The Legend of Pradeep Mathew (56 page)

The shop windows down the street read ‘Afforda-Bull’. The library has ‘Reada-Bull’; the post office ‘Senda-Bull’. Everywhere the cartoon bull in shades thumbs his approval. As the bus pulls out I’m happy to observe graffiti on the Thank You for Visiting Bulls sign. Someone has spray-painted the letters h-i-t at the end of the sentence.

Arriving in Wanganui, we park outside Victoria Avenue. The afternoon sun is not as hot as Colombo’s, but is as sharp as a laser and induces headaches.

WangaVegas, my motel, is as tacky as its name and is run by a middle-aged Scottish couple who dress in leather jackets. There are pictures of Elvis and Sinatra and someone called Howard Morrison on the walls. My room has a TV with four channels and a view of a brick wall. The hall leading to the jacuzzi room is lined with slot machines.

The next day, I drive around Wanganui with a map on my lap. The town square is alive with swearing schoolkids. The women wear no make-up, the men wear tracksuit bottoms and no shoes, people in shops are as friendly as Jehovah’s Witnesses. There’s a nice library, a second-hand tape shop, an old English boarding school and a Maori building with demon midgets carved on maroon rectangular wood. They guard the entrance with eyes as big as rugby balls and tongues that snake around their heads.

On paper, there is nothing wrong with this place. But something less visible than smell hangs in the breeze. I take the drive up Durie Hill through puddles of fallen leaves. I look down from the birdless skies to the shabby cars to the distant river. This is where decent people with nothing to prove come to die.

After three days at Motel WangaVegas, I realise that the silver-haired biker lady’s stocky crew-cut husband is actually a woman. Denise and Davina biked down from Kilmarnock in the 1960s. They arrived here via a ferry from Sumatra and decided never to go home. They do not ask me what I am doing in their adopted hometown and they let me borrow their phone book.

In Wanganui, there are zero Sivanathans, five Pradeeps, eight Mathews, eleven Sivas and fifteen Matthews with a double t. It will take time for me to drive around this strange town and park outside unfamiliar letter boxes. It will require preparation to drop in unannounced on thirty-nice strangers and ask them what a double bounce ball is.

I ask the Scottish lesbian biker aunties if they’ll give me a good rate on a one-month booking. They give me a generous forty day/forty night discount and are grateful to see me front up with cash.

I retreat to my discounted room with cans of beer and the phone book.

While watching a Ranfurly Shield game on Sky, I make myself one promise. If after forty days and thirty-nine visits I have not found him, I will stop looking. I will go home and write my album and cut my hair and never think about Pradeep or Siva or Mathew ever again.

I get called curry muncher by glue-sniffing skinheads at Kowhai Park. I avoid conversation with the locals and spend my evenings at empty bars. Each day is measured in crossed-off names. Some days I clear two or three, some days none.

I sit outside houses and look for signs, what signs I don’t know. I figure that when I see him I’ll know, even though I have little more than blurry photos from several haircuts ago. It takes me a while to get my bearings, to be able to tell these identical streets apart. To tell which neighbourhood houses pensioners and which shelters the methamphetamine addicts.

Having crossed four Pradeeps off my list, I walk into a narrow lane off Anzac Parade. I have saved this, the juiciest lead, for last. This is the only Pradeep with the right initials.

The houses have locks on their gates and the lawns are filled with the carcasses of cars. A pale long-haired man in tight black jeans walks three Rottweilers on a leash. I stay in my car till they pass. The man’s face is pierced in four places and his dogs are muzzled.

M.S. Pradeep works at the garage at the bottom of the street. I’m greeted by a pink boy in blue overalls holding a spanner.

‘Who you want?’

‘Are you Mr Pradeep?’

‘Yep.’

‘You’re Sri Lankan?’

‘I’m New Zealand.’

‘Your father?’

‘He’s …’ He calls into the house. ‘Ma, what country was the sperm donor from?’

A voice shouts from behind the garage.

‘Eh?’ he shouts back. ‘Indonesia?’

The voice shouts something else that neither of us hear.

‘Malaysia?’

He looks at me with pale eyes. The only thing Asian about this man-boy is his greasy hair.

‘My dad left when I was a kid. He was …’

‘Eurasian,’ says a blonde woman peeping through the window. She also wears overalls and looks just like the boy. ‘He was Eurasian. And don’t you call your father names.’

I look at the lad. ‘Is your first name Mathew?’

‘Nah, mate.’ He turns to his mother. ‘Well, that’s what he was, right? He donated his sperm and fucked off.’

‘Mark Stephen Pradeep, you will not disrespect your …’

I leave them to it and walk back to the rent-a-car. I pass an unkempt man in boots and sunglasses sitting on his lawn smoking a roll-up. ‘Want some oil?’

‘Hash oil?’

‘Nah. Engine oil.’

There is a pause. Then he bursts into laughter. ‘Me mate Skid will bring a tinny and a cap to your car. It’ll cost ya $50.’

He gets up and walks into the house. He comes out with a man in a hood who sits in my passenger seat and empties his pockets into my glove compartment. The man smells of urine and is easy to bargain with. There are three foils, two brown capsules, a lighter with the logo of a political party called McGillicuddy Serious, a carved wooden pipe and some crumpled cigarettes.

I take the pipe and the lighter and just one of the foils and ask him for the shark tooth hanging around his grubby neck. He says it was a gift from his grandfather, but when he sees my money, he hands it over. I sprinkle some cabbage into the pipe and light it up.

Without warning the man puts his hands around my neck, chanting what sounds like a rugby haka. After he ties the shark tooth to my Adam’s apple, he rubs his nose on mine, insisting that it is a traditional Maori greeting. Then he takes my money and exits the car.

Day eight. It takes longer than I anticipate to pay surprise visits to thirty-nine suspects. Surprise is important. If Pradeep is hiding, he probably doesn’t want to be found.

While there are no Sivanathans in the entire Wanganui–Manawatu region, there are a disproportionate number of Sivas, most of whom are clustered around Tuatara Lane, a road that smells of cigarettes and fried food.

At the first house Karalea Siva, mother of seven, directs me to her brother-in-law next door. I meet Malini Siva, Visith Siva and Aaron Siva, all of whom tell me they are unemployed.

Matthew Siva is in his fifties and is related to everyone in the neighbourhood. He wears a singlet over his beer belly and is more belligerent than his cousins. I ask him how come they all have an Asian surname. He scratches his head and asks me if I’m from the dole office.

‘I’m looking for an old friend.’

‘Our family name is Siva, bro. You got a problem with that?’

‘Then why does your cuzzie’s letter box say Sivatu?’

The door is slammed.

Patricia Beatson at Marsellaine Grove has three dogs and has never watched cricket. But her lodger S.M. Pradeep watches it all the time. Her house is painted in rainbow colours. The foundation is violet, the roof is red. The interior starts at blue-green and ends at yellow-orange. She is a retired professor who teaches at the Wanganui Polytechnic.

She describes her lodger as a shy man in his forties who works at the local library. She believes him to be from India or Fiji. She says he is unmarried and obsessed with cricket.

The rainbow house is filled with paintings, mostly figures in garish garments with eyes that follow you around the room. She serves me Dilmah tea while I wait for her lodger to come home.

She tells me she lectured in art till she lost her sight in one eye. Now she lectures in mathematics.

‘That’s a big switch.’

‘Not really. Art is maths. Maths is art.’

She spends all afternoon showing me paintings and talking of numbers. She says that colours have musical frequencies and that if she ever lost the sight in her good eye, she would conjure up paintings through sound.

She speaks with a wonderful lilt and her language is as colourful as her topics. Her tea smells of flowers and tastes like fruit. And when she laughs the whole house sparkles. So when Sanjay Maninda Pradeep turns out to be a geek with a lisp who did not play cricket for Sri Lanka, I do not feel as if I have wasted an afternoon. In fact my thirteenth day was perhaps the one I enjoyed the most.

Adriana calls to say that if I go back to Sri Lanka, she will let me have Jimi for the summer. I tell her my work is not yet done and we get into an argument. She says she is separating from her professor. I ask if she will join us in Sri Lanka over the summer and she says no.

The biker aunties start cooking me breakfast and I start chipping in with groceries. They tell me there is a debate raging over whether Wanganui should be spelled Whanganui. Neo-Nazis have sent hate mail to the
Wanganui Chronicle
over this. We make fun of a TV soap called
Shortland Street
and end up watching a show I do not understand called
Lost.
Denise and Davina still do not ask me where I go during the day, but they offer to pack me sandwiches.

The quest has its moments – not all of it is lawns and picket fences and unhelpful neighbours. I get to take a canoe upriver to a Christian marae called Jerusalem. My oarsman is a Maori with a tattoo on his face, who tells me of pagan worship in the nearby villages. As if on cue, in the ripples before us we see a dead cow surrounded by wasps floating amid the reeds.

Past Ratana we arrive at Jerusalem where Katarina Gray Mathew invites me for a christening. I am given mulled wine and meat baked in an underground pit. We end the evening huddling around a guitar singing sweet songs.

I drive to Gonville and visit three Matthews families, each slightly shabbier than the last and all white-skinned pakehas. After that I decide to visit the local asylum.

‘You look like Caine in
Kung
Fu,’ says Peter Plumley Matthew gazing at my cloth bag. Peter is at the Lake Lewis Mental Hospital, an institution that was investigated for the liberal use of electro-shock therapy in the 1980s.

Peter Plumley Matthew tells me that Gonville used to be filled with swingers and that it destroyed his seven marriages. He is the most well-mannered person I encounter on my travels. I suppose seven wives is enough to drive any man to an asylum.

He tells me that he will become mayor of Wanganui and ban nuns. That he will napalm the Collegiate School. He tells me that everything in the universe rots, especially the human soul. He doesn’t tell me anything about Sri Lankan cricket or about a cricketer who shares his name. On my twenty-first night in Wanganui, Peter Plumley Matthew features in every one of my nightmares.

My final suspect, P.S. Mathew, lives at 93 D Longbeach Drive, Castlecliff.

After this I have no more leads. I may as well hook up with KiwiTour and head for Queenstown and not think for a while. Not think about whether I want to live in Sri Lanka with Adriana.

The fields around Castlecliff are covered in scrub and the streets are sandy. P.S. Mathew’s flat is next to a fish and chip shop. I climb the stairs and am almost mauled by a sheepdog. The dog runs past me into the open doorway and disappears into the street. The steps are rose red and the walls are egg white. The door to 93 D is green and has the words Arnie, Coruba, Leander spelled in letters culled from newspapers cellotaped onto it ransom note style.

I knock and the door opens wide. Inside is dark and cluttered. Dark blue sheets with rune symbols block out the afternoon sunshine, shielding the room from the laser-like, headache-inducing heat that I’m still not used to.

A coffee-coloured lady with a slight moustache looks me down. The only light in the room comes from a TV playing a cricket match. It looks like New Zealand vs Bangladesh. The light falls on two Polynesian women dressed in shorts and T-shirts. One is knitting a wall hanging, the other is chopping up green leaves with scissors.

The one before me wears a housecoat that tugs at her sides.

‘What do you want?’

‘I’m looking for P.S. Mathew.’

‘What for?’

‘I’m a friend from uni.’

The ladies in the room cackle with laughter.

‘What did you do at uni, Coruba? Your PhD?’

‘Hey, I know this guy,’ says the curly-haired one doing the knitting. ‘You used to come to Courtneys on the square.’ She turns to the one wearing glasses. ‘The curry fella, used to sit by himself, we thought he was gay.’

‘Leanne!’ says the one who answered the door. ‘Don’t use that word.’

‘Yeah, Leaky,’ says Glasses. ‘Curry muncher is racialistic. You should say sorry.’

‘I didn’t say curry muncher,’ says Curly. ‘I says curry. Hey bro, do you like curry?’

To my ears, curry muncher sounds less like a racial slur and more like a Looney Tunes character.

‘Yes, I do. You ladies like cricket?’

I have seen these slappers at the empty bars I’ve sat at. They wore too much make-up and clothes ten years too tight. Harmless, middle-aged women who thought they were twenty-three. The apartment is a quagmire of wine bottles, plates, chocolate wrappers and cushions. It smells of incense and stale perfume. There is a poster of the Dalai Lama on the wall.

‘Nah,’ giggles Moustache. ‘Leanne wants to sleep with Chris Cairns. Arnie wants to root Adam Parore.’

‘Don’t be gross, Coruba,’ shouts Curly.

‘You want to have a smoke?’

Something stops me from crossing the threshold.

‘My fella likes cricket,’ says Glasses.

‘Your fella likes fellas,’ says Curly, who gets a cushion thrown in her face.

‘So none of you know a P.S. Mathew?’ I ask from the doorway. Moustache answers. ‘I’m Sandra Mathew. Everyone calls me Coruba.’