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‘THE SARONG-MAN IN THE OLD HOUSE’ BY MICHAEL MENDIS

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It was raining that night, a little more than half a century ago, when he sat in his bedroom, teaching algebra to Krishnan, a newfound friend.

Wijey remembers this now in the darkness of his corridor, with the green paint on the walls. And nothing else, but for the shadows.

The rainy day ghosts.

They were both boys, and Wijey had no idea of the things he was about to discover beyond that night, but that’s not what moves him the most about this memory. There is, in most of us, a stolid self-pity of sorts, when we think of things that broke our hearts when we were still just children. But more, much more, when they break us somewhere else. A place without a name, for now.

And Wijey taught him carefully, what he knew – navigating the various X and Ys, cautious not to overwhelm.

Wijey was a rich little boy, unlike Krishnan. With a lot of books lined against his bedroom wall, the Dickenses and the Flemings on two opposite sides. His shiny prefect’s badge from middle-school, sitting primly on the dresser, next to the bottle of Old Spice he never wore because he didn’t like the smell. They were all there: little pieces of imported wealth that he had arrayed around himself, in case anyone wanted to know why he was important.

When the lesson ended, Wijey’s mother convinced Krishnan to stay the night, because it was not safe to drive in the storm all the way to Wattala, where he lived. She said it would probably last all night, the storm.

Their dinner was brought up to the bedroom in a large tray. The woman carrying it, Prema, was quiet and brisk, and Wijey called her by name without any hesitation. While they ate, she laid out Wijey’s spare pyjamas for Krishnan, and fresh towels.

‘Do you want more parippu?’ Wijey kept asking him. Or ‘Shall I put some pol sambol?’ And they talked about the radio shows and music, and Rukmani Devi, and the Hepburns. Krishnan looked up at the ceiling a as he talked, a funny habit he probably outgrew. The Hepburns, he couldn’t stop talking about: those two women, being so different from each other. He kept saying, ‘It’s Audrey’s body,machan . . . that shape,’ and he would have used a word like exquisite, had he had access to it, to describe what he meant.

Wijey didn’t like being called machan. And Wijey didn’t like talking about the Hepburns. But he didn’t say anything. He sensed there was something to it, this dislike of the topic – but only in the way one would see soft tendrils of smoke seeping through a door. It wasn’t a fire, an inferno, if he didn’t open the door. It was just a stream of smoke, leaking. Harmless. At least for the time being.

They talked into the night, with the rain hammering outside, about things that only barely snagged Wijey’s attention. Something else kept him talking, wanting to talk, but all of it was still shut behind the door that screened the streaming smoke.

He kept the windows open, and tiny vapours of rain sprayed into the room with the smell of dissolving dust and, soon, it was time to go to sleep.

Wijey’s days stretch and inch into each other now, with hardly any movement in the house of green walls, but for the shadows, starting short in the mornings, and gradually reaching across the floors and furniture, along the route the sun took across the sky. Like a sundial, marking time and undulating memory.

But everything in the house seems alive, their movements all in an equal speed, an equal rhythm. The furniture, the shadows, the thick dust. The man.

Wijey climbs the stairs forever, a walking stick clutched in his fingers, his sarong held in a clench of cloth around his waist – undone, slipping, unhelpful.

Nobody is here. Nobody has remained.

He sways.

The wooden stairs creak. The walking stick seems to bend. He palms the wall to balance himself.
While he forgets the sarong.

And he is naked, instantly. One hand on the wall, one hand on a bandy stick, in the middle of his stairs.

The sarong, a bangle around his ankles.

The wetness is a celebration, when it hadn’t rained in so long a time, and the dust outside his house had stopped moving, with nothing to move against, nothing to stir it into swirls. And the smell. As the water comes hurtling through the sky, he sees it almost in slow-motion, speeding, in a hurry to meet the ground that has been dry for too long. The smell of it has always been homely to him, because he remembers a friend, a girl from his teen years, who always used to ask him, Do you like the smell of it on the dust?’ and he would say ‘Yes,’ every time, wondering if there was a reason for it. It must have been the instant change in the air they had been breathing – its freshness. It was a funny way to find hope, to feel suddenly better. But that’s how it always was.

Wijey remembers being sixteen, how difficult it was. He is now at the very edge of his sixties, sitting on a sloping armchair with armrests that could swivel to become footrests. And now, so many years after being sixteen, he thinks, that the smell of new rain also had a note of innocence to it. Maybe it’s his own innocence as a boy who found hope in the smell of rain-on-dust that he remembers, that he associates with the smell of rain-on-dust now.

That girl, wherever may she be now?

Wijey brings his trembling, dying fingers to his lips, fiddling absently with the dry flakes of skin there, picking at them. A habit he carried to maturity from immaturity – like an old seller of wares, bringing home a load he was supposed to trade away for something better.

I say his fingers are dying because he is old. Because he is and alone. On that sloping armchair.

But more because there is no turning back for him.

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