The Cat's Table

by Michael Ondaatje

  Now I was back in that very same landscape. And walking to the Ramadhins’ home after the funeral made me feel I was falling through branches we had climbed years earlier. The house, when I got there, looked smaller, and Mrs Ramadhin looked frail. The wisps of white hair made her taut face more beautiful, more forgiving – for she had been a strict as well as a generous person to her children and to me. It was only Massi who could fight against her mother’s rules, as she did for a good part of her life.

  ‘You stayed away too long, Michael. You stay away all the time.’ The mother’s words were an arrow carefully pointed at me, before she came forward and let me enclose her in my arms. In the past, we had barely touched. ‘Mrs R.’ I had called her all through my teenage years.

  So once again I entered their home on Terracotta Road. A group of people were giving their condolences to the parents in the narrow hallway and then walking on towards the living room, where the sofa and the nest of side tables and the paintings were in the very same places they had been when I visited as a teenager. It was a time capsule of our youth – the small television set, the same portraits of Ramadhin’s grandparents in front of their home in Mutwal. The past his family had brought to this country would never be given up. But now there was an added picture on the mantelpiece, of Ramadhin in his graduation robes at Leeds University. The plumage did not suit him or disguise him. His face looked gaunt, as if he was under stress.

  I had walked up close to it and was staring at him. Someone gripped my arm at the elbow, fingers pressing intentionally hard into the flesh, and I turned. It was Massi, and suddenly, almost too quickly, it felt we were shockingly close to each other. I had seen her at the chapel when she’d walked between her parents to sit in the front row and quickly bent her head down. She had not been in the receiving line in the hall.

  ‘You came, Michael. I didn’t think you would come.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I?’ Her warm, small hand touched my face, and then she was off to deal with others, to speak and nod to what was being said to her, or give a needed embrace. She was all I watched. I was looking for any sign of Ramadhin in her. There had never been much echo between them. He was large, had a lumbering body, while she was taut and quick. A ‘fast coterie’, he had written. They had the same colour hair, that was all. But I felt there must be something she now carried of him – something she had been given at his abrupt departure. I suppose I needed Ramadhin’s presence, and it was not here.

  It would be a long afternoon, during which we saw each other only from across the room, speaking to various relatives. All through the stand-up lunch I noticed her moving from person to person in this expatriate community in the role of a dutiful family bee – going from a devastated old aunt, to an uncle still too cheerful by habit, to a nephew who did not understand why everyone was so calm, for he adored Ramadhin, who had tutored him in mathematics and used to reason with him through any crisis. I saw her sitting with that boy on a lounge chair in the garden, and I wanted to be there with them rather than under the curious gaze of one of her parents’ friends. I suppose because the boy was ten years old. And I wished to know what she was saying to him, how she could justify what she was saying or why we were behaving like some composed sect who spoke only in whispers. And then I saw it was not the boy who was weeping but Massi.

  I left the man in mid-sentence and went out and sat by her and put my arm around her shuddering body that never stopped shaking, and not one of the three of us thought of speaking. And when I looked up later through the glass doors into the house, I realised that all the adults were inside and we were the children in the garden.

  The evening began to darken and as it did, the Ramadhins’ modest home, which had once been a sanctuary for me, seemed a frail ark. The last visitors were slowly walking out onto the unlit suburban street. I was standing beside the family in the hallway about to leave as well, needing to make the train back to central London.

  ‘I have to catch a plane tomorrow afternoon,’ I said, ‘but I’ll be back in a month, with luck.’

  Massi was watching me carefully. It was what we both had been doing all afternoon, as if reconsidering a person we had once known well. Her face was broader and there was a different manner than when we were young. I was witnessing her new and careful courtesy to her parents. She who had been in loud battle with them all through her teens. I was aware of these differences just as I knew she could pin me down more clearly than anyone among my recent friends. She could have hauled out some perception of me from our past and placed it adjacent to what she was seeing now. She’d been the sidekick to her brother and me during school holidays, when the three of us lounged in a city that was not quite ours and where we were made to feel it was not quite ours – it was a strange contained universe we moved around in, taking the bus to a swimming pool in Bromley or to the Croydon public library, or to Earls Court to see the Boat Show, or Dog Show, or Motor Show. No doubt we still had the same knowledge of those specific bus routes in our brains. She’d witnessed all my changes during our teens. All of this was in her.

  Then the gap of eight years.

  ‘I have to catch a plane tomorrow afternoon but I’ll be back in a month, with luck.’

  She stood in the hallway watching me, her face in clear shock at the loss of her brother. Her boyfriend was beside her, holding her by the elbow. We had spoken earlier in the evening. If he was not her boyfriend, he certainly hoped to be.

  ‘Well, let me know when you get back,’ Massi said.

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Massi, why don’t you walk with Michael to the station? You two should talk,’ Mrs R. said.

  ‘Yes, come with me,’ I said. ‘This way we’ll have an hour together.’

  ‘A lifetime,’ she said.

  Massi existed in the public half of the world that Ramadhin rarely entered. There was never hesitation in her. She and I would come to share a deep slice of each other’s lives. And whatever became of our relationship, the ups and downs of its seas, we improved as well as damaged each other with the quickness I learned partially from her. Massi grabbed at decisions. She was probably more like Cassius than like her brother. Although I know now that the world is not divided that simply into two natures. But in our youth we think that.

  ‘A lifetime,’ she had said. And in that hour I took the first steps back into Massi’s life. The two of us walked to the station and our pace slowed as we spoke. We entered total darkness where the road bordered a soccer field, and it felt we were whispering in an unlit corner of a stage. We talked mostly about her. She already knew enough about me, my brief, surprising career that had taken me to North America, and resulted in my leaving her world. (‘I didn’t think you would come.’ ‘You stay away all the time.’) We excavated the missing years. I had hardly been in touch, even with Ramadhin. I sent an occasional postcard that located where I was, nothing much more than that. There was a lot to discover about what she and her brother had been doing.

  ‘Do you know of a person named Heather Cave?’ she asked.

  ‘No. Should I? Who is she?’ I imagined some person I might have run into in America or Canada.

  ‘Apparently Ramadhin knew her.’

  She went on to say there had been no convincing explanation for the circumstances of Ramadhin’s death. He had been found with his heart stopped, a knife beside him. That was all. He had gone into the darkness of one of the communal gardens in the city, near the girl’s flat. Massi told me he was supposedly obsessed with her, someone he had been tutoring. But when Massi looked into it, there was only one girl, fourteen years old, Heather Cave, who he gave lessons to. If she was the one Ramadhin was enamoured of, he would have had an overwhelming guilt that must have filled him like dark ink.

  She shook her head and turned away from the subject.

  She said she did not believe her brother’s existence in En gland had been happy; she felt he would have been more content with a career and a home in Colombo.

  Every immigrant
family, it seems, has someone who does not belong in the new country they have come to. It feels like permanent exile to that one brother or wife who cannot stand a silent fate in Boston or London or Melbourne. I’ve met many who remain haunted by the persistent ghost of an earlier place. And it is true that Ramadhin’s life would have been happier in the more casual and less public world of Colombo. He had no professional ambition, as Massi did and, as she suspected, I did. He was the more gradual one, the more concerned one, who learned what was important at his own pace. I told her I still wondered how he had managed to put up with Cassius and me on that voyage to England. She was nodding, smiling now, and then asked, ‘Have you seen him? I read about him every so often.’

  ‘Remember we told you once that you should look him up?’

  We began to laugh. At one time, Ramadhin and I had tried to convince Massi that Cassius would be the perfect person for her to marry.

  ‘Maybe I should … maybe I still could.’ She was kicking at the wet leaves in front of her, and had put her arm through mine. I thought about my other missing friend. The last time I had heard about Cassius was when I met an actress from Sri Lanka who knew him when they were teenagers in England. She spoke of how he took her on a date, very early in the morning, to a golf course. He brought along a couple of old clubs, a few balls, and they climbed over the gate and wandered on the course, Cassius smoking a joint and lecturing her on the greatness of Nietzsche before he attempted to seduce her on one of the greens.

  At the station we confirmed the time of the train, then went into the night café under the railway bridge and sat there barely speaking, looking at each other across the formica.

  I never categorised Massi as Ramadhin’s sister. They seemed too distinctly themselves. She had an eager spirit. One mentioned a possibility and she met it, like the next line of a song. She was someone people in another era would have called ‘a pistol’. That is how Mr Mazappa or Miss Lasqueti would have described her. But she was inward and hesitant this night in the almost empty cafeteria by the train station. There was an older couple there, who had also been at the funeral and reception, but they kept to themselves. I needed Ramadhin there, with us. I was used to that. Maybe it was Massi’s quietness that allowed his presence, and maybe it was this new affection between us that so quickly erased the years, but he came right into my heart and I started crying. Everything about him was suddenly there in me: his slow stroll, his awkwardness around a questionable joke, his love and need of that dog in Aden, his careful care of his heart – ‘Ramadhin’s heart’ – the knots he had tied and was so proud of that had saved our lives, how his body looked when he walked away from you. And the decent intelligence that Mr Fonseka saw, and that Cassius and I never saw or acknowledged, but which was always there. How much more of Ramadhin did I take into myself, just with memory, after we stopped seeing each other?

  I am someone who has a cold heart. If I am beside a great grief I throw barriers up so the loss cannot go too deep or too far. There is a wall instantly in place, and it will not fall. Proust has this line: ‘We think we no longer love our dead, but … suddenly we catch sight again of an old glove and burst into tears.’ I don’t know what it was. There was no glove. He had been dead six days. If I was being honest, I had to admit I had not really thought of Ramadhin as someone I had been close to for some time. In our twenties we are busy becoming other people.

  Did I feel guilty that I had not loved him enough? That was partly it. But it was not any thought that broke down the wall, allowing him to come into me. I must have begun remembering, replaying all the little fragments of him that revealed the concern he had for me. A gesture to signal that I was spilling something on my shirt, which in fact had happened the last time I saw him. The way he tried to include me in what he was excitedly learning. How he went out of his way to hunt me down and then remain my friend in England, when he had gone to one school and I to another. I was not difficult to find in the network of expatriates, but anyway he had searched me out.

  I have no idea how long I sat like that, by the plate-glass window that separated me from the street, with Massi across from me not saying a word, just her hand reaching out to me, palm turned up, that I did not see and so had not taken. We are expanded by tears, we are told, not reduced by them. It had taken me a long time. I couldn’t look at her. I peered beyond the fall of restaurant light into the dark.

  ‘Come. Come with me,’ she said, and we went up the stone steps of the station to wait for the train. There were still a few minutes and we walked up and down the long platform to its unlit peripheries and back, not a word between us. When the train approached there would be an embrace, a kiss of recognition and sadness that would knock down the door for us for the next few years. We heard the crackle of an announcement and then saw one light beaming down on us.

  SOME EVENTS TAKE a lifetime to reveal their damage and influence. I see now that I married Massi to stay close to a community from childhood I felt safe in and, I realised, still wished for.

  Massi and I continued to see each other, at first shyly, and then partially to recover the almost lovers we had been in our teens. There was the shared grief of Ramadhin’s death. And then there was the comfort of family. Her parents welcomed me back into their home – the boy, still a boy to them, who had been for years their son’s best friend. So I would often go to Mill Hill and be in the house that I once had escaped to as a teenager, where I used to loaf with Ramadhin and his sister while their parents were at work – in their living room with its television, or in the upstairs bedroom with the green foliage outside. It is a place I could walk through blindfolded, even now – my arms outstretched to gauge the width of the hall, taking so many steps to enter that room by the garden, then three more steps to the right, avoiding the low table, so I would know, when I slipped the blindfold off, that I would be standing in front of the graduation picture of Ramadhin.

  There was no one else and no other place I could turn to with my emptiness.

  A month after his death, Ramadhin’s family received a consoling letter from Mr Fonseka and they allowed me to read it, for he described our days on the Oronsay. He did say some polite words about me (and nothing about Cassius), and he spoke of seeing ‘a luminous academic curiosity’ in Ramadhin. He wrote about how the two of them had discussed the histories of the various countries we had travelled past, and all the natural as opposed to the artificial harbours; how Aden had been one of the thirteen great pre-Islamic cities; how there was an ancestry of famous Muslim geographers who’d lived there before the age of the gunpowder empires. On and on Fonseka’s letter went, in a style that was still familiar to me almost twenty years later.

  Fonseka’s passion for knowledge always had within it the added pleasure of his sharing it. It was the way I suppose Ramadhin was with the ten-year-old nephew he had tutored whom I had met at the funeral. Mr Fonseka would not have known I was still in touch with the Ramadhin family, and I suppose I could have surprised him by going up to Sheffield with Massi to visit him. But I never did. She and I were busy most weekends. We were lovers again now, engaged to be married, with all of the formality that families who live abroad insist on. The weight of the tradition of exiles had fallen over us. Still, we should have skipped all of that, rented a car, and gone to see him. But I would have been shy of him at that stage in my life. I was a young writer and feared his response, even though I am sure he would have been courteous. It was after all Ramadhin who he must have assumed had the natural sensitivity and intelligence to be an artist. I do not believe those are necessary requisites, but I half believed it then.

  I am still surprised it was Cassius and I who came out of that world and survived in the world of art. Cassius, who in his public persona insisted on using only his argumentative first name. I was more amiable, I had cleaned up my act, but Cassius took it on the road, scorning, snorting at the pooh-bahs of art and power. A few years after he had become well-known, his school in England, which he had hated and wh
ich had probably disliked him, asked him to donate a painting. He cabled back, ‘FUCK YA! STRONG LETTER FOLLOWS.’ He was always one of the roughs. Whenever I heard of something outrageous and thrilling that Cassius had done, I simultaneously thought of Fonseka reading about it in the newspapers and sighing at the gulf that existed between fairness and art.

  I should have gone to see him, our old guru of the hemp smoke. He would have revealed Ramadhin in a different way from how Massi did. But her family had been broken, and she and I were the link to mend it, or at least plaster over the uncertain situation of his death that had left all of them powerless in dealing with their grief. As well, our desires were fed by an earlier time, from that very early morning in our youth when she seemed painted by those shifting green branches. We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to loosen and untie.

  Being sisterless and brotherless, I had behaved with Ramadhin and Massi as if they were my siblings. It was the kind of relationship one has only during one’s teens, as opposed to the kind of relationship with those we collide against when older – with whom we are more likely to change our lives.

  So I thought.

  Together the three of us had crossed those abstract and seemingly uncharted times that were the summer and winter holidays. We’d skulked around the universe of Mill Hill. At the cycle track we reenacted great races – wobbling up the slope, charging down the incline to a sensational photo finish. In the afternoon we disappeared into some bijou in central London to watch a film. Our universe included Battersea Power Station, the Pelican Stairs in Wapping that led down into the Thames, the Croydon library, the Chelsea public baths and Streatham Common, sloping from the High Road towards distant trees. (This was where Ramadhin found himself for a while on the last night of his life.) And Colliers Water Lane, where Massi and I eventually lived together. All these places she and Ramadhin and I had entered as teenagers and come out of as adults. But what did we really know, even of one another? We never thought of a future. Our small solar system – what was it heading towards? And how long would each of us mean something to the others?