She smiled at that. ‘I will give it a try.’
Behind us there was the whoosh of green water parting in the pool. Pavel hauled himself out and picked up a striped towel from one of the deckchairs. He draped it around him and came towards us. His belly hung low and heavy and was streaked with long hair. He looked like a bear in wet pyjamas.
I stepped aside.
He patted his wife’s bottom with his paw. She brushed it away.
‘We have to watch the sun go down,’ she said.
I left them to it. Wishes are a risky business. That’s one thing I have learnt for sure in these last few years of war and terror, of unexpected peace and pockets of prosperity. The risk of unintended consequences is always very high.
*
The owner of the Green Shell hotel was a Gujarati from Dubai. The cook at the back was the only animated creature in the whole establishment, but he didn’t know much more than the name of the man—Mr Bharat. He said Mr Bharat appears twice a year when there are things happening in Galle and when he has special guests. The rest of the time he lets Alex, the manager, run the place anyway he likes. Some weeks in the low season when it is too hot and there are no guests, all the staff sleep in their sarongs by the pool, snoring with the trees. All except the cook. If no guests are booked, he says, he goes home to his family. Nobody ever just drops in. It is not that kind of a hotel. If a reservation is made, out of the blue, Alex calls him on his cell phone and he cycles over.
When Mr Bharat comes, it is a different matter. Everyone wakes up, the cook said. It is like they all get an injection in the butt. The gardener is out sweeping the grass, the room boys are dusting from floor to ceiling, rubbing the salt off every strip of wood, the receptionist is on the phone organizing the world and its uncle, and even the accountant is jumping from ledger to ledger like a cat on gas. Only Alex continues unchanged. Smiling like there is no tomorrow, high on something or the other.
As it turned out, on this February night, Eva and Pavel were the only guests. For dinner, Alex had organized a candlelit table in the central veranda with small temple lamps circling it on the floor. You could hear the sea, and the green sleeves in the wind. Nothing else. I finished my meal early, in the staff quarters, and strolled out into the garden where halogen mushrooms had blossomed in a forest of shadows. I saw the couple at their table. They had a bottle of wine in a silver ice bucket on a stand next to them and sparkling wine glasses close to their lips. They had asked for seafood, and the cook had decided to make a squid dish with coconut, sea kale and kankun. Chancy for a first night, in my opinion, sea or no sea. I was tempted to ask what they thought of the creation but I didn’t want to intrude. They had their fingers intertwined and their ankles were touching, reddening under the table. I walked by the edge of the pool instead and went up to the beach.
In the dark, the sea seemed a troubled creature coiling and swirling and slapping its washing on the sand. The nightwatchman was out by one of the gateposts. He had a flashlight in his hand and a gun in a holster on his hip.
‘What’s it like here?’ I asked him in Sinhala.
‘Good.’ He moved a piece of driftwood out of the way. ‘Now it is good.’
‘Why the gun?’
He checked the holster. ‘We had some trouble once. But not any more. Not after the boss arranged this little putha.’
‘What kind of trouble?’ I asked.
‘All kinds, but not now. Nobody dares to come near this hotel after I fired a couple of shots.’
‘Only turtles, huh?’
‘Yes. They come. Every night at this time of the year. You’ll see them any minute now.’
I took some foreigners—friends of my boss in those days when I worked at the corporation—to a turtle hatchery once: that was before the tsunami. Such frail little things piddling in a tank, you couldn’t imagine how they would grow those huge shells and end up looking like humps of rock.
‘They have their favourite spots on the beach?’
‘I don’t know if they are the same turtles, but they come to the same places.’
‘Maybe they have memories just like us.’
The nightwatchman laughed. He had a slippery laugh that skimmed the water like a flat stone. ‘They are smarter than us. Their memories they pass from generation to generation.’
‘I think we do too,’ I said. I don’t know why I said it. How would I know? It was just instinct. I think I was thinking too much about the troubles we have had, year after year, wave after wave. There was a time it seemed it would never end.
Eva and Pavel came up arm in arm, halfway between stuffed to bust and conjugal cohesion. ‘Are they here? The turtles?’ She loosened herself from him and swayed closer to me. I could smell grape on her breath, or a cocktail of something more carnal.
‘No,’ I said. ‘We haven’t seen anything yet.’
‘Alex said they would be on the beach by now.’
The nightwatchman swung his flashlight and the beam swept the sloping sand, dancing over the suds draining out.
‘I missed the green flash at sunset, so I have to see the turtle,’ Eva teetered on tiptoe. ‘Isn’t it also good luck to see a turtle?’
‘So they say, miss,’ the nightwatchman said. ‘That’s what they say, but if it is true I must be the luckiest man in the world.’
‘You are,’ she laughed tipsily. ‘Amazingly lucky to be here every night.’
I saw Pavel’s teeth gleam in the moonlight.
‘Lucky, miss?’ The nightwatchman lowered his head. For him, on his beach, it seemed there was only the pounding of the sea. A deep, dark, unrelenting sea. ‘Maybe, miss.’
‘Sure. Just look at all this.’ She flung out her hands. ‘The Indian Ocean.’
‘Yes, miss. Like you say, I am lucky to be here.’ He paused, not sure whether he should disturb the eager couple with any more talk about himself. Then, as if unable to stop the flow, he added, softly, ‘I survived the tsunami.’
I heard her take a sharp breath. ‘Here?’
‘Just nearby.’ He switched the flashlight on again and indicated the mean curve of the beach. ‘We had a house over there. It went with the wave. They all went, my wife, my daughter, my son, my mother, my brother and all his family and my uncle’s family. All twenty-two of them. All except me. Big bad wave.’
The breeze dropped. The sea seemed to have flattened before his words. Nothing broke the surface. No turtle heads bobbing up. There were no flippered domes on the wet sand. No sign of them at all. You’d think there was no life left anywhere in the water.
‘I am so sorry,’ Eva said, standing very still.
Right at the edge of the horizon, I could see the tiny yellow light of a fishing boat.
‘But you are right, miss,’ the man said. He kicked some sand down towards the sea. ‘In this world, we must be the lucky ones if we survive from one day to the next.’
Janus
We know about Stalin now, we know a lot about him and his ruthlessness. We know all about his blind spots. His folly, his mistakes with Germany, his mad collectivization. We also know a lot about Mao’s blindness: the Great Leap into a hole, the Cultural Revolution. Great leaders make great mistakes. It is a sort of status symbol that they cannot resist. We can see it in our own day, all over the world from UK to Ukraine. Italy to Iraq. My father used to say: make big mistakes, make big history.
His own were minor, so nobody knew about them except me and a bunch of his old cronies who have now all passed away. Mistakes of not seeing things for what they were. He admired strategy and would draw comparisons between Bismarck and Khrushchev, as though ships and shoes were the same thing. Or Gandhi and Rommel as if they were brothers and the salt march was a desert fox’s false trail. In the world of the Royal Colombo Golf Club where he worked as a caddie, he was an intellectual giant. A self-taught revolutionary political force bursting into consciousness in a wilderness of Crimplene slacks and muddy water holes. He didn’t see that his own life was of such
little consequence that his name would be forgotten before the ninth hole: ‘Oi, caddie, what to bugger that with now?’ his golfers would ask, eyeing the rough, the pin and the lie of the land. One time he tried to organize his fellow caddies to demand better conditions and a rise in pay rates. A reasonable enough project, you’d think, but he picked a fight with some four-iron thug who wouldn’t budge, instead of asking to meet with the committee in the clubhouse counting the dosh. His errors were peanuts but they pained him. ‘A good man will not forget even a misplaced divot,’ he would say, ‘whatever the state of his front yard.’ But big shots are just brazen. When a big man takes a wrong turning, he doesn’t back out like you and me, he just tears up the whole road and makes a new map. Nobody knows what to do then. And if he barges about with enough bravado, he can be a real hero.
Take Brigadier Bling. Despite looking like a shrunken version of Lenin—the forehead a little deflated, the chin knocked back in an upper cut—he had become the most popular figure on Colombo’s five-star dance floors during the war. He was often pictured in the society pages of the glamour magazines, in a champagne handloom kit and silver cuffs, with a canyon of glossy flesh on high heels purring above him, grinning as if he’d tripped out of a Soviet time warp into our local Neverland. He became a celebrity after blowing up a cave in Kurunilpitiya where the Tiger chief was meant to be doing an early Saddam. The whole thing had misfired and the subsequent Tiger retaliation had been brutal with massive not-so-collateral damage, but he had nailed two second-tier enemy warlords in the aftermath and managed to get the TV cameras in for the victory parade. Next thing you know he is the daily news in full regalia with the epaulettes blooming on his shoulders: a champ and a star.
I recognized him the moment he stepped out of his buggered-up black Peugeot on the side of the old Galle Road. The car had its nose to the ground and the driver who flagged me down was a soldier with a gun.
‘Take the sir to Ambalangoda,’ he ordered.
‘What happened?’
‘Bullock,’ he said. ‘As we came round that shit bend.’
I saw the creature then, hooves in the air, head in a ditch. ‘So, army has no backup now?’
‘Shut up and take him to Manel Guest House. The turn-off is at the 84 kil-stone.’
‘Guest house?’
‘Right.’
‘Not five-star?’
‘Just do as you are told, mister van man.’
I had dropped off two Iranian New Age anglers at an emporium in Hikkaduwa on a one-way run (although they had properly paid for the full return fare) and was on my way home, so it was not a problem. In any case, unlike my father, I knew who you shouldn’t argue with. Armed soldiers were at the top of the list, next to policemen and ministers of state, not counting kingpins and top dogs, of course, who could wallop you any time they chose.
The soldier slid the door open and the brigadier climbed in. His face was sombre, his moustache dyed but droopy. His was a face that clearly brightened only for a camera, and preferably after a cocktail or a quick jig had eased the pain of snuffing chaps. I released the brake and got going. Although he was a big man in the military, he was now firstly my passenger. And in the van, I can pull rank. The captain of the ship is the boss. At any rate, he was not in uniform—except for his boots—and although he wore three rings close to his knuckles and a huge watch, he had no gun.
From all the antiterrorism measures we’ve been through, I know the importance of establishing authority in times of upheaval. So I said, ‘Sir, please fasten the seat belt.’
He didn’t protest as some big shots like to do. I heard the click of the buckle. My mind was racing. This was one helluva pickup, I thought. You don’t get to ferry a man like this very easily as a free agent in the business. Heat-seeking tourists in a daze, home-seeking desperadoes from the diaspora, freewheelers and business-seekers from erratic states, these are easy pickups, but a guy who can do a killer foxtrot and the Gaga jive with equal ease, and whose career from the battlefield to the ballroom was legendary, is a gift from the gods. In 1958, my father was drawn as the caddie for Didi Singh, the champion of Dehradun and the most elegant swing in the southern hemisphere of his era. He said it was ‘a gift from the gods’ just to watch the man walk and, for a barefoot communist atheist like my father, that was saying something. Now I knew what he had meant: by sheer chance to be in such close proximity to a superstar was not to be sneezed at whichever way the wind was blowing.
I didn’t say anything else for a couple of K’s. I let him settle in and become comfortable in the van. When the road is clear, the steady drone of the engine and the sleepy road humps that swell a long-distance journey lulls everyone into that couch-state, which allows dreams to drift out of their mouths. I too go into a state, but I have to be sufficiently alert to avoid stray cattle and gunmen, and that I have learnt to do. Driving a van is not like driving a tank. There is an art to keeping things smooth, to listening, and to learning the ways of the world we live in.
‘Is it a dance?’ I asked after a little while.
‘What?’
‘This place in Ambalangoda, is it like for a beach gala you are going?’ I realized my mistake the moment I said it. He was not a holidaymaker and being so direct may not have been the most productive line to take with a man sharpened by military manoeuvres and jive talking. I tried to cover up with blather. I told him how I knew of a very talented mask-maker in that area who has diversified into making costumes for celebrations and galas. I said I had heard that Ambalangoda beach parties had become very popular with the fashionable set in Colombo and that was why I thought he might be going there. Given his reputation, I reckoned he might be game for a devil-mask.
But he said nothing. His face was as good as a mask.
Unlike him, I sometimes don’t know how to keep my mouth shut. I get that from my father. He also had the knack for speaking out of turn.
‘You know, sir,’ I said, ‘now that the war is finished, you can get all your soldiers doing salsa or something, no? Instead of that goose-step business on Galle Face we could have a carnival like in Cuba or somewhere.’ I had heard that even Castro liked to tap his toe and I thought a Mardi Gras of the Buena Vista might have more appeal than a Kim Jong-il parade for the brigadier, but he still said nothing in reply.
*
Manel Guest House had little to distinguish it from a hundred other seaside houses dotted along the coast. Even the lettering of the signboard was the same as any other place with a room or two to let. In the front, facing the road, a new wall had been built with barbed wire on top. An odd precaution, I thought, given that the tsunami sea on the other side of the house was surely the real danger these days.
I beeped my horn at the gate and waited.
A wire-haired old woman opened it and ushered us in.
The brigadier stepped out of the van as though he were at a sunset drill. I am sure his hand brushed his forehead in a half-salute, but I suppose it might have been something more traditionally deferential towards the old housekeeper. I watched unsure what I should do next. My mission was accomplished: I had delivered him to his destination. I must therefore now be a free man. But with the military, even in civilian clothes, you couldn’t take such freedoms for granted. So I asked the brigadier point-blank. ‘This is the place, no? OK if I go now?’
He looked at me as though I might make a good target for rifle practice, or even a bayonet run for one of his young machine heads, but he spoke politely. ‘Can you wait a little? Have a cup of tea. I am sure you need a cup of tea.’
The old woman put a wrinkled hand to her mouth. She seemed to be laughing but with no real mirth. ‘One sugar, two sugar?’
‘One,’ I said, brave as any runt of a soldier in an ambush.
They both disappeared and I waited by the van. The house had a modern airy look: a pretty front door, punctured with fretwork, was set in a wall of curly air bricks that you could see right through to a sparse open-ended lounge that ran the le
ngth of the house. I could even see the bare sandy garden on the other side and the thin blue threat of the ocean beyond. The ground floor seemed designed as a flow-through. A smart move that showed we do learn.
After a while, the woman came to the front door and beckoned. ‘Come, inside. Tea is ready.’
She led me to a little yellow bench on the far side of the room. A small tea-table had been propped up in front of it with a piece of folded newspaper under one of the legs. Next to it an even more wonky stool. I took the bench.
‘He is with our nona upstairs,’ the housekeeper said. ‘He said he will want you to take him to Colombo when he has finished here.’ She lifted the little cosy she had put over the teacup and frowned.
‘I can’t just wait doing nothing,’ I said.
‘He won’t be long. You had better wait. He comes every month but there’s not much he can do with her. She won’t move from her room. She just puts the AC full and stays inside.’
‘Can’t he call for a helicopter or seaplane or something? Isn’t he a big shot?’
She smothered another heartless laugh. ‘He must like you. You are a big joker, no? You have been joking with him? Most people are too frightened, you know, because you never know, no?’ She drew her finger across her knotted throat with a big scary grin.
Then she left me to my cup of tea and went upstairs. I wondered what she meant. What would an officer like him do if he didn’t feel like laughing at a joke? This is a lawful democratic republic, not some gangland playground. But then, I have to admit, sometimes it does feel like things have gone a bit funny lately. You don’t expect to find a roving brigadier with no bodyguard, not even a gun, just a watch as big as the moon, buggered on the side of a road. Or a hostess in hiding, sealed in an air-conditioned room by the sea waiting for his honour. These days, it seems, anything could happen.
The saucer had a teaspoon with a tiny ceramic devil-mask clipped to the end. I held it by the ears and stirred my tea.
While I was trying to work out my options, the front door opened and a young man with a bandana around his head hopped in. He was dressed in welted denim and had crutches and only one leg. He pointed one of the crutches at me. ‘Is that your van out there?’
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