Once Upon a Tender Time

by Carl Muller

  ‘What’s this? Police taking to Kandy in my van with bicycle? What? You’re von Bloss’ son? What the devil are you doing here?’

  ‘From home jumped and came. Bicycle also stole,’ the policeman said. ‘To Kandy taking. To police there giving and coming.’

  It was a short walk to the police station from the Kandy railway station. The policeman wheeled the bike and Sonnaboy rose up to seize his son by the shoulders and shake him until he felt he was trapped in a giant winnow.

  ‘You know the trouble you have caused! Police cars going all over Colombo, people praying in church for you, everybody upset. I went to Sellas! You go there again to see what you’ll get! Girls! What girls at your age! You think we don’t know? Small bloody wretch writing love letters. Mother gave her a good hammering. You come home and behave yourself, you heard?’

  So the prodigal returned and was beaten and given a flurry of slaps by his mother too, for stealing her sewing money and the neighbours came to look him over and exclaim and say, ‘Some dance you led everybody,’ and Mr Dias swayed in to say that, ‘If my son will tie to the lamp-post and hammer,’ and tell Sonnaboy, ‘Yes, men, thash what’ll do. One thing no bluddy nonsense with my buggers. You have drink? Put two shots at that Vihara Lane joint. Buggers mus’ be mixing an’ giving.’

  And so were Carloboy and Audrey parted and both children brooded and decided to call it a day. Kandy and Colombo, no longer connected by bicycle became isolated, receding into a mist so unreal that neither place mattered. Carloboy found this business of undying love and its many hazards too much to handle. What was the use? All he got for his pains was a beating, a soreness of loss, an emptiness of spirit and, as the popular songs proclaimed, a broken heart. He decided to circulate. Saranankara Road was full of girls. So what? The whole world was full of girls. And years of agonizing over one was, he decided, an appalling waste of time. Where had it got him? By the time his fourteenth birthday came around and two Germany’s had been established and NATO had come into being, he had become almost predatory in his relationships with a long line of girls with whom he took his satisfaction and then abandoned. Some of them clung on, refusing to accepted rejection. Monique Ludwick would creep around the house and climb in through the store room window. She would leave her knickers at home.

  Cindy Perera would always go to the outhouse servants lavatory when Carloboy came in to play carrom with her brothers. It was a signal for him to break away. ‘Wait a bit. I’ll put a pump and come,’ and he would race round the house and tap and dart into the lavatory where they would clutch at each other and kiss and he would satisfy himself, standing up, and say. ‘I’ll go. You wait a little and then come out.’

  ‘You love me?’ she would ask.

  He would nod. ‘Of course. Now wait quietly. I’m going.’ No, he didn’t love anybody, anything. Love meant beatings, ridicule, shame, torrents of rantings and ravings and those fierce slaps only his mother could give. The world, he decided, was a foul, rotten place. Uncle Viva would come, humming hymns through his nose, whining insistently about the evils that beset all mankind. ‘Now we are in end time,’ he would bleat, ‘destruction! destruction! The Lord will smite the sinners!’

  Sonnaboy would yawn. ‘Don’t talk bloody nonsense, men. Smiting! If smiting then Russia also can make the atom bomb? If Russia is so bad why did God allow?’

  A fierce argument would follow which raised many issues, all half-cocked, half-baked, of use only because they contained some merit in keeping the crosstalk going.

  ‘See will you, even our Dutch buggers. Where all their pakkum15 now? Japanese pushed from East Indies and now Indonesia came. Where the bloody Dutch? Gone. Did the bolt!’

  Viva would dig his nostrils, ‘Wickedness!’ he would trumpet. ‘Pray, men, pray. Whole world is going to damnation. Ah, how, men, Beryl? How the children? Carloboy is studying? My three are doing all right, praise the lord, learning well in Bandarawela school. Now Claude is fifteen almost sixteen, no? Winston and John also OK only Winston likes to joke too much. Told him only las’ week, ask God to help, son, not good to make jokes everytime and must be more serious, no?’

  ‘How are the girls?’

  Viva sighs. ‘Patricia is at home. Left school also and in the house with Opel. Little lazy, men and Opel always grumbling. Praying for good husband for her. From Diyatalawa navy camp sometime fellows coming on the road and have nice Burgher boy also always looking when pass the house but all in God’s hands, no?’

  Carloboy, listening, would grin slowly. What a load of rubbish this uncle talked. God’s hands, Praise the Lord. Pray, pray, pray! ‘Penda’ was agog in class with the Cold War in Asia and how the Communists had chased Chiang Kai-shek into Formosa. And here was this uncle with his big nose in his Bible, praying that someone will marry his Patricia! Marry! ‘Marry for what?’ he told his cousin Ian de Mello who, although much older, lived a sad, befuddled life under his tyrannous mother.

  Ian would look sheepish. ‘If not how? To have a girl must arrange and get married, no?’

  ‘Aha! You’re thinking of landing a girl?’

  Ian would ripen redly. He stuttered when he grew excited. ‘Then how?’

  ‘What madness, men, just catch and do. I’ll tell? You come home. Our servant woman not bad, men. You like to put a try?’

  ‘Mad? As if your mummy won’t see.’

  ‘She won’t see. Whole time sewing. I’m also thinking, one day I went to the kitchen. Had a ‘pult in my pocket and it was sticking out in my trouser. She gave a funny look and said, “Baby, in pocket what?” and came and caught it and I said, “That’s my catapult,” and she’s laughing and saying, “Ah catapult only? I thought something else.” How? I asked “You thought what?” and she’s just smiling and looking. Easy to catch and do, men.’

  Ian grew redder. ‘Ma-ma-my gosh. Yu-yu-you shure? What about . . . what about our servant?’

  ‘Apo, old no? And if put a shout or something . . .’

  ‘Ma-ma-my God. Ma-ammy will kill. But here. I-I-think Dunny Uncle . . . Dunny Uncle, he-he’s doing men. Ki-Ki-kitchen he’s going when Mummy sleeping e-e-in the afternoon. One day I went-went to the ba-ack to drink water. Kitchen door clo-closed but when I’m ca-ca-coming door open and Dunny-Dunny Uncle coming out.’

  ‘That old bugger. Anything for him. Enough he landed you? Now also you’re going?’

  ‘No-no-now I won’t. Wo-won’t call also.’

  ‘Old bugger!’ Carloboy says again. ‘Did to me also one day, and I know, no, how he came and did to Marie and Heather also. I tried to tell Mummy and got a slap only. One thing useless going to tell anything. In the room, men, and Heather is small also.’

  Poor Ian. He hung on Carloboy’s every word and fantasized immensely and masturbated with a diligence that should have earned him a knighthood. But the conversation made Carloboy think more about the woman so conveniently at home in the kitchen and he took to hanging around the rear veranda and brushing against her at the door and, growing bolder, coming up behind her one day as she stood at the kitchen window, to press against her broad buttocks. She stood still for a second, then pressed backwards into him and breathed, ‘Baby go. Mummy if come?’

  He walked away, hard, throbbing, sat on the old rattan chair in the veranda and pretended to read a Sexton Blake. It was, for him, a mid-term holiday. The girls were at school. Baby Michael crawled around a mat in the hall, Beryl was big with child and had taken to sleeping in the afternoons. Long hours at her sewing-machine gave her, she said, a pain in her back. She called to Soma: ‘This child for a little look after. What big baby doing?’

  ‘There backside chair a book reading. Asleep falling I think.’

  ‘Here a little come and wait. I’ll nex’ door go and come this dress fit-on for next door lady and come. Kitchen door close and come and here wait.’

  Carloboy dropped the book on his face and breathed evenly. Beryl came. ‘How? Asleep fell. Like that let be. I’ll go and come.’

  Carloboy
heard the kitchen door being closed and the sound of his mother’s slippers on the front step, heard her say, ‘This door also close. If anybody comes I’m next door say and afterwards to come tell.’

  Oh, Carloboy knew where and why his mother was going. Next door, of course, where Bunty and Dora de Kretser were not at home and their boarder, Kinno Mottau occupied a room and Beryl would creep in and Kinno would come to the hall windows and draw the blinds. It used to be different before Soma was installed. Kinno would come home then. He would sneak in through the back door, coming around the common well. Beryl, because of her stomach, chose to go to the front door.

  Carloboy rose, went to the hall. Soma looked up. ‘Baby got up?’

  He nodded. ‘Mummy went?’

  The woman nodded. Carloboy sat beside her, looked at her. Funny, he thought, one never notices servants. She was young, soft-lipped, large eyes, beautiful eyes, he thought. Yes, she was so black-haired, so pretty. He took her hand. Soma moved urgently. ‘Mummy if come . . .’ He assured her that Mummy won’t come. He knew she wouldn’t. Mummy was being fucked by the lodger next door. He knew it. He hated it but now he had Soma to himself. He pulled down his trousers zip. Soma nuzzled him and embraced him and he found that she wore an undercloth too. ‘Take out, will you,’ he said and she pretended to struggle as he undid her wraps. When he pushed her down, her cloths lying in a heap against her, her dark bush, her brown thighs, her long legs, her cleft of navel were like a poem of exceeding grace. Gently he mounted, pushing his knees between her. His mouth touched her chin. He felt himself rigid, pushing, brushing, seeking entry and her hand helped him enter. He buried himself in her and she gripped his buttocks. He pushed and they were one. It was such a sensation. He arched and pushed, then moved and her feet, firm against the mat, raised and lowered her lower body to his rhythm. He felt a warmth grow and he moved quicker, quicker and he heard her breathe in a strange, whistling way, mouth open. Suddenly it was a delirium of sensation and spending, spending and he felt as though she was draining him of life. Orgasm clutched at them with a single, grasping hand. He lay over her, head in her shoulder and she pressed her lips to his forehead, his ear. ‘All inside went, no,’ she whispered.

  He nodded.

  ‘Baby quickly get up. I’ll wash and come soon, before too much go in.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Baby if get? Good thing from hospital pills some kind bringing and giving. Anyhow careful must be, no?’

  Carloboy watched her drape her cloths. ‘Come soon,’ he said and looked down at the dampness on the front of his trousers. ‘Trouser must change Mummy coming before.’

  When Beryl returned, Carloboy was cleaning his bicycle. ‘Anyone came?’ she asked.

  Soma said no. She then went to the kitchen, slyly touching the boy’s head as she passed him. That night he thought about her and pressed his hardness into his pillow and stroked and stroked until he spent himself.

  At fourteen, going on fifteen he had fucked his first woman.

  Chapter Fourteen

  There is little left of the Burgher community in Sri Lanka today. Many have adapted, or left, and yet, a few remain to cling to a vanished past. The erosion of emigration and inter-marriage began a long, long time ago. In 1796 when the British took over the island, the Burghers were given a choice. Stay and be ruled or go to Indonesia.1 Those who stayed became quite passionate about all things English, but for years and years after the British take over, the Burghers still celebrated St Nikolaus Day on December 5 although many sent their children to be educated in England. Let it also be said that the Burghers became so attuned to their colonial rulers that they actually fought in South Africa against the Dutch in the Boer War. Strange? No, just the quirks of happenstance. British education, British standards, were the stepping stones to a good future in Ceylon. Those who rose to eminence orbited in their own social plane. In the 1920s six of Ceylon’s nine Supreme Court judges were Burghers.

  But—and aha! there’s the rub—the great commingling and feverish intermingling produced a Burgher community which, with its many gradations of colour, raised its own snobberies. All Burgher families have had mixed marriages, and yet at the gateway to the fashionable part of Colombo there still stands a white and gingerbread house which is the Dutch Burgher Union where records are kept, which trace each Burgher family to a European ancestor. Here, the snobbery begins. The community becomes classified. ‘Top quality’ are they who can show an undiluted paternal European line. And what makes all this so special? As Sonnaboy, after his fifth arrack would have said, ‘Balls!’ which, as a juicy expletive, covered everything. The Dutch East India Company, when it took control of Ceylon in 1665 found the island a convenient staging post between the Cape of Good Hope and Dutch possessions in the Far East. What came in thereafter were company employees and fortune seekers from the rough and tumble of Europe. No bluebloods, mind. One saving grace, it could be said, was that, unlike Australia, there was no ‘ball and chain’. As mentioned earlier, especially of Jaffna, intermarriage was the done thing (apart from a frenzied screwing around which was a pleasurable pastime) so where does that leave us? And where does it leave the author who is also a Burgher? Why, one piteously pleads, this snobbery?

  Carloboy, at fourteen, found another edifice to this hardcore Burgherness rise very near where he lived. Saranankara Road accepted the establishment of St Nikolaus Home—a home for elderly Burgher ladies who had lost everything: their homes, their families, their ties. Although Burghers maintained strong family ties, this was a phenomenon of the changing times. Children, grandchildren, even great-grandchildren quit Ceylon, migrating to Australia, England, Canada, New Zealand, the US. Old women, bereft of all they had queened over, were stranded. Families sent money for their upkeep, true, but they sat in the home, quarrelled incessantly (which was their only real entertainment) and memories and their rosaries were their talismans to fight the awful loneliness that enshrouded them.

  Carloboy was quite taken up with the home. Relics in a house of relics, elderly women seated, cooling themselves with small hand fans, eating home-made toffee, yearning for someone, some fair-skinned, brown-haired visitor to march in, say ‘hullo aunty’ or ‘hullo granny’ and place a parcel in their laps and say, ‘Look what I brought for you.’

  It took just eight years, eight years after Independence, for the cosy world of Sri Lanka’s Burghers to collapse. Once again the choice: adapt or leave . . . and most left. Carloboy found this all quite unthinkable. He would argue with old Mr Young in Pereira Lane, who, with his lank wife who had a candlestick complexion, and his children Daryll and Claudia, were preparing to leave for Australia.

  ‘So what for going, Uncle. Can stay here, no?’

  ‘And do what? No future for our children now. You tell your daddy also to pack up and go.’

  ‘Never mind going. But see will you, all the grannies and old people dumping and going.’

  ‘No, son, you don’t understand. These countries only want young people who can work. Can’t carry old people and go.’

  ‘But that’s not fair, no?’

  ‘Why not? There I can still work and Darryl also get a job and Claudia can go in an office and Mrs Young also can take a job. So all four will work.’

  ‘Just they give jobs when go?’

  ‘Plenty of jobs, men. And everything have there. Not like here.’

  ‘So why can’t take old people also? Can keep at home when all are going to work.’

  ‘Who’s going to look after if all go to work? There also will have to put in a home. And new place, new things, won’t even like. They are used to here, no?’

  Yes, there seemed no way out. Dump the old, the frail, the feeble. No future for them. Only the whitewashed walls of a home, the dreary wait for death. As American actress Celeste Holm once said: ‘We live by encouragement and die without it—slowly, sadly and angrily.’

  And who was there to encourage the old ladies of St Nikolaus Home? Rather, it was the universal opinion
that Carloboy, like a lot of heedless Burgher youth, was driving his schoolmasters and others in authority into premature old age. ‘An early grave,’ ‘Connor’ would intone, ‘that’s what I’ll get because of you,’ while ‘Pol Thel’ who loathed the boy, swore fervently that he had more grey hairs on his comb each morning. ‘Lapaya’ had to leave. He couldn’t take it any more. He never brought a pen to class, anyway, and the boys were quite fed up with the way he would say: ‘One of you give me a pen.’ The problem was he would stick the pen into his coat and carry it away.

  ‘Sir, my pen, sir.’

  ‘What? What pen?’

  ‘My pen, sir, you took.’

  Sometimes he would give it back with an ‘oh’ and an ‘ah’ but one day he just glared at Abdi and said, ‘Nonsense. You must be dreaming,’ and walked away with a nice Parker 41. Abdi was annoyed and boys put their heads together—an occurrence that bodes no good for anyone.

  Lapaya beetled in the next day. He set the day’s lesson. Apparently the man had other things to do. He could be writing his autobiography. All he did was say: ‘Read chapters six and seven. No noise. End of period I’ll ask questions.’ And he would begin to write. It had to come. He raised his head. ‘One of you give me a pen.’

  Forty-two boys form a sizeable class. When this number, in seven half-dozen knots, suddenly stampede all else is chaff. Lapaya yelped. Boys surged, chairs banged backwards, glad cries of ‘here, sir,’ ‘here my pen, sir,’ and the poor man cowered, eyes popping as his whole class milled around his desk, brandishing fountain pens. His desk was showered with pens, the noise was deafening, the hoots, cheery cries, laughter and rousing, roistering roars ran outdoors to echo down the corridor. Forty-two pens. Who the blazes wanted forty-two pens? Parkers, Swans, Watermans, Shaeffers . . . Lapaya windmilled out of his chair with a strangled scream. His first blow took ‘Bull’ de Sara on the ear. He swiped at Doyne, missed and caught L. M. Perera on the side of the neck. Bassie, mercifully, didn’t get a fit, but Lapaya seemed to be in the grip of something more vast than epilepsy. He seized handfuls of pens and hurled them out of the window. The row sucked back, inward. Boys stood, gaping, as their pens vanished. They were two floors up and outside it rained pens on old Kadalayachchi2 who gave a sharp scream and plucked her basket of pickled olives out of the way. The uproar of dispersion became a crescendo of deprivation. Lapaya broke and ran as grim-faced boys advanced on him. It took three masters and a co-opted prefect to restore order. Some pens, when recovered, were in writing order, many had to be scrapped. Lapaya decided to leave. To join a nunnery, maybe, but never to face that hideous class ever!