The Hungry Ghosts (40 page)

“Like a peréthaya,” Thushara Nanda would later declare of Charles, “come to haunt us with his silent, starving presence.” That was how they would speak of him later in their hatred.

My grandmother was the only one who felt sorry for him, and he must have sensed this, because he watched her attentively whenever she passed. If she caught his eye, he would smile and sit up, nodding in a friendly manner. Finally, one day, he asked where she was going with the basket under her arm and if he might come along. My grandmother assented. Rosalind was with her and would be chaperone.

They had hardly spoken to each other before and walked apart towards the vegetable garden. My grandmother finally asked shyly, “England is very nice?”

“Oh, yes,” he declared, “it’s the best place on earth.” Seeing she was ready to be impressed by this mythical place studied in school, he began to tell her about the marvels of London and how he had seen the king, and about the wonders of the 1938 Empire Exhibition that he had seen in Scotland last year.

Of course, when they returned from the garden, both her mother and Thushara Nanda had a talk with my grandmother. She argued back, telling them they were being rude and unkind to their visitor. Charles was a nephew. This inhospitality was a shame to their dead sister’s memory. Did Charles hear the argument and understand its meaning, even though he did not speak Sinhala? Or did he just sense the tension between the older women and his cousin? He began to waylay my grandmother as she passed, asking questions about the village and the world around them. He went with her and Rosalind about their tasks, rolling up his sleeves to dig the ground so they could retrieve yams, going up a tree to throw fruit down to them, carrying their heavy baskets. In the evenings, he began to drop by her house to talk about England, to show her picture postcards he had brought of London.

Did my grandmother fall in love with him? In recounting her story, she claimed all she felt was sorry for him. “I was stupid, Shivan, just stupid. I should have been more careful and listened to my mother and aunts. I should not have ignored that craving in him to belong.”

In the midst of all the tension his presence brought, my grandmother kept up her nightly swims to the reef. It was as if the hand of karma guided her
down to the beach at night as the moon grew increasingly full, her near-nakedness more and more visible.

One afternoon, my grandmother returned from an errand with Charles and Rosalind to find a gentleman in his forties having tea with the older women on Thushara Nanda’s verandah. The buttons of his white linen coat strained against his rotundity, his cheeks flushed from the heat, round glasses perched on the edge of his nose. His bald head was shiny with sweat, a raw rim where his solar topee had sat, the hat now on the table before him.

Something had changed in Daya’s aunts and mother. They were looking at their nephew with sympathy and curiosity.

Charles’s face reddened. He took off his fedora and held it to his stomach like a shield.

This gentleman, Mr. Ariyasinghe, addressed Charles in a mild tone that was slightly jocular to hide his discomfort. “It’s nice to find you hale and hearty, young man. Your father’s relatives in Colombo were wondering what had happened to their nephew. They wish you back with them.”

Charles flicked his hat against his stomach and scowled into the distance, ignoring my grandmother’s surprise at these other relatives he had not mentioned.

“It has been delightful having young Charles,” Thushara Nanda said, beaming at Mr. Ariyasinghe, who was cousin to Charles’s father. “But we must not take your foreign relative over in this way. It is important he spends some time with his paternal family as well.” The other women nodded, trying to hide their relief behind pious expressions.

Later that evening, Rosalind, who had heard from other servants, told my grandmother the reason Charles had left England. According to Mr. Ariyasinghe, Charles had been in love with an English woman who had led him on to amuse her friends, all of them entertained by the temerity of this dark colonial. Finally, there had been a public humiliation at a dance.

Mr. Ariyasinghe, a judge on circuit, would pick Charles up in a week on his way back to Colombo. The older women became very hospitable and gracious towards Charles. But he grew increasingly sullen and dismissive of their cordiality, guessing they were sorry for him but also relieved he was going. My grandmother would find her cousin sitting in a secluded corner of
the garden, lips twitching as if carrying on a conversation with himself, or pacing the road that led to the family compound. She wanted to express her sympathy, to promise she would write to him, but there was a wild speculation when he looked at her that warned her to stay away.

A few nights after Mr. Ariyasinghe’s visit, Daya returned from the reef to find her cousin waiting on the beach. She let out a small cry and clutched at her wet underwear to cover as much of her body as she could. “I … I’m sorry.” He backed away. “I didn’t mean to offend you.” He turned to give her privacy. My grandmother grabbed her nightgown off the rock where she had left it and wriggled into it.

“Cousin Charles,” she said softly, struggling to communicate in a language that was not her own, “you are not being seen here with me. It will only bring trouble for a young girl seen such with a man.”

“Daya, Daya,” he whispered, coming to her, taking her cold wet hands in his, “I love you, and I want to marry you.”

“Ah, no, Cousin Charles.” She gently pulled her hands away. “That is not to be. I am not feeling for that.”

“Do you not love me?” he demanded tearfully.

“But you are not loving me,” she said, and touched his arm out of sympathy. “You are wanting to belong and be like us. But marrying will not make it so. Only, it will make you unhappy, living-living with country folk. You will be missing your other life soon and then hating your wife.”

“No! I will not miss that other life. I am nothing there, nothing.”

My grandmother made her way up the beach, lurching as her feet sank into the sand. She was afraid of his appeal, afraid of her sympathy. But also, perhaps, afraid she did love him and that such love would only lead to misery.

Charles must have sensed her feelings, because he followed, importuning her all the way up the steep road, my grandmother saying, “No, no, it is not to be.” When they were at the gate to the compound, he grabbed her shoulders and tried to kiss her. For a moment their lips met, then she broke away with a cry. The dogs in the compound heard her distress. They began to bark, the alarm spreading from dog to dog on each verandah. Lights in the houses flickered on as lamps were lit; the alarmed voices of her relatives and their servants warbled as they struggled out of sleep. My grandmother lifted the
hem of her nightgown and darted towards her house, hoping to slip in through the back before she was discovered. Charles hurried after her.

They made it only as far as the middle of the courtyard before the women charged out, some with rifles, others holding up lamps, accompanied by male servants with sticks and scythes. Thushara Nanda had a torch. Its beam swept the courtyard and caught my grandmother and Charles. The long sigh of waves against the shore could be heard in the silence. Her nightgown was torn at the neckline, she realized, from the brief scuffle with Charles.

The women converged from all directions until they were a circle around Charles and Daya. Her mother, her aunts, her cousins, were ghostly in the lamplight. Charles pushed past the women with a cry of despair and ran to his room. My grandmother was left alone, the women staring at her as if she were a stranger. “Amma,” she whispered, and held out her hands. But she might as well have been invisible to her mother. She turned to her aunts and cousins. Some averted their faces, others backed away.

Rosalind came forward and put her arms around my grandmother, who had begun to shake, her breath stuttering. It was the ayah who led her mistress to their house, the other women following behind in silence as if trailing a hearse, my great-grandmother weeping softly.

After that my grandmother became a spectral thing who stayed in her room or the back garden of her parents’ house. She was their only child, and they alternately wept and railed at her. “No one would listen to me, Shivan. No one would let me tell my story. It did not matter. The damage had been done. Because, by the next morning, our servants had spread the word throughout the village. The marriage prospects of my unmarried cousins were in jeopardy.”

So my grandmother lived like this, in seclusion. Sometimes she would stare at herself in the mirror feeling as if she had been hollowed out, no longer a young woman but a ghost.

Then about four months after Charles had left, Mr. Ariyasinghe came to call on the family. The story of what happened had somehow reached their family in Colombo. He did not mention what version they had heard, and referred to the whole thing diplomatically as “that regrettable incident.” He told my great-grandparents that after Charles’s humiliation in England he’d had “difficulties” involving unsavoury new friends and opiate addiction. “This
is not a young man in charge of all his faculties,” Mr. Ariyasinghe said, wiping his glasses and speaking in his measured, kindly way, as if in court. It was clear he felt Charles was more to blame than Daya.

“What good does telling us this achieve?” my great-grandfather asked bitterly.

Mr. Ariyasinghe nodded. “Yes, of course,” he said evenly. From where he sat on the verandah, he was the only one who could see my grandmother standing inside by the threshold of the front door. Half glancing at the parents, half glancing at her, he informed my great-grandfather that he was a childless widower and would be “honoured and delighted” to marry his daughter. My great-grandfather did not ask if he wanted to see his future bride, nor even what her expectations might be.

“He was a good, kind husband, Shivan,” my grandmother said to me. “He never treated me as if I were soiled. Yet he never asked what happened. In our time, those were not things people discussed, not even husbands and wives. And living each day with that unspoken thing, the daily knowledge that to my family and the world I was guilty of something I did not do, corroded me. And so I was never happy; that is, until you came into my life. When I looked up and saw you standing in my room, sniffling, my heart broke with happiness. You were like rain soaking a parched land.”

She had finished her story and was waiting now for my judgment. I could not bear to look at her. By offering this secret she was hoping to tie us close again. But all I wanted was to be free of the suffocating weight of our past together.

“Why are you telling me all this now?” I asked harshly. “It’s too late. Nothing you can do or say will fix what has happened.”

“Ah, Puthey,” she said softly, holding out her hands to me, palms cupped as if to receive a gift.

I could feel my throat constricting. To escape her, I had to deliver a fatal blow. “There is something you should know, something I have been meaning to tell you.” I turned to her with a thin smile. “It wasn’t Amma’s idea we go to Canada. It was mine.” She dropped her hands in shock. “It was me, Aacho, who went to the Canadian embassy and got that form. I begged and pleaded until Amma gave in and filled it out.”

She searched my face in the hope I was lying, but I held her gaze. An ancient tired expression came over her. She stood up and hobbled towards the
door. She held on to the door jamb for a moment to steady herself, then continued out to the saleya.

Another of my grandmother’s stories, “The Demoness Kali,” begins with this line:
As a forest fire raging out of control only stops when it reaches a lake or river, so hatred and vengeance can only be quenched by the waters of compassion
.

In the household of a rich merchant, the senior wife, who is barren, discovers one day that the junior wife is pregnant. Overcome with jealousy and fear for her status, she poisons the junior wife, killing the unborn child in the process. In her death throes, the junior wife makes a fervent wish for her next birth, “May I be reborn to devour your children,” thus unleashing a bad karma that follows the two women through many lives. They are reincarnated as cat and hen, tigress and doe, the two women taking turns as aggressor, the stronger animal consuming the weaker one’s offspring each time, the distraught mother making a fervent wish to be reborn to devour the other’s young. Finally, after many life cycles, the senior wife is born as a noblewoman and the junior wife as the Demoness Kali. In disguise, Kali insinuates herself into the household of the noble-woman and twice eats her children, gobbling them up like plates of rice. The noblewoman gives birth again, and one day she is bathing in a river near the Devram Vehera monastery when she sees the demoness approaching without her disguise. She snatches up her child, who is sleeping on the riverbank, and flees. Kali gives chase, and since she has supernatural power she soon catches up, just as they reach the gates of the monastery. The demoness grabs on to the edge of her victim’s sari, but the noblewoman rips herself away and rushes inside the gates with her baby. The demoness cannot follow, because the god Saman guards the entrance and will not let her pass.