by Heather Burt
“Oh Christ, machan. Is that you?”
He strained against the weight of the three-wheeler, but the vehicle gripped him tighter.
One of the soldiers was standing by the truck, shouting orders that reached Rudy like muted percussion. Rudy called to the man in English, then in Sinhala, panicking, in his confusion, when his shouts seemed to him nothing more than whispers. The soldier, however, darted a look in his direction and sprinted over. His polished boots stopped inches from Rudy’s face. With a whistle, he signalled to someone Rudy couldn’t see, and soon after, the weight of the three-wheeler began to shift. As the vehicle was righted, new fires coursed down his legs. Clenching his fists, he focused again on the figure by the truck.
“Can you help me get to that boy over there?” he shouted at the legs around him. “I need to see if he’s okay. He’s my—I need to see him.”
One soldier ran off. The other crouched next to the wounded taxi driver, pressing two fingers to the man’s jowl. “The ambulance will come soon,” he said, then he stood and jogged away.
Rudy lifted his torso, supporting its weight on his forearms. His pelvis screamed, though the intensity of the pain served to dull the throbbing of his shoulder and head and the sting along his gashed arm. He fixed his eyes on the young man in the shade of the truck. Then, with agonizing slowness, he began to haul his lower half across the pavement, his arms awkwardly doing the work of legs, every inch of progress a marathon of exertion. He stopped often and brushed the glass out of his path so he could rest his cheek on the ground. People moved around him, some of them running into the maelstrom to help, others hobbling away from it, bloody and stunned. More soldiers had arrived, their tidy uniforms an incongruous sight. They carried the limp forms of those too injured to walk and deposited them in the shade of the army truck. Rudy was grateful he could scarcely hear, and began to wish he couldn’t see. But he needed to get to the boy.
When at last he neared the truck, he shifted his course to move around the strangers who lay in his way: a pair of businessmen; a woman in a bloodstained pink blouse; another woman, with grey-streaked hair falling out of its bun. He’d begun to sense, with a creeping, prickling flush of horror, that the six or seven people lying in the shade were dead, or close to it. There was no pain in their battered faces, no trace of feeling at all. They could have passed for synthetic dummies, fashioned from some realistic, but not quite perfect, material. It might have been possible to dismiss them altogether—he desperately wanted to—if it weren’t for Kanda. If Kanda were to be alive when he reached him, then these grim bodies on the pavement had to be real. On some level, he had to be responsible for them as well.
A foot or so away from the boy, he stopped, closed his eyes, and lowered his cheek to the ground. He imagined looking down at his student’s face and seeing the same expressionless, rubbery features that signalled the strangers’ fates. In his mind he saw the confident, intelligent young man lying senseless on the pavement, and the image filled him with a panicky dread that reached far beyond the pandemonium of Janadhipathi Mawatha.
He lifted his head and struggled forward with his arms. The street began to spin. Though he was virtually prone on the ground, he felt he would fall. He groped a few more inches and forced his eyes to focus. It wasn’t Kanda. The fellow looked nothing at all like Kanda, and for an instant Rudy wondered who it was he’d been following through the city. His head throbbed. With what felt like the last of his strength, he pushed away from the line of bodies and flattened himself on the spinning ground.
Sometime later—he’d lost all track of time—he felt a hand rest gently on his shoulder, and he opened his eyes.
“You are Mr. Van Twest, no?”
Rudy lifted his head and looked up at the man crouching next to him—a doctor, or a paramedic of some kind, with a bald head and round spectacles.
“My son is a pupil at your school.” The man smiled briefly. “He loves everything American, and he says you’re from America.” His expression became serious. “I think you need a doctor, sir. I saw you trying to get away. Leg is broken, maybe?”
Rudy noticed that his hearing had improved. When the man’s hand slipped away from his shoulder, he raised himself onto his forearms.
“What happened here?”
The man ran his palm across his bald head and surveyed the destruction. “Hatred,” he said. “So much hatred.” He looked down at Rudy. “But as I was saying, sir, you must go to the hospital. The orders are to take only the really serious ones now, but I think we can find a place for you.” He reached out and patted Rudy’s shoulder. “Special case.”
Rudy hesitated then nodded. “Thank you, Mr. ...?”
“Wettasinghe. My son is Viraj.”
“I remember him,” Rudy lied.
“Ah, good!” Again the man’s smile was fleeting. “Tell me, Mr. Van Twest. You didn’t have any of the children with you this morning? Was it a school outing?”
He thought of Kanda, still unaccounted for.
“No. I had a spare period, and I came downtown to do some errands.”
Mr. Wettasinghe shook his head. “Terrible luck you had today, sir. But the worst is over. I’ll come back with the stretcher.” He assumed an air of authority. “You must stay where you are, Mr. Van Twest. No more crawling around. The hospital will be very busy, so the sooner you’re getting there, the better.”
Mr. Wettasinghe jogged off in the direction of an ambulance that had pulled up in front of the clock tower. Rudy turned away from the bodies on the pavement and rested his head on his uninjured arm. Something crinkled inside his pocket—Kanda’s letter. He struggled to remember its content. Something about lions and gazelles and survival of the fittest. He tried to remember more, but what came to him instead was an image of the boy standing on the traffic island in the middle of President Street, looking out at the fragile calm, checking his watch. And a glib voice.
The Tigers employ kids a hell of a lot younger than Kanda.
The idea was unthinkable. He pushed it away.
In a final attempt to shut out the chaos all around him and the fires in his own body, he imagined himself with Clare Fraser on a slow, swaying train ride through the hill country of his grandfather’s tea estate.
APRIL 1945
The back of the tea factory was the area where the men stacked wood and fed the fires for the ovens that dried the fermented tea leaves. As the previous day had been a poya day, no plucking had been done, and the ovens were not yet needed. Alec rounded the corner of the factory, thinking that in the absence of any workers he would snitch some wood and ease his boredom by building something. He stopped short, however, for leaning against the factory wall were his brother and another man, the latter blocked almost entirely by Ernie. The two of them looked as if they were locked in an important conference. Alec retreated behind the side wall and peered around the corner. He stood on tiptoe, craning his neck, and saw that the other man was Amitha. He and Ernie were facing each other, and for a moment Alec strained to hear what they were talking about, until he remembered that Amitha couldn’t talk—a source of confusion, for what was the point of loafing about with someone who couldn’t talk? Alec wondered briefly if the tea taster might be giving one of his comic performances, but he was far too still for that. And besides, Ernie wasn’t laughing.
Restless, but having nothing better to do, Alec scuffed his shoe in the dirt and watched his brother with his usual mixture of resentment and admiration. For while Ernie’s tendency to loaf about with factory workers was a nuisance, even Alec could not deny there was a great deal about him to be admired: the strength of his long limbs; his easy command of words and ideas; his ability to fit in with all manner of people, even the stylish, club-going young men he preferred to avoid. In many ways, barring the painting and the poetry-writing, Ernie was a more suitable man-of-the-house than their father was. For although their father had an important job and commanded respect, he lacked a mysterious but important something that E
rnie clearly possessed. The word that seemed best to describe this something—a word that Alec had heard one of his father’s friends use in reference to Ernie—was charisma. Ernie had charisma. It was something that Alec had attempted occasionally to project, smiling a certain way, entering rooms as if they were his own private domain, but he had no way of knowing if his efforts had been at all successful, or even noticed.
Ernie lit a cigarette and passed it to Amitha, then he lit one for himself. As the two smoked, Alec began to sense in the interaction something of which, he was quite certain, his father would not approve. Yet he couldn’t say precisely what it was. Nor did he fully understand why his father would disapprove. Other than the obvious and, for Ernie, ordinary transgressions of loafing about with a factory employee and mucking up his white shirt on the grimy factory wall, the actions that Alec observed were frustratingly innocent. There was something not right, however, something out of the ordinary, and he found himself, as he had during the Tea Maker’s recent lecture, willing his brother to do something, anything, that could be construed as an active declaration of the war that had been brewing for quite some time now.
The strength of his own will took Alec by surprise.
With casual defiance, Ernie tossed his unfinished cigarette through the open door of the wood stove—a seemingly trivial thing but nonetheless criminal, Alec was certain, for tea making was a delicate process. Anything could throw it off or contaminate it, even petty intruders like Ernie’s cigarette. It wouldn’t be tattling to mention the offence in passing, or, even better, to ask their father whether or not it was permissible to throw rubbish in the wood stove; this was, after all, something a Tea Maker needed to know about. Expecting his brother to be on his way any second, Alec scurried back to the front of the factory then turned and retraced his steps, so that when he and Ernie crossed paths it would look accidental. And he did want to cross paths. For even though he was going to cause trouble for his brother, it occurred to him that Ernie might be in a mood to take him to Nuwara Eliya in the car and entertain him with funny or scandalous stories. But Alec made it all the way back to his starting point without meeting his brother.
He peered around the corner of the building again and saw that Ernie and Amitha had shifted position. Ernie was now slouched back against the factory wall; Amitha’s palms were pressed to the wall, on either side of Ernie’s head, and his legs were straddling Ernie’s. Ernie was making hand signs, like the sort that got made in the tasting room, and Amitha was watching. Alec scowled. He hammered the toe of his shoe into the dirt then took a step forward, intending to break up the bizarre interaction. Instead of carrying on, though, he stopped short, as if a barrier stood between him and the two young men. There was no barrier, however, and his reluctance only frustrated him further. Something told him he should march up to Ernie and insist they drive to Nuwara Eliya. For his brother’s own good, this something at the back of his mind said, Alec should pull him away. But he remained where he was, unable to act.
Then Amitha laughed, a low, off-key sort of laugh, and Alec looked more closely. Ernie’s fingers were laced together in another hand sign. Amitha lowered one of his own hands from the wall and took hold of Ernie’s thumb. Carefully he manipulated its position, then he switched to the wrist of Ernie’s other hand and moved it, too. A lesson, it seemed. Ernie had attempted one of the tea taster’s hand signs and made Amitha laugh when he did it wrong. Now Amitha was correcting him. The explanation was both straightforward and entirely insufficient, and Alec was suddenly afraid to keep watching. He turned away and marched off in the direction of the P.D.’s bungalow, frowning intensely.
At the mouth of the long dirt drive that led to the road, he stopped and surveyed his calm surroundings helplessly. He wanted desperately to be playing cricket—to have a solid bat in his hands and the promise of a perfect, biting crack of contact to dislodge the baffling scene in his head. Eyeing the distance to the road, he assumed a batsman’s stance and swung at the air. Then he ran.
It was well over a wicket’s length to the end of the drive, but when he reached the road, he turned left and kept going, in the direction of Nuwara Eliya. He was no longer Alec Van Twest the school cricket champion, however; he was a British soldier, just landed in France, and the entire world was counting on virtuous, fearless men like him to run out the evil Nazis. He ran faster, in spite of the heat. Then he modified his story. The Nazis had retreated back across Europe, into Asia, and were now infiltrating Ceylon with the help of the Japanese. They were planning to reorganize in the hill country, where they thought only ignorant peasants lived (though they were in for a rude awakening). At that very moment, Nazis and Japs were closing in on Nuwara Eliya, and a citizens’ alert had been issued. All able-bodied males were being called upon to help fight. Alec wiped his forehead on his sleeve. The other boys his age had been instructed to stay home, but he, Alec Van Twest, was an exception; his remarkable abilities had been noticed. He was brilliant: he’d learned everything there was to know about tea making and would probably be appointed P.D. as soon as he came of age. He was stealthy: he’d been spying on factory intruders, and rumour had it he was on the verge of an arrest. He was strong and fast. Most importantly, he had charisma—an often-ignored but crucial quality. Some men pretended to possess it, but they were fakes and impostors and weren’t to be trusted.
Alec’s soles rattled against the hard pavement, and he wished he were wearing his tennis shoes. Soldiers didn’t wear tennis shoes, of course, but then soldiers didn’t generally run long distances on paved roads under the April sun. A few yards up the Normandy beach and into the safety of a village—what could be easier? The road to Nuwara Eliya, on the other hand, was miles long. It was winding and much hillier than it ever seemed in the car. Alec looked over his shoulder and was both impressed and vaguely anxious to see that the P.D.’s bungalow had disappeared. He ran on, but in his isolation the futility of what he was doing became more and more apparent. At the sight of a fruit stand up ahead, he slowed to a jog, then a walk. His chest heaved and sweat streamed down his face and back. For a moment he couldn’t remember what had brought him out on this ridiculous marathon in the first place, but when the scene behind the tea factory came back to him, as confusing as before, Alec feared it would be impossible to get rid of.
He picked up a long, thin branch from the side of the road and whipped it through the weeds growing next to the pavement. He whipped the mercilessly hot air. Then he whipped the outstretched palms of several invisible Nazis. He was about to strike at his brother, for refusing to take him to Nuwara Eliya, when his attention shifted to Amitha and found there a surprisingly fitting target. He pictured the uneducated, unspeaking tea taster leaning over his brother and lashed out with his whip. The stick whistled through the air, and for a second or two the figure in his mind lurched in pain. Then it resumed its position, as if nothing had happened, and Alec was forced to lash out again. Over and over he repeated the process, sweating and grunting, until some people in the back of a passing lorry pointed at him and laughed. Scowling, he threw his whip at the lorry, but the branch flopped unceremoniously to the pavement.
Now just a few yards from the fruit stand, Alec dug in his trouser pockets and came up with enough coins to buy a coconut. There were plenty of drinks in the icebox at home, but the cool, sweet water of a king coconut was the least the world owed him on this infernal day. The fruit vendor was alone at his stand, and as Alec approached him he silently rehearsed his request in Sinhala. It was a habit he’d acquired from his brother, who insisted it was rude always to speak English to shopkeepers and labourers. Right before the carefully chosen words left Alec’s mouth, however, he swallowed them back. For through a muddy but powerful logic, the fruit vendor became, suddenly, an enemy, no less deserving of his contempt than Amitha. The two were no different, really, for they both belonged to that tribe of men lurking silently in shadows all over the country, waiting to take over. Both the Tea Maker and Ernie had suggested a
s much. But while Alec had previously found the prospect of such a takeover exciting, he now recoiled from it, ashamed that he’d done nothing as yet to combat it.
“One coconut,” he said, in the haughtiest, most disdainful tone he could muster.
“Some fruit too?” the man said. “Nice rambutan? Banana?”
“No.”
The fruit vendor lopped off the top of a fat yellow coconut and offered the bulky drink to Alec. Wordlessly Alec handed over his money then went to sit under a nearby tree, his back against the trunk, his legs splayed. He tipped the coconut, took a few gulps, and stared. Before him was a swooping, sprawling valley of tea, rolling waves of green, dotted here and there with crimson-flowered trees. Far below him a river sparkled, and on the other side of the valley waterfalls rushed down craggy cliffs. The beauty of the scene was so astonishing he wondered how it was that he hadn’t ever noticed it, and he sat in a kind of awe. But it didn’t last.
Once again the factory scene came back to him, more disturbing than before, and, with it, a vague recollection of a schoolyard conversation with Rohan and Peter. It was then that Alec had learned there are men who do it with other men. “Homos,” they were called. Lunatics, perverts. “Up the arsehole!” Rohan had hissed, and the three of them nearly exploded. It was funny at the time, in the way that disgusting things were funny, but now the idea filled Alec with horror. He saw Amitha’s hand touching his brother’s, his face and shoulders leaning closer, and the source of his uneasiness became clear: the tea taster was a threat. A far more dangerous one than any ordinary labourer or fruit vendor could be, because his true nature was hidden. And though Alec didn’t quite believe that his brother would be gullible enough to succumb entirely to Amitha’s evil, Ernie was, as their father often said, too easily influenced by other people.