Suncatcher Read online

  Because of the yard-round basket he carried on his head, he could not see me but I crouched low anyway, making the intruder into a gunman with a sombrero and turning his reddish sarong into chaparajos. An unwitting desperado, he lifted the iron hasp of the gate and clanged it, clearly not understanding the risk.

  Siripala hurried out, barefoot, shushing to silence him. He pointed to his wrist. The paper collector checked his wrist too. Neither had watches but both pretended their lives blossomed richer than they did. The man patted his headgear and drifted downstream; Siripala retreated.

  The realm of make-believe, I could see even then, was not mine alone.

  Every evening, the eastern corner of Dickman’s Road and Havelock Road by the sports ground melted into a patch of yellow grass and scruffy shadows of upended rickshaws. Skinny bullocks would sniff the pissed-on ground and drift drunkenly on. Rugby veterans, cutting a fast corner to get to their own watering hole in time for a sundowner, sometimes foundered. I arrived at exactly five thirty, after the dog-catcher had been, nervous: would Jay turn up?

  The sky had a half-hour or so to fully ripen but the slope up Dickman’s Road was already restless; the jacaranda trees swayed, gathering up their wind-tipped leaves, brushing against nests and cocoons, stirring their dozy residents into action. Crows bristled, beaks open; other birds jostled in the branches, ready to join in the frenzy and herald the dance of the sun rolling out his rug of darkness and shaking out the stars, as he did above the canyons of the West.

  ‘Hey, man, watch your back.’ Jay yanked the Beano I had clipped to the rear mudguard carrier for emergencies. ‘Anyone could just flick that, machang.’

  ‘No-o.’ The syllable went off-key. ‘I was looking out for those bats.’

  ‘If you wanna be a hunter, you must become invisible.’

  Jay was hardly invisible; he was wild and gangly – his limbs shooting out in all directions, big enough to be everywhere – even though he appeared so suddenly, like a gun in the hand of a gunslinger.

  ‘There are more trees on the other side of the grounds.’

  ‘Bats would launch off from a much wilder place.’

  ‘There’s a jungle on our road,’ I declared, bewildered by my audacity.

  ‘So, let’s check it out. You lead.’

  The thrill he unleashed in me surpassed anything I had ever known: trusted so quickly to lead. Trusted by the one who was the natural leader. I wheeled my bike around and sped down the road before Jay had a chance to change his mind.

  The sweeper by the toddy shack raised his broom in a salute as I flew past. At the shortcut, I waited for Jay to catch up. Hardly any cars came along that road – a blind corner where I had once almost ridden straight into Mr Selvarajah’s shiny Studebaker. His driver had given me such an evil look that if I ever found that car parked out on the road, I vowed to let the air out of all the tyres.

  ‘Down there?’ Jay jerked his head, pointing with his chin.

  I did a snake with my hand and led the way, ringing my bell along the narrow lane lined with the high wall of a Bavarian fortress on one side and crumpled black-jacket trees on the other until we reached my green dream-swell.

  Jay let out a low whistle. ‘This is a real kalava. How big?’

  ‘Massive. It goes on and on.’

  ‘Ad infinitum?’

  ‘I keep watch from the balcony.’

  ‘Is there a path in?’

  ‘Dunno.’ I said the word the way I had heard Jay say it. ‘You can go in anywhere.’

  Jay lowered himself to search the perimeter, then began to move forwards holding his bike lightly by the centre of the downturned handlebars, uncoiling a muscle at a time. Only on a page had I come across anyone move so quietly and so alert – all there, body and soul clenched tight.

  ‘What have you spotted in there?’ Jay asked.

  ‘There’s a bear, maybe.’ Bears and bison would be an improvement on the usual stray cats and bullfrogs.

  ‘You’ve seen tracks?’

  ‘Weird sounds.’

  We came to a break in the fence where the barbed wire had snapped and lay in loose coils. Two red-eyed butterflies floated lazily into the lantanas.

  ‘Hear that? Yellow-eared bulbul.’

  ‘Let’s put the bikes in my garden first,’ I suggested. Jay followed me home and we hid them snug next to each other in the front yard.

  He crouched, already in hunting mode, as we slipped back out of the gate and across the road. His slippers made no noise while mine flip-flopped with every step I took. How did he do it? Suck the rubber up through the soles of his feet? I suppressed the urge to own up, tell Jay that there really was nothing in there to see except grass snakes and caterpillars. The kalava was a jungle of illusions, a dream-hole framed by a gate of whispery ivory and thorns. Nothing more.

  Jay lifted an umbrella of white flowers out of the way and cleared a safe passage. Working carefully, dipping his head here and there and noting every broken twig and overturned blade, he took the lead. Within minutes the fence, the road, the house, all signs of human life disappeared. The colours became brighter and denser, the air stiller and fuller, trapped in a dome of green. He whispered the names of plants: castor, veralu, nelli, nika. As we reached a clearing near the centre, the whoop-whoop-whoop call of a coucal echoed over the crackles of leaves and insects. Jay twisted back and put a finger to his lips.

  A coucal – an ati-kukula – a large black bird buttoned up in haughty, toffee-brown wings, was hardly wildlife. One could be found in every other garden in Colombo, admonishing smaller animals like a stern, sozzle-eyed squire, but this one’s sombre warning had set off several other creatures. A small scarlet bird, close by, puffed up its chest and sounded its own shrill alarm.

  Jay paused, drawing the birdsong into himself before whistling back. ‘Fantastic. Minivet. Male. This could be the place. If there are bigger trees farther in, they might be there hanging like bobos – those bats.’

  All I could spot hanging were dried scimitar pods and swollen breadfruit. An orange-throated lizard scrambled up a tree and froze, sensing danger. Jay picked up a small stone from the ground; a second later it flew and hit the tiny animal, knocking it into the bushes.

  ‘I don’t like it.’ I swallowed hard. ‘We should go back.’

  Jay raised his hand, palm up, scout style. ‘Not yet. We go as far as the jak tree.’

  I was beginning to feel hemmed in by all the thick, fuddling chlorophyll. My father had once warned me: ‘Don’t go off track, son. Put your head above the parapet and it is bound to get blown off. Understand?’

  Jay reached the target and circled it stealthily, studying the patchwork branches, the big, prickly fruit, his eyes sliding from side to side, measuring, sorting, solving.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Look, there it is. Not an ordinary ati-kukula. See the beak? It’s green. I’ve not seen a green-billed one before, have you?’

  Not in the dark, I wanted to say. The sun’s wake was fast coagulating; soon you would see only a mass of tangled shadows and fangs snarling at the moon. ‘There is a bigger jungle farther on, you know.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘After our house, there is only one bungalow and then it is like swampland.’ Siripala was adamant that illicit kasippu distillers did moonshine executions of any nosy parker down by the creek and fed their bodies to the crocs you could hear snuffling through midnight.

  The green-billed coucal took off, heavily, crashing through the bushes of carambola and sparking a chorus of frantic birdsong. I watched Jay’s pleasure glow as he followed its bumbling flight. Then, through a gap in the trees, I spotted the convoy of bats pricking a line in the distance. We were in the wrong place to follow them – wide off the mark. Mortified, I tried to distract Jay.

  ‘I saw a snake.’

  The ground could have been crawling with reptiles, but Jay searched the treetops instead and noticed the distant formation.

  ‘They’ve changed the fl
ight path.’ He didn’t dwell on it, quickly shifting his interest to what other birds might be hiding in the foliage. ‘Is that an orange babbler?’

  The shame of failure that always hung around my shoulders seeped in deeper. I knew I should apologise for leading him astray, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. To admit inadequacy as a navigator would double the agony of the blunder and I could not handle that; no, better hurry nightfall and bring on the howl of coyotes and mooncalves.

  Outside our house, Jay was cheerfully upbeat. ‘That green-billed coucal was phenomenal. So rare. Miles better than following any dumb bat.’ He collected his bike and waited for a few seconds at the gate before climbing onto the saddle. His long lashes caught the last rays of the sun and brightened the corners of his eyes.

  A car horn beeped farther up the road.

  ‘So, see you around, pardner.’ Jay rang his bell. I waved him off.

  A small and difficult truth dawned on me as he disappeared: I wanted Jay close, but I did not want him inside the house. I did not want him to see the clutter of cheap furniture and useless newspapers that filled the sitting room; the ordinariness of my parents. The promise of blameless companionship I had found in him had nothing to do with anyone except the two of us, and I was determined to keep it that way.

  The black-framed spectacles my father wore for reading were narrow at the bridge and thick at the sides; balanced precariously on his flat nose, the plastic arms often acted as blinkers helping him to focus on the serious business of form.

  Twice a week he would have the opportunity, before my mother came home, to fold his ‘race paper’ into a small rectangle and carefully mark it with crosses and circles, calculating form to potential. His pencil would hover between the ‘place’ and ‘win’ decisions until the last minute, juggling the bookie’s odds against the five-and-a-half-hour time difference, as it was then, between Colombo and Goodwood or Kempton Park; then, tucking his pencil behind one ear, he’d call Siripala and hand him a clutch of green rupee notes and the scrap of paper on which he had written the time of the race and the names of the horses. ‘This one for place, this one for win. Understand? So, go.’ He’d set Siripala on his own race up to the bucket shop by the main junction on Havelock Road and warn him to be back within half an hour. It didn’t bother him that he rarely won, or that even when his horse did win, against the odds, Siripala claimed he’d got the bets confused and had put the money on the wrong one.

  The day after the jungle expedition with Jay, my mother came home early – soon after Siripala had been dispatched on his mission. My father had settled down to the rest of his newspaper unaware of her frustrations at the studios or the transformation in my life. He smoothed the damp paper to try to stiffen the headlines in the climate of permanent humidity that swathed his marriage.

  Undiverted, she noticed the yellow pencil stub lodged behind his ear. ‘You are not betting again, are you?’

  ‘Now? No, not now.’

  ‘Where’s Siripala?’

  He peered over his thick spectacles. ‘Fellow was here a minute ago.’

  I couldn’t help but admire my father’s ability to wriggle out of a corner.

  But she zeroed in: ‘You haven’t sent him to the bucket shop again, have you? Aren’t they all shut down? New law, no? Isn’t that what enforcement is meant to do?’

  ‘A foolish legal aspiration of the morally demented. They can ban racing here in Colombo, my dear, and stop a local punt. But, you know, even this government can’t stop horses running in England.’

  ‘You are betting on what – English races?’

  ‘We have the radio, Monica? Your medium. So, time to turn the tables. They are the jockeys and we wear the top hats now. The age of imperialism is over.’ He chortled and clicked his big toe with his second in a kind of raspy salute, the way normal people snapped their fingers. ‘If you form a club, you see, dearie, you can do whatever the heck you like.’

  Converting an immediate retort into a reproachful sigh, my mother went over to the sideboard where several unopened pinkish envelopes stood pressed between two small, carved ebony elephants. She picked up one of the envelopes, her hand shaking with the charge.

  ‘You haven’t even paid the electricity bill. Another redletter warning. Ignore, ignore, but what next? They’ll cut us off – then what?’

  ‘I told you, they’ll never cut us off.’ He scraped the edge of one thumbnail against the other, prising out an argument hidden under the white, uneven tip. ‘Electricity they need us to use. Otherwise what’s the point? Bet those jackasses don’t even know where the off switch is. Don’t worry. Why give money sooner than necessary? “Just-in-time” is all the fashion now.’

  ‘We can’t live like this, Clarence. It’s madness. On a tightrope all the time. Any minute, we’ll fall.’

  I slipped out of the house before the quarrel escalated and took off on my bike.

  At the bottom of Greenlands, a familiar figure ducked into the teashop where bare-bodied idlers huddled smoking and drinking endless cups of syrupy kadé tea. Siripala, an expert at his own calculations, could always shave time for himself on his errands.

  As I took the turn, Wolfman, the neighbourhood thug, stepped out onto the road swinging a thick, black stick in his hand. I braked. The bike skidded, sending me sprawling. The man advanced, uglily. Siripala didn’t even peek out, but a woman in the teashop jeered at Wolfman’s bloated belly flopping over his sarong; it gave me just enough time to pull up the bike and escape.

  At the milk bar, safe again, I asked for a Chocolac. ‘Did my friend come by?’

  ‘That boy? Come and gone.’ Mahela, his face round and irrepressible, jiggled the milk drink to the Jim Reeves tune playing on his radio before passing it over.

  ‘But he always comes at this time, no? To catch the sunset, he said.’

  ‘Caught bloody enough today. The bird in the pocket. Clever as a monkey, that boy. He could catch the sun in a thunderstorm, if he wanted to.’

  ‘The yellow bird?’

  ‘Shah,’ he wagged his head in admiration. ‘Set a trap with the cage up there.’ He indicated the laburnum. ‘Don’t know what he put inside but that sootikka flew straight in and pop – he had the fellow.’

  I imagined Jay’s big face breaking into a smile. ‘Lucky for him.’

  ‘He went with the cage hanging off a pole. He’ll be at home teaching it to sing hymns now.’

  ‘Where’s his house?’

  ‘Don’t you know it? The Alavis residence: Casa Lihiniya?’ He noticed the tiny spots of blood on my elbow. ‘What happened? You fall, putha?’

  ‘Just a stupid kerfuffle.’ Casa Lihiniya: a charmed House of Swallows for a boy who could catch even the light in the sky.

  My own sanctuary was a ten-minute ride away, at the top of St Kilda’s Lane: a second-hand bookshop where a quick dip into an adventure annual, or an illicit paperback, never failed to give me a boost.

  Most of the time, Mr Ismail, the proprietor – hair oiled and neatly parted to the left – would be marooned on a brown cane chair behind a school desk on the front veranda surrounded by piles of salt-speckled books. His papery hands would sort them carefully by category, binding, size. Crusty old hardbacks would then be lodged close to him; the stacks of comics, organised by superhero, farthest away at the back of the shop. In six months I had gone through all the Green Lantern and Batman series, then the column of smaller pocket-sized Commando war comics. Recently I had discovered motor magazines, paperback detective stories and mystifyingly adult thrillers. The credo at Mr Ismail’s shop stated that you buy, sell and exchange all in one go at a fixed price. ‘No credit,’ was Mr Ismail’s favourite line. No credit meant you sometimes had to make do with two paperbacks, instead of three. Or a Beano, instead of the latest Boy’s Own, or the new Saint escapade. The transaction became a ritual, almost sacramental. Although the books – except for the Soviet ones – were second-hand and had been pored over by many pairs of greedy eyes, for me only one
other person floated in that world: Mr Ismail – a man with millions of words at his fingertips and a capacity for remaining silent at will.

  On this late afternoon, the glare had been nearly all sucked out of the sun and the thin orange lozenge foundered in its final dissolve while Mr Ismail, wedged between two cardboard boxes overflowing with blue-backed Pelicans, contemplated the inch of inky sea on the horizon with more suspicion than usual. His neat shirt with the dog-eared collar tucked deep into the waistband of his faded trousers, he rocked back in his chair, a bare, skinny foot crossed on his knee, toenails bared.

  ‘After more war stories?’

  ‘No more, Mr Ismail. Read all those.’

  ‘Ah, new shipment coming this week. American adventures. The education attaché at the U.S. embassy has a big family and they get through a lot, he says. Americans know how to turn even an argument into an adventure, the stuff of dreams.’

  ‘Any argument?’ Could the feud at home one day become profitable?

  ‘Can’t make out his new friend though. Tourist, apparently, but more like a lapsed beatnik to my eye.’ He snuffled back the unwelcome note of incomprehension. ‘So then, what are you looking for today, young man?’

  ‘Information, Mr Ismail.’

  ‘An encyclopaedia, is it? Cost a lot, you know. And the exchange value of pure knowledge these days is abysmal.’

  ‘Jus’ curious.’

  Mr Ismail wiped the desk with the back of his hand, sending a small storm of paper flakes and silverfish shells into the air. He fixed me with a ropey eye. ‘You have acquired a new curiosity?’

  ‘Only birds.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Actually, birds and bats. Wanna know how they fly.’

  His face eased, relieved. ‘They applaud, young man. They clap with their wings and applaud the sky. That’s how.’

  I moved my hands together cautiously. ‘How? This does nothing.’