I remained silent.
‘We’ll go this Friday,’ he continued. ‘I’ll pick you up as usual, at 3 a.m., so be outside waiting, with all the gear.’
I remained silent.
‘I gather you’ve lost your tongue.’
‘I’m just looking at my diary. I still need to do all the deliveries from the last hunt.’
I saw myself in my childhood room, sitting at the oak desk, my father hovering over me. By then, I no longer called him ‘father’： he was He. My father had died in the war. I didn’t know this new man, whose eyes were unfocused. He ranted. He wanted me to study, to get out of the village, to make something of myself. Was that so unreasonable?
Well, I did. Look at me. Didn’t he tell me to chase money at any cost? When he died, he no longer remembered my name. But he walked the same, in the care home, along that green corridor, up and down, hovering over green lino, not knowing who he was or who I was. I guess we can die many deaths.
Seraphim cleared his throat. He’d allowed me the silence, but it had gone on too long.
‘That’s fine,’ I said, ‘I’ll see you on Friday.’
*
I lay in the dark thinking about Nisha, the way she had held on to me in the night, grieving for the lost baby. There are many ways to lose a person, that was something Nisha had taught me. It was then she told me the third story of loss.
After her husband died in the gem mines of Rathnapura, Nisha decided to move back to Galle to stay with her mother, in the house between the sea and the paddy fields, where she had lived as a child. By that time, her father had passed away and her mother had retired and was able look after Kumari while Nisha worked.
She found a job as a street vendor in Galle Face Green – an urban park in the jumbly city by the beach – making kottu. Sometimes there were rallies there and parties, and, back in the old days, horse races that she had attended with her father. Along the green now was a sizzling rainbow of street food. Every day she made the kottu, adding roti, meat, vegetables, egg and a spicy sauce called salna, prepared on a hot plate and chopped and mixed with silver blades.
The man who owned the stall was fat and dark. For the first few weeks, he watched over her, especially during the final step of preparing the dish, where she mashed and chopped all the ingredients together with the blunt metal blades. He wanted to make sure she got the process ‘just right’。 Once he was satisfied – ‘This is the fucking best kottu in Galle. I grew up on this stuff and know what’s good’ – he more or less left her to it, and went off to manage his other stalls. He paid her hardly anything, but it was the only job she had been able to find: she’d walked up and down the streets practically begging for work. All day long and late into the evening, she was bathed in aromatic spices, and her sweat and her tears dripped into the food, for she did not, for a single day, stop crying and longing for her husband.
There was a carousel a few stalls down, whose music never ended, and opposite an old woman sold colourful saris. Next to her, a middle-aged man had a cart selling nuclear-orange isso vadai – spicy lentil cakes with prawns – and next to him a young woman who made luminous desserts with shredded coconut wrapped in betel leaf.
The park was ringed with food vendor carts lit by small puddles of electric lights at night. There were colours and smells and sounds everywhere, and Nisha was exhausted. Her mother’s pension was measly, so Nisha was keeping them all afloat. When her husband had been alive, they had worked together to pay the bills, and although it had been tough, at least she had been in it with someone else, with both their wages helping them get by. They had also managed to put a bit aside for Kumari’s education. It was Mahesh’s wish that his daughter would be educated, and be the first in the family to attend university.
Once Nisha left for work, Kumari would cry. In fact, she cried until she turned blue. Her grandmother could do nothing to console her.
‘Your daughter is a crazy genius,’ Nisha’s mother would say to her. ‘She knows too much. I can’t distract her like I could with you. She’s bloody minded. Where did she get this from?’
‘You, Amma!’ Nisha would say, remembering her mother’s obsession with her little sister’s heart all those years ago. Remembering the pendant that Kiyoma had thrown into the river to free herself.
Kumari was always awake when Nisha came home from work. There was nothing Nisha’s mother could do to get her to sleep. She tried everything. She sang to her, she walked her along the beachfront. Nothing – Kumari looked at the waves and laughed. Nisha’s mother changed the songs to prayers, chanting beneath the hush of the trees in the garden. At one point she thought of organising a thovil: ‘Nisha, I’m at my wits’ end. This child of yours is possessed.’ She was joking, of course; Kumari still smiled through it all.