would not be more forthcoming. No one had known what to say next. May went over to her father and sat on the floor beside him.
‘Well, let’s have some tea, huh?’ Bee had suggested, returning his wife’s look defiantly ‘What are we waiting for?’
And that had been all that had happened at that visit. They had simply taken tea and made small talk. At one point Sita had gone to the bedroom she shared with her sister and collected a few of her belongings. She had shown them her wedding ring. Heavy filigree Tamil gold, not what the Fonsekas cared for, she knew, but they had admired it anyway. The newly weds would be living in Stanley’s old bachelor pad, an annexe in Havelock Road, she informed them. The family listened politely.
‘We’ll stay there for a while,’ Sita had said. ‘Once I get a job and we can afford something better, we’ll move.’
It was no good any of them visiting, she told her mother.
‘The place is too small to swing a cat,’ she said.
The Fonsekas stared at her, not understanding the strange phrase. Why would they want to swing the cat? And it was then, for the first time, that Stanley had laughed. Ah! thought Bee, understanding at last, startled by the sudden animation in the man’s face; yes, he could see what the attraction was.
That had been fourteen years ago. Fourteen years that had given Ceylon time to change for the worse. Time enough for corruption to rise unchecked and burn like a forest fire. Riots, demonstrations, the bitterness accumulated from a century of foreign rule, all these things combined to unhinge the nation. While the British, Bee observed bitterly, had de-camped, the Ceylonese had no concept as to where on earth they were going.
Bee gave up talking about his eldest daughter and buried himself in his work. Eventually the servant woman persuaded Kamala to have Sita’s horoscope drawn up. The sea of superstition still remained. Bee watched, refraining from comment. What was done was done. Slowly, aware of his own weaknesses, he tried to be fair to Stanley, refusing to tolerate any comments on their differences in his home. It was the British who were the enemy, not his son-in-law’s. The plight of the Tamil people since independence was what needed to be addressed, not petty family differences. But for the first time Bee understood how complex a business this was. Determined, in spite of his son-in-law’s covert challenges, he tried to patch the rift. If he was disappointed, he did not show it.
‘It’s just his nature,’ he would say to Kamala whenever she became upset. ‘Human nature is the same the world over.’
But the easy affection he had once shared with Sita vanished. He did not expect it to return. Now all was correct and careful. Slowly his work had begun to sell and he became a prominent figure in the tiny artistic community that existed on the island. Once or twice a painting had sold to collectors in Malaysia. So, with one daughter married, and another growing up, he buried his disappointment and painted instead. Two years passed in this way. Sita visited, sometimes with Stanley, but more often than not alone. Her new husband was always busy. He still wanted desperately to go to the UK.
‘When we have saved up a little,’ Sita told her parents without a tremor of regret in her voice, ‘then we’ll leave.’
Bee understood. What else can the man do? Even while Kamala wept, he accepted the inevitable.
‘She chose a difficult path,’ Bee said, ‘and in spite of everything I can’t help admiring her.’
He spoke as he believed, never knowing how his words would return to haunt him.
Then five years and three months into their marriage, in the cool of the rainy season Sita announced she was pregnant. Bee responded to the news with astonished silence. Kamala, thinking he was angry, eyed him warily. But Bee was not angry. Far from it. On the same evening in the deepening twilight, he went on his usual walk across the beach to watch the ships taking up their position on the horizon and to marvel at the way in which this simple piece of information had altered his perception of the entire world, forever. A child, his grandchild! A blessing that, after so many years, brought such hope. I am glimpsing eternity, he thought, speechless with amazement. Out there in the void, between the fore and aft of his own life, was an extraordinary vision of the stars. He was delirious with happiness. Standing on the beach, gazing out towards the sea with nothing beyond him except Antarctica, he had fallen in love with this notion of immortality. Here was a life to be, not of his own time yet joined to him by time’s common flow. They would be bathers in the same sea, he and this child; time had brought the generations together. This was how he felt, even before he set eyes on her, the little scrap they were to call Alice. As far as Bee was concerned it was love at first sight, paradise regained. Alice, returning from the hospital in her mother’s arms, ready to be shown the sea for the very first time, could anything top that? In that instant he had seen her great dark eyes roaming curiously towards the ocean and he knew that forever after the shore and the sea would be bound up with Alice, his first grandchild.
Things changed rapidly after that. He changed. All that had been falling apart began to reassemble. Kamala watched him indulgently, secretly breathing a sigh of relief. May laughed, teasing him. The neighbours became accustomed to his long discourses on the child and the nature of childhood. Her intelligence was soon legendary and had quickly become an established fact in this part of the coast. Bee didn’t care. They could laugh at him as much as they wished, but his painting now began to be influenced by the child’s interests. He stopped the sweeping watercolours of the ocean and began to paint in miniature: small sea plants that grew in cracks, minute white seashells buried on the edges of rocks, fragments of marine life washed up in the monsoon storms, fish scales, raindrops on the edges of a coconut frond. All the things in fact that he had begun to show his new granddaughter. The dealer in Colombo came to visit and liked what he saw. Life in miniature, he called it, and urged Bee to paint more. There was, it appeared, a market for this closely observed minutiae. Bee allowed the dealer to take a few paintings. But mainly he was reluctant to sell this new work, for it felt too private to be seen by others. He re-decorated the room facing the ocean, for before long, Alice was old enough to be left with them. And finally he saw, to his greatest joy, the child wanted to be near him as much as he wanted to see her.
‘Grandpa!’ she cried, as soon as she caught sight of him, waking from a sleep, carried in her mother’s arms, delighting in the sight of him.
Stanley wanted her to speak only English, of course, but somehow both Singhalese and Tamil slipped into her vocabulary. Bee made no comment, the gleam in his eye saying it all. The child could do no wrong. Kamala produced small, dainty cakes whenever a visit was eminent and May, grown tall and very lovely now, embroidered white frocks for her niece.
Time passed slowly as the sea and the old whitewashed house absorbed these moments thirstily. Memories moved lightly against the sun-warmed walls. It was a long golden moment stretching over almost a decade. Sita gave up her job as a teacher and began to write a small column for the woman’s page of the Colombo Daily News. An uneasy existence between Singhalese and Tamils existed lulling them into a false security. She wrote her articles under a pen-name and Alice, without anything being discussed, was taught to use her mother’s Singhalese maiden name. By the time she was ready to go to school she thought of herself as Alice Fonseka.
Then one night, when Alice was five, Stanley was beaten up on his way back from work and his money stolen. When he arrived home he was bleeding from a wound on his head and his clothes were torn. Luckily Alice had been staying with her grandparents. Sita called for their usual doctor, but he refused to come out, telling her to take her husband to the hospital instead. The police too were indifferent. There was a travelling circus in that part of town, the policeman said, shrugging. Best to keep away from Galle Face for a bit. It would be impossible to find the culprit.
And
