THE RAIN CAME PELTING DOWN and the crowd began to disperse. Saha called out to Para to follow him and ran for cover under the platform where those who had sat closest to it had already found shelter.
‘Some speech,’ said Saha, drying his hair with a handkerchief.
‘Some man,’ responded Para.
A pimply faced youth next to him smiled and nodded. He was about to say something when his companion, an older man who looked like his father, asked him, ‘What was it he said about the estate workers?’ His son was not sure, and Saha answered him. ‘He said that they were not ready to join them yet, but his friend Natesa Iyer was working on it.’
‘No, not that,’ rejoined the man.
‘Ah, you mean that bit about the labourer is a labourer, not a Tamil or a Sinhalese or an Indian?’
‘Yes. That was a bit too much wasn’t it?’
‘Was it?’ asked his son weakly.
‘We are not ready for it yet.’
‘When do you think you are going to be ready for it – after independence?’ bristled Para. ‘And you are going to get that all by yourself, are you, without the rest of us?’
He would have gone on, but Saha pulled him away. ‘Look, there’s Tissa,’ he said, pointing to the other side of the platform where Tissa was dismantling the stage. Tissa must have seen them at the same time because he signalled to them to wait for him.
The rain stopped as abruptly as it had begun and people began to move out of their shelters. The clock at St Anne’s struck five.
‘I should be going,’ said Para, ‘or I’ll be late for work.’
‘Wait and say hello to Tissa.’
‘No, really.’
‘OK, see you soon.’
Tissa joined Saha a few minutes later and together they walked through the park towards the exit. The sun was out now, but arrived weak and damp through the dripping leaves of the trees.
‘How was it then?’ asked Tissa enthusiastically.
‘Fine.’
‘Fine? That’s all you can say?’
‘I enjoyed it.’
‘Enjoyed it?’ Tissa’s voice went up an octave.
‘All right, it was rousing.’
‘And the Chief?’
‘He was good. Clear. Precise and to the point.’
‘That’s all?’
‘And rousing.’
‘Bloody hell. What do people have to do to get some passion out of you?’
Saha smiled smugly. He liked to think that he could keep his emotions in check.
‘Well, come and give me a hand at the weekend then,’ Tissa enjoined him.
‘I can’t. Auntie Prema is bad again and –’
‘Yes, yes. All right,’ Tissa gave in ungraciously.
They had come to the park gates by now, and Saha turned to take leave of his friend.
‘He should have been on the platform with them, you know. Uncle. That was his friend Hamban William who spoke first.’
‘Ah, that’s who it was. The second speaker, you mean, not the chairman who got all those cheers from the crowd?’ Tissa nodded. ‘I thought I’d seen him at Uncle’s.’
‘How many times I asked Uncle to come and meet the Chief!’ Tissa shook his head in bitter regret.
But Uncle doesn’t see eye to eye with the Chief, thought Saha, lowering his head and patting his hair down with his hands.
‘I know what you are thinking,’ Tissa told him, ‘but those days are gone. We need organization now, and the Chief is doing it. It’s still the same fight though. Why can’t he see that?’
Saha said nothing. He heard only the pain behind the words, and the loss of faith. Tissa had looked up to S.W. all his life, and he wanted the old man up there, with the others, on the podium, to be recognized for the fighter he was.
‘The least he could have done was to come to the rally.’
Again Saha was prompted to reply, but held himself back. Tissa knew why his uncle could not come, but that did not assuage his disappointment. He had wanted to show off to the old man, show him that he was continuing in the same tradition, and he wasn’t there. It was like the time when he, Saha, had won the Scripture Prize at St Benedict’s, and had wanted his father to have it, as his prize, for sending his son to school, or at least to be there; but that was impossible, absurd, and he had made do with Uncle Segaram. This, of course, was much more important. It was like an initiation, like when Saraswathi came of age.
‘He could have got you or Para to look after her,’ Tissa grumbled.
‘It was he who sent us.’
‘Not the same thing, is it?’
‘That’s plain silly,’ Saha reproached. ‘You know he doesn’t trust anyone else to look after her. He even thinks she is ill because of him.’
Tissa raised his eyebrows quizzically.
‘All that womb business,’ Saha flung his arms embarrassedly about.
Tissa looked as though he wanted to believe Saha, but his hurt got the better of him.
‘It’s his pension, that’s what it is,’ he said bitterly.
‘Oh, don’t be bloody stupid,’ Saha flared up, and broke into an angry defence of S.W…. Of course the old man wasn’t thinking of his pension: he still had a couple of years to go, hadn’t he? Tissa looked doubtful and Saha changed tack. Why risk it anyway? With his record, he had only to make one false move. Saha stopped. S.W. didn’t need that sort of defence. Tissa was confusing him. All the old man was concerned about was his wife’s health, as simple as that. Who would look after her if something happened to him? Who was going to pay all the doctor’s bills? And still he had sent Tissa a tenth of his pay towards the strike fund. What more did Tissa want?
‘He won’t even take extra money for my board and I’ve got to hide it in the shopping I do for him,’ Saha confided. But Tissa remained unmoved.
‘If you feel that way about the strike,’ Saha cried out in frustration, ‘what do you think it is doing to him? He has fought his whole life, and Prema is his whole life, and it must crucify him to be divided like that. And you, you are going to judge him?’ Saha looked at his friend in disgust.
‘I’ve got to go,’ he said, and turned to leave, when Tissa suddenly flung his arms around him and swung him round.
‘You really love him, don’t you?’ he asked.
‘Not as much as you do,’ replied Saha in the honesty of his anger. ‘Maybe I understand him better.’ Tissa’s glasses were misting over, and Saha offered him his handkerchief. ‘In this thing, anyway. I too have the same, the same … conflict.’ He paused, trying to give the correct words to his thoughts. ‘I don’t know what my first duty is, to my own folk or to other people, poor people, like us. I know they are connected, it is the same injustice that gets to me, it is what makes me want to fight. But if I fight too hard and lose my job, who will look after my father and my sisters?’
‘Couldn’t you do both?’ asked Tissa putting his glasses back on and returning the handkerchief to Saha.
‘But how can I? At some point they cancel each other out. It is different for you, you have no responsibilities.’ And then more generously he added, ‘You are different, anyway, more impulsive, purer, in a sense. I go about things more slowly, more deliberately.’
Just then, Sultan came through the gate and stood by Tissa, a bundle of leaflets in his hand and a question on his face.
‘Where on earth did he spring from?’ laughed Saha. Sultan seemed to turn up when he was least expected. ‘I should be going.’
‘OK, I’ll come home on Sunday. Definitely.’
Tissa did not turn up on Sunday or the weekend after. But by then the strike had grown into a general strike all over Colombo. Goonesinha’s plans were succeeding. The workers at Walker’s and Brown’s and Lipton’s and Harrison’s came out in support of the government workers in the railways, the docks and the machine shops. People were beginning to see that the fight was not just against the bosses but against the British. And they brought out their old clothes, their family trinkets and ornaments, and turned them into money to add to the strike fund.
There was excitement in the air, and a distant sound of chains being broken. Saha could not go to work without wanting to join the strikers on the streets: if only the clerks had a union of their own. Para went from house to house collecting food for the strikers, as though it was what he was meant to do all his life. And on the seventeenth day, S.W., at Prema’s instigation – she was getting better by the day she assured him – came out to join his old friends, Hamban and Kanda and Podi, in a march through the streets of Colombo that brought the city to a standstill. But the police were out in numbers by then, and the army hovered on street corners, and the heady smell of victory was not unmixed with the bitter taste of fear.
By the end of the third week, the money had begun to run out; the public had no more money to spare, and Tissa, who was in charge of the collection, came home to empty tins. Para reported that food was becoming scarce, and its distribution a hit and miss thing; some families were on the verge of starvation. And the strikers were beginning to tire of Goonesinha’s endless negotiations. The inactivity was getting to them and when, two days later, two of the strike leaders from Harrison’s and Hoare’s suddenly disappeared, the strike began to fold up. The drift back to work began with the commercial firms and soon spread to the docks and railways. The strike ended the following week, in unconditional surrender, leaving the acrid smell of burnt ambitions in the air.
Tissa dragged himself home to S.W., bewildered, bedraggled and running a high fever. He had lost his glasses in a skirmish somewhere and looked even more lost than he was. Saha gave up his bed to his friend and slept on a mat on the floor beside him. Prema tried to bestir herself in the kitchen but gave up. And S.W. seemed to pride himself in his new-found worth as cook and nurse and woman about the house. Some of that spilt over into Saha’s life, and he began to put aside his studies to attend to Tissa or to listen to Prema, who got more garrulous as she got better. Para slid in and out, doing the outside chores like some old family retainer. Slowly a sort of peace settled over the household, and by the time Tissa was well enough to return to work, uncle and nephew had been returned to their old relationship, prompting Saha to remark pietistically to his brother, ‘You see, all these things are sent to test us. You should read the Gita.’
And then, one day, S.W. received a letter, postmarked OHMS, requiring him to present himself before the Railways Inquiry Board to ‘answer certain questions appertaining to the recent strike’. At first, he thought nothing of it. He had had nothing to do with the strike, if only because Prema had been ill at the time. And as for going on the demonstration, that was nothing: everyone had. The letter was probably a mistake. He wrote to the Railway Board to say so, but got a postcard in reply reiterating the instructions in the first letter.
S.W. was puzzled. The strike had been over for several months now and he had been back at work almost as long. Yet no one in his workplace had a clue as to what the letter was all about, least of all his bosses. He had certainly been outspoken about the men who had been dismissed as a result of the strike, but everyone knew that he had not gone along with the idea of a political strike in the first place. He was a union man, plain and simple.
The Board of Inquiry thought otherwise. They accused him of being an agitator from way back; in fact he had been nothing but a trouble-maker all his working life. He may not have been implicated in the most recent strike – that remained to be seen – but he certainly could not deny his past activities. They were all down in black and white.
S.W. had no wish to deny them. Indeed, he was proud of them. But he had been punished for them already, and he smilingly counted out his punishments as though they were notches on his gun. They had no call to punish him a second time for the same offence, or was that not British any more?
Ponsonby was not impressed. He had been appointed Chairman of the Board by Governor Manning and, like Manning, he hated the natives, but, unlike Manning, he made no secret of it. They stood in the way of progress, he was known to have said, all those thousands of smelly creatures, they did nothing to help themselves, and they still aspired to the rights of the white man. And if they thought that striking was a way of getting there, they had bloody well think again.
He was a short, fat man, with a balding head and a forest of whiskers, and he puffed out his chest as he made his declaration of war, causing the sweat to break out on his fat, florid face. S.W. laughed as he recounted the tale to Saha and Prema at the end of the first day’s hearing.
‘If only he could see himself as I see him,’ he ended good-humouredly.
‘Who is he?’ asked Saha.
‘Ponsonby? President of the Planters’ Association. He hates strikes and he has threatened to shoot Natesa Iyer if he so much as utters the word “strike” on the estates.’
The second day went very much the way of the first, with charges being read out and S.W. answering them. Ponsonby again ran the show, but the other two members of the Board did most of the questioning. Ponsonby did not turn up on the following two days, and his colleagues appeared to be more relaxed in his absence, even conciliatory. One of them in particular, the Scotsman, went so far as to offer S.W. a cup of tea at a sticky moment in the questioning, and to suggest that they should be concentrating on the business in hand, not on past improprieties. He smiled a yellow smile at S.W., who could not help noticing what a nondescript man he was, despite his courteous manner and disarming smile. His companion, on the other hand, looked like a clerk turned gigolo, with his dashing little pencil moustache and slick black hair. He went along, though, with everything that Strachan said. And between them, they put S.W. at his ease.
He agreed with them that the strike was a mistake and, encouraged by Strachan, he went on to confess that his sympathy was with the strikers, not for the strike: this wasn’t the time for it. Strachan raised his eyebrows questioningly. The workers were not ready for it, S.W. went on earnestly, and it had to come from them, from below. Strachan looked blank, and Upjohn mirrored his blankness. Out of their own need, S.W. could not avoid his compulsion to explain, fuelled by their own sense of grievance and injustice, not foisted on them from above … he stopped. He had said too much.
So it was not just his wife’s illness that had kept him from getting involved in the strike, Strachan offered, dragging on his unlit pipe, it was the principle of the thing. Upjohn nodded his pomaded head vigorously, willing S.W. to agree. S.W. held his tongue. Strachan took a match to his pipe, but did not light it. He put his pipe down on the table and looked intently at S.W. From that perspective, he ventured, one might even say that S.W.’s past misdemeanours … ahem … activities … were done in good faith, and therefore had no bearing on the present case. He turned to Upjohn: Mr Ponsonby could not quarrel with that, could he? Upjohn shook his head from side to side and wrinkled his pretty nose, as though to say that there was no chance of disagreement there from the chairman.
S.W. felt uncomfortable. He was sure Strachan meant well and was trying to help him out. But why? Because he disliked Ponsonby? He certainly had not tried to hide his contempt for the bibulous planter. Or because he considered himself a cut above the rest, an Oxford man, and enlightened? Whatever the reason, if Strachan’s suggestion meant disowning his friends or his past…. He was about to say as much when Strachan held up his hand: no, no, he did not mean S.W. to recant his past. Oh no. What he wanted was merely for S.W. to write a letter to the chairman of the board saying that he disagreed with the strike on principle. That, after all, was the truth, wasn’t it? So why not say it? The rest S.W. could leave to Upjohn and himself. They would have a word with Ponsonby. That way S.W. could save his pension and live to fight another day. Strachan rubbed his hands together and chuckled, as though he had solved an intricate mathematical problem. Upjohn glowed: the case was closed.
‘No,’ S.W. heard himself say, his voice an octave higher. ‘That is not what I said. That’s too black and white. You have it all there in my evidence. I have nothing more to say to you. I am leaving.’ And he walked out of the chamber.
On the following day, the newspapers carried an interview with Ponsonby who expressed satisfaction at the way the inquiry was going. Some senior unionists, he said, had seen the error of their ways and were prepared to work alongside the government in future. Some of them, in fact, had been forced into strike action against their will by outside forces. It was up to the government, of course, to bring these forces to book.
That evening Tissa turned up on his Uncle’s doorstep, brandishing The Trumpeter. Saha opened the door to him, but he pushed past his friend, demanding to know where his Uncle was.
‘He’s eating,’ replied Saha weakly, following Tissa into the dining room.
‘How could you do this, Uncle?’ yelled Tissa, throwing down The Trumpeter on the table in front of S.W. The old man looked up and went back to his dinner. Prema, who on hearing the commotion had come rushing out of the kitchen, followed her husband’s example and said nothing. They had been anticipating Tissa’s visit ever since the news broke, but they were not sure how it was going to take him.
‘How could you?’ Tissa repeated himself, walking up and down the dining room, shaking his head in disbelief. Saha could not bear his friend’s distress, but found himself sympathizing with S.W. more.
Prema sat down at the table and indicated to Tissa that he should sit down too.
‘Don’t we allow people to finish eating, any more, before we start fighting?’ she asked, placing her pudgy arms on the table.
‘I am sorry, Auntie, but this is my uncle we are talking about.’ There was a catch in his voice. S.W. put aside his dinner.
‘Sit down, son. What is it I have done?’
‘This is you, right?’ Tissa picked up the paper and stabbed his finger at the report. ‘You told them all that.’
‘No. They made it up.’
‘But they made it up from what you said.’
‘Whatever I said, they would have –’
‘You are the one who goes on about loyalty.’ Tissa was beside himself with grief and anger. ‘Where is your loyalty here, to Podi and Vadivel and them? They were your friends, and they have lost everything.’
S.W. bowed his head and waited for the storm to pass, but Prema was roused to his defence.
‘So, if your uncle got sacked,’ she said bitingly, ‘Podi Appu would have got his job back?’
Tissa let out his anger in a sigh and dropped into a chair.
‘Or did they have a better chance if your uncle could show the Board that, whatever they had done in the past, they were not the ringleaders this time?’ Saha was stunned by Prema’s cold logic: he had known neither her coldness nor her capacity for argument before. But it roused Tissa to anger again.
‘And disown the strike – and the Chief?’ Tissa had not shaved that morning and, seated in the shadow of the lamplight, he looked lean and gaunt and accusing.
‘But it was not their strike, it was his. Why should they take the blame for him?’
‘What sort of loyalty is that?’ There was more disappointment in the question than anger and Prema, leaning towards Tissa, responded in a kinder vein.
‘Loyalty to oneself?’ She held up the palm of her hand questioningly. Tissa did not say anything. The question lay on the table between them.
‘To support something you do not quite believe in, and then go along with it because you supported it,’ pressed Prema, ‘what is that if not loyalty? To your own truth?’
Good lord, thought Saha, another philosopher, and hiding it all in the kitchen. He looked at S.W. and caught him smiling behind his hand.
Prema got up and busied herself clearing the table. ‘Have you eaten?’ she asked Tissa. The subject was closed.
‘Yes, Auntie,’ he replied abjectly, and Saha’s heart went out to his friend: he was such a tempest.
S.W. reached for a cigar on the sideboard behind him, and Tissa went off to find him a light. He came back with a box of matches, lit his uncle’s cigar and sat down on the chair beside him. Prema brought in the tea. Saha, who had been seated by the window, joined them at the table. The conversation turned to the forthcoming wedding of S.W.’s niece in Galle. S.W. did not want to go; he had long lost touch with his sister and when he needed her to come and look after Prema she had made some silly excuse. Prema said she would make the trip if she was well enough and S.W. proposed that Tissa should take his place.
‘All right, Uncle, but I don’t think Auntie Lourdes likes me very much, not after that –’
‘Yes, yes, we won’t go into that again,’ Prema stopped him and Saha, who was anticipating a juicy bit of family gossip, could not hide his disappointment.
The kitchen clock was striking ten when Tissa got up to leave. S.W. suggested that he stay the night, but Tissa shook his head ruefully.
‘Can’t, Uncle,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to get up early morning. The Chief wants me to go up-country with him to see Natesa Iyer.’
‘Important man, eh?’ mocked Prema.
‘Hmm. Can’t do without me,’ Tissa mocked back.
‘Must be his fluent Tamil,’ Saha observed sarcastically.
‘No thanks to you,’ Tissa upbraided Saha and added, in Tamil, that Sultan was a better teacher than Saha ever was.
‘Does Tissa speak good Tamil then, Saha?’ S.W. inquired smilingly. ‘Better than me?’
‘I suppose he does, Uncle, but it is Muslim Tamil,’ and they had a hearty laugh at Tissa’s expense.
Tissa pretended to be aggrieved. ‘Well, the estate workers understand me,’ he said, ‘and I am better off talking to them than to you lot.’
‘That’s right son, you tell them,’ encouraged his aunt. ‘And come again son, in a better mood next time.’
After Tissa had gone, S.W. turned to his wife and said, ‘He is still not quite right with us, is he?’
‘No, he isn’t. He needs time. And he needs to get away from that Goonesinha.’