The Luminist

by David Rocklin

  The sight chilled him. Unbidden moments joined him in the dankness. His father, breathing life into old colonial laws. Bright roses spitting from gunmetal. Himself, in his father ’s emptying eyes.

  “ You’re getting water all over the floor,” Mary snapped, “and who do you think cleaning it falls to?”

  She took him to the scullery. He knew it immediately by the smell. Caked pots, buckets of rancid vegetables gone to oily black, meat on a butcher ’s table, its marbled flesh infested with flies.

  “Servants,” Mary said, “don’t see the filth their betters live in. They don’t smell their stench. Servants concern themselves only with what’s to be done.”

  She stacked a single cord of wood atop the iron grate in the scullery hearth, then packed it in with crisp dead palm fronds. Striking a match, she lit a fire and bade him to sit. “I’ve no place for you to wash, and you aren’t about to walk through the house shod in mud. Let it dry and cake. That’ll do for you.”

  “ It is no different at home. I ’m used to it.”

  “ No doubt.”

  She left him. He stripped to his loin cloth and sat close to the fire. The wood was relatively young and green at its core. Its smoke was faintly pungent. The fire would last a bit longer.

  He draped his clothes across a stone seat to dry. A sound made him spin, his hands swift to cover his immodesty. Ewen stood in the doorway, dripping wet from the storm. He was naked and carried two towels. Raising one, he rubbed his face frenziedly, then handed the second towel to Eligius.

  Eligius peeled ribbons of mud from his skin as he dried himself. Like a sheet of woven silk, the towel was the softest thing to touch him since his mother’s hand. How long ago that had been.

  He stretched his sore muscles, willing the heat of the fire into them. The boy sat down next to him and aped his every move.

  I should hate you, Eligius thought as he regarded the boy. I should stand at your gate and scream until you leave.

  He wiggled his toes. The boy did as well, delighted with the game. They held their hands out, fingers spread, until the light glowed through their skin and the veins could be read like words. Smiling, the boy put his arms out to Eligius. He wanted to be held. To be lifted.

  Eligius leaned close to the boy. “ No.”

  Ewen’s eyes went wide with shock.

  Eligius dressed quickly and left the boy in the room. His clothes were warm and stiff. They crackled as he walked back down the hall. His day was at an end, and with it his station as the holder of poles, the ditch digger, the keeper of charades that the Colebrooks did not smell and did not invite ridicule from their fellow colonials. That their child did not view him as just another Indian to ride.

  He followed the sounds of muted conversation to a dining room, where the family sat around a table picking at plates of the meat he’d seen in the scullery. It was enough that they brought their appetite for beef to Ceylon. That they consumed it heedless of its condition sickened him. Didn’t Britishers have the wealth of empires at their disposal? Wasn’t this sa’ab one of the chosen, charged with the colonials’ stewardship of India? Yet they lived the lives of near -villagers.

  “ Mother,” Julia said, finally looking up from her plate. Like the others, she ate as if she were a starving Peshwar.

  Catherine set down her fork and its speared coal of meat.

  “ My pay,” he said to Mary.

  “ He’s inquiring about the rupees,” Mary said. “ I ’ll tell the boy that he may first return the extra food he secreted into his pockets. Does he think I ’m blind? Very little goes on in this house that I do not see.”

  It was all he could do to stay quiet while Mary wrestled her words into Tamil. “The food is for my mother and sister,” Eligius told her. “ My sister especially. She is sicker every day. This is why I am here.”

  Catherine stood at the sound of footsteps. “Charles. We’ ve saved food for you. How goes your work?”

  The man she called Charles put his hand on the back of a chair, steadying himself as he sat. Only then did he look up at the Indian boy before him. His face grew still as air before a storm. His hands trembled.

  Eligius trembled as well. I remember you, he thought. Old lion.

  His eyes were so like Ewen’s that Eligius thought he might hold out his arms to be lifted.

  Mary started to translate, but Charles interrupted. “ I understand, and so does he. The food or the rupees. It cannot be both. Or else how will he learn the value of honest labor?”

  Julia began to protest. “ It’s not fair, father. You agreed to – ”

  “ Let it be food.”

  He’d spoken in their English. “ In the time it takes me to bring rupees to market and buy the food, Gita might die. But I don’t believe the food I have amounts to ten rupees. I shall take more. My family has seen too much loss.”

  He stood and waited, and wondered if this god of theirs – sometimes a baby, sometimes a man who simply bled and died, like other men he’d known – would pull the world out from under him. It would be such a simple thing to do to a servant.

  “There is something memorable about you,” Catherine said.

  IN ALL, MARY gave him enough food to last into the next day. Some bread, some beli fruit, and some wrapped lamb battered in coconut milk and chick pea flour, a reasonable effort by her at kamargah. All covered in another of those wondrous cloths he’d dried off with. “ Your memsahib’s got more that needs doing,” she told him at the gate. “There’s the rest of the yard, and the harder chores, and of course her postings, which must go out daily. She’s an irrepressible correspondent, that one.”

  “ With Holland.”

  “ Him. Others. Disciples and divines, the missionary always says. Her letters fly to and from Dimbola like these bloody insects.”

  “ I will do all of these things for rupees, or for food.”

  “ My, we’re a cheeky one. I can see I’ll wear myself out keeping you in line. The most important task lies with Holland House itself. The whole thing ought to have washed out to sea with the mud, if you ask me. There’s repairs to be done, and plenty of, if it’s to be ready for his arrival. Now go home. No doubt she’s watching and wondering what we’re talking about. The wife of a director can see conspiracies in the blowing of leaves.”

  He glanced back at the house, but saw nothing in the darkened windows. Dimbola was so still; it arose in him a childish contemplation that the day had been a dream.

  THAT EVENING, CATHERINE braved the mud. She crossed the yard and closed herself up in the cottage to consider the day ’s events. The boy could be provocative; Charles and Mary especially heated at the sound of his voice. To them he was surly and entitled. He withheld his appreciation of English to mock them or worse. Perhaps he’d think overnight on what this colonial family did not have, how it lagged others, and not return.

  She busied herself with tucking Julia’s portrait in the cottage alcove – Julia had shown scant interest in it – and examining her failures under the light of the crossing moon, but she could not stop thinking about the boy. Strange, that they ’d first encountered each other when neither knew the other ’s name, and now this. A cleared path. His footfalls in Dimbola. The shadow she’d seen at Court, emerged from a bloody day to life.

  She found the Court image among the faded moments that she’d tried and failed to hold. It was nothing but a stain on paper to anyone else’s eyes. Little more than dust. Yet she could find everything in its murk. The ampitheatrical lobby of the East India Court, the elusive, glimmering light, the boy’s silhouette, prone and quivering in the streaming sun. His gray shadow across the marble floor like a spill of ash.

  She drove a nail into the cottage wall and hung the paper from it. A rainwashed inference of structure and a boy, now with a name. Eligius.

  The Night, Moving

  THE CLOUDS PARTED JUST ENOUGH TO LAY A SLIVER OF moonlight across Eligius’ path, easing his way. It was late when he reached his hut. His mother and Gita
were both asleep on his mat. For a moment he thought his mother had fallen into sleep clutching a dead child. Then Gita’s distended belly filled and fell, and he could breathe again.

  He set the food on his mother ’s altar. Tiny seeds covered the altar top amidst a fine, pungent powder. Ajwain; his mother had been grinding it to medicate Gita’s bowels.

  He felt foolish and impotent. The man of the house, whether he wished it or not, and he’d failed to do as he was asked. Food was fine enough, but what did it matter to a child who could no longer keep it down?

  “ Know that I ’m here, Eligius.”

  Chandrak came from Sudarma’s room. He was half dressed. The withered root of his leg quivered until he shifted his weight off of it. His hair was tousled, his shoulders rouged with scratches. The scars across his left side formed craters atop his skin. Sudar - ma’s scent, cardamom and citrus, radiated from him.

  “ I present myself to you with respect for you and your father,” Chandrak said. “ Your mother and sister need two different sorts of men. Let us each be men for them, you and I. Or would you rather she beg in the streets of Varanasi with the widows? Wake up and speak to him, Sudarma. I’ll dress, and then Eligius will talk of his day.”

  “This can’t be,” Eligius whispered to his mother as Chandrak withdrew to Sudarma’s room. “This is Swaran Shourie’s home. You have no right.”

  “Swaran is dead, meri beta.”

  She ignited a thin reed of incense and plunged it into a cup, releasing a veil of sweet smoke that washed the hut clean of musk and sweat. “ From the time you were born, I ’ ve had a vision of you. You’re somewhere else. Somewhere beautiful, watching the lights the way you do. Now I see that I was never supposed to have the men others have.”

  “ Make him leave.”

  “ Sometime I hope you’ll tell me what you see in the light that holds you the way it does. I think you wouldn’t get so lost if you had a father. I think I wouldn’t worry if I had a husband. Ay, my child, don’t despise me for wanting. We all hate what we turn into. You may still. You won’t be alone. I see women staring at their babies as if they were strangers. Men watch the sea and wish they didn’t have to return home. Your father and I thought that we’d escape the worst of this life. But days drift over us. I’ve done things I never thought I’d do.”

  Chandrak came out wearing a clean shirt and pants. “Come with me to the fires, Eligius.”

  “Go with him.” Sudarma watched from the doorway as Eligius followed Chandrak into the street.

  Chandrak stepped between banyans. He left the road behind. “Come. This way.”

  “ But the fires. And the soldiers. It’s past curfew.”

  “ We’ll make our own fire.”

  He followed Chandrak to a clearing hewn from causarina and breadfruit. There were two other men waiting silently. He didn’t recognize them.

  “ You brought food only,” Chandrak said. “ What about money?”

  “I had to choose. Gita starves – ”

  “Tell me about them.”

  “ I don’t understand. Who are these men?”

  “ What did you see of their house? What do they have?”

  “ I won’t go back.” The sound of his own voice disgusted him. A child’s plea. “Every minute I ’m there, I ’m shamed. I ’ll work in the fields. You have no right to be in my home with my mother.”

  “ Let me deal with this boy,” one of the men said.

  “No.”

  Chandrak took Eligius by the arm and led him back into the jungle. “ It’s unfair of me to expect so much of you without warning, Eligius. But I have a reason. I know you better than you think. You hate them. You remember Swaran dying at their hands, and if you could, you’d do something. I tell you, you can. I see so much of him in you. I ask you now, picture their home. What did you see?”

  “ Furniture. A rug. Gas lamps.”

  “These are big,” Chandrak blurted impatiently. “Think of small things. Personal things.”

  “ I know what you’re asking. I won’t steal. It’s enough that you make me work for them—”

  There was only the briefest shudder of air; Chandrak ’s slap made no sound. His open hand snapped Eligius’ head back.

  “They ’re murderers,” Chandrak told him. “ We’ ve toler - ated them for too long. Not striking back at them, that is your shame. But you will strike, and I ’m telling you how. You go back. Remember what they have, anything that can be taken a little at a time. For now, that’s enough. When you prove to me that you’re a man, I ’ll tell you of the great work we’ve begun. But hear me. You will do this for your father and for me. You will watch them and I will watch you.”

  He left Eligius amidst the swaying boughs. The undertow of the men’s murmurs sank beneath the hiss of air-stirred leaves.

  Picking his way back to the road, Eligius hesitated. There was the fire, and the men’s talk of the fields. There was his hut, where the shapes of Sudarma and Chandrak twinned in the doorway.

  He turned away from all of it. This night, Matara breathed new truths.

  Somewhere else, he thought. Better to find the way there.

  BY THE TIME he made it to the Colebrooks, the moon sat low above the sea, plating the visible world in blue. Its light made jewels of the raindrops falling on him as he sat against a thick tree outside the gate. It would be dawn soon. He would be smarter for the next day ’s work. He would eat only when obliged to by the demands of his tasks, and take back as much of the colonials’ money as he could. Gita needed more than omum powder to keep her from the valley.

  He would watch and remember. But would he speak of it? Was Chandrak right?

  Lost in his thoughts, he didn’t notice the figure standing at the gate, an alabaster doll in the cold moonlight. Julia’s pale skin disappeared beneath a fan of hair.

  “ Why are you here? My mother will not pay you more just because you beat her to the sunrise.”

  Her haughtiness hid something. A restlessness. She was not at ease, and it made him smile.

  “ Don’t pretend you don’t understand me. I was at the table, or did you forget?”

  “I did not. I brought home the food and returned because I wanted to see the lion’s mouth before I slept.”

  “Are you insulting me?”

  “No,” he laughed. “It’s a place. The highest point in Ceylon. You can see every corner of the sky from there. And since it was more than halfway, and it was already so late…”

  “And I think you’re lying. I think you’re as insolent at home as you are here, and they wouldn’t let you through the door.”

  “ If you wish.” He bundled himself tighter.

  “Did you know there would be trouble that day at Court? I always meant to ask, had I seen you again.”

  Shifting position, he turned his gaze towards the sea.

  “ I suppose,” Julia said loudly, “ you’ ve no interest in why I chose to come out here. Certainly, I could have noted your presence with the same indifference you now display and returned to my bed. Well, enjoy the water.”

  She spun on her heels and took a few steps. “ If you must know,” she called, “ I felt you deserved something more for the work you did.”

  He stood and walked to the gate. “Come back. Please.”

  “ If it matters so much to you.”

  She held out a thin chain. The glass bauble he’d seen at the Court caught the moonlight and flared, sending its shards across his chest. “ You cannot speak of this to mother,” she said. “It wasn’t right that you should simply receive food. We should all receive food, just as we should receive the next day. This is all I have. I cannot take her money. She knows it too well. But I am told by men more worldly than I that you steal from us and sell our goods at bazaars. If so, I hope you’re paid well.”

  The bauble spun at the end of her chain. He raised it level with his eyes. It fashioned the moonlight into a calliope of white clouds that overlay the trees, the sea, her.

  She
was walking away. This time there was no hesitancy in her step. She’d done all that she’d come to do.

  He found that if he held the bauble just so, he could throw tiny lights deep into the Colebrooks’ yard, to the gazebo even, and set them dancing with a flick of his wrist. He imagined Julia watching him with the queer mix of her ilk’s imperiousness and the odd wakefulness that had brought her to the gate.

  A bit of his light found Holland House. Clearly there would be other tasks. The letters, preparing the yard, perhaps anchoring the pole again while the memsa’ab held forth. He felt certain that Holland House was where he would find himself most often. Then, he supposed, the Colebrooks would have no further need for him. By then Gita might be healthy, and he would find a new way to show his worth at home.

  Someone was in the cottage doorway.

  He quickly covered the bauble with his hand and looked again. The clouds came and took the moon away. Now he couldn’t be sure of what he’d seen – a figure standing behind a chair in the open doorway. All was night. He couldn’t discern anything.

  He settled back against the tree and waited. In time he closed his eyes. Soon he was aloft over a land too dark to see.

  Mother and Child

  HE LOOKED UP AT THE SOUND OF FEET WHISKING through the dewed grass. Mary stood over him, bowl in hand. “ Bring it into the house when you’ ve finished. There’s a mountain of mud to be cleared, and more yet when you’re past that.” She left him the porridge without a word on finding him just outside Dimbola’s gate.

  He ate the thin mixture of cracked rice and milk, then began shoveling the mud away. Gradually, the sun broke through and stirred some warmth in his blood. It felt good to be alone, testing himself against the weight of his country. The glass bauble tapped against his chest in gentle time to his work.

  At mid-day, the memsa’ab emerged from the house carrying a parcel of letters. He grabbed his tunic and put it on, tucking the bauble within.