The Cat’s Table (12 page)

Ramadhin’s Heart

FOR MOST OF my life I have known there was nothing I could give Cassius that would be of any use to him. But I felt I could have given something to Ramadhin. He allowed me affection. There was a bitter appeal for Cassius about his own privacy. I saw it even in the paintings, in spite of his evocation of that night in El Suweis. But I always thought I could have helped Ramadhin in a difficult situation. If I had known. If he had come and talked to me.

In the early 1970s, while I was working for a brief period in North America, I received a cable from a distant relative. I remember it was my thirtieth birthday. Leaving what I was doing, I managed to get on a red-eye flight to London, where I checked into a hotel and slept for a few hours.

At noon I took a taxi that dropped me off in Mill Hill, by a small chapel. I caught a brief glimpse of Ramadhin’s sister, Massi, and then, once we were inside, of her coming down the aisle. Since our teenage friendship we had not seen much of each other. I had in fact not seen Ramadhin or any members of his family for eight years. I suspected we had all become very different people. Ramadhin had written in one of his last letters to me that Massi was ‘moving with a fast coterie’ and working for the BBC, on one of its music shows, and that she was ambitious and very smart. Nothing about Massi would have surprised me, I suppose. She was younger, and had arrived in England a year after us and quickly adapted.

Over the years, I had come to know their parents well, a gentle pair who had brought up that very gentle son. The father was a biologist, and he always spoke about my uncle, ‘The Judge’, whenever he found himself forced to have a chat with me when no one else was around. I suppose my uncle and Ramadhin’s father were at about the same career level. Mr Ramadhin, though, was a slightly incompetent man in terms of the real world (wrenches, breakfast, timetables), while his wife, also a biologist, organised everything and seemed to be content standing in the shadow he cast. Their life and their careers and their home were to be a ladder for their children to climb up on. And in my teens I wanted to spend as much time as I could in the quiet discipline and calm of their Mill Hill house. I was always there. Ramadhin’s illness, his heart trouble, had made them a more cautious and quieter family than mine. They existed under a bell jar. I was at ease with them.

Now I was back in that very same landscape. And walking to the Ramadhins’ home after the funeral made me feel I was falling through branches we had climbed years earlier. The house, when I got there, looked smaller, and Mrs Ramadhin looked frail. The wisps of white hair made her taut face more beautiful, more forgiving – for she had been a strict as well as a generous person to her children and to me. It was only Massi who could fight against her mother’s rules, as she did for a good part of her life.

‘You stayed away too long, Michael. You stay away all the time.’ The mother’s words were an arrow carefully pointed at me, before she came forward and let me enclose her in my arms. In the past, we had barely touched. ‘Mrs R.’ I had called her all through my teenage years.

So once again I entered their home on Terracotta Road. A group of people were giving their condolences to the parents in the narrow hallway and then walking on towards the living room, where the sofa and the nest of side tables and the paintings were in the very same places they had been when I visited as a teenager. It was a time capsule of our youth – the small television set, the same portraits of Ramadhin’s grandparents in front of their home in Mutwal. The past his family had brought to this country would never be given up. But now there was an added picture on the mantelpiece, of Ramadhin in his graduation robes at Leeds University. The plumage did not suit him or disguise him. His face looked gaunt, as if he was under stress.

I had walked up close to it and was staring at him. Someone gripped my arm at the elbow, fingers pressing intentionally hard into the flesh, and I turned. It was Massi, and suddenly, almost too quickly, it felt we were shockingly close to each other. I had seen her at the chapel when she’d walked between her parents to sit in the front row and quickly bent her head down. She had not been in the receiving line in the hall.

‘You came, Michael. I didn’t think you would come.’

‘Why wouldn’t I?’ Her warm, small hand touched my face, and then she was off to deal with others, to speak and nod to what was being said to her, or give a needed embrace. She was all I watched. I was looking for any sign of Ramadhin in her. There had never been much echo between them. He was large, had a lumbering body, while she was taut and quick. A ‘fast coterie’, he had written. They had the same colour hair, that was all. But I felt there must be something she now carried of him – something she had been given at his abrupt departure. I suppose I needed Ramadhin’s presence, and it was not here.

It would be a long afternoon, during which we saw each other only from across the room, speaking to various relatives. All through the stand-up lunch I noticed her moving from person to person in this expatriate community in the role of a dutiful family bee – going from a devastated old aunt, to an uncle still too cheerful by habit, to a nephew who did not understand why everyone was so calm, for he adored Ramadhin, who had tutored him in mathematics and used to reason with him through any crisis. I saw her sitting with that boy on a lounge chair in the garden, and I wanted to be there with them rather than under the curious gaze of one of her parents’ friends. I suppose because the boy was ten years old. And I wished to know what she was saying to him, how she could justify what she was saying or why we were behaving like some composed sect who spoke only in whispers. And then I saw it was not the boy who was weeping but Massi.

I left the man in mid-sentence and went out and sat by her and put my arm around her shuddering body that never stopped shaking, and not one of the three of us thought of speaking. And when I looked up later through the glass doors into the house, I realised that all the adults were inside and we were the children in the garden.

The evening began to darken and as it did, the Ramadhins’ modest home, which had once been a sanctuary for me, seemed a frail ark. The last visitors were slowly walking out onto the unlit suburban street. I was standing beside the family in the hallway about to leave as well, needing to make the train back to central London.

‘I have to catch a plane tomorrow afternoon,’ I said, ‘but I’ll be back in a month, with luck.’

Massi was watching me carefully. It was what we both had been doing all afternoon, as if reconsidering a person we had once known well. Her face was broader and there was a different manner than when we were young. I was witnessing her new and careful courtesy to her parents. She who had been in loud battle with them all through her teens. I was aware of these differences just as I knew she could pin me down more clearly than anyone among my recent friends. She could have hauled out some perception of me from our past and placed it adjacent to what she was seeing now. She’d been the sidekick to her brother and me during school holidays, when the three of us lounged in a city that was not quite ours and where we were made to feel it was not quite ours – it was a strange contained universe we moved around in, taking the bus to a swimming pool in Bromley or to the Croydon public library, or to Earls Court to see the Boat Show, or Dog Show, or Motor Show. No doubt we still had the same knowledge of those specific bus routes in our brains. She’d witnessed all my changes during our teens. All of this was in her.

Then the gap of eight years.

‘
I have to catch a plane tomorrow afternoon but I’ll be back in a month, with luck
.’

She stood in the hallway watching me, her face in clear shock at the loss of her brother. Her boyfriend was beside her, holding her by the elbow. We had spoken earlier in the evening. If he was not her boyfriend, he certainly hoped to be.

‘Well, let me know when you get back,’ Massi said.

‘I will.’

‘Massi, why don’t you walk with Michael to the station? You two should talk,’ Mrs R. said.

‘Yes, come with me,’ I said. ‘This way we’ll have an hour together.’

‘A lifetime,’ she said.

Massi existed in the public half of the world that Ramadhin rarely entered. There was never hesitation in her. She and I would come to share a deep slice of each other’s lives. And whatever became of our relationship, the ups and downs of its seas, we improved as well as damaged each other with the quickness I learned partially from her. Massi grabbed at decisions. She was probably more like Cassius than like her brother. Although I know now that the world is not divided that simply into two natures. But in our youth we think that.

‘A lifetime,’ she had said. And in that hour I took the first steps back into Massi’s life. The two of us walked to the station and our pace slowed as we spoke. We entered total darkness where the road bordered a soccer field, and it felt we were whispering in an unlit corner of a stage. We talked mostly about her. She already knew enough about me, my brief, surprising career that had taken me to North America, and resulted in my leaving her world. (‘
I didn’t think you would come.’ ‘You stay away all the time
.’) We excavated the missing years. I had hardly been in touch, even with Ramadhin. I sent an occasional postcard that located where I was, nothing much more than that. There was a lot to discover about what she and her brother had been doing.

‘Do you know of a person named Heather Cave?’ she asked.

‘No. Should I? Who is she?’ I imagined some person I might have run into in America or Canada.

‘Apparently Ramadhin knew her.’

She went on to say there had been no convincing explanation for the circumstances of Ramadhin’s death. He had been found with his heart stopped, a knife beside him. That was all. He had gone into the darkness of one of the communal gardens in the city, near the girl’s flat. Massi told me he was supposedly obsessed with her, someone he had been tutoring. But when Massi looked into it, there was only one girl, fourteen years old, Heather Cave, who he gave lessons to. If she was the one Ramadhin was enamoured of, he would have had an overwhelming guilt that must have filled him like dark ink.

She shook her head and turned away from the subject.

She said she did not believe her brother’s existence in En gland had been happy; she felt he would have been more content with a career and a home in Colombo.

Every immigrant family, it seems, has someone who does not belong in the new country they have come to. It feels like permanent exile to that one brother or wife who cannot stand a silent fate in Boston or London or Melbourne. I’ve met many who remain haunted by the persistent ghost of an earlier place. And it
is
true that Ramadhin’s life would have been happier in the more casual and less public world of Colombo. He had no professional ambition, as Massi did and, as she suspected, I did. He was the more gradual one, the more concerned one, who learned what was important at his own pace. I told her I still wondered how he had managed to put up with Cassius and me on that voyage to England. She was nodding, smiling now, and then asked, ‘Have you seen him? I read about him every so often.’

‘Remember we told you once that you should look him up?’

We began to laugh. At one time, Ramadhin and I had tried to convince Massi that Cassius would be the perfect person for her to marry.

‘Maybe I should … maybe I still could.’ She was kicking at the wet leaves in front of her, and had put her arm through mine. I thought about my other missing friend. The last time I had heard about Cassius was when I met an actress from Sri Lanka who knew him when they were teenagers in England. She spoke of how he took her on a date, very early in the morning, to a golf course. He brought along a couple of old clubs, a few balls, and they climbed over the gate and wandered on the course, Cassius smoking a joint and lecturing her on the greatness of Nietzsche before he attempted to seduce her on one of the greens.

At the station we confirmed the time of the train, then went into the night café under the railway bridge and sat there barely speaking, looking at each other across the formica.

I never categorised Massi as Ramadhin’s sister. They seemed too distinctly themselves. She had an eager spirit. One mentioned a possibility and she met it, like the next line of a song. She was someone people in another era would have called ‘a pistol’. That is how Mr Mazappa or Miss Lasqueti would have described her. But she was inward and hesitant this night in the almost empty cafeteria by the train station. There was an older couple there, who had also been at the funeral and reception, but they kept to themselves. I needed Ramadhin there, with us. I was used to that. Maybe it was Massi’s quietness that allowed his presence, and maybe it was this new affection between us that so quickly erased the years, but he came right into my heart and I started crying. Everything about him was suddenly there in me: his slow stroll, his awkwardness around a questionable joke, his love and need of that dog in Aden, his careful care of his heart – ‘Ramadhin’s heart’ – the knots he had tied and was so proud of that had saved our lives, how his body looked when he walked away from you. And the decent intelligence that Mr Fonseka saw, and that Cassius and I never saw or acknowledged, but which was always there. How much more of Ramadhin did I take into myself, just with memory, after we stopped seeing each other?

I am someone who has a cold heart. If I am beside a great grief I throw barriers up so the loss cannot go too deep or too far. There is a wall instantly in place, and it will not fall. Proust has this line: ‘We think we no longer love our dead, but … suddenly we catch sight again of an old glove and burst into tears.’ I don’t know what it was. There was no glove. He had been dead six days. If I was being honest, I had to admit I had not really thought of Ramadhin as someone I had been close to for some time. In our twenties we are busy becoming other people.