The Cat's Table Read online

  Narayan and Gunepala, the cook, were my constant companions when I was a child, and I probably spent more time with them than with my family and learned much from them. I watched Narayan loosen the blades from a lawnmower in order to sharpen them, or oil the chain on his bicycle tenderly with his open palm. Whenever we were in Galle, Narayan and Gunepala and I would climb down the ramparts to the sea and swim out so they could fish on the reef for dinner. Late in the evening I’d be found asleep at the foot of my ayah’s bed and have to be carried by my uncle to my room. Gunepala, who could be bitter and short-tempered, was a perfectionist. I’d watch him pick out any questionable food from a boiling pot with his calloused fingers and fling it ten feet away into the flower beds – a chicken bone or an overripe thakkali, which would be eaten instantly by the rice hounds that hovered about, knowing this habit of his. Gunepala argued with everyone – shopkeepers, lottery ticket salesmen, inquisitive policemen – but he was aware of a universe invisible to the rest of us. As he cooked he whistled a variety of birdcalls rarely heard in the city, familiar to him from his childhood. No one else had that particular focus on what was or could be audible to us. One afternoon he woke me from a deep sleep, took me by the hand, and made me lie down beside some bullock manure on the driveway that had been there for several hours. He pulled me right down beside it and made me listen to the insects inside the shit, consuming this feast and tunnelling from one end of the faeces to the other. In his spare time he taught me alternative verses to popular bailas that were full of obscenities, swearing me not to repeat them, as they referred to well-known gentry.

  Narayan and Gunepala were my essential and affectionate guides during that unformed stage of my life, and in some way they made me question the world I supposedly belonged to. They opened doors for me into another world. When I left the country at the age of eleven, I grieved most over losing them. A thousand years later, I came upon the novels of the Indian writer R. K. Narayan in a London bookstore. I bought every one and imagined they were by my never forgotten friend Narayan. I saw his face behind the sentences, imagined his tall body sitting at a humble desk by his small bedroom window, knocking off a chapter about Malgudi before being called by my aunt to do something or other. ‘The streets would be quite dark when I set out to the river for my ablutions, except for the municipal lamps which flickered (if they had not run out of oil) here and there in our street … All along the way I had my well-defined encounters. The milkman, starting on his rounds, driving ahead of him a puny white cow, greeted me respectfully and asked, “What is the time, master?” – a question I allowed to die without a reply as I carried no watch … The watchman at the Taluk office called from beneath his rug, “Is that you?” – the only question which deserved a reply. “Yes, it’s me,” I always said and passed on.’

  I knew my friend had perceived such details on our morning walks along the High Level Road. I knew the bullock cart driver, I knew the asthmatic who ran the cigarette stall.

  *

  AND THEN, ONE day, I smelled burning hemp on the ship. For a moment I stood still, then moved towards a staircase where it was stronger, hesitated about whether to go down or up, then climbed the stairs. The smell was coming from a corridor on D level. I stopped where it seemed strongest, got on my knees, and sniffed at the inch of crack under the metal door. I knocked quietly.

  ‘Yes?’

  I went in.

  Sitting at a desk was a gentle-looking man. The room had a porthole. It was open, and the smoke from a rope whose end was burning seemed to follow a path over the man’s shoulder and out the porthole. ‘Yes?’ he asked again.

  ‘I like the smell. I miss it.’

  He smiled at me and gestured to a space on his bed where I could sit. He pulled open a drawer and brought out a coil of rope a yard long. It was the same sort of hemp rope that hung slowly burning outside the cigarette stalls in Bambalapitiya or the Pettah market, anywhere in the city, really, where you lit the single smoke you had just bought there; or, if you were running and wanted to cause a disturbance, you used the end of the burning coil to light the fuse of a firecracker.

  ‘I know I shall miss it too,’ he said. ‘And other things. Kothamalli. Balsam. I have such things in my suitcase. For I am leaving forever.’ He looked away for a moment. It was as if he had said it aloud to himself for the first time.

  ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Michael,’ I said.

  ‘If you are lonely, Michael, you can always come here.’

  I nodded, then slipped out and closed the door behind me.

  His name was Mr Fonseka and he was travelling to England to be a teacher. I would visit him every few days. He knew passages from all kinds of books he could recite by heart, and he sat at his desk all day wondering about them, thinking what he could say about them. I knew scarcely a thing about the world of literature, but he welcomed me with unusual and interesting stories, stopping abruptly in mid-tale and saying that someday I should find out what happened after that. ‘You will like it, I think. Perhaps he will find the eagle.’ Or, ‘They will escape the maze with the help of someone they are about to meet …’ Often, during the night, while stalking the adult world with Ramadhin and Cassius, I’d attempt to add to the bare bones of an adventure Mr Fonseka had left unfinished.

  He was gracious, with his quietness. When he spoke, he was tentative and languid. Even then I understood his rareness by the pace of his gestures. He stood up only when it was essential, as if he were a sick cat. He was not used to public effort, even though he was now going to be a part of a public world as a teacher of literature and history in England.

  I tried to coax him up on deck a few times, but his porthole and what he could see through it seemed enough nature for him. With his books, his burning rope, some bottled Kelani River water, as well as a few family photographs, he had no need to leave his time capsule. I would visit that smoky room if the day was dull, and he would at some point begin reading to me. It was the anonymity of the stories and the poems that went deepest into me. And the curl of a rhyme was something new. I had not thought to believe he was actually quoting something written with care, in some far country, centuries earlier. He had lived in Colombo all his life, and his manner and accent were a product of the island, but at the same time he had this wide-ranging knowledge of books. He’d sing a song from the Azores or recite lines from an Irish play.

  I brought Cassius and Ramadhin to meet him. He had become curious about them, and he made me tell him of our adventures on the ship. He beguiled them as well, especially Ramadhin. Mr Fonseka seemed to draw forth an assurance or a calming quality from the books he read. He’d gaze into an unimaginable distance (one could almost see the dates flying off the calendar) and quote lines written in stone or papyrus. I suppose he remembered these things to clarify his own opinion, like a man buttoning up his own sweater to give warmth just to himself. Mr Fonseka would not be a wealthy man. And it would be a spare life he would be certain to lead as a schoolteacher in some urban location. But he had a serenity that came with the choice of the life he wanted to live. And this serenity and certainty I have seen only among those who have the armour of books close by.

  I am aware of the pathos and the irony that come with such a portrait. All those foxed Penguin editions of Orwell and Gissing and the translations of Lucretius with their purple borders that he was bringing with him. He must have believed it would be a humble but good life for an Asian living in England, where something like his Latin grammar could be a distinguishing sword.

  I wonder what happened to him. Every few years, whenever I remember, I will look up any reference to Fonseka in a library. I do know that Ramadhin kept in touch with him during his early years in England. But I did not. Though I did realise that people like Mr Fonseka came before us like innocent knights in a more dangerous time, and on the very same path we ourselves were taking now, and at every step there were no doubt the same lessons, not poems, to learn brutally by heart, just as there was t
he discovery of the good and cheap Indian restaurant in Lewisham, and the similar opening up and sealing of blue aerogrammes to Ceylon and later to Sri Lanka, and the same slights and insults and embarrassments over the pronouncing of the letter v and our rushed manner of speaking, and most of all the difficulty of entrance, and then perhaps a modest acceptance and ease in some similar cabinlike flat.

  I think about Mr Fonseka at those English schools wearing his buttoned sweater to protect himself from English weather, and wonder how long he stayed there, and if he did really stay ‘forever’. Or whether in the end he could no longer survive it, even though for him it was ‘the centre of culture’, and instead returned home on an Air Lanka flight that took only two-thirds of a day, to begin again, teaching in a place like Nugegoda. London returned. Were all those memorised paragraphs and stanzas of the European canon he brought back the equivalent of a coil of hemp or a bottle of river water? Did he adapt them or translate them, insist on teaching them in a village school, on a blackboard in the sunlight, the rough call of forest birds screeching nearby? Some idea of order at Nugegoda?

  WE WERE BY now fully knowledgeable about most locations on the ship – from the path air ducts took in their journey away from the turbine propellers, to how I could slip into the fish preparation room (by crawling through a trolley exit), because I liked to watch the fish butchers work. Once I balanced with Cassius on the narrow struts above the false ceiling of the ballroom in order to look down at the dancing humans. It was midnight. In six hours, according to our schedules, dead poultry would be carried from the ‘cold room’ to the kitchens.

  We had discovered the door to the armoury had a buggered latch, and when the room was empty we strolled through it, handling the revolvers and handcuffs. And we knew each lifeboat contained a compass, a sail, a rubber raft, plus emergency chocolate bars that we had already eaten. Mr Daniels had finally told us where the poisonous plants were in the fenced section of his garden. He pointed out to us the Piper mephisticum that ‘sharpened the mind’. He said elders in the Pacific Islands always took it before a critical peace treaty was debated. And there was the curare, growing almost secretly by itself under an intense yellow light, which when inserted into the bloodstream, he told us, was able to knock out the recipient into a long, unremembered trance.

  We were also aware of more informal timetables, ranging from when the Australian began her roller-skating, before dawn, to the late hour, when we waited at the lifeboat for the prisoner to appear. We studied him carefully. We could see that round each of his wrists was a metal cuff. These were connected by a chain about eighteen inches long, so his hands were allowed some movement, and there was a padlock.

  We watched him in silence. There was no communication between him and the three of us. Save one night, when all at once he paused in his walk and glared into the darkness towards us. He could not see us. But it was as if he was conscious of us there, that he had picked up our scent. The guards did not notice us, only he did. He gave a loud growl and turned away. We must have been fifteen yards away, and he was manacled, but he terrified us.

  A Spell

  IF OUR JOURNEY to England was recorded for any reason in the newspapers of the time, it was because of the presence on the Oronsay of the philanthropist Sir Hector de Silva. He had boarded the ship and was travelling with a retinue that included two doctors, one ayurvedic, a lawyer, and his wife and daughter. Most of them stayed in the upper echelons of the ocean liner and were seldom seen by us. No one in his party accepted the invitation to eat at the Captain’s Table. It was assumed they were above even that. Although the reason was that Sir Hector, a Moratuwa entrepreneur, who had ground out his fortune in gems, rubber and plots of land, was now suffering from a possibly fatal illness and was on his way to Europe to find a doctor who would save him.

  Not one English specialist had been willing to come to Colombo to deal with Sir Hector’s medical problem, in spite of being offered considerable remuneration. Harley Street would remain in Harley Street, in spite of a recommendation from the British governor, who had dined with Sir Hector in his Colombo mansion, and in spite of the fact that Sir Hector had been knighted in England for his donations to various charities. So now he was cocooned in a grand double suite on the Oronsay, suffering from hydrophobia. At first we did not concern ourselves with Sir Hector’s illness. His presence on board ship was seldom mentioned by those at the Cat’s Table. He was famous because of his great wealth, and that did not hold any interest for us. But what did make us curious was our discovery of the background to his fateful journey.

  It had happened this way. One morning Hector de Silva had been breakfasting on his balcony with friends. They were joking among themselves in the way that those whose lives are safe and comfortable entertain one another. At that moment, a venerable battaramulle – or holy priest – walked past the house. Seeing the monk, Sir Hector punned off the title by saying, ‘Ah, there goes a muttaraballa.’ Muttara means ‘urinating’, and balla means ‘dog’. Therefore, ‘There goes a urinating dog.’

  It was a quick-witted but inappropriate remark. Having overheard the insult, the monk paused, pointed to Sir Hector, and said, ‘I’ll send you a muttaraballa …’ After which the venerable, reputedly a practitioner of witchcraft, went straight to the temple, where he chanted several mantras, thereby sealing the fate of Sir Hector de Silva and closing the door on his affluent life.

  I cannot remember who told us the first part of that story, but the curiosity among Cassius and Ramadhin and me immediately pulled the millionaire’s presence in Emperor Class into the foreground of our thoughts. We were busy trying to find out as much as we possibly could after that. I even sent a note to my supposed guardian Flavia Prins, and she met me briefly by the entrance to First Class and said she knew nothing. She was annoyed because my note had hinted at an emergency and I had interrupted one of her important bridge games. The problem was that at the Cat’s Table, the others were not talking about it much. Not enough for us. So we eventually approached the Assistant Purser (who, Ramadhin noted, had a glass eye), and he was able to reveal more.

  Sometime after the episode with the passing venerable, Sir Hector was coming down the stairs of his great house. (The Assistant Purser used the phrase ‘climbing down the staircase’.) His pet terrier was at the foot of the steps waiting to greet him. A usual occurrence. This was an animal loved by all members of the family. As Sir Hector bent down, the affectionate animal leapt for his neck. Sir Hector pulled the dog off, at which point the animal bit his hand.

  Two servants eventually got hold of the creature and put it in a kennel. While the animal was being caged, an in-law treated the bite. Apparently the terrier had already behaved strangely that morning, racing around the kitchen under the feet of the servants, and had been chased out of the house with a broom, before slipping back calm and muted at the last minute so it could await its master at the foot of the stairs. The dog had bitten no one during the earlier fracas.

  Later that day Sir Hector passed the kennel and wagged his bandaged finger at the animal. Twenty-four hours later the dog died, having shown symptoms of rabies. But by then the ‘urinating dog’ had already delivered his message.

  One by one they came. Every respected doctor who serviced Colombo 7 was brought in for consultation for a cure. Sir Hector was (save for a few illegal gunrunners or gem merchants whose worth would always be unknown) the richest man in the city. The doctors spoke in whispers all the way down the long corridors of his house, arguing and finessing the defence against rabies, which was already beginning to affect the wealthy body upstairs. The virus was travelling at five to ten millimetres per hour to other cells, and there were already symptoms, such as burning, itching and numbness at the site of the bite, but the terrible signs of hydrophobia were not yet apparent. As the patient was being given supportive care, the duration of the illness might last as long as twenty-five days before it was fatal. The terrier was dug up and checked once more to be certain of rabie
s. Telegrams were sent to Brussels, Paris and London. And three staterooms were booked on the Oronsay, which was the next ship leaving for Europe, just in case. The liner would stop at Aden, Port Said and Gibraltar, and it was hoped a specialist would be able to meet with the vessel in at least one of these locations.

  But it was also being said that Sir Hector should remain at home, as it was likely that his condition would worsen during a possibly rough voyage where medical facilities might be minimal; plus the fact that there was usually a second-rate doctor on board, usually some twenty-eight-year-old intern whose parents had pull at the Orient Line headquarters. Besides, ayurvedic practitioners were now also arriving at the house from the Moratuwa district, where the de Silva family walauwa had existed for more than a century, and these men claimed to have successfully treated victims of rabies. They argued that Sir Hector, by remaining on the island, would be close to the country’s most powerful herbal remedies. They spoke vociferously in the old dialects he was familiar with from his youth, saying that the journey would leave him far from these potent sources. As the cause of the illness was local, the antidote would always be found somewhere in the same place.

  In the end, Sir Hector decided to take the ship to England. Acquiring wealth he had also acquired a complete faith in the advancements of Europe. Perhaps this would prove to be his fatal flaw. The ship’s journey was twenty-one days long. He assumed he would be driven instantly from the Tilbury docks to the best doctor in Harley Street, where, he thought, perhaps there would be a respectful crowd outside, with maybe a few Ceylonese who were fully aware of his financial status. Hector de Silva had read one Russian novel and he could imagine it all, whereas a cure in Colombo seemed to rely on village magic, astrology, and botanical charts in a spidery handwriting. He had grown up knowing some local cures, such as quickly urinating on a foot to alleviate the pain from sea pencils. Now he was being told that for a mad dog’s bite the seeds of the black ummattaka, or thorn apple, should be soaked in cow piss, ground into a paste, and taken internally. Then, twenty-four hours later, he should take a cold bath and drink buttermilk. The provinces were full of these cures. Four out of ten of them worked. That wasn’t good enough.