The Luminist

by David Rocklin

  “He and I were different,” Chandrak said. “But we wanted the same thing. I still do.”

  “They shot because of you.”

  Chandrak’s eyes were on him. They made him afraid of his own anger.

  The voices of those shepherding their prayers out to sea were high and sweet. Laughter and curses at the cold mingled easily with their requests for good health and streets whole enough for carts to travel.

  “They shot because of all of us,” Chandrak said. “Because of our skin and our language. Because we live at all. Yet, I beg you to forgive me, Eligius. Let there be something between us. If not fealty, then calm. At least that.” He took a small glass bottle from under his tunic. When he uncapped it, a smell like rotting tamarind briefly infected the air. He held the flask up for Eligius.

  “No.”

  “ Take it into the sea and leave it there. That I shouldn’t find it.” His eyes were wet. “Swim fast. It won’t be as cold. Pray for peace for Sudarma. A woman alone.”

  Carefully, Eligius drizzled scant oil into each diya, lit them and set them atop the tide. He slipped out of his clothes and lowered himself into the water. Frigid waves punched the air from his lungs.

  He uncorked Chandrak’s bottle and listened to its contents empty into the water. Then he crushed the frail spun glass in his fist. His blood greeted the salt sea.

  He kept one glass shard, then let the others go. They caught the cold stars as they sank. Arranging the remnant on the diya, he turned it until the flame light was magnified.

  So you can see, appa.

  He propelled the diyas forward with a push of his hand, creating gentle waves that swept them toward the other lights scattered over the surface of the sea. Health for my mother. Health for Gita.

  The tide’s return from shore took his lights away. A better home.

  Some diyas were extinguished by the waves. Others were so small that he couldn’t be sure of them anymore. His lights floated among the many. He couldn’t tell them apart. Soon even his appa’s light folded into the black tide. Nothing of them seemed memorable.

  He thought of the girl at Court that day. The way her light lingered after she’d gone. The way the soldiers’ lights didn’t linger at all as they found his father again and again.

  That I do not always live this way.

  He returned to shore. Sudarma sat near Chandrak. She stared at the sky while Gita slept against her. “How far did they get?” Chandrak asked.

  “They didn’t burn long,” Eligius said.

  HE LAY AWAKE all that night, listening to the runoff water split the ground outside his hut. It was as if someone had laid a strip of the murmuring sea down Matara’s middle.

  Chandrak came to his hut in the morning. “You deserve more than the fields.” A grave man, relating a grave fact. “I’ve spoken to your mother and made arrangements through the missionary at Port Colombo.”

  “You have no right to speak to anyone about me.”

  His mother slipped a tunic over his head, let it fall, tugged roughly at it to test the strength of her mending. He grabbed it, ready to tear it to pieces and throw it at this presumptuous man’s feet. His pulse pounded beneath the skin of his temples.

  “It was your father’s,” Sudarma said. She gently moved his hand away and smoothed the fabric. “He served a colonial family. Now you serve another. Your father was treated well. Maybe they’ll treat you well.”

  She handed him some bread and a battered diya. “This was my grandfather’s. I’ve kept it for you. Do all that you are told to do. If you don’t come home with rupees, I will not allow you to stay here.”

  CHANDRAK KEPT AT his heels, so he picked up his pace. His father’s tunic felt like thorns against his skin as they passed through the jungle.

  Chandrak led him to the opposite end of Port Colombo, where the clock tower rose above the crossing of Chatham and Queen streets. The East India Trading Company’s fleet began at the southern shore and extended out to sea like a cobblestone path of sails. The schooners closest to port waited for scurrying Tamils to unload crates of the colonials’ motherland needs: tins of smoked beef, pipe tobacco, linens and woolens, grand carriages and bicycles for the children. A separate line of workers loaded the ships with satin and muslin, salt, indigo, wild birds for the London and Paris zoos. Amid the bustle were the repatriating Britishers, their pockets overflowing with bits of Ceylon, boarding for the long voyage home.

  Two families, British and Indian, waited on the docks in the shadow of an immense clipper, the Earl of Abergavenny. The Britishers stood on one side in their finest clothes. Servants wielded parasols against the misting rain their children insisted on playing in. The other family stood stoically as the rain made suggestive skins of their garments. Both families watched the eldest of their children walk the gangway, the Indian boy after the English boy.

  “The sad truth of our life among them,” Chandrak said. “Disease, schooling, culture. Then comes the moment when their families have to send their children back to England or risk losing them to our hazards.”

  “And the Thevar child?”

  “A servant, I’m sure. Where they go, he follows.”

  Chandrak paused before an open crate of canned fruits. “I am only a pauper,” he told the mate overseeing the crates’ unloading. His English was broken and pathetic. “But what I wouldn’t give for the food of my betters.”

  The mate, a hirsute man darkened to a burnished red by the sea sun, picked up a jar of apples. “Am I a do-gooder, then? Bound to give tithes from the pockets of my employer?”

  “No, sa’ab. It’s a hard life.”

  The mate smiled. A bit of curdled yellow glinted between his rotting teeth. He tossed Chandrak one of the jars and bade him a good walk.

  Chandrak twisted the lid off of the jar and dipped his fingers into the syrup to pluck a slice. “Where were we?” He licked his fingers, then held them out to the falling rain to be washed clean. “Oh yes, the Thevar child made to follow his better. And now my display disturbs you. At least tell me this much. You thought I was stupid. So did your father. I’m an articulate man when it serves me.”

  “About the servant, his life isn’t his own. About you? I didn’t think you were stupid and neither did my father. He thought you didn’t care.”

  “Any day, the Court directors could move the whole of the southern provinces further into the jungle, if they thought a crop of coffee would fare better where our huts stand. Do you care about this?”

  “I think it’s wrong. But I’ve seen enough of men who think words change the world. Go on and tell yourself how smart you are – you’ll bleed just like my father. Nothing changes.”

  “It’s not me you should be angry at. They do this to us, Eligius. With their laws.”

  The colonial family bade farewell to their eldest as he climbed aboard ship. The child’s mother stifled sobs with an embroidered kerchief.

  “I don’t know the law,” Eligius said, “nor will I ever want to again. I know what I’ve seen. Men throwing stones and rotted fruit at the Court gate. What good does any of it do?”

  “Hiranyagarbha made stones first. As he made more and more things, like any good craftsman, I believe he got better at his task. He made man last, and manmade laws, and laws make consequences for men. Not just us. Them. They will bring the consequences on themselves.”

  A constellation of rain glistened on Chandrak’s forehead. His breathing came harder, faster.

  Eligius glanced around nervously. Were the colonials standing across the street watching? Could they understand Chandrak’s words? To be seen speaking in anger in their Port, Indians were jailed for that.

  Chandrak’s voice fell, as if he knew what Eligius feared. “Stones draw blood. Blood changes law. Laws draw maps around nations, and create them, or destroy them. Now see, we’ve found the missionary. More of this talk another day. Calm yourself, boy.”

  Tall and gangly, the missionary Stephen Ault was known to most of the southern p
rovinces. He lived, it seemed, to convert them and to funnel the charity of right-minded colonial women who donated blankets and books describing the ways of Christianity.

  Eligius followed Chandrak down the length of Port Colombo’s dock, along the sea. The waves pushed against the wood stanches, swaying the planks beneath. It felt as if the world strained to turn over.

  Ault stood in a swiftly moving line of servants wending its way to the ship’s captain. At their turn, each servant called out the name of the family they represented. The captain searched through neatly stacked piles of letters and parcels while the colonials sat shielded inside their carriages, waiting for words from loved ones across the sea.

  Ault came to them with a slim parcel of letters. “First to my parish for an umbrella,” he said to Chandrak in slow, rudimentary Tamil. “Then to the boy’s employer in Kalutara. Tell the boy to put these under his tunic so they’ll stay dry.”

  “What need do we have for an umbrella after hours in the rain?” Eligius asked in English.

  “How wonderfully you speak! Let me explain. For you, arriving in the appearance of need is expected, and so you shall. For me, it would not do to look as bad off as I otherwise am. You’ll learn, if it’s in you to learn. Now, no more dawdling.”

  They left the docks and crossed Chatham, slipping from tree to tree in an effort to blunt the rain and rising wind. Briefly they shared the canopying fronds of a palm with a Britisher and his young wife. She struggled to keep the crinkled ruffle of her dress out of the downpour while her husband turned her away from two young beggars. Starvation and sickness bent their bodies. Their backs filled with wheezing breath, pressing the accordions of their ribcages against their parchment skin. They were redolent with the manure they offered to sell for fuel. “Come, yaar, four lakhs of rupees…”

  “There’s a break in the rain,” Ault said. “Quickly now, before another cloudburst strands us here.”

  They followed the missionary across Chatham to a muddy corner, where the monsoons had eaten a gorge into the street. Abridge fashioned from hemp and planks of unshaved wood spanned one side to the other. Down this far from the Galle Face, the buildings reflected none of Port Colombo’s relentless gentrification by the British. Still chained to the beginning of the century, the storefronts and rooming houses were constructed from cheap stone and wood gone wormy from the seasons.

  Ault’s squat tenancy lay at the end of the block, among tobacconists and spice sellers. Its door opened upon a room scarcely larger than the huts found in Matara. The walls were porous stone that bled seawater. The floor was littered with candle drippings. A wooden cross hung from the wall near a small sketch of a man in priestly vestments, holding two fingers up to a blazing star.

  “Father Paul Tanford,” Ault said. “He founded the school in which I studied. In his name I came to this jungle. The day I arrived, I felt lost to England. It’s been twelve years, and I fear your people remain unknowable to me.” He opened his umbrella in the doorway. The rain had thinned to a sheet of cold pins.

  Ault gestured to Eligius’ parcel of mail. “Can you read as well?”

  Eligius turned the top envelope over as they walked. The sender’s hand was imprecise, and it took him a moment to discern the author, Sir John Holland. Catherine Colebrook was the recipient.

  “Service is one of the paths to the divine in your faith, isn’t it?”

  Ault was looking at him. As if it concerned him, Eligius thought, whether I crumble. “Is it such a terrible thing to help your family when they need you? Put those envelopes back in your tunic, so when you present them to the memsa’ab, you’ll be seen as concerned for their condition.”

  Their path took them out of the jungle at Kalutara, where they followed the sea to a small hill rising from a swath of cultivated fields. There the Colebrook estate stood, like all the colonial homes he’d seen before. Yet there was something about it that spoke of wildness and neglect. Blight twisted much of their fields. A tenacious ivy had overtaken the walls of the main house, erasing the demarcation between it and the ground. The hill it rested on sloped down to a river. Churned by the rains to brown rapids, it had flooded the entire frontage, up to the veranda wrapped around the base of the house. The property was thick with coconut, casuarinas, mango, and breadfruit, but they were underwater to the base of their trunks.

  He could see the problem from the gate. The Colebrook estate was a basin, high at either end and dipped in the middle.

  A flotilla of wood had been hastily erected to span the flood. The planks led to the side of the house, where a canopy of billowing sheets had been erected. From the gate, Eligius could see rows of chairs facing forward toward the veranda and a canopied stage.

  “Your memsa’ab,” Ault said, “lives on superlatives as if they were her daily bread.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Flattery,” Ault said. “It will see you through when matters grow dark, as matters are bound to do. Remember to present her with the letters. As I knew nothing of you, I’ve not told her of your ability with English or your abhorrence at what it is you will be doing. It’s best that you find your own place.”

  Eligius hesitated at the gate. “Did you know my father?”

  Chandrak watched him.

  “Yes,” the missionary said.

  “Did you bring him to these people?”

  “To the people who lived here before. I’ve known your village for many years. I help where I can. I thought he might find something of worth here. That happens in the strangest places, I’ve come to realize. If not him, then someone else. But what of it?”

  The back of Eligius’ neck was stiff from the cold rain, but he couldn’t rub it, or return Chandrak’s warning gaze, or move at all. To act was to tilt the world somehow, and then he would not be able to put it right.

  “I can remember how he was before the books and laws, when he was a man like other men in my village. He was my father. And then he wasn’t. The other men listened to him speak but stopped calling him to the fire. My mother hardly looked at him. Everything that mattered got lost.”

  “The boy is upset,” Chandrak said. “Let me speak to him. For his mother. It will help things.”

  Ault dismissed them with a wave. Chandrak led Eligius away from the missionary. “There’s a greater good to be served,” he told Eligius. “I will tell you what you need to know about these people, and you will listen.”

  “No, grama sevaka. I just want to go and come home with rupees.”

  Chandrak’s hand tightened until a warning of pain blossomed in Eligius’ arm. “Do you know they want to stamp England across India’s brow? The households they’re creating, like the one your father served, are English households. No matter that Ceylon lies just outside the window. In their homes, it’s the role of the dutiful wife to govern her family’s days and nights, their meals, their sleep, their social obligations and their cleanliness, and yet not be seen to govern anything, or else their husbands look weak. Do you understand this?”

  “Yes,” he said grudgingly. It wasn’t so different from his own home.

  “Your memsa’ab’s husband is infirm. She has two children, and with all this to manage and never enough to manage it with, she must maintain their position. A servant who helps his memsa’ab with such things is a great blessing. You will be a servant they depend on. Tell me you will do this.”

  Eligius nodded. He wanted to leave, yet something of Chandrak’s anger felt familiar, a once-inhabited room violently rearranged.

  “I ask you now, be a man like your father. He served them so he would always know how it felt to bear these bastards on his back. It gave him strength to be the man he was.”

  The rain left tears on Chandrak’s cheeks. “Go. Send your heart away and walk through their gate as if nothing mattered.”

  He turned from Eligius and shambled into the gathering storm. The soldiers’ guns had made a ruin of him. His wearying, tilting gait carried him away from the estate onto the m
uddying road.

  Ault waited impatiently at the gate. “What is so bothersome to you? I really must know, or else think of you as a boy too selfish to be concerned with his family, especially where the father of the house has met with such an end. Now tell me or else put this childish sulking aside.”

  “I don’t want to be here,” Eligius said.

  “Is it that I knew your father? Does his shadow stretch over the kindness of Christian labor?” Ault considered him a moment. “I think your father simply learned to have hope that things could be made better, and hope became important above all else. Above soldiers, above dying, above you. What can anyone do for such a man?” He opened the Colebrooks’ gate.

  Send your heart away.

  Eligius entered. He heard the gate close behind him, and the sound of Ault’s departing over the pebbled road. Outside of it all, the day moved.

  To the Gates of Empire

  AFTER GRACE, MARY SERVED THE WYNFIELDS FIRST. Charles and Andrew sat at the far end of the lunch, engrossed in conversation. Catherine sat across from Lady Wynfield, who shared stories of her son’s exploits with Sir John as they followed the threads of the star tapestry.

  “Rangoon, last we heard. In any event, our visit. For I well recall the difficulties setting up a home. Charles should soon be paid sufficiently to afford some furnishings.”

  This caught Andrew’s attention. He ceased his discussion with Charles. “Great work lies ahead.” He offered Lady Wynfield a withering look that shrank her in her seat. “Great reward accompanies.”

  “Hence our visit,” Lady Wynfield said uncomfortably. “Andrew, may I?”

  Andrew shrugged.

  Taking Catherine by the arm, Lady Wynfield led her outside to their carriage. Catherine paid scant attention. As they made their way between rows of empty chairs, she could not get Charles’ expression out of her thoughts. Proud, at times arrogantly so, a man who suffered no one. Summarily silenced by Andrew and humiliated by Lady Wynfield, and he responded as if he expected such treatment. As if he harbored no expectation of better.