The Perfect House

I had always wanted to build the perfect house. For years I had looked at other people's, surreptitiously, because as you know, houses don't like to be stared at, whatever their owners might think. It had to be small, it had to be in the city. Not for me those dreaming palaces tucked away in the golden countryside: that too was a beautiful dream, but it was not my dream. All I knew was that my house had to have a window on either side of the entrance, widely spaced like the eyes of a beautiful woman, and that you would be able to look straight through from the front to the back. That was all. I need hardly add that I had never built a house before.

Well, it all happened, and it took longer and was more painful than childbirth. (I can hear the wife snorting in the kitchen.) Of course once I had built it, I couldn't afford to live in it, the interest payments on the loan being so high. So I tried to give it out on rent, and then nobody wanted to rent it either. Trouble was, you see, it didn't look like a house. Some people said it looked like a church, other people said it looked like a casino. It had three floors.

"How do you manage to get to the bedrooms?" they asked.

"With the agility of a mountain goat," I replied.

A famously budding restaurateur wanted it, to start a swine-dining establishment. "I must have it," he said, "just bear with me till I give notice at my present place." That was eleven years ago, and I am still waiting, Henry.

Then along came Ulla, the answer to all my prayers. She arrived in an ancient silver Bentley, tall and blonde and very beautiful (Ulla, not the Bentley). I wondered idly how the house would take to her. Ulla was a big girl: you looked at her and you thought Wagner, the Ring Cycle, and all those flaxen maidens rushing back and forth across the stage in golden horns, shrieking and bellowing.

"Why is it," she asked, "every house in Colombo has its garage opening into the sitting room?"

I laughed loudly because mine didn't, the garage being tucked away in the basement.

"I like it," she bellowed, "I'll take it."

Now the house is built in a cunning way, to look much larger than it actually is. You have to be very clever about what you put in it. Once Ulla entered the sitting room there was room for little else, so my heart sank when all this curly-wurly repro furniture started to arrive.

Mine not to reason why, I thought sadly. It's as if you've just given away your beautiful daughter a the altar to a man who, you discover too late, wears gold chains round his neck and grows the nail on his little finger too long.

I left her to it and, really, the first year was fine because Ulla had paid the year's rent in advance on signing the lease. How little I knew then about the gentle art of landlordism in Sri Lanka. Ulla had two teenage daughters, Helga and Hannah – not half as lovely as the mother – and two servants, an old boy called Odiris, and a half-wit called Thomas who had fallen from a coconut tree when he was young and was a bit desiccated as a result.

When the second year's rent was due, I gave it a week out of tact, and another out of delicacy, then I went round.

Odiris was standing at the basement entrance smoking a vile local cheroot. Thomas was with him, looking, well, vacant.

"Hamu né," said Thomas. My lady isn't in. Odiris said nothing, but pointed upwards silently with the smoking cheroot: for this little gesture I have loved him like a brother ever since. Hamu was obviously in, but not at home to the likes of me.

I went in and sat down on a satinwood repro, directly under what I knew was Ulla's bedroom. Now I built this house from the odds and sods they were throwing out when they demolished the old UNP headquarters at Sri Kotha. The recycled teak floors I had installed upstairs were a dead giveaway. A creak here, a creak there: I could imagine Ulla gliding about up there, noiselessly as she fondly imagined. I dug myself in and read The Island paper from cover to cover, all three pages of it. Then I had a brainwave.

"Tell Hamu I'll be back another day," I shouted from the verandah to the two domestics. I slammed the door shut, and silently sat down again. Five minutes passed. Then an almighty bellow:

"Thomas! Has he gone yet?" Ulla was halfway down the double-return staircase before she noticed me, sitting there quietly, like a mouse among its droppings.

"Ashok," she said, switching on a smile like a long-life bulb, "you've caught me at a bad time, you naughty boy! Why didn't you call before you came?" (Because you would definitely have made sure you were out then).

"I don't have anything for you at the moment, but why don't you try me next week?" (Yes dear, that too, but what about my rent?)

"I'll come on Tuesday," I replied.

On Tuesday she came downstairs with a box.

"No rent, I'm afraid, but this is a present from me to you." It was a puppy, and we named him Pooch. Life is such a bitch.

Another week went by and nothing happened. You may ask why I didn't send round a thundering letter of demand through a lawyer. The simple answer is that Sri Lankan lawyers are not what they are meant to be, and in a second Ulla would have had the demanding lawyer eating out of her hand, or on her lap, or both, and my case would have been out of the window.

"Let's invite her to the little fellow's birthday party," suggested the wife. (She can be quite clever at times, the homemaker.)

Now these Sri Lankan parties are not your western style crisp-and-twiglet affairs. There are jugglers and magic shows and pony rides. And that's just for the adults.

Ulla made a big entrance in a small skirt, and immediately gathered together a following of young fathers. They trailed her round and round the garden hoping she would reveal a little of her German magic. Really, I needn't have bothered with the ponies.

A couple of hours later, when the young fathers were beginning to thin out, I tracked Ulla down to a stone bench in the garden.

"These are very good," she said, knocking back an arrack and passion fruit cocktail. "This is my fourth."

"Ulla," I began.

"I know what you're going to say," she interrupted, fishing about absently in a large tapestry bag. She pulled out a brown envelope. "I didn't get your boy a birthday present because I knew you'd prefer this."

There was ten thousand in the envelope, a long way short of the rent.

"Ashok, Ashok, if only you knew how difficult life is for me;" she crossed and recrossed her legs to show just how difficult. ";I have to find dowries for Hanna and Helga;"

Dowries! I thought to myself, these amazing white women, they come out to live in Sri Lanka and become more Sri Lankan than us natives. They treat us like shit, and God how we love it! It's a sort of new age colonialism, but with very willing subjects. I took the money humbly, gratefully, thankfully. I would have doffed my cap if I'd had one.

In the course of the year I must have gone to the house at least twenty times, coming away each time with two thousand here, three thousand there. Once when I arrived she was defrosting her fridge, passing out stuff to Helga and Hanna.

"You have no idea how hard it is for us business people," she said sternly. A selection of hams and salamis was beginning to emerge from the fridge.

"Things are so depressed." Smoked pork knuckles from Keells.

"I don't know how I'm going to manage if things get any worse." Bottles and bottles of chilled Liebfraumilch.

"You should have got her to pay you in knuckles," said the wife wistfully when I came home empty-handed.

Worst of all, the house, my beloved house, was beginning to show the strain. Two beautiful women can never really coexist satisfactorily under the one roof without one or other giving way: there was damp in the basement and white ants in the walls. Thomas and Odiris were never allowed upstairs unless Ulla was present – did she have money stashed under the mattress?- and she hardly ever was. As a result the cleaning and tidying hardly ever got done, the doors and windows never opened. Any clothes to be washed were thrown casually over the balustrade from upstairs to the sitting room below. I know, because I was at the receiving end once. (Don't ask).

Another time I went to the house I was greeted by the words "Hamu ispiritale" My lady's in hospital.

Ulla was ensconced in a double-aspect corner room at the New World Hospital, suffering from an allergy. You have to be an expert string-puller to get one of these rooms, which are usually booked months in advance and cost as much per day as a labourer gets in a month. She was attended by a coterie of minions, Miss Balthazar who operated the fax, Sanju the office boy, and various smartly dressed gents.

"Ashok," she said, "how good of you to come." I composed my features into a 'concerned' look.

"Look!" she said whipping back the sheets. (Miss Balthazar averted her eyes). The famous legs had swelled and turned a delicious pale crimson, like two smoked hams from Keells.

"But I haven't forgotten any of you." She looked magnanimously at me and the natty gents. As if on cue Miss Balthazar stepped forward under the weight of an enormous cheque-book. Ulla signed and presented me with not one, but three cheques.

"This for now, this a week later, and this a week after that." Triple the pleasure. The natty gents received one each.

"You can cash them at my bank in Fort." She leant back to show that the audience was at the end. I shared a three-wheeler into Fort with my fellow creditors. At the bank entrance there was a bit of a scuffle. I had paid for the taxi so they were politely insisting I go in first.

"Age before beauty," I said and rolled in. And so it happened that my cheque got presented first, and was the only one that was realised, there being insufficient funds for theirs. I came away a happy man: it doesn't pay to be too polite in Colombo these days.

Of course there is a footnote, a postscript to this tale. My two other cheques, duly presented a week and fortnight later, both bounced. I now find that this seems to be standard Sri Lankan business practice, so I can hardly blame Ulla too much.

"She'll have to go," said the wife, and I agreed sadly; but it was the house that took the initiative in the final putsch, the putting in of the boot. Late one rainy night the following week I got a frantic call. "Come immediately!"

I drove over to the house in the pelting rain.

Ulla was standing in a pool of water, and for a moment there I thought she had lost all control.

"Just look at this house!" She began to shriek and bellow, a Wagnerian counterpoint to the raging storm outside. "Riddled with termites, and now this bloody leaking roof!"

"You're right," I agreed calmly. "It's best if you try to find another house. I will, of course, refund any rent that has been overpaid." This was a joke because it was actually she who was owing me rent. But she brightened up considerably at this and we parted almost friends.
