Short Story - The centipede

Buddhi Bamunusinghe

It was a misty morning. The soft drizzle caressed my skin, which was already dampened by a cold bath. I looked over the hills as I threw the wet towel over the clothes line. A centipede that had been crawling along it, fell and slithered away. I followed it with my eyes until it crept into a tuft of grass.

I thought of the day ahead of me. My husband's finances were improving, but I could not give up my further training, to achieve my objective of becoming a Diploma'd music teacher.

With much coaxing I managed to avoid taking my youngest daughter that day, with me, to Colombo. She was preparing for the Year-5 scholarship examination and therefore needed the physical and mental relaxation at home. My mother had agreed to look after my three children, for the day.

I was lucky to find a vacant seat in the intercity express, a single - on the left hand side. I settled down wishing for a decent occupant for the "jumping seat", appended to mine.

I felt a sense of satisfaction, as I peeped into the little mirror, in my bag. I couldn't help indulging in the vain thought of being pretty. Memories of my Cleopatran mien, which my friends used to tease me, would lure a thousand charming princes, came back. I closed my handbag and settled down to plan my day, so that, I could return home before nightfall.

The music class, once I got there, would last for three hours. I had to pass the Diploma this time. There were only two more weekends. Then, it would be time for the exam, and finally, hopefully, I would also be, a qualified teacher of Western Music, which had been my dream from childhood.

I looked around the bus and saw a young girl, gazing at my feet. I had a weakness for trinkets. She was most probably attracted by the anklets that I was wearing, which were quite eye catching and dainty. I considered my outfit for the day to be quite becoming and smart.

While I had adorned one wrist with gold bangles, the other had a gold wristwatch clasped around it. I felt the girl's eyes examining my feet. This made me turn my eyes to the floor, and suddenly realized why she had been staring, so intently, at my feet.

In the dim light of the neither regions of my seat I saw the hind part of a crawling insect, most probably a centipede, vanishing under the rug. "How strange", I thought.

That was the second one I had seen, for the day. I shuddered as creatures that crawled were not my best friends at all.

The bus started with a passenger in every seat. As usual the AC was not working properly and the occasional dripping of water from the ducts, made the passengers turn and wriggle in their seats, as the cold clammy drops found their marks, with unerring aim.

The radio was clamouring at full volume and the cacophony of music, that erupted from it, nearly deafened everyone, within earshot.

The gallante of a driver, then began his dramatic exhibition of his masculine manoeuvring prowess, complete with his sweeping movements and socializing gimmicks, of saluting and waving.

He often added to this display, a quite unmelodious rendering of horn tooting, with which he saluted numerous vehicles that passed by.

Suddenly the shutter moved and a blast of wind blew my hair all over my face. The passengers were informed that the AC was out of function. I looked around and noticed the lady behind me, twisting in her seat.

She started to squirm and suddenly with a loud screech, jumped off her seat and shook her hair wildly. I, like everyone else in the bus, thought that she has lost her mind. Then she chanted with another loud shriek, "A centipede!".

All the passengers got excited and started to look for the offending creature. Ladies yelled in fear and lifted their sarees and a few even jumped onto their seats. Some gents pulled off their socks in suspicion, to see if the centipede had crawled in. Others got off their seats and started poking around the bus looking for the centipede.

Suddenly a young woman asked for a polythene bag and the ensuing sounds distracted everyone. After a while, one by one, the passengers settled down again.

The music continued in the bus. But now the driver had changed stations and the melodious voice of a popular Sinhala artiste was issuing from the radio, making everyone drift into a fairy tale world of make believe and romance.

Out the corner of my eye, I could see people looking around suspiciously, searching for the offending creature, wondering where it had gone, and whether it might make another appearance. Each one seemed to dread an encounter with the crawling presence but feigned bravado and put up a bold face.

The driver seemed to be the least concerned, as he manoeuvred his mechanical beast with his heroic mannerisms. With a nod here and a wave there, or a raucous "toot-toot" on the horn, he imagined himself to be the monarch of this steel domain of conveyance.

Suddenly, I noticed a family, seated right behind the driver's seat. The mother had a brush in her hand and was trying to brush her son's unruly hair while the father threatened to pull his ears off, if he did not accede to his mother's ministrations. The prodigal resisted all the efforts of both parents with glee and great aplomb.

Then, all of a sudden, the boy snatched the brush out of his mother's hand and threw it out of the driver's window, yelling "Centipede, centipede" and while doing this, he grazed the right ear of the driver with the brush.

The driver nearly jumped out of his seat in fright. He snatched at his ear and waved his arms across his head, to brush away the centipede, which he was sure, was crawling up his balding pate.

The bus weaved terrifyingly into the path of oncoming traffic on the other lane. Horns tooted, brakes screeched and people yelled in fright as the metal juggernaut lurched to and fro, with the driver doing his marionettes dance at the wheel. And then to his great credit, the driver found his wits and brought the bus to a screaming halt, almost running into a lamp post in the process.

When the driver rounded on the boy, the devil was in his eyes. And if looks could kill, the parents would have been childless. In that instant.

The boy's father jumped up and calmed the drive down by pretending, that the boy had actually seen the centipede, crawling up the seat and had brushed it off, saving him from an unexpected calamity.

The incident gave rise to such a din inside the bus, that nobody knew what was going on until the conductor intervened and reminded the driver, that if they got late, they would miss the turn, for the return trip. So the bus set off again, but this time with a much more subdued driver, sans his earlier lordly ways.

Gradually, the passengers settled down again. Each one, lost again in his own private world. I was nearing my destination.

I gathered my belongings wondering where the centipede really was, and hoping that it had not crawled into my bag.

I alighted from the bus at my stop, moved back and raised my head to look at the departing vehicle. And I suddenly saw it. The great offender, the creator of near pandemonium, and the purveyor of mortal terror.

The much sought after phenomenon - the centipede. There it was in all its splendour! Its bright redness spread for all to see. Its front antennae waving, it was clinging onto the glass, with all its fine appendages, with grace and finesse.

As the metal behemoth pulled off and moved away, I could not help casting a second glance at the many legged creature, on the glass, and I was sure, I saw it tilt its head, in a mock salute.

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Dickens: A tale of two professions

He's one of history's greatest novelists but Charles Dickens actually got his start on a newspaper's police desk.

Lyn Pykett

DICKENS: Just as for many people Shakespeare is English literature, so Charles Dickens is the English novel. Many commentators have noted their topicality, subject matter and campaigning mode of address make Dickens's novels like journalism.

Early reviewers noted this. Walter Bagehot (writing in 1858), described Dickens as depicting London "like a special correspondent for posterity'. Indeed, much of his work was in the form of journalism. This master of the novel was a journalist before he was a novelist and continued to write for, and edit, newspapers and magazines throughout his career.

Dickens's career as a writer began not with the publication of his first book, the first series of Sketches by Boz in 1836, but 10 years earlier, when the 13 or 14-year-old Dickens provided accident, fire and police reports for a penny a line for a paper called The British Press.

Dickens's adult career as a writer began in 1831 when he was employed as a reporter and sub-editor for the Mirror of Parliament, a weekly paper producing verbatim reports of speeches in both houses of Parliament.

From March 1832 he also worked for the True Sun, a London evening paper, which at that time prided itself on the speed with which it reported debates on the Reform Bill then going through Parliament.

This radical paper took a strong line against public executions, child labour and the old and new poor laws, all causes Dickens took up in his fiction.

Late in 1833 Dickens also began to submit sketches and stories - at first unsolicited and unpaid - to the Monthly Magazine. He went on to place such material, on a commissioned basis, in The Morning Chronicle, The Evening Chronicle and several magazines. He became a staff reporter at five guineas a week on The Morning Chronicle in August 1834, a position he kept for two and a half years.

It was also in August 1834 that he established his first identity as a writer when he attached the name 'Boz' to a sketch that appeared in the Monthly Magazine: all his writing hitherto had appeared anonymously, as was the custom on most newspapers and magazines at that time.

These early years as a newspaper and magazine man were important in the formation of Dickens the novelist. As well as providing him with a secure income, they served as an apprenticeship in life and literature, allowing him to experiment with various writing styles, providing him with material to write about and drawing him into debates about contemporary politics and social issues.

His development of the Boz byline enabled him to develop an authorial identity and build a relationship with the readers who were soon to become the Dickens public.

Dickens's first novels grew out of periodical pieces. The Pickwick Papers is a series of scenes, sketches and tale, many of which refer to contemporary topics and events Dickens covered for the Morning Chronicle, including the Norton-Melbourne divorce case, which he drew on his representation of the court scenes in the Bardell v Pickwick action.

Oliver Twist began life as the second of the Mudfog Sketches Dickens contributed to a new monthly magazine, Bentley's Miscellany, which he began to edit in January 1837.

The Old Curiosity Shop was Dickens's attempt to revive the fortunes of his next magazine project, Master Humphrey's Clock, whose sales flagged when it failed to satisfy the demand, which Dickens had created, for continuous narrative; sales increased when he developed Master Humphrey's story of his night-time meeting with little Nell and his visit to the old curiosity shop from a short sketch into a serial narrative that filled the whole of each issue of the periodical.

Apparently tiring of the pressures and constraints of the weekly publication of serial fiction, Dickens abandoned this periodical in September 1841 and turned to publishing novels in monthly parts. However, he continued his association with newspapers throughout the 1840s.

In 1845-46 he launched and edited a new publication, The Daily News, having been brought in by the paper's backers as a celebrity name whose growing reputation could be mobilised on behalf of the paper's mission to "elevate the character of the public press" and pursue the principles of "Progress and Improvement", of education and civil and religious liberty. Dickens saw this paper through its launch but, temperamentally unsuited to the daily pressures of editorship and with other writing projects to pursue, he resigned his post a few weeks later.

Throughout the 1840s Dickens also wrote reviews of books and plays and pieces on a wide range of contemporary topics for radical weekly paper.

The Examiner. Because they were anonymous, these pieces on social, legal and sanitary reform did not add to his celebrity, but their subject matter and their manner fed into his later fiction.

Dickens drew on and consolidated his literary celebrity in his next big journalistic project, Household Words, a weekly journal in which he aimed to "speak personally" to the readers of his novels by gathering together essays, stories, reviews, letters, all "as amusing as possible, but all distinctly and boldly going to what in one's own view ought to be the spirit of the people and the time." Dickens was thus setting himself up to speak to and for his age.

Household Words was a campaigning journal that fought against illiteracy and championed the cause of education for the lower classes and improved working and living condition for various categories of worker.

It concerned itself with matters of sanitation and public health, advocated the reform of various outmoded laws and judicial practices, and it attacked nepotism, incompetence and apathy in government.

All of this went out under Dickens's name, since most of the individual pieces were unsigned. Critics of the weekly suggested that in its relentless quest to be amusing and in its treatment of social questions, Household Words was prone to be exaggeration and distortion.

As one review put it (The Press, 1859): "Isolated blemishes in the social system are magnified through the hazy medium of exaggerated phrases to the dimensions of the entire system, and casual exceptions are converted into a universal rule and practice."

Similar criticisms were also made of Dickens's great social novels of the 1850s, usually by those who did not think society was in any great need of reform.

Dickens's last important journalistic undertaking was All the Year Round, which he started in 1859, following his quarrel with the publishers of Household Words.

The new magazine carried much the same weekly mix of entertainment, instruction and topical journalism as before, but Dickens also sought to reserve "the first place in these pages for a continuous original work of fiction: that it was hoped would "become a part of English literature."

Many of the first readers of Dickens' novels would have encountered them as serialised episodes that were surrounded by articles on science, technology and natural history, on the history, geography, economy and social institutions of Britain and other countries, and on the social issues of the day.

Some of this undoubtedly seeped into their reading of his fiction and in some cases Dickens, the conductor and editor, carefully arranged essays and the serial parts of novels so they were in active dialogue with each other. Dickens' first readers read his fiction in a different format and context from the ones in which most subsequent readers have encountered it: the format and context of journalism.