Roti and other memories

Tea was made hot and sweet, back at home, a strong, almost cloying concoction that I can rarely replicate over here. We had some coffee plants at the bottom-end  of the L-shaped garden. They would be plucked sometimes, seeds extricated and dried, occasionally the drying beans would show signs of mould or fall afoul of a passing spray of cat piss. The beans that survived would be ground. Made into, grainy, earthy, cups of coffee. Nowhere as smooth as instant coffee. But I miss it now. In a way that I will never miss Nescafe, or my caffe latté, latte macchiato, espresso macchiato, ristretto etc today.

Amina Saïd in her poetry

talks about weaving a carpet of memory

My carpet is patchy, fraying at the edges…

Thosai, eaten hot off the pan. Appa used to eat thosai on the little pantry table,  next to the kitchen, and not in the dining room, so that he could get them hot and eat them before the cooled. He used to get annoyed when they lost warmth. Saras akka was an expert with the thosai ladle. First she would take a ladle-full, from the thosai mixture. Pour it in a broadening spiral on the hot iron surface, then smoothen it in another spiral. She would make two varieties. Cooked on a flat black slab of iron.  One was a sedate, soft, pancake-like creature. The second was a glistening piece of magic, slathered with a coat of oil and cooked to a crisp so that the bits crackled in your mouth as you chewed. Sometimes she used to cook them with ghee, and those days were heaven. 

I could write poems, books, about ghee. It adds flavour to anything, subtle, aromatic. As if someone melted butter, mixed it with some magic herb. They call it unrefined butter. Perhaps that is what adds the flavour, the impurities, the bits and bobs of unknowns. (like what I imagine the flavour of kassippu liquor to be, brewed in the jungle, derived from whatever falls into the barrel). Or maybe that's not what unrefined means. Anyway, sometimes, on special occasions, you get the hint of ghee in fried rice, lubricating the slide of grain against grain… shiny on thosai…perfuming the decadent softness of Bombay sweets…

Roti. We often used to eat roti. Thin, unleavened bread. A hard pancake of cooked dough. When the roti is hot, scrape a bit of butter on, it begins to melt. Twisting-off pieces, sopping up hodi (gravy) on one’s plate. Maybe scooping up some dhal, add a smidgeon Katta Sambol for spice. In my head I can smell wafts of molten butter, mixed with the coconut in the dough, rising up, mixing with the thick, wholesome, milk-gentle fragrance of dhal… The thought of dhal reminds me of Cadju curry. Piles of cashew plucked, separated from the fleshy fruit, dried and cleaned, cooked in coconut milk until their raw crunch softened into a milky chalk-soft creamy texture. They’d be cooked with peas that would bob about amongst the cadju and rupture in a juicy burst upon biting, or disintegrate.  Sweeter, more vegetal than the cadju.

…and Poll (coconut) sambol. First you use a coconut scraper, (there’s a place called Odiris that makes them), to scrape a decent pile of coconut, holding the half-coconut steady while you turn the handle of the scraper, round and round. Then you mix in chili, lime, and umbalakada - maldive fish – and mix it about, adding in a pile of chopped onion. Its all mixed up until it is a small mound, fluffy, in a bowl. When eaten with bread, or perhaps even roast paan (small, lightly roasted loaves) and spicy fish hodi, with the onion crunching it is indescribable. The savoury-ness of the dried fish adding depth to the chili. and the lime a slash of tartness, mixing in with the other flavours. The bread giving body and chewy-ness, the hodi an infusion of spicy liquid. Smooth, savory heat. (One of the joys of traveling in Sri Lanka is eating in dodgy places, or semi-dodgy places. Once on a long drive back from Yala, Nimalan, Anojan, S and I stopped at a “hotel”, half constructed, ordered food. I remember having the most amazing sambol. Fluffy, infused or rubbed with just enough chili, finely chopped onion, occasional, unexpected pleasure of Umbalakada.) I could eat it for hours. 

The Sinhalese name for eggplant is batu - but there are several other batus. Thalana batu, an almost-bitter vegetable the size of a billiard ball, but oval. There is a smaller batu, called thibbtatu. Tiny, as small as a blueberry, tough and green and it grows in a little bush. I think we had one in Wattala. When cooked the right way, with the little berries split open, (perhaps they open during cooking)  there is a salty, savoury weight of flavour, as if it were meat or fish. Another delicacy were the meaty chunks of madu-maalu, flat-fish. Eat, bites cleaving, viscous glide  of each morsel, cartilage crunched effortlessly. Saras akka used to make Iddli, in her iddli pan, like short, thick flying saucers, small doughy clouds that would disintegrate as you swirled them in Sambhar  (spicy vegetable gravy.) (I used love the way they served sambhar in grungy, dirty Saiver shops – ladling it out of stainless steel buckets).

In Hatton town they used to sell Umbalakada wadai. Small fried dough-cakes with a chunk of umbalakada on top. I walked into Uncle Sivalingam’s house one day, eating one. He said I was like my father, who would eat food sold anywhere on the street. I remember feeling vaguely proud, of being thought of as classless. And maybe more importantly, of being like my father.

Loft

At the very apex of Wattala House, accessed through a small spiral, iron staircase, is a small room with many windows. When we were desigining Wattala house together, we had meant it to be a loft room where you could close the rest of the world away with a trap door, and survey the land around the house. It looks interesting as you approach the house. Creates a long, narrow swathe of white wall  from roof to ground, smudged now here and there with the green of mould. Long windows, all round. Art-deco minaret. An atheist’s steeple. Silent pulpit where sermons can waft into the head. 

Like many a random childhood dream, it didn't exactly work out. The electrician didn't put in a connection for a fan (I remember him now, large and rotund, unruly hair and hirsute body like a somewhat gormless bear). I never did use it to hang out. Maybe it was too small a room to do anything with.  Now it is the Colombo version of Hatton's Lata Pata (junk) room full of odds and ends and bits of things that don't fit anywhere else Disassembled pieces of double beds. Now that I think of it, they're the skeleton's of trees  like bits of people, that survive over millenia. Bones. If I was there now, would the air smell different up there, if one stayed long enough?  Would birds come in and nest in the lattice-work above the windows if I didn’t make too much noise?

I wonder what I could do with the place. Fit in a table and a bean bag? Watch the back yard, watch who walks up and down Singha road. Watch uncle Bandula get drunk and start shouting at people on the road or at imaginary enemies.  Run my hands over the smooth ridges of the closed trapdoor, enjoy being away from the world, like when I’m wearing earphones.

Perhaps someday far off a child of mine

will explore, in the loft room, now that I am too old

too set in the matrix of adulthood

for play

Back from Home

The air and the cold is unfamiliar

upon my return.

The sameness of the houses

and the dull colours

remind me of my first trip to England.

The bike takes turns slowly and awkwardly

in my hands.

For a brief moment I wonder what side
I should ride on.

My face hurts with the cold,

All is dark and sharp and angular.

There has been no gradual fade from warm to cold,

from soft, muggy air to harsh and clear.

Only a jarring change.

(I prefer in-betweens, and slow fades

like how Christian Spain fades into

what used to be Muslim Spain and then to

Morocco, across the sea)

I try to remember Colombo,

the stickiness of sweat

 - between my fingers - in
a film across my face. Rain -
thunderous,
soporific thrum,
rustling impacts on wet,
glistening leaves,
saturated earth...
The trip home (home?) 

feels like a blur of memories

even when I was there I

had trouble grasping onto things

events happening so fast, so chaotic, so

without control

that I couldn't get a grip,

couldn't take a photograph
in my mind, put
things into any logical order or

into neat boxes
of wrong and right.
Ammi and Appa  are to the right of me, to

the left of me, below me and above
me, I try now to remember
moments of communication, 
common ground.

The conversations we had, the three of us
sitting in a solemn circle on the balcony,
(Appa tells me to be careful when I enter
because the parrots are feeding)
in the growing dark,
me slapping away mosquitoes, real and
imagined with one of appa's handkerchiefs
that I took off a rack

Appa tells me

how he had been brought down to Ragama

as a child

How his family came from Malaysia

the travels of his grand uncle

[censored]

ammi talks of how she and appa met, how her parents reacted, at first,
how they ended up in the same office,
just out of law college,

[censored]

Ammi is so apprehensive

about my impending

departure

About me being a ghost

That there is almost nothing that I can say

to help

Only inanities

Often I feel as if I have nothing to share
or maybe no time to share

no space for it in my head or theirs

The Colombo  lifestyle beckons seductively,

colours to see,

smells

to smell, not like 

this icy

city

(although, this early winter morning

in the Hague as I head to work, steam 

or smoke

rises slowly

from a building,

and the light is soft  

there is a spare, gentle beauty 

in the skeletons of trees

and the delicate sun.

Smell of manure slowly makes its way

through the cold, still air)

Insidious?

so many people, so poor, so
at beck and call, doormen who open doors,  people to

pack one's grocery bags, push one's elevator buttons  

drivers to drive....

(I remember looking at the way I was dressed, and looking at the way A was dressed,
how new my clothes were, how tattered his clothes were)

....cooks to cook.

The nostaligia and

displacement

(or at least the burning

edge of it)

will last only a few days

After which I will

re-submerge

into routine

back to the quotidian

out of the flow

of the jar and judder and sideways leap of

creative life

No warp no woof no deviation 

No colour no spark that does not fade

over the day

the teeth in the wind will drive away
all memory

of heat and dust
and moisture

(I

know

that some of this is man-

-made handmade by me the hand

maid of my own

dark mate) 
Its funny how I am two different men

in Colombo and The Hague

Back home my brain

is a storm

of multi-coloured sand

in my mouth and in the trees

the road and

in the sound of bees

here it is  

is a merry-go-round

faded grey

Is neither me?

Perhaps one place

throws into sharp relief the other.

Makes the cold keener on this side, thickens
the smoke and dust

on the other.

Trundling routine  vs chaos. Deafening silence vs cacophony.
Middle-class

mundane-
ity vs grotesque
disparity...

Perhaps
I’m just painting

two straw men

Perhaps being a stranger

in both places make me blind

to the gentle, pleasing

in-betweens 

(and oh the sky is beautiful

It reminds of those fleeting

moments at the edge of consciousness

drunk with music, alcohol, or emotion)

Perhaps instead of a dirge I need a love song

(I started reading Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return

to the Native Land and

was taken aback by his bitterness

did not feel like reading on)

Maybe be
like Frank McCourt who

could laugh

about his Limerick childhood

where his baby brother had to drink, instead of milk,

for lack of money, sugar water

given by a friendly barman.

Dip beneath the veil, feel

the face of everyday 

Enough Gemini.

Time to return,

Sagittarius.

Time to feel

the roundness of cobblestones. 
(A man in front whistles while

dragging a bag through sleet)

Through the hoof

on every cleat.

Road

An old woman

with unruly graying hair cradles

a bundle of wood,
long and twisted.

Telephone poles lie abandoned,
covered in weeds.

Boy swinginging a stick, a

worn towel wrapped
around his thin shoulders

like a shawl. A

little girl with a flowered skirt

pauses as she heads into a temple,

gazes at our bus.

Roof-tiles
in the old-fashioned

arched style,
troughs and peaks of

asymmetrical
aging curves.

The roads begin to wind
as we climb. Steep
side lanes
cut into the hillside and
disappear
into the trees.

Old man in white,
jowls bunched under moustache.

Half-made earthen steps
weave along the road

stony, wild.

Two dogs wrestle in the grass.

Roadside stalls
on the kadugannawa climb
have dangling
harsh bright
florescent lights.

The hillside falls away
below
The bus ahead is crowded, 
passengers struggling for
space and grip, I
feel uncomfortable, watching them
from our comfy seats.

Curtains are neatly tied
in the window
of a wooden shack.

Old poster fading on a tree trunk,

bright signs

stuck in paddy fields.

A tree like a crouching witch

with branches
like gnarled hands.

Bundles of rope
trussed neatly
in a row in a shop verandah.

Squad of orderly milk cans 

in the back of a truck.
Black dog 

resting his snout on cement floor.

In the back of a lorry, a 

boy sits
on crates of empties,

hands clasping the necks

of two bottles

Unhusked corn in piles.

A Jackfruit tree emerges

from the thatched roof

of a small hut

(glimpse of trunk
within).

Someone has used sticks and branches

to weigh down the tagaram roof

of a stall.

Jackfruit split

with ripeness, or a heavy fall,

innards barely visible.

Old fertilizer bags lie abandoned.

Men sitting on tree trunks
on the back of a
truck, one young

and talkative, another

old with white hair.

A child peeks

over the seat of a motorbike.

Vehicle graveyard,
out front a trailer lies tractor-
less, filled
with rusted junk.

Round scar
of a fallen limb on the bole of a tree

We eat at a place called Saruketha (fertile
paddy field)

I like the name,
although the devilled
cuttlefish is bland,

“mee kiri kamu!” (lets eat
buffalo curd!) on a sign

“Bulath vitak!” (betel leaf
bunches!)
on another.

Schoolgirls in pigtails.
Graying hair of a
man on a bicycle.   

A bed on the verandah of a

wattle and daub house

has a red sheet.

Fragments of a poster on a tree.

A tuk tuk driver leans back, foot near handle,

texting on his mobile.

White chest hair on a middle aged man,
his sarong tied high
on his belly.

Breadfruit leaves
turn yellow
on the ground.

House near the rail-tracks, walls
discolored
by time and dirt.

A bamboo grove,
young leaves spiky
and wild.

Old leaves
gather in clumps
on corrugated roofs.

Fuselage of an old van

near a garage. An

old woman

re-ties her waist-cloth.

watching the road.

Idle whip of a cow’s tail.
A thatched roof on stilts protects
an orderly pile of bricks,
there must be a kiln nearby. A
stray dog watches
the buses go by,
Drying clothes weigh a line into an awkward curve
Houses painted a fading lime green
and dusty pink.

A man sits by a pile of unhusked corn, his

blackened pot
ready for customers.

Another pot,
covered.

smoke rising.

AH

His lanky gauntness is omnipresent. Careworn grey trousers hanging loosely off his thin legs. So tall and so spare he could have been made out of wood. Hooked Roman nose  and missing teeth. An emperor who grew up stuck inside  the chicken coop of the mind. He works with the energy of a  demon (climbing,  chopping, fixing, digging...) and the precision  of a  machine, one of those people  for whom every knife-stroke, every step  lands perfectly.  He has a cognitive sharpness that almost cuts, deployed often  to track which cars and buses and vans he overtook. Daily he launches foul-mouthed illogical rants about politics, politicians, war and the cost of living.

When I was a kid, before “tuition class” or stuck in traffic along the grimy length of the airport road he used to tell me things...

Like when in his village,  there had been a dead body. Decomposed.  He had helped carry the cadaver,  the skin coming off in his hands. Had taken a small piece of  bone, given it to a drunken man at a tavern  and told him it was dried fish.  Told him to eat it.

About a soldier  who had been assigned to use heavy machinery in a field, a motor hoe or something. How he had been using it illegally  in another place to make some money, and how the heavy claw of the machine  had fallen back on him. Crushing him. AH and other soldiers had taken him to hospital. His head on AH's lap. Before he died he told AH that he was sad about his family, that he was thinking of his family.

And about his days driving a toddy lorry. I pictured one of the lumbering, ancient, rumbling, panting wooden-backed monsters  that ply the roads from the coast to the hills up and down. When they went to pick up the toddy one day, he drank so much he couldn’t reverse the lorry out of its parking spot. Showed me with his hands him repeatedly trying to put the lorry in gear. I pictured one of those tall gear shafts like the ones you see in TATA buses

He used to offer me plantains and mangoes and jackfruit. The mangoes would occasionally still bear the black debris from the cut of a sooty knife. Proffer them with an aggression and insistence that bordered on harassment, that may have been amusing, interesting in an old woman but almost a physical affront coming from a man. Words used like loose bullets uncontrolled. Occasionally taunting. Waiting for you to rise to the bait.

Back when he lived in Dummalasuriya we went down to AH’s house. Bathed in the river. AH in makeshift swimming trunks fashioned out of a knotted banyan-vest. Drank toddy out of a large one-and-a-half litre plastic coke bottle, till we were laughing uncontrollably. While my father lay content in an armchair on the verandah.  His wife made curried squid, tiny, digit-sized morsels speared with iratu (the stalks of coconut leaves) and a pollos (young jackfruit) curry, so thick with coconut milk  that the chunks disintegrated in my mouth like blocks of savoury cream.

Some years later, when she got aches and pains in her knees, AH used to complain  that when they were getting married, nobody told him. That she’d get aches and pains in her knees.

Clingendael

The wind has turned into an unruly monster

Shaking the trees, whipping

the bushes

I stall, occasionally,

like a seagull.

The sun is out,

glinting at the side of my spectacles

attracting brightly coloured

clothes, strollers,

babies

The light blurs my eyelashes

as I look up.

The light green of leaves

is turning an orange-

brown

Long Days

Back then
behind the bedrooms,
in the house-sized cut in the hill
that rose up to where the plant nursery was
there was a bed of strawberries
not the giants you get in the West
but small ones, wild and imperfect.
At dinner I used to like to crack open chicken bones
or chew the soft drum-stick ends and suck out
the thick savoury marrow.
Sometimes we used to get fresh cow’s milk
from the Cow Baas down the hill
It tasted so different from the powdered version,
especially if you let it cool,
and the filmy skin grew thick and tangible
on the surface.
Underneath its wooden floors
Hatton bungalow is criss-crossed by a series of deep drains
As a small child I’ve gotten into them and thought
maybe I could creep through.
Mysterious pipes from the bungalow,
emerge in the guava grove
heading down towards the lake
Tall sepia walls, whose corners disappear into darkness,
floor cold to the touch of slipper-less feet.
Musty smell of store-rooms.
Warped wood in the pantry floor.
From the children’s bedroom
there is also access through a missing ceiling board
into an attic-like space .
My mother used to write stories
about a pack of mice who used to live in the Lata Pata (junk) room
behind the cook’s bedroom
The Lata Pata room was always a place of mystery
full of random things
We used to spread talcum powder
on the floor of the lobby
until our feet slid and we would “skate”.
We never did manage to furnish Hatton house
they way it once must have been
but the sitting room was warm and
the shelves full of books
One day my parents
called-in a priest to look at the house
he followed the swinging of a cross
on a string
and dug up a small silver foot
washed it in a basin
within it my family says
were the ashes of human remains
it was a “Hooniyama”
Something placed there to ensure no person who set eyes on that bungalow
would get to purchase it
my mother says they bought the house without visiting it
and maybe that's why they got to buy it.
(Hatton was the reason we could not flee when the riots happened
all my parents savings were tied up in it)
I often wondered about this incident
How much of it is true
I remember vaguely
the image of the priest in his white smock
and the washing of the little metal foot
in a basin of water.
I used to walk down the stone steps in front,
next to the gnarled cypress tree
to the half moon shaped lawn
unruly grass
little anthills popping up everywhere on the periphery
stand at the edge and gaze over the greenness of the lake.
When tea is planted in estates
hills have furrows cut into them
burrowing all the way to the bottom
down which water can escape
slicing through ring-shaped ditches circling the hills
When I was a boy playing cops and robbers,
we used to scrabble through the twigs
until we found something vaguely pistol-shaped.
hide in the ditches, slide down the furrows.
I discovered
that the way to not get caught, shot
is not to move at all
to lie quietly in a ditch
and look at the sky
through the leaves
of tea bushes.
At night, after a day of playing
we used to bathe in hot water
triggering the wrath of a hundred maana-
grass scratches
combat-injuries sustained
during hours playing
on the hillsides
In the smooth tea bushes that look like curly hair from far away
The rasping serrated leaves
of maana bushes
on unplanted hills.
The slopes ranging down
from Hatton bungalow
to the lake
to the right of the crescent-shaped lawn
had guava trees terrace after terrace.
We used to spend hours on those trees
our bare soles
rubbing shiny spots of familiarity on the knobbly tree trunks
choosing just the right guava fruit
not too soggy after rain (they taste watery then)
not too soft and ripe
because they might have gone bad.
Occasionally we’d build a tree house
planks slotted into clefts in the larger guava trees
I used to be fascinated by the idea
of building something autonomous, that you could live in
somewhere to eat, safe from the rain
it felt like an earthy, tactile magic
And bonfires. We had bonfires
We used to thrust knobbly potatoes into the embers
and the ash covered wood
sometimes wrapped in foil, sometimes not
they would come out burned, blackened,
mostly inedible

There is a picture of me and Shehan on holiday in Hatton
we are chewing on sausages
stuck on sticks

It reminds me of those long days
full of play