The Cat’s Table (5 page)

The Turbine Room

WE NEEDED TO stay up to witness what took place on the ship late at night, but we were already exhausted from waking before sunrise. Ramadhin proposed we sleep in the afternoons, as we had done as children. At boarding school we had scorned these afternoon naps, but now we saw that they might be useful. However, there were problems. Ramadhin was billeted next to a cabin where, he claimed, a couple were laughing and groaning and screeching during the afternoons, while the cabin next to mine was occupied by a woman who practised the violin, the sound easing its way through the metal wall into my room. Just screeching, I said, no laughing. I could even hear her argue with herself between the impossible-to-ignore squawks and plucks. As well, the temperature in these lower cabins that had no portholes was horrific. Any anger I had towards the violin player was modified by knowing that she was also probably perspiring, and likely wearing the bare minimum to be respectable to herself. I never saw her, had no knowledge of what she looked like, or of what she was trying to perfect with that instrument. These did not seem to be Mr Sidney Bechet’s ‘formal and luxurious’ notes. She was just repeating the notes and runs endlessly, then hesitating, and beginning again, with that film of sweat on her shoulders and arms as she spent those afternoons alone, so busy, in the cabin next to mine.

We three were also missing one another’s company. In any case, Cassius felt we needed a permanent headquarters, so we chose the small turbine room we’d entered before our descent into the hold with Mr Daniels. And it was here, in the semi-darkness and coolness, with a few blankets and some borrowed lifejackets, that we created a nest for ourselves during some of the afternoons. We would chat for a bit and then sleep soundly in the midst of the loud roar of those fans, preparing ourselves for the long evenings.

But our night investigations were not successful. We were never sure of what we were witnessing, so that our minds were half grabbing the rigging of adult possibility. On one ‘night watch’ we hid in the shadows of the Promenade Deck and at random followed a man, just to see where he was going. I recognised him as the performer who dressed up as The Hyderabad Mind, whose name we had been told was Sunil. Somewhat surprisingly, he led us to Emily, who was leaning against a railing, wearing a white dress that seemed to glow as he went closer. The Hyderabad Mind half covered her, and she held his fingers cupped within her hands. We could not tell if they were talking.

We stepped back, further into the darkness, and waited. I saw the man move the strap of her dress and bring his face down to her shoulder. Her head was back, looking up at the stars, if there were stars.

THE THREE WEEKS of the sea journey, as I originally remembered it, were placid. It is only now, years later, having been prompted by my children to describe the voyage, that it becomes an adventure, when seen through their eyes, even something significant in a life. A rite of passage. But the truth is, grandeur had not been added to my life but had been taken away. As night approached, I missed the chorus of insects, the howls of garden birds, gecko talk. And at dawn, the rain in the trees, the wet tar on Bullers Road, rope burning on the street that was always one of the first palpable smells of the day.

Some mornings in Boralesgamuwa, I used to wake early and make my way through the dark, spacious bungalow until I came to Narayan’s door. It was not yet six o’clock. I waited until he came out, tugging his sarong tighter. He’d nod to me, and within a couple of minutes we’d be walking quickly and in silence across the wet grass. He was a very tall man, and I was a boy of eight or nine. Both of us were barefoot. We approached the wooden shack at the foot of the garden. When we were inside, Narayan lit a stump of candle and then crouched with the yellow light and pulled the cord that burst the generator into life.

So my days began with the muffled shaking and banging of this creature that gave off the delicious smell of petrol and smoke. The habits and weaknesses of the generator, circa 1944, were understood only by Narayan. Gradually he calmed it and we’d go into the open air, and in the last of the darkness, I’d see lights go on haltingly all over my uncle’s house.

The two of us walked through a gate onto the High Level Road. A few stores were already open, each lit by a single bulb. At Jinadasa’s we bought egg hoppers, and ate them in the middle of the almost deserted street, cups of tea at our feet. Bullock carts heaved by, creaking, their drivers and even the bullocks half asleep. I always joined Narayan for this dawn meal after he awakened the generator. Breakfast with him on the High Level Road was not to be missed, even though it meant I would have to consume another, more official breakfast with the family an hour or two later. But it was almost heroic to walk with Narayan in the dissolving dark, greeting the waking merchants, watching him bend to light his beedi on a piece of hemp rope by the cigarette stall.

Narayan and Gunepala, the cook, were my constant companions when I was a child, and I probably spent more time with them than with my family and learned much from them. I watched Narayan loosen the blades from a lawnmower in order to sharpen them, or oil the chain on his bicycle tenderly with his open palm. Whenever we were in Galle, Narayan and Gunepala and I would climb down the ramparts to the sea and swim out so they could fish on the reef for dinner. Late in the evening I’d be found asleep at the foot of my ayah’s bed and have to be carried by my uncle to my room. Gunepala, who could be bitter and short-tempered, was a perfectionist. I’d watch him pick out any questionable food from a boiling pot with his calloused fingers and fling it ten feet away into the flower beds – a chicken bone or an overripe
thakkali
, which would be eaten instantly by the rice hounds that hovered about, knowing this habit of his. Gunepala argued with everyone – shopkeepers, lottery ticket salesmen, inquisitive policemen – but he was aware of a universe invisible to the rest of us. As he cooked he whistled a variety of birdcalls rarely heard in the city, familiar to him from his childhood. No one else had that particular focus on what was or could be audible to us. One afternoon he woke me from a deep sleep, took me by the hand, and made me lie down beside some bullock manure on the driveway that had been there for several hours. He pulled me right down beside it and made me listen to the insects
inside
the shit, consuming this feast and tunnelling from one end of the faeces to the other. In his spare time he taught me alternative verses to popular
bailas
that were full of obscenities, swearing me not to repeat them, as they referred to well-known gentry.

Narayan and Gunepala were my essential and affectionate guides during that unformed stage of my life, and in some way they made me question the world I supposedly belonged to. They opened doors for me into another world. When I left the country at the age of eleven, I grieved most over losing them. A thousand years later, I came upon the novels of the Indian writer R. K. Narayan in a London bookstore. I bought every one and imagined they were by my never forgotten friend Narayan. I saw his face behind the sentences, imagined his tall body sitting at a humble desk by his small bedroom window, knocking off a chapter about Malgudi before being called by my aunt to do something or other. ‘
The streets would be quite dark when I set out to the river for my ablutions, except for the municipal lamps which flickered (if they had not run out of oil) here and there in our street … All along the way I had my well-defined encounters. The milkman, starting on his rounds, driving ahead of him a puny white cow, greeted me respectfully and asked, “What is the time, master?” – a question I allowed to die without a reply as I carried no watch … The watchman at the Taluk office called from beneath his rug, “Is that you?” – the only question which deserved a reply. “Yes, it’s me,” I always said and passed on
.’

I knew my friend had perceived such details on our morning walks along the High Level Road. I knew the bullock cart driver, I knew the asthmatic who ran the cigarette stall.

*

AND THEN, ONE day, I smelled burning hemp on the ship. For a moment I stood still, then moved towards a staircase where it was stronger, hesitated about whether to go down or up, then climbed the stairs. The smell was coming from a corridor on D level. I stopped where it seemed strongest, got on my knees, and sniffed at the inch of crack under the metal door. I knocked quietly.

‘Yes?’

I went in.

Sitting at a desk was a gentle-looking man. The room had a porthole. It was open, and the smoke from a rope whose end was burning seemed to follow a path over the man’s shoulder and out the porthole. ‘Yes?’ he asked again.

‘I like the smell. I miss it.’

He smiled at me and gestured to a space on his bed where I could sit. He pulled open a drawer and brought out a coil of rope a yard long. It was the same sort of hemp rope that hung slowly burning outside the cigarette stalls in Bambalapitiya or the Pettah market, anywhere in the city, really, where you lit the single smoke you had just bought there; or, if you were running and wanted to cause a disturbance, you used the end of the burning coil to light the fuse of a firecracker.

‘I know I shall miss it too,’ he said. ‘And other things.
Kothamalli
. Balsam. I have such things in my suitcase. For I am leaving forever.’ He looked away for a moment. It was as if he had said it aloud to himself for the first time.

‘What is your name?’

‘Michael,’ I said.

‘If you are lonely, Michael, you can always come here.’

I nodded, then slipped out and closed the door behind me.

His name was Mr Fonseka and he was travelling to England to be a teacher. I would visit him every few days. He knew passages from all kinds of books he could recite by heart, and he sat at his desk all day wondering about them, thinking what he could say about them. I knew scarcely a thing about the world of literature, but he welcomed me with unusual and interesting stories, stopping abruptly in mid-tale and saying that someday I should find out what happened after that. ‘You will like it, I think. Perhaps he will find the eagle.’ Or, ‘They will escape the maze with the help of someone they are about to meet …’ Often, during the night, while stalking the adult world with Ramadhin and Cassius, I’d attempt to add to the bare bones of an adventure Mr Fonseka had left unfinished.

He was gracious, with his quietness. When he spoke, he was tentative and languid. Even then I understood his rareness by the pace of his gestures. He stood up only when it was essential, as if he were a sick cat. He was not used to public effort, even though he was now going to be a part of a public world as a teacher of literature and history in England.

I tried to coax him up on deck a few times, but his porthole and what he could see through it seemed enough nature for him. With his books, his burning rope, some bottled Kelani River water, as well as a few family photographs, he had no need to leave his time capsule. I would visit that smoky room if the day was dull, and he would at some point begin reading to me. It was the anonymity of the stories and the poems that went deepest into me. And the curl of a rhyme was something new. I had not thought to believe he was actually quoting something written with care, in some far country, centuries earlier. He had lived in Colombo all his life, and his manner and accent were a product of the island, but at the same time he had this wide-ranging knowledge of books. He’d sing a song from the Azores or recite lines from an Irish play.

I brought Cassius and Ramadhin to meet him. He had become curious about them, and he made me tell him of our adventures on the ship. He beguiled them as well, especially Ramadhin. Mr Fonseka seemed to draw forth an assurance or a calming quality from the books he read. He’d gaze into an unimaginable distance (one could almost see the dates flying off the calendar) and quote lines written in stone or papyrus. I suppose he remembered these things to clarify his own opinion, like a man buttoning up his own sweater to give warmth just to himself. Mr Fonseka would not be a wealthy man. And it would be a spare life he would be certain to lead as a schoolteacher in some urban location. But he had a serenity that came with the choice of the life he wanted to live. And this serenity and certainty I have seen only among those who have the armour of books close by.

I am aware of the pathos and the irony that come with such a portrait. All those foxed Penguin editions of Orwell and Gissing and the translations of Lucretius with their purple borders that he was bringing with him. He must have believed it would be a humble but good life for an Asian living in England, where something like his Latin grammar could be a distinguishing sword.

I wonder what happened to him. Every few years, whenever I remember, I will look up any reference to Fonseka in a library. I do know that Ramadhin kept in touch with him during his early years in England. But I did not. Though I did realise that people like Mr Fonseka came before us like innocent knights in a more dangerous time, and on the very same path we ourselves were taking now, and at every step there were no doubt the same lessons,
not
poems, to learn brutally by heart, just as there was the discovery of the good and cheap Indian restaurant in Lewisham, and the similar opening up and sealing of blue aerogrammes to Ceylon and later to Sri Lanka, and the same slights and insults and embarrassments over the pronouncing of the letter
v
and our rushed manner of speaking, and most of all the difficulty of
entrance
, and then perhaps a modest acceptance and ease in some similar cabinlike flat.

I think about Mr Fonseka at those English schools wearing his buttoned sweater to protect himself from English weather, and wonder how long he stayed there, and if he did really stay ‘forever’. Or whether in the end he could no longer survive it, even though for him it was ‘the centre of culture’, and instead returned home on an Air Lanka flight that took only two-thirds of a day, to begin again, teaching in a place like Nugegoda.
London returned
. Were all those memorised paragraphs and stanzas of the European canon he brought back the equivalent of a coil of hemp or a bottle of river water? Did he adapt them or translate them, insist on teaching them in a village school, on a blackboard in the sunlight, the rough call of forest birds screeching nearby? Some idea of order at Nugegoda?