BURIED LIVES
ONE March midafternoon in Trincomalee, Sri Lanka, Mr. N. K. S. Venkatesan, a forty-nine-year-old schoolteacher who should have been inside a St. Josephās Collegiate classroom explicating Arnoldās āThe Buried Lifeā found himself instead at a barricaded intersection, axe in hand and shouting rude slogans at a truckload of soldiers.
Mr. Venkatesan was not a political man. In his neighborhood he was the only householder who hadnāt contributed, not even a rupee, to the Tamil Boysā Sporting Association, which everyone knew wasnāt a cricket club so much as a recruiting center for the Liberation Tigers. And at St. Joeās, he hadnāt signed the staff petition abhorring the arrest at a peaceful anti-Buddhist demonstration of Dr. Pillai, the mathematics teacher. Venkatesan had rather enjoyed talking about fractals with Dr. Pillai, but he disapproved of men with family responsibilities sticking their heads between billy clubs as though they were still fighting the British for independence.
Fractals claimed to predict, mathematically, chaos and apparent randomness. Such an endeavor, if possible, struck Mr. Venkatesan as a virtually holy quest, closer to the spirit of religion than of science. What had once been Ceylon was now Sri Lanka.
Mr. Venkatesan, like Dr. Pillai, had a large family to look after: he had parents, one set of grandparents, an aunt who hadnāt been quite right in the head since four of her five boys had signed up with the Tigers, and three much younger, unmarried sisters. They lived with him in a three-room flat above a variety store. It was to protect his youngest sister (a large, docile girl who, before she got herself mixed up with the Sporting Association, used to embroider napkin-and-tablecloth sets and sell them to a middleman for export to fancy shops in Canada) that he was marching that afternoon with two hundred baby-faced protesters.
Axe under armāhe held the weapon as he might an umbrellaāMr. Venkatesan and his sister and a frail boy with a bushy moustache on whom his sister appeared to have a crush, drifted past looted stores and charred vehicles. In the center of the intersection, a middle-aged leader in camouflage fatigues and a black beret stood on the roof of a van without tires, and was about to set fire to the national flag with what looked to Mr. Venkatesan very much like a Zippo lighter.
āSir, you have to get in the mood,ā said his sisterās boyfriend. The moustache entirely covered his mouth. Mr. Venkatesan had the uncanny sensation of being addressed by a thatch of undulating bristles. āYou have to let yourself go, sir.ā
This wasnāt advice; this was admonition. Around Mr. Venkatesan swirled dozens of hyper kinetic boys in white shirts, holding bricks. Fat girls in summer frocks held placards aloft. His sister sucked on an ice cream bar. Every protester seemed to twinkle with fun. He didnāt know how to have fun, that was the trouble. Even as an adolescent heād battened down all passion; while other students had slipped love notes into expectant palms, heād studied, heād passed exams. Dutifulness had turned him into a pariah.
āDonāt think you chaps invented civil disobedience!ā
He lectured the boyfriend on how his generationāmeaning that technically, heād been alive though hardly self-consciousāhad cowed the British Empire. The truth was that the one time the police had raided the Venkatesansā flatāheād been four, but heād been taught anti-British phrases like āthe salt marchā and āsatyagrahaā by a cousin ten years olderāhe had saluted the superintendant smartly even as constables squeezed his cousinās wrists into handcuffs. That cousin was now in San Jose, California, minting lakhs and lakhs of dollars in computer software.
The boyfriend, still smiling awkwardly, moved away from Mr. Venkatesanās sister. His buddies, Tigers in berets, were clustered around a vendor of spicy fritters.
āWait!ā the sister pleaded, her face puffy with held-back tears.
āWhat do you see in that callow, good-for-nothing bloke?ā Mr. Venkatesan asked.
āPlease, please leave me alone,ā his sister screamed. āPlease let me do what I want.ā
What if he were to do what he wanted! Twenty years ago when heād had the chance, he should have applied for a Commonwealth Scholarship. He should have immured himself in a leafy dormitory in Oxford. Now it was too late. Heād have studied law. Maybe heād have married an English girl and loitered abroad. But both parents had died, his sisters were mere toddlers, and he was obliged to take the lowest, meanest teaching job in the city.
āI want to die,ā his sister sobbed beside him.
āShut up, you foolish girl.ā
The ferocity of her passion for the worthless boy, who was, just then, biting into a greasy potato fritter, shocked him. He had patronized her when she had been a plain, pliant girl squinting at embroidered birds and flowers. But now something harsh and womanly seemed to be happening inside her.
āForget those chaps. Theyāre nothing but troublemakers.ā To impress her, he tapped a foot to the beat of a slogan bellowing out of loudspeakers.
Though soldiers were starting to hustle demonstrators into double-parked paddy wagons, the intersection had taken on the gaudiness of a village fair. A white-haired vendor darted from police jeep to jeep hawking peanuts in paper cones. Boys who had drunk too much tea or soda relieved themselves freely into poster-clogged gutters. A dozen feet up the road a housewife with a baby on her hip lobbed stones into storefronts. A band of beggars staggered out of an electronics store with a radio and a television. No reason not to get in the mood.
āBlood for blood,ā he shouted, timidly at first. āBlood begets blood.ā
āBegets?ā the man beside him asked. āWhatās that supposed to mean?ā In his plastic sandals and cheap drawstring pajamas, the man looked like a coolie or laborer.
He turned to his sister for commiseration. What could she expect him to have in common with a mob of uneducated men like that? But sheād left him behind. He saw her, crouched for flight like a giant ornament on the hood of an old-fashioned car, the March wind stiffly splaying her sari and long hair behind her.
āGet down from that car!ā he cried. But the crowd, swirling, separated him from her. He felt powerless; he could no longer watch over her, keep her out of the reach of night sticks. From on top of the hood she taunted policemen, and not just policemen but everybodyāshopgirls and beggars and ochre-robed monksāas though she wasnāt just a girl with a crush on a Tiger but a monster out of oneās most splenetic nightmares.
Months later, in a boardinghouse in Hamburg, Mr. Venkatesan couldnāt help thinking about the flock of young monks pressed together behind a police barricade that eventful afternoon. He owed his freedom to the monks because, in spite of their tonsure scars and their vows of stoicism, that afternoon theyād behaved like any other hot-headed Sri Lankan adolescents. If the monks hadnāt chased his sister and knocked her off the pale blue hood of the car, Mr. Venkatesan would have stayed on in Sri Lanka, in Trinco, in St. Joeās teaching the same poems year after year, a permanent prisoner.
What the monks did was unforgivable. Robes plucked knee-high and celibate lips plumped up in vengeful chant, they pulled a girl by the hair, and they slapped and spat and kicked with vigor worthy of newly initiated Tigers.
It could have been another girl, somebody elseās younger sister. Without thinking, Mr. Venkatesan rotated a shoulder, swung an arm, readied his mind to inflict serious harm.
It should never have happened. The axe looped clumsily over the heads of demonstrators and policemen and fell, like a captured kite, into the hands of a Home Guards officer. There was blood, thick and purplish, spreading in jagged stains on the manās white uniform. The crowd wheeled violently. The drivers of paddy wagons laid panicky fingers on their horns. Veils of tear gas blinded enemies and friends. Mr. Venkatesan, crying and choking, ducked into a store and listened to the thwack of batons. When his vision eased, he staggered, still on automatic pilot, down side streets and broke through garden hedges all the way to St. Josephās unguarded backdoor.
In the menās room off the Teachersā Common Room he held his face, hot with guilt, under a rusty, hissing faucet until Father van der Haagen, the Latin and Scriptures teacher, came out of a stall.
āYou donāt look too well. Sleepless night, eh?ā the Jesuit joked. āYou need to get married, Venkatesan. Bad habits canāt always satisfy you.ā
Mr. Venkatesan laughed dutifully. All of Father van der Haagenās jokes had to do with masturbation. He didnāt say anything about having deserted his sister. He didnāt say anything about having maimed, maybe murdered, a Home Guards officer. āWho can afford a wife on what the school pays?ā he joked back. Then he hurried off to his classroom.
Though he was over a half-hour late, his students were still seated meekly at their desks.
āGood afternoon, sir.ā Boys in monogrammed shirts and rice-starched shorts shuffled to standing positions.
āSit!ā the schoolmaster commanded. Without taking his eyes off the students, he opened his desk and let his hand locate A Treasury of the Most Dulcet Verses Written in the English Language, which he had helped the headmaster to edit though only the headmasterās name appeared on the book.
Matthew Arnold was Venkatesanās favorite poet. Mr. Venkatesan had talked the Head into including four Arnold poems. The verses picked by the Head hadnāt been ādulcetā at all, and one hundred and three pages of the total of one hundred and seventy-four had been given over to upstart Trinco versifiersā martial ballads.
Mr. Venkatesan would have nursed a greater bitterness against the Head if the man hadnāt vanished, mysteriously, soon after their acrimonious coediting job.
One winter Friday the headmaster had set out for his nightly after-dinner walk, and he hadnāt come back. The Common Room gossip was that he had been kidnapped by a paramilitary group. But Miss Philomena, the female teacher who was by tradition permitted the use of the Headās private bathroom, claimed the man had drowned in the Atlantic Ocean trying to sneak into Canada in a boat that ferried, for a wicked fee, illegal aliens. Stashed in the bathroomās air vent (through which sparrows sometimes flew in and bothered her), sheād spotted, she said, an oilcloth pouch stuffed with foreign cash and fake passports.
In the Teachersā Common Room, where Miss Philomena was not popular, her story was discounted. But at the Pillaisā home, the men teachers had gotten together and toasted the Head with hoarded bottles of whiskey and sung many rounds of āFor Heās a Jolly Good Fellow,ā sometimes substituting āsmartā for āgood.ā By the time Mr. Venkatesan had been dropped home by Father van der Haagen, who owned a motorcycle, night had bleached itself into rainy dawn. It had been the only all-nighter of Mr. Venkatesanās life and the only time he might have been accused of drunkenness.
The memory of how good the rain had felt came back to him now as he glanced through the first stanza of the assigned Arnold poem. What was the function of poetry if not to improve the petty, cautious minds of evasive children? What was the duty of the teacher if not to inspire?
He cleared his throat, and began to read aloud in a voice trained in elocution.
Light flows our war of mocking words, and yet,
Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet!
I feel a nameless sadness oāer me roll.
Yes, yes, we know that we can jest,
We know, we know that we can smile!
But thereās a something in this breast,
To which thy light words bring no rest,
And thy gay smiles no anodyne.
Give me thy hand, and hush awhile,
And turn those limpid eyes on mine,
And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul.
āSir,ā a plump boy in the front row whispered as Mr. Venkatesan finally stopped for breath.
āWhat is it now?ā snapped Mr. Venkatesan. In his new mood Arnold had touched him with fresh intensity, and he hated the boy for deflating illusion. āIf you are wanting to know a synonym for āanodyne,ā then look it up in the Oxford Dictionary. You are a lazy donkey wanting me to feed you with a silver spoon. All of you, you are all lazy donkeys.ā
āNo, sir.ā The boy persisted in spoiling the mood.
It was then that Mr. Venkatesan took in the boyās sweaty face and hair. Even the eyes were fat and sweaty.
āBehold, sir,ā the boy said. He dabbed his eyelids with the limp tip of his school tie. āMine eyes, too, are wet.ā
āYou are a silly donkey,ā Mr. Venkatesan yelled. āYou are a beast of burden. You deserve the abuse that you get. It is you emotional types who are selling this country down the river.ā
The class snickered, unsure what Mr. Venkatesan wanted of them. The boy let go of his tie and wept openly. Mr. Venkatesan hated himself. Here was a kindred soul, a fellow lover of Matthew Arnold, and what had he done other than indulge in gratuitous cruelty? He blamed the times. He blamed Sri Lanka.
It was as much this classroom incident as the fear of arrest for his part in what turned out to be an out-of-control demonstration that made Mr. Venkatesan look into emigrating. At first, he explored legal channels. He wasted a monthās salary bribing arrogant junior-level clerks in four consulatesāhe was willing to settle almost anywhere except in the Gulf Emiratesābut every country he could see himself being happy and fulfilled in turned him down.
So all through the summer he consoled himself with reading novels. Adventure stories in which fearless young Britonsāsailors, soldiers, missionariesāwhacked wildernesses into submission. From lending libraries in the city, he checked out books that were so old that they had to be trussed with twine. On the flyleaf of each book, in fading ink, was an inscription by a dead or retired British tea planter. Like the blond heroes of the novels, the colonials must have come to Ceylon chasing dreams of perfect futures. He, too, must sail dark, stormy oceans.
In August, at the close of a staff meeting, Miss Philomena announced coyly that she was leaving the island. A friend in Kalamazoo, Michigan, had agreed to sponsor her as a ādomestic.ā
āIt is a ploy only, man,ā Miss Philomena explained. āIn the autumn, I am signing up for post-graduate studies in a prestigious educational institution.ā
āYou are cleaning toilets and whatnot just like a servant girl? Is the meaning of ādomesticā not the same as āservantā?ā
Mr. Venkatesan joined the others in teasing Miss Philomena, but late that night he wrote away to eight American universities for applications. He took great care with the cover letters, which always began with āDear Respected Sirā and ended with āHumbly but eagerly awaiting your response.ā He tried to put down in the allotted blanks what it felt like to be born so heartbreakingly far from New York or London. On this small dead-end island, I feel I am a shadow-man, a nothing. I feel Iām a stranger in my own room. What consoles me is reading. I sink my teeth into fiction by great Englishmen such as G. A. Henty and A. E. W. Mason. I live my life through their imagined lives. And when I put their works down at dawn I ask myself Hath not a Tamil eyes, heart, ears, nose, throat, to adapt the words of the greatest Briton. Yes, I am a Tamil. If you prick me, do I not bleed? If you tickle me, do I not laugh? Then, if I dream, will you not give me a chance, respected Sir, as only you can?
In a second paragraph he politely but firmly indicated the size of scholarship he would require, and indicated the size of apartment he (and his sisters) would require. He preferred close proximity to campus, since he did not intend to drive.
But sometime in late April, the schoolās porter brought him, rubber-banded together, eight letters of rejection.
āI am worthless,ā Mr. Venkatesan moaned in front of the porter. āI am a donkey.ā
The porter offered him aspirins. āYou are unwell, sahib.ā
The schoolteacher swallowed the tablets, but as soon as the servant left, he snatched a confiscated Zippo li...