B009Y4I4QU EBOK (9 page)

In these years I have only seen a few of our belongings. Friends from London brought a few things to Colombo for me in those early months. Some framed photographs that I couldn’t bear to look at, a T-shirt of Steve’s that I wear at night and that is now threadbare,
Clifford the Big Red Dog
, which I hid away. And now here is everything. A swirl of images dazes me. I can grasp but a handful.

There is, of course, the evidence of our absence and of when it all ended. The branches of the two apple trees now spread across the width of the garden, we would have pruned them. When I went to the foot of the garden earlier, a startled fox leaped into the neighbor’s lawn through a hole in our fence but kept staring at me, now an invader in its territory. The yellowed
Guardian
newspapers in the rack in the living room are from the first week of December 2004. Stuck on the wall of our study is a printout of four tickets for
The Snowman
at the Peacock Theatre on the fifth of January 2005.

There is a pile of unopened Christmas presents on our bedroom floor. I remember now. The presents were given to Vik and Malli by Steve’s family the weekend before we left for Sri Lanka. “You’ll get so many presents in Colombo,” I told the boys. “It’ll be more fun to open these when we get back.” I find a Christmas card sealed in a red envelope, written
by Vik to my parents. “To Aachchi and Seeya, we are coming to Colombo on the 8th of December, from Vikram and Malli.” I must have forgotten to post it before we left. And a calendar for 2005 that Malli made in school, with a delicate design of orange and gold dots that he had crafted with a little boy’s devotion. I am in shreds.

But as I drift tentatively around the house, an undertow of calm also tugs at me, drawing me away from the agony, just a little. I can almost slip into thinking that nothing has changed. That we still live here. In the playroom, Malli’s baby doll sits in a stroller as always. His silver tiara is on the mantelpiece and, by the fireplace, his pink ballet shoes. On the floor, a few sheets of A4 on which Vik has written out the score charts of his imaginary cricket matches, Australia v Namibia, Zimbabwe v India, and of course to annoy me, Sri Lanka always lost. The little cloth badge he got for completing his eight-hundred-meter swim just a few days before we left London is on his bookcase. I said I would sew it onto his swimming shorts when we returned. On their wooden blue desk is a poem that Malli and I wrote about a purple-eared creature he named the Giddymeenony, who lived beyond the sea and had a cactus growing on its nose. With a drawing of it and all. In this playroom, they were so secure.

The boys’ shoes are by the kitchen door, dried mud on them still. There is even some onion peel
in that clay pot Steve used for cooking beef curry. A shaft of afternoon sun falls across the red sofa in the living room and, as always, I can see dust drifting in the beam. On the floor by the fireplace is the large bronze pot I bought in Cambodia. Malli once did a pee in it. I put my hand inside and pull out some black chess pieces. Upstairs in our study, a dead wasp on the floor, and another wobbling on the curtains, there was always a nest outside this window, and Steve and I were stung a few times. In the boys’ bedroom, a medicine spoon that looks like it was used last night, with crystals of Nurofen syrup. On our bed a few hairs, not mine, Steve’s and maybe Vik’s. Two dinosaur-shaped toothbrushes in the bathroom, and a basket of laundry, Steve’s sarong on the top.

I want to put them back in here, I just want to put them back. They would so want to be here, they loved this house.

This is exactly how I know our home to be. And now I find myself at ease. It feels natural, despite my protestations to myself that this is not ordinary or natural because they are not here and will never be. Before coming back here, I expected to be assailed by objects that I’d forgotten. But there are no surprises. I brace myself and open the wardrobes upstairs. Do I dare look at their clothes? Something is going to get me now surely. Cautiously, I open door after door
and drawer after drawer. But it is all as I know it to be. There is not one sock that I pull out and think, I don’t remember this one. And after all the rummaging, my eyes cling to a white school shirt of Vik’s, all washed and ironed, waiting patiently on its hanger. He wore this to his school Christmas concert the night before we left London. I hesitate, then take the shirt off its hanger and hold it, feeling its softness. None of this so menacing now.

How I relished my time alone at home back then, on those days when I was meant to be working from home and the boys were at school and Steve at the office. I would wander the house, put out the washing, make some tea, and maybe look out for the woodpecker that hammered holes in our garden shed. And here I am now, after our life ended, sitting on the floor of our living room, leaning against the sofa and staring at the tops of those overgrown apple trees with that same tranquillity stealing up on me. And I slip into my old ways, unthinkingly.

I begin tidying up a bit, putting things where they should be, or where
I
always thought they should be. What’s Vik’s cricket bat doing on the mound of soft toys? I pick it up and stand it by the box with the balls and bails, that is its rightful place. And Malli’s puppets go with his dressing-up stuff. There is a bath mat by the radiator, I put it down by the shower. This
laundry is clean, I should fold it. I carry the basket to the boys’ room. And then I stop myself. What am I doing? Who am I readying the house for, they are not coming back. Don’t be a fool, this is mad.

But I can’t stop. I go into the kitchen and switch on the fridge. It doesn’t feel right without that hum. I boil the kettle for no reason. On the draining board by the sink are two thin wooden placemats, Steve and I would have used them at dinner on our last night in the house. I wipe them and stack them on the shelf. And I pick up a small faded blue plastic bowl that’s on the kitchen table. Anita and I found this in the middle of the lawn when I first walked into the garden earlier in the day. I recognized it in an instant then. It was the bowl that Vik ate his first solid food from when he was a few months old, one spoon of baby rice mixed in water. It must have become a garden toy over the years, we wouldn’t have given it a second thought. Anita was surprised to see that bowl on the lawn. It wasn’t here last evening, she insisted, she’d walked in the garden after the gardener cut the grass yesterday. So it must have been the foxes that brought it out later at night, then.

I stare at this little dirt-covered bowl, remembering Vik kicking his legs as he spat out his first mouthful of food. And I don’t rush outside to put it away where it belongs, in the shed with the rest of the garden toys. It wouldn’t be mad or foolish to keep it indoors now.

S
arah, Niru, Fionnuala, and I sit around my kitchen table. It is a dull autumn afternoon, the sun punctures the gray now and then. We drink tea and nibble dark chocolate, maybe expecting it to revive us a little. We are still shaken. An hour ago, when they each rang the doorbell and I opened the door to them, we couldn’t stop sobbing. We are together in my home in London after nearly four years.

And this is what we did so often. Back then. Our children had been constants in each other’s lives, ever since Noah and Alex and Finian and Vikram were a year old maybe, ever since we wheeled them to our local library for story time. And over the years, as our children went through school together, the four of us would gather regularly to catch up on our news—about work, about home, about the play Sarah and I saw at the Donmar that week. There would sometimes be a whirl of children about us, sometimes not. Those precious school hours I should have dedicated to that paper on the macroeconomic policy in Nepal were readily sacrificed for a good gossip.

Now we are in this same kitchen, after it has all ended. This is something I was sure we’d never do again. Even when I decided to make a second visit to our home and stay a few days, this was not part
of the plan. It would be too awful, it would be too familiar, and that would be unbearable, I thought. But I’d only been back some hours when I called my friends over. And then I panicked. This will be different from when we’ve previously met up in London in these last four years. Those surroundings—the café at Foyles bookshop, that Turkish restaurant in St. John’s Wood—kept reality at bay, somewhat. But here in my home, I will be destroyed by getting too close to the life I lost.

And I was right. We sit here, and I lapse into thinking that nothing has changed, no one has died. It is one of those afternoons when Fionnuala and I take our sons to their football class in that sports hall, which, for some strange reason, we have to enter through a locker room full of partially clothed young men who’ve just played basketball, not that we complain. Then I have to remind myself. That life is over. But how can it be? Sitting here, that seems impossible. The steam from this kettle rises and drifts towards the window above the sink, just as it always did. That tap still drips if I don’t give it an extra twist. The boys’ mud-covered shoes are reassuringly by the kitchen door, they could have just come inside. And the green and pink marks on this kitchen table from Malli’s colored pens are as bright as jelly beans.

My friends find the house calm and inviting, no different from before. They were nervous coming
back here, not knowing how they’d react. For years now, they have looked away whenever they drove past our street. Today Niru was jolted by the sight of the garden, flashes of the boys’ birthday parties we had there. Now we eat more chocolate and talk about those parties. We laugh, remembering Vik booting a ball through the window next door. We were sitting right here when we heard that shattering of glass.

We laugh, and I am unsettled. Why do I feel this lightness? This is indeed like the old times, but it seems bearable, I am enjoying it even. Then I warn myself. I shouldn’t get too comfortable. Don’t I know that Malli will not stand on that chair again, wearing a pink tutu and licking cake mix off a wooden spoon? Steve will not come in the front door at seven, there will be no clatter as he empties his pockets onto the table in the hall. The windows next door will remain intact. Still, I am relieved to reenter the warmth of our life, even though I know that reality will get me, later.

And right enough, it does. In the evening, the hush in this house is intolerable. I turn up the music, I talk loudly to Sarah, who is staying over, but this silence keeps ricocheting off the walls. I find myself listening out for the boys and Steve. There is a box of half-eaten chocolates on a shelf in the guest room. I can almost hear Vik and my mother whispering in that bed at night as they tuck into those
chocolates, Ma ignoring my protests that the boy has already brushed his teeth. I am stunned by the quiet in the playroom. I turn on the light and see some star-shaped tinsel glistening on the floor, an entire galaxy at my feet.

When I lie in our bed the power of their absence assails me. The sheets have not been changed since Steve and I last slept on them. I haven’t been able to bring myself to wash them, and so I sneeze all night. Steve’s sarong still hangs on the exercise bike by the window. But his shoulder is not under my head. On Steve’s pillow, the one his head hasn’t touched in nearly four years, there is an eyelash.

I can’t look, I pull the quilt over my face, yet I can see the four of us, crowded into this bed early on a Sunday morning. The boys have tiptoed into the room to announce at the tops of their voices that it is a sunny day. When I ignore them, Malli asks, “Why do humans need to sleep so much?”
Humans
was his word for adults, and we didn’t correct him, just added it to that set of garbled words that was only ours. Now those words hover in this room, unuttered. And I am alarmed, not wanting to reawaken these memories, not here at night in so much quiet. I am now thankful for these dusty sheets, at least I have my sneezing to distract me.

In the morning I hear the squeak of floorboards. It is Sarah, already awake. I would get annoyed when Steve creaked about at six a.m. as he went between
the bathroom and the study, turning on the computer, checking the NBA results from the previous night. I’d have thought this sound would unnerve me now, but this morning I find myself clinging to its familiarity, which soothes me somehow.

It is early light, and I step into the garden. Walking barefoot on dew-sodden grass, I always loved this. Autumn is the spider season, and the shrubs are aglitter with webs. Steve and the boys would feed the spiders. They’d carefully place a live ant on these silken threads and marvel as the spider trapped it between its legs and squeezed it into pulp. “See, it sucks up the ant juice like a milkshake,” Steve told the boys. If there was an especially elaborate web, they’d implore me not to destroy it when I watered the garden.

And there is a lovely web on the climbing rose this morning, very showy and intricate. But they can’t see it. So is it because I am hazy from sleep that I still feel a stab of wonder when I do? My desolation of last night is now dissolving, but is this just the cheer of the early sun? I wonder, but I am also certain that, for some time at least, I will keep returning to this house and to its warmth and comfort. There is a small snail edging across the table on the patio. The heat from its tiny body is thawing out the beads of frost that have studded the table overnight. It leaves a watery trail. They would be so stirred by this.