‘Those things are going to kill you,’ Mahinda said, squinting against the bright sunshine, carefully watching where he put his feet. It was market day, and every farmer within a ten-mile radius had come into town to sell their wares. If one somehow avoided being run over by an overzealous bullock cart, one inevitably stepped in the patties the skinny bullocks left behind.
Vannan filched several rambutans from a passing cart. ‘So what exactly are we looking for?’
‘Idiot, it was you who suggested I spin the silk myself.’
‘I guess it’s a spinning wheel you’ll be wanting, then,’ he said. ‘We’d better head down to the north end of the wharf.’
‘I know, I used to live in Jaffna, remember!’ Mahinda told him as they climbed on a bus heading towards Kankasanthurai on the north side of the peninsula.
Six months of the year, vendors from Puducherry in India used the calm seas to make the 150-mile journey to Jaffna. With a southerly breeze behind them, the distance could be covered in a matter of mere hours, making it an attractive proposition for the astute businessman.
Mahinda and Vannan hurried through the busy market, not bothering to look at the snake charmer or the bright tent of sarees, but they could not help but be transfixed by the firewalkers.
‘Show your devotion to the Draupati Amman – she was with you when your soul was created and she will be with you when the world ends,’ devotees called out as they rushed forth over pits of hot coals, their eyes glazed with religious fervour.
‘We’d better keep moving,’ Mahinda said to Vannan, pulling at his sleeve after what seemed to be an eternity.
The vendor they were looking for was the famous Mustafa Mohamadeen. ‘Come one, come all!’ the barrel-chested merchant called from the flap to his glorious tent, the tassel on his moth-eaten fez dangling over his bright blue glass eye. ‘If you can’t buy it from Sir Mohamadeen, it is not worth having!
‘So what are you looking for today, young sirs? May I interest you in a cassette radio? A thousand rupees – very cheap. Or how about a new hoe? A fine new hoe for strong young farmers like you.’
‘We are actually looking for a spinning wheel,’ Mahinda informed the trader as they stepped into his sumptuous fabric-hung tent, a world quite different to that of the derelict fishing port outside.
‘A wheel to spin yarn,’ Vannan clarified.
‘Why do you need to spin yarn? If it is cloth you need, why, I have it in abundance! I have silk, cotton, polyester, dupioni silk, chiffon, lace, wool – not that you need that in this heat – guipure lace, bombazine, brocade, bump, cambric . . .’
‘No, I need a spinning wheel.’
‘If it is a silk saree you are after, I have a better collection than those clowns over there,’ Mustafa Mohamadeen replied, pointing towards another bright tent.
‘No, we need a spinning wheel,’ Vannan said patiently.
‘What for?’
‘To spin silk.’
‘You fool, everybody knows you throw silk by reeling it straight from the silkworm’s cocoon. Why do you need a spinning wheel if you want to reel silk?’
‘Because I want to spin silk instead,’ Mahinda explained.
‘Why?’
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘Because I do,’ the merchant told him.
‘Because I want to create silk without killing the moth inside, okay? Satisfied?’
Mustafa Mohamadeen, the greatest trader south of Andhra Pradesh, stopped for a moment. And started to laugh. So much that his large belly jiggled and tears started to stream down from the corners of his eyes. ‘What fool’s errand are you on?’
‘It is my own foolish errand, so show me your spinning wheels if you have them.’
‘Of course I have them . . . come this way,’ the merchant said, leading the boys out the back of the tent over a precariously unbalanced gangplank to the vessel that had brought him to Jaffna.
‘Spinning wheels, spinning wheels,’ Mustafa Mohamadeen muttered to himself as he pulled off tarpaulins from piles of junk on the deck. ‘Here we are, spinning wheels,’ he said finally, dragging several specimens to the fore. ‘What type of a spinning wheel would you like? A double drive or a single drive? I even have some that are electric, though I would not recommend it here during the dry season. Your electricity is more off than on.’
Mahinda looked at the vast array of machines on offer, confused. Some were made of wood and some were made of steel. Some had their two wheels at interesting angles and others had strange pieces that stuck out. He looked at Vannan, who shrugged his ignorance. ‘Which do you recommend?’ he asked the trader.
‘I would recommend a double-drive, foot-operated machine like this one here. It’s a fine bargain for 1500 rupees.’
‘Do you have anything cheaper? What about this?’ Mahinda asked, pointing to a rusty specimen with one large wheel and another smaller one.
‘That is 2000 rupees. Don’t be fooled by the rust. It is a superb spinning wheel, look!’ Mustafa said, giving the wheels a delicate nudge. Both started to turn, one clockwise and the other anticlockwise. ‘An expert spinner could make a good thousand yards of yarn with this in a day.’
‘What about an ignorant jackass?’ Vannan asked, and Mahinda scowled at him.
‘Well, young man, if you are a beginner, you can’t go past this, the Saraswati 1000. Made 100 per cent in Hyderabad! 100 per cent! Look at its sleek lines. The wood is from the pine trees in the Himalayas. With this you’ll be spinning like a Saliya within a week!’
And it was a handsome piece indeed, all pale pinewood gleaming in the bright Jaffna sun. Anyone could see that this was a premium piece of equipment.
‘How much?’ Mahinda asked softly.
‘Three thousand rupees,’ Mustafa Mohamadeen announced proudly, patting his belly.
‘Err . . . perhaps not,’ Mahinda said, backing his way out of the boat.
‘Why, young sir, how much were you intending on spending?’
‘About 300 rupees?’
‘But I thought you were serious buyers!’ Mustafa Mohamadeen was outraged. ‘Off with you! I should set the watch on you for wasting my time!’ he roared, running the boys off his leaky boat.
‘Well, that is that, then,’ Vannan said. Mahinda trailed despondently behind him as they made their way to catch another bus. In Nallur they made a quick stop at one of the seedier vendors that lined the road to the temple and bought an old offering plate for twenty-five rupees, giving the young pusari another ten to do the offering.
‘We should have spent more money on the offering,’ Mahinda muttered afterward. ‘I have nothing else to spend it on now.’
‘The gods don’t need your money. Keep it for something worthwhile like food,’ Vannan replied, smoothing his hair back and sniffing under his armpits as they made their way around to the elephant sheds at the back of the temple.
And there she was. Sitting warily on a coconut tree stump dressed in a bright pink saree, nervously watching everyone who came around the corner. Vannan rushed to stand on one side of a large palmyra tree while she coyly went to stand on the other side, both of them within earshot but not actually touching or seeing one another.
Shivani was all things required in a classically beautiful Tamil woman. Fair skinned and lusciously curved with bright eyes that could laugh merrily or just as easily be filled with winsome tears.
‘Oh my darling Shivani, how I have missed you,’ Vannan cried, then broke into the chorus of a familiar Tamil love song. ‘Every moment of every minute I am apart from you, my heart bleeds with unending pain. You are the bow to my arrow and the sun to my moon and the milk to my tea.’
If Shivani had been a halfway sensible woman, she would have demanded Vannan speak to her properly. But no, she would drag on the drama for a full half-hour, sighing, gushing and cooing in return. It was excruciating, and today’s performance was no exception.
As always, their brief reunion ended in tears. ‘I know you will fin
d someone else to love! Someone your mother will approve of!’ Shivani sobbed hysterically, clutching at the golden cross she wore around her neck. Her family had converted to Catholicism only to secure free education for her brothers. She was no more a Catholic than the sacred cow tethered to the gate of the kovila, but in moments of desperation, she would appeal for any form of divine intervention. ‘I swear to Almighty God that I will kill myself as sure as I stand here if you stop loving me!’
‘Oh my darling,’ Vannan declared, ‘I will surely follow you to the grave!’
‘And only if the both of them were to die would I be free of this farce,’ Mahinda muttered to himself.
‘Till next time, my darling,’ Shivani declared, then ran through the trees to the temple and out to the street beyond.
‘Till next time, my sweet,’ Vannan cried and came sadly to stand beside Mahinda. ‘I think it’s time we went back home.’
‘Will you be able to hold back your tears until we get to the bus halt or do you want my hanky now?’ Mahinda asked. Vannan punched him in the arm.
It was nearing early evening and they would need to catch the bus soon to get back to the village before the jungle animals took control of the roads, but Mahinda was hungry. ‘Here, let’s have some rotis,’ Mahinda offered sarcastically, pointing to the a roadside stall. ‘May it be a balm to your broken heart.’
As they squatted by the road with their rotis, Vannan droned on and on about Shivani. ‘Machang, you have no idea. She is a princess. She is a goddess. She is a queen. She is in fact a woman in a million. No, a woman in a billion. No, she is the only woman in the world like her!’
‘Of course she is, you idiot! How could there be another woman exactly like her?’
‘You are an arse! A complete and utter arse!’ Vannan said, but he carried right on. ‘Have you seen her eyes? They are so dark they reflect the universe.’
Mahinda wanted to point out that Vannan had probably never seen Shivani’s eyes, for they never spoke face to face, but he couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Vannan only stopped talking when a group of young men pushed past shouting and chanting slogans, so many of them it was almost like a parade, making their way to an open space next to the town hall.
‘What are they saying?’ Mahinda asked. He was bilingual but struggled to make out what the men were saying in their thick Jaffna accents.
‘Bloody stupid fishermen,’ Vannan muttered after listening for a few moments. ‘Some Eelam nonsense. How are they going to unite the Tamil nation when the various castes aren’t allowed to use each other’s toilets? I can see it now. The great revolution brought to its knees by the fact that soldiers can’t crap in the same toilet!’
‘Let’s go watch,’ Mahinda suggested.
‘You fool! They’ll butcher you before you even set foot in the park!’
‘But how would they know I was not a Tamil?’
Indeed, Vannan and Mahinda looked so similar that they could be mistaken for brothers.
‘Have you seen the way you walk?’ Vannan demanded.
‘Of course I haven’t seen the way I walk. How could I?’
‘Because all Sinhala men walk like Tamil women. Watch!’ Vannan said. He leapt to his feet before sauntering backwards and forwards effeminately in front of his friend.
‘You really are an idiot . . .’ Mahinda growled, but before Vannan could reply, they both saw Mustafa Mohamadeen lumbering through the crowds dragging something large behind him. He was heading straight for them, and when he saw that they had noticed him, he waved and beckoned them over. They made their way over to him, curious.
‘I was packing my boat to return to Puducherry when my crew reminded me of this,’ the trader said, wiping his sweaty brow before coughing and spitting by the roadside. ‘I have spent the last half-hour looking for you. I had hoped I could find you at the bus halt.’
‘What is it?’
‘It is a charka.’
‘A what?’
‘A charka. A traditional Indian spinning wheel. The very model made famous by Gandhiji.’ It was a large piece of furniture too, about four feet by four feet with two horizontal wheels. ‘Look, when you are spinning, you’ll have to pull this one to an angle,’ the man explained.
‘How much do you want for it?’ Mahinda asked, feeling ill at the thought of the food they’d just spent their money on.
‘Nothing. Take it. It’s yours. It’d cost me as much in fuel to take it back to India,’ the old trader replied, walking away.
‘Does it come with instructions?’ Mahinda called after him.
‘Have a look at the bottom of the box.’
Mahinda could not quite believe his luck.
‘So, how exactly are you planning on getting that home?’ Vannan asled, looking at the large box sceptically.
Mahinda looked up to retort that a man who could heft ten bunches of kurumba could easily move this onto a bus when he saw Badayana Bala coming from the direction of the district hospital.
‘Bala, machang! Is that you? I didn’t know you came to Jaffna today!’ Mahinda called out, much to Vannan’s consternation.
‘Did you have to do that? You knew I’d help you take it home,’ he groaned.
‘But this way I don’t need to hear you carry on about Shivani anymore,’ Mahinda whispered back as Bala squirmed his way across the street.
‘Machang, it is this diarrhoea! Came to see the doctors yet again, but they can’t do anything!’ Bala replied, doubling over to demonstrate his intestinal pain.
As it turned out, it was just as well that they’d met Bala, for the box that the spinning wheel came in disintegrated even as they loaded it onto the bus, and it took three sets of hands to get the whole thing back to the village.
‘Just make sure you wash the damn thing before you start spinning with it. You don’t want anyone to catch diarrhoea from your silk,’ Vannan muttered as he left Mahinda at his house amid a sea of charka parts.
Anger was apparent in every one of Mahinda’s movements as he prepared to weave yet another enclosure for his silkworms. He dumped an armful of coconut fronds on the ground and hacked the leaves off with one blow.
‘I heard you and your father had words this morning,’ his mother said softly, coming through the copse of trees behind him.
‘What is his problem? I am not behind on any of my chores and yet he will pick on me!’
‘Mahinda, Mahinda . . .’ his mother said, trying to grab his arms as he brushed past to start tending to a small grove of mulberry bushes.
‘I can never do anything right! He will always find fault, won’t he?’
‘Mahinda,’ his mother said, holding her hands out in supplication. ‘You have done everything right by him. You will do so much more than your father and I, and his heart is bursting with pride. He is just sad to see you go.’
‘But why does he always have to complain about . . . you know . . . about this?’ Mahinda demanded in frustration.
‘The simplest and easiest answer is that he doesn’t understand—’
‘What do you mean, he doesn’t understand? Of all people, he should understand! Didn’t he drag you up here from Matara so he could pursue his dream of becoming a farmer? We’ve all nearly starved to death because of it!’
His mother sighed. Yes, she and her husband had come up to the inhospitable north in the 1960s to build a new life, answering the call of the socialist government then in power. They had truly believed, like so many others, that it was only by supporting the drought-stricken north that a unified Ceylon could built.
‘A separate village of Tamils, a separate village of Muslims and village of Sinhala people is not a nation! We need to learn to live together,’ the populist politicians had called out in the villages and towns of the south. ‘We’ll provide you with free land! We’ll rebuild the ancient tanks built by the great Sinhala kings and provide water for the great push north!’
Mahinda’s father had thought frequently of poisoning his wife and family
along with himself in the following years. The climate in the north was arid and unpredictable, and the government’s support had been at best sporadic. Many had fled back south, especially when another drought hit in 1976, but Mahinda’s parents had persevered.
‘This is our home now,’ his mother had reassured her husband. ‘We can survive on what we have. We don’t need much,’ she’d insisted. She’d been an avid student of health sciences at school and knew how to dry and grind the fish that so were plentiful in the seas around Nayaru to increase the nutritional value of the rice porridge that was the staple diet of most farming families. She also supplemented their meagre meals with wild herbs filled with life-saving iron and other trace elements. So unlike most in the village, Kusumaveti Ratnayaka’s children didn’t display the obvious symptoms of malnutrition, such as rickets and scabies.
The success of her family could not be laid solely at her feet, though. The gamanayaka, a princely descendant of the Jaffna royal family, had been a man ahead of his time. He’d braved the ire of other village headmen around Nayaru by protecting and supporting the immigrant farmers from the south.
‘No, he doesn’t understand,’ his mother repeated firmly again, laying a gentle hand on his shoulder. ‘All your father ever dreamt of was to become a farmer. To live an independent life free from the big landowners. In you he sees more. You are about to leave and become an engineer! An engineer, my son! Respectability, wealth and a secure future! It is more than he ever dreamt of for his son, and he cannot understand that your dreams are different.’
Mahinda shrugged. He could not forget the way his father had spoken to him that morning.
‘What are you doing?’ his father had demanded when he saw the spinning wheel Mahinda was fiddling with.
‘I’m trying to fix this spinning wheel,’ Mahinda had said, and started excitedly to explain the whole plan.
‘Why are you wasting your precious time with all this nonsense!’ his father had roared, kicking the offending spinning frame. ‘You barely have three months before you head off to Colombo and you want to waste your time on this cockamamie idea? There’s work to be done in the fields. And if you weren’t so selfish, you’d help your brothers and sisters with their schoolwork.’
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