TONY

We, Mother carrying sister, and I, left Depanama when it was just beginning to get dark. We walked up the narrow gravel path on to the Pannipitiya-Borella road, passed Ambagashatara Handiya - the junction of the four mango trees - with the man at the boutique trying to light his old petromax lamp and mother hurrying past because she didn't want to be explaining things to him, perhaps; then as we took the bend near Manchi Akka's little tea boutique opposite the gate leading to the Village Headman's house, the Kelani Valley train was pulling out of the Pannipitiya railway station, the little compartments already lit and moving in a chain like a glowworm seen over the low line of cactus bushes on the edge of the embankment beyond which rose the two storeyed building of the station, and the sad whistle of the train rose and fell three times, lingered in the air and then settled over everything.

Tony, our dog who had been with us for well over seven years, followed us all the way, and packs of vicious mongrels came snarling and howling and he defied them all, swinging deftly every which way with a short clipped bark full of disdain for the hoi-polloi. We crossed over from the Old Road beyond the railway station, through an ancient gate-post fallen on its side like some historic ruin and which would have stood there long before the High Level Road came and severed it from a large coconut estate, and now we came to a spot on the "Alut Para" - no one then called it High Level Road, for the new road to Avissawella had to be identified in relation to the old road - and waited for the bus to take us to Wijerama junction, five miles towards Colombo.

The suitcase mother carried in one hand and the reed bag - 'pan malla' which I carried and which smelled of onions and milchard rice - were deposited on the ground and Tony settled down among them, panting happily and giving us grateful looks, for he was never allowed to follow us this far from home. I squatted by his side in the gloom of late evening, and felt him warm, and my fingers were moving through the soft light brown coat and I kissed him lightly on the forehead and there was a quick movement of the muzzle touching my cheek. He smelled good. Tony always smelled good, even after We became poor and could not care for him like before, and he was constantly away, moving with stray dogs, over the fields and under the rubber trees, through the scrub jungle, but always at home in the evening, and never smelling bad, looking clean like when we were at the big house and he was sent out only at the end of a leash led by a servant.

Now it was dark at the bus stop, dark enough for lights, but the bus came without headlamps, emerging slowly out of the late evening shadows, preceded by a mighty roar and rattle. It was one of those low-roofed open-bodied affairs with two seats up front next to the driver and two rows next entered by two openings on either side and at the back two rows facing each other with two seats back to back in the middle where there was a metal pole holding the roof and with a rear entrance with a two-step footboard on which the conductor usually rode.

We got in from the rear entrance and Tony was awaiting his turn impatiently, placing his paw twice on the footboard to be pushed back by the conductor; 'chip chip' said the conductor never even looking fully at the dog and I was too frightened to look back as I sat away from Mother on a seat on the side-row and kept looking past the driver's head and through the slightly upturned half-of-a windscreen to the darkness beyond, until I heard the conductor shout 'Raaaaaights' and the bus lurched forward with a shudder and the headlamps came suddenly, piercing the dark in a yellow shaft of light.

Our new home was half a house in the village of Egodawatta, and at that time reached only by a gravel path which skirted an RAF Camp on the right and an expanse of shrubland broken by a couple of thatched huts on the other, and which in turn gave way to a plot of rubber, dark and gloomy even at high noon. The village began at the end of the rubber plot and sloping gently through old homesteads strewn all around with straw and cowdung and dark and damp under coconut, jak, breadfruit and all kinds of other trees, ended in the paddy fields on all three sides. The narrow cart track to the village branched off from a broader road which began at the Wijerama Junction just within sight of the eighth mile post on the High Level Road, moved through a middle-class residential area of neat houses with glass paned windows and parapet walls and well kept little gardens heavy with roses, crotons, and bougainvillaea, crested a hill coming into full view of the British RAF Camp - this is the site of the present Sri Jayawardanapura University - which occupied both sides of the road save one block of land with three attached houses first, with their narrow and half enclosed verandas opening out onto the road, and then a fairly large house set deep inside a garden with a parapet wall with two gates - one permanently closed - and took an abrupt elbow bend to the right and once again cutting through the Camp premises proceeded to Rattanapitiya - a small junction on the Colombo - Kesbewa highway.

The cart track to Egodawatta at this elbow bend moved along one border of the Camp fenced by tall concrete columns with their top ends tilting outwards and holding thick coils of barbed wire. At regular intervals were tall mahogany trunks rising above the concrete columns and holding a large electric bulb with a plain shade with a broad rim.

Night had fallen when I first walked this stretch with Mother, all the way from Wijerama to Egodawatta. Father had gone before with the single bullock cart which held all the worldly belongings we were now left with. Mother was carrying my sister, two years old then, and she (Mother) held the suitcase in one hand. I carried the 'pan malla' smelling of onions and milchard rice.

I was sad and I was angry. Not because we had left Depanama. Not because we had become poor and were shifting to half a house; I was too young to understand the implications of that, and I was not angry because I was carrying a bag full of smelly onions and milchard rice.

I was sad and angry because we had left Tony behind.

Four days later I was back at Depanama, alighting from a near empty bus and walking along the road above the railway line where the tips of the cactus bushes on the embankment were still wet with dew and the eight o'clock sun warm on the flower pots hanging from the scalloped roof-edge of the little veranda of the Morawaka dispensary, the red, pink, yellow, and purple flowers dripping over in thick clusters.

I was sent with some specific things to do: buy the weekly rations from the co-op store, collect the new ration books from the Headman's office, and also, if I could feel up to it, collect the dressing table mirror - now the mirror was part of the old ebony dressing table, one of the few items left over from the days at the big house, and Mother didn't want to risk getting it cracked in transport, and she detached it from the table and left it at Mr. Lawrence Perera's house - he was our immediate neighbour, worked at Cargill's and wore a full suit complete with tie, was Catholic, and went to church every Sunday with his family, and in their house was a gramophone which played the latest songs of Ananda Samarakoon, and the eldest boy, Anton, was my best friend - to be collected later. But I had another very important task to perform, something I had secretly vowed to myself I would do.

I WAS GOING TO TAKE TONY HOME; WALK WITH THE HIM ALL THE WAY FROM DEPANAMA TO EGODAWATTA.

Now I walked past Manchi Akka's boutique, and up the little rise in the macadam road to Ambagashatara - the four mango trees; only two were there when I came to know the place, or as I remember it, two gnarled fruitless giants - and began to proceed on the left of the road bordering Mrs Jayasinghe's land and through the thickly leafy veralu trees bunched together by the edge of the road I could see the sun bright on the open patch where once stood the tennis court, and where cattle would lie now, at all times of the day and especially at high noon, sunning themselves, sprawled like carcasses, very still, with crows on them, picking ticks. The veralu trees were in full bloom, and the canopies were flecked with white and all along that side of the road, the flowers lay scattered, thin pale white pieces like shredded strings and the air was heavy with that strange scent of veralu flowers - a smell which was vaguely familiar and disturbing at the same time, something which also belonged somewhere else but which I couldn't quite place then.

The smell followed me after I passed the trees and came up to the spot where there was a break in the thick undergrowth along the edge of Mrs Jayasingha's land. Here I could still see traces of the old driveway leading up to the house, and the empty space where once the house stood, leading me quickly in a jump-cut in time to one of my earliest memories when we had dinner in that house, and Mrs Jayasingha - a rotund lady with short-cropped hair and who was Burgher but who wore saree because she was married to Mr Jayasingha who was Sinhala - had placed me on her lap and was trying to make me eat some pudding because Mother couldn't make me eat it, and Uncle Ronald - Mrs Jayasingha's eldest son - was playing an accordion. Only the visual came with no sound, like when the sound track of a movie is switched off.

And then came the bark; the sharp clipped aristocratic bark, and with it came Tony, crashing through Mrs. Jayasingha with the custard pudding in the dessert cup held delicately in one hand and the dessert spoon suspended somewhere between my mouth and her ample bosom, and Uncle Ronald opening and closing the folds of the accordion in an arc just below his chin.

Tony came out of nowhere, charging and barking, leaping-turning-twisting-rolling-jumping-licking-whining-moaning in a delirium.

By eleven o'clock I had finished all my assignments: rations from the co-op store - the smelly yellowy big grained milchard; six chundus of it at two per coupon, sugar; brown sticky and smelling faintly like stale bees' honey: three pounds of it, Dhal: the variety referred to as 'Mysoor parippu', fine-grained and pink and mistakenly believed to be coming from Mysore in India and boycotted under the orders of the JVP when the Indian Peace Keeping Force was alleged to be raping girls in Jaffna in the late eighties until someone enlightened us that the dhal had nothing to do with India and was really 'Masoor Dhal' which came from Turkey, and wheat flour; finely powdered and called 'Amerikkan piti' with a stress on the first K which implied of course that the flour came from America though it may have come from any country where wheat was grown; new ration books from the village headman's office - this time the books were a light blue in colour with the smell of fresh biscuits about them; and now I was at Mr. Lawrence Perera's house to collect the mirror.
Tony was faithfully by my side; since that reunion near the entrance to Mrs Jayasingha's land he had kept close to me almost desperately not wanting to lose contact again, even ignoring the bun I bought for him though it looked quite certain to me that he had been starving in the last few days. Fiendish barking and howling had erupted every now and then as we moved through foreign territory but had subsided when we kept going, and Tony kept as close to me as possible pressing against my legs to reassure himself that I was there with him. Mr Perera had gone to work at Cargills, his son Anton, my friend had gone to school with his two sisters - in fact all the children of the area were at some school somewhere because it was a weekday, and I had not gone to school because I had never gone to school and at that time I was still not going to school - and that's another story - and on that day it suited me fine that none of the kids I knew were at home, because when you have a secret plan you don't want to meet anybody - and Mrs Perera was trying to persuade me to eat something by way of lunch because it was close to midday and I was eager to get away because when you have a secret plan you want to keep moving all the time and Mrs Perera kept asking me what I was going to do with the dog and I kept improvising a story that Father was going to come within the next few days in Uncle Eugene's car to take him away and Mrs Perera looked like she didn't believe one word of what I said and I felt she thought we were never going to take the dog away but I was not going to tell her that I intended walking all the way to Egodawatta with the dog because then she would have certainly stopped me from doing such a darn fool thing. It was very near high noon as I clambered up an embankment and reached the High Level Road, panting sweating and already feeling exhausted having walked the first near half-a-mile. I avoided going through the old gateposts on the old road just after the level crossing, but walked along the road past the post office -now the post office was the front room adjoining the verandah of an old house within a large garden, with the window of the room expanded to form a counter - beyond which on the same side the road fell away to a narrow valley and came up on the other side to meet the High Level Road, and I took the little footpath which linked the two roads, old and new, across the narrow. little valley. On my left hand I carried the mirror - it seemed much heavier and larger than I thought it to be - on the right hand the provisions -contained in a gunny bag - and since both my hands were full and I didn't want Tony to stray too much away from me or tarry a while sniffing and peeing I had him on a thin coir rope with one end tied to my trouser buckle; those days trousers - short as well as long -had two buckles of white nickel on the sides to hold them tight at the waist. The 'Alut Para' was a pretty lonely stretch up to Maharagama in those days and there were no people about when I appeared at a point just before the eleventh-mile post where the road cut through a ridge with the land rising steeply on either side in walls of brick red kapok. The road was a shiny path, looking fresh and clean like it has been washed, as it stretched before me and I knew it led straight to where I was going - no branching off, no by-roads, no risk of taking the wrong turn, and I felt comfortable, like someone was holding my hand. I walked and I stopped - sometimes to adjust my burdens and some- times to ease the growing pains in my hands and legs - and after a long time of walking and stopping I reached the spot which is known by a large two storeyed store with intricate trellis work in blue and white - Roslin Nonage Kade/Roslin Nona's Boutique, where there was a large mara tree and a gravel road branched off to the left and on the right the same gravel road moved to cross the railway line to meet the old road. Now this would have been a wonderful place to rest awhile - it was cool under the shade of the giant mara tree-but there were people at the boutique and I kept moving on and the road sloped down gently across a paddy field which stretched far away to the left and there was a little temple at the bottom of the road by the edge of the field and on the right of the road the paddy field continued until it reached the rail track, At the end of the slope in the road and before it started climbing again there were mara trees on either side and this is where I stopped. I virtually collapsed. I was still far away from home, and behind me I could still see the road coming out of the cleft in the ridge at the eleventh-mile post. As I looked around things were blurred, and there was a feeling some- where in me of getting choked, of not being able to breathe, and my legs were numb and my body wet and slowly going cold, and since this is exactly how I felt when I used to get those fits long ago and which was the reason I was not sent to school - or rather one of the reasons - I was gripped with fear, which made me sweat more and feel dizzy. Then the thought occurred to me - not in a blinding flash, but in a slow gradual manner like when you slip into a coma which happened whenever I had those fits, and which is painless because it means giving up the struggle and relaxing - that I will never make it home. I dropped my head on the gunny bag and felt comfortable and I closed my eyes and heard Tony's heavy breathing and felt his breath on my face, and a breeze came over the paddy fields making me cool like when Mother spread a piece of cloth dipped in cologne on my forehead during high fever. There was a time lapse here, a slow mix like in a movie, and then I was moving again -not with any conscious effort, but just moving like a sleep-walker-pushed or pulled by some atavistic fear, because suddenly the thought of night falling had occurred. The heat of the high noon had dropped, the sky had gone grey and the smell of rain hung in the air which moved around silently and stealthily like a cat. The slow climb from under the mara trees was over; the old road joined the new road and the rail track which came along with the old road suddenly pulled away and disappeared among the thick foliage in the large home- gardens behind old houses with sloping roofs and open verandas which once-upon-a-time would have stood far behind their fences but were now almost flush with the new road; a little further up, the old road reappeared, but now it was on the left of the new road and there was only a thin strip of bare land between the two roads and along the old road front were little old houses set inside little plots of land and there was a boutique with a long verandah half enclosed by a counter painted in alternate strips of blue and white on which were bottles with multicoloured lozenges in them; and I kept moving in a daze with hands straining feet paining knees hurting but Tony trotting by my side cool and easy and from somewhere over and beyond the tangle of coconut tree tops and sloping roofs on my right came the sad and melancholy whistle of the little train. Then there was the little house by the edge of the road - it stood and still stands, a good forty five years later, just after a point where the old road merges with the new road to re-emerge separately on the other side - the right once more - and just before the new road (then) ran bordering an abandoned rubber plantation with an old upstair house set deep inside. The little house sloped down to rest on four thin wooden columns painted a brick red. There was a teapoy in the middle of the veranda with a tablecloth, white and tasselled at the edges, and on the table was a brass bowl mounted on three brass elephants with raised trunks. There were two chairs with arm rests placed against the wall and on the wall just above the backs of the chairs were two framed rabbits facing each other, and the rabbits were made of satin cloth moulded inside with cotton in bas-relief and outlined with coloured beads and sequins - I couldn't see all these details from the road but knew them by memory because the identical handiwork decorated the main doorway of Geera Atha's house - and Geera Atha was a very old man who brought us milk every morning, and lived all by himself in a very old house which stood at the end of the gravel road a little beyond Mr. Lawrence Perera's homestead. The two rabbits on the wall facing each other in the little house by the road pulled me out of the trancelike state in which I was walking; it was something like coming out of a tunnel, or like when you have strayed too far out and you hear something or smell something or see some - thing and you know you're still within reach and not lost. I stopped. Right in front of the house. And all of a sudden I felt thirsty. I must have been thirsty all along, but now looking fondly at the two rabbits on the wall wanted a drink of water very badly. Putting down the things in my hands was in slow motion, because the hands had gone stiff under the weight and took time to move. The gunny bag stiff and bulging with the provisions stood upright on the ground and the mirror was placed on its face against the bag and Tony released for a moment from my waist first sat on his hind legs and then stretched himself full length from paw to tail-end panting and drooling at the mouth but looking quite pleased with himself, My eyes moved casually over the bag and I had the feeling that something was amiss, but I couldn't quite place my finger on it. I put my hand inside the bag and felt the rice, and the two packs containing sugar and dhal and my hand began to smell of milchard but still I had that uneasy feeling that some- thing was missing and then all at once it struck like a thunderbolt: The Ration Books: The ration books were missing. My knees felt as if they were melting and a hot lump rose up from the guts and pressed against the chest, and it made me dizzy in the head and now I was feeling cold all over like when I used to get those fits. (In those days the ration book was an important article in one's existence; it was legal evidence of Ceylonese - Sri Lanka was Ceylon then - citizenship and carried with it the right of universal franchise -and that was crucial when the first UNP government of independent Ceylon headed by Mr D. S. Senanayaka was busy denying segments of Indian labour on the plantations Ceylon citizenship and deporting them to India - it was the national identity card, and if you happened to be poor, like what we had become, was the sole means of your weekly subsistence all rolled into one; without the ration book you were a non-person, and if you lost it the procedure to obtain a new one was very complicated, involving affidavits, long hours at the DRO's office etc., and once a servant -that is when we were at the big house-lost Father's book,and he was mad having to go through all the trouble of getting a new one and swore that's the last time he will go through the procedure and warned Mother to be careful in future, and Mother was so very careful - especially after we became poor and kept it locked in her little almirah - and now I have gone and lost not one book but all four, which meant the entire family was wiped out from Ceylon in one fell blow, and that by me doing a damn fool thing - walking with a stupid dog all the way from Depanama.)
