The Hungry Ghosts (27 page)

T
HE MORNING AFTER
S
RIYANI’S PARTY
, I turned down my grandmother’s request to go out with her, claiming I had a headache, and lay in bed reading. Whenever a vehicle came down our road, I lifted my head from the pillow and strained to make out if it was Mili’s motorcycle. Finally I heard him pull up outside our house and ring the gate bell. I rushed out of my bedroom and overtook Rosalind, who was making her way across the saleya. “It’s for me,” I cried, waving her away. When I was on the verandah, I gathered myself together, then sauntered down to the gate.

Mili was seated astride the motorcycle, his grin curiously rueful. The sight of him, so handsome, his eyes crinkled against the glare, caused something to loosen in me, a slipping into pleasure.

“You look like you’ve been asleep,” he said.

I began to smooth down my hair. “No, no, I like it,” he said shyly.

“I … I was just lying down.” Then I added, “You tired me out last night.”

He laughed.

“You didn’t say when you would come. But I was hoping it would be this morning.” I touched his knee briefly.

“Cocky bugger. What if I hadn’t come at all?”

“Oh, no, you would have come. After all, you are the great Sex Fiend of Cinnamon Gardens.”

He shook his head, grinning, and held out a spare helmet. “Come.”

I was expecting we would go to his house in Cinnamon Gardens or to a restaurant, and I was puzzled when we rode outwards from central Colombo past Nugegoda towards Kalubowila. Once we left the older part of the city, the buildings became shabby concrete boxes with narrow windows and flat roofs, the streets winding chaotically, devoid of pavements and trees. Mili
turned down a dirt lane and came to a stop at a house that had a boundary wall splotched with green mildew. We went through a rusted takaran gate into a front garden with a few dusty shrubs and a sickly looking bougainvillea growing in it. Mili led me along a path around the side of the house and stopped in front of a door with flaking brown paint. “This is home now, Shivan.” He pressed his lips together and shrugged at my astonishment.

The flat was dark and had that fusty smell of clothes folded away while still damp. In the living room were a rattan settee and armchair that had lost their varnish, the cane strips which held the joints together loose and curling. Farther back was a dining table, its glossy maroon veneer chipped. Faded curtains hung in the windows and doorways to two bedrooms.

“Mili?” a querulous voice called out. One of the curtains parted and his mother came out.

The Mrs. Jayasinghe I had seen, at prize-givings and sports meets, had worn expensive organza saris, her hair done by a stylist, face carefully made up. The woman before me was dressed in polyester slacks which were out of fashion and a white cotton blouse slightly yellowed with age and washing. The handbag over her shoulder was expensive but battered around the edges and of another era. There had always been an arrogant bustle to the old Mrs. Jayasinghe, head held high, plump figure a symbol of her wealth and beauty. But now she was thin and she moved slowly.

When Mili introduced me and told her I was from Canada, she said, “How lucky you are to be there, son, and not living in this hell we call a country.”

She was going to spend the afternoon with a cousin, and as we were chatting about my life in Canada, a taxi honked outside the gate. She nodded to me, kissed her son on the cheek and left, walking in that way my mother did, parcelling out her energy as if she were sick.

Once she was gone, Mili, stating the obvious, said, “My pater and mater are separated.” He put his helmet down on the dining table. “And you know how Sri Lanka is. Unless you have a lot of money, court cases are out of the question.” He shrugged. “The kind of lawyer we could afford would have no chance against my pater’s Cinnamon Gardens lawyer. So now my pater lives in our old house with his mistress and we live here. He gives my mater a small allowance, but this is as far as we can get with it and my salary.”

While Mili spoke he went about the room, putting his bag down, looking through the mail. He was trying to appear nonchalant, but I could see that he was desperately ashamed of this place.

“Ah, Mili.”

He turned to me with a crooked smile and I put my arms around him. He rested his chin against my shoulder, running his fingers up and down my back in an absent-minded manner. Soon the movement of his hands became more purposeful.

We took our time undressing each other as we lay face to face on his bed, stopping to gaze and touch and run our tongues over every part that came exposed. I could feel Mili’s muscles slide under his skin as he moved. The hair on his chest, arms and legs was fine and very black against his lighter skin. His cock was pulsing against the white fabric of his briefs, and when I drew his underpants down, his erection slipped sideways across the V of his groin, the shaft a smooth satiny brown, the head a dark purple. The baby powder, which he used to absorb the sweat in his groin and underarms, gave him a familiar musky smell. We spent long periods just kissing and holding each other, then we would resume making love again.

Those early weeks with Mili were glorious and we saw each other every evening. When my grandmother found out he was the son of Tudor Jayasinghe, she was delighted I had a friend from such a prestigious family. She urged him to treat our house as if it were his, saying she was happy he was looking out for her grandson and that I had been thoroughly bored in the company of “two old women.” On her instruction, Rosalind began to set an extra place for Mili at dinner. Afterwards, I would sit with him on the verandah and listen to the crickets and birds while he smoked. When we talked about our school days or Mili told me what had happened to the boys in our class and various teachers, I would think of all the Canadian men I’d had affairs with and the strain of having to explain myself and Sri Lanka to them. With Mili it felt so peaceful, this shared history, this elliptical way of talking, because we both understood the same world and its idioms. Mili was always delighted with my quips and sarcasm and he would encourage me by protesting, “that’s too far, Shivan, that’s too far,” then laughing as I continued to skewer some boy or teacher or a person we were observing on the street.

Mili’s social world consisted of three couples he worked with at Kantha, and I soon got to know them well. Dharshini was second-in-command under Sriyani, and her husband, Jagath, looked after the organization’s finances. They came from upper-class Kandyan Sinhalese families and had that slow ease born from generations of wealth. Though their salary was paltry, they lived in a nice Cinnamon Gardens house that was Dharshini’s dowry. Dilan and Avanthi were from the US and spoke with American accents, having lived there since childhood. They had met at the University of Chicago, where they were both doing their Ph.D. theses on Sri Lanka’s ethnic problem. They were intense in that way of returning expatriates, anxious to assimilate into Sri Lankan culture.

The last couple was Ranjini and Sri, the man with the bushy beard who had hung around us at the party. Their relationship had been forbidden by Ranjini’s parents because Sri was Tamil. She had acquiesced to parental pressure and was betrothed to a distant cousin. Yet she and Sri kept their love affair going in secret. The others were constantly urging Ranjini to assert herself, teasing her about working in human rights and not standing up for its principles in her private life. She was good natured about this, letting out little squeals of laughter and wiping tears of mirth with a frilly-edged handkerchief. Her time in jail—where she would still have been but for the intervention of Sriyani’s husband, who had high-level connections in the government—gave her hallowed status among her colleagues. Also, her demure manner was an advantage with village women, who opened up to her in a way they didn’t to others.

Ranjini regarded me as a younger brother and called me Shivan-malli. I would often find her watching me, head to one side, eyes merry with some knowledge. She did not speak English fluently and would ask me the meaning of a word or if she had said something correctly. She would unconsciously take my hand as we talked, in the way Sri Lankan girls did with each other.

Mili’s friends treated me as one of his school chums visiting from abroad. I was sure they never suspected Mili—cricket captain, motorbike fanatic—of being gay. But then, there was his ongoing single state. Since they never questioned this or tried to set him up with a woman friend, I formed the theory that to them Mili was so hardily male he could not fit into the domestic routine of women or bend to the softness of loving one. I felt the other men greatly admired him for not succumbing to domesticity.

The bars and restaurants we went to with Mili’s friends were bare-walled rooms that looked like canteens, with metal chairs and tables and fluorescent lighting; not the opulent hotel lobbies our former classmates frequented. We would spend entire Saturdays and Sundays at the cabanas on Mount Lavinia beach, sending one of the cabana boys for kotthu rotis and hoppers from the local Muslim restaurant or a trishaw driver to The Great Wall for Chinese food.

One weekend at Mount Lavinia, Ranjini and I went in search of the pineapple vendor who patrolled the beach. As we walked along the water’s edge to keep our feet cool from the burning sand, we fell into talking about Buddhist stories. I had told her earlier that my grandmother often used to narrate them to me. Ranjini, having studied Buddhist literature, knew many more tales than I did. “But have you heard the Rupananda story, Shivan-malli?” she asked, and when I shook my head she told the story of how Lord Buddha had created a phantom, a very beautiful sixteen-year-old girl, to teach his vain cousin Rupananda a lesson on beauty. The phantom was visible only to Rupananda, who saw it when she came to hear her cousin preach. She fell immediately in love and could not stop gazing at the phantom’s beauty, consumed with desire for this girl. The next day, she rushed back to see the object of her love. But this time the phantom appeared as a twenty-five-year-old, and Rupananda felt her love diminish a little. Still, she returned again and again, and on each successive visit Lord Buddha aged the phantom to a middle-aged woman, an old woman, and finally into a sick crone who fell dead at his feet and began to decay and suppurate, worms crawling out of her body. Rupananda was cured of her attachment to her beauty. She cut her hair, removed all her lovely garments and put on the robes of a nun.

“It is a good story, no, Shivan-malli?” Ranjini said, smiling at me sweetly, yet holding my gaze. “Yes-yes, I knew you would especially like that story.” I nodded, looking towards the horizon to hide my consternation. She had guessed we were lovers. I was sure Ranjini, like my grandmother, had rendered an altered version of the original, to get her point across.

The most splendid time of Mili’s and my first weeks together was a visit to Sriyani’s beach house.

The bungalow was on the south coast, and Sriyani, ever the communist man’s daughter, lent it to anyone who asked. The house had verandahs all around, and airy rooms that were sparse but tastefully furnished, concrete beds and divans built into the floor and painted white, their mattress covers and cushions an aquamarine-and-emerald stripe. From the front verandah the garden sloped down to the sand and turquoise sea glittering with shards of light, a mist trembling where the waves crashed against the beach. The bungalow was in a grove of coconut trees that kept the building cool and shady. The rustle of palm fronds, as they bowed and reared in the wind, was like the sound of a second sea. An amiable old man named Piyasena served as cook, cleaner and watchman. He had a family in the village nearby and was pleased when Sriyani had guests because he could return home for the night and not guard the place.

The sea was a little rough, but Mili and I went in, as far as we dared, and spent the morning in the water. When we came back to the bungalow, lunch was laid out—nutty brown rice, fresh fried fish, huge prawns in a red coconut curry and local village vegetables like batu, pathola and kathurumurunga.

After we had eaten, the man left, saying he would be back to cook dinner. We locked the gate, raced each other to the bedroom and made love, chuckling as we pulled each other’s clothes off as if this was a gleeful, forbidden treat, tasting the sea salt on each other’s skins. Once we had slept, we made love again more languorously under the mosquito net, the smell of salt mingled now with our dried sweat.

In the evening, we told Piyasena not to wait and serve us, that we would wash up after we had eaten. We sat on the front verandah in planter’s chairs, our feet up on the leg rests, sarongs wound tight around our shins, sipping beer. The sun was setting in that rapid way it does in the tropics, going under the horizon suddenly, with a burst of pink, orange and purple. The sea changed to bottle green, glowing as if light pulsed upwards from the seabed. Looking over at Mili, I longed to slip into his chair and hold him, yet the ache of his distance filled me with pleasure.

Those early weeks were magical, but the impossibility of our love was already between us. When Mili visited my grandmother’s house in the evening, there was often an unspoken sexual frustration between us. Sometimes I would
invite him to my room and we would kiss, but always with an eye on the curtain in the doorway, our bodies barely brushing. As in a lot of Sri Lankan homes, we left our doors open for ventilation. Shutting mine would raise questions. As time passed, Mili had less to say as we sat on the verandah. He would often stare out at the garden, smoking. Or he would speak moodily about the rising violence of the JVP in the south, that more and more bodies were being found by the main roads, some killed by the government, some by the JVP. The thing he dwelt on most was the recent murder of a prominent human rights lawyer who was falsely arrested by the police for the death of the actor-turned-politician Vijaya Kumaratunga. A government press release had claimed the lawyer was a high-ranking member of the JVP and responsible for this assassination. He had died in a Colombo hospital, the post-mortem revealing that his body bore more than a hundred wounds and that his death had been caused by bludgeoning with a blunt instrument. “The cord is getting tighter and tighter, Shivan,” he would say, “tighter and tighter.” While I believed that this rising violence truly troubled him, at the same time, I felt he sensed my dislike for talking about such things as they spoilt our time together, and he was doing it to thwart and irritate me.