Praise for When Memory Dies:

‘I’m recommending When Memory Dies to everyone’ – Arthur C. Clarke

‘Sivanandan’s theme – the baneful influence of colonialism – is highly political, but he writes with such humanity that what could be dry fact and ideology is transformed into a gripping and inspiring fiction’ – Kate Chisholm, Sunday Telegraph

‘It’s impossible to read this book without being shocked and moved’ – Commonwealth Writers Prize commendation

‘An absorbing evocation … he conjures up his homeland in lovingly physical detail, intensified by absence’ – Margaret Walters, Sunday Times

‘An extraordinary storyteller who has total control over his material’ – Athol Fugard

‘A brilliant and moving saga … it anatomizes hope and honesty with a haunting intimacy’ – The Nation

‘Few family sagas have captured this aspect of suffering as lyrically as Sivanandan’s striking novel. A compelling and very human story, as beautifully told as it is unrelenting in its devotion to truth’ – Booklist

‘Heartbreaking and heart-warming by turns, it pits the tenacity of the spirit against the brutalization of life’ – New Internationalist

‘Sivanandan infuses the story with palpable feeling for his country and its plight. Instructive and deeply felt’ – Kirkus Reviews

‘A searing novel about the death throes of a people, the nightmare accentuated by the everyday lives and loves of a family whose emotions transcend ethnic boundaries’ – Good Book Guide

A. SIVANANDAN

When Memory Dies

For Jabe – beyond owing.

Table of Contents

Praise
Title Page
Dedication

BOOK ONE: Forgotten Mornings
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

BOOK TWO: My roots no rain
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

BOOK THREE: False Memories
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Copyright

BOOK ONE

Forgotten Mornings

‘And I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother 

Through the parables

     Of sun light …’

Dylan Thomas

1

MY MEMORY BEGINS, as always, with the rain – crouched as a small boy against the great wall of the old colonial building that once housed the post office. It frightened me, the great monsoon downpour, and saddened me too, threw me back on my little boy self and its lonelinesses, the growing things in myself I could not tell others about, the first feel of the sadness of a world that kept Sanji from school because he had no shoes. And I welcomed the lightning then, not frightened any more, for it would strike me dead and Sanji would have my shoes, and I would be sad no more.

Or I was sad for the trees and the birds and the little kid goat battered and cowed by the rain. I was afraid for the plantain trees, heavy with fruit, now swaying dangerously from their trunks, and I was sorry that the crows, proud kings of the dung-heap, should make common cause with house-sparrows under the eaves of roofs. But suddenly the rain would lift and the trees come erect again, putting forth to the sun which had as suddenly appeared, and the crows would caw once more. And a mist would rise from the hot roads like dawn. It was the seasons’ return, in that moment that had gone and come again, it was awe and grief and wonderment crowding in on each other, a first involuntary affirmation of life that was somehow mixed up with Sanji’s shoes. It was the first memory of my growing world.

Other seasons I would come to know – spring and autumn and winter – and other countries where shoes abounded. But the things that crowded in on me that day in the rain, and in many rains after, and made me an exile for the better part of my life, were also the things that connected me to my country and made me want to tell its story.

But there is no story to tell, no one story anyway, not since that day in 1505 when the fidalgo Don Laurenço de Almeida, resplendent in gold braid and epaulettes and hat plumed with all the birds of paradise, landed on our shores and broke us from our history. No one story, with a beginning and an end, no story that picks up from where the past left off – only bits and shards of stories, and those of the people I knew, and that only in passing, my own parents and son, or heard tell of, for there was no staying in a place or in a time to gather a story whole, only an imagined time and place. And no story of the country – or, if of the country, not our story but theirs, the parangis’. Except that we all bore the imprint of that history, like a stigma, internalized it even, made it our own, against our will, calling to memory the while to lose it by losing memory itself.

My father worked in the post office, the new post office by the large tea estate, no more than a cry away from the disused building that had sheltered me from the rain that day. He was born in Sandilipay, a bone-dry village in the north of Ceylon, at the turn of the century. His father was an inept farmer on whose lacham of land nothing seemed to grow but children, thirteen of them in as many harvests, till the villagers enviously referred to him as ‘the man with the green penis’. Only nine of the children, five of them sons, survived childbirth and infancy. My father was the youngest. And on his education my grandfather, awakened to the possibilities of a safe career in the British Raj, concentrated the attention of his passionless years. So that by the time the boy was twelve years old, he was fluent both in English and Tamil, excelled in arithmetic, and was constantly nagged by his brothers for being immersed in a book when it was his turn to feed the goats or milk the cows or run the chickens in for the night.

One day the headmaster of my father’s school turned up at the old man’s ‘farm’.

‘Are you Sahadevan’s father?’ he inquired without ceremony, leaning his bicycle against the wall. My grandfather looked up from the aubergine plants he was tending, took in the man with the bike – tall, self-possessed, dressed in immaculate white verti and shawl and banian – and went back to his aubergines. A rogue, he thought, from town, a trader perhaps, some unpaid bill? He knew the seed merchant, the ironmonger, the pawnbroker, all the people he had business with in town. But this man? Perhaps he was the new pawnbroker. The old man was alarmed at the thought. The drought had already damaged his crops, and there was now this unexpected visitation from town. The seasons on the one hand, rapacious townsmen on the other. He needed time to think, prepare his defence, draw the man on to peasant ground and fight him there. He raised himself slowly, pulling his loin cloth together, and walked up to the well.

‘Are you Sahadevan’s father?’ the man demanded impatiently. And stung by the arrogance in his tone of voice my grandfather quite lost his temper.

‘Yes, I am,’ he retorted. ‘And what is that to you? Besides, I have got a name too, you know.’

‘Yes, yes I know that, Mr Pandyan,’ the intruder replied easily. ‘You see, I am the boy’s headmaster. I sent a number of messages for you to come and see me. Now I have had to come all this way.’

‘Oh sir, I am sorry,’ answered my grandfather abjectly, going into his peasant slouch of deference.

He invited the headmaster to come into the shade, saying that he must have had a tiring journey. And why hadn’t he told him he was coming? He would have met him at the house. He hesitated in his embarrassment. What would he like? A little toddy perhaps? He had some fresh toddy. Or would he like some water to cool his face? No?

He began drawing water from the well, washing himself, taking in the new situation. The headmaster, good heavens, the headmaster, come all the way to see him, he who had never been to school!

‘Well, sir, you are out of the sun at least. Is your bike all right over there?’

‘Mr Pandyan, please, I want to talk about the boy. I have no time to waste. Besides you have got your work to do.’

Sahadevan was in trouble. Expelled, perhaps? My grandfather became wary again.

‘You don’t have to worry about me, master. Time I have, that is all I have in fact.’ He stared at the headmaster hopefully. ‘Well, sir, what about the boy? He is a good boy you know, not a trouble-maker or anything like that; maybe he could study a little harder.’

But it was very difficult, he added, to get all the work done on the farm by himself, even with three boys. The eldest had married and moved away and Sahadevan had to help a little, milking the cows and that. ‘But I’ll see that he works harder, if that is all.’

‘Mr Pandyan, if you will stop a minute, I’ll tell you what I came to see you about.’

‘Yes, yes, that’s a good idea,’ the old man said, squatting now on his haunches before the headmaster, a supplicant awaiting truth. Sahadevan was a fine boy, the headmaster told him, and an excellent student, the best in the school. It was very creditable that he had been able to leave the village school so early and come to him. He hadn’t known a word of English at the time. Imagine that! And in three years he had beaten the rest of his class in English and arithmetic. In fact, he had been recommended for a double promotion.

‘Double promotion? What is that, sir?’ asked the old man, glowing with pride, the drought forgotten. Another seed had begun to sprout.

It meant that Sahadevan, instead of going from Form 2 to Form 3, would go straight to Form 4, the headmaster answered. My grandfather jumped up in delight, reaching for his pot of toddy. ‘And that means he will leave school earlier and help me on the farm?’

‘No, no, Mr Pandyan, he must not become a farmer,’ the headmaster replied anxiously. ‘He is an extraordinarily bright boy. He must go to a proper college, in Colombo. That is what I came to see you about.’

Sahadevan, he explained, was college material. St Benedict’s or St Joseph’s, they were the best, if they would take him. But the old man would have to find the money. In fact they might even try to get him a scholarship or at least a bursary. ‘The sooner he goes the better,’ he finished.

College material? the old man reflected. Well, well, well, the headmaster was right, education was a great thing, a great thing. Perhaps the boy would enter government service, who knows, a government agent one day even, eh? Yes, yes, the headmaster was right. Of course his other sons could help him manage the farm. It wasn’t much of a farm anyway. And truth to say, he wasn’t a very successful farmer either. Yes, by all means, let the boy have education. Perhaps he might even become a headmaster.

Rising, he took a swig from the pot and held it out to the headmaster, who turned it down. He sat on his haunches again.

‘But, sir,’ he complained despondently, ‘there’s no money. I can sell my wife’s jewels, but there is only the bangles left now. And my eldest daughter, she is getting on, you know.’ He shook his greying head. ‘Twenty-two and no man in sight. I haven’t a dowry to give her, except a bit of this land, and you know that’s not very much.’ He drank from the pot again. ‘Where will I go for money, sir, even if he gets that scholarship or something, how will I feed him and buy him shoes and things? Of course there’s my wife’s brother, the dry fish trader –’

‘I know, Mr Pandyan. I know Mr Segaram well.’

‘Sahadevan can stay with him. But we never got along, you know. He always wanted to adopt Sahadevan, because his dried-up wife couldn’t have any children herself. I told him he could have one of the girls, or even the second boy who is not very good on the farm. But no, he wanted Sahadevan.’

‘Mr Segaram is one of the old boys of our school, you know, and he has given the school a lot of help.’ The headmaster hesitated. ‘He was down to see me last week, in fact, and I told him about the boy.’

‘You did?’

‘Don’t misunderstand me. Sahadevan was only mentioned in the course of conversation: he is very good at science too, you know. I told Mr Segaram about trying to get him into St Benedict’s.’

‘That bloody fool. What does he know about education?’

‘Mr Pandyan,’ said the headmaster, with some warmth, ‘Mr Segaram is prepared to keep the boy, support him, provide him with school uniform, shoes, meet all his school expenses –’

‘He bloody well won’t, headmaster! He bloody well won’t! No boy of mine is going to be obliged to that bloody trader! Dry fish, is it? He has made his money on dry fish? And now he wants to make my son a dry fish merchant too? And marry him off, I suppose to his wife’s niece? Oh no, Sahadevan will go to that college – you arrange it, you arrange it – you arrange that scholarship thing, and I’ll find the money for school expenses! I will. Somehow.’

‘Be reasonable, Mr Pandyan,’ replied the headmaster angrily. ‘Your son’s future is at stake and all you can think of…. What has Mr Segaram done to you?’

‘Done to me? Done to me? He tried to play me out of my dowry, that’s what, and then he tried to buy my land.’

‘Yes, but that was a long time ago. He has changed. So must you. If he wants to help the boy, let him. Even if you find the money for the school uniform and books, where’s he going to stay? Besides, Mr Segaram lives so close to St Benedict’s. The boy walks seven miles to school every morning and evening now. St Benedict’s is only a mile from Mr Segaram’s house. Come on, Mr Pandyan, be reasonable.’

And watching my grandfather weaken, he added that there was nothing like education in this world. Surely he could see that for himself. It was a wonderful chance for the boy. Besides, he couldn’t go on working all his life. Sahadevan would look after him, he was sure of that, a very thoughtful boy.

‘Oh, all right then, headmaster. But mind, Segaram must come and ask me himself, none of this go-between business. It is not as though he is doing me a favour, you know.’

The headmaster nodded. ‘I understand,’ he said.

‘Does the boy know?’

‘No, not yet. I thought you should be the one to tell him, Mr Pandyan.’

And so my father went to college, St Benedict’s College, a school run by Catholic brothers in the north of Colombo. He did very well at his studies there too, winning the school Scripture and general knowledge prizes in his last year. But after passing his School Certificate examination, he had to leave, as neither his uncle nor his father could support him any longer. The old man’s land had all gone as dowry to his two eldest daughters; two more of his sons had married and gone away, the other had been crippled by a fall from a palmyrah tree (the story was that he drank the toddy even as he tapped the tree, a job which he should have left to the low-castes anyway). Two daughters, the twins, remained unmarried. Even the mud house in which my grandparents lived had fallen into decay. And Segaram had been slowly pushed out of his dry fish business by the Anglo-Fish Corporation.

For a time my father helped his uncle Segaram with his ailing business. But when a few months later the Anglo-Fish Corporation had finally swallowed Segaram up, my father was taken into the firm, from the generosity of their heart, the company made out, though Segaram knew it was to win his customers over to the firm. And for a while it looked as though my father would make his mark in business: he was good at figures, was straight and firm in his dealings with customers and worked as devotedly for the corporation as he had for his uncle. ‘That boy has a good head for business,’ Mr Thomson, the director of Anglo-Fish, was heard to say. ‘He will be running this firm one day.’

But Grandfather Pandyan wanted the boy beside him. He was getting old and the heart had gone out of his fight against land to which he no longer belonged, for it no longer belonged to him. He now managed what he once owned in return for a portion of rice and a handful of vegetables. His sons-in-law, both townsmen, cared nothing for the land but still claimed their share of the produce at harvest time. Not only did they refuse to put money into seed or fertilizer, but they accused my grandfather of neglect and downright theft whenever their portion of the produce fell. Kept from loving and caring for his land, and watching his family fall apart, the old man had taken to drink and to bed. My grandmother sent for Sahadevan. Mahadev would have done as well: as the eldest it was his duty to take up his father’s burden, but he had a family to support and a job to mind. As works overseer (albeit subordinate to his father-in-law), hiring out labour on contract to the government for road-works, he had to keep constant watch over his labourers to make sure the job was done in time. Pandyan’s second son was a cripple and spent his time in social activities around the temple and in prayer. The two other boys lived in their wives’ villages some twenty miles to the north, drinking their dowries away. So it fell to Sahadevan to mind the farm and care for his parents and unmarried sisters. Besides, everyone looked up to Sahadevan, his brothers-in-law too, for had not Sahadevan passed his School Certificate? And he was no slouch as a farmer either: if anyone was able to get any money out of the land, he could.

For close on two years Sahadevan worked night and day to make the farm pay. He managed to make some small profit in the first year and, even more remarkably, persuaded his brothers-in-law to put some of their profit back into the farm. But twice the rains had been late, and labour was hard to come by.

‘Those damn low-caste fellows can get better jobs in town now,’ observed Pandyan bitterly. The Roman Catholic priests, he complained, had promised the nalavans that they did not have to be submissive and obedient to be born to a higher caste in their next birth. All they had to do was to convert to the true faith of the Roman church and they would go to heaven.

For a while Sahadevan held out against the odds. But at the end of the second year, his brothers-in-law wanted the farm sold so that they could marry their sisters off: cash and not land had become the more attractive dowry. Besides, old Pandyan was getting anxious about his two unmarried daughters. Sahadevan would have to find a proper job, one more suited to his English education. A clerical job, hopefully, in the service of the central government in Colombo. There were openings there for bright young Tamils, the British seemed to favour them, and a government job carried the type of prestige that would restore the respect in which Pandyan’s family had once been held. And then there was all that security.

Respect and security. Old man Pandyan fingered them for a moment – they were not the things he had quite wanted from life. As a young man he had rejected them both. He had fought and accepted and revelled in the recurring drought and the untimely rain. He had wept when the crops failed him and rejoiced when they broke through the barren land against all the dictates of heaven. And he had celebrated his own strength at having brought them through against the will of the gods before whom only a moment before he had lain an abject supplicant. Up one moment, down the next, an endless love affair with the land and the sky, without a progression or an end, and yet moving in a spiral upwards through a re-volution of time.

Now the land had been taken from him. His rhythm was broken. Time had become one-dimensional, unilinear. He was at outs with the world.

But with his son he found another rhythm, a way of keeping step with the new order of things, another measure of time. It was not altogether to his liking, but as he saw this other seed sprout and grow and battle with its own world, he determined to keep faith with it.

Respect and security. He would accept them for the sake of his daughters, to wed them better; for himself even, though not for his son. But there, he knew, he need have no fear, for even into this new order of things, enclosed though it was, Sahadevan would bring his own measure of disorder and protest and rebellion. Sahadevan would break through, like corn.

In the certainty of that continuity, Pandyan rose from his bed and walked tall in the promise of Sahadevan’s days, wearing now a verti and shawl, as the father of a prospective government servant should, and sporting a rolled-gold wrist watch.

My father was nineteen when he returned to Colombo once more, this time to take up a post as a clerical servant in the telegraph department of the postal service. His uncle Segaram offered to put him up, but Sahadevan wanted to be adult and free and found himself room and board with a Sinhalese family a few miles from his office in Slave Island. At first he worked hard and studied long into the night for his departmental exams: he was still too fresh from the poverty of his village to spend money on the pleasures of the city. But he liked to fall from time to time, as he put it, indulging in a beer now and then with his friends from the office, visiting the bioscope on occasion and even betting on a horse one day. All the little things which as a schoolboy at St Benedict’s he had promised himself he would do when he was grown up and had money of his own. But he still managed to send some money home to his parents, and even a sari or two to his sisters.

Gradually his ‘extravagances’ got worse. He developed a taste for cards, beer gave way to arrack. The remittances home began to fall off. And though he applied himself to his work at the office, he paid no heed to his studies. But to his surprise, and that of his friends, he passed his departmental exam at the end of the first year and was confirmed as Junior Clerk, Grade IV, which meant of course that he would be entitled to one week’s leave in the year and a free railway ‘warrant’. On the strength of that, Sahadevan decided to visit his folk.

He bought apples and grapes for his sisters, who had never even seen them before, a verti for his father, a shirt for his brother and a Bangalore sari for his mother, and all manner of sweets and chocolates and biscuits as befitted a man returning from the capital – all on the money he had borrowed from his friends against his next month’s pay.

The journey to Jaffna took a whole day and his neat white suit and polished brown shoes were bedraggled and dirty by the time Sahadevan entered the last lap of his journey, in a bullock-cart, to his village, some ten miles from the railway station.

As they drew away, the carter looked covertly at the youngster seated beside him and thought he knew his face. The pug nose and the broad forehead topped by a shock of black hair seemed familiar to him. Surely it was … no he could not be certain, and these townsmen were not a communicative lot. But it must be … he had the same build as the old man, medium height and sturdy as a bull.

‘It is Mr Pandyan’s youngest son, isn’t it?’ the carter finally burst out, unable to contain his curiosity. But Sahadevan, immersed in the thoughts of his homecoming, did not respond, and the driver quickly lapsed into conversation less intimate, remarking that trains were not very reliable, and he must have had a tiring journey. Then, roused to the slowness of his own vehicle, he yelled at the bull, beating it mightily with his stick and twisting its tail at its arse with a deft flick of his toes. ‘Juk, juk,’ he shouted. ‘Juk, juk, you son of Satan, can’t you go any faster?’

‘Yes, it’s a long journey,’ said Sahadevan agreeably. With the comforts of trams and buses behind him, he was becoming used to the cart once more. ‘Two whole days on the train, and only five days of my leave left. It’s not worth it,’ he fretted, trying to remember the driver’s name.

‘Oh no, don’t say that, master,’ replied the carter, certain now that it was Pandyan’s son. There was no mistaking his voice. ‘You have been away a long time, a whole year, and your folk have missed you. Very proud of you too. Your father started on that new well with that money you sent him. I was helping him. The water in the old well was getting salty and –’

‘Velan, it’s Velan, isn’t it?’ yelled Sahadevan in sudden recognition, his veneer of city reserve falling completely away from him. ‘Yes of course it’s Velan. You had gone to live in your wife’s village when I came back from Colombo to run the farm. No wonder I couldn’t remember you. I haven’t seen you since I was a boy, and you recognized me?’

The driver grinned and passed two fingers through his shock of greying hair. ‘Well, young master, I carried you around as a boy, didn’t I? And you haven’t changed all that much, still got the old man’s features, and his temper, I dare say. Remember that time he took a stick to you because the cows hadn’t been milked all day, and you ran up the mango tree? Ha ha, I’ll never forget that!’

‘Yes and he didn’t know that I was stuck up there and couldn’t come down even if I wanted to, did he?’ Sahadevan too was grinning now, the memory vivid in his mind.

‘Go on! He knew all right, the old fox, but he wouldn’t let on, not he! Pretending he’d wait there all day just to punish you. Yes! If I hadn’t come along, you’d both be there still, such stubborn people, both of you.’

Velan continued to reminisce. There was that other time when the young master ran away from school, he recalled, and Sahadevan chuckled. Well, fancy him remembering that. He was observing the way the driver’s eyes narrowed as they peered into the past. In the village there were only memories and people, the man told him, weddings and funerals and feuds. It was different for city folk. They had so much to do and no time for anybody.

‘But I knew the city couldn’t have changed you. You are still one of us, thambi,’ he assured Sahadevan.

And so restored to his old relationship, Sahadevan began to bombard Velan with question after question. Why was he driving a cart? What had happened to the farm? His wife, how was she? And his son, it was the boy only, wasn’t it? When had he come back to Sandilipay?

A shadow passed over Velan’s features, lined now, and pinched in pain. Dead, he sobbed. Both his wife and son. Some long and terrible fever. Enteric, perhaps.

The sadness in his eyes deepened.

‘My wife, she was expecting another baby, perhaps a son to help with the farm – who knows?’

He wiped the tears away. She died in hospital, he said. The city hospital, mind. He shrugged with resignation. The doctors couldn’t do anything. Perhaps he should have listened to the native physician.

He struggled to keep his tears back and it was a little while before he could continue. ‘I couldn’t stay on in the farm after my wife died,’ he said more calmly. ‘So I sold it and bought this cart – set up in business, you might say.’ He gave Sahadevan a wry smile: the truth was hard to bear, even harder to tell. But he saw Sahadevan’s eyes mirror his grief and gave in. ‘Land without sons, thambi, what use is that to anyone?’

Sahadevan was silent. He couldn’t say anything. What was there to say? They continued their journey in a communion of sorrow.

‘He is here, he is here. Colombo uncle is here!’ His nieces ran into the house to tell their grandparents. Their baby brother had been left behind and, picking up the straggler, Sahadevan followed close behind the others. His mother came rushing out from the kitchen to meet him, wiping her hands on her sari, smiling and crying at once. His father had put aside the paper he was reading and came forward at a more leisurely pace, waiting his turn to embrace his son. His sisters and brothers-in-law were there too, as well as his cousins and aunts. Even his brother had broken with his temple routine to receive him. And Rover, his old mangy dog, shook the fleas off him to go and greet his master. They were all there, just to celebrate his homecoming!

His mother’s eyes widened in alarm. ‘Oh look at your nice suit, all splattered with mud! Why didn’t Velan bring you right up to the house?’

He tried to put her at ease. Enveloped in the folds of her sari, she was smaller than he remembered.

‘The lanes are all muddy, amma. The cart couldn’t get through. Anyway, it’s only a short walk from the main road.’

His mother offered him a towel and verti. ‘The well’s over there,’ she pointed, ‘behind the cadjan fence, the new well, your well. I’ll have some soda water to drink when you come back in.’

‘Soda water?’ bristled the old man. ‘Soda water? He is not in the city, you know. Fetch him some toddy, some fresh toddy. Kunju, go and get your uncle some of your father’s toddy, if he hasn’t finished it all,’ he mumbled.

Sahadevan shed his suit and shoes behind the curtain that separated the men’s room from the women’s and put on his verti. He picked up the towel and walked to the well, looking once again at the familiar trees around him. He could still smell his mother’s cooking. He came back from the well refreshed, and joined his father on the verandah over a pot of palmyrah toddy.

‘You have not completed this addition to the house, then?’ he inquired.

‘No, son,’ Pandyan wiped the toddy from his moustache. ‘There was the well to finish, and the roof of the old house to thatch, and your mother has been having those attacks again. Mahadev sends some money too, you know, but somehow it all goes.’

‘But you were anxious to get this part of the house finished for Saraswathi’s dowry. Why didn’t you tell me you needed more money?’

‘You are doing your best as it is. And look at you, so thin and gaunt. In fact, once the rainy season is over and this part of the house is done, you needn’t send us so much money. You must look after your health, son. That’s more important than getting Saraswathi and Lakshmi married off. Anyway there’s no hurry to discuss these matters now. Finish your toddy. Then we’ll go and eat.’

The menfolk were already seated cross-legged on the floor of the kitchen with their plantain leaves before them, waiting to be served, when Sahadevan came in behind his father.

‘Mind your head‚’ Pandyan warned his son, but too late: he had forgotten to crouch through the door. Rubbing his forehead ruefully, Sahadevan sat down, to find that his mother had taken his plantain leaf and replaced it with a plate resting on a stool.

‘What is all this, then?’ growled Pandyan. ‘Plates and stools, and what next? What is the matter, woman, do you think your son has forgotten to eat off a plantain leaf?’ And as his wife hurriedly took away the stool and plate and put a leaf before Sahadevan, he added, ‘He only works in the city you know. He doesn’t have to follow their ways.’

‘Yes, of course –’ Sahadevan began, when Rama, the religious brother, broke in.

‘Why didn’t you go to the shrine room after your bath and put holy ash on your forehead?’ he asked.

‘I forgot,’ replied Sahadevan lamely, more in apology to his mother, who was devout without being intolerant. No one paid much attention to Rama anyway.

As his mothers and his sisters served up the piping hot rice with dhal and brinjal and fried fish and prawns, Sahadevan realized what an occasion this was. Rice and one vegetable, if that, was all they usually had.

‘Eat up, son,’ his mother said plying him with more food. They were his favourite prawns.

‘No, amma, really. I have had my share.’

‘There is plenty left for us,’ said Saraswathi and Lakshmi in unison from the fireplace at the back of the kitchen, where they were dissecting a big ripe jak fruit. ‘And the children have eaten.’

‘Guess what you are having tomorrow,’ said the old lady. She served Sahadevan yet another spoonful of rice.

‘No more, please. I can’t eat any more, I’m full,’ pleaded Sahadevan, covering his leaf with his hands. ‘Well, what are we having tomorrow? Not kool?’

‘Yes, kool‚’ said his mother proudly. Her eyes shone. ‘Kool, with crabs, nice young ones, and beans and fish-heads and jak seeds and prawns and –’

‘Oh, amma. You shouldn’t have gone to all this bother. And they are all so expensive now,’ Sahadevan protested.

‘You don’t have to worry about that, son,’ said Pandyan. ‘Your no-good brothers are sending some of the stuff from town. They couldn’t take time off their drinking to come and see you, but they still want to remain in your good books. They haven’t sent us a bloody thing up to now. Though I bet they’ll be coming to you for some money sooner or later.’

‘How are they?’ asked Sahadevan.

‘Don’t speak to me about them, son. The sooner they are forgotten the better.’ And the old man, finishing his meal, rose and left the kitchen.

‘He can’t sit very long on the floor nowadays,’ explained Sahadevan’s mother, squatting before him. ‘You will go and see your brothers, won’t you? They are also my children, after all.’

Sahadevan looked long and lovingly at his mother. Her face had not changed much over the years. A few more lines and wrinkles perhaps, but the strength was still there, and an inexplicable softness that pain had not dimmed or poverty hardened. It always amazed Sahadevan, this gentle strength of hers. His father’s more rugged toughness he could understand. It had to do with his battle against the land and the seasons and his pride as a provider. But it was she who had to make do with what he provided, bear his thousand children, yield to his slightest whim. Or so it would appear. But beneath it all, Sahadevan knew, they had another unspoken life which wove them together. He had seen it that time his mother was ill with pneumonia and Pandyan would not leave her side, tending her as he never tended his field, nursing her all through the night and day, partaking of her pain and yet bearing down on her to live with the strength of his will. Sahadevan was ten at the time, but somewhere in his boy’s mind he had known that if his mother died his father would never be the man he was.

‘What are these attacks you have been having, then?’ Sahadevan asked his mother.

‘Oh, they are nothing, son. Just some dizzy spells. Your father makes too much of it just because I fell one time at the well and cut my head. But that was a long time ago. He wrote to you about it. I am all right now. Anyway it’s all in His hands.’

‘Yes,’ said Sahadevan impatiently, brushing God aside for the moment. ‘But what do the doctors say, or are you still taking native medicine?’

‘Something to do with the blood, the hospital said, asked me to eat properly, do less work, not go to the well. They are town people. What do they know of our life? Maniam is much better. He gave me some herbs and things, and that horrible concoction I take every morning. But it’s doing me good. See, I’m fatter already,’ and she stood up to show herself better.

Sahadevan looked at his mother’s body, wearied with incessant childbirth. There was certainly strength there. Once, he remembered, it had had a bearing about it, to match that noble face; but now it just looked used up, and the burden of carrying it around had begun to shadow her eyes with pain. Sahadevan could not stand it, but at the same time he knew that it was from hardship and grief and the bearing of children that she had winnowed the stuff of her life. She could rest her body now; her daughters would do the work.

And he provide?

Sahadevan was filled with the shame of his own extravagances. His meagre remittances home had hardly eased his parents’ poverty. The ‘new house’ – no more than a rectangular structure partitioned into two rooms and a verandah opposite and parallel to the old house – remained unfinished, his twin sisters unmarried. And yet his parents hailed him as their benefactor. It was to him and Mahadev, they said, that they owed everything. The only thing that worried them now was the dowry for the girls. Once they were married, the old couple could die in peace. But at the same time Sahadevan must not neglect his health through providing for them. All those shirts and saris and sweets he had brought: there was no need for that. Money did not grow on trees. Besides, Mahadev was a fully-fledged overseer now and the money he sent would provide the cash part of Saraswathi’s dowry, and once the ‘new house’ was finished, she could easily find a suitor. Mr Reddy, the marriage-broker, had assured them of that, and once she was married off, it would smooth the way for Lakshmi, who had the same fine features as Saraswathi but, as the darker of the two, would not attract eligible young men. A widower, perhaps, who would be satisfied with part ownership of the old house. But there was no real hurry. Sahadevan must look after himself first, find proper lodgings. Living with a Sinhalese family was no good, they didn’t eat properly, their cooking wouldn’t be to his liking. Perhaps he should go and live with some of the Jaffna boys who had rented their own house in Kotahena near his uncle Segaram’s place. They had their own cook too, a Tamil, and shared all the expenses. A ‘chummery’, yes, that was what they called it, a ‘chummery’. Perhaps that was where Sahadevan should go and live.

In the days that followed Sahadevan became familiar once more with the hardships his folk had to endure. They did not starve, it was true, the old man still grew the few vegetables they needed on a small bit of land behind the house and there was enough money to provide them with rice once a day, but in sickness they had to forego some of that to pay for medicine. The roof of the kitchen was leaking, and its mud walls had begun to crack. The three chairs they had (for visitors) had been repaired beyond redemption, and even the mats they slept on had gaping holes.

How could he have lost touch with all this, wondered Sahadevan. Perhaps it was his job that did this to him. Working for a monthly salary seemed to break the connection between work and need, and turn his wants into needs. He had to get a hold on himself, get his life back into some sort of order.

He went back to Colombo determined not to fail his parents’ hopes. He gave up his lodgings in Slave Island and went to live in the chummery in Kotahena, where he was to spend the next two years leading a more frugal life, a studious one, even. He sent more money home, passed his departmental exams, found promotion and visited his folk every six months as he now had two railway warrants a year.

At first he liked the life. It returned him to the austerity of his years on the farm and enabled him to fulfil his growing responsibilities. Like a man, said ‘Uncle’ Nayagam, the chummery’s elder, a short, pudgy man who seemed never to have been young. ‘And a fine example to us all,’ he added graciously. But the praise made Sahadevan apprehensive. He did not want to be a man like ‘Uncle’ Nayagam was, a man waking, working, praying, eating and sleeping to the clock, a pre-ordained and mechanical man whose seldom joy was his annual visit to his wife in Jaffna and his constant sorrow the fact that all it had yielded was another baby. And so he never got around to bringing his family to live with him, which was why he had rented the house in the first place, and settled for a family of chums instead, on the understanding of course that they would leave (as chums would) the day he brought his wife and children home.

But that day never comes, does it, Sahadevan asked himself ruefully, wondering whether he too would end up like Nayagam. The government service was full of them, men who had left their wives and children back in some remote village in the north and gone off to serve the British Raj in some God-forsaken part of the country, opening up roads and railways and post offices. Constantly on the move, with a camp-bed and a tin trunk for comfort and company and a yearly rail pass to connect them to their families. Some never saw their families at all. Like his cousin Velu. He was a road builder up-country – engineer, they would have called him if he was qualified and white – and every time the government wanted to carve out a road through the jungles they sent for him, pushing him farther and farther inland until one day he completely vanished from view.

No, he did not want to end up like Nayagam or Velu, Sahadevan told himself. He would want his family with him, when he married. Like his Sinhalese mates in the post office. But it was easy for them. This was their part of the country. They had lived here all their lives. They had friends and relatives here and the villages were not too far removed from the towns anyway. The towns in fact seemed to have grown out of the villages as naturally as the buying and selling they were so good at, and even the railway lines that broke through coconut land and paddy field looked a natural part of the landscape. But in his part of the country, the railways had pushed the villages violently aside and set down towns at random with no more purpose than to transport landless farmers to the south.

And here in the south, where the land was green and lush, the seasons more tempered and life less harsh and ungiving, Sahadevan felt himself drawn into another way of life which was not all hardship and duty. He learned again some of the joy he had known from wrestling with the land as a farmer and had lost in the work of pushing a pen over interminable ledgers, but this time from a growing acquaintance with leisure, learning that evenings were not just for overtime and Sundays for study but perhaps also for sitting on a beach by twilight, or playing ping-pong at the YMCA, or merely talking with friends over tea. It was slow and painful, though, this acquaintance with divided time that separated labour from life and created nothing. But the other, that saw time as a continuum of work and pay, Nayagam’s time, seemed even more deathly, as his Sinhalese friends were quick to point out.

‘You Jaffna fellows live a dreary bloody life,’ Tissa had remarked in the office canteen one day. Seeing Sahadevan stiffen, he had quickly added, ‘I don’t mean you. You at least have a drink with us now and again. But those other chaps in your boarding. What joy do they get out of life? Especially that married fellow, Nayagam?’

Tissa had just been appointed staff representative on the canteen management. He was tall, thin and bespectacled, and handsome in a spare sort of way.

Sahadevan gave him an uneasy look. ‘We have all got our folks in the village to support, Tissa, relatives, poor relatives. How can we let them down? I couldn’t have gone to college without their help, you know.’

‘Yes, yes, I understand all that, Saha,’ answered Tissa impatiently. He straightened his tie: he was on an official visit to the canteen. ‘We are not exactly rich ourselves. My father has to look after two other families apart from his own, and we have only a small bit of coconut land. So all right, maybe the land is more fertile here in the south. But the point is that you don’t have to be so bloody dismal about it. I went to Jaffna once you know, to a village, I had another Tamil friend just like you, he got transferred to Dimbulla, and I didn’t see any of this there. Of course the people were poor, but they still got a kick out of life, and so generous they were. They seemed to enjoy giving what they didn’t have. But when you Tamils come to Colombo, you get so mean and small, all the life seems to go out of you, and you huddle together in bloody caves.’

A few weeks later Tissa invited Sahadevan over to his parents’ home near Kalutara. Within hours of meeting Tissa’s family, Sahadevan felt more at ease with himself than he had for a long time, whether at the chummery or at his uncle Segaram’s house. Tissa’s coastal village, with its coconut palms, flowering rhododendrons and green vegetables, its tiled roofs and cemented verandahs, was nothing like his own. And yet there was a familiar warmth and hospitality and an easy-going acceptance of him that he had not known since he had left Sandilipay. Quite easily and simply Sahadevan slipped into Tissa’s way of life, got to wearing a sarong, which he found less inhibiting than the verti, developed a taste for the milder Sinhalese curry, and saw in Tissa’s sister a brasher beauty than he had been accustomed to. Even the buggy in which Tissa and he had gone from the station to the village seemed somehow familiar, and the gathering of Tissa’s uncles and aunts and cousins and nephews and nieces reminded him of his own reception in Sandilipay. Tissa himself seemed a different man, not cock-sure or cheeky any more, but respectful to his elders, considerate of those younger than himself and helpful to all, giving to each his value and his place. It was a pattern of relationships Sahadevan understood but not one that he would have readily associated with Tissa.

By the time Sahadevan returned to Colombo a week later, his ideas about southern folk had already begun to change. They were not as uncaring and self-indulgent as he had previously assumed. Though they had cause to be; their land was kinder to them, their hardships less fraught. Perhaps that explained their outgoing natures and their easy acceptance of life’s vicissitudes. His own folk by contrast were impassive and dour, their relationships more principled, their kindnesses more harsh. They gave as the southerners gave but, unlike them, they knew the cost of their giving.

Gradually Sahadevan began to loosen up. He was still conscious of his duty to his parents and sisters, but he was now able to take this in his stride, not expecting that he would lose sight of it just because he spent some of his leisure with his Sinhalese mates, swimming in the sea or loafing in the countryside or just playing with their children. He took his friends home to the chummery to give them ‘a taste of good Tamil cooking’ or a lesson in vegetable gardening. And they in turn brought to the chummery a gaiety that even Uncle Nayagam reluctantly gave in to.

Two years later, the chummery broke up. Some of Sahadevan’s friends had already left on being transferred out of Colombo, and now Uncle Nayagam, having finally given up his dream of bringing his family to Colombo, took up a minor position closer to home. Sahadevan went to lodge with Tissa’s uncle and aunt, the Wijepalas.