The Flower Boy (3 page)

The fact that Appuhamy did know best was beside the point for John Buckwater, who wanted a happy, supportive wife by his side as he came to terms with this new land and its unfamiliar people.

Instead, he had come to rely implicitly on Appuhamy, who was a sort of majordomo cum butler cum valet.

Appuhamy had worked with British people before, and had been bequeathed to John Buckwater by the previous planter at Glencairn. He claimed to be sixty years of age, although John privately suspected him to be nearer seventy.

He was a slight but imposing figure in his snowy-white sarong, white shirt and broad black belt. He wore his long, scanty gray hair in the traditional fashion—oiled and drawn into a tight knot at the back of his head and held in place with a tortoiseshell comb, rather like a Spanish señora.

It was Appuhamy who hired Premawathi as housekeeper. She was a good choice, for not only did she speak passable English learned from her years at a missionary-run convent, but she was also quick, competent and abhorred laziness.

The only drawback was that she came with three children, but she quickly forestalled any possible objections, pointing out that the two girls could help in the house after school. In a house the size of Glencairn, the extra hands would be helpful.

The little boy was just over a year old, but Premawathi promised to keep him in the servants' quarters and the four soon settled down in a little room off the kitchen.

Premawathi's husband, Disneris, worked as a salesman in a Colombo grocery shop. Because of his meager salary, he could not afford to keep Premawathi and the children with him, so the job at Glencairn had been the answer to all their prayers.

He tried to visit them once a month, but train fares were steep and the journey was long. Often, he wouldn't see his family for three months at a time. It was a bad situation, but it couldn't be helped. Colombo was expensive and jobs were scarce.

The three children went to the church school, which was a ten-minute walk from Glencairn. After school, the two girls swept, cleaned, made beds and helped Premawathi with the cooking.

Chandi romped through the tea plantation, and ran a profitable little business on the side.

chapter 3

IN 1505, THE PORTUGUESE LANDED IN CEYLON, FIRMLY DETERMINED to make it their own. The resident Ceylonese people, ruled by no fewer than three kings in three separate kingdoms, were divided by loyalty, caste and a few other factors. They were ripe for conquering.

The Portuguese walked in easily enough, but had the usual geographical and linguistic problems conquering heroes face when conquering unfamiliar lands.

The Ceylonese were quick to catch on, and although they bowed down to the might of the foreign invaders, they were not above having a few laughs at their expense.

One particular episode occurred when they enlisted the help of a few islanders to lead them to the kingdom of Kotte, so they could inform the incumbent king that he was to be relieved of his duties. It is said that the trip, which could have taken a few hours, took days before the tired and footsore conquerors were delivered to the now ex-king, by a bunch of sniggering Ceylonese.

The islanders obediently embraced Catholicism and a few Catholics, who married them. Although the Portuguese succeeded in annexing most of Ceylon for themselves, the central hill kingdom of Kandy remained inviolate. No amount of guns, cannons and bayonets could battle against strategically placed rocks rolled down mountainsides by an unseen enemy.

The intricacies of guerrilla warfare were new to the Portuguese.

In 1642, the Dutch sailed in to see what all the fuss was about. After unceremoniously getting rid of the Portuguese, they claimed the island as their own. With them came the Dutch Reformed religion, Roman Dutch law, a whole bunch of Dutch recipes and a few more intermarriages. They too ruled all but the still inviolate Kandyan kingdom.

In 1796, flushed with success in recently acquired India, the British decided that it was now their turn. Having equally unceremoniously got rid of the Dutch, they claimed the island for
their
own. This time, the whole island.

With the help of a few turncoat Sinhalese, they stormed Kandy, imprisoned the ruler Rajasinghe II and set up home.

They did this quite literally, building typical English residences ranging from stately Tudor mansions to quaint cottages, bringing everything but the kitchen sink over from England. The bathroom sinks
were
brought over, porcelain Armitage Shanks affairs, which were proudly installed in their English-tiled bathrooms.

The British brought over the Protestant faith, but found the convertible natives all taken; they belonged to either the Catholic Church or the Dutch Reformed Church. But minor setbacks like this were no great deterrents, and they settled down to a long and hopefully profitable rule.

It was soon discovered that while Colombo on the coastline was warm and humid for most of the year, the hill country was delightful: cool, temperate and ideal for plantations.

So mountains were blasted, roads were built and railways were laid. Some islanders were enlisted to work by means of bribery and promises of later jobs, but since the British didn't really trust them to do anything but the most menial of labor, the bulk of the work was done by the British themselves.

The Ceylonese, an essentially lazy lot, had no complaints but watched with interest to see what would come next.

Next came coffee.

Recognizing the money to be made from cultivating the rich, fertile hill country, the British decided that since tea was already being successfully grown in India, Ceylon would be the coffee producer for the empire.

So coffee was planted and all went swimmingly until a blight struck, ruining entire plantations. After battling unsuccessfully to contain, if not eradicate it, they gave in and watched helplessly as the fruits of their labors literally went up in smoke.

But the British fighting spirit was not to be quelled by little things like coffee blights. Tea had worked fine in India. No reason why it couldn't here.

Once it was safely established that tea was doing well and there was no foreseeable danger of blights, the British dug their heels in and laid their pipes and slippers firmly down on Ceylonese soil.

The hills were alive with the King's English.

By this year, 1935, the British were as firmly established as they would ever be, and if there were ominous rumblings from the natives, they were firmly ignored, like everything else remotely unpleasant in this tolerably pleasant land.

Up in the mountains their mini-England flourished, ably commanded by British planters and their British wives. Clubs did brisk business and tea parties, bridge nights and cricket matches were the order of the day.

The weather also usually behaved itself.

Tea plantations sprang up one after the other, all with nostalgic British names like St. Anne's, Abercrombie, Loolecondera, Windsor, St. Coombs and, of course, Glencairn. Each had its own tea factory and bungalow on the lines of an English country manor, complete with fireplaces, bay windows, music rooms and solariums on the inside, and pergolas, lily ponds, swimming pools and manicured gardens on the outside.

While tea plantations thrived, so did the bungalow gardens, which were full of imported British blooms to complement the imported British belles. Marigolds, hydrangeas, daisies, lilies, chrysanthemums, carnations and English roses grew in carefully manicured beds and borders.

And while tea was the Sudu Mahattaya's business, flowers were Chandi's.

APRIL WAS THE Nuwara Eliya season, when the Colombo social set arrived en masse to escape the stifling heat of the capital. Some stayed with planter friends or at their privately owned hill cottages. Others stayed at the Hill Club or at the Grand Hotel in Nuwara Eliya.

They spent the next couple of months playing golf at the golf club, trout fishing at Lake Gregory, horse riding at the racecourse and down Lady McCallum's Drive, or sipping Pimms and martinis in the shade of massive, flamboyant trees.

In the evenings, they donned white ties, tails and evening dresses and congregated at the Hill Club or the Grand Hotel for an evening of dining and dancing.

As the influx began, the mountain roads which wound round the hills like sleepy snakes would wake up to the sounds of coughing, spluttering automobiles struggling up the hills in second gear.

When they began the climb up the mountain on which Glencairn sat, Chandi would be waiting, a huge bunch of flowers in his arms. As the cars chugged past, Chandi would thrust his flowers through their windows and pipe, “Flowers, lady? You want flowers?”

The ladies would be enchanted by the grinning little flower boy. The men, who didn't like being thus upstaged, usually growled, “Be off with you, you little scamp!”

The cars would disappear, leaving Chandi clutching at his precious booty.

When they came round the next bend, he would be there again, holding out his flowers and saying, “Only twenty-five cents, lady! Nice, pretty flowers?” in a hopeful voice. His endearing grin would be firmly in place.

“Oh, where did he come from?” the ladies would exclaim, thoroughly entertained. Chandi would be out of breath from running up and then down the mountain to catch up with the cars, but the prospect of the twenty-five cents would lend wings to his feet.

About two appearances later, Chandi would be off to pick more flowers, the shiny twenty-five-cent coin feeling pleasantly heavy in his shirt pocket.

Visitors to Glencairn often showed up with bunches of flowers remarkably similar to the ones growing in the garden outside.

In the first week of April, Chandi had made two rupees this way. Because of the slightly illegal nature of his business, he told nobody about his little fortune, which lay buried in a corner of the garden, carefully marked by a large flat stone.

Now he sat and wondered if the stone had been washed away by the rain, or been buried by mud. He hoped not. He had plans for that money.

He had originally intended to buy his mother a new reddha or two. He had wanted to buy Rangi a schoolbag so she didn't have to carry her books in the crook of her arm, where they dug into the soft flesh there and left red welts. He had wanted to buy himself a bicycle so he could use it for his flower business; running was hard work.

Now he was saving it to go to England.

It seemed like the best thing to do. He didn't want to stay there. He just wanted to go and then come back, because everyone who came from England seemed to have huge bungalows and beautiful books and red-and-green-checked shorts. Those were reasons enough.

He wanted a house of his own, not a room off the kitchen. He wanted his mother to wander through gardens picking flowers, and for Leela and Rangi to have their own rooms. He wanted to sit at a big dining table and have an Appuhamy bring unlimited quantities of food in to him. And he wanted his father to be able to live with them.

His mother often told him that if he studied hard and did well in school, he could get a good job and look after them all. He had decided long ago that England was a far faster and less tedious way.

He wondered if he would meet the Sudu Mahattaya's son while he was there. He knew his name was Jonathan although he never called him that. Actually, he never called him anything because Jonathan had never spoken to him. He, like his sister Anne, was a quiet child, and spent his time reading or kicking a ball around the lawn by himself. Once Chandi had seen Jonathan and had wished he would ask him to come and play, but Jonathan had not even noticed him. So Chandi had stood there quietly and watched.

Jonathan had seemed lonely.

RIGHT NOW, CHANDI was lonely.

The rain was still lashing down like a thousand whips on a buffalo's back. He crept out, made his way to the drain and stepped into it. He almost lost his balance but managed to steady himself. The water rushed in its haste to make way for more rushing water, and the drain seemed wider and deeper than he remembered.

At the kitchen steps, the drain continued but Chandi stopped. He cocked his head like Buster sometimes did, and listened hard, but all was quiet. Straightening up, he dashed inside the kitchen and into their room. Thankfully, it too was empty. If Rangi had been there, it would have been okay. Leela would have gone straight to Ammi and told her.

Shivering now with cold and reaction, he hastily dried himself and pulled on another pair of shorts and another too-small shirt. This pair of shorts was brown. The shirt had once been gaily striped in sky blue and white. Many washings and dashings against the stone at the well had faded it to a watery blue. There were two buttons missing midway and his stomach showed through the gap.

Chandi felt better. Then he remembered the red-and-green-checked shorts on the croton hedge. His shirt would have long been buried by mud, but the shorts would be lying there like the proud standard of a rebel army. He wondered if they could be seen from the house. He hoped not, because if they could, he would have a lot of explaining to do. He almost started out again to retrieve them, but then thought it better to lie low for a bit, so he sat on the kitchen step and stared out at the rain.

AT THE FAR corner of the back garden, the vegetables gave way to dense green foliage near the gray cemented well. The trees grew close and blocked out the sun, ferns of different kinds grew out of the cracks in the cement, and vines and creepers twisted languidly around the trees, some hanging down like leafy green curtains.

Frogs croaked, lizards lifted their chameleon heads to listen, and the gentle rustle of the trees was occasionally broken by the sudden flight of some exotic bird. One almost expected to see a gnome scuttling away into the undergrowth, or a couple of fairies swinging from the vines.

This was where Chandi washed in the mornings, and bathed in the afternoons with his mother. Leela and Rangi bathed later in the day, after their housework was finished.

Chandi loved his baths. For about half an hour each day, he had his mother's undivided attention. And at the well, she changed.

Not into her diya reddha, which she wore while bathing, but into another person. A person who talked and listened and laughed. Maybe pulling up water in the leaky aluminum bucket helped rid her of the tensions of the day. Perhaps it reminded her of when she was young and her mother had bathed her, probably at a well just like this one; whatever it was, Chandi loved her. Not that he didn't anyway.

He would strip naked and watch while she wriggled, with skill born of years of practice, out of her blouse and brassiere and reddha and underskirt, into her old tattered diya reddha, her bathing cloth. She would lift up her arms and slowly, gracefully release her long black hair from its tight knot. Then he'd crouch down on the clean concrete and watch her drawing up the water, the muscles of her strong brown arms rippling with the effort of pulling.

The first bucketful was always a shock, and he would gasp and blow as the ice-cold water rained on him. Ammi would laugh at him, with him. She'd pretend to pour slowly, and then suddenly empty the bucket on him, her dark brown eyes dancing with mischief. He'd squeal and she'd laugh some more. When he was wet through, he would soap himself while she bathed.