Funny Boy (7 page)

“Does she marry the king in the end?” I asked eagerly.

“Marry the king?” Amma repeated. She laughed. “You must be mad.”

“Why?” I cried, disappointed that the story didn’t end with a marriage.

“Because at that time people didn’t marry outside their race.”

“And now?” I asked, determined to get a happy ending out of the story. “If it was now, would they have married?”

Amma looked at me, irritated by my persistence. “I don’t know,” she said. “Probably not.”

“But
why
not?”

“Because most people marry their own kind,” Amma said in a tone that warned me not to ask further questions.

I found my enthusiasm for
The King and I
ebbing. I couldn’t see the point of a play where the hero and heroine didn’t get married at the end. Amma must have read my mind, because she said, “You’ll have a good time. The songs in
The King and I
are very catchy.”

The next Saturday, I went for my first rehearsal. Amma drove me to my grandparents’ house, and from there I went
by bus with Radha Aunty. When rehearsals were over, I was to come back to my grandparents’ house for dinner, and then Amma would pick me up.

The rehearsals were held at St. Theresa’s Girls’ Convent. Sonali attended the school, but I had never been there myself. The high spiked gates were covered with sheets of takaran so no one could look in or out. Today, they were slightly ajar. We took a path that led to a netball court, crossed it, and then went down a corridor towards the rehearsal hall. Now I could hear the sound of a piano, and a lady singing. We entered the hall and stood at the back. The only people on the stage were a white lady and a white boy. Before they could finish their song, another lady rose from a chair in the middle of the hall and cried out, “Stop. Stop.” She began to walk towards the stage, calling out directions to the actors. Radha Aunty took this opportunity to introduce me. This lady, whom she called Aunty Doris, looked me over and smiled. “What a lovely boy,” she said. “Should have been a girl with those eyelashes.” Aunty Doris had fair skin like a foreigner, and yet she spoke English as we did, with a Sri Lankan accent. She wore big round glasses and there were deep dark circles under her eyes.

Since we would not be needed for a while, Radha Aunty took me outside into the courtyard. Some children were playing a game in one corner, but I stayed with Radha Aunty. A group of men and women were seated on some steps, and when they saw Radha Aunty they called to her to come and join in an argument they were having. They were discussing a song in the play which said that man was like a bee and woman
like a blossom. A man, whose name I learned was Anil, had started the discussion. He agreed with this sentiment and all the men supported him.

They began to argue, each side yelling with joy when they scored a point. Radha Aunty was soon the leader of the girls and she and Anil exchanged comments back and forth until Radha Aunty said, “I would rather wither and drop off my stem than be pollinated by a bee like you.”

At this retort even the boys cheered, and Anil bowed slightly to concede to her the victory.

As we walked towards the hall a little later, one of the girls gestured towards Anil and said to Radha Aunty, “I think that bee is dying to pollinate your blossom.”

The other girls who had heard this comment screamed with laughter. Radha Aunty was not amused. “You’re mad,” she said. “Utterly mad.”

Although I didn’t altogether understand the joke, I knew that it was something bad, because Radha Aunty looked very annoyed.

After rehearsal that day, we were walking to the bus-stop when Anil drove up in his car and stopped. He rolled down his window and said, “Do you want a lift?”

“No,” Radha Aunty replied.

“But I’m going in your direction, and the buses are very slow and it’s too late to be standing at the bus-stop alone.”

Radha Aunty hesitated for a moment and then accepted. On the way, she was silent and he didn’t say much either. I began to wonder if that argument between them had been more serious than it appeared. He offered to drop us at my
grandparents’ gate, but she insisted that he leave us at the top of the road.

When we came into the drawing room, Ammachi looked up in surprise from her newspaper and said, “How did you get home so quickly?”

“We got a bus right away,” Radha Aunty replied.

I glanced at her, puzzled, and she gave me a warning look. When we went down the corridor to her room, I waited for her to give me an explanation for her lie, but she declined to say anything.

After the next rehearsal, Anil offered us a lift and Radha Aunty accepted a little more graciously this time, though once again she insisted that he drop us off at the top of the road.

When we came back to my grandparents’ house, Ammachi was waiting for us in the front garden. Radha Aunty greeted her, but in return Ammachi glared at us.

“Who is this boy you’re taking lifts from?” Ammachi asked.

Radha Aunty paused for a moment, then she lifted the latch of the gate and we went into the garden. “What boy?” she said.

“Don’t lie to me. I know you’ve been taking lifts.”

“So?” Radha Aunty shrugged as if she couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about.

“Who is he?” Ammachi demanded.

“A boy. From the play.”

“What is his name?”

“Why?”

“What is his name?”

“Anil.”

“Anil who?”

Radha Aunty was silent.

“What is his last name.”

“Jayasinghe,” she replied finally.

Ammachi let out a small cry that was both triumphant and despairing. “A Sinhalese! I knew it!”

Appachi came out onto the front porch, drawn by the sound of her voice. Ammachi turned to him. “What did I tell you? She was getting a lift from a Sinhalese. Only a Sinhalese would be impertinent enough to offer an unmarried girl a lift.”

Appachi didn’t say anything, but his expression showed that he regretted having come out. Radha Aunty sensed his sympathy and appealed to him. “He lives in the next road, that’s why he offered us a lift. It was so much easier than taking the bus. What’s so wrong with getting a lift from a boy I know?”

“What’s wrong?” Ammachi said. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong.” She paused for effect. “People will talk.”

“So let them.”

“And what if the Nagendras hear that you’re galavanting around with an unknown Sinhala boy?”

Radha Aunty was silent. She looked at the ground in front of her, a sullen expression on her face.

Ammachi came a little closer to Radha Aunty. “Is there something going on with this Sinhala boy?” she asked.

“No!” Radha Aunty cried, her eyes wide with hurt.

Ammachi studied her keenly and then her expression softened. “Anyway, don’t do it again.”

She tried to touch Radha Aunty’s arm, but Radha Aunty gave her an angry look and went up the steps and in through the front door. I followed her. The intensity of Ammachi’s
reaction had shaken me. I wondered why Anil’s being Sinhalese upset her so? I was in a Sinhala class at school and my friends were Sinhalese. My parents’ best friends were, too. Even our servant was Sinhalese, and, in fact, we spoke with her only in Sinhalese. So what did it matter whether Anil was Sinhalese or not?

Janaki was waiting for us at the end of the corridor. She had been listening. “It’s that banana seller at the top of the road who told,” she said to Radha Aunty. “I have a mind to get my sister’s husband to give him a sound thrashing.”

“She’s such a racist,” Radha Aunty said to me.

I looked at Radha Aunty. I did not understand the meaning of the word “racist,” but I could tell that it was not a nice thing.

“Radha, baba, you mustn’t forget what happened,” said Janaki.

Radha Aunty clicked her tongue against her teeth impatiently. “Oh, I’m so tired of that,” she said. “Why can’t we just put it behind us.”

Janaki sighed and said, “You were too young to remember when they brought the body home. You should have seen it. It was as if someone had taken the lid of a tin can and cut pieces out of him.”

I stared at Janaki in shock.

“I know, I know,” Radha Aunty said, brushing aside Janaki’s remarks. “But is that a reason to hate every Sinhalese?”

Janaki glanced down the corridor, for Ammachi had come in through the front door. She turned and hurried away to the kitchen and Radha Aunty went into her room. I didn’t follow her. Instead I stood there, as Ammachi came towards me.
Familiar as her face was – especially the disapproving expression with which she looked at me before asking why I had not gone to wash my face and hands before dinner – I somehow saw her differently now.

At first I could not think of anyone who would explain the word “racist” to me and tell me the story of that body. Then it came to me that my father was very approachable once he was comfortably seated in the garden each evening, the second glass of whisky in his hand.

So, one evening, I waited until I saw that dreamy, philosophical expression soften his features, then I approached him.

“Appa?” I said.

“Hmmm?”

“What is a racist?”

He turned in his chair and studied me. “Where did you hear that word?” he asked.

I told him and he was silent for a moment, nursing his glass of whisky.

“Appa, who was that person who was killed?” I asked.

“It was Ammachi’s father,” he replied, after a moment. “Your great-grandfather.”

I stared at him. I thought about the photograph of my great-grandfather which hung at the centre of all the pictures in the corridor at my grandparents’ house and I found it impossible to connect him with the dead man Janaki had described.

“Why?” I finally asked. “Why did somebody do that?”

“Because he was Tamil.”

“But you’re Tamil and I’m Tamil and nobody’s killing us.”

“This was twenty years ago, in the fifties, son. At that time, some Sinhalese people killed Tamil people.”

“But why?”

He shifted in his chair. “It’s too hard to explain. You’ll understand when you’re older.”

“But I want to know now.”

He looked at me, irritated. “It had to do with some laws,” he said. “The Sinhalese wanted to make Sinhala the only national language, and the Tamils did not like this. So there was a riot and many Tamils were killed.”

From then on I began to listen carefully to the conversation of the adults to discover more about the quarrels between the Sinhalese and the Tamils. What I learned made me very uneasy, because I realized these problems were not a thing of the past.

There was a group in Jaffna called the Tamil Tigers. They wanted a separate country and the Sinhalese were very angry about this. Ammachi often talked about the Tigers. She was on their side and declared that if they did get a separate state, which they would call Eelam, she would be the first to go and live in it. My father told her she was mad. This made Ammachi even more angry and they had many disputes about the Tigers. Now I understood why they had quarrelled so bitterly when I started school a year ago and my father had put me in a Sinhalese class. Ammachi said he was betraying the Tamils, but my father had said that there was no use in putting me in a Tamil class when Sinhalese was “the real language of the future.”

I began to notice other things as well. In school, it was customary for classes to challenge each other to a game of cricket. Sometimes, instead of playing against other Sinhalese classes, the boys in our class played the Tamil class. When this happened, there was none of the usual joking and laughing, and when the match was over the players parted without shaking hands or patting each other on the back.

The next rehearsal was on the morning of spend-the-day. It was only for the children and wives of the King of Siam. Anil was not there and we were spared the embarrassment of having to refuse his lift.

When we came back for lunch, Janaki was waiting for us, a grim expression on her face. She asked Radha Aunty to follow her to the kitchen. When I attempted to go with them, she shooed me away and shut the kitchen door, so I ran into the side garden and stood beneath the kitchen window.

“What’s wrong?” I heard Radha Aunty ask.

“You’ll never believe, baba. This morning your Amma went to see the Jayasinghes to make sure that boy stops giving you lifts.”

Radha Aunty drew in her breath. “What happened?” she asked.

“When she came back she said she had fixed everything.”

“How embarrassing!” Radha Aunty cried. “I can never face that boy again!”

After a moment, Radha Aunty spoke again. “I must go there and apologize, Janaki.”

“Baba!” Janaki exclaimed, “Are you mad or something!”

“I must do it. Today.”

“You know, baba,” Janaki said, “this evening I am taking the children for a sea bath. Come with us and then you can go and see him.”

“But what if the children tell?”

Janaki was silent for a moment. “Best thing is to take that Arjie with you. The children will think you have gone back to the house together.”

When we went for a sea bath that evening, I could hardly contain my excitement. I knew that I had to act normal, otherwise the cousins, and especially Sonali, might suspect that something was wrong. The feeling of fear that we might get caught and the thrill of doing something forbidden made me want to squeeze Radha Aunty’s hand as we walked down to the beach. Radha Aunty seemed very calm and, had I not overheard her conversation with Janaki, I would have never suspected that she was planning anything.