On their first visit to the Sea House the couple had stayed only for the evening. Sita had hardly spoken. It had been an awkward distressing event and the little information they did glean was unsatisfactory. Stanley worked in an office in Colombo. He was a stenographer, he told Bee, working at a firm that imported fruit from abroad.
‘Why do we need fruit from the British?’ Bee had asked, forgetting to hold his tongue. ‘Haven’t we enough wonderful fruit of our own?’
His wife and daughters had frowned disapprovingly. But Stanley hadn’t seemed to mind.
‘Apples,’ he had said. ‘The British living here miss having things from their homeland. So we get apples for them. After all, we should encourage them to stay. It’s better for the country, safer for the Tamils, anyway.’
Bee made no comment. He took out his pipe and tapped it against his chair. Then he lit it.
‘I want to go to England one day,’ Stanley had confided a little later on.
He was eating the cake his new mother-in-law had baked hastily. There had been no time to make an auspicious dish for the bride and groom; this was all she could offer. The servant woman standing in the doorway, waiting for a glimpse of the eldest daughter, shook her head sadly. This was not the way in which a Singhalese bride returned home. It was a bad omen. The bride and groom should have been given many gifts. Jewellery, for instance, a garland of flowers, a blessing at the temple. The bride should have entered her old home wearing a red sari, to be met by her sister and fed milk rice. And before all of this, right at the very beginning, the servant woman believed, before the wedding date had even been set, the couple’s horoscope should have been drawn up. But none of these things had been done. It was very, very bad. As far as the servant woman could see, shame had descended like a cloud of sea-blown sand on this family. Sita had brought it to the house, trailing her karma carelessly behind her, fully aware but indifferent to the ways in which things worked in this small costal town. The servant felt it was a wanton disgrace.
‘I want us to go to the UK,’ Stanley had said, taking Sita’s hand in his.
Watching him, Kamala had become afraid. She thought he sounded a boastful man.
After we have children, of course,’ Stanley continued. ‘This bloody place is no good for children to grow up in. Everything is denied to us Tamils. Education, good jobs, decent housing—everything. The bastard Singhalese are trying to strangle us.’
His voice had risen and he had clenched his fists.
‘Stanley!’ Sita had murmured, shaking her head.
Bee had seen with a certain savage amusement that at least his daughter had not quite forgotten her manners.
‘Does your family know you’ve got married?’ he had asked his new son-in-law finally, ignoring his wife’s look of unease.
What did Kamala think? That he too was going to behave badly?
‘Yes, yes. I’ve just told my mother. We’ll be visiting her after we leave here,’ Stanley said dismissively, lighting a cigarette without offering Bee one.
He 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