Short Story:

Of love and loneliness

Jean Arasanayagam

It is never too late to speak of that love for someone who is no longer alive. No, never. She shared her secret with me one evening when I was a child stepping across the boundaries that separated her adult world from mine. She opened the door of that secret room where all discoveries are made. I entered and those moments are there, forever embedded in my mind.

There is not a single photograph left behind of her, my adopted Godmother. I tried after all these long years to trace at least one that could be in the possession of her nieces who had emigrated to Australia years before but nothing had been preserved. Only the memory of that gentle face, that soft maternal body remains in my mind. Aunty Gladys.

She belonged to my childhood living in that large rambling old house, Royden, with the two jambu trees standing in the front garden. The back garden was a place of endless fascination and mystery to me. The entire slope behind the house was made up of terraced flower beds with winding paths that led downwards to paddy fields beyond which lay the railway lines. It was at Royden that my memories of aunty Gladys and Uncle Alroy began.

Royden was a house which to me was full of sunlight flooding in from the open windows to fall on the cretonne upholstered furniture and the carpets covering the wood paneled floors of the drawing room. A house that was always filled with people, the young nieces, Sylvia and Thelma and the nephew Noel, the uncles and aunts, friends.

It was never a lonely house filled with silence and shadows. Even now, years later I dream of houses, different houses in different landscapes. The houses, some of which belong to the reality of that era we lived in, in the provincial town of Kadugannawa.

Royden, Paradise View. Houses with names where people settled in to create the history of their lives. Before death and migration changed everything and people moved away from what I realized would never be permanent safe enclaves.

In each of those houses there was festivity and celebration. I was yet to know violence, death or loss in any of them. The adult world appeared to be safe. But it was a world from which I often strayed, wanting to listen to the silence of my own thoughts, to explore my own dreams.

I was emerging out of the chrysalis. I was becoming more aware of that adult world which admitted us as children to share in those elaborate and ritualistic games which were performed as part of a way of life.

There existed a kind of formal pattern which the adults followed and into which we were initiated. There were dance steps to be learned. There were gameboards with rules. We danced the Palais Glide and the Lambert Walk. We clowned and bumped about with Boomps-a-daisy and Roll out the Barrel. Foxtrots. Quicksteps. Tangos. Rhumbas.

Waltzes. The music came from HMV gramophones, pianos, guitars. We spent hours playing Thiamchonal, we learned of reaching a destination, of meeting hazards on the way, of having to start all over again on that gameboard. We treated victory, a heady sensation with joy and faced defeat without rancour. As we danced and sang, the rhythms of life entered our blood, the preamble to the mating dance at which the adults were so adept.

Where then was Aunty Gladys? In those early days? She was always there. Her hair smoothly brushed back over her forehead, a deep wave held back by a tortoise shell slide, wearing dresses of silk or linen, with collars, buttons down front, a buckled belt, court shoes, stockings and with that air of ineffable kindness.

She had no children of her own but I never felt their absence. Her life was filled with Sylvia, with Thelma, with Noel, with all of us. I followed her about when we went to Royden for all those lunches, dinners, parties. She showed me how she made her own ginger beer in big earthenware crocks floating with fat plums.

Ice cream churns were filled with custard, the wooden barrels packed with ice and the handle turned steadily until the ice-cream formed. She showed me how to make pastellas, the pastry rolled out and cut in circles, the patty curry spooned in the centre.

I would fold the pastry, press down the edges seal them with egg white and make fluted serrations with a fork. It was at some of those parties that I learned of the trickster pastella. Filled with mysterious fillings, if you were caught you would have to let go of all shyness and inhibitions and sing, dance or perform antics to amuse the others.

Royden was a world in itself, of entertainment, hospitality, friendship. Sylvia and Thelma played duets on the piano, strummed on Hawaian guitars, sang alto and soprano, voices harmonizing, blending so beautifully together as they sang those sentimental romantic songs, 'Harbour Lights', 'When my Dreamboat Comes Home', 'Blue Hawaii', 'On the Beach of Waikiki'.

Where were those far away places, islands and azure blue oceans, those idyllic landscapes? That map of the world was still to be shaped in my mind. This small provincial world contained the only life I knew.

My aunts, my father's sisters, placed a globe on the dining table and set it spinning to show us where the Cunard liners would take them on their voyages to England and Europe.

Those worlds were unknown places to me. As Sylvia and Thelma swayed their hips and danced, I danced with them too. We followed those mimic steps wearing full bunched skirts with floating streamers and leis of frangipani about our necks.

After the piano duets, the singing accompaniment and Hawaiian dancing, we children were summoned to an early dinner. We sat with our chairs drawn up to the dining table like adults but with starched white damask serviettes tucked around our necks. As we grew older, the serviettes were placed on our laps.

The dining table was spread with damask linen, cones of snowy serviettes, standing upright beside our plates' gleaming silver cutlery and cut-glass tumblers. The glass water-jug was always covered with a circle of tasselled net bordered with tiny loops and tinkling coloured beads.

We ate the same food as the adults, the dinners being formal ones. There was the spinning of yarn after yarn, the men emptying their brimming glasses of whiskey while the ladies sipped sweet sherry. Music entered our psyches with those dulcet voices of Sylvia and Thelma drifting through the still air.

One day those metaphors of dreamboats, harbour lights and blue Hawaii would change and take on a new reality through the passage of those migrations to the Antipodes.

But all that would take years to be accomplished. Until then, here was a moment encapsulated in time as we sat sedately, tilting our soup spoons half-filled with consomme delicately away from the soup plate without spilling a drop in its passage, inclining our heads ever so slightly as if to receive a benediction.

Grilled seer fish followed. Roast chicken, boiled potatoes, Heinsz greenpeas, a salad of crisp lettuce and tomatoes in a vinaigrette.

A dessert of caramel pudding or stewed fruit, apples, pears, peaches, apricots with custard and a quivering red moss-jelly. And so we ate, sitting sedately like grown ups. Going through those early menus of life.

I suddenly became conscious that time was passing. The dinner parties at Royden were coming to an end. Uncle Henny died and only Thelma and her mother were left behind at Paradise View. Without uncle Henny, Paradise View became lonely. His widow's face grew sad. She rarely smiled.

That view of an imagined Paradise became an illusory glimpse of a transient world. I, the little girl who had stood beneath the jambu tree calling out to Uncle Henny, was now growing up. We too had to leave our bungalow perched on the hill and move to the township of Kandy.

Uncle Alroy and aunty Gladys sold Royden to the widow of a Professor of Botany, Professor Chandrasekera from the University of Colombo. She and her son took up their abode in that house with the jambu trees and terraced garden.

The willow pattern plates that covered the dining room walls were carefully taken down and put away. The furniture, the piano, the guitars were packed away. Uncle Alroy and aunty Gladys became our close neighbours in Kandy. They lived in a house called Inbastan. They always lived in houses that had names.

This house had a small courtyard with a little gate that opened out onto the main road. Our house just a few doors away had a parapet wall with potted palms, an All-Spice tree and the deadly nightshade plant where I used to watch the insects drawn into that lethal viscous fluid struggling, drowning. There was also a flourishing margosa tree. Swinging plants swung from the eaves in hollowed-out bamboo and the little garden was full of squirrels and birds.

Once more the visits were interchanged between our families and the pianos in both our houses were heard again with the sing-songs and duets continuing. There were fancy dress parties and Birthday parties. We were in an out of each others houses.

I was no longer the child I was and measuring my height against the wall I found I was growing taller. My view of the world was now an all embracing one. Aunty Gladys was still so much a part of my life. The parties continued. The dance of life continued unabated. New people entered our lives. New friends. The tempo of the dance began to change. New words, new sentiments, new melodies. The rhythm of our lives became more frenetic.

The Second World War was at its height. British soldiers and sailors were the new entrants at the parties. Our spirits were readying themselves for a new migration. For parting. For departure. For farewells and that going away from which there would be no return. Condemned, each of us, to the eternal loneliness of the spirit.

As I reached adolescence, I began to retreat into a shell, absorbed in that world of books which spoke of emotions I was still to experience. Walking alone one deserted roads searching for the irretrievable landscape of that childhood I had left behind in Kadugannawa.

Searching for that revelatory glimpse which would give me knowledge of myself. My solitary walks often took me along Halloluwa road where there was a dark bat-infested tunnel, from which foetid odours emanated. Water seeped down the drip ledges on the sides of the hollowed out rock walls.

The dense darkness which did not admit a single ray of light but which was filled with a secret life of its own was a place of fear and mystery. It was a tunnel which belonged to history, the rock blasted by prisoners of war during the colonial era of British rule.

Its purpose, a shorter diversionary route for military purposes. Soon it fell into disuse. Abandoned to humans but a different kind of life flourished within that moisture laden air.

The odour of a forgotten prehistoric life which engulfed the senses. Within, there were myriads of insects, reptiles, bats, rank vegetation where from the detritus of buried seed new roots snaked forth, new plants sprang up.

I was often drawn to that cave mouth but it was forbidden territory. There were boundaries but what did I know of danger or fear at that point of my life? I was however aware of the hidden force of darkness. I did not explore that tunnel but walked through sunlight and climbed innumerable steps to reach the summit of the hill above the tunnel.

Up there in the silence of shadowy trees and huge clumps of fern, the outside world appeared to be the safer world, the sunlight filtering through the leaves deceptively mitigating the darkness of that subterranean tunnel. I could not even explain to myself why I wanted to be solitary and alone on that deserted road.

My untried innocence, the loss of which was inevitable, protected those few years from ambush and from violation of body and mind. No one could protect me when I stepped into that cave. The darkness of my own inner thoughts swallowed me up and then spewed me out to scatter in fragments at the mouth of the dark tunnel.

One evening when I walked into Inbastan alone, I encountered aunty Gladys. The others were in some other part of the house. Inbastan was one of those old houses that stretched along a passage with a maze of rooms on one side.

It also had an inner courtyard and steps leading into unknown places with a wall and a door that shut out the outer world. The house began on the main upper road and then fell on into the lower road. Each room was enfolded in its own privacy.

"Come, Lynette," aunty Gladys called me softly. "There is something I want to show you. Come, let's go into our bedroom." She led me gently by the hand. I followed her. It was the first time I was to enter her bedroom. And the last. The bedroom with glass paned windows which opened out onto the inner courtyard was arranged in a predictable way.

There was no riddle for me to puzzle out in the way the solid teak furniture occupied all the habitual places. The twin beds, side by side was part of the accepted intimacy of a staid and established marriage. It was a sharing of that bond that welded two souls together with invisible bands of steel which nothing would break.

There stood the mirrored dressing table, the massive wardrobe, the bedside table, a chair or two. The furniture displayed nothing of the turmoil of tumultuous thoughts and feelings. At night the bedspreads would be neatly folded and put away and uncle Alroy would wear his pyjamas, aunty Gladys, her nightgown. They would say their prayers and sleep, clasped perhaps in that warm embrace of a long tried and unaltered or unalterable relationship.

I sat on the edge of the bed careful not to ruffle the bedspread. Aunty Gladys went up to the wardrobe, opened its locked doors with a silver key from a bunch of keys of various sizes and lifted from the top shelf a big, beautiful life-sized baby doll.

It is only now, many years later, when I have given birth to my own children and cradled them in my arms looking into their unshadowed eyes to see myself as I had once been that I realize the longing aunty Gladys must have had to share her secret. It was a secret that could be shared only with one such as myself. Who had known her all those long years. Woman. Child. Child. Woman.

Each of us had to step delicately over that invisible line which separated the years of our lives. For me, the adult experience was still nebulous. What did I know or understand of that aching void, that hankering to feel the throb and heartbeat of a living, child in that birthing.

In the cradling arms of aunty Gladys and myself lay a real, living, breathing child. I held that baby in my arms and within myself I felt the stirrings of a strange new love. It was a love that reached me from that lonely heart.

How many years was it since she had created this child of her imagination? How many years was it since she had hidden that child of her imagination away, preparing with patient and loving care, the layette for the baby.

The smocked baby shirts, the knitted bonnets and booties. The baby linen delicately embroidered. How many years had it taken her to share this secret with any living soul? I became selfish all of a sudden. I wanted to take that baby home. I wanted to possess her. I had longed for another baby brother or baby sister.

Unfulfilled longings. I could not ask aunt Glayds outright. Some delicacy of feeling prevented me but I made up my mind that I would make my mother the go between. The negotiator.

When I did tell my mother she refused my pleading request She understood aunty Gladys. She was a sensitive woman. I let it rest. I never mentioned the baby doll to aunty Gladys again nor was I ever invited to hold or bathe or wipe with soft linen that doll. Nor would I dust the body with talcum powder sprinkled on the swansdowne power puff.

Once only, once. Never again. those exquisite hand-sewn garments were folded and put away. We had entered that inner room, a space in time where no clocks marked the passage of time, no pendulum struck its resonant chords. Silence. The closing of the door. The sharing of that secret which up to this day fills me with a sense of sadness. I still remember the formal patterns, the landscaping of that childhood garden with the two jambu trees covered with clusters of deep red jambus.

The laden branches were filled with birds and squirrels. I had stood beneath those trees and looked out beyond the garden on to the road calling out to those who were inside the house "I can see uncle Henny. I can see uncle Henny. How brief was that glimpse of him. How lost that glimpse of Paradise View. The landscape changed and we all went away. The jambu trees remained until they grew old and gnarled and the fruits grew tart and shrunken.

Aunty Gladys was part of that going away. She was with me until a while longer, remaining long enough to extend my knowledge of life and the world. At the same time she left me with a sense of deep guilt. I never had the courage to make my own confession to her. And now to whom can I make that confession to ease the pain in my memory? Only to the ghost of her memory.

Even to this day I am racked with guilt and sorrow. Being childless, both uncle Alroy and aunty Gladys lavished their love on their beautiful golden retriever. One evening rushing into their house with my parents on one of our evening visits, I who was the last to enter, left the wooden gate carelessly open in my eagerness to go inside.

The dog ran out into the main road. She was knocked down by a passing car. The body was brought indoors and aunty Gladys wept uncontrollably. Her tears fell on that golden brown retriever which had ceased to breathe.

I could not bear to see her cry. I could not confess those words that may have altered her love for me. It would have destroyed me. It would have destroyed her. Would she have ever forgiven me for that loss?