The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [18]
Some mornings in Boralesgamuwa, I used to wake early and make my way through the dark, spacious bungalow until I came to Narayan’s door. It was not yet six o’clock. I waited until he came out, tugging his sarong tighter. He’d nod to me, and within a couple of minutes we’d be walking quickly and in silence across the wet grass. He was a very tall man, and I was a boy of eight or nine. Both of us were barefoot. We approached the wooden shack at the foot of the garden. When we were inside, Narayan lit a stump of candle and then crouched with the yellow light and pulled the cord that burst the generator into life.
So my days began with the muffled shaking and banging of this creature that gave off the delicious smell of petrol and smoke. The habits and weaknesses of the generator, circa 1944, were understood only by Narayan. Gradually he calmed it and we’d go into the open air, and in the last of the darkness, I’d see lights go on haltingly all over my uncle’s house.
The two of us walked through a gate onto the High Level Road. A few stores were already open, each lit by a single bulb. At Jinadasa’s we bought egg hoppers, and ate them in the middle of the almost deserted street, cups of tea at our feet. Bullock carts heaved by, creaking, their drivers and even the bullocks half asleep. I always joined Narayan for this dawn meal after he awakened the generator. Breakfast with him on the High Level Road was not to be missed, even though it meant I would have to consume another, more official breakfast with the family an hour or two later. But it was almost heroic to walk with Narayan in the dissolving dark, greeting the waking merchants, watching him bend to light his beedi on a piece of hemp rope by the cigarette stall.
Narayan and the cook, Gunepala, were my constant companions when I was a child, and I probably spent more time with them than with my family and learned much from them. I watched Narayan loosen the blades from a lawn mower in order to sharpen them, or oil the chain on his bicycle tenderly with his open palm. Whenever we were in Galle, Narayan and Gunepala and I would climb down the ramparts to the sea and swim out so they could fish on the reef for dinner. Late in the evening I’d be found asleep at the foot of my ayah’s bed and have to be carried by my uncle to my room. Gunepala, who could be bitter and short-tempered, was a perfectionist. I’d watch him pick out any questionable food from a boiling pot with his callused fingers and fling it ten feet away into the flower beds—a chicken bone or an overripe thakkali, which would be eaten instantly by the rice hounds that hovered about, knowing this habit of his. Gunepala argued with everyone—shopkeepers, lottery ticket salesmen, inquisitive policemen—but he was aware of a universe invisible to the rest of us. As he cooked he whistled a variety of birdcalls rarely heard in the city, familiar to him from his childhood. No one else had that particular focus on what was or could be audible to us. One afternoon he woke me from a deep sleep, took me by the hand, and made me lie down beside some bullock manure on the driveway that had been there for several hours. He pulled me right down beside it and made me listen to the insects inside the shit, consuming this feast and tunnelling from one end of the feces to the other. In his spare time he taught me alternative verses to popular bailas that were full of obscenities, swearing me not to repeat them, as they referred to well-known gentry.
Narayan and Gunepala were my essential and affectionate guides during that unformed stage of my life, and in some way they made me question the world I supposedly belonged to. They opened doors for me into another world. When I left the country at the age of eleven, I grieved most over losing them. A thousand years later, I came upon the novels of the Indian writer R. K. Narayan in