Noontide Toll Read online

  ‘So, if he is the one, what next?’ Father Perera asked.

  ‘I have to talk to Marion. She is the one who knows the girl’s family. He has to be brought to account but it will be a painful process for all of them.’

  ‘What about the military?’

  ‘This country is not ruled by the military, is it? He beat her up and left her to die. If he can do that in his home town, imagine what he would have been like in a war zone. They will wash their hands of him.’ Mr Patrick jabbed hard at the cushion next to him. ‘He is a fucking murderer. Surely he must be punished?’

  ‘I am not a judge, I am only a priest.’

  ‘I am neither, but I know what is right and what is wrong. I told Marion, if anyone could get us to this psycho, you could, Father. And I was damn right.’

  ‘I got you to this major, that’s all. I don’t know what he is.’

  The words hung in the back of the van like smoke. Why is it, I wondered, that some of us cannot shake our doubts whatever we do while others can be so dead sure of things? All I have for certain is a weird sense of complicity and the more I try to escape from it, the more it seems to grow. I wanted to ask the Padre, why is that? He should know but it was not my place to ask questions any more. I was only the driver now, no longer a fellow diner. They were deep in their own matters—talk that didn’t make sense to me. The major had been decent enough. Mr Patrick was the one proving to be dodgy.

  The town, when we reached it, was quiet. A corner shop had a light on, a white fluorescent flare. One eating place was still open. Nothing else. I stopped at the junction and waited for a man on crutches to cross the road. I remembered how when we were coming I noticed several people with missing limbs in this town. There was a lot of damage around that one gets accustomed to very quickly. The burst shells of houses around Kilinochchi, which I have passed a dozen times or more; the wasted fields. The first time you see a toppled water tower or a building with its sides ripped off, it is undeniably a shock. This was the war, you think. But then soon after that a pile of debris, a flattened home or a broken man just becomes the surroundings. It is simply what is there. What happens. Like a soldier whacking a shuttlecock or a padre sucking a mango. You don’t look twice. You don’t think about the boy who lost his home to a whistling bomb, or his mother who stepped on a landmine and lost both feet and now has to hobble around on stumps. North or south, you try to avoid thinking too much. What to do? You put a cassette in the machine and sing along to a song about moonlight and love. Paddy fields and doves. It is normal, you say. We have to live in a normal world, whatever happens. Is that wrong? The major did not seem to me a bad man. He was very correct in his manners and acknowledged me in a way that many people in the civilian world don’t. Not just with the mangoes, which was a treat, but in talking to me. No one has asked to have their photo taken with me before, except tipsy foreign tourists. No doubt he could kill a man without batting an eyelid, but I could not believe he would have really beaten a woman to pulp while visiting his family. How could he? I waited for Mr Patrick to say something more incriminating.

  His phone beeped. ‘I’ll text Marion and say we found him,’ he said.

  Father Perera shook his head. ‘We only have a fuzzy little picture that looks a bit like him, Patrick. No real evidence that he even met her. You should have asked him. Confronted him. If he is guilty, there would have been a sign.’

  Mr Patrick was sweating even though the air con was on full. His face blazed. ‘Do you really have any doubt? Did you not see his hands? When we post the picture the driver took this evening, I am sure someone will recognize him. The two of them must have been seen together somewhere.’

  ‘I don’t know, Patrick. I just don’t know.’

  To my mind, Father Perera was not giving Mr Patrick much pastoral guidance. The kind we need in times of trouble. I was also not too happy getting dragged in as the picture taker. Matters are a lot clearer to a military man. They are trained to make quick decisions and fast exits. Although in Jaffna, I have to say, the major seemed to be in no hurry to leave. But then, if he is the monster they say he is, where can he go? Where can a big man who loses it go? After all, people do lose control, don’t they, in times of war? The whole business is insane anyway, killing and maiming like there is no tomorrow. How can you shoot someone in the head and call it duty? How can anyone be normal after that? Father Perera was right. They should have asked him, not assumed. Got him to talk more about himself than their crazy PE routine and the taste of forbidden fruit. Father Perera should know how it works. That’s his field, after all. Redeeming the sinner, rectifying our faults. Drawing confessions. I believe Christians say there is nothing that cannot be absolved, if admitted. I’d like to ask him if that is true. It would make a difference, not only for the major but for all of us.

  Deadhouse

  Dr Ponnampalam was in a short-sleeve safari jacket of the sort I have not seen in a dozen years, but he was well turned out, unlike his son—a scruff from the tips of his uncombed hair to the tangled mess of his trainers. The boy must have been in his late teens and looked like he had not seen daylight before noon for years. He yawned. ‘No latte, no nothing. What a dump.’

  ‘That was good island coffee, Mahen.’ Dr Ponnampalam’s head, a small ball perched necklessly on the larger ball of his body, dipped.

  ‘Not even Nescafé. Half a teaspoon of rubbish in a pot like a watering can.’

  The doctor ignored his son’s grumble and greeted me. ‘Good morning, Vasantha. You slept well, I hope.’

  ‘Thank you, doctor,’ I said. ‘They give us tour drivers from Colombo good rooms here.’

  The boy scrunched up his face into as different a shape as he could from his father’s. ‘Upstairs, no air con. No nothing.’

  His father glanced at the road. ‘Did you ask how to get to the place, Vasantha? I don’t recognize any of this.’ He spread his hands as he must have done to carry his baby son once, before the boy turned into something he could not understand, like this land. If I had been a father, I would have made sure my son knew our proper place in the world. It is good to know where you stand. But maybe that is not so easy if you are uprooted like these two.

  I pulled out a piece of paper that the receptionist, a much smilier young man than the doctor’s son, had given me. An eagerly drawn simple map, A to B. ‘Only ten minutes in the van,’ I said. ‘Past the hospital.’

  ‘You can find the hospital?’ His face relaxed at the thought of familiar ground. ‘Then we are OK.’

  Mahen, the boy, got in and sat right at the back where I have the windows screened with batik curtains—a special recent touch for the new sun-avoiding visitors we attract: Gulfers, gangsters, pilgrims of pain. Our peace dividend. He stretched out, ready to sleep. His father placed himself in the middle of the middle row from where he could see in every direction, unimpeded. On our way up, he had told me that this was his first visit back to Jaffna since his boyhood. He went to England as soon as he got the chance in 1952 and never wanted to come back. ‘Was England so good those days?’ I asked. It doesn’t look very inviting now from what you see on BBC World. He said it was very hard going, but he was young then and wanted to make something of his life. He said this partly for the benefit of his son, I think, but the boy pretended to doze. ‘And you did well, sir,’ I said. The boy’s eyelids flickered. ‘You became a doctor and now you can come back and do something,’ I added a little louder to stir the boy. This country needs doctors. ‘I am not a medical man,’ he explained, settling down. ‘I am a student of history. Now that the war is over I am coming back to see what is left of the nightmare.’ He said he was not sure what he would find, and whether he really wanted to see the place again but he felt he had to come back and look for his own history. He was not the only one. I see a lot of them these days. People looking for something long lost and irretrievable like childhood—their own, or their children’s. Sometimes I feel I am also a kind of doctor and that the journey I help them w
ith is a form of healing. With these two, it was night by the time we crossed the border on our way up. We arrived in darkness and they saw nothing until we turned into the lighted porch of the Hibiscus. I think Dr Ponnampalam was relieved. ‘I need time to adjust. After all this time, I still need a little more time.’

  I turned off Hospital Street and headed towards the ponds. I knew this area from my last trip. We passed the bright white GTZ house, the German NGO base where Mrs Klein stayed when she was up here, and took the shady lane marked by a cross on my map. I think the cross signified a sentry point. There certainly was a small green hut at the spot, crumpled with sandbags; a couple of soldiers in there looked as lost as the rest of us. In my mirror I could see the doctor tighten up. He was not, I think, by nature a tense man but guns, even if they are not pointing at you, can have that effect. You don’t have to be Tamil to feel anxious.

  ‘Soldiers everywhere, but nothing to do,’ I said to comfort him. ‘They only smoke now.’

  He was not convinced and looked around nervously for the fire that he was sure was burning, or some other sign of malice.

  I took another turn. On this road the houses were bigger. We passed a guest house that looked a cut above our small hotel. Although several of the houses by the road were squat mid-century buildings squeezed into subdivided front gardens, there were older villas visible behind them. I asked the doctor whether he recognized the road.

  He peered out. ‘This is the one?’

  ‘It’s the road the man said to go to. More houses now, but the road is the same. Not widened.’ I know when a road has been widened. It doesn’t have wiggly bits like this. Our road makers, north or south, are lazy buggers and like to bulldoze everything. Straighten things out in their sleep. ‘Can you imagine it without these new houses?’ I asked. It was his road after all, not mine, whatever they say on TV about Jaffna belonging to us all. He is the one who lived here as a child, not me.

  ‘I can’t. I remember coconut trees, a breadfruit tree in the garden. This is not it.’

  Mahen pulled back one of the curtains. ‘Stop,’ he yelled.

  We were going slowly, so I could stop the van without mayhem.

  ‘Reverse. Go back.’

  ‘What did you see?’ his father asked.

  I checked the mirrors and reversed until the boy again said, ‘Stop.’

  ‘Look.’ He pointed at a skinny, brown dog sniffing around a small opening in a mass of overgrown foliage. Behind the broken gate I could see the remains of a small Catholic shrine. ‘Didn’t you say there was some churchy thing on your road?’

  Dr Ponnampalam stared at the garbled structure, rebuilding it chip by chip in his eyes. ‘Yes, son. Well done,’ he said at last. ‘That could be it. There were a lot of flowers in there. I used to catch butterflies at the back.’

  ‘House is nearby then?’ I asked.

  ‘Past that bend. On the other side of the road. Let’s go, driver, let’s go.’

  After nearly sixty years of staying away, suddenly he was in a big hurry as though it might disappear before we got there.

  *

  Dr Ponnampalam must come from a very well-to-do family. That is how he could go to England and become a doctor without medicine, while people like us go up and down the same old roads hoping for nothing more than a change of hoardings. This house, his family home, was enormous. It rose like a giant beast through the tangle of overgrown ferns and bushes and trees. We could only see a part of its elephant-like side. It had been built at a peculiar angle. Not facing the road, as though it disdained public thoroughfares and had its own kingdom to rule.

  ‘Palm Villa,’ the doctor sighed. There was a blackened sign nailed to the limy wall that confirmed he was right, and half a dozen coconut trees sprawled around the front garden proved the point in a lackadaisical sort of way.

  ‘Your house, sir?’ I asked. His son must surely be impressed, I thought. I wanted him to be moved. Despite our differences in class, wealth and race, I could see something of myself in each of them and I wanted the elements to meet.

  Mahen whistled. ‘Massive.’

  The metal gate of spiralling ironwork had a thick chain wound around it secured by a fat padlock. I rattled the gate while father and son got out and stood a little closer together than before. Closer than I had ever done with my father.

  ‘I never really believed I would ever see it again,’ the doctor said softly.

  ‘But that’s why we came. You’ve been planning this ever since you retired.’

  ‘Ten years ago, there was a chance with my VER. Voluntary early retirement.’ He said the words like a prayer and looked up at the sky. ‘But we missed it because of your mother’s illness. Then it got bad again. By 2009, the war was intensifying. You remember all those reports? BBC? Channel 4? How could I think of coming back? I couldn’t even imagine it. It was only after Olwyn came six months ago that I thought I must. If he can come, why the heck can’t I?’

  I heard a sound from the house. A door opened and a man crossed the veranda and disappeared down the steps at the front of the house.

  ‘Someone is there,’ I said to the others.

  About a minute later, the bushes parted and a young man in jeans and a striped polo shirt appeared—his hair gelled up and his eyes puffy as though he too, like the youth of today, had only just woken up.

  We all waited. Lost for words, if not language itself. But as I was only the driver, not the leader or even the guide, I bided my time. Eventually, Dr Ponnampalam broke.

  ‘Vanakkam,’ he said hesitantly in Tamil and then reverted to English. ‘Who lives here?’ Despite his many years abroad, he could tell the young man was a minion.

  ‘Only me, sir.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Milton, sir. Manager.’

  ‘This was my house.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘I used to live here.’

  ‘With madam?’ The puffy eyes widened. ‘She is coming. She will be here eleven o’clock. Madam Sujitha.’

  Mahen took up his father’s cue with an exuberance I had not suspected. ‘Who the fuck is Madam Sujitha?’

  ‘Son,’ his father tried to stem the language and yet spur the unexpected vigour of his progeny. ‘Please.’

  ‘This is her guest house. She lives next road and will be coming soon.’

  I thought I could get Mahen engaged a bit more. ‘Maybe you can look inside then?’ I suggested.

  ‘Yeah, can we?’

  Milton scratched his head. ‘Look? Can do.’ He searched his pockets and found a key. With some difficulty, he managed to open the padlock and undo the chain. The gate had to be lifted up an inch to swing open as the hinges had bent and made the corner dig into the ground. It was not designed to encourage guests. He lowered the gate back into position behind us and then led the way to the house. We scrambled through a jungle to get to the front where once upon a time, I imagined, the young Dr Ponnampalam in his short trousers would have been greeted by manicured blossoms and a sparkling veranda. Instead, we came to an enormous, bony tree that cast a gloom over the crumbling building. Close up, you could see that the wood everywhere had warped, the pillars had gone wonky. It looked like a large, dishevelled, shabby drunk barely able to stand rather than the majestic thing we had glimpsed from the road.

  Dr Ponnampalam leant back, trying to take the full measure of the old house in one gulp.

  ‘You like to see the bedrooms, sir?’ Milton seemed to have perked up. I don’t think he had much practice in the business. I asked him how many guests were staying. The sandwich board propped up against the wall seemed unlikely to catch many passers-by.

  ‘Zero. Right now, no one staying. We are making the rooms ready.’

  ‘Not yet open then?’

  ‘We are open. But no guests, no. Not yet. Madam says that someone is coming soon, so we have one room ready. Almost. Come to see.’

  I noticed a desk at one end of the veranda. Another uneven sign on it—THE MANAGER—in
dull white block letters with an open copy of Hi!! magazine providing the only gloss. The front room, the foyer you could say, was empty except for the stairs.

  Milton waved us on. ‘Upstairs.’

  In unfamiliar territory, one should be cautious. After thirty years of war, you learn that. I tested each wooden step before putting my full weight on it, but the doctor seemed to have slipped into a reverie. He climbed up with his head rolling from side to side as if the gentle rocking would reconcile the sad dust and disrepair around us to the cherished images of his childhood. At the top, Milton led us out on to the balcony. The large tangled garden spread out below us, one part of it sunken like a wreck. The bushes and trees seemed to tumble into it in splashes of red and green.

  ‘Bedroom number one round the corner,’ Milton said. ‘But please be very careful.’ He pointed out a gaping hole in the floorboards. ‘Damage to be repaired tomorrow.’

  He went ahead to the end of the balcony and pulled open a curtain. We all trooped into the large room. In the centre stood a sturdy wooden bed with bright spindles at the head and foot and a four-inch foam mattress that looked as hard as a squashed loaf of stale country bread. A new mosquito net was bundled up and hung from a rope hooked to an impressively high ceiling of the kind required by the high-born, be they English, Tamil or Sinhala. Near the window there was another smaller bed with a metal frame that might have belonged in a hospital.