Suncatcher

by Romesh Gunesekera

  ‘My father is not interested in family or arrack. He has enough trouble with my mother. He threatened to dump her.’

  ‘Never. Your mother?’ He took a sip. ‘I prefer Scotch too, but…’

  Gerry slipped away and was swallowed by the dark edge beyond the circle of candles. As he disappeared, the crackle of cicadas swelled up, fracturing the night. I wanted to follow Gerry, slim and elusive, among the trees, out of hearing and leave behind the family problems of the overloaded.

  Later, when we crawled into our separate beds, cocooned in mosquito nets – us two boys in one room, Elvin in the other – the intense darkness muffled my wants.

  The night was still, thick and deep. Jay’s thousand greenstringed lyres swaddled. Not even a whisper ruffled the trees even though the earth was spinning and every leaf breathing. The only sound came from the drone of a poison-pronged insect circling the cotton mesh and the sudden whine as it tried to drill through the net. None of it bothered Jay in the next bed; his breath was even and steady. I lay rigid, tense and too alert. I was convinced we were more than what we seemed; that we were boys whose bodies were dross that would one day be discarded, dry sloughs from which we’d escape and find ourselves more lasting shapes. I wanted it to be so. Unable to sleep, I pulled out the slim pamphlet I had stolen from my father’s shelf and hidden at the edge of the mattress where the net was tucked in. We each had a small silver Eveready flashlight issued for emergencies. Huddled and shielded by a pillow, I clicked mine on and started to read the dense pages. Luckily, in the small white circle of the torch beam the tightly packed print loosened into words of mystifying appeal: liquidation … monopoly … drunkards. The thin, prematurely yellowed paper had the surprising smoothness of a comic instead of the raw, rough grain and rasp of a homespun schoolbook. The pamphlet had been printed and stitched two years earlier, a half-mile or so as a bat would fly from our house on Grebe Road, but the words and sentences could have come from my father’s mouth any day of the week. The problems described in the pages were hard to grasp at times but the arguments proved comforting. If the night had not been so unsettling, I would not have read more than a few paragraphs before nodding off. Instead I got through almost all the pamphlet, from a rant against vodka to a hymn on the virtues of cinema, before falling asleep with the flashlight warm under my chin.

  At dawn a diffused grey light softened the treetops; the threads of night spiders snapped. A groggy cock crowed. I woke to find Jay already in his khaki shorts, fitting fat orange cartridges into an ammunition belt.

  ‘Ready to shoot?’

  ‘A shotgun?’

  ‘Time you learnt,’ Jay said. ‘Thing is, make sure the stock is tucked well into your shoulder, otherwise you’ll dislocate it. Or it’ll kick you in the face and break your jaw.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll just watch.’ The pace was too dizzying.

  ‘Joking. It’s only a four-ten – the smallest bird-gun. Even a girl can handle it. Just a matter of technique. We hunt snipe today. Gallinago. Fast birds. Zigzag from right under your feet. You have to pull the gun up fast, bang.’ He simulated the action. ‘Aim ahead. Where he will be, not where he is.’ He showed me how to load the gun and passed it over.

  ‘What are these?’ I asked fingering the dozens of notches on the wooden stock.

  ‘Crows,’ he said. ‘On the other side are the snipe I’ve bagged.’

  Ten minutes later, we were heading down to the paddy fields. A low morning mist, wispy, untroubled yet by the warming sun, masked the hillside in cotton rags.

  ‘Stick to the same speed as me as we comb through the paddy, okay?’ Jay lowered his voice. ‘Safety, you understand? Keep the line. You’ll hear the whirr when they take off. Always shoot straight ahead. Don’t swing and get me by accident.’ He smothered a laugh, but I didn’t see anything funny in the possibility.

  As we crossed the stream, sunlight brightened into a grainier yellow, burning off the night’s remaining fluffs and the mirror dew on the lower ground. In the distance, the wrinkled green edge of the estate released its dawn minstrels: coppersmith barbets, thrushes, minivets.

  Leaving our sandals by the main sluice, we stepped into the field of golden paddy guarded by a limp scarecrow, a hundred yards away, and a pair of vagrant bushlarks squeaking in the rushes. I knew, even then, young as I was, that this sense of contentment could not last. Maybe carrying a real shotgun in my hand for the first time, and knowing what it had done and could do, cast a pall. Or maybe my father’s warnings, the polemics in his book, were beginning to unsettle me. Tranquillity could only be temporary.

  ‘Make lots of noise,’ Jay called out. ‘We have to flush the blighters out.’

  I carefully inserted a cartridge into the breech, as Jay had shown me, pressing it in from the brass edge of the base, wary of setting off the charge even though I knew the primer – a tiny pink button in the centre of the shiny base – needed a hammer blow. With my thumb I slipped the safety catch off and cocked the gun, determined to keep my hand steady. I didn’t think to question why we were hunting these birds.

  ‘Stay in line.’ Jay started moving, the gun pointing down but firmly locked into his shoulder, finger hooked around the steel trigger.

  I did the same and kept to a parallel path; the pressure of my finger against the metal tightened all my veins. My whole body hummed taut, ready to explode. I zeroed in on every sound in the field, from the squelch of the mud underfoot to the lisp of the grain. Would I see it or hear it first? The sudden whirr of wings that Jay had mimicked by blowing through his lips and fluttering them. Why would the zigzag birds – the Gallinago gallinago – come here? They could go anywhere in the world. Why would they come here and get shot? Of course, they didn’t know they would be shot. And if they were in my patch, the chances were they would not be hit. But why doesn’t instinct take them somewhere safer? Out of the reach of boys with guns. Would my father, a zigzagger himself, have an answer?

  Then, a rush of wings. A second later – the bang of Jay’s gun.

  Next, I had my chance. Another whirr, a brown flash, then an explosion in my hands. I had no idea where the shot went, or whether I had even got the gun pointing up. It did kick my shoulder though, hard.

  ‘Good shot,’ Jay called out. I let out the breath I hadn’t known I was holding in, relieved I had not swung round in my excitement and shot my friend by mistake.

  ‘Did I get it?’

  ‘No. But good try.’

  We had another couple of chances each, and I felt I was beginning to understand the procedure, and how deep an instinct I had for this pursuit. An irreversible connection grew between the hunter and the hunted – a line from life to death.

  ‘So, how?’ he asked when we had climbed out of the rice.

  ‘I’m getting the hang of it.’

  ‘A shotgun is easy, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah.’ My shirt was stuck to my skin. My shoulder ached. I could have spent hours more in the paddy, unthinkingly sowing hard, round pellets of lead in the slowly blistering air, forgetting to question anything. I stroked the gun. ‘But why are we doing this? You like birds, no?’

  ‘I love them, that’s why,’ Jay said as though that clarified everything; that death was a gift to give, a kindness to creatures smaller than himself who had lost their way, or were frightened of winter.

  Near the bungalow, we found Gerry clearing out the hen house.

  ‘Find the eggs, did you?’ Jay tossed him an avocado he had picked off a tree.

  ‘All found, but lunch hiding in the bush. One with the green feather in the tail.’

  ‘Man, you gotta flush him out. Go down that way, and we’ll scare him from the other side.’

  The cock sprang out and skittered across the sand, Gerry caught it by the foot and took it squawking up to the kitchen yard where Sulaiman patrolled the border with his hands hidden behind his back.

  Gerry offered him the bird; Sulaiman grabbed it by the neck. His other hand swung out with a machete. He sliced t
he head off with one stroke and let the bundle of frantic feathers fall. The headless chicken spun around spurting blood and then ran around the yard blindly, bumping from bush to tree. Although we had been hunting and fishing for the table, it had all been in a fantasy. For all Jay’s talk, we had brought nothing back. Now, something had been killed specifically for us. I’d seen creatures die before, like the crows that Jay had shot, but this was one that we were going to eat. I did not have the words, back then, but I knew that the world was being turned inside out. Soon, I feared, it would disappear and I would be left floating in emptiness.

  Gerry picked up the carcass when it had stopped flopping and dropped it into a basin of water, releasing a cloud of scarlet plumes. A flock of jungle babblers sounded the alarm and took to the air.

  ‘Wanna pluck it?’ Jay asked, revelling, for the first time I felt, in my discomfort.

  I moved away and glanced at Sulaiman. I asked him: ‘Is that like a ritual? What you did?’

  Sulaiman sheathed what could have been a smile as he wiped the blade of his machete. ‘No, Master Kairo. That is just what we do here on the estate when we need to feed our visitors, as instructed by the boss in the house. Not a religion. You must not rush to judge, not knowing the man nor his faith.’

  Back at the bungalow, breakfast was ready; I made do with roast bread and jam and a slice of papaw, having no stomach for eggs.

  Afterwards, on the front steps, Jay showed me how to clean the guns and oil the barrels with a plumb line and sponge. In the hot sun, the smell of burnt cartridges and linseed oil seeped deeper into my fingers as I tried to focus on the mechanics, as yet unclear about what I liked and what I disliked.

  ‘How’s about a drive? We have a cool contraption all rigged up.’

  ‘Sure.’ That would be safer. Ever since I first picked up a motoring magazine at Mr Ismail’s bookshop, I had wanted to drive. To go as fast as I wished, in control of everything. Fully grown up. Primed. Knowing for sure all those things I was so unsure of as a boy.

  The vehicle turned out to be a small two-wheel hand tractor no bigger than the motorised lawnmowers I’d seen in American movies, or a wheelbarrow with an engine. Gerry lugged it out of the shed and Jay poured a pint of kerosene into the gleaming red pot that was the fuel tank. He set the throttle at the third mark and pulled the choke out full, then wound the starting rope around the flywheel and yanked it. The metal wheel turned but the engine did not catch. He adjusted the throttle and choke combination and tried a couple more pulls without success.

  ‘This works, no?’ he asked Gerry.

  ‘Not working now.’

  ‘No one fix it?’

  ‘Your uncle can fix it, father said. So to wait. We have the buffalo for paddy, cow for cart.’

  Jay pulled off the caps and tops near the motor and blew into the crevices the way he blew into the nostrils of the estate dogs to get them excited. Then he tried turning the flywheel again. Not a spark.

  He asked Gerry to get the toolbox and some newspaper and, when he brought them, immediately started stripping the engine carefully, adjusting the jaws of the spanner to each nut, unclipping wires, prising off the heat shield, dismantling the outer flange. Gerry and I followed the operation, fascinated, until Jay got stuck on four screws that had seized up.

  I suggested oil.

  Jay applied a drop of kerosene with his finger; it made no difference. He kept at it and after ten minutes managed to get a couple of the screws off; enough to reach the fuel pipe, but not to remove and clean it.

  Gerry’s solution was to twist a piece of newspaper into a long thin probe; it wasn’t firm enough.

  ‘We need a pipe cleaner,’ Jay said. ‘Kairo, go ask Uncle Elvin. He’s bound to have one.’

  Elvin was not in his chair in the garden, nor in the bungalow. I checked the cookhouse where the same silent woman as the previous day crouched on her haunches in front of a stone slab, systematically scraping the green ridges of a long drumstick of murunga. Watching the ritual, I began to see that this might be the drudgery that the Soviet pamphlet railed against, the household chores that it claimed enslaved women. The passages had not seemed relevant in the circle of my flashlight; at home Siripala did the cooking and a dhobi man came to do the laundry. Never my mother. We had no servant woman. But then, I remembered, even in our Grebe Road house the person who cleaned the bathroom was a woman. She came from outside and hardly ever spoke. Head always lowered, her wobbly front only loosely covered, she’d crouch and scrape the floor tiles, peeling back my confused thoughts with the rasp of her brush.

  The cook raised her eyes. I asked if she knew where the others were – Elvin and Sulaiman. She moved her furrowed head slightly, implying she knew nothing beyond her stone slab and the chipped saucers of turmeric and chilli powder, karapincha and rampe, next to it. Then, yielding, she wagged her chin and suggested the pond.

  At the water’s edge, Elvin, listening to Sulaiman, raised his hand and made a gesture that could signify a million acres, or a galaxy, or surrender, or possibly one of those moments of hollow fabrication that plagued the grown-up world.

  This was probably the wrong time to be asking for pipe cleaners but I ran up to give the mission more urgency than a faulty two-stroke motor.

  ‘Uncle, Uncle Elvin.’

  ‘What? What’s happened? Ambush? Snipers?’

  ‘We need a pipe cleaner. Jay said you might have one.’

  ‘You boys started smoking already?’

  ‘Jay is cleaning the engine.’

  ‘The jeep?’

  Sulaiman immediately knew the problem and jumped in: ‘The Landmaster, sir. Not functioning. On the list to discuss, sir, down at the bottom, after we deal with the pineapple trenches.’

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘Wilt, sir. In this particular case, water level is not the problem. We must spray fenitrothion or carbophenothion every three months, if you are agreeable, to have any hope of a crop next season.’

  ‘Not the pineapple. What’s wrong with the hand tractor?’

  ‘Oh-oh. Won’t start, sir. You pull and pull but it doesn’t make even a fart.’

  Uncle Elvin didn’t laugh, so I explained. ‘Jay says we need a pipe cleaner.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t have one, son, although I agree they are extremely handy things to have around.’

  Sulaiman clasped his fingers together in front of him.

  ‘Maybe can get the new model, sir. One with crank-handle.’

  ‘Let’s go have a look.’

  Jubilantly, I sprinted ahead to tell Jay that the cavalry was on its way.

  ‘He’ll know what to do. He’s forever taking apart engines and putting them together again. You should see him work on that vintage Bentley of his. It’s fan-tabulous,’ Jay said.

  I was amazed at how he had dismantled so much of the tractor motor without any qualms and spread the components out like jigsaw pieces on the newspaper. I wanted to learn how to do that too: proceed without fear, do whatever needed to be done without hesitation.

  I monitored every move as Jay handled the engine parts – peering at the gaps, blowing dust off, easing the catches, checking bolts, braces, belts – completely absorbed by the task at hand, pride and elation pumping in tandem.

  Elvin arrived, Sulaiman in tow, and nearly swooned: ‘That’s neatly laid out, son. Definitely a budding engineer, I’d say.’

  ‘I’ve watched you, Uncle.’ He moved the grey, dented manifold into line. ‘One hand on the wheel, the other holding the spanner.’ Jay pulled out one of the rubber hoses and squeezed the end.

  ‘That’s good. You need to be able to use both hands in today’s world. The future definitely needs two hands to be grasped.’

  Sulaiman’s tempered laugh turned into a cough, which he smothered quickly with the cloth he whipped off the top of his head. He then quickly smoothed the material and fixed it back, tightening the knots on the corners of the improvised skullcap with both hands.

 
‘Problem is the darn fuel pipe. Can’t get the thing off to clean it.’

  Elvin crouched down next to Jay and examined the bare bones of the motor; they had a bond that I feared I might never be able to match.

  ‘Pipe cleaner is a good idea, son, but right now we need an alternative.’

  ‘We tried a twist of paper, but no good.’

  Elvin rested his face in a bracket made with his finger and thumb. ‘We need something long, thin and flexible.’

  The moment he described the need, I saw the solution. I pushed a dried coconut frond, one of Jay’s fallen tree harps, forward with my foot. The spines of each leaf of the frond curved obligingly. ‘An ekel?’

  Elvin slapped his knee. ‘That’s it, sonny. You got it.’ Jay picked up a needle and tested it but it broke.

  ‘You need one that’s not so brittle. Try a greener one.’

  I found him a fresh leaf and stripped most of the blade off, keeping a tiny piece at the end like the sponge rag on the plumb line we had used to clean the gun barrels earlier. I broke it into a manageable size and handed it to Jay.

  ‘Brilliant,’ Elvin said. ‘That should do the trick.’

  Jay inserted the flagged end into the pipe and wiggled it, biting his lip as he dug further in. At first nothing happened and I started to sharpen another ekel. Then Jay let out a triumphant whistle and a tiny stream of kerosene began to trickle out.

  ‘Bravo.’ Uncle Elvin clapped him on the back.

  Jay jabbed the ekel in again and more crud streamed out. ‘I still don’t understand why it didn’t even splutter when we cranked it. Even with no fuel it should still make the sound, no?’

  ‘Has someone been messing with the innards?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Had the engine been opened up?’ Elvin turned to Sulaiman. ‘You try to get it fixed at all?’

  ‘No, sir. I told the boy to wait for you.’

  Jay rubbed the tip of his nose. ‘Come to think of it, the cover nuts were easy but the inside screws were sheared like someone had tried to force them.’