Mosquito
Roma Tearne
For Barrie, who understood,
and for Oliver and Alistair and Mollie
…they are places that don’t belong to geography but to time.
Saul Steinberg,
Reflections and Shadows
T
HE CATAMARAN, ITS BLUE-PATCHED SAILS
no longer flapping, its nets full of glistening catch, came in after the night’s fishing. The breeze had died down, the air had cooled, and the fishermen’s sarongs slapped wet against their legs as they swung the boat above the water, to and fro, and up and along the empty beach, scoring a dark, deep ridge in the sand. Often, before the monsoon broke, the sea was like a mirror. The sky appeared joined to it with barely a seam, there was a faint vibration of thunder and along the shoreline the air hung in hazy folds, suspended between land, and sea, and sky. In a few hours the heat would spread insidiously, hovering with the mosquitoes and the spiders that waited motionless and lethargic, trapped by their own clammy inertia. But still there was no storm. Every year it was like this, before the monsoon, for three or four days, sometimes even longer. Every year, around the third week in June, a yellowing stickiness, a blistering oppression clung everywhere, so that even the bougainvillea lost its radiance.
Theo Samarajeeva walked back from the beach with fresh fish for lunch. It was still early. The manservant, Sugi, had
brought breakfast out on to the veranda. A black-and-gold lacquered tray with a white cloth was placed on the cane table. There was a silver teapot, a jug of boiled milk, one cup and a saucer. There was some freshly cut pineapple and some curd and roti.
‘You had better get the lime juice ready, Sugi,’ said Theo Samarajeeva wryly, hearing the gate click shut. The manservant grinned and went inside.
‘You see, by a process of elimination I knew you would be coming here,’ Theo said, turning towards the gate by way of greeting.
‘How?’ asked Nulani Mendis, appearing, sitting down opposite him, and helping herself to the glass the manservant held out to her. Theo Samarajeeva watched as she drank. He watched her gasp as the cool, sharp liquid caught in her throat. He noticed that her fingernails had small slivers of paint under them. She wore a green skirt wrapped tightly around her waist, and a soft faded white blouse of some thin opaque fabric. The skirt was old, and almost exactly the colour of the lime juice.
‘How did you know I would come today?’ she demanded again when she had finished drinking.
‘Well,’ said Theo, ‘I saw you walking on the beach earlier, and as I hadn’t seen you for at least twenty-four hours I told Sugi: Ah! Miss Nulani will be here later so don’t forget her lime.’
Nulani smiled guiltily, remembering she was meant to go straight home.
‘So, poor Mrs Mendis still waits for her daughter, no?’ he guessed.
Inside, in the dark interior of the house, music was playing on the radiogram. It floated out through the open windows, tripping effortlessly down the steps from the veranda before dispersing into the trees.
‘I’ve been drawing,’ said Nulani, taking out a small notebook from her satchel. ‘Look!’
She moved her chair closer to his, giving him the book. Images rose out of it, they fell hither and thither, marvellously, on to his knees. A man sat under a tamarind tree, another squatted in the narrow spit of shade afforded by a house. A woman stretched out on a makeshift bed staring at the rough edges of a palm roof through the bars of the window. Someone, a middle-aged man, lean legs stretched in front of him, was writing, head bent at a table. He had a cigarette in his left hand and behind him was the blur of tropical trees.
‘This is me, no? When did you do this one?’
‘Yesterday,’ said Nulani, laughing. ‘I was hiding over there, you didn’t see me.’
‘You little pest! Why didn’t you make yourself known? Sugi had made a fine red mullet curry. You could have eaten with me.’
‘You are not angry?’
‘I feel the bushes have eyes,’ he teased her. ‘I shall have to watch everything from now on. No talking to myself any more! But seriously, these are good. Are you going to use them in a painting?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Nulani, frowning. ‘Do you really like them?’ And boldly, ‘I want to paint you. But…’
Theo considered her. For a moment he felt lost for words. Nulani Mendis had been visiting him for nearly three months now. It had begun when he had first moved to this part of the island. The convent school had invited him to give a talk on his latest book. He had not long been back from the UK, some perversity making him give up the modest success he enjoyed there. People thought him mad. The Liberation Tigers had been demanding a separate Tamil state for years with no success. Civil unrest grew daily. Then, after Singhala was made the national language, discrimination against the Tamils became
commonplace. A potential guerrilla war was simmering. Why did he want to go back to that hell? they asked. Was he off his head? An established writer, with a comfortable life in London, his own flat, his work, what could he want with Colombo? Was it not enough writing books on the impending violence, did he want to
live
it too? But, he had no ties. Perhaps it was sentimentality in early middle age? Perhaps the terrible events from the past had finally got to him, they said.
Theo could not explain. He himself barely understood this sudden compulsion, this urgency to go home. It was a time when everyone who could was escaping. Perhaps simply because he no longer had anything to escape from, going back was not a problem. So he told his agent he would work better if he had some sun and, putting his flat on the market, he left. The agent said nothing, thinking privately that what Theo really needed was some distraction, danger even. Do him good, thought the agent; add richness to this next book. Other men might have given up writing altogether after what he had been through, but Theo had carried on. He probably needed a complete change of scene, needed to put the past finally behind him. So, with this in mind, the agent encouraged him to go back, for a time at least.
It was 1996. While he had been away Sri Lanka had changed. The change confused Theo. He found himself remembering the liberal atmosphere of his youth. Where was it? In England, whatever corruption there was, was kept discreetly out of sight. Or maybe he was less critical because the British were not his own people. It was a different matter in Colombo where every small injustice, every appalling act of violence seemed a personal affront. The civil unrest he had predicted in his books, the beginnings of rage seemed to have been nurtured in his absence, and spread, like a newly germinated paddy field. He left Colombo, moved to a backwater, and began writing his fourth novel. His
second book was being made into a film and an article about him appeared in one of the papers. The local schools, having noticed it and having registered his arrival in the town, asked him to speak to the pupils. At first he had hesitated, worrying. But what was there worth worrying about in these troubled times? People had been garrotted for less outspoken views, so why did he care? His life would go on for as long as it would, or it simply would cease. Why worry? He was no longer a Buddhist, but Buddhism had worked on him like milk and honey nonetheless. He agreed to give two talks, one at the boys’ school and the other at the convent. Nulani Mendis had been one of the students. She had held her hand up and asked him several questions.
‘The girl hardly speaks,’ the teacher had told him afterwards. ‘Since her father was murdered she has become silent. The mother has given up trying to make her talk. All she does is draw, draw, draw.’
But on that day she had spoken to Theo and later, on one of his early-evening walks along the narrow strip of beach behind the house, he saw her again. He had smiled slightly, registering her good looks, and remembering the story of her father, he waved. But she seemed to vanish into the darkness. After that he kept seeing her and he guessed she lived nearby. Then Sugi caught her in the garden. She was drawing his stone lions. Sugi began complaining loudly.
‘Sir, sir, these local children are pests. They’ve started coming into the garden again. We need to get rid of them or they will multiply!’
Surprised, Theo came out and, recognising her, asked her name. Then he invited her, in spite of Sugi’s protest, to come over at any time and draw. This had been nearly three months ago. She never called him anything except Mr Samarajeeva. He supposed, wryly, that this was out of a sense of respect for his
age. But she came back, again and again, and, if she did not appear for a few days, he became inclined to drift into bad temper.
‘Can I go now?’ she asked, breaking into his reverie. ‘I want to draw the house from over there.’
She had been with him since breakfast.
‘Won’t you be late for school?’ he asked. ‘Does your mother know you are here?’
‘No,’ she said, disappearing around the side of the house. Her voice reached him from another part of the garden, vague and indistinct. ‘No, she’s out. And I’ve finished the jobs she gave me so I can go straight to school from here.’
Theo shook his head, amused in spite of himself. The manservant gave him a look that said clearly, ‘I told you, these local children are pests.’ But she’s different, thought Theo.
At first she came only once a week, barely speaking, staying further back in the garden. But as she grew bolder she seemed to be there all the time. Then, one day, out of the blue, she showed him her notebook for the first time. The sketches were all of him, delicate, and with a clear unwavering likeness. Startled, he took down his book of Picasso drawings and talked to her about the artist. After that she began to talk to him.
‘I will be seventeen in three months,’ she said.
On another afternoon she told him about her brother Jim. He was only eighteen months younger. She told him, they were not close.
‘It is our karma,’ she said solemnly. ‘We have brought it into this life.’
Their father, she said, had known most of this long before the astrologer came to visit. He told their mother, soon after the birth of Jim, he had seen it in a dream; the children would never be close. He could see it written on their faces, he had said, the girl child, and his infant son. Their mother, hearing
this pronouncement, had begun wailing. After all her labours was this the future? But their father told his wife sternly to stop her noise. Be thankful, he said, for the fact that both children were healthy. After puberty, he suspected, after they came of age, they would cross a great expanse of water, leave Sri Lanka. Go to mainland India even. It would be a good thing, he had said, for peace in this country was always uncertain. Thus had her father predicted, long before the astrologer came to plot their horoscopes, walking up the steps of the house. With his saffron robes and his sandals dusty with beach sand, and his black umbrella faded with the heat. Their father, not foreseeing his own death in the riots of the following June, felt the future of his children grow large in his own mind.
How long was it before she realised the strange masculine world inhabited by her brother was not for her, wondered Theo. Was it when she was still small? Did her understanding come, as all unshakeable beliefs do, not at any given moment but slowly, like seawater seeping into a hole dug on a beach? Lucky Jim could pace his domain freely, marking his undisputed territory, certain of his own image of the future. But what of Nulani?
Sometimes while her brother slept, before the father’s unpre-dicted death, when they were younger, Nulani told Theo, she would bend over Jim and smell the sugar-sweet baby scent of greenness on his skin, run her finger across an old scar that straddled the rounded grubbiness of his brown leg. Later when she was older, she told Theo, she stole a box of Venus B pencils (Made in Great Britain) from the house of their English neighbour, to draw her sleeping brother. But the neighbour found out and demanded she be punished for stealing. She returned the pencils; two of them were used and broken.
‘All right, Mrs Mendis,’ the neighbour, the Englishman, told her mother angrily, ‘I know it must be hard for you, with
your husband dead. But “render unto Caesar” and all that!’
He had laughed, without rhythm. Nulani had wondered if that was how the English laughed. She knew she would not be allowed into the Englishman’s house again. She would not be able to play with his daughter Carol any more; she would never be able to touch her shining golden hair.
‘Why did you take them?’ her brother had demanded. ‘Render unto Caesar,’ he had said, sounding like the Englishman.
Nulani’s uncle came. Because her father was no longer alive, it was his duty to beat her with an
ekel
stick.
‘Render unto Caesar,’ he had said. They were ashamed of her. The whole family avoided the neighbours now, eyes cast down whenever the jeep drove them about, into the city, to the beach, shopping.
‘See what you’ve done to us.’
Nulani could see. She stopped drawing her brother when he slept. She just looked at him. Her little brother. She was his
loku akka,
his big sister. Her father had said they would not be close. But no one, she told Mr Samarajeeva, not even the astrologer, had said she would not love him.
And now she came here to draw. Arriving early, leaving late. Always talking. Transformed.
‘Child,’ Theo said suddenly now, drifting back from his thoughts and realising the time, ‘you’ll be late for school.’
When there was no answer he went to look for her at the back of the garden, but then he heard the gate click again.
‘I’m late,’ she called, grinning at him, hurrying off. ‘But I’m coming back!’
And she disappeared up the hill with a wave of her hand.
They swarmed so thickly that they might easily have been mistaken for smoke. Rising swiftly from the water-filled holes dug by the
gem miners in their search for sapphire, the mosquitoes seemed suspended in reflected light. For a moment the holes appeared as mirrored surfaces, blue as the sky. Further out towards the coast the rainwater filled the upturned coconut shells, as they lay scattered across the groves. Here the beautiful female anopheles mosquitoes, graceful wings glinting in the sun, landed lightly and prepared to create a canoe of death for their cargo of eggs. The Ministry of Health sprayed the coconut groves with DDT to prevent outbreaks of malaria. The metallic smell drifted and mixed heavily with the scent of frangipani and hibiscus. There had been no epidemic for nearly five years.