistant nodded.
‘How beautiful,’ a voice said in English close to them. ‘Hello, Sita, hello, Alice.’
Sita turned. It was Jennifer’s mother.
She was trapped, by a trick of fate, in this place of dead silk worms. Pramless, lifeless and incomplete. Oh God! thought Sita, wanting to flee. Jennifer’s mother was smiling at them. Behind her was Jennifer and dimly, just entering the shop, was the servant woman carrying the baby.
‘Someone getting married?’ Jennifer’s mother asked in a friendly voice.
She was smiling uncertainly now. In the background the servant woman jiggled the baby, who made gurgling noises whilst chewing his fist. The servant woman came towards them. When the baby saw his mother he stared for a moment, fixedly. Taking his fist out of his mouth, he broke into a huge toothless grin.
‘You weren’t at school,’ Jennifer whispered. ‘Why not?’
She too sounded uncertain.
‘I’m not coming back,’ Alice told her, triumph turning like a boiled sweet on her tongue.
‘But you’ll get behind with your studies.’
‘The work done in this country doesn’t amount to much,’ Alice said scornfully, repeating something she had heard her father say.
She hesitated, wanting to say something that had the word ‘bastard’ in it, but her mother was within earshot and with a flash of perception she saw her mother too was struggling. Jennifer continued to stare at her. She looked taken aback. Some regret for this lost friendship hovered on her face. She hesitated.
‘Did it hurt? The cane? Is that why you’re not coming back?’
Alice shook her head. She glanced at her mother and felt her own anger flapping like a kite in the breeze.
‘No, of course not!’ she said. ‘I’m not coming back because it’s a waste of time if I can’t study in English.’
The sight of Jennifer, lost for words, wanting at last to be friends was more than she could bear.
‘I have no interest in this backward country, you know,’ she said, gaining confidence, speaking loudly. ‘I’m going to make new friends in England.’
And she turned her back on Jennifer, slipping her hand into her mother’s cold one, ignoring the small space of loneliness that lodged inside her.
They hurried out. Neither of them said anything more about the encounter. In the mill, they joined the queue. Great mounds of spice spewed out of the machine into gunny bags. Saffron, cumin and coriander. The fine particles of chilli in the air made their eyes water and their throats sore. Sita covered her mouth with her sari train and told Alice to put her handkerchief over her nose. The air was full of red dust. An old woman sneezed without covering her mouth and Sita drew Alice aside, angrily. Small things made her angry, very quickly, Alice observed.
‘There are thirty thousand germs suspended in the air,’ she whispered.
Alice tried to imagine thirty thousand germs somersaulting in the spice mounds, grinning and deadly. The old woman sucked her breath in and Sita frowned. The queue was moving very slowly and all she could see was the rope, lying quietly coiled beside the broom, out in the kitchen yard.
Stanley had lied to Sita. It was a small lie that she would never think to check up on, but he wasn’t going to see their friend Aruguna. He was on his way to visit Neville, his Tamil friend. Neville worked at the Colombo News Agency. Stanley headed towards Main Street and the bus stop, but as he approached the numb
er 14 bus drove swiftly past, laden to bursting point with passengers. Stanley cursed under his breath. He knew there wouldn’t be another bus for half an hour, at least. Deciding to wait, he glanced at his watch. It was by now a quarter to eleven and already the day was hot. By early afternoon he would be walking in a pool of sweat. He hated this wretched climate. He leant against a piece of guttering and watched a crow foraging for food in a drain, his mind a contented blank. When he heard the soft thud, followed a moment later by the sound of breaking glass, he hardly registered it. There was a short, stunned silence and then screams. The back end of the number 14 bus lurched towards the pavement and was ripped apart. Smoke belched out. Stanley froze. He had missed the bomb by a whisker. There were people running in all directions. Stanley hesitated, not wanting to go too close just in case there was a second bomb. Almost immediately it seemed the screams were overlaid by the sounds of ambulance sirens. The police arrived and began cordoning off the area with tape, moving people on and shouting to the paramedics carting off the bodies. The army, appearing swiftly, began directing operations at gunpoint. Onlookers began to move hastily away. No one wanted to get tangled up with the army. Stanley stood in a shocked haze of sweat and horror, watching. But for a stroke of luck he would have been a victim.
He quivered with fright and superstitious thoughts, never far off, made him shudder. Only this morning he had watched as a silver fish had dropped down from the rafters, narrowly missing his face. Stanley swallowed. Marvelling at his good luck, he wished he were safely on the boat to England. The army were aggressively herding people in all directions, looking for a scapegoat. Stanley didn’t want to be noticed. Forcing himself to slow down and behave normally, he began to walk in the direction of home. But then it occurred to him there was nothing to go home for, just yet. Sita would be at the spice mill and after that she had some other shopping to do.
Last night’s unhappiness, his wife’s insatiable obsession in recounting their recent tragedy and the guilt she always induced, exhausted him. It sapped his energy and was slowly driving him mad. When she wasn’t crying about what had happened, she was crying about leaving the island. But then again she didn’t want to stay here either. It was a nightmare and the only certain thing was that, somehow, it all boiled down to being his fault. What was he meant to do? he wondered, unhappily. He half suspected she wished she had not married him. Often he wished it too. The wish lay between them, replacing the sex they no longer indulged in. Sita, with her small beautiful face, her delicate frame, her lovely friendly smile, had ensnared him in some distant lifetime and only now did he understand that the things he had once found so attractive were becoming a noose around his neck. Reluctant to spend his few hours in Colombo with her, bone-tired of her neediness and her constant desire for more than he could offer, he hesitated. They were as different as Eskimos and Greeks, he thought gloomily, dodging the potholes and avoiding the cow dung on the road.
He crossed Pettar, looking nervously around him. The streets here were subdued, people were standing in shop doorways talking softly amongst themselves, fearful. Only further along, near the fort, was life untroubled by the bomb. An old man, a palmist, sat cross-legged on the ground, doing readings. Who could have predicted, mused Stanley following his own line of thought, that the relatively harmless act of falling in love could have had such a disastrous effect on my life. He groaned inwardly, thinking of the added complication of the child. Everyone had warned him of the foolishness of marrying a Singhalese. Courting disaster, Neville had said. Well, he had ignored their advice and now he too was part of the huge melting pot of suspicion and mixed race mess. While slowly, in the face of the Fonseka clan, his excellent sense of self-preservation was being eroded. Well done, Stan, he told himself. Time you left. He began to whistle tunelessly.
By now, it was nearly eleven thirty. Luck had been on his side for once today and he was suddenly badly in need of a whisky. Turning away from the main road, he headed for the docks. Neville was alone in his office.
‘Ah!’ he said, waving Stanley in. ‘Here’s the intrepid traveller! Come in, men, come in. All packed and ready?’
He laughed boisterously.
‘What’s the matter? You look as though you’ve seen a ghost!’
‘There’s been a bomb.’
Neville nodded. ‘Of course, of course.’
‘You heard about it?’ Stanley asked, taken aback. ‘So soon?’
It always amazed Stanley that his friend knew everything that went on in the city without moving away from his desk.
‘I’ve a bit of an emergency on at the moment, you know,’ was Neville’s usual excuse, when asked to join in on any social events. But as far as Stanley could see, these emergencies emerged out of nothing and went away equally quickly. Neville’s business appeared to be conducted exclusively on the telephone, of which there were three in his office. Every news story came to him in this way. And yet he always had his finger on the pulse, knowing the latest scandal long before anyone else did. He was a useful man to know. When Stanley, for instance, had first applied for his passport it had been Neville who had helped him with the application, making sure it was processed quickly and then, later on, it had been Neville who had told him where to get the cheapest ticket for the crossing.
‘Buy from the Greeks, men,’ he had said. ‘Trust me, they are the cheapest.’
Stanley had trusted him and the passage was booked in a single phone call. It was only after it was fixed that Stanley had remembered Bee wanted Sita’s ticket bought too.
‘Really? Hah, these Singhalese buggers have plenty of money, don’t they?’
And Neville had fixed two more tickets for late July with no other comment, although Stanley had a strong feeling he disapproved.
On the night Sita had gone into hospital, Stanley had visited him quite late. Neville had welcomed him in the usual easy manner and, taking a bottle of whisky out of his safe, had plied Stanley with drink. In the early hours of the following morning it had been Neville who had been first to ring him with the news that Sita had lost the baby. In the panic that followed it had not occurred to Stanley to ask how his friend had known.
Stanley often thought how refreshing it was being in the company of one’s own people. You knew where you were with them.
This morning Neville was in his usual avuncular mood.
‘You look like you need a drink,’ he said shrewdly, taking a new bottle of whisky out of a drawer and a jug of ice from the fridge. The ceiling fan gently moved the papers on his desk. Stanley pushed some books off a chair and sat down. It was well past the middle of the day.
‘I can’t believe I’ll be on the high seas tomorrow, away from this bloody country,’ he sighed. ‘Thank God!’
He had only eaten half the hopper at breakfast and the whisky on an empty stomach was making him feel light-headed. When the telephone rang a few minutes later, Neville answered it in Singhalese.
Stanley sat gazing idly out of the window, not really listening, clinking the ice in his glass as he watched the rickshaw men hurrying on bare feet, spitting betel as they ran. Beyond him the sea moved restlessly in the confines of the harbour, glistening in the sunlight. Soon, thought Stanley, with a feeling of exquisite pleasure, I won’t have to look at this any more. Colombo was so overrated, he thought, and he wondered what it would be like meeting up with his brother after nearly fourteen years. Stanley, the younger of the two, had stayed close to his mother’s side after she had been widowed. The last to leave, never to return, he thought with happy finality. He would break his mother’s heart, he knew, but it couldn’t be helped. In any case, according to his mother it had been Sita who had taken him away.
This morning’s bomb was the second explosion in two weeks. No doubt someone would claim responsibility for it later. Some poor sod from the resistance movement, an uneducated Tamil, would pay the price. Neville finished his conversation and swivelled around on his chair.
‘Another drink?’ he asked,
switching smoothly to Tamil.
Stanley shook his head, envious of such fluency. It suddenly occurred to him that Sita might have heard about the explosion and be worried.
‘I ought to go, men,’ he said uneasily. ‘She’ll create merry hell otherwise. I just wanted to say good-bye and thank you for everything.’
‘But you’ve only just got here!’ Neville said in surprise. ‘Was there something in particular I could do for you?’
Stanley hesitated. He wasn’t sure if he could ask again.
‘I was wondering if I could ring my brother?’
‘Of course, of course, men, why didn’t you say? Here, go ahead.’
So Stanley dialled the number and waited. Rajah worked in an office somewhere in London. Having persuaded Stanley to leave the island, he had promised to find him a job. It would not be easy, he had warned, for with Sita and the child to support money would be tight but, Rajah had paused tactfully, there was only one child! A blessing in disguise in some ways. When he had first heard these words, Stanley had felt an enormous lightening of his heart.
‘A bomb went off on the bus this morning,’ he said now, as soon as he heard Rajah’s voice. ‘I just missed it.’
‘Well, it’s time you left,’ the voice answered faintly, after a pause during which Stanley fancied he could hear the sea. ‘How’s Ma?’
Stanley noticed his brother now spoke with a slight accent. He sounded like a lot of the UK returned people, not quite a white man, not quite belonging at home.
‘I haven’t seen her since after the funeral. Have you news about a job yet?’
‘Relax, relax; wait till you get here. Go and visit Ma, give her my love.’
They chatted for a moment longer. When he had finished, Stanley handed the phone back to Neville.
‘He’s doing very well, you know,’ he said, a touch of envy in his voice.
Neville finished his drink.
‘Well, you will too, soon,’ he said casually. ‘The Tamil diaspora are very successful, men. They are also an important part of our fight against all the injustices we are enduring here. You mustn’t forget that either!’
