Thirty Breaths
FROM THE SAFETY OF THE BANYANS, ELIGIUS WATCHED Gita play in front of their hut. Her hands stretched hopelessly at a macaw preening in the low boughs. Over a year old and still no words. Chronic illness had slowed her, the way it did so many of Matara’s babies.
At twilight the cooking scents made him giddy with hunger, yet he still couldn’t bring himself to leave the safety of the trees. If he did, he would have to tell his mother he’d failed even at being a servant.
Sudarma came out. She folded some chapati in a banana leaf and walked into the jungle not thirty yards from him. Gita nuzzled her neck, breathing her mother’s skin in sleep.
In the fading light, the purpling swell under Sudarma’s left eye shone like blood. Her lip was split raggedly. Sounds made her flinch. The jungle was no longer a house she knew.
He waited for her to open a safe distance, then followed. Immediately, he knew where her path would lead.
Teal and jackfruit formed a canopy above his head, crowding out the faint stars. The air grew crisp. He kept well back from his mother as the trees overtook the horizon. At its highest point, the beach at Port Colombo resembled a sea of fine dust. The last of the fishermen perched above the gentle tides on stilts, their reflections shaded to shadow by the waning light. Austere, blazingly white government buildings and Dutch merchant houses lined the coastline inland to the Galle Face.
They passed the first of three caves where long dead priests had painted his people’s history in raw colors. Buddhist frescoes told of the hell awaiting those who strayed from the path.
Soon the route gave way to a sharp turn alongside a plunging waterfall that irrigated cultivated terraces of rice. It was still the greenest, mossiest place he’d ever seen.
He stopped near a pillar of the elephant temple. His mother kissed her fingertips gingerly and touched a plaque as if it were Gita’s cheek. Flat, of brushed copper, it had been hammered by artisans with the likeness of Ganesha, elephant-faced lord of obstacles and beginnings.
Sudarma went up a short flight of stone steps into the temple’s broken sanctuary. In a moment he heard Chandrak. “There isn’t enough for all of us.” Drunk.
Gita started to cry.
He clenched his fists impotently, listening to the sound of his mother’s beating. After some minutes, the others – he heard many – stopped their approving grunts. His mother emerged on the stairs. She held Gita in her arms and was careful not to fall. Distant monkeys howled at her passing.
When she was clear, he climbed the stairs.
A dozen men lay on woven mats, licking their fingers. Teethgouged fruit littered the temple’s stone floor, next to a small pyre of broken bottles. The smell of spilled lihuli permeated the air.
He recognized two of the men as once-friends of his father. Lalajith, a fisherman who sold in the market until his drinking overtook him. Then, even his son wouldn’t share nets. Varini, who pulled a hansom for the colonials in Tangalla. They were insufficient for the world. Not strong enough to provide for their families or resist the soldiers.
Reaching down, he plucked a large, flat shard of glass from the pile. Gray as a storm sky, resilient in his hands, it would make for a distraction when the sun reappeared and he could resume his redirection of the light. He wondered where he could keep it. He wondered where he lived, now.
Chandrak stared at him.
“I bring nothing,” Eligius told him.
“And yet you’re here.”
He sat on the opposite side of the dying fire. “I can gather more wood.”
“We keep it small. So we can’t be seen.”
“What happens when it dies?”
Chandrak hoisted a bottle.
“No,” Eligius said.
“Be a man tonight. Tonight, a son joins me.” He raised his fist and shook it. There was still some blood on his knuckles, drying in the fire’s heat. “We’ll make room for you. All is forgiven.” He offered his bottle again.
Eligius picked it up and drank. Bitter liquid scoured his throat. Another man, thrown away.
Chandrak’s head nodded loosely. “Be quick with the wood, Eligius.”
Eligius got up. The sound of rustling paper in his tunic was like thunder through the trees, yet when he glanced over at them, the men hadn’t stirred. Their rubbery bodies faded towards sleep.
Under the copper shield, where the elephants waited for their cousins the clouds to lift them, he searched his tunic for the memsa’ab’s letter. He found it, but found no clouds of steam rising from his mother’s prophesy to carry him away.
The liquor raced up into his gullet. In a thicket of orchids, it left him.
“WAKE UP, BOY. We’ve need of you.”
Varini shoved him again. Eligius rose groggily to his feet. His body felt encased in stone.
Chandrak was gone, as were the others.
Varini motioned for him to follow. In the half-light of dawn, Eligius saw another boy waiting for them near the treeline. As he drew closer, he saw that it was Hari. His once-neighbor had grown gaunt and hard since Diwali, when he’d pronounced Gre - tel’s death in English to Eligius’ approval.
“Where are we going?” Hari asked. His lips were thin and bloodless with hunger.
“Be quiet, the both of you. There are colonials across the clearing.”
Varini led them around the crescent perimeter of a field carpeted with woven vines and the far-flung root coils of the surrounding trees. Eligius studied the furthest wall of the jungle for signs of the Britishers, but saw only Chandrak, who waved them over. They entered the trees, careful to keep low.
“Walk into the clearing,” Chandrak told them. “Both of you.”
“Varini said there are colonials,” Eligius protested.
“They’ll see us! We’re trespassing.”
“There’s only one. Let him see you.”
“For what reason?”
“He is useless,” Lalajith said. “Hari will be obedient.”
“Give me a moment with him.”
Chandrak turned Eligius away from the other men standing among the trees. “Do you love Ceylon?”
“Yes,” Eligius said uncertainly.
“Do you understand now, they will not do as your father hoped? They will not allow us a voice in our own lives. You left their world and came back to ours. Do you see that I am all you have?”
His bitter breath lit Eligius’ eyes. It pushed rivers through his body and made him long for the lion’s mouth. Up so high above the neem growing out of the mountainside, nothing could reach him.
“We’ve no other way to live, Eligius.”
“I don’t want to hurt anyone.”
Chandrak pushed Eligius and Hari to the tree line. “Do not stand up until you’re halfway.”
They fell to their knees and began to crawl. Glancing back, Eligius saw faces peering between the leafy curtain. The sun broke through the pickets of tree trunks and glinted brilliantly from the silver blades of machetes.
He froze.
“What are you doing?” Hari hissed. “We’re not halfway.”
“I can’t do this.” He slowly stood into the young light and waited for Chandrak to emerge in a hobbled-leg rage. But Chandrak remained hidden with the others.
The husk-dry sound of breaking branches spun Eligius around. A man entered the clearing from the opposite end of the field, his uniform like blood across the lush growth.
Hari whimpered against the ground. When he gazed up at Eligius, his eyes were terrible eclipsing moons.
“Soldier,” Eligius mouthed.
“You there!” the soldier cried.
Hari leapt to his feet and ran. Eligius couldn’t move. The soldier leveled his rifle and all Eligius could see was the black cave at the end of the barrel. There would be no warning when the ruby light rose and gray smoke belched, and he would seep sticky glistening ponds into the dirt like his father before him.
A shot rang out and he sprinted without realizing he�
��d moved. Something hot and humming flew past his head. A tree trunk ahead of him burst open in a split flower of bark and green wood.
Chandrak knocked him down the moment he pierced the trees. He clasped Eligius’ throat and pressed him against the jungle floor as Hari flew past, tears streaking his face. The veins in Hari’s neck were as thick as tack lines. His lips peeled back as if by the force of winds.
The other men converged on the soldier as he ran into the trees. The jungle sprang to life in a downpour of hammering hands and tumbling bodies.
A rifle emerged from the mass. It was closely followed by the soldier’s boots, his coat and brass buckles.
Chandrak released his grip. Air forced its way into Eligius’ lungs.
The soldier lay splayed-legged on the ground, pinned by a thicket of bodies. Stripped to his underclothes, he whimpered and begged in English. He was young and slightly built. His face was slick with sweat and fear.
The soldier’s eyes found Eligius, and hated him. “Listen to me,” he pleaded. “Please, you may have what you want. Please, just listen.”
Chandrak brought Eligius to the weeping soldier’s side. The men holding him down tightened their grip. Forcing Eligius to his knees, Chandrak took out a knife and put it into Eligius’ hands. He wrapped his own hands around its hilt and pressed it against the soldier’s chest. Its gleaming tooth sent tremors through the soldier. His torso pitched wildly, but there were too many against him.
“I won’t,” Eligius cried.
Madness filled Chandrak’s face. “They left a stain on us. Wash it away.”
Chandrak was scared. Eligius could see beneath the leathered face and the foundry-pocked flesh; he saw the face of the man at Court, crying for home.
Chandrak pressed down on Eligius’ hands. Eligius tried to hold the blade away from the soldier’s chest, but Chandrak’s grip crushed his fingers into the knife handle.
Pain flared through Eligius’ wrists, into his arms and shoulders as Chandrak leaned hard against him. The blade’s tip sliced shallowly into the soldier’s skin. A small trickle seeped to the soldier’s shirt. He screamed. Someone’s hand covered his mouth, sealing his pleas inside.
Hari came to Chandrak’s side.
“Help me,” Eligius pleaded as the men gathered around them.
Hari added his hands to Chandrak’s. Tears fell from his chin. “I’m afraid.” He closed his eyes.
Eligius screamed as something fibrous in the reaches of his back snapped. He tore his hands away, jerking the knife sideways. The thin gash he left in the soldier’s chest beaded with blood. The soldier’s head shook faster and faster.
Eligius leapt to his feet and bolted past Chandrak’s outstretched arms, past the others and into the trees before any of them could react. He heard the violent passage of men rising in angry pursuit of him. Hari’s cries mingled with those of the young soldier. English words of prayer erupted into the sky like rousted birds. Then the sputtering sound of someone drowning. Then only Hari, but by then Eligius was too far to be sure of anything.
Soon the sounds behind him fell away. When the night found him, he was still running on legs he no longer felt.
AT DEVAMPIYA, HE stopped. When it was light enough to see the abandoned village and its broken huts, he gathered wood apples. Cracking their hard shells, he scooped out their sour custard with his fingers. He took coconuts for their sweet water and gourds to make a bitter stew, the way his mother did. In the trees he found a hung line of seer fish. They were dry and only a little rotten. His stomach would reject much of it, but so be it.
The jungle was a living map, alive with destinations. He could go to the port and operate the cooling punkah fans for the colonials. He could become a water carrier, a messenger, a door opener. He could cut grass, make bricks, sweep children’s rooms clear of scorpions. He could build his own hut, plant cotton and become a village unto himself. Or he could sneak back into Dimbola and steal to his heart’s content. Maybe he would find other men and throw the Colebrooks’ home open to them. What would it require, to ascend in the eyes of his own? A blade, he guessed, plunged into the soft skin of colonials whose names and voices and wants he had come to know.
Around him, the light folded. He waited to see if the shadows of the trees might become permanent on the jungle floor or on his skin. But they kept shifting into each other until the sharp demarcations of the leaves and the broken hut walls melted away. There were no feathers in the world outside the memsa’ab’s camera. Nothing was held, in the dark or the light.
The young soldier’s cries would not leave him.
He reached into his tunic. The memsa’ab’s correspondence to Holland still lay against his skin, where he’d folded it for safekeeping. Her precious, starry paper from across the sea, wasted on such a sad letter.
He let it slip from his fingers, and his glass with it.
HE AWOKE IN a beam of morning sun. His skin felt agreeably warm. The glass shard broke the light into pillars that touched everything within his bleary sight.
Rising stiffly, he squinted as the light’s reflection on the glass burst brilliantly before him. He put his hand over his eyes, letting bubbles of color fill and fade back into the dusk of his palm.
The memsa’ab’s letter lay on the ground, under the glass. Bits of leaves and dew drops were trapped between them like insects in amber. He lifted the glass to brush them off, but something of them remained. The letter was dotted with discolorations in the shape and location of the leaves. They were on the glass as well, in the same configuration.
He held the glass into the sun. Faint as dissipating mist, their images spattered the shard’s surface, unmistakable in shape, down to the perforations and hushed tracings of veins.
Something stirred his mind. He wiped some dew from fallen leaves and slickened the memsa’ab’s paper. Finding a larger leaf, he laid it atop the paper and pressed it into the light.
The last of the bauble was rapidly departing his skin. Days in the jungle had all but scoured it from his hand.
The bauble had been in Julia’s hand, that day in Holland House. It made a halo of sun on her skin. Nothing else of her survived the journey through the camera to the memsa’ab’s paper, nothing but its image.
There. A dream of the leaf began. Faint tracings of veins, threading from the silver salt to the glass. As he breathed, they darkened ever so slowly. The light moved with the sun’s rise and he moved with it, keeping the paper and glass bathed. Over countless minutes the leaf filled in. He withdrew it from the sun. It held, like the feather. Like Julia, but only that part of her touched by the bauble’s bent, concentrated light.
He left Devampiya’s ruins behind.
MARY OPENED THE front door. He raced past her without a word. She gave chase but he moved as if devils sped after him.
Catherine was in the study, composing at a small table set up by Charles’ chair. Charles’ color had not improved. He stared vacantly out the window.
“Madam, I’m sorry.”
Catherine and Charles looked up at Mary’s voice. Eligius stood in the doorway, heaving with the effort to take breaths. His hair and face were slickened with sweat. Catherine despised the thought rising from the tumult in her. He looks as if he’s just been born.
Eligius raised the glass. She saw the image imprinted there. A stain bearing the unmistakable marks. The veins were as frail as thread. The leaves bore scalloped edges. The faint permeable light of it told her that he had somehow brought it forth from life.
Charles and Mary, their stares of indignation; the both of them could join hands and stroll to hell. Look at it.
“I need a hammer,” Eligius said.
“Mary,” Catherine said, “get him a hammer.”
“What? I will not – ”
“Now.”
In the yard, Eligius found the ladder and ascended to Holland House’s roof. His entry had roused Julia and Ewen. While Catherine set up the camera, they gathered at the foot of the structure to wa
tch him pull his crude wooden patches loose and toss them to the ground. The shadowy interior of Holland House filled with sunlight. When the strongest light found the chair, he went inside, where he took out the window panes with a gentle tap of the hammer.
“How?” Catherine held up the leaf.
“The light. The light was on Julia’s arm. It was the only part of her that came. And the feather sat atop your paper in the sun before I patched the roof. If we concentrate more light on the work, it will stay longer. I know it. We’ll use glass to make the light stronger.”
He wielded the hammer to fashion rough, cracked squares from the window panes. Catherine brought silver salt. Somewhere, she thought, Sir John is smiling at the woman who longed to possess shadows, who now finds the missing light.
“Wait,” she said. “In one of the letters I received, Sir John enclosed cotton. He spoke of life and death.”
She gave him her key to the locked room.
“All of your most precious things are in there,” he said.
“Go. Bring his letter to me. I think there may be a way to hold these images still.”
He ran. His heart ran ahead of him. In her room, he found Sir John’s letter, the guncotton and a tin. Life and death, Sir John had written, in eternal stalemate.
In Holland House Catherine opened the tin of collodion and dipped one of Julia’s quills into it. Afoul, heady stench filled the air. “Sir John said it had the power to hold the guncotton still. Why not this?”
She brushed collodion onto the glass. Tilting it this way and that, she directed the crawling tide across the surface until it was coated with a second skin that bent the colors from the light.
Eligius slipped it inside the camera.
“Mother.”
Julia sat in the chair, wrapped in a brocade shawl. Her head tilted up, a girl of great privilege and station.
He arranged the glass around her. Sunlight sparkled from one pane to the next, bathing her in gold.
“Is it right?” Eligius asked. He held up the cloak for Catherine.
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