B009Y4I4QU EBOK Read online

  He always was meticulous. His study is vacant now. I drift in this space that once had such order. Over there by the door was where his black lawyer’s robes used to hang. I twirl my fingers in the dust on the bare bookshelves that line the walls.

  For some thirty years I spent time with my father in this room, browsing his library. When I was about ten, I discovered the tranquillity of my father’s study at night and began to explore his vast book collection. I would sit cross-legged on the floor here, immersed in The Jungle Tide by John Still. I learned that you could understand an elephant’s mood from its footprints, that you could tell if it was running in fear or ambling in hope of water. I was transfixed by the tales of jungle gods—anyone who didn’t make them an offering of two leaves fixed on a twig, they’d smite with blindness. My wonder and enthusiasm pleased my father. He was a reserved and contained man, and it was among his books that we began to savor each other’s company.

  In these past six years I’ve recoiled from remembering my childhood. I felt foolish about my youthful contentment, was niggled by a notion that even as an unsuspecting child I must have been marked, doomed. But now here in the home I lived in as a child, I am more open to glimpses of what a gloriously happy time it was. Apart from when our dachshund Nutmeg was severed in two by a double-decker bus.

  I remember being mindlessly happy when as a teenager I made my brother late for school by adjusting and readjusting myself at the mirror by the front door when he was waiting for me in the car, our driver anxiously sounding the horn. I remember being a contented eight- or nine-year-old listening to our old ayah Seelawathie tell us stories of yakkas (demons) on nights my parents were out. Sometimes I’d fuss before they’d leave—why do you have to go dancing again?—and they’d calm me with a spoonful of cough syrup and rush out, my mother wearing a puffed-up hairpiece and a glitzy nylon sari, so fashionable in Colombo in the 1970s. Dozy with the medicine, I’d join Seelawathie in reciting the names of a long list of yakkas whom she insisted were nearby, hovering around us. Demons didn’t matter to me, I felt safe in this house.

  Years later when I was at Cambridge, every summer I brought friends back to my home. They had never been to Asia before, and these English boys would be impressed by the din of crickets as they sat out on the lawn at night drinking whiskey with my father. My mother patiently took David to the doctor about his dodgy stomach while he expounded to her the urgency of world revolution, sitting in the back of her chauffeur-driven car. And one summer I shamelessly two-timed Steve and another boyfriend, Sri Lankan, not stopping for a moment to imagine that one day Steve and I would be creating a home for our sons in this house.

  You have two homes, Steve and I always told the boys, and “Aachchi house” is your Colombo home. They needed to be rooted here, growing up as English–Sri Lankan children in London. And they went from one home to another, and from one country to another, effortlessly.

  In this house my parents thrived as grandparents. They spoiled my children and took on their interests and curiosities with vigor and delight. I was amused by how my mother would willingly “go in goal” in the back garden while Vikram slammed a football at her. Vik would sit on my father’s lap in his study and read books about man-eating tigers in India. Ma was as wound up as Vik in the days before another Harry Potter book came out. Malli never understood the need to wait for a sequel. “Why can’t you get a pirate copy?” he’d ask, paying little heed when his grandfather told him in his lawyerly way that you couldn’t pirate books that were unwritten and that it was, in fact, wrong to pirate anything. “When I grow up I’m going to be sooo smart,” Malli would say. “I’m going to make pirate DVDs and make pirate books before anyone writes them.”

  I invite monks to the house to perform a Buddhist ceremony, one that passes on merit to the dead. My parents observed these rituals. Now in their living room that is fragrant with freshly cut jasmines and incense, three monks sit on chairs that have been draped with pristine white cloth. One of the monks strikes a match and lights the brass oil lamp on the table in front of him. He unwinds a reel of white thread and passes it among me and my friends, who are sitting across from the monks on woven grass mats spread on the floor. Then the three monks begin their invocations. But as they harmonize their chanting, I still find it inconceivable that my family left this house one December morning and never came back. If anything, tonight feels like my very first night in this house, some thirty-five years ago, when there were more monks and more chants and life here was about to begin. I hold on to the white thread that’s being blessed with prayer and conjure those other glowing oil lamps around the now-absent pond.

  Do I dare open it? It’s Steve’s work diary for 2004. Two thousand four, our last year. The diary is in a bag of our things in my aunt’s house in Colombo. In these past years I’ve picked it up, then hidden it away, panicked. Steve always wrote more than work appointments in his diaries. They were filled with reminders to take the children for haircuts, our plans for weekends and holidays, and notes to himself like (after he and I had a quarrel) “Tell S she was right, make up.”

  For most of that last year, until September, we lived in Sri Lanka. It was a blissful time. Steve and I had been wanting this for a while, an extended stay instead of the usual rushed holiday. So when we both had sabbaticals, we went to Colombo. We took the boys out of school in London and enrolled them in one there. I’ve kept that time distant in my mind these past six years. I especially didn’t want to consider our unsuspecting joy and ease.

  I am now in Colombo for the summer with Steve’s sister Beverley, her husband, Chris, and their children, Sophie and Jack. Steve’s family has made regular trips to Sri Lanka in the time since the wave, sometimes twice yearly. My niece and nephew are almost as intimate with life here as my boys were. In those early days I convinced myself that Steve’s family must blame me for bringing him here, getting him killed. But then my father-in-law came to Colombo and held my hand and told me that Steve was always so happy here, that for him it was also home.

  Encouraged by my in-laws, I opened Steve’s diary. It was all there. Details of our nine months in Sri Lanka. I didn’t read much, I quickly hid the diary away. But since looking into it I can’t escape the memories of that last year. I reenter that time constantly. Strange, though, how for six years these thoughts have held back.

  The beggar at the traffic lights on Horton Place has no arms. My niece Sophie reaches into her bag to give him some money. I’ve seen him so often in these last years, but only now do I remember. This beggar would be at these same traffic lights when we drove the boys to and from school that year. Steve gave him a weekly “allowance” to stop him weaving through traffic to get to our car each day, but it didn’t work. My mother’s driver insisted that Steve was being unnecessarily charitable. He claimed this man had blown up his own arms while trying to make a bomb to kill a neighbor, a rumor most likely. Our children also disapproved of this armless man. “Why can’t he do a job?” Vik would say, alarming Steve and me by his lack of compassion.

  I remember now, the boys were often grouchy on the way to school. This Colombo school was boring, they wished they were with their friends in London, the playground here was small. My declaring that they were having a wonderful new experience did nothing. Steve used music to improve their mood. He’d play the Susheela Raman track “Love Trap” in the car. When they heard the lyrics “ ‘Your body is a love trap … Your honey lips are impossible to resist,’ ” the boys would liven up in disgust. “Ugh. Body. Lips, yuk.” “Are you sure?” I’d say to Steve about his child-cheering-up tactics. But Vik and Malli stepped out of the car deliriously grossed out and ready for school.

  We had rented a house in central Colombo during that time. Whenever I’ve passed that street in these years since the wave, I’ve looked the other way or pretended to myself it was of no significance. Now I drive down this narrow lane with my in-laws. And I can see them, Steve and Malli, walking up here. Malli has his doll in a stro
ller, they are playing “Dads and Dads.”

  Time snaps back. It was just this morning we were all here, surely. Vik grew big and strong that year, I can feel now how the muscles on his thighs were hardening. He was seven, but I was buying clothes for a twelve-year-old. In Colombo, he was always playing sports, exciting Steve with his skill at cricket, keeping pace with his dad when every evening they sliced across the large swimming pool in my old school. I’d tell them to get lost when they played football on blazing afternoons and came back wet and shirtless with arms stretched out for a hug. I can’t bear to walk into those playing fields, where I feel their footprints must still be fresh.

  I’ve berated myself continually for bringing my family back to Sri Lanka that December. What was the need? We had only recently returned to London. We did too much, rushing between two countries, wanting it all, we couldn’t get enough. I had it all, and I blew it, I’ve thought. In the early weeks after the wave, I’d have recurring dreams of my very mild-tempered friend Fionnuala striding down our street in London, screaming at me furiously for taking my children back to Colombo that Christmas.

  But this summer, as I am more alive to those months we spent here, I accuse myself less. I can see why Steve and I decided to return. We wanted some continuity with the life we’d established.

  That year, away from our usual routine in London, we had time. Steve and I worked on our research projects and papers. On holidays and weekends the four of us traveled.

  We hiked in the rain forest, often. We’d wake in the dark for the dawn chorus. I haven’t heard that divine song in some six years, I can’t bear to, but I remember it vividly now. The distant bubbling erupted into cooing and pealing interspersed with the panic of parakeets and the kruk-krukking of jungle fowl. And above all that, the fluting of a spot-winged thrush, and higher still, the clarion whistle of a warbler.

  We were frequently on the beach. Vik and I would walk on the empty morning sand to watch arrack-breathed fishermen draw in their nets as the crows went wild. Steve made sashimi with the freshest tuna that was just off the boat, he relished that, proclaiming it “the dog’s bollocks.” Now I have a memory of us on a beach, eating gunnysack loads of mussels, steamed only in their own juices on an open fire. The clatter of slurped-out shells on a tin plate, salt on the children’s eyelashes, sunset. Malli called this time of day “the sky is upon the table time.” That was his version of the early lines of T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock.” I don’t know quite why, I often recited them to the boys.

  We went to Yala many times. We’d been taking the boys there even before they could walk. We explored the scrub in a jeep, the heat rising off cratered tracks, our hair matted with powdery red dust. Vik understood the jungle, and I loved that. He’d be the first to spot a stone plover on a showery beach, he knew the long lush whistle of a bush lark. We always stayed at the same hotel. Each time we were there, Vik bought a “Checklist of Yala Birds” from the souvenir shop. I found these booklets in that same bag where Steve’s 2004 diary was. Vik had marked off in them the birds he’d seen on each trip. I flicked through quickly, on each page his happy little ticks in a red pen.

  I’ve been returning to Yala over these years, and on the drive from Colombo when I’ve approached the Udawalawe reservoir, I’ve always looked away. Vikram loved this spot, where hawks sail upwind above the gleaming water. On the night of the twenty-sixth of December 2004, when I was being driven back to Colombo, I hid my head between my knees as that van raced along the reservoir. I can’t look because Vik will never see this again, I thought then. Six years later, I am on this same road with Steve’s sister and her family. But for the first time since the wave, when we come to the reservoir, I am able to look.

  Our nine-month stay in Sri Lanka in 2004 ended on the first of September. We were back in our garden in London just as the apples were turning red. In school, the boys got badges at morning assembly for settling back well. So when Steve and I discussed plans for the Christmas holidays, it wasn’t hard to decide. The boys had rooted themselves well in Colombo, we should keep that connection close. Even a short trip would be fine. Just three weeks.

  As always, Steve wrote in his diary various tasks he had to do in those three weeks. A deadline for a paper, a conference call, chores. I saw he’d written the date and time of our flight from London to Colombo, nine p.m. on December 8. There was no note about our flight back on the thirty-first, maybe he meant to do that later. But scrawled across the twenty-fourth, twenty-fifth, and twenty-sixth was the last word he wrote in that diary for 2004. Yala.

  They never left. The wave didn’t scare away the pair of white-bellied sea eagles that nested by the lagoon near the Yala hotel. When I first came back here after the wave and spotted them, I didn’t dare watch. These were Vik’s eagles, not mine. Then I became compulsive. I needed to see them each time I returned. I couldn’t leave until I had at least a glimpse. I wanted their reassurance. But, please, I asked myself, reassurance of what?

  Maybe I just needed their distraction. I’d gaze at the two eagles gliding the air thermals with such graceful abandon, unconcerned to hunt even. Other birds—waders, crows—are always in an alarmed frenzy when these great raptors approach. They screech warnings or fly behind them as a mob to harass them away, but the eagles are untroubled. Diverted by watching them, I could tolerate being here, perhaps. Here where I was robbed.

  But there is a surprise. I am standing on the shore of the lagoon years later now, and don’t realize for a while that the two eagles I am watching are a different pair. Their wing feathers are smaller and not black but a dark brown. These are juvenile birds. Vik’s eagles have bred, and now there are four.

  I’ve never seen this before. The young eagles are learning to fly. They lunge off from a branch, drift a few moments, then flap back to the nearest tree, urgently. Now they try again, but they tumble. They drop through the air for some moments, almost entangling their wings.

  And look. An upside-down eagle. One of the young sea eagles is attempting to dive but is the wrong way around. It’s falling on its head, looks like. Legs splayed, talons pointing at the sun, white belly gleaming, head looking up at the sky, not down.

  When it comes to pancakes, my mind goes blank. Try as I might, I can’t remember how to make a pancake. I am thrown by this, I who made pancakes so often. Am I so estranged from who I was? The boys ate their pancakes with a syrup of lemon juice and sugar. Steve had his with chicken curry and dhal. And they haven’t done this in six years now. I startle myself as I say this. As though it’s a new truth, I am stunned. I want to put a fist through these last six years and grab our life. Claim it back.

  I want to be in our kitchen late on a Saturday morning as Steve walks in with a paper bag filled with bagels for lunch. I’d toast them with mozzarella, and tomato and basil and chopped green chilies. Steve and I will have a glass of Sancerre. The bagels at our local bakery were nowhere near as good as the ones we bought from the Brick Lane Beigel Bake when the two of us lived in East London long years ago, before the boys were born. We went to late-night movies at the weekends then, and on our way home stopped here for the steaming hot bagels that were pulled from those ovens all night. At three a.m. it was just us and London cabbies cramming into that brightly lit shop where you got a dozen bagels for a pound. We would tell the boys about our lost carefree nights. “It was so good then, we went out all night, and we didn’t have you to bother us so we could sleep as late as we wanted on Sundays.” They’d look downcast.

  In the summer, at weekend lunchtimes, Steve lit up the barbecue. Squid marinated in lemongrass and lime and chili flakes. Slices of salty haloumi cheese and lamb chops and sausages from Nicos, our local Greek Cypriot butcher. Nicos always doubted that Steve was English. “The English know nothing about good food, how is he English?” he’d ask, and I’d tell him it was my good influence, and he accepted that.

  And often, at the weekends, Steve cooked big meals, and we had friends over. Or his family visited and ther
e would be more than twenty of us for Sunday lunch. He’d make our version of raan, an Indian lamb roast. We’d marinate a leg of lamb for two days in a mix of yogurt, almonds, pistachios, lots of spices, mint, and green chilies. Steve watched the roast, concerned that it would not be tender enough, throwing some gin on the meat when basting it. The meat, he’d say, must be so soft, it can be eaten with a spoon.

  On quieter days we cooked duck eggs, ate them with crumpets. The boys were impressed by duck eggs. They cupped them in their palms to feel the weight, they tapped the hard shell. Vik would pretend to spin bowl with one, enjoying my agitation as he twisted his fingers around it and lurched forward, raising his arm. He eventually put the egg down, saying, “Calm down, calm down”—in a strange accent (meant to be Liverpudlian). This was something he learned from his father. Regular life. So I thought.

  It was at the Sunday farmers’ market in Palmers Green that we bought duck eggs. Whenever we went there, Malli would get lost. We usually found him among a heap of purple-sprouting broccoli, his hair sticking up like a baby heron’s. We’d buy greengages in August. Often they were perfect, not too yielding, but not unripe. And in the spring Steve bought artichokes. He steamed them with garlic and bay leaves, and we ate them hot. Steve showed the boys how to separate each petal and scrape out the pulp with their bottom teeth. He’d describe to them how he first ate artichokes when he was about ten, and was traveling in his father’s lorry somewhere in France.

  For my father-in-law, Peter, the isolation of driving a lorry for weeks on end on European roads was redeemed a little by wine and food. Peter shunned the egg and chips served at the truckers’ stops. Instead, every evening he coiled his articulated lorry onto narrow country lanes to reach a French or Italian village where he’d made friends with a family who ran a small restaurant, which was usually their dining room, and where each day just one dish was cooked. From the time Steve was about seven, he’d gone with his father on a long trip to Europe during the summer holidays. It was on those journeys that he first tasted risotto, and rabbit stew with bacon, and bouillabaisse, and ravioli that didn’t come out of a can, and he loved it all. His friends back home were envious of these trips. But if he began telling them about his culinary adventures, they looked at him blankly and said, “You wha—?” and got on with causing grievous bodily harm to each other playing football, accusing him of “eating foreign.” Foreign was not popular fare on an East London council estate in the early 1970s.