The Cat’s Table (4 page)

C Deck

I SAT ON my bunk looking at the door and the metal wall. It was hot in the cabin by late afternoon. I could be alone only if I came here, at this time. Most of my day was busy with Ramadhin and Cassius, sometimes Mazappa or others from the Cat’s Table. At night I was often surrounded by the whispering of my card-players. I needed to think backwards for a while. Thinking backwards I could remember the comfort of being curious and alone. After a while I would lie back and look at the ceiling a foot or two above me. I felt safe, even if I was in the middle of the sea.

Sometimes, just before darkness, I found myself on C Deck when no one else was there. I’d walk to the railing, which was the height of my chest, and watch the sea rush alongside the ship. At times it appeared to rise almost to my level, as if wishing to pluck me away. I would not move, in spite of this havoc of fear and aloneness in me. It was the same emotion I had when lost in the narrow streets of the Pettah market, or adapting to new, undiscovered rules at school. When I could not see the ocean, the fear was not there, but now the sea rose in the half-dark, surrounding the ship, and coiled itself around me. No matter how scared I was, I remained there, adjacent to the passing darkness, half wanting to pull myself back, half desiring to leap towards it.

Once, before I left Ceylon, I saw an ocean liner being burned at the far end of Colombo harbour. All afternoon I watched the blue acetylene cut into the flanks of the vessel. I realised the ship I was now on could also be cut into pieces. One day, seeing Mr Nevil, who understood these things, I tugged at his sleeve and asked him if we were safe. He told me the
Oronsay
was healthy, it was only in mid-career. It had worked as a troop ship during the Second World War, and somewhere along one wall of the hold there was a large mural in pink and white of naked women astride gun mounts and tanks that had been painted by a soldier. It was still there, a secret, for the officers on the ship never went into the hold.

‘But are we all right?’

He sat me down and, on the back of one of the blueprints he always carried, drew me what he said was a Greek warship, a trireme. ‘This was the greatest ship of the seas. And even it no longer exists. It fought the enemies of Athens and brought back unknown fruits and crops, new sciences, architecture, even democracy. All that because of this ship. It had no decoration. The trireme was what it was – a weapon. On it were just rowers and archers. But not even a fragment of one exists now. People still search for them in the silt of river coasts, but they have never found one. They were made out of ash and hard elm, with oak for the keel, and green pine they bent into the shape of the frame. The planks were sewn together with linen cords. There was no metal on the skeleton. So the ship could be burned on a beach, or if it sank, it dissolved in the sea. Our ship is safer.’

For some reason Mr Nevil’s depiction of an old warship gave me comfort. I no longer imagined myself on the decorated
Oronsay
, but on something more self-sufficient, more stripped down. I was an archer or a rower, on a trireme. We would enter the Arabian Sea and then the Mediterranean that way, with Mr Nevil as our naval commander.

That night I woke suddenly with the feeling that we were passing islands, and that they were nearby in the darkness. There was a different sound to the waves beside the ship, a sense of an echo, as if they were responding to land. I turned on the yellow light by my bed and looked at the map of the world I had traced from a book. I had forgotten to put names on it. All I knew was that we were going west and north, away from Colombo.

An Australian

IN THE HOUR before dawn when we got up to roam what felt like a deserted ship, the cavernous saloons smelled of the previous night’s cigarettes, and Ramadhin and Cassius and I would already have turned the silent library into a mayhem of rolling trolleys. One morning we suddenly found ourselves hemmed in by a girl on roller skates racing round the wooden perimeter of the upper deck. It seemed she had been getting up even earlier than we had. There was no acknowledgement on her part of our existence as she raced faster and faster, the fluent strides testing her balance. On one turn, mistiming a cornering leap over cables, she crashed into the stern railing. She got up, looked at the slash of blood on her knee, and continued, glancing at her watch. She was Australian, and we were enthralled. We had never witnessed such determination. None of the female members of our families behaved this way. Later we recognised her in the pool, her speed a barrage of water. It would not have surprised us if she’d leapt off the
Oronsay
into the sea and kept pace for twenty minutes alongside the ship.

We therefore began waking even earlier to watch her roller-skate the fifty or sixty laps. When she was finished, she’d unlace her skates and walk exhausted, sweating and fully clothed, towards the outdoor shower. She would stand in the gush and spray of it, tossing her hair this way, that way, like some clothed animal. This was a new kind of beauty. When she left we followed her footprints, which were already evaporating in the new sunlight as we approached them.

Cassius

WHO WOULD NAME a child Cassius, I think now. Most parents have veered from giving a firstborn such a name. Though Sri Lanka has always enjoyed the merging of classical first names with Sinhalese last names – Solomon and Senaka are not common, but they exist. The name of our family paediatrician was Socrates Gunewardena. In spite of its bad Roman press, Cassius
is
a gentle and whispering name, though the youthful Cassius I got to know on the voyage was very much an iconoclast. I never saw him side with anyone in power. He drew you into his perspective of things and you saw the layers of authority on the ship through his eyes. He relished, for instance, being one of the insignificants at the Cat’s Table.

When Cassius spoke about St Thomas’ in Mount Lavinia it was with the energy of someone remembering a resistance movement. Since he was a year ahead of me at the school, it felt we were worlds apart, but he was a beacon to the younger students, for he had seldom been caught for his crimes. And when he was caught, not one hint of embarrassment or humility crossed his face. He was especially celebrated after he managed to lock ‘Bamboo Stick’ Barnabus, our boarding-house master, in the junior school toilet for several hours to protest the revolting lavatories at the school. (You squatted over the hole of hell and washed yourself afterwards with water from a rusty tin that once held Tate & Lyle golden syrup. ‘Out of the strong came forth sweetness’, I would always remember.)

Cassius had waited until Barnabus entered the students’ ground-floor toilet at six a.m. for his habitually long stay, and then, having jammed a metal rod against the door, proceeded to encase the lock with a quick-drying cement. We listened to our housemaster throwing himself against the door. Then he called our names, beginning with the students he trusted. One by one we offered to go for help, then drifted off onto the school grounds, where we had to relieve ourselves behind bushes, and then went for a swim or dutifully entered the seven a.m. homework study class that Father Barnabus had in fact instituted earlier in the term. The cement had to be shattered off with a cricket stump by one of the groundsmen, but that was not until late afternoon. By then we hoped our housemaster would be overcome by fumes, perhaps be faint and uncommunicative. But his vengeance proceeded rapidly. Whipped, then expelled for a week, Cassius became even more of an icon for the junior school, especially after a stirring speech by the Warden at morning chapel that damned him for a full two minutes as if he were one of the fallen angels. Of course, no lesson was learned from this episode – by anyone. Years later when an old boy donated funds to St Thomas’ for a new cricket pavilion, my friend Senaka said, ‘First they should construct some decent bogs.’

Like me, in order to be accepted into an English school, Cassius had taken an exam overseen by the Warden. We had to answer several mathematical questions based on pounds and shillings, whereas all we knew were rupees and cents. There were also general-knowledge questions, such as how many men were on the Oxford rowing team and who had lived at a place called Dove Cottage. We were even asked to name three members of the House of Lords. Cassius and I were the only students in the Warden’s living room that Saturday afternoon, and he threw me an incorrect answer to the question, ‘What do you call a female dog?’ He had said, ‘Cat,’ and I had written that down. It was the first time he had actually spoken to me, and it was with a lie. I had known him until then only by reputation. All of us in the junior school saw him as the incorrigible of St Thomas’ College. No doubt it galled the school staff that he would now be representing its name abroad.

There was a mix of stubbornness and kindness in Cassius. I never knew where these qualities came from. He never referred to his parents, and if he had he would probably have invented a scenario to make himself distinct from them. In fact, during the journey the three of us had no real interest in one another’s background. Ramadhin would speak now and then of the careful advice his parents had given him about his health. And as for me, all the other two knew was that I had an ‘aunt’ in First Class. It had been Cassius who recommended we keep our backgrounds to ourselves. He liked the idea, I think, of being self-sufficient. That is how he saw our little gang existing on the ship. He put up with Ramadhin’s domestic anecdotes because of his physical weakness. There was a gentle democracy in Cassius. In retrospect, he was only against the power of Caesar.

I suppose he changed me during those twenty-one days, persuading me to interpret anything that took place around us with his quizzical or upside-down perspective. Twenty-one days is a very brief period in a life, but I would never unlearn the whisper of Cassius. As the years went by I would hear of him or read about his career, but I would never meet him again. It was Ramadhin I would keep in touch with, visiting him in Mill Hill, where his family lived, going to matinee movies with him and his sister, or to the Boat Show in Earls Court, where we would try to imagine the deeds that Cassius would commit if he were in our company.

EXAMINATION BOOKLET: OVERHEARD CONVERSATIONS, DAY 1 TO DAY 11

‘
Don’t look at him, you hear me? Celia? Don’t ever look at the swine again!
’

‘
My sister has a strange name. Massoumeh. It means “immaculate”, “protected from sins”. But it can also mean “defenceless”
.’

‘
I have a specific dislike, I am sorry to say, of the Sealyham terrier
.’

‘
I thought she was a bluestocking, at first
.’

‘
We use fruit as a fish poison sometimes
.’

‘
Pickpockets always come out during a storm
.’

‘
This man said he could cross a desert eating just a date and one onion a day
.’

‘
I suspect, because of her language skills, she was scooped up by Whitehall
.’

‘
I’m ruined by that singleton!
’

‘
I told your husband when he offered me a three-day-old oyster that it was more dangerous to me than having a sexual act when I was seventeen
.’

The Hold

LARRY DANIELS WAS one of those who ate with us at the Cat’s Table. A compact, well-muscled man, he always wore a tie, always had his sleeves rolled up. Born to a burgher family in Kandy, he had become a botanist and spent much of his adult life studying forest and plant cultures in Sumatra and Borneo. This was to be his first journey to Europe. Initially the only thing we knew about him was that he had an overwhelming crush on my cousin Emily, who would barely give him the time of day. Because of this lack of interest he had gone out of his way to befriend me. I suppose he had seen me laughing with her and her friends by the pool, which was where Emily could usually be found. Mr Daniels asked me if I would like to see his ‘garden’ on the ship. I suggested I bring my two cohorts, and he agreed, though it was clear he wanted me to himself so he could quiz me about my cousin’s likes and dislikes.

Whenever Cassius and Ramadhin and I were with Mr Daniels, we’d spend the time asking him to buy us exotic cordials at the pool bar. Or we’d persuade him to make up a foursome at one of the games on deck. He was an intelligent, curious man, but we were more interested in testing our strength by wrestling with him, all three of us attacking him simultaneously, then leaving him gasping on a jute mat while we ran off, sweating, to dive into the pool.

It was only at dinner that I was unprotected from Mr Daniels’s queries about Emily, for my assigned seat was next to his, and I would have to talk about her and nothing else. The one piece of information I could honestly give him was that she liked Player’s Navy Cut cigarettes. She had been smoking the brand for at least three years. The rest of her likes and dislikes I invented.

‘She likes the ice creams at Elephant House,’ I said. ‘She wishes to go into the theatre. To be an actress.’ Daniels grasped at that false straw.

‘There’s a theatrical company on the ship. Perhaps I could introduce her …’

I nodded, as if recommending it, and the next day I saw him speaking to three members of the Jankla Troupe, entertainers on their way to Europe to perform their brand of street theatre and acrobatics, but they were also giving occasional performances for passengers during the journey. They would juggle, sometimes casually at the end of an afternoon tea with their plates and cups, but most of the time they appeared formally, in full costume and excessive make-up. Best of all, they would call passengers up to the improvised stage in order to reveal private things about them, which were sometimes embarrassing. Mostly the revelations involved the location of a lost wallet or ring, or the fact that the passenger was going to Europe to be with a relative who was ill. These things were announced by The Hyderabad Mind, whose face was streaked with purple and whose eyes, rimmed with white paint, looked as if they might have belonged to a giant. Really, he could terrify us, for he would stroll into the depths of the audience to pronounce the number of children a person had, or where his wife had been born.

Late one afternoon, wandering alone on C Deck, I saw The Hyderabad Mind crouching under a lifeboat, putting on his make-up before a performance. He was holding a small mirror in one hand, while the other quickly gashed on stripes of purple paint. The Hyderabad Mind had a slight body, so that the painted head seemed too big for his delicate frame. He peered into the mirror, unaware of me a few feet away as he improved himself in the half-shadow of the lifeboat that hung from the davits. Then he stood, and as he stepped into sunlight the colours burst forward, the ghoulish eyes now full of sulphur and perception. He glanced at me and walked past as if I were nothing. I had witnessed for the first time what possibly took place behind the thin curtain of art, and it gave me some protection the next time I saw him onstage, decked out in full costume. I felt I could almost see, or at least now was aware of, the skeleton within.

It was Cassius who loved the Jankla Troupe most. He was eager to join as a member, especially after Ramadhin called us over excitedly one day to say he had seen one of the troupe remove a watch from the wrist of a man he was giving directions to. It was so subtle the passenger was completely unaware of the loss. Two afternoons later, The Hyderabad Mind strolled into the audience and told the man where his watch ‘might’ be if he happened to be missing it. This was brilliant. An earring, a valise, the typewriter from a stateroom were lifted and then fenced to The Hyderabad Mind, and eventually their locations revealed to the owners. When we told Mr Daniels about our discovery, he simply laughed and said it was similar to the art of fly-fishing.

But before Mr Daniels had known about this aspect of the troupe, he simply introduced himself to its members, and said he had a good friend, Miss Emily de Saram, a very talented young lady who loved the theatre, and perhaps she could watch them rehearse if he brought her along? Which he eventually did, I gather, a day or two later, although how much interest in theatre Emily had, I do not know. In any case, this was how she met The Hyderabad Mind and how she went on to live a life different from the one that was expected.

Apart from what we clearly saw as his softness towards Emily, we were not that curious about Mr Daniels. Although nowadays I would probably enjoy the man, would want to walk through some botanical garden of his, listening to him speak of the unusual qualities of a plant we were passing, the fronds and palms and hedgerows brushing our arms.

One afternoon he gathered the three of us and took us where he had promised – into the bowels of the ship. We went through a foreroom where there was a rush of air from two turbine fans linked with the engine room. Mr Daniels had a key, and with it we entered the hold – a cave of darkness that disappeared down several levels into the ship. In the distance below us we could make out a few lights. We climbed down a metal ladder attached to the wall, going by levels full of crates and sacks and giant slabs of raw rubber with its intoxicating smell. We heard the loud croaking purr of a chicken run and laughed at the birds’ sudden silence when they became aware of us. We heard rushing water in the walls, which Mr Daniels explained was water being de-salinated after being drawn out of the sea.

Reaching the bottom level of the hold, Mr Daniels set off into the darkness. We followed a path of dim lights that hung just above our heads. He turned right after about fifty yards, and there we came upon the mural Mr Nevil had told me about, of women astride gun barrels. I was startled by its size. The figures were twice as big as we were, and they were smiling and waving though they had no clothes on and the landscape behind them was desert. ‘Uncle …’ Cassius kept asking, ‘what is that?’ But Mr Daniels would not let us pause and herded us on.

Then we saw a golden light. It was more than that. As we came closer it was a field of colours. This was the ‘garden’ Mr Daniels was transporting to Europe. We stood in front of it, and then Cassius and I and even Ramadhin began racing through the narrow aisles, leaving Mr Daniels behind in a crouch, studying a plant. How big was this garden? We were never certain, because not all of it was ever fully lit at the same time, for the grow lights that simulated sunshine turned on and off independently. And there must have been other sections we never saw during that journey. I don’t even recall its shape. It feels now as if we dreamt it, that it possibly did not exist at the end of that ten-minute walk in the darkness of the hold. Now and then a mist filled the air, and we would raise our faces to receive the fine rain. Some plants were taller than we were. Some were titchy things no higher than our ankles. We put our arms out and patted the ferns as we passed them.

‘Don’t touch!’ Mr Daniels said, pulling down my outstretched hand. ‘That’s
Strychnos nux vomica
. Be careful – it has an alluring smell, especially at night. It almost tempts you to break open that green shell, doesn’t it? It looks like your Colombo
bael
fruit, but it isn’t. It’s a strychnine. These with their flowers facing down are angel’s trumpet. The ones facing up, wickedly beautiful, are devil’s trumpet. And here’s
Scrophulariaceae
, the snapdragon, also deceptively attractive. Even if you just sniff these, you will feel woozy.’

Cassius inhaled deeply and staggered back dramatically and ‘passed out’, crushing a few frail herbs with his elbow. Mr Daniels went over to move his arm away from an innocent-looking fern.

‘Plants have remarkable powers, Cassius. This one’s juice keeps your hair black and your fingernails growing at a healthy rate. Over there, those blue ones—’

‘A garden on a ship!’ Mr Daniels’s secret had impressed even Cassius.

‘Noah …’ said Ramadhin quietly.

‘Yes. And remember, the sea is also a garden, a poet tells us. Now, come over here. I think I saw the three of you smoking bits of that cane chair the other day … This will be better for you.’

He bent down and we crouched with him while he plucked some heart-shaped leaves. ‘These are
Piper
betel leaves,’ he said, placing them on my open palm. He moved on, picked up some slaked lime from a cache and combined it with slivers of areca nut he had in a jute bag, and handed the mixture to Cassius.

Within minutes we were proceeding along that modestly lit path chewing betel. We were familiar with the mild street intoxicant. And as Mr Daniels had pointed out, it was safer for Ramadhin than smoking a cane chair. ‘If you go to a wedding, they sometimes add a sliver of gold to the cardamom and lime paste.’ He gave us a small hoard of these ingredients, along with some dehydrated tobacco leaves, which we decided to save for our predawn strolls, when we could spit the red fluid over the railings into the rushing sea or down into the darkness of the foghorns. The three of us walked with Mr Daniels along the various paths. We had been at sea for days, and the range of colours had been limited to white and grey and blue, save for a few sunsets. But now, in this artificially lit garden, the plants exaggerated their greens and blues and extreme yellows, all of them dazzling us. Cassius asked Mr Daniels for more details about poisons. We were hoping he might tell us about a herb or a seed that could overpower an unlikeable adult, but Mr Daniels would say nothing about such things.

We left the garden and returned through the blackness of the hold. When we passed the mural of naked women, Cassius once again asked, ‘What is
that
, Uncle?’ Then we climbed the metal ladder back to deck level. It was more difficult going up. Mr Daniels was almost a flight above us, and by the time we got to the top he was outside smoking a beedi that was rolled in white paper rather than a brown leaf. He stood with it cupped in his left hand and seemed suddenly keen to lecture us about palms from all over the world. He imitated how they stood and how they swayed, depending on heritage or breed, how they would bend with the wind in their submissiveness. He kept showing us the various palm postures until he had us laughing. Then he offered us the cigarette and demonstrated how to inhale it. Cassius had been eyeing it, but Mr Daniels gave it first to me and the beedi went back and forth among us.

‘Unusual beedi,’ Cassius said slowly.

Ramadhin took a second puff and said, ‘Do the palm trees again, Uncle!’ And Mr Daniels proceeded to distinguish for us more of the various postures. ‘This of course is the talipot, the umbrella palm,’ he said. ‘You get your toddy from it, and jaggery. She moves this way.’ Then he imitated a royal palm from the Cameroons, which grew in freshwater swamps. Then something from the Azores, followed by a slender-trunked one from New Guinea, his arms becoming its elongated fronds. He compared how they shifted in the wind, some fussily, some with just a sidelong twist of the trunk, so they could face the strongest winds with their narrowest edge.

‘Aerodynamics …
very
important. Trees are smarter than humans. Even a lily is better than a human. Trees are like whippets …’

We were laughing and laughing at all the poses he struck. But suddenly the three of us ran away from him. We screamed as we raced through the women’s badminton semi-finals, and leapt cannonballing, with all our clothes on, into the swimming pool. We even got out and dragged a few deckchairs back in with us. It was the popular hour, and mothers with infants were trying to avoid us. We released all the breath from our bodies and sank to the bottom and stood there waving our arms softly like Mr Daniels’s palm trees, wishing he could see us.