Running in the Family (9 page)

To jungles and gravestones.… Reading torn 100-year-old newspaper clippings that come apart in your hands like wet sand, information tough as plastic dolls. Watched leopards sip slowly, watched the crow sitting restless on his branch peering about with his beak open. Have seen the outline of a large fish caught and thrown in the curl of a wave, been where nobody wears socks, where you wash your feet before you go to bed, where I watch my sister who alternatively reminds me of my father, mother and brother. Driven through rainstorms that flood the streets for an hour and suddenly evaporate, where sweat falls in the path of this ballpoint, where the jak fruit rolls across your feet in the back of the jeep, where there are eighteen ways of describing the smell of a durian, where bullocks hold up traffic and steam after the rains.

Have sat down to meals and noticed the fan stir in all the spoons on the dining table. And driven that jeep so often I didn’t have time to watch the country slide by thick with event, for everything came directly to me and passed me like snow. The black thick feather of bus exhaust everyone was sentimental against, the man vomiting out of a window, the pig just dead having his hairs burnt off on the Canal Road and old girlfriends from childhood who now towel their kids dry on the other side of the SSC pool, and my watch collecting sea under the glass and gleaming with underwater phosphorus by my bed at night, the inside of both my feet blistering in my first week from the fifteen-cent sandals and the obsessional sarong buying in Colombo, Kandy, Jaffna, Trincomalee, the toddy drink I got subtly smashed on by noon so I slept totally unaware of my dreams. And women and men with naked feet under the dinner table, and after the party the thunderstorm we walked through for five seconds from porch to car, thoroughly soaked and by the time we had driven ten minutes—without headlights which had been stolen that afternoon at the pool—we were dry just from the midnight heat inside the vehicle and the ghosts of steam cruising disorganized off the tarmac roads, and the man sleeping on the street who objected when I woke him each of us talking different languages, me miming a car coming around the corner and hitting him and he, drunk, perversely making me perform this action for him again and again, and I got back into the car fully wet once more and again dry in five miles. And the gecko on the wall waving his tail stiffly his jaws full of dragonfly whose wings symmetrically disappeared into his mouth—darkness filling the almost transparent body, and a yellow enamel-assed spider crossing the bidet and the white rat my daughter claims she saw in the toilet at the Maskeliya tennis club.

I witnessed everything. One morning I would wake and just smell things for the whole day, it was so rich I had to select senses. And still everything moved slowly with the assured fateful speed of a coconut falling on someone’s head, like the Jaffna train, like the fan at low speed, like the necessary sleep in the afternoon with dreams blinded by toddy.

In the early afternoon several children and I walk for an hour along the beach—from the foot of the garden at Uswetakeiyawa, past the wrecks, to the Pegasus Reef Hotel. After twenty minutes, with sun burning just the right side of our faces and bodies, climbing up and down the dunes, we are exhausted, feel drunk. One of my children talking about some dream she had before leaving Canada. Spray breaking and blazing white. Mad dog heat. On our left the cool dark of village trees. Crabs veer away from our naked steps. I keep counting the children, keep feeling that one is missing. We look down, away from the sun. So that we all suddenly stumble across the body.

From the back it looks like a crocodile. It is about eight feet long. The snout however is blunt, not pointed, as if a crocodile’s nose has been chopped off and the sharp edges worn smooth by tides. For a moment I actually believe this. I don’t
want the others going too close in case it is not dead. It has a double row of pointed scales on its tail, and the grey body is covered in yellow spots—with black centres so they form yellow rings. He looks fat and bulky. No one from the village about ten yards away seems to have noticed him. I realize it is a kabaragoya. In English a sub-aquatic monitor. He is dangerous and can whip you to death with his tail. This creature must have been washed out to sea by a river and then drifted back onto the beach.

Kabaragoyas and thalagoyas are common in Ceylon and are seldom found anywhere else in the world. The kabaragoya is large, the size of an average crocodile, and the thalagoya smaller—a cross between an iguana and a giant lizard. Sir John Maundeville, one of the first travellers to write of Ceylon, speaks of their “schorte thyes and grete Nayles.” And Robert Knox says of the kabaragoya that “he hath a blew forked tongue like a string, which he puts forth and hisseth and gapeth.” The kabaragoya is in fact a useful scavenger and is now protected by law as it preys on fresh water crabs that undermine and ruin the bunds of paddy fields. The only thing that will scare it is a wild boar.

The thalagoya, on the other hand, will eat snails, beetles, centipedes, toads, skinks, eggs and young birds, and is not averse to garbage. It is also a great climber, and can leap forty feet from a tree to the ground, breaking its fall by landing obliquely with its chest, belly and tail. In Kegalle the thalagoyas would climb trees and leap onto the roof or into the house.

The thalagoya has a rasping tongue that “catches” and hooks objects. There is a myth that if a child is given thalagoya tongue to eat he will become brilliantly articulate, will always speak beautifully, and in his speech be able to “catch” and collect wonderful, humorous information.

There is a way to eat the tongue. The thalagoya is killed by placing it on the ground, doubling its head under the throat, and striking the nape with a clenched fist. The tongue should be sliced off and eaten as soon as possible after the animal dies. You take a plantain or banana, remove the skin and cut it lengthwise in half, place the grey tongue between two pieces of banana making a sandwich, and then swallow the thing without chewing, letting it slide down the throat whole. Many years later this will result in verbal brilliance, though sometimes this will be combined with bad behaviour (the burning of furniture, etc.). I am not sure what other side effects there are apart from possible death.

My Uncle Noel was given a thalagoya tongue. He spat half of it out, got very sick and nearly died. His mother, Lalla, who had a habit of throwing herself dangerously into such local practices, had insisted he eat it. In any case her son did become a brilliant lawyer and a great story teller, from eating just
part
of the tongue. My father, who was well aware of the legend, suggested we eat some when we were in the Ambalantota resthouse. One had just been killed there, having fallen through the roof. All the children hid screaming in the bathroom until it was time to leave.

The thalagoya has other uses. It has the only flesh that can be kept down by a persistently vomiting patient and is administered to pregnant women for morning sickness. But as children we knew exactly what thalagoyas and kabaragoyas were good for. The kabaragoya laid its eggs in the hollows of trees between the months of January and April. As this coincided with the Royal-Thomian cricket match, we would collect them and throw them into the stands full of Royal students. These were great weapons because they left a terrible itch wherever they splashed on skin. We used the thalagoya to scale walls. We tied a rope around its
neck and heaved it over a wall. Its claws could cling to any surface, and we pulled ourselves up the rope after it.

About six months before I was born my mother observed a pair of kabaragoyas “in copula” at Pelmadulla. A reference is made to this sighting in
A Coloured Atlas of Some Vertebrates from Ceylon, Vol
.
2
, a National Museums publication. It is my first memory.