Noontide Toll Page 5

  ‘No door?’ I asked.

  Milton shrugged. ‘Every day power cut. So no AC. Anyway no need to hide now.’

  ‘Where was your room?’ Mahen asked his father. ‘Was it this?’

  Dr Ponnampalam looked distraught. ‘I don’t remember this room. This is very big. Everything is bigger. I thought it would be smaller.’

  ‘Was it up here? Could have been, no?’ I asked, as keen as everyone to find a home for what they call the diaspora.

  ‘Yes, but not here.’

  ‘Back room?’ Milton asked. ‘Very nice back room with a view of the church?’

  ‘I remember I could see the church.’ The doctor’s eyes dilated as he slowly turned around.

  We shuffled into the centre of the house and Milton showed us the other room. There were boxes and pieces of wood, a trestle table with a saw and a hammer on it. Milton said it was the workshop. The carpenter was coming tomorrow. The doctor went in. There wasn’t room for all of us, so I stayed out.

  ‘I don’t see the church,’ Dr Ponnampalam cried, disappointed.

  ‘Sorry, sir. Used to be able to see, before the bomb.’

  I don’t understand what people like Dr Ponnampalam want from life. Don’t get me wrong. It is not a Tamil–Sinhala thing, but the richer you are, it seems the more muddled you get. What would make a boy growing up in a house like this want to leave? He left long before the Tigers could even miaow, years before their great leader took his first potshot. Now the big shot was dead with a hole in his head and the blood of thousands has soaked the land, while Dr Ponnampalam has a balding head and a hole in his heart which he can’t seem to fill for love or money. But a big house, I suppose, is not always a happy house.

  There was a beep of a car horn from the road. Milton hurried down the stairs.

  I went out on to the balcony to look. The gate creaked and a few minutes later a lady appeared by the front steps with Milton. She had her grey hair tied in a bun and was dressed in sporty clothes like a Galle Face jogger on a suicide mission.

  From below me, Dr Ponnampalam emerged.

  ‘So, what do you think of it?’ she asked. ‘We are updating everything.’

  ‘It’s not how I remember it.’

  ‘Ha. Nothing ever is. You will have some Nescafé?’

  I heard Mahen hiss, ‘Yes.’

  She turned to Milton. ‘Bring the coffee, and that tin of biscuits.’

  I could do with some coffee too, if it was on offer. I made my way downstairs.

  Madam Sujitha was standing with a hand on her hip, a woman of scary authority. ‘So, Milton says you lived in this house?’ she asked the doctor.

  ‘As a boy. Sixty years ago. I was just looking at my room.’

  ‘My father never liked this house. He used to say that it was a millstone around our family’s neck. He rented it out but it never paid, he said. Perhaps it was better for your father than mine.’ I think she was trying to build a bridge, but I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near it if she was planning to blow one up.

  ‘I liked it, but at night I used to get very frightened. There were all sorts of noises. I thought it was haunted.’

  ‘So, you are looking for the ghost now?’ She laced her fingers over her face and peered as if through a balaclava.

  Milton came with a coffee jar and put it on the desk. Another young boy brought some small cups and a pot of hot water.

  Madam Sujitha said that she never knew the house or its occupants when she was young. After she got married she went to Canada. ‘We didn’t want to stay. It was a bad time. The 1980s.’ She laughed. ‘It has been bad times ever since I was born, my father claimed. He was right. He was shot on those steps.’ She spooned out the coffee in small measures. ‘He wouldn’t stand for any nonsense. He spoke his mind, you see. He’d make a fine ghost to frighten little boys.’

  ‘Oh my God, I am sorry.’ Dr Ponnampalam seemed oddly shocked by death.

  ‘Why are you sorry? You were not one of the assassins, were you?’

  ‘Was it LTTE or army?’

  ‘Why? Who did you give your money to?

  ‘I live in England. I left before you were born.’ He lowered his head.

  Milton handed out the cups. No milk, no sugar.

  ‘So, no little diaspora donations to our Tigers? No investments in government bonds to fight them? No hedging your bets?’

  From the increasing anger in her voice, I wondered for a moment whether she had killed someone herself. She, like me, belonged to a generation that had gone mad enough for anything to be possible. But then something in her face subsided. ‘Never mind all that. You are here to make peace with the past for your son, no? Come, sit down. You must sit in your old house after coming all this way.’

  She led the way down the veranda to where a few cane chairs lay like smaller shipwrecks pulled ashore. She took the straightest chair while Mahen sprawled on the only cushioned one. The coffee seemed to have extinguished the spark he had shown when we first entered the house, or perhaps it was the numbing effect of talk about the past. His father seemed wary, having learnt recently the need to test everything first. He gently moved one of the chairs a few inches before sitting on it.

  ‘So, you came back from Canada? After the war ended?’ he started tentatively.

  ‘Ended?’ she laughed. ‘No. No. I came back twenty years ago. In Canada, at our central library, I went to a talk and I was awakened. Politically, you know. I was young and idealistic. I had to come back and do what I could for our country. There was a lot to do.’ She turned a hand in the air as if to spin a top towards Mahen. ‘There is a lot to do.’

  Which country? I wondered. Whose side was she on? The diaspora, we have been told, are the troublemakers and if it was she rather than Dr Ponnampalam that they meant, I could well understand the headache.

  ‘You came home,’ Mahen said softly with a note of admiration that worried me. But I was pleased he had been listening. Tomorrow belongs to youngsters like him but what could he do with it if he didn’t know anything about yesterday?

  I looked at the rampaging bushes, the twisted trees, the broken wall. You don’t need a tsunami to wreak havoc.

  ‘We had three houses. They were all empty. I was the only person in the family left. I started a school in one, kindergarten. Montessori. You know. Something like that, but my own style, you know. And we lived in the other. A small house. Not haunted like this one.’ She laughed again. ‘No, this was in a really bad state. I don’t know when your family left, but it was very broken down. Wild animals only. I think everyone was frightened of this house. Maybe like you they also thought it was haunted. Luckily.’

  To my mind it was more a gloomy house, depressed like an old man at the end of an unfulfilled life, rather than a bad place. Benevolent even, despite the mess it found itself in. It was she they would have feared. But then I grew up in a shack next to a cemetery in Colombo. I have no problem with ghosts. These days, in this country, no one can afford to worry about ghosts.

  ‘Why is that?’ the doctor asked, inclining his head, more like a student than a doctor. ‘Why luckily?’

  She leant forward and spoke so urgently that I assumed she was describing events from last year at the end of the war. But the central events were to do with the LTTE retreat from Jaffna in the mid-nineties. ‘I was living in our main house, near the school, when the LTTE order came to evacuate. Government forces were gaining ground, you remember? LTTE strategy has always been to draw back into the jungle when threatened, leaving nothing for the occupiers. No population. They may have invested in gold in Bangkok and Singapore, but here they always knew people were the only real asset. Half a million people left Jaffna in twenty-four hours. The whole place became a ghost town, not just this house of yours, doctor. All of Jaffna became a ghost town.’

  Mahen had been roused by the urgency of her voice and was leaning forward. I didn’t want her to stop, whatever her politics were. As Dr Ponnampalam was mesmerized, I butted in. ‘So, you lef
t? That was lucky?’

  She laughed. ‘I didn’t come from Canada to go and squat in the jungle. No way. In the school we had fifty early learning books donated from England, two computers from the Germans and three dogs. You think I was going to leave all that for a bunch of Sinhala louts from some godforsaken village in a rain forest? We packed the lot and moved in here. There is an attic at the backside of the roof. You can’t see it from the road. We hid there for three weeks eating roti and drinking rainwater. Up and down the street they were fighting like cats: gunfire, mortars, shelling.’ She laughed again. ‘Our biggest problem was keeping the dogs quiet. But nobody came even near the house. This big, old, haunted house. No Tigers, no soldiers. They were all way too scared of the place.’

  ‘So, it is haunted?’ Mahen asked, buoyed up at last. ‘A ghost house?’

  ‘If it was, the ghosts also left in the evacuation. It was a fully dead house. Now we will turn it into a guest house.’ She laughed and opened the biscuit tin. ‘You like a ginger nut?’

  Mahen grabbed one. Perhaps the caffeine had finally kicked in too. The father hesitated as if everything in the old country was suddenly suspect.

  ‘No more the school?’ he asked.

  ‘Not the same way. I think I will specialize in history lessons. That in itself is becoming a battlefield.’

  A bird screeched and a coconut plummeted noisily through the palm fronds and thudded into the ground below the veranda.

  ‘Very dangerous garden,’ Dr Ponnampalam said. ‘I remember a coconut fell just like that and nearly killed Auntie Matilda. After that my father had to have the nearby trees neutered every season. We had coconut flowers all over the place. But I always ran past those trees in case another nut fell.’

  ‘Those were the good old days.’

  ‘Good?’

  ‘Then, only nuts fell from the sky. When the war came to Jaffna, it was bombs, no?’

  ‘But the house was not bombed, was it?’

  ‘Like I said, in a funny way it is a lucky house. All around the bombs fell on houses, but not here. I think those trees fooled them. Maybe it looks like camouflage from the sky. Maybe they thought it was a chief’s camp, so they missed. Those air force planes never hit any Tiger camps however big they were, you know.’ She laughed in a big boomy way. ‘Safest place, so you don’t get bombed, was a chief’s place. If the planes came when you were eating at home, you have to run out on the street with your plate of food, because the bombs were sure to fall only on a house or a building easy to see. I suppose they needed a target to aim at like a cross or something, or maybe they just dumped their load when they got tired of looking.’

  ‘I didn’t know they bombed all this.’ Mahen clearly had not learnt anything in England. Perhaps fathers there said as little as fathers here.

  ‘In those early days, they didn’t have high-grade Chinese arsenals. Some of the bombs were just oil barrels filled with explosives, scrap and shit. Sewage. Real stink bombs. So we gave them the names of our favourite government ministers. Here comes the big craphead or there goes the little fart.’

  ‘But now, madam,’ I couldn’t help intervening again. I didn’t want the boy to get the wrong idea. ‘It is all different, no? Things are good? No more war, no more explosions, no? New government.’

  ‘True. Much better with no bombs. But you know what they say: even an orange can explode under pressure. So it all depends on what really changes.’

  Mahen pressed a finger to the tip of his nose, flattening it. ‘You found something here?’

  She brightened. ‘You know, we are very progressive here in Jaffna. Whatever the hoo-ha, peace is good. Many of the key posts are now held by women.’ She ran through the list: the Government Agent, the Commissioner for Local Government, the Education Officer, the Mayor, et cetera. ‘You should stay here with us. You will warm your heart here in Jaffna.’

  *

  When we got back in the van, father and son were both pensive.

  ‘Back to the hotel, doctor?’ I asked.

  Dr Ponnampalam checked his watch. ‘Can we drive up to the sea? I’d like to see the sea.’ His restlessness, I reckon, comes from spending all that time abroad. He was like a foreigner: wanting more and more, even when he had more than he could deal with.

  ‘Which sea, doctor? There is sea all over. This is a peninsula, no? You want the north coast?’

  ‘No, I mean the bay. By the fort. I want to see Kayts and the islands. I remember them, you know. The beach where we’d go for a sea bath.’

  I don’t think he knew what he was really looking for. He was clutching at fragments in the slow-motion explosion that had been his life. I took the main road that circled the fort. There was a causeway, straight as a needle, connecting the mainland to the nearby islands facing the Palk Strait. I had never been on it.

  ‘Should I go on that?’ I asked. There was a checkpoint but another van, like mine, was going through.

  ‘Yes, let’s go,’ Mahen said with more than a hint of his father’s voice.

  I stopped by the sentry hut. The soldier peered in but didn’t say anything; the language barrier they live with is probably what makes these fellows so tight-lipped up here. He just waved me on.

  The road was under repair in places. Very dusty but strangely serene, leading into nothing. A straight road going nowhere. That has been the story of my life. My father never took me to the place where he was born, the village he grew up in. We just stayed where we were by the cemetery in Colombo.

  After about ten minutes, we reached the island and a line of trees half submerged by the tide. Marshland. We passed a huge temple.

  ‘This is Kayts,’ the doctor said. ‘We used to come here on Sundays. It is the loveliest place. They say one of the three Magi sailed from here, you know?’

  We came to a crossroads and I slowed down. I couldn’t tell a Magi from a magpie.

  ‘Turn right,’ the doctor said. ‘Let’s go into the wetlands first.’

  The road was narrower but smooth. A few minutes later, we were in another world. It is hard to believe this was once fighting territory. Trees grew out of the water. Cormorants dived in and out. Wildfowl took flight. A long, flat landscape and a big sky in harmony. There was no sound except for the drone of my van. I could imagine fish idling in the bulrushes. We came to another junction and I turned right again without even asking. Somehow I knew what to do.

  ‘You remember this?’ Mahen asked his father.

  ‘Yes, I remember this.’

  ‘I’d like to live here, Dad.’

  My heart almost missed a beat. Is this the returning, or the rising of the dead? I saw in my rear-view mirror his father touch his hand as though DNA might be the true politics of the day.

  ‘In Jaffna?’

  ‘In Palm Villa. Can’t we rent it from that lady?’

  ‘She is turning it into a guest house.’

  ‘She wants rental, that’s all. We can make a deal. Wouldn’t you like to go back and live in your old house?’

  I saw Dr Ponnampalam flinch.

  His son leant closer to him. ‘You remember the drawing you did of what you said was our house for my junior school project. You remember? I didn’t think it was real. I didn’t know what you were on about then.’

  I tried to imagine what it was like for him to grow up in a country so far from his father’s childhood. Does it make a difference? Are the dreams in the diaspora so very different from ours? I wanted Dr Ponnampalam to say yes. I wanted Mahen to come back and show me how a new generation can build something despite the weaknesses of the old. But then I wondered what he would be like when the gaps in his memory are finally filled and he joins the dots of his and his father’s dislocated life. The lives of Madam Sujitha, Milton and all the others dead and alive.

  We came to two mangled heaps of rusted iron on a plinth looking like one of those modern sculptures you read about in British Council pamphlets. A soldier was standing on the road next to the enclosure. Further along,
there was a shrine with a flag and a big commemorative plaque. Beyond it, the water was still and the sky grey. A small formation of ducks were flying south. I could hear them calling. I rolled down my window. ‘What is this?’ I asked the soldier.

  He shrugged. ‘Landmine.’ He said it was the scene where, back in 1992, the senior command of the army were blown up. I remembered the stories of plots and counterplots in that era of rage and insanity. The time when it seemed friends became enemies and enemies became friends. But then that’s perhaps the way it is, always. Nobody knows who is really who and what they have done and what they might be about to do.

  Dr Ponnampalam rubbed his face with both hands, hard and vigorously, as if he was trying to erase something stuck to it. He turned to his son. ‘I don’t know, son. I don’t know if I can. I learnt something, growing up here. It was a refuge once, but even in those days the place seemed haunted. Can you imagine what it would be like to live there now?’

  Scrap

  I want to learn Chinese. If you are going to live in this country, I think it would be a good idea to learn Chinese. I read in a magazine that China will be the most important and biggest economy in the world soon. It probably already is, because the magazine was an old one at the Belihuloya Rest house. Not really the place you’d go for breaking news. So, maybe wherever you live, even the UK, it might be a good idea to learn Chinese now.

  I had four Chinese executives in my van the other day. They might even have been mandarins. Anyway, I learnt three new words: Niha, chi and xie xie. The last is a repeat, so I don’t know whether to count it as one or two. And ‘chi’ means something disgusting to us, rather than ‘good balance’ as it is to them, so it will be hard to use. Sepala, the guide from the ministry, had to do everything except say ‘niha’ (hello) and ‘xie xie’ (thank you) through Chen, the young interpreter from Fuzhou, who had a smiley round face with a pair of pink spectacles pinching his tiny nose. Thirty years of war, sixty-five years of independence, three hundred years of colonialism, two thousand five hundred years of Buddhism . . . Sepala droned on. The whole spiel immediately reverted through the squeaky gullet of this fresh graduate from apparently the most prestigious college of foreign languages in southern China. He was a friendly boy and keen to teach but even keener to learn and already knew more Tamil than I did—although that might have been a blunder in the briefing as far as Sepala was concerned. Tamil cut no ice with him. But he had to admit, the boy was smart. Even before we got to Dambulla, Chen had picked up half a dozen Sinhala words. He said, in rapid-fire English, that his target was fifteen words a day. He wrote them in a little green notebook like an eco-Mao in the making.