The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [50]
A month after his death, Ramadhin’s family received a consoling letter from Mr. Fonseka and they allowed me to read it, for he described our days on the Oronsay. He did say some polite words about me (and nothing about Cassius), and he spoke of seeing “a luminous academic curiosity” in Ramadhin. He wrote about how the two of them had discussed the histories of the various countries we had travelled past, and all the natural as opposed to the artificial harbours; how Aden had been one of the thirteen great pre-Islamic cities; how there was an ancestry of famous Muslim geographers who’d lived there before the age of the gunpowder empires. On and on Fonseka’s letter went, in a style that was still familiar to me almost twenty years later.
Fonseka’s passion for knowledge always had within it the added pleasure of his sharing it. It was the way I suppose Ramadhin was with the ten-year-old nephew he had tutored whom I had met at the funeral. Mr. Fonseka would not have known I was still in touch with the Ramadhin family, and I suppose I could have surprised him by going up to Sheffield with Massi to visit him. But I never did. She and I were busy most weekends. We were lovers again now, engaged to be married, with all of the formality that families who live abroad insist on. The weight of the tradition of exiles had fallen over us. Still, we should have skipped all of that, rented a car, and gone to see him. But I would have been shy of him at that stage in my life. I was a young writer and feared his response, even though I am sure he would have been courteous. It was after all Ramadhin who he must have assumed had the natural sensitivity and intelligence to be an artist. I do not believe those are necessary requisites, but I half believed it then.
I am still surprised it was Cassius and I who came out of that world and survived in the world of art. Cassius, who in his public persona insisted on using only his argumentative first name. I was more amiable, I had cleaned up my act, but Cassius took it on the road, scorning, snorting at the pooh-bahs of art and power. A few years after he had become well-known, his school in England, which he had hated and which had probably disliked him, asked him to donate a painting. He cabled back: “FUCK YA! STRONG LETTER FOLLOWS.” He was always one of the roughs. Whenever I heard of something outrageous and thrilling that Cassius had done, I simultaneously thought of Fonseka reading about it in the newspapers and sighing at the gulf that existed between fairness and art.
I should have gone to see him, our old guru of the hemp smoke. He would have revealed Ramadhin in a different way from how Massi did. But her family had been broken, and she and I were the link to mend it, or at least plaster over the uncertain situation of his death that had left all of them powerless in dealing with their grief. As well, our desires were fed by an earlier time, from that very early morning in our youth when she seemed painted by those shifting green branches. We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to loosen and untie.
Being sisterless and brotherless, I had behaved with Ramadhin and Massi as if they were my siblings. It was the kind of relationship one has only during one’s teens, as opposed to the kind of relationship with those we collide against when older—with whom we are more likely to change our lives.
So I thought.
Together the three of us had crossed those abstract and seemingly uncharted times that were the summer and winter holidays. We’d skulked around the universe of Mill Hill. At the cycle track we re-enacted great races—wobbling up the slope, charging down the incline to a sensational photo finish. In the afternoon we disappeared into some bijou in central London to watch a film. Our universe included Battersea Power Station, the Pelican Stairs in Wapping that led down into the Thames, the Croydon library, the Chelsea Public Baths, and Streatham Common, sloping from the High Road towards distant trees. (This was where Ramadhin found himself for a while on the last night of his life.)