The Luminist (6 page)

Governor Wynfield came to the lion's side and led him away. “There's trouble,” he said curtly.

Ahead of them, Swaran stood in the court doorway, frozen before a sea of screaming men just beyond the gate. The shapeless rumble of voices rose like heat. Eligius couldn't understand
what they were saying, the men hurling themselves against the bars again and again.

Papers spilled from Swaran's hands as he left the doorway for the courtyard beyond. They caught the sea winds and hurtled upward.

“Appa!”

Eligius followed his father into the courtyard, where Chandrak lay on the hard stone near a cluster of carriages. An undulating circle of soldiers beat the cowering shape of him. His left leg bent grotesquely.

Matara's men were at the front of the mob, crying Chandrak's name, and Swaran's.

Eligius heard his father's voice now. A strangled, guttural wail. Wading into the teeming courtyard of soldiers, his papers swirling away from him, Swaran walked unsteadily towards the men around Chandrak. He paused, bent to the ground, then shambled on.

Eligius broke into a run when Swaran raised the banyan limb.

A young soldier with a blemished face pointed to Swaran and shouted something. His words were pulled up to the sky with Swaran's papers. Three other soldiers leveled their rifles at Swaran. The volley of thunder silenced the crowd.

There were lights. Tiny burning flowers spat from the dull metal barrels. Bursts of red opened Swaran's skin, his chest and head, leaving gashed holes all over him.

Thin plumes of smoke rose from the soldiers' rifles. The angry embers of their barrels faded.

The crowd ran hellishly then, in every direction. Swaran stood motionless in the courtyard. His expression was quizzical and concentrated, and so familiar to Eligius, who had been watching him for months as he grappled with the colonials' laws as if trying to grasp the fraying threads of a dream. He crumpled to the ground next to Chandrak.

“Help me!” Chandrak cried as he pawed at his own
wounds. A bullet had rent his left side open. “Take me home!” His cries were a boy's, suddenly afraid of the world.

Eligius knelt to his father. He slipped a hand beneath his head and tried to lift him away from the stain of blood spreading across the cobblestones. For a moment it was just him in the lifeless glass of his father's eyes, just the still reflection of him against the sky. Then there were soldiers behind and above him, pulling him away.

After the Rain

ON THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY OF SWARAN'S DEATH, THE whole of the world gathered itself in a gray winding sheet. Eligius spent nights counting the clouds sailing across the gaps in his roof. Fat drops filled his hut with music.

The rains had come for Ceylon. It was Aipassi, 1837.

On the evening of Diwali, the sky finally cleared. Matara's women brought their cooking pots out into the cool air. They called greetings and compared felled walls. They lit fires. The women who had pinches of curry and onion raita for their muthai kothu parotta spared some to those who did not. They sent their children out to fetch water from the well at the base of the trail to the sea. The echoes of spatulas pounding against skillets followed them down and back again.

After dinner, a neighbor boy, Hari, came to see Eligius for his English lesson. Already families were leaving their homes to join the processional of lamps to the sea in celebration of the harvest holiday. They took the path down the cliffs, their frail diyas forging flickering ribbons through the jungle.

“Hari, hurry.” Eligius jostled the boy's shoulder. “We're leaving soon.”

Hari returned to his English lesson. “And they gathered at shore to bid farewell, and set her to sea, asleep. The Lord's hand did hold hers, held her tethered to the deep, until she was no more than brine, than air. Then the Lord bade her, awake, and held her no more, and to the dark sea bottom, Gretel fell.”

“Your English improves each time.”

Sudarma baked chapati over their fire. She turned a lump of dough, careful to fan the plume of sweet smoke away from their doorway. The bread's cooked skin crisped to a golden shade, like the colors Eligius saw against the mountains at twilight when the cliffs became light itself.

She was smiling. It was a hard smile, as if she'd tasted bitter root. Sometimes she resembled Swaran, the same vanishing point in their gaze.

“It's time,” she said.

He accepted Hari's offering of palm oil and told the boy to keep the book. “When I see you next, tell me what you think of her end.”

The procession of his neighbors grew heavier. They carried their diyas as if those fragile lights were burdens. To him, the lights were the only beautiful thing he knew in Matara.

“I remember when your father asked you the very same question,” she said. “About that poem. What would you say now, I wonder.”

Eligius took his lamp and began the walk. Sudarma followed him, shifting Gita in her arms as she rolled a bit of cloth between her teeth for wicks. She wore her white garment; she was still a mourning wife and always would be. It dragged the dirt like everyone else's, yet the baubles she'd adorned it with were a gaggle of stars tumbling through their village.

“Maybe colonials prefer an Indian who knows their dead Gretel,” he said. “For myself, I don't see the use in poems.”

“May I walk with you?”

Chandrak came up alongside them. “I've missed too much, not having a family.”

Sudarma bowed her head meekly.

“Eligius,” Chandrak said, “you are the man of your family. I will respect your wishes.”

“It doesn't make a difference to me where you walk.”

He strode ahead, ignoring the open stares of his neighbors. He tried to fill his vision with the lights all around him.

Where the land ended in a rocky jut overlooking the sea, there was one well-worn path down to the beach. Some of the women did an impromptu karakattham, dancing with pots of uncooked rice atop their heads.

He took his mother's hand. Together they picked their way down the slope to the beach, where the fishermen tied their skiffs for the night. Chandrak followed them.

The men stripped off their clothes and left their sandals on the rocks. They waded into the frigid Arabian Sea with their lit diyas held above the tide.

Sudarma picked a spot on the breakers and sat. Some of the cut stone bore the stamped legend of the John Company. The letters had been shallowed by the lapping water. “You offer Lakshmi our prayer,” she said. “You're the man of our family tonight. I'll stay here, where Gita and I can see you.”

He scrabbled to the water's lapping edge. Chandrak followed. “You were braver than I was that day,” Chandrak said. “I wanted to tell you that. Your father would be proud of the man I see now.”

“Don't speak of him. It's for me only.”

The last of the twilight's color drained away. It was hard to see the other men. Only their faces in the golden fog cast by their lamps.

“He and I were different,” Chandrak said. “But we wanted the same thing. I still do.”

“They shot because of you.”

Chandrak's eyes were on him. They made him afraid of his own anger.

The voices of those shepherding their prayers out to sea were high and sweet. Laughter and curses at the cold mingled easily with their requests for good health and streets whole enough for carts to travel.

“They shot because of all of us,” Chandrak said. “Because
of our skin and our language. Because we live at all. Yet, I beg you to forgive me, Eligius. Let there be something between us. If not fealty, then calm. At least that.” He took a small glass bottle from under his tunic. When he uncapped it, a smell like rotting tamarind briefly infected the air. He held the flask up for Eligius.

“No.”

“ Take it into the sea and leave it there. That I shouldn't find it.” His eyes were wet. “Swim fast. It won't be as cold. Pray for peace for Sudarma. A woman alone.”

Carefully, Eligius drizzled scant oil into each diya, lit them and set them atop the tide. He slipped out of his clothes and lowered himself into the water. Frigid waves punched the air from his lungs.

He uncorked Chandrak's bottle and listened to its contents empty into the water. Then he crushed the frail spun glass in his fist. His blood greeted the salt sea.

He kept one glass shard, then let the others go. They caught the cold stars as they sank. Arranging the remnant on the diya, he turned it until the flame light was magnified.

He propelled the diyas forward with a push of his hand, creating gentle waves that swept them toward the other lights scattered over the surface of the sea.
Health for my mother. Health for Gita.

The tide's return from shore took his lights away.
A better home.

Some diyas were extinguished by the waves. Others were so small that he couldn't be sure of them anymore. His lights floated among the many. He couldn't tell them apart. Soon even his appa's light folded into the black tide. Nothing of them seemed memorable.

He thought of the girl at Court that day. The way her light lingered after she'd gone. The way the soldiers' lights didn't linger at all as they found his father again and again.

He returned to shore. Sudarma sat near Chandrak. She stared at the sky while Gita slept against her. “How far did they get?” Chandrak asked.

“They didn't burn long,” Eligius said.

 

HE LAY AWAKE all that night, listening to the runoff water split the ground outside his hut. It was as if someone had laid a strip of the murmuring sea down Matara's middle.

Chandrak came to his hut in the morning. “You deserve more than the fields.” A grave man, relating a grave fact. “I've spoken to your mother and made arrangements through the missionary at Port Colombo.”

“You have no right to speak to anyone about me.”

His mother slipped a tunic over his head, let it fall, tugged roughly at it to test the strength of her mending. He grabbed it, ready to tear it to pieces and throw it at this presumptuous man's feet. His pulse pounded beneath the skin of his temples.

“It was your father's,” Sudarma said. She gently moved his hand away and smoothed the fabric. “He served a colonial family. Now you serve another. Your father was treated well. Maybe they'll treat you well.”

She handed him some bread and a battered diya. “This was my grandfather's. I've kept it for you. Do all that you are told to do. If you don't come home with rupees, I will not allow you to stay here.”

 

CHANDRAK KEPT AT his heels, so he picked up his pace. His father's tunic felt like thorns against his skin as they passed through the jungle.

Chandrak led him to the opposite end of Port Colombo, where the clock tower rose above the crossing of Chatham and Queen streets. The East India Trading Company's fleet began at the southern shore and extended out to sea like a cobblestone path of sails. The schooners closest to port waited for scurrying Tamils to unload crates of the colonials' motherland needs: tins
of smoked beef, pipe tobacco, linens and woolens, grand carriages and bicycles for the children. A separate line of workers loaded the ships with satin and muslin, salt, indigo, wild birds for the London and Paris zoos. Amid the bustle were the repatriating Britishers, their pockets overflowing with bits of Ceylon, boarding for the long voyage home.

Two families, British and Indian, waited on the docks in the shadow of an immense clipper, the
Earl of Abergavenny
. The Britishers stood on one side in their finest clothes. Servants wielded parasols against the misting rain their children insisted on playing in. The other family stood stoically as the rain made suggestive skins of their garments. Both families watched the eldest of their children walk the gangway, the Indian boy after the English boy.

“The sad truth of our life among them,” Chandrak said. “Disease, schooling, culture. Then comes the moment when their families have to send their children back to England or risk losing them to our hazards.”

“And the Thevar child?”

“A servant, I'm sure. Where they go, he follows.”

Chandrak paused before an open crate of canned fruits. “I am only a pauper,” he told the mate overseeing the crates' unloading. His English was broken and pathetic. “But what I wouldn't give for the food of my betters.”

The mate, a hirsute man darkened to a burnished red by the sea sun, picked up a jar of apples. “Am I a do-gooder, then? Bound to give tithes from the pockets of my employer?”

“No, sa'ab. It's a hard life.”

The mate smiled. A bit of curdled yellow glinted between his rotting teeth. He tossed Chandrak one of the jars and bade him a good walk.

Chandrak twisted the lid off of the jar and dipped his fingers into the syrup to pluck a slice. “Where were we?” He licked his fingers, then held them out to the falling rain to be washed clean. “Oh yes, the Thevar child made to follow his better. And
now my display disturbs you. At least tell me this much. You thought I was stupid. So did your father. I'm an articulate man when it serves me.”

“About the servant, his life isn't his own. About you? I didn't think you were stupid and neither did my father. He thought you didn't care.”

“Any day, the Court directors could move the whole of the southern provinces further into the jungle, if they thought a crop of coffee would fare better where our huts stand. Do you care about this?”

“I think it's wrong. But I've seen enough of men who think words change the world. Go on and tell yourself how smart you are – you'll bleed just like my father. Nothing changes.”