Extravagant Strangers, page 30
now awftah fifteen years mi fall out a fayvah
Inglan is a bitch
dere’s no escapin’ it
Inglan is a bitch
dere’s no runnin’ whey fram it
mi know dem have work, work in abundant
yet still, dem mek mi redundant
now, at fifty-five mi gettin’ quite ol’
yet still, dem sen’ mi fi goh draw dole
Inglan is a bitch
dere’s no escapin’ it
Inglan is a bitch fi true
is whey wi a goh dhu ’bout it?
Romesh Gunesekera
[1954–]
Romesh Gunesekera was born into a distinguished family in Sri Lanka. When he was twelve years old, he left for the Philippines and four years later moved to Liverpool to board at a small public school. He later attended Liverpool University, where he studied English and philosophy. In 1993 he published a collection of stories entitled Monkfish Moon. Like Gunesekera himself, the characters in these stories are caught between the worlds of their colonial homelands and England.
Gunesekera’s first novel, Reef(1994), written with a Writer’s Bursary from the Arts Council of Great Britain, is the moving tale of a young boy named Triton who works for a marine biologist in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Triton begins as an innocent, impressionable servant, but by the end of the book Sri Lanka is in the midst of political upheaval and Triton and his master have moved to London, where Triton eventually establishes his own restaurant. Through a rich, sensuous and often humorous narrative, Gunesekera depicts Triton’s emotional growth and disillusionment. Reef won the Yorkshire Post’s Best First Work Award, and was short-listed for the 1994 Booker Prize.
Gunesekera has two daughters and currently works in the London headquarters of the British Council.
The following extract from Reef addresses the step-by-step method by which assimilation into English society takes place. Gunesekera wishes us to understand that the process of becoming English is one fraught with danger. The slow inevitability of accepting that one stands at the head of a ‘line of bedraggled, cosmopolitan itinerants’ is lyrically evoked.
Strandline
In London, Mister Salgado settled us into an apartment near Gloucester Road and immediately started work at his institute. It rained continuously in those first months, dribbling down the sides of the building and darkening the wintry sky. The rain seemed to denude the trees and shrink the earth outside our window. I stayed indoors most of the time with the television on. Mister Salgado didn’t have much time to show me anything. We didn’t go anywhere until the following spring, when he arranged a visit to Wales where a colleague of his had a cottage to rent.
There was a pebble beach at the bottom of the cliff near the cottage. When the tide retreated, the shingle gave way to muddy sand and revealed the debris of a whole new world to me: Irish moss, moon jelly, sea kelp, razor-clams and cockle-shells, sand dollars and frisbees, blue nylon rope and dead sea urchins. In the evenings, when I walked along the path of crushed, purple-ringed mussel-shells and grey whelks, I would hear the sea birds cry, plaintive calls of cormorants and black-tipped herring-gulls as sad as our uprooted, overshadowed lives. Then the northern sun would find its prism and the sky would flare into an incandescent sunset above the oil refinery on the other side of the estuary; petrochemicals stained the air in mauve and pink as deliciously as the Tropic of Capricorn off our coral-spangled south coast back home. The sea shimmering between the black humps of barnacled rocks, mullioned with gold bladder-wrack like beached whales, thickened into a great beast reaching landward, snuffling and gurgling. The sky would redden, the earth redden, the sea redden. In pockmarked, marooned rock pools speckled hermit-crabs and rubbery, red sea anemones dug in; limpets and periwinkles and bubble weed held fast waiting for the tide. Thin, furry tongues flickered out of their lidded shells, casting for the slightest light in the eddies of cool water.
I asked Mister Salgado, ‘Do all the oceans flow one into the other? Is it the same sea here as back home?’
‘Maybe.’ He shrugged. ‘The earth has spun with its real stars under a beautiful blue robe ever since the beginning of time. Now as the coral disappears, there will be nothing but sea and we will all return to it.’
The sea in our loins. A tear-drop for an island. A spinning blue globule for a planet. Salt. A wound.
Back home that April, in 1971, the first of the insurgencies erupted in a frenzy of gunfire and small explosions. Bands of zealous young guerrillas roamed the villages and townships staking out their place in a crude unending cortège. Thousands were killed in the reprisals. The earth of a generation was forever cauterized. ‘Our civilizations are so frail,’ Mister Salgado said, reading the news reports of ghastly beheadings on the beach. But these were only precursors of the staggering brutality that came, wave after wave, in the decades that followed: the suffocating infernos, the burning necklaces, flaming molten rings of fire; the Reign of Terror, abductions, disappearances and the crimes of ideology; this suppurating ethnic war. The bodies would roll again and again in the surf, they would be washed in by the tide and be beached by the dozen. The lives of brothers, sisters, men and women, lovers, fathers and mothers and children would be blighted time and again, unremembered.
But as we walked up the sheep-hill together he would only say, ‘She could have been here, you know. Plucking mushrooms out of the earth, or tying a knot in the long grass.’ He would hold my arm and step over the puddles on the pewter rocks. ‘Look at the bracken rippling between the heather. Here even the wind weeps.’
In our Victorian London home, I would simmer a packet of green flageolets soaked in cold water for six hours; I would wait for him to spill another sentence or two from his head and mark one day from the next.
His job at the institute proved short-lived. ‘Another country running out of money,’ he said, nurturing his own tight-lipped regression. Back home when he had told his assistants that the south-coast project had been suspended, Wijetunga had gone crazy. He had threatened to blow up the bungalow. ‘We can do it,’ he had shrieked, shaking a clenched fist. No messing, boyo. But here, when it came to his turn, Mister Salgado took the news as another simple fact of life.
He found another, more modest job with a local education authority. ‘It’s not what you do every day, but the thoughts that you live with that matter,’ he would tell me, tapping his head with his finger. ‘That, after all, is the sum total of your life in the end.’ I would light the gas fire in the sitting-room and bring out the beer.
‘So, why did we come here then?’ I asked. ‘Like refugees?’
‘We came to see and learn,’ he said, parting the net curtains and staring out at a line of closely pollarded trees. ‘Remember?’
But are we not all refugees from something? Whether we stay or go or return, we all need refuge from the world beyond our fingertips at some time. When I was asked by a woman at the pub, ‘Have you come from Africa, away from that wicked Amin?’ I said, ‘No, I am an explorer on a voyage of discovery,’ as I imagined my Mister Salgado would have replied. The smoke was thick and heavy like a cloud of yeast spread everywhere. She laughed, touching my arm and moving closer in the dark. A warm Shetland jumper. A slack but yielding skin with patchouli behind her ears. I was learning that human history is always a story of somebody’s diaspora: a struggle between those who expel, repel or curtail – possess, divide and rule – and those who keep the flame alive from night to night, mouth to mouth, enlarging the world with each flick of a tongue.
Every May I brought out our summer clothes with their bygone labels – Batik Boutique, CoolMan of Colpetty – and replenished the spice-racks in the larder. I would try to imagine where I would be, and he, the coming winter when the snow might fall for Christmas and Norfolk turkeys would brown in native kitchens: we would move to yet another short-let property. Mister Salgado’s hair turned grey from the temples upward and he began to wear tinted spectacles. Finally, in ’76, he said it was time to settle down. He bought a maisonette in Earls Court. There was a magnolia tree in the garden. We learned to sit silently in big, brown chairs and watch the creamy flowers peel, petal by petal, under a red sun sinking somewhere in Wiltshire.
I read all Mister Salgado’s books, one by one, over the years. There must have been a thousand books in the sitting-room by the end, each a doorway leading somewhere I had never been before. And even after I had read all of them, each time I looked I would find something new. A play of light and shadow; something flitting in and out of a story I knew by heart. New books came every week. After years of tracking his books and after thousands of pages read and reread, I knew instinctively where he would put the newcomers, as if we had both attuned our own inner shelving to a common frame out of the things we read, separately, in our time together. We never spoke about it, but I am sure he also constructed a kind of syllabus for me to follow. He would leave particular books in particular places: on the toilet roll or on top of a pile of his clothes or balanced precariously on the edge of a table with a teacup on top, knowing I would tidy them away and, as I did so, would dip in and be captivated: The Wishing Well, Ginipettiya, The Island. I am sure he wanted me to read these books, but I don’t know whether he knew that I read all his other books as well; all his boxed but boundless realities.
I went to classes and other libraries, night and day, for almost all the years we spent in London together; broke all the old taboos and slowly freed myself from the demons of our past: what is over is over forever, I thought.
‘Why is it so much less frightening here,’ I asked him, ‘even on the darkest night?’
‘It’s your imagination,’ he said. ‘It is not yet poisoned in this place.’ As if we each had an inner threshold that had to be breached before our surroundings could torment us.
One day I showed him a newspaper report about a symposium on Man and Coral that had taken place. ‘You should have been there,’ I said. ‘Presiding over it all.’
He looked wistful. ‘It was a kind of obsession before, you know.’
‘But other people now, at last, all over the world seem to share that obsession …’
‘You remember, all one ocean, no? The debris of one mind floats to another. The same little polyp grows the idea in another head.’ He smiled and touched my head. ‘But these gatherings are full of people who see the world in a different way now. They carry a lot of heavy equipment, you know. Suntan oil. Scuba tanks. They are only concerned with the how, not the why. I belong to another world. Even Darwin searched his desk for a pen, more than the seabed, you know. He relied on reports, talk, gossip. A tallowline. He looked into himself. In our minds we have swum in the same sea. Do you understand? An imagined world.’
The one time I did swim out to Mister Salgado’s real reef, back home, I was frightened by its exuberance. The shallow water seethed with creatures. Flickering eyes, whirling tails, fish of a hundred colours darting and digging, sea snakes, sea-slugs, tentacles sprouting and grasping everywhere. It was a jungle of writhing shapes, magnified and distorted, growing at every move, looming out of the unknown, startling in its hidden brilliance. Suspended in the most primal of sensations, I slowly began to see that everything was perpetually devouring its surroundings. I swam into a sea of sound; my hoarse breathing suddenly punctuated by clicking and clattering, the crunching of fish feeding on the white tips of golden staghorn. My own fingertips seemed to whiten before me as trigger-fish, angel-fish, tiger-fish, tetrons, electrons and sandstone puffer-fish swirled around me, ever hungry.
Mister Salgado shook his head. ‘I should have done something of my own with that bay. I used to think that in a month or two, the next year, I would have a chance to turn the whole bay into a sanctuary. A marine park. I used to plan it in my head: how I’d build a jetty, a safe marina for little blue glass-bottomed boats, some outriggers with red sails, and then a sort of floating restaurant at one end. You could have produced your finest chilli crab there, you know, and the best stuffed sea-cucumbers. Just think of it: a row of silver tureens with red crab-claws in black bean sauce, yellow rice and squid in red wine, a roasted red snapper as big as your arm, shark fin and fried seaweed. It would have been a temple to your gastronomic god, no? I thought of it like a ring, a circular platform with the sea in the middle. We could have farmed for the table and nurtured rare breeds for the wild. A centre to study our prehistory. We could have shown the world something then, something really fabulous. What a waste.’
‘Let’s do it here,’ I said. ‘Let’s open a restaurant here, in London.’
‘That’s for you to do,’ he said. ‘Some day, for yourself.’
He bought the red Volkswagen about that time and taught me to drive. We motored all over the country. We would fill up the tank on a Sunday morning, and drive for miles visiting every historic house, garden, park and museum within a day’s circuit. ‘The Cook’s Tour’ he called it with a happy smile, and everywhere explained to me the origins of each artefact we came across. ‘The urge to build, to transform nature, to make something out of nothing is universal. But to conserve, to protect, to care for the past is something we have to learn,’ he would say.
One cold, wet afternoon we came back to discover a small snackbar at the end of our road up for sale. Mister Salgado said, ‘Here’s your chance. Make it come true.’ He invested the last of his savings in it. I painted it the colours of our tropical sea. Bought some wicker chairs and a blackboard for the menu. I put coloured lights outside and bucket lanterns inside. It was ready to grow. Mister Salgado beamed.
Then, in the summer of 1983, mobs went on the rampage in Colombo. We saw pictures of young men, who looked no different from me, going berserk on what could have been our main road. The rampant violence made the television news night after night for weeks. There had been nothing like it when trouble had broken out before, when books had been burned and the first skirmishes had started. Even during the insurgency of ’71, the news had come only in drifts, distanced. But this time images of cruelty, the birth of a war, flickered on the screens across the world as it happened. I remembered my fervent schoolmaster: his wobbly, black bicycle with its rust-eaten chain-guard, the schoolbook he always carried with him and the black umbrella that would bloom in the warm rain. I had found him in a ditch on the edge of our rice-field, that unsettled month which ended with me coming to Mister Salgado’s house. His legs had been broken by a bunch of older boys who used to huddle in a hut in the schoolyard and chant the slogans of a shrinking world.
At the end of the summer, out of the blue one day, Tippy telephoned Mister Salgado. He was changing planes at Heathrow, heading for New York to do some deal. He said he got our number from Directory Enquiries; Tippy knew how things worked all over the world. He said it was wartime now, back home. ‘Buggers are playing hell.’ He talked about the political shenanigans, the posturing and the big money that was there to be made as always out of big trouble. ‘Big bucks, boy,’ he said. ‘Big bloody bucks.’ Right at the end he mentioned Nili. He said she was in a sanatorium off the Galle Road. She was on her own. The business with Robert had ended soon after we had left. He had gone back to the States. Eventually she had started a venture of her own: a guest house for tourists. It had done well. But then during the violence of the summer, a mob had been tipped off that Danton Chidambaram and another Tamil family had been given shelter there by Nili. Their own homes had been gutted. She had hidden the two families upstairs and scolded the louts who came after them. The next night a mob had come with cans of kerosene and set fire to the place. There had been wild dancing in the street. She went to pieces. ‘In a mess, men. Hopeless. You know how it is, machang … killing herself now. She has no one, really.’
Mister Salgado put the phone down and pressed his fingers to his temples. He repeated what Tippy had said to him. He told me he had to go and see her. ‘I must go back.’
I had once asked her advice about a dish I was making. She had shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘You are the master now, the master of cooking!’ I didn’t tell my Mister Salgado that. Instead I said, ‘It’s been too many years. So much has happened.’ I modelled my voice on his as I had always wanted to, but I knew I could not stop him. I should not.
‘You know, Triton,’ he said at the end, ‘we are only what we remember, nothing more … all we have is the memory of what we have done or not done; whom we might have touched, even for a moment …’ His eyes were swollen with folds of dark skin under and over each eye. I knew he was going to leave me and he would never come back. I would remain and finally have to learn to live on my own. Only then did it dawn on me that this might be what I wanted deep down inside. What perhaps I had always wanted. The nights would be long at the Earls Court snack shop with its line of bedraggled, cosmopolitan itinerants. But they were the people I had to attend to: my future. My life would become a dream of musky hair, smoky bars and garish neon eyes. I would learn to talk and joke and entertain, to perfect the swagger of one who has found his vocation and, at last, a place to call his own. The snack shop would one day turn into a restaurant and I into a restaurateur. It was the only way I could succeed: without a past, without a name, without Ranjan Salgado standing by my side.
On a crisp cloudless Sunday morning, I drove him to the airport. At the check-in counter, while searching for his ticket, he came across his spare keys. ‘Here, you’d better have these,’ he said and handed them to me. A couple of hours later he flew out, after a glimmer of hope in a faraway house of sorrow.
Kazuo Ishiguro
[1954–]
Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan. He left in 1960, when his father, a scientist working for the British government, was transferred to England. The move was meant to be temporary, but the family never returned to Japan. Ishiguro’s formal education took place in Britain, where he attended a boys’ grammar school in Surrey and then the University of Kent at Canterbury, from where he received a BA in English and philosophy in 1978. Ishiguro was a community worker for the Renfrew Social Work Department before taking an MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. Thereafter, he was employed as a social worker for one year.
