Cinnamon Gardens (8 page)

Sonia began to eat again, angrily clinking her cutlery against her plate.

Balendran had to admit that his wife was right. It was indeed a betrayal of everything that not just he, but Sonia also, believed in. Still, he had already promised his father that he would speak to Richard. Balendran sighed.

Sonia heard his sigh, but she read it as impatience with her charges. She shook her head. The greatest dispute between her husband and herself was over his blind obedience to his father and her constant irritation and annoyance at it. It made little sense to Sonia, like a man of science believing in goblins. Balendran, she knew, was not an ineffectual man. After he had taken over running the family estate and temple, they had flourished in a way they had never done under his father. Intellectually, he was
his father’s superior and was thoroughly knowledgeable on all aspects of Tamil culture and religion. In fact, she had often told him he should put his knowledge down in a book. He always demurred, and she could not help but feel that it was in deference to that atrocious book the Mudaliyar had written, entitled
The Splendours of the Glorious Tamil Tradition
. She thought of how the Mudaliyar had been invited to America because of the book and passed himself off as a great Hindu sage; how those gullible Americans had flocked to his classes to learn meditation from a man who had not gone much further in meditation than any woman who did her daily pooja at the family shrine. Renunciation was the first step to true meditation, something her uncle knew nothing about. He had become even more indulged since he returned with that foolish Miss Adamson and her master-this and master-that.

The Mudaliyar was a son, a first son at that. Sonia knew, from various conversations she had heard, that he had been hopelessly indulged. From the time he was a child, he had been taught to feel his superiority, his right never to be thwarted. He was free to interrupt his mother’s conversation with his childish pipings, sure that he would be greeted with a fond “Ah, Sinna-Rajah is speaking.” When he wished, for his amusement, to horrify his elders, he would attempt a household chore. Then he would be sure to be greeted with appalled cries of “Sinna-Rajah is touching a broom!” “Sinna-Rajah is lifting a pot!” “Sinna-Rajah is cleaning his shoes!”

Such a child, once he became a man, was like a blunt knife, unsharpened on the hard stone of adversity. In the twenty years of her marriage, Sonia had once or twice been forced to battle the Mudaliyar, and she had found that her uncle, when faced with the assertion of another’s will over his own, often reacted
excessively out of a fear at his authority being questioned, a sense of the world falling away from him.

Balendran and Sonia had finished eating and the houseboy began to remove their plates. Sonia glanced at her husband. A letter from their son in England had arrived this morning, but she did not wish to tell Balendran the news when such conflict hung between them. It would stain his joy in receiving the letter.

“Who is Richard Howland?” she asked as a gesture of reconciliation. “Haven’t heard you mention him before.”

“An old school friend,” Balendran said, glad of the change of subject and her conciliatory tone. “We used to share a flat in London for a short while.”

Sonia nodded and waited for him to continue, but Balendran, as always, did not elaborate on his London days and she dropped the subject.

“By the way,” she said as they began to eat dessert. “We got a letter from Lukshman this morning.”

“A letter!” Balendran cried in delight, putting down his spoon. “How is he? No, don’t tell me. I want to read for myself.”

She smiled at his happiness and felt, as they did in anything to do with their son, a sudden closeness between them.

Once they had retired to the drawing room for coffee, Sonia gave him the letter and then sat down across from Balendran. He opened it and began to read. When he smiled and laughed out loud, she cried, “What? Which part are you reading?”

“The part where your Aunt Ethel descended on his digs, declared them unfit, and had him removed to her house.”

Sonia laughed. “Poor Lukshman,” she said.

“Poor Aunt Ethel.”

When Balendran finished reading the letter, he put it down
on his lap and stared ahead of him. Sonia could tell he was filled with the same melancholy she had felt after reading it.

Balendran sighed and shook his head. “We shouldn’t have let him go.”

“We had to, Bala. He needed to further his education. We parents are simply the bows. Our children the arrows we shoot into the future,” she said, citing the thought from the philosopher Khalil Gibran that she had often used to comfort them.

He nodded and opened his hands, palms upward, to show that he submitted to the necessity that his son, in the interest of his education, should be halfway around the world from him.

Sonia volunteered a lot of her time and effort to the Girls’ Friendly Society on Green Path. It had been set up for single working girls – secretaries, teachers, shop assistants – who had come to Colombo for employment. The society ran a boarding for some of them, but, more important, it provided a meeting place in the evenings and this kept many of the girls from the vices and dangers of the city. Sonia had been one of those instrumental in setting it up. She helped in the administration and taught the girls English and other skills.

Soon after lunch, Sonia left for the Girls’ Friendly Society and Balendran went into his study to attend to the temple accounts. He found it in disarray. Sonia and the houseboy had taken down all the books from their shelves, so that the bookcases could be cleaned. The books were in high piles on the floor, and, as he walked around them to get to his desk, Balendran noticed a copy of Edward Carpenter’s
From Adam’s Peak to Elephanta:
Sketches in Ceylon and India
sitting on top of one pile. He picked it up. It had been a gift from Richard. He opened the book and read the dedication Carpenter had written to him, recalling the trip Richard and he had made to see Carpenter after reading his
Intermediate Sex
. Seldom had a book had such a profound effect on him. There, for the first time, he learnt that inversion had already been studied by scientific men who did not view it as pathological, indeed men who questioned the whole notion that regeneration was the sole object of sex.

Richard had sought out other books by Carpenter and discovered
From Adam’s Peak to Elephanta
, which he bought for Balendran. He had been surprised to find that Carpenter had visited Ceylon and was good friends with the famous Arunachalam, first president of the Ceylon National Congress. Richard, meanwhile, made inquiries about Carpenter and found out that he lived at Millthorpe, in the countryside near Sheffield, with his companion. He had pressed Balendran to write to Arunachalam, who was a family friend, and ask for a letter of introduction. Balendran had refused, for fear that he might arouse suspicion about himself, even though Richard pointed out that Arunachalam must approve of Carpenter’s way of life if they were such good friends. Finally, Balendran had agreed to write to Carpenter himself, as a family friend of Arunachalam, and ask if they might visit.

Balendran recalled now the long walk from Sheffield to Millthorpe. What a glorious summer day it had been, warm but not enough to make walking uncomfortable, rolling fields on either side that sloped down to the road, the light green of the grass contrasting sharply with the dark colours of the trees that bordered the fields and clustered here and there in small copses.
Then there had been Carpenter’s house, nestled amongst foliage, a charming brook running at the foot of his property.

When Richard and he had met Carpenter and his companion, George Merrill, Balendran had been amazed and then intrigued by the way they lived, the comradely manner in which they existed, the way they had carved a life out for themselves, despite such strong societal censure.

Balendran shut the book. The visit had given Richard and him such faith in the future of their own love. But a month later, that hope had been destroyed by the arrival of his father and, with him, reality. Youth is terrible, Balendran thought as he put the book back on the pile. Alive, beautiful but ultimately painful. He was glad to be free of the searing ache of it. Youth was like that proverbial konri seed – red to view but with a black tip – its vitality and radiance deceptive. The passage out of youth was an acceptance of this deceptiveness, the stripping back of life to what it really was. That was the way he thought of his time with Richard. How foolish to have imagined that the world would change over for them. Balendran knew, now that he was a father himself, that his father had done the right thing. The Mudaliyar’s terrible anger at the time had been the roar of a bear protecting its cub. It had been out of love for him.

At forty, Balendran felt that, despite the difficult years of his marriage, despite the necessary compromises he had to make, his father had acted wisely and correctly. He looked around his study. It was vastly different from the Mudaliyar’s, light and airy, with lace curtains that constantly moved in the sea breeze. There was a callamander antique desk and chair in the centre of the room, one wall was taken up with bookshelves, a brass
bowl filled with araliya flowers sat on an ebony stand. Balendran compared his present comfort to the meagre life he might have had in London. He would have never amounted to anything but a junior partner in some barrister’s firm and he would have remained so to this age. The only flat he could have afforded would have been similar to the one he had as a student with its unbearably cold hall and toilet. As for Richard, surely their love would have withered under Balendran’s increasing frustration and envy as he watched his friend soar to the heights of the legal profession. There had been a shabbily dressed Indian gentleman who had lived in the same crescent as them. He had seemed ancient then, but he was probably close to Balendran’s present age. He had a constantly apologetic manner about him, an excessive deference, the way he would unnecessarily step off the pavement to let others pass. This was the image Balendran held for himself when he thought of what might have happened if he had stayed in London with Richard. He had his father to thank for saving him from such a fate.

The thought of his father made Balendran recollect the promise he had made to him about Richard. He sighed. He had undertaken to do this for his father and so must follow it through. Otherwise, he would have to explain his own political views to his father and this he did not wish to do. Yet could he really present his father’s opinions as his own? He tried to imagine doing that and saw the growing dismay in Richard’s eyes that his friend, champion of socialism and other liberal causes in his student days, had ended up so conservative. Balendran shook his head. He could not do that. He frowned, considering his predicament. Then he had an idea. Rather than giving his father’s opinion as his own, he would talk to Richard about the various views by Ceylonese on what the commission should do.
In the process, he would present his father’s point of view. Balendran, satisfied that he had found the solution, began the temple accounts.

The different stages of a man’s life are often reflected in the guests he invites to his annual dinner. Nowhere was this more so than at the Mudaliyar Navaratnam’s birthday. For amongst those invited were comrades from his Mayfair days, their conversation, after all these years, consisting of nothing more than horses, motor cars, and cricket. Miss Lawton was also a regular guest. She had known the Mudaliyar from the time she had arrived as a young assistant headmistress in Ceylon. Though it would be hard to believe now, the Mudaliyar had been a strong advocate of education for young women in those days. Then there were his colleagues from the forty-five years he had served in the Legislative Council. While some of them had remained faithful members of the Queen’s House set, others had gone on to join the Ceylon National Congress and agitate for self-rule, thus setting their political path in direct contradiction to the Mudaliyar’s. Still, the Cinnamon Gardens circle was tight and to have not invited them would have caused an unpleasant social reverberation for host and guests alike. At this year’s dinner, there were a few new invitees. Members of the Ceylon Tamil Association, with whom the Mudaliyar had recently thrown in his lot. It promised to be a controversial evening.