Funny Boy (19 page)

Jegan had not been to our hotel before, and he was impressed by how beautiful it was. He especially liked the dining room because it had a rock garden in the middle of it and a small waterfall which cascaded down the rocks.

On our first evening there, my father invited Jegan to join him for their customary evening drink. He didn’t object when I came along with them to the table the waiter had placed on the beach. The sun was setting, and the beach was quite crowded with foreigners and local villagers. We sat in silence, watching the sky change colour at the horizon. Then Jegan leaned forward in his chair and looked keenly at something on the beach. My father regarded him, curious. Jegan turned to him and said, “Is what is happening what I think is happening?”

I turned to look down the beach now, wondering what Jegan had seen. There was nothing out of the ordinary. As was usual at this time, there were many foreign men around. A lot of them were talking to young boys from the village.

“Yes,” my father said.

“And they come back to the hotel?”

My father shrugged. “Sometimes.”

“You don’t mind?”

“What am I to do? They have paid for the rooms. Besides, if I tried to stop it, they’d simply go to another hotel on the front.”

“But isn’t it illegal?”

My father chuckled. “I don’t see any police out there, do you?” He poured himself another drink. “It’s not just our luscious beaches that keep the tourist industry going, you know. We have other natural resources as well.”

He held his glass up to Jegan. “Cheers.”

Jegan didn’t respond. Instead, he stared down the beach again, a stern expression on his face.

On the afternoon of the second day, I was reading in the hammock in front of my parents’ room when I saw Jegan striding across the garden towards our rooms, the manager hurrying behind him. From the grim expression on Jegan’s face and the harassed look on the face of the manager, I could tell something was wrong. “Aiyo, sir, don’t,” the manager said, “the boss is sleeping.”

Jegan ignored his plea, stepped onto the patio outside my parents’ room, and knocked on the glass door. After a moment, my father came to the door and parted the curtain. When he saw the look on their faces, he opened the door and came out, closing it softly behind him.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

Before Jegan could answer, the manager said, “Aiyo, sir, small problem, sir.”

“Small!” Jegan said to him angrily. He turned to my father. “This man tells me that I am not supposed to correct the staff myself. I must give him all my criticism and he will convey it to them.”

The manager now seemed very distressed. My father indicated to him that he was excused and he hurried off.

My father looked at Jegan for a moment. Then he stepped off the porch and pointed to some chairs that were near my hammock. As they walked towards me, I became very still. He invited Jegan to sit down.

“Yes,” he said, “those were my orders.”

Jegan looked at him in surprise.

“Why, Uncle?” he asked.

“That’s the way we do things here,” my father replied, brushing something from his sleeve.

Jegan regarded him for a moment and then said, “It’s a Tamil-Sinhala thing, isn’t it?”

My father was silent.

“That … it’s ridiculous,” Jegan cried.

“Look,” my father said, “you don’t understand.”

“What don’t I understand, Uncle?”

“The political climate is very volatile. With the Tigers killing Sinhala policemen and the Tamil party calling for separation, the Sinhalese are very anti-Tamil right now.”

“What about the Sinhalese massacring innocent Tamils during the riots last year?”

My father gestured with his hand to show that he didn’t disagree with Jegan. “The fact is one must be careful these days. Things are very unstable in this area. During the riots, the mob came here calling out my name. If it wasn’t for my manager and other senior staff, this hotel would have been destroyed.”

Jegan looked at him, surprised.

My father nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I never talk about it because I don’t want to upset my family. They don’t know how it was in this area. The Banduratne Mudalali, who owns a lot of the hotels around here, is very anti-Tamil. His thugs did terrible things. Tamil families were dragged out of their houses and hacked to death. They poured kerosene on them and set them on fire.”

Jegan was silent.

“Look, son,” my father said, “I didn’t think there would be a need to explain this to you. But the truth is I have given you a high position and there’s bound to be some resentment in part because you’re Tamil.”

“You gave me the position because I was good, Uncle, not because I was Tamil.”

“They don’t see it that way. You know how we Tamils are always accused of favouring each other.”

“Yes, yes. And the Sinhalese, they never do that?”

“But we are a minority, and that’s a fact of life,” my father said placatingly. “As a Tamil you have to learn how to play the game. Play it right and you can do very well for yourself. The trick is not to make yourself conspicuous. Go around quietly, make your money, and don’t step on anyone’s toes.”

Jegan sighed impatiently.

“Look at me,” my father said. “I’ve done well for myself, haven’t I? I’m happy, aren’t I?”

Jegan didn’t answer.

My father leaned forward and patted him indulgently on the knee.

“It’s good to have ideals, but now you’re a man, son. Soon you will become a husband and a father, and you must think about what that means. You have a bright future ahead of you. Don’t spoil it.” He stood up. “Our manager here is a fine man. Listen to him and he’ll teach you a lot.”

My father put his hand on Jegan’s shoulder for a moment and then he went back to his room. As he opened the door to go inside, I heard Amma ask, sleepily, if everything was all right.

“Yes,” my father replied. “Everything is fine.”

The conversation I had heard between them had disturbed the tranquillity of the afternoon. The recent riots, which had seemed so removed from my life, now took on an immediate and frightening dimension. I thought about what might have happened if we had been here at the time the riots broke out. I remembered the day they had started. Slowly, the news about what was happening in other parts of the country had begun to come into Colombo. The things we heard were so terrible that everyone had been sure there would be a forty-eight-hour curfew, and people had rushed to the shops to stock up on provisions. But there had only been night curfew, and, in Colombo at least, things had gone back to normal in a few days. What seemed disturbing, now that I thought about those 1981 riots,
was that there had been no warning, no hint that they were going to happen. I looked all around me at the deserted beach, so calm in the hot sun. What was to prevent a riot from happening right now? I thought, even as I lay in this hammock, was it not possible that a mob was getting ready to come to our hotel? I shuddered.

A slight noise made me look up. Jegan had risen from his chair. He started to walk away, and suddenly I didn’t want to be alone with my thoughts. I called out to him.

He came over. “How long have you been here?”

I looked at him to show that I had heard their conversation.

He began to push my hammock back and forth as if it were a swing.

“Do you think those riots will happen again?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. Instead he said, “Come, let’s go for a walk on the beach.”

I got out of my hammock.

“You know,” Jegan said, after we had walked in silence for a while, “this reminds me of Jaffna and the time I used to go for sea baths with my classmates.”

“I’ve never been to Jaffna.”

“Well,” he said, “this is not a very good time to go.” Then he added, “The police and the army are very cruel in Jaffna. They do terrible things to the Tamils there.”

“Torture?”

He looked at me in surprise. “How did you know that?”

“I know,” I replied, not wanting to tell him about Daryl Uncle.

“Were you ever tortured?” I asked.

He glanced at me quickly and then away. “No,” he said. “But I knew somebody who was.”

Now I watched him closely.

“A friend. We worked together in the Gandhiyam movement.” He looked at me. “In fact you remind me of him, when he was your age. We were … we were very good friends.”

We had reached a rock now and he motioned for us to sit down on it.

“So what happened?” I asked.

“He left for Canada as a refugee, and I went off and joined the Tigers.”

I stared at him in shock.

“Don’t tell anybody, okay?”

I nodded, still staring at him. “Are you a Tiger?” I asked in a hushed voice.

He smiled. “Not any more.” He saw that I was waiting for him to continue. “If you become a Tiger you cannot question anything they do. Recently they killed a social worker because he disagreed with their opinions.” He looked at the sea moodily. “On the other hand, what is the alternative? We cannot live like this under constant threat from the Sinhalese, always second-class citizens in our own country. As my father used to say, ‘It’s small choices of rotten apples.’ Here you can be killed by the Sinhalese and there you can be killed by the police or the Tigers.”

We sat on the rock for a long time, talking. He told me about the Tiger training camp in South India. He also spoke about his
friend in the Gandhiyam movement. I could tell that he had loved him very much; his having been tortured had affected him deeply.

The bond between Jegan and I grew stronger after that conversation on the beach. When we were back in Colombo, he invited me to go jogging with him. Every evening, after Jegan came back from work, he would change into a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, and together we would set off for the Ministry of Sports’ grounds. We would take the bus down Bullers Road and get off near Radio Ceylon. From there we would walk to the grounds, which were next to Independence Square. Diggy was furious with envy when he found out about these outings. He wanted to come as well, but couldn’t swallow his pride and ask Jegan. For his part, Jegan never invited him, and I was glad of this. I had been excluded and humiliated by Diggy plenty of times, and it felt good to get my own back.

One evening, we were warming up before our run when I noticed that Jegan was looking at two men who were warming up near us. They noticed him now, and he raised his hand tentatively in greeting. They nodded, but they had a warning look in their eyes, as if telling him not to approach them. When we started to jog, however, they caught up with us. Gradually, Jegan picked up his speed and left me far behind. The two men kept up with him, and I noticed that they drew closer and talked to him. Once we had finished jogging and were seated
on the grass, they came and sat somewhere behind us. Without turning around, Jegan said something to them in Tamil which I didn’t understand. They replied, and I noticed that Jegan turned slightly to his left to watch as three men jogged by. One of them, the older one, had on an expensive brand-name track suit, unlike the simple shorts and T-shirts we wore. After a while the men sitting behind us got up and began to jog again.

“Who were those men, the ones you talked to before?” I asked him.

“Oh, just old school friends,” he said casually, but he had a troubled expression on his face.

He stood up and said it was time to go. As we left the grounds, I noticed he was looking at an expensive car that was parked nearby. It had a small Sri Lankan flag attached to its antenna, and there were two men in uniform leaning against the side of it.

That evening, I was looking for the cinema page in the newspaper when I came across a picture of the man we had seen at the sports grounds in the expensive track suit. He was distributing awards at a school prize-giving event. I read the caption under the photograph and discovered that he was a Tamil minister in the government.

The next evening, instead of walking to Bullers Road to catch the bus, Jegan turned right and set off in the other direction. “Where are you going?” I asked.

“Oh,” he said, “didn’t I tell you? I’ve decided to use Police Park instead. It’s much closer than the Ministry of Sports and we’ll save on the bus fare.”

Although his reasons made sense, I didn’t entirely accept his explanation. Something was troubling him, but what it was I couldn’t tell.

Then a few days later I found out.

We came home from school one day to find Amma and Neliya Aunty sitting on the verandah, looking alarmed.

“What happened?” Diggy asked.

“The police were here,” Amma said.

“The police!” I said. Amma and I looked at each other, remembering our last encounter with the police.

“What did they want?” Diggy asked.

“They wanted to speak to Jegan,” Neliya Aunty said.

“Why?” I asked, feeling suddenly afraid.

They both shrugged.

“Anyway,” Amma said, “I called the office. Jegan and your Appa should be here soon.”

We went to put away our schoolbags. As we walked down the hall, Sonali took my arm and asked what I thought was happening. I shook my head. I couldn’t help remembering that conversation Jegan and I had on the beach. I wondered if the police visit was connected to his having been a Tiger.