eight eightWhen it comes to pancakes, my mind goes blank. Try as I might, I can’t remember how to make a pancake. I am thrown by this, I who made pancakes so often. Am I so estranged from who I was? The boys ate their pancakes with a syrup of lemon juice and sugar. Steve had his with chicken curry and dhal. And they haven’t done this in six years now. I startle myself as I say this. As though it’s a new truth, I am stunned. I want to put a fist through these last six years and grab our life. Claim it back.
I want to be in our kitchen late on a Saturday morning as Steve walks in with a paper bag filled with bagels for lunch. I’d toast them with mozzarella, and tomato and basil and chopped green chilies. Steve and I will have a glass of Sancerre. The bagels at our local bakery were nowhere near as good as the ones we bought from the Brick Lane Beigel Bake when the two of us lived in East London long years ago, before the boys were born. We went to late-night movies at the weekends then, and on our way home stopped here for the steaming hot bagels that were pulled from those ovens all night. At three a.m. it was just us and London cabbies cramming into that brightly lit shop where you got a dozen bagels for a pound. We would tell the boys about our lost carefree nights. “It was so good then, we went out all night, and we didn’t have you to bother us so we could sleep as late as we wanted on Sundays.” They’d look downcast.
In the summer, at weekend lunchtimes, Steve lit up the barbecue. Squid marinated in lemongrass and lime and chili flakes. Slices of salty haloumi cheese and lamb chops and sausages from Nicos, our local Greek Cypriot butcher. Nicos always doubted that Steve was English. “The English know nothing about good food, how is he English?” he’d ask, and I’d tell him it was my good influence, and he accepted that.
And often, at the weekends, Steve cooked big meals, and we had friends over. Or his family visited and there would be more than twenty of us for Sunday lunch. He’d make our version of raan, an Indian lamb roast. We’d marinate a leg of lamb for two days in a mix of yogourt, almonds, pistachios, lots of spices, mint, and green chilies. Steve watched the roast, concerned that it would not be tender enough, throwing some gin on the meat when basting it. The meat, he’d say, must be so soft, it can be eaten with a spoon.
On quieter days we cooked duck eggs, ate them with crumpets. The boys were impressed by duck eggs. They cupped them in their palms to feel the weight, they tapped the hard shell. Vik would pretend to spin bowl with one, enjoying my agitation as he twisted his fingers around it and lurched forward, raising his arm. He eventually put the egg down, saying, “Calm down, calm down”—in a strange accent (meant to be Liverpudlian). This was something he learned from his father. Regular life. So I thought.
It was at the Sunday farmers’ market in Palmers Green that we bought duck eggs. Whenever we went there, Malli would get lost. We usually found him among a heap of purple-sprouting broccoli, his hair sticking up like a baby heron’s. We’d buy greengages in August. Often they were perfect, not too yielding, but not unripe. And in the spring Steve bought artichokes. He steamed them with garlic and bay leaves, and we ate them hot. Steve showed the boys how to separate each petal and scrape out the pulp with their bottom teeth. He’d describe to them how he first ate artichokes when he was about ten, and was travelling in his father’s lorry somewhere in France.
For my father-in-law, Peter, the isolation of driving a lorry for weeks on end on European roads was redeemed a little by wine and food. Peter shunned the egg and chips served at the truckers’ stops. Instead, every evening he coiled his articulated lorry onto narrow country lanes to reach a French or Italian village where he’d made friends with a family who ran a small restaurant, which was usually their dining room, and where each day just one dish was cooked. From the time Steve was about seven, he’d gone with his father on a long trip to Europe during the summer holidays. It was on those journeys that he first tasted risotto, and rabbit stew with bacon, and bouillabaisse, and ravioli that didn’t come out of a can, and he loved it all. His friends back home were envious of these trips. But if he began telling them about his culinary adventures, they looked at him blankly and said, “You wha—?” and got on with causing grievous bodily harm to each other playing football, accusing him of “eating foreign.” Foreign was not popular fare on an East London council estate in the early 1970s.
But for Steve’s family it was. Steve’s father was born in Rangoon and lived there and in western India until he came to England with his parents and three brothers in 1946, when he was ten. According to family lore, they were the first Lissenburghs to return to Europe after one Wilhelm Lissenburgh left northern Holland and sailed on a merchant ship to South India in the mid-seventeenth century. When they settled in England, in a small seaside village near Bournemouth, Steve’s grandmother and her sisters drove long distances searching for spices and ingredients for making balachang, a tangy prawn paste. My mother-in-law, Pam, when she married, quickly learned to eat spicy food and to cook chicken curry. So Steve grew up on curries she made using Bolst’s Curry Powder, which came from Bangalore in a tin and which his father relished when he came home at the weekend from Italy or France.
Vik and Malli liked stories about Granddad being a lorry driver and about Steve’s travels in the lorry when he was a boy. We’d linger over lunch as Steve described how he slept in a bunk inside the lorry and did his homework as they drove through long tunnels in the Italian Alps. Vik was impressed to learn that Steve even helped Granddad unload his enormous container. Mal was incredulous that sometimes there were only tomatoes in there, so many tomatoes, that’s unbelievable. Or rather, unbeleeevable, in Malli-speak.
These conversations inevitably ended with Vik complaining about Steve’s chosen occupation. He was peeved that Steve had really bungled this. “Why can’t you be a lorry driver? What’s research? I hate research, it’s so boring, Charlie’s dad’s a policeman, that’s even better than being a lorry driver. Isn’t it? Isn’t it?”
He’d stop grumbling when I gave him his pudding. In the autumn I often made apple-and-blackberry crumble. The two apple trees in our garden go wild with fruit. We sometimes picked blackberries when we went walking in the woods, and Steve instructed the boys to only pick the clusters hanging high in the bushes. “My granddad called the ones lower down pissed-on berries,” he would tell them, and they liked that. Later in our oven those urine-free blackberries burst under the crumble and trickled like purple lava across that buttery crust.
In our house, Malee was the best pudding maker. She was much more than a nanny to us, she was our friend. And she spoiled us with her delicious food. She made blueberry muffins with buttermilk and baked bread buns with grated coconut and palm treacle inside. Steve and I returned from work to the warmth of freshly steamed string hoppers and the heady aroma of blackened tuna curry bubbling in a clay pot, thickly spiced and sharp, with lots of goraka, a dried, very piquant fruit.
Steve loved cooking seafood. In London we’d get live lobsters from the Wing Yip supermarket off the North Circular Road. I tried not to watch as the man behind the counter took out a couple of live lobsters from a tank and killed them and chopped them and cracked their claws for our stir-fry. In our kitchen that night, chunks of lobster turned crispy in a sauce of black bean, ginger, and shallots and red chili flakes. If the claws were well cracked, the liquid seeped in, and the meat inside was delicious, and Steve helped the boys dig it out with chopsticks. I would tell them that when I was their age and went on holidays in Sri Lanka, my parents bought gunnysacks filled with live crabs from the market, and we’d have crab curry for lunch, very, very spicy. And that the grown-ups always drank fresh coconut toddy before lunch. And that the toddy smelled like puke, so my cousin Natasha and I sat on the steps of our rented bungalow crying and retching from that stink. The boys were gleeful at the thought of our distress.
Our quest for fish sometimes took Steve and me to Billingsgate Fish Market at dawn. Our friends thought we were quite insane, waking up at four a.m., having Malee sleep over so we could leave home without the children. “Why can’t you just go to Waitrose?” they’d ask. The sparkle of big fish markets they just didn’t get.
For us it was bliss. We sloshed about from stall to stall on those nippy mornings, drinking coffee that tasted like barely brewed tea, from plastic cups. We’d stop and admire Devon crab in their gleaming purple shells and olive-skinned John Dory with disgruntled deep-sea faces and clawlike spikes on their dorsal fins. We searched for the sea bream with the brightest eyes and flesh that sprang to the touch, and for the plumpest monkfish tails. We bought squid by the boxful, and whole cuttlefish shining in their pinkish cloaks, and tuna, and sometimes swordfish. When we got home, Steve would try to ask Malee nicely if she could clean the squid and cuttlefish, and she would tell him to get lost. If he was mad enough to go out in the wee hours and stink the house out with tons of fish, he could clean it himself. So Steve got further delayed on that report for the Department of Work and Pensions and laboured at the kitchen sink, his hands covered in cephalopod slime.
The boys were curious about our early-morning excursions. Did we see a whole swordfish at the market, they’d ask, big sword and all. I had told them that when I was a girl in Sri Lanka, I had a swordfish blade with spikes sticking out of it, I kept it on the bookshelf in my bedroom.
I was about twelve or thirteen when I got that blade. We were holidaying in Wilpattu, a national park in the northwest of the country, and had driven for hours on bumpy dirt tracks to a fishing hamlet deep in the jungle. My parents, uncles, and aunts were in their usual search for lobsters and crabs. The swordfish blade was perched on a broken-down catamaran, and I was looking at it with interest when a very handsome young fisherman came up to me and told me I could have it. Just as I was beginning to enjoy what I thought had been an unnecessary crab-shopping trip, my uncle Bala marched up and asked the young man if he wanted to marry me, boasting my virtues, I always came top in class. The poor boy hurried away, shocked and embarrassed. Someone did take a photo of him, though, bare-chested, wearing a blue and yellow sarong and a shark’s tooth tied on a black string around his neck. Some years later I found that photo in a book I’d taken with me when I went to Cambridge, having failed to make it as a child bride. That photo is still in a box at home in London. I once showed it to the boys. “Much better looking than Dad, no?” I asked. Vik was affronted, “No way!”
I don’t want to remember all this. Not alone. I want to fondly reminisce with Steve. It will be one of those days when we’ve stolen out for lunch. We’ll be at La Bota in Crouch End, where the charred baby octopus is so succulent. We didn’t get much done on those days we both worked from home. Steve would constantly pop his head around the door of whatever room I was in (“Elevenses?”) and we’d sit in the garden and have tea. Or he’d call me into the study (“Remember this?”) and play something like that Elvis Costello track he introduced me to in Cambridge. Steve did do a very good Elvis Costello impersonation at the time. That song was “Alison,” Alison is an anagram for Sonali, he told me proudly in his college room, in the days when I didn’t take much notice of him. “Hmm,” I thought when I first heard those lyrics: “ ‘I heard you let that little friend of mine, take off your party dress.’ ”
After our wasted days, Steve worked late into the night, two, three a.m. was common. But we always managed an unhurried dinner, just the two of us, once the boys were in bed. I can see Steve now, cooking dhal, a bottle of Chimay in his hand, listening to Coltrane as he watches over the bubbling oil, waiting for the mustard seeds to pop. Eerie but flawless, Steve would say about Coltrane’s Blue Train. While cooking, he’d leap and dunk a basketball into an imaginary hoop. Come on, play basketball with me, he’d constantly say, and I’d raise my eyebrows and put my feet up on a chair. I was equally impatient when he spoke about his nostalgic love for strawberry-flavoured Angel Delight.
I can also feel now the freedom of our Friday nights, when the babysitter came and we headed out. We’d eat at Odette’s in Primrose Hill or at Blue Diamond in Chinatown. We’d stop at Bar Italia on Frith Street for double espressos, and we’d take our time sipping them on the pavement outside, even on the coldest nights. Or we’d drive all the way to Green Street in East London, to a Punjabi café that made the best naan bread. Driving around London at night, I loved that, the city felt rightfully ours. True Londoner that he was, Steve understood the city, and I learned it with him. And now, often, when I revisit these places, I am warmed by remembering those easy evenings. But I also often reel. How can there be a London without Steve?
I remember the four of us driving home to North London on our last Sunday in England. We’d been to Fortnum & Mason to buy a Christmas pudding for my mother. Steve wanted to show the boys the new offices his research institute was moving to, near the Post Office Tower. It was raining, and I was in a hurry to get home. “Do it when we’re back in January,” I said. We’d had lunch at Fortnum’s that day, and Vik was thankful that finally we’d brought him to an English restaurant. While Malli considered himself Sri Lankan, Vik insisted he was English, because Daddy was. Steve also bought his favourite Dark Lime Marmalade that day, for when we returned from Colombo.
My friend Anita had cleaned out our kitchen that January, jams and marmalades and all. The first time I went back to our home, I stared at the empty gleaming spice jars in the cupboards, my head in a whirl. Now, each time I am in London, I restock our kitchen, bit by bit. Those white ceramic pots are again filled with turmeric and cloves and cinnamon and fenugreek and flakes of dried fish. But some things in our kitchen I can’t bear to even glimpse. I can’t touch Steve’s oyster knife. I dare not open his cookbooks. It would be too much to see a chili oil stain on a barbecued squid recipe or a trace of a mustard seed on the aubergine curry page of his Ceylon Daily News Cookery Book.
On Steve’s very first night in Sri Lanka, he leaped, half-clothed, into the ocean at Galle Face Green at midnight, and I said he was nuts. That was in 1984, when he was nineteen and in his second year at Cambridge and I was in my third. Steve, and our friends Kevin and Jonathan, had come to Colombo with me that summer. They all flung off their shirts that night and dived from the tarred promenade right into those big August waves before I could say anything about the ocean there being dirty or about the strong currents that lurked. We’d only come down to the seafront for a walk, not to swim. Now I had to take them home in the car with their grimy feet and soggy shorts and dripping underpants. Mad, silly boys, I scolded them later, and as always Steve objected to being called a boy, he was a man, and as always then I scoffed.
That first summer Steve played cricket on our street, shirtless and barefoot, with the small boys in my neighbourhood. Kevin, Jonathan, and he sat on the high wall at the back of our garden, swigging from large bottles of Lion Lager. They gathered around my father in his library to examine his collection of ancient maps. At dinnertime they stuffed themselves with string hoppers and prawns, Steve’s devotion to my mother’s prawn curry beginning then. And after dinner I’d leave the door that led from the balcony to my bedroom unlocked for Steve, and he’d lie on the double bed he shared downstairs with Kev, waiting impatiently for my parents to finally turn in. At the time I still had that ugly painting of a girl playing a violin that someone gave me for my thirteenth birthday hanging in my room.
They had fifty pounds each, Steve, Kev, and Jonathan, to travel around the country for three months that summer. Steve sat next to me on the bus, the elbow he stuck out the window burning in the sun, and thrilled to the newness of the landscape of the southern coast. I held my nose as a child threw up in front. On the beach at Unawatuna, Jonathan wore a large floppy hat and read a biography of Lenin under a tree while Kev and Steve flung each other about in loutish mock fights, chanting, “come an’ have a go if you think you’re ‘ard enough”—very childish, I thought. To prove to me they were capable of more profound emotions, they sang “Song to the Siren” sitting on a rock, declaring that when they first heard it played on John Peel Sessions, their hearts stopped.
We went on the train to Nuwara Eliya to spend a few days with my parents at the Grand Hotel, and Steve forgot to pack any clothes. How could you be so stupid, didn’t you think your bag was a bit light, I asked, and when Kev and Jonathan ran out of clothes to lend him, he wore mine, unconcerned. Kev took a photo of him swinging from the branch of a mossy tree on the top of Pidurutalagala Mountain looking ridiculous in my green top.
Four summers after that first trip, Steve arrived in Sri Lanka with a new suit, all his Smiths tapes, and a large carton of duty-free cigarettes for my grandmother, and we got married. We lived in Colombo for the next two years, renting an apartment with an old stone bathtub and overpolished cement floors, and an enormous spider named Insy who hid behind the kitchen sink.
And every night we did averages. We’d sit at the table after dinner, mosquitoes savouring our bare feet. Steve would give me the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack and say, “Ask me something.” So: “Graeme Hick in 1987?” I’d ask. “Sixty-three point sixty-one,” he’d reply. “Viswanath, 1975?” “Eighty-five.” “Michael Holding?” “Twenty-three point sixty-eight.” “Cowdrey, 1965?” “Seventy-two point forty-four. No, no, seventy-two point forty-one.” And so it went. These were batting or bowling averages. He had to (and did) get them correct to the second decimal point. Riveting, married life.
Steve learned the rhythm of my family effortlessly. He joined in the afternoon gossip of my mother and aunts, egging them on with questions about saris and socialites. He bonded with Ma by admiring the rubies on her new earrings and riled her by insisting that her prized silver serving dish looked like the FA Cup. Still, my mother sent him an elaborate lunch every day in a tiffin carrier to the school where he taught economics and played lots of basketball. If his lunch was late, he’d phone my parents’ house, but Saroja, our cook, who insisted on calling him sudu mahattaya (“white gentleman”), although he pleaded with her not to, would be confused about who was phoning until he announced loudly, “This is the white gentleman speaking,” leaving the other teachers in the staff room quite aghast. Steve impressed my young cousins with stories from London. His version of Dave and him challenging heavy-booted fascists selling their newspapers on Brick Lane skipped over the bit when the two of them were sent packing and crept into the nearest pub. Steve tried to match my father and uncle in their beer and whisky drinking but couldn’t quite. Da showed Steve the correct way to tie a sarong.
At the temple on full-moon nights Steve patiently held my grandmother by her arm as she took her time distributing coins to rows of beggars who wished her prosperity in her next life. And he smiled even more patiently when she told him, “I really like you, Steve, but I wish Sonali married a nice Sinhala doctor, never mind.”
In those first years after we were married, Steve and I travelled around Sri Lanka in a rickety red van he’d borrowed from his school. That van stuttered up the steep road to Horton Plains, and on those chilly grasslands we saw the flashing eyes of hundreds of invisible sambar deer lance the twilight mist. And it was only after he’d inched that van back down a precipitous track that Steve calmly said, “Looks like the brakes are fucked.” It was not the brakes that gave up when we slid in the mud on the shores of the Minneriya lake. I bellowed at Steve for not noticing that the van’s tires had almost no tread, while near us a serpent eagle split open a fish’s gut.
The most frequent trips we made in that red van were to Yala. As a child I spent countless family holidays there, when we stayed for a week in a bungalow in the jungle, and my parents and aunts and uncles always brought too little water and soft drinks for the children but somehow got the quantities for beer right. We’d all sleep, eight beds in a row, on an open veranda at night, with only a three-foot wall between us and an elephant that appeared in the glare of the moon. I loved driving around in a jeep in the dry months when the jungle is a lattice of grey, its monotony broken only by the green burst of a wood apple tree or the red of torn bark. I liked it when the rains came, and the roads were spongy, and the trees instantly turned lime green, and the grass was mosslike in the evening light. While my brother and cousins squabbled over the last drop of Fanta in the back of the jeep, I sat next to my father and learned all about birds.
Now, in the late 1980s, an insurrection in southern Sri Lanka meant hardly anyone came to the Yala national park. So Steve and I could bask in our solitude, staying weeks at a time in an empty hotel by the sea, where the staff let us get our own beers from the bar because they were too busy playing carom and a tall tusked male elephant with a broken tail roamed outside after dark. It was to become more plush over the years. This was the same hotel we were in when the wave came for us.
Steve was utterly pleased with himself for taking that red van where only a four-wheel-drive jeep should go. We skidded across rocks and struggled in deep sand and nearly toppled over on trails that were mostly washed away. Often we encountered a herd of elephants on a narrow track. We’d park on a side to let them pass, but sometimes they’d tire of us and line up in front of our flimsy red van, coiling trunks, kicking dust, thundering their throats, readying to charge. Steve’s hand would reach for the keys to start up the engine, but they would have fallen, and it was only after much fumbling under the seat that we could make our escape. “Ali madiwata harak,” Steve would laughingly say about this later, and I’d tease him about his attempt at being clever. He’d picked up some of my mother’s countless Sinhala idioms, this one meaning “It’s bad enough the elephants are here [to destroy the crops], now the cattle have joined too.”
Each evening we’d sip a beer on a rock by the lagoon near our hotel and recount our day’s adventures and conjure up our future. As a child, I always wanted to be a ranger in a national park when I grew up, and now Steve’s enthusiasm for the wild matched mine. So we cancelled our plans to return to England to do Ph.D.’s in economics. We’d become naturalists and live in the jungle, in a tent. Of course we did go back to England and get doctorates in economics. But on those Yala evenings, as the lowering sun gave that lagoon a coating of crushed crimson glass, our dreams made complete sense.
Two blue whales slip under our boat. I lean over the rails and look. Beneath the sunlit water these whales are blue indeed, an unlikely glowing aquamarine. With a loud rush they surface moments later, dappled grey and startlingly close. We see more whales spouting in the distance—great gusts of mist erupt from the ocean’s surface and quickly fade, so fleeting. I count eleven blue whales in all. The two near us don’t swim away. They circle our boat, vanishing under it again and again, menacing or playful, who knows. I told my friend Malathi that this boat looked insubstantial when I first saw it at the Mirissa harbour at daybreak. It seems more so now.
But I am too spellbound to be unnerved. I’ve never seen a blue whale before. I steady myself on this boat that sways in the ocean’s swell.
Our boat sits alone in a smoky dark-blue ocean twenty miles from the southern coast of Sri Lanka. There are no other boats in sight, it was some hours ago we last saw land, the sky is bare, no birds. I expand this emptiness, thinking how to the south of us is endless ocean, and then Antarctica. The sea is deep here, it drops two thousand meters to where darkness is complete and some fish have no eyes. Vik knew all about this, the midnight zone.
And Vik was struck by the wonder of blue whales. He grappled with their immensity, as long as three buses, tongue as heavy as an elephant, heart the size of a car, how can that be? He was awed by their ancientness and ancestry. There were whales even sixty million years ago, but isn’t it true they looked like dogs? I remembered all this as our boat chugged out of the small harbour. I shouldn’t be on this boat, I thought, as I nibbled on a ginger biscuit to stop feeling seasick. Vik never got to see a blue whale. I shouldn’t be out searching for whales when Vik can’t. It will be agony without him. I’ll have hell to pay.
And earlier, as the new heat of day warmed my bench on this wooden boat, their absence crowded me. Up front by the bow, that’s where Steve and Vik should be sitting. Malli should be leaning his head on this rail. This sun should be finding the hidden red in his silky black hair. I’ve flung my flip-flops in that corner, there should be three more pairs piled on top. We always loved the morning ocean, still and soft. The prospect of something this sublime, blue whales, and I couldn’t stow away their absence as I sometimes can. It charged out.
The boat entered open ocean, the coastline twisted and tilted behind. This southwest coast we knew so well. I surveyed it now. At the far end of the Mirissa beach, a bright surf lunged at a rocky outcrop, Girigala or “Parrot’s Rock,” it’s called. To the left, the sandy sweep of the Weligama Bay with its waveless, shallow waters and a colourful huddle of fishing boats. And beyond, the octagonal lighthouse at Dondra Head that the British Imperial Lighthouse Service built in the late nineteenth century. I never tired of telling the boys that this is Sri Lanka’s southernmost tip, not that Malli cared when he had a tantrum there because he was hungry and wanted only red bananas. Steve and I planned to have a house along this coast some day soon.
In these six years since they died, I’ve found it hard to tolerate this landscape. I spurn its paltry picture-postcardness. Those beaches and bays are too pretty and tame to stand up to my pain, to hold it, even a little.
Two silvery flying fish leaped out of the ocean, tails swaying. They wobbled in the air a moment before gliding above the emerald sea, fins transformed into gauzy wings. The boat dipped and rolled. We’d been out here for nearly two hours, no hint of whales. The sun was high, lighting fireworks on the water.
Malathi and I talked with Rajesh who navigates this boat with a couple of crew. Until recently Rajesh was a fisherman, as were generations of his family before him. Then a few years ago someone discovered that blue whales and sperm whales migrate along a route in these waters. Now in the early months of the year when there is no monsoon, Rajesh does whale-watching trips. He told us about how he has dived in the presence of blue whales. A container ship appeared in this otherwise empty ocean, heading southward. Rajesh instructed us to hold tight the rail, the ship’s passing would make a big wave, and it did. He steered deftly through it, so expert, all muscle, quite a lovely scar on his cheek. Steve should see, how I am impressed.
As the first blow of a whale was sighted, our boat speeded up, and I was in our living room in London. Vik and I on the red sofa watching The Blue Planet. I could hear him catch his breath as two blue whales appear on the screen, impossibly huge even as the aerial camerawork dwarfs them in an infinite ocean. He twists his hair faster and faster as they cruise and dive. And as our boat chopped the water, I wished the whale ahead of us would disappear. I can’t endure whales without Vik.
But another misty spout beckoned from a few miles in front, and my want for wild wonder got the better of me. Blue whales, I was roused. Then that music from The Blue Planet came back to me, the BBC Concert Orchestra playing that hymnlike blue whale score. I flinched and bullied my memory. Put a sock in it, give it a rest.
Now Malathi and I cling to the rails on this open deck, our eyes transfixed on the two blue whales alongside the boat. We are heady, enthralled. This is the largest creature that has possibly ever lived and, as Malathi tells me, one of the most elusive. Rajesh has turned the boat’s engine off. The sea slops against the hull.
It’s hard to comprehend a creature of such unearthly dimensions. The two whales rotate around our boat, they move with effortless grace, seeming to have some powerful purpose. The sight of them is staggering, the sensation sacred. I am happy to be here, thankful even.
I want every detail. I want to take in all this blue whale magic, maybe more so because Vik can’t. I search the ocean as he would. There is a stir in the water, a foamy mass heralds the head that rises to the surface, its shape an ancient arch. The whale breathes, and a flare of water fizzes in the air. I want to see more now, I want the head to lift higher, that huge pleated jaw, or better still, maybe this whale will breach. But I am left wanting, soon the head is submerged.
They keep their hugeness hidden, these whales, rarely revealing themselves whole to my eager eyes. As one of them cruises underwater, I see burst after burst of glowing blue. When the other breaks surface, the front of its body curves back into the ocean as the rest of it emerges, and the swiftness of this glide gives no hint of hauling impossible bulk. The whales keep their mystery. I am left to infer their might.
The men working on the boat tell us they haven’t sighted whales in this sea for some days now. Not since the tsunami in Japan, they say, and they wonder if these creatures were disturbed by it. It is five days now since the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan. And I’ve not been able to keep away from those television images. As much as they horrify me, I want to see the meanness of that black water as it crumples whole cities in its path. So this is what got us, I thought, when I saw waves leaping over seawalls in Japan. This is what I was churning in. I never saw the scale of it then. This same ocean. Staring at me now all blue and innocent. How it turned.
Where were these whales when the sea came for us? I wonder. Were they in this same ocean? Did they feel a strangeness then? Another whale who was in the distance has come closer now. I hear a loud, low bellow as it exhales. Now the whale inhales. Resounding in this vastness I hear a doleful sigh.
I am hushed. I sit now on a damp cushion on the floor of this boat, not compelled anymore to grab every glimpse of these whales. My earlier discord eases. I don’t dread whales without Vik. I don’t need so much to duck and dive from remembering. I am unclenched and calmed by the beauty of these creatures, by their pureness, and I savour this relief. Then again I look. This is amazing, now a whale shits. A vast crimson slick slowly fades into the blue water. Ah, you should see this, Vik. All that krill.
I want to stay on this boat forever. I am lulled by the breeze from the sea and the rocking boat. In this endless expanse of ocean, I feel snug. These blue whales are unreal and baffling, yet surrounded by them I settle awhile. Somehow on this boat I can rest with my disbelief about what happened, and with the impossible truth of my loss, which I have to compress often and misshape, just so I can bear it—so I can cook or teach or floss my teeth. Maybe the majesty of these creatures loosens my heart so I can hold it whole. Or have I been put in a trance by these otherworldly blue whales?
It feels as though I am in a dream here, in this slow haze of sea and sky. A whale now dives. For the first time I see the great flukes of a blue whale tail rise out of the water. The dive takes just moments, but for me this time slowly unfurls. The water sliding off that lifted tail seems to freeze into stalactites.
And I remember now another dream. Some months after the wave, Anita told me about a dream Kristiana had. She was eight years old then, bewildered by the loss of her friends. One morning at breakfast, Kristiana insisted that Vik and Malli had come back home. She talked about her dream of the previous night. She saw Vik and Mal, they were holding hands, they were walking out of the sea.
The tail of the diving whale slaps down and vanishes into the blue. This is a deep dive, the whale has left us. I see the glassy imprint of its tail tremble on the water, but soon it smooths away. The ocean is losing its morning stillness. It’s gone noon, waves gather, the boat shudders.
We head back to shore, and I tell Malathi that blue whales and Steve and I go back a long way. There was an early story that Steve told me. It made me notice him as more than an always-drunk eighteen-year-old from East London who’d made it to Cambridge. He’d described to me an experience he had on his first visit to the Natural History Museum when he was six years old. It was a school trip. He walked into the Blue Whale Gallery not knowing what was awaiting him. Then he saw the life-size model of a blue whale. The intensity of feeling that arose in him made tears stream from his eyes, he said. He was utterly overwhelmed, this was the most stirred he’d ever been. He’d never suspected such magnificence could exist. He was a little boy who’d rarely ventured outside the block of council flats he lived in, and now this sight, an epiphany. But he was also fearful. He knew he’d be tormented by his friends if they saw even a hint of his tears. In his inner-city school, even if you were only six, you couldn’t cry about whales.
Before I left Colombo for Cambridge at the age of eighteen, my mother fussed about the bland English food I’d have to eat and tried to teach me to cook dhal. But onions made me nervous. I’d been this way since I was three, when my aunts locked me in the onion room in my grandmother’s house—to punish me for disturbing their afternoon siesta, most likely. That shadowy room was scattered with wicker baskets swarming with small red onions. From that day I hadn’t been able to touch an onion or eat it raw—an onion peel drifting somewhere in the house, and I’d call for someone to clear it away. Apart from onions I wasn’t anxious about anything when I went to university. I was leaving Sri Lanka for the first time, I’d never lived away from my family, and I was parting from all my friends in the girls’ school I’d been to since I was four. But I was unperturbed. Everything that mattered then—studying, making friends, flirting—came easily to me, and I was cheerily secure. But Aaththa, my grandmother, worried for me. Every evening, after scolding the servants for bruising the jasmines they’d picked for her, she would light an oil lamp and offer the ruined flowers to a stone Buddha and pray that I wouldn’t marry an ali wandura—an “albino monkey,” aka a white man.
During my first winter in Cambridge in 1981, it snowed so heavily that my self-assurance crumpled. I regarded the icy mess that was the Huntingdon Road in dismay—to get to lectures, I have to cycle two miles on that? My new friends were patient. Their bikes flanked mine on either side and back and front as I teetered along. We quickly became a close-knit group, those of us who read economics at Girton, spending most of our waking hours together, moving in a pack. When I first met David and Alan, they announced to me that they’d come to Cambridge for “excellence, excellence, excellence,” but a few months later, David was skipping lectures with me so we could listen to Our Tune on Radio One. Lester, who was a year above us, would sometimes try to hide his East London heritage during Formal Hall by pretending, unsuccessfully, that he was a Nigerian prince. Clive impressed us all, he’d had a gap year and gone busking with his fiddle in Mexico. Seok, who was from Singapore, and I were the foreigners. Not only was she more skilled on a bicycle than I was, she wore punk makeup and Goth clothes. I wore a bright blue Michelin Man–looking jacket given to me by my aunt.
In that first year I had a lot to learn. Grasping Keynesian critiques of monetarism was the relatively easy part. I struggled more with Life of Brian, my first Monty Python film. I didn’t get half the jokes. I persuaded myself to like The Clash just because David did, I bought Combat Rock. My friends and I were heady with our recent initiation into left-wing politics, hardly taking time to sleep for discussing the crises of capitalism. To protest against Thatcherite policies of cutting public spending at a time of high unemployment, in the Cambridge Union I sat next to a young man wearing polka-dot trousers and threw eggs at Sir Geoffrey Howe.
I’d been in Cambridge a year when Steve arrived. He’d also come to Girton to read economics.
“Does it rain here often?” This was the first thing Steve said to me. Except he said “rhine,” not rain, and I stared at him thinking, What? He was standing behind me in the lunch queue, a tall and skinny eighteen-year-old, with a wooden tray in his hand. He repeated his question in response to my blank look, scarlet-cheeked now. When I figured out what he’d said, I still thought, What? I gave some uninterested reply and turned to the curly-haired boy who was with him—Kevin, he told me his name was—hoping for a more inspiring chat. Steve later told me he thought then, you arrogant cow.
Steve and Kevin relied on each other to navigate Cambridge, an untried terrain for these two working-class boys, Steve from East London and Kevin from Basildon in Essex. So at the sherry reception to meet the Mistress of the college, Steve nudged Kevin as he told her, “Me and me friend want to …” but too late, she corrected him and said “You mean, my friend and I.” Kev tried to stop Steve picking out and eating the leaves from the cup of green tea he’d been served by their economic history professor during a tutorial—“No, mate, you don’t do that, no.” In those days Steve wore a green bomber jacket, Doc Martens boots, and a West Ham football scarf. This look of urban toughness was at once defeated because his grandmother had knitted STEPHEN across his scarf, as you would for a five-year-old.
The two of them quickly became the comics in our group. They regaled us with wildly exaggerated impersonations of characters from their local neighbourhoods, savouring the knowing that in Cambridge they would not be maimed for this, as they would be back home. So they’d act the thief who stole his neighbour’s TV and displayed it in his own living room—even though the neighbour was a friend who often popped over for a chat (and probably to watch Crimewatch UK, who knows). Or “hard men” who strutted the streets saying, “You lookin a’ me or chewin’ a brick?” and were affronted if you looked them in the eye. And those with ambitions to make it big in the world of crime—wannabe bank robbers and bare-knuckle fighters who lived by the code of not “grassing up” friend or foe to the law. This was the first I’d heard of Cockney rhyming slang and learned that tea leaf was “thief” and butcher’s hook meant “look” and trouble and strife was, of course, “wife.”
Every evening Steve and Kevin were drunk, vomit arcing over Trinity Bridge or dripping down shut windows that hadn’t been opened fast enough. I kept my distance. “Her ladyship,” they’d tease me. “Look, she’s miffed, she’s turning her nose up at us.” Two rowdy boys, I thought, not yet fully formed.
So I wasn’t seeking Steve’s interest when each morning I sauntered down the hallway we shared wearing a transparent white kurta and no underwear—I’d only just woken up and was going to the bathroom. But this encouraged him to come to my room with his copy of The Complete Poems of John Keats and read from it. That book was stained with black grease, he’d taken it with him on his travels across Europe in his father’s lorry the previous summer. He told me he read Keats’s “Lamia” sitting on a crate in a warehouse in Milan, and not even the din of unloading trucks could distract him from Lamia the serpent transforming herself into a woman, writhing and foaming—“her elfin blood in madness ran.” Now from “Lamia” he read me the lines “Eclipsed her crescents, and licked up her stars” several times over. You could be a tad more subtle, I thought.
But he had glossy black hair that fell across his forehead and very distinct, slanted dark eyes and a pointy chin. Sweet. So I enjoyed the occasional hours we had together, just the two of us, without Kevin or the rest of our friends. We went for long walks on a dirt track by fields where the veterinary science department kept deviant-looking bulls with oddly shaped heads. And through St. John’s playing fields at dusk. I was still unaccustomed to how early daylight caved in on English autumn afternoons. We hurried to the tea room of University Library when the hot scones were served. I was bored with the economics I had to study that year and readily gave up grappling with Sraffa’s theory of value to linger with Steve among the stacks in the North Wing, reading pamphlets on party games in the British colonies or books on East End villains like the Kray twins. Steve told me that not too far from where he lived, in Whitechapel, was the Blind Beggar Pub where the Krays shot someone.
Steve was full of stories about his family and his childhood and about the London he knew. He’d grown up in Manor Park, on the outer edges of East London—“growing up on the Manor,” it was called locally. It was here that Steve played football with his brother, Mark, late into the night under streetlamps. He loitered with his friends outside the sweet factory nearby, imagining the rich pickings inside. They ate tomatoes that grew wild by the sewage works near the Roding River, a trifling tributary of the Thames, and their faces broke into a rash. One day Steve’s father told him that he’d smash his kneecaps if he saw him hanging around too many street corners. Steve knew his dad wouldn’t but was thankful for the threat. It allowed him to stay in and do his homework when his friends called round, yet again, to go hurl milk bottles against the wall of the social club at the end of their street. “Na, not tonight, mate, me dad’ll kill me.”
His father’s long absences from home due to his job meant that Pam, his mother, raised Steve, his brother, and his two sisters largely on her own. She did so cheerfully and very volubly. When Steve was little, she’d embarrass him no end by bemoaning to everyone at the launderette the fact that his ears stuck out, as the two of them folded the family laundry. Although Pam’s daily life was confined to their East London neighbourhood, she had a great curiosity about world affairs and politics. And of all her children, it was Steve who paid attention to her interests. As a teenager, he’d spend long evenings lying on the sofa with his head on his mother’s lap, evaluating for her the French parliamentary system or explaining the Spanish transition to democracy. His mother’s other passion was romance novels—she read one a night—and Steve and his sister Jane would be instructed to buy second-hand paperbacks by the dozen for her from a stall in Green Street Market.
They’d stop by the market on their way to see West Ham play at Upton Park on Saturdays. Since Steve was about seven, Jane, who was five years older, took him to football matches. After the game they’d visit their grandmother, who lived near the stadium in a flat full of clutter above a Chinese takeaway. She always told Steve he was bright because he took after her sister, who was “the cleverest woman in Rangoon.” In Rangoon, his grandmother’s father was the supervisor of a slaughterhouse, and she spent her days playing tennis or going to garden parties.
His details caught my fancy—so many yarns, tender and funny. My stories of my childhood seemed meagre in comparison. I told him about my first trip to the cinema when I was five, to see My Fair Lady. My parents had to bring me home halfway because I began howling at the steaming hot bath that was being run for Eliza. We had only cold showers then in Sri Lanka, and I thought she was about to be boiled alive. This upset me more than the stilt walker who came down our street once a week in the afternoons, when my mother was having a nap and I was playing outside.
Despite that early nervous talk about rain, Steve had a self-belief that ran deep, I soon learned. He was unruffled, at ease with himself. When we had exams or essays to write, he had remarkable focus. He worked intently, nimble and efficient in identifying what was important from those absurdly vast reading lists. Always precise, those notes he scribbled with a pencil on revision cards in the hush of the library’s Manuscript Room.
Steve came to Cambridge from a secondary school that was academically dismal. When they were sixteen, a couple of his peers would spell Hitler as “Itla.” The street outside was lined with police riot vans at the end of the school day. Mobs of students who played truant turned up at the gates to fight others who’d spent the day wrecking classrooms. Apart from our friend Lester, who’d been to that same school, no one went to university, some went to prison. On hearing that Steve was off to Cambridge, one of the veteran delinquents assumed it was just another borstal and said, “Which one’s that then? What’s the grub like there?”
Steve was always relaxed about the bedlam in his secondary school. It even worked to his advantage, he told me. For he had the undivided attention of his teachers, a rare student they could actually teach, and he thrived. And the troublemakers let him. He had respect for being on the basketball team. It also pleased a few of his white peers that “one of them” was excelling. “That’ll show the Pakis,” they’d say, perceiving that it was mainly Asians who achieved anything academically in that school. This was the late 1970s and early 1980s, when notions of white supremacy were widespread among groups of youth in deprived neighbourhoods. The distress he felt about the prejudice and hatred around him, Steve poured into his troubled teenage poems about the corrupt urban soul.
Some Sunday afternoons in Cambridge, the two of us would go study in a meadow or an orchard, a bottle of Southern Comfort in hand. The English countryside had no allure for me as yet, and I would complain that it was boring, no wild elephants charging at us. Steve declared that, unlike me, he could find charm in any landscape. He described how he’d luxuriate in the glow of early sunlight striking red brick on his council estate as he cycled through its streets every morning delivering newspapers for Patel’s, the newsagents on Romford Road.
We would hitchhike from Cambridge to London a few times a term, the group of us. We’d go to the Reading Room in the British Library and to Highgate Cemetery, out of reverence for Karl Marx. Our friend Seok introduced us to Cantonese roast duck and rice at Kai Kee on Wardour Street. It was on one of these trips that Steve’s great passion for the bronze Sri Lankan statue of the goddess Tara in the British Museum was ignited. Another time, one December afternoon, he made Seok and me walk around his neighbourhood for hours looking for the place he buried his Action Man when he was six. It was cold and dull—what was that nonsense he’d told me about radiant red brick?—and I was pouting.
But the next morning when Steve came to my room and sat on my bed, I reached for him. To save him the bother of, yet again, reading Keats. He was very eager, of course, so sweetly intense, but before long he said, “Back in a minute,” and left. I later learned this pause was so he could sprint to Kevin’s room and bang on his door and brag “I snogged Sonal” and relish his friend’s response. Kev threw him onto the floor. “You lucky bastard, you jammy git.” Had I known then of this silliness over a kiss, I would never have let him in my room again that cold December morning. But he came bounding back. And stayed a good while.