The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [62]
Each night the girl stayed alone in the hut, waiting for her mother’s return, barely lighting the lamp, as there was only a quarter-inch of fuel. When night arrived she slept, waking in the later dark, with nothing to do until sunrise. She lay on the pallet and drew a map of the countryside in her mind and planned where she would go the next day to search for her mother. She could be anywhere, hiding in an abandoned village or along some river where trees hung over the fast-moving water. There was the possibility of her mother’s slipping down a bank in her distress or failing in a halfhearted attempt to wade across the lagoon. The girl feared all bodies of water; in them you could see the darkness below the surface where it attempted to reach light.
Birdcalls woke her and she left the hut to search for her mother. Neighbours offered to take her into their homes, but at night she always returned to the hut. She had told herself she would keep looking for two more weeks. Then she stayed another week. Eventually she wrote a message on a tablet, which she hung on the wall over her mother’s pallet, and walked away from her only home.
She went inland and south, living on whatever fruits and vegetables she could find. But she longed for meat. A few times she begged for food at a house and was given dhal. She did not tell them her story, just that she had been travelling for a week. She passed monks with their held-out bowls, and she passed the coconut estates where the guards at the entrances were brought lunch by someone on a bicycle. She stopped near these sentries and talked to them in order to inhale the meal they were eating openly in front of her. In one village she followed a rice hound along back lanes to the remnants of a meal that had been flung out from a kitchen door. She found a cut-open jak fruit and ate so much of the petal-shaped fruit that she was sick, then overcome with sudden fever. She climbed down into a river and stayed there hanging on to a branch in order to lose the feverish heat in her. She had been travelling for more than eight days when she saw four men carrying a trampoline along the road. She knew where she was. She followed at a distance, till they eventually turned and asked who she was. She said nothing. She loitered but did not lose sight of them, even when they started crossing a field and disappeared over a scrub hill. And so she came upon the tents. She asked for Pacipia and a thin man brought her over to a woman. This was her father’s sister.
In certain ways she looked like him. Pacipia too moved like an animal. She was very tall, and appeared tougher than the girl’s father in the way she treated the men and women around her. It was a small rural circus she was responsible for, and she held it together with strict rules. She was different with the girl, however. She lifted Asuntha into her arms and walked away from the performers to some thorn trees. She ran her fingers through the girl’s hair as she listened to her brother’s daughter tell her about meeting the father in jail, the disappearance of the mother, the hunger for meat above all else. Pacipia had met the mother a few times, and she nodded, careful not to let the girl know what she was thinking. Eventually, when she thought it was all right, she put the girl down.
She took Asuntha into each of the tents. The sides were rolled up because of the afternoon heat, and the girl saw the acrobats sleeping in the daylight, facing the wind that came through the open sides, all the way from the coast. In spite of the fact that she had been travelling alone for at least a week, she was still unsure of the place she was now in. But her aunt assumed she was not naturally nervous. She was her father’s child, wasn’t she? The girl stayed beside Pacipia those first days, hampering her preparations. There were to be some performances