Refugee

Paper and plastic strewn all over the rail tracks. A crumpled polythene bag curls over the rusty iron. There are power-lines overhead, taut and thin. Perhaps they are for the trains. Are the trains electric?  There is a flood-light on the struts of electric wires. It is weak and characterless against the still-light evening sky.

By contrast the small fire in the middle of our huddled group is full of life. Flickering, dying, reviving. Quiet crackling. The light dances gently on Hasan’s thin polythene raincoat.  He is is resting his head on his father’s knee. He is a sturdy, stocky, teenager. But the long walk and unrelenting cold has worn him out. He is curled up like a child. Dark hair and sharp nose. Eyes closed.  The edge of the dirty make-shift tent half covers Hasan’s back. Fuad, Hasan’s father, keeps his palm protectively on Hasan’s temple. Immobile. But a caress, nonetheless.  Fuad is bald, but his chin is covered in silver stubble. 

I don’t know the two men next to Fuad. In their late twenties, or early thirties.  The one nearest to Fuad has a sharp jaw, aquiline nose. The other has heavier features. He’d have looked almost menacing if he wasn’t clutching a worn, pink cotton hat.   There is an empty can of sardines next to the fire. The aroma of its remnants wafts upwards, mingling with the smell of smoke, reminding us of our hunger.  My stomach clenches. The plastic water bottle is now half empty.

Beyond us, the rest of our camp ranges haphazardly across the railway lines. Men standing in small groups. A young woman tracks the stumbling explorations of a toddler with tense eyes. Three older women sit side by side on a rail-track. Their scarves are a colourful contrast to the dreary beige of our surroundings.   One of them has found an umbrella, and clutches it to ward off the light, miserable drizzle. By the side of a shallow wall near the station, the group of young boys are already asleep. I had watched them during our long dreary walk. Faiz, Amir, and… my mind goes blank. Who’s the third? Sayed? Yes, that’s right.. All three ranging between twelve and fourteen. Skinny, scruffy, with long limbs that did not seem to obey them as they walked, or sat. Nervous eyes.

But now in the fading light they are three bundles of cloth.  Two huddled up in an almost infant-like pose. The third, probably the lanky Amir, stretched out like a long, weather-beaten bag. Its hard to tell one from the other, for their heads are  covered by their make-shift blankets. I look closer. The “blankets” are layers of random bits of cloth. I haven’t talked to them, other than a brief word or two.  They keep to themselves, and also avoid the older men.  They pretend to be tough, sitting with with wide-spread legs near the cooking fire, shoulders as broad as possible, spitting onto the path with a confidence belied by their eyes… I remember watching Faiz when he thought he wasn’t being watched. Squatting like a little child, struggling to open the cover of a packet of food. Scrabbling, hesitant fingers. Boys who should still be with their mother. Or playing outside their houses. 

Opposite them, across the tracks, another boy bathes using a small plastic bucket.  He pours water into the bucket from a weather-beaten iron drum. He is surrounded by rubble, as if this station had been bombed in a war. Behind him is an ancient railway carriage, gone entirely to rust. I see more people arrive at the encampment. A middle-aged, serious faced man walks at the head of the group. On his shoulders is a small, sleepy looking girl. One of her eyes is obscured by a lock of hair. Behind him a woman walks in a white, blue and pink scarf. She is clutching the hand of a girl of perhaps seven or eight, in oversize pants and a sweater fit for someone twice her size.  

The struts of the electric lines repeat one after the other into the distance. Likes the sketches my  art teacher used to draw in school. To teach us about perspective, and how objects in the distance look smaller than those nearby. My body aches from the long walk. It is hard to keep my eyes open, but I don’t want to head to my torn polythene bedding. The sharp edges of the stony ground push through the thin fabric, keeps me awake. Even when my body becomes accustomed to the hard ground, my mind is like a machine. Running. Running. Like a film. Like it is also a carriage on a track. The past comes into view unstoppable. Full of colour and smell and it is so real I tense so hard I cannot breath.  I try to breath-in my bedding for distraction. Dig the lengthening nail on my index finger deep into the skin of my palm.

Samantakuta

The wind here is endless.

It whistles. Pokes its icy snout into my crevices.  

Whispers past the iron railings stuck into my side. I shouldn’t care. But personally, I like the sun. It is my great misfortune to have spent my whole life (well, at least the past 12,000 years. Bit of a blur before that) on a cold and foggy mountain-top.

Below my bulbous, bushy, bulk the mountain falls away in a vertiginous swoop. After about a hundred meters straight down the hillside slopes outward into a gentler incline.  A line of steps snakes down ridges like a long white jagged scar. Through thick green forest. Brightly dressed devotees like ants, swarming up wards.  They start climbing in the middle of the night. So you hardly ever see the mountain without them. Overall, if you were a bird flying above me, being whipped about gusts, you’d see something like a giant god-sized mossy ant-hill.

I’d introduce myself.

But it’s complicated. I’m so many things.

And yet, mostly I’m not any of those things.

Not in the way people think, anyway.

You’d think I’d remember exactly when I attained boulder-hood, but one of the problems of being thousands years old is that you tend to forget things. You’d also think I have interesting thoughts, having seen so many monsoons pass me by. You’d be wrong. It turns out I don’t have any of those long thoughts people talk of. Just slow ones. About damp. Or noise.

Damn bells everywhere…

There is a shack about fifteen feet below me. That’s where the pilgrims stop to catch a breath, listen to the pounding of their hearts in their head. Order a cup of strong tea with lots of milk and sugar. The “walls” of the shack are polythene sheets, translucent in their thinness, whipping about in the pre-dawn wind. The corrugated roofing is weighed down by a few bags of rubble, and old, bent, iron piping.  

There’s always a dog or two or seven in the tea shack. Pint-sized mongrel types of murky, distinctly diverse ancestry. Coats a dozen shades of dirty brown with hints of faded white. Curled up near the feet of a pilgrim. Ernest, foxy snouts. Absorbing the warmth of company through a furtive, snuffling, proximity. Inching closer if you move away. They don’t have names. Well, not human ones. Though one of the tea-shack boys calls the smallest one Citizen. A big name for such a small puppy.

The mongrels are the only animals that come here now. In the old days lone elephants would wonder up the mountain.  Placing their tree-trunk legs slowly and carefully on the steep inclines. Grasp a bunch of leaves on a branch with the delicate, prehensile tip of a trunk. Haul it down. Unhurried. Until it rips off the tree.  Curve the trunk mouth-wards. Chew, thoughtfully. Gravely. They haven’t been here for a hundred and fifty years. They were all shot when the coffee plantations were planted. Then the coffee died….

But I digress. What I mean to say, was…

I like the tea-shack. Practical.

Warm.

Not holy at all.

Which brings us to the crux. Or the nub. The essence.

The problem, as it were, is that I’m Holy.

Well, not exactly me, but the oversized, slightly cartoonish footprint on me. Its on my… well, you wouldn’t understand boulder anatomy, would you, so lets just say on me. You can hardly see it now. It’s covered by so much jeweled bric-a-brac & brass tat. But, as an Englishman (I remember him. He had a face like a morose Great Dane) wrote 200 years ago, “its resemblance to the impression of a human foot is very rude indeed. It is an oblong, five foot four inches long, and two feet seven inches wide in the widest part, which is over the toes”.

 And also the mountain.

That’s Holy too.

And its all… how can I put it…

Different types of holy to different people.  Sort of an all-purpose spiritual buffet.

People have been setting up myriad worshipful whatnots on the mountain and me for thousands of years. In recent times, I’ve been wearing a temple as shiny as it is tacky. Used to be wood, this tutelary top-hat. A few centuries years ago. With carvings. But now it’s all concrete & brass railings. Multi-coloured flappy flag bits. Makes my surface itch, all this kitsch. I guess it could be worse. It used to be silver umbrellas at one point in the 1600s.

Every few hundred years one king or chieftain or local Big Man loses and another wins and the flags and umbrellas and knickknacks on the mountaintop change. The ancient (well, middle-aged, I’d say) chronicles change tack promptly, like a clipper when the wind turns, say things about the old boss like  "…. he adopted a false faith. He placed miscreant ascetics of false faith on the Sumanakuta to take for themselves all the profit accruing therefrom" etc. Then about the new boss “[h]e commanded the adherents of the false faith from now onwards not to do so, and charged the sons of the [insert new deity] to carry out in the right way the many sacrificial ceremonies which should be performed there”. Etc etc.

Hereabouts, the chronicles tend to agree with whoever is running the show at the moment.

Have done so for thousands of years.

Still do.

Shiva’s Peak.

Adams Peak.

Pico De Adam.

St. Thomas’s Peak,

Siri Pada, Ascent to heaven…

So many names for one mountain. There’s barely any deity around who doesn’t seem to have some sort of lien or right of way here.  Some call my mountain…  

(Yes yes I don’t own it but it as much mine as yours. More mine I think, if you consider who came here first. Technically I’m part of the mountain. Until I roll off, that is. Or am quarried to build condominiums.)

…any way, some call the mountain Saman Kande, the mountain of Saman. Who, you may ask, is Saman? Aha. Saman the deity of the wilderness. Saman the lord of the mountain fastness. You can find his statues in dewale shrines, where Hindu gods are worshiped, often inside a Buddhist temple. But some people think he was a local chieftain thousands of years ago. I remember his name on the lips of pilgrims for more than two millennia.  He’s not alone, though. A thousand five hundred year ago, a Chinese monk wrote “when Buddha came to this country, wishing to transform the wicked nagas, by his supernatural power he planted one foot at the north of the royal city, and the other on the top of a mountain”. Yes. My mountain. Almost a thousand years later, an itinerant Moroccan explorer “My only desire in coming to this island was, to visit the blessed foot of our forefather Adam”. Apparently Adam stood on me on one foot for ages as an act of atonement. Though alternatively, it could’ve been for a lark. Or because he’d made some sort of bet. You can never tell.  

A Venetian merchant who visited me on the advice of Kublai Khan wrote “they say that on this mountain is the sepulchre of Adam our first parent; at least that is what the Saracens say. But the Idolaters say that it is the sepulchre of SAGAMONI BORCAN, before whose time there were no idols. Five centuries ago a Chinese voyager claimed that the footprint on me was made by P’an-ku, the primordial man. A hundred years afterwards the Portuguese believed that it was that of St. Thomas or of an Ethiopian eunuch, the treasurer of Candace, Queen of the Ethiopians. Two centuries ago: “In the middle of the mountain called Sivanolipatham, three rivers rise out of Sivan’s foot…”.  Apparently Lord Shiva danced on me, and left his footprint.

My personal favorite is the version of Moses of Chorene, the Patriarch of Armenia. That the footprint was made by the devil. Ibidem Satanae lapsum narrant – Satan fell there. I don’t remember seeing him, though. Or is it her?

Anyway, you get the picture. The air here is thick with prayer. Layer upon layer of incense-smoke, wafting fragrance of warm oil, supplications, entreaties, curses, petitions to a dozen different omnipotent omniscient almighties. Like sediment packed densely over millennia. Packed so tight sometimes it feels hard to draw a breath. So thick it’s hard to see very clearly.

Speaking of which, it’s still too early for the mist to clear, this morning. Hints of sun on the horizon, though. Clouds gathering in the folds of the mountain.  I can feel the weight of the pilgrims on me, their clothing wrapped around them. Shivering. Queuing to worship the foot, ring the bell. The quick-soft patter of mongrel-paws. Officious in a way that only small, owner-less dogs can be. The heft of a herd of tourists, weighed down by cameras, lenses, selfie-sticks, backpacks. The soles of their sports-shoes scuffing my skin.

Its not that I mind the company. People have climbed me for so long I cannot imagine life without them.  Like earnest ants, trudging and winding up the slopes. Even before there were footpaths. Before there were steps. Before Alexander the great (actually a man of quite average height, if memory serves…) had chains set into the slopes. Travellers. Pilgrims. Poor people. Rich people. Thin people. Fat people (well, not many fat people, actually. Not in the old days, anyway. Quite steep, these slopes.). I just don’t understand the way they think. Many, full of faith in the giant footprint of their lord and god. Yet full of doubt about the beliefs of the idolaters. The infidels. The worshippers of the false gods.  And the occasional apostate.

Who climbed the same steps.  

Who made the same

obeisance before

the same cleft

in my side.

Odd, that.

A year of not writing

Too much traffic on this road

Not enough time

and stillness

for words to grow

like fungi. Delicate-limbed

plants so thin they are

translucent

In Rioja in a walled town in a cellar I had some wine

that had  complicated whorls

of musty-vegetal-sweetness

in its nose

because of tiny creatures

that lived on the skins

of its grapes, flown

in by fruit-flies to

grow in the ridged

nooks, crannies-

of aging barrel-

staves

Brettanomyces

Winemakers kill the little creatures

by bottling the wines after

sterile filtration

terrible phrase

like a Coetzee novel

Months of sanitized office walls

sterile and filtered, have left tall, white

canyons, an endless

canvas strait-jacket

in my head

Meandering  camel-paths have become

asphalted-over

No weaving caravans

from Xi’an, where the king of Qin 
had his terracotta golems, 

through Kashgar and Samarkand
Mongol, Turkic and Persian  

to Palmyrene 
caravanserai, souqs 
at Aleppo,

Constantinople...

No ships embark

from the Moluccan archipelago

or Jiaozhi, beyond 
the Golden Chersonese
clinging tight

to the coasts of

Malabar and Coromandel
past the tip of Serendib

to the Aksum empire or

through the  Bab-el-mandeb

up the Red Sea

Only jet-planes now

and straight

colourless contrails

in the sky

Ulysses

I like white noise

the company

of strangers

Oddly freeing

Terra nullius tabula

rasa, no

stain

yet on the veiny map of roads

rivers thoughts

fights dis-

appearance

into the familiar

I can wait

let the words

wash

over me

like

music

Quayside

The posts by the quayside are rusting. They used to, I think, be painted green. But now  they are mostly rust coloured, with hints of its former greenness.  On the flagstones are fragments of nut-shells, remnants of cigarettes, smalls oases of weed popping up in between the stones. The debris at the corner of the pier have become old friends that I greet everyday. An old tractor tire half out of the water. Rocks half covered in moss. Plastic bottle moving with the waves, battering rhythmically against the rocks.

  

Our boat is placed well away from the smelliness of the fishing boats, on the other side of the pier. We sit there in the evenings. With the gentle “gloop gloop…swoosh…gloop gloop…swoosh” of the water against the pier. The peaceful humming thrum of a boat a little ways away.  I liked to look at the masts, ropes leading down to furled sails, half-visible, half-silhouetted against the evening sky.  Soft light with only a hint of sun.  It was one of the few times I could relax. Where I didn’t have to talk. Struggle to communicate.

The harbor water changed depending on the wind. Sometimes it was like polished old glass. Surface smooth with gentle dips and flaws.  Sometimes it was skin with goosebumps. Sometimes a tablecloth where an errant dish had pushed up the surface in rolls.  When the water fell against gently sloped concrete, instead of the “gloop” there’d be a sound almost like the crash of tiny breaker.  A miniature “swoosh” and swirl of bubbles. Like the sound of a paddle slicing into water and pushing its way through.   

I look, half-envious, at the people with boats of their own.  Though boats scared me. They terrified me. The weight of responsibility of piloting them. Boats were also like people. They’ve histories like people. Personalities like people.  They aged like people.  Sometimes you think a boat is immobile, but if you watch long enough, they move.  In a slow rhythm that doesn’t entirely match the movements of the boat next to it. I like objects that are like people.

A Gardia Costiera boat always moored near us. No. CP22022. F carefully avoided ever looking at it. Sometimes a boat from the Aeronautica Militaire would moor as well.  Lord knows what they did in these quite waters. Sometimes one of the big ships would start up. Or a big ferry like the Paolo Veronese. Getting ready to load up its trucks and move on. And I would sit and listen to the deep deep base thrum of the engines. Almost waiting for a resonance within me. Like the thumping you feel inside when you’re in a club. There was a response…but more subtle than my response to a beat. It wasn’t a thumping  in my chest.  It was a heightening of the senses.  As if something momentous was just about to happen. Military menace of machinery in the air. 

The Veronese is beautiful. The clean lines of her hull only briefly marred by the gushing exit of water through small holes near the waterline.  Llifeboats crafted in white and tan at the sides, and a smaller one at the rear. Two sleek funnels on the two sides. Two masts. Its rear doors into her hold like a giant maw with trucks lined-up waiting to drive in. Her engine is guttural. Steady. Unlike the rise in frequency of the sound of an approaching car, or the receding drone of one going away along the quay. Or the nervous zip and clatter of motor bikes.

Flight

Years ago my mother wrote short stories about mice
who lived in the store room in Hatton.
It was magical yet familiar,
a dream set in all the intricate details,
smells and feel of home.
I was in the stories, and Appa and Ammi, Akki, 
Saras akka, my cousin Shehan 
and Subramaniam aatha the cook.
When I read them now the memories flood
back like a warm, inchoate blanket,
a winter duvet where the years
have gnawed little rips
and the occasional tear.
Sometimes I wonder
whether those days
were ever real.
Whether the vague terrors of childhood
have been smoothed over
with the velvet dust of years.
I try to grasp again the feel 
of cat’s whiskers on the back of my hand,
the smell of morning in Hatton,
as if nothing in the landscape had ever been touched.
Complex multi-layered bouquet
of crushed guava leaf,
thrill of chlorophyll like perfume...
as a kid, I remember smelling
it for minutes while in a tree.
Smoky crackle of twigs in the fireplace.
Uneven squeak of floorboards.
Scarred cane wood settees in the sitting room,
furniture we’ve had from before the riots of ‘83
smooth curves jarred by occasional old wounds 
exposing the innards of ivory-yellow wood.
Books on Marx and Engels and Mao,
next to a row of frayed Reader’s Digests,
some from the 70s.
I remember finding a biography of Neruda,
didn’t even know who he was
but was fascinated by the word sketches 
of his conquests of un-named women
in harvest fields.
Smiling, subservient faces of estate workers
with whom I couldn’t speak, my Tamil too halting. 
Even back then I knew vaguely of their grotesque poverty,
having to drink tea from a hollowed out half coconut
gristle still spiky on the outer shell,
breakfast a morsel of unleavened roti bread,
livened only by a bite of nai miris. 
Shallow walls of the tortoise enclosure,
residents trundling
in a constrained oval
jaws chewing in slow motion.
They laid an egg once, but nothing came of it.
Sterile white oval,
small work of flawed magic.
Five years later, 
In Rajagiriyra we lived upstairs
above the Bandaranaike’s.
I used to slide down 
the banisters of those stairs
for hours.
Dreaming up a dozen lives that I
thought I led. 
Always been like that. Always will be.
Living in my head.
Living in worlds 
I made for myself. 
Ten years later,  after we moved to Wattala
at lunch I used to read books, TV 
blaring in the background
and appa and ammi nearby, 
The smell of sambol, mallung salad, fried eggplant... 
would drift in the air, mingle with 
updates from Saras akka about food prices, 
our driver Appuhamy’s lectures on politics,
dog grunts and the smoothness of cats
lurking hopefully on chairs, waiting
for a piece of fish-bone with watchful eyes.
Now, in my own apartment in Clingendael
(watched by a fat Dutch pigeon 
on the balcony rail)
I read my mother’s poems.
She has that knack of catching colours
A painter’s eye.
Clear window that cuts through
mundane daily updates, stilted
language of emails.
I wish talking to family was always like this
Clarity and warmth in colour.
I remember as a child,
when left alone
I used to feel their absence
like I had been moved away from a hearth
like someone had tamped down the central heating.
Now, I’ve been away for so long
I have forgotten how
proximity floods the mind
with the fullness of warm silences.
A few days after I got married,
Krystyna and I had a chat.
She said when I arrived at the poruwa
surrounded by family, with my parents,
I had looked strong.
Different from how I usually look.   
The memory of it tightens my throat,
made me wonder whether being atomized 
had robbed me.
Whether flight from the cocoon
had made me a man but killed the boy
carved sharp lines
but emptied my veins
of some essence I can’t define.
Singha Road to San Francisco,
my family is an uneven web
splayed across the world.
They are like friends I made in early childhood,
chosen by proximity, not personality or chemistry.
But like childhood friends they have seen me
when I was a seed.
Before I put out leaf and grew tall
and bent and green and twisted.
Knew me  when my bones
weren’t hardened ,
when I was knobbly kneed.
They fit me like we’ve
spent time together 
in a womb
or a sardine can.
They are not my size and shape
but the concave in my body fits the convex in theirs.
The kinks in my limbs and the pointed ends of my mind
fit into familiar groves in theirs.
After some years, and a few thousand miles,
the groves and kinks have become unfamiliar
silted over by change and age
and exposure to  different
kinds of sunlight 
and wind.
Email and voices on a telephone, record
only imperfectly
this inching apart
like the blue-grey tint on a Hiace van's rear window
making the landscape on the other side
seem obscure, unreal.
Once you meet in a year or 
two, the differences
in face and skin and timbre
of voice 
and mind
are as disorienting
as  walking out of a dark cinema into daylight
or a shift in the tarmac beneath your feet
That’s it I think. The ground
beneath your feet.
When I see appa and ammi 
somewhere other than in Wattala
they seem strangely out of place
like people shipped in by time machine. 
One a Peter Pan in a world that doesn’t understand
the need for fantasy or crocodiles with clocks in their stomachs,
or the joy of crunching lettuce.
One a silent weight
of cigarette smoke and man-smell
blunt, true, scarred and brittle as old iron,
quiet as an empty room with someone
in a chair in the shadows.
While getting a haircut
I searched in the mirror  
for appa's and ammi's features.
The giant forehead perhaps.
Maybe the beginnings of my father’s nose
Akki has a big forehead too, 
although hers is round
and mine is oddly oblong.
Laabi writes of a nomad
who confuses one city with another,
one continent with another
gets tangled in tongues,  
of pounding on the bars of separation... 
No wonder emails don’t feel real.
They’re like a yoghurt cup on a string,
taken with you through
the wardrobe
in those Narnia books.
I wonder whether writing down
these thoughts will change things,
like breaking an ants nest to see within
or capturing an insect
to stick it on a cork screen.
But I don’t care.
I have no other way of holding on to those days
memories that wrinkle and deform
like fresh basil leaves overnight.
Intangible as evening light
beginning to fade
on a dirt road.