He might have been joking, but Mr Colin was upset. He didn’t seem to know what to do.
‘In that case, how about a sweetie for now?’ Mr Colin looked pleadingly at his wife.
I kept my mouth shut. You can make up the future, but I am not sure you can do that with the past and still be yourself.
Miss Susila was still flushed and tense but she pulled out the packet of hard-boiled sweets from her bag and handed it over to Mr Abeysinghe. ‘Would you like one of these?’ she asked. ‘They are from England.’
Running on Empty
Some nights, I just want to drive. We can do that now. No curfew, no roadblocks. Only a toll plaza, and that’s a long way off out of town. The cost of petrol is high, but if I need to be in the van on my own, carrying no one, going nowhere, remembering nothing, loafing, I can do it. I tap in the cassette Mrs Cooray left in the van and turn up the volume, pretending the bouncy song is about me: Mister Van Man, bring me a dream . . . I swing down to Narahenpita, jiggling the wheel, go up Park Road, then right on to Havelock and a sharp left into Dickman’s rib. When I reach Galle Road, in the dead of the night, I step on it and head for the Colombo Fort hoping that some magic will be caught in my beam.
This place becomes a secret city at night. It has always been like that. In the old days, when we had the war in the north that we never talked about, hardly anybody would be out after nine at night. No need for a curfew. The streets were dark. Only a few VIP cars cruised about, doing deals, or a solitary three-wheeler puttering home, having risked a night in hell for a last fare. Nobody on foot who didn’t wear a uniform and a gun. That’s all gone now, thankfully.
Now the streets are clean, hosed down. The decades-old debris of blown-up banks cleared, the burnt-out carcases of buses carted away. The oil barrels of makeshift checkpoints gone, mostly, and even the grey walls that hid all our minor fortresses have been demolished. There are coloured lasers instead, and salsa dance dens and traffic lights winking. If I turn at Colpetty, down past the old market where the destitutes try to hide, and take the roundabout by the cinema and head back on Duplication, even after midnight, I see party people tumbling out of blacked-out German cars into coffee bars and nightclubs—the few who have more money than sense. The ones who are forever carefree, who have never cared about anything but themselves. Perhaps they know something the rest of us don’t and are enjoying whatever they can get hold of before the coffers run dry. Sometimes it feels like this is now a country of no consequences. But then, someone gets shot for speaking out of turn, or saying the wrong thing, and you realize that there are consequences after all.
So, what to do? Follow the swing, not the ball, as my father used to say, and step on the gas?
I go straight past the beautiful presidential Temple Trees, the last of the camouflage sentries and dun-coloured sandbags still guarding the residence, right up to Galle Face where the old hotel is lit up. This Christmas they had more fairy lights than an elephant on parade and the biggest tree outside the entrance since the crazy days of the 1950s. I remember coming as a boy with my father to see those fancy decorations. Or was it to polish the golf clubs of some visiting champion staying there? Maybe the one with the peachy turban who was a big hit at the ladies’ tea. A real sandman bringing a dream. The hotel is over a hundred years old. It has seen the best and the worst of times. Days of plenty, days of strife. Japanese Zeros heralding the Second World War, Sunday crowds eating pink candyfloss, army parades turning the grass to dust, athletes in training, magicians and charlatans of every shade, kite flyers, Tiger moths, suicide bombers, wedding couples on the cusp. They come and are briefly illuminated, then all too quickly completely forgotten in the noontide’s toll.
We now have palm trees planted along the road. The military camp on the other side has gone and another hotel is due to be built. Someone said it might be Chinese. The newest opposite the oldest. Ahead, the darkness of night is being burnt off by the bright lights of the port where container ships are coming in from Hong Kong and places I have never heard of. The skyline is rising. I like to drive right down to the end past the Beira, where the water is dark and the pelicans sleep, and take a turn in front of the old stone parliament building, so small and insignificant beside the five-star concrete monsters that have grown around it. No one stops me. I check my rear-view mirror.
Occasionally around here, some low-slung Porsche burns rubber for a second or two and shoots in front of me up towards the Hilton and the new chic plaza of the renovated Dutch Hospital: a flash of a girl with bare arms and sparkling teeth, a burst of exhaust like gunfire. It will be a Lamborghini soon enough, the way things are going. I step right down on the accelerator, wanting to feel a Samurai surge too, as if this was another night race, but the old Toyota can’t go very fast. It has taken me all the way from the northern tips of Jaffna’s wounded streets down to the flooded coves on the south coast, beyond Mirissa, and every mile is logged in my mind but it feels like we have all been spinning in sand. I carry a big load now, wherever I go, from the yearnings of teenagers to the heartache of soldiers. I carry more than dreams. There is so much in my head I wonder how I will ever get it out. How do I do it before it is too late? Before I forget what has happened, what I saw, what I thought, what I believed on all those journeys north and south. The hopes, the aspirations, the secret guilt embedded in our shaken lives. Before I give up on the stories that make us who we are and drift with the tide into oblivion like every other sleepy grey head in the world.
I turn left and head for Union Place where, in a fit of madness, I can spend a day’s hire on a masala pizza at my favourite neon joint. I park my van right outside the big glass door. There are no dossers on the pavement, no queues at the counter. My luck is in.
‘Extra topping on your pizza, Mister Van Man?’ Nisha, in her funny hat, sings.
‘Yes,’ I reply. ‘Yes. Put a couple of extra green chillies, please, and can I have a cold beer on the side?’
She sprinkles stardust in a circle like a healer and smiles as if tonight, as darkness falls, she might just bring me everything.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Sigrid Rausing and Chiki Sarkar for their enthusiasm, and their teams at Granta and Penguin India for running full speed with this book. Thanks to Bill Hamilton for finding a road map and special thanks to Curtis Gillespie for a crucial gear change, early in the day, Helen and Shanthi for fine-tuning, Tanisa for the flag, and Nanyang Technological University for a refuelling stop on the last lap. Thanks also to the many friends met on the road, north and south, and especially behind the wheel in Sri Lanka whose stories led me to Vasantha’s van.
Romesh Gunesekera is the author of Monkfish Moon, Reef, The Sandglass, and The Match (all published by The New Press). He grew up in Sri Lanka and the Philippines and now lives in London.
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