Saree

by Su Dharmapala

  The headmaster, the saintly old Sir Poornaswarmy, beamed at Mahinda, encouraging him to go on, and he did, raising his voice just a little. After a moment or two the examiners turned their attention back to him, but the chief examiner muttered something under his breath. Not many understood, and even those who did thought maybe they had misheard him. Except for Mahinda, who was close enough to both hear and understand. Para Demala. Filthy Tamil.

  Within a blink of an eye, Mahinda switched from Tamil to faultless classical Sinhalese. His subject was Sri Lanka’s name.

  ‘The island’s first recorded name was Tambapani. Golden sands. Though our precious island has an even more ancient name. A name bestowed on it by the greatest epic known to human literature – the Ramayana. It was the Indian sage Valmiki who coined the name Lanka – the resplendent isle . . .’

  ‘That was very good. But I wouldn’t get my hopes up about getting into university,’ the chief examiner drawled arrogantly when Mahinda was finished.

  ‘Oh, I think he has every chance of getting into university,’ old Sir Poornaswarmy objected. ‘He has done all the extracurricular subjects and is the top in the district.’

  ‘But they are standardising exam results again now.’

  ‘That is just wrong!’ the headmaster spluttered. ‘We checked. We checked with the education board before our lad came back to the village. They said that standardisation was over!’

  About ten years earlier, in the early seventies, the government had introduced a policy designed to ensure that students from all districts were equally represented in university placements. Until then, most places had gone to English-speaking Tamils from the north and east and Sinhalese from the towns and cities. Now results were standardised across the island and there was a district quota system. Affirmative action had had a discriminatory effect; Tamil students from the north had to do better than rural dwelling Sinhalese students to get into the same courses.

  ‘No, it isn’t. The decision to reintroduce the policy was made last week,’ the examiner told him.

  Mahinda said nothing. He knew the man was lying to aggravate the old school master.

  As the bell tolled to indicate the end of the examination period, Mahinda pushed his rusty old bike along the narrow strip of palmyra trees that ran from the road to behind the school hall and waited by the filthy waterhole. A waterhole inhabited by a flock of nervy waterfowl.

  The waterfowl had just cause to be nervy, though. Had it not been for the plentiful supply of fish remains that floated down the little stream behind the school they would have long sought a different home. For the students took delight in tormenting the poor creatures. It wasn’t uncommon for firecrackers to be lobbed at the birds from the makeshift science laboratory under the coconut tree. And one full moon, some of the more enterprising villains had brought in a half-filled clay pot of ra. Had it not been for the headmaster, who kept a close eye on his charges and knew when they were up to no good, all the birds would have perished of alcohol poisoning.

  Mahinda watched the village teachers as they packed up and waited patiently for the chief examiner to finish his duties. It was clear from the stiff smiles on his teachers’ faces that even they found the examiner irritating. When the man finally stepped out into the sunshine, Mahinda struck, jumping on his rusty pushbike and riding straight at the waterhole, as fast as he could go, lobbing large pebbles like grenades and then swerving hard to avoid landing in the murky water as he swung around.

  ‘Quaark! Quaark!’ the birds screamed as they took flight.

  ‘Iskolay Mahathaya, look where you are going!’ Mahinda yelled as the chief examiner bolted to evade being run over. As the man rushed back to the safety of the schoolroom, he ran into the path of one of the heavier waterfowl. The terrified bird defecated liberally over the man’s bald pate.

  ‘You did that deliberately!’ the examiner shouted. ‘I will make sure you fail!’ Not that anyone took much notice. They were too busy laughing at the sight of the sticky grey-white goo dripping down his head and his ears.

  Mahinda rode off, not looking back. A whole three months of blissful freedom beckoned before he might be required to go to university.

  ‘Mahinda putta, you do our district proud,’ farmers called from their fields as he rode past. On one side of the narrow bunt, tender green rice plants were planted in neat furrows, and on the other side, maturing tobacco plants topped with bright pink flowers. The heady woody fragrance of tobacco flowers mingling with the sea spray gave Nayaru its unique fragrance.

  As he rode through the little group of shops that served as Nayaru’s trading hub, the modalalis tossed ripe rambutans at him. They smiled as he caught the fruit with one hand while steering his bike with the other.

  ‘Be like him when you grow up,’ young mothers advised their boy children as they played in the sand by the lagoon. Their hearts swelled with maternal pride at the sight of him, tall and lanky, with the promise of the man he would become. His intelligent eyes shone bright from under his heavy brows, his skin darkened by years of working under the hot sun in his father’s fields.

  As the road turned south, Mahinda screeched his bike to a dusty halt when he saw the gamanayaka strolling across from his hut to greet him.

  ‘Puttar, I don’t have to tell you the dreams of this village are riding on your shoulders,’ the old man said. ‘Achiamma and I have been doing abishekam for you all week. By the power of Lord Ganapathi, may you be the star that shines on us all.’

  Mahinda looked at the ground, unable to meet the village headman’s kindly eyes or acknowledge his wife’s generosity. Abishekam – libation with fresh milk of the stone statues of the gods Lord Ganesh and Lord Shiva in the small village temple – took devotion and time. And most of all, love.

  ‘Off you go, puttar. Have a rest now. And enjoy your holidays.’

  Mahinda gave the man an embarrassed little bow as he pushed off again and continued his journey home. The young man didn’t stop for long once he reached the half-mud, half concrete house he called home, though. His brothers and sisters rushed to greet him as he came through front gate.

  ‘Can you take me down to the lagoon to swim?’ ‘What does the word ‘obfuscate’ mean?’ ‘Can you mend my bonika?’ three of the six of them demanded in unison. Mahinda took a moment to answer their questions, reaching out to push back his youngest sister’s glasses on her button nose before making his escape. ‘I’m home now for a few months, I’ll teach you all manner of things,’ he said, before darting through the house to pick up the reel he’d whittled from a piece of driftwood.

  ‘Are you going already?’ his grandmother demanded, cutting him off at the doors to the kitchen.

  ‘Yes, I haven’t been for months now and it could all be a mess . . .’

  ‘Why don’t you give it up?’ the old lady grumbled, handing the boy a decidedly chipped cup of hot tea. ‘The island is haunted. They say the moths are actually spirits of dead people.’

  ‘Pfft,’ Mahinda scoffed as he swallowed the dark brew in one mouthful and made his escape. He had a great deal to do before the tide turned and he needed to hurry.

  Everybody in these parts knew about the copse of trees that jutted out into the middle of the lagoon like an island but nobody ever really wanted to go there. It wasn’t just the rumours about ghosts – the lagoon itself was teeming with sea snakes. Mahinda saw half a dozen or so in deeper waster as he splashed across sandbar, then picked his way carefully around the little stinger crabs that scurried around at low tide and got to work immediately. He hadn’t visited in some time, so the brisk sea breeze and the elements had done their worst. The little hut Mahinda had fashioned from some old corrugated-iron sheets was a mess: the pupae baskets all upended and fallen branches everywhere.

  He was busy sorting through the baskets of cocoons when he heard her bell, carried on the evening breeze as the wind changed direction.

  ‘I thought I’d find you here,’ his mother said, carefully alighting fro
m her bicycle, her eyes bright and cheery. ‘What did you do your oration on?’

  ‘I spoke about Sri Lanka. The name Sri Lanka.’

  ‘Did you talk about Ramayana? That it was in the Hindu epic that first referred to Ceylon as ‘Lanka’ – the resplendent isle. That it was the Indian sage Valmiki who coined the name?’

  ‘Yes, of course I did. How could I forget the first story you ever told me?’ Mahinda smiled. Mother and son worked together, chatting as they set the hut to rights.

  It had been quite by accident that Mahinda and his mother had found the silk moths, here on this very island. A whole whisper of them, all white with grey markings. They’d come to gather firewood early one morning after a terrible storm had lashed the coast. ‘They must have been blown in from India,’ his mother had said, turning her face to the uncommon northerly wind.

  A few weeks later they’d found a nest of cocoons where the moths had laid eggs. ‘Why, I am sure we’ll be able to throw some silk from these,’ she’d told Mahinda with shining eyes as she spied the fluffy cocoons.

  ‘For what, Amma?’

  ‘For a beautiful silk saree. I would be a queen if I dressed in silk,’ his pretty young mother had said, twirling around in the little clearing.

  They had taken the cocoons home, but as soon as his mother dropped the golden pods in boiling hot water to throw the silk, young Mahinda had started screaming.

  ‘They are dying, Amma! They are dying!’

  Sure enough the pods were twisting violently, the larvae inside fighting desperately at being boiled alive in their self-spun enclosures. One cocoon even jumped straight of the cast-iron pot, landing in the dirt of the kitchen floor.

  His mother had immediately scooped the cocoons out of the scalding water and hugged him to her breast. ‘But I want you to be a queen, Amma,’ he’d cried. ‘I promise to make you a silk saree. I promise – but how can I?”

  ‘What if we find a way, hmm? What if we find a way to get silk without killing the moths?’

  That was how it’d all begun. Over months and years, they’d collected the cast-off cocoons and attempted to extract silk from them. At first, his mother had just humoured the little boy, amused by his interest in the project, but as he became older, she saw real ambition in his eyes. Every day after school, he would experiment with ways to collect the silk, his little pink tongue poking out of the side of his mouth.

  When he was ten, she took him on a long bus journey to Jaffna to look at books on sericulture at the majestic old library. The little boy had bravely asked the chief librarian to explain some of the more obscure words in the books to him, which amused the straitlaced public servant no end.

  ‘I could barely see the top of his head over the counter, but he demanded to know what sericin was,’ the man chortled into his afternoon tea as he told his colleagues.

  Back at home they had planted mulberry shrubs. ‘Don’t waste my precious fertiliser on those stupid trees,’ his father had snapped, but his mother took a little of the precious urea anyway, to encourage the shrubs to grow.

  And now they were almost there after fourteen years. They almost had the twenty pounds of cocoons they needed. Twenty pounds of soft gold fluff that Mahinda carefully kept in a hessian sack in the little hut.

  ‘Putta, you’d better hurry and go home,’ his mother urged, pointing to the rapidly incoming tide. When he frowned, she rushed to reassure him. ‘Don’t worry about me. I won’t be far away.’

  If there was ever a job that every lad in the village aspired to from when he could first walk, it was to be a village watcher. Fathers and elderly men were automatically exempt from this duty, so it fell to the fittest and sharpest young men to protect the village from dusk to dawn. From three treetop lookouts, these young farmers and fishermen kept a keen eye out for the elephants, leopards and wild boar that roamed freely within the dense jungle just a few miles away.

  It was quite common to see a procession of little boys follow these strapping young men along the dusty red laneways of the village at dusk, their milk bellies sticking out over their tattered shorts as they followed their heroes, shoulders back and fearsome frowns on their faces. Fearsome at least until their mothers stepped out onto their doorsteps to call them in for dinner – then they ran home like the little lambs they were.

  ‘Decided to come back, have you?’ Vannan called from above as Mahinda clambered up the rough rope ladder. ‘I didn’t quite miss your ugly face but I certainly missed the food,’ he teased, reaching for Mahinda’s food parcel even before his friend made it onto the platform high above the ground.

  ‘Who has been watching with you?’

  ‘The dung-for-brains Govinda and then Badayana Bala. But I kicked him out after I caught him taking a watery crap off the side,’ Vannan growled. ‘I mean if you have to have a crap, at least crap in the direction of the jungle and not in the direction of the village! So I have been doing the watch on my own.’

  ‘But I’ve been gone for six weeks.’

  Vannan had already spread steaming bowls of idali, coconut chutney and drumstick curry out on the mat. ‘Do you have any idea what it was like being stuck with those two buffoons all night? Govinda could not stop talking about his goats and Badayana Bala could not stop farting!’ he said. He opened Mahinda’s banana leaf–wrapped rice packet and grinned. It was filled with good village food: kos cooked in rich coconut cream, spicy handalo and dambala. The fresh jackfruit, fish and curried vegetables was a meal fit for a king. The boys sat and exchanged food, laughing and joking and catching up on the village news as darkness fell.

  ‘So, how was it? Ammachi did abishekam for the entire four weeks,’ Vannan asked finally, pouring himself and Mahinda a hot cup of black tea from a thermos.

  ‘Not too bad. Tell Ammachi I will come around tomorrow to thank her. There are a couple of good bunches of kurumba on the tree on the south side of our field. I was going to take one to the gamanayaka and his wife. I’ll bring a bunch for Ammachi too.’

  ‘Just take a bunch for the gamanayaka’s wife. My mother would no sooner expect something from you than she would from me. Once you get to university, I’m sure she’ll quite disown my brothers and I altogether and say that you are her son.’

  Mahinda smiled. ‘And how is the planting going? I saw some of your southern fields from the lagoon when I came in this evening. The field closest to the road looks a little sparse.’

  ‘You aren’t still going over to the island, are you? Haven’t you given up on that crackpot idea yet?’

  Mahinda raised an eyebrow. ‘When have I ever given up on anything?’

  ‘Did you hear back from the spinners in Trincomalee, then?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘So? What did they say?’

  ‘That I was insane. Here, look at this,’ Mahinda said, pulling a letter from the waist of his sarong where he’d tucked it in. Vannan grabbed it and started reading by torchlight, but Mahinda didn’t wait for him to finish.

  ‘They say that it is not possible to spin fine saree silk from silk hankies,’ he told his friend. He knew what the note said by heart.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because the silk is too coarse. You need to reel saree silk straight from the cocoons.’

  ‘Maybe they have a point. You might have to give this up. Your mother died, Mahinda. She is not coming back,’ Vannan pointed out gently.

  ‘Vannan, I made her a promise and I intend on keeping it.’

  And into the night the friends chatted, their conversation punctuated by eerie jungle noises as they kept watch, the call of elephants and the growl of leopards carrying in the darkness. They returned more than once to the problems Mahinda was having with his silk.

  ‘See, when the moths leave their cocoons, they make a mess of it, almost ripping the cocoons in half,’ Mahinda explained. ‘We can’t reel full lengths and that makes the spinning a little more complicated.’

  ‘More complicated?’ Vannan asked.

  ‘Yes.�
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  ‘But not impossible.’

  ‘I don’t think so, but I’m not sure,’ Mahinda said.

  ‘Learn to spin the silk yourself, then.’

  ‘I am having enough problems growing the damn worms – how am I going to spin the silk as well?’

  ‘Mahatma Gandhi spun his own cotton.’

  ‘He also took on the might of the British Raj and chased them out of India.’

  ‘So you are admitting that us Indians are better than you Lankans finally?’ Vannan goaded.

  ‘You’re a Tamil, you damn fool! You’re no more Indian than I am!’

  ‘Just come to Jaffna with me this weekend,’ Vannan said. ‘We’ll see if we can buy a spinning wheel from the market. The trade winds have risen, so there’ll be boats from Puducherry.’

  Mahinda looked sceptically at his friend but then shrugged. ‘Why not? I have taught myself almost everything about growing silkworms anyway. I shall teach myself how to spin as well,’ he conceded. ‘So, how are things going between you and Miss Shivani?’ He knew the real reason his friend wanted to go to Jaffna.

  Vannan shrugged. ‘Who knows? All I know is that I need a good harvest in the next six weeks before I can even consider approaching her family.’

  ‘Have you told your parents?’

  ‘Are you mad? They would kill me! My parents will never consent to a marriage with a Karawe. The fisherman’s caste! My mother would die! But with my own tobacco harvest, I will be able to stand on my two feet and not depend on them. I have even started thatching my own house on the field my athappa left me.’

  Mahinda rolled his eyes. ‘Just make sure you break the news to your mother after I leave for Colombo. I don’t want to be here when the crying starts!’

  ‘But you’ll be there, right? You know, when I get married,’ Vannan said.