Noontide Toll Page 7

  I asked the waiter for one, wondering idly what kind they’d have: imported Tiger beer?

  He disappeared into the back. When he returned, he had a tall, dark bottle of Three Coins on a metal tray and a young woman in a grey trouser suit in tow. Halfway across the room, she overtook him, pushing a metal chair neatly out of the way and coming to a stop in front of my table.

  ‘Welcome.’ She parted her lips in a smile, but barely a muscle moved beyond her mouth. Her eyes seemed to be calculating the exact dimensions of my head, neck and chest. She noted the position of my hands and the state of my fingernails. ‘From Colombo?’

  I nodded. ‘Jaffna tour.’

  ‘This is the place to break journey then.’

  ‘That’s what they wanted. My party needs a lot of rest.’ I patted my stomach as though I was the pregnant one.

  ‘Drivers must rest also. Driving all day is too much, no?’

  I shrugged. Once you are in the driver’s seat, all that matters is keeping your eyes open. Maybe not all that matters, but the main thing. On these long empty roads going north, even the speed of your reflexes isn’t that important. We are no longer at war. ‘This is a nice place.’

  She looked at me now as if she were trying to tell whether I was being truthful. As if it mattered. ‘I am the Assistant Manager. Miss Saraswati. My job is to make this hotel very welcoming so that it becomes the regular stop for all tours going up to Jaffna.’ She paused. ‘For breakfast, lunch, dinner or overnight. We can do everything.’

  I had no doubt she could. She seemed very capable, although she definitely needed a better cook.

  ‘Are you from a hotel school then? Catering and management?’ People who have made more informed choices in their lives than I have always impress me.

  ‘We had a lot of training.’ She let the waiter put the tray down and pour half the bottle of beer into my glass. ‘We have to be able to cope with every situation. If we keep focus, we can overcome problems. Any problem.’ She had the severe look that some women have when they think that their time is running out.

  I waited for the froth to subside. ‘Starting something like this up here must be difficult. ETs are pouring into the south like cement from a pipe now, but here it is still only locals, no?’

  ‘Cement?’ She looked puzzled. ‘ETs?’

  ‘You could say like beer or water, but I was thinking of the new hotels being built and all the European tourists, even the Nordics, now happily sunning themselves on the beach.’ As I spoke, it occurred to me that the picture I was painting was probably impossible to imagine in this dumping ground of bombs. I gulped down some beer and poured the rest of the bottle into the glass, realizing too late that out of courtesy I should have offered her some. ‘Are you from Kilinochchi?’

  ‘Nearby.’ She tipped her head. ‘I went to Jaffna and then came here.’

  ‘College?’ I asked admiringly.

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Because of the—’

  ‘Yes.’ The word was quick and oddly unerring. Not only did she have poise and determination but she seemed tightly strung, like one of those ballerinas performing with the Bolshoi on TV. Every look, every movement bound to a larger purpose. The Spice Garden Inn was lucky to have her: it surely would not fail with her in place.

  The waiter, who had moved to the back of the room, started. ‘Rat,’ he yelped.

  Miss Saraswati spun around. A big brown rodent was scurrying across the floor toward the tallboy in the far corner. She hissed, loud and sharp, and it froze for a moment. As it began to edge forward again, she grasped my beer bottle by the neck and flung it. The bottle hit the rat with such force that the creature thudded against the wall. The bottle rolled along, unbroken. Its base had smashed the animal’s small skull.

  ‘Burn it,’ she instructed the waiter. ‘Use a plastic bag. Wash your hands afterwards.’ She turned to me. ‘Sorry about that. I’ll bring you another bottle.’

  I stared at Miss Saraswati. ‘You learn to do that at Jaffna hotel school?’

  *

  While she went to get another beer, I sat and gazed at my plate of food. I don’t mind rats, or the killing of them; I was just a little stunned by her action. The accuracy with which she had thrown the bottle was extraordinary.

  When she returned, her polite smile was back in place. ‘Sorry,’ she said again and placed the new bottle in front of me. She sat down. ‘Please eat.’

  I pushed my plate away.

  ‘What? No appetite now? Don’t worry. It’s dead, no?’

  ‘I ate.’

  ‘They are all over the town, but we do not allow them here. I believe it is not good for guests to see.’

  ‘Yes, true. Guests can get upset very easily.’

  ‘Usually the dogs keep the rats away.’

  ‘Dogs are good. Yes.’ I had a dog once, a small terrier. It had belonged to a Danish man I worked for in Colombo. When he was posted to Laos, he decided that he couldn’t take the little fellow with him. I offered to look after the dog and, when I told him that I lived in a house with a small garden, he let me. But, about a year later, the dog died. It shot out of the gate one day and was hit by a minister’s sidekick in one of those high-speed VIP cavalcades on the main road. This happened a long time ago—it was not the fault of our current government—and I wouldn’t have told her about it, if she hadn’t asked.

  She nodded, as though small killings were a natural part of politics as well as of hotel management. She pulled out one of the two paper serviettes from the chrome clip on the table and smoothed it like a mini funeral shroud. ‘You have to bury the dead and move on.’

  ‘Bury or burn?’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. What matters is what you carry inside.’ Her mouth tightened with what I thought was a hint of hurt or anger. She wasn’t talking about rats or dogs.

  I like to know about the world beyond our shores. About faraway countries where people behave differently. I like to hear about their food and customs. How they deal with the cold and the rain. What it is like to drive on the other side of the road. I like to take foreign tourists around because it gives me a glimpse of a place that is different in touch, taste, smell, sound and look, from the place I am stuck in. I watch how they sit, how they walk, how they talk, and I try to see what they want to escape from and then return to. They are not all driven only by the desire for sex in new places. Some want to know about our history and our culture and what makes us live the way we do. So do I. Sometimes I don’t know how we manage. We know so little and the little we do know we get so muddled. Miss Saraswati intrigued me. She seemed to come from some other place: not Kilinochchi, not a Jaffna college, not anywhere nearby but from somewhere dark and hungry and deep. Somewhere beyond the blackness at the end of the garden, where even the moonlight shrank back. Of course, I was not her guide; she was really mine, so the sock was on the wrong foot, if you know what I mean. But still, I wanted to know about her.

  ‘Your family? Are they here?’ That might give me a place to start, I thought.

  ‘Have you come to these parts before, Mister Van Driver?’

  ‘Vasantha,’ I said and added, ‘I have driven up to Jaffna a few times now.’

  ‘Then you must know that it is best not to ask about families. It is best not to ask about someone’s brother or father or mother or sister.’

  ‘Why?’

  She looked at me like I was a lost cause. ‘After a war, it is best not to ask about the past.’

  That is not true, I thought. After such a calamity, surely one should? How else will we know what really happened? And if we don’t know, will it not be repeated? At any rate, we should not let war, or half-baked political decrees, pervert our native habits of curiosity and easy engagement. But I didn’t say any of this. She did not seem in as conversational a mood as she had earlier, and even then she had hovered in some in-between place. Hospitality training, I imagine, helps you to mask your feelings with a smile and to polish that facade of p
leasant well-being that Sri Lankans, our foreign visitors tell me, are so good at putting on. But, in Miss Saraswati’s case, the training was incomplete. She was not a natural. She could mask but she couldn’t do the other thing. She had been named after the goddess of learning, but she seemed to believe that ignorance was bliss. When she turned to look at the door, I noticed a thick scar where the skin had crumpled at the base of her neck. When she turned back, it slid under her collar and was hidden again.

  *

  In my room in the drivers’ quarters, I sat with the door open. Some oil sticks had been lit along the veranda to ward off the mosquitoes. The only sound was the hum of the fluorescent tube further along. Whenever I drive foreign visitors at night, out in the country, they always comment on how dark it is. I used to think, How could it be otherwise? But having been told this so many times, I have begun to see things through their eyes and, for me too, night outside of Colombo now feels very dark. The blackness is like ink seeping through my eyes and into my head. What is happening inside me is no different from what is going on outside. That leads me to thoughts about death, which are pointless and help no one. The difficulty then is to think of something else. Sex, the antidote you grasp for in youth, is less engaging when you are cloistered in a driver’s room in the middle of nowhere; and politics, the other base impulse, is a bit of a nightmare these days. Crime—I mean stories about crime, not crime itself—works best, and I especially like crime stories that come from England or America. Bollywood has the edge on musicals, but Pinewood and Hollywood have cornered the criminal stuff. So a pirated DVD is a good solution, if you have the right gadget. I’ve been thinking about getting one of those portable players; I just need a few big tips to get me into a spending position.

  But that night, in the inky blackness in Kilinochchi, all these other things began to merge together: politics, history, even sex, in the form of Miss Saraswati, where it was bound up with mutilation and death. We all have a private past, a store of thoughts, feelings, sensations, disappointments that nobody else will ever unearth. That’s just life. But in Miss Saraswati’s case, it seemed to me, there was something more deliberately hidden. Areas cordoned off. I suppose it was only natural. So much is kept off limits these days. There are things we don’t speak of, things we not only don’t remember but carefully forget, places we do not stray into, memories we bury or reshape. That is the way we all live nowadays: driving along a road between hallucination and amnesia. As long as you are moving, you are OK—you have negotiated safe passage, for the moment. It is only when you come to a stop like this, in a black night in the middle of nowhere, that things wobble a bit and you wonder about the purpose of roads. You sit in the dark, frightened at the life you’ve led and the things you’ve left undone. You can only hope that in the long run it won’t matter, but that in itself is no consolation at all.

  The staff quarters of the Spice Garden Inn, or at least the drivers’ rooms, had been built by a benevolent but misguided despot. The essentials were there: bed, table, chair, window, coir mat, electric light. The walls were painted. Yellow in my room, green next door. And yet there was something prison-like in the air. The rooms had been designed by a person who would never stay in them himself, or perhaps herself. Each element in itself was inoffensive, and it was difficult to tell what the flaws were. All I knew was the difference I could feel between comfort and discomfort. The ideal and the disillusioning reality. From what I’ve heard, living in the USSR before perestroika was like that. You knew something was wrong, but you didn’t know how to make it right.

  I stepped outside for a cigarette. I’m not much of a smoker, but there are times when I have this urge to fill my lungs with poison. If the damage is there, I want to invite it in. Make it mine so that I can do something with it.

  Everywhere the edges blurred. I walked along the veranda on a narrow path between light and dark, then out into the garden, where I thought the darkness would consume me, but a tiny glimmer of light from the sky seemed to spread into a silvery web. And when I lit my cigarette, there was more to contend with. After one or two drags, I put it out and waited. Sometimes it feels like the poison is in the air.

  Then I saw her. She was on the main balcony of the hotel, a silhouette darker than the darkness, but unmistakably her. Looking out at the fields, like the guardian of an unquenchable dream. She slowly uncrossed her arms and bent down. When she straightened up again, she had something in her hand. It looked like a revolver but when she clicked the catch, a beam of light shot out. She ran it along the fence at the end of the garden and did a sweep around the pond. She caught the eyes of an animal and held the light on it for a few seconds, the beam as steady as a military searchlight. Then she switched it off making the night darker than ever.

  *

  In the morning, I went and ate some bread and sambol, and waited for the Arunachalams to appear. I took a refill of tea that was a travesty, even by the standards of the previous night’s dinner, and sat on one of the garden chairs from where I could see the breakfast room. I wondered how long Miss Saraswati had kept watch from the balcony and when she would resume her office duties.

  I heard Mrs Arunachalam before I saw her. She was complaining about her husband’s snoring, although I would have guessed that the reality of the bedroom situation was the reverse. Mr Arunachalam said nothing in return. I thought of alerting him to the virtues of the sound-blocking headphones that many of my recent foreign clients sported. They heard nothing that they had not programmed themselves to hear and managed to avoid any pollution of their inner world with the din of local colour. It was an admirable survival technique in a noisy world. Pollution is, after all, the world’s biggest problem. Even in Malaysia, people apparently suffer from it.

  The couple took a table on the veranda.

  ‘I would like ham and eggs and toast. You think they have ham here?’ Mrs Arunachalam scraped her chair forward.

  ‘What about a thosai? Better, no?’

  ‘But I have this craving. And no sleep even, not with you and your trumpeting.’

  Miss Saraswati appeared between them and said something I couldn’t hear. She seemed able to placate Mrs Arunachalam without recourse to pork. When they had finished breakfast and gone upstairs to pack their toothbrushes and tweezers, or whatever, Miss Saraswati came out to me.

  ‘You are a peacemaker, as well,’ I said.

  ‘We do whatever it takes.’ She gave me a card. ‘Bring all your tours here. We can cater for all.’

  ‘I can see that,’ I said. ‘Terrific training, your catering college.’

  She put her hands together and lowered her head. This time, her collar was tightly buttoned and revealed nothing, but I noticed that the trigger finger of her right hand was callused and discoloured at the edge.

  Then Mrs Arunachalam called me. ‘Driver, come here. Can you put this bag on the seat in there? I need it right next to me. And put the AC on before we get in, so it will be nice and cool for a change. I can’t be getting hot again.’

  Miss Saraswati looked at me. I wanted her to smile, even that put-on smile, but her face was blank. Her black eyes gave nothing away. I wished for a moment that I knew what she was thinking, and then I was glad that I didn’t. There comes a point when you don’t want to know.

  Renewals

  The guard in the sentry box was grumpy, but that was probably because I woke him with the sound of my horn. Not exactly a trumpet, but it does have an annoyingly high pitch. He rubbed his eye with a fist and studied my number plate. There was nothing to check, only a ritual to go through before he pulled open the gates and let us drive into the library grounds.

  The building looked appropriately venerable. Very solid and large and white like something out of the colonial era. But that is all an illusion. The library was burnt in an act of pure malice in 1981 and rebuilt only a few years ago. Even the original building, according to Mr Desmond, was completed only in 1954. Not in the days of the British. So the look is all make-beli
eve—an art we seem to excel at in this country, north and south.

  I followed the circular drive to the grand high-ceilinged porch where I deposited my passengers: Mr Desmond and his two assistants.

  ‘You can park around the side,’ he said, peering back through the window. ‘We will be about an hour.’ He may not have been here before but he had studied the plans of this building very thoroughly.

  I waited until they had climbed the big steps before easing the van out of the porch. Although technically there was a parking area to the side, as Mr Desmond had indicated, a big metal No-Entry sign blocked the way in so I had to go around the front garden, freshly manured and carefully trimmed with hedges of purple crotons, to slip into the parking area on the other side. The shade trees were huge and must have predated the original building. I imagine the librarians, or architects who designed the place, may well have chosen the site for the trees. Their massive presence gave the place a sense of serenity, even though they had been unable to sustain it against the assaults of our special breed of vandals and lunatics.

  There were two other vehicles parked in the shade. Both cars from a bygone age: a round-hipped Humber and a sharp-finned Hillman. The Humber had a driver asleep at the wheel, while the other car seemed to doze on under-inflated tyres undisturbed by the parrots and the magpies diving in the air above it.

  I reversed into a bay littered with tiny yellow jasmine flowers, and angled the van so that I would see Mr Desmond the moment he appeared on the steps. It was not a getaway position really, but it did mean I could move straight in to pick up my clients without delay. Those are the little touches that the big-tour chauffeurs miss but the client always appreciates.

  I would have liked to see this library in its heyday. In the sixties, I imagine it was swarming with students. I would like to have been one myself, walking about in long trousers and carrying books and shouting slogans. It was not my life but I think I might have enjoyed it. I like learning. But I guess driving is not something you study in a library or a college, and Tamil was a language I knew nothing of as a boy at school. The Sinhala stream was undiluted in those days. And I had glandular fever as well, which put an end to a lot of youthful dreams of random fornication and dizzy drunken deviations in any language.