The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [46]
Over the years, I had come to know their parents well, a gentle pair who had brought up that very gentle son. The father was a biologist, and he always spoke about my uncle, “The Judge,” whenever he found himself forced to have a chat with me when no one else was around. I suppose my uncle and Ramadhin’s father were at about the same career level. Mr. Ramadhin, though, was a slightly incompetent man in terms of the real world (wrenches, breakfast, timetables), while his wife, also a biologist, organized everything and seemed to be content standing in the shadow he cast. Their life and their careers and their home were to be a ladder for their children to climb up on. And in my teens I wanted to spend as much time as I could in the quiet discipline and calm of their Mill Hill house. I was always there. Ramadhin’s illness, his heart trouble, had made them a cautious and quieter family than mine. They existed under a bell jar. I was at ease with them.
Now I was back in that very same landscape. And walking to the Ramadhins’ home after the funeral made me feel I was falling through branches we had climbed years earlier. The house, when I got there, looked smaller, and Mrs. Ramadhin looked frail. The wisps of white hair made her taut face more beautiful, more forgiving—for she had been a strict as well as a generous person to her children and to me. It was only Massi who could fight against her mother’s rules, as she did for a good part of her life.
“You stayed away too long, Michael. You stay away all the time.” The mother’s words were an arrow carefully pointed at me, before she came forward and let me enclose her in my arms. In the past, we had barely touched. “Mrs. R.,” I had called her all through my teenage years.
So once again I entered their home on Terracotta Road. A group of people were giving their condolences to the parents in the narrow hallway and then walking on towards the living room, where the sofa and the nest of side tables and the paintings were in the very same places they had been when I visited as a teenager. It was a time capsule of our youth—the small television set, the same portraits of Ramadhin’s grandparents in front of their home in Mutwal. The past his family had brought to this country would never be given up. But now there was an added picture on the mantelpiece, of Ramadhin in his graduation robes at Leeds University. The plumage did not suit him or disguise him. His face looked gaunt, as if he was under stress.
I had walked up close to it and was staring at him. Someone gripped my arm at the elbow, fingers pressing intentionally hard into the flesh, and I turned. It was Massi, and suddenly, almost too quickly, it felt we were shockingly close to each other. I had seen her at the chapel when she’d walked between her parents to sit in the front row and quickly bent her head down. She had not been in the receiving line in the hall.
“You came, Michael. I didn’t think you would come.”
“Why wouldn’t I?” Her warm, small hand touched my face, and then she was off to deal with others, to speak and nod to what was being said to her, or give a needed embrace. She was all I watched. I was looking for any sign of Ramadhin in her. There had never been much echo between them. He was large, had a lumbering body, while she was taut and quick. A “fast coterie,” he had written. They had the same colour hair, that was all. But I felt there must be something she now carried of