The Flower Boy (6 page)

“Who can give me an example of a verb?” he asked. In his eagerness to share his accumulated and hitherto useless knowledge with this young band of moldable minds, he sometimes forgot that they were four- to eight-year-olds who didn't know what the word
example
meant, let alone
verb.
He also had a tendency to forget his audience and wax eloquently on and on, until the school bell cut him short with cruel suddenness.

“Skip, jump, talk, cry, eat, drink, valk!” he boomed suddenly, making the class jump. “These are verbs, children, verds used to describe
doing
things.”

They grinned and giggled, hugely enjoying the show. At the back of the class, Chandi silently drank in every word and verb.

“Who can make a sentence with a verb?” said Mr. Aloysius, by now not even waiting for the answers that wouldn't come anyway. “The boys
jumps,
the girl
eats,
the crow
flies,
the dog
barks,
the child
skips,
the voman
valks
,” he bawled, mopping his sweating head with his large red cotton handkerchief, which matched his red bow tie. He perspired a lot.

Chandi stared intently, fascinated by the ring of curling gray hair that surrounded the moonlike smoothness of his bald head, like Caesar's laurel wreath. Hair grew out of his ears too, gray tufts that stuck straight out.

He wondered if Ariyasena, the barber in Nuwara Eliya town, charged extra for cutting ear hair. He absently probed his own ears with his little finger, trying to see if any had started there. He found a tiny lump of red-brown wax which he rubbed on a page in his exercise book and made a streak like the tail of a comet, but thankfully no hair. At least not yet.

When the final bell finally rang, he shoved his books into their cloth bag, and joined the streaming flow of children rushing out of the door and down the path. He looked around for Sunil but couldn't see him. He had probably already run down the path to the workers' compound where he lived with his family.

Chandi was disappointed because Sunil was fun to walk with.

Sunil believed anything Chandi told him, because Chandi lived at the bungalow where everyone knew anything could happen. He believed Chandi when he told him that he had seen the new Sudu Baby being born. He believed that Chandi had got to name the new Sudu Baby, although he didn't think much of the name Elizabeth, mostly because he couldn't pronounce it. He hadn't said anything to Chandi though.

He believed Chandi when he told him that the Sudu Mahattaya had taken him for a drive in the big silver car. Everyone had seen the car at some time, and Sunil was delighted that someone he knew and actually talked to had been in it. And when Chandi told him about the time he'd gone with the family for a picnic at Victoria Park, it was then that Sunil had started to hero-worship Chandi.

Chandi wasn't really lying, not the way liars lie anyway. He just chose to believe nicer things than actually happened. He had long ago discovered that it was pleasanter that way.

“Chandi, wait for me!”

Chandi stopped and waited for Sunil, who was running breathlessly down the hill. When Sunil caught up with him, they linked arms and walked slowly, like a solemn bride and groom.

“Something happened yesterday,” he said casually to Sunil.

Sunil caught his breath.

“Yesterday, I played with the Sudu Baby in the tea bushes.”

Sunil's breath escaped with a little whoosh.

“Isn't she too small to play with you?” he asked tentatively, not wanting to offend his hero.

“Oh no,” Chandi declared airily. “She can crawl, can't she? So I did too. We played hide-and-seek and she wore a dress with sunflowers on it, but then she went behind the yakka tree—” He broke off.

“No!” Sunil breathed.

“Yes,” Chandi said, “but I rescued her and the Sudu Nona was so pleased with me that she asked me to come and play in the house with them.”

“Did you?” asked Sunil in wonder.

“No. My mother wouldn't let me. She was probably jealous, or maybe she didn't want Leela and Rangi to get jealous. Anyway, I didn't yesterday but maybe I will today.”

They walked the rest of the way in silence. Sunil's silence was loud with admiration and just a little whisper of envy. Chandi's was like an empty room where echoes happen.

At the bottom of the hill, near the white-painted wooden arrow-shaped sign that said GLENCAIRN, they went their separate ways, Sunil to his two-roomed home in the workers' compound, and Chandi to his one-roomed home in the big bungalow.

HE COULDN'T SEE his sisters, behind him or ahead. They had either gone home or stayed back because it was their turn to clean the classroom. Not that it mattered much to him, because he liked walking by himself. It was far better than having to hurry to keep up with them.

They walked fast. He supposed they had got that from Ammi.

He walked slowly, dreamily. He didn't know who he got that from.

He left the mountain road and took the shortcut along the little oya that burbled its way past Glencairn.

Up ahead he could see the bungalow. It looked like a white cake sitting on a green carpet. Although the sun was warm, the air was crisp and cool. Not cool enough for a sweater, though.

His own burgundy woollen one was tied around his waist.

He had to remember to untie it before he reached the house; Ammi had scolded him for tying it, telling him to think of the less fortunate children who didn't have sweaters to wear. He tried to, but he couldn't think of anyone except the Sudu Nona's son, who had been the original owner of the sweater, and who was definitely more fortunate than he was. He had scores of sweaters and besides, he was in England while Chandi was only in a sad imitation.

He saw something shiny in the stream and stopped to look, hoping it was a fish. It was only a rusty Heinz tin, probably tossed in there by one of the more fortunate, besweatered children.

He reached the main gate, and was about to turn left toward the kitchen entrance when he saw something that made his heart start to gallop.

A pink baby pram sat under the shady canopy of the jacaranda tree. It was turned away from him so he couldn't see if She was in it. At the far end of the driveway, which was at least thirty feet from where he stood, he could see the ayah engaged in vivacious conversation with the firewood man.

He dropped his bag, opened the gate just enough to slip through and ran across the lawn toward the pram, keeping to the hedge. It briefly occurred to him that he'd been running along a lot of edges and hedges lately.

He reached the pram, inched his way around it and stopped. After more than six months of waiting, the moment was upon him. He was gripped by sudden panic. What if she were ugly and nasty and didn't want to be his best friend?

She was asleep, her hands curled into fists and her eyelashes fanned out on her flushed pink cheeks. She was wearing white, not yellow like in the dream, but he didn't care. He smiled slowly—she was beautiful.

Rose, he thought, and as if she heard him, she opened her eyes.

For what seemed like an eternity, they regarded each other solemnly. Then she smiled, displaying two perfect white teeth that looked like pieces of coconut, pursed up her lips and blew a spit bubble at him. He felt encouraged.

“Hello,” he said in his best British accent.

He was rewarded with another spit bubble.

“My name is Chandi,” he said, frantically searching his brain for all the English phrases he'd learned from Mr. Aloysius and kept stored for just this moment. But his brain had gone blank, so he just stood there and grinned foolishly, like a new father meeting his baby for the first time.

He held his hand out to her. She grabbed his finger and held on to it. He laughed.

“Rose,” he said experimentally, tasting the name.

She laughed.

“Best friend,” he said.

She laughed louder and tightened her grip on his finger.

Rose had chosen.

So that was that, he thought triumphantly.

That would show them. Ammi and Rangi and Leela and Ayah—he heard her laugh. He turned and saw her walking slowly down the driveway with the firewood man, who was pulling his firewood cart with more enthusiasm than Chandi had ever seen. Chandi realized he had to get out of there fast.

“I'll come back and see you soon, Rose,” he promised her in Sinhalese, and tried to withdraw his finger. She held on with grim determination. “Soon, Rose, maybe tomorrow,” he said, trying to pull away. She laughed and gurgled and blew spit bubbles and hung on. The voices were close now and he was frantic.

“Rose,” he whispered urgently. “If you don't let go of my finger they will see me and Ammi will whip me for sure.”

She let go at last.

He crawled on his belly as fast as he could, trying to get to the gate before they did. He would have gone down the passage that ran around the house, but his schoolbag was just outside the gate. He grabbed it and ran.

“Chandi! What happened to you?” His mother stood there wiping her hands on her reddha. He looked down. His white school shirt was streaked with grass stains.

“I fell,” he mumbled, and went indoors.

chapter 6

IN DEFERENCE TO HER REAL NAME, HE DECIDED TO CALL HER ROSE-LIZZIE. And although he didn't see Rose-Lizzie again for another month, he hugged those five minutes to himself.

It kept him warmer than any burgundy sweater could have during the freezing Nuwara Eliya nights, when the temperature slipped right down and a thin film of frost covered the grass, turning it to silver.

It helped him get through chilly mornings listening to Teacher's loud disjointed snores. It made him pay even more attention to Mr. Aloysius's soliloquies, and made his brain take note of and file away even more words and phrases.

It was like a happy spell he could summon up whenever the need arose.

And the need frequently arose.

He stopped hovering around the front garden hoping for a glimpse of Rose-Lizzie; he had already had one. He stopped pestering the unpesterable Rangi with questions about what the not-so-new-by-now baby looked like; he already knew.

Other people noticed the change in him. Ammi with slanting looks of concern, soon forgotten by work to be done. Leela with direct stares of suspicion, and suspicious questions. Rangi with happiness, because he was happy. She wasn't really interested in knowing why.

In his newfound state of happiness, Chandi sang Christmas songs because Christmas was coming. He'd already seen two Christmases at the bungalow, but this one was different. There had been no Rose-Lizzie then.

Already preparations were under way in the house. A huge spruce was currently lying in the side veranda, its trunk in an old tin bath full of water.

Appuhamy could be seen teetering on ladders as he searched cupboards for Christmas decorations and fabric-covered pelmets for cobwebs.

All through the year, he faded in and out of rooms and days like a sad ghost, but at Christmas he came alive, as if he had been conserving his strength throughout the year just for these two weeks.

Premawathi too was infected by the Christmas fever, hurrying back and forth even faster than usual. Thanks to her years at the convent and countless Christmas fairs to raise money for the Wanathamulla poor, she was a skilled Christmas cook.

In these weeks and days leading up to the (other) big birth, she baked scores of mince pies and breudhers from old Dutch recipes. She iced countless Yule Logs and chopped thousands of nuts, sultanas, crystallized ginger, pumpkin preserve and other things for the Christmas cake.

While Appuhamy shone in the house, Premawathi shone in the kitchen, looking for all the world like a typical English housewife preparing for a typically English celebration.

“It's all so strange,” the Sudu Nona was heard to say to similar-minded, magazine-reading, tea-drinking English ladies. “Not only does she speak passable English, but she makes passable mince pies too. Thank God—imagine having curry for Christmas, my dear!”

ON THE TWENTIETH of December, Jonathan reluctantly returned home for his school holidays. He looked even more lonely and out of place than he had before he left. He found his mother even more unbearable, his father even more reticent and his sister even more buried in her books.

The only bright spot in his otherwise gloomy existence was his new baby sister, Lizzie.

He doted on her and spent hours playing with her and talking to her, never seeming to get bored with her limited conversational abilities like most almost-eleven-year-olds would have. Instead, he seemed to delight in her gurgles and spit bubbles and even her wet nappies.

His mother couldn't understand it. To her, the baby was a necessary evil that had been visited on her one night, the Third Child. Jonathan was her beloved firstborn.

She had envisioned the two of them having many cozy chats in front of the fireplace, taking long hand-in-hand walks through the gardens and generally making up for lost time. Instead, she lost her son to her baby.

She bitterly resented the time Jonathan spent with Lizzie and although she tried valiantly to conceal it, it would often snake out in a petulant comment.

“Mama would
occasionally
like to talk with you, dear.”

“Darling, you've plenty of time to learn to change nappies, you know.”

“What do you two
talk
about?”

And so on.

Jonathan soon learned to ignore the comments and instead of loving his mother less, he loved Lizzie more. He felt an odd kinship with this happy, smiling creature who had come into his life so unexpectedly.

In spite of the fact that he had been cosseted and pampered by his mother from the day he was born, he was lonely, and felt that Lizzie was too.

But unlike him, she didn't seem to mind, finding her own happiness in rattles and spit bubbles and, lately, in shiny baubles and tinsel emerging from dusty boxes like hibernating animals after their long sleep.

IN THIS CROWDED sea of Christmas excitement, Chandi floated like an uninhabited island, hugging his happy thoughts to himself. Even at the church school, where the nativity play rehearsals were in full swing, he was frequently pulled up for not concentrating, but he didn't mind.

This was Mr. Aloysius's big chance to show the tiny world of Glencairn what a great theatrical director/producer he could have been. He had already appointed Father Ross from the tiny Glencairn church to be his official assistant, although the good father's role was limited to collecting old sheets, towels, tinsel and clothes to be used for costumes and props.

So far they had done quite well, and the motley assortment sat in an old tea crate under Teacher's table.

Father Ross had come out to Ceylon to convert natives and spread the word of God, before going on to India where more heathens awaited his ministrations.

Having traveled no farther than London from his native Scotland, he had imagined Ceylon to be a wild, untamed place with naked, spear-toting, sunworshiping natives everywhere. The reality had both disappointed and relieved him. Being of a teaching background and because of a dire need for dedicated (which actually meant underpaid) teachers, he had been sent to Glencairn and put in charge of the church and church school.

He had grown to like it here and was genuinely fond of his parishioners, who in turn felt real affection for the mild-mannered, good-natured priest, who wasn't above having an arrack with them at weddings, baptisms and funerals.

Every time the Nuwara Eliya diocese brought up the subject of India, Father Ross would tell them he had so much more to do here, and they let him be.

He was a true missionary, and didn't give them problems involving married women and young boys like the previous parish priest had.

CHANDI WAS CAST as one of the three kings, much to Sunil's secret disappointment, who himself was only one of about thirty shepherds. But Sunil did not live at the bungalow.

The nepotism continued with Rangi playing the Virgin, and Leela as the Angel Gabriel.

Every day they had to stay an extra hour after school to rehearse.

The tables and chairs were cleared away from one of the classrooms and the thirty dirty shepherds took their places.

Sunil had to shade his eyes and look up at the cobwebby ceiling for the Star in the East, which was going to be fixed later on. For now, all he could see were alarming-looking cracks with brown fungus growing out of them.

Then along came Rangi, her Joseph, and his imaginary donkey. Under Mrs. Carson's old blue bathrobe, Rangi had a pillow tied around her stomach that had split in one corner after too many tyings and now left a trail of moldy cotton behind her.

They had to knock at an imaginary door and face Bala the school bully, who played the obnoxious innkeeper quite well. The manger was made up of handfuls of dried African grass, and it was there they sat to wait for the Savior to make an appearance from Rangi's leaky pillow.

The actual birth was censored. The audience only saw Anne's old plastic one-eyed baby doll, wrapped in swaddling old nappies, lying in the manger.

Chandi and his two other kings arrived, also shielding their eyes and staring up at the fungus-filled cracks, looking in vain for something that looked like a star, that wasn't really a mummified spider.

The grand finale was when shepherds with their imaginary sheep, the Magi on their imaginary horses and camels, and the other faithful met at the manger to pay their respects to the one-eyed baby doll.

Although he didn't mean to hold up rehearsals, Chandi did anyway, with all his questions. What if the Baby Jesus had decided to be born into a palace, or at least a bungalow? In fact, why hadn't he? Wouldn't he have saved his parents a lot of grief? Why didn't God send down a chariot to take them to Bethlehem? Why didn't God get rid of Herod, because then there would have been no trouble to start with?

Mr. Aloysius struggled to find answers, but eventually left it to Father Ross to deal with Chandi's spiritual teetering.

The Sudu Mahattaya and Nona and their children were coming and there were rumors that the family from Windsor would also attend. It was important to create a good impression, he told his charges, who had no idea what “impression” was. They hadn't got that far in their English class.

At which juncture, Chandi presented him with another poser: didn't only God create?

Mr. Aloysius ignored the question, wishing for the umpteenth time that Chandi would stop asking questions. None of the other children did.

BACK AT THE bungalow, the Sudu Nona eyed her calendar with increasing trepidation. If there was another thing she hated about being the lady of the manor, it was the guest appearances she was supposed to make every now and then.

She had no idea what she was expected to do, so she usually nodded and half-smiled, as if full smiling would encourage familiarity. She felt a little like royalty.

The play was scheduled for the twenty-third of December at five in the evening, which was also inconvenient since she had guests for Christmas Eve dinner. The family from Windsor had invited them the previous year, and this year it was Elsie Buckwater's turn. She was determined to do better than they had.

Bigger turkey, more potatoes, more Brussels sprouts, more mince pies, more Christmas pudding.

On the afternoon of the twenty-third, Chandi fidgeted while Leela fitted the silver-paper-covered cardboard crown on his head.

He wore his school shorts and shirt, but had a frayed piece of purple silk from someone's old sari tied around his shoulders like a cape. He carried the top half of a broomstick covered with silver paper in one hand, an empty gift-wrapped box in the other and had pink powder, lipstick and rouge on his face.

He felt slightly ridiculous.

The chief guests arrived sharp at five and were met and escorted to their seats by a nervous reception committee headed by Mr. Aloysius. The family from Windsor had not come, which was both a disappointment and a blessing, since there were only six bugless chairs in the school.

They had been debugged earlier on by Antonis, the half-mad school watchman, who had poured several pots of boiling water over them, and had managed to pour some on his feet as well, hence the dirty bandages and the hobble.

With the exception of Mrs. Buckwater's genteel snores and the plastic one-eyed, fingerless baby doll Jesus slipping through Rangi Mary's nerveless fingers and landing on Chandi Magi's respectful foot, the play played smoothly.

Afterward, scores of lipsticked and rouged kings, shepherds, angels and others flocked to pay respectful homage to the Sudu Mahattaya, who ruffled a few heads, patted a few backs, clucked over a few babies and smiled once at Mr. Aloysius.

They all slid uncertainly past the Sudu Nona, who didn't at all mind being slid past. It gave her less to do. Anne looked amused, Jonathan looked distraught and Premawathi tried hard not to beam too much with motherly pride.

Only Chandi was disappointed, for Rose-Lizzie had been left behind at the bungalow with her ayah-jailer.

CHRISTMAS DAY ARRIVED quickly, not at all like last year when it had chugged in like the Ruhuna Kumari with all twenty carriages attached, negotiating a particularly tricky climb.

The family decked themselves out in their seasonal finery and left for church in the silver car, which had been brought out and polished by Krishna for the occasion.

They went to the church in Nuwara Eliya town.

The small Glencairn church had its Christmas service too, attended by a full congregation of unbedecked factory workers who sang louder and prayed harder than all the bedecked people in the big church in Nuwara Eliya.

Premawathi couldn't go because she had too much to do, and Rangi and Leela had to help her, so Chandi missed Christmas service. He didn't really care.

He waited impatiently until the family came back from church, because this was the one day in the entire year when the help was allowed to hover around the open drawing room door to watch the presents, which had sat underneath the Christmas tree, being handed out and opened.

He wasn't really interested in the presents, but Rose-Lizzie would be there. Open and revealed like a just-unwrapped, longed-for Christmas present.