II
THE ASHFIELD TAMIL
CASSIE SPOTTED THE SPICE MART because she was on the lookout for a South Asian grocery. At the launch of their university’s Centre for Australian Literature, Ash had expressed his disappointment with a Sri Lankan restaurant where he had recently dined. The dhal had proved particularly unsatisfying, said Ash. It was thin and sour, nothing like the comforting curried lentils, velvety with coconut milk, that he had eaten as a child.
Ash—as Ashoka preferred to be known—mentioned the dhal because he had noticed that women were moved by references to that aspect of his past. When they learned that he had lived in Sri Lanka as a child, they pictured him in a tropical garden where fruit fell to the hand, too innocent to divine the vicious historical turn that would soon cast him on the grudging benevolence of the West. This satisfying nonsense simplified everything, clearing factual clutter to reveal the way forward. Now whatever needed to happen next could happen.
It had been explained to Ash that the government funded the Centre for Australian Literature after a ministerial survey of humanities graduates found that eighty-six per cent of English majors had never read an Australian book. Asked to name a contemporary Australian novelist, responses were more or less equally divided between ‘that Oscar and Louise guy’ and Stephen King. Most declined to ‘Name a novel by Patrick White’, although one student recalled Riders on the Storm. These results were welcome: they could be blamed on the ousted Labor government.
Predictably, the national broadcaster—a viper’s nest of socialists, tree-huggers and ugly, barren females—had seized on the survey, exhuming one of its bleeding-heart ideologues to moan about funding cuts to education. The flagrant bias of the national broadcaster was a gift to the government’s spin doctors, but the survey struck an unexpected chord with the right-wing press. ‘Aussie Heritage Lost to Multiculturalism’ (broadsheet) was backed up by ‘Our Classroom Shame’ (tabloid). At this warning shot from its chief ally, the government acted decisively, and the Centre for Australian Literature opened after just five years.
At the launch, Cassie watched the men whose speeches followed one another. She was in the first year of her doctoral candidature. Leanne, her supervisor, was the inaugural director of the Centre, but Cassie saw that Leanne was of no account. The Aboriginal elder whose customary welcome had opened the ceremony was equally beside the point. These two were required by protocol but only got in the way, like a debutante’s white gloves. The men on the podium had smooth or corrugated faces, they tolerated the symbolism of women and Aboriginal people, and they were in charge. Their various speeches came down to one: ‘Do not imagine we wouldn’t crush you if we chose.’ Cassie had been brought up to believe that the world these men inhabited—the rage and spite and cruelty that were its grim, medieval furnishings—had been swept away. Now and then, the realisation that it had not swam blackly before her like a frightening malfunction of vision.
While she listened, Cassie went on eating, having edged her way to the buffet as soon as the speeches began. She was a bony girl who was always hungry. As a child, she had craved white bread, and thin slices of dried sausage spread with mustard, and dark plum jam in which you could stand a spoon. All these things, which Cassie was fed by her grandmother, were banned at home. At home there was nourishing sugarless cake, and soybean casseroles in which tomato skins floated. From the mudbrick house in a valley up north, where two kelpies had succumbed to snakebite, Cassie fled during the holidays to Sydney and her grandmother’s flat: to plate-glass windows and Schubert, to creamy veal and embroidered tablecloths, to a toilet with no spiders and no scary notice about blockages taped to the wall. Oh, the wonderful, modern pleasure of a toilet that flushed!
The Minister for Education said, ‘I like to begin every day, the pressures of public office permitting, by dipping into one of our world-class Australian writers.’ He misquoted a line of Henry Lawson and beamed. The mistake was spotted only by the Lawson specialist, an alcoholic, who by that stage of the evening was incapable of speech. Education being a trivial portfolio, the minister, a golden boy, had also been entrusted with Immigration. ‘Young people are the wealth of our nation,’ he announced. He had forgotten, momentarily, that he was in an institution that catered to lazy, feral degenerates, for his own children had come into his mind: a trio of cherubs.
All the bottles within sight were empty. The Lawson specialist began to drain the contents of abandoned glasses, believing he was the only person present who remembered that the minister had once left children seeking asylum to drown off the Australian coast. As often happened, the Lawson specialist was quite wrong. The minister himself recalled the incident perfectly: the children were foreigners and Muslims, and the pressure of public office had not permitted their rescue. ‘As Shakespeare reminds us,’ improvised the minister, ‘the child is father to the man.’ Shakespeare, while unfortunately not Australian literature, was universal and, like the minister, beyond reproach.
Cassie’s mouth was full when a man she didn’t know asked if the pastry she was eating contained meat. A girl came out of nowhere to confide, ‘I often think about going veggo. But I just really love a good steak!’ Smiling, she shook all her curls at the dilemma, extravagant in a rose-coloured dress. She turned her rosy shoulder in such a way that she was addressing only the man and said, ‘And bacon!’
‘Yes, it’s the kind of thing that must have once taken up many a conversational hour in Rome,’ he replied. ‘You know: the injustice of slavery versus the inconvenience of life without slaves.’
The girl’s enthusiastic body went still. Then she went away.
‘Hi,’ said Ash. ‘I’m Ash.’
Cassie was a little shocked. But she saw a knight: brutal in a just cause.
A bunch of people ended up at a Lebanese restaurant later that evening. Cassie found herself sitting next to Ash. They asked each other questions that had nothing to do with what they really wanted to know, while their bodies conducted a separate, unambiguous conversation. Ash learned that Cassie was writing a thesis on Australian expatriate novelists. He was at the dinner because he knew Leanne from a library committee, he explained. It had rained earlier, and drops clung to the cars parked outside the window by which they sat—Cassie thought of fish with rivers still slipping off their fins.
Menus were brought. By means of urgent gestures, the Lawson specialist indicated that he needed a drink.
Someone asked, ‘Shall we share?’
Ash said that he was a vegetarian. ‘But the rest of you, please go ahead. I’ll order for myself.’
‘Why don’t we all get vegetarian?’ said Leanne, glancing around. ‘I can’t remember the last time I ate meat anyway.’
Her research assistant said helpfully, ‘When Baniti took us to that halal restaurant in Auburn last week. We had camel.’
‘Well, obviously I didn’t want to be culturally insensitive,’ said Leanne.
Ash told a story of getting lost between his apartment and the university. It was a ten-minute walk, but he had found himself on the Princes Highway. It had been plain to Ash from day one that the natives adored an idiot Pom. ‘I’ve no idea how it happened, but I wound up on a bus heading to Kogarah,’ he concluded. He gave the suburb three syllables, ko-ga-ra, transforming it into an Italian resort.
‘Kog-rah! Kog-rah!’ the Australians shouted, and split their sides.
Ash told Cassie softly, appealing to her alone, ‘When you’re still finding your way around, you make mistakes.’
At The Spice Mart, which stood across the road from Ashfield Station, rice was heaped on the floor in stitched cloth bags as well as in giant plastic packs. The man behind the counter was as elongated and flat as if he had passed under a roller. Wrapped in the dusty smell of lentils, he was anomalous among the spices and Bollywood DVDs, having clad his two dimensions in a bureaucrat’s pressed trousers and pinstriped shirt.
When she discovered that he came from Sri Lanka, Cassie enquired after his �
��ethnic group’. It was an excuse to speak about Ash. ‘My partner has Sinhalese ancestry,’ she explained, ‘although he identifies as British.’ She realised that she had almost said ‘husband’ when even ‘partner’ was a stretch for someone she had known barely a month. The shopkeeper continued to examine her through the heavy glasses that turned his eyes into aspic set with beetles. He was a Jaffna Tamil, he said. ‘But here no one knows who we are. What to do?’
Cassie was familiar with this kind of thing. Her grandmother had grown up in Vienna, and laments about Australian ignorance circulated readily with the torte.
The shopkeeper asked if she had seen an Indian grocery. ‘That side, on Liverpool Road?’
‘No.’
‘I have been here three years. They came last month. You didn’t see them?’
Iron-spined, he came out from behind his counter to show her the chutneys and pickles, and was revealed as a darkly varnished plank. On his advice, Cassie came away with onion sambol and a little curry-leaf plant in a pot. Ash was pleased with the sambol, which he said went tremendously well with grilled cheese. Cassie told him about the Ashfield Tamil, concluding, ‘He used to be a postmaster in Sri Lanka.’ As soon as he had said that, his clothes had made sense: Cassie saw that he was dressed for the past.
‘Tamils do very well for themselves,’ said Ash. ‘They’re hardworking, intelligent people. Terrifically good at maths.’ He knew no Tamils but was repeating the kind of thing his father said. The only other person who had offered Cassie fixed pictures of this or that race was her grandmother. When Cassie’s grandmother was young, her politics had landed her in a camp. She emerged from it at the end of the war despising everyone she had once loved: the poor, the oppressed, Communists, Jews. The other prisoners had spat at her and threatened her and taught her to steal. She had gone into the camp trusting in goodness and come out knowing there was none. By the time Cassie knew her, she lived in Cremorne with a view of Sydney Harbour and hated Australians. Her daughter had betrayed her by marrying one. The flaxen grandchild—a throwback to her girlhood—was forgiven. As time went on, the harbour became a casual blue insult hurled at the grandmother’s life. To thwart it, the curtains in her flat were kept shut. In aquarium-like gloom, the grandchild listened to ravishing Lieder and a voice that said Italians were liars, Slavs were animals and gypsies spread disease. Between the girl’s visits, the grandmother lived for dumplings and strudel, for childhood recovered spoon by spoon. Merciful childhood turned her arteries to concrete and killed her before the blonde sprite grew tall enough to say, ‘You are a bitter, crazy old woman, Oma, and your hair has fallen out.’
Ash’s mother was Scottish; he had been born in London, and educated at universities in England and the States. For five years in the 1970s, well before the civil war, the Fernandos had lived in Sri Lanka. Ash went to an international school in Colombo where the little girls wore pale pink or pale green or pale blue dresses. ‘International’ meant an Egyptian boy and four Taiwanese sisters and Ash. Everyone else was white. The only language Ash had ever spoken fluently was English, although he had enough French to deploy, in a respectable accent, various phrases made essential by Derrida and Foucault.
When Ash was born, the British had been gone twenty years from the subcontinent. Empire was a concept, deplorable of course, but nothing to do with Ash. He was a political scientist, and had written incisively, and at times intelligently, on The Global Subaltern: Mobility and Modernity in a Transnational Age. Ash’s father was a GP, his mother a gynaecologist. Their professional disparity engendered a tension that must have informed Ash’s childhood, although he had not been aware of it. Yet it might have been at the root of the mild rebellion that turned him from medicine, which was so plainly his destiny, to politics. As soon as Ash left school his parents divorced, and he realised that all three of them had been waiting for this to happen. His parents remained friends, living only streets away from each other in Swiss Cottage with new partners and stepchildren. Ash acquired a half-sister. Christmas, by tradition a grave festivity at which the three Fernandos had opened expensive gifts and peacefully dismantled a goose, developed into a riotous affair with reindeer antlers and aunts. A preposterous ceremony known as Kris Kringle played its part in Ash’s decision to apply for the lectureship in Sydney that he saw advertised on a sleety November day.
Women—but not only women—were drawn to Ash, to his politeness and his eyes. His eyes suggested, obscurely, that he had suffered. In Sydney, an emeritus professor offered him the use, rent-free and for as long as he liked, of a pied-à-terre in Newtown. It consisted of a big, high-ceilinged room on the top floor of a subdivided Victorian mansion. A bathroom opened off the hall, and a short stair led to a room at the top of a tower. It contained a hard chair, and a table that served as a desk. On clear days, the view reached to a distant, glinty line that was Botany Bay. It was the long stair down to the street that had defeated the professor’s knee. For most of his life, he had been a radical with a kingly beard. Now, having retired to the Hunter Valley, he was writing a monumental work that examined everything by which he had lived and judged it a sham. His wife had stopped speaking to him. Introduced to Ash, he saw a foreigner newly arrived in Australia: that meant someone who needed help. He lied, ‘My heart,’ hitting himself on the chest to explain about the stairs. He wouldn’t confess to arthritis, which made an old man of him. That night, resting between savage paragraphs, the professor began to cry. He was remembering what Ash had said: ‘In every way that matters your heart is entirely sound.’
Everyone Ash knew in Sydney lived in houses in which rooms opened off a long passage. These corridors were unfailingly dark and cold—why didn’t Australians heat their houses? There would be, at best, a dodgy, unflued gas heater in a living room. Sydney remained for Ash a city of cold bedrooms, cold bathrooms. Oh, but how he loved it! For a long time after leaving Sri Lanka, he had remembered leafy lanes held in a sea-blue rind. He went back when he was twenty-four. Colombo was full of soldiers and dust. Ash went away again quickly and didn’t return. In Sydney he recovered lost mornings of steamy grey warmth. The city was regulated and hygienic—occidental—yet voluptuously receptive to chaos and filth. It knew the elemental, antique drama of the sea. Whether or not Ash could see it, the sea was there with its deaths and its ships. Whenever a storm stirred the Pacific, every hill in Sydney was a tarmacked wave. The city smelled briny and fumy. It was a smell that made Ash feel something like homesick but without sadness. In those first weeks, when he was at his most porous, past and present fused. The understanding cries of crows—Ah! Ohh! Aahh!—rang out from his childhood. A botched arpeggio overheard on a humid afternoon revived the Czerny exercises played by nine-year-old Ash. He recognised things he couldn’t name: trees that ruined concrete with their toes, reckless floral perfumes. Even the fruit bats rotting on power lines were dreamy visitants from the past.
Sydney was a summer city as London was a winter one. Its dusty golden light set a nimbus around bodies moving unhindered in floaty clothes. When dark jackets and heavy scarves appeared in the streets, the city looked hangdog and shifty. That yolky light was one of the things Ash had missed without knowing it. His emails to friends around the world said, ‘I spent too many years in places where the light was blue.’
Cassie was oaty porridge: pale, reassuring, wholesome. Ash thrilled to her satisfying breasts, her orderly teeth. Her eyes, widely spaced, gave her the remote look of someone listening to distant music. She wore empire-waisted velvet dresses, with sleeves gathered at the wrist, which had belonged to her mother. Cassie was taller than her mother, and the jewel-coloured dresses barely skimmed her knees. Evoking a vanished age, they intensified her faraway air. Her reading glasses had large frames that made her look like a girl playing at being a grandmother; when she took them off, there were a few seconds when she seemed dopey and pitiless. All her effects were like that, uncalculated, incidental, and her artlessness was part of her power. Sometimes she turned up in j
eans topped with a vintage blouse, pintucked and demure, in a lilac-y sort of blue. Tiny fabric loops fastened two nacre buttons at the back. At the sight of Cassie’s shoulderblades, faintly shining through the blouse, Ash wanted nothing more than to undo those buttons.
There were fragile, potent, slightly witchy things on Cassie’s windowsill: a bird’s skull, lavender sea urchin cases, a view of the Prater painted on glass. There was also a photo of her parents: solid, dark strangers. They proved what Ash had known all along: Cassie was a changeling, magical. That was the kind of foolishness she called up in Ash. He would have been embarrassed for any friend who indulged in it.
Cassie had the Sydney imperviousness to cold. Her velvet dresses—emerald, sapphire, topaz—were unlined. When an icy gale blew from the west, she slipped a weightless coat over her dress, or a lambswool cardigan. She seemed to own neither scarf nor gloves. Her concession to winter was socks inside her boots. Previously, Ash had thought of Australians—if he thought of them at all—as no-nonsense, practical people: Canadians with tans. Now he realised that he had overlooked what history had required of them: they were visionaries, adept at denial. Australians had seen pastures where there was red dust, geraniums where there were trees as old as time, no one where there were five hundred nations—they dealt with winter as a tank deals with a blade of grass.
In bed, arching beneath Ash, Cassie bit the side of his palm. There was salt in her, he decided. That made him think of his mother: her salty Scottish eyes. His mother had emailed Ash on the day he left: ‘Australians are hard-working and very successful. They are suspicious of their success and resent it. They are winners who prefer to see themselves as victims. Their national hero, Ned Kelly, was a violent criminal—they take this as proof of their egalitarianism. They worship money, of course. Anyway, enjoy yourself.’
The Life to Come Page 3