On the Far Side, There's a Boy

by Coston, Paula

  ‘Anupama says that is not polite and not a question. I can see her writing that. I say she must put what I ask.

  ‘My question is “Do you have a computer typing? What kind is it?”

  ‘Happy birthday on 27th August. Anupama asked me to say, but I have agreed. I could not send you a present. Anupama wishes we had.

  ‘I have a cough again. Anupama is cuddling me. I am watching her write.

  ‘If we could send you a present, mine would be invisible ink. I dilute Coca-Cola with water. I dip a stick in it. Then I would write over it, and you of course would type across. To see the writing, we would heat it in the oven. We could find translators. They would be our special agents.

  ‘Here are the reasons why I would choose this present.

  We could communicate most secretly.

  Things that are there and not there, both, intrigue me.

  ‘Are the things we hide still real? Are they still facts? I entreat you ardently, please tell me your opinion.

  ‘I am annoyed. I want Anupama to write that. I have checked. She has written it. But she will not tell you why I am annoyed. She will only write that she will not tell you. She has gone to start the baby jak fruit curry. Now I am very very annoyed. I am writing this part trying hard.

  ‘My question is what does your brother do if you do not do what he asks.

  ‘She is coming back. I will hide the letter. I will say I have lost it. I will give it to Mr Mendes when she is not here.’

  ‘29th September 1985

  P.S. I know that Mr Mendes has the letter. I told him that this is another part. I request you to believe strongly that this is indeed another part, absolutely essential. This is a fact. I have most numerous things still to say to you and ask you. I wish we had shared more facts. I ardently wish you were here so we could talk.’

  ‘What does your brother do if you do not do what he asks?’

  Martine answered Mohan when the letter came, but inwardly. Well, sometimes Jonas digs in his heels. And sometimes, I register his long, stricken face and know that I’m not giving him what he’s asking for.

  The letter came in early October, with the cold nights drawing in. Martine was at her swimming pool surging up and down in the butterfly, trying not to think of Charlie. The moon was shrinking down beyond its last quarter, blinking at her churning progress through a skylight, at her thrashings of mind and body away from Charlie.

  For mental distraction she thought about contraception. She was three months on the diaphragm, having left the pill. She felt in some sense whole again, her ovaries dragging at her abdomen. And then there was a moment, an instant of fantasy, uncharacteristic, that to this day she no longer even remembers. To her eyes breaking the surface, the broken pieces of the moon flashing in the water in their uneven rows became the blisters in a pack of Loestrin.

  She aimed for the pool end, another swimmer fighting her to it. Her palms pressed the cool tile of the wall, and she crouched and kicked off and twisted, but the pill images stayed with her, dot-dashing along the lane beside her. She pulled herself onto the ladder. The word monath came to mind, month, connecting her cycles to the word moon. After that brief hallucination she’d be attuned to the moon as poetry, not just as fact, for always.

  Monath. Mona. The words evolved in her brain into Mohan. As her feet slapped to the changing rooms, frustration returned about him. There was something wrong between him and Anupama –And, she cursed, whatever it is you can’t do a sodding thing about it.

  Swimsuits flopped over cubicle doors. The tiles bounced women’s halloos, laughter, shouts, gossip, reminding her of something about the letters. There were things about them she couldn’t fathom. Mohan seemed to speak in several voices, some of them almost lover-like, or adult. Apart from the familiar interrogator with his ‘My question is’, of late she’d picked up the oddest tones: philosopher, scientist, bad dreamer, Buddhist – who disliked religion, even so – and to her the weirdest, with its talk of invisible ink: secret agent. As if he’d refracted into various personalities, become a puzzle. He was no longer what he’d been, revolving in a corner of the gadget of her life, a routine widget, an unremarkable little part she needn’t be too concerned with.

  She assumed with an inner shrug that the alien voices came from her, a kind of splintering effect of the mugging or her recent combat with Jonas.

  She reclaimed her clothes and armlet from her locker. As she did, the hook on her cubicle door caught her and scratched a finger. A red drop oozed. She reminded herself, Concentrate on Mohan, not on Charlie.

  ‘What I like most is writing to you…I have things still to say to you…I ardently wish you were here.’

  ‘It is the most sad sentence,’ Astrid had pointed out.

  An enigma of a boy, delicate and thin, under an alien tree, its leaves like paws. Out of nowhere he broke through Martine like a bead of blood through a membrane. From then on, she really did want to share herself with him.

  10 Anupama

  Wednesday 6 February 2013

  It’s afternoon, and Anupama’s husband Asiri is at his job on reception at the Suisse Hotel. Before he left, they kissed long and deep. Her groin still tight, Anupama paces their corner of garden to the tooting of the birds, fanning herself with her iPhone clone. Her washing is drying over the hibiscus: she still prefers the old, country method.

  She’s been rehearsing, for the hundredth time, what she knows. She’s discovered the narrowness of the ways that a forty-one-year-old Sri Lankan, a woman who is only now taking her A levels, can train to become a barrister. She thinks of Asiri. Husband. She hasn’t yet told him the narrowness of those ways.

  ‘Handanandāmāmā,’ she remembers, ‘there was a time when I was most fascinated by the crust movements of this island. Our metamorphic rocks, lurking in layers. Gradually I discovered that even before their time it was sand and clay and silt that went on to make the rocks that went on to make the metamorphic layers. And these facts feel to me as deeply hidden yet as significant as that original silt.’

  She resolves, I cannot put it off any longer. I must tell him.

  * * *

  1984–1985

  October 1984, and Anupama was on the laneside after school. There was a bees’ nest in a high tree, the bulbous sac pendulous from an inaccessible branch. Her brothers wanted to help their neighbours build the dislodging fire. Jayamal pushed and Mohan darted among grown men positioning brushwood and a ladder, but Anupama fished a half-written letter out of her skirt pocket. Although it was light, to her mind the moon still watched her.

  ‘Handanandāmāmā, here are some pleasant facts for our album,’ she started inside her head. ‘When amma was young, she used to clamber up behind her family’s house, following mountain streams for water. The streams were pure, especially at that altitude. Times are different now, and we live in a different place. Amma is not happy.’ She tried to smile. ‘Still, you see me climb to her old spots, to think of her and watch the dragonflies. They are magnificent.’

  She shook her head. ‘Unfortunately there are other facts also. Have you noticed,’ she asked, ‘that Mohan’s sleep, since Black July, has grown still worse? Also he has a cough like words he dare not speak. Of course, there has been further hideous news since Black July.’

  ‘And now Miss Martine has written, this long time after, about it. She is asking, “What has happened to you since July last year, I mean 1983? Is your family all right?”

  ‘I know some facts about our troubles. Unfortunately, Mohan knows a few also. Because facts are rare and precious, that does not mean that when we learn them they cannot hurt.

  ‘So I have not read Miss Martine’s questions to Mohan. I am writing, in Mohan’s name, merely enough to warn her not to write that way again.’ Anupama frowned at the paper in her hand. ‘I hope it is the proper thing. Auntie-Uncle Moon, I am still only thirteen.’

  October 1985. A year had passed, and Anupama hadn’t talked to the moon in all that time. She had her reason
s.

  The stars and its waning oval lit the rain stabbing the dark as, heedless of her soaking, she hauled two pails of water from the nearest village stream.

  Without greeting her Auntie-Uncle Moon she threw down the buckets and burst out, ‘At last I have the courage. I have been too ashamed to speak to you until now. When tatta has sometimes said, “Come and sit under the black umbrella,” meaning the night, I have not, for fear of seeing you. When Mohan and I wrote to Miss Martine about the Buddha’s birthday, and I had to write about full moon, I felt unworthy to write your name. The other day I saw you in the stream in pieces. Of course it is most unscientific, but for a moment, I thought it was because of me.

  ‘I know you watch me and see everything. Nothing is concealed from you. But I believe that the Roman Catholics have a practice they call confession; and now I must confess to you anyway, to try to make myself better, although you know it all, of course.

  ‘Last year I began something not right. In scenes I was involved with there were untruths that made changes. I know I made the dishonest details; what I do not know is when those details, like the edges of P.J. Cooray’s metamorphic rock, moved, and pushed, and started to heat and carve the events around them, step by step, until things became the unbearable way they are.

  ‘I took step number 1 for the protection of Mohan, or so I thought. It was when I asked Miss Martine not to mention our political troubles to him, hiding my strong plea in his words. Remember, I talked to you about it. She must have listened: she has never written again on these difficult matters. But Mohan’s fearfulness continued, as you will have noticed. He ordered me to tell her his cough was serious. Then that a cobra came to his bed that could say his name. Then he wanted me to ask her whether his foolishness in wanting a special present had taken InterRelate’s letters from the postman. Then, whether the swordsmen at Esala Perahera were bad men. I did not write these things. I disobeyed to protect him – perhaps Miss Martine also, if I am perfectly honest.’

  Far off, a barn owl lowed.

  ‘You shine on the mighty Lion Rock at Sigiriya also. I went there with my school once. What I had done was one shallow step through the water gardens beneath its cliff and giant paws. And yet it was a step.’

  Anupama’s hair hung in wet hanks. She straightened and took up the buckets and began to carry them home.

  She went on, ‘And then I took step number 2. I helped Mohan write more interesting letters. I have to explain.

  ‘InterRelate’s latrines arrived in the village a while ago, remember. No more bushes for the women, no more polite pretence of calling them the bathroom. Mohan joined the boys and men to watch the builders. He threw them numerous questions; sometimes they let him load a bucket with cement. He learnt everything, as you know, about latrines.’

  ‘You will remember one day. Upeksha and amma and I took our pails to the well, in the grass where we children often play. This takes up the water from the ground, whereas our tanks, which receive the rains, were rather dry. Amma sank down to listen to the ladies. There was auntie Sashi and auntie Nilu and auntie Prema and their daughters, washing their hair and clothes in the stream, and the venerable mother of auntie Nilu, like a cluster of bright fruit. They studied me in an utterly pointed fashion.

  ‘“Soon someone will be back here for a different reason,” chuckled auntie Sashi.

  ‘Auntie Prema nodded. “A few months? I give her a year at most.”

  ‘They were staring past the InterRelate badge below the collar of my frock to my own Mist-Laden Mountains taking shape. Up till then I had myself been fascinated about them. Upeksha stuck out her front and pouted. Even amma cackled.

  ‘I knew to what time they were referring. Suddenly I was not quite sure about it.

  ‘“Well, I’m ready for my next stage of life, working in Kandy and earning a wage,’ taunted Upeksha.

  ‘Amma made a noise. I put my arms around her: so my sister was thinking of leaving, school and home both.

  ‘Auntie Nilu teased amma, “You once said you couldn’t decide whether Upeksha should speak less and think more, or Anupama speak more and think less!”

  ‘Everyone stared at me again.

  ‘Tatta and amma hope that Jayamal will go to Jeshta Vidyala College; Mohan too. As you know, Upeksha and I go to a Kandy school also, for girls only. Several of our ladies, including Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike, have become most powerful people. I am not foolish: I may not achieve as much. However, I want to try.’

  Anupama tripped on a tarmac patch, recovering at a run, raising her pails to prevent spillage.

  ‘You are waiting for my confession, Handanandāmāmā. How the latrines led to step 2.

  ‘By last January, Mr Mendes had started bringing our foreign letters. Mohan was utterly brimming with questions for Miss Martine: about the slowness of the English mail, and numerous other topics. But he did not think to tell her about the latrines – even though they had been his lifeblood, as I say.

  ‘When I reminded him, he said, “Oh yes!”

  ‘I asked, “What shall I put in the letters about them, little one?”

  ‘He merely suggested,“‘They built latrines.’” Then he shrugged, and because the rains had eased, ran to dig in the garden, not so far from our latrine.

  ‘I was most frustrated, Handanandāmāmā. Those words were not the truth of who he was. So I bribed him with halapes to describe septic pits and S-traps and wire mesh and so forth; then I wrote her this retelling. I must confess, I bribed him for other letters – although, once the kikkul treacle was melting in his mouth, he got more and more unwilling.

  ‘So step 2 went by, lifting us, like the Sigiriya boulder gardens, somewhat above the truth, because I was not absolutely honest. I showed a joyous boy, bursting with curiosity, but not the fact that his interests could as suddenly vanish.’

  Anupama stopped, resting her burden in the road. A moonbeam lit a creature that slid ahead in the darkness.

  ‘A water monitor!’ she exclaimed. ‘I studied a chameleon this morning. Until today, Mohan used to bring me their shucked skins.’

  ‘“Look! He was just about to eat it!” he would sometimes crow.’

  She stared at the white egg of the moon reflected in one of her brimming vessels. ‘Handanandāmāmā, your light can penetrate chameleon skin: it is ragged and transparent, like a veil.’

  ‘I use our latrine to store such finds. Mohan helps…used to help me.’ Anupama made a small, ragged sound. ‘As we entered the stink, Mohan would pull me down and pinch my nose against it, making me splutter. Then in the dark round the back he would spring onto my hands. We have nailed rough planks across the back wall, making narrow shelves. I have lined up my rocks along them. I have old tobacco tins and jars for Miss Martine’s stamps – as you know it is I, not he, who love them – along with the skins I collect of lizards, snakes and dragonflies. Mohan lifts…used to lift down a jar for me, placing the new skin inside.’

  She hefted the buckets and set off again. ‘But I must stick to my album of facts.

  ‘We have all been nervous lately, because amma is worse. We hear her screaming or slamming her shutters for no reason, or find her on the kitchen floor. The mothers and fathers wanted to perform a thovil to drive away her bad spirits, but tatta will not. He enters her room and talks to her, then scowls and goes to his chair with the Lanka Deepa.

  ‘Upeksha and Jayamal have cared for themselves for a while; up until now Mohan has had a person to care for him, and that person is me. But the mothers think I am strange. Auntie-Uncle Moon, where is my mature and caring lady? It was this that caused the third step, I suppose.

  ‘Already Mohan was content to say much to Miss Martine the way I suggested it, because he is so young.

  ‘But I began adding more to the letters. Without Mohan’s permission I told her about your significance to our people, and enquired about her birth, moon and other festivals, and requested stamps, and described our dragonflies and what happens to the ny
mphs, and outlined, in case she did not know, the fact and mystery of surface tension. I even got Mohan to write more letters than he wanted. By now I must have been climbing the narrower, steep stone steps of Sigiriya, but I am afraid I barely noticed.’

  The rain was falling heavily now. Howls began from a wooded slope.

  ‘Jackals,’ Anupama commented. ‘Then’, she carried on seamlessly, ‘I crept up to step 4 – because I longed to share how I felt and thought.

  ‘It began from the latrine.

  ‘One day I discovered Mohan most furtively using my store-shelves in the same way I did. Along the lower planks he showed me a toy car and a lorry, his favourites; the raw kernel of an areca nut, marked to look like a cricket ball; a picture of a football match from the Lanka Deepa; and Upeksha’s eggplant curry, still steaming and sweetly fragrant, in a banana leaf. And something in his fist.

  ‘“A shrew!” he whispered, peeping under his thumb.

  ‘These were not objects merely: he had chosen them as symbols of the delights of his young life.

  ‘He whispered, “I don’t want them to break or disappear.”

  ‘I deduced, ‘“Because of Jayamal.”’

  ‘“Or an accident, or anything.” His fearful condition had arisen again. “Will you borrow the Jarasinghes’ camera? If we could take a photo, then I’ll always have them.”

  ‘He is excellent at technical things. I found a broken toddy crate, which he upended. We put each item in a compartment, and Mohan designed a door on a string to prevent his shrew escaping. When we raised the door for the photo, however, it still escaped.

  ‘I suggested another way to preserve his treasures. “We can write a list, even send Miss Martine a copy.”

  ‘That idea bored him utterly, to be perfectly honest; but me it had most suddenly inspired. While he was dictating this list for Miss Martine – his dislikes, also – I could insert into the writing “What do you like?”, “What things do you not like?”, the questions to get her answers. They seemed quite natural, really, Handanandāmāmā, like a buffalo’s horns before their reflection in water, and Mohan, still learning to read and write, was not aware; nor of some further questions I decided to add. Little queries, about changes in larvae, and in liquid.