• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 277 0

a London bookstore. I bought every one and imagined they were by my never forgotten friend Narayan. I saw his face behind the sentences, imagined his tall body sitting at a humble desk by his small bedroom window, knocking off a chapter about Malgudi before being called by my aunt to do something or other. “The streets would be quite dark when I set out to the river for my ablutions, except for the municipal lamps which flickered (if they had not run out of oil) here and there in our street…. All along the way I had my well-defined encounters. The milkman, starting on his rounds, driving ahead of him a puny white cow, greeted me respectfully and asked, ‘What is the time, master?’—a question I allowed to die without a reply as I carried no watch…. The watchman at the Taluk office called from beneath his rug, ‘Is that you?’—the only question which deserved a reply. ‘Yes, it’s me,’ I always said and passed on.”

I knew my friend had perceived such details on our morning walks along the High Level Road. I knew the bullock cart driver, I knew the asthmatic who ran the cigarette stall.

AND THEN, ONE DAY, I SMELLED burning hemp on the ship. For a moment I stood still, then moved towards a staircase where it was stronger, hesitated about whether to go down or up, then climbed the stairs. The smell was coming from a corridor on D level. I stopped where it seemed strongest, got on my knees, and sniffed at the inch of crack under the metal door. I knocked quietly.

“Yes?”

I went in.

Sitting at a desk was a gentle-looking man. The room had a porthole. It was open, and the smoke from a rope whose end was burning seemed to follow a path over the man’s shoulder and out the porthole. “Yes?” he asked again.

“I like the smell. I miss it.”

He smiled at me and gestured to a space on his bed where I could sit. He pulled open a drawer and brought out a coil of rope a yard long. It was the same sort of hemp rope that hung slowly burning outside the cigarette stalls in Bambalapitiya or the Pettah market, anywhere in the city, really, where you lit the single smoke you had just bought there; or, if you were running and wanted to cause a disturbance, you used the end of the burning coil to light the fuse of a firecracker.

“I know I shall miss it too,” he said. “And other things. Kothamalli. Balsam. I have such things in my suitcase. For I am leaving forever.” He looked away for a moment. It was as if he had said it aloud to himself for the first time.

“What is your name?”

“Michael,” I said.

“If you are lonely, Michael, you can always come here.”

I nodded, then slipped out and closed the door behind me.

His name was Mr. Fonseka and he was travelling to England to be a teacher. I would visit him every few days. He knew passages from all kinds of books he could recite by heart, and he sat at his desk all day wondering about them, thinking what he could say about them. I knew scarcely a thing about the world of literature, but he welcomed me with unusual and interesting stories, stopping abruptly in mid-tale and saying that someday I should find out what happened after that. “You will like it, I think. Perhaps he will find the eagle.” Or, “They will escape the maze with the help of someone they are about to meet….” Often, during the night, while stalking the adult world with Ramadhin and Cassius, I’d attempt to add to the bare bones of an adventure Mr. Fonseka had left unfinished.

He was gracious, with his quietness. When he spoke, he was tentative and languid. Even then I understood his rareness by the pace of his gestures. He stood up only when it was essential, as if he were a sick cat. He was not used to public effort, even though he was now going to be a part of a public world as a teacher of literature and history in England.

I tried to coax him up on deck a few times, but his porthole and what he could see through it seemed enough nature for him. With his books, his burning rope, some bottled Kelani River water, as well as a few family photographs, he had no need to leave his time capsule. I would visit that smoky room if the