The Hamilton Case

by Michelle De Kretser

  There came a day when she stopped eating, unnoticed by all except Soma, who noticed everything; still she kept finding her way downstairs to her chair on the verandah. There were hours when her needle was a weight she could barely lift, as in a dream. But a border of gros point lotuses flowered beneath her fingers. It surrounded a parade of caparisoned elephants, drummers, dancers and a crimson-petaled sun. She made, in those last weeks, a set of six chair backs, thousands of stitches. But she left the sixth unfinished because a shadow fell across her knees and she looked up to see her daughter step forward to claim her.

  With his canteen of filtered water thudding against his white shirt, Harry ran all the way down the lane to show his mother what the morning had brought: a tooth threaded with blood, the hole in his smile.

  Filing away the papers that concerned his wife’s death, Sam came across the certificate of their marriage. It was the date that made him pause. Fifteen years; and already she was blurring like fine print, he couldn’t recall with certainty how tall she was, or the particular gracelessness with which she held her body.

  One memory, however, remained with him to the end of his days. It was a Friday afternoon before the war. He had allowed a junior advocate to stand him lunch at the Jersey Hotel in the Fort and told him a good one over the deviled prawns: Old Mother Hubbard she went to the cupboard to get the postman a letter. When she got there the cupboard was bare—so they did it without. Which was better. One of the eccentricities of the Jersey in those years was that instead of measuring out a peg, the bottle was brought to the table. At the end of the meal the waiter used his thumb to gauge how much had been drunk, and that was what went on the chit.

  When Sam emerged into the street that afternoon, leaving his companion to settle the bill, a tramcar was rattling past. The suriya trees had dropped yellow blossoms on the pavements. In the violet shade of a line of rickshaws a child sat on his heels, puffing on a beedi.

  Sam turned into Chatham Street and saw a shapeless female standing in front of Hidaramani’s window. He looked again and recognized his wife, peering through the glass at a bolt of flame-colored cloth. Bright colors attracted her. He had put the kibosh on that sort of thing from the start; he didn’t want to have to turn up to public functions with a bally parrot on his arm. Even now she was obediently clad in a dull blue garment drained of all light, as dreary as a wet morning. For a moment he considered taking her into the shop and inviting her to choose herself an extravagant length of cerise or scarlet. Not to have made up into a frock but to keep locked in her almirah, a furtive pleasure gleaming in that musky dimness. From time to time she would open the door and run her finger along its lustrous folds. But as he was about to greet her she turned and saw him, and the impulse faded. It had been such a long time since they had surprised each other.

  He had three names, Henry Stanley Edward, and a fourth, Harry, but his mother always said putha, naming the relationship that bound him to her. In the park a few days after she vanished, he heard, “Putha! Where are you hiding, putha?” He let go of his ayah’s hand and ran toward the voice. On the far side of a bed of flaming crotons he cannoned into an imposter in a pink sari. The lesson had to be administered three or four times before he understood that an act of his, committed in ignorance, had driven his mother away forever.

  The compass of his grief led him unerringly to the only other person in the house who mourned with him. Soma had been a servant since she was ten years old, had weeded the headman’s paddy fields since she was seven. On a scale of worth, she would have placed herself considerably below a buffalo. Yet this girl with her village ways possessed the ability, uncommon in any walk of life, to identify goodness at a glance. The other servants had mocked the nonamahatheya’s failure to question the rate at which rice sank in the wooden chest in the kitchen, had sniggered at the ease with which she was deceived over a discrepancy in the change brought back from market. In that perceived stupidity Soma had recognized the compliment of trust, and loved the dead woman for it.

  Now she looked at the child and saw her own sorrow replicated in the set of that narrow body. He was a silent presence, swinging his legs on a pantry chair, while she scoured the dinginess from brass with a mixture of brick dust and lime juice. When she applied fresh pipeclay to the hamuduruwo’s tennis shoes, a shadow sidled around the corner of the house to squat beside her on the back verandah. She noticed that all neglected things hurt him. A discarded sweet wrapper, blown in from the lane, was a torment until he smoothed out its creases and placed it in a tin he kept in his toy cupboard. A shoe lying at a careless slant to its fellow required straightening so that it would not feel slighted. Soma set herself the task of exorcising the neediness from his face.

  She began by talking to the child of whatever came into her mind. It was an ancient, banal remedy. It had emerged, uncorrupted, from the verdigris of privation that had stained her own childhood, when she drew comfort, night after night, from the voices of her parents, murmuring to each other in the dark. She spoke to Harry of the weather, and the sowing of paddy, and how to predict the sex of an unborn child. Her flat voice with its countrified locutions set out the taboos to be observed when cultivating a bulath garden, and the feminine appearance, neither too dark nor too pale, too thick nor too thin, of the perfect betel leaf. She told him the story of the age-old enmity between the cobra and the polonga, and of a rock pool, deep in the jungle, where on certain nights a drowned golden chariot gleamed. The place was guarded by giant eels. Of those who dared to challenge them, no more was heard. She described a rich man who was so stingy that he sold all his rice and ate only boiled jack. She spoke of her mother, who had died of a fire in her stomach, when she herself was a child. Afterward, her father took her on a journey. They walked for four days through the jungle. At night they slept on verandahs in strange villages, and she was frightened of devils and leopards. Then they came to a sprinkling of huts near the coast, and her mother’s people. She was given a fried egg, the first she had eaten. The following morning her father gave her a silver ten-cent coin, and she understood that he was going away. It was the last time she saw him.

  Once, she referred in passing to the nonamahatheya. At once Harry began to speak of something else, raising his voice over hers. Still, he had grown noisy again. That terrible watchful silence no longer accompanied him into a room. But the clear-water openness of his face had gone too, never to return.

  With yellow soap and a scrap of coconut husk, Soma scrubbed grease from the clay chatties in which the lunchtime curries had cooked. The boy fetched a book and stood on a chair beside the veined porcelain sink, turning pages. One day she would hold her own children in thrall with stories of a land where cows flew through the sky, and a devil disguised himself as a dish painted with roses and pranced down the street on legs as skinny as a chicken’s.

  Those two heads close together were an affront. In the first instance there were the other servants. The powerless are necessarily alert to the whims of the powerful. The nonamahatheya’s fondness for Soma had attracted jibes that the girl was mostly too stupid to understand. Now here was the child singling her out all over again. Resentment simmered like broth. The boy’s ayah was the jug from which it eventually poured, an overflowing of spite.

  This woman, a crone with a pinched mouth, went to Sam and laid her tale before him. He heard her out in silence. She was Lokugama raised. He had sent for her when Harry was born, to Leela’s dismay. She would have preferred to employ a young girl. But Agnes had been Sam’s own ayah, and later Claudia’s. He would admit no argument against her.

  She told him that Soma was encouraging the child to make a garden for his mother beside the verandah where she used to sit. He had planted a flower bed with slips of coleus, because the dead woman had loved their bright leaves, and fashioned an edging from the spiky, coral-flushed shells she had helped him gather on a beach one morning. A stone dove with a broken wing served as a centerpiece. Around its neck Harry had placed the glass bangl
es, amethyst and sapphire and ruby, gorgeously rimmed with gold, that he had given his mother at Christmas.

  When the woman had ended her recital, Sam said, “I will see to it.” It was the signal that she was to leave. But she lingered, unwilling to relinquish the pleasure of doing evil. “It is certain to be a charm,” she repeated. And then, the formula with which she always prefaced a lie: “I have seen with my own eyes . . .”

  “Go now,” he thundered, outraged that she should presume to gossip with him.

  Agnes crept back to the kitchen, her heart hammering with joy. Her rigmarole about sorcery and charms Sam dismissed as the ignorance of her kind. But the substance of her insinuations remained, burrowing its way into his brain. He had been half conscious of the complicity between his son and that lumpish girl, but with the reluctance of a man who suspects his wife of adultery, thrusting away the evidence that will prove him a cuckold. Now the ayah’s tale-bearing dragged the thing out from the trees and placed it like an ambush across his path. He went upstairs, unlaced his shoes, lay on his bed. Tissa’s boy was dragging his ekel broom along the drive, raising a mindless shriek. The sea mimicked it like an idiot.

  When Leela died, Sam had pictured his son at his knee, seeking his guidance. He understood that the child would miss his mother; that was only natural. At the same time it was no bad thing for the boy to step from the shelter of those petticoats. He had been babied by his mother, so that he was given to a dreamy foolishness. At night a light was left on in his room, wasting money, because he was afraid of gonibillas, the bogeymen with whom his ayah had once threatened him. When giants with rouged lips came stalking down the lane in glittering skirts, he was found trembling in an upstairs bathroom where he babbled about “the scissor man”; no amount of rational explanation about stilts could lure him out to watch the bora kakul men dance.

  Very early on the morning after the funeral the child had gone into the garden with his watercolors and daubed paint on all the flowers he could reach, blotches and wavering stripes of unnatural color, rainbow streaks on creamy gardenias, emerald and purple smears on a bed of marigolds. Pressed for the rationale of this small but irritating offense, all he would say, eventually, was that he wanted it to be different.

  Sam arranged tennis lessons. There was also swimming, three times a week before school, and cricket on Saturday morning. He had looked into his son’s small remote face and longed to fashion a bridge between them. It occurred to him that while Latin was not taught at Neddy’s until Standard 4, there was no harm in getting a head start on the other chaps. He drilled Harry at breakfast: hanc civitatem, haec civitas. Infinitus est numerus stultorum.

  Crucially, he treated the six-year-old as an equal. In this way the child would understand that it was time to put away childishness. On Sundays they lunched in a restaurant. Harry studied menus longer than his arms, learned to calculate a five percent tip. Sam laid educational facts before him: for instance, that trial by ordeal was still quietly practiced at the turn of the century, when a witness had reported two villagers suspected of a crime required to thrust their hands into boiling oil under the supervision of their headman.

  Billy Mohideen rolled to a stop by their table one day. The years had doubled Mohideen’s tonnage; a youth in a beautiful sky-blue shirt treading daintily in his wake created the impression of a child bowling a giant hoop. Mohideen introduced this apparition as an upcoming star in our mercantile firmament. One of his catamites more likely, thought Sam, eyeing the blighter’s cushiony indigo lips. Really, Mohideen was shameless. He waggled a fleshy pink palm in Sam’s direction, exclaiming, “The famous Obey!” In his mouth it sounded like a warning; a veiled reference to infection, perhaps.

  Sam said, “I was just discussing the Hamilton case with Harry, here.” He paused to let this sink in. “Destined for the Bar, this one. Or perhaps the Bench. We haven’t decided.”

  “Hamilton case,” said Mohideen meditatively. “Oh yes, Hamilton case. My God, all those years vanished like two ticks.” He dropped his voice. “Pukka shame about that show, Obey. Jolly high time the English packed up, isn’t it.”

  His creature yawned, fluttering the tips of his fingers against his mouth. His nails were trimmed but had a suspicious sheen.

  “Mind you,” said Mohideen, still in that conspiratorial murmur, “even then there were fellows saying it served you right for saving coolies.” A contented squeak escaped him. “So when our chaps take over, your persona could still be non grata, isn’t it.”

  Sam said, “Don’t let me detain you, old boy. At our age, it’s so diffi-cult to stay erect after a feed.”

  It flew past Mohideen of course, but he saw the other blink.

  Now, studying the molded acanthus leaves on his bedroom ceiling, Sam was swept with sadness. Everything he reached for eluded him. Harry received his overtures with the polite reserve that had always characterized their relations, while choosing to moon about behind a servant. Yvette Taylor’s face rose before his eyes. A man had loved her insanely. Her bloodless lips and greenish pallor had received a corpse as their due. Sometimes it seemed that the whole world was privy to a secret withheld from him. He recognized this for self-pity but remained imprisoned in its logic. It required punishment.

  He sent for Soma the next morning, after Harry had left for school. It was only the eleventh day of the month; but she would be paid in full, in lieu of notice. He informed her of these facts, all she needed to know. Then he took up his newspaper.

  She was the kind of person who breathes noisily. He put down his paper in irritation. “I shall be leaving for court in half an hour,” he said. “Have your box ready for inspection.” In Sinhalese he always used the lowest form of address, suitable for animals, because anyone who deserved respect spoke English.

  With her eyes directed at the gleaming parquet, for it would have been offensive to look at the hamuduruwo’s face, Soma asked, “Is my work unsatisfactory?”

  He got to his feet. “Twenty-nine minutes,” he said, and left the room.

  She was waiting for him on the front verandah. Her box was a length of striped material, spread on a table to display its contents. Using a ruler, he sifted through her possessions. She owned two spare jackets and a flowered cloth. A towel. A small blue tin of talcum, a veined sliver of soap, a box of tooth powder, a comb, a needle skewered through a spool of white cotton.

  A purse woven from coconut leaves contained a rupee note as soft as a rag, a few coins, two hairpins and a tiny wooden elephant, brightly painted, its flanks superbly curved. He picked up the exquisite little object, no larger than a date but satisfyingly solid on his palm, and sensed the girl’s fear. He recognized the elephant, of course: one of a pair from the Noah’s Ark, hand-carved on a Swiss mountain, that he had presented to Harry on the child’s third birthday.

  “What is this doing here?”

  “Harry baby gave it to me, hamudurawanai.”

  At once he grasped the potent symbolism of the gift, one half of two. He slipped the toy into his pocket. “This isn’t yours to keep,” he said.

  It could have been much worse. He could have had her charged with theft. Still, her hand was unsteady when she made a cross beside her name in his wages book to show that she had received all the money due to her.

  All that remained was to supply her with a chit. He went into his office room, took a sheet of notepaper and wrote: The bearer, Somawathi, has been in my employment as a servant woman for sixteen years. Her work is satisfactory but her character is marred by a certain slyness.

  He was halfway down the steps to the car waiting under the portico when she said, “Hamudurawanai.”

  When he turned, she said, “Harry baby.” Then she stopped. “What?”

  But she only stood there, moving her head a little.

  From a recess of his trunk, the bolanool man produced a greasy fold of leather with a lump in it. A water-worn yellow pebble rolled on Maud’s palm. “A snake stone,” said the Moor. “A charm against snak
e bite.”

  It was no larger than a chickpea, faintly luminous in shadow. “A cobra carries it in his mouth. At night, he places it on the ground and watches over it. He will defend it with his life.”

  She set it by her plate at lunch, and saw Sirisena eye it. When she held it out to him, he turned it in the tips of his fingers.

  “You climb a tree in which a cobra lives and wait until nightfall,” said Maud. “When the snake comes out from his hollow in the trunk, he places his stone on the ground beside him. Its shining attracts fireflies, which cobras love to eat. Then you part the leaves very carefully and empty a bag of ashes over the stone. The cobra circles the tree all night, searching for his lost treasure. In the morning you climb down and take the stone. The snake will never return to that place.”

  In the kitchen, where his wife was grinding chilies, the bungalow keeper reported the conversation.

  “That thing will draw snakes into the house,” said Padma at once. “You must get rid of it.”

  “How am I to do that? Do you imagine she won’t miss it?”

  Padma sighed. She had never set eyes on the sea but conceived of it as akin to the stupidity of men: immeasurable, eternal.

  The trunk road was intersected by a flow of greenish-brown water. Sirisena left his bicycle by the bridge and clambered down to the stream. There he remained for over an hour, his sarong tucked up around his thighs, rummaging in wet sand. To the dhobi children who came swarming around him, he replied that he was looking for a gold chain. The clasp must have been weak, he told them. He had been leaning over the parapet of the bridge when the chain and its tiny gold cross slithered from his neck and into the water below. The children helped him search for it, wading out through clots of foam.