The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [36]
We began to argue about what to see. Ramadhin wanted to visit the aquarium that had been built a few decades earlier. It was obviously something Mr. Fonseka had told him about. He was sullen about having to see the markets first. In any case we entered the narrow shops that sold seeds and needles, made coffins, and printed maps and pamphlets. Out on the street you could have the shape of your head read, your teeth pulled. A barber cut Cassius’s hair and poked a vicious pair of scissors quickly into his nose to clear away the possibility of any further hair in the nostrils of a twelve-year-old.
I was used to the lush chaos of Colombo’s Pettah market, that smell of sarong cloth being unfolded and cut (a throat-catching odour), and mangosteens, and rain-soaked paperbacks in a bookstall. Here was a sterner world, with fewer luxuries. There was no overripe fruit in the gutters. There were in fact no gutters. It was a dusty landscape, as if water had not been invented. The only liquid was the cup of dark tea offered to us by the carpet salesman, along with a delicious, permanently remembered almond sweet. Even if this was a harbour city, the air held hardly a particle of dampness. You had to look closely, for what might be buried away in a pocket—a petite vial of oil for a woman’s hair, folded within paper, or a chisel wrapped in oilcloth to protect its blade from the dust in the air.
We entered a concrete building at the edge of the sea. Ramadhin led the way through a maze of mostly subterranean tanks. The aquarium appeared deserted except for a number of garden eels from the Red Sea and a few colourless fish swimming in a foot of saltwater. Cassius and I climbed to another level, where there were taxidermic examples of marine life, lying in dust alongside whatever technical equipment was being stored—a hose, a small generator, a hand pump, a dustpan and brush. We gave the whole place five minutes and revisited all the stores we had been into, this time to say good-bye. The barber, who still had no other customers, gave me a head massage, pouring unknown oils into my hair.
We reached the wharf before the deadline. Out of a too-late courtesy we decided to wait for Mr. Daniels on the dock, Ramadhin wrapped up in a djellaba, and Cassius and I hugging ourselves in the brisk air coming from over the ocean. The barges rocked in the water, and we tried guessing which vessels were owned by pirates, for we had been told by a steward that piracy was common here. A cupped hand held up pearls. The afternoon’s catch of fish, strewn at our feet, more multicoloured than their indoor ancestors, sparkled whenever buckets of water were sloshed over them. The professions along this promontory belonged to the sea, and the merchants whose laughter and bartering surrounded us were the owners of the world. We realized we had seen just a small sliver of the city; we had only glanced through a keyhole into Arabia. We had missed the cisterns and wherever it was that Cain and Abel were buried, but it had been a day of intricate listening, of careful watching, all our conversations made up of gestures. The sky began to darken out at Steamer Point, or Tawahi, as the bargemen called it.
Finally we saw Mr. Daniels striding along the wharf. He was carrying a cumbersome plant in his arms, and was accompanied by two weak-looking men in white suits, each holding a miniature palm. He greeted us cheerfully—obviously he had not been too concerned, if at all, by our disappearance. The slight, moustached figures helping him were silent, and as one of them passed me the small palm, he wiped the sweat from his face, and winked, and smiled, and I saw it was Emily in men’s clothes. Beside her was a similarly disguised