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By Root 289 0

that evening there must have been a breeze in the hold, or was it the roll of the sea? Behind us were dark leaves of pencil trees and a black calabash. We had water bowls on the table with cut flowers in them, and across from me was my cousin, her arms resting on the table, her features so eager in the flickering light. On one side of her was Mr. Nevil. His giant hands that once dismantled ships reached for a bowl and shook it gently, so its flower rolled in the water under the swaying light of the lamp. He was, as always, at ease in his silence, unconcerned that no one was talking to him. Emily leaned away from him to whisper to the waif. The girl thought for a while and then whispered her own secret into the ear of Emily.

It was a meal none of us rushed. Each of us looked shadowed, abandoned, until we leaned forward to be caught in the light. Each of us moved slowly as if half asleep. The gramophone was rewound, and the Indonesian limes were passed down the table.

“To Mr. Mazappa,” Mr. Daniels said quietly.

“And to Sunny Meadows,” we answered.

The cavernous hold carried our words, and for a while no one moved. There was just the gramophone’s continuing music, the slow breath of its saxophone. A faint mist, set off by a timer somewhere, fell for about ten seconds over the plants and the table, and on our arms and shoulders. None of us protected ourselves from it. The record ended and we heard the repeating scrape of the needle, waiting to be lifted. The two girls in front of me whispered back and forth, and I watched them, listened to them, closely. I focused on my cousin’s lipsticked mouth. I could hear this word and that. Why? When does it happen? The girl shook her head. I think the girl said, You could help us. And Emily, looking down, said nothing for a while, deep in a thought. There was this trench of darkness between one side of the table and the other, and I could see them through it, from the other side. There was laughter somewhere, but I was silent. I noticed Mr. Gunesekera also looking straight ahead.

“He’s your father?” Emily whispered in surprise.

The girl nodded.

Asuntha

SHE SPOKE TO NO ONE ON THE BOAT about what her father had done. Just as, when she was a young girl, she would never reveal or admit where he was or what he was doing. Even when he was arrested and sent to his first jail. He had been just a thief then, a man working his trade, on the edge of the law. He had evolved from being a young, confident troublemaker.

He was part Asian, part something else. He was never sure what. The name Niemeyer could have been inherited or stolen or invented. When he was taken away to prison, the wife and child were left with barely a rupee. The wife began to lose her wits, and the child soon found her mother no longer reliable. She would be silent and uncommunicative, or she spat out a fury towards everyone, even to the young daughter. Neighbours tried to help with subsistence, but she turned against all of them. She began harming herself. The girl was just ten years old.

She got a ride with someone and went to Kalutara prison. She was allowed to see her father. They talked, and he told her the name of his sister who lived in the southern province. Her name was Pacipia. There seemed nothing else the father could do to help. Just this name. Niemeyer was about thirty-six then. His daughter saw him cornered in the prison cell, still lithe, but all his natural gestures were muted. He could not embrace her through the bars. Bars that as a thief he would have slathered himself with oil in order to slip through. Still, he seemed powerful to her, moving back and forth in an efficient silence, like that quiet voice of his that seemed to leap across space and enter you as a whisper.

But it was more difficult to get home. During the journey it was Asuntha’s eleventh birthday. She remembered it suddenly, as she was walking the thirty or so miles from Kalutara. Her mother was not at home, or anywhere in the village. She had left a small thing, a present, wrapped in a leaf, a partially beaded bracelet with