Songbirds(68)

‘Yes?’

‘Kumari, Nisha’s daughter. I’ve been thinking about her. Have you spoken to her again?’

Here he sighed deeply. ‘I have,’ he said. ‘But I just don’t know what to tell her.’





A taxi drives into the village. It stops outside the widow’s house.

There you go, the driver says, glancing with a yawn out of the window.

The woman in the car double-checks the address on her phone.

It’s coming up to midnight and the widow has been waiting up for them. She comes out onto the patio and raises her thumb. Yes, she says, welcome. This is the right place.

The taxi driver opens the boot and carries two medium-sized cases, one in each hand, up to the front door of the widow’s home.

Round the back, she says. That’s a good lad.

The widow leads the couple through the courtyard to the guesthouse and shows them around. The man picks up a sugared almond from the pillow and sucks it and says it reminds him of something, though he can’t for the life of him remember what.

Tomorrow we will visit the Byzantine Museum and the Museum of Barbarism, the woman says.

They are both equally illuminating, the widow says, before she leaves them alone.

I like the word Barbarism, the woman says to the man. It strips violence of ideologies – leaves it bare, don’t you think?

The other houses in the village are dark by now and so is the road leading out of the village, once the taxi has rumbled away.

Down by the lake, flesh has been removed from the head of the hare, from its abdomen and its hind legs. There are three mice feeding upon it now: one scuttles across the body as if it is running over a small hill.

The sky is dark. Clouds have gathered, thick and heavy, as a storm is brewing.





22

Yiannis

‘Y

IANNIS, MATE. I WANT YOU to go on another hunt this weekend. We’ve had a number of huge orders come through. Christmas parties coming up and all that malarkey. It’s gonna be busy again, like it was last year, remember?’ Seraphim said, over the phone.

I was in the bedroom with the windows closed, shutters down, keeping out the winter and the light, agitating about what news this Tony guy might have about Nisha.

What exactly was Seraphim asking me to remember? How I did everything without questioning it? How I had killed inside me the boy I used to be? How I had lied to Nisha?

I remained silent.

‘So,’ he continued, ‘this time, let’s go to the west coast of Larnaca. You had a great catch there last month. I’ll come with you this time, we’ll be even more productive.’

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.