‘Up here,’ Vannan called, resigned, as he too slid down. Only Nimal held his perch high up in the canopy.
‘Oh, my precious putta, I can’t tell you how happy I am to finally see you!’ Mrs Subramanium gushed, making the transition from threatening to congenial in less than a second. She handed the silk to a nervous Mahinda, who grasped it with both hands. ‘As I was telling your poor mother, having a fully grown son is such a burden, a burden he is obliged to reduce by getting himself a good wife!’
‘As I have said before, I am not interested in getting married.’
‘Sure you are! You just don’t know it!’ she insisted, turning briefly to Vannan’s mother, who was smiling. ‘I have arranged marriages for everyone from here to Puttalam. I have all the eligible young men and women on my books. Both Tamil and Sinhala. Did you know I brokered the marriage for the daughter of the mayor of Puttalam? A fine young lady.’
Mahinda looked up at Nimal, who was clinging to the tree for dear life. From the mutinous set to his mouth, Mahinda knew he would not come down until the interlopers had gone. That might be some time, though. Vannan was like a silk moth caught in a spider’s web. No matter how much he struggled, he could not escape Mrs Subramanium, but he would not give up the fight.
‘So, I have proposals from all the good Vellalar families from Puttalam to Jaffna. I even have half the families from Trincomalee. I think Sanuja Jayaratnam is a fine young lady. You must ignore her buckteeth, though. No one is perfect,’ Mrs Subramanium insisted, shoving a handful of photos at Vannan and ducking her head back into her capacious black handbag.
All the information about prospective brides was there in Mrs Subramanium’s handbag. In neat faded files, colour-coded for caste and social strata. Gold for wealthy Vellalars, lime green for children of Muslim merchants and blue for the offspring of Karawe families. ‘Blue for Karawes like the ocean they sail!’ she joked. And the individual files contained information about the bride’s age, Vedic horoscopes and photos.
Mrs Subramanium proposed one bride after another. As soon as had Vannan rejected one young lady, the next profile of another came up.
‘I never give up, you know!’ she insisted as she ferreted deep into her bag. ‘And as soon as our Mahinda finishes his studies in Colombo, I have the daughter of a wealthy Sinhala modalali from Trincomalee all lined up. She is only eleven now but in six or seven years she’ll be perfect! I told your father all about her when I saw him in Mullaitivu the other day when he was in town to buy your youngest sister’s new spectacles.’
Vannan could not help but smile as Mahinda spluttered with horror. ‘Did you hear that? She’ll be ready in six or seven years!’ he teased. Busy tormenting his friend, he almost missed the photo that accidentally fell out of the matchmaker’s handbag.
‘And who is this?’ Vannan asked, leaning over to pick it up from the muddy ground. Mahinda saw a strange look cross his face. ‘Who is this?’ Vannan asked again, gently wiping specks of dirt from the image of the bride’s face.
‘Her name is Shivani and she is of no use to you,’ Mrs Subramanium retorted, whipping the photo from his hand. ‘Notwithstanding, I think I have a very good offer for her hand from an educated government clerk from Puttalam.’
‘And why is a clerk from Puttalam better than me?’
‘She is a Karawe,’ the matchmaker insisted. ‘Do you want to break your mother’s heart? Do you? Marrying a girl beneath you?’
‘Is that what you say to the Karawe families? That they are beneath Vellalars?’
‘No, I lie to them that there are no higher people than the warriors of the sea,’ she retorted.
‘But she is the most beautiful creature I ever beheld,’ Vannan insisted, taking the photo back and looking at it in the evening light.
‘Are you sure your son is not blind?’ Mrs Subramanium asked his mother. ‘Half the girls I have shown you today are at least as pretty as or even prettier than her.’
‘No, they are not. She is the most beautiful woman in the world!’ Vannan declared.
‘I would be the laughing stock of all the matchmakers in the land if I brought your proposal to her family.’
‘And why am I such a difficult prospect? I am the eldest son. I will inherit the most land!’ Vannan declared indignantly.
‘Mrs Subram—’ Vannan’s mother tried to get a word in edgewise but was ignored.
‘She is a Karawe!’ Mrs Subramanium said. ‘What will your children be? Neither fish nor fowl?’
‘That is ridiculous and you know it. It would not be the first time an inter-caste marriage has been made! Or are you too scared? Scared to go and broker the marriage? Or are you just a second-rate matchmaker?’ Vannan goaded.
Mrs Subramanium did not quite know what to say. She looked at Vannan’s mother, who finally spoke.
‘Mrs Subramanium, this is the first time he has even shown a slight interest in any girl. He has been rejecting all your proposals for the last two years. I frankly don’t care if she is a Karawe. All I know is that with three farmer sons I need help in the kitchen. Broker the marriage, if you please,’ she said. ‘I don’t really believe this caste business is of any use at the end of it all.’
Mrs Subramanium looked more than a little mortified. ‘But . . . but . . .’
‘Just present my son’s proposal. That is all we can do.’
Mahinda finally started spinning late one evening, by the light of several kerosene lamps. Vannan had taken Nimal to do the watch with him, ostensibly because the silent boy did not give him a migraine, but in reality because he understood that Mahinda needed time.
The letter had arrived from Colombo University offering him a place. The engineering course would span the next five years. His father had burst out into uncharacteristic tears, as had the gamanayaka. Even Vannan’s appa had cried. The sight of three grown men bawling like babies had alarmed Mahinda, who was feeling rather overwhelmed himself, but soon the men had pulled themselves together and retired to the gamanayaka’s porch to celebrate with a bottle of arrack. Vannan’s mother was already busy making food for him to take to Colombo, though he would not be leaving for three weeks yet. She made things that would keep well, like packets of fried dried gourds and deep-fried jackfruit.
‘Puttar, who will look after you? You will have nothing when you get to Colombo,’ she had worried, bustling around her tiny kitchen in quite a tizz.
‘I will be fine, Ammaci. I hear food at the university is top class,’ he told her, trying to sound confident. She wasn’t fooled, though. She saw the sudden brightness in his eyes and heard the tiny wobble in his voice.
He would desperately miss Nayaru – the simple village life and the sweet smell of ripening tobacco and sea spray. He’d miss his silkworms, his family and his friends. The only thing that cheered him was the fact that Vannan’s proposal for Shivani’s hand in marriage had not been dismissed out of hand. Shivani’s parents, frustrated by her long reluctance to consider any of the proposals put to her, had agreed to a meeting.
‘Any marriage, even one to a dirt-grubbing Vellalar, has to be better than having a spinster daughter,’ her father had conceeded. ‘Let him come. And if she likes him, she can marry him.’
An entire delegation was leaving Nayaru at the weekend to meet the family. Even Nimal had been roped in to carry the ceremonial platter of betel leaves despite his mute protests.
‘My weedy younger brother is too large to carry one and Shivani is so excited to use you as a pageboy for our wedding. She thought you were so cute when she met you the other day. She has an outfit with a frilled shirt all picked out for you already!’ Vannan said as he read out his latest letter from Shivani. Nimal did not look pleased.
Mahinda liked to see Vannan so happy, but he was tired of his gushing and his tone-deaf love songs, so when Nimal agreed to do the watch in his place, he was delighted. He couldn’t take one more night-long treatise on the many perfections of Shivani Muttasingham without hitting Vannan over the head with
a coconut and stuffing the husk in his mouth.
As darkness fell that night he had walked over to the hut on the island with eight hanks of silk ready to spin. It took him a considerable amount of time to assemble the charka. It was a sizeable piece of equipment, about four feet in length, consisting of one large wheel that sat at right angles to the main strut and several smaller interlocking wheels. Much like the model made famous by Mahatma Gandhi, it required the user to sit cross-legged to spin it.
The wheel was old, very old – the wood was a deep mahogany colour and scored with nicks and scratches that spoke of many years of service. It was also wont to get stuck. Mahinda suspected it’d spent so many years in the hull of Mustafa Mohamadeen’s humid junk that it had warped out of shape.
So he spent some time sanding away uneven sections, tightening, adjusting and soothing the wooden parts first. He applied wood oil and polished the interlocking wheels until they glowed in the evening light. He then greased the parts that would not touch the silk, using an old rag to apply the fat. It was just as well Mahinda had an engineering bent or else he could never have got the thing working!
Then he worked the spinning wheel, watching the smooth wave and form of it, getting to know its foibles as he gently spun some cotton, rolling a combed hank in one hand while he turned the wheel with the other, the rhythm of the machine somehow in harmony with the sound of the waves breaking on the shore beyond the lagoon.
A little after nine, Mahinda stood up and retied his sarong. ‘I can’t put it off any longer. It is time to spin some silk. Either this thing works or it does not!’
But it did not work. He tried about half a dozen times and the silk would simply not catch. The more frustrated he grew, the slower he went, to make sure the silk fibres clung to each other, but then there was not enough tension to pull the thread through. Then he tried to spin it fast, but the silk did not catch at all and the central line broke.
After several hours he stood up and yelled his anger into the star-lit sky. ‘I give up. This is not possible. Why did I even start this stupid project?’ He pushed the charka away, blew out the lamps and strode across to the beach, intending to go home to bed, but by the light of the full moon he saw that it was a king tide.
‘And now I’m stuck,’ he muttered to himself. Sure he could wade across, but he didn’t like his chances with the sea snakes. So he walked the length of the beach instead, looking at the bright moon reflecting on the lagoon, full to the brim with water. Gold on black. In the distance he could hear soft chanting.
Why of course! Vannan’s mother was doing yet another abishekam to thank the gods for sending Mahinda to university.
‘I’ll do a special abishekam for you this time. Now that you are to become a university man! And an engineer! You do us so proud. You will need the help of the goddess Saraswati,’ Vannan’s mother had told him.
The chant was unfamiliar – the Hindus in and around Nayaru seemed to call more often on Draupati Amman and the god Shiva than on Saraswati – but the soft breeze carried the words to him. ‘Yaa Kundendu Tushaara Haaradhavalaa, Yaa Shubhravastraavritha, Yaa Veenavara Dandamanditakara, Yaa Shwetha Padmaasana Yaa Brahmaachyutha Shankara Prabhritibhir Devaisadaa Vanditha Saa Maam Paatu Saraswati Bhagavatee Nihshesha Jaadyaapaha.’
‘May goddess Saraswati, who is fair and beautiful like the jasmine-coloured moon and whose pure white garland resembles frosty dewdrops; who is adorned in radiant white attire, on whose arm rests the veena, and whose throne is a white lotus; who is surrounded and respected by the gods, protect me. May you remove my lethargy and brighten my life with the light of knowledge.’
Mahinda did not quite know what came over him next – maybe it was an enchantment – but as the words seeped into his heart, his moths came fluttering around him in the moonlight and guided him back to the charka, their gentle wings pushing him towards the shed. They hovered near his hands as he took up the silk and fluttered over his head as he bowed it in thanks. Then, repeating the prayer to the goddess Saraswati, he started to spin.
He sat spinning, and spinning, and spinning. First very slowly. But by and by, the magic of the goddess was revealed to him. The spiralling of a single fibre clockwise pulled the others along while another pulled anticlockwise. It was a dance. A dance of creation masking a dance of death. For when one created silk thread, the silk itself disappeared. To create one, one must inevitably destroy the other.
More than a few times Mahinda got stuck. The needle at the eye of the charka broke and he had to stop and refit the damn thing. But as dawn lit the morning sky like a newborn opening her eyes for the first time, Mahinda had beside him two hanks of spun silk in a lustrous shade of golden white, soft and supple enough to make the finest silk saree.
Mahinda had caught the bus from Trincomalee back to Puttalam at just past midnight and was back in Nayaru by daybreak. He could barely contain his excitement when he got off, running the full three miles back to his village from the bus halt. He didn’t bother going back home – he wanted to share his news with people who understood him the best. Vannan and Nimal.
The first thing he noticed when he reached Vannan’s parents’ modest home was the lack of activity. At a little past six in the morning, the place should have been bustling, his brothers on their way to look at their fields, his mother setting the large handwoven mats out to dry freshly threshed rice.
‘Is something wrong? Has someone died?’ Mahinda called out, walking around the back of the house to the kitchen.
‘They might as well have.’ Krishna, Vannan’s younger brother, was sprawled in the yard with a blackened eye and a split lip.
‘What? What happened? Where is Vannan?’
‘Like you give a damn about him!’
‘Krishna!’ Vannan’s mother admonished softly from the door, her hands filled with cloths and a slimy green poultice for her son’s blackened eye.
‘If it weren’t for Mahinda, we wouldn’t be in this predicament!’
‘What Krishna? What did I do?’ Mahinda demanded.
‘You! You and your people!’ Krishna yelled standing up abruptly. ‘Had the gamanayaka supported my ana through school he would have had everything. The girl he desires, the education he deserved and the standing in the community that is his birthright. Instead he was betrayed by his own kind for you! You should never have taken that bursary!’
‘You know I didn’t want it! I came back from school in Jaffna after my mother died intending to work with my father. You were there. You heard the discussion. All I have ever wanted to be is a farmer,’ Mahinda cried out in frustration.
Krishna faced Mahinda square on. The boy had grown in the last few months, Mahinda noticed, and was now taller than him.
‘That bursary was set up especially for my brother after you won the scholarship to Jaffna!’ Krishna said. ‘The village wanted to take a chance and see if my brother could get to university. But you gave up your scholarship and came back. Then the gamanayaka chose to give you the bursary instead, so you could continue studying. Why did you take it? You are no better than a common thief!’
At this point Mahinda lost his temper and pushed him. Just enough to get Krishna’s attention. They were like brothers – he had known Krishna since birth – and as the older brother Mahinda was due some respect, so what happened next completely caught him off guard. Krishna swung a clenched fist at him.
Mahinda went sprawling on the ground, his lip split and the contents of his hessian shoulder bag strewn around him on the ground. He was too surprised even to react when Krishna picked him up him by the lapels of his shirt and shoved him against a wall.
‘Do you know what they did to us?’ Krishna said in a low voice. ‘They insulted us and dishonoured our appa. They said we weren’t worthy of Shivani! All because of you!’ He slammed Mahinda so that his head hit the wall.
‘My son is killing Mahinda! My son is murdering his brother!’ Vannan’s mother screamed, dropping the fresh poultice on the soft earth.
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‘I still don’t understand what happened!’ Mahinda yelled.
‘Because of you they said we weren’t good enough to join their family. They could not overlook Vannan’s lack of education – and you are the one who took his place at university.’
‘I may not even have got into university!’ Vannan said, appearing suddenly behind his younger brother. He came to stand next to Mahinda, pushing Krishna away with the pointy end of his mother’s broom. ‘The gamanayaka chose Mahinda because it was more likely he would get in.’
‘That’s because the government lowered the entry requirements for the Sinhalese and made it harder for the Tamils!’ Krishna shouted, pushing Vannan’s weapon aside. ‘Now Mahinda’s father is walking around like a giant because his son has got into university and our appa was tossed out into the rain!’
‘That didn’t matter in the end anyway. Mahinda came back here and the quotas operate on a district basis, not a race base. Don’t you see?’ Vannan pleaded. ‘Or have those damned LTTE fools got into your head too?’
‘No! You don’t see!’ Krishna roared. ‘You are on the Sinhala side. Every time you defend them or side with them, you spit on your own people! Ammaci, I am off to Puttalam. The Tigers are recruiting and I’ll be damned if I will let my own kind be treated like dirt!’ He turned and stalked off in the direction of the bus halt.
‘Puttar! No!’ Vannan’s mother screamed. ‘Vannan! Go after him! Save your brother!’
‘Let him go,’ Vannan said. ‘He’ll be back within a week. He’s no soldier. He double hoes his fields to protect fieldmice.’
‘So what happened?’ Mahinda asked that evening as they watched over the village. After the dramatic exit of Krishna, the gamanayaka had seen fit to come and visit Vannan’s parents and to console and counsel them at length about their son’s desertion.
‘The LTTE are a plague,’ the village headman had said. ‘They are taking dutiful children away from their parents and turning them into monsters. My second cousin’s boy died in one of their training camps. They came and gave my cousin five hundred rupees and his body.’
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