The Flower Boy

by Karen Roberts

  He went back inside and immediately bumped into his mother, who was hurrying past with the mulberry jam to set on the dining table. “Chandi, not now!” she said impatiently. “I have so much to do! Don’t get in my way!”

  She had been in his way. Not the other way about. But he said nothing. Five minutes later, she rushed in, pushed a plate of roti and jam into his hands.

  That was when she had said, “Eat it quickly before someone comes in. One day I’ll get into trouble because of you! Jam! What next!”

  He sat down and ate.

  When the last bit of mulberry jam had been wiped up by the last piece of roti, he took his plate over to the sink.

  The sink was a cemented square pit set into the floor, with an outlet for water and a tap in the wall above it. He had strict instructions not to go near it so he set his plate down and waited for someone to come along and open the tap so he could wash his mulberry-jammy hands.

  When someone finally came along, it was his sister Rangi. Rangi was his favorite. She walked to school with him, sometimes holding his hand and swinging it gently. His other sister, Leela, never had time for him. She never walked. She rushed, like Ammi.

  Chandi could share his secrets with Rangi. He showed her his collection of stones from the spot in the garden where the overhead gutter leaked, his onion plant which he had grown himself, and he even let her feed his guppy, who lived in a jam bottle in a corner of their room.

  Rangi teased him and tickled him until fat tears of laughter ran down his face. Then she would gently wipe them away and brush her nose against his. His heart would swell with love, and for the rest of the day he would follow her around with doglike devotion, knowing she would not get exasperated or impatient like Leela did.

  HE WASHED HIS hands and splashed cold water on his face.

  Rangi looked at him. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  He looked innocently at her. “What?”

  She tweaked his nose. “You’d better brush your teeth or Amma will get angry. And it’s not a very good idea to make her angry today.”

  “Why not?” he asked, hoping he was finally going to get an explanation for the strange goings-on. He wasn’t disappointed.

  “Sudu Nona is having her baby today,” she whispered. “That’s why Amma is so busy. But she will notice if you don’t brush your teeth.”

  “Isn’t she going to the hospital?” he asked. He knew that people had babies in hospitals because that was where Ammi had had him.

  “They were going to, but there’s been a landslide farther down the road. They won’t be able to take the car past it. And the doctor can’t come here either.”

  Chandi was momentarily distracted by the news of the landslide. Today was Sunday so there was no school, which was a pity since landslides usually meant staying home on school days. How come landslides never happened on school days? He brought his thoughts back to the present.

  “What are they going to do?” he asked.

  “Have it in the house maybe. I don’t know. You’d better stay out of Amma’s way though. Especially if you’re not going to brush your teeth.”

  “Rangi, can we go and watch?” he asked hopefully.

  She laughed. “You’re so funny.” He didn’t see anything funny in what he had said. But then, he was only four.

  As soon as Rangi left, he ran down the corridor to see if the baby had arrived, and cannoned into the last person he wanted to see.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” his mother demanded suspiciously.

  “Rangi said Sudu Nona’s baby was coming, so I thought I’d go and say hello, since I’m older,” he replied grandly.

  She dragged him back to the kitchen by his ear, ignoring his howls of protest. She pushed him outside and said, “Go and play, and don’t let me see you or hear you for the rest of the day!” She went back down the corridor muttering to herself.

  Although forcibly ejected from the house, he viewed the prospect of a whole day outdoors with anticipation. The gardens were huge and there were always interesting things to see and do.

  Then it started to rain.

  Now, chilled by the drop in temperature and more than a little afraid of his mother’s anger, Chandi sat huddled inside his tomato and spinach house.

  The rain was still coming down fast and furiously. Beyond the house, it soaked the hills. Mountain paths became treacherous, fast-flowing streams of mud, trickling waterfalls became roaring monsters and placid mountain pools turned into churning masses of contained fury.

  And landslides slid.

  USUALLY, THE TEA slopes were dotted with the colorful figures of the tea pickers, the bright oranges and reds of their saris standing out like bold, happy flags in the turquoise tea. Although the huge wicker baskets hanging from their heads were heavy, they were always cheerful, making ribald jokes with one another in Tamil while their nimble fingers flew from one bush to the next.

  Today, the hills were empty. The landslide had made it impossible for most of them to work. The few who had braved the storm had found shelter in the factory.

  Even the Kankanipillai, the superintendent, who was known to be the worst kind of slave driver, could not ask them to go out in this kind of weather. He had already lost a few of his pickers to pneumonia and he couldn’t afford to lose any more.

  His immediate concern, however, was not work, but how to remove the workers from where they had taken shelter just inside the main entrance. They were dripping water everywhere.

  The factory, normally a hive of activity and tea dust, wore a slightly haunted look. Most of the machines and fans had not even been started that morning.

  From the outside, it looked like an English boarding school, surrounded by rolling green hills and sprawling homes.

  The closest was the Sudu Mahattaya’s place, Glencairn.

  The Sudu Mahattaya’s real name was John Buckwater, although nobody called him that. Sudu Mahattaya meant “white gentleman” in Sinhalese and that, after all, was what he was.

  He was a brusque man, short in speech and economical in gesture, but kind nonetheless. When Sinnathamby, whose father worked at the factory, had fallen into a well and drowned, he had given the family an extra week’s wages. And when Nariamma had slipped down a path and broken her ankle, he had driven her to the Nuwara Eliya hospital himself, and had kept paying her wages even though she hadn’t been able to work for six weeks.

  The women were safe, too, for unlike some other planters, John didn’t force his attentions on them. There were no light-skinned, blue-eyed children on Glencairn other than those given to him by his English wife.

  He went around the factory every morning and then set out on his daily inspection of the plantation. He was a remote but familiar figure in his crisp white bush shirt and starched khaki shorts, ivory-handled walking stick in one hand, and his bad-tempered dog, Buster, on a leash in the other.

  He didn’t bark like Buster.

  He just didn’t say very much.

  In comparison, the Sudu Nona talked a lot. No one knew her name and she knew no one’s name. Those who had seen her said she was beautiful, like an angel, with delicate white skin and long golden hair that she wore in a knot at the top of her head. Those who had heard her speak said she sounded like a Pentecostal magpie, speaking in tongues.

  She didn’t like Ceylon, didn’t like having to move herself and her family from England to this strange, untamed place full of unfamiliar people and smells. She did, however, like the role of lady of the manor and the small army of servants that was hers to command if she wished, which she didn’t.

  She left it to Chandi’s mother, Premawathi, to run the place, and spent her days drifting aimlessly through the manicured gardens, reading three-month-old British magazines and drinking the excellent tea her husband’s factory produced.

  And since Jonathan, her only son, had been sent away to an English boarding school last year, she seemed to have lost interest in even these few pursuits, preferring t
o sit around and mope.

  He was only ten, far too young, in her opinion, to leave his darling mother.

  At seven, her daughter Anne wore the slightly condescending air of a child who knew she was more intelligent than her mother. Which in fact she was.

  Anne adored her father, and emerged from her room only if he was around. She went to the little school reserved exclusively for British children, and returned home to her room and books.

  At mealtimes, she ate and talked sparingly, showing signs of animation only when directly addressed by her father.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t love her mother. She just didn’t seem to have too much in common with her.

  Since the lady of the house had become pregnant, it seemed that the entire house was expecting. She was querulous and complained incessantly, because this pregnancy had come as an unpleasant surprise.

  She had Jonathan and Anne, one of each gender, which had been quite adequate. Now she felt cheated by Mother Nature and couldn’t help wondering why she, of all the women in the world, had been chosen to bear once again the task of perpetuating the human race, which she didn’t much care for anyway.

  So they lived side by side, John Buckwater’s little family in the main bungalow, and the little family of staff in a small set of rooms off the kitchen.

  Although the family was scrupulously polite to the help, there existed a yawning chasm between them. The family had never had servants in England. Most of the servants had never worked for white people before. Neither knew quite how to treat the other, and however hard they tried, they never seemed to get it right.

  And so the relationship, if it was even that, stumbled on dotted with misunderstandings, reprimands and sullen silences. It was colored by gratitude and servility on one side and almost impossibly high expectations on the other.

  WHEN JOHN BUCKWATER had first arrived in Ceylon some three years ago, it had been to a vast bungalow, a fully equipped tea factory and a thriving tea plantation.

  He had spent a few months out in India some years before, but hadn’t really stayed long enough to learn very much. In India, he had visited friends in the governor’s office and vaguely considered taking up a job there. This was his first shot at being a tea planter.

  Other than Appuhamy, who came with the bungalow, and the Kankanipillai, who came with the factory, there had been no workers or servants. He had left it to the Kankanipillai, who knew the area and the people, to hire factory workers and tea pickers. He tried in vain to interest his wife in hiring her household staff, but she had languidly said, “Darling, Appuhamy knows best.”

  The fact that Appuhamy did know best was beside the point for John Buckwater, who wanted a happy, supportive wife by his side as he came to terms with this new land and its unfamiliar people.

  Instead, he had come to rely implicitly on Appuhamy, who was a sort of majordomo cum butler cum valet.

  Appuhamy had worked with British people before, and had been bequeathed to John Buckwater by the previous planter at Glencairn. He claimed to be sixty years of age, although John privately suspected him to be nearer seventy.

  He was a slight but imposing figure in his snowy-white sarong, white shirt and broad black belt. He wore his long, scanty gray hair in the traditional fashion—oiled and drawn into a tight knot at the back of his head and held in place with a tortoiseshell comb, rather like a Spanish señora.

  It was Appuhamy who hired Premawathi as housekeeper. She was a good choice, for not only did she speak passable English learned from her years at a missionary-run convent, but she was also quick, competent and abhorred laziness.

  The only drawback was that she came with three children, but she quickly forestalled any possible objections, pointing out that the two girls could help in the house after school. In a house the size of Glencairn, the extra hands would be helpful.

  The little boy was just over a year old, but Premawathi promised to keep him in the servants’ quarters and the four soon settled down in a little room off the kitchen.

  Premawathi’s husband, Disneris, worked as a salesman in a Colombo grocery shop. Because of his meager salary, he could not afford to keep Premawathi and the children with him, so the job at Glencairn had been the answer to all their prayers.

  He tried to visit them once a month, but train fares were steep and the journey was long. Often, he wouldn’t see his family for three months at a time. It was a bad situation, but it couldn’t be helped. Colombo was expensive and jobs were scarce.

  The three children went to the church school, which was a ten-minute walk from Glencairn. After school, the two girls swept, cleaned, made beds and helped Premawathi with the cooking.

  Chandi romped through the tea plantation, and ran a profitable little business on the side.

  chapter 3

  IN 1505, THE PORTUGUESE LANDED IN CEYLON, FIRMLY DETERMINED to make it their own. The resident Ceylonese people, ruled by no fewer than three kings in three separate kingdoms, were divided by loyalty, caste and a few other factors. They were ripe for conquering.

  The Portuguese walked in easily enough, but had the usual geographical and linguistic problems conquering heroes face when conquering unfamiliar lands.

  The Ceylonese were quick to catch on, and although they bowed down to the might of the foreign invaders, they were not above having a few laughs at their expense.

  One particular episode occurred when they enlisted the help of a few islanders to lead them to the kingdom of Kotte, so they could inform the incumbent king that he was to be relieved of his duties. It is said that the trip, which could have taken a few hours, took days before the tired and footsore conquerors were delivered to the now ex-king, by a bunch of sniggering Ceylonese.

  The islanders obediently embraced Catholicism and a few Catholics, who married them. Although the Portuguese succeeded in annexing most of Ceylon for themselves, the central hill kingdom of Kandy remained inviolate. No amount of guns, cannons and bayonets could battle against strategically placed rocks rolled down mountainsides by an unseen enemy.

  The intricacies of guerrilla warfare were new to the Portuguese.

  In 1642, the Dutch sailed in to see what all the fuss was about. After unceremoniously getting rid of the Portuguese, they claimed the island as their own. With them came the Dutch Reformed religion, Roman Dutch law, a whole bunch of Dutch recipes and a few more intermarriages. They too ruled all but the still inviolate Kandyan kingdom.

  In 1796, flushed with success in recently acquired India, the British decided that it was now their turn. Having equally unceremoniously got rid of the Dutch, they claimed the island for their own. This time, the whole island.

  With the help of a few turncoat Sinhalese, they stormed Kandy, imprisoned the ruler Rajasinghe II and set up home.

  They did this quite literally, building typical English residences ranging from stately Tudor mansions to quaint cottages, bringing everything but the kitchen sink over from England. The bathroom sinks were brought over, porcelain Armitage Shanks affairs, which were proudly installed in their English-tiled bathrooms.

  The British brought over the Protestant faith, but found the convertible natives all taken; they belonged to either the Catholic Church or the Dutch Reformed Church. But minor setbacks like this were no great deterrents, and they settled down to a long and hopefully profitable rule.

  It was soon discovered that while Colombo on the coastline was warm and humid for most of the year, the hill country was delightful: cool, temperate and ideal for plantations.

  So mountains were blasted, roads were built and railways were laid. Some islanders were enlisted to work by means of bribery and promises of later jobs, but since the British didn’t really trust them to do anything but the most menial of labor, the bulk of the work was done by the British themselves.

  The Ceylonese, an essentially lazy lot, had no complaints but watched with interest to see what would come next.

  Next came coffee.

  Recognizing the money to be
made from cultivating the rich, fertile hill country, the British decided that since tea was already being successfully grown in India, Ceylon would be the coffee producer for the empire.

  So coffee was planted and all went swimmingly until a blight struck, ruining entire plantations. After battling unsuccessfully to contain, if not eradicate it, they gave in and watched helplessly as the fruits of their labors literally went up in smoke.

  But the British fighting spirit was not to be quelled by little things like coffee blights. Tea had worked fine in India. No reason why it couldn’t here.

  Once it was safely established that tea was doing well and there was no foreseeable danger of blights, the British dug their heels in and laid their pipes and slippers firmly down on Ceylonese soil.

  The hills were alive with the King’s English.

  By this year, 1935, the British were as firmly established as they would ever be, and if there were ominous rumblings from the natives, they were firmly ignored, like everything else remotely unpleasant in this tolerably pleasant land.

  Up in the mountains their mini-England flourished, ably commanded by British planters and their British wives. Clubs did brisk business and tea parties, bridge nights and cricket matches were the order of the day.

  The weather also usually behaved itself.

  Tea plantations sprang up one after the other, all with nostalgic British names like St. Anne’s, Abercrombie, Loolecondera, Windsor, St. Coombs and, of course, Glencairn. Each had its own tea factory and bungalow on the lines of an English country manor, complete with fireplaces, bay windows, music rooms and solariums on the inside, and pergolas, lily ponds, swimming pools and manicured gardens on the outside.

  While tea plantations thrived, so did the bungalow gardens, which were full of imported British blooms to complement the imported British belles. Marigolds, hydrangeas, daisies, lilies, chrysanthemums, carnations and English roses grew in carefully manicured beds and borders.