Saree

by Su Dharmapala

  ‘Oh, Nimal,’ Mahinda grumbled. ‘You’re missing the whole point! I want to make silk without hurting the moths – but I don’t want to hurt birds either!’

  ‘And no, I am not a sissy,’ he protested when Nimal started to mock him, prancing around like a girl. ‘You are a Buddhist, you should understand . . .’ Then he realised that Nimal probably hadn’t had the same level of religious education he had. Or Kusumaveti’s gentle mothering either.

  ‘All life loves life. Everyone of us clings to our bodies as a mother clings to her newborn child,’ he explained softly, echoing his own mother’s very words. ‘So to kill, to destroy another’s body and to separate the athama from the kaya is wrong.’

  Nimal pointed furiously into the air. Into the air that should have been buzzing with moths. He clearly loved the creatures – Mahinda realised it when he saw Nimal’s chin give a telltale wobble, and a watery brightness to his eyes.

  ‘Look, maybe we need to give this up altogether. I’ll be leaving soon anyway and you’ll need to go back to your parents.’

  Nimal shook his head, digging his little toes into the ground and crossing his arms. There was no way he would return to his parents’ hut. He’d escaped the horrors of what he’d seen down south only to walk into another living hell.

  ‘So what will you do? While I am gone?’ Mahinda demanded in exasperation.

  Nimal looked proudly around him, gesturing to the enclosures and the healthy silkworms, and puffed up his chest.

  ‘No, you can’t! You can’t live here all your life! The doctor said you needed to start mixing with people to help you to start speaking again.’

  Nimal rolled his eyes.

  ‘Yes, I agree with you that doctor was a bit of a hack, but you won’t learn to speak hiding here talking to silkworms and moths!’ Mahinda growled. He was still cross with the Tamil doctor who’d seen them at the public hospital. He had given Nimal the barest of attention. ‘Sinhalese people speak too much anyway,’ he’d snapped at Mahinda. ‘There wouldn’t be half as much trouble if they kept their mouths shut! So this is probably a good thing!’

  It was just as well that the tiny but strong Nimal had been there with them or else Mahinda could never have managed to stop Vannan punching the man in the mouth.

  Vannan had ranted all the way to Jaffna University, then got into an even bigger snit when they ran into Shivani’s eldest brother, Theevan, whom Mahinda knew quite well from his days at Jaffna Central College. Mahinda knew Rajan and Geevan too, Shivani’s middle brother and youngest brother. He was glad not to see them all together.

  ‘Still friends, are you? And you even have an accomplice now!’ Theevan had drawled, seeing Mahinda, Vannan and Nimal come through the gates.

  ‘And why wouldn’t we be friends?’ Vannan had growled at his brother-in-law to be. Vannan had met Shivan’s brothers through the district cricket tournaments.

  ‘I don’t imagine it was easy being told that the village headman chose a Sinhalaya over you to support through school.’

  ‘The gamanayaka made the best decision,’ Vannan said.

  ‘How does it feel? To be treated like dirt?’

  ‘I would eat dirt for this man,’ Vannan said. ‘He is closer to me than my own brother. I have no problem with a system that gives good village-bred boys a chance to get to university. You city mongrels can fight over Tamil rights all you like – it has nothing to do with me. Now get out of my way,’ he’d pronouncd with fire.

  ‘Careful you don’t grow a big mouth, we have ways of silencing people now,’ Theevan had threatened but quietened visibly when a few young men wearing the armbands of the Liberation Tiger of Tamil Eelam came past. Threatening violence was one thing, but seeing a young man who you’d played cricket with murdered in an instant was something else, which was would happen to Mahinda if he were identified as Sinhalese.

  It had shocked Nimal to the core when they’d met Shivani later in the day and Vannan explained to him that she was Theevan’s sister. ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ Vannan had reassured him. ‘She is nothing like him.’

  ‘You can’t stay here in the hut with the silkworms, Nimal. How do you think you’re going to survive when I leave?’ Mahinda demanded.

  Nimal mimed the shape of a luscious woman, indicating Shivani, then mimed a plate of food and rubbed his belly, indicating the promise she had made to keep him fed.

  ‘You sure you want to do this? Live here like a hermit and eat from Vannan and Shivani’s?’

  Nimal nodded enthusiastically, then grabbed a couple of empty cocoons from a nearby pile and stuffed them in his ears, laughing.

  ‘It’s just as well you have the cocoons, then. You’re right, that is the only way to survive Vannan’s singing,’ Mahinda laughed in agreement.

  There was something quite special about tobacco harvest. Rice was grown to feed the community, but tobacco, well, tobacco was grown to buy luxuries like cooking oil, soap, cloth and kerosene. So a good harvest meant smiles all around, laughter and bonhomie.

  Laughter gave way to bliss when the Ceylon Tobacco Board truck left the lagoon, headed for Puttalam laden with cured leaves, so heavy that its chassis carved groves along the uneven mud road as it left the collection of shops that acted as the depot. The village farmers were paid for tobacco by the kilo and would rather see the truck drag its way to town like a pregnant bitch than wait for a second truck that may or may not come.

  The village children would chase the truck, slow as it was, all the way to the main road, tossing firecrackers as they ran, their eyes bright and their skinny legs pumping as fast as they could to keep up. Then they would return home to a delicious meal of rich red rice, paripu and pepper fish before everyone in the village would take the afternoon off to relax. Even Mahinda’s father was in a good mood.

  Which was why, on that particular afternoon, Mahinda was able to sneak away, after all the ruckus had died down. His father was having a rare nap in the shade of the old kos tree in his coconut-string hammock, his brothers and sisters had all gone down to the other side of the lagoon to play with their friends, and his grandmother was visiting, sitting around with the other village grandparents and forensically examining the gossip of the last six months.

  ‘I didn’t expect to find you here,’ Mahinda said as he spotted his mother kneeling beside Nimal looking at an enclosure full of worms.

  Nimal looked up at Mahinda as if he were mad. He’d sensed something unusual moments before Mahinda had arrived. He could not describe to Mahinda the eerie coldness in the air or the strange sounds of a bicycle bell he’d heard.

  ‘Babies care not for the tobacco harvest,’ his mother smiled. ‘Why, I am sure I delivered Nimal here just a few days after harvest some fifteen years ago!’

  ‘Happy birthday, Nimal!’ Mahinda congratulated his friend. ‘Vannan and I will make sure we’ll celebrate this week!’

  Nimal looked terrified.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Mahinda chided. ‘We won’t do anything silly.’

  ‘So, tell me. What have you been doing?’ his mother asked, looking at the large pot they had set on three stones.

  ‘Oh, so much!’ Mahinda exclaimed, as Nimal’s eyes followed him with concern. ‘Don’t worry. She is not like other grown-ups. She understands,’ he explained to the boy.

  Mahinda misinterpreted the boy’s concern about him talking to thin air, thinking that Nimal was still shaken from the savage tongue-lashing they’d received in the aftermath of the bird-butterfly massacre, just days before. How were Nimal or Mahinda to know that the flock of sula sula were used by the fishermen to spot schools of tuna in the sea?

  ‘Damn fool children! Damn silly games!’ the head fisherman had roared. ‘We didn’t know what had happened. We’ve been out on the water for two days without catching a damn thing! Two whole days!’

  The gamanayaka had stepped in, reaching out with placating hands, but had been rudely brushed aside. ‘Silkworms! I’ll give you bloody silkworms,’ the barrel-chested fish
erman had yelled, grabbing Mahinda by the front of his T-shirt. ‘Families will starve because of your silliness!’

  In the end, the man stomped off ungraciously, muttering that if Mahinda had not been earmarked for university he’d be used as live bait to catch fish instead. ‘He’d be perfect to catch that shark that’s been escaping my net for years! Three hundred pounds, I reckon.’

  ‘We were making so many mistakes, Amma, no wonder the spinners in Trincomalee said they could not spin for us,’ Mahinda explained, reaching out for an old exercise book. He’d carefully copied reams of information from the library at Jaffna University between its faded pages.

  ‘The problem was that we were boiling it but not for long enough or hot enough. The spinners in Trincomalee spin cotton, and you only need to comb cotton to clean it of its impurities. To make silk ready for spinning, you need to boil it. Here, let me show you,’ he said, picking up several larvae, all busy secreting silk from their open mouths.

  ‘See, the silk that the Bombyx mori worm produces in its salivary glands has two components: sericin and fibroin. The fibroin is the stringy centre of the silk and sericin is the sticky stuff that binds the whole thing. A single cocoon has up to fifteen miles of silk!

  ‘To unravel and spin silk, we need to boil it. Hot. To get the sericin really loose. No wonder the weavers in Trincomalee rejected the samples I sent them – as soon as they started spinning their spindles would have stuck! And if they tried to comb the impurities out, their combs would have stuck too!’

  ‘And what is this?’ Kusumaveti asked, pointing to a hank of fibres hanging off a hook, a grey-white mass swaying at the slightest puff of breeze.

  ‘It’s some we did for practice a few days ago,’ Mahinda explained. ‘But it’s not quite right. The thing is, Amma, we’ve been using coconut leaves to boil the water, but I don’t think it’s been hot enough. So I found an old kos tree in the forest and I have been hacking it and bringing it here. Kos burns hot. I hope to get the silk from all these cocoons today,’ he said, showing his mother a stack of cocoons.

  ‘Oh my goodness!’ Kusumaveti crowed, eyes shining at her son’s cleverness. ‘I’m so proud of you.’ She squeezed his shoulder. ‘But now I will have to go – I’m needed elsewhere.’

  ‘Can’t you stay just a little longer, Amma?’

  ‘My darling, one can never time the birth of a child. The head fisherman’s daughter went into labour about five hours ago. She is young and strong and will need more time. But the basketweaver’s wife is quite the way along. I suspect she’ll have the baby any minute now and I don’t want to be long away from her!’

  ‘But Amma, there’s five miles between their huts!’ Mahinda cried aghast.

  ‘Which is why the district pitched in and bought me a bicycle!’ his mother smiled, climbing on the bike and waving merrily as she sped away.

  ‘Well, we’d better get on with this then,’ Mahinda said to Nimal, who was still looking at him in horror. To whom exactly was Mahinda speaking to? Was he insane?

  ‘Come on,’ Mahinda said ignoring the look of horror on the boy’s face. ‘Let’s get on with it.’

  So for the next quarter of an hour they set about getting everything ready for boiling the silk cocoons. In the past two weeks they’d made a healthy collection of cocoons, enough to warrant a large pot. Before they started, both Mahinda and Nimal squatted around an old chipped plate and pulled out their rusty pocketknives to scrape shavings from a couple of bars of Lifebuoy soap. This was the trick that Mahinda had not had the chance to share with his mother.

  While Mahinda had gleaned a great deal from the technical books he’d found in the agriculture section of the library, it had been in the literature section that he’d struck gold. While Nimal and Vannan had wandered off to play cricket on the lawn in front of the library, Mahinda had wandered aimlessly in and between the high stacks, breathing in the musty fragrance of books decaying in the salty air, until a faded, silk-bound volume caught his attention.

  It was a set of short stories about ancient Chinese pilgrims who had travelled to India to study Buddhism, grisly tales full of blood and gore in which pilgrims fought off vicious bandits and even nastier packs of snow leopards that tracked them from the peaks of the Himalayas to the fabled gates of the centre of Buddhist learning, Nalanda in Bihar. And as the protagonist in the first story lay dying in his bed, the head arahant came to his side to guide his spirit towards nirvana. It was in their dialogue that the precious nugget of information lay.

  ‘Love and compassion are the reason we are born, and yet it is love and compassion that can free us from the unending cycle of birth and death, my son,’ the wizened old monk had advised. ‘Tell me of the place where you were truly happy, where you could be yourself and you were just loved as you are.’

  ‘At my mother’s house,’ the dying pilgrim had wheezed. ‘She was the silk mistress for Emperor Hsiu Tang and she earned the bao from our feudal lord for being the most skilful silk maker in all the Western kingdoms. But she was kindness itself. She was a devout Buddhist and refused to hurt her silk moths. So she used daikon juice mixed with soybean oil to weave her silk.’

  Mahinda hadn’t finished the story, so giddy with joy that he was. The juice of the fat white daikon radish was a strong alkaline and mixing with it soybean oil would have made a soapy solution. Maybe this was it. Maybe soap was the key that would help him spin the shorter fibres together. Soap had not been mentioned in any of the other books about silk processing.

  Mahinda and Nimal finished scraping the soap and set the shavings to boil in the large vat of water. They were just about to drop half a hessian sack of cocoons into it when Vannan came tearing into the clearing, his eyes wide with terror. His body was coated with sweat and grime, and judging by the splatters of mud on his blue sarong, he’d just waded through his father’s freshly irrigated paddy fields.

  ‘You have to save me!’ Vannan cried. ‘Hide me quick!’

  Mahinda did not think twice as he quickly grabbed some rope from the hut. He tied one end to a heavy rock and tossed it over one of the higher branches of an angsana tree, tugging hard to ensure that it was firmly caught on a branch. ‘You climb,’ he instructed Vannan. ‘I’ll keep it tense.’

  In his hurry to scale the trunk, Vannan’s sarong came loose not once but three times. He took a deep breath to calm himself before putting a foot on the fork of a low branch and hefting himself up higher with the aid of the rope.

  ‘I heard that the Tigers had been recruiting in and around Puttalam, but I didn’t realise they’d come as far down as Nayaru,’ Mahinda said urgently as Vannan reached the midway branches. ‘Don’t worry, Nimal and I are right behind you. We are quite safe here.’

  ‘It’s not the LTTE, you damned fool!’ Vannan called back. ‘It’s Mrs Subramanium! I’m not scared of the LTTE, but everyone is scared of Mrs Subramanium! Even the LTTE!’

  ‘Holy hell, Vannan! Why didn’t you say!’ Mahinda yelled, loosening the rope so that Vannan landed on a branch heavily. ‘Did she see where you were going?’

  ‘I don’t think so. My brother sounded the alert when he saw her umbrella in the distance and who can miss that stupid bright blue and green saree she always wears!’

  Mahinda and Nimal made small work of pulling apart the hearthstones and dousing the fire, then fanned the smoke away in the brisk sea breeze. They’d both managed to climb halfway up two largish angsana trees and were hidden by their leaves when Vannan’s mother came into the clearing following a largish lady dressed in an incongruously bright saree. From the vantage point of the trees, she looked like one of those colourful chameleons that could be easily found in the forest just beyond.

  ‘You must be here, I know you are,’ Mrs Subramanium called out loudly. Several birds from nearby trees took flight. ‘I know you are not hiding up on the watchtowers and I know you aren’t hiding by the school hall like you did the last time I came. And Mahinda Ratnayaka’s grandmother said that he had come here, so
I know you must be here too.’

  Vannan glared at Mahinda through the canopy of the trees, clenching his fist with outrage. Mahinda rolled his eyes and shrugged. What could he do?

  ‘Come now. The time for silly childish games is long past,’ she called out.

  Neither Vannan, Mahinda nor the mute Nimal made a sound, sitting tight on their perches. They could outwait her any day of the week.

  ‘Well, we’ll just have to wait for them to return, I guess,’ Mrs Subramanium said, glancing about her. ‘This looks like a boys’ playhouse. Cheek, look at the nonsense these boys are collecting,’ she observed, rummaging through the bag of cocoons with distaste.

  ‘While I’m here, I might as well tidy up,’ Vannan’s mother said, walking into the hut to make Nimal’s basic bed. Out of the corner of Mahinda’s eye he could see Nimal screw his face up with outrage.

  ‘Now look at this!’ Mrs Subramanium commented, picking up a stack of Sinhala language periodicals that Mahinda had brought for Nimal. ‘All comics!’

  ‘I might as well take all these clothes home to be washed,’ Vannan’s mother said, picking up a few pairs of musty shorts and T-shirts and stuffing them into a bag. ‘That boy Nimal has no one to look after him properly.’

  ‘What’s this?’ Mrs Subramanium asked, picking up Mahinda’s little copybook full of notes. ‘Can’t understand a word of it,’ she sniffed, dropping it carelessly on the ground.

  Up in his tree, Mahinda gritted his teeth.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know what these boys are doing,’ Vannan’s mother muttered. ‘Look at this, just look at this,’ she said, picking up the hook on which Mahinda had draped the silk he’d collected just a few days before. ‘I’ve been looking for this hook all week! It’s what I use to hang my pot for boiling clothes in!’

  ‘Stop!’ Mahinda called. ‘Don’t!’ He climbed down the tree hurriedly and without much grace, pausing at the base of the tree to retie his sarong. ‘That’s the silk we collected the other day!’

  Mrs Subramanium grabbed the hook of silk and held it over a puddle of mud. ‘So, where is he?’ she demanded, her eyes glinting. ‘Tell me or I will throw this silk in the dirt!’