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.

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