‘Sometimes people get off early not knowing where they are going. Or get bumped off.’
‘Same direction then.’
‘Sometimes they meet in a collision.’ He dropped the cigarette and ground it with his boot. ‘It becomes a disaster.’
Why do soldiers have boots with such long laces? It must take ages to do up. Hardly the most efficient way of preparing a fighting unit. But before I could ask him about the battle benefits of Velcro, he threw me another wide ball.
‘Do you think a soldier should marry?’
‘I guess you can’t live together. In the barracks, I mean. But you have home leave, don’t you?’
‘What if she is the enemy?’
‘The war is over. There are no enemies now, are there?’
‘You see my heart is there, in Trinco, in a small red-and-yellow bakery on the bay road where she sells bread and biscuits. But there are these big things between us and I don’t know what I can do.’
‘Things?’
‘It is like a wall dividing us. How can you cross the thing that you have built to protect yourself? Do you know what I mean?’
I put away the lighter. The rampart was a wall. The human heart was something else. ‘Does she know how you feel?’
‘Her brother was a fighter. LTTE cadre. She doesn’t know what happened to him. But I do. What I know is like a stone crushing me, even though what I did was right.’
‘What did you do?’ I asked.
‘We were on our way back to base from Pulmoddai where there had been some trouble. LTTE were doing some nasty things all around. Killing civilians and all. Terrorizing, no? But we fell into a trap. He and three other Tigers were waiting for us on the detour we had to take. A claymore hit the jeep in front of us and then they opened fire. Captain Daminda did a crazy charge and got two of them with a grenade. He was hit in the shoulder but he went on. A real war hero. I got her brother when he tried to make a run for it. I couldn’t take my finger off the trigger. I ripped him to shreds. The little shit had killed three of my batch in one go.’
I tried to imagine the carnage. ‘How do you know he was her brother?’
The tributaries at the corners of his eyes thickened. ‘We try to identify them. I don’t know why because I can’t imagine anyone really keeping a record. But this one, at least I know who he was. I wish I didn’t. He had a photo in his pocket. The family in front of the bakery. She was there in it with him soaked in blood. I got rid of the picture. He shouldn’t have been carrying it. I have never told her. It was before the victory but you know how it is. Some things you can’t forget. Even if you burn the stuff, the smell sort of sticks to your skin. You can’t wash it off.’
*
After the soldier went back to the barracks to do whatever soldiers do on duty at nightfall, I walked back along the ramparts looking at the sea. A dog’s mouth. The edge was foaming, the water darkening.
When I was twenty-three, I too had fallen in love. I didn’t know it then, but it was the best time for it. The ruptures of ’71 had faded and the war to come was as unimaginable as the casual brutality that passes for modern life now. But the social barriers between people still seemed insurmountable.
My father carried golf clubs for a living; her father played with them and probably didn’t need a living. I saw her in blue denim, her hair in a ponytail, which in itself was enough to spin my head in 1978. She was careering down the road from the clubhouse in an open-top Mini Moke, the oddest vehicle in Colombo since Dingiri Banda’s three-wheel donkey cart. I was smoking by the cemetery wall contemplating life and death in a philosophical sort of way, as we young men who shunned politics for motorcycle maintenance did in those days. The MM slowed for the bend, she changed down and the clutch screeched. Like a toy, the vehicle trundled down to the junction and came to a standstill. The engine was whirring uselessly, the clutch slipping and whining. Flicking my yellow shirt into shape, I went over. Cool as a Sunday ice palam.
‘Clutch, missie,’ I said. ‘It’s not catching.’
She looked at me as though I had risen from one of the graves on the other side of the wall, rather than a cool refrigerator. ‘Clutch?’
‘Shall I take a look?’
‘You can fix it?’ One of her eyes, beautiful as it was, seemed misaligned. The imperfection gave me hope. I like to fix things, and although I am no surgeon, I am drawn towards the unbalanced.
I opened up the engine compartment and took a look at the clutch cable. I reckoned if I adjusted it, she’d be able to get enough grip on the clutch plate to drive a few miles more.
‘How far are you going?’ I asked. ‘It won’t last long.’
‘Bambalapitiya,’ she said.
‘That’ll be right,’ I said. ‘You’ll need to call the garage tomorrow. They will have to put a new plate. This one must be ten years old.’
I found a small cloth bag of tools behind the spare wheel. There was a spanner that fitted the lock-nut. There was just enough room to get at it and wedge a fifty-cent piece like a washer.
‘Try the clutch pedal. No engine.’
I wondered if I should offer to go with her. I wanted to. I could drive her home, coaxing the clutch an extra mile to take a roundabout route. Maybe catch a glimpse of the sun kissing the sea, together, yellow on blue. It seemed almost possible, but I knew it wasn’t. That was not the world we lived in then.
I wiped my hands on the tool bag and fitted everything back in place.
‘You have to go easy with the clutch. Try not to stop and start.’
‘What? Go without stopping? What about the roundabout?’
‘You have to go slow. The clutch is worn out.’
Then she smiled for no reason. Perhaps she did trust me: a cool-hand dude on the road in trousers too big by half. I wanted to say ‘I love you’ in English like they do in the films. Would she then take me by the hand and ask me to drive her up to Galle Road and over, down one of the Bambalapitiya sea lanes to her neat and polished home of gold coins and cake?
The moment passed. She got in the car, started it and eased the clutch. She knew what she was doing. People like her always do in the end, whatever happens under the bonnet. She drove away with my fifty cents and left me with nothing but a dream.
*
What I like about bringing visitors to Galle Fort is that in the evenings I am almost always free. They rarely need a van once they are settled in their pamper rooms of cosy lust and languor. And I don’t have to stay in some dingy drivers’ quarters. Most of the smaller poncey hotels don’t have staff rooms as every spare inch has to go on water pools or antique Dutch furniture. I have an arrangement with Ismail, another early retiree from the Coconut Corporation in Colombo I used to work at: I kip in his family home where I am given a biriyani dinner, a bed and a simple breakfast for a very modest cost. I only have to telephone him a day or two before and I can be sure of a welcome.
This time I was given the new room that he had added to the top floor. Ismail said that they had just finished it and that I would be the first to use it. After my stroll on the ramparts, I went up to the new room. It had a large window that opened towards the sea. If I leant out, I could see the lighthouse and the ramparts. It made me feel safe—a natural feeling in a fort. After all, that’s why they were built. Even in Jaffna fort, it must have felt safe like that once, and here there hasn’t been a war since the British beat the Dutch almost two hundred years ago. But I didn’t know what I felt safe from: there was no danger that I had to face. Not even a dilemma like the soldier. I felt for him. It seemed to me that he too might miss his chance or not see the turn he should take. Sometimes it feels like we are all driving in the dark with no headlights.
At about 7.30 in the evening, Ismail’s son—a boy of about six—knocked on my door and peeped in. He whispered that my food will be ready soon, down in the dining room, and bit his lower lip with a line of tiny teeth. By the time I got downstairs, he had scampered into the kitchen. Ismail was waiting for
me.
‘You like the new room?’ he asked.
I told him it was the best room. The window was a real boon.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I thought it would be good to have a window up there facing the sea. I think we will be getting plenty of visitors. Everyone who can is making an extra guest room.’
‘I hope I won’t be squeezed out,’ I said.
‘You are the bringer of guests to our town, my friend. So there will always be room for you, Insha’Allah. Who did you bring this time?’
‘Russian playboys,’ I said. ‘They were very excited about a spa weekend.’
Ismail laughed. ‘If the walls ever came down in this town, can you imagine what we would see? The things that must go on in those blue steam rooms.’
‘The future is in pleasure, they say. One of them was talking about cruise ships coming here soon. You know, big multi-level pleasure palaces with thousands of tourists. They’ll eat up the town.’
‘We are ready. Open to all the filthy winds of change now.’ Ismail laughed. ‘We can handle even a plague of locusts.’
I told him about the soldier I had been talking to earlier and how he seemed to feel trapped by the past despite the prospects ahead. ‘What could a man in his situation do?’ I asked.
‘Start afresh,’ Ismail said. ‘It is hard enough for a woman to really love a killer, never mind the killer of her brother. How can he ever expect her to be his?’
‘What? Give up?’ It did not sound like the Ismail I knew. Normally, he would be the one who would insist on going the extra mile. If I had known him when I was a young man, I am sure he would have given me the push I needed in front of the Mini Moke, whatever the state of the contents of my purse. He was the one who urged me to go for promotion, to go to English classes, to think ahead. When I retired, he was the one who said, ‘Buy the van, Vasantha. Do as you dream.’
He let his eyes droop. ‘No, my friend, it is not giving up. But you have to recognize what is insurmountable. To forgive so much is too much.’
‘But it was not his fault. It was the war.’
‘That is the problem. You have to start somewhere else with a clean slate.’
Out on the ramparts, I had thought that everything we did was an attempt to protect ourselves against the turmoil around us, the sea out there that would dash us to pieces if we did nothing. Our defences have to be strong. But then we find we have become nothing but a line of defence. I wanted to tell the soldier what Ismail had said: start again with a clean slate. Only thing is that I am not sure there are any clean slates left. He might do better just to talk to the girl. Tell her the truth. Tell her what had happened. The truth will come out one day and there was more hope if he spoke than if he stayed silent, adrift. But then, that’s easy for me to say. My moment passed long ago. Now I am the one hopelessly adrift.
Fluke
Mr Weerakoon is a smart man with an eye for design. His blue suit is tight so that he looks like he is bursting with energy, which I imagine impresses his clients who are in need of gurus with vitality. His briefcase, which doubles as a computer case, is also blue. Pale blue. To my mind that is less impressive, but it does give him a very modern look like his wedge of shaped black hair. The case is made of pretend leather and has a neoprene sleeve. I know because he told me so.
‘Neoprene sleeve inside,’ he spluttered, jabbing at the bag. ‘Flexible, lightweight, ultra-protection. From Singapore. Good, no?’
He got into the back seat, even though he was my only passenger, saying loudly that he had some preparation to do before the meeting. He opened the case and pulled out a smart silvery laptop before I had closed the door.
I loaded the two cardboard boxes in the back and got behind the wheel. ‘AC, sir?’ I know now not to take the climate for granted. Sometimes, heading south, passengers can completely surprise you with their eco-preferences and worries about melting ice caps.
‘Put it full. Very sticky day.’ He checked his watch. ‘We have to be there by ten o’clock. You can make it?’
‘No problem, sir. Once we pass Moratuwa, traffic will clear.’
‘Ten-thirty I do the first session: setting goals, objectives, priorities. After lunch, we do the Plan.’ He caught my eyes in the rear-view mirror and grinned. Yesterday Kurunegala, today Kalutara, tomorrow Kirulapone. Boom time, no? Kuala Lumpur is my ultimate goal.’
By the time I got on to Galle Road, he was deep in his screen of bullet points and exploding pie charts. Although I could hear the odd mumbling and the occasional click of a tongue or keyboard, he didn’t say anything more to me until we reached the Blue Water turn-off.
He checked his watch again. ‘Good timing, Vasantha. Very good.’
I turned in through the massive gates and drove right up to a porch big enough for an aircraft.
When we stopped, Mr Weerakoon zipped up the laptop and patted the bag as if it were a pet. He got out and asked me to bring the boxes I had packed in the back to the meeting room after I had parked the van. ‘There will be a big sign: Marketing: The Secret of Success.’
He checked his pockets, patted his blue case again, and waddled down the long straight walkway towards the reception desk in the wide pavilion. He was a man of the modern world. The brand-new face of our remodelled country open at last for full-on business.
*
The meeting room was large and spacious with a view of the pool and the coconut trees around it. You could just about glimpse the sea beyond the steep beach. There were two secretive women and about a dozen shy men milling about near the entrance to the room, several half-throttled by their plump polyester ties. A dumbstruck Buddhist monk—a bhikkhu—in freshly laundered robes stood by a pillar with his tightly furled umbrella, equally speechless.
Mr Weerakoon was inside fiddling with some cables, looking flustered.
I put the boxes on a table by the side. ‘Any problem, sir?’ I asked.
‘Bloody projector doesn’t work. I have it all on the computer but there is no connection.’
‘Shall I call the technician?’
‘He was here, but didn’t know what the heck was wrong. Bugger has gone now to look for some jack.’
I am not a computer man, but I do have a knack with machines. Someone once told me that the human body has magnetism in it, and with some people the flow is such that machines respond to their touch, and immediately straighten out the kinks in their system. I took the cables from Mr Weerakoon and jiggled them about. The plugs all fitted their sockets, so I rocked the projector, tipping it one way and then the other. I pressed in the cross-head screws at the back and gave the plastic Ouija board underneath a couple of firm taps. ‘Try now, sir,’ I said.
He switched it on again and the screen behind him lit up with a picture of a purple bud bursting into flower. He looked back over his shoulder and grinned. ‘Bravo! How did you do that?’
‘Chinese say you need good chi.’ I was pleased to have been able to help.
‘You better stay in the room then. Keep that Gucci flowing. Good for you anyway. You might get a tip or two about marketing. You are a small-size entrepreneur, no?’
I reckon neither he nor I could spell the word, never mind pronounce it, but I thanked him nevertheless and asked what I should do with his boxes. He told me to lay out the brochures and the handouts on the side table, next to the coconut cookies. ‘My own marketing,’ he winked.
A few minutes later the delegates sidled in, shuffling papers and cell phones nervously and choosing their seats around the conference doughnut. Numbers had swelled to more than twenty, but there were still some empty chairs. I perched on a stool at the far end by the boxes where I had a fine view of the pool outside. There was a painted stork standing by it. I couldn’t tell if the bird was real. These days it is so hard to spot a fake.
Mr Weerakoon greeted his delegates, bouncing on his toes with the vroom of an enthusiast and then launched into his presentation. The computer worked perfectly and the screenshots faded in and
out of flashy diagrams and big bold spinning statements, like paper aeroplanes. Although he said it was about marketing principles applicable to any size of business, it seemed miles too complicated for a one-man/one-van business like mine. The few bits that I could follow seemed to me to be plain common sense: figure out what you want, what your customers want and when they want it. The other stuff about bell curves and market segmentation and www dot shots seemed so much hot air. When I started my business, the whole thing was very simple. I got my pension from the old corporation at fifty-five and decided to do only what I love—drive. I could have got another office job in some private company but who would want to work in Colombo if they didn’t have to? That was the time when you had to go through security even for a pee and the building might explode any day with some suicide bomber in a pink sari. No one believed the war would ever really end. So, when Ismail told me that Lionel wanted to get rid of his van—the minibus run had become too competitive for him—and suggested I buy it, I did. I only had to change the colour to blue (because white worries too many people, given all our white van disappearances) and paint a big silver V in English on the side. Then I put the word out at a couple of hotels, the golf club and the offices of my former bosses that I was a man with a van for hire. My marketing was executed in about half the time Mr W took to get his notes in order. Plus a drive around town with a carton of cupcakes for the secretaries, PAs and fixers-at-large. After that, pure patience.
At twelve-thirty exactly, Mr Weerakoon shut the lid of his computer. ‘Lunch break,’ he announced. ‘In the afternoon, we plunge into planning.’
The monk in front of me muttered something about his stomach. The two young women touched each other’s wrists and smiled.
Mr Weerakoon beckoned me. ‘You wait here until they are all out and then lock the door. My computer we’ll keep in here. Safe, no?’
‘Yes, sir.’ I do whatever my customer wants me to do. That’s the key. It is no big secret.
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