On the Far Side, There's a Boy

by Coston, Paula

‘What things do you not like? Here are mine. Coughing. Cobras because they cannot be good spirits in the house. Anupama says yes but I say no. I do not like Buddhism lessons. Anupama is writing that I do not like her curries but I want to.

  ‘If possible, I kindly request you to put outstanding stamps on your letters – showing seeds, insects, reptiles or minerals.’

  Certain phrases stood out. ‘I kindly request you to describe your moon festivals…put outstanding stamps on your letters.’

  Martine registered, Mohan’s getting more demanding.

  Then there were his questions, ‘What do you like?’ and ‘What things do you not like?’

  She thought, Like a date showing off his emotional literacy, male to female. As if trying to make a good lover’s impression.

  Through the spring, leaving work, Claire, who lived two stops from Martine, offered, ‘Stay on the tube and walk home with you?’

  Martine said she was fine, happy and fine; but fear from the mugging was still in her somewhere, like an undeveloped negative.

  Mohan’s fears seemed to lie elsewhere than the civil war: coughing, firecrackers, people talking fiercely, sharp swords and in his dreams. Reading, Martine thought, Comfort him. Why can’t I comfort him?

  Whereas Jonas’s fears started to touch her. Of not belonging anywhere. Of finding no one liked what he could offer. Of disintegrating into no one in the sight of everyone, especially himself. Unlike her he seemed to need love, had to have it, maybe couldn’t even otherwise survive.

  The differences in Mohan’s writing seemed to become more marked.

  ‘Mrs Thatcher opened the Victoria Dam on the Wimalasiris’ TV. It is an arch dam. Here is my diagram.

  ‘Amma did not do the things at New Year. Anupama says do not worry about amma.

  ‘It is raining. Anupama says it is not English cats and dogs but Sri Lankan boar and bullocks.

  ‘Your letter said “I get a bit foolish sometimes when it is full moon.”

  ‘That is funny.

  ‘What I do not like. Answer. Being made to do things and not to do things also like you. I do not like people playing tricks on me also. But I like people trying to help me and being kind to me. That is a strange thing not to like.

  ‘Anupama wants to write about the Buddha’s birthday, the first day of full moon this month. But I do not want to tell you about the thorana by the snakeish road and paper lanterns with candles and the seven lotus-flower steps from the feet of Prince Siddhartha and being kinder to ill people like amma. Anyway Anupama promises strongly that amma is not ill. I am not interested, only in my birthday.

  ‘Anupama says “How absolutely typical of a young and foolish boy. You are for certain not the young Prince Siddartha.”

  ‘She is laughing. I tell you that she took a long time to write about full moon.

  ‘Here are two more things. I do not like it when people tease me and when they talk fiercely in quiet voices.’

  Martine couldn’t quite put her finger on the letters’ evolution. And she was chastened that Mohan had picked up on the thing about her craziness at full moon. It had just been a cheap remark to fill up the page. She began to search out special stamps, as he asked.

  ‘28th July 1985

  Dear Miss Martine

  I am happy Jonas lives closer to your house and you like him more and more. Anupama says she understands.

  ‘My question is “Was he naughty before?”

  ‘My question is “Why is he in a house away from your house?”

  ‘My question is “What does he work?”

  ‘I have made a model of the tube. It is bamboo. You are a nutmeg and cinnamon sticks. You cannot go in. I cannot send you a photo. We are waiting to borrow the camera from the Jarasinghes.

  ‘Here is my drawing of our lands. I am a pilot looking down. You can see the mountains. They stand near our village. The snakeish road goes up and round. Some people call the mountains the Knuckles Range. It is better to call them Dumbara Kanduvetiya, or the most admirable geologist P.J. Cooray says the Mist-Laden Mountains, because there are no knuckles on our side of the ridge.

  ‘On our side under the scrubby summits are the cloudforests, the high montane region. The tea plantations grow in the mists of moisture also. In the high hills are ferns and mosses among the waterfalls. There are evergreen and semi-evergreen and coniferous trees. There are the red flowers of big flame trees. Below are the lower montane and tropical regions and our village and other villages and paddy and many tropical plants. The paddy of the fathers is on a terrace. Look, you can see the rice stalks sticking out. The snakeish road goes down to Kandy.

  ‘Your stamp of a dragonfly is outstanding. It might be the scalloped spreadwing. The water lilies look like ours. Sometimes I climb to the streams very far. There are bright birds and many dazzling insects. Among the dragonflies there are dark forest-wraiths, mountain reedlings and numerous others –117 species, in fact.

  ‘The nymph lives in water for up to four years then crawls out, shedding its skin on the stem of a water plant. The adult lives only one year. I remain puzzled. Which part of the dragonfly changes, and which part stays the same?’

  Another letter came with it, impatiently, in the same envelope. This was a new development, too.

  ‘30th July 1985

  Mr Mendes is still here and Anupama wants me to write to you again. She wants me to tell you about the Esala Perahera festival. It is about the rains. There are processions near the Temple of the Tooth. The elephants wear bright coats and jewels. I do not like the flames jumping about in the fire dances. The men with sharp swords who go to the river and [girl’s writing incomplete]. We are stopping now to talk about my dreams.

  ‘We have finished talking. The swordsmen cut the river, nothing else.

  ‘I utterly enjoy the fact called surface tension. It is a skin on liquid. If it is cut, it grows together most rapidly. However, once again I am puzzled. Is that skin, healed over, the same as the skin before?

  ‘I tell Anupama that my letters are growing longer.

  ‘Anupama says “You are growing longer too, so this should not surprise you.”

  ‘Please be gentle with your brother, because you are older. Anupama says she is gentle. She is not crying.

  ‘I wish I had told you more about growing big. I wish I had asked about growing big in England.

  ‘What I like most is writing to you, to be perfectly honest.’

  One August day, soon after getting these letters, Martine gave up her seat on the tube to a pregnant woman. Minutes later, the train braked in a tunnel. There was a forced roar from the engine, then a death-throe ticking.

  She smiled at the man jammed up against her. ‘My watch has stopped.’

  He sighed behind unnecessary dark glasses, showing her his watch. She had a meeting at Waterloo, tendering for the teacher development of a whole outer London borough. This can’t happen, she thought.

  The crammed carriage was sweltering. Some passengers closed their eyes or stared ahead, buried themselves in books or papers or the jangle of their Walkmans, but the rest stared wildly or smiled like sudden friends, trying, against tube protocol, to connect.

  There was a clank then sounds of tinkering. Martine’s fears of a lock-in didn’t take hold on the tube unless, like now, an engine ceased its chuntering. Blood pumped into her ears, the life plea of the hostage. The expectant woman pushed at her cuticles. A boy fanned his girlfriend; laughing, she fanned him back. A mother gripped her toddler’s teddy bear too tight, fumbling the beads around her neck.

  Feeling rammed up against the black brickwork through the windows, Martine cast about for a calming strategy too.

  From memory, she clutched at the questions in Mohan’s recent letters that had stood out: ‘What part of the dragonfly changes, and what part stays the same?’; and, about the surface tension of water, ‘Is that skin, healed over, the same as the skin before?’

  Teaching was her standard act of giving, so she prepared her a
nswers ready for writing down. That occupied her until the train was fixed.

  Revisiting the letters that day started something. She didn’t know it at the time. It was as if their details began to irrigate her, at the same time rusting the cogs of her current life. She was being primed. Inside her soon would rear up Mohan’s scrubby summits; his cloudforests and tea plantations; his ferns, mosses, waterfalls with dragonflies: a whole new landscape, bathed in an angel light.

  9 Martine

  Wednesday 6 February 2013

  Jocelyn Teague responds to Martine’s email.

  Martine screens her scratchy voice, enthusing to itself. ‘…I just know you’ll both get on…I’ll send you directions on buses, tube and so on…Have you got a digital photo that I can take in? Could you ping it through?’

  Martine feels for her heart: to her surprise, it’s beating just the same. Sancho is roaming his cage more than usual though, back and forth, up and down with stop-start deliberation, as if he knows something is up.

  She’s texted Jonas that she’s said yes. He’s pleased for her –And probably, she thinks, a bit relieved for himself. To celebrate, he texts back, he’s coming over later, and will try to bring the girls. Martine sidles past Sancho, foraging from the cupboards and the fridge. For the family she makes more pastry, and frangipane this time, and bakes them into little, fat plum tarts.

  Jonas hasn’t visited for a while: too busy getting ready for America. A month ago he broke the news. Him and Pearl: in Pearl’s case, for a holiday, at least at first. Jonas hesitated after he’d told Martine, then tried to pat her hand. She remembers pushing her chair back, pretending it was to offer him a beer, and yet she liked that brief male touch.

  Now that she’s emailed Jocelyn, she has to broach the guest room. It used to be her home office before last year’s crisis and she retired and her mother went. Four boxy walls and one small window, a single bed and a narrow bedside table, a desk and chest of drawers. The paintwork looks dejected. She’s rung the decorator, who says that, for a price, his nephew can fit her in.

  She blinks at the clutter she’ll have to move. There’s a scrumpled scarf in a bag, which Martine was going to frame. Her mother’s golf clubs and the now unneeded clothes, Mum’s dog bed and secret trophies, in paper in their box; and of course the letter carton. Another cracker joke torments her: What’s spring cleaning? A sign the laptop is broken.

  She picks up the carton and heads towards her bedroom. She elbows open her wardrobe door. There isn’t room on the top shelf. She rests the carton on her white duvet. From the high storage space, she tips out a plastic bag, full of scarves and hats and gloves she never wears. She’ll take them to a charity shop or somewhere. Swiftly, she hefts the carton round and up. For a moment it feels supernaturally heavy, the weight on a pulley inside a pendulum clock. She pushes it into darkness. The letters are once more hidden, but they’re attached to her life; and despite her resistance her life, wound up like a dead weight, is starting slowly to drop.

  * * *

  1985

  It was a mid-September Sunday in Harrow Weald. Empty bamboo steamers, blue and white sauce bowls, sesame crumbs, fortune cookie wrappers and starched red napkins littered Mr Wu’s best tablecloth. Jonas and Astrid smiled with Martine at her sixty-year-old mother in her new violet dress.

  ‘You deserve the best for all you’ve done for us.’ The three said variations on this theme.

  Martine’s mother seemed serene, happy to have them round her.

  That day, Astrid unofficially entered the family – to Martine, another cause for celebration. She saw her as quirky, calm and sure. Her own life could continue on its oiled tramlines now since, with Astrid, Jonas should be like she was: happy and fine.

  He took Martine aside. ‘This one’s on me.’

  She opened her bag. ‘I’ll do it.’

  His shoulders bunched, and she got a pang she recognised by then. She’d nearly refused his lift to Harrow Weald, too.

  ‘OK, let me pay half.’

  The words of Mohan’s recent letter reminded her, ‘Please be gentle with your brother, because you are older.’

  A sister could affect her brother too much. In recent months she and Jonas had strung a line of effort between them; there was a little more give and take.

  She took out a credit card, Jonas started a cheque. He turned to her.

  ‘15 September,’ she supplied.

  He grinned. ‘1985: who’da thought? Only a year back, we…’

  Martine sat with Astrid in the back of Jonas’s beaten-up Capri on the return to London. At last her mother knew about the letters: Martine had assured her that they didn’t mean maternal cravings.

  Now she showed a couple to Astrid, who was a plumber. ‘Here’s one about latrines.’

  Her Debbie Harry hair shutting off her little face, Astrid read.

  Then in her seesaw voice she either stated or asked, ‘You do this to help the boy’s people.’ She addressed Jonas at the wheel. ‘You could draw for her a latrine. Like the Underground drawing you telled to me.’

  He said, ‘Don’t read back there. It’ll make you sick.’

  Astrid sat back giggling, ‘Only his driving, it does that.’

  She studied the latest letter. ‘Conflict is there with the sister.’ She quoted from it, ‘“Please be gentle with your brother.”’ She winked out of sight of Jonas and made a neck-wringing gesture. ‘What is “growing big”?’

  Martine shrugged. ‘Growing up? Which seems to worry him.’

  Astrid gave a little exclamation. ‘“What I like most is writing to you,” it is the most sad sentence.’ She cocked her head.

  Martine’s gaze rested on Astrid; later, she took out the letter and looked at it again.

  Another question had been picking at her mind: Jonas had asked it himself, a while ago. Why Mohan? Why a boy? She’d asked InterRelate for one – unthinkingly, she felt. Also, she found herself puzzling, In that did they oblige me, or was a he their decision? In the end she’d asked InterRelate.

  She got the answer just after her mother’s birthday.

  ‘Dear Miss Haslett

  Excuse this hasty scrawl. We have little time for individual correspondence. Attached is a photocopy of a proposed official response to an FAQ – suggested by a Colombo colleague – which might answer your query. I have highlighted the relevant section. Please forgive that it is addressed to colleagues. I should have Tippexed out the comments meant only for us, which may be a little blunt, forgive me, but I am, in haste,

  ‘Sincerely

  Derek Ffrench

  Public Relations Manager, InterRelate International, London’

  ‘Dear Derek and London team

  Some thoughts re: the FAQ “How was ‘my’ adoptive family/the location of ‘my’ adoptive family, and/or ‘my’ adoptive child/the gender of ‘my’ adoptive child chosen within the family?”

  ‘Sponsors can assume that all our local efforts are undertaken primarily on their behalf. They may find it hard to see themselves as anything other than clients; they may regard us more as a service than a charity. This is natural. Theirs will tend to be the market-orientated perspective of the affluent, commodified, “developed” world.

  ‘That said, they may on occasion ask for some account of how we identify the beneficiaries of their generosity, and perhaps they are entitled to know more than we currently tell them.

  ‘Would there be mileage in updating our FAQs to include something like the text below? Our field officers consult with a) other NGOs and b) communities, community organisations and groups in the locality. Through this process, plus their own systematic, on-the-ground research, they establish key areas of need, e.g. education, sanitation, health education etc.

  ‘InterRelate Colombo analyses the officers’ quantitative and qualitative findings. The local needs identified are ranked in terms of urgency and severity. From this process, one or more spending priorities, e.g. sanitation, are ascertained. Achievable objectives
, including the budget/funds needed, are articulated, e.g. “Build x latrines @ x cost in x locations.”

  ‘Existing funds are allocated, and/or essential fundraising begins, e.g. advertising for more sponsors in countries we choose to target.

  ‘With the locations for new projects now identified, field officers return to those communities. Through house-to-house visits, they identify a) families who are likely to prove committed recipients of communications from overseas sponsors, and b) children, one per family, whom parents and officers agree would be suitable ‘readers’ of, and respondees to, such letters.

  The choice of child is a delicate matter, and needs sensitive discussion with parents and other respected elders linked to the home. Within any community, particularly in a country like Sri Lanka with its current ethnic and religious tensions, an equitable spread of children should be sought – in terms of ethnic origin, religious affiliation and gender.

  Concerning gender, traditionally Sri Lankan families accord boys more choices and privileges than girls. The eldest boy, especially, has a particular status among his siblings – but for InterRelate, in some cases he may be less appropriate as a writing partner than, say, a younger brother (it is to be hoped, after all, that the relationship with a sponsor will last and develop). Attempts to persuade families to nominate a girl over a boy should be made circumspectly, with due regard for prevailing local views on gender roles.

  ‘Educating sponsors more fully in these realities can only help us by engaging them still more. If we explain things diplomatically, perhaps we can also start to shift their perceptions of their part in the process of charitable “adoption”.

  ‘Good wishes to all in London

  Anura de Silva

  Programme Manager, Colombo Office, InterRelate International’

  This answered some, but not all, of Martine’s puzzles.

  Then there were more undercurrents in Mohan’s latest letter.

  ‘25th September 1985

  Your typing is different. Anupama did not notice.

  ‘My question is “Our mountains do not sound beautiful. The jackals and the bats screeching and Jayamal copying me talking are annoying.”