‘Maybe you wanted to spit in their faces and curse their children. But all you did was cry and shiver and plead. Maybe, they used nails on your fingernails. Maybe, you told them what they wanted to hear. Maybe, they made you eat a gun.’
He has tears in his eyes that he does not bother wiping.
‘That’s how they took you?’
‘That’s how they took us all. 20,000 in the last year. Innocent fools, mainly. There weren’t that many in the whole JVP.’
‘I wasn’t JVP.’
‘Minister Cyril Wijeratne said, “Twelve of yours for one of ours.” He wasn’t joking. Bugger just got the sums wrong.’
‘Twenty thousand disappeared? You got the sums wrong.’
‘I’ve seen the bodies.’
‘So have I. Five thousand, max.’
‘The JVP killed less than three hundred. To crush us, the government killed more than twenty thousand. Maybe twice that. These are facts, sir.’
‘The government has killed over twenty thousand,’ says Drivermalli, overhearing a conversation beyond his ears. ‘Why keep killing? The JVP is crushed. The LTTE are silent.’
‘Shut up and drive,’ says Balal.
‘If there is an afterlife, we will all pay for this,’ says Drivermalli.
‘Fool. There is no afterlife,’ says Kottu. ‘Only this shit.’
‘Where are we going?’ asks Drivermalli.
‘Turn left at that junction,’ says Balal. ‘And stop talking.’
‘Not a bad idea. To eat a gun,’ says Drivermalli as he turns the wheel.
‘So what are the rules, Comrade Pathirana?’ you ask Sena from the rooftop of the white van.
‘No rules, sir. Like Down There. You make your own.’
‘I mean with travel. Can I go wherever the wind blows?’
‘Not really, hamu. You can travel wherever your body has been.’
‘That’s all?’
‘You can go where your name is spoken. But you can’t fly to Paris or the Maldives. Unless your corpse is taken there.’
‘Why the Maldives?’
‘Ghosts mistake that place for paradise. There are more spirits than stingrays in those shallows.’
‘But you can ride winds?’
‘Like public transport for dead people, sir. I will show.’
With that, he disappears through the roof of the van. He calls out to you and you look around. The dawn has broken and the buses have filled with office slaves and schoolkids training to become them. Each vehicle has a creature like you hanging off it. You look down the line of traffic and see a ghoul on every car roof.
‘Maali-Sir. Come. Dive in.’
You pinch yourself and feel nothing. Which could mean you’re dreaming. Or that you no longer have a body. Or that you’re dreaming of no longer having a body. It may also mean that you could safely attempt diving into a metal roof of a moving white van. In you go. It is like jumping into a swimming pool, if the water tasted like rust and wasn’t wet.
‘How can we travel in a van and not fall through the bottom.’
‘Sir is not listening. We’re attached to our bodies. Can ride any wind that passes where our corpse has been.’
‘That’s it?’
‘If you kick the bucket in Kandana and are driven to Kadugannawa for burial, you can get off anywhere on the Kandy Road.’
‘Yes, but if stabbed in a kitchen in Kurunegala and buried in the garden, options are limited no?’
He pushes you back to where the meat is and where the stench is. He stands between Balal and Kottu and waits. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that you tried it on with this skinny lad. In the last decade, you screwed anything that moved and many things that preferred not to. That’s a quote from your roommate DD, shared over a martini. A taunt, disguised as a joke.
The van hits a bump near Bishop’s College. Sena inhales something that isn’t air and slaps both Balal and Kottu at the same time. The momentum of the van makes their heads bang together. Sena lets out a laugh and you do, too. Even the dead enjoy a bit of slapstick.
‘What the hell?’ shouts Kottu, holding his scalp.
‘Sorry, boss,’ monotones Drivermalli. ‘Just a small bump.’
‘I’ll give you a small bump.’
‘These roads are shit. Time for this government to go.’
‘No one cares about your politics, Drivermalli,’ says Kottu, rubbing the bump on his head.
You ask Sena how he did this and he says there are skills that disembodied spirits have access to. But only once you have decided.
Decided what, you ask.
‘Whether you’re joining us.’
‘Us?’
‘Ones like you and me.’
‘Who wear garbage bags?’
‘Who will give justice for all those killed. To allow those without graves to find vengeance.’
‘How?’
‘By destroying these fuckers. Their bosses. And their bosses’ bosses. The scum who killed us. We will get them all, hamu. Sir doesn’t believe me? That is your first mistake.’
‘Aiyo, putha. I have made more mistakes than you have had screws.’
‘My body was kept in a freezer with seventeen others. Before they finally got around to throwing me in that lake,’ says Sena, wrapping the bags around him.
The van jerks and the goons grumble. Drivermalli seems to have clamped on the brakes while dozing. It is then you notice the lines on his face and the shadows that fall on his ears. His eyes hold a despair not unusual in one who navigates Colombo’s traffic while transporting human meat. Sena whispers in the boy’s ear as the van starts moving again.
‘I will help you find what you have lost,’ he says.
There is no indication that Drivermalli can hear him, other than a twitch in his brow.
‘Those who have wronged will be punished. Those who are wronged will be soothed.’
‘Can he hear you?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘We can talk to the living?’
‘This is a teachable skill.’
The van comes unstuck at a Mirihana roundabout and makes its way past the suburbs into factory lands.
‘Where we going, Sena?’
‘Aren’t you curious about the other two bodies in the back?’
You look at the flies circling the meat in the bags at the back of the van. You wonder if flies get reborn as us.
‘Who are they?’
‘You’ll find out soon.’
‘Now I’m curious. Where are we going, Comrade Sena?’
‘I don’t know, boss. Looks like we might be getting graves.’
‘Is there much left to bury?’
‘It is just meat, hamu. The beautiful part of you is still here.’
Not many have called you beautiful, though that’s what you were. You think of your beautiful body being sliced by a cleaver. How ugly we all are when reduced to meat. How ugly this beautiful land is, and how ugly you were to your Amma, to Jaki and to DD. Eggplants
DD called it the ugliest thing in the universe and you told him there was plenty of ugly in the world and this wouldn’t even make the top ten. The box under the bed contained five envelopes and each of them contained its own share of ugly. Each envelope housed black-and-white photographs and had the name of a playing card scrawled on its cover in felt pen. You lived in a room with no furniture and threw away everything in your life except for your photos and your boxes.
DD said he’d only seen three eggplants in his life: yours, his father’s and his own.
‘Such a privileged existence,’ you said. ‘They don’t all look like eggplants. Most look like chicken necks, some like mushrooms, a few like baby’s fists.’
‘You’ve seen plenty, no?’ asked DD, a question more loaded than the armoured car manned by children that carried you once in Kilinochchi.
‘A few,’ you said. ‘They were all beautiful.’
‘I bet you’d kiss anything,’ said DD. ‘Anything that moves. Anything that won’t.’
‘In the case of eggplants, they always tend to move when you least need them to.’
You told him your grand theories of the penis. How Asians do more screwing despite having the smallest ones. How the average member is both muscular and fleshy, moist and dry, hard and soft, smooth and wrinkled. It is the only part of your meat suit that can shape-shift. Imagine a nose growing inches whenever you lied. Or your little toe turning into a thumb.