Praise for The Match
‘Beautiful and atmospheric . . . The Match, which is both contemporary and period, flares into a multi-textured realism through its melancholic, gentle humour and the brilliant creation of a character named Sunny . . . Gunesekera’s lightness of touch enables him to evoke intense feeling without losing narrative flow . . . Subtle and convincing, it is life as art, art as life. Gunesekera is gifted and possessed of a rare humility. He has written an engaging, appealing, universal and hopeful book that not only shows what fiction can do, it shows why fiction is written – and read’
Irish Times
‘This is a most intimately and precisely imagined novel. Those who have followed Gunesekera from the debut stories of Monkfish Moon and his subtle first novel, Reef, won’t be surprised. Yet so complete a match . . . between empathy and artistry, between lively observation and intellectual grasp of cultural tensions, always surprises. Henry James said about Balzac’s relation to his characters: “It was by loving them that he knew them.” Loving, while remaining in sharp moral control, is a hard business, but it leads to the profoundest kind of knowledge, as The Match so movingly demonstrates’
Independent
‘Gunesekera is strikingly adept at delineating the landscape of rootlessness . . . [He] has a gentle, generous, deceptively light touch and a quiet genius for comic set pieces’
Sunday Times
‘Few novelists have so skilfully underlined the beauty of patience as a redeeming virtue. A slow run-up to the wicket brings its own rewards’
Times Literary Supplement
‘Gunesekera beautifully captures the march of time and progression of life’
The Metro
‘Reminiscent of the style of R.K. Narayan, it’s no wonder Gunesekera has been a big Booker-shortlisted author, the plot is coherent, the language easy to delve into without being over-simplistic and the characters are well rounded and colourful, all seen through the eyes of a dry-witted narrator. A must-read’
Asiana
‘This is a most engaging novel, written with wit, good humour, intelligence and an agreeable lightness of touch . . . Gunesekera has that essential gift of the novelist: the ability to make words live, to create life on the page’ Scotsman
‘A funny, moving and effortlessly accomplished novel . . . Whether it is the safe compounds, cricket matches and curry lunches of Manila, or “fat, soggy chips” wrapped up in the Liverpool Echo, Gunesekera is equally deft at evoking the pathos and absurdities of expatriate life . . . The narrative pace is impeccable, the dialogue accurate, the feel for place certain, the portraits sharp’
Spectator
‘Gunesekera has a lightness of touch and a wry tone which mark him out . . . [He] captures well the tongue-tied adoration of a young boy for an older girl and the comic disjunction between the adult and adolescent worlds’
Literary Review
‘Simply unparalleled . . . Gunesekera’s prose sings’ Channel NewsAsia
‘The Match is a tenderly affirmative novel, which works through subtle resonances and echoes . . . It affirms the possibility of a vision, however brief, of eternity when one is in sync with everything else and the possibility, finally, of finding the right words to live life in’
The Hindu
‘The Match is an urgent, compelling examination of the nature of memory’
Sydney Morning Herald
© 2006 by Romesh Gunesekera
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.
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Originally published in Great Britain by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, London, 2006
Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2008
Distributed by Two Rivers Distribution
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Gunesekera, Romesh.
The match : a novel / Romesh Gunesekera.
p. cm.
“Originally published in Great Britain by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, London, 2006”—T.p. verso.
ISBN 978-1-62097-056-0 (ebooks)
1. Sri Lankans—Great Britain—Fiction.2. Cricket—Great Britain—Fiction.3. Fathers and sons—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9440.9.G86M38 2008
823'.914—dc22
2007021883
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Helen
CONTENTS
Viewfinder 2002
Wristwork 1970
Chin Music 1973
A Duck’s Egg 1986
Ground Glass 1994
Chowkidar 2002
Shooting a picture is holding your breath . . .
Henri Cartier-Bresson
VIEWFINDER
2002
TIMING IS the thing, the ageing Hector wrote from his home on the outskirts of Colombo. Our troubles may soon be over. I only hope it is not too late. He enclosed a cheque for Mikey’s sixteenth birthday. Get him a good bat as a present, Sunny. You remember how you suddenly got the cricket bug?
The day the letter arrived, Sunny’s morning paper in London reported that a ceasefire, brokered by Norwegian mediators, had been signed by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the LTTE, and the Government of Sri Lanka. A Memorandum of Understanding to erase the maiming and killing of nineteen years. It seemed to Sunny that the impossible was beginning to happen. Roadblocks in Colombo had been swiftly dismantled, the army backed into barracks and politicians on all sides were said to be making gleeful holiday plans. As the rest of the world was gearing up for bush warfare and a state of permanent terror, it finally seemed as though in Sri Lanka violence might be repudiated in favour of weekend shindigs at five-star beach hotels with gunslingers and majorettes prancing in bikinis. Colombo columnists had already begun to write about fjords and smorgasbord as though these things were native to Trincomalee. The Tigers, they claimed, were learning to souse fish. It looked as though this was a lull that would last. In his letter, Hector had added: The cricket team is due to tour your part of the world. They’ve had a run of nine Test victories. England could be the tenth – 2002 might be a year to remember.
The prospect cheered Sunny. The old man Hector – nearing eighty – was still able to do that: raise his spirits, even with his wavering handwriting, with the tiny dented words he crammed between the faint lines of his notepaper. If things were looking up, Sunny thought, if the war in Sri Lanka was really over and the cricket promising once again, then perhaps it was time to go back, to focus on the fast ball as he had done when he was his son Mikey’s age. To go back at least to his halfway house, between the Colombo he had been born in and the London he now lived in, the forgotten city of his unexpected upbringing, and find the hidden heart of his life.
WRISTWORK
1970
FOR THE first years that he lived in Manila, young Sunny Fernando knew no other Ceylonese in the city apart from his father’s friend Hector. Then in the long, dry heat of 1970 the Navaratnams turned up. Sunny was nearly fifteen and had r
ecently acquired a pair of tinted glasses. Tina Navaratnam was unlike any girl he had ever seen.
He first heard of her from Robby, his best friend.
‘Sunny, you lucky prick,’ Robby whined down the telephone.
‘Hey, you are back?’
‘Thank God.’ It was nearly the end of the summer holidays and Robby had been away with his parents. His mother had been a Filipina beauty queen, but his father, a burly, balding, Algerian businessman, was deemed by even Robby to be an alien. ‘Have you seen that astounding piece that has come? A girl from Ceylon right next door, man. Sunny, you know her?’
Sunny sighed at his friend’s crass ignorance. ‘Impossible.’ In Ceylon, as it was called then, he had never been near a girl – that is to say within fifteen feet – who was not one of his mother’s prissy piano protégées, or a passing vagrant, or possibly a dubious relative pinched into a gloomy printed frock. ‘Ours was a very divided society.’ He trotted out one of his father’s phrases.
‘You should, dickhead.’
‘Yeah?’ Sunny thought how far he’d come into this bright Americanized world where girls wore hardly any clothes and pouted with alarming ease.
He headed over to Robby’s house. The other two in their gang – Herbie greenfingers and speedy Junior – were coming round too. While waiting for them up on the balcony, Sunny saw her. Tina Navaratnam dashed out of the house next door straight into her father’s silver Mercedes. The car eased out like a royal horse and carriage.
‘Nice?’ Robby leered.
‘Neat wheels,’ Sunny replied.
‘Oh, cojones.’
Sometimes Robby could be an absolute lout. Sunny did like the car. The sharp European styling, the tight hum of precise engineering, the barely suppressed b.h.p. From an early age he had been fascinated by horses – their flaring nostrils and breezy tails, the potent idea of bucking broncos. Tina, with her abundant mane and long, smooth, graceful racing nose was almost too much.
For the rest of the holidays Sunny found solace in centre-fold fantasies and cold showers. He dreamt of lassoes, love knots and star-spangled spurs and dreaded going back to school because she’d be there and he would not know what to do or say. But it turned out that she had been sent to a boarding school up in the hills, beyond the reach of the hot fingers of any young Manileño, home-grown like Robby or like Sunny, temporarily resident.
Sunny didn’t see Tina again until the Christmas break. He was in the menswear section of Rustan’s, the Makati department store voted best in Asia, if not the world. He had just selected his gear for the new season – Jockey’s naturally – when he saw her from behind, shying away from a grey plastic torso sporting the latest 100 per cent all-man nylon Skants.
Tina’s languorous fingers strayed over an imported string vest.
After three months, here was the chance to get close to the girl that plagued his dreams. An agonizing minute passed, he removed his specs and stepped forward. ‘Er . . . Hi.’
It was enough to keep him going for several days. He couldn’t remember what she had said in reply, whether she had spoken at all. He had revealed the tip of his tongue to her, and that was electrifying. He thought soon they might have a good thing going. With time-lags, of course, and hesitations. That was only to be expected. A conversation was a complex thing. He was old enough to know that.
On the day of the jeepney strike – the 7th of January – when the principal mode of public transport in Manila, the folksy converted US army jeeps, came to a halt, Robby declared that revolution was in the air. Marcos, six months into his second term as president, was already being called a tyrant. The student protests of the year before – the so-called First Quarter Storm – had created widespread dissent, but nothing obviously Maoist or Marcosist was going on in his part of town – Makati. The car park of the Commercial Centre was full. Sunny headed for Dulcie’s to dig into a crisp, puffy merienda pastry.
Sally, a breezy American girl from his class, was sitting at the nearby soda fountain with Tina. She called him over. ‘Hi, Sunny. You know Tina? She’s from wherever too. India?’
‘Ceylon.’ Tina adjusted her teeny orange sun dress.
‘Yeah, an island,’ Sunny added. It was something his geography teacher liked to bang on about, comparing the continent Sally knew – North America – to the seven thousand, one hundred and seven islands of the archipelago on which she was now marooned, tipsy on Del Monte juice and wanton capitalism.
Tina looked at Sunny and smiled knowingly. He blushed, heady with the sense that they already shared more than one secret – an island in the Indian Ocean, Rustan’s Menswear. Possibly a sublime attraction to erotic dressage.
‘Do you . . .’ Sunny started.
‘So, you are Sunny.’
‘Yeah.’ Sunny beamed. ‘You live in San Lorenzo.’
It seemed easier to speak for each other.
Tina hid her smile with a sip from a huge bowl of Halo-halo – the ever-present Filipino mélange of shaved ice, diced pineapple, papaya, tinned milk, green jelly, ice cream and a spoonful of red kidney beans. The concoction wobbled in front of her nose. ‘I saw you in Rustan’s.’
‘You like Halo-halo . . .’ Sunny groped for something to keep the conversation going.
‘You don’t?’
Sunny lunged for the safety of the everyday. ‘Coke?’
Sally, who had been fiddling with her pigtails, picking at split ends, had had enough. ‘Tina, hurry up. We have to be there in ten minutes.’
Sunny didn’t want her to hurry up. Halo-halo should not be forced down any throat, however inviting it may be.
‘I’ll see you,’ he said in hope to one – Tina – and resignation to the other. But he was happy. He had managed an almost intimate conversation – spanning weeks – of about twenty-five, maybe thirty, words including Americanisms like hi, OK and yeah which he had learnt to say without flinching. He turned the corner with studied nonchalance and once out of sight, did a quick wobbly skip of delight.
Robby turned up the next day in new red flares and a fancy foreign shirt. His tight curls had been teased out into a bush and a modest moustache was beginning to show itself. He had one of his smuggled Gitanes dangling from his mouth. ‘Sunny, you know this game cricket? Can you play it?’ He broke into an impressive cough. French smoke was so very cool.
Sunny hadn’t heard the word cricket mentioned since he’d come to the Philippines. Amazed, he stared at the sexy packet of blue and white swirls in Robby’s hand. Eventually he nodded. ‘Yup.’
‘I wanna know how to play.’
‘Why?’ Robby was not the sporty type.
‘I read about it.’
He was not the bookish type either. Reading was an unnatural act for him, except perhaps for a page or two of his father’s Henry Miller and some indecipherable Parisian porn he’d picked up on holiday. Even those he’d tried to barter for the local ‘bedtime stories’ of rampant fornication illustrated with fuzzy photos of fat dongs and bare bottoms.
He took another puff and spluttered. ‘Papa was talkin’ about it . . . I wanna impress him, sige. We are due for serious talk about bread.’
Robby always had an ulterior motive, although he often pretended whatever happened was pure luck. ‘Bahala na,’ he’d simper.
‘We need a bat, a ball and a wicket – stumps and bails.’
Robby’s right eye narrowed in a vain effort to look like James Dean. ‘Bails? What is it? Bails is what? Come on, Sunny, putanginamo. Tell.’
‘It’s not so easy, Robby. Let me find the stuff, then you’ll see.’
Back in Ceylon, Sunny had had all the paraphernalia of a minor enthusiast, but he’d never played in a proper team. He’d consoled himself with the smell of linseed oil and crotch boxes like the other outcasts at his Colombo school. Now he saw the possibility of a captain’s cap.
Sunny’s father, Lester, had come to Manila in order to work as a journalist in 1967, as so many others did – from Ceylon, India, Malaysia, Ho
ng Kong – because President Marcos, the new Ilokano clean broom, had pledged that the Philippines would have the freest press in Asia. The then heroic champion of social justice and civil liberties had promised Utopia. Lester Fernando, desperate to leave the constraints of Colombo, had become delirious at the dream of a land that might combine El Dorado with Fleet Street.
‘Guaranteed total freedom we have here,’ Lester used to say in those early days, opening a fresh tub of Magnolia flavour-of-the-month ice cream. ‘You know how important independence is? Nothing can ever be hidden, any more.’ He’d check his plastic scoop like a professional sleuth and use a stubby little finger to get the last bits out.
Manila, he had believed, was destined to become the centre of a new journalism that would make the American heroes of the day blanch. The city would provide a refuge for any correspondent under threat; a free Filipino press would enable all of Asia to open its eyes, shake off the yoke of imperial bureaucracy and join the twentieth century with reporting that was pure and true. No censoring, no toadying, and a circulation that would rise to the hundreds of millions.
His dreams were short-lived. Living in a society of conspicuous consumption on what was still a hack’s salary proved too much for Lester. He soon saw how money controlled the media. And so he gave up journalism and went into the more lucrative business of marketing and PR. Within two years he had moved with his son into a swanky Makati enclave of executive households, charmingly called the village of Urdaneta, outside the limits of the old town.
When Sunny first heard the name he thought it came from the moon, or some place in outer space. He knew nothing yet of Fraya Andres de Urdaneta, the crotchety flag-waving monk and his fellow Basque, Miguel López de Legazpi – their 1564 journey of appropriation from Mexico to Cebu, and on to Manila, for the glory of King Philip II of Spain. He knew nothing of the history of the Philippines, the Namayan Kingdom, the datus, rajahs and sultans who had ruled before the conquistadors blundered in; nothing of America’s smutty imperial adventure, the commonwealth of baryos and baranggays, the Tondo, the river Pasig; nothing of the Catholic Church or cardinal sin, never mind the Ave Maria. But he liked the word – Urdaneta – even though the place was, as he quickly learned to say, kind of weird.
The Match Page 1
