Be good sweet maid and let those who will be clever
hanging above a marble-topped dressing table reeking of camphor?
The past was my maternal grandparents’ house, a burnished copper name plaque, Glenburn, on a bluestone wall, white pebbles crunching under the baker’s boots, his horse and shiny cart in stippled shade beyond the fence, pling of the enamel lid over a yeasty warm pipe-loaf. Had I been at home I would have ripped away the crust, eviscerated the soft milk-smelling centre, and gorged the non-brown bread.
The past was a tantalisingly locked shed, a brown and white ladies bicycle - my freedom machine, abandoned by a waddling aunt, smells of ancient engine-oil, Cousin Ray’s Indian and Matchless motorbikes, black-out blinds from a time of war, when no needle of light was allowed to escape for fear of Japanese bombs.
The past was an unimaginable time when my grandfather had been able to walk with crutches instead of being a grey-cardiganned trunk with frog-glasses growing out of a wheel chair, and my grandmother did not wear a Bell’s palsy-defying brown plastic tube which pulled up the corner of her mouth and hooked behind her right ear. It was a time when my grandparents had sex and made children. They made a bad one: my uncle, a beautiful, smart one who never quite believed in herself: my mother, and a decade-trodden doormat: my aunt.
Once, in my aunt’s two-tone green Holden Special, we drove to visit some of my grandfather’s cousins who lived in a white stone cottage on a cliff. They told us of an ancestor who had drowned a hundred years ago. His boat capsized in a storm as he was rowing to light the flame in the light-house we could see through a spray of rain and foam in the grey waves of the bay. I could never quite imagine him, only the strong strokes of his arms in a wet shirt, my fear at the thought of his determination in the greater strength of crashing cold waves. He existed as an heroic animated torso in a haunted alcove of my imagination, like the staccato flame of a red electric candle in a Chinese shrine, winking behind bales of rice and stacks of yellow buckets in some sagging teak-plank store.
My paternal grandparents existed only as absence, as proof of our unworthy colonial Otherness in a continent they disdained to visit. They demanded immediate replies to their annual Christmas letters and gifts of things in boxes stamped with pictures of shops called Barkers of Kensington. Things like tiny glass animals which we soon broke, often deliberately. They demanded photos and unblemished letters written in perfect handwriting, between even and faintly-ruled lines. We had to call him Grand-daddy. The letters were sealed with a red wax stamp. My paternal grandparents were very important. We hated them.
I visited them once, in the 1970s, wearing the only dress I owned and shoes with wedge heels. I kept these clothes for crossing tricky borders, and they had seemed to work for me. My grandfather met us at the station. I looked down on a head like a brown speckled egg with rogue eyes. He drove us around in his Rover, showing us various pitches where he had played cricket for the County. He made us pink gins: two before lunch. He showed us his hothouse with rare prize orchids, his “Englishness” suddenly undone like a trouser zip in this rash act of boasting the tropical flowers in their gaping, pendulous whiteness ─ the flowers that grow in the Island.
Don’t mention the Island, my father had cautioned in every letter that caught up with me across two years of travel through Asia and Europe. My grandfather’s denial of his birth place had always seemed pitiable. I didn’t know much about the British Empire in those days, and even less about my grandfather.
My grandmother was a tallish ice-queen with harsh blonde hair and a mouth saw-gashed with lipstick strokes. I had expected she might show some pleasure at meeting me. I was her first-born grandchild and hadn’t seen her since I was three.
I hardly dared to sip a glass of wine as we ate the crudely hacked honey-dew melon, the halibut in some tv dinner sauce, and the Sainsbury’s packet meringues jammed together with gelatinous cream. Throughout lunch, my grandparents interrogated me. Every question concerning my parents and siblings was poison-tipped with judgmental venom about their religion, choice of partners, life-styles, habits. My husband was snubbed, despite my best efforts to include him.
Grannie brushed off my offer to do the dishes: the kitchen, that refuge of co-operative comradeship between women in Australia, was a domain in which she wrinkled her nose amid the detritus of rinds and corks and cardboard. I was banished to the living room.
Grand-daddy, who had earlier observed in a mock-pained voice that we read that dreadful “socialist rag”, The Guardian, was now patiently engaged in winding up my husband with gratuitous insults against the black African cricket-players, who were beating the imperial crap out of the sweating Brits in a televised match.
I really don't know why they let these blacks play in the South African team at all, he said with a taunting smile.
We kept our eyes on his tiger-skin rug with its bared teeth still intact, so that Grand-daddy's wicked little tease fell rather flat. I didn’t ask about the dead stripes on which my wedge-heels rested. We left early, our cool intact. As a protective measure, I resolved never to see them again: a decision I regret occasionally as a missed opportunity for exorcism.
Despite their diet and a hefty Diazepam habit, neither of these ancestral misanthropes died until they had celebrated sixty years of incompatible and vitriolic marriage, and their ninetieth birthdays. They largely disinherited their colonial progeny in favor of our English former-punk cousins, who had wisely exchanged their mohawks for Metropolitan police-person helmets, and their bad manners for inventive sycophancy and opportunistic theft.
In their not so golden years my father had spent four months of each year visiting his parents and their senile caprices. I should mention here that the Old Man had, a decade or so earlier, begun to dye his hair, moustache and eyebrows black, and his face and hands an alarming jaundiced brown. The result was disconcertingly uneven and an obvious fake. He looked like a cross between Groucho Marx with hepatitis and Saddam Hussein after the bunker. The thick askew lines of his jet-black eyebrows guaranteed that he would be targeted in every airport security check. He never knew a smooth passage through Customs in any country, and all of this was well before Islamophobic reactions to 9/11. His myopic furtive air and habit of refusing to be parted from his battered black briefcase did not help. Then there was the matter of the Punjabi suits which he adopted to complete his re-invention – in much the same spirit as older Americans abroad who wear Florida shirts.His reasons for adopting this radical new persona were never clear to me, but then there was much about my father I did not know.
Grand-daddy had reacted predictably to his son’s sudden swarthiness, denying him accommodation at the ancestral home, which faced a rather pleasant Common in the comatose city of Guildford. Undaunted, my father continued to run errands, shop, and help with their housework, despite a daily five kilometre return hike from his lodgings to “Greencroft”, and his father’s resentment of this “interference”.
It was the birthday affair that sealed my father’s disinheritance under Grand-daddy’s will. My grandfather had visited the Island only once as an adult, almost twenty years after his own father’s death. As he stood in the wreck of his uniform on the deck of the troop-ship, inspecting the amorphous green land mass for the first glint of iron roofs and wharves, an Anglo-Indian soldier joined him. The Private was scribbly-thin. He had barely survived malaria in Rangoon two months ago, Barnard recalled. Poor chap had made a reputation as a one-rupee fortune-teller on the voyage. He would probably spend it all on arrack and whores as soon as they docked. Barnard flipped a rupee coin onto the back of the Private’s hand as it lay on the rail.
Eighty-eight years of life had seemed an eternity to my grandfather, who was then only forty-two and newly decorated with battle-scars and a Chinese Green Dragon medal for bravery in Burma. The only souvenir Barnard brought home from his visit to the Island was this soothsayer’s number, eighty-eight.
Our male ancestors prided themselves on their rationality, as I discovered many years later when I read the nationalist speeches of my great-grandfather and the texts on Euclidean geometry written by my great-great grandfather. “Fact” was enshrined in the highest alcove of my patriarchal ancestors’ legal intellects. Yet Grand-daddy Barnard Pereira was shadowed throughout his life by the prediction, increasingly as his eighty-eighth birthday approached.
When the day arrived, and my father presented him with a silver paper-knife, my grandfather was visibly upset.
You’d better have it yourself, he said, his voice gloomy as the chime of a gothic clock, It’s no good to us. You should have saved your money. It was very extravagant of you.
My father concealed his humiliation, determined to salvage some gratitude from this unfortunate start to the day. He scurried to the baker and ordered a large cake embossed with Happy 88th birthday in cursive loops of red jelly. He ordered champagne and phoned my grandparents’ neighbours to invite them to a little afternoon celebration. My grandfather never spoke to him again.
With the Ice Queen’s death, certain mementos, some money, and less tangible objects came into my father’s possession. There were photographs and a noticeable diminution of his chronic anxiety. He decided to visit the Island.
After his routine inquisition at the airport, my father set about re-discovering the history of his illustrious Portuguese-Burgher ancestors. In his once-white kurta and loose cotton trousers, he was delighted to be mistaken for a “local” by astute beggars and the near-sighted. Flattered, and determined to compound the illusion, he quickly absorbed slabs of Sinhala. This feat is itself testimony to his remarkable linguistic ability and consummate talent for mimicry. His facility, the Old Man would later claim, was genetically endowed.
From Panadura to Polonnaruwa, fat bluebottles of history tumbled mumbly-jumbly from the mouths of over-eager and under-informed anecdotalists in every guest house, bajaj taxi, and Galle Road TATA bus my father boarded
...your uncle was the richest man in all Colombo … His son died most tragically by his own hand.
My father relished these flamboyant fictions and confused memories almost as much as “Grand-daddy”, his father, had enjoyed following ladies’ legs down Mayfair. He visited the National Archives, where he was disappointed to discover that there were no records of any “Portuguese Burghers”. In fact no such group had ever existed. The Portuguese had married native women and the daughters of slaves from the East Indies, and settled happily among their families. It was only when the Dutch settlers sought to distinguish themselves as a group under British rule in the early 19th century that “Burgher” was invented as a description of ethnicity.
Undeterred, my father, wearing his curry-stained blue Punjabi suit, on a particularly inauspicious hair-dyeing day, knocked upon the hallowed portals of the Dutch Burgher Union. Here, the ancient alabaster-white guardian of Dutch records recoiled visibly and dismissed him with ill-concealed relief when she discovered that his name was “Pereira”.
Oh no, that is a Sinhalese name, she cooed.
You’re quite wrong. It is a Portuguese name as everyone knows, my father shouted at the handle of the oak door. You chupid woman.
A 3-wheeled Bajaj taxi cruised smokily-throatily towards my father, who was waving with amateur-theatrical agitation. The driver of this decrepit conveyance, perceiving what he thought must be an England returned countryman, pulled out his price-negotiating trump card with uncannily intuitive flair:
My name is Morris, sir, I am honest…Morris…I am a Christian.
My father agreed to the fare at once, and perched himself within full sight of Morris’s dashboard, a resplendent and eclectic shrine of St. Christopher medals, and images of Buddha, Ganesh, and Jesus, Mary and Joseph, contained within a fence of flashing fairy lights. With an additional blessing from the hand of a pallid plastic Jesus in a dull Perspex case high above Galle Road, Morris revved enthusiastically into the Babel of horns and brake screeches, the Hades of fumes and burning rubber, the anarchic war-zone of Kollupitiya traffic.
My father’s faith in St. Christopher was a corner-stone of his Catholicism, so he shouted answers in Sinhala to Morris’s predictable questions in English as the bajaj dodged in and out of tiny opportune slivers of space between buses and trucks, overtaking blindly and furiously. Somewhere along Dhammarama Road the bajaj became lopsided and Morris bumped to a stop. He and my father agreed that St Christopher had indeed protected them from this flat tyre occurring on the mayhem of Galle Road. The bitumen bubbled on the road as they tipped the bajaj onto its side like a big toy. Morris replaced the tyre, sweating in his long sleeved shirt and trousers.
My father hovered uncertainly.
Would you like some tea? he asked, as Morris pushed the bajaj back onto its wheels.
In the greasy blackened cave of the tea shop Morris ate three samosas.
I am a poor man, sir. I was an orphan, you see… And now so many children to feed. What to do?
My father sensing the approaching bite, replied that he too had six children. Morris, however, was not so easily dissuaded from his lugubrious monologue. He spoke of his mother, who had died when he was twelve, and of his father who had abandoned her before his birth. He pulled out the crumpled photograph of a coy girl of eighteen or so in an Army nurse’s uniform, and another of the absconding father, a familiar figure in a ragged British Army uniform.
to be continued....
