That left Ranjit worse off than before. He couldn’t place the name. It did sound vaguely familiar, but from where? School? His father’s temple? It could have been from almost anywhere, and try as he might, Ranjit could not fit a face to the name. A later news story, long after lunch, after Ranjit had nearly given up, said the suspect had left a wife and four small children behind him.
It really was not his business, Ranjit told himself. He wasn’t successful in convincing himself, though, because if he didn’t know for sure just who this Kirthis Kanakaratnam was, how could he know it wasn’t someone who had in some context been a friend?
That was why Ranjit called the police. He called their central headquarters number, and he did it from a phone in a part of the campus he rarely visited. The voice was a woman, not young, and not in the habit of giving information away. A prisoner named Kirthis Kanakaratnam? Yes, perhaps so. They had a good many persons held in one Colombo jail or another, and they didn’t always give their right names. Could the caller give more information about this person? The names of some of his associates, for example? And was the caller himself related to him? Or perhaps associated with him in some enterprise? Or—
Ranjit quietly hung the phone up and departed that area. He didn’t really think that a squad of Colombo police was likely to come racing down the hallway any minute. But he was also far from positive that they weren’t, and saw no reason to wait around to find out.
When Ranjit got back to his rooms that night, there was the next best thing to Gamini’s actual presence waiting for him, namely, an e-letter from London. (There was also a message that Ranjit’s father had called and wished to be called back—very good news, Ranjit thought, because at least the old man seemed willing to speak to him again… but, all the same, it was the e-letter from Gamini that he looked at first.)
Gamini was showing every sign of having a wonderful time in London. Just yesterday (he wrote) he had walked over to the campus of University College London because Madge had told him that there was something she wanted him to see. Well, it was interesting, all right, assuming you liked looking at dead—even long-dead—bodies, because what was there to see was the waxed and mummified corpse of the two-hundred-years-ago English utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham. He was always there, Gamini said, but usually locked away in the wooden cabinet he called his “Auto-Icon.” As a special favor to Madge it had been unlocked for her by a smitten junior faculty member. This Bentham, Gamini went on to explain, had been a really ahead-of-his-time early-nineteenth-century thinker, had even once written a carefully thought out argument for extending tolerance—well, some tolerance, anyway—to homosexuals. Bentham was revolutionary, Gamini added, but he was also somewhat cautious. He didn’t publish the argument. He locked it away, and so it stayed for a century and a half, until someone finally put it into print in 1978.
By then Ranjit was getting tired of Jeremy Bentham, and a little curious about why Gamini was telling him so much. Could it be because Bentham had been one of the first significant figures to write with some sympathy about homosexuals? And if so, what was it that Gamini wanted Ranjit to understand about that subject? It certainly wasn’t that either of the young men considered himself homosexual, because they certainly did not.
He found that subject uneasy to think about and went on. There wasn’t much more of the letter anyway. A bunch of Gamini’s fellow students—Gamini didn’t mention this Madge there, but Ranjit would have bet a large sum that she had been in the group—had gone up to Stratford-upon-Avon for a day. And then at the very end, in a brief afterthought, the big news: “Oh, listen, I’ve got some summer courses I need to take, but Dad wants me home for a few days this summer so I can see Gram one more time before she goes. He says she’s doing poorly. So I’ll be back in Lanka for a bit. Where will you be? I don’t know if I’ll have time to get to Trinco—but somewhere?”
Well, wasn’t that grand news? It was. And the only thing that slowed Ranjit’s quiet exultation was the fact that his father’s call needed to be returned.
The old man picked the phone up on its first ring. His voice was cheerful, too, as he said, “Ah, Ranjit”—affectionate, pleased— “why do you keep secrets from your father? You didn’t tell me that Gamini Bandara had gone to England!”
Though no one was there to see, Ranjit rolled his eyes. If he had failed to tell his father the news, it was almost entirely because he had been confident his father’s watchers would make sure it got to him. The only surprising thing was that it had taken so long. Ranjit considered for a moment whether or not to mention that Gamini would at least briefly be coming home, and decided not to do the dormitory staff’s work for them. He said guardedly, “Yes, he’s going to school there. London School of Economics. His father thinks it’s the best school in the world, I think.”
“And I’m sure it is,” his father agreed, “at least for certain kinds of studies. And I know you must miss him, Ranjit, but I have to say that it goes a long way toward solving a major problem for me. No one is going to be worrying about your closeness with a Sinhalese boy when there’s an ocean or two between you.”
Ranjit didn’t know what to say to that and sensibly said nothing. His father went on. “The thing is, I’ve missed you very much, Ranjit. Can you forgive me, Ranjit?”
Ranjit had no need to think over his answer to that. “I love you, Father,” he said at once, “and there is nothing to forgive. I understand why you had to do what you did.”
“Then,” his father said, “will you come and spend your summer holidays here in Trinco?”
Ranjit assured him he would like nothing better, but he was beginning to feel uneasy. The conversation was getting sticky. He was glad when he remembered the question his father might be able to answer. “Dad? There’s a man from Trinco who’s been arrested in Colombo, Kirthis Kanakaratnam, and I have a feeling I might have known him at some time. Do you know who he is?”
Ganesh Subramanian sighed deeply—whether because the question was troubling to him or because he, too, was grateful for the change of subject, Ranjit could not tell. “Yes, of course. Kirthis. Don’t you remember him, Ranjit? My tenant? The one with all those little children, and a wife in somewhat poor health? He usually worked as a coach driver for one of the hotels along the beach. His father used to do odd jobs around the temple until he died—”
“I remember now,” said Ranjit, and he did. The man they were talking about was short and as black as Ranjit himself. He had lived, family and all, in the tiny house at the edge of Ganesh Subramanian’s property: by the most optimistic count, three rooms all told, for two adults and four tiny kids, and no interior plumbing. Ranjit’s clearest memory was of the mother despondently washing children’s clothes in a huge tin tub… and the children whining around her feet as they assiduously dirtied more clothes, and themselves.
When Ranjit got off the phone, he readied himself for bed, feeling pretty good about the world. Things were going well. He had made up with his father. He was going to see Gamini, at least briefly. And that mystery concerning the identity of this Kirthis Kanakaratnam was solved, and he would never have to think of the man again, he thought.
Statistics wasn’t quite as boring as Ranjit had feared it might be. It wasn’t much fun, either. Long before Ranjit entered the class, he had a pretty good understanding of the differences between mean, median, and mode and knew what a standard deviation was, and it didn’t take him long to learn how to draw any kind of histogram the teacher wanted. But the teacher surprisingly turned out to have a sense of humor, and when she wasn’t teaching the class what stem-and-leaf and other statistical plots were, she was almost—well, sometimes she was almost—as entertaining to listen to as Joris Vorhulst himself.
But on second thought, Ranjit told himself, no. That was going too far. She was a nice enough person, but she just didn’t have the material of Astronomy 101 to work with. Such as the space elevator and its wondrous ways.
Even Artsutanov’s lift wasn’t the only game in town. What (asked one of the students one day in astronomy class) about something like the Lofstrom loop? For that you didn’t