Once Upon a Tender Time

by Carl Muller

  Carloboy struggled for words to explain, then said, ‘It’s like your clock,’ and Don ruffled the boy’s hair and said,

  ‘You know, son, you’re right. You go and read that book I gave you.’

  Carloboy would sit against his tree through warm mornings and hot afternoons and in the evenings when the air was tempered with a breeze and the rain trees sighed in a lovesick way. ‘One of the oldest living trees in the world,’ the book said, ‘Adanson found them, wrote about them and they were named after him. He said that the African baobabs are over 5000 years old. Alexander von Humboldt called them the oldest, organic monument of our planet. Age is equated with girth. A hundred feet in circumference would make such a tree 1400 years old.’ Carloboy worked out the age of his tree unitarily and told Uncle Don his tree was 850 years old. Don told Sonnaboy and Beryl was startled to learn that her son was ‘dancing with some elephant tree or something.’

  ‘See what saying now,’ she told her mother, ‘that small devil went and found an elephant tree. Never heard such nonsense.’

  ‘Tell to lock in the house even and keep, child. If elephants have on the tree mustn’t go near, no?’

  ‘Told, no, how many times, to keep an eye on that devil. Mus’ be drinking with the other drivers and don’t care what that one is up to!’

  ‘That one’ or ‘that devil’ as his mother always called him, had no time for maternal endearments or blandishments. Stranger things than a mother’s cross moods fire a boy’s imagination. His book said how long ago, French sailors off the coast of west Africa saw the baobab’s dark green foliage and called that westerly headland Cape Verde. He would go to his tree, run his hands over the elephant-skin bark. Villagers came to sit with him, share his enthusiasm.

  ‘Rain time we fruit breaking,’ said an ancient fellow, ‘for medicine making. For skin trouble, sores, stomach pain, when fever getting, very good. But elephant if come then trouble. Elephant tree eating. Very soft it is,’ and with a curved knife the man hacked away the bark and plunged in his blade.

  Carloboy was shocked. How could he know that his giant was so vulnerable? Such clay feet, so to say. Beneath the bark was a light, spongy wood.

  The old man cackled. ‘This tree anyhow dying won’t.’ He showed where, in patches, the inner bast had been hacked away to make rope to tether buffalo. ‘From this rope very strong. Elephant even tying up can. Baby afraid don’t get. This tree dying won’t. Two-three years before elephants coming tree all ate. Even that dying did not.’

  The conversation was like a challenge tossed to fate. Elephants did trundle through the very next day—and there stood their favourite dish. Carloboy stood aghast as villagers crowded around. He felt as though he had lost the bottom of his stomach. His tree . . . his tree had been almost completely gouged out. Its gnarled tentacles of stubby branchlets actually teetered in the breeze like some gigantic crow’s nest ready to topple at the slightest provocation.

  ‘Six elephant,’ a woman jabbered, ‘small two ones also. Came and rub and rub then with the heads banging and pushing pushing.’ The cow elephants had scooped out the fine inner fibre to feed their calves. The tree lay, almost on its side. Its inner wood, attacked by some sort of fungus, was so brittle, so porous, that it was easy to scoop into. Such a big, bulky trunk. Carloboy’s eyes smarted. It was so . . . so . . . grandfather clockish, he thought wildly, yet a child could tear it apart!

  The boy felt pain. His giant had cheated. He went home, downcast and Sonnaboy said, ‘There, Uncle Don gave a book for you. A present, he said. Bought at Caves bookshop in Colombo and brought.’

  Carloboy looked at it without much interest. Fantastic Trees by Edwin A. Menninger. Don had scribbled, ‘All you want to know about the baobab.’ Carloboy put it away and withdrew into a shell of self-pity. ‘All I want to know,’ he muttered fiercely, ‘as if I don’t know.’

  He spent his days with the gang, collecting a gunny sack of leaves each morning for his rabbits, fishing, riding into town where behind the huge cupola of the Ruvanweliseya 6 the boys trained their catapults on the crude nests of roosting cranes. Cranes were fishy if cooked, but made an excellent meal when roasted outdoors. Sometimes, as a bird crashed down, it would tumble a nest too and when some po-faced pilgrims suddenly received a clutch of pale-blue eggs on their heads and began to shriek ‘Saadhu saadhu!’7 in contralto, locals chased the gang away with threats that this was a sacred city and a Buddhist city and ‘if coming to kill birds and throw eggs catch and put in the police station!’

  This cheered the boys no end and Carloboy shed that queer sense of injustice that had cloaked him. And then he met that old villager again. The man was carrying a straw bag of red peppers on his head. ‘Ah, baby,’ he said toothlessly, ‘now coming not. Now aliya gaha to see coming not?’

  ‘Now dead must be.’

  ‘Dead? How to die? I said, no, dying won’t. Elephant to ground pushing even, dying not. Go and see, will you.’

  That evening twelve railway town boys made pilgrimage. They stole pomegranates and somebody broke Mr Wickremasinghe’s window and Benno snagged his shirt on a fence and ripped his sleeve—but at the end of the trail there squatted the tree. Yes, squatted, yet proud, strong, enduring. David Livingston wrote once that he had seen baobab trees fallen, lying on the ground, yet continuing to grow. This was their magic.

  For the first time that evening Carloboy really read Menninger . . . and understood the true wonder of his tree, its amazing vitality, its refusal to die, the phoenix of the plant kingdom. The days were becoming all too short. His daddy would take him to Colombo for Christmas and it would be the usual rounds of visits and wishes and eating cake and people to jostle and the roar of traffic and the smoke-smelling gritty city dust. He hated it. And he had a baby brother too and Mummy and all else would go back to Anuradhapura while Diana and he would be cooped in Aunty Anna’s tiny room with its black doors and brown-stained glass and look out of window bars to see Mr Colontota’s cluster of ground orchids that straggled drunkenly and the high wall which hid the houses beyond.

  He felt a shiver and clenched his fists. Royal College. A new place to go, learn, be caned, oh yes, be caned. Some things are too much for a free-spirited boy to absorb. He lay in bed and scowled. ‘I hate it,’ he muttered and lay for a long time that night, staring into the darkness.

  Chapter Ten

  Suddenly, the Burghers of Ceylon—and to a large measure, the people of Ceylon—took the Americans to their hearts. The British, who fretted and strutted the stage, were large in their claims that they were winning the war. Of course they were. But American derring-do held centre stage. The first all-American air raid on Germany—that audacious daylight attack on Wilhelmshaven—was, as everyone said, a dilly. It made Hitler ‘piss his pants’ as engine driver Bertie Arnolda said, and Sonnaboy von Bloss was quite overwhelmed by the fact that Germany had begun civil conscription of women. The Burghers didn’t take to the Russians as cordially. The news that Leningrad had been liberated occasioned a few desultory ‘ohs’ and ‘ahs’. ‘Godless Russians’ as Leah de Mello always called them, were beyond the pale. Wasn’t Father Sebastian, the new priest at St Lawrence’s, always pleading with his parishioners for the conversion of Russia?

  The problem with the British, as George Orwell so succinctly put it1 was that deep down, ‘the mass of the people are without military knowledge or tradition and their attitude towards war is invariably defensive.’ No one tried telling that to the bristly British who held the reins, but even those who lorded it in the plantations of tea and rubber would sit in their airy verandas and the wife would cast baby blue eyes on the tea-cushioned mountains and hubby would sniff appreciatively at his b. and s. and think that it was certainly a great pity about those poor perishers back home and, Victoria Cross or no, this was the life!

  Even when the soldiers paraded out of St Peter’s, band leading, it was said that they sang:

  I don’t want to join the bloody Army

  I don’t wa
nt to go to fucking war

  I want no more to roam

  I’d rather stay at home

  Living on the earnings of a whore!

  Frankly, the only enemy the ‘Tommy’ ever acknowledged openly was his own sergeant-major!

  Carloboy, pushed into the huge red brick building which was the Royal College, found the school imposing, quite unnerving and he was simply borne in, as by a tide of scurrying, bumping, thumping boys of every shape and size. Old Fernando, the Registrar, collared him, eyed him narrowly and gave his famous ‘silly grin’. ‘Form One C,’ he said, ‘upstairs, turn right, go to the end,’ and there sat fuzzy-haired Mr Naths with his fat cheeks and black face and a chalk-dusted coat who surveyed this new batch of boys with a look that was quite paternal.

  Linton Jayasekera hissed, ‘You can fight? I’m the strongest here. If you think you’re big, challenge you to a fight after school!’

  Carloboy stared, shook his head ever so slightly and opened his New Everyday Classics. Sonnaboy had groaned at the booklist. It necessitated a special trip to Wahids in Bambalapitiya where thousands, he was sure, of other parents had also come, waving their lists, demanding attention.

  Royal had its share of masters, and in heaping quantities at that. ‘Bada’ Eddie was headmaster. He had two canes, wore grey suits, sweated, and waited for boys to be ‘sent’ for punishment. There was ‘Cow-pox’ Abey who liked to slap boys. He considered a slap a form of art. ‘Keep your face at the correct angle!’ he would say, and the victim would assume a love-bird head position and, satisfied with the stance, Abey would then parade the class expounding on the sins of the sufferer who developed a crick in his neck and the look of a long distance runner who suddenly finds the finish line receding before his eyes. Oh, the slap is duly administered, of course, but the boy is stiff-necked for a further ten minutes and wonders if a slap on the other side on his face would help.

  ‘Connor’ Rasana was just that. He was inducted as a temp . . . and stayed. He was the filler-in whenever the regulars absented themselves and the boys would relax and grin hugely and lead the poor man into all manner of outlandish subjects where extrication was a source of much belly-laughing and desk thumping.

  ‘Sir,’ said Carloboy, ‘in the old days camels and leopards used to mate.’

  ‘Hmm. In the old days had a lot of different animals.’

  ‘Yes, sir. And they were called cameleopards. Sir, how did the camel and leopard mate?’

  ‘That’s not a thing for you to know,’

  ‘But sir, the leopard is in our jungles, no? And the camel is in the desert.’

  ‘Those days were different.’

  ‘But how, sir?’

  History was interesting too, especially when ‘Connor’ stood in and gazed vacantly at the textbook. He would clear his throat, look importantly through his gold-rimmed spectacles. ‘Today we are going to talk about the Six Year War. This Six Year War went on for six long years . . . von Bloss!’

  ‘Sir? Me, sir?’

  ‘Yes, you. If the war went on for ten years what will they call it?’

  ‘Who, sir?’

  ‘Anybody. That’s not my question.’

  ‘Ten Year War, sir.’

  The man beams. ‘Very good, very good. Today you’re very bright. Abdi! What are you doing with your head inside the desk?’

  ‘Pocket Billiards’ was Mr Rupa who always had his hands in his pockets in which he played, possibly, with his keys or small coin or whatever his pockets contained. This, naturally, caused the usual boyish interest. They immediately seized on the notion that the man was playing with his testicles, hence the name. ‘Lapaya’ was the master who taught Sinhalese and there was ‘Penda’ who had flabby cheeks, taught Latin and spent long minutes of every period stuffing his charges with the proper declining of Penda. ‘Penda, Pendere, Peppendi, Pensum’ he would keep bleating until the name stuck. Cantle was scoutmaster, drill master, cadet master and games master. Stuck, as he was, with boys in gym shorts and swimming trunks and with a hail-fellow-well-met smile that was accompanied by much back-slapping and general bonhomie, the school accepted his geniality and thought it needed dissection. Boys had been taken in by such jolly types before. A man would be so nice, so positively avuncular, and then, having wheedled his way past lowered defences, cup his victim. Most uncharitably, they labelled him ‘Cupper’ and senior boys would tell wide-eyed first formers, ‘You be careful. Catch and cup you, that’s what he’ll do.’ The fact that Cantle was also the boarding master, strengthened the myth.

  The school was too prestigious for words. A school for the élite, although ‘free’. The richest, most influential and important of Colombo’s society had their children firmly ensconced in Royal where the motto is Disce aut Discede2

  and the colours are blue, gold and blue and the honour boards in the hall commemorate the scholastic achievements and the laurels won, of some of Sri Lanka’s greatest sons. Principal, J.C.A. Corea, ruled the roost; but the man who terrorized both big and small fry and had a bullet head and a thick, muscular neck and kept six canes on his rack and sat in state in a large room hemmed in by bookcases, a globe, important-looking files, several prize shields and cups and a lot of college paraphernalia was ‘Jowl Kula who caned Carloboy whenever he got the opportunity—which, alas, was frequent.

  The chronicler will not dwell overly on those early years. Nobody paid much attention to first formers except the more randy prefects who had their own room and were allowed a measure of disciplinary enforcement. Prefectship came with honours gained—a swimming blue or a good scholastic record or after gaining colours at cricket and the merit of donning the school blazer. Eleven-year-and ten-year-old first formers were sized up for their ‘cabbage’ quality and a cabbage was a boy who was eminently ‘cuppable’.

  Strange stories would circulate with increasing frequency. Gustavus Ranks, it was said, was taken by three prefects into their ‘study’ where his trousers were pulled down, after which he was treated to many close encounters and then had had the tip of his foreskin burnt with a lighted cigarette! And again, there was Jayaraj who was fair, limpid-eyed, delicately featured and shy. Those who declared that they had succeeded in drawing him behind the tuck shop and gaining much satisfaction in the events that immediately followed, were given the dubious title ‘cup god’ and Jayaraj was acknowledged as being a ‘pukka cabbage bugger’.

  Carloboy, too, fell into this category but he had a working knowledge of what to expect and how to avoid the aftermath of those peremptory bum-squeezes at assembly and the lewder advances of the bigger boys. Also, Anuradhapura had made him whip-strong and independent. It was better, he decided, to be a maniac of sorts, lead the ragging, boo the loudest and be a pain in the butt to all and sundry, thus earning universal notoriety as a hellion and best left to create those many disasters, in school and out, which only he could do best. Let’s put it this way. When Sonnaboy wished to place his second son, David, in Royal, Principal Corea shuddered. ‘One von Bloss is enough!’ he said and refused to unbend—not for all the fair maids in Christendom!

  ‘You can see,’ Sonnaboy had said (and that was years later), ‘masters are biting the nails when even talking about you!’

  Yes, Carloboy made his own space, did his own thing, was fierce in body and spirit and, yes, disced well enough so that he couldn’t be faulted enough to be disceded! Aunty Anna, of course, complained to Sonnaboy each time he worked train to Colombo and came to see how his children fared, that she was losing ‘Pounds, men, pounds.’

  ‘So good, no? Too fat you are. If unlock the piano even and keep he will play and be quiet.’ Anna, let it be known, had bought Sonnaboy’s piano and was very proud of her purchase. She would sit at it with fat fingers that buried themselves into the keys and found chords that, even in these raucous days, are still to be discovered. Carloboy, who had developed a lively knack of playing anything ‘by ear’ was furious to know that his piano had been sold and more furious when his aunt kept it lock
ed. ‘Not for you to just thump and spoil,’ she had said, ‘when go out of tune will have to call that Ephraums to repair and you think your father will pay?’

  Carloboy told Diana, ‘How? Our piano! All those days we played and nobody said thumping. Let lock and keep. Wait will you and see what I’ll do!’

  What he did was spectacular enough. He found, in the tiny backyard with its old crates and a woebegone mattress and old strips of wire netting, a nest of rats. Mother rat had made a cosy burrow in the old fibre mattress. It was so simple to raise the top of the Metzler and pop four baby rats in. They disappeared among the ranks of wood and felt with tinny squeaks and found their new home vastly interesting. And that, he said to himself later, was that.

  He disliked Mr Colontota who only ate fish in whatever form it was produced and was the fussiest, stuffiest person he knew. He also disliked living in a room with Diana who still ‘pippied’ to many disapproving ‘chuk-chucks’ by Anna and had to be taken to St Clare’s where she grew very surly and strange, surrounded, as she was, by Sinhalese girls who were more robust in manners and physique. She would come in, out of the bathroom, in a thin slip and sit on her bed. Then, cloth in hand, raise a leg to wipe her feet. This, Carloboy knew, was the only thing interesting about his sister. Diana, in all innocence would wipe one foot at a time, propping each on the bed, and the boy would stare at her vagina with its very protuberant, red clitoris and slip a hand into his pocket to restrain his own impatient penis.

  Yet, he switched off quickly enough and strode out to eat the buttered hoppers3 with a ladle of yesterday evening’s gravy, pick up his books and go to school. It was a long while before Anna told Sonnaboy that she had reached the end of her tether.

  ‘Next door going whole evening and dancing with that Gerard and Anton and whole clique of boys in the behind garden. Going to play, fighting, people coming to complain. Sent, men, to front house for Sinhalese tuition. Big girl said will teach. Don’t know what he’s doing there, but came to the wall to tell not to send anymore. Won’t listen to anything. Mr Colon said will give with the cane and how the cheek? Saying you’re not my father. Anney can’t keep, men. Diana even never mind but I have to sit in the bathroom to wash the sheet and pippie clothes every day. See, will you, both have bad reports. Mr Colon also grumbling and saying why took . . .’ Anna sighs, clutches her rosary in a kind of desperation, ‘You can’t put anywhere else, men?’