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By Root 254 0

” she had said. And in that hour I took the first steps back into Massi’s life. The two of us walked to the station and our pace slowed as we spoke. We entered total darkness where the road bordered a soccer field, and it felt we were whispering in an unlit corner of a stage. We talked mostly about her. She already knew enough about me, my brief, surprising career that had taken me to North America, and resulted in my leaving her world. (“I didn’t think you would come.” “You stay away all the time.”) We excavated the missing years. I had hardly been in touch, even with Ramadhin. I sent an occasional postcard that located where I was, nothing much more than that. There was a lot to discover about what she and her brother had been doing.

“Do you know of a person named Heather Cave?” she asked.

“No. Should I? Who is she?” I imagined some person I might have run into in America or Canada.

“Apparently Ramadhin knew her.”

She went on to say there had been no convincing explanation for the circumstances of Ramadhin’s death. He had been found with his heart stopped, a knife beside him. That was all. He had gone into the darkness of one of the communal gardens in the city, near the girl’s flat. Massi told me he was supposedly obsessed with her, someone he had been tutoring. But when Massi looked into it, there was only one girl, fourteen years old, Heather Cave, he gave lessons to. If she was the one Ramadhin was enamoured of, he would have had an overwhelming guilt that must have filled him like dark ink.

She shook her head and turned away from the subject.

She said she did not believe her brother’s existence in England had been happy; she felt he would have been more content with a career and a home in Colombo.

Every immigrant family, it seems, has someone who does not belong in the new country they have come to. It feels like permanent exile to that one brother or wife who cannot stand a silent fate in Boston or London or Melbourne. I’ve met many who remain haunted by the persistent ghost of an earlier place. And it is true that Ramadhin’s life would have been happier in the more casual and less public world of Colombo. He had no professional ambition, as Massi did and, as she suspected, I did. He was the more gradual one, the more concerned one, who learned what was important at his own pace. I told her I still wondered how he had managed to put up with Cassius and me on that voyage to England. She was nodding, smiling now, and then asked, “Have you seen him? I read about him every so often.”

“Remember we told you once that you should look him up?”

We began to laugh. At one time, Ramadhin and I had tried to convince Massi that Cassius would be the perfect person for her to marry.

“Maybe I should … maybe I still could.” She was kicking at the wet leaves in front of her, and had put her arm through mine. I thought about my other missing friend. The last time I had heard about Cassius was when I met an actress from Sri Lanka who knew him when they were teenagers in England. She spoke of how he took her on a date, very early in the morning, to a golf course. He brought along a couple of old clubs, a few balls, and they climbed over the gate and wandered on the course, Cassius smoking a joint and lecturing her on the greatness of Nietzsche before he attempted to seduce her on one of the greens.

At the station we confirmed the time of the train, then went into the night café under the railway bridge and sat there barely speaking, looking at each other across the Formica.

I never categorized Massi as Ramadhin’s sister. They seemed too distinctly themselves. She had an eager spirit. One mentioned a possibility and she met it, like the next line of a song. She was someone people in another era would have called “a pistol.” That is how Mr. Mazappa or Miss Lasqueti would have described her. But she was inward and hesitant this night in the almost empty cafeteria by the train station. There was an older couple there, who had also been at the funeral and reception, but they kept to themselves. I needed Ramadhin there, with us.