Swimming in the Monsoon Sea (18 page)

He pushed past Selvi and went into the shelter area, where he began to fill up the feeders with seed.

“Fine.” Selvi stormed past him on her way out. “You claim to like your cousin, but all you want to do is deny him pleasure. You’re selfish.
I’m
going to ask Niresh. Why should he suffer because of your —”

“Don’t you dare talk to him about it,” Amrith yelled. “If you do, I’ll … I’ll …”

“You’ll what?” Selvi made a dismissive sound. She put one hand on her hip and wagged her finger. “If I want to ask him, I will. You can’t do anything about it.”

She let herself out of the safety porch onto the terrace. As a parting shot, she flung at him, “Maybe Niresh will come with us and you can stay at home!”

Amrith went back to filling the feeders, his hands shaking. He felt furious and yet desperate at the same time. Selvi and her friends wanted to draw Niresh into their world, and he had already seen that his cousin was amenable to this. If they monopolized Niresh, Amrith would have to tag along silently, largely ignored. These three weeks were so precious. It was already bad enough that he would have to start attending rehearsals again in eleven days and spend mornings away from Niresh. Now it looked like the girls would be intruding on the time he did have alone with him.

“Amrith.” He turned to find Mala regarding him sympathetically. “I’ll talk to akka about it.” She touched his
arm. “You’re right. You have only three weeks with your cousin and you should spend all the time you possibly can with him.”

Her sympathy made him suddenly teary. He turned away, shrugging her hand off. “It’s just not fair,” he said, after a moment. “Selvi has so many friends and now she wants to try and take away the one person I have.”

“Yes, I know, I know,” Mala said soothingly. “I’ll have a chat with akka.”

By the time they went to bed that night, Mala had talked to her sister. Selvi was no longer angry and, in fact, joked about the whole thing. She presented Amrith with an itinerary she had drawn up for Niresh’s three weeks here. Beside each activity, she had written
Amrith not included
.

He knew this was her way of saying sorry, and so he took the joke in good grace.

Amrith wanted to spend every minute he could with Niresh, and the thought of having to practice his typing each morning, in addition to rehearsals, was unbearable. He went to ask Uncle Lucky to let him off.

Uncle Lucky, after some token resistance and a lecture on the hazards of sloth, agreed to free him from typing until his cousin left.

The next day, when Niresh arrived, the boys stood for a long moment, looking at each other. It seemed to Amrith, as he took his cousin’s suitcase from him, that there was a new depth of affection between them.

Niresh had not swum in the sea yet. Because of the monsoon, the waves were too high, the pull of the current dangerous. Amrith suggested that they try Kinross Beach. With the reef not far out, it was relatively safe.

Kinross was only ten minutes away. They went down their street to the railway lines that ran alongside the sea, and walked beside them until they got to their destination.

When they reached Kinross, Amrith saw that the beach was half its usual width and the encroaching sea had pushed the sand up into banks. He signaled to Niresh, and they made their way to a grove of coconut trees. They stripped down to their trunks. The sky was clear, with clouds like lengths of gauze fluttering by. The sea, despite its swell, was a brilliant blue, tipped with emerald green.

When they got to the sea, Amrith went in up to his ankles. The water was cool. He never liked to plunge in and, instead, preferred to wade out slowly, hugging himself. Niresh, however, splashed out and, the moment it was deep enough, he dove into the water with a whoop. He swam out swiftly, then turned around and let a wave carry him back.

“Am-rith, Am-rith,” he intoned, as he drifted close to him, “time to go in.” Niresh splashed some water at him.

Amrith grinned. “Fuck off.”

Niresh pretended to be absolutely shocked. He wagged his finger at him and, in mock-punishment, splashed him again.

Amrith feebly splashed back.

Niresh laughed wickedly and began to circle him. “Time to go under, cousin.”

Amrith quickly sank down into the water and came up spluttering. He pushed his hair back and wiped the water off his face.

“There, isn’t that better?”

Amrith nodded.

Niresh was looking at him, smiling oddly.

“What?”

His cousin shook his head.
“Nah
, you wouldn’t understand.”

“Yes, I would. Come on.”

“Okay, but don’t take this the wrong way.”

Amrith drifted closer.

“You and your sisters, even their friends, you guys are all about my age, but you seem much younger.” He held up his hands. “It’s not a bad thing. I really like it, because I’m having so much fun. But I see that you guys can afford to act young because everything is taken care of in your life. There are always people to watch out for you. I mean, even those damn change-room attendants at the club.”

Amrith was silent, absorbing this. He had never thought of his life as being this way.

“So,” Niresh said, splashing some water at him, “aren’t you going to ask me how I got my dad to change his mind?”

Amrith
had
wondered.

“I told him that I was going to be so bad at school that the authorities would take me away from him and send me to live with my mum.”

Amrith wanted to know if he would like to do this, but he did not dare ask.

“I wouldn’t go, of course,” Niresh said, as if he had read his mind. “I hate her. She’s married to this rancher in Alberta and is happy as a pig in shit. I mean, sure she calls me every so often, but that’s just her guilty conscience. This one time, I went to visit her in Alberta. Her new husband — he’s a Jesus-freak — thought he could act like my father and tell me what to do. He tried to send me to a Christian camp. I told him to go fuck himself. So he hit me. Can you believe it? And she just stood by and didn’t do anything. So I went to my room and began to pack and she came in and started trying to make me stay, telling me that he was a good man, and that people in rural Alberta raised their children differently than what I was used to. I guess she must’ve thought I deserved it,
eh
. I threatened to call the police unless they put me on the next flight back to Toronto.”

Niresh’s face had grown increasingly angry. He turned and thrashed out into the sea. Amrith knew not to go out to him. As Amrith bobbed up and down in the water, he found himself thinking of how his uncle had wanted to pack Niresh off to camp, but his cousin had begged to come here instead. The more Amrith got to know Niresh, the more he felt that Niresh’s life in Canada was not as much fun as he made it out to be. He did not know enough about that
country to be able to tell if Niresh’s stories — about being on the football team with his three friends and all the things they did together — were true, but he suspected some of them were made up.

When they got back to the house, they used a shower in the side garden that had been built for rinsing off after sea-baths. Amrith found himself watching Niresh, the way he stretched his arms above him and held his head back, the way the water trickled down his stomach. Niresh noticed that Amrith was looking at him. He grinned and splashed some water at him. Amrith grinned back.

In the bedroom, Amrith waited for Niresh to use the bathroom first, as he might want to shower properly with soap and shampoo.

Jane-Nona had taken his cousin’s clothes out of the suitcase and put them on shelves in Amrith’s almirah and in the chest of drawers. Niresh went through his clothes in the almirah and threw a pair of white underpants, denim shorts, and a red golf shirt onto the bed. “So you’ve told me that most Sri Lankans don’t have vacuum cleaners or dishwashers. But what about washing machines?” He came and stood by the bedpost. “I mean, what do you guys do with dirty clothes?”

“We wash them by hand.”

“You
wash your jeans and shirts by hand?”

“No, there’s a woman who comes once a week and washes the clothes.”

“Neat.”

Niresh pulled his trunks down his thighs and let them fall to the floor. “When we were coming in from the airport, we saw these women beating clothes on rocks.” He picked up his towel and pulled it back and forth between his thighs, his penis bouncing up and down. “Does your woman do it that way?”

“Yes.” It was not so, but Amrith could not think anymore. The blood was thudding through his head. He had not seen his cousin, nor, in fact, any man naked before.

Niresh swung around. “Am I in your way?”

“Umm.”

Actually, he was. Amrith had to get a change of clothes. He went past Niresh to the almirah. There was a mirror on the inside of the door. As Amrith crouched down to search for his clothes, he looked covertly at Niresh’s reflection. Sri Lankan men were modest and did not strip down in front of each other.

His cousin was bigger than he was, tight curls clustering around his heavy penis and testicles. Unlike him, Niresh was circumcised, a dark purple ring where the shaft ended, the head curiously vulnerable and exposed. His eyes traveled upwards and he found his cousin looking at him, a slight smile on his face. With a quick movement, Amrith straightened up, grabbed his shirt, his shorts, and his underpants from a shelf. Niresh had begun to pull on his underwear, facing away from Amrith.

“I need … I need to use the toilet.” Amrith hurried into the bathroom. Once there, he shut the door and
leaned against it, his eyes closed. After a moment, he placed his clothes over a rail and pulled down his trunks. His penis sprang up. He looked down at it in dismay.

“Amrith, Amrith.” Niresh was calling out from the other side of the bathroom door.

“Um
 … what … yes?”

“I’m going out to the courtyard, okay?”

“Yes … I’ll see you there.”

The moment the bedroom door closed, Amrith lowered the lid on the toilet, sat down on it, and leaned his head back against the coolness of the cistern. He closed his eyes and tried one of his remedies — reciting “If” by Rudyard Kipling. When that failed he tried the prayer “Hail Holy Queen.” Finally he got up and willed himself to urinate, the one thing he was certain would end this embarrassment.

When Amrith came out to the courtyard, Niresh was talking to Mala.

“So you guys never go to concerts?”

She shook her head.

“Back in Canada, we go all the time. Especially in the summer. Who do you like?”

“Anne Murray.”

“Seen her. Who else?”

“Olivia Newton-John.”

“Ditto.”

Mala was impressed.

Niresh had seen Amrith, and he waved to him. As Amrith went across to join his cousin, he tried to stifle a feeling of shame that welled up in him.

The girls had been very good about not monopolizing Niresh, and Mala tried to slip away, making an excuse. Amrith, however, asked her to stay and chat with them. He did not want to be alone with his cousin for once.

That night, when they were in bed and had switched off the lights, Niresh lay with his hands behind his head for a while. Then he cleared his throat. “Your mum, she was really pretty.”

Amrith turned towards him quickly.

His cousin glanced at him and then away. “I looked in the album. I guess Jane-Nona left it out by mistake, while she was clearing a drawer for me.”

Amrith lay on his back and stared at the ceiling. His arms were by his sides, his fists clenched.

“What was she like, Amrith? She seemed like a really fun person in the photographs.”

“Um
 … I don’t remember.”

Niresh sat up in bed. “You don’t remember her at all?”

“No.”

“Shit,” his cousin said softly. Then, “What about your father? Do you remember him?”

Amrith held his breath for a long moment, then slowly released it. “No.”

“My dad told me that they died in an accident, but he never told me what happened and I was wondering.…”

“Niresh.”

“Yeah?”

“Please. I … I don’t want to talk about it. I can’t. I just can’t. Please.”