by Roma Tearne
When they had finally met, he had found the relationship genuinely puzzling. What was the attraction? he asked Kamala. Kamala had no idea either. Night after night they lay awake discussing their eldest daughter, getting no closer to the truth, for Stanley was a strange, uncommunicative man. Nothing the family could do, not even May’s winsome ways, had succeeded in drawing him out or dispersed the coldness that was, they felt, part of his character. Sita, the daughter who had been the closest to Bee as a child, now seemed uncomfortable in her father’s presence.
On their first visit to the Sea House the couple had stayed only for the evening. Sita had hardly spoken. It had been an awkward distressing event and the little information they did glean was unsatisfactory. Stanley worked in an office in Colombo. He was a stenographer, he told Bee, working at a firm that imported fruit from abroad.
‘Why do we need fruit from the British?’ Bee had asked, forgetting to hold his tongue. ‘Haven’t we enough wonderful fruit of our own?’
His wife and daughters had frowned disapprovingly. But Stanley hadn’t seemed to mind.
‘Apples,’ he had said. ‘The British living here miss having things from their homeland. So we get apples for them. After all, we should encourage them to stay. It’s better for the country, safer for the Tamils, anyway.’
Bee made no comment. He took out his pipe and tapped it against his chair. Then he lit it.
‘I want to go to England one day,’ Stanley had confided a little later on.
He was eating the cake his new mother-in-law had baked hastily. There had been no time to make an auspicious dish for the bride and groom; this was all she could offer. The servant woman standing in the doorway, waiting for a glimpse of the eldest daughter, shook her head sadly. This was not the way in which a Singhalese bride returned home. It was a bad omen. The bride and groom should have been given many gifts. Jewellery, for instance, a garland of flowers, a blessing at the temple. The bride should have entered her old home wearing a red sari, to be met by her sister and fed milk rice. And before all of this, right at the very beginning, the servant woman believed, before the wedding date had even been set, the couple’s horoscope should have been drawn up. But none of these things had been done. It was very, very bad. As far as the servant woman could see, shame had descended like a cloud of sea-blown sand on this family. Sita had brought it to the house, trailing her karma carelessly behind her, fully aware but indifferent to the ways in which things worked in this small costal town. The servant felt it was a wanton disgrace.
‘I want us to go to the UK,’ Stanley had said, taking Sita’s hand in his.
Watching him, Kamala had become afraid. She thought he sounded a boastful man.
After we have children, of course,’ Stanley continued. ‘This bloody place is no good for children to grow up in. Everything is denied to us Tamils. Education, good jobs, decent housing—everything. The bastard Singhalese are trying to strangle us.’
His voice had risen and he had clenched his fists.
‘Stanley!’ Sita had murmured, shaking her head.
Bee had seen with a certain savage amusement that at least his daughter had not quite forgotten her manners.
‘Does your family know you’ve got married?’ he had asked his new son-in-law finally, ignoring his wife’s look of unease.
What did Kamala think? That he too was going to behave badly?
‘Yes, yes. I’ve just told my mother. We’ll be visiting her after we leave here,’ Stanley said dismissively, lighting a cigarette without offering Bee one.
He would not be more forthcoming. No one had known what to say next. May went over to her father and sat on the floor beside him.
‘Well, let’s have some tea, huh?’ Bee had suggested, returning his wife’s look defiantly ‘What are we waiting for?’
And that had been all that had happened at that visit. They had simply taken tea and made small talk. At one point Sita had gone to the bedroom she shared with her sister and collected a few of her belongings. She had shown them her wedding ring. Heavy filigree Tamil gold, not what the Fonsekas cared for, she knew, but they had admired it anyway. The newly weds would be living in Stanley’s old bachelor pad, an annexe in Havelock Road, she informed them. The family listened politely.
‘We’ll stay there for a while,’ Sita had said. ‘Once I get a job and we can afford something better, we’ll move.’
It was no good any of them visiting, she told her mother.
‘The place is too small to swing a cat,’ she said.
The Fonsekas stared at her, not understanding the strange phrase. Why would they want to swing the cat? And it was then, for the first time, that Stanley had laughed. Ah! thought Bee, understanding at last, startled by the sudden animation in the man’s face; yes, he could see what the attraction was.
That had been fourteen years ago. Fourteen years that had given Ceylon time to change for the worse. Time enough for corruption to rise unchecked and burn like a forest fire. Riots, demonstrations, the bitterness accumulated from a century of foreign rule, all these things combined to unhinge the nation. While the British, Bee observed bitterly, had de-camped, the Ceylonese had no concept as to where on earth they were going.
Bee gave up talking about his eldest daughter and buried himself in his work. Eventually the servant woman persuaded Kamala to have Sita’s horoscope drawn up. The sea of superstition still remained. Bee watched, refraining from comment. What was done was done. Slowly, aware of his own weaknesses, he tried to be fair to Stanley, refusing to tolerate any comments on their differences in his home. It was the British who were the enemy, not his son-in-law’s. The plight of the Tamil people since independence was what needed to be addressed, not petty family differences. But for the first time Bee understood how complex a business this was. Determined, in spite of his son-in-law’s covert challenges, he tried to patch the rift. If he was disappointed, he did not show it.
‘It’s just his nature,’ he would say to Kamala whenever she became upset. ‘Human nature is the same the world over.’
But the easy affection he had once shared with Sita vanished. He did not expect it to return. Now all was correct and careful. Slowly his work had begun to sell and he became a prominent figure in the tiny artistic community that existed on the island. Once or twice a painting had sold to collectors in Malaysia. So, with one daughter married, and another growing up, he buried his disappointment and painted instead. Two years passed in this way. Sita visited, sometimes with Stanley, but more often than not alone. Her new husband was always busy. He still wanted desperately to go to the UK.
‘When we have saved up a little,’ Sita told her parents without a tremor of regret in her voice, ‘then we’ll leave.’
Bee understood. What else can the man do? Even while Kamala wept, he accepted the inevitable.
‘She chose a difficult path,’ Bee said, ‘and in spite of everything I can’t help admiring her.’
He spoke as he believed, never knowing how his words would return to haunt him.
Then five years and three months into their marriage, in the cool of the rainy season Sita announced she was pregnant. Bee responded to the news with astonished silence. Kamala, thinking he was angry, eyed him warily. But Bee was not angry. Far from it. On the same evening in the deepening twilight, he went on his usual walk across the beach to watch the ships taking up their position on the horizon and to marvel at the way in which this simple piece of information had altered his perception of the entire world, forever. A child, his grandchild! A blessing that, after so many years, brought such hope. I am glimpsing eternity, he thought, speechless with amazement. Out there in the void, between the fore and aft of his own life, was an extraordinary vision of the stars. He was delirious with happiness. Standing on the beach, gazing out towards the sea with nothing beyond him except Antarctica, he had fallen in love with this notion of immortality. Here was a life to be, not of his own time yet joined to him by time’s common flow. They would be bather
s in the same sea, he and this child; time had brought the generations together. This was how he felt, even before he set eyes on her, the little scrap they were to call Alice. As far as Bee was concerned it was love at first sight, paradise regained. Alice, returning from the hospital in her mother’s arms, ready to be shown the sea for the very first time, could anything top that? In that instant he had seen her great dark eyes roaming curiously towards the ocean and he knew that forever after the shore and the sea would be bound up with Alice, his first grandchild.
Things changed rapidly after that. He changed. All that had been falling apart began to reassemble. Kamala watched him indulgently, secretly breathing a sigh of relief. May laughed, teasing him. The neighbours became accustomed to his long discourses on the child and the nature of childhood. Her intelligence was soon legendary and had quickly become an established fact in this part of the coast. Bee didn’t care. They could laugh at him as much as they wished, but his painting now began to be influenced by the child’s interests. He stopped the sweeping watercolours of the ocean and began to paint in miniature: small sea plants that grew in cracks, minute white seashells buried on the edges of rocks, fragments of marine life washed up in the monsoon storms, fish scales, raindrops on the edges of a coconut frond. All the things in fact that he had begun to show his new granddaughter. The dealer in Colombo came to visit and liked what he saw. Life in miniature, he called it, and urged Bee to paint more. There was, it appeared, a market for this closely observed minutiae. Bee allowed the dealer to take a few paintings. But mainly he was reluctant to sell this new work, for it felt too private to be seen by others. He re-decorated the room facing the ocean, for before long, Alice was old enough to be left with them. And finally he saw, to his greatest joy, the child wanted to be near him as much as he wanted to see her.
‘Grandpa!’ she cried, as soon as she caught sight of him, waking from a sleep, carried in her mother’s arms, delighting in the sight of him.
Stanley wanted her to speak only English, of course, but somehow both Singhalese and Tamil slipped into her vocabulary. Bee made no comment, the gleam in his eye saying it all. The child could do no wrong. Kamala produced small, dainty cakes whenever a visit was eminent and May, grown tall and very lovely now, embroidered white frocks for her niece.
Time passed slowly as the sea and the old whitewashed house absorbed these moments thirstily. Memories moved lightly against the sun-warmed walls. It was a long golden moment stretching over almost a decade. Sita gave up her job as a teacher and began to write a small column for the woman’s page of the Colombo Daily News. An uneasy existence between Singhalese and Tamils existed lulling them into a false security. She wrote her articles under a pen-name and Alice, without anything being discussed, was taught to use her mother’s Singhalese maiden name. By the time she was ready to go to school she thought of herself as Alice Fonseka.
Then one night, when Alice was five, Stanley was beaten up on his way back from work and his money stolen. When he arrived home he was bleeding from a wound on his head and his clothes were torn. Luckily Alice had been staying with her grandparents. Sita called for their usual doctor, but he refused to come out, telling her to take her husband to the hospital instead. The police too were indifferent. There was a travelling circus in that part of town, the policeman said, shrugging. Best to keep away from Galle Face for a bit. It would be impossible to find the culprit.
And besides,’ the policeman had said smiling broadly at Sita, taking in the fact that her husband’s name was Tamil, ‘these things happen to everyone. Not just the Tamils. You mustn’t be so sensitive.’
Sita stared back at him, speechless. The men had hurled racist insults at her husband in Singhalese. How could the policeman think this was not a racist attack?
‘Why doesn’t your husband think of going back to Jaffna?’ the officer had suggested.
He sounded reasonable and was, he told her, trying to be helpful. Sita couldn’t believe her ears.
‘I’m doing this because I like the look of you,’ the policeman said, swaggering a little, holding his paunch with both his hands. ‘I’m doing this as a favour, d’you understand?’
When he smiled she had seen the prawn-pink undersides of his heavy lips and shuddered.
‘My husband is not from Jaffna,’ she had shouted, ‘not even his relatives came from Jaffna.’
The policeman had stared at her suggestively, warningly Afterwards she felt violated.
‘He asked me what a nice Singhalese girl like me was doing married to a Tamil,’ Sita had told her parents when she came to collect Alice.
Bee, listening grimly, wanted to go to the chief constable in Mount Lavinia, but neither Sita nor Kamala would let him make a fuss.
‘Everything’s fine here, Father,’ Sita had said, shaking her head, calming down a little. ‘Don’t make trouble. It’s safe for Alice here and for May, too. Leave it.’
So against his better judgement he had consoled himself with the fact that it was just one incident. One corrupt policeman in a disturbed country was not as bad as all that.
The Sea Serpent emerged through the trees, lumbering towards the station and breaking into Bee’s thoughts. He smiled as with a grinding of metal the train came to a halt. A moment later Alice leapt out at him followed tiredly by Sita.
‘Hello, birthday girl!’ he cried, kissing the top of her head and taking his daughter’s bag.
‘I can’t stay very long,’ Sita warned. ‘I’ve got to catch another train back this evening.’
‘Have you brought the car? Is Aunty May with you? And is Esther coming? And Janake?’ asked Alice.
‘Steady on,’ Bee said, talking with his pipe in his mouth in the way she loved. ‘Now you’re such a great age you must try to act a little bored. It’s more grown up that way.’
‘But I have been bored!’ cried Alice, her eyes like the polish of water on wet stones.
‘She talks too much in class,’ Sita said, irritated. ‘It was so bad today, her teacher made her sit by herself. No, Alice, it isn’t funny,’ she added in warning.
Alice grinned, wrinkling her nose. Later on, when she had her grandfather all to herself, she would tell him what her day had really been like.
‘Why go back tonight?’ Bee asked, helping his daughter into the waiting car.
Alice could not wait. She sucked in the air like a lollypop and shot straight into the back wishing her mother would simply leave quickly. The back seat of the car had the familiar smell of warm leather and love. There were other smells too, of sea, sand and grease and long, younger days sitting on tedious journeys in the heat. It held the memory of sticky Lanka lime and hot winds blowing and can—I-eat-the patties-yet whines. The sea was out of sight for the moment, screened by a tangle of bougainvillea, but still its presence remained powerful. Sea sounds were everywhere, tossing about and fragmented by the breeze.
‘So,’ Bee said wryly, glancing over his shoulder, for she had been silent for at least a minute, ‘how’s the birthday girl? Asleep?’
He pretended to look stern and Alice squealed with pleasure. She felt as though she was sucking on a sherbet dib-dab, or running with a kite. Excitement made her want to shout and wriggle her toes all at the same time but her mother was talking and so, impatiently, she tied a string to her pleasure and reined it sharply in. The sound of her mother’s sombre voice always deflated her a little. Bee glanced at her in the mirror. Then he coaxed the old Morris Minor slowly up the hill. Tantalising glimpses of the beach followed them.
‘Esther and her mother want to see you,’ Bee said.
His daughter had leaned back and closed her eyes.
‘That’s nice,’ she said, shutting out the view.
A man with a white loincloth looped over his legs was drawing a catamaran across the sand. Alice blinked; unknown to her, the image fixed itself in her mind forever. Two sun-blackened boys were collecting coconuts in a sack. In the high bright daze they appeared silhouetted like matchstick men. The
car climbed up Station Road with a sound like an old cough tearing at its throat. It passed the small kade where Bee bought his tobacco. Bougainvillea choked the stone walls all along the way. Magenta and white; too bright to look at without squinting. A golden-fronted leaf-bird flashed past, heading for a canopy of hibiscus bushes, leaving a searing after-burn of colour, and all around the seagulls’ cries made invisible circles in the air. It was almost four o’clock. Nine years had scuttled away like a crab.
‘I wish today would slow down,’ she said, as the car clutched the hairpin bend, turning higher and higher until suddenly, sprawling in front of them and with no warning, the Sea House appeared.
The light had changed the colour of the house. Everything was clearer and more beautiful than Alice remembered. Someone had sharpened the picture of it, making the verandah and the old planter’s chairs and the garden appear brighter too. In a moment Kamala appeared and Alice was enveloped in a juggery-scented hug. On the table was a selection of rasa kavili, Singhalese sweetmeats. She did a quick count in her head. Alu-Eluvang and hakura appa, juggery, hoppers and jelly. No, nothing had been forgotten. All her favourites were there: the boroa, the small delicious Portuguese biscuits she loved, and the jug of freshly squeezed lime juice. In the middle, in pride of place, was a magnificent love cake with nine candles waiting to be lit. Her grandmother had not stopped smiling. Beside her, tied with a pink ribbon, was a lime-green bicycle.
‘Well,’ Bee asked, ‘so, what d’you think about the colour?’