Noontide Toll

by Romesh Gunesekera

  *

  On the terrace, by the pool, a special buffet lunch had been laid out especially for the marketing seminar. There was a board on the grass declaring it in big red letters and an exclamation mark.

  Mr Weerakoon saw me. ‘Locked up?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  He held out his hand for the key. ‘Come then, you can have your lunch with us. We have some no-shows, so there is plenty of food.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ I said. Nice-looking spread. Rice and curry as well as a creamy stroganoff and something inevitably Chinese with spring onions and black bean sauce.

  I helped myself to a spoonful from every dish and sat at a table by the water’s edge. The other delegates seemed to break into age groups. The younger men laughed and circled the two women with newfound jargon while the older ones ogled weakly from the coconut bar. One beefish man with a sharp nose and large startled eyes hurried over late from the washroom, shaking water off his hands. He looked hardier than the others and smiled at no one. He helped himself to a heap of rice and stroganoff and came to my table.

  ‘So, how?’ he asked.

  ‘Nice and cool,’ I said. ‘By the water.’

  ‘Yes. Without water we are nothing.’

  I tried to fathom it. ‘What? Nothing?’

  ‘Sri Lanka is an island. Without water we would just be part of India.’

  He had a point. ‘But what about Africa?’

  His lips tightened. ‘Valleys, rifts. No chance. Not Africa. But anyway, we are fortunate to have the sea.’ He put his plate down and studied the topography of his food. Then he looked at me. ‘Lucky.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Lucky,’ he said again and stuck out his hand. ‘My name is Lucky.’

  I stood up and shook his hand, reckoning it was OK. His hands had been thoroughly wet. Washed, I had no doubt, with soap and water. I could smell the sissy lemongrass from the pretty ceramic dispensers in the washrooms. ‘I see. I am Vasantha.’

  ‘What’s your business?’

  ‘Transport,’ I said.

  ‘Mine too, now.’ He smirked as though it was a very shady business. ‘Water transport.’

  He sprinkled salt all over his plate and sat down.

  ‘You mean bowsers or boats?’

  He laughed, tipping his head back. ‘Very good. Very good.’ When his head was level again, his eyes had hardened. ‘Navy. We have a fleet parked down the coast.’

  ‘Why marketing, then?’ I asked puzzled. ‘Is the navy selling stock?’ He might have been a naval commander but rank does not bother me. I’ve had former ministers and high-rolling hoodlums in my van. They are all just punters and in the van they are putty in my hands. I don’t give a toss about their social standing or net worth, only their willingness to talk to me. And, very importantly, their personal hygiene. You have to keep the van clean and fresh, otherwise your clients will get put off. No customers, no business. No business, no life. Lemongrass is just the ticket, as far as I am concerned.

  ‘The war is over.’ He spoke in a mix of Sinhala and English. ‘We have ships doing nothing. So now they have started whale-watching cruises for tourists. Brilliant idea, no? Mirissa is fantastic for it. My concept is to go more comprehensive. They say we have five hundred million bucks in the bank.’ He held his fists up in the air as though the money was in them. ‘My plan is to persuade the big boys to go into the hotel business as well. Offshore, onshore.’ He banged his fists together. ‘Connect cruise to hotel and pull the Japanese. Put a casino as well. The rest of the world will follow.’

  ‘The Japanese certainly have a thing about whales, according to an article I read in the newspaper.’

  ‘Exactly. You have to think strategically. If you don’t start the fight, you don’t get to throw the first punch. Every navy in the world learnt the lesson of Pearl Harbour.’

  I hummed my assent, swallowing a mouthful. It made sense. ‘You did battles in the navy?’

  ‘Mannar.’ His scalp inched back as if at some private marketing folly. ‘Very tough.’

  ‘So, you must be happy now. Chasing whales must be better than chasing Sea Tigers.’

  He smiled again. ‘That’s a good one. We should put it on a banner. You are a real marketing guru, no? Yes, whales are much, much better. Everything is good now, except for this stupid WC business.’

  I glanced at his hands again. They still looked damp. ‘No towels in the washroom?’

  ‘You know, those bloody buggers in Europe and America want to stick their noses into every little nook and cranny. It is very unsettling.’ He swatted a fly that had landed on the edge of the table. He got it. Back-of-the-hand Obama shot. But his face seemed to grow more troubled with every thought. ‘Uncertainty is not good, no? Not good for tourism, not good for me, not good for you. We all make mistakes, it is not always a war crime. We have to learn not to scratch at the scabs, no?’

  I felt I was getting out of my depth. I finished the last of my stir-fry dollop, Chinafying the stroganoff. ‘I think I’ll go get some pudding,’ I said. ‘Nice wattalappam on the side there.’

  ‘You know, we used to have a round bomb that looked just like that. We called it what’ll-happ’n.’ His mouth twitched, signalling another upheaval. ‘So, be very careful.’

  On my way to the dessert table, Mr Weerakoon caught up with me. ‘My phone is gone,’ he squealed, all panicky. ‘It must have slipped out of my pocket in the van. Can you see if it is there? Brand-new Nokia. It’ll be a disaster if it is gone. Big, big disaster.’

  I told him not to worry. Cell phones are forever sliding out of pockets in my van. I find them lodged between seats, silted up under the springs, scuttled in the back by the spare tyre. All over the place. Nursing secrets, aching to spill the beans.

  Forgoing my pudding, I went to the van and sure enough, it was there nestling at the back with a bottle of mineral water and a packet of cream puffs. The screen was locked but his pin was still the usual four zeros.

  By the time I got back, the navy’s latest secret weapon for commercial supremacy had settled on a lounger for a snooze. The puddings had been cleared. I managed to grab a plantain off the fruit bowl before that too disappeared, and went to find Mr Weerakoon and give him his phone.

  *

  I didn’t go back into the afternoon session. I wanted to close my eyes out in the open. The others, including the refreshed torpedo and the sated monk, had wandered back into the room to map their future strategies of success in our brave new world of infinite opportunities. There was a soothing sea breeze making music with the trees, the sound of the sea keeping the same soft time it has done since the world began. I wondered what the whales out there in their sea lanes knew of us and our schemes. Even if they had any inkling, would they care?

  In the sea air, we can all sleep like old people whose memories have finally receded and left them in peace. That afternoon, under the trees, it seemed as though everything could be forgotten: the trouble brewing under my van, the perforations on the exhaust pipe, the worn treads of the offside rear tyre, the unpaid electricity bill at home waiting for some extra cash flow, that last argument I had with my father, twenty years ago and still knotting my stomach, Mrs Subramaniam’s letter I steamed open and decided not to post for her husband’s sake. And then, there is everything else that has happened. With luck, one can forget it all, scabs or no scabs. Just float on our unexpected good fortune and snore with the whales—head down in our great comfortable sea of amnesia.

  The trick is to learn how to be lulled into sleep. I thought I should tell Mr Weerakoon that, on our way back. Marketing is a doddle. Dealing with a cock-up is the real problem. Small mistakes that grow into bigger ones. God knows we have had plenty of those. A tip from me to him: find out from the sailor how to sleep easy. Whatever your foibles, your wanton misdeeds, you can dream of new ventures and be a success if you can sleep easy. It can’t be that difficult. People do it all over the place. A secure pin number is a good start.
/>   Shoot

  In the tsunami of 2004, the Galle cricket stadium was destroyed. Obviously, that was not all. Up and down the coast, thirty thousand people lost their lives. Whole towns in the south disappeared. The devastation was as bad as the war. Maybe only half as many people died, or a third, but all in a day rather than over thirty years of human madness.

  My father came from a small village near Matara, the southern town that more or less disappeared under the wave. It has now been rebuilt and relocated a few miles uphill. As my father was not much of a family man, and his father even less so, I hardly had any connection to the place and now the place is no longer where it had been. So, that’s that really. If I had any allegiance to the south, I would be tempted to relocate it, like the town. Hambantota, not far away, is a luckier spot and tempting. Or, given the vagaries of political fortunes in our country, perhaps I should take a tip from the foreigners I ferry and go for Galle—a magnet since the days of Sinbad. But then, how much of one’s life—future, present or past—is really under one’s control? Sinbad never knew where he was going. Sinbad was a dodo.

  Maybe I should take a lesson from Sanji instead and be more focused on my own needs. As he would say, you must not let yourself drift in some other asshole’s shit stream.

  *

  Sanji was a cameraman. A small fellow with small eyes and a wide nose that seemed squashed from cheek to cheek by the knobbly boxes he pressed against it. Lucky for him that there has been a digital revolution, otherwise he would be completely stunted by the stuff of his trade.

  I had brought him to the rebuilt pavilion of the new Galle stadium. He got out warily and laid out an arsenal of photographic equipment in front of the van: tripods, lens bags, cameras, reflectors. Out on the pitch, a solitary groundsman was lining up the stumps.

  ‘They better come soon,’ Sanji said. ‘Otherwise, we’ll have to postpone for the evening.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Nobody else is using the place today.’

  Sanji stuck a finger up in the air. ‘Sun. After eleven o’clock the light is too damn straight.’

  I looked up at the sky trying to imagine arrows of light. ‘Is that not good?’

  ‘Very harsh. Wipes out everything. Trouble is that Giorgio says the girls’ faces need four hours to firm up, and out here they can’t get up at five in the morning.’

  I’d seen Giorgio and his girls partying at the rooftop restaurant in the fort, opposite my lodgings, way past midnight. ‘Is that what they normally do?’

  ‘In Europe, it doesn’t matter. You can work with the light even if you have been popping all night. He doesn’t understand how hard it is here.’

  ‘You live in Europe?’

  ‘Milan.’

  ‘I thought you must be from India,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You are not Sri Lankan, no?’

  His boxer’s nose flared. ‘I am from Vavuniya,’ he said softly.

  I usually try to be careful in my assumptions and in what I say. When you deal with people from all over the world, you learn to tread a middle line. But Giorgio and his frolicking poppy girls had confused me. ‘You were only talking English, so I thought . . .’

  ‘I speak Tamil also.’ He paused. Then he smiled. ‘And Italiano. You?’

  ‘Only a few words. I am trying to learn some Tamil. I drive to Jaffna sometimes. My German is better.’

  ‘I would like to see Jaffna again,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe your Giorgio will do some filming there.’

  ‘Fashion shoot in the ruins?’

  ‘There are nice places.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I mean not damaged.’

  ‘Really? I’d like to see that. I went to college in Jaffna for one year, before joining up.’

  I think Sanji enjoyed confounding me. Every time I thought I had his measure, he would say something to throw me off balance. But that’s the thing, isn’t it? You never know what a man has been up to before you meet him. That hand might only have been waggling his tom-tom, but it might also have been wringing someone’s neck.

  ‘Joining? You mean . . .’

  ‘In ’83, I was eighteen. I was not a child soldier.’

  ‘How long were you fighting?’

  ‘I was better with a camera than a gun.’ His finger was crooked, as if to prove he was more adept at pressing a shutter release than pulling a trigger. ‘When the propaganda unit started up, it seemed just the place for me. But then when the Indians came, the politics became bloody Machiavellian.’

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked, wondering if he had lapsed into Tamil.

  He ran his hand like a spider across his thighs. ‘You know, all plotting and double-dealing. Indian bloody Peace Keeping crap. It was a game I didn’t like. Something had gone wrong. I could see that right at the top people had their own ideas. Personal interests. Your boys and ours were like sprats for their schemes.’

  ‘So you went to Italy?’ It sounded like a script to a film.

  ‘I had some connections through the trade. I found some guys and they found me some work. And then Giorgio came to do a documentary on immigrants. That’s how I met him. When he moved into fashion, more than ten years ago, he asked me to join his team.’ A small smile nicked the corners of his mouth. ‘He likes the edge I bring, you know. Fashion also is a kind of jungle. We did London for a few years. Paris. New York. Now we travel all over the world looking for new angles to shoot.’

  ‘Aren’t you worried coming back here?’

  ‘The war is over. I am now an Italian. Giorgio wants to break into the Asian market. So we have come to do a taster with cricket.’

  ‘Sports fashion?’

  Sanji grinned more broadly, cutting loose. ‘We are combining the two niche lines they excel in here.’

  ‘Have you got our cricket stars coming?’ That would be a coup, I thought.

  ‘I think they would have liked what we have in mind with the girls, but then the problem is that the selectors, the politicians, every pimp and dingbat will want to be in on the action. And, you know, those cadgers are not at all photogenic, whatever they may think.’ He rubbed his fingers together, crisping an imaginary note. ‘We only needed permission to use the grounds. He wants a couple of shots at the crease, with the stumps, and a pavilion in the background to contrast with the famous lace here. Our theme is ebony and ivory. Black and white but shot in colour.’

  I said I thought that these days everything was done with computers. I had read in a Sunday supplement only a couple of weeks ago about how they can manipulate a picture just like batting an eyelid. That’s why nowadays, apparently, you cannot trust any photograph. Nothing is evidence for anything any more. Everything could be doctored. ‘That’s what they say, no? So, can’t you just make it up in a studio?’

  He picked up one of the larger long-barrelled cameras and tested it. ‘That’s not our style. You see, we are dealing with a completely artificial thing. This glamour. So what we try to do is give it some real weight, you know. A bit of flesh. We create a real moment in an unreal world. That’s why we need the right location. It is not just in the eye.’ He tapped the side of his nose. ‘A good photo smells right. If it is fish, it smells of fish. If it is girls, it smells of girls.’

  I tried to imagine this small passionate man out in the jungles of the north, filming his ruthless comrades dodging mortars, shooting soldiers, killing innocents no doubt and all the while developing this extraordinary nose that would one day turn him from a fighter into a fashion photographer with the flair of a perfumer.

  *

  Giorgio turned up at ten-thirty in a swanky new Land Rover. He swung out of the front door, shirtsleeves flapping. He pulled out two cricket bats. ‘Ciao, Sanji. All OK?’

  Two long slender figures slid out from behind him like mystified gazelles. They wore whites that clung like paint. One, I guessed, was Italian, the other local or Indian. I am not one to know any more.

  ‘Bellissimo,’ Sanji hum
med.

  The driver of the Land Rover, Mr Wimalasiri from the hotel, got down last, clutching a floppy sun hat.

  Sanji put something to his eye and aimed it at the girls. When Giorgio reached us, Sanji wrinkled up his big nose and said, ‘Too late, boss.’

  Giorgio checked his watch. ‘No. We can do it. Two minutes up there, in the middle of the grounds.’

  Sanji lifted up a camera. ‘The light is white. The costume is white. This is OK for washing powder, not sex in a box.’

  Giorgio scowled at him. Mr Wimalasiri seemed nonplussed.

  The tiny gold cross on the chain around Giorgio’s neck glinted. I wouldn’t have thought he was a religious man, but I guess he has the Godfather and all that to contend with in his line of business. ‘Girls, strip off. We need you by those sticks out there just in lace.’

  ‘Troppo caldo, Giorgio,’ the Italian girl pouted.

  ‘She’ll burn,’ the other girl whined. The voice was definitely more Bishop’s College than Bollywood. ‘Even I will burn.’

  ‘I told you girls to wear Factor 50. I gave you the bottle. Matt finish. We don’t want the sweaty look here. This is supercool lingerie.’

  ‘The bottle was vodka, not sunscreen.’

  ‘Never mind. Look, just two minutes is all we need. Sanji here is amazing. He is an action photographer. He can shoot a fucking MiG on speed.’

  ‘Can’t we just twirl them around our fingers?’ The girl threw back her head in a voluptuous throaty look.

  ‘The point is that the thongs are on you, not off.’

  Mr Wimalasiri tried to intervene. ‘Just a minute . . .’

  ‘Come on, girls. Let’s go.’

  Reluctantly, they began to peel off their cling film.

  ‘I say,’ Mr Wimalasiri tried again, pointing my way. His eyes, like mine, had popped.

  I stared. There was nothing I could do about the sun, the screen, anything. I was here only because the Suleiman Brothers van had broken down and they needed someone in a hurry to bring all the extra equipment down to Galle and I usually take their overflow.