On the Far Side, There's a Boy

by Coston, Paula

  ‘I don’t want to act the old colonial. Imagine I’m just asking you to help me.’

  ‘For dollars.’

  A hot odour floated round him, mown grass or rain-drenched leaves.

  ‘Our history here makes me uncomfortable.’

  ‘Everyone oppresses everyone, or tries to.’

  ‘You mean in the civil war.’

  ‘Not only in the war, ne?’

  She showed him the route on her map, the only school-bus route through the right side of the mountains, according to the Tourism Bureau. ‘Through Matale and Raththota.’ Santha confirmed this from his local knowledge. She added, ‘Mohan told me he was 40 kilometres from Kandy.’

  Out of town on the A9, they touched and re-touched the wide current of the Mahaweli, at one point passing its sign carved into stone: a cobra with five thick necks, like a fountain. Water is truth, thought Martine, if sometimes different from fact, not really knowing what her thought meant. She glimpsed women bathers on a sandbank, separate from the men. If she’d had more time, she might have swum herself.

  Through red-dusted yards of building materials and outlets for vehicle body parts behind their chain-link fences, the van bisected the wide streets of Matale with its batik workshops, passing Matale bus station and forking on and right, east and north-east. People everywhere. She stopped looking at faces and hoping: there were too many.

  The roadside shops of several villages jerked by. Then they were in Raththota, an industrial village aspiring to be a town. The engine still turning, Martine’s heart chuntered with it.

  Santha flashed his bloodshot eyes at her, pointing to the dashboard and the dusty town outside. ‘Here is 40 kilometres.’

  She got out and stretched her legs and gulped down bottled water, looking round at the little place. She thought, Ugly. Many buildings were partial, scaffolded with bamboo.

  ‘It’s got to be nearer the mountains,’ she said.

  She remounted eagerly. On the far side of Raththota, the one undulating road on the map began to narrow and climb.

  Santha growled, driving slowly as if unwilling. ‘Few buses between here and the mountains, ne?’

  Martine insisted, ‘But some.’

  Santha countered, ‘Two bus changes for the boy if he lived beyond here. Few buses out so far. Not practical for a Kandy school. It would not be allowed.’

  ‘He talked of the mountains.’

  ‘We all talk of the mountains.’

  Martine said, ‘Nevertheless.’

  They wound up and round. Off the road, Martine eyed unmade lanes and tracks, simple houses squatting down behind the trees: wattle and daub or timber, sometimes brick. Did they count as villages?

  According to Santha, ‘Yes. But there’s no paddy, which your family must have.’

  On a hairpin, they bypassed an open-fronted shop with a table, chairs, an awning and a part-stocked chiller cabinet. A cool spot, the Lankans called them. Martine twisted her head and craned in all directions. She was sure she’d know the village when they saw it.

  The land rose, lush green growth enfolding the snake of the road. They slipped through a scattering of shacks set in plots of vegetables and paddy, a village called Pelawatta, meaning Young Shoots.

  ‘We’re not near enough to the mountains,’ Martine said over the engine.

  ‘51 kilometres. This is the mountains,’ Santha snapped.

  Martine couldn’t accept this. She consulted her laptop notes. At the top, Mohan had told her, were the ‘scrubby summits’ and the ‘cloudforests’, the montane region, with ‘ferns, mosses and waterfalls in the high hills’; below, the tea plantations ‘not far up’; below that, the ‘lower montane and tropical regions’, with ‘our village and other villages and the paddy and many tropical plants’.

  They passed through another small settlement.

  Santha punctuated, ‘57 kilometres.’

  Now I’m getting upset, Martine noticed. Why am I so upset?

  They arrived in a towering forest, coniferous, dropping away to the left, and Santha stopped to urinate. The crickets scraped, and there was the burble of some bird. The scent of pine was vaporised in fresher, thinner air.

  Santha grunted, ‘The plantation is a foreign project of the 1970s. Timber for building.’

  In the mattress of brown needles beneath the trees, nothing grew. Martine accepted, It’s an object lesson about foreign colonisation. She was thirsty. For some reason, they had both run out of water.

  Santha warned, ‘Soon we’ll be in the tea plantations. British history. Not for you, ne?’ He reminded her, ‘The boy said, “the tea plantations not far up”. So when we reach them, that’s too far.’

  Martine shook her head. ‘Don’t stop.’

  She had to test the facts to their conclusion.

  Soon a basic terraced eating place appeared, the Riverstone Holiday Inn.

  Martine said, ‘Please stop.’

  Its rustic balustrade dropped sheerly before overlapping planes of blue and bluer mountains. Waterfalls slashed them, glinting in the distance.

  Leaning beside her, Santha spat over the drop. She desired the waterfalls.

  ‘40 kilometres could be poetic licence,’ she entreated.

  Santha heeled the rust-red soil, smiling down at his sandal.

  He told her brusquely, ‘61 kilometres. For poetic licence too much, ne?’

  At Martine’s insistence the van ground on towards strange, cone-shaped hills. Beyond them she saw a red cleft flinging out a tall, white cascade. Now the hills surrounded them. A cool, moist haze perfumed with sandalwood enveloped them. Bushes clipped like cut-outs in green cork spiralled the cones in geometric lines, alternating with the orange stripes of soil, like easy mazes in a children’s book. Dark women bent as if decoding them then straightened, flinging something onto their backs. Tea. The red-splashed parasols of flame trees rose here and there, shading the crop with leafy spokes. Pickers’ houses in bright pastels nestled together, like enamels. The ornamental gardening of the British imperialists, registered Martine.

  ‘Keep driving. Please.’

  They passed a sign marking the beginning of the Knuckles Range Conservation Zone, with rules for walkers, campers and day-trippers planning barbecues. Plastic rubbish at the roadside. Wind hurtled through the landmark of a view with a TV mast up high. Tourism and technology, even here. Then over a ridge and below them lay the dry zone: bleached slopes and flats, old paddy.

  ‘That’s the end of Mohan’s side of the mountains,’ Martine admitted, and something in her stopped. ‘OK, turn round.’

  Santha revved noisily as if to underline a point and, in a practised three-point turn, started them back the way they’d come. Martine told herself that the villages below the cloud-forests weren’t so far from them, just a fingernail ride down a guitar string. It just meant halting in various places, feeling for the right note.

  The first hamlet they returned to did have lily ponds. Shacks sloped down to either side of the road. Log stores, scrawny chickens running, gardens shooting up with vegetables and fruit and staring, weatherbeaten faces. The asterisks of the water lilies glowed on the sparkling water, like a children’s book plate illustration.

  ‘Mohan wrote of water lilies!’ Martine said.

  Santha grunted, ‘The water is for survival.’

  As are some of my other images, she upbraided herself: children fishing, setting traps, scrambling among the ferns and moss for wood. Still, a romantic gloss always prevails.

  Santha idled the van through the few gardens by the roadside.

  ‘There’s no temple near, no Post Office or primary school,’ he pointed out.

  Martine had shown him all those references from Mohan. She wanted to wrench off the gearstick, jam it in his mouth.

  By the next village down, the air was more humid, the growth more tropical and verdant. Santha meandered the van about. Along a lane there was a gilt Buddha in Perspex: Mohan’s village had had a shrine. Martine spotted a stone ta
nk for the rains, which, again with poetic licence, could be the well he’d mentioned. A paddy terrace sped up Martine’s heart. There was a wayside shop that she supposed could be a Post Office.

  ‘It’s not,’ barked Santha. ‘And it’s too far here even to walk down to a bus.’

  Martine wanted to puncture him with a sharp object. They descended, the ferns and mosses and waterfalls left behind.

  They pitched into Pelawatta again, the village called Young Shoots. The first thing Martine saw was a small white structure with a dirt-streaked, cross-legged Buddha in front of it, off to the right of the road. The feet clothed in flowers and necklaces and brass ornaments. To the left of the road, a stream tumbled over boulders and, on a patch of grass, a tank stood that could take up water from the water table and call itself a well. Opposite, a small cuboid building.

  ‘Community hall,’ sniffed Santha as they passed.

  ‘I’d like to get out,’ said Martine.

  There were the crickets still, and yapping dogs somewhere, and, from inside a hut, people laughing, and the caw of birds in the treetops.

  Martine walked down the twisted road, Santha following. Clusters of shacks with verandas. Among the carefully tended vegetables and spice bushes, most gardens had a latrine shed. The stream passed under the road, threading through shallow terraces of paddy in which two men stood talking. She forged down a track while Santha waited, unconvinced. Among more dwellings, a tiny primary school lay out of sight of the road. Its peeling facade had unglazed blanks for windows, and there were bright blue swings in the playground.

  Martine doubled back to the road. Along the verges, pepper vines embraced tall trees. She was no longer sweating. Or, it seemed to her, breathing. Cocoa pods hung down. There were erica-nut palms, clove trees, jak-fruit trees, breadfruit trees with baseball mitt-like leaves.

  First, in a fenced houseyard at the roadside she saw the sulphur yellow flowers of a flame tree, Peltophorum pterocarpum. Like flags to arrest her attention. There was also a king coconut with drinks crates stacked beneath it and a tyre swing slung from a jak tree. In the middle of the red ground, a pitched straw roof covered a log store; in one corner stood a latrine. To the side was a huddle of buildings – no, building. Two parts of the house were wattle and daub, at right-angles to each other; there was a breeze-block annexe. Each dwelling had a veranda.

  She recited under her breath, ‘“Senior father and junior father and the mothers and five cousins are living by our house not our house but on the side.”’

  It fitted. It fitted. Beyond the yard, rows of gourds, melons, carrots, beans, chillis and aubergines, a ginger plot and a turmeric plot, glittered in the sun. An irregular-shaped paddy field with channels cut across it, a red cow grazing the surface, tilted to the distant stream.

  ‘He called the cow Bluey,’ Martine said. ‘It was red.’

  ‘They’re all red here,’ said Santha.

  At the tree-lined perimeter a dog erupted, barking. Martine didn’t jump. Another joined it. She thought she heard another somewhere close.

  ‘“We have three good brown dogs,”’ she recalled without needing her laptop from the van.

  Santha made a noise, pointing to a higher place on the road. She hurried back. A modest handpainted sign on a wall. Under a wooden archway, they took steps down. There was an unmistakable red posting box and a window for transactions, but it and the little lobby were empty. Somewhere out back, she heard the snuffles of a baby.

  Martine quoted, ‘“Today the bus went past us then two houses on the snake road then the Post Office.”’

  ‘Past us?’ queried Santha.

  There was the putt-putt, whirr of a tractor in a field, and someone on a bicycle scribbled by.

  ‘I will shout, ne?’ Santha said at the counter.

  Martine was torn as to who and how to ask. She ran down the road to the house with its three connected dwellings. She touched the treetrunks with her palms, knelt and pressed her face to the chain-link fence. She thought she saw something –The beginning of my birthdate? – carved into the breadfruit tree.

  She called, ‘Mohan!’

  Humidity blotted up her voice. There was a cricket bat against the log store. Now she was sure. She began to imagine other clues, disregarding the forward march of time, disregarding all those years elapsed. Cricket stumps: weren’t there were some abandoned by the well back there? And a plastic hoop-and-post game scattered in the playground at the school?

  From a lane overhung by trees an elderly man with his sarong hitched into his waistband slowly made his way towards them, a bundle of straw on his back.

  ‘Ayubowan,’ Martine said as he drew level.

  The man halted with a wariness in his eyes. Santha suggested he walked away and had a word with him. Martine reluctantly agreed.

  They talked for a while, then Santha’s gestures got emphatic, and the man was shouting hoarsely and poking him in the chest with a bony finger. Then they were both laughing, and Santha shrugged and came away.

  He blinked as he reached Martine, ‘I am sorry. There is no one in this village called Liyanage. I gave the names, the occupations, the ages, the mother who, sadly, died. No family as you describe them has lived here in recent times, ne?’ Foreseeing Martine’s doubts he added, ‘He is an old man, but without problems of the mind, because I tested this tactfully. And he has been here all his life. I do not see that he would lie because, forgive me, I did offer him money.’ For the first time, he frowned as if with concern for her. ‘We can ask some other people here, but…’

  A version of something Martine’s mother had said came back to her.

  ‘About Mohan. You were just looking in the wrong place.’

  30 The field

  (Field: The oval or circular area of play in cricket, consisting of infield and outfield around the rectangular pitch)

  April 2012

  Santha checked with the two farmers in the paddy, and the mother of the baby who eventually emerged, surprised to see anyone, at the Post Office. The old man seemed to be right: no Mohan Liyanage, or his family, had in living memory dwelt there.

  On their return towards town, Santha parked at Matale District Secretariat, the low building surrounded by palm forest that held the electoral lists. As a local he was more likely to have success, so Martine lurked in the office lobby. She watched him being charming or overbearing as required, unexpectedly assiduous.

  An official eventually brought thick files, and Martine saw the men discuss them for a while, but when he walked her back to the van Santha said, still in his animated state, ‘Many Liyanages.’ He expanded, ‘It would take long to find the family from the names. Perhaps with an appointment, in a few weeks…’

  They also called at the tall, pink, modern Matale Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths.

  Re-entering the van, Santha repeated, flashing his white-toothed smile, ‘Many Liyanages.’

  Martine couldn’t think about defeat.

  On the journey back to town Santha lapsed into thoughtful and morose.

  Martine broke the silence. ‘Where shall we try next?’

  ‘He couldn’t live beyond Raththota,’ he said at last.

  The following day Martine went back to the Tourism Bureau in the KCC, to be helped this time by a dithering girl with a coral manicure.

  ‘Could I trace Mohan through his schooling?’

  ‘Oh, well, I… It is the school holidays. You could have visited the Ministry of Education, if you had only written in advance. Some people could not trust you otherwise.’ The girl hesitated. ‘We sometimes have problems. People could become, ah, unfriendly or take advantage over you. And on your side…’ She coloured darker. ‘Oh, how can I say? A few foreign ladies come looking for boys of a younger age, isn’t it. “Beach boys”, so we say.’

  Martine thought of Damion, Garey, Kumar, Ravi, Johnnie and other memorable boys at school, of the fine line she’d never crossed.

  ‘Mohan’s friend once met a boy, Pieter, at
the British Council. Could there be a membership register?’ The girl didn’t know, but scribbled out the British Council address. Martine persisted, ‘And Victoria’s Secret? Where his sister used to work.’

  The girl perked up. ‘Ah! Now this…It’s on Pallekele Industrial Estate.’ She marked it ‘V.S.’ on Martine’s map.

  ‘Also,’ said Martine. ‘Small World, the charity. It doesn’t have a phone number here, I suppose?’

  It didn’t, just as Sandra Gearing in London had told her; and Sandra hadn’t armed her with any aid contacts on the ground. Martine had emailed, but the woman hadn’t replied.

  Martine texted or emailed her mother and Jonas at intervals. They were concerned for her, but fine. The days passed without a word from Sandra Gearing.

  Next, Martine and Santha tried the British Council in the middle of Kandy. Stepping out of the lift on the third floor, they were among the shelves of a modern library. Santha approached the desk clerk, introducing Martine as a British teacher. The young woman disappeared to find her boss, who gave Martine his sole, birdlike attention.

  Martine said, ‘I’m trying to find someone local. He had a friend called Cruz who came here, at least once. And Cruz saw a boy called Pieter here, Sinhalese, adopted. Have you got records we could see? Of membership? Or attendance?’

  The man smiled at her. ‘What year please?’

  Martine showed the letter. ‘1988.’

  His face shaded. ‘A long time. We were in a different building then. And I was not yet working.’ He shook Martine’s hand. ‘Sorry, we could not have papers from so long.’

  As an antidote to what appeared the Council’s bland cross-cultural condescension, Martine persuaded Santha to a trip to the public library, although he warned, ‘No good, ne?’

  On the ground floor, locals were reading newspapers, staff mounting cuttings at wooden tables and students absorbing tomes in panelled booths. Upstairs were texts behind glass, some written in the ancient way on palm leaves, many about the origins of Sri Lanka. Book-dazed women librarians stared.

  Martine approached a woman of flitting movements in a blouse printed with butterflies. ‘I’m looking for records of a family, of someone who was a boy in the 80s.’