Saree
Page 17
That last statement had really rankled, as he had been spending every spare moment he had with his younger siblings, looking over their schoolwork and setting them extra tasks to do over the holidays. He’d also spent the better part of every evening being quizzed by his youngest sister, Prema, whose greatest ambition was to work at the Sinhala Dictionary office. She was working through the dictionary, her cracked horn-rimmed glasses perched on her button nose, asking everyone the meaning of obscure words. ‘What do you think noesis means?’
‘I want you to plough all the fields on the south side of the lagoon and get them ready for planting by the time you leave for Colombo,’ his father had decreed.
‘But that’s more than ten acres to clear! I won’t have time!’
‘You’ll just have to make time, then!’
So he’d ploughed all day, eating into the precious little time he had to tend to his silkworms. The tide had already turned when he finally made it to the island that afternoon and he didn’t relish spending the night up on the watchtower with a wet sarong.
‘Now I won’t have time to figure out if this silk thing is even worth pursuing!’ Mahinda complained bitterly to his mother. ‘It was hard enough as it was – if you don’t feed them regularly, they die, and if they don’t die, some stupid bird eats them!’
Kusumaveti opened her mouth but stopped before she spoke. Wisps of hair that had escaped from the bun at her neck fluttered around her face, and she closed her eyes and turned, as if she heard something on the very wind. ‘Duty calls,’ she said softly. ‘I’ll have to go now, my darling. Can you please remind your father again that your sister needs new spectacles? I keep telling him, but he forgets.’
Mahinda nodded, and she went to fetch her bicycle, ringing the bell and waving as she took the long way around the lagoon. The merry sound rang in his ears a long time, but at length he returned to his weaving, marginally calmer now.
He managed to complete one enclosure and then picked several large clusters of larvae from the surrounding trees. No matter how much anyone might laugh at him, he knew the silk caterpillars were intelligent creatures. When he spent time with them, they started to recognise his voice, raising their pale white faces to him as he tended to them, looking at him curiously.
Yet caring for them was tricky. He couldn’t just dump mulberry leaves in their basket and leave. He’d done that a few years ago and found that the worms would gorge themselves to death within a day. Slow and steady feeding was what was needed. Ideally, he’d come and refresh the bed of mulberry leaves every couple of hours.
Mahinda was so engrossed in sorting the silk cocoons that he didn’t hear the uneven footsteps coming towards him until they were very close.
‘Hey, is that you, Nimal?’ Mahinda asked, squinting into the darkness of the forest.
The boy staggered forward.
‘What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be resting at home?’
Nimal didn’t answer but collapsed lifeless on the ground.
‘Does he follow you everywhere?’ Vannan asked exasperatedly as Nimal squatted by the edge of the field watching them. They were furiously hoeing the lowest section of Vannan’s southern field with the briefest strokes possible. News was that Mrs Subramanium was back in the village and the entire male population had disappeared. Even the ne’er-do-wells who usually loafed around the village shops had found occupation.
‘Yes,’ Mahinda replied in between heaves of his hoe.
‘Why? Surely he is annoying you! He’s sure as hell annoying me!’
Mahinda smiled. Despite what he said, Vannan had brought Nimal some hand-me-down clothes from his younger brothers and was very much an accessory in ensuring that the boy had enough to eat.
‘He doesn’t want to go back home and he doesn’t want to stay with us either,’ Mahinda said.
‘Why not? Your grandmother’s kiribath and pol kiri shodi are famous all around Nayaru. Hell, I’d move in with you if I could!’
‘How should I know why he doesn’t want to move in? He doesn’t speak.’
‘So, how do you know he doesn’t want to move in?’
‘Because every time I ask him, he shakes his head and hides in the hut,’ Mahinda said as he stopped to adjust the hoe.
‘How do you know he even understands you?’ Vannan asked. ‘He doesn’t speak, right?’
‘Malli!’ Mahinda called to Nimal, raising his voice. ‘Can you go and get me the small flat stone by the well? I need to sharpen my hoe.’ The little boy scurried with alacrity to the other side of the field. ‘See, there’s nothing wrong with his hearing. He just doesn’t speak.’
Vannan grunted. ‘So do you know why he no longer speaks?’
‘All I’ve been able to gather is that he left Colombo after his nona died. He’s seen some awful things. The other day, I went to the hut early to drop off his breakfast before I started on the north field and I heard him screaming in his sleep. About someone burning . . .’
‘Poor boy.’
‘I wish I could help him. It’s fine that he sleeps in the shed now, but what is he going to do in a couple of months when the rains start?’
‘He can move in with me and Shivani once we get married,’ Vannan muttered.
‘Why? So he can poke his eyes out with your blunt farming tools? It’s bad enough that what he’s seen has rendered him dumb but watching the two of you will surely make him want to go blind too!’
Vannan put his hoe down to punch Mahinda in the arm. Hard. At which point Mahinda put down his hoe too, to block the punch. Soon the friends were on the freshly ploughed earth, wrestling each other with wild abandon, putting each other in head holds and trying to rub each other’s faces in their smelly armpits. They stopped only when Vannan managed to tug loose Mahinda’s sarong.
‘Hey, stop!’ Mahinda protested, clutching at the near-threadbare garment.
‘Why? Are you ashamed of the sugar banana you have hiding underneath there?’
‘No more than you are of those peanuts you call balls,’ Mahinda laughed back, standing up to give his friend a helping hand. ‘Shivani is going to be utterly disappointed on your wedding night! Hey, what?’ he demanded when Vannan stopped.
Vannan pointed to something behind Mahinda’s shoulder, and he spun around to look.
And there was Nimal, frozen with terror, his eyes unseeing. Urine started to drip down his leg onto the red earth and the putrid odour of faeces filled the air.
Mahinda and Vannan approached him slowly. ‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ Mahinda reassured the boy, touching him on the shoulder. ‘We wouldn’t really hurt each other.’
‘No, I’d sooner cut off my own arm than hurt this good-for-nothing dung-for-brains,’ Vannan said.
‘Come, let’s get you changed, hmm?’ Mahinda said gently, and he took the boy down to the little stream by the lagoon to clean himself while Vannan collected their hoes and other equipment and went to fetch some clean clothes.
‘Does he do that often?’ Vannan asked later, when they were back in the shed.
‘No – this is the first time.’
‘He needs to be seen to. He needs help.’
‘I know, I know,’ Mahinda said. ‘I spoke to the vedda . . .’
‘The vedda is a bloody hack! I wouldn’t let him tend to my dog, much less Nimal!’
‘Yes, but even he recommended I take Nimal into Jaffna. So a proper doctor can have a look at him. If you are all right with it, I was thinking I’d bring him with us next week.’
‘Yes, Shivani suggested that we meet at the fort in her last letter. She can steal a few minutes from her friend’s engagement party around the corner,’ Vannan said squatting in the shed. ‘We can go the evening before and spend the night at my aunt’s house. If we get to the hospital early, we’ll be able to avoid the queues.’
‘You and Shivani better get married before Shivani runs out of weddings to go to! How else will you meet?’
‘Shivani will never run out of
weddings to attend. We are Tamils, remember. There’s a wedding to go to every second week. Speaking of doing things quickly, though, how are you going with your silk project?’
‘Good and bad. Nimal is quite amazing,’ Mahinda replied. ‘See, he’s been helping me with the silkworms. He’s even woven some enclosures for me and keeps them well fed, look!’
In fact Nimal had made Mahinda’s shed a cosy place. Despite his small size, the boy was a hard worker, and while Mahinda was out working in his father’s fields, Nimal had taken to managing the silkworms.
‘They aren’t scrawny little maggots anymore, are they?’ Vannan observed, taking in the healthy, plump caterpillars munching away on juicy mulberry shoots.
Had Mahinda been truly honest, he would have confessed to the heart-wrenching fit of jealousy that had gripped him when he’d found Nimal tending to his precious silkworms. How dare this boy touch his pets? The silk moths and their offspring were his charges! What if Nimal killed them with his inept handling?
‘You have to be very careful with them! And don’t handle them too much!’ Mahinda had scolded.
But over a few days, it became clear that Nimal, with his fewer responsibilities, could care better for the creatures. Tend to their needs more attentively.
‘The trick is to give them fresh shoots every two hours. And look at the size of the cocoons!’ Mahinda said proudly, showing Vannan the gunnysack.
‘So have you started spinning the yarn yet?’
‘Well, that’s the bad bit. As you can see, I’ve managed to put the charka together,’ Mahinda explained. ‘The pictures in the manual were pretty self-explanatory.’
‘Thank goodness, or I wouldn’t think you’d make much of an engineer!’
‘I can spin cotton easily enough, but not silk,’ Mahinda said, and gave his friend a demonstration, first spinning some cotton he’d picked up from the village store and then trying again with the slippery silk. No matter how he tried, the silk wouldn’t pull as easily, and a knot formed at the eye causing the wheel itself to get stuck. ‘I have washed and washed the silk, it just won’t slip into the spinning line,’ he complained.
Vannan leant in to feel the difference between the cotton and silk with his rough calloused fingers. ‘The cotton is softer and more supple,’ he said. ‘Maybe you need to do something to the silk before you spin it. Process it somehow.’
‘But how? And how am I supposed to find out? Since those damn fools burnt down the Jaffna library, there isn’t anywhere I can find information!’
‘Have you tried the university?’
‘Of course not. Jaffna University is a Tamil Tiger stronghold.’
Vannan looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘How about this? I’ll come with you to the university, and if someone asks, I’ll say you and Nimal are my deaf and dumb cousins from Batticaloa.’
‘Don’t be stupid – they’d kill us!’
‘Don’t you want to find out if this ridiculous idea of yours is worth pursuing or not?’
‘Of course I do!’ Mahinda said. ‘But they’ll know that Nimal and I are Sinhala and kill us on the spot. They’re not stupid, you know!
‘Of course they’re stupid, you bloody fool! Think of the cause they’re fighting for! To split in half an island the size of India’s smallest fart! They’ll never succeed!’
The Protestant missionaries who’d come to Nayaru Lagoon in the late 1700s and early 1800s had written to their families that they had found the Garden of Eden. ‘This is God’s own good earth. How can these heathens not believe in God when confronted with the majesty of his work?’
Even the hard-bitten northerners from Jaffna were known to holiday down in Nayaru, finding a peaceful balm for their souls in the calm lagoon and the gentle pace of village life, where each day stretched as long as the next with little or no urgency to shorten it. No one hurried. No one fretted. There were no buses to catch and no business to tend to that could not be sorted out the next day.
Even Vannan was known to stop and admire the lagoon reddened by the rising sun at dawn as he walked to his fields. He loved to match the stroke of his hoe with the rhythm of the waves on the beach beyond. ‘The wind was high today, so I was able to clear twice as much land,’ he’d joke.
So it was in the early hours as Mahinda walked to the island on the lagoon to take Nimal his breakfast. He stopped on the beach just as the sun peeped over the horizon, turning the salt water a deep shade of vermilion as a sula sula swooped across from the other shore. It sang a trilling song, its bright red webbed feet a stark contrast to its grey plumage as it ducked and weaved in the cool morning breeze.
For several breathless minutes it played, soaring high in the sky before plummeting dramatically down, neatly avoiding the water, only its feet trailing the surface, leaving a sweet ripple behind. It was as if it knew it had an audience and played to Mahinda’s naive enchantment. Yet even the most committed of show-offs tire of their own antics, especially if they have just a single routine. So with a gleam of greedy anticipation in its eyes, the bird swooped towards the island, its beak already half-open, salivary glands leaking at the thought of juicy white moths.
Mahinda tracked its descent, spellbound. The only sound was the waves lapping at the beach beyond – which made the crack of the old BB gun from the trees even more disconcerting. In one instant the bird was swooping, and in the next, it was dead, its bright red blood staining the whitening water as the sun rose steadily in the morning sky.
‘What did you do that for?’ Mahinda cried horrified. ‘I gave you that gun to scare away boars, Nimal, not to shoot innocent birds!’
Nimal looked angrily at Mahinda in return. Glare for glare. Stare for stare. Rage fairly emanating from his scrawny body. He refused to relinquish the gun even when Mahinda tried grabbing it from him. If Mahinda was outraged, so was Nimal! He tugged at Mahinda’s torn T-shirt and pointed.
‘What? What do you want me to see?’
Nimal thrust Mahinda into the clearing, which only the day before had been swarming with moths. One never hears the flapping of a single moth, but hundreds or even thousands of flapping moth wings create a sound almost as eerie as it is sweet. When Mahinda had visited the previous evening, the clearing had been buzzing, but now, it was strangely quiet. Not a single moth to be seen.
There were several dead birds on the ground, though. It looked as if Nimal had resorted to his trusty slingshot first, only turning to the BB gun after he’d depleted his stock of appropriately sized pebbles.
Even the worms were gone, judging by the upended enclosures. Sure, the fact that birds preyed on moths had been an issue before, but Mahinda had dismissed it as part of the cycle of life. They’d taken moths before, but never massacred them. What had happened this morning was war. A bloody battle. With severe casualties on both sides.
‘Oh no . . .’ Mahinda cried. ‘What are we going to do?’ he said, collapsing unceremoniously on the ground. A banana-leaf parcel dropped from his hands and landed in the dirt.
Nimal grabbed his breakfast, setting it carefully down on the rickety table in the hut before coming back out to give his friend’s ear a vicious tug. He seemed to be saying that the situation wasn’t hopeless, and that Mahinda should get up and get on with it.
‘What? All right, so we still have the pods to depend on for new breeding stock – but even that’ll take a good month!’
Nimal gave him pointed look.
‘Okay, twenty to twenty-five days,’ Mahinda conceded. ‘But I don’t have much time left. I have to head down to Colombo before February.’
Nimal gave him a withering look before pulling at his T-shirt again to drag him to the hut.
Mahinda had fashioned a little bed for the boy, high above the ground to keep him safe from night creatures such as the deadly scorpions and amphibious sea snakes wont to escape from the lagoon of a night. He saw now that Nimal had fashioned several storage containers from discarded fishermen’s crates and stowed them under the bed.
Mahinda peered over the edge to see his silkworms. All of them. In various stages of development, from tiny ones that were almost invisible to the large languorous ones almost ready to start spinning cocoons. All safe and snug. And as Nimal made a small cooing noise, the larger worms raised their heads in his direction and allowed him to stroke them. Leaning into his caress. Making it clear they loved and craved the boy’s gentle touch.
Mahinda looked at the upended enclosures and back at Nimal and his worms, confused. ‘Did you have time to save the worms before the birds attacked?’
Nimal shook his head and gestured that it was cold.
‘You’re going to have to try again, Nimal. I don’t understand.’
Nimal sighed and looked at Mahinda as if he were a simpleton. This time he gestured to the sun in the east and then pointed to the west. Mimed the action of sleeping, and the cool of the night. To keep the silk larvae warm, he’d been collecting them in the evening and popping them to sleep under his bed.
‘So you get them out and put them in their enclosures during the day and take them in at night?’
Nimal nodded, smiling, before turning to caress some of the worms again. He picked up those worms clearly starting to spin and put them in enclosures with other cocoons, so that they could transform together. His kissed his fingertips and rubbed them on their bellies before leaving them to their change.
Mahinda sighed. ‘Even if we have silkworms, it’s going to take a while before they’re ready to breed. Anyway, the birds will attack again.’
Nimal gave an evil grin, pulled out his slingshot and waved it at Mahinda, as if to say that he’d be properly ready the next time.