B009Y4I4QU EBOK (14 page)

And they laughed at us, when we were children. They thought it hilarious when I was distraught that time we holidayed in a dirty bungalow in Elephant Pass in the north of Sri Lanka. I was fourteen and wanted to be partying in Colombo, not stuck out in this remoteness with only an enormous lagoon and a train that went past once every night. “Come watch the train,” they’d say to me, chuckling, and I’d sob. I remember the mirth my cousin Krishan caused when he was a little boy learning to read—he struggled with the word
right
. “ ‘Every cat
has a
rigit
to eat fish,’ ” he would read with aplomb, a cat food advertisement on the back of a
Reader’s Digest
. His mother and aunts would shriek with glee and press two rupees into his hand.

On an afternoon like today, Ma and my aunt Swyrie would be sitting out on this veranda, trying to outdo each other in not eating the chocolate cake on the table beside them because it would make them fat. Not looking fat mattered. I scolded them when they took it too far with that man selling bee’s honey in the Habarana jungles—on another vacation that was. This almost toothless man, with straggly long hair and clad only in a loincloth, spent his days collecting wild honey, holding a flare to the mouths of beehives high up on trees and smoking out the bees. He was sitting in a forest glade when we met him, squeezing out liquid from the honeycomb with both hands, his long fingernails stained and gnarled. Pleased with the prospect of a quick sale, he held forth on the medicinal properties of his honey. Ah, but is it fattening? asked my mother or aunt. He looked at the two of them, alien species with lipstick and large sunglasses, and unsure of the correct response replied in his singsong voice, “Those who are too fat lose weight, those who are thin gain.” “So what do you think will happen to us then?” they pestered him, giggling. Mortified by their ridiculous vanity, I quickly made them pay him and leave.

Now, in this house, I can bring my parents close.
For six years I’ve pushed them and their death to the fringes of my heart. That’s all I could tolerate, my focus was on our boys and Steve. How hideous, that there should be a pecking order in my grief.

Often, in the far corner of this veranda, by the garden, there would be a seamstress bent over an ancient Singer sewing machine,
tuk-a-tuk-a-tuk-a
, I can hear her now. There was invariably something Ma urgently needed sewn. My mother was always elegant and paid careful attention to how she dressed. Except for the day before my wedding, when she was so busy and distracted that she rushed downstairs in the morning wearing a silk blouse and her usual sequined sandals but no trousers.

A few days before we left for Yala, Ma’s seamstress made some dressing-up clothes for Malli. A parrot outfit and a large blue satin sack adorned with gold stars for his costume collection: his Christmas presents. He wore his parrot outfit on Christmas night, and it was tight around the ankles. We’ll have it altered when we get back to Colombo tomorrow, Ma told Malli. Now I remember: some months after the wave, when I was scouring the ruins in Yala, I found that blue sack. It was entangled on the branch of a dead tree, intact, the satin still agleam.

I sit on the floor of my parents’ bedroom, and it seems vast now, cleared of its furniture. Ma would
drape her saris standing in front of the mirror that hung on one wall. I can see her fasten a pleat, reaching for a pin from a white porcelain bowl, the pin beaded with a tiny button so the silk wouldn’t tear. Her saris were her art, they filled mothballed wardrobes in their bedroom and in her dressing room. She despaired that I didn’t show adequate enthusiasm for her collection. “Who’s going to wear all these saris when I am dead? I don’t know why I bother to buy so many,” she’d say. Or she’d tell me, “You are so boring, such a shame you became an academic. I saw some women like you going to a conference the other day, so badly dressed, I wanted to cry.” Malli was her hope, he understood glamour and flair. “Tell your mum to wear prettier clothes, more makeup,” she’d say to him as he stretched out on her bed admiring his collection of small scented soaps. On our last night in this house, I did dress up, and both my mother and son approved. It was the evening of Malli’s violin concert, and I wore one of Ma’s saris, a crimson silk. Malli watched me dab on some lipstick and told me he had his own lipstick, I could use it if I liked. Next time, I said.

My parents’ bedroom leads to the balcony on which my mother enacted her daily farce with the fishmonger. Each morning he’d arrive at the gates screaming out the contents of the baskets tied to the pole he had slung across his shoulders. She’d yell to him that she needed nothing, although she
intended to buy his entire catch, and he’d leave, loudly disgruntled, full well knowing he’d be back. They’d repeat this for some hours before he emptied his baskets by the gate, his day’s work quickly done, and Ma would have more fish than she needed but at half his asking price. Steve would look at the crows and flies rushing to the bloodstained gravel by the gate and ask my mother if there was not a more efficient way to shop.

My parents helped Steve and me negotiate life in Colombo. In their minds we were still children, needing to be looked after. And in these years I’ve not permitted myself to yearn for their care. I’d feel even more perilously alone if I did, I’ve thought. Yet here in our home, snug in these familiar surroundings, I can’t help but crave their comfort. Each night my father would stand on this balcony smoking his last cigar for the day. I want the smell of that smoke to reach me now and make my eyes sting just as it did then, although then I always complained about it.

I settle into our life in this house and am suddenly chilled. As always, I think about how I didn’t stop. When we ran from those waves, I didn’t stop at the door of my parents’ hotel room. I decided not to. A split second it was, and I didn’t know then what we were running from or running to, but I decided that.

The last time I saw my mother, it was the night before the wave. After dinner on the terrace of the
hotel, I said goodnight to her. I was hurried, the boys were tired, and I was taking them to bed. Goodnight was all I said. My father I saw the next morning when he knocked on our door to take back the pair of binoculars that Vik had borrowed from him. He was packing to leave. I only half-opened my eyes. Why are you packing so early, why do you have to be so bloody organized, I thought.

He always was meticulous. His study is vacant now. I drift in this space that once had such order. Over there by the door was where his black lawyer’s robes used to hang. I twirl my fingers in the dust on the bare bookshelves that line the walls.

For some thirty years I spent time with my father in this room, browsing his library. When I was about ten, I discovered the tranquillity of my father’s study at night and began to explore his vast book collection. I would sit cross-legged on the floor here, immersed in
The Jungle Tide
by John Still. I learned that you could understand an elephant’s mood from its footprints, that you could tell if it was running in fear or ambling in hope of water. I was transfixed by the tales of jungle gods—anyone who didn’t make them an offering of two leaves fixed on a twig, they’d smite with blindness. My wonder and enthusiasm pleased my father. He was a reserved and contained man, and it was among his books that we began to savor each other’s company.

In these past six years I’ve recoiled from remembering
my childhood. I felt foolish about my youthful contentment, was niggled by a notion that even as an unsuspecting child I must have been marked, doomed. But now here in the home I lived in as a child, I am more open to glimpses of what a gloriously happy time it was. Apart from when our dachshund Nutmeg was severed in two by a double-decker bus.

I remember being mindlessly happy when as a teenager I made my brother late for school by adjusting and readjusting myself at the mirror by the front door when he was waiting for me in the car, our driver anxiously sounding the horn. I remember being a contented eight- or nine-year-old listening to our old ayah Seelawathie tell us stories of
yakkas
(demons) on nights my parents were out. Sometimes I’d fuss before they’d leave—why do you have to go dancing again?—and they’d calm me with a spoonful of cough syrup and rush out, my mother wearing a puffed-up hairpiece and a glitzy nylon sari, so fashionable in Colombo in the 1970s. Dozy with the medicine, I’d join Seelawathie in reciting the names of a long list of
yakkas
whom she insisted were nearby, hovering around us. Demons didn’t matter to me, I felt safe in this house.

Years later when I was at Cambridge, every summer I brought friends back to my home. They had never been to Asia before, and these English boys would be impressed by the din of crickets as they sat
out on the lawn at night drinking whiskey with my father. My mother patiently took David to the doctor about his dodgy stomach while he expounded to her the urgency of world revolution, sitting in the back of her chauffeur-driven car. And one summer I shamelessly two-timed Steve and another boyfriend, Sri Lankan, not stopping for a moment to imagine that one day Steve and I would be creating a home for our sons in this house.

You have two homes, Steve and I always told the boys, and “Aachchi house” is your Colombo home. They needed to be rooted here, growing up as English–Sri Lankan children in London. And they went from one home to another, and from one country to another, effortlessly.

In this house my parents thrived as grandparents. They spoiled my children and took on their interests and curiosities with vigor and delight. I was amused by how my mother would willingly “go in goal” in the back garden while Vikram slammed a football at her. Vik would sit on my father’s lap in his study and read books about man-eating tigers in India. Ma was as wound up as Vik in the days before another Harry Potter book came out. Malli never understood the need to wait for a sequel. “Why can’t you get a pirate copy?” he’d ask, paying little heed when his grandfather told him in his lawyerly way that you couldn’t pirate books that were unwritten and that it was, in fact, wrong to pirate anything.
“When I grow up I’m going to be
sooo
smart,” Malli would say. “I’m going to make pirate DVDs and make pirate books before anyone writes them.”

I invite monks to the house to perform a Buddhist ceremony, one that passes on merit to the dead. My parents observed these rituals. Now in their living room that is fragrant with freshly cut jasmines and incense, three monks sit on chairs that have been draped with pristine white cloth. One of the monks strikes a match and lights the brass oil lamp on the table in front of him. He unwinds a reel of white thread and passes it among me and my friends, who are sitting across from the monks on woven grass mats spread on the floor. Then the three monks begin their invocations. But as they harmonize their chanting, I still find it inconceivable that my family left this house one December morning and never came back. If anything, tonight feels like my very first night in this house, some thirty-five years ago, when there were more monks and more chants and life here was about to begin. I hold on to the white thread that’s being blessed with prayer and conjure those other glowing oil lamps around the now-absent pond.

D
o I dare open it? It’s Steve’s work diary for 2004. Two thousand four, our last year. The diary is in a bag of our things in my aunt’s house in Colombo. In these past years I’ve picked it up, then hidden it away, panicked. Steve always wrote more than work appointments in his diaries. They were filled with reminders to take the children for haircuts, our plans for weekends and holidays, and notes to himself like (after he and I had a quarrel) “Tell S she was right, make up.”

For most of that last year, until September, we lived in Sri Lanka. It was a blissful time. Steve and I had been wanting this for a while, an extended stay instead of the usual rushed holiday. So when we both had sabbaticals, we went to Colombo. We took the boys out of school in London and enrolled them in one there. I’ve kept that time distant in my mind these past six years. I especially didn’t want to consider our unsuspecting joy and ease.

I am now in Colombo for the summer with Steve’s sister Beverley, her husband, Chris, and their children, Sophie and Jack. Steve’s family has made regular trips to Sri Lanka in the time since the wave, sometimes twice yearly. My niece and nephew are almost as intimate with life here as my boys were. In those early days I convinced myself that Steve’s family must blame me for bringing him here, getting him
killed. But then my father-in-law came to Colombo and held my hand and told me that Steve was always so happy here, that for him it was also home.

Encouraged by my in-laws, I opened Steve’s diary. It was all there. Details of our nine months in Sri Lanka. I didn’t read much, I quickly hid the diary away. But since looking into it I can’t escape the memories of that last year. I reenter that time constantly. Strange, though, how for six years these thoughts have held back.

The beggar at the traffic lights on Horton Place has no arms. My niece Sophie reaches into her bag to give him some money. I’ve seen him so often in these last years, but only now do I remember. This beggar would be at these same traffic lights when we drove the boys to and from school that year. Steve gave him a weekly “allowance” to stop him weaving through traffic to get to our car each day, but it didn’t work. My mother’s driver insisted that Steve was being unnecessarily charitable. He claimed this man had blown up his own arms while trying to make a bomb to kill a neighbor, a rumor most likely. Our children also disapproved of this armless man. “Why can’t he do a
job
?” Vik would say, alarming Steve and me by his lack of compassion.

I remember now, the boys were often grouchy on the way to school. This Colombo school was boring, they wished they were with their friends in London, the playground here was small. My declaring that
they were having a wonderful new experience did nothing. Steve used music to improve their mood. He’d play the Susheela Raman track “Love Trap” in the car. When they heard the lyrics “ ‘Your body is a love trap … Your honey lips are impossible to resist,’ ” the boys would liven up in disgust. “Ugh. Body. Lips,
yuk
.” “Are you sure?” I’d say to Steve about his child-cheering-up tactics. But Vik and Malli stepped out of the car deliriously grossed out and ready for school.