On the Far Side, There's a Boy

by Coston, Paula

  ‘Ayubowan,’ she winked, but then was craning for her first sight of the mountains.

  Their outlines blue, like smoke. There was an outcrop like a tombstone, Bible Rock to the colonials, and another like an arrowhead, where Mohan’s hero Saradiel lived. She thought, They look like stage flats, as if there’s nothing solid in between; palm trees protruded from the forested distance like pop-ups in a book. The boy’s gaze trickled away. Among the trees tumbled shacks like cardboard cartons, out of reach.

  In Martine’s eyes, the train ride and the landscape stood for Mohan. It was as if he had a hand in how she saw things, as if he was revealing his life in stages on that journey: childhood, youth and the male in full maturity; shacks, paddy, forest unrolling for her like murals, mountains lining up. As if, eventually, he’d be unpeeling everything for her, one skin at a time.

  In Kandy, at the busy little station, her sweat was a breaking tide, first a hot slick wave then tepid. The light burned through bronze dust. She took another tuk-tuk. The driver in his Watermen T-shirt jabbering into his mobile drove a little yellow house: rag rug, water bottles, curlicued chrome fittings, small cupboards with chrome handles, a pink troll and family photos on the dashboard, Sinhala warbling from two speakers. The air was the fragrance of sandalwood, the odour of drains, a talcum-powder sweetness from somewhere, the lush smell of vegetable growth, the saliva-triggering draw of toasted spices. The clay dust and exhaust smoke on the main town roads transformed the lemon yellow light pouring down from the hillsides into a brassy sepia screen, like wire mesh. Reality was potent, alcoholic, beside her soft-drink dreams.

  In broken English, on the lake road, the driver shouted her a lesson on tuk-tuk driving. She grinned at the horn-blowing traffic stand-offs. She didn’t fret for the tube, for the passenger’s easy conviction of achieving her destination. Here the buses and tuk-tuks jostled and huddled, stopped and started, got gridlocked. She was so mesmerised she didn’t get round to telling the driver what she was doing there.

  Her destination was a mistake, she suspected, shrinking at the standard hotel welcome as she entered the dim lobby: dusky faces dipping over dusky steepled hands, papaya crush cocktails and an ‘Ayubowan: Long life’ from the hostess in her turquoise local saree for the tourists. An obliging tunic-ed bell boy with a toothpaste smile would probably brush on her door at night, pointing out that ‘Madam, this is safer closed.’

  From a wrought iron table beside the hotel lawn she could see a border of vivid oleanders and the tops of trees, hedging off whatever lay beyond. She identified the lawn’s dishevelled, strap-leaved grass as Zoysia matrella poaceae: in a way she’d prepared a lot, for many years, for this journey.

  A boy brought sweet black tea.

  Martine said, ‘Will there be rain?’

  The boy said, ‘The sky is not so heavy. In your honour, there may be no rains today.’

  Martine blurted, ‘Sorry. I can’t stay here.’

  She didn’t want James Galway fluting in the lift, frangipani laid by a dusky hand on the turned-back bedsheet, porridge and bacon on the groaning breakfast buffet: vestiges of a bygone, colonised deference.

  The boy wagged his smiling head. ‘OK, OK. I will bring the manager.’

  Martine waited for the manager, and looked. Apartment balconies overhung the view to her left, cluttered with bicycles and buckets. A painted huniyam yakka mask, the Black Prince of Sorcery with his bug eyes, distended nostrils and cobras rearing from his brow, traditionally for thovil, the expulsion of an illness, hung on an outside wall. A shaking of branches, and Mohan’s English teacher popped through them, a toque macaque with that distinctive fan of head hair, its expression fixed and comic. The fist twitched, under the lifted chin. It almost felt like a message from Mohan.

  The crickets were ever-present, the white noise of their seething. Above the town the light was golden, limpid. Trees sprang dense from the hillsides down below. The landscape defied Martine’s London life: that was engineering, the coordination of routines, of journeys by tube and car, entrances to and exits from shops and bars and offices and restaurants, rises and falls on escalators and in lifts. That was in her mind: this was in her pores.

  She looked north and east, to the hills. She thought, He’s somewhere over there. She pictured ferns by a mountain stream, and a dragonfly, like a splash of oil, bouncing against a bullrush. With the right help she’d get to Mohan. She had a self-revelation: she was like the scalloped spreadwing, her wings unpacking, gluey in the light, a couple of her limbs at most still in the holed boat of the nymph with its broken oars of legs that she was unfurling from.

  Her gaze swept round again. High on a forested hillside a Buddha sat cross-legged, white as chalk. As the manager bustled towards her, in a long, smooth stroke the light withdrew from the sky, deepening like tea dregs.

  ‘Madam, sorry, sorry. Very busy.’

  City lights began to cluster below. The stars pricked on. A dog’s bark echoed somewhere in a hoarse, foreign way. A yellow glow haloed the Buddha, white lights picking out one side.

  ‘The Buddha says that all life is suffering,’ Martine joked ineptly, quoting Mohan from long ago, ‘and I’m afraid I must make you suffer by moving out.’

  She transferred to a Kandy homestay. Up a winding unmade lane, it was a faded, crumbling house dangling cables of old cobweb from the ceiling, with bright gnomes and plastic windmills in the flower-filled garden and the portrait of some stern Victorian commander on the stairs. The doll-like owner, Hilda, spoke timid English and kept an evasive but smiley houseboy. Martine slept off her jet lag.

  The next day, late, having showered in the antique bathroom, she went down. The kitchen was wooden drainers stacked with crockery and two old butler’s sinks. Hilda greeted her, clearing spaces among the cooking pans on the long kitchen table. Two visitors already sat there, sipping milky tea from mismatched English porcelain. Hilda rebuffed Martine in shrugs when she went to help her with the piles of washing up.

  Hilda’s friends were a local couple who’d dropped by, she in an ornate, Indian-style saree and blouse, he in an expensive lightweight suit. She looked older; he had a fleshy, lived-in face.

  The wife asked in Sinhala, ‘Why are you in Sri Lanka? Ayi? Why? Are you a tourist?’

  Martine attended to Hilda as she painfully translated.

  Tourism was prevalent in Kandy, Martine had already seen. Self-prostitution, she thought. She found this hard to accept, not quite compatible with her expectations. The woman visitor’s autocratic air seemed to link her to the medallioned officer on the stairs. A phrase came back to Martine, suited to the tourism and the woman: the imperialism of need. She took the letters and pictures from her bag, but finding nowhere to lay them, put them back.

  ‘I’m here to see Kandy. Mostly to find someone. He’s a Lankan, Sinhalese.’

  Hilda interpreted, swapping Martine’s teacup with a mango splayed in a floret.

  The wife didn’t react. ‘We came back here to stop him working.’ She put out a hand to stop her husband lighting a cigarette. ‘And because I was homesick.’

  The man said mildly in accented English, ‘I just retired a little early.’

  The woman studied Martine. ‘You’re a scientist like Vijitha?’ She indicated her husband.

  ‘You can tell,’ said Martine.

  The woman turned to him. ‘You say I always know.’

  Vijitha kept to English. ‘Mmm. It would be better for the world, perhaps, if more people remembered the word “science” meant something less definite than knowledge. I wonder if you agree.’

  He looked at Martine kindly. He, his wife and his comment posted themselves almost at once into her dreams.

  She asked, ‘What was your field?’

  ‘Light out of true. Gravitational lenses, specifically. I still study them, in my spare moments.’

  ‘We were in Baltimore. And before that, Greenbelt,’ the woman persisted in Sinhala. ‘Vijitha worked for NASA.’

  ‘I
may need a researcher,’ said Martine. ‘Do you by any chance know someone?’

  With a curling lip the woman said something, she could tell a knockback, although Hilda didn’t interpret, merely exchanging Martine’s fruit rind for an egg hopper.

  Vijitha softened his wife’s rejection. ‘The Sri Lankan Tourism Promotion Bureau have a desk in the KCC. A mall in town. They have guides.’

  ‘I want another cup of tea,’ his wife signalled clearly to the room.

  Martine set out on foot, carrying the umbrella. The shimmering sound of crickets, the cawing of a bird. Enter on a computer the number of cricket chirps on average over five seconds and select a season: a programme calculates the ambient temperature. A cricket fact, girl. She pulled her bad-joke face.

  Down the lane, she stopped. The hills were steeply wooded folds pinned by the gilt brooch of the temple far below her, its dual kinked roof still hiding the lake from view. The hairpin of a transmission tower scratched the skyline, red and white. She knew that landline communication had largely bypassed this challenging, hilly country. People linked through the ether using mobiles and satellites, and the roads had been transformed in the last decade. More Sri Lankan facts. The white hulk of the Buddha gleamed across the valleys. She passed a hotel drive guarded by an army of vermillion, canna lilies on black stems, smiling a no at the line of tuk-tuk drivers.

  The roads below were dense with traffic. A uniformed policeman was controlling the trucks and tuk-tuks with incomprehensible flicks of his stiff gloves. She crossed to the lake, and the matter-of-fact in her receded. It was as if, with the fine plume of the lake’s water jet, Mohan himself was obscuring the ornamental garden of an island, and as if, using the island, he was screening the Queen’s Bath House behind it, standing on white pillars on the water. Beyond the white block of the Bath House, only the roofs of the Temple were visible, the gold apex of the most sacred at their centre. Somehow, Mohan’s dance of several veils.

  Locals passed Martine, scanning her from under the shelter of umbrellas. Any could be a thirty-four-year-old Mohan, or a relative.

  She followed the Cloud Wall round the lake, a concrete stencil of pierced white flames. Looking as she now did, the Temple complex opened up: the statues and planted paths of the garden, the wooden pillars of the ancient audience hall, the terracotta and grey-tiled roofs surrounding the Temple, its roof a beak of gold. She skirted the railings. At the Queen’s Bath House she imagined a swim in the waters underneath, illicit, one moonlit night maybe. On the shoreline, a father bent to his son. The boy offered a plastic bag to the ripples, trying to scoop the crowding fishes.

  She left them for the streets, climbing the escalator inside the KCC.

  At the Tourism Bureau counter she explained her mission to a bright-eyed woman who waited for her to finish, nodding patiently, then said, ‘Perhaps you have a letter of reference, from, ah, some professional. Back in the UK.’

  ‘I’m a teacher myself.’

  ‘Do you have a letter to explain this, and why you’re here?’

  Martine hadn’t expected to need letters, introductions. ‘Sorry, no.’

  ‘In that case, it is too short notice for a researcher or guide.’

  Hiring a Bureau driver would feel to Martine like patronage, but she swallowed her scruples and asked.

  ‘Again that will be difficult.’

  ‘Can you help with information, at least? Ways to the family that I could try myself?’

  ‘The telephone directories are not so helpful I’m afraid. Most people here use mobiles. But the kacheri, the District Secretariats, hold electoral lists. And the Registrars’ offices keep births, marriages and deaths. Although Liyanage: that is such a common name.’

  Martine said, ‘A map would help, one that shows the roads from here into the Mist-Laden side of the Mountains.’

  For a moment she felt the irony of the location she clung onto: she’d always assumed that a better life for Mohan would mean a life made somewhere else.

  The women struggled together over Google Earth on Martine’s laptop, but the assistant said, ‘We are a little behind here. Not all the little villages are even on GPS.’ She offered her a paper map, ‘Although again here,’ she said, ‘one or two places may be missing.’ She checked, ‘You say he came from the Mist-Laden Mountains to school in Kandy? Then the buses go only along here.’ She traced a route from Kandy through towns called Matale and Raththota. Rising from those, just one, crinkled road. ‘This is tarmacked now. But you need a sensible driver, isn’t it.’ Martine thanked her and made to leave. The woman added, ‘One small idea. You say the family was drumming in the Esala Perahera. It is not the time of year for it of course, but…’ She mentioned the Media Centre, beside the audience hall of the Temple. ‘Sometimes they arrange filming of such performers. You might try.’

  Martine found Pizza Hut on the street corner next to the Temple entrance. She scaled the stairs. Under a plasma TV showing Tom and Jerry, a female pianist plinky-plunked a piano. In memory of Phil, Martine sent a thought out somewhere. Teenage waiters ogled the screen, unwillingly called away by pizza appearances or the need to whizz up smoothies and now, Martine’s request to see the manager.

  A man with a grey moustache and a tonsure of thin hair appeared and bustled towards her. ‘My wife’s umbrella. How kind, so kind.’

  The woman at the piano got up and came towards them. ‘Bohoma sthuthiyi.’

  Many thanks. She took the umbrella. Slim and graceful, she was decades younger than the man.

  ‘Can we thank you with a pizza?’ the manager asked, rubbing his hands. Martine declined. ‘Well, can we offer you something, anything, else?’

  She hesitated. ‘I’m looking for someone who wrote to me. Beyond Matale and Raththota, in the Dumbara Kanduvetiya. I need someone English speaking to help me, maybe a driver. Someone who knows Kandy really well.’

  The manager translated to his wife, and they murmured.

  ‘My wife’s cousin used to be a guide. He has been sick, but he is almost better. He has a van, good for the mountains. I will ring him.’

  The man turned to his mobile, and within minutes he was leading Martine elsewhere.

  In the alleyways off Yatinuwara Street crowded chattering traders at open shops and stalls, a knife grinder, an old woman mending umbrellas. Doorways spilled out goods, pouches filled with pirated DVDs, sacks of plastic toys and gadgets in fluorescent colours.

  The manager led Martine up dark, steep stairs into the hot compelling stink of chicken biryani. Betel red walls, light filtering in from the grimy window, dishes chalked on a blackboard. The sign outside had said the Grand Imperial Eating House. Lunchtime diners, all men, alone, studied the Dinamina or the Lanka Deepa at cracked formica tables, shoehorning rice and curry into their mouths. Most glanced at Martine and then greeted her escort. The house manager hurried forward, grinning them towards a table. The Pizza Hut man refused it, addressing him in Sinhala.

  There was a whine and a shriek, then shouts, and diners scraping back their chairs and shoving past Martine, towards the back of the room. At the basin for rinsing hands they circled a man, wet hair pouring over his face. With a hiss, water fired from the base of the tap.

  The house manager stooped and turned the stopcock. He and the dripping diner traced the fault to a crack. The manager swore. Martine stood and watched from the blank between the mostly emptied tables and the dust-filled light from the window. In gestures, everyone seemed to agree a spanner was wanted. The boss skidded off. He returned with a cloth and a sink wrench. He ducked under the basin.

  He struggled to loosen the tap nut. The quiet of effort fell. Martine’s pizza friend tugged the man’s shoulder. He tried too but had no luck, so each man tried in turn. The manager pulled the last man out and elbowed his way back under and strained and twisted and at last got the nut off and released the pipe under the sink. The tap fell into his palm.

  With one man gone for a new fitting, the men lounged around waiting, lobbing c
ashews into their mouths, pantomiming about plumbing and patting each other uncomfortably, smiles sliding out. The manager brought Martine a plate of biryani. She sat down feeling helpless. One man with a frizz of hair spectating from a corner, uninvolved, brought her his own dish, and showed her how to eat it with her hand.

  The runner remounted the stairs with a tap. Swiftly the manager dropped it in, secured the nut and reattached the pipe. The group deflated, still chuckling, their words fast giving out. The word foreigner was in Martine’s head, as it had been since the sign at the airport. Masculinity was exotic and intriguing, a country far beyond her, as it had always been.

  The boss gestured her to the newly functioning basin, passing her a towel. Then her Pizza Hut escort led her to the man who’d shown her how to eat, introducing him as Santha, his wife’s cousin. A burly man near Martine in age, with a leonine head and paws of hands. With downcast eyes and muttered questions he listened to his relative, folding his newspaper slowly, over and over; from the chat, he seemed unwilling to take her on.

  She explained her quest in English. He still didn’t respond. She produced the letters and the drawings.

  He squinted at them, turning them, then said at last, ‘Hari, hari,’ OK, OK, swaying his head slowly, his lower lip jutting. He switched to English. ‘Two hundred dollars for your two weeks here. Extra for diesel and bata.’ He growled, ‘I will do the best. We may find him or not, ne? Not my problem.’

  ‘Santha is good,’ the Pizza Hut manager assured her.

  Martine thought, I don’t like him. But what other help do I have? And from then on, Santha also entered her dreams.

  29 Run-up

  April 2012

  Martine followed directions from the woman in the mall that took her up a quiet road around the back of the Temple, but the guards put up gloved hands. From what she could make out, she couldn’t get to the Media Centre without some kind of pass. For the moment, she abandoned her attempt.

  The next day, Santha collected her in his van. She ignored the open back door and climbed in beside him, a statement met with inquiring, pink-tinged eyes.