The Hungry Ghosts (24 page)

My grandmother was sending her car, and since it was so early in the morning, I expected to find the driver waiting as I came out of Customs into the arrivals lounge. A mass of German tourists teemed confusedly beyond the exit, calling to each other like lost birds, a Sri Lankan guide trying to shepherd them to the currency exchange booths and the waiting bus outside. They finally moved on and I saw my grandmother seated at the far end of the lounge. She raised her hand briefly and I began to wheel my cart towards her.

My memories of her, I was realizing, had been from a child’s point of view and I was struck by how small she was amidst the bustle of activity. When I reached her, we were still, gazing at each other. Her face was thinner and more lined, and the stroke had puckered her right cheek upwards. There was a
walking stick beside her seat. My grandmother nodded to say, yes, she had changed. “Ah, Puthey.” She indicated for me to bend towards her. She took my face in her hands and kissed my cheeks. “You have come back. I have so longed to see your face.” Her speech was slightly slurred, the right corner of her lower lip stretched tight and glistening.

A warmth flooded through me at the love in her eyes. “Ah, it’s so good to be back home, Aacho.”

Our old driver, Soma, appeared with a porter in tow. “You took your time coming.” She glared at her driver, who was grinning with delight at seeing me. She transferred her glare to the porter. “How much do you want? We are not foreigners.”

He named his price in a wheedling tone and there was some fierce bargaining before my grandmother brought him down to half what he had asked. As he took my cart, she said to me, “Foreigners are ruining these fellows. Giving them tips-tips and everything.”

She reached for her walking stick. I offered my hand, but she waved it away and, using the stick, levered herself from the chair. Now she did grip my arm, and we began to walk along an open-air corridor that led to the chaos of cars, vans and buses parked outside the building.

“How is your mother?” she asked, and then sighed. “Her error has trailed her, nah? If she had listened to me, she could have had a very different life.” Seeing my discomfort, she added, “Anyway, what is to be done? We must all live out our karma.”

By the time we got to the car, her breath had taken on an irregular flutter and sweat beaded her forehead. She leaned back in the seat, eyes closed as the porter loaded the trunk. When he came around to her window to collect his fee, she shoved the money at him, muttering about rogues and scoundrels.

As we drove towards Colombo, I looked out at the world we were passing. Children in starched white uniforms and ties stood at bus stops, cloth bags slung over their shoulders. Early office workers waited alongside them, the men in slacks and white shirts, the women in saris clutching handbags. The workers mopped their brows with handkerchiefs, laughing and talking with each other. Bicyclists rode by, one with a huge bunch of bananas strapped to his rear carrier, another transporting his entire family, the wife perched sidesaddle on the back rack, two little girls on the cross bar. In roadside
restaurants, little more than shacks with roofs of rusting takaran, hoppers were being cooked on kerosene burners, vadais fried in vats of oil. I glimpsed people at trestle tables with banana leaves before them piled with idli, thosai, or string hoppers, onto which bare-chested little boys in soiled shorts dolloped soupy sambar out of metal buckets. Then there were the hundreds of pariah dogs in that easy cohabitation with humans, some sitting outside the restaurants, quivering for any scraps that might be thrown at them, others lying on the road, ambling out of the way as approaching vehicles blasted their horns. The garden walls, whose lower ends were stained with brownish-red dust, had bougainvillea spilling their abundance over the tops. Araliya trees were in full bloom, their fallen petals lying in the dirt; huge tamarind trees spread their canopies over the road. Everything about the landscape was familiar and strange at the same time; that odd disjunction of coming home to a place that was not home anymore.

As we drew closer to Colombo, large billboards appeared for things I had not eaten in five years, whose taste I knew so well—Lemon Puffs, Marie biscuits, Glucorasa, Kandos chocolates—and promoting these products were the same cricket players and actors and former Miss Sri Lankas. A cinema poster announced a new film starring Gamini Fonseka and Geetha Kumarasinghe, and as I read the Sinhalese lettering, I felt the delight of rediscovering that other language which had lain submerged within me for half a decade.

The car arrived at my grandmother’s house, and some moments after the driver pressed his horn, Rosalind pulled back the gates, craning her neck to see me.

“Ah, yes,” my grandmother said, gesturing at the ayah as we passed her, “prepare yourself for a monsoon of tears.”

The house, like my grandmother, was smaller than I remembered. In honour of my visit, no doubt, she’d had it recently whitewashed, the red tiles and wooden fretwork replaced or mended.

When I stepped out of the air-conditioned car, the air was loud with the rasping of crows, the blare of traffic on the street, a koel shrilly winding up its notes in the mango tree. And now the heat, which I had not been so aware of, pressed its weight against my skin.

Rosalind was hurrying up the front path, and when she reached me she started to cry, taking my hand, touching my face, saying those same words
she had spoken to my mother all those years ago. “Aiyo, baba, the gods have been good to allow me this sight of you before I die. I never thought I would see you again.”

My eyes started to well up too, and I hugged her, something I had never done before.

My grandmother hobbled around the car to us. “Ah-ah, have you got the breakfast ready?” She did not approve of my show of affection and blamed Rosalind for it.

I protested that I was not hungry, but my grandmother waved her hand. “Of course you are. You don’t want to disappoint our Rosalind. She has been up from four o’clock cooking. Now go and wash.”

In my room, everything was exactly as I had left it—the blue curtains with green polka dots, my light-blue coverlet, its nubbles worn with age and washing, the picture above my bed of a boy in a field of poppies. The shallow slot on my white wooden table contained my old Parker fountain pen and a few yellow pencils, half used. My old sarong was hanging over the chair, worn Bata slippers beside my bed. The almirah released a swell of camphor when I opened it. My clothes were neatly folded, shirts on hangers. I went over to the bookshelf and knelt, hands on knees, staring at the Famous Fives, the Secret Sevens, various Agatha Christies, my copies of
War and Peace
and
Pride and Prejudice
, numerous Jeeves and Woosters. I drew out
The Magic Faraway Tree
, sat on the edge of my bed and read the first page, remembering what joy it was to lie in bed, the fan grating above me, lost in the world of these books. Every so often, I recalled, I would surface from the fictional realm to take a spoonful of sweetened condensed milk mixed with chopped bananas from a bowl beside my bed. Forgotten was my guilt about acquiring these books and how I had kept them hidden from my mother.

“I sometimes come in here and sit. It brings me comfort.” My grandmother had been standing in the doorway, watching me. She waved her hand. “Go, go, wash quickly. Rosalind is beginning to complain the food is getting cold.”

My old towel was over the rack in the bathroom. As I splashed my face and rubbed the familiar sandalwood soap into my skin, I felt as if I were washing away not just my journey but also the past five years.

In honour of my arrival Rosalind had made the auspicious breakfast of the Sinhala New Year—kiribath, ambul thiyal, katta and seeni sambol, beef curry,
kavum, kokis, lavariya and ambul bananas. She stood behind my grandmother, who was seated on one side of the table. The only other place setting was to my grandmother’s right, at the head. “Aacho—” I began, but she waved me to the chair, saying, “Come-come.”

I sat, awkward at this elevation. Rosalind began to dish out food for me. I tried to stop her giving me too much, but she would not hear of it. “Look at you, baba, you’re so thin. Chee! I thought Canadian food was supposed to be healthy.”

My grandmother did not eat much and instead, like Rosalind, watched me. I ate to please them both.

After breakfast, as I sipped a cup of tea, a sudden exhaustion swelled through my limbs. My head jerked as if in protest against sleep.

“Why don’t you take a nap, Puthey,” my grandmother said. “We’ll wake you for lunch.”

I lay down on my bed. The next thing I knew, it was early evening. Despite the fan above, I was sweating. The glare of the sun hurt my eyes and there was a metallic taste in my mouth. I pushed myself up on my elbows but then fell back, putting my arm over my face to block out the light. After a few minutes, I forced myself out of bed and went to take a shower.

When I stepped out of my room, the saleya was deserted. Beams of sunlight cut across the floor, a thousand dust motes whirling in them. My grandmother had left for the temple, as she always did at this time. I walked around the saleya, picking up familiar objects and putting them back. From the kitchen I could hear the muffled thumping of pestle against mortar, but before I could go and chat with Rosalind, my grandmother’s car pulled into the carport, and I went to greet her with a smile.

13
 

T
HE NOVELTY OF BEING BACK IN
S
RI
L
ANKA
soon wore off. Without the routine of school or visits to the American Center Library, without the bickering, complaining, laughing companionship of my mother and sister, time became a boggy thing that pulled me into a torpor. Because I had been so solitary when I lived here, I did not have old school friends to invite me on trips or to dinners, clubs and the theatre. My grandmother did one errand each morning and I always went with her. Afterwards, she stayed in bed to gather enough strength to attend the temple. She never had dinner with me, as the evening pooja left her exhausted, and also because she did not eat much anymore. At seven, she would have a cup of Bovril and a piece of toast in her bedroom, then fall asleep. I had forced Rosalind to give up serving me at dinner; my years in Canada had made me uncomfortable with this. I dished out my meal in the kitchen and ate alone in the darkened saleya, a book propped in front of me, rereading one of my old classics by the dim light above.

Boredom drove me to call Renu’s old professor Sriyani Karunaratne.

I had met Sriyani only once, when my sister and I had gone to see a play at the Lionel Wendt Theatre. Renu knew her heroine would be attending, and as we waited for the performance to begin she kept getting up from her seat to scan the theatre. At last she cried out, “Oh,” and signalled frantically to a woman with greying hair cut in a pageboy style, dressed in white slacks and an emerald-and-gold striped Barbara Sansoni shirt.

“Sriyani-akka,” Renu gushed, as the woman came up to her.

“Ah-ah, you’re here,” Sriyani replied in an even, pleasant tone. She was short and plump, with an olive complexion and a hooked nose that had a tiny diamond mukkuthi in it. She seemed rather amused at my sister’s adoration, and she nodded at me, eyes crinkled with goodwill.

My sister introduced me, and Sriyani declared, “But, my, you look just like your mother.”

I blushed under her gaze and blurted, “You know my mother?”

“Of course. We were in school together. I was a few years senior, but, you know, your mother just stood out. Miris, they used to call her. Fiery, like a chili, and so extremely smart.”

I liked her, though I had not expected to, imagining that she would be sharp and self-righteous like Renu. I sensed a quick mind at work beneath her serene, mildly amused manner.

When I finally telephoned Sriyani one evening after my return, a male servant answered and asked suspiciously who I was. He conveyed the information to Sriyani, who said in the distance, “Ah-ah, yes-yes.”

Her footsteps approached the phone at a leisurely tip-tap. “Hello,” she said, in her low, cultured voice, “is that you, Shivan?”

“Um … yes.” I did not know what to call her. It should be Aunty Sriyani, as she was an older woman, but I knew this was not right.

“Well, well, it’s nice you’re here,” she said evenly. “You must come and visit me.”

“I would like that.”

“Yes-yes, you must come,” she continued, as if she had not heard me. “Why don’t I send the car for you tomorrow and we can have lunch, hmm?”

“Thank you. Um … what time shall I be ready?”

“Oh, you know, lunch time,” she said vaguely. “See you then,” she added briskly and put the phone down.

I was dressed by eleven thirty and lay on my bed, reading under the fan. About half an hour later, someone rang the bell at the gate. By the time I had put away my book, fixed my flattened hair and straightened out the wrinkles in my shirt, Rosalind had answered the summons. “Someone has come for you,” she said, as I passed her in the saleya. “A young mahattaya on a motorcycle.”