Noontide Toll

by Romesh Gunesekera

  Then the girls glanced in my direction too, which I found disconcerting. I smoothed down my shirt and brushed a hand past my fly, just in case. Slowly I realized that they were not looking at me but at something behind me. I turned and found a throng of schoolboys surging in through the gates.

  ‘What the fuck are they doing here?’ Giorgio barked at Mr Wimalasiri.

  ‘Schoolboys,’ he said as though they were another species of deer moving through some far-flung Middlesex savannah.

  ‘I know they are fucking schoolboys, but didn’t we pay for someone to close this place up for the morning? Can’t they lock the goddam gates?’

  ‘Late afternoon would have been better for the light,’ Sanji said.

  ‘We were told there would be none of these little wankers here in the morning.’

  ‘School must have closed,’ Mr Wimalasiri suggested weakly.

  Giorgio looked at Sanji. ‘What do we do?’

  Sanji squinted up at the sky. Three large clouds like puffs of smoke were drifting in from the sea. He spoke with the cold, calm voice of a veteran. ‘We might get some cloud cover for a few minutes. So, you have choice, boss. We forget the wicket shot and give the boys a free show, or come back with pyjamas when the flags are down and the sun is low. You have one minute to decide.’ He started to switch the lenses on one of his cameras. There is a point, it seems, when a technician can run the whole show. You have to trust your crew then to know what you want and how best to deliver the goods. That’s the way to go these days, in business or in war. Let the dogs loose. Let them do what has to be done. Achieve first, count the cost later. If anyone can be bothered about cost. At any rate, these boys were unlikely to cause any real harm. ‘We could do a fantastic chicken rush. Even handheld video, boss, if you want. Those boys look hungry. It will be the real thing.’

  ‘No pads? No gloves?’ Beads of perspiration trickled down Giorgio’s prickly neck. ‘We wanted a finger up.’

  ‘I can do all that later. But this, can’t you feel it?’ Sanji jerked his head at the mob. It had swelled some more and was beginning to gather speed coming towards us. ‘This is the X-factor we have to catch now, boss, or never.’

  I could it feel it then, not only out there but in me too as if the urge of the horde had seized me and filled the rifts from adolescence to dotage. The girls looked a little dazed in their tiny slips of lace, unsure of the balance between their magnetic power and their sheer vulnerability.

  Giorgio gripped the cricket bats. His eyes twitched as though flicking through the spread he had in his mind. Then his mouth burst. ‘Shoot.’ He pressed a bat into the hands of each of the girls. ‘Both hands, girls. Now run, girls. Run. Sanji, you shoot, you fuckin’ shoot the little pricks chasing the lace. Shoot.’

  Turtle

  Anew road changes the shape of the land. You are, after all, taking a knife to the face of the earth. But more than that, when you cut a new road you change the way everyone sees the place. Our first-ever expressway, for example, a toll road, has turned the whole of the south squarer. Made it more landed. Fair enough you might say with all the baronifying going on, but now we have a route that is solid and unwavering and boring. As more and more people use it, the idea of an island will disappear. If you don’t see the sea, how would you know you are on an island? It would only be a rumour, like being at war in some far-off place, or wallowing in indefinite peace, or the idea of the poor coasting idly in a land of plenty, or that the rich suffer equally in times of austerity.

  According to Eva, the pinkiest passenger to ever grace my van, and her husband, Pavel, whenever the authorities in the old days of communist Czechoslovakia wanted to flex their muscles, they would build a road. It showed who was in charge and who controlled the destiny of ordinary people. Except, of course, they eventually lost control and missed destiny by a mile. Now who even remembers the name of Gustáv Husák, except those who had the misfortune of living under his thumb? And people like me, I guess, with time on our hands, twiddling our thumbs behind a wheel.

  ‘How did that happen?’ I asked.

  ‘Our Velvet Revolution,’ Pavel said with an enigmatic smile. ‘It changed the world.’ He didn’t speak as much as his wife, but whenever he did, he also forced a smile. He had neat straight teeth. Dental care must have been very good when he was a child. Communism, even behind the rusty iron curtain, couldn’t have been all bad if your teeth were kept in shape like that, and for free. They used to say you could tell a lot about the quality of life for the ordinary person by the state of the nation’s teeth and his was a lot better than any you’d see in a comparable mouth here or, I bet, even in America.

  ‘I remember something about the iron hand in control.’ I said. ‘It was a phrase, no?’

  ‘The invisible hand?’ Eva suggested, blowing a bit of stray floss back.

  Her husband dissented. ‘No, no. That is now. Capitalism is the invisible hand we have clasped to our hearts, my dearest. Then, before 1989, we had iron fists shoved in our mouths. We had blinkered eyes and concrete heads.’ He let a small laugh escape the ivory cage. ‘It was a bad time.’

  ‘You cannot imagine it, Va-shantha,’ Eva said, struggling sweetly with my name and whistling as she spoke between her even more beautifully proportioned pearly gates. ‘They controlled everything and sometimes very harshly, but also sometimes very subtly. Like the iron fist was in a velvet glove.’

  ‘I have heard that saying also,’ I said.

  ‘Life was better than in many other countries behind the curtain, but censorship made it difficult for us to speak, you know,’ she added as though it was a matter of dental hygiene.

  ‘Strangulation, but done cleverly. They left no external marks.’ Pavel felt his throat. ‘As a country, we almost stopped speaking altogether.’

  ‘Everything had to have a double meaning otherwise there was no meaning.’ Eva put her palms together and opened them like a book of flesh. Her small breasts heaved and she oozed a scent that made me think the hand gesture must be from an east European Kama Sutra or something.

  ‘But English then? How did you learn English?’ I asked, trying to banish the unnerving image of her strapped to a dentist’s velvet bed with her lovely lips bared.

  ‘We all learnt as many languages as we could. It made up for the silence around us.’ She shook her pale hair to free her head from the old days. ‘Our theatres used silence, our artists used darkness, our writers used the surreal, symbols, double entendres. That was the way to speak about things. That, and using foreign languages. Anything but Russian.’

  It made sense.

  When I turned off the pristine expressway on to the old coast road, my passengers both sighed in unison at the sight of the sea. Dirty grey and choppy in a ruffled bay but still a real bit of ocean as you would rightly expect to see around an island, silent or not.

  Eva murmured, ‘That is beautiful.’

  Her husband stroked the long-haul fuzz purpling his jaw. ‘Now it feels like we have really arrived somewhere new. The highway was like driving to Brno. But this is what we imagined when they said, escape to paradise.’

  It is amazing what a splash of water can do. No wonder people go mad in a desert. I used to think a mirage was an illusion, a mistake, brought on by the pressure of a hostile environment, but now I wonder whether it is really a strategy for survival. Something we make up because we need to, because the alternative is a reality too hopeless to live with. Travelling, even loafing about, is I guess one way of making it up.

  The couple had been booked into the Green Shell, a boutique hotel further down the coast. I had never been there before but I had the exact paper coordinates.

  Further down the old-style coast road we came to the more seductive curves of the south. The glimpses of sand, the swish and skirts of the smiley sea, entranced my passengers and they seemed to drift into a dreamworld just like the rest of us. After about half an hour, we reached the specified marker. The hotel had high daunting iron gates painted a
lizardy green. I honked the horn and the gates opened. I drove up a gravel drive. In front of us a lush vivid garden rippled out. Grey columns or pillars, which I call ‘Bawa lines’ (after a lesson on architecture from one of my first tours with Mr Dissanayake), rose to long sloping green roofs spread like wings pinned in flight.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Eva said again, making me wonder if her English was more limited than I had thought.

  ‘A castle by the sea,’ her husband added.

  I opened the van and got their colour-matched leathery luggage out. A young man in a green sarong appeared at the entrance and smiled one of those large lopsided smiles, like a split coconut, which dazzle our visitors into forking out fistfuls of money for trifles and curd. He stood there as though that was all he needed to do in the business of hospitality: smile timelessly and wait for a tip. Service at the Green Shell, it seemed, was discreet to the point of neglect.

  ‘Bags,’ I snapped at him and that woke him up.

  Pavel reached out to shake my hand. ‘Thank you.’

  It might have been a legacy of his communist upbringing, or sea-air amnesia that brought on this act of leave-taking, but we were not due to part company yet. There was no need for handshaking. I had been hired for the week: two nights on the coast for some steamy moonlight and sea spray, then a shopping day in Colombo before a romp around the hill country and our inescapable cultural triangle. In any case, the obligatory scented wet towel rolls hadn’t been brought to freshen up and clean our hands. So I smiled too, like a good local, and kept my hands to myself.

  The couple went up the steps more tentatively than most of my other foreign tourists would. These two had soft crepe mules on, with white socks, and they walked as though they were mice in a Moscow ballroom rather than a couple girding their loins for a strenuous bout of honey spooning. Usually, even at this stage of a holiday, four hours off the plane, most of my European clients would have abandoned all footwear and be flopping around vastly unbuttoned, swinging giddily between the sudden prospect of loose liaisons and the unexpected handicap of blistering heat. Not these two. Perhaps they had never seen the sea so close and the sea you could glimpse from the foyer was like a blue whale in clover, or something.

  I followed them and stood nearby in case they needed my help to negotiate things. I like to do that little bit more for my clients. It’s the way to build a proper business.

  The manager, who looked much more the tourist in his green shorts and flowery shirt, stepped out of his office and also did the local smile. Even his flip-flops were green. His big yellow toes pricked up as he shook his new guest’s still loose aimless hand which clearly made Pavel feel much more at home. More so, when the manager added to his greeting, ‘Dobrý den!’

  Pavel didn’t let go of the hand. He pulled the man nearer and searched his face. ‘Ĉeský?’

  The manager grinned disarmingly and broke free. ‘Slovakia, actually,’ he continued in English. ‘Welcome to the Green Shell. Please, have a cool drink.’ He beckoned a dazed-looking girl who floated up carrying a tray of long cloudy glasses decorated with fruit ribbons.

  They say this island of ours is the crossroads of the world. A lot of blah-blah about trade routes, sea lanes, strategic points, et cetera. But the more I see of it in this business, and the more people I meet, the more I understand the real truth of the matter. We live at one of those crazy junctions where everyone gets stranded not knowing which way to look, never mind go. All nodding like sleepyheads unable to ever completely wake up.

  *

  Late in the afternoon, after a cup of trendy green tea, I came out to watch the sunset. I don’t know why we are always drawn to it. Moths to a flame? Or maybe we are just fascinated by the idea of an end; the horizon and what lies beyond the finishing line. I’ve heard that only the human species thinks about their own demise, and maybe that’s what it is, but we are not the only ones prone to self-destruct. Who knows what the moth thinks? At the boundary of the garden there is a bundy roll of grass. Beyond that a short steep beach and then the huge sea sucking at the sun. Standing at the edge of the sand, you cannot help but be mesmerized. Although I know that it is the earth that is turning and that this drama of a sinking sun is only an optical illusion, it is hard to believe that the sea is not pulling it in and that we are not witnessing the death of a god. A sun god that bends down to kiss his own reflection, and in so doing dies. Again and again.

  ‘It is so beautiful.’ Eva had come up behind me. ‘The sea is beautiful.’

  ‘Yes, madam,’ I agreed. It was beautiful in a terrifying sort of way. I couldn’t get the death of the sun out of my head. They say it will happen for real, millions of years from now. But when it happens, would it be at dusk? On a day like this? It sinks. Touches the sea. And we all go out like candles nodding in a dark silent gale, grasping for a last word.

  ‘We have come a long way for this,’ Eva said sleepily. She ran a blue shawl through her fingers. I am no Hindu, but the blue rush made me think of Krishna blooming under the milky hands of a gopi.

  ‘The sunset?’

  ‘A place so beautiful you can forget everything.’

  ‘Where do you live, madam? Is it what they call a concrete jungle?’ I stuck to my protocol.

  ‘No, we live in a very pretty place. A city by the sea.’

  ‘I thought Mr Pavel said you had no sea.’

  ‘That’s in our homeland. But for the last few years we have lived in Croatia. He is working there. We have the Adriatic near.’ She hesitated a moment. The wind lifted and the thousands of leaves and fronds in the garden made a collective sound to muffle my pulse. ‘But there are difficulties.’

  ‘Croatia has had some trouble, no?’

  ‘The history is not so nice,’ she said staring steadily ahead. ‘We have come to forget what he has to do there.’

  ‘His work?’ It baffles me, what some people do for a living and what they do when they don’t do that.

  ‘Yes, but I have been thinking of nothing but that. The loose memories. The nightmares of those who were children in the war. What good could possibly come from such bad happenings. We thought at least we won’t have to talk about it here. We have agreed not to mention it to each other.’ She raised her bare coy shoulders. ‘He and I,’ she added, and I wondered whether that meant she would like to talk to someone else about it. That she would like me to ask her about her life and what had become of it.

  So I did. ‘You like your home country more than where you live now, even with the sea there?’

  ‘Yes. I do.’

  ‘Where is that home?’

  She looked down at her feet, searching for a clue. ‘A small town near Prague. Nothing there but fields and a forest full of fungi. We had a famous explosives factory but that is closed now.’

  I wondered if she could see how closely we might be connected: the fuse that quite possibly wired her parish arsenal to the young woman who blew herself up in front of our office building in Colombo only a few years ago. ‘You grew up there?’

  ‘Yes, I never went anywhere until I went to Prague. To the university. I met Pavel there. He comes from Zámrsk. Also a small place, but he knew much more about the rest of the world. His father had even come here to Ceylon in the 1960s as an engineer on some construction project. “Solidarity through technical assistance” was the slogan those days. We had a song about that in school.’

  ‘Mr Pavel came too?’ It was like one mad thing after another.

  ‘No, he was not even born then. But he wants to find the house where his father stayed in Colombo. The tour operator recommended we spend at least two nights here first, by the sea, to relax, you know, before going to the city.’

  ‘That seems to be the recommended itinerary these days, for honeymooning especially. With the new road, it is all now easy.’

  ‘I am so glad to be here. I don’t need to go anywhere else. Here I think I might be able to forget everything. It feels safe.’ She glanced at me. ‘Do you also think i
t is safe?’

  At that moment, I did not feel I was in the safest of places. Not with her floating so dreamily in an ocean of emotion.

  The sea, it is true, can be sleepifying, but even then to my mind it is not very safe. Maybe it is because I am a driver, and I need to guard against the forces of narcolepsy. I read an article about that in Reader’s Digest. The sound of waves, lullabies, popular songs, things that soothe too much and put you to sleep behind the wheel are very dangerous. Apparently, it is a big problem on the highways of America and Europe, although I guess they don’t mean the rhythm of the sea but radio waves, or country music. Still, the same applies. But I didn’t want to spoil her mood with my dark thoughts.

  ‘The boys here say that turtles find this spot the safest. They come up the beach every night.’

  ‘Really? This beach here?’

  ‘Yes. They come to lay their eggs. If you are lucky, you’ll be able to see them tonight.’

  Perhaps it was the wind, or the sharp stingy air, but her eyes seemed to moisten. It struck me then that quite a few of the foreign couples I drive to the coast, and up and down the hill country, have a similar urge. They come eager for a wedding ritual, or a second try at the honeymoon, yearning for the nuptials of a lifetime in the warm air. They come propelled from the inside to perpetuate their dreams and then are dumbfounded. Eva seemed to me to be a woman at that vulnerable age when one’s urges ripen too fast to know what to do.

  ‘You must watch the sunset first,’ I added. ‘When the sun goes in the water, there is a green flash. If you make a wish when you see it, the wish will come true.’

  ‘Really?’ For a brief moment, it looked to me as though the green flash was in her eyes.

  ‘That’s what they say.’ I shrugged. ‘Never worked for me, but I find it very difficult to keep the wish in mind while looking so hard to see the green flash.’ The truth dawned on me then. ‘Actually, maybe it does work, because at the moment you see it, you realize what you have been really wishing for is only to see it. Nothing else.’