Noontide Toll Read online

  Also by the author

  Monkfish Moon

  Reef

  The Sandglass

  Heaven’s Edge

  The Match

  © 2014 by Romesh Gunesekera

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.

  ‘Mess’ was first published in Granta 125. ‘Roadkill’ was first published in the New Yorker.

  Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to: Permissions Department, The New Press, 120 Wall Street, 31st floor, New York, NY 10005.

  First published in India by Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Books India, 2014

  Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2014

  Distributed by Perseus Distribution

  CIP data is available

  ISBN 978-1-62097-021-8 (e-book)

  The New Press publishes books that promote and enrich public discussion and understanding of the issues vital to our democracy and to a more equitable world. These books are made possible by the enthusiasm of our readers; the support of a committed group of donors, large and small; the collaboration of our many partners in the independent media and the not-for-profit sector; booksellers, who often hand-sell New Press books; librarians; and above all by our authors.

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  This book was set in Bembo Std

  10987654321

  ‘There was nowhere to go . . . so keep on rolling under the stars.’

  Jack Kerouac, On the Road

  Helen

  Contents

  Full Tank

  NORTH

  Folly

  Mess

  Deadhouse

  Scrap

  Roadkill

  Renewals

  SOUTH

  Ramparts

  Fluke

  Shoot

  Turtle

  Janus

  Humbug

  Running on Empty

  Acknowledgements

  Full Tank

  Every time I drive across the causeway to Jaffna, I feel I am entering another country. The lagoon is as big as a sea. The sky touches it at the edge, on the left, and on the right, and the wind makes the ripples look like waves. The fellows at the checkpoint know me so well now that they don’t even look at my ID. They crack a couple of jokes about the state of my van and laugh their heads off. I tell them it is a Japanese van. In 1945, Japan was a dump. Nobody thought the Japanese could make even a cup of tea any more, but now Toyota is the biggest car company in the world. It’s a funny business, I tell them. No one knows who will have the last laugh. Look at Germany, same thing. German tourists are rolling in it now. Their chancellor is the boss of Europe. It makes you wonder about this business of defeat and victory.

  Today, I am the van man for two Hollanders and Mrs Cooray. I get some oddballs in here, but this is the oddest trio in a while. My job is to drive them to Jaffna for one night only: straight there and straight back. By the end of the trip we would have spent more hours on the road than in the town. Apparently, a guide has been arranged for a morning tour of the place. Some crazy scheme for a renovation project or something.

  Mrs Cooray, from the new Heritage Agency, is in charge. ‘You have petrol, no?’ she asked the moment she got in. She is like the deputy governor’s wife I had to chauffeur when I worked at the Coconut Corporation. Before I got my desk job, I used to drive her all around Colombo. It was a good job even though she was another madcap. I preferred being behind a wheel—going somewhere—than behind a desk. That’s why I started this business with the van the moment I retired from the corporation. It is a minibus, not a sports car, but it makes me feel young. When I tell my tourists that I retired a year ago, at fifty-five, they are astounded. ‘Fucking hell,’ Mr Benton from Brighton said. His language surprised me. But that’s the way the new breed of tourist talks nowadays, even when they are flip-flopping in their mid-sixties and should know the risks of a loose mouth and all that. They come from such developed countries, but they have to stay in service until they lose their marbles. Then they come here on a tight budget looking for their goolies.

  Sometimes I think the way the world is organized is a joke.

  The hotel Mrs Cooray booked for the night is off Hospital Street. I have stayed in it before. It is an OK place, but I can’t help thinking, we are in a land where every road seems to lead to a hospital. You could say we have all been a little damaged by the last few decades, so I guess that is only right. Up here, in this wounded country, even the sky bleeds every evening.

  The Hibiscus Hotel has no star rating. The porch has been repainted in pink but there have been no attempts at improvements inside since my last visit. Even so, our group looks happy enough. I think the Dutch have very low expectations. Maybe because they can’t see very far ahead with the dykes and all that. How they ever conquered the world, I don’t know. Or even how they set sail on the high seas with their balls of Edam.

  Soon it is dark and Kanna, the duty manager, giggles and turns the coloured lights on making the place even more garish. The staff are sweet but there is a long way to go before a hotel like the Hibiscus hits the mark. Jaffna has never been a major tourist destination and is not about to be one—not just yet, whatever the newspapers say.

  ‘We start tomorrow at eight o’clock, Vasantha,’ Mrs Cooray says, standing under a glass bowl of fuzzy light. The lampshade is swarming with noisy insects. ‘We go to the fort in the morning and after lunch we have a meeting at the Navalar Cultural Hall. You know it?’ She searches her handbag for something, then snaps it shut triumphantly. ‘Never mind. There will be an army boy here in the morning to show us the way.’

  I bow. ‘Goodnight, madam.’

  She sprays her arms with the small yellow canister she’d found in her bag. ‘Goodnight, Vasantha,’ she says and floats over to the reception area to join the others, humming the bouncy song she had made me put on, again and again, in the van about a sandman bringing us a dream.

  I make my way to the staff quarters. Kanna says I can have the best room to myself this time. Normally, in a place like this, one would have to share but there are no other drivers here tonight. So, I can sleep like a king in a land of dead kings. I ask for a cool beer and Kanna laughs. I tell him I have been on the road for eleven hours and I am very thirsty. He finds the idea of an eleven-hour drive an even bigger joke than a cold Lion lager.

  ‘All that way, just to stay for one night? What do they want?’

  ‘Two of them have come from a lot further. From Holland in Europe.’

  Kanna laughs again. ‘But not from Hague, no?’ He gives me a beer and a plate of roti. I wonder if he gets Channel 4 or Al Jazeera where there has been a lot of talk about the war courts of The Hague. How a small Dutch town like that on the edge of Europe became the conscience of the world is a mystery to me. We could all learn something from that.

  Out in the garden, beyond the palmyra, I hear an owl hoot. It has been a long time since I have heard one—an owl. It must mean something, but I am too tired to remember. All I know is that with a van, at least, you are never stuck. You can always get in it and go for a loaf. You don’t have to feel trapped. If you are on the move, there is always hope.

  NORTH

  Folly

  When I stepped out in the morning, I found a fellow with a sharp, pointed head examining the wheels of my van. I hadn’t seen him at the hotel before.

  ‘Mokadtha?’ I asked him, in Sinhala. What’s up? Half challenge, half greeting. My smattering of Tamil had already spun out of reach before breakfast. It seemed not to matter to him. Jaffna being what it is today, maybe anything goes.

  ‘This tyre won’t last long up
here,’ he warned. ‘You should change it.’ A few minutes later, Mrs Cooray and her party appeared under the porch. I pulled open the sliding door of the van with a bit of an effort. ‘You need oil,’ he added. ‘A little squirt.’

  Mrs Cooray, dressed in a bright yellow blouse and bountiful blue jeans, came full sail across the courtyard. Her entourage—two Dutch visitors caught in the slipstream—looked crumpled as though they had slept together in a cramped cot.

  ‘Are you Dilshan?’ she asked pointy-head.

  He blinked. ‘Guide, madam.’

  ‘You will take us to the fort?’

  ‘No problem, madam.’

  They climbed into the van. The two Dutchmen forced themselves into the narrow back seat while Mrs Cooray, small, round and cheerful, bounced into the spacious middle row. ‘Did you rest, Vasantha?’ she asked me.

  ‘All right, madam,’ I said. I was pleased to see them all back in their places, exactly as they had been for the journey up from Colombo the day before.

  Our guide waited until everyone was settled and then jumped in next to me. ‘Yamu,’ he said, in Sinhala. ‘Let’s go.’

  I started the engine and we rolled to the gate. He gave no other direction, so I turned right on the lane and headed towards the main road. Guides in our country are like that. They don’t say anything until you are about to make a wrong turn. Then they shout ‘left’ or ‘right’, amazed that you had not divined the correct route. Is it because we are an island people and expect everyone to know the same things like one big happy family? Anyway, I have learnt to go by instinct until I am told not to. What else can you do when everything is so muddled? Happy families are a rare treat. So I turned right again, at the junction, although on this occasion, I have to admit, I did know the way to Jaffna Fort. Our hard-edged guide was there only to get us in through the army security. An off-duty soldier. Moonlighting. Squirting oil, you might say, on troubled waters.

  ‘Did you enjoy your breakfast?’ Mrs Cooray asked her two guests, settling herself sideways along the length of the seat.

  ‘It was good,’ the taller one, Paul, said, ‘but I had hoped they would have some pittu or appam.’

  ‘The hotel just opened a few months ago. They are trying very hard to do proper continentals.’

  ‘The pineapple jam was excellent,’ the other man, Vince, piped in.

  I hadn’t had any people from Holland in my van before. I liked these two. They might have been diplomats, or from some funding agency, but they didn’t talk much. On our journey up, I don’t think they said more than a couple of dozen words each. But already they have picked up some local terms. Mrs Cooray made up for it though. After coffee in Dambulla, three and a half hours into our journey, she would not stop talking. She gave me a cassette for the player and sang along with the hits of the fifties. In between, we heard everything about her family: from her pickled grandmother in Nugegoda, to her son-of-a-Dalmatian husband who had abandoned her for an Australian horse-breeder even though he couldn’t tell a piebald from a jackass.

  ‘What does an Australian jockey have that I don’t, huh?’ she asked her incredulous guests. I looked in my mirror and saw them exchange looks. ‘Two, not one, but two children he fathered,’ she said, as though he had been a randy farmer sowing paddy in her field. ‘Then he discovers his orientation. Hell of a compass that is, no?’ She was now the incredulous one. ‘I know in Amsterdam it is all very this and that, but what am I to tell my boys when they grow up? That he liked to go side-saddle in the outback?’

  It was not so surprising that the two men kept quiet.

  ‘Left, left.’ Our guide thumped the dashboard.

  I turned the wheel, unflustered by his sudden fit. In my van, I maintain a sense of serenity, whatever goes on inside or out. People like that. A place of safety. An island of peace. The tips I get are good. They are grateful, no doubt, that I have not killed them, or injured them, or even aged them with squealing brakes and stops and starts. Having paid for a piece of paradise, they are then bombarded with warnings and get worried about travel sickness, dengue, landmines and nerve gas and so are amazed to get to their pleasure pools unharmed. Not only that, they even discover some comfort cruising our colourful roads. In their relief, their generosity gets the better of them. A smooth, safe ride is what I deliver, however long the journey. Not easy on the A9 to Jaffna. Especially after all the rain, never mind the war. Looking at the road, you’d think there’d been an air strike by a bunch of pot-headed monsoon gods. In some places, the craters are bigger than my wheels.

  But the ordinary roads in Jaffna are not bad. On a Sunday morning, they are clean and clear. Like down south in the old days. Among the coconut trees and lotus ponds, you hardly notice the bullet-riddled cottages and toppled walls. We got to the fort area in no time. Dilshan jabbed a finger this way and that to get me to go round the cricket stadium to the entrance.

  ‘Look, the sea.’ Mrs Cooray beat the back of my seat. The blue bruise in the distance fattened like a mirage and began to sparkle as I took the curve. ‘Ten cents for me.’

  In my mirror I saw Vince the shorter peer forward. Paul, already stooped inside, turned his head to look out of the side window. ‘What’s that big white building?’

  Mrs Cooray nudged Dilshan. ‘Is that the library?’ Her voice hit a pitch of disbelief only found in the swankiest shops of Colombo, or on Indian breakfast TV.

  ‘Yes, madam,’ Dilshan said. Then broke into Sinhala. ‘Eka thamai. That’s the one that was burnt in ’81. Now completely rebuilt. It looks, they say, just the same.’

  ‘Can we go in?’ Paul asked, enthralled.

  ‘No, sir,’ Dilshan replied in courteous but firm military English. ‘Today not possible.’ He urged me to drive on and we sped past the gates and the bronze statue of a Jaffna giant. I wondered how long he had been there, fixed to his strip of scorched earth, pondering the fate of his molested land.

  *

  The outer walls of the fort form a bare crust that looked to me like the edges of an old wound. I drove slowly to the checkpoint and stopped. The young soldier on guard recognized Dilshan and came up to the window.

  ‘So, how?’ Dilshan greeted him. ‘Anybody in there today?’

  The youngster made a face. ‘Nobody comes.’

  Dilshan waved his hand as if he was paddling water, urging me to drive on. No further conversation was necessary. Dilshan had credentials bursting out of his biceps. I waited for the young soldier to lift the red pole and then went through. The old stone fort is really a small fortified town with high ramparts, barracks, official residences, the church and so on. Or at least that was what it used to be. Now even the gateway is a ruin.

  ‘Is there any shade to park in?’ Mrs Cooray asked. ‘The van will get so hot.’

  I stopped at the edge of the dried-out moat. ‘No, madam. No trees here.’ Even the grass had been beaten to dust by the bands of Tiger cadres and the boom pah pah of the Sri Lankan army over the last thirty years.

  Dilshan jumped out and yanked open the passenger door. ‘Come, madam. We have to walk from here.’

  Mrs Cooray peered out suspiciously. ‘In this sun? Can’t we just drive in a little bit at least?’

  ‘Only army can drive in, madam. This one is a military zone.’

  ‘But you are army, no?’

  ‘Not official duty, madam. Come this way, please.’

  Mrs Cooray climbed down and unfurled a polka-dot umbrella. The two Dutch men followed her out. Paul put on a pair of sun goggles that made him bug-eyed, while his companion squinted under a cupped hand. Dilshan led the way doing an occasional parade-ground half-step to keep in line with Mrs Cooray. We headed for the entrance tunnel in military formation, with me bringing up the rear.

  ‘So, this is one of your legacies, Paul, Vince,’ Mrs Cooray said loudly. ‘It was the envy of the world at one point, you know. Until the troubles came it was a perfectly preserved example of an eighteenth-century Dutch colonial fort.’

  ‘Yes,
built in the shape of a star,’ Paul said.

  ‘Why did they do that? They didn’t have aeroplanes, no? So, who could tell what it looked like? Because that’s the thing, no? It is like a star only if you look from above?’ Mrs Cooray stopped. ‘Was it for aliens?’

  ‘No, no.’ Paul lowered his head. ‘The fort was built for the eyes of God.’

  Mrs Cooray turned to him, nearly smacking Dilshan with her umbrella. ‘Wasn’t that just the church?’

  ‘No, no,’ Paul repeated his newfound litany. ‘No. Everything was for God.’

  ‘My goodness,’ Mrs Cooray breathed out. ‘Everything, huh? For the see-all.’

  I looked around. There was a noticeboard on the wall, by the entrance, displaying a diagram and giving a short account of the site as if it were Pompeii and ruined by natural mayhem. The wall itself was crumbling. The tunnel was a mess. It looked godforsaken to me. Mrs Cooray’s see-all clearly didn’t care eff-all, but I didn’t say anything. These days you can’t be too careful. Any hole in the country can hide a blabbermouth or a snitch.

  Inside the tunnel there were two more soldiers, one at either end. The first one, with a gun hanging off his shoulder, seemed more on duty than the other one who was sitting on a chair and blowing smoke rings. Dilshan saluted and they both straightened up. Mrs Cooray twirled her umbrella. Paul paused to examine some war graffiti.

  ‘Sir, come this way,’ Dilshan said.

  When we emerged on the other side, we found a large open space the size of a cricket ground. In the centre a few trees struggled to stay awake surrounded by a sea of smashed stones and burnt bricks. The rubble had been organized into sections and the debris sorted according to size and colour. At the far end stood some fragments of bombed-out buildings. The only complete structures were the shrouded military barracks in the far corner.

  ‘There is nothing left,’ Mrs Cooray said.

  ‘No, madam.’ Dilshan wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘Bombs, no. We had many big battles.’