Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Chapter 5
If it hadn’t been for the worms it is highly likely I would be writing this story from my palatial office in a major hospital or as part of a large City law firm.
If it were not for worms, it is highly likely that I my standard work uniform would not be a (Size 16) grey pant suit with bright coloured sandals, matching earrings and chunky necklace, with a name tag boldly displayed on my ample bosom saying: “Shivanthi S. Principal”.
If not for worms, I would be dressed in a gown of some sort on my usual days at work – a surgical gown or a black dress with a silly wig.
I am no doctor or lawyer by profession, but the next best thing if you ask me. I am a real estate agent by profession, a fact that had many of my parent’s friends and associates raising their collective eyebrows. It was what you could call something ‘left field’, the curve ball that many of those of my ethnicity could not clearly compute.
For you see, real estate agentry to a bright Sri Lankan female is a little like pole dancing to Margaret Thatcher: simply incomprehensible.
Indeed over the years, when people had asked my parents what their eldest (still unmarried!) daughter did for a living, you would find Mum or Dad feigning a coughing fit or a seizure as they attempted to mention the unmentionable.
“But I AM a professional, Mum,” I’d hiss. “Why are you so embarrassed.”
It was no good. In my parents’ world, to be a real estate agent was about as much of a “profession” as being a ditch digger.
Anyone with half a brain of Sri Lankan ancestry is considered to be destined for the professions – the real ones. That’s the ‘done thing’, ‘the given’. It didn’t help that I had been “a brilliant student” in my high school years, according to reports by several of my teachers. Their gushing reports of my exceptional results had resulted in dangerously high expectations.
When I was a young teenager, my mother always boasted to anyone who would listen, that her daughter would one day be a surgeon.
It was a futile exercise in a self-fulfilling prophesy for her ambitions were clearly doomed from the start.
Which is how the worms come into it.
I sucked at the sciences, the prerequisites for a career in medicine. And then, there was the ill-fated experiment in biology requiring the dissection of an earth worm.
I couldn’t get it right, slaughtering more than my fair share of the unfortunate annelids in my Year 8 Biology class, and proving a woeful lack of hand-eye co-ordination that could not bode well for an ambition in surgery.
I just couldn’t cut straight, my hands shaking as if I had the palsy so badly that instead of neatly bisecting the creatures I cut most in half . It was like the Texas Earthworm Massacre, my lab table a mass of worm halves by the end of the lesson and the rest of the class shaking their heads in disbelief.
My complete ineptitude at Home Economics was a further ill augury.
I recall one of my earliest ‘sewing’ assignments in Year 10, when I produced the hideous piece of clothing you could imagine. So poor was my stitching that one arm went blue when slipped through the sleeve; the hem was finished at a dubious angle; and the collar I sewed of such poor proportions that, when finished, my head appeared to be balanced on a rather large dinner plate.
I was a poor seamstress and so I could not stitch. I had a gammy hand and so I could not dissect (damn worms!).
Surgery was certainly never to be my forte.
There was the law, of course, but my parents simply could not countenance that. I have no idea why at the time. It would be only years later that I would associate their feelings with an unpalatable story involving a rather well-known Sri Lankan legal figure and what were most likely some unsavoury advances to my mother.
““I can’t believe he put his hand on my backside,” my mother would exclaim, decades later. “Chi! As if I would look twice at him, ugly fellow.”
In my final year of high school, I was called upon to make one of the most important decisions of my life. What I would do with my education. I had duxed every one of my humanities subjects. I was average at best at mathematics.
My parents’ dreams of producing a doctor were clearly misguided. What was left to me?
I could tell you that I pondered deep, long and hard on the career path I would choose. But I would be lying.
The truth is, I chose my career in the least scientific way possible. When selecting my university course, I simply opted to do what my best friend at the time, Louise was doing. Much more organised and career focussed that I was, Louise had done all the research and proved to be a well-informed career guidance source. She gave me a compelling synopsis of her course of first-choice comprising one sentence.
“Err, it’s called, um, a Bachelor of Business Communication and you can do like, Advertising, Journalism and Public Relations,” she explained.
“Sounds alright to me!” With barely a blink of an eye, I decided this was the course for me.
And so it was that I took the first steps to what would eventually become An Unsuitable Career.
But what I didn’t realise at the time was that choosing a career in fact should involve a great deal more thought and rumination.
I had probably spent more time choosing a filling for my lunch time routine of sandwiches.
There are many practical considerations when choosing a career such as:
1. Does your family background make you suitable for your career of choice? For example, if your Uncle Dan is a convicted paedophile, it’s probably wise to avoid a career involving children for the sake of possibly unpleasant associations down the track. If your mother is the town whore, then it’s probably unwise to consider a political career although, come to think of it, this may be a very good match when you think about the number of people you have to screw to make it to the top job.
2. Do you have the kind of personal qualities that suit your chosen career. For example, those who are prone to seedy qualities – lying, stealing and the like – are wise to avoid leanings toward careers in crime prevention. Blind people make lousy lighthouse keepers. School bullies should avoid social work. Those who can’t keep secrets should forego careers in the secret service. I’m sure you get my drift.
3. Does your chosen career enable you to do the things you want to do in life? Want to meet a millionaire, marry him and never have to work again? Perhaps avoid jobs in the prison system. Want to travel to exotic places? Then the public service is an unlikely choice unless you consider a visit to a cubicle on another floor to constitute an exciting travel experience. Want to become rich and famous? Then a career in quantity surveying is not for you as this is not a profession that is always a stepping stone into celebrity magazines.
At 17 though, who thinks about these things? At 17, you are full of possibilities and the idea of practicalities is clearly stifling and is to be ignored.
I didn’t know it then but that star my Mum was wishing on for my brilliant career was infact her dream, combusting, exploding and being sucked into a black hole.
Practical Consideration #1
Unless you’re planning to be a movie star, it’s likely that your name is the last thing you’d consider when choosing a career.
It’s certainly not something I considered.
I’ve checked my white pages and I can confirm that there are some unfortunate surnames.
If your surname is ‘Bitch’ or ‘Harsh’ do you really want a career as a preschool teacher or a marriage counsellor? If your surname is ‘Reckless’ you’re probably not suited to be a driving instructor or an inspector of quality standards in a condom factory. ‘Corpse’, ‘Coffin’ and ‘Death’? Nursing, medicine, and anything to do with keeping people alive and well are, adviseably, out.
Where my name was concerned, I was doomed to stand out like testicles on a naked nun.
Shivanthi Sattambirilage-Koorkoolasuriya Nanayam Pieris. You try introducing yourself like that on a public phone? Before you can gasp for breath, you have to insert another coin.
At 21-syllables, it’s a name that’s unlikely to be used as a pseudonym or anyone wishing to work undercover.
It’s a name that is unlikely to be used by a supermodel or a rock star. Or come to think of it, a newsreader.
It’s a name that gets you into trouble at American airports.
It’s a name that’s difficult to pronounce under the influence of alcohol.
It’s an unsexy name and it’s my ‘baggage’. Because my name means I cannot be separated from my ethnicity.
My name screams FOREIGNER in any country other than Sri Lanka and especially in my adopted country.
The two together – my Sri Lankanness and the world that was Australia – meant my name was one of the practicalities I should have considered in making my career choice.
But I didn’t.
Practical Consideration #2
Believe or not, how you speak and sound can make a huge difference in your career of choice, as I was to (belatedly) discover.
We all know that people with beautiful rounded accents and deep voices are born for roles in radio. We know that people who can speak quickly are great as race callers or auctioneers. And those with husky, sensual voices will do well in just about any career with possibly the exception of bull-wrestling or anything else where large amounts of testosterone are a requirement.
But what about people with voices like mine? Accented with spices, loud and not always comprehensible?
What about people who speak too quickly? Who can’t pronounce their “R”s or “Ws” or have lisps?
These are not voices usually heard on the recorded voices in elevators. ‘The Thseventh floor, pleaths mind your tstep” – I don’t think so.
They aren’t the voices reading out the weather. “In Bwisbane today we can expect wainy conditions with fine conditions for the west of Austwalia”.
Speech pathology is out for those with voice impediments, or anything where you may have to talk to people and/or be taken seriously, it seems.
In my case, being of Sri Lankan origin has meant that I have been cursed with an accent that automatically mean people look for my mop, bucket and broom. Mine is the accent of the hired help.
I should have taken this into consideration.
But I didn’t.
Subsequently, when at the age of 20, I found my self released from the steady environment of education into the ‘real world’, I was confronted by a range of challenges that pushed me further and further away from what I had imagined would be my (poorly) chosen field of endeavour.
Firstly, thanks to my name and accent, I found that while my wonderful letter writing skills secured me the interview, one look at my brown (and unpleasantly freckled) face meant that I didn’t even get to square one.
I wrote 180 letters, received five job interviews, and exactly ‘zero’ job offers.
I doggedly pursued my ambitions to be fully employed.
I applied for the Public Service and was told I was “too motivated” to journalism.
I applied for a clerical position at the Brisbane City Council and had to perform an IQ test. I was told I was “unlike any other applicant” they had ever had and additionally, not stupid enough to be primed for the tedious career of a bureaucrat.
What to do? Mummy encouraged me to do another degree – as an Executive Secretary – so I could be a Hansard reporter.
How low I had sunk – from possible brain surgeon to secretary. The world was proving to be a cruel place.
Had it not been for my Dad and his fixation with the technical education system, it is likely that that is where I would have ended up – as that embalmed and featureless fixture in the corner of a court house or the House of Representatives, trying to contain my expressions of contempt or disbelief as my fingers sped over a keyboard, resigned to letting my brain shrink by nanometres as my working day stretched to a working eternity.
Instead, my Dad chanced upon the Certificate in Real Estate offered by the Coorparoo TAFE – and so my career began. No, it was not a brilliant one, but it meant I would have an income and that was now, apparently enough.
You see, for all my parents’ Sri Lankan desires for producing a family of barristers and brain surgeons, my Mother especially was nothing if not practical.
It has been one of her strengths that, like the subject of a Kenny Rogers song, she’s been canny enough to know when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em.
And so, she folded up her aspirations that I could possibly be the next Queen of England and accepted that I was to be a scullery maid.
But that was not my fate, as we would eventually discover. Because I had a special talent that was far more valuable than my high IQ, my typing speed or the fact that I can lick the tip of my (long, pointed) nose with my tongue. My special talent was that I was a liar. Not just any liar. A great one.
Fate it seemed had delivered me to the most suitable of those unsuitable careers: the year I turned 22, I joined the not-at-all-ironically-named firm of ‘Robb & Hammer’ and began my journey to become one of Brisbane’s leading – and only female - real estate entrepreneurs.
If it were not for worms, it is highly likely that I my standard work uniform would not be a (Size 16) grey pant suit with bright coloured sandals, matching earrings and chunky necklace, with a name tag boldly displayed on my ample bosom saying: “Shivanthi S. Principal”.
If not for worms, I would be dressed in a gown of some sort on my usual days at work – a surgical gown or a black dress with a silly wig.
I am no doctor or lawyer by profession, but the next best thing if you ask me. I am a real estate agent by profession, a fact that had many of my parent’s friends and associates raising their collective eyebrows. It was what you could call something ‘left field’, the curve ball that many of those of my ethnicity could not clearly compute.
For you see, real estate agentry to a bright Sri Lankan female is a little like pole dancing to Margaret Thatcher: simply incomprehensible.
Indeed over the years, when people had asked my parents what their eldest (still unmarried!) daughter did for a living, you would find Mum or Dad feigning a coughing fit or a seizure as they attempted to mention the unmentionable.
“But I AM a professional, Mum,” I’d hiss. “Why are you so embarrassed.”
It was no good. In my parents’ world, to be a real estate agent was about as much of a “profession” as being a ditch digger.
Anyone with half a brain of Sri Lankan ancestry is considered to be destined for the professions – the real ones. That’s the ‘done thing’, ‘the given’. It didn’t help that I had been “a brilliant student” in my high school years, according to reports by several of my teachers. Their gushing reports of my exceptional results had resulted in dangerously high expectations.
When I was a young teenager, my mother always boasted to anyone who would listen, that her daughter would one day be a surgeon.
It was a futile exercise in a self-fulfilling prophesy for her ambitions were clearly doomed from the start.
Which is how the worms come into it.
I sucked at the sciences, the prerequisites for a career in medicine. And then, there was the ill-fated experiment in biology requiring the dissection of an earth worm.
I couldn’t get it right, slaughtering more than my fair share of the unfortunate annelids in my Year 8 Biology class, and proving a woeful lack of hand-eye co-ordination that could not bode well for an ambition in surgery.
I just couldn’t cut straight, my hands shaking as if I had the palsy so badly that instead of neatly bisecting the creatures I cut most in half . It was like the Texas Earthworm Massacre, my lab table a mass of worm halves by the end of the lesson and the rest of the class shaking their heads in disbelief.
My complete ineptitude at Home Economics was a further ill augury.
I recall one of my earliest ‘sewing’ assignments in Year 10, when I produced the hideous piece of clothing you could imagine. So poor was my stitching that one arm went blue when slipped through the sleeve; the hem was finished at a dubious angle; and the collar I sewed of such poor proportions that, when finished, my head appeared to be balanced on a rather large dinner plate.
I was a poor seamstress and so I could not stitch. I had a gammy hand and so I could not dissect (damn worms!).
Surgery was certainly never to be my forte.
There was the law, of course, but my parents simply could not countenance that. I have no idea why at the time. It would be only years later that I would associate their feelings with an unpalatable story involving a rather well-known Sri Lankan legal figure and what were most likely some unsavoury advances to my mother.
““I can’t believe he put his hand on my backside,” my mother would exclaim, decades later. “Chi! As if I would look twice at him, ugly fellow.”
In my final year of high school, I was called upon to make one of the most important decisions of my life. What I would do with my education. I had duxed every one of my humanities subjects. I was average at best at mathematics.
My parents’ dreams of producing a doctor were clearly misguided. What was left to me?
I could tell you that I pondered deep, long and hard on the career path I would choose. But I would be lying.
The truth is, I chose my career in the least scientific way possible. When selecting my university course, I simply opted to do what my best friend at the time, Louise was doing. Much more organised and career focussed that I was, Louise had done all the research and proved to be a well-informed career guidance source. She gave me a compelling synopsis of her course of first-choice comprising one sentence.
“Err, it’s called, um, a Bachelor of Business Communication and you can do like, Advertising, Journalism and Public Relations,” she explained.
“Sounds alright to me!” With barely a blink of an eye, I decided this was the course for me.
And so it was that I took the first steps to what would eventually become An Unsuitable Career.
But what I didn’t realise at the time was that choosing a career in fact should involve a great deal more thought and rumination.
I had probably spent more time choosing a filling for my lunch time routine of sandwiches.
There are many practical considerations when choosing a career such as:
1. Does your family background make you suitable for your career of choice? For example, if your Uncle Dan is a convicted paedophile, it’s probably wise to avoid a career involving children for the sake of possibly unpleasant associations down the track. If your mother is the town whore, then it’s probably unwise to consider a political career although, come to think of it, this may be a very good match when you think about the number of people you have to screw to make it to the top job.
2. Do you have the kind of personal qualities that suit your chosen career. For example, those who are prone to seedy qualities – lying, stealing and the like – are wise to avoid leanings toward careers in crime prevention. Blind people make lousy lighthouse keepers. School bullies should avoid social work. Those who can’t keep secrets should forego careers in the secret service. I’m sure you get my drift.
3. Does your chosen career enable you to do the things you want to do in life? Want to meet a millionaire, marry him and never have to work again? Perhaps avoid jobs in the prison system. Want to travel to exotic places? Then the public service is an unlikely choice unless you consider a visit to a cubicle on another floor to constitute an exciting travel experience. Want to become rich and famous? Then a career in quantity surveying is not for you as this is not a profession that is always a stepping stone into celebrity magazines.
At 17 though, who thinks about these things? At 17, you are full of possibilities and the idea of practicalities is clearly stifling and is to be ignored.
I didn’t know it then but that star my Mum was wishing on for my brilliant career was infact her dream, combusting, exploding and being sucked into a black hole.
Practical Consideration #1
Unless you’re planning to be a movie star, it’s likely that your name is the last thing you’d consider when choosing a career.
It’s certainly not something I considered.
I’ve checked my white pages and I can confirm that there are some unfortunate surnames.
If your surname is ‘Bitch’ or ‘Harsh’ do you really want a career as a preschool teacher or a marriage counsellor? If your surname is ‘Reckless’ you’re probably not suited to be a driving instructor or an inspector of quality standards in a condom factory. ‘Corpse’, ‘Coffin’ and ‘Death’? Nursing, medicine, and anything to do with keeping people alive and well are, adviseably, out.
Where my name was concerned, I was doomed to stand out like testicles on a naked nun.
Shivanthi Sattambirilage-Koorkoolasuriya Nanayam Pieris. You try introducing yourself like that on a public phone? Before you can gasp for breath, you have to insert another coin.
At 21-syllables, it’s a name that’s unlikely to be used as a pseudonym or anyone wishing to work undercover.
It’s a name that is unlikely to be used by a supermodel or a rock star. Or come to think of it, a newsreader.
It’s a name that gets you into trouble at American airports.
It’s a name that’s difficult to pronounce under the influence of alcohol.
It’s an unsexy name and it’s my ‘baggage’. Because my name means I cannot be separated from my ethnicity.
My name screams FOREIGNER in any country other than Sri Lanka and especially in my adopted country.
The two together – my Sri Lankanness and the world that was Australia – meant my name was one of the practicalities I should have considered in making my career choice.
But I didn’t.
Practical Consideration #2
Believe or not, how you speak and sound can make a huge difference in your career of choice, as I was to (belatedly) discover.
We all know that people with beautiful rounded accents and deep voices are born for roles in radio. We know that people who can speak quickly are great as race callers or auctioneers. And those with husky, sensual voices will do well in just about any career with possibly the exception of bull-wrestling or anything else where large amounts of testosterone are a requirement.
But what about people with voices like mine? Accented with spices, loud and not always comprehensible?
What about people who speak too quickly? Who can’t pronounce their “R”s or “Ws” or have lisps?
These are not voices usually heard on the recorded voices in elevators. ‘The Thseventh floor, pleaths mind your tstep” – I don’t think so.
They aren’t the voices reading out the weather. “In Bwisbane today we can expect wainy conditions with fine conditions for the west of Austwalia”.
Speech pathology is out for those with voice impediments, or anything where you may have to talk to people and/or be taken seriously, it seems.
In my case, being of Sri Lankan origin has meant that I have been cursed with an accent that automatically mean people look for my mop, bucket and broom. Mine is the accent of the hired help.
I should have taken this into consideration.
But I didn’t.
Subsequently, when at the age of 20, I found my self released from the steady environment of education into the ‘real world’, I was confronted by a range of challenges that pushed me further and further away from what I had imagined would be my (poorly) chosen field of endeavour.
Firstly, thanks to my name and accent, I found that while my wonderful letter writing skills secured me the interview, one look at my brown (and unpleasantly freckled) face meant that I didn’t even get to square one.
I wrote 180 letters, received five job interviews, and exactly ‘zero’ job offers.
I doggedly pursued my ambitions to be fully employed.
I applied for the Public Service and was told I was “too motivated” to journalism.
I applied for a clerical position at the Brisbane City Council and had to perform an IQ test. I was told I was “unlike any other applicant” they had ever had and additionally, not stupid enough to be primed for the tedious career of a bureaucrat.
What to do? Mummy encouraged me to do another degree – as an Executive Secretary – so I could be a Hansard reporter.
How low I had sunk – from possible brain surgeon to secretary. The world was proving to be a cruel place.
Had it not been for my Dad and his fixation with the technical education system, it is likely that that is where I would have ended up – as that embalmed and featureless fixture in the corner of a court house or the House of Representatives, trying to contain my expressions of contempt or disbelief as my fingers sped over a keyboard, resigned to letting my brain shrink by nanometres as my working day stretched to a working eternity.
Instead, my Dad chanced upon the Certificate in Real Estate offered by the Coorparoo TAFE – and so my career began. No, it was not a brilliant one, but it meant I would have an income and that was now, apparently enough.
You see, for all my parents’ Sri Lankan desires for producing a family of barristers and brain surgeons, my Mother especially was nothing if not practical.
It has been one of her strengths that, like the subject of a Kenny Rogers song, she’s been canny enough to know when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em.
And so, she folded up her aspirations that I could possibly be the next Queen of England and accepted that I was to be a scullery maid.
But that was not my fate, as we would eventually discover. Because I had a special talent that was far more valuable than my high IQ, my typing speed or the fact that I can lick the tip of my (long, pointed) nose with my tongue. My special talent was that I was a liar. Not just any liar. A great one.
Fate it seemed had delivered me to the most suitable of those unsuitable careers: the year I turned 22, I joined the not-at-all-ironically-named firm of ‘Robb & Hammer’ and began my journey to become one of Brisbane’s leading – and only female - real estate entrepreneurs.
Chapter 4
Malcolm Sattambirilage-Koorkoolasuriya Nanayam Pieris was 37 when he made the journey from Sri Lanka (“Ceylon” in his memories) to Australia in 1972, trawling behind him three undernourished children, a wife, several crates of furniture that followed him (by sea), and a set of golf clubs (the must-have of any immigrant worth his salt).
If you are to gauge the compatibility of couples by their similarities, then Malcolm and Mirabelle were indeed perfect for each other.
Both were born to privileged tea planters’ backgrounds in Ceylon; both were educated in elite private Catholic boarding schools; both had a passion for the arts – both Mum and Dad dab hands with a paintbrush – and both seemed never to be short of an interest to follow.
Like Mum, Dad too was always quick to learn something new. Not long after arriving in Australia, he discovered the country’s then free Technical and Further Education system and took to it with gusto, completing courses in beekeeping, accounting, lapidiary and, inexplicably for a man destined for a life in the suburbs, Animal Husbandry.
Fluent in Tamil, Sinhalese, Russian and English, my Dad’s penchant for acquiring information on any range of completely useless and irrelevant subjects would eventually become legendary.
From the History of the Gaza Strip to the sources of Gum Disease to the Foundations of Freud’s Theories of the Mind, my Dad read widely, his capacity for both acquiring and retaining knowledge for the sake of it predating the Internet.
Our home was, as a consequence, always overflowing with books – text books, coffee table books, books on art, great novels, small works of fiction.
But the most important books were those on Gardening with my father – who held a Certificate in Agriculture – one of the absolute Masters of Growing Absolutely Anything Anywhere. Like my mother, he had his favourites of course. A long love-affair with bromeliads; an encyclopaedic knowledge of cacti; an ill-conceived and ultimately unsuccessful bid to set up a cashew plantation in Mareeba (with the seeds ordered by phone from Trinidad); a small mango plantation established in a virtually infertile soil in a new suburb south of Brisbane (eventually producing mangos so spectacular he was featured in a Special Edition of ‘The Greenthumb’s Gazette).
He also had a fascination with exotic fruits including the Black Sapote, the virtues of which Dad frequently exalted.
“The chocolate pudding fruit,” Dad explained although the first, last and only time I ate one I thought that the “Baboon Shit Fruit” was probably a more apt description.
Dad’s range of interests made him an expert on many subjects that, coupled with his natural sense of humour, ensured Malcolm was a great raconteur, the life of most parties where he would usually end up also, completely drunk.
In short, Dad was a great talker and of course the rest of us – including my two sisters, Lakshmi and Mohini - followed suit.
But his gift of the gab aside, there was one talent my Father had that I had unknowingly inherited and that I would discover only decades later.
He was an extraordinarily gifted bullshit artist and, as the years wore on, dad’s stories became increasingly bizarre until we were left wondering if perhaps he suffered from Munchausen’s Disease.
My mother had an in-built radar when it came to sussing out which of Dad’s tales were real or imagined and often, at the turning point of one of his stories – as his audience hovered in anticipation of a climax – my mother would shout from the garden or the kitchen or wherever she had disappeared to, “Don’t tell lies, Malcolm, chi!”
“Don’t Tell Lies” (or another version “all lies, men”) I should explain is a common Sri Lankan exclamation that translates in Australia to a variety of statements usually involving a description of faeces of one kind or another. ‘Bullshit’, ‘Bullcrap’ or just plain ‘Crap.’
The word “Chi” or Chick-aya” (with the emphasis on the a-ya) means the speaker things you’ve said something inappropriate, unacceptable or just plain foul. It can be translated to “Yuck” so when my mother exclaimed “Don’t Tell Lies, Chi!” what she was really saying was: “You ought to be ashamed of yourself you dirty liar”.
As it is, there were many of my father’s tales the veracity of which my two sisters and I still doubt today:
The story of how Malcolm Sattambirilage Etcetera Ran Away to India
In 1952, aged just 15, my father, Malcolm for no real reason decided to hop on his bicycle and ride north from his home, north east of Colombo to India. Along the way it is likely he was carted by various modes of transport: rickshaw, buffalo-back, omnibus, lorry and finally a marine craft of some description across the width of the Palk Strait that separates Sri Lanka from India. He claimed he had a desire to join the Royal British Airforce and was hell-bent on reaching England for this purpose.
He had barely reached India however, before a number of distractions connived to throw him off course. The first of these was a cricket match sponsored by the local Maharaja of Kerala held at a small playing field near the local markets. Here the young Malcolm snuck into through a tiny hole in the fence: not a great feat for a runt of a child. Lost in a sea of sarongs, the Maharajah had been short a man in his impromptu Eleven and the announcement had been made that volunteers were needed to fill the position of Third Leg. It was my father who raised his scrawny arm.
Malcolm would recollect the Maharajah as a tiny, barrell-shaped man who would not have been out of place in a retelling of “Snow White” with a high pitched voice that was at odds with his fearsome white beard. At his first meeting, the provincial ruler had been outfitted in a rich, brocaded jacket in emerald tones, worn over a white sarong. Impracticably, in Dad’s story, he had been stroking a small Chihuahua called “Mahatma” who was barely bigger than a bloated lentil and yapped annoyingly every time a run was made.
It was a fantastic match as my father, lithe as a serpent in his youth, proved his prowess in batting, bowling and fielding. He caught out the opposition’s number one and two batsmen, and when at the crease, hit eight sixes in a row, the crack of the ball drowned out by the deafening cheers of the crowd mingled with the intermittent mooing of the omnipresent holy cows and the crowing from the baskets of roosters that were typical of market days. When my father’s eleven trounced the opposition by 58 runs, both the Maharajah and flea-bitten Mahatma had been ecstatic.
“Boy! You have many talents!” the Maharajah had bellowed in the excitement. “You must come and work for me. If nothing else, we can get some meat on your bones.”
And so it was that my father’s stories became even more amazing – that he had been engaged as a powder monkey at one of the Maharajahs’ many gold mines; that he had been allowed to sleep with Mahatma at the foot of the Maharajah’s bed on a satin pillow encrusted with emeralds; how he had been instructed in archery, badminton, skeet shooting and how to light a hookah without burning his fingers; how he had been promised an education at the Maharajah’s expense – in London no less; that he had been treated like the pip-squeak ruler’s own son.
Depending on whether my mother was within ear shot, and I only heard him once, Dad would also claim that he had nearly been betrothed to one of the Maharajah’s seven beautiful and hitherto virginal daughters and how, as a lustful pubescent young man, he had managed to practice at least half of the karma sutra with three of them – at the same time. Unfortunately, it was this episode that meant he had been caught with his sarong down and physically thrown out of the Court.
He never did make it to London.
The story of Malcolm Sattambirilage Etcetera and His Fabulous Con
At thirteen, my father reckoned he had already discovered the entrepreneurial skill that has seen his own father, my grandfather, establish a plant-based empire across Ceylon, including a network of contacts as far as Batavia and West Africa.
The Sattambirilage name had, at least until my father’s generation, been associated with long-distance business relationships including connections to monarchies, governments and crooked politicians.
Ceylon in those days was a wild frontier where anyone with rat cunning, a gold tooth and any connection however obscure to a White Anglo Saxon, could con coconuts from the claws of the clueless.
It was a snake-oil merchant’s paradise meaning that anyone who wasn’t a native of the Island continent could lay claim to the largesse of the land as long as the right pieces of paper were signed.
Being able to lie straight in bed was only rarely a requirement.
It was an entrepreneur’s paradise, as my father would, apparently, discover.
Dad’s great con was the Lightbulb Distilled Water Company, an enterprise that saw the cunning teenager bottling up pints of water from a muddy stream near his home. He bottled the H2O into recycled beer bottles and sold it for a handful of rupees to passing motorists for use in topping up their ancient car batteries.
Malcolm, an adept artist (from whom, I imagine, I have inherited my ability to draw), even carved a logo into a coconut shell and created labels from the resulting stamp and a pot of India Ink borrowed from his father’s offices.
The crafty branding of a Lightbulb with the slogan “A Bright Idea for Batteries” added to the legitimacy of his claims that the common stream water had special qualities to guarantee a longer battery life.
LDWC was soon raking in hundreds of rupees a month and my father, unrestrained by the boring restrictions we face to day by Securities Commissions and other legal watchdogs, embarked on a project to further develop his Distilled Water Empire.
At a meeting of the local Villagers he told a sea of illiterate faces that they could become successful Muthalali’s (a Sri Lankan word meaning ‘trader’) overnight. He convinced them to buy shares in his new venture at 15 cents a piece or various products of barter. These included fingertips of the local hashish, bars of the local Kandos chocolate and in one case, a bottle of bulls-eyes a toothless old amma had been saving in an old Marmalade jar she had stolen from one of the Estate houses in which she had a sinecure.
It was only after Malcolm’s mother, my grandmother, discovered Malcolm’s callous ruse (barely nine days after LDWV was ‘publicly listed’ as it were) that the enterprise was peremptorily disbanded, the young CEO soundly whacked with the handle of a broken Ekel broom and sent to his bed.
The story of How Malcolm Sattambirilage Etcetera Built An Aeroplane
The year he turned 18, my father’s ill-conceived journey to India had ended when, sick with a serious case of amoebiasis, he had been despatched home by a Royal Surgeon of Kerala.
Ejected from the Maharajah’s Court after some three months, he had found himself work on the road gangs that were then busily attempting to construct the new infrastructure under the direction of the Calcutta-based Institution of Engineers. It had been five years since India had gained Independence from Britain and the whole place was abuzz with the excitement of a redescribed nation, rebuilding itself.
Months later, after Dad had become very ill and vomiting and “shitting like a bastard” as he explained, the authorities put the child on a Douglas DC-3 enroute to Colombo.
He arrived home to a hero’s welcome with a fattened hen slaughtered to celebrate the occasion. According to my Dad, after his departure, my grandmother, devastated, had kept under her pillow the handle of the Ekel broom she used to discipline him. It was incredibly uncomfortable to sleep on as her pillow was no more than a roll of fabric and she slept on a woven mat (her padura) on the hard stone floor. She had burned umpteen sticks of incense and lit endless oil lamps before the tiny statue of Buddha she prayed to each evening, praying for his safe return. Not only that, all the villagers had been in mourning for at least a week, Dad said, the community utterly saddened by the thought that the former Lightbulb Distilled Water Company CEO might have come to some horrible end at the hands of those filthy Indians.
But a matter of weeks after his arrival back home, Malcolm Sattambirilage Etcetera had stumbled, literally, upon his next big thing.
Now my father’s home, the house my great grandfather had built was a stone and wood edifice set on the ridge of a thickly forested area of Ceylon. From the top floor window of this bungalow one had a view of a horizon of gentle, deep green mounds covered in thick plantings of tea bushes. Closer by, clutches of rubber, plantain, coconut, rambutan and jack fruit connived in clumps, while to the rear of the home, a mangle of rainforest comprising strangler figs, banyans and other large, moss-covered trees created an impenetrable shield of vegetation that only someone quite foolhardy would dare venture into – someone like my father.
“Ai oh men, I don’t know what possessed me,” my Father would remember to his usually captivated audience. “I know I was a bit of a silly bugger back in those days.”
And so it was one steamy December day, on the eve of the drenching monsoons, the young Malcolm decided to venture into the hitherto unexplored depths of the jungle taking with him my grandfather’s ancient compass, an old Ghurka knife that was only a collectible displayed on the mantelpiece (blunt and useless) and a piece of chalk. He could not remember exactly how long he expected to be gone – perhaps a few hours.
In the way of such tales, it’s not surprising that my father, intent on slashing and beating his way forward into the swathe of vines and tree trunks, completely lost track of time. So it could have been a few or several hours but it was somewhere in his dogged progress through the jungle that he found it. At first all he could see was a faded red star on what looked like a flat panel, partly covered in mud. And then he noticed what would turn out to be part of a wing above his head.
“A plane!” Dad would yell, thumping his thigh with his open hand. “I had found an old aeroplane, men!”
His hands shaking and pure excitement coursing through his veins, Malcolm would tell how he had used the Ghurka knife to cut away the branches that had conspired to conceal the aircraft, which was in fact not an aeroplane, strictly speaking, but a rusted but otherwise intact Maeida Ku-1 twin boom Japanese military glider.
It was perfectly feasible that a Japanese glider might have gone down over the tea country of Sri Lanka, Dad would explain. After all, Colombo was convenient port for gun ships and other naval vessels bound for the east coast of Africa throughout the Second World War that had ended less than a decade before.
“You know how thick the mist can get. What, men, those Japs could be sneaky buggers, ninjas and all that,” and he’d make a karate chopping movement with his hands as if he were preparing for a roundhouse kick to someone’s nuts.
When Dad’s 18 year-old-brain processed what his eyes had festooned upon, that possibly late December evening, he would say that it was as if the Lightbulb on the labels of one of his old distilled water bottles had suddenly flashed to life.
Remember that Dad had always wanted to fly. He had three broken toes to prove it – the result of an ill-conceived dive off the roof of the two-storey family home holding aloft two ping pong bats which he had uselessly flapped in imitation of a bird before he had plummeted to earth.
This Japanese glider unearthed from the jungle therefore, seemed to him like a sign from above. That it was all meant to be, that dream he’d always had of commanding the skies like a bird.
As the afternoon deepened my dad had sat himself next to his new prize, a plan puddling in some deep well inside his brain.
In his thinking, it was all so simple and he had to admit, even brilliant.
He began to daydream about clouds and birds and Icarus soaring near the sun. He propped himself up against a rock and hummed to himself. He was so immersed in his thoughts he didn’t realise that, all that time while he was unveiling that rusty Kawasaki, he was being watched by one of the most vicious of the local wildlife – a peacock whose territory has been threatened.
Look, I have no idea why my father had to throw in this piece of the narrative. We would all have been happy enough with the discovery of an old Jap glider. But my Dad was an amateur storyteller and he suffered, as many of us Sri Lankans do, with a tendency to melodrama and overwriting.
So we’d let Dad go, not questioning him as, quite unbelievably, he would recount how the blissfully daydreaming youth was suddenly set upon by a ferocious bird, who, followed by two pea hens, bore down upon him with outraged shrieks.
The young man had immediately rolled in the dirt, flailing his Ghurka knife and screaming loudly enough to startle the male who, its tail of teals and purples fanned in outraged, lowered its head and pointed its beak directly at my father’s gonads.
He had wrestled the bird to the ground, grabbing its neck so firmly that the bird was soon divested of at least three of its tail feathers in its fright.
“I would have throttled the bugger but then the servants came,” my Dad would say.
Indeed, my grandfather’s huge retinue of household staff – the gardener, the watcher and even one of the dhobis making a later delivery of newly laundered bedsheets to the back door- had been alerted by the screams of the ‘mahathaya’ or master.
The descending mob was enough for the birds to surrender as they squawked an escape through the undergrowth.
It was only the next day that my father’s plan took shape. He had learned some mechanical skills on those road gangs he’d worked in and in his mind, of course he could get that old glider going.
For three weeks my father returned to that place in the jungle bringing with him his father’s Driver whose real name was Wijethunga but who my dad had nicknamed Jesus, primarily thanks to his legendary ability to resurrect absolutely anything.
Jesus, said Dad, was a multi-talented fellow who could not only drive everything from a car to a lorry or even a train, but he could also fix anything that was broken (including the aforementioned three broken toes my father sustained as a young child – it was Jesus who had bandaged and splinted up the damaged metatarsals - with the help of the top of a match box and some duct tape).
So Jesus was of course the perfect Aide in my father’s bid to revive the old glider.
As I understand it, over the course of several weeks, my father enlisted the servants to clear a large area around the aircraft with Jesus seconded to the full-time task of tinkering with the aircraft.
Fortunately, the glider had sustained only minor damage to the fuselage and apart from a wonky landing wheel was superficially in good order.
It was only a matter of a day or two before Jesus gave the Maida the thumbs up.
“All done Master,” the Driver had announced to my father’s joy – which was short lived, for he was soon, confronted with a new problem.
I told you my great-grandfather’s property was located on a hill which meant the chance of getting the aircraft to flat land, enough to create a runway was impossible.
The only solution, as Dad saw it, was to attempt to launch the plane in the old fashioned way – by literally throwing it off the hill. It was a glider wasn’t it?
First the servants were enlisted to cut a rudimentary path through the jungle 30 feet wide so the vessel could be safely pushed out of the jungle and out onto the abandoned roadway, built in the last century by more British road gangs and winding up the hillside.
The launch day was meticulously planned.
My father consulted the weather almanacs routinely broadcast on the BBC. He scouted the hilltop for a suitable area from which to launch himself. He settled on a clay platform metres from the perimeters of his father’s tea plantation where the owls circling the clouds indicated a reasonable height for an aeronautical feat. Importantly, he consulted the local Buddhist monks to ensure that they would chant for his success.
Malcolm recounted a pristine morning, blue skied and cloudless. How the entire village had been captivated by his plan and a motley assortment of people came to help him that day. There came the elderly carting an encyclopaedia of ailments – everything from flatulence and ulcers to skin rashes and halitosis. They complained loudly about their aches and pains but many were experienced tea-pickers for whom the climb was nothing. The women, crooking their saris around their necks deftly heaved their knock knees and bow legs past the rows of tea bushes. The men hoisted their sarongs around their aging testicles, and chewing beetle, prattled in either Tamil or Sinhalese as they held aloft Father’s amazing creation.
Malcolm himself cut a majestic figure. For head protection, he had borrowed an old motorcycle helmet that belonged to Jesus. To honour the occasion and to remember the very moment that the heavens had delivered the Maeda to him, he had adorned the helmet with five peacock feathers. It was a sight to behold, the teal, bronze and purple of the peacock feathers blinding in their loveliness and creating the illusion of a Spartan’s war helmet.
And so it was that Malcom Sattambirilage Etcetera, at the age of 18, found himself in the cockpit of an ancient military glider. Surrounded by a sea of villagers counting down in Sinhalese from ten to one as, with Jesus overseeing the technicalities of the manoever, a crowd of men on each wing set up a few hundred yards from the edge of the precipice and pushed, and pushed.
Over rocks and potholes, the tips of the wings brushing the border of tea bushes, they eased the machine forward until its nose inched slowly over the edge of the cliff. The collective held their breaths. Prayers to Buddha, Ganesh and any one of the tens of thousands of their gods were uttered beneath betel-stained breaths. And then, there was my father, actually flying!
In fact, as Dad tells it, he flew at least for two miles, taking in the spectacular views of tea country, waterfalls and lakes seared by sunlight. He flew alongside Eagles, spoonbills and whatever birdlife he found up there. His way was lit by rainbows, and the light of heaven itself.
Assisted by a tail wind, he sailed in the sky for perhaps fifteen minutes at a cruise speed of around 30 miles per hour, by his reckoning until quite suddenly, it gave up the ghost.
The Maeda went into a tailspin and Dad only just managed to get it horizontal before he crash-landed in a rice paddy.
Unfortunately, the glider literally fell to bits, my father flung clear into a large pile of buffalo dung that cushioned the impact.
Afterwards, he was hailed as a hero among the villagers with his exploit achieving a legendary status. His helmet and the peacock feathers, still in tact, were apparently forwarded to the Royal Museum of Colombo along with a lengthy written description of the events surrounding the extraordinary resurrection of the Maeda.
This was, unfortunately, lost in transit. At least that was Malcolm’s story.
If you are to gauge the compatibility of couples by their similarities, then Malcolm and Mirabelle were indeed perfect for each other.
Both were born to privileged tea planters’ backgrounds in Ceylon; both were educated in elite private Catholic boarding schools; both had a passion for the arts – both Mum and Dad dab hands with a paintbrush – and both seemed never to be short of an interest to follow.
Like Mum, Dad too was always quick to learn something new. Not long after arriving in Australia, he discovered the country’s then free Technical and Further Education system and took to it with gusto, completing courses in beekeeping, accounting, lapidiary and, inexplicably for a man destined for a life in the suburbs, Animal Husbandry.
Fluent in Tamil, Sinhalese, Russian and English, my Dad’s penchant for acquiring information on any range of completely useless and irrelevant subjects would eventually become legendary.
From the History of the Gaza Strip to the sources of Gum Disease to the Foundations of Freud’s Theories of the Mind, my Dad read widely, his capacity for both acquiring and retaining knowledge for the sake of it predating the Internet.
Our home was, as a consequence, always overflowing with books – text books, coffee table books, books on art, great novels, small works of fiction.
But the most important books were those on Gardening with my father – who held a Certificate in Agriculture – one of the absolute Masters of Growing Absolutely Anything Anywhere. Like my mother, he had his favourites of course. A long love-affair with bromeliads; an encyclopaedic knowledge of cacti; an ill-conceived and ultimately unsuccessful bid to set up a cashew plantation in Mareeba (with the seeds ordered by phone from Trinidad); a small mango plantation established in a virtually infertile soil in a new suburb south of Brisbane (eventually producing mangos so spectacular he was featured in a Special Edition of ‘The Greenthumb’s Gazette).
He also had a fascination with exotic fruits including the Black Sapote, the virtues of which Dad frequently exalted.
“The chocolate pudding fruit,” Dad explained although the first, last and only time I ate one I thought that the “Baboon Shit Fruit” was probably a more apt description.
Dad’s range of interests made him an expert on many subjects that, coupled with his natural sense of humour, ensured Malcolm was a great raconteur, the life of most parties where he would usually end up also, completely drunk.
In short, Dad was a great talker and of course the rest of us – including my two sisters, Lakshmi and Mohini - followed suit.
But his gift of the gab aside, there was one talent my Father had that I had unknowingly inherited and that I would discover only decades later.
He was an extraordinarily gifted bullshit artist and, as the years wore on, dad’s stories became increasingly bizarre until we were left wondering if perhaps he suffered from Munchausen’s Disease.
My mother had an in-built radar when it came to sussing out which of Dad’s tales were real or imagined and often, at the turning point of one of his stories – as his audience hovered in anticipation of a climax – my mother would shout from the garden or the kitchen or wherever she had disappeared to, “Don’t tell lies, Malcolm, chi!”
“Don’t Tell Lies” (or another version “all lies, men”) I should explain is a common Sri Lankan exclamation that translates in Australia to a variety of statements usually involving a description of faeces of one kind or another. ‘Bullshit’, ‘Bullcrap’ or just plain ‘Crap.’
The word “Chi” or Chick-aya” (with the emphasis on the a-ya) means the speaker things you’ve said something inappropriate, unacceptable or just plain foul. It can be translated to “Yuck” so when my mother exclaimed “Don’t Tell Lies, Chi!” what she was really saying was: “You ought to be ashamed of yourself you dirty liar”.
As it is, there were many of my father’s tales the veracity of which my two sisters and I still doubt today:
The story of how Malcolm Sattambirilage Etcetera Ran Away to India
In 1952, aged just 15, my father, Malcolm for no real reason decided to hop on his bicycle and ride north from his home, north east of Colombo to India. Along the way it is likely he was carted by various modes of transport: rickshaw, buffalo-back, omnibus, lorry and finally a marine craft of some description across the width of the Palk Strait that separates Sri Lanka from India. He claimed he had a desire to join the Royal British Airforce and was hell-bent on reaching England for this purpose.
He had barely reached India however, before a number of distractions connived to throw him off course. The first of these was a cricket match sponsored by the local Maharaja of Kerala held at a small playing field near the local markets. Here the young Malcolm snuck into through a tiny hole in the fence: not a great feat for a runt of a child. Lost in a sea of sarongs, the Maharajah had been short a man in his impromptu Eleven and the announcement had been made that volunteers were needed to fill the position of Third Leg. It was my father who raised his scrawny arm.
Malcolm would recollect the Maharajah as a tiny, barrell-shaped man who would not have been out of place in a retelling of “Snow White” with a high pitched voice that was at odds with his fearsome white beard. At his first meeting, the provincial ruler had been outfitted in a rich, brocaded jacket in emerald tones, worn over a white sarong. Impracticably, in Dad’s story, he had been stroking a small Chihuahua called “Mahatma” who was barely bigger than a bloated lentil and yapped annoyingly every time a run was made.
It was a fantastic match as my father, lithe as a serpent in his youth, proved his prowess in batting, bowling and fielding. He caught out the opposition’s number one and two batsmen, and when at the crease, hit eight sixes in a row, the crack of the ball drowned out by the deafening cheers of the crowd mingled with the intermittent mooing of the omnipresent holy cows and the crowing from the baskets of roosters that were typical of market days. When my father’s eleven trounced the opposition by 58 runs, both the Maharajah and flea-bitten Mahatma had been ecstatic.
“Boy! You have many talents!” the Maharajah had bellowed in the excitement. “You must come and work for me. If nothing else, we can get some meat on your bones.”
And so it was that my father’s stories became even more amazing – that he had been engaged as a powder monkey at one of the Maharajahs’ many gold mines; that he had been allowed to sleep with Mahatma at the foot of the Maharajah’s bed on a satin pillow encrusted with emeralds; how he had been instructed in archery, badminton, skeet shooting and how to light a hookah without burning his fingers; how he had been promised an education at the Maharajah’s expense – in London no less; that he had been treated like the pip-squeak ruler’s own son.
Depending on whether my mother was within ear shot, and I only heard him once, Dad would also claim that he had nearly been betrothed to one of the Maharajah’s seven beautiful and hitherto virginal daughters and how, as a lustful pubescent young man, he had managed to practice at least half of the karma sutra with three of them – at the same time. Unfortunately, it was this episode that meant he had been caught with his sarong down and physically thrown out of the Court.
He never did make it to London.
The story of Malcolm Sattambirilage Etcetera and His Fabulous Con
At thirteen, my father reckoned he had already discovered the entrepreneurial skill that has seen his own father, my grandfather, establish a plant-based empire across Ceylon, including a network of contacts as far as Batavia and West Africa.
The Sattambirilage name had, at least until my father’s generation, been associated with long-distance business relationships including connections to monarchies, governments and crooked politicians.
Ceylon in those days was a wild frontier where anyone with rat cunning, a gold tooth and any connection however obscure to a White Anglo Saxon, could con coconuts from the claws of the clueless.
It was a snake-oil merchant’s paradise meaning that anyone who wasn’t a native of the Island continent could lay claim to the largesse of the land as long as the right pieces of paper were signed.
Being able to lie straight in bed was only rarely a requirement.
It was an entrepreneur’s paradise, as my father would, apparently, discover.
Dad’s great con was the Lightbulb Distilled Water Company, an enterprise that saw the cunning teenager bottling up pints of water from a muddy stream near his home. He bottled the H2O into recycled beer bottles and sold it for a handful of rupees to passing motorists for use in topping up their ancient car batteries.
Malcolm, an adept artist (from whom, I imagine, I have inherited my ability to draw), even carved a logo into a coconut shell and created labels from the resulting stamp and a pot of India Ink borrowed from his father’s offices.
The crafty branding of a Lightbulb with the slogan “A Bright Idea for Batteries” added to the legitimacy of his claims that the common stream water had special qualities to guarantee a longer battery life.
LDWC was soon raking in hundreds of rupees a month and my father, unrestrained by the boring restrictions we face to day by Securities Commissions and other legal watchdogs, embarked on a project to further develop his Distilled Water Empire.
At a meeting of the local Villagers he told a sea of illiterate faces that they could become successful Muthalali’s (a Sri Lankan word meaning ‘trader’) overnight. He convinced them to buy shares in his new venture at 15 cents a piece or various products of barter. These included fingertips of the local hashish, bars of the local Kandos chocolate and in one case, a bottle of bulls-eyes a toothless old amma had been saving in an old Marmalade jar she had stolen from one of the Estate houses in which she had a sinecure.
It was only after Malcolm’s mother, my grandmother, discovered Malcolm’s callous ruse (barely nine days after LDWV was ‘publicly listed’ as it were) that the enterprise was peremptorily disbanded, the young CEO soundly whacked with the handle of a broken Ekel broom and sent to his bed.
The story of How Malcolm Sattambirilage Etcetera Built An Aeroplane
The year he turned 18, my father’s ill-conceived journey to India had ended when, sick with a serious case of amoebiasis, he had been despatched home by a Royal Surgeon of Kerala.
Ejected from the Maharajah’s Court after some three months, he had found himself work on the road gangs that were then busily attempting to construct the new infrastructure under the direction of the Calcutta-based Institution of Engineers. It had been five years since India had gained Independence from Britain and the whole place was abuzz with the excitement of a redescribed nation, rebuilding itself.
Months later, after Dad had become very ill and vomiting and “shitting like a bastard” as he explained, the authorities put the child on a Douglas DC-3 enroute to Colombo.
He arrived home to a hero’s welcome with a fattened hen slaughtered to celebrate the occasion. According to my Dad, after his departure, my grandmother, devastated, had kept under her pillow the handle of the Ekel broom she used to discipline him. It was incredibly uncomfortable to sleep on as her pillow was no more than a roll of fabric and she slept on a woven mat (her padura) on the hard stone floor. She had burned umpteen sticks of incense and lit endless oil lamps before the tiny statue of Buddha she prayed to each evening, praying for his safe return. Not only that, all the villagers had been in mourning for at least a week, Dad said, the community utterly saddened by the thought that the former Lightbulb Distilled Water Company CEO might have come to some horrible end at the hands of those filthy Indians.
But a matter of weeks after his arrival back home, Malcolm Sattambirilage Etcetera had stumbled, literally, upon his next big thing.
Now my father’s home, the house my great grandfather had built was a stone and wood edifice set on the ridge of a thickly forested area of Ceylon. From the top floor window of this bungalow one had a view of a horizon of gentle, deep green mounds covered in thick plantings of tea bushes. Closer by, clutches of rubber, plantain, coconut, rambutan and jack fruit connived in clumps, while to the rear of the home, a mangle of rainforest comprising strangler figs, banyans and other large, moss-covered trees created an impenetrable shield of vegetation that only someone quite foolhardy would dare venture into – someone like my father.
“Ai oh men, I don’t know what possessed me,” my Father would remember to his usually captivated audience. “I know I was a bit of a silly bugger back in those days.”
And so it was one steamy December day, on the eve of the drenching monsoons, the young Malcolm decided to venture into the hitherto unexplored depths of the jungle taking with him my grandfather’s ancient compass, an old Ghurka knife that was only a collectible displayed on the mantelpiece (blunt and useless) and a piece of chalk. He could not remember exactly how long he expected to be gone – perhaps a few hours.
In the way of such tales, it’s not surprising that my father, intent on slashing and beating his way forward into the swathe of vines and tree trunks, completely lost track of time. So it could have been a few or several hours but it was somewhere in his dogged progress through the jungle that he found it. At first all he could see was a faded red star on what looked like a flat panel, partly covered in mud. And then he noticed what would turn out to be part of a wing above his head.
“A plane!” Dad would yell, thumping his thigh with his open hand. “I had found an old aeroplane, men!”
His hands shaking and pure excitement coursing through his veins, Malcolm would tell how he had used the Ghurka knife to cut away the branches that had conspired to conceal the aircraft, which was in fact not an aeroplane, strictly speaking, but a rusted but otherwise intact Maeida Ku-1 twin boom Japanese military glider.
It was perfectly feasible that a Japanese glider might have gone down over the tea country of Sri Lanka, Dad would explain. After all, Colombo was convenient port for gun ships and other naval vessels bound for the east coast of Africa throughout the Second World War that had ended less than a decade before.
“You know how thick the mist can get. What, men, those Japs could be sneaky buggers, ninjas and all that,” and he’d make a karate chopping movement with his hands as if he were preparing for a roundhouse kick to someone’s nuts.
When Dad’s 18 year-old-brain processed what his eyes had festooned upon, that possibly late December evening, he would say that it was as if the Lightbulb on the labels of one of his old distilled water bottles had suddenly flashed to life.
Remember that Dad had always wanted to fly. He had three broken toes to prove it – the result of an ill-conceived dive off the roof of the two-storey family home holding aloft two ping pong bats which he had uselessly flapped in imitation of a bird before he had plummeted to earth.
This Japanese glider unearthed from the jungle therefore, seemed to him like a sign from above. That it was all meant to be, that dream he’d always had of commanding the skies like a bird.
As the afternoon deepened my dad had sat himself next to his new prize, a plan puddling in some deep well inside his brain.
In his thinking, it was all so simple and he had to admit, even brilliant.
He began to daydream about clouds and birds and Icarus soaring near the sun. He propped himself up against a rock and hummed to himself. He was so immersed in his thoughts he didn’t realise that, all that time while he was unveiling that rusty Kawasaki, he was being watched by one of the most vicious of the local wildlife – a peacock whose territory has been threatened.
Look, I have no idea why my father had to throw in this piece of the narrative. We would all have been happy enough with the discovery of an old Jap glider. But my Dad was an amateur storyteller and he suffered, as many of us Sri Lankans do, with a tendency to melodrama and overwriting.
So we’d let Dad go, not questioning him as, quite unbelievably, he would recount how the blissfully daydreaming youth was suddenly set upon by a ferocious bird, who, followed by two pea hens, bore down upon him with outraged shrieks.
The young man had immediately rolled in the dirt, flailing his Ghurka knife and screaming loudly enough to startle the male who, its tail of teals and purples fanned in outraged, lowered its head and pointed its beak directly at my father’s gonads.
He had wrestled the bird to the ground, grabbing its neck so firmly that the bird was soon divested of at least three of its tail feathers in its fright.
“I would have throttled the bugger but then the servants came,” my Dad would say.
Indeed, my grandfather’s huge retinue of household staff – the gardener, the watcher and even one of the dhobis making a later delivery of newly laundered bedsheets to the back door- had been alerted by the screams of the ‘mahathaya’ or master.
The descending mob was enough for the birds to surrender as they squawked an escape through the undergrowth.
It was only the next day that my father’s plan took shape. He had learned some mechanical skills on those road gangs he’d worked in and in his mind, of course he could get that old glider going.
For three weeks my father returned to that place in the jungle bringing with him his father’s Driver whose real name was Wijethunga but who my dad had nicknamed Jesus, primarily thanks to his legendary ability to resurrect absolutely anything.
Jesus, said Dad, was a multi-talented fellow who could not only drive everything from a car to a lorry or even a train, but he could also fix anything that was broken (including the aforementioned three broken toes my father sustained as a young child – it was Jesus who had bandaged and splinted up the damaged metatarsals - with the help of the top of a match box and some duct tape).
So Jesus was of course the perfect Aide in my father’s bid to revive the old glider.
As I understand it, over the course of several weeks, my father enlisted the servants to clear a large area around the aircraft with Jesus seconded to the full-time task of tinkering with the aircraft.
Fortunately, the glider had sustained only minor damage to the fuselage and apart from a wonky landing wheel was superficially in good order.
It was only a matter of a day or two before Jesus gave the Maida the thumbs up.
“All done Master,” the Driver had announced to my father’s joy – which was short lived, for he was soon, confronted with a new problem.
I told you my great-grandfather’s property was located on a hill which meant the chance of getting the aircraft to flat land, enough to create a runway was impossible.
The only solution, as Dad saw it, was to attempt to launch the plane in the old fashioned way – by literally throwing it off the hill. It was a glider wasn’t it?
First the servants were enlisted to cut a rudimentary path through the jungle 30 feet wide so the vessel could be safely pushed out of the jungle and out onto the abandoned roadway, built in the last century by more British road gangs and winding up the hillside.
The launch day was meticulously planned.
My father consulted the weather almanacs routinely broadcast on the BBC. He scouted the hilltop for a suitable area from which to launch himself. He settled on a clay platform metres from the perimeters of his father’s tea plantation where the owls circling the clouds indicated a reasonable height for an aeronautical feat. Importantly, he consulted the local Buddhist monks to ensure that they would chant for his success.
Malcolm recounted a pristine morning, blue skied and cloudless. How the entire village had been captivated by his plan and a motley assortment of people came to help him that day. There came the elderly carting an encyclopaedia of ailments – everything from flatulence and ulcers to skin rashes and halitosis. They complained loudly about their aches and pains but many were experienced tea-pickers for whom the climb was nothing. The women, crooking their saris around their necks deftly heaved their knock knees and bow legs past the rows of tea bushes. The men hoisted their sarongs around their aging testicles, and chewing beetle, prattled in either Tamil or Sinhalese as they held aloft Father’s amazing creation.
Malcolm himself cut a majestic figure. For head protection, he had borrowed an old motorcycle helmet that belonged to Jesus. To honour the occasion and to remember the very moment that the heavens had delivered the Maeda to him, he had adorned the helmet with five peacock feathers. It was a sight to behold, the teal, bronze and purple of the peacock feathers blinding in their loveliness and creating the illusion of a Spartan’s war helmet.
And so it was that Malcom Sattambirilage Etcetera, at the age of 18, found himself in the cockpit of an ancient military glider. Surrounded by a sea of villagers counting down in Sinhalese from ten to one as, with Jesus overseeing the technicalities of the manoever, a crowd of men on each wing set up a few hundred yards from the edge of the precipice and pushed, and pushed.
Over rocks and potholes, the tips of the wings brushing the border of tea bushes, they eased the machine forward until its nose inched slowly over the edge of the cliff. The collective held their breaths. Prayers to Buddha, Ganesh and any one of the tens of thousands of their gods were uttered beneath betel-stained breaths. And then, there was my father, actually flying!
In fact, as Dad tells it, he flew at least for two miles, taking in the spectacular views of tea country, waterfalls and lakes seared by sunlight. He flew alongside Eagles, spoonbills and whatever birdlife he found up there. His way was lit by rainbows, and the light of heaven itself.
Assisted by a tail wind, he sailed in the sky for perhaps fifteen minutes at a cruise speed of around 30 miles per hour, by his reckoning until quite suddenly, it gave up the ghost.
The Maeda went into a tailspin and Dad only just managed to get it horizontal before he crash-landed in a rice paddy.
Unfortunately, the glider literally fell to bits, my father flung clear into a large pile of buffalo dung that cushioned the impact.
Afterwards, he was hailed as a hero among the villagers with his exploit achieving a legendary status. His helmet and the peacock feathers, still in tact, were apparently forwarded to the Royal Museum of Colombo along with a lengthy written description of the events surrounding the extraordinary resurrection of the Maeda.
This was, unfortunately, lost in transit. At least that was Malcolm’s story.
Chapter 3
With Oprah replaced by one of those dreadful afternoon advertorial shows, Mum was snoring on the sofa after lunch.
It was the weekend and with Monday the Labour Day holiday, I was grateful to have the extra day off.
Weekend’s off were rare. There were usually Open Houses or Auctions to attend on Saturdays and sometimes, my more zealous clients wanted me to show people through their properties on Sundays.
As the principal of my own agency, I enjoyed great freedom and flexibility. But the demands of the property market meant I rarely allowed myself time off.
My mother complained I was a workaholic, usually coughing dramatically into a handkerchief or moaning about mythical pains in various, alternating body parts. She meant, of course, that I wasn’t at home to attend to her cups of tea and sandwiches, that I was an “ungrateful child”, the favourite of her accusations.
But after 42 years living with her, I was impervious to her puerile efforts to manipulate my guilt.
I took my days off when I chose, not when my mother’s lumbago was playing up.
Now, in my bedroom, I vaguely contemplated the top drawer of my dresser. The large vibrator Mohini had given me for my last birthday beckoned.
I toyed with the notion of sexual pleasure. A girl had to get it when she could. But without the TV to hide the sound, I didn’t want my mother discovering me self stimulating my clitoris, although even with her fiendish ability at Scrabble, I doubted she knew the meaning of that word.
In fact, I had a vague recollection that once Mum had heard the word and asked me what it meant. I had shrugged as nonchalantly as I could and feigned ignorance.
“Sounds like some kind of European car,” Mum had surmised. “I must look that up.”
Now I lay back on my European pillows with a sigh.
My room was a haven in more ways than one. Here I was mercifully separated from the cacophony of mauve and lace that characterized my mother’s taste. This was my sanctuary where my eyeballs could be spared the array of bad art, Sri Lankan artefacts – brass bowls, painted monster masks, wooden elephants – and crocheted rugs that leapt from the clutter of the rest of the house.
My two fingers wondered toward my knickers when I heard him.
‘THAT’S A FILTHY THING YOU’RE DOING.’
‘Must you speak in Capitals, Dad?’
‘HOW ELSE WILL YOU KNOW THAT I’M CALLING FROM THE GREAT BEYOND.’
‘It can’t be THE GREAT BEYOND, Dad. You’re Buddhist. There’s no BEYOND, remember’
‘YOU SHOULDN’T MOCK THE DEAD.’
‘I’m not mocking you, Thathi. But shouldn’t you have come back as something? “
My eyes warily scanned my walls. There were no living things to suggest my father might have returned as say, a gecko or a daddy long legs, the usual creatures lurking in the corners of the house.
‘ANYWAY, SHOULDN’T YOU BE AT LEAST A LITTLE SHOCKED THAT I CAN SEE WHAT YOU’RE DOING?’
‘I didn’t realise that Buddhists could be reborn as invisible perverts.’
On my bedside table, a clock chewed carelessly through the seconds. I turned my head to check the time. It was almost three o’clock.
Through an open window overlooking the garden, I could smell my mother’s marigolds. It was May and the sky outside was a cloudless blue. I heard the sound of a lawnmower.
‘It’s a bit early , even for you, isn’t it, Thathi?’
‘NIRVANA IS TIMELESS AFTER ALL’, my father tsk-tsked.
‘Yes, yes I know but really, it’s afternoon for god’s sake. In the books, spirits aren’t supposed to reveal themselves in broad daylight?’
To be honest, I was miffed that my ritual of weekend masturbation had been interrupted so rudely.
‘What do you want anyway?’
‘I WANT TO KNOW IF YOU’VE REMEMERED.’
‘What?’
‘YOU KNOW.’
‘I don’t’
‘YES YOU DO.’
‘No I don’t’.
I threw myself off my mattress with a grunt.
‘God, dad, you’re still so bloody childish’
‘YOU SOUND LIKE YOUR MOTHER.’ Even from the dead, I already knew Dad could still be wounded. I relented.
‘Look, it’ll come to me, I know but for now, can’t you just go off an do what dead people do?’
Silence.
‘Dad?’
There was a rustle by the window. A crow with a knowing eye had landed on the ledge and was pecking its reflection.
‘YOU’LL REMEMBER, SHIVVY. I KNOW YOU WILL.’
‘Trust you to be a crow,’ I grumbled. The bird cocked its head and winked at me.
*
I may have been imagining things.
I don’t know if my Father really spoke to me as he often did. He’d be a voice I heard in capitals for some unknown reason.
I only know that it FELT as if I were in conversation with him.
My left brain did not like it at all but the Buddhist part of me, somewhere in my right I think, loved the idea.
At times, I considered seeking the services of a psychiatrist. Dad would speak to me at the most inopportune moments, sometimes scaring the crap out of me.
Nobody knew. I hadn’t had the heart (or the guts) to discuss the way my father had unexpectedly materialised to me.
My window ledge vacated by the crow, I concentrated on the blue skin of the sky.
My father had been killed suddenly a decade earlier.
Enough time had elapsed for the raw wound of his not-being to have healed and we could all – Mohini, Lakshmi , Mummy and I – talk about ‘the old man’ as we called him, without at least one of us bursting into tears.
But it was my mother who, I think, was not entirely unhappy when her husband of 36 years finally went off to the next phase on his Wheel of Enlightenment.
In many ways I believe it was relief.
Malcolm, my father, had been a diabetic Type I since at least his mid-thirties and I often felt as if it were a way for the heavens to taunt us.
For my father had not only cheated death but almost seemed to covet it – especially as his diabetes progressed.
Whether it in involved poisionous creatures, automobile accidents, medical scares or just plain acts of stupidity, my father had 90 lives it seemed to us and we had all anticipated my Father’s early demise.
Yet the decades progressed unrelentingly and, when at 50 and 60, my Father still remained alive and kicking, I think my Mother simply lost patience.
We imagined the diabetes would claim him but in the end it had been something none of us could have anticipated.
We called it ‘an accident’ to make more palatable our terms of reference.
It explained why I could still hear the Old Man.
And perhaps it explained the absence of anything like grieving on the part of my Mother after Dad doffed his hat and passed through the Eternal Portals.
My Mother was not given to unnecessary emotions. Aside from some jubilation upon scoring a 50-pointer in a game, she had an essence about her that would not be moved by death or disaster. She was not given to unnecessary displays of affection and was monitored her emotions as if she were a brigadier and her feelings – love, fear, hatred, anger – soldiers on a parade ground, brainwashed and cowed into single file and made to perform various formations on command.
So it’s no wonder that Mummy had a reputation for a little carelessness where the feelings of others were concerned.
Aside from the Sri Lankan’s trademark expression of sympathy – “Sin, Ai Oh” - my mother was impervious to anything other than the most superficial sympathy.
I put it down to her own stoic upbringing. A product of Ceylon’s unpredisposing boarding school system, Mirabelle Simbilage had taught her three daughters that tears were useless. All life was suffering and it was best to stick your chin and get on with it without grumbling.
‘Be grateful for what you have,’ was Mirabelle’s motto and she lived by it. She did not tolerate self pity and despised complaining. In many ways, she was bullet proof, a toughness that at times meant she could be callous, and even cruel.
So, when my Father died, we were, none of us, alarmed when my mother, in the middle of the eulogy at my Dad’s funeral, began rummaging manically in her purse.
I had hissed: “Mum, stop it! I can’t concentrate.”
“What men! I’ve lost my keys,” Mum had hissed back.
As the priest had boldy rallied on, the rest of us attempted to turn a deaf ear to the sounds of Mum’s wallet, a torch, a Stanley Knife and an array of card cutting tools were dislodged from her cavernous bag.
When the packet of large glass pearls (left over from one of her forays into beading) was accidentally released, we all tried to ignore the clatter like pellets of rain across the hard floor of the church.
If only we had stopped the ceremony to pick them up, we might have averted the disaster that ensued when at last, it was time for us to leave the church.
The priest, making his way to the front of the aisle to bless Dad’s coffin, slipped on the beads, skated like Jesus on thin ice into the pedestal on which a vase of bromeliads were displayed. When that fell, it crashed onto Dad’s coffin, dislodging a spray of water that drenched my aunties sitting in the front row.
Mummy, all the while, stared unperturbed at her hymn book as I indicated to the organist that she should begin the recessional hymn.
At that point Mum leaned toward me and said: “I told you we should have had a Buddhist ceremony. “
She hadn’t. The Buddhist ceremony had been my suggestion but Mum, a keen church goer, had insisted on a Catholic one, to appease her pastor with whom she had forged a strong friendship.
Pastor Jack, apparently, was a dab hand at knitting, and he and Mum had become firm friends over a church project to make blankets for the homeless.
Even if ‘the accident’ had no part to play in it, I blame the Catholic funeral for the fact that Dad, it seemed, had failed to fully make the passage into the nether world.
Because a few months after his death, I started to dream about him, until the first time he talked to me.
I can’t recall what I’d been doing. All I knew now was that Dad was still around me and I had become used to routine conversations and interruptions from the nether world.
There were some rules of engagement that had been set, he told me, by a greater power.
‘Who?’
‘IF I TOLD YOU THAT I MIGHT BE DEMOTED DOWN THE WHEEL’
‘It seems like you already have, Dad. Shouldn’t you be communing on a more heavenly plane?’
‘I CAN’T GIVE YOU ANSWERS, SHIV. THAT’S ONE RULE. YOU CAN’T TREAT ME LIKE A SPIRITUAL SEARCH ENGINE.’
‘No questions?’
‘YOU CAN ASK ME WHAT THE CAPITAL OF SURINAM IS – BUT NO QUESTIONS ABOUT OUR PAST.’
‘What about the future? At least you’d be useful then.’
‘PROBLEMATIC. I CAN’T BE SEEN TO FAVOUR YOU. IT CREATES ATTACHMENT.’
‘To the future?’
‘CONSIDERING WE BROUGHT YOU UP AS A CATHOLIC, YOU HAVE A GOOD GRASP, SHIV.’
‘So you won’t tell me if they’re true.’
‘YOU MUST FIND YOUR OWN PATH TO YOUR OWN UNIVERSAL TRUTH.’
I grunted. ‘You know what I mean.’
‘WHEN YOU REMEMBER, YOU’LL , KNOW.’
‘What?’
‘YOU’LL KNOW.’
‘I’ll know what I should remember?’
‘WE MUST DISCOVER OUR OWN QUESTIONS.’
‘And find our own answers.’
Initially, I had been surprised at how much like the Dalai Llama my Father sounded when he spoke as the dead.
Certainly, in his living years, he wasn’t known for any grandiose language. Asked to comment on the issue of the future when alive, Dad would more likely have said – and this, in the terrible Australian accent he had crafted over the years: “Fuck what’s going to happen, mate. Let’s worry about the shit going down right now.’
But spirits don’t speak like that.
Why is that?
It was the weekend and with Monday the Labour Day holiday, I was grateful to have the extra day off.
Weekend’s off were rare. There were usually Open Houses or Auctions to attend on Saturdays and sometimes, my more zealous clients wanted me to show people through their properties on Sundays.
As the principal of my own agency, I enjoyed great freedom and flexibility. But the demands of the property market meant I rarely allowed myself time off.
My mother complained I was a workaholic, usually coughing dramatically into a handkerchief or moaning about mythical pains in various, alternating body parts. She meant, of course, that I wasn’t at home to attend to her cups of tea and sandwiches, that I was an “ungrateful child”, the favourite of her accusations.
But after 42 years living with her, I was impervious to her puerile efforts to manipulate my guilt.
I took my days off when I chose, not when my mother’s lumbago was playing up.
Now, in my bedroom, I vaguely contemplated the top drawer of my dresser. The large vibrator Mohini had given me for my last birthday beckoned.
I toyed with the notion of sexual pleasure. A girl had to get it when she could. But without the TV to hide the sound, I didn’t want my mother discovering me self stimulating my clitoris, although even with her fiendish ability at Scrabble, I doubted she knew the meaning of that word.
In fact, I had a vague recollection that once Mum had heard the word and asked me what it meant. I had shrugged as nonchalantly as I could and feigned ignorance.
“Sounds like some kind of European car,” Mum had surmised. “I must look that up.”
Now I lay back on my European pillows with a sigh.
My room was a haven in more ways than one. Here I was mercifully separated from the cacophony of mauve and lace that characterized my mother’s taste. This was my sanctuary where my eyeballs could be spared the array of bad art, Sri Lankan artefacts – brass bowls, painted monster masks, wooden elephants – and crocheted rugs that leapt from the clutter of the rest of the house.
My two fingers wondered toward my knickers when I heard him.
‘THAT’S A FILTHY THING YOU’RE DOING.’
‘Must you speak in Capitals, Dad?’
‘HOW ELSE WILL YOU KNOW THAT I’M CALLING FROM THE GREAT BEYOND.’
‘It can’t be THE GREAT BEYOND, Dad. You’re Buddhist. There’s no BEYOND, remember’
‘YOU SHOULDN’T MOCK THE DEAD.’
‘I’m not mocking you, Thathi. But shouldn’t you have come back as something? “
My eyes warily scanned my walls. There were no living things to suggest my father might have returned as say, a gecko or a daddy long legs, the usual creatures lurking in the corners of the house.
‘ANYWAY, SHOULDN’T YOU BE AT LEAST A LITTLE SHOCKED THAT I CAN SEE WHAT YOU’RE DOING?’
‘I didn’t realise that Buddhists could be reborn as invisible perverts.’
On my bedside table, a clock chewed carelessly through the seconds. I turned my head to check the time. It was almost three o’clock.
Through an open window overlooking the garden, I could smell my mother’s marigolds. It was May and the sky outside was a cloudless blue. I heard the sound of a lawnmower.
‘It’s a bit early , even for you, isn’t it, Thathi?’
‘NIRVANA IS TIMELESS AFTER ALL’, my father tsk-tsked.
‘Yes, yes I know but really, it’s afternoon for god’s sake. In the books, spirits aren’t supposed to reveal themselves in broad daylight?’
To be honest, I was miffed that my ritual of weekend masturbation had been interrupted so rudely.
‘What do you want anyway?’
‘I WANT TO KNOW IF YOU’VE REMEMERED.’
‘What?’
‘YOU KNOW.’
‘I don’t’
‘YES YOU DO.’
‘No I don’t’.
I threw myself off my mattress with a grunt.
‘God, dad, you’re still so bloody childish’
‘YOU SOUND LIKE YOUR MOTHER.’ Even from the dead, I already knew Dad could still be wounded. I relented.
‘Look, it’ll come to me, I know but for now, can’t you just go off an do what dead people do?’
Silence.
‘Dad?’
There was a rustle by the window. A crow with a knowing eye had landed on the ledge and was pecking its reflection.
‘YOU’LL REMEMBER, SHIVVY. I KNOW YOU WILL.’
‘Trust you to be a crow,’ I grumbled. The bird cocked its head and winked at me.
*
I may have been imagining things.
I don’t know if my Father really spoke to me as he often did. He’d be a voice I heard in capitals for some unknown reason.
I only know that it FELT as if I were in conversation with him.
My left brain did not like it at all but the Buddhist part of me, somewhere in my right I think, loved the idea.
At times, I considered seeking the services of a psychiatrist. Dad would speak to me at the most inopportune moments, sometimes scaring the crap out of me.
Nobody knew. I hadn’t had the heart (or the guts) to discuss the way my father had unexpectedly materialised to me.
My window ledge vacated by the crow, I concentrated on the blue skin of the sky.
My father had been killed suddenly a decade earlier.
Enough time had elapsed for the raw wound of his not-being to have healed and we could all – Mohini, Lakshmi , Mummy and I – talk about ‘the old man’ as we called him, without at least one of us bursting into tears.
But it was my mother who, I think, was not entirely unhappy when her husband of 36 years finally went off to the next phase on his Wheel of Enlightenment.
In many ways I believe it was relief.
Malcolm, my father, had been a diabetic Type I since at least his mid-thirties and I often felt as if it were a way for the heavens to taunt us.
For my father had not only cheated death but almost seemed to covet it – especially as his diabetes progressed.
Whether it in involved poisionous creatures, automobile accidents, medical scares or just plain acts of stupidity, my father had 90 lives it seemed to us and we had all anticipated my Father’s early demise.
Yet the decades progressed unrelentingly and, when at 50 and 60, my Father still remained alive and kicking, I think my Mother simply lost patience.
We imagined the diabetes would claim him but in the end it had been something none of us could have anticipated.
We called it ‘an accident’ to make more palatable our terms of reference.
It explained why I could still hear the Old Man.
And perhaps it explained the absence of anything like grieving on the part of my Mother after Dad doffed his hat and passed through the Eternal Portals.
My Mother was not given to unnecessary emotions. Aside from some jubilation upon scoring a 50-pointer in a game, she had an essence about her that would not be moved by death or disaster. She was not given to unnecessary displays of affection and was monitored her emotions as if she were a brigadier and her feelings – love, fear, hatred, anger – soldiers on a parade ground, brainwashed and cowed into single file and made to perform various formations on command.
So it’s no wonder that Mummy had a reputation for a little carelessness where the feelings of others were concerned.
Aside from the Sri Lankan’s trademark expression of sympathy – “Sin, Ai Oh” - my mother was impervious to anything other than the most superficial sympathy.
I put it down to her own stoic upbringing. A product of Ceylon’s unpredisposing boarding school system, Mirabelle Simbilage had taught her three daughters that tears were useless. All life was suffering and it was best to stick your chin and get on with it without grumbling.
‘Be grateful for what you have,’ was Mirabelle’s motto and she lived by it. She did not tolerate self pity and despised complaining. In many ways, she was bullet proof, a toughness that at times meant she could be callous, and even cruel.
So, when my Father died, we were, none of us, alarmed when my mother, in the middle of the eulogy at my Dad’s funeral, began rummaging manically in her purse.
I had hissed: “Mum, stop it! I can’t concentrate.”
“What men! I’ve lost my keys,” Mum had hissed back.
As the priest had boldy rallied on, the rest of us attempted to turn a deaf ear to the sounds of Mum’s wallet, a torch, a Stanley Knife and an array of card cutting tools were dislodged from her cavernous bag.
When the packet of large glass pearls (left over from one of her forays into beading) was accidentally released, we all tried to ignore the clatter like pellets of rain across the hard floor of the church.
If only we had stopped the ceremony to pick them up, we might have averted the disaster that ensued when at last, it was time for us to leave the church.
The priest, making his way to the front of the aisle to bless Dad’s coffin, slipped on the beads, skated like Jesus on thin ice into the pedestal on which a vase of bromeliads were displayed. When that fell, it crashed onto Dad’s coffin, dislodging a spray of water that drenched my aunties sitting in the front row.
Mummy, all the while, stared unperturbed at her hymn book as I indicated to the organist that she should begin the recessional hymn.
At that point Mum leaned toward me and said: “I told you we should have had a Buddhist ceremony. “
She hadn’t. The Buddhist ceremony had been my suggestion but Mum, a keen church goer, had insisted on a Catholic one, to appease her pastor with whom she had forged a strong friendship.
Pastor Jack, apparently, was a dab hand at knitting, and he and Mum had become firm friends over a church project to make blankets for the homeless.
Even if ‘the accident’ had no part to play in it, I blame the Catholic funeral for the fact that Dad, it seemed, had failed to fully make the passage into the nether world.
Because a few months after his death, I started to dream about him, until the first time he talked to me.
I can’t recall what I’d been doing. All I knew now was that Dad was still around me and I had become used to routine conversations and interruptions from the nether world.
There were some rules of engagement that had been set, he told me, by a greater power.
‘Who?’
‘IF I TOLD YOU THAT I MIGHT BE DEMOTED DOWN THE WHEEL’
‘It seems like you already have, Dad. Shouldn’t you be communing on a more heavenly plane?’
‘I CAN’T GIVE YOU ANSWERS, SHIV. THAT’S ONE RULE. YOU CAN’T TREAT ME LIKE A SPIRITUAL SEARCH ENGINE.’
‘No questions?’
‘YOU CAN ASK ME WHAT THE CAPITAL OF SURINAM IS – BUT NO QUESTIONS ABOUT OUR PAST.’
‘What about the future? At least you’d be useful then.’
‘PROBLEMATIC. I CAN’T BE SEEN TO FAVOUR YOU. IT CREATES ATTACHMENT.’
‘To the future?’
‘CONSIDERING WE BROUGHT YOU UP AS A CATHOLIC, YOU HAVE A GOOD GRASP, SHIV.’
‘So you won’t tell me if they’re true.’
‘YOU MUST FIND YOUR OWN PATH TO YOUR OWN UNIVERSAL TRUTH.’
I grunted. ‘You know what I mean.’
‘WHEN YOU REMEMBER, YOU’LL , KNOW.’
‘What?’
‘YOU’LL KNOW.’
‘I’ll know what I should remember?’
‘WE MUST DISCOVER OUR OWN QUESTIONS.’
‘And find our own answers.’
Initially, I had been surprised at how much like the Dalai Llama my Father sounded when he spoke as the dead.
Certainly, in his living years, he wasn’t known for any grandiose language. Asked to comment on the issue of the future when alive, Dad would more likely have said – and this, in the terrible Australian accent he had crafted over the years: “Fuck what’s going to happen, mate. Let’s worry about the shit going down right now.’
But spirits don’t speak like that.
Why is that?
Chapter 2
Thivanthi!” my mother shouted from the living room. “It’s time to make your move! Come child!”.
Lowering the handle of the toasted sandwich maker, I cringed. “Put your teeth back in, Mum!” I shouted back.
As usual, Oprah blared at a thousand decibels and my mother and I struggled to make each other heard over the din. The black media megastar was interviewing Tina Fey.
It may have been a rerun, but I wasn’t sure.
“ Sometimes, looking at pictures from the campaign, I had to look twice—was that really her, or was it you? So, when you were finally there onstage impersonating her, were you scared? ,” Oprah asks Tina.
Tina: “ No…”
Mum: “Shiv!”
Tina: “… I wouldn't have enjoyed doing it alone, because I never did anything alone on SNL.
Oprah: “When I'm on TV, I can sometimes feel when a moment transcends the studio and is transported into people's living rooms. Did you feel that energy? All those people watching and thinking…”
Mum: “Thivanthi!”
Me (shouting) : “Would you like a sandwich, Mum?”
Mum: “What!”
Me: “A sandwich. I’m making ham and cheese.”
Mum (grunting, something obscure): “Just a piece of bread is fine.”
I sighed. My mother appeared to survive on a diet comprised entirely of white bread, sweets and her daily glass of sherry. It surely did not augur well for her health but at seventy-five years of age, she seemed to defy the odds.
With my toasted sandwich pushed up against a single, thickly buttered slice of white bread on a small plate and a cup of tea in the other, I went to find my mother in what we Simbilage’s called “the television room”.
I had often wondered why the television had been exalted to such a status that it had its own room named after it when in fact it was also the room that housed our best sofa, my father’s prized Jason Recliner rocker (a find at a garage sale) and my mother’s vast collection of tools required for an array of craft activities.
Why this room was not called the Craft Room or the Recliner Room is anyone’s guess and to this day, I imagine that 28 inch Panasonic gloating at its kingpin status.
It was a status that was well earned, I suppose, because, whether crafting or reclining, my parents were inevitably drawn to whatever was on the small screen.
Without a doubt, my parents were what you’d call “TV addicts”, having discovered a love affair with television only well into their thirties after we’d immigrated to Brisbane from Ceylon.
In their defence however, they were aficionados, in the main, of the ABC, which was “obviously” the choice of intellectuals and arty-farty types, and so of course, watching television was never considered to be in any way bad for you.
There was no limit to how much of it we could watch – as long as we were satisfied with whatever “Aunty” had to offer.
The result of course was that, eventually, my family would lay claim to a general knowledge that was, even I have to admit, impressive.
My family, in short, ate, drank and made merry in front of the television set and I’m certain that if fornication had ever been on my parent’s agenda, they would have done “it” inbetween Aunty’s promotions.
I’d been living at home for nearly all of my forty-two years and it gave me a strange sense of certainty in the world that whenever she was home, my mother could be could be counted on to be just where I’d always found her – in the television room.
Now, as I prodded the door open with my elbow and carefully wielded the tray with my sandwich, Oprah was still cooing over Tina.
“Jesus! That’s loud,” I shouted.
I lowered my plate onto a camphor wood chest that passed as a coffee table. It was covered in a fine lace tablecloth embroidered with tiny flowers.
I reached over for the remote control and killed-off Oprah. Silence swooned in my ears.
“Aah, that’s better.”
“Why’d you knock that off, I was listening to that?”
Mum sat in an oversized tracksuit on the dark brown velour sofa that was the centrepiece of the living room. Beside her, a book of Sudoku puzzles had been placed face down. In front of her, a Scrabble Board was laid out over a small, teak card table. She was crocheting, peering through thick spectacles at her handiwork. On the floor I saw the folder of recipes, neatly cut and labelled that my mother had laboriously pasted into a large scrapbook.
On a small table next to the couch was a lamp with a tassled shade that was always on as the ‘television room’ was always a little dark. My mother’s increasing short sightedness meant she relied on every bit of available light, morning, noon and night. There was no concern for electricity bills.
Beside the lamp was a small packet of matches, a pair of scissors, a craft knife and a packet of razor blades. There was also an empty jam jar packed with an assortment of sorry pens, pencils and syringes. Syringes? I remembered my father and his decades as a diabetic. I could still smell him in the room. Sometimes I could feel him brush against my skin. Or was that the dog?
We had put Buster down at least two decades before but often I’d feel a shiver at my legs as if that mangy cattle dog was still farting at my feet.
“God, Mum, you really are getting deaf in your old age,” I groaned.
Mum peered at me with disarming eyebrows that were really nothing more than two lines badly etched with an eyebrow pencil I knew had been whittled down to half with a half-blunt kitchen knife (we could never locate a sharpener).
My mother had an obsessive aversion to body hair, a woman who plucked, shaved and waxed at every opportunity, stopping only just short of a Brazilian although that was only a hypothesis.
It was the reason why I had long ago nicknamed her ‘The Old Plucker’, sometimes shortening it to ‘’the OP’ or lengthening it to SOP the ‘S’ being for ‘Silly’.
Mum made a whistling sound against her teeth. ‘Your turn,’ she said.
Sipping loudly at my tea, I eyed the Scrabble Board. ‘Hey! What’s this!” I said. ‘Eieio’.
‘A sound of pain,’ my mother sagely observed.
‘I don’t believe you!’
‘You never do but when’s the last time you caught me out?’
I sighed and eyed my rack of tiles.
‘All vowels,’ I groaned. ‘Typical’.
‘You always say that, child. Every time you think you will lose you say, ‘Typical’ and then you always end up winning.’
‘Well …’
Mum put down her crochet work and glared at me. ‘I don’t know why you have to lie about everything.’
‘What…’
‘Why is everything about calling your bluff, Shivanthi. Life is not a game of poker.”
With a sudden movement, Mum reached across the tiny space separating my rack from hers and turned it around to face her.
‘Huh! Just as I suspected,’ she said, “P-M-H-S-T and only E and I’.
Mum returned to her crocheting. ‘You should be at work today. I heard you on the phone this morning, you know.’
I threw my chin out. ‘So what?’
An index finger outstretched mid-stitch, my mother frowned. ‘You don’t even have an Uncle who’s an arcaheologist. You told them he’d just arrived here from Colombo and was stuck at the airport and apparently, because I had slipped in the bathroom and dislocated my hip, you had to go and collect him. They must have asked why he couldn’t catch a taxi, because I heard you explain that your Uncle was blind…”
“I did not!”
“Stop it. There you go again. I heard you. What’s more it seems this mythical uncle of yours was blinded after a cobra attacked him while he was out on one of his digs in Bangladesh.”
“Oh, here we go,” I grumbled.
“Make no mistake, Shiv, one of these days your lies are going to get you into really deep trouble. Then you’ll be sorry.”
“No you’ll be sorry,” I said. “Now put your teeth back in.”
I located an “O” on the board and with “Mephisto” racked up 85 points.
Lowering the handle of the toasted sandwich maker, I cringed. “Put your teeth back in, Mum!” I shouted back.
As usual, Oprah blared at a thousand decibels and my mother and I struggled to make each other heard over the din. The black media megastar was interviewing Tina Fey.
It may have been a rerun, but I wasn’t sure.
“ Sometimes, looking at pictures from the campaign, I had to look twice—was that really her, or was it you? So, when you were finally there onstage impersonating her, were you scared? ,” Oprah asks Tina.
Tina: “ No…”
Mum: “Shiv!”
Tina: “… I wouldn't have enjoyed doing it alone, because I never did anything alone on SNL.
Oprah: “When I'm on TV, I can sometimes feel when a moment transcends the studio and is transported into people's living rooms. Did you feel that energy? All those people watching and thinking…”
Mum: “Thivanthi!”
Me (shouting) : “Would you like a sandwich, Mum?”
Mum: “What!”
Me: “A sandwich. I’m making ham and cheese.”
Mum (grunting, something obscure): “Just a piece of bread is fine.”
I sighed. My mother appeared to survive on a diet comprised entirely of white bread, sweets and her daily glass of sherry. It surely did not augur well for her health but at seventy-five years of age, she seemed to defy the odds.
With my toasted sandwich pushed up against a single, thickly buttered slice of white bread on a small plate and a cup of tea in the other, I went to find my mother in what we Simbilage’s called “the television room”.
I had often wondered why the television had been exalted to such a status that it had its own room named after it when in fact it was also the room that housed our best sofa, my father’s prized Jason Recliner rocker (a find at a garage sale) and my mother’s vast collection of tools required for an array of craft activities.
Why this room was not called the Craft Room or the Recliner Room is anyone’s guess and to this day, I imagine that 28 inch Panasonic gloating at its kingpin status.
It was a status that was well earned, I suppose, because, whether crafting or reclining, my parents were inevitably drawn to whatever was on the small screen.
Without a doubt, my parents were what you’d call “TV addicts”, having discovered a love affair with television only well into their thirties after we’d immigrated to Brisbane from Ceylon.
In their defence however, they were aficionados, in the main, of the ABC, which was “obviously” the choice of intellectuals and arty-farty types, and so of course, watching television was never considered to be in any way bad for you.
There was no limit to how much of it we could watch – as long as we were satisfied with whatever “Aunty” had to offer.
The result of course was that, eventually, my family would lay claim to a general knowledge that was, even I have to admit, impressive.
My family, in short, ate, drank and made merry in front of the television set and I’m certain that if fornication had ever been on my parent’s agenda, they would have done “it” inbetween Aunty’s promotions.
I’d been living at home for nearly all of my forty-two years and it gave me a strange sense of certainty in the world that whenever she was home, my mother could be could be counted on to be just where I’d always found her – in the television room.
Now, as I prodded the door open with my elbow and carefully wielded the tray with my sandwich, Oprah was still cooing over Tina.
“Jesus! That’s loud,” I shouted.
I lowered my plate onto a camphor wood chest that passed as a coffee table. It was covered in a fine lace tablecloth embroidered with tiny flowers.
I reached over for the remote control and killed-off Oprah. Silence swooned in my ears.
“Aah, that’s better.”
“Why’d you knock that off, I was listening to that?”
Mum sat in an oversized tracksuit on the dark brown velour sofa that was the centrepiece of the living room. Beside her, a book of Sudoku puzzles had been placed face down. In front of her, a Scrabble Board was laid out over a small, teak card table. She was crocheting, peering through thick spectacles at her handiwork. On the floor I saw the folder of recipes, neatly cut and labelled that my mother had laboriously pasted into a large scrapbook.
On a small table next to the couch was a lamp with a tassled shade that was always on as the ‘television room’ was always a little dark. My mother’s increasing short sightedness meant she relied on every bit of available light, morning, noon and night. There was no concern for electricity bills.
Beside the lamp was a small packet of matches, a pair of scissors, a craft knife and a packet of razor blades. There was also an empty jam jar packed with an assortment of sorry pens, pencils and syringes. Syringes? I remembered my father and his decades as a diabetic. I could still smell him in the room. Sometimes I could feel him brush against my skin. Or was that the dog?
We had put Buster down at least two decades before but often I’d feel a shiver at my legs as if that mangy cattle dog was still farting at my feet.
“God, Mum, you really are getting deaf in your old age,” I groaned.
Mum peered at me with disarming eyebrows that were really nothing more than two lines badly etched with an eyebrow pencil I knew had been whittled down to half with a half-blunt kitchen knife (we could never locate a sharpener).
My mother had an obsessive aversion to body hair, a woman who plucked, shaved and waxed at every opportunity, stopping only just short of a Brazilian although that was only a hypothesis.
It was the reason why I had long ago nicknamed her ‘The Old Plucker’, sometimes shortening it to ‘’the OP’ or lengthening it to SOP the ‘S’ being for ‘Silly’.
Mum made a whistling sound against her teeth. ‘Your turn,’ she said.
Sipping loudly at my tea, I eyed the Scrabble Board. ‘Hey! What’s this!” I said. ‘Eieio’.
‘A sound of pain,’ my mother sagely observed.
‘I don’t believe you!’
‘You never do but when’s the last time you caught me out?’
I sighed and eyed my rack of tiles.
‘All vowels,’ I groaned. ‘Typical’.
‘You always say that, child. Every time you think you will lose you say, ‘Typical’ and then you always end up winning.’
‘Well …’
Mum put down her crochet work and glared at me. ‘I don’t know why you have to lie about everything.’
‘What…’
‘Why is everything about calling your bluff, Shivanthi. Life is not a game of poker.”
With a sudden movement, Mum reached across the tiny space separating my rack from hers and turned it around to face her.
‘Huh! Just as I suspected,’ she said, “P-M-H-S-T and only E and I’.
Mum returned to her crocheting. ‘You should be at work today. I heard you on the phone this morning, you know.’
I threw my chin out. ‘So what?’
An index finger outstretched mid-stitch, my mother frowned. ‘You don’t even have an Uncle who’s an arcaheologist. You told them he’d just arrived here from Colombo and was stuck at the airport and apparently, because I had slipped in the bathroom and dislocated my hip, you had to go and collect him. They must have asked why he couldn’t catch a taxi, because I heard you explain that your Uncle was blind…”
“I did not!”
“Stop it. There you go again. I heard you. What’s more it seems this mythical uncle of yours was blinded after a cobra attacked him while he was out on one of his digs in Bangladesh.”
“Oh, here we go,” I grumbled.
“Make no mistake, Shiv, one of these days your lies are going to get you into really deep trouble. Then you’ll be sorry.”
“No you’ll be sorry,” I said. “Now put your teeth back in.”
I located an “O” on the board and with “Mephisto” racked up 85 points.
Chapter 1
I can’t remember when I told my first lie, or even what it was about.
And I don’t even remember the first time I told a lie and realised how useful it was, the good lie, told so convincingly that it was a feat of the tongue.
What I do remember though is that, at a very young age, I was told not to lie for it would lead me only to hellfire and damnation.
Good ole hellfire and damnation. It’s served many a disciplinarian well, at least the Catholic ones I first met at boarding school.
I was just five years old when I was despatched to St Brigid’s in Colombo, behind my elder sister Mohini.
St Brigid’s was a large, sprawling property overseen by Irish Catholic nuns and catering to children from kindergarten through to Grade Twelve.
Here I was introduced to a culture obsessed by the virtues demanded by God and the saints, where prayer and hymns figured in large chunks of a typical day. We prayed first thing every morning, coerced from our beds at an hour when it was barely light to recite a litany from a two-sided, fullscap sheet of prayers. We prayed before meals. We prayed before study. I’m sure we even prayed while we were scratching our bums.
Every morning we trouped in an orderly queue, our veils upon our heads, to the church where a full mass was said. They were dreary affairs.
I saw the inside of that accursed church to mark every saint’s day and at least bi-weekly confessions where I struggled to think of what sins I might have had the chance to commit inbetween the hours I was forced to spend in church.
There were benedictions and several funerals. Every time one of the nuns went on her journey to the Heavenly Father, we children were required to walk around the body usually placed on display in the main aisle of St Brigid’s church.
This was a diversion we generally despised. Dead nuns, I must say, have little to recommend them in the way of entertainment. I was only a small child and my eyes were usually in line with the edge of the open coffin.
I would have to stand on tiptoes to view the corpse’s nostrils where usually little flies would collect in eager anticipation of the process of decomposition that would follow in due course. I have to say that to this day, when I see those little flies, I invoke again the scent of rotting lily petals and that stale talc smell of a dead nun.
Corpse-viewing aside, we boarders recited an umpteen rosaries each week. From time to time, we would be marched to a grotto outside the church where a statue of the Virgin Mary would be lit up by way of some artfully positioned incandescent bulbs. There was nothing Steven Spielberg about it. No special effects to suggest to us this was really the Holy Mother reincarnate. The globs of dry pigeon shit on her blue veil were a giveaway.
Here we’d be forced to kneel on the road, our bony little knees bruised by gravel, and pray to Dear God that the torture would be over soon.
And we recited the Ten Commandments by rote until they were implanted in our brains. Amongst them THOU SHALT NOT LIE.
As a good Catholic girl I learned that the Holy Scripture condemns lying as absolutely as it condemns murder and fornication. In fact, I knew people were not even allowed to lie if it meant saving a man’s life.
I blamed Saint Augustine. Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of him! He was opposed to lying in any way, regardless of the consequences, no ifs or buts. In fact, he reckoned that if the truth was difficult, then it was better to be silent if possible.
The Saint had said: “If a man is hid in your house, and his life is sought by murderers, and they come and ask you whether he is in the house, you may say that you know where he is, but you cannot tell: you may not deny that he is there.” It’s the fine print in religion I love, don’t you?
Aristotle in Ethics seemed to agree when he said that lying undermines character and in the long term, makes it more difficult to achieve a good life.
Luther concurred, too. “I consider no vice on Earth to be more damaging than lies and disloyalty,” he had said.
Plato, on the other hand, excused lying in some circumstances, particularly for heads of State for whom he saw lying as a “privilege” which might be applied for the public good. Doctors also were excused. More fine print!
For the rest of us good Catholic girls, lying was absolutely, a mortal sin.
*
But if telling lies was so bad, why did we do it? I often wondered.
Some brain analysts claim that lying is a sign of cognitive advancement. It takes a fertile and high-functioning brain in order to create a lie. In other words, lying is not for idiots.
In fact, we begin lying around the age of two or three when we start to realise that we aren’t always being watched and there are some lies we can get away with.
As four year olds, typically we stretch the truth around once every two hours, while the average six year old will have his nose grow about once every 90 minutes. The general motivations include gaining an advantage, staying out of trouble or self promotion. These were motivations I would become familiar with. But more on that later.
Older children become even more skilled at lying.
Why? Because lying is a skill of survival.
Human beings as a species will lie to avoid trouble and its repercussions; to preserve reputations; to avoid hurting someone’s feelings; to increase stature and reputation; to manipulate; and to control information; we lie to gain an advantage; we lie to stay ahead.
In fact we humans lie for one of a hundred reasons.
But I would discover my own.
I Shivanthi Simbilage lied simply because I found it the most natural thing in the world.
*
Lying is not for the half-hearted or the faint-hearted.
It takes courage, guts, balls!
You can’t dip your toes into the mean, cold depths of lying. You are obliged to dive in, shouting ‘Geronimo’, stilletoes and all, with no regrets.
There’s no such thing as a partial lie just as there is no such thing as a partial swim.
Lying is an act of immersion. There is no skimming of the surface.
Once any statement or situation involves what might be construed as only a bit of a lie, then the whole statement or situation becomes part of the lie.
It’s a bit like saying that a worm-eaten apple is only inedible on the side the worm is living in. You see? It doesn’t gel does it?
As for the justification of lying, I’m with Saint Augustine. There can be no claims of enabling the veneers of civilisation – of protecting another’s feelings, of maintaining cordial relationships, of easing another’s lot in life.
No lie can be justified. It is what it was. It is not a truth. It is not a half-truth.
There is no sleight of hand that truly transforms a lie into a virtue.
No matter how you hold it up, a lie remains a lie.
But here is the thing I would eventually discover.
Learning not just how to lie, and feeling comfortable with lying is only half of the story.
The other half is the sheer exhilaration, the freedom, the sense of achievement and power that is the result when an otherwise ‘good’ Catholic girl discovers the creativity of a really, really, damn good lie.
It is as if the three lemons on the poker machine light up in unison.
There is a hallelujah I can hear in the heavens.
There is a tingling sensation in my cheeks.
It is that, that satisfaction I remember as opposed to the exact nature of that first times I lied with cunning and intent.
This was not like the lie I’d told when I had broken my mother, Mirabelle’s favourite vase. When Mum had asked who had done it, I had replied “Nobody”.
This was not the lie I’d told when I had placed the family cat into the cage containing my mother’s prized macaw. When Mum had asked who had done it, I blamed my innocent younger sister, Lakshmi, turning a deaf ear to her sobs as my father, Malcolm, paddled my younger sister’s backside.
This was the kind of lie that took purpose, that required a talent of invention, and most of all, required me to repaint the dull colours of my mundane life into a blinding kaleidoscope of impossible colours that were as stunning as they were absolutely credible.
It was the kind of lie that was so big I was sure no one would believe me. And then, when my lie was eaten up in one credulous gulp, it produced a feeling that had no equal.
It distressed me that I could not quite remember exactly what lie had first lured my on the path to damnation.
It must have been a good one because I had certainly been damned by it, at least in one way.
And I don’t even remember the first time I told a lie and realised how useful it was, the good lie, told so convincingly that it was a feat of the tongue.
What I do remember though is that, at a very young age, I was told not to lie for it would lead me only to hellfire and damnation.
Good ole hellfire and damnation. It’s served many a disciplinarian well, at least the Catholic ones I first met at boarding school.
I was just five years old when I was despatched to St Brigid’s in Colombo, behind my elder sister Mohini.
St Brigid’s was a large, sprawling property overseen by Irish Catholic nuns and catering to children from kindergarten through to Grade Twelve.
Here I was introduced to a culture obsessed by the virtues demanded by God and the saints, where prayer and hymns figured in large chunks of a typical day. We prayed first thing every morning, coerced from our beds at an hour when it was barely light to recite a litany from a two-sided, fullscap sheet of prayers. We prayed before meals. We prayed before study. I’m sure we even prayed while we were scratching our bums.
Every morning we trouped in an orderly queue, our veils upon our heads, to the church where a full mass was said. They were dreary affairs.
I saw the inside of that accursed church to mark every saint’s day and at least bi-weekly confessions where I struggled to think of what sins I might have had the chance to commit inbetween the hours I was forced to spend in church.
There were benedictions and several funerals. Every time one of the nuns went on her journey to the Heavenly Father, we children were required to walk around the body usually placed on display in the main aisle of St Brigid’s church.
This was a diversion we generally despised. Dead nuns, I must say, have little to recommend them in the way of entertainment. I was only a small child and my eyes were usually in line with the edge of the open coffin.
I would have to stand on tiptoes to view the corpse’s nostrils where usually little flies would collect in eager anticipation of the process of decomposition that would follow in due course. I have to say that to this day, when I see those little flies, I invoke again the scent of rotting lily petals and that stale talc smell of a dead nun.
Corpse-viewing aside, we boarders recited an umpteen rosaries each week. From time to time, we would be marched to a grotto outside the church where a statue of the Virgin Mary would be lit up by way of some artfully positioned incandescent bulbs. There was nothing Steven Spielberg about it. No special effects to suggest to us this was really the Holy Mother reincarnate. The globs of dry pigeon shit on her blue veil were a giveaway.
Here we’d be forced to kneel on the road, our bony little knees bruised by gravel, and pray to Dear God that the torture would be over soon.
And we recited the Ten Commandments by rote until they were implanted in our brains. Amongst them THOU SHALT NOT LIE.
As a good Catholic girl I learned that the Holy Scripture condemns lying as absolutely as it condemns murder and fornication. In fact, I knew people were not even allowed to lie if it meant saving a man’s life.
I blamed Saint Augustine. Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of him! He was opposed to lying in any way, regardless of the consequences, no ifs or buts. In fact, he reckoned that if the truth was difficult, then it was better to be silent if possible.
The Saint had said: “If a man is hid in your house, and his life is sought by murderers, and they come and ask you whether he is in the house, you may say that you know where he is, but you cannot tell: you may not deny that he is there.” It’s the fine print in religion I love, don’t you?
Aristotle in Ethics seemed to agree when he said that lying undermines character and in the long term, makes it more difficult to achieve a good life.
Luther concurred, too. “I consider no vice on Earth to be more damaging than lies and disloyalty,” he had said.
Plato, on the other hand, excused lying in some circumstances, particularly for heads of State for whom he saw lying as a “privilege” which might be applied for the public good. Doctors also were excused. More fine print!
For the rest of us good Catholic girls, lying was absolutely, a mortal sin.
*
But if telling lies was so bad, why did we do it? I often wondered.
Some brain analysts claim that lying is a sign of cognitive advancement. It takes a fertile and high-functioning brain in order to create a lie. In other words, lying is not for idiots.
In fact, we begin lying around the age of two or three when we start to realise that we aren’t always being watched and there are some lies we can get away with.
As four year olds, typically we stretch the truth around once every two hours, while the average six year old will have his nose grow about once every 90 minutes. The general motivations include gaining an advantage, staying out of trouble or self promotion. These were motivations I would become familiar with. But more on that later.
Older children become even more skilled at lying.
Why? Because lying is a skill of survival.
Human beings as a species will lie to avoid trouble and its repercussions; to preserve reputations; to avoid hurting someone’s feelings; to increase stature and reputation; to manipulate; and to control information; we lie to gain an advantage; we lie to stay ahead.
In fact we humans lie for one of a hundred reasons.
But I would discover my own.
I Shivanthi Simbilage lied simply because I found it the most natural thing in the world.
*
Lying is not for the half-hearted or the faint-hearted.
It takes courage, guts, balls!
You can’t dip your toes into the mean, cold depths of lying. You are obliged to dive in, shouting ‘Geronimo’, stilletoes and all, with no regrets.
There’s no such thing as a partial lie just as there is no such thing as a partial swim.
Lying is an act of immersion. There is no skimming of the surface.
Once any statement or situation involves what might be construed as only a bit of a lie, then the whole statement or situation becomes part of the lie.
It’s a bit like saying that a worm-eaten apple is only inedible on the side the worm is living in. You see? It doesn’t gel does it?
As for the justification of lying, I’m with Saint Augustine. There can be no claims of enabling the veneers of civilisation – of protecting another’s feelings, of maintaining cordial relationships, of easing another’s lot in life.
No lie can be justified. It is what it was. It is not a truth. It is not a half-truth.
There is no sleight of hand that truly transforms a lie into a virtue.
No matter how you hold it up, a lie remains a lie.
But here is the thing I would eventually discover.
Learning not just how to lie, and feeling comfortable with lying is only half of the story.
The other half is the sheer exhilaration, the freedom, the sense of achievement and power that is the result when an otherwise ‘good’ Catholic girl discovers the creativity of a really, really, damn good lie.
It is as if the three lemons on the poker machine light up in unison.
There is a hallelujah I can hear in the heavens.
There is a tingling sensation in my cheeks.
It is that, that satisfaction I remember as opposed to the exact nature of that first times I lied with cunning and intent.
This was not like the lie I’d told when I had broken my mother, Mirabelle’s favourite vase. When Mum had asked who had done it, I had replied “Nobody”.
This was not the lie I’d told when I had placed the family cat into the cage containing my mother’s prized macaw. When Mum had asked who had done it, I blamed my innocent younger sister, Lakshmi, turning a deaf ear to her sobs as my father, Malcolm, paddled my younger sister’s backside.
This was the kind of lie that took purpose, that required a talent of invention, and most of all, required me to repaint the dull colours of my mundane life into a blinding kaleidoscope of impossible colours that were as stunning as they were absolutely credible.
It was the kind of lie that was so big I was sure no one would believe me. And then, when my lie was eaten up in one credulous gulp, it produced a feeling that had no equal.
It distressed me that I could not quite remember exactly what lie had first lured my on the path to damnation.
It must have been a good one because I had certainly been damned by it, at least in one way.
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