He looked down at his drink for a moment and then up at Jegan. “I loved your father, you know,” he said.
Jegan nodded.
“When I left for England, I was more sorry to leave him than I was my own family.” My father paused and stared out at the garden. “While I was in England, we grew apart.”
After Jegan had left that evening, my father sat on the front verandah, sucking contemplatively on a toothpick. Amma and Neliya Aunty came out and sat with him. “You know,” my father said, and he took the toothpick out of his mouth, “there’s that storeroom above the garage? It’s doing nothing, no?”
Amma sat back in her chair and looked at him sceptically. “You think so?” she said.
“Why not. We’re always talking about letting it out. Better to someone we know. Besides, I would like to do it. For Buddy’s sake.”
Amma shrugged. “I don’t mind.”
I felt a thrill of excitement go through me. The thought of Jegan moving into our home, of my being in constant contact with him, filled me with an unaccountable joy. I felt that his presence would invest this commonplace, familiar environment with something extraordinary.
A few days later, Jegan came to live with us. We returned from school to find Amma on her way to the room above the garage, a pile of linen in her hand.
“Jegan is here,” Amma called to us. “Come and say hello.”
We followed her down the driveway. As we climbed up the stairs, I could hear Jegan moving around inside his room. Diggy, I noticed, walked ahead of us, impatient to be the first one to enter the room. He had not been around when Jegan had visited, and he was anxious to meet the new addition to our home. I admired his lack of reticence in knocking briefly on the door before entering.
Jegan was unpacking when we came in, and he greeted us with a wave of his hand. Diggy shook hands with him as if he was his age, and then looked around the room with frank curiosity. The room had been transformed from a cluttered storage space into a very comfortable apartment. Amma and Neliya Aunty had taken a lot of trouble to make it look good. Some of the old furniture that Amma had put away with the intention of selling it had been brought in. The place seemed to have become sacred by his presence, and I did not dare venture too far into it.
Jegan started work in my father’s office. Soon he and my father seemed inseparable. Every morning they would leave for work together and often return in the evening at the same time. Jegan would go for a jog then, and later in the evening he would join my father for a drink in the garden. These evening drinks became a ritual, and if for some reason Jegan was late coming home, my father would wait for him before having his drink. I would often sit on the verandah listening to their conversations, usually out of sight behind one of the reed mats we hung from the eaves of the verandah to keep out the sun. I always had a book with me in case somebody caught me listening.
At first my father only talked to Jegan about his friendship with Jegan’s father, but gradually he started to tell him other stories about his childhood. I was intrigued by these conversations, for they were my first real intimation that my father was more than just a figure of paternal authority. I began now to see him as a man who had been a boy like myself.
Once my father told Jegan about an affair he’d had with an English girl when he was studying in England. She had worked in the university cafeteria, and she had really wanted to marry him. He had been keen on the idea, too, until he returned to Sri Lanka for a holiday and came to his senses. An English girl, he had realized, would never fit in with his family. Also, she was from a working-class family, and “low class was low class whether it was English or Sri Lankan.” This story, more than any of the others, truly amazed me. A love affair with a white person, with all the taboos that surrounded it, took a certain spirit and nerve, a certain thumbing of one’s nose in the face of society. True, my father had finally ended it, but I could not even imagine him beginning the relationship. It did not fit with the strict, proper man I knew.
One evening, not long after Jegan had started working for my father, I was surprised to hear them talking about antagonism in the office towards Jegan.
“The trick is not to take it seriously,’ ” my father said. “They’ll soon get used to you.”
“But what if they don’t, Uncle?” Jegan asked.
My father clicked his tongue against his teeth dismissively. “I’m the boss. If they don’t like it they can leave.”
Jegan was silent.
“The truth is that you are very good,” my father said. “Both my partner, Sena, and I know that. The old adage, ‘You can’t keep a good man down,’ is very true. Especially now. With this free economy, any man who has a talent and works hard can get ahead.”
He leaned over and patted Jegan on the knee. “You have a bright future. You mustn’t let these petty things stop you.”
Jegan seemed fonder of me than he was of Diggy or Sonali. Whenever he saw me sitting on the verandah he would stop by and talk to me. He had a nice way of talking which didn’t include any boasting or coarseness. He often told me about his work with the Gandhiyam organization and about Dr. Rajasundaram, the founder. The life he had led while working in the movement seemed very different from the life I knew – so much more purposeful. From the way he talked I realized that this had been a particularly happy time in his life.
My father seemed very pleased with this growing connection between Jegan and myself, and once I heard him talk to Jegan about it in the garden.
“I’m glad you take an interest in him,” he said. “That boy worries me.”
I leaned forward, wondering what it was that worried him.
“Why, Uncle?” Jegan asked.
My father was silent for a moment. “From the time he was small he has shown certain tendencies.”
“What do you mean, tendencies?” Jegan asked.
“You know … he used to play with dolls, always reading.”
My face suddenly became hot at the realization that he was discussing this with Jegan, for whom I had such high regard. I thought to get up, go into the garden and thus interrupt this mortifying conversation. Fortunately my father was embarrassed as well, for he said, “Anyway, the main point is that I’m glad you’re taking an interest in him. Maybe you’ll help him outgrow this phase.”
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with him,” Jegan said.
For as long as I could remember, my father had alluded to this “tendency” in me without ever giving it a name. Jegan was the first one ever to defend me, and for this I grew even more devoted to him.
A few weeks later, an incident took place that showed a new side of Jegan.
It happened one morning. Sonali, Diggy, and I went out of the gate on our way to school to find a man pasting a large poster on our wall that had a picture of a lamp on it. I had seen many of these posters around Colombo recently and would not have paid much attention to them had Amma not pointed them out every time we passed one, saying angrily, “Is this what they call democracy?”
I had asked Amma once why she was angry, and she explained what was happening in Sri Lanka. This was the year of elections, but the government wanted to stay in power for another six years, so they were holding a “referendum” to extend their term, without an election. If you thought the government should continue to rule, you put a tick next to the lamp sign on your ballot. Otherwise, you put a tick next to the pot sign. Amma said that it was wrong not to have an election, but, worse, government supporters were putting posters everywhere to “influence people’s minds,” and this was illegal.
Sonali went back in the house to fetch my parents, and by now a few neighbours were watching from their gates. My parents and Neliya Aunty came out. Jegan was with them. They stared at the man in astonishment.
My father walked up to him. “Who gave you permission to do this?” he asked in Sinhalese.
The man acted as though he had not heard my father. Jegan now moved to my father’s side.
&
nbsp; “This is a private wall,” Jegan said. “If you don’t stop that now, we’re going to call the police.”
The man smiled at Jegan, challenging him to do so.
“I’m telling you to stop it now,” my father said, his voice rising.
In response, the man picked up a poster and slapped it against the wall.
Then, before anyone could react, Jegan stepped forward, caught the man by his arm and, with a quick twist, threw him to the ground. We stared at both of them in shock. Jegan now stood with his legs on either side of the man. “Get up and take that poster off the wall,” he said. He spoke quietly, but there was a terrible anger in his voice.
The man glared at him and refused to move.
Jegan went to the wall and ripped the poster off.
“Ey,” the man cried out, and scrambled to his feet, “that’s government property.”
“Government property, is it?” Jegan said grimly, and he tore the poster in two.
“You pariah, wait and see what’ll happen to you,” he said.
Jegan took a step towards him. The man hurriedly picked up his pail of glue and backed away. When he was a safe distance from Jegan, he spat on the ground and shouted, “You don’t know who you’re dealing with.”
Then, fearing that Jegan might come at him again, he turned and hurried up the road.
Once he had gone, there was an audible sigh of relief from all of us. “Good work,” Perera Aunty, our next-door neighbour called out. “Taught the bugger a lesson.”
“It seems that they’re doing this everywhere,” Mrs. Bandara, the neighbour who lived across the road from us, said. “They put a lamp banner in some woman’s garden, and when she protested they assaulted her.”
I stared at Jegan, feeling admiration but also uneasiness. How effortlessly he had grasped the man by the arm and flung him to the ground. Where had he learned to do that? I noticed that my parents, too, were looking at him speculatively.
My father turned to Jegan. “You shouldn’t have done that.”
Jegan looked at him in surprise. “Why, Uncle?” he said. He sounded hurt.
“These days it is necessary to be discreet. We could have let him put up the poster and torn it down later.”
“But he had no business to put up the poster in the first place. This postering is illegal,” Jegan said.
Amma and Neliya Aunty nodded in agreement.
“That’s not the point,” my father said. “One must be careful not to antagonize the wrong people.”
Jegan looked at the poster in his hand. He was clearly disappointed by my father’s reproof.
In the weeks that followed, Jegan was doing so well at my father’s office that my father and Sena Uncle decided to promote him to a senior supervisory position. He would be in charge of doing the hotel inspections so that Sena Uncle and my father could be free to begin plans for a new hotel in Trincomele. The next time my father went down to do inspections, Jegan came along with us. Our hotel was about a three-hour drive south of Colombo and was one of many in the area. The people in the town near it were poor and lived in very small houses. Some of them made their living by selling trinkets to tourists. Others worked in the hotels. The only rich person in the town was the Banduratne Mudalali, who owned most of the hotels. He lived in a big house on top of a hill, and we would often see him being chauffeured around in his Pajero jeep.
Jegan had not been to our hotel before, and he was impressed by how beautiful it was. He especially liked the dining room because it had a rock garden in the middle of it and a small waterfall which cascaded down the rocks.
On our first evening there, my father invited Jegan to join him for their customary evening drink. He didn’t object when I came along with them to the table the waiter had placed on the beach. The sun was setting, and the beach was quite crowded with foreigners and local villagers. We sat in silence, watching the sky change colour at the horizon. Then Jegan leaned forward in his chair and looked keenly at something on the beach. My father regarded him, curious. Jegan turned to him and said, “Is what is happening what I think is happening?”
I turned to look down the beach now, wondering what Jegan had seen. There was nothing out of the ordinary. As was usual at this time, there were many foreign men around. A lot of them were talking to young boys from the village.
“Yes,” my father said.
“And they come back to the hotel?”
My father shrugged. “Sometimes.”
“You don’t mind?”
“What am I to do? They have paid for the rooms. Besides, if I tried to stop it, they’d simply go to another hotel on the front.”
“But isn’t it illegal?”
My father chuckled. “I don’t see any police out there, do you?” He poured himself another drink. “It’s not just our luscious beaches that keep the tourist industry going, you know. We have other natural resources as well.”
He held his glass up to Jegan. “Cheers.”
Jegan didn’t respond. Instead, he stared down the beach again, a stern expression on his face.
On the afternoon of the second day, I was reading in the hammock in front of my parents’ room when I saw Jegan striding across the garden towards our rooms, the manager hurrying behind him. From the grim expression on Jegan’s face and the harassed look on the face of the manager, I could tell something was wrong. “Aiyo, sir, don’t,” the manager said, “the boss is sleeping.”
Jegan ignored his plea, stepped onto the patio outside my parents’ room, and knocked on the glass door. After a moment, my father came to the door and parted the curtain. When he saw the look on their faces, he opened the door and came out, closing it softly behind him.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
Before Jegan could answer, the manager said, “Aiyo, sir, small problem, sir.”
“Small!” Jegan said to him angrily. He turned to my father. “This man tells me that I am not supposed to correct the staff myself. I must give him all my criticism and he will convey it to them.”
The manager now seemed very distressed. My father indicated to him that he was excused and he hurried off.
My father looked at Jegan for a moment. Then he stepped off the porch and pointed to some chairs that were near my hammock. As they walked towards me, I became very still. He invited Jegan to sit down.
“Yes,” he said, “those were my orders.”
Jegan looked at him in surprise.
“Why, Uncle?” he asked.
“That’s the way we do things here,” my father replied, brushing something from his sleeve.
Jegan regarded him for a moment and then said, “It’s a Tamil-Sinhala thing, isn’t it?”
My father was silent.
“That … it’s ridiculous,” Jegan cried.
“Look,” my father said, “you don’t understand.”
“What don’t I understand, Uncle?”
“The political climate is very volatile. With the Tigers killing Sinhala policemen and the Tamil party calling for separation, the Sinhalese are very anti-Tamil right now.”
“What about the Sinhalese massacring innocent Tamils during the riots last year?”
My father gestured with his hand to show that he didn’t disagree with Jegan. “The fact is one must be careful these days. Things are very unstable in this area. During the riots, the mob came here calling out my name. If it wasn’t for my manager and other senior staff, this hotel would have been destroyed.”
Jegan looked at him, surprised.
My father nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I never talk about it because I don’t want to upset my family. They don’t know how it was in this area. The Banduratne Mudalali, who owns a lot of the hotels around here, is very anti-Tamil. His thugs did terrible things. Tamil families were dragged out of their houses and hacked to death. They poured kerosene on them and set them on fire.”
Jegan was silent.
“Look, son,” my father said, “I didn’t think there would be a need to
explain this to you. But the truth is I have given you a high position and there’s bound to be some resentment in part because you’re Tamil.”
“You gave me the position because I was good, Uncle, not because I was Tamil.”
“They don’t see it that way. You know how we Tamils are always accused of favouring each other.”
“Yes, yes. And the Sinhalese, they never do that?”
“But we are a minority, and that’s a fact of life,” my father said placatingly. “As a Tamil you have to learn how to play the game. Play it right and you can do very well for yourself. The trick is not to make yourself conspicuous. Go around quietly, make your money, and don’t step on anyone’s toes.”
Jegan sighed impatiently.
“Look at me,” my father said. “I’ve done well for myself, haven’t I? I’m happy, aren’t I?”
Jegan didn’t answer.
My father leaned forward and patted him indulgently on the knee.
“It’s good to have ideals, but now you’re a man, son. Soon you will become a husband and a father, and you must think about what that means. You have a bright future ahead of you. Don’t spoil it.” He stood up. “Our manager here is a fine man. Listen to him and he’ll teach you a lot.”
My father put his hand on Jegan’s shoulder for a moment and then he went back to his room. As he opened the door to go inside, I heard Amma ask, sleepily, if everything was all right.
“Yes,” my father replied. “Everything is fine.”
The conversation I had heard between them had disturbed the tranquillity of the afternoon. The recent riots, which had seemed so removed from my life, now took on an immediate and frightening dimension. I thought about what might have happened if we had been here at the time the riots broke out. I remembered the day they had started. Slowly, the news about what was happening in other parts of the country had begun to come into Colombo. The things we heard were so terrible that everyone had been sure there would be a forty-eight-hour curfew, and people had rushed to the shops to stock up on provisions. But there had only been night curfew, and, in Colombo at least, things had gone back to normal in a few days. What seemed disturbing, now that I thought about those 1981 riots, was that there had been no warning, no hint that they were going to happen. I looked all around me at the deserted beach, so calm in the hot sun. What was to prevent a riot from happening right now? I thought, even as I lay in this hammock, was it not possible that a mob was getting ready to come to our hotel? I shuddered.
Funny Boy Page 14
