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By Root 255 0

in England, but we were different by then, no longer free of the realities of the earth. And in some ways, at that time I was closer to his sister, for Massi always accompanied us on our journeys across South London—to the Herne Hill cycle track, to the Brixton Ritzy, and then the Bon Marché, where we would race down the aisles of food and clothing, for some reason delirious. Some afternoons Massi and I sat on the small sofa in their parents’ house in Mill Hill, our hands creeping towards and over each other under the blanket while we pretended to watch the interminable golf coverage on television. Early one morning she came into the upstairs room where Ramadhin and I were sleeping, and sat beside me, her finger to her lips to silence me. Ramadhin asleep in his bed a few feet away. I began to sit up, but she pushed me back with an open palm, then unbuttoned her pyjama shirt so I could see her new breasts, which appeared almost pale green from the reflection of trees outside the window. In the time that followed I was conscious of Ramadhin’s cough, the grate as he cleared his throat in his sleep, while Massi, half naked, fearful, fearless, faced me with whatever emotion goes into such a gesture when one is thirteen.)

We left the crockery and the knives and spoons that came with our stolen meals in the lifeboat, and slipped back down to Tourist Class. A steward would eventually discover traces of our numerous breakfasts during a later security drill when the lifeboats were manned and swung over the water, so that for a while the Captain searched for a stowaway on board.

It was not even eight o’clock when we crossed the border from First Class back to Tourist Class. We pretended to stagger with the roll of the ship. I had by now come to love the slow waltz of our vessel from side to side. And the fact that I was on my own, save for the distant Flavia Prins and Emily, was itself an adventure. I had no family responsibilities. I could go anywhere, do anything. And Ramadhin, Cassius, and I had already established one rule. Each day we had to do at least one thing that was forbidden. The day had barely begun, and we still had hours ahead of us to perform this task.

WHEN MY PARENTS ABANDONED their marriage, it was never really admitted, or explained, but it was also not hidden. If anything it was presented as a mis-step, not a car crash. So how much the curse of my parents’ divorce fell upon me I am not sure. I do not recall the weight of it. A boy goes out the door in the morning and will continue to be busy in the evolving map of his world. But it was a precarious youth.

As a young boarder at St. Thomas’ College, Mount Lavinia, I loved swimming. I loved anything to do with water. On the school grounds there was a concrete channel down which the flood-waters raced during the monsoons. And this became a site for a game some of the boarded boys participated in. We leapt in so we could be hurled forward by the current, somersaulting, flung from side to side. Fifty yards farther along there was a grey rope that we grabbed to pull ourselves out. And twenty yards beyond that, the channel of racing water became a culvert that disappeared underground and journeyed on in darkness. Where it went we never knew.

There might be as many as four of us racing down again and again in the channel waters, one at a time, our heads barely at the surface. It was a nervous game, grabbing the rope, climbing out, then running back under the heavy rain to do it one more time. During one attempt my head submerged as I approached the rope, and I did not come up in time to catch it. My hand was in the air, and that was all as I sped towards the eventual buried culvert. It was my given death, that afternoon in Mount Lavinia, sometime during the March monsoon, foretold by an astrologer. I was nine years old and there would now be a sightless journey into an underground darkness. A hand grabbed my still-raised arm and I was pulled out by an older student. He casually told the four of us off and then hurried away in the rain, not bothering to see if we