Vikram was finally preparing to leave for the east coast. He told the servant woman Thercy that he was going away for a time. He told her to pass the message on to his guardian should he contact her. Thercy nodded without questioning him. It was none of her business and Vikram was old enough to please himself. She was glad to have the house to herself for a while. Once he goes, she thought, I will give the place a good clean.
Vikram packed a rucksack. He shouted to Thercy to give him some ironed shirts. Then he went into the town. There
had been no trouble for weeks, no curfew, no murders. The army seemed to have gone to ground. It was as good a time as any for Vikram to disappear. Gerard told him the Chief should not be kept waiting. So Vikram went over to the gem shop. As soon as Gerard saw him, he closed the door and shuttered up the shop. Then they both went upstairs.
‘Can I have some arrack?’ asked Vikram.
Gerard hesitated for a fraction of a second. Since the business at the crossroads, he noticed, Vikram was less polite, more confident and full of demands. But he got two glasses and poured some arrack for them both. He handed Vikram his travel documents. The papers stated that Vikram was a Singhalese man of twenty.
‘You shouldn’t have a problem with that,’ Gerard said easily. ‘Your Singhala is perfect, you even look Singhalese. In fact, if I didn’t know better I would say you were one of these bastards!’
Vikram grinned. Gerard noticed he downed his arrack in one gulp.
‘You know what to do, huh? Take the train to Colombo. Then go to this address and ask for Rajah. Say Singh sent you. Give him this packet of tea. Be careful how you hold it. There’s no tea inside it, remember!’ He laughed heartily, amused at his own joke. ‘Rajah will take you to Batticaloa. You’ll have to travel by night because of the daytime roadblocks. But that shouldn’t be a problem as there’s no curfew at the moment. When you get to Batticaloa you will be given over to a man called Lakshman. You can speak Tamil with him, safely. Lakshman will take you to the Chief. He’ll blindfold you for security reasons, OK? Now, any questions?’
Vikram said nothing, looking meaningfully at the arrack bottle.
‘No,’ said Gerard shortly. ‘Not in the middle of the day. I
can’t afford to have you drunk in broad daylight. Now, listen carefully. You’ll be at the training camp for a couple of weeks, maybe a bit longer. I’ll see you only after that. By that time you’ll have been briefed for your next assignment. Then there’ll be nothing you won’t be able to do for the Tamil people. You’ll get your chance to avenge your family at last. OK?’ He paused. ‘Again, any questions?’
‘Can I have my gun back?’ asked Vikram.
Gerard sighed. The truth was he was getting a little bored with the boy and his monosyllabic ways. After the initial eagerness at the crossroads shootout, Vikram had sunk back into his usual morose silence. Well, anyway, thought Gerard, this latest little job will put some life back into him. Brute force was fine for a foot soldier but Gerard hoped for better things from Vikram. He knew the work ahead would be punishing and rigorous, the assignment the most ambitious the Tigers had undertaken yet. It remained to be seen if the boy was up to the task. Vikram was looking at him expectantly. Oh yes, thought Gerard wearily, the gun. I almost forgot.
‘Vikram,’ he said patiently, ‘you can’t take it with you. You will have your own gun once you get to the camp, men. A more up-to-date model. You can’t travel with a thing like that across enemy territory. Why can’t you understand?’
For a moment he thought the boy would argue. But then Vikram picked up his pass and his papers and left. Silently, as he had come.
Outside, the afternoon was gelatinous with the heat. It was the mosquito season once more. Everywhere the drains were clogged with rotten fruit that had burst open. The sun, dustladen and harsh, lay with bright indifference over the shuttered town. An occasional bicyclist passed by. Vikram crossed the main road and turned through the coconut grove heading
towards Sumaner House and the last of his things. Bony cattle grazed on the common land, chewing a frothy cud, gazing into the distance. A stray dog barked at the breeze. Otherwise the town rested from the heat. Vikram passed by a water pump, stopping to quench his thirst. A few overripe mangoes lay squashed on the ground among a scattering of cigarette stubs and smashed beer bottles. The stench of garbage was everywhere. Since the war had advanced to this corner of the island, even the refuse was not collected. The market stalls had sold out long ago and moved on but the stray cats remained, skimming the ground for a phantom lick of fish, staring sleepily at the flies that swarmed on their sores. Vikram passed the road island and cut across through the temple grounds. Ahead of him was Nulani Mendis. He could see her talking to the local doctor. The doctor was writing something on a piece of paper. Then he nodded and went towards the temple. Seeing Vikram the girl raised her arm in greeting and waited. She was wearing a white dress and she had tied her hair in a coil at the back of her head. She looked cool and very pale. She waited and as he came closer fell into step with him. Vikram was startled. He saw that today she did not smile.
‘My mother is not very well,’ she said as though she was picking up a previous conversation. She pointed in the direction in which the doctor had gone. ‘And I can’t get this prescription until four o’clock.’ She looked around as though she expected to find what she needed.
‘What’s the matter with her?’ asked Vikram.
‘I don’t know. I think she misses my brother. It is a terrible thing to lose a son.’
Vikram said nothing, remembering the story of Lucky Jim’s departure. Mrs Mendis had thrown a party and most of the school had gone to it.
‘I looked for you at my brother’s party,’ the girl was saying. ‘But you didn’t come. Have you left school?’ she asked, adding, before he could say anything, ‘I have. There seems no point. I’m no good at anything.’
She sounded lost. Vikram looked at her curiously. Something, some desperation, uncoiled itself from her and moved towards him. Did she mind that much about her useless brother? He could not think whom she reminded him of.
‘You can draw,’ he said and the girl smiled so suddenly that Vikram stopped walking, startled.
‘Yes,’ she nodded. ‘I can draw.’
But she spoke flatly, reminding him of the rumours that had once circulated about her silences. He had the strangest of urges to tell her not to mind so much, but the heat and her proximity confused him. Her apparent ease, as though it was an established fact that they were friends, unnerved him too. They walked a little way saying nothing. The girl seemed lost in thoughts of her own.
‘What’s it like in Sumaner House?’ she asked at length. ‘Do you get lonely in such a big place?’
She was looking at him. Her eyes were huge and unhappy. He saw that they were very clear, like the eyes of a small child.
‘My father was killed too,’ she said softly, unexpectedly. ‘I expect you’ve heard. Everyone gossips about it. We never found out who poured petrol over him. The police came, but they never caught anyone. I was in the house when it happened. I saw everything.’
They had come to the top of the lane where her house was. Vikram did not know what to say.
‘Don’t let gossip worry you,’ she continued.
He had the oddest feeling they were talking of something else entirely, that they had spoken in this way before. It seemed to
him they were picking up threads from another conversation.
‘Everyone does it,’ she went on. ‘It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just the way things are.’
‘You’re friends with the old man at the beach house,’ he blurted out unthinkingly.
He knew she would leave in a moment, but he wanted to keep her here, wanted to keep her talking to him. Suddenly he could not bear the thought of her going home. The girl stood for a moment longer, looking at him. Vikram saw that in fact she was exhausted, that possibly she had been crying. Small beads of perspiration had gathered on her brow and there were dark rings under her eyes. And although her hair was coiled up she wore no flower in it as he had often seen her do.
‘He has gone away,’ she said flatly.
She stared out at the sea. He thought she might say something else but she seemed to change her mind and smiled instead. The smile didn’t quite reach her eyes and he wished he hadn’t mentioned the old man. Confused, he scuffed the ground with his feet. She put out her hand and touched his arm.
‘Don’t do that,’ she said absent-mindedly. ‘You’ll ruin your shoes.’
Vikram could think of nothing to say.
‘I must go,’ she was saying. ‘I must make my mother some coriander tea. See you.’
And the next moment she was gone.
Time crawled slowly like the geckos that came out of the cracks in the walls. Every day Nulani returned to the beach house and painted under the watchful eyes of Sugi. He tried to make her eat a little, knowing that when she was at home all her energies
were directed towards caring for her mother. Theo had been away for three weeks.
‘Halfway there, already,’ said Sugi encouragingly.
But it was no use, Sugi could see that her unhappiness was growing and her energy fading like the colour in her green skirt.
‘How is your mother today?’ he asked. He knew from his friend Thercy that Mrs Mendis was very unwell.
‘Must be her broken heart,’ Thercy had said. ‘Even though her daughter looks after her so lovingly, it’s the boy she wants. It was always the boy as far as she was concerned.’
Jim Mendis wrote one letter home. The day the letter arrived the girl came rushing down the hill to Sugi, wanting to tell him the news.
‘He shares a house with an English boy,’ she said. ‘They have become good friends. And he plays cricket,’ she said delighted for him.
Sugi listened. Jim Mendis had not asked a single question about his mother or sister.
Theo wrote. Without any hope that the post would reach her, still he wrote. ‘
I’m longing to come home
,’ he said.
Every night, he told her, he put a tick in his diary. He hoped she was missing him as much as he missed her. And, he said, smiling as he wrote, everywhere he looked he saw only her face. Distance had focused his thoughts, stripped him of diffidence. Slowly he wrote his first words of love and, having started, found he could not stop.
The party for the film premiere was very grand, very important, I suppose, but, without you, I didn’t have the slightest interest in it. All I could think of was how much I miss you and wonder what you would make of so many
strange people, all dressed in their finery. How you would have wanted to draw them all! Everywhere I go I seem to see things with your eyes. You see what you’ve done to me? And incidentally, have I told you how lovely your eyes are? Or, when you used to sit at the back of the veranda in your lime-green skirt, how impossible it was for me to work? All I wanted to do was to keep you talking so I could stare at you! And now you are so far away. Last night I woke in a panic worrying about whether you were all right. I had to force myself to remember you had Sugi looking after you. I trust Sugi with my life, you know, and so can you. I calmed down when I remembered that. I have told him we are going to get married when I return. I know you won’t mind. Sugi only wants us to be happy.I’ve been telling my agent a little about you too. Well, he was questioning me. He knew Anna, you see. And he saw how I was after she died. In fact, he was very good to me at the time. Now of course he could see I was different and he was curious to know the reason for this. Transformed, was what he said. Who has done this to you? he asked me. So I told him a little. Not too much, you understand. I’m not ready to share you with too many people yet! But I told him I feel as though a light has been switched on in my life. The light that is you! Three weeks, less, if you don’t count the last weekend, and I will be home.
‘I can’t hear his voice any more,’ the girl said to Sugi, panic-stricken. ‘He’s been away for so long I’m frightened.’
‘Draw him,
putha
,’ said Sugi soothingly, comforting her as though she was his own child. ‘Have faith. He’ll be back very soon. You must not be afraid.’
And by some miracle, when she calmed down, she saw that indeed she could draw him from memory. Perfectly.
‘See,’ said Sugi, triumphantly, ‘all those months of practising have been worth it. His likeness is perfect!’
And then, suddenly, her mother’s illness was not just simply a broken heart. She had malaria. The doctor was reluctant to admit her to hospital. Conditions were not good there. It would be better, and safer, he told Nulani, if they could nurse her here at home. So Nulani and the servant changed the sweat-sodden sheets and tried as best they could to deal with the deadly sickness as Mrs Mendis’s body twisted and turned in agony.
‘Soon, very soon, Sir will be back,’ said Sugi, who had begun to shop and cook for them.
By the time the first case of malaria occurred Vikram was already in the eastern province at the special camp. The camp was near an underground cave, deep in the jungle. Close by was a river that overflowed in the rainy season. Once this had been a place of pilgrimage but now the ground was full of newly dug graves. The leader of the camp, who was not much older than Vikram, told him the dead were mostly women and children.
‘First they were raped,’ he told Vikram, ‘then we were brought in to shoot them.’
‘Who were they?’ asked Vikram.
‘Muslims.’
The boy told Vikram that the dead amounted to 270. They were people who should not have been living there, it was not their land, it was Tamil land. And their husbands and sons were all in the Singhalese army. The Tigers had turned their sub-machine guns on them, sending bullets buzzing like bees. And then afterwards the rains had washed the bodies into the river.
Later, the boy told Vikram, the bodies had surfaced, bloated and stinking like cattle, with stiffened limbs. Some soldiers still thought the place was haunted with the souls of the dead, others, that Muslims had no souls to speak of. But that was some weeks ago, the boy told Vikram. Now the whole place had been cleaned up for their camp.