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.