George Kandy craned his neck and stared into the spear-shaped branches crisscrossing above them. It was different with number eleven than it had been with the first ten: it was taking longer. The first, not counting the mender’s daughter by the sluice, was a Ralahami’s daughter from Maspota who bit his wrist when they started, leaving a welt like a zipper trail. With the second, the eldest daughter of the Ralahami of Mahakeliya, he pressed his forearms into the damp dirt on either side of her face, too far for her to touch when she began turning her head back and forth, eyes closed, lips opened, teeth clenched. The beads around her neck shook like a boy boasting with a sack of marbles. Was she thrashing or dreaming or reaching to kiss him? George decided to kiss numbers three, four, five, six, and seven to hold them in place. He kissed hard. Two tried to suck back their own lips, their fine-lined eyes bulging with sudden, real shock, as if this, a full mouth kiss, was the true outrage of what was being done to them. One of them kissed back with a hurried gulping mouth, a knowing mouth. She was a dark girl from Rambawewa whose father had explained over sweets and tea and betel and cigarettes that she was actually fair as milk. Such a devout girl, she had gone to temple at noon and not waited for the servant to bring the parasol because she wanted to make puja before the chief monk took his nap. A grandmother’s bridal portrait was shown; the girl was said to be her very picture and even though the photograph paper was blooming mould flowers, the fairness was indisputable, no? Robert and Arthur sipped their tea and considered the photograph and the sunlight upon the verandah, wondering why then every uncovered thing wasn’t teaplucker black. Fair as milk in a tar-pot. George also studied the photo and then glanced at the girl who had earlier entered the room, as every engagement prospect did, with her eyes fixed high and distant as if she alone could see the jewel spark atop some temple spire halfway across the island. George asked his grandfather to have his uncle ask her father if he could walk to temple too: if someone could show him the way.
Almost always he’d asked to see the village temple; sometimes he asked to see the paddy. Whenever he was refused, George ate everything on every platter before him. One time he asked to play cricket with the girl’s brother and cousins. Never again. George was bowled on the second ball and said he was not allowed to field in his suit. He had to wait with the younger boys on one side of the wicket while on the other the prospective bride waited behind a group of girl-cousins loud like babbler birds. After that, he only asked to see whatever it was the girl’s father boasted about first: whether the thriving paddy or the temple’s shining new bell, the new audience room or parapet wall or dining hall, the village water tank that, in this miraculous thriving place, was only ever broken from having to hold too much.
For the bridal parents, the boy’s request was a high offence to the way things had always been done, the way things were to be done, but why stop now? They had already agreed to receive a prospective groom from a village where the walauwa people were said to be pyre upon pyre of bloody and bad omens and the villagers themselves layabout tinder, a prospective groom who came calling in dark modern suit and loud modern shoes, whose family asked for no perches but only a stretched engagement because of the boy’s pending studies abroad, a prospective groom whose good name, Kandy, was a rogue’s open outrage against holiness and fate, whose father was said to be serving the British at Peradeniya and otherwise would have conducted this visit himself but instead left the highest duty a father owes his son to a throatless grandfather and bug-eyed uncle and sent them here in a motorcar that had gained and immediately ruled the village with its gleaming and roaring, surpassing the best of all possible dowries. All this had already been agreed to without even looking at the boy’s horoscope: not allowing a supervised walk this far into things would have been as high-born and backward as racing their motorcar with a garlanded bullock.
And so the fathers ignored their wives burning beside them and would later try to argue What harm they were only children and meantime made a show of staring threats at their daughters before releasing them—threats to behave as unassailably as they’d been raised to behave; threats to behave just modern enough to seem right for someday riding in a motorcar. Fathers’ guilt became tyrants’ commands to the chosen escorts—older brothers, head servants, and, if necessary, unmarried, unmarriageable aunts. Commands that George eventually answered, after he and she and escort had walked out of walauwa hearing, after first asking for only five minutes alone so they could speak plainly, truly, to see what there could be between them. He’d ask while pulling something out of his father-stuffed pocket, something wonderfully heavy or miraculously cold or shiny or delicate. Meanwhile, the girl, who had been warned to say nothing while beyond her mother’s hearing, stared daggers in vain at the distracted escort as George dragged her into the never-so-dark trees.
On the second drive, this one going south, they had started at Galagedera, whose walauwa family kept a tusker in a clearing. The Ralahami said the elephant was royal caste, just ask the mahout; in fact such stories he could tell of the days of the kings, when this fellow’s ancestors had carried princes to their weddings and to wars and then on to the water tanks of vanquished princes. Etc. George asked who could show him the way to the stall and he had the eighth on a bed of succulent leaves and dung flies while her older brother stood some hundred paces away, studying a stack of Japanese baseball cards. Ten minutes later, the three of them walked back to the walauwa. George and his dungy knees were in front, the brother was next, his head down, looking at the cards before he had to hide them. Coming up behind, stiff as a sudden old woman, the prospective bride called after her brother, demanding half of his stack—six for not telling that he’d made her go with the fat fellow and six for not telling what the fat fellow had just done to her. But before they could argue the terms someone else called after them— the mahout, smiling to be given the rest of the cards for his own forgetting. George watched and listened and could have helped. He had many more of the cards in his jacket pocket. His father had brought him a box full when he had come and told his grandfather and uncle that Japanese planes with sun-spotted wings had dropped bombs on Colombo and Negombo. George had wondered if they’d dropped these cards too. He had stacks at home; he had enough for the mahout and the brother and the girl who had even moved a little herself but she could always say it was the dung flies and sharp grass. But none of that mattered now—there were three more walauwas to visit before they turned home again.
The ninth girl was tall and slender and said to be the fastest ever born in Mawatagama. He couldn’t get her down so he bulked her against a cinnamon tree. She kept pushing his face away with her bangle-wrapped forearm and so he didn’t kiss this one and afterwards she slipped down and sobbed once, then sprang and boxed him hard and ran through the brush onto the laneway home. George ran after her, slower by bulk and breathless from the shot but running still because now he owed her that much symmetry. The servant girl ran too, slower because she had concealed what George had given her in the waistband of her skirt and did not want to drop it, and when they reached the walauwa first, second, and third, the girl’s parents and Robert and Arthur were watching from the verandah, having come out at the noise of villagers who had cheered the girl on to victory. The mother was horrified. She sent the servant back to find any dropped bangles and earrings and called her daughter into the house, who was otherwise standing in front of her future father-in-law heaving like a laundry woman. She was taken by the ear to a back room and slapped past sobbing. Left there while George and Robert and Arthur accepted apologies and went, she fell asleep, and waking found the servant girl on her knees beside the cot, asking for forgiveness, and bargaining. Her hands were cupped to show the filigreed locket George had given her to wait on the laneway. Its inset picture was of two pale girls leaning head-to-head and smiling.
Number ten, a born-to-sob beauty from Barandara, had also right away refused, pulling back when George took her wrist, as if she already knew, and George wondered and liked wondering if perhaps he was becoming legend after only nine times, but thinking legend was nothing like its making. He pulled her wrist harder and the girl began crying for her chaperone-aunty to help, an aunty who, despite being fair, full cheeked, and well born herself, no man would marry because it was known in the village that she had been born with only one kidney. The aunty gave her niece the lacquered fan that George had gifted and told her not to cry, and that she should never mention this to anyone, and the girl sniffed, “Mention what, Kidney Aunty?” and her aunty told her never mind, only wait on the far side of the lane and pass the time by singing the pretty song they’d been practising before the visit. And then, for the first time, George Kandy was the one pulled into the trees. Meanwhile, in the walauwa, Robert asked the parents why the escort had been called Kidney Niece when she was told to walk with George and the daughter down the laneway. The hosts, hands wringing at the prospect of this burden lifted, smiled at Arthur and agreed with Robert that Thusitha, her true name, was very pretty. Robert pressed the question. After some crab-wise talking, the Ralahami said that it was his niece’s pet name, that it came from the shape of a birthmark, and further that her father the Ralahami’s younger brother was a rubber man in Malacca who had asked him to see about his daughter’s prospects. She was already twenty-plus. Arthur was more than thirty. The Ralahamis discussed their horoscopes, Arthur’s and Thusitha’s, until they could hear George stomping up the steps, the aunty and daughter following behind him singing sweetly like they were going to cry. Arthur watched her enter, marvelling at the prospect of a kidney shape born to be found and kissed. George asked for a cool drink and the girl asked to lie down and then Thusitha, who was George’s tenth, was introduced to Arthur, who would be her second.
When it happened over number eleven, George wondered why it hadn’t happened before. More than one night a week in the walauwa, his nose bled while he slept. In the morning he would cover the bleed marks with pillows and blankets and toys—not because he was ashamed but because he was waiting. He was trying to fill a whole sheet with his noseblood because then they’d tell his father, who’d have to stay, for once, past the latest unwrapping. But taut over number eleven, the only daughter of the Ralahami of Ridigama, the pressure at the back of George’s neck from holding back the drip was taking more of his attention than the thing itself. The blood was dropping down his throat and he could taste it, hard and thick and sweet and unceasing, an iron tang like motorcars. George dropped his chin and down his nose the blood dripped and the girl screamed as it pattered onto her forehead and across her cheek and her neck, four dark red marks on a dark red rope. Now she looked like a child-bride playing with pottu but she had already been made otherwise than a child and he wouldn’t stop now because he was already going and even though she started calling for the brother, who came and so had to forfeit the chrome lighter shaped like a Mississippi steamboat that George had promised him. Or so George thought, in this way innocent about what it meant to give and take promises. The brother crashed through the brush and evaded a droopy sentry stand of palm trees to grab him off his sister, seething “What kind of moment was this?” He forced open George’s fist and took the lighter, smashed his nose, and smeared some of George’s blood on his own shirt to show he had been defending the family name. He dragged his screaming sister home, the lighter hot in his other hand, which uselessly threatened and waved off the absolutely feasting audience of villagers emerging suddenly and everywhere like flies on uncovered meat.
Sam stood outside his son’s room, in light the colour of hasty tea, lamplight turned low to wake no one else. As if the whole walauwa wouldn’t be listening while he took George away. He’d sent in the driver, moments before, and now was waiting with remembering.
“Sir,” whispered the driver, parting the bedroom curtain and coming into the hallway.
“What is it, Joseph?”
“Sir, I cannot make him come.”
“Why not?”
“Sir, he says he is waiting for you to take him.”
But those first few nights of his temple life had been a rage of their own remembering, of the soothing his father had given him that early early morning when they’d left the hut and he’d been carried to a cart and they had gone from the village, of how he would have asked—but why would a son have to ask his father holding him as he was, proud and promising as he was—why no branch was broken as they passed the village boundary? Of course they were coming home.
“Tell him I am waiting in the car and that we are going. We are going now. And tell him that if he does not come straight away”— Sam suddenly raised his voice—“tell him that for what he has done, believe it, I will leave him in this village and make it that he never leaves here again.”
Father and son reached the rest-stop at Ambepussa in bright upcountry morning. They parked a short dash away from the crowd—fruit sellers and letter writers, club-footed beggarmen and spice-fingered ailment doctors, tour guides, marriage brokers, rickshaw men, coat-pocket gemologists, moneychangers—all of whom were already sweating just to stand around and call each other machang mali yakka until there was nothing left to smoke or chew. Who would only move, but move like lightning, a smiling mob of lighting, at a waving hand extended from a motorcar window. Sam almost extended his own, just to be able to wave them off when they came. Otherwise, there was nothing to do but begin, begin to be outraged. Not just by the boy’s shameful, dirty things, or by the treasure Sam had had to send to the father in Ridigama, or even by his being delayed a day on his way back to Colombo to pick up Mountbatten’s ivory and special cases. But, instead, begin to be outraged as the father: no more the outraged son.
“Right. And so I am to believe you wear that suit I brought you to be engaged in as your sleeping clothes? Or was it that you heard me arrive the night before and listened to our talking and dressed like this for the morning? What do you think should be done for the girl? For her family? For your own? I should give your clothes to those beggars over there and strip you down to nothing. See how you’ll do in the world when you’re no one’s son with nothing.”
Sam swallowed and wondered how long before the driver returned with water. His throat was so dry to talk like this, to spend like this. To spend like this, it seemed, in vain.
“You turn and face me when I am speaking to you,” Sam commanded. “Turn. Turn and face your father or George I will turn you I promise that.” His last words came out low and harder than he had expected or thought possible with his own blood: low and hard like harbour-talking. And the boy did turn, right away, the whites of his eyes showing more than only fear to hear his father speak this way, to him.
They drank the water the driver brought and then Sam laid two cigarettes across Joseph’s cupped palm and sent him off. A full glass of water and still Sam’s throat was drought dirt. And now, the boy was staring at him with heavy eyes and a clamped mouth, impassive, already victorious but for his eyebrows, which were softer, indecisive.
“Your Siya and Arthur-uncle have told me what they were told by the girl’s father, but you will tell me yourself. If you want to do as men do, you must answer as men do.”
George said nothing.
“You will tell me before we go on to Colombo, to the harbour. Otherwise—”
“Otherwise?”
“You don’t ask me otherwise. I am your father, and I will …”
“Yes, Appachchi?”
Sam was exhausted. He didn’t think he’d ever spoken so many such words. Family words, words that demanded of him a greater carry than any Pettah threat or harbour deal. Words with nothing behind them but everything that was his own.
“I have enough cigarettes to keep the driver over there until he smokes his lips black. We will wait here until you tell.”
“Ha.”
“Mokatha?”
“You will wait? Ha. You, who won’t even wait in the room for me to say thank you for all your shiny rubbish? You, who has never waited? Ammi used to say—”
“You call what I have given you shiny rubbish?”
“I never asked for it.”
“Ah. Right. You never asked for the Dinky cars and you never asked for the new slingshot. You never asked for anything! Right? RIGHT, GEORGE? Shall I tell you what I never asked for?”
“I think the only thing you ever asked for was a car accident.”
Sam struck him across the cheek, his signet ring catching skin. He raised his hand for more if the boy dared to say her name again. But George buried his head in his lap, his hands covering his face, shaking. Sam turned to see if he could catch Joseph’s eye. And while he looked for his driver he had to listen to no man seated beside him but to a broken boy, sobbing. A poor boy. His. Beside him. His. A poor boy. He was too. But was he ever to be more? Sam’s lips pursed and blew, pursed and blew, louder and louder pursed and blew breaths of putha but before he could say dear son loud enough to be heard George sat up looking like some kind of madman, his nose all reddish-brown mud, tears streaking down his ring-welted cheeks. He was shaking, foaming, with laughter.
“You never asked for a son, right? You never asked! BUT CAN YOU GUESS HOW MANY I’M GOING TO HAVE? CAN YOU GUESS?”
The father never gave the son the victory of guessing how many. The son never gave the father the victory of asking where they were going, which became, after they reached Colombo harbour and George was shaved to skin and changed into a soldier’s uniform while Sam smoked a cigarette, where he was being sent. After a band of Italian POWs were taken off the ship—squinting, muttering prayers and curses and head-jerking challenges to anyone who held their eyes—George was taken on with a scrum of Indian troops. The gangplank was pulled up. Sam turned and went, removing George’s horoscope leaf from his coat pocket and tossing it into the harbour water, where it floated and faded unto nothing in a yellow foam that was bobbing and lapping with food wrappers and cigarette butts and, this morning, an unexpected litter of mottled pups.