The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [20]
I brought Cassius and Ramadhin to meet him. He had become curious about them, and he made me tell him of our adventures on the ship. He beguiled them as well, especially Ramadhin. Mr. Fonseka seemed to draw forth an assurance or a calming quality from the books he read. He’d gaze into an unimaginable distance (one could almost see the dates flying off the calendar) and quote lines written in stone or papyrus. I suppose he remembered these things to clarify his own opinion, like a man buttoning up his own sweater to give warmth just to himself. Mr. Fonseka would not be a wealthy man. And it would be a spare life he would be certain to lead as a schoolteacher in some urban location. But he had a serenity that came with the choice of the life he wanted to live. And this serenity and certainty I have seen only among those who have the armour of books close by.
I am aware of the pathos and the irony that come with such a portrait. All those foxed Penguin editions of Orwell and Gissing and the translations of Lucretius with their purple borders that he was bringing with him. He must have believed it would be a humble but good life for an Asian living in England, where something like his Latin grammar could be a distinguishing sword.
I wonder what happened to him. Every few years, whenever I remember, I will look up any reference to Fonseka in a library. I do know that Ramadhin kept in touch with him during his early years in England. But I did not. Though I did realize that people like Mr. Fonseka came before us like innocent knights in a more dangerous time, and on the very same path we ourselves were taking now, and at every step there were no doubt the same lessons, not poems, to learn brutally by heart, just as there was the discovery of the good and cheap Indian restaurant in Lewisham, and the similar opening up and sealing of blue aerogrammes to Ceylon and later to Sri Lanka, and the same slights and insults and embarrassments over the pronouncing of the letter v and our rushed manner of speaking, and most of all the difficulty of entrance, and then perhaps a modest acceptance and ease in some similar cabinlike flat.
I think about Mr. Fonseka at those English schools wearing his buttoned sweater to protect himself from English weather, and wonder how long he stayed there, and if he did really stay “forever.” Or whether in the end he could no longer survive it, even though for him it was “the centre of culture,” and instead returned home on an Air Lanka flight that took only two-thirds of a day, to begin again, teaching in a place like Nugegoda. London returned. Were all those memorized paragraphs and stanzas of the European canon he brought back the equivalent of a coil of hemp or a bottle of river water? Did he adapt them or translate them, insist on teaching them in a village school, on a blackboard in the sunlight, the rough call of forest birds screeching nearby? Some idea of order at Nugegoda?
WE WERE BY NOW FULLY KNOWLEDGEABLE about most locations on the ship—from the path air ducts took in their journey away from the turbine propellers, to how I could slip into the fish preparation room (by crawling through a trolley exit), because I liked to watch the fish butchers work. Once I balanced with Cassius on the narrow struts above the false ceiling of the ballroom in order to look down at the dancing humans. It was midnight. In six hours, according to our schedules, dead poultry would be carried from the “cold room” to the kitchens.
We had discovered the door to the armoury had a buggered