Running in the Family (17 page)

Wildlife stormed or crept into homes this way. The snake either entered through the bathroom drain for remnants of water or, finding the porch doors open, came in like a king and moved in a straight line through the living room, dining room, the kitchen and servant’s quarters, and out the back, as if taking the most civilized short cut to another street in town. Others moved in permanently; birds nested above the fans, the silverfish slid into
steamer trunks and photograph albums—eating their way through portraits and wedding pictures. What images of family life they consumed in their minute jaws and took into their bodies no thicker than the pages they ate.

And the animals also on the periphery of rooms and porches, their sounds forever in your ear. During our visit to the jungle, while we slept on the verandah at 3
A.M.
, night would be suddenly alive with disturbed peacocks. A casual movement from one of them roosting in the trees would waken them all and, so fussing, sounding like branches full of cats, they would weep weep loud into the night.

One evening I kept the tape recorder beside my bed and wakened by them once more out of a deep sleep automatically pressed the machine on to record them. Now, and here, Canadian February, I write this in the kitchen and play that section of cassette to hear not just peacocks but all the noises of the night behind them—inaudible then because they were always there like breath. In this silent room (with its own unheard hum of fridge, fluorescent light) there are these frogs loud as river, gruntings, the whistle of other birds brash and sleepy, but in that night so modest behind the peacocks they were unfocussed by the brain—nothing more than darkness, all those sweet loud younger brothers of the night.

We are having a formal dinner. String hoppers, meat curry, egg rulang, papadams, potato curry. Alice’s date chutney, seeni sambol, mallung and brinjals and iced water. All the dishes are on the table and a good part of the meal is spent passing them around to each other. It is my favourite meal—anything that has string hoppers and egg rulang I eat with a lascivious hunger. For dessert there is buffalo curd and jaggery sauce—a sweet honey made from the coconut, like maple syrup but with a smoky taste.

In this formal setting Gillian begins to describe to everyone present how I used to be bathed when I was five. She had heard the story in detail from Yasmine Gooneratne, who was a prefect with her at Bishop’s College for Girls. I listen intently, making sure I get a good portion of the egg rulang.

The first school I went to was a girls’ school in Colombo which accepted young boys of five or six for a couple of years. The nurse
or ayah in charge of our cleanliness was a small, muscular and vicious woman named Maratina. I roamed with my pack of school friends, usually filthy from morning to night, and every second evening we were given a bath. The bathroom was a sparse empty stone room with open drains in the floor and a tap to one side. We were marched in by Maratina and ordered to strip. She collected our clothes, threw them out of the room, and locked the door. The eight of us were herded terrified into one corner.

Maratina filled a bucket with water and flung the contents towards our cowering screaming bodies. Another bucket was filled and hurled towards us hard as a police hose. Then she strode forward, grabbed a child by the hair, pulled him over to the centre, scrubbed him violently with carbolic soap and threw him towards the opposite side of the room. She plucked another and repeated the soaping. Totally in control of the squirming bodies, she eventually scrubbed us all, then returned to the bucket and thrashed water over our soapy nakedness. Bleary-eyed, our bodies tingling and reeling, our hair curved back from the force of the throw, we stood there shining. She approached with a towel, dried us fast and brutally, and threw us out one by one to get into our sarongs and go to bed.

The guests, the children, everyone is laughing and Gillian is no doubt exaggerating Yasmine’s account in her usual style, her long arms miming the capture and scrub of five-year-olds. I am dreaming and wondering why this was never to be traumatically remembered. It is the kind of event that should have surfaced as the first chapter of an anguished autobiographical novel. I am thinking also of Yasmine Gooneratne, now teaching at a university in Australia, whom I met just last year at an International Writers’ Conference in New Delhi. We talked then mostly about
Gillian who had also been at university with her. Why did
she
not tell me the story—this demure woman in a sari who was once “bath prefect” at Bishop’s College Girl’s School, who officiated over the cleansing of my lean five-year-old nakedness?

April 8th
From Anuradhapura we drive towards the Wilpattu Jungle, through the small town of Nochiyagama. “That’s it,” I tell my daughter, “that’ll be a good name for a child of yours.”
Nochi
. Once we reach Wilpattu a tracker-guide is assigned to us. He will live with us during the next few days and be with us whenever we take treks out in the jeep to look for animals. We now have an hour’s journey to the middle of the jungle. It is a slow ten-mile-an-hour drive on bad roads of red clay and sand.

5
P.M
. Manikappolu Utu. A large wooden house on stilts, and fresh “elephant droppings” around the place, which turn out to be buffalo shit. We empty the jeep of all the food we have brought and begin to change out of sweat-soaked clothes. On the porch is a muted light and long cane chairs. A delicate rain begins pattering on the tin roof then suddenly veers into a thunder shower
which whitens the landscape. To the left of the house is a huge pond, almost a lake, where water lilies float closed at this hour, now being pounded bouncing under the rain. The girls are out there in their dresses getting wet and suddenly the rest of us decide this is the only chance for a bath that we will have here and walk out into the storm. Nine of us holding up our arms for all the rain we can reach.

We are slightly drunk with this place—the beautiful house, the animals which are appearing now, and this tough cold rain turning the hard-baked earth into red mud. All of us are in our solitude. Not really concerned about the others, just revelling in a private pleasure. It is like communal sleep. The storm falters then starts up again, wilder than ever. The bungalow’s cook and the tracker watch from the doorways of the house not quite believing what is happening to this strange mixture of people—Sinhalese, Canadian, and one quiet French girl—who are now soaping themselves with a bar of soap and throwing it around like a foaming elixir so everyone is suddenly white, as if in a petticoat, and now trying even harder to catch the rain everywhere, bending over to let it land on our backs and shoulders. Some move under the warmer rain of the trees, some sit as if it was Sunday afternoon on a bench by the pond of water lilies and crocodiles, and the others wade ankle-deep in swirling mud by the jeep. On the other side of the pond there are about thirty deer—as if in a dry universe. And storks on the bank whose reflections are being shattered.

Then a new burst of energy. A
val oora
—a large filthy black wild boar has appeared majestically out of the trees with tusks that turn his quiet face into hair-lipped deformity. He watches, making us aware of each other half-soaped, happy and ridiculous, dresses heavy with rain, sarongs above the knees. All of us—the
lilies, the trees with their wind drunk hair, this magnificent val oora who is now the centre of the storm—celebrating the elimination of heat. He moves straight-thighed, stiff, but with a lunging walk, keeping his polite distance.

Wild black pig in a white rainstorm, concerned about this invasion, this metamorphosis of soap, this dented Volkswagen, this jeep. He can take his pick, any one of us. If I am to die soon I would choose to die now under his wet alphabet of tusk, while I am cool and clean and in good company.

* * *

Last morning in Wilpattu. Everyone packing and arguing in the hushed early light. Where is the torch? My Leyden shirt? Whose towel is this? Last night, right off the porch, a leopard tracked and waited for a chance to pounce on one of the deer that stayed around the house. Our dinner was interrupted by screams from the deer, and we were soon all outside using the flashlights to pick out the red eye of the leopard, the green eyes of the deer and later the red eye of the crocodile who had come to watch. Everyone lasciviously waiting for a kill.