On the Far Side, There's a Boy

by Coston, Paula

  ‘As you know, I already have the mother species of auntie, my mother’s two sisters and my father’s brothers’ wives. I also have the father species of uncle, my father’s brothers. But a nanda is a father’s sister, and I do not have that kind of auntie; and a māmā is a nanda’s masculine mate; so I shall put the words with Handa, the word for you, for Moon. Handanandāmāmā: Auntie-Uncle Moon.

  ‘You will be the Auntie-Uncle to whom I can speak about almost anything. I shall build you an album of facts, because I collect them.’ She paused. ‘Some will be scenes from the life of me and Mohan.’

  She would have said more, but from the veranda amma quavered, ‘Anupama! There is the food to serve. Come in.’

  It was Thursday 24 March 1983. Later that evening, she talked to the moon again. Over the hiss of the cicadas, the collared scops owl was hiccupping from some treetop. She had finished her chores and homework; now she was hallooing for one of their dogs down the ridges of the paddy, under the stars.

  She stopped, upturned her face and said, ‘Handanandāmāmā, today was the first scene for our album. Did you see Mr Semasinghe the postman? He came earlier, in his blue shirt with the red badge and his nearly worn-out flip-flops, not the black shoes that he should wear. He walked up to our doorway with letters in his plastic carrier bag. I did not see him because I was at school, so were Upeksha and Jayamal. But Mohan does not go to school yet, as you know. He was with amma and the mothers, my father’s brothers’ wives who live here also, in the houses joined to ours; so he saw the letter when it came.

  ‘From wherever you were in your orbit, Handanandāmāmā, did you see us two tired, hardworking sisters, Upeksha and me, trudging into the garden? Amma was sitting on her outside chair. Jayamal was home from school before us, leaning hard against her, spinning the baby coconut machine he had made, tick-tick-tick, faster and faster. She smiled at Jayamal and me because our uniforms were still spotless, but she grumbled at Upeksha because her white dress was not; she smiled and grumbled both.

  ‘“A letter from the lady, like they promised!” Mohan cried.

  ‘He ran into the house with his arms out, counting “40, 41, 42, 43”, round the sleeping mats in the boys’ room, where he will not often sleep, round the chairs in the sitting room, and squeezing behind them, round Upeksha’s and my rolled mats: around mine in particular, where the letter lay. He is most adorable running and counting, always from 40 like that.

  ‘I wondered why the letter was on my mat.

  ‘“Leave the letter alone until your father gets home,” amma said.’

  Anupama left her retelling. The dog had limped to her from the stream at the bottom of the paddy. Dragging him by the scruff, a bone in his growling mouth, she returned to the yard and shut him up. She resumed swinging on the tyre swing.

  ‘Just before you appeared in the sky, Moon, tatta came in. We showed him the letter. Most abruptly he stopped chewing his betel and spat it out like poison. Did you see that, Handanandāmāmā? He told amma to get up from her white chair, even though there was the other just beside it, claiming it for himself and opening the Lanka Deepa, giving a shakeout to its pages. Peering at it in the darkening light. On the edge of the rug with the cloves spread out, Jayamal and Upeksha had a coconut lamp and were already doing their homework. Evidently it was my job to read the letter.

  ‘An official had stamped the envelope “InterRelate International, Colombo Office” with a most smart address on Park Road. Mohan pulled out three papers and an empty envelope, fastened by a staple – too roughly, I had to show him how. The top paper was thick and clearly from Miss Martine’s pen, being in English writing. Unfortunately her script was spiky and joined up, not printed like in our textbooks, so I could not read it. The second page, thin and greyish, was written in our letter curls and arches (you know that they are formed in that way, Handanandāmāmā, to withstand the splitting of the straight veins of the Corypha palm leaves on which our forbears wrote). At the bottom was a sheet from the Colombo office. Its typing gave us, the chosen family, careful directions for writing replies from Mohan.

  ‘“Read, read,” said Mohan, jumping along beside me.

  ‘I lit the kerosene lamp and put him on my knee indoors. From the kitchen the fumes of coriander and chilli roasting were making my mouth water. The others gathered round me, even tatta.

  ‘When I had nearly finished, Mohan shouted, “Now I’m excited! 40, 41, 42…”, and ran off to play with his plastic truck around the firewood store and the chickens and the yellow flame tree and the king coconut tree and the breadfruit tree and the jak tree.

  ‘Handanandāmāmā, that is the first scene for our album.’

  Anupama stifled a yawn. Earlier, she had heard Mohan shrieking in protest about his bedtime, pleading to sleep with her and Upeksha as normal. Now, only the crickets. No one had missed her from indoors. She went inside.

  A few nights later, the moon was waning over Anupama as she sat on a boulder in the stream.

  She said to the moon, ‘I forgot this washing so I could see you.’

  It lit up a pile of white on stone. She began dipping it into the stream, drawing it out, rubbing and dipping it again. Among the black humps of the trees, a deer was barking.

  She confided, ‘I have been thinking. Below most of this island – the mountains rising near us, the paddy that tatta works – lie the most great, angled layers of rock. I collect rocks as well as facts. The layers are metamorphic. P.G. Cooray’s book in the school library says that there was a post-Miocene uplift long ago, and that the mountains have three pereplains. The rocks have changed over billions of years, perhaps are changing still, because of heat, and pressure, and folding and re-folding. Each process affects the others. So are they stable or not?

  ‘These are the facts: Miss Martine’s letter arrived; amma and Mohan kept it for me. But the reasons why tatta pretended to read the Lanka Deepa hid in layers. They might have been the same reasons why he came inside once I was reading. Or various reasons might have pushed up against each other.

  ‘Then there is amma. She wanted me to read Miss Martine’s letter. I knew because she got me to bend so that she could smooth my dress and pull one dented sleeve. The reasons might be the same as why she now leaves the evening meal, apart from the grinding and roasting of spices, to Upeksha and me, and why, to my sadness, she cannot decide whether to smile or grumble when we come home – or much else, to be perfectly honest. Her reasons might have pressed against tatta’s, or tatta’s against hers, until those reasons shifted and changed again.

  ‘Upeksha is older, and has more homework and duties at home than I do. Jayamal is a boy: tatta and amma listened when Jayamal said no to reading and writing the letters to Miss Martine.’ She went quiet. ‘There might have been other reasons, I suppose, why I was thought the best one. Reasons about me.’

  Eventually, she stumbled home with the laundry. About her role, reader and scribe, it appeared she must stay unsure.

  From then on, Anupama often sought out the moon and spilt her thoughts.

  In July 1983, in the early hours of the morning, she began, ‘Handanandāmāmā, this has happened.’

  Stealing a plastic chair out of hearing of her sleeping father on the veranda, Anupama told the moon what it must already have seen.

  ‘Last night, tatta and senior father walked home from town together. The rains were loud, but I could still hear tatta shouting. They burst into the kitchen soaking, banging their umbrellas, pushing us aside to dry themselves at the oven. I smelt the gusts of moonshine in the room. Tatta says he never drinks, but this is not a fact.

  ‘He was shouting, “Motherfuckers! Bastards! Fucking sodomites!”

  ‘I have never heard him angry till last night.

  ‘Senior father dropped most wearily into a chair. “Yeah, yeah, they started all this, we know that.”

  ‘Tatta struck his drenched Lanka Deepa, or rather the news it had printed. “What have I been telling you all evening? Our people. Ma
king things a hundred-shitting-fold times worse. Burning cars in Kandy, in other places digging Tamils out of buses, ripping at them like animals…” Uncle passed a warning glance from him to Jayamal, Upeksha and me, against the wall where horror had pinned us. And tatta saw Mohan and swore again. The little one had crept to the oven, and was feeding his plastic cars into the flames.

  ‘We four dumbstruck, horrified children were hurried suddenly away.

  ‘I whispered to Mohan, “You can sleep on my mat tonight.”

  ‘He has been dreaming awful dreams, Handanandāmāmā. He crawls onto my mat, and I allow him. He will grow taller and stronger, more like a little man, but for now he smells mostly of earth and smoky spices, Auntie-Uncle. Last night I stroked him until he flopped entirely.

  ‘I am trying to help him, Handanandāmāmā. Do you think I am doing right?’

  The months rolled on to 1984. One night, after the special curries and milk rice she had helped her sister Upeksha make, Anupama finished her homework by a lantern in the garden. Algebra; acids and alkalis; more of the island’s geography. In that household, it was hard to get time alone, so she delayed, shaking out the peppercorn rug, feeding the chickens, sweeping up the yard. She peered between the blots of the flame tree, the breadfruit tree and the jak fruit true, but the moon was unseen because that night it was new. She realised that sometimes she’d have to talk without its presence.

  She murmured, ‘Handanandāmāmā, here is another, happier scene for the album. Mohan’s birthday is today, 8 March. Up until today, Mohan has been quite annoying, to be perfectly honest.

  ‘He has kept on asking, “What present will I get, what present will I get?”‘He has asked amma and Upeksha and Jayamal and me – even tatta and the fathers and mothers. He probably asked you also.

  ‘This morning he was bothering us again. “Where is it? Where is it?”

  ‘Tatta led him outside. “Well now, little one,” he said.

  ‘Tatta’s bicycle stood against the house. Lashed to the back was a little cart with a seat. Tatta had made it.

  ‘He pointed out, “Now you can ride with me sometimes.”

  ‘He has been building it at junior father’s, round the side of our house, keeping it a secret. Mohan is overjoyed.

  ‘This evening, before the birthday meal, Mohan found me near the rug of peppercorns, at my x + y = z. Did you see him? He gazed at me through those lashes. They fringe his eyes enough to melt anyone: they truly are enchanting.

  ‘He said, “Will you write to Miss Martine? It’s my birthday after all.”

  ‘Then I suspected why he had been pestering.

  ‘“Did you think Miss Martine would send you a present?” I put on a stern expression – although I longed to tease him, to be perfectly honest. I said, “She will not know it is your birthday until you inform her, at any rate.” At last he understood, and we settled down to write. “But you cannot ask for a present. It is not proper,” I insisted.’

  Anupama smiled at the moon with a contented sigh. ‘That is a happy account of our family, is it not?’

  The children’s holidays passed; May came. Now that Anupama saw she could talk to the moon when it wasn’t there, they also communed in daylight. One Sunday she was desperate to speak, so she scrambled, in drenching rain, far up into the montane regions. She sank to her haunches in the cool air by a waterfall, planning to return with bundles of brushwood to justify her absence. A green bee-eater dropped to her level then flicked past.

  ‘I hope you are listening, Handanandāmāmā,’ she began. ‘This is a most dreadful scene for the album.

  ‘During the April holidays, Mohan started wandering off. You would have heard us joke that he was playing in his mind of toys. When the holidays ended, he stopped attending school, even though, as you know, he had only recently started. I leave for big school earlier, so I made Jayamal promise to take him, but still, often the little one disappeared. No one sent a message from school enquiring after him; and despite tatta’s urging, amma would not ask Mohan’s teacher for advice. Another thing that amma could not decide.

  ‘Now the rains have arrived, of course. So on Friday, we three tired, hardworking schoolchildren, Upeksha and my friend Harshini and I, were walking home from big school, from the bus station. A truck of bricks splashed past on the narrow road, soaking us, under our umbrellas, in papaya-coloured water. There was a screech and a bump. Fearful bellows from the driver and the man on the back soon reached us.

  ‘During the rains, Harshini giggles that any vehicle is a “blind fish trying to breed with the snakely road”. “Snakely road”: that is what little Mohan calls it. I thought the truck had hit a pothole – after all, there are so many; but stumbling up a way we saw a hump, like a pile of dirty laundry amid the torrents of red. It was Mohan’s blood, like the pulp of watermelons. One thin, long arm was gashed, and so was his left side.’

  Anupama stopped, head in her hands. A tiny squirrel brushed through the wet undergrowth.

  She restarted, ‘We carried him home with the driver and his mate. We clapped to tatta down below us, under the shelter in our paddy. He rushed to discover what had happened.

  ‘Jayamal worried, “Why is amma talking to herself?”

  ‘Tatta took Jayamal and Upeksha in, instructing them to tend to amma and Mohan. Amma lay making the most frightening noises; Mohan looked like a branch a leopard had crushed, on his mat in the main room. Then tatta carried the outdoor chairs, sloshing through the water, to the shelter of our pouring yellow flame tree.

  ‘He gestured me to sit.

  ‘“Do you understand what happened?” he asked, pushing his soft voice against the most fierce rush of rain. I shook my head. “Mohan has been disappearing daily to the bus that brings the mail. He expected it to bring a present from Miss Martine.” My heart began to thump. “Whenever he heard an engine, he ran all the way up our track and onto the road. And when the bus came by, without a parcel carried into the Post Office, he crept back home again.”

  ‘“Where were amma and the mothers?” I croaked.

  ‘Tatta looked at me. He has most handsome teeth under his moustache, do you not think? Not one is missing, and the betel is a most beautiful, even stain.

  ‘He said, “Amma was lying down, and the mothers were talking to her. Sometimes she doesn’t feel well. And now, you see, she may feel a little worse.”

  ‘He has never before spoken to me for so long, Handanandāmāmā. It must have been five minutes: a significant point for the album.

  ‘He asked, “Was there something you put in his letter, Anupama?”

  ‘I said, “I’m not quite sure.”

  ‘My heart began to somersault, because then I saw what had happened.

  ‘My brain must have been in my x and y and z because the most cunning Mohan had had me scribe, in the letter about his birthday, “The bus is bringing the letters first to the Post Office…. The bus also brings any much bigger parcels.”

  ‘Beneath the bus words, there had been a birthday hint: a layer.’

  Anupama was mumbling now. ‘Handanandāmāmā, tatta drew his chair up close.

  ‘He said, “When Mohan is better, write to Miss Martine with him beside you. Make sure he says he was not expecting, will never expect, a present. Do this politely, and in a way that Mohan understands.” My face began to glow. “I’m going to tell you why no one should send us anything.” His fists gripped his sarong; his thigh muscles twitched. “As your father, I’m the one who provides for this family.”

  ‘The rain plopped through the tree roof, all around us.

  ‘Today I have done it, Auntie-Uncle. I have written for Mohan, “Buddhists do not need presents unless they are meant for other people, people who really need them.”

  ‘I am thinking, Handanandāmāmā. InterRelate International is about to bring our village the most wonderful gift of latrines. So even tatta’s statement was not a fact. And another layer was hiding: tatta might not have said what he said, or not in the sa
me way, if Miss Martine had been a man.’

  5 The object

  Monday 4 February 2013

  The iPad, with its dongle plugged in, glares again in the unlit cell of the bunk room. The overhead monster is once more prone, heaving and humming. The object of Martine’s indecision hunches under the monster’s bed. If only there were total quiet. Quiet is dope. Then you can imagine voices, ones that could make your actor’s name one day, the cool ones, the roaring drunk, the lovable crim, the misunderstood outlaw, whatever voices you want.

  Facebook has a message, and a new photo: the family and best friend Luna. They’re on the observation deck of the local tower at home, seated in its bar café. Their necks stretch towards the viewer as if bunched with cord, parental tendons straining, dark cheeks and Luna’s much paler face bleached by the flash of the camera light. They all have red-eye.

  The message is from Sister Number Two. ‘We miss you. We’re all worried about you. Even Creepy says hello.’ Creepy is Sister Number One. ‘D’you know yet about the 15th ? Have they found you someone?’

  The object’s woodsmoke fingers write back, in the family’s language, ‘Miss you and Luna too. Creepy’s still a total suck-up no doubt. I know this is an escape of sorts but it’s shit here. Bastards. Still not sure about the 15th but shouldn’t be anything to stress about.’ The object whispers inaudibly a variation of the same old fencing mantra, handling again those keys on the neon wristband. En garde, flèche, epée. Balestra, marche, attaque. Sixte, quarte, octave, septime. The fingers finish, tapping out, ‘If any of you ring, don’t gab that I’ve got the net.’

  Eventually the object pats out another message, addressed to ‘Black Sheep Shit.’

  ‘I hate you. The family hates you. I think even Creepy hates you.’

  Why wouldn’t they all hate him, the eldest brother who left home without a word, the brother missing for two years without a trace? The bile of the message is purging.

  ‘Actually I miss you,’ the writer adds, contrite.