The Hamilton Case (20 page)

At the far end of the house, Padma, with her husband deep inside her, heard the pitch and fall of that recital. The servants’ room was pungent with coconut oil. On a tea chest draped with a length of eau-de-Nil satin that had once been a pajama leg, a lamp glowed before an eight-inch plaster statue of the Virgin: a wedding gift from the nuns. At some point on their tossing voyage from Liverpool six hundred shoddily stowed madonnas had suffered fractured halos and chipped hands. When the crate was levered open in Colombo a shrewd bishop converted pecuniary disappointment into the conviction that deserving orphans the island over would see only the gorgeousness of gold paint, the horizon-blue sweep of that mantle.

The pair laboring in the room knew they were envied. They ate rice twice a day, they had a tiled roof over their heads, the work of caring for an old woman and a dilapidated house could not be described as arduous. Yet long after the shadows rearing on the wall beside her had quieted, Padma lay sleepless. This was the compass of it, rotting in the jungle with those cracked tones invading her skull. She knew the place was
moospainthu
. It blighted her cooking. Curries emerged from that kitchen as bland as milk, or so fiery they drew tears. Sauces refused to thicken. A jungle fowl simmered for two hours ended as bone wound with glutinous string. Liquids evaporated or boiled over as soon as she glanced away. Even dishes that seemed faultless when eaten returned to the back of the throat as a putrid tang.

Her husband scoffed at her talk of enchantment. He passed freely through the house, untroubled by its humors. There were seasons when Padma saw milky molecules coalesce on a verandah or gather in a doorway. The contrast between light and shade was more violently marked at these times. Forms sharpened, a table or pillar taking on an etched distinctiveness, the world waxing resolute in the face of an encroachment. Sirisena noticed nothing. Padma kept to the kitchen, where a stew ruined inexplicably. She crossed herself. In the enclosure where chickens pecked she scraped charred flesh from the pot, her nostrils flaring against the crusty stench.

There was a snake coiled on Maud’s pillow. She shouted and sprang away, but when Sirisena came running in it was only her housecoat, a careless twist of chiffon. The lid of a tureen became a mirror that reflected everything except her face. She reached for a cake of gardenia soap and found it fringed with fish hooks. There was also a bird, feathered brown and dusty purple, perched on a brass curtain rod or stepping along the back of a chair; or, horribly, gazing up at her, a prickle of claws along her instep.

At the far end of an empty verandah, a child slid into view. His arms were folded over an object he clutched to his chest but his face was in shadow. She took half a step forward and he wasn’t there. But what set her heart knocking was the certainty, sudden as a blow, that something essential had eluded her.

The place itself eroded the distinction between perception and hallucination. It hung a devil mask in a flamboyante tree, a bold gray langur monkey whose mocking face presided over the drive. It impaled a turquoise rag on a twig and then, when Maud reached for it, bewitched by that brilliance, slipped a rotting wing into her fingers. Nothing was as it seemed. Nothing stayed the same. Flowers staged brief, violent dramas, blazing and dropping within the day. A cloud burst and sticks exploded into tender green leaves. A scratch on the bungalow keeper’s heel blossomed overnight, unfolding petals of yellow pus. Maud turned her head away from a bloated pi dog that lay stinking by the roadside, held fast in a trembling mesh of red ants; an hour later it had been picked clean of all corruption.

The alchemy of change, hostile to all patterning, worked with dizzying swiftness. The carter who carried away the nightsoil from the servants’ lavatory was always accompanied by his daughter, a capering four-year-old in a filthy pink skirt. One morning the little girl was not there. Her father wept by the kitchen door, relating how the child, usually as robust as a coconut, had complained of a stiff neck the previous afternoon and was dead by nightfall. For the first time in Maud’s life there was nothing to distract her from these mutations. They induced nausea, like lines of print held too close to the eye. It was a matter of perspective. Trying to adjust itself, her mind swung a little loose on its hinges.

Looking back on those months, she would picture them marbled with lunacy. She continued to observe the rituals that keep a life from fraying, but observed them oddly, a bath lit with candles at midnight, a table set under the mango tree at four in the afternoon. Ordinary things, some ugly, entranced her. She might turn a spoon in her hands for hours, as if to discover its function or marvel at its perfection. She studied the small jeweled flies that settled on the slice of papaw before her and made no motion to disturb their feeding. For two or three days at a stretch her mind would be inhabited by a detailed eroticism, bright lewd images succeeding each other swiftly like postcards thumbed to excite desire: the bungalow keeper naked and priapic before her, her cousin Iris stroking a faceless girl who knelt between her thighs.

It was an interval of heightened, almost painful sensations. Objects she had handled unthinkingly—a towel, a nail file—turned velvety and repulsive to the touch. Colors flared more forcefully, and translated themselves into flavors, the blue-black of a crow experienced as a thick plummy sweetness, the scarlet of canna rising in her nose like mustard. The place would not be reduced to background. It cast nets of leaves about her. It caressed her arms with its warm yellow tongue.

Madness seemed as inviting as cool sheets. She spent an afternoon crouching in her almirah, among the discarded skins of her evening gowns. After a while the conviction came to her that this finery should not be left to rot in the dark. The next morning she trod the length of the verandah in bare feet and midnight-blue lace. Sam found her glittery-eyed in a carapace of bronze beading, her greasy playing cards fanned out before her. He caught a whiff of spice. She turned her head and he saw that she had inserted a clove in each earlobe in lieu of a jewel.

He had opened his mouth to inform her that she had stepped over a boundary, when she rose from her chair. Even barefoot she was taller by half a head. He tightened his lips, carried his bouquet of chits to his room, slipped the car into gear while the sky was still dim the next morning.

W
hen the doctor confirmed what Leela already knew, she registered only the dull anticipation that her condition now aroused in her. But this time she began each day vomiting into a blue-rimmed enamel basin. It went on for hour after hour. There was a respite in the afternoon, when she trembled with exhaustion on her bed, a hummock of feeble flesh with a handkerchief soaked in eau de cologne across her temples. Shark cooked in a white curry that contains fenugreek seeds encourages the flow of a woman’s milk, so she forced herself to swallow a few spoonfuls with rice each day.
Nivithi sambol
too was prepared daily, as spinach develops a baby’s brain. Then Soma was holding the
nonamahatheya
’s head over the basin again. Four months later when the vomiting ended, the child had still not dislodged itself.

There was a prickling sensation, like pins and needles, running along Leela’s arms. She realized it was hope, exercising itself with the caution of a limb grown numb from disuse.

The first time, she had sewn and embroidered dozens of baby shirts in graded sizes. Also bibs and satin-stitched pillow slips, and bath sheets with yellow ducks appliquéd along the borders. One day she opened a chest that had remained padlocked for years and folded back layers of tissue paper. Soma, padding in with her broom, found the
nonamahatheya
surrounded by scraps of lace and lawn and cotton. Leela held up an exquisite little shirt, white shantung with blue smocking at the yoke and wrists, for the girl to admire. But Soma recoiled. Here was the source of the evil, she declared, in her slow, flat voice, these ghost babies hungry for life and sucking it out of her mistress. Their presence in the house was
moospainthu
.

The next day Tissa sent his boy to the kitchen door to say there were two Rodi women at the gate. Buddhists shunned contact with the Rodiya, considering them unclean; yet they made their living by begging and were rarely turned away from a house. They were believed to possess second sight and the evil eye, and it was judged unwise to cross them.

Usually it fell to Tissa’s boy to deposit food and coins in their trowel-shaped bowls, which he was careful not to touch. That afternoon the
nonamahatheya
herself came out of the house, carrying boiled rice, curried bitter gourd, salt fish and a rustling parcel done up in brown paper. The Rodi women under the jacaranda watched in silence as the bulky figure crossed the lawn, an ungainly woman rendered clumsier by pregnancy. Approaching those emaciated effigies, with sweat pooling under her breasts, Leela was aware of how much space she occupied in the world.

In a mud-colored sling across her chest one of the beggars carried a baby with yellow crusts along its eyes. It was to this woman that Leela presented her parcel. At that, the other Rodiya seized her hand, turned it over, ran the ball of her thumb hard across Leela’s palm. “The child will be a boy,” she said. “Healthy, strong. There is nothing to fear.”

She was turning away from them when the woman with the baby spoke. “The first one will come for you before your son’s milk teeth have fallen.”

O
ne evening the lights dipped and flickered. Then they went out. That in itself was not unusual; the supply of electricity to Lokugama was at best unreliable. But then a woman screamed from the rear of the house: a drawn-out wail followed by three strangulated notes. Frozen on the verandah, Maud thought, Sirisena has murdered his wife. Now he will come after me.

After an eternity dull footsteps approached. The bungalow keeper carried a candle stuck to a saucer. Maud looked at his hands, club-thumbed and blunt-edged, and hoped it would be over quickly.

He said, “
Nonamahatheya
, dinner is served.”

Afterward, when he was clearing the table, she asked, “Who was that woman screaming at the back?”

“That was the devil-bird.”

At once her mind was brushed with purple and brown feathers, a curved beak waiting for the moment her attention faltered. But Sirisena went on talking. “In our village they say there was a woman whose husband killed her because he suspected the child she was carrying was not his. He buried her body with the child still alive inside her. Now she roams the jungle at night, and from time to time she cries out to warn another woman of violent death.”

She asked what this bird looked like.

He shook his head. “No one has ever seen it. But it cries,
Magai lamaya ko? Magai lamaya ko?
”

“Where is my child.”

He said, “These are only stories.”

A week later he returned from market bringing news of a girl who had been discovered in a jungle grave with her throat cut. The police sergeant had put his boot on the corpse of a chameleon that lay nearby. “That’s the mark of the devil-bird. It always leaves a dead lizard to show that it passed.”

At times Maud was convinced that the walls pressed about her, a ceiling lower than she recalled, a corridor narrowing at her step. Yet the house was emptier than it had ever been. As a girl, she had passed through its overstuffed rooms and understood at once what she was witnessing: the delusion that, given an adequate weight of chesterfields and candelabra, sufficient swathes of linen and plum-red velvet, domesticity would prevail in that setting. In certain moods she had been apt to see the illogic of Sir Stanley’s architecture as expressing a fundamental dissonance between the bones of order that held the household rigidly upright and the decay at work everywhere under that roof.

It was a sentiment that had overwhelmed her one evening, in the third year of her marriage, halfway through one of her famous cold buffet suppers: such a waste of endeavor, this pitting of talk and jellied venison against the soft snarl of the jungle. She set down her glass. Twenty yards from the gate, lamplight and braided music and embroidered satin shoes might never have existed.

Now, as she trailed her own footprints in and out of rooms, Maud thought how greatly the house had improved since Sam had stripped it. A tension had seeped from its shell, dissipating through yawning boards and cracked panes. She lingered in an echoing chamber that bats had colonized one year; although it had been scraped clean of excrement, the smell was still bad. Yet the sullen resentment that used to sour the breath of the place was gone.

She flipped a little nipple and shadows rolled into corners. But electricity in that house cast a weak, grayish light. It suggested something haggard waiting just beyond its reach.

The bird with the dragging, purple wings no longer tormented her. Instead, footsteps sounded along the verandah, a dry pattering as of grains spilling from a sack. Maud thought of the child she had glimpsed with his arms folded to his chest. She told herself he was a creature concocted by her brain, a thing of addled chemistry. Nevertheless she lay awake at night, listening. Something was sobbing on the other side of the wall. Years before, when she herself was still a girl, one of her children had died in that room. Her lips framed a soundless question:
Magai lamaya ko? Magai lamaya ko?

In the weeks following Leo’s death Maud had willed herself not to think of him. It was not, after all, so difficult. He had spent only two hundred days in the world. She slept fourteen hours a night, having swallowed the powders prescribed for her. Later, when she allowed herself to remember him—on the anniversary of his birth, or death—she found that the baby was no longer himself but a cluster of sensations associated with him: sadness, a vague odor of cloves, the crimson and ivory upholstery of the Panhard his father had bought soon after he was born. Now, precise images of Leo’s flesh flowed through her mind: a kinked toe on his left foot, the downy sphere of his skull. His clean pink yawn. “Little lion,” she said, and blew onto his scalp. “Little beast.” He batted the air above his chest.