The Cat's Table

  EXAMINATION BOOKLET: OVERHEARD CONVERSATIONS, DAY 1 TO DAY 11

  ‘Don’t look at him, you hear me? Celia? Don’t ever look at the swine again!’

  ‘My sister has a strange name. Massoumeh. It means “immaculate”, “protected from sins”. But it can also mean “defenceless”.’

  ‘I have a specific dislike, I am sorry to say, of the Sealyham terrier.’

  ‘I thought she was a bluestocking, at first.’

  ‘We use fruit as a fish poison sometimes.’

  ‘Pickpockets always come out during a storm.’

  ‘This man said he could cross a desert eating just a date and one onion a day.’

  ‘I suspect, because of her language skills, she was scooped up by Whitehall.’

  ‘I’m ruined by that singleton!’

  ‘I told your husband when he offered me a three-day-old oyster that it was more dangerous to me than having a sexual act when I was seventeen.’

  The Hold

  LARRY DANIELS WAS one of those who ate with us at the Cat’s Table. A compact, well-muscled man, he always wore a tie, always had his sleeves rolled up. Born to a burgher family in Kandy, he had become a botanist and spent much of his adult life studying forest and plant cultures in Sumatra and Borneo. This was to be his first journey to Europe. Initially the only thing we knew about him was that he had an overwhelming crush on my cousin Emily, who would barely give him the time of day. Because of this lack of interest he had gone out of his way to befriend me. I suppose he had seen me laughing with her and her friends by the pool, which was where Emily could usually be found. Mr Daniels asked me if I would like to see his ‘garden’ on the ship. I suggested I bring my two cohorts, and he agreed, though it was clear he wanted me to himself so he could quiz me about my cousin’s likes and dislikes.

  Whenever Cassius and Ramadhin and I were with Mr Daniels, we’d spend the time asking him to buy us exotic cordials at the pool bar. Or we’d persuade him to make up a foursome at one of the games on deck. He was an intelligent, curious man, but we were more interested in testing our strength by wrestling with him, all three of us attacking him simultaneously, then leaving him gasping on a jute mat while we ran off, sweating, to dive into the pool.

  It was only at dinner that I was unprotected from Mr Daniels’s queries about Emily, for my assigned seat was next to his, and I would have to talk about her and nothing else. The one piece of information I could honestly give him was that she liked Player’s Navy Cut cigarettes. She had been smoking the brand for at least three years. The rest of her likes and dislikes I invented.

  ‘She likes the ice creams at Elephant House,’ I said. ‘She wishes to go into the theatre. To be an actress.’ Daniels grasped at that false straw.

  ‘There’s a theatrical company on the ship. Perhaps I could introduce her …’

  I nodded, as if recommending it, and the next day I saw him speaking to three members of the Jankla Troupe, entertainers on their way to Europe to perform their brand of street theatre and acrobatics, but they were also giving occasional performances for passengers during the journey. They would juggle, sometimes casually at the end of an afternoon tea with their plates and cups, but most of the time they appeared formally, in full costume and excessive make-up. Best of all, they would call passengers up to the improvised stage in order to reveal private things about them, which were sometimes embarrassing. Mostly the revelations involved the location of a lost wallet or ring, or the fact that the passenger was going to Europe to be with a relative who was ill. These things were announced by The Hyderabad Mind, whose face was streaked with purple and whose eyes, rimmed with white paint, looked as if they might have belonged to a giant. Really, he could terrify us, for he would stroll into the depths of the audience to pronounce the number of children a person had, or where his wife had been born.

  Late one afternoon, wandering alone on C Deck, I saw The Hyderabad Mind crouching under a lifeboat, putting on his make-up before a performance. He was holding a small mirror in one hand, while the other quickly gashed on stripes of purple paint. The Hyderabad Mind had a slight body, so that the painted head seemed too big for his delicate frame. He peered into the mirror, unaware of me a few feet away as he improved himself in the half-shadow of the lifeboat that hung from the davits. Then he stood, and as he stepped into sunlight the colours burst forward, the ghoulish eyes now full of sulphur and perception. He glanced at me and walked past as if I were nothing. I had witnessed for the first time what possibly took place behind the thin curtain of art, and it gave me some protection the next time I saw him onstage, decked out in full costume. I felt I could almost see, or at least now was aware of, the skeleton within.

  It was Cassius who loved the Jankla Troupe most. He was eager to join as a member, especially after Ramadhin called us over excitedly one day to say he had seen one of the troupe remove a watch from the wrist of a man he was giving directions to. It was so subtle the passenger was completely unaware of the loss. Two afternoons later, The Hyderabad Mind strolled into the audience and told the man where his watch ‘might’ be if he happened to be missing it. This was brilliant. An earring, a valise, the typewriter from a stateroom were lifted and then fenced to The Hyderabad Mind, and eventually their locations revealed to the owners. When we told Mr Daniels about our discovery, he simply laughed and said it was similar to the art of fly-fishing.

  But before Mr Daniels had known about this aspect of the troupe, he simply introduced himself to its members, and said he had a good friend, Miss Emily de Saram, a very talented young lady who loved the theatre, and perhaps she could watch them rehearse if he brought her along? Which he eventually did, I gather, a day or two later, although how much interest in theatre Emily had, I do not know. In any case, this was how she met The Hyderabad Mind and how she went on to live a life different from the one that was expected.

  Apart from what we clearly saw as his softness towards Emily, we were not that curious about Mr Daniels. Although nowadays I would probably enjoy the man, would want to walk through some botanical garden of his, listening to him speak of the unusual qualities of a plant we were passing, the fronds and palms and hedgerows brushing our arms.

  One afternoon he gathered the three of us and took us where he had promised – into the bowels of the ship. We went through a foreroom where there was a rush of air from two turbine fans linked with the engine room. Mr Daniels had a key, and with it we entered the hold – a cave of darkness that disappeared down several levels into the ship. In the distance below us we could make out a few lights. We climbed down a metal ladder attached to the wall, going by levels full of crates and sacks and giant slabs of raw rubber with its intoxicating smell. We heard the loud croaking purr of a chicken run and laughed at the birds’ sudden silence when they became aware of us. We heard rushing water in the walls, which Mr Daniels explained was water being de-salinated after being drawn out of the sea.

  Reaching the bottom level of the hold, Mr Daniels set off into the darkness. We followed a path of dim lights that hung just above our heads. He turned right after about fifty yards, and there we came upon the mural Mr Nevil had told me about, of women astride gun barrels. I was startled by its size. The figures were twice as big as we were, and they were smiling and waving though they had no clothes on and the landscape behind them was desert. ‘Uncle …’ Cassius kept asking, ‘what is that?’ But Mr Daniels would not let us pause and herded us on.

  Then we saw a golden light. It was more than that. As we came closer it was a field of colours. This was the ‘garden’ Mr Daniels was transporting to Europe. We stood in front of it, and then Cassius and I and even Ramadhin began racing through the narrow aisles, leaving Mr Daniels behind in a crouch, studying a plant. How big was this garden? We were never certain, because not all of it was ever fully lit at the same time, for the grow lights that simulated sunshine turned on and off independently. And there must have been other sections we never saw during that journey. I don’t even recall its shap
e. It feels now as if we dreamt it, that it possibly did not exist at the end of that ten-minute walk in the darkness of the hold. Now and then a mist filled the air, and we would raise our faces to receive the fine rain. Some plants were taller than we were. Some were titchy things no higher than our ankles. We put our arms out and patted the ferns as we passed them.

  ‘Don’t touch!’ Mr Daniels said, pulling down my outstretched hand. ‘That’s Strychnos nux vomica. Be careful – it has an alluring smell, especially at night. It almost tempts you to break open that green shell, doesn’t it? It looks like your Colombo bael fruit, but it isn’t. It’s a strychnine. These with their flowers facing down are angel’s trumpet. The ones facing up, wickedly beautiful, are devil’s trumpet. And here’s Scrophulariaceae, the snapdragon, also deceptively attractive. Even if you just sniff these, you will feel woozy.’

  Cassius inhaled deeply and staggered back dramatically and ‘passed out’, crushing a few frail herbs with his elbow. Mr Daniels went over to move his arm away from an innocent-looking fern.

  ‘Plants have remarkable powers, Cassius. This one’s juice keeps your hair black and your fingernails growing at a healthy rate. Over there, those blue ones—’

  ‘A garden on a ship!’ Mr Daniels’s secret had impressed even Cassius.

  ‘Noah …’ said Ramadhin quietly.

  ‘Yes. And remember, the sea is also a garden, a poet tells us. Now, come over here. I think I saw the three of you smoking bits of that cane chair the other day … This will be better for you.’

  He bent down and we crouched with him while he plucked some heart-shaped leaves. ‘These are Piper betel leaves,’ he said, placing them on my open palm. He moved on, picked up some slaked lime from a cache and combined it with slivers of areca nut he had in a jute bag, and handed the mixture to Cassius.

  Within minutes we were proceeding along that modestly lit path chewing betel. We were familiar with the mild street intoxicant. And as Mr Daniels had pointed out, it was safer for Ramadhin than smoking a cane chair. ‘If you go to a wedding, they sometimes add a sliver of gold to the cardamom and lime paste.’ He gave us a small hoard of these ingredients, along with some dehydrated tobacco leaves, which we decided to save for our predawn strolls, when we could spit the red fluid over the railings into the rushing sea or down into the darkness of the foghorns. The three of us walked with Mr Daniels along the various paths. We had been at sea for days, and the range of colours had been limited to white and grey and blue, save for a few sunsets. But now, in this artificially lit garden, the plants exaggerated their greens and blues and extreme yellows, all of them dazzling us. Cassius asked Mr Daniels for more details about poisons. We were hoping he might tell us about a herb or a seed that could overpower an unlikeable adult, but Mr Daniels would say nothing about such things.

  We left the garden and returned through the blackness of the hold. When we passed the mural of naked women, Cassius once again asked, ‘What is that, Uncle?’ Then we climbed the metal ladder back to deck level. It was more difficult going up. Mr Daniels was almost a flight above us, and by the time we got to the top he was outside smoking a beedi that was rolled in white paper rather than a brown leaf. He stood with it cupped in his left hand and seemed suddenly keen to lecture us about palms from all over the world. He imitated how they stood and how they swayed, depending on heritage or breed, how they would bend with the wind in their submissiveness. He kept showing us the various palm postures until he had us laughing. Then he offered us the cigarette and demonstrated how to inhale it. Cassius had been eyeing it, but Mr Daniels gave it first to me and the beedi went back and forth among us.

  ‘Unusual beedi,’ Cassius said slowly.

  Ramadhin took a second puff and said, ‘Do the palm trees again, Uncle!’ And Mr Daniels proceeded to distinguish for us more of the various postures. ‘This of course is the talipot, the umbrella palm,’ he said. ‘You get your toddy from it, and jaggery. She moves this way.’ Then he imitated a royal palm from the Cameroons, which grew in freshwater swamps. Then something from the Azores, followed by a slender-trunked one from New Guinea, his arms becoming its elongated fronds. He compared how they shifted in the wind, some fussily, some with just a sidelong twist of the trunk, so they could face the strongest winds with their narrowest edge.

  ‘Aerodynamics … very important. Trees are smarter than humans. Even a lily is better than a human. Trees are like whippets …’

  We were laughing and laughing at all the poses he struck. But suddenly the three of us ran away from him. We screamed as we raced through the women’s badminton semi-finals, and leapt cannonballing, with all our clothes on, into the swimming pool. We even got out and dragged a few deckchairs back in with us. It was the popular hour, and mothers with infants were trying to avoid us. We released all the breath from our bodies and sank to the bottom and stood there waving our arms softly like Mr Daniels’s palm trees, wishing he could see us.

  The Turbine Room

  WE NEEDED TO stay up to witness what took place on the ship late at night, but we were already exhausted from waking before sunrise. Ramadhin proposed we sleep in the afternoons, as we had done as children. At boarding school we had scorned these afternoon naps, but now we saw that they might be useful. However, there were problems. Ramadhin was billeted next to a cabin where, he claimed, a couple were laughing and groaning and screeching during the afternoons, while the cabin next to mine was occupied by a woman who practised the violin, the sound easing its way through the metal wall into my room. Just screeching, I said, no laughing. I could even hear her argue with herself between the impossible-to-ignore squawks and plucks. As well, the temperature in these lower cabins that had no portholes was horrific. Any anger I had towards the violin player was modified by knowing that she was also probably perspiring, and likely wearing the bare minimum to be respectable to herself. I never saw her, had no knowledge of what she looked like, or of what she was trying to perfect with that instrument. These did not seem to be Mr Sidney Bechet’s ‘formal and luxurious’ notes. She was just repeating the notes and runs endlessly, then hesitating, and beginning again, with that film of sweat on her shoulders and arms as she spent those afternoons alone, so busy, in the cabin next to mine.

  We three were also missing one another’s company. In any case, Cassius felt we needed a permanent headquarters, so we chose the small turbine room we’d entered before our descent into the hold with Mr Daniels. And it was here, in the semi-darkness and coolness, with a few blankets and some borrowed lifejackets, that we created a nest for ourselves during some of the afternoons. We would chat for a bit and then sleep soundly in the midst of the loud roar of those fans, preparing ourselves for the long evenings.

  But our night investigations were not successful. We were never sure of what we were witnessing, so that our minds were half grabbing the rigging of adult possibility. On one ‘night watch’ we hid in the shadows of the Promenade Deck and at random followed a man, just to see where he was going. I recognised him as the performer who dressed up as The Hyderabad Mind, whose name we had been told was Sunil. Somewhat surprisingly, he led us to Emily, who was leaning against a railing, wearing a white dress that seemed to glow as he went closer. The Hyderabad Mind half covered her, and she held his fingers cupped within her hands. We could not tell if they were talking.

  We stepped back, further into the darkness, and waited. I saw the man move the strap of her dress and bring his face down to her shoulder. Her head was back, looking up at the stars, if there were stars.

  THE THREE WEEKS of the sea journey, as I originally remembered it, were placid. It is only now, years later, having been prompted by my children to describe the voyage, that it becomes an adventure, when seen through their eyes, even something significant in a life. A rite of passage. But the truth is, grandeur had not been added to my life but had been taken away. As night approached, I missed the chorus of insects, the howls of garden birds, gecko talk. And at dawn, the rain in the trees, the wet tar on
Bullers Road, rope burning on the street that was always one of the first palpable smells of the day.

  Some mornings in Boralesgamuwa, I used to wake early and make my way through the dark, spacious bungalow until I came to Narayan’s door. It was not yet six o’clock. I waited until he came out, tugging his sarong tighter. He’d nod to me, and within a couple of minutes we’d be walking quickly and in silence across the wet grass. He was a very tall man, and I was a boy of eight or nine. Both of us were barefoot. We approached the wooden shack at the foot of the garden. When we were inside, Narayan lit a stump of candle and then crouched with the yellow light and pulled the cord that burst the generator into life.

  So my days began with the muffled shaking and banging of this creature that gave off the delicious smell of petrol and smoke. The habits and weaknesses of the generator, circa 1944, were understood only by Narayan. Gradually he calmed it and we’d go into the open air, and in the last of the darkness, I’d see lights go on haltingly all over my uncle’s house.

  The two of us walked through a gate onto the High Level Road. A few stores were already open, each lit by a single bulb. At Jinadasa’s we bought egg hoppers, and ate them in the middle of the almost deserted street, cups of tea at our feet. Bullock carts heaved by, creaking, their drivers and even the bullocks half asleep. I always joined Narayan for this dawn meal after he awakened the generator. Breakfast with him on the High Level Road was not to be missed, even though it meant I would have to consume another, more official breakfast with the family an hour or two later. But it was almost heroic to walk with Narayan in the dissolving dark, greeting the waking merchants, watching him bend to light his beedi on a piece of hemp rope by the cigarette stall.