The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [7]
I was seldom alone with Mr. Hastie. When he turned up at midnight he must have felt I ought to be getting my rest, so he rarely attempted conversation, and there would be only a few minutes before the others arrived. At some stage during his travels in the East, he had picked up the habit of wearing a sarong, and most of the time he wore just that around his waist, even when his friends came by. He’d bring out four shot glasses and some arrack. The bottle and glasses would be placed on the floor, the table cleared of everything except cards. I’d look down from my modest height on the top bunk and see the spread of a dummy hand. I watched the deals, listened to the shuffles and the bidding. Pass … One Spade … Pass … Two Clubs … Pass … Two No Trumps … Pass … Three Diamonds … Pass … Three Spades … Pass … Four Diamonds … Pass … Five Diamonds … Double … Redouble … Pass … Pass … Pass … They rarely had conversations. I remember they used to call each other by their surnames—“Mr. Tolroy,” “Mr. Invernio,” “Mr. Hastie,” “Mr. Babstock”—as if they were midshipmen in a nineteenth-century naval academy.
Later during the journey, when with my friends I would run into Mr. Hastie, he behaved very differently. Outside our cabin, he was opinionated, and a constant talker. He told us about his ups and downs in the Merchant Navy, his adventures with an ex-wife who was a great rider of horses, and his strongly held affection for hounds over any other breed of dog. But in the half-glow of our cabin at midnight, Mr. Hastie was a whisperer; he had courteously, after the third evening of cards, replaced the bright yellow cabin light with a muted blue one. So as I entered the realm of half-sleep, drinks were poured, rubbers were won, money changed hands, the blue light making the men seem as if they existed in an aquarium. When they finished their game, the four of them went on deck for a smoke, Mr. Hastie slipping back into the room silently a half-hour later to read for a while before turning out his bunk light.
SLEEP IS A PRISON FOR A BOY who has friends to meet. We were impatient with the night, up before sunrise surrounded the ship. We could not wait to continue exploring this universe. Lying in my bunk I would hear Ramadhin’s gentle knock on the door, in code. A pointless code, really—who else could it have been at that hour? Two taps, a long pause, another tap. If I did not climb down and open the door I would hear his theatrical cough. And if I still did not respond, I would hear him whisper “Mynah,” which had become my nickname.
We would meet Cassius by the stairs and soon would be strolling barefoot on the First Class deck. First Class was an unguarded palace at six in the morning, and we arrived there even before a fuse of light appeared on the horizon, even before the essential night-lights on the deck blinked and went out automatically at daybreak. We removed our shirts and dove like needles into the gold-painted First Class pool with barely a splash. Silence was essential as we swam in the newly formed half-light.
If we could last undetected for an hour, we had a chance to plunder the laid-out breakfast on the Sun Deck, heap food onto plates, and abscond with the silver bowl of condensed milk, its spoon standing up in the centre of its thickness. Then we’d climb into the tent-like atmosphere of one of the raised lifeboats and consume our ill-gotten meal. One morning Cassius brought out a Gold Leaf cigarette he had found in a lounge, and taught us how to smoke properly.
Ramadhin politely refused, having his asthmatic condition that was already evident to us and the other diners at the Cat’s Table. (As it would continue to be evident when I saw him years later, in London. We were thirteen or fourteen by then, meeting up after losing sight of each other while busy adapting to a foreign land. Even then, when I’d see him with his parents and his sister, Massoumeh, he was constantly catching every neighbourhood cough or flu. We would begin a second friendship