The Hungry Ghosts (35 page)

After a moment he nodded and sighed.

The three-storey house was a thin tower on such a small plot of land that the outer wall of the house also served as the boundary wall. Its slimness gave the building a curiously long-necked fragility that was enforced by the absence of windows overlooking the street. Mili said that the place belonged to a German man. Since foreigners could not buy property in Sri Lanka, the house was owned by his boyfriend, a former beach boy. It was used by other beach boys who needed a place to bring foreign clients.

Mili stayed on his motorcycle, keeping the engine running. I rang the front door bell, then raised my eyebrows at him. He reluctantly went to park nearby. As he came back, hands shoved in pockets, he glanced up and down the street as if nervous someone we knew might see us.

A peephole slid open in the door and a young man stared out at us. “Yes?” he asked rudely in Sinhala.

“We want to take a room for a few hours.”

There was stentorian breathing on the other side and it took me a moment to realize he was accompanied by a dog. “This guest house is only for foreigners.”

“I am a foreigner,” I said, switching to English. I took out my Canadian citizenship card and he looked at it carefully.

There was much moving of bolts and chains, then he opened the door. He led us down a short dark corridor without saying a word, the pariah dog nudged up against his side. We emerged into a shady courtyard that was neat and clean, magenta bougainvillea growing up the white walls. Foreign men, their skins the colour of overripe papaw, sat at tables with boys, some of whom looked like teenagers, dressed alike in tank tops and jeans, with tight coral necklaces around their necks. The other guests examined us, but we avoided meeting anyone’s gaze.

Our host, who had not given his name, led us up some narrow stairs to a room with a double bed neatly made up with clean sheets. There was a mirror on the opposite wall and a side table with a gurulettuva filled with water. He stated his price and I paid him. When he had counted out the notes, he said sternly, “I need the room in two hours. When you are done, please remove the sheets and put them in there.” He gestured towards a wicker laundry basket.

Then we were alone. Mili and I stared at each other as if neither knew what to do. “This is quite a place,” I said.

Mili grinned. “Yes, a bloody whorehouse.”

I put my arms around him and pressed my crotch into his. “And here we are, a couple of whores.”

He brushed his hand across my forehead, then gently kissed my eyes, cheeks, nose and throat before slipping his tongue into my mouth.

After we had made love, Mili propped himself up against the headboard and I sat between his legs, leaning back against his chest as he smoked, his breath tickling the top of my ears. “I have a little surprise for you,” he said after a while. “I asked Sriyani for the beach house.”

“She said yes?” I asked, half turning.

“Of course. Why not?” He gave me a puzzled look.

I pressed back against him and squeezed his knee. “No reason. That’s great. How nice of Sriyani. When do we leave?”

“Tomorrow, after work. I have asked for a few days off. I need time to think.” He grinned teasingly at my inquiring look. He was not going to share his thoughts with me yet.

We spent the rest of the day together, having tea at the Mount Lavinia Hotel and a beer at our regular beach cabana. By the time Mili dropped me off at my grandmother’s house, the last red glow in the sky was purpling, shadows moving swiftly over everything. I was reluctant to let him go, dreading the tense silence between my grandmother and me.

After he left, I opened the gate wearily and started to make my way up the driveway. Rosalind rose from a bench in the garden and gestured for me to stop.

“Baba,” she whispered as she came up to me, “please, don’t go inside.” She shook her head. “You cannot go inside.”

“Why Rosalind?” I gripped her elbow. “What has happened?”

She began to cry, wiping her face on the edge of her sarong. “It pains me too much to say it.”

I walked rapidly up the driveway, the skitter and crunch of gravel loud in the still evening. The verandah was deserted, and when I entered the saleya it was dark. I started towards my room. A lamp was switched on and I turned to find my grandmother seated in an armchair, hands folded in her lap, face stony.

“So, you’re back.” There was something very tired in her voice.

“I’ve been out.” I swallowed hard. “Out with Mili.”

“Yes, I know.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “I know exactly where you have been. Chandralal had you followed by one of his golayas.”

She nodded at my shocked expression, then her face flooded with anguish. “That Jayasinghe boy, taking my obedient, innocent grandson and changing him into this grotesque …” She made a disgusted sound. “I cannot even say the word.” She leaned forward in her chair. “How could you be so gullible, Puthey? How could you let yourself be led into such corruption?”

“Mili didn’t corrupt me.” I laughed briefly, still stunned. “I’m like this. It is my nature.”

My grandmother shook her head. “Nonsense, nonsense. The Jayasinghe boy has bad blood. Though the father’s side is good, the mother is a Burgher,
it’s all that vile European blood. You are my grandson, you cannot be that way.” Yet there was a helpless plea in her denial.

“It’s not Mili or his blood. I live like this in Canada.”

She struggled to her feet. “You are saying such a horrible thing to mock and punish me. All you want to do is break the heart of an old woman who has been nothing but good to you.”

“You call the way you have treated me good?” My head was flooding now with a white heat at the thought of her asking that thug to spy on me, to violate Mili and my privacy. “Do you know how much I hated those afternoons in your room as a child? Do you know how much I hated going around with you on all your errands, looking at those thuppai properties? Do you think I did any of it out of love? You must be mad. I don’t love you. I have never loved you.”

My grandmother let out a cry. “Your mind is clouded, ruined by that Jayasinghe boy.”

“No, Aacho, I don’t love you,” I continued in an awful, reasonable tone. “I have never loved you.”

She hobbled away in the direction of her bedroom, but I went after her, still speaking in that sensible, wounding tone. “If I had not bent to you, we would have been thrown out onto the street, or so I thought as a child. And you knew I was thinking like that and took advantage of my innocence. You used my fear to get me where you wanted me to be.”

“Stop yourself before you say anything you cannot take back,” she cried, turning to me. “Don’t do what your mother did, I beg you.”

“Whatever my mother did, you drove her to do it.”

She gave me a haunted, helpless look, then went into her bedroom.

The house felt stifling. I could not bear to be there anymore. I went out to the garden and paced the dark lawn, the dew-heavy grass
hush-hushing
beneath my feet. I was planning my next moves with a steadiness that surprised me, the steadiness that comes when you finally speak a truth. “How easy it was, how easy,” I said to myself with wonder as I picked up an araliya flower that had fallen on the lawn and looked at the brown stains where its petals had been crushed.

I would tell Mili everything at the beach house. Then, when we returned from our holiday, I would ask Sriyani to take me in for a while, explaining
why. I was also going to urge Mili again to study in Canada. Some shift was happening in him and I hoped to influence that change. If he still refused, then I would stay on in Colombo. I had not given up my Sri Lankan citizenship and could find work here. With my foreign education, my family name, my facility in English, I had plenty of options.

20
 

M
ILI AND
I
WERE TO LEAVE THE NEXT EVENING
after he finished work. Our plan was to stay four days, taking in the weekend.

The morning felt long without any work to do. I tried reading but it was impossible to concentrate. I would not venture into the saleya. Every time my grandmother’s footsteps came towards my room, I felt that hot white anger flooding me, then relief when she passed on in another direction. While I exulted in this newfound cruelty towards her, at the same time I was frightened by it.

Finally my grandmother summoned Rosalind and informed her she had some errands to run and would be back for a late lunch. I made sure to have my meal early, then visited a bookstore in the afternoon and had a long tea at one of the hotels. I returned home in the early evening when I knew she would be visiting the temple. I had already packed and hidden the knapsack under my bed. I sat down to write my grandmother a letter in Sinhala.

When I heard Mili’s motorcycle at the gate, I put the note on the dining table and ran down to the front gate.

I was panting when I got outside and Mili squinted at me quizzically. “Are you alright?”

I nodded, slipped the knapsack around my shoulders and put on the spare helmet.

We rode south through Colombo and soon left its urban sprawl behind. The motorway was open to the sea on one side. I held Mili close, enjoying the speed of the motorcycle beneath us, its power, feeling the slip and slide of his cotton shirt against his ribs as he shifted with the curve of the road. The cool ocean air smelt of freshly grated coconut.

It was dark when we got to the beach house. Piyasena came rushing to open the gate, smiling shyly in welcome. Our dinner was ready and suddenly we were starving. Piyasena had made crab curry, and when I expressed my delight he said he remembered how much I had liked it the last time.

Later, after Piyasena left, we sat on the front verandah sipping beer, listening to the ocean thunder against the beach. Nothing was visible beyond the light by the back gate, but then the moon rose and the sand began to glimmer like some awakening scaly beast. We went down to the beach, let our sarongs fall around our ankles and ran naked into the waves. Because of the currents at night, we stayed close to the shore, crouching in the water, our knees and thighs grazing the bottom when we swam. Mili drew me to him and we made love in the water.

As we floated in the waves afterwards, I told Mili all that had happened with my grandmother. And though it frightened me to tell him our relationship was no longer a secret, I felt the lightening of my burden. We were now in this together. When I finished, Mili turned and struck for the shore. I gave him some time, then followed. He was slipping on his sarong when I reached him, tying its ends into a knot at his waist. I sat on the sand by him, still naked, and lightly touched his calf. “There is nowhere to run, Mili. What has happened cannot be changed. You might as well sit down by me so we can talk.”

After a moment, he lowered himself to the sand, and I could see in the moonlight that his eyes were lustrous with alarm.

“I am going to visit Sriyani when I return,” I said, “tell her everything and ask if I can stay with her a little while.” I shifted so my shoulder was touching his.

“Sriyani knows too?”

“She put two and two together.” I spared him her opinion that everyone knew about him.

“But you know, Mili, my days in Sri Lanka might be numbered. I might have to return to Canada. And I wish you would consider coming too, sometime soon.”

Mili played with a shell, some emotion working in his face. “Yes.”

“Yes?”

He smiled ruefully and moved a strand of wet hair from my forehead. “Going abroad to study is something I wanted to think about this weekend.”

Then he told me that a few days ago Sriyani had called her workers together and advised them to secure visas to whatever country they could get. They might have to leave suddenly if things got very bad, as they probably would. If the government did not make their lives hard, the JVP would, as it began to clamp down on all dissenters. Even she was thinking of taking up a fellowship at a university in England, one she had been offered before but turned down. If their long-term goal was to do some good in their country, then they had to accept that certain short-term battles must be lost.

Mili had talked with Sriyani privately to see what she thought of his applying to universities abroad. She had urged him to do so; a degree would be useful when he returned. She was getting old. New leaders would be needed.

“Did she mention what university she might do her fellowship at?” I asked.

“No,” Mili replied, surprised by the question.

Sriyani, I was sure, had no plans to leave. She was not going to abandon Sri Lanka and her cause. Yet she was giving the others a way out, and I could already see who would choose what. Dilan and Avanthi would return to America; Jagath and Dharshini would stay on, their ties too strong. Mili had been on the fence, but our relationship no longer being secret had pushed him towards leaving.