The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [51]
SOMETIMES WE FIND OUR TRUE and inherent selves during youth. It is a recognition of something that at first is small within us, that we will grow into somehow. My shipboard nickname was “Mynah.” Almost my name but with a step into the air and a glimpse of some extra thing, like the slight swivel in their walk all birds have when they travel by land. Also it is an unofficial bird, and unreliable, its voice not fully trustworthy in spite of the range. At that time, I suppose, I was the mynah of the group, repeating whatever I overheard to the other two. Ramadhin gave it to me accidentally, and Cassius, recognizing its easy outgrowth from my name, started calling me that.
No one called me “Mynah” but the two friends I made on the Oronsay. Once I entered school in England, I was known only by my surname. But if I ever got a phone call and someone said “Mynah,” it could be only one of them.
As for Ramadhin’s own first name, I rarely used it, though I knew it. Does knowing give me permission to assume I understand most things about him? Do I have the right to imagine the processes of thought he went through as an adult? No. But as boys on that journey to England, looking out on the sea that seemed to contain nothing, we used to imagine complex plots and stories for ourselves.
Ramadhin’s heart. Ramadhin’s dog. Ramadhin’s sister. Ramadhin’s girl. It is only now that I see the various milestones in my life that connected the two of us. The dog, for instance. I still recall our playing with it on the narrow bunk bed during the brief time it was with us. And how it had at one moment come over to me quietly and fit its snout and jaws between my shoulder and neck like a violin. Its scared warmth. And then with Massi, our fitting together too, cautious and nervous as teenagers, and then quicker and more delirious at our discovery of each other after Ramadhin’s death, almost knowing we could not have come together without it.
Then there was the story of Ramadhin’s girl.
Her name was Heather Cave. And whatever was still unformed in her at the age of fourteen, he loved. It was as if he could see every possibility, though he must have also loved what she was at that moment, the way we might adore a puppy, a yearling, a beautiful boy who is not yet sexual. He would go to the Cave family’s flat in the city to coach her in geometry and algebra. They sat at a kitchen table. If it was sunny they would sometimes have a tutorial in the fenced garden that bordered the building. And during their last half-hour, as a little informal gift, he got her to speak of other things. He was surprised at her harsh judgements of her parents, the teachers she was bored by, and some “friends” who had tried to seduce her. Ramadhin had sat there stunned. She was young but not naive. In many ways, she was probably more worldly than he. And what was he? A too-innocent thirty-year-old, in the cocoon of that small immigrant community in London. He was not active or knowledgeable about the world around him. He was substitute teaching as well as tutoring. He read a good deal of geography and history. He kept in touch with Mr. Fonseka, who was in the north—there was supposedly a rarefied correspondence between them, according to his sister. So he listened to the Cave girl across the table, imagined the various spokes of her nature. Then went home.
Why didn’t he break the spell of that high-flown correspondence with Fonseka by mentioning her? But he could never have done that. Fonseka surely would have known how to sway him away from her. Although how much of a realist was he about teenage character that can be brutal beneath the veneer? No, it would have been better for him to have confided in Cassius. Or me.
On