The Minister’s Demon sits on the tub and slaps his master awake. He looks at you and smiles as Sena emerges from the smoke.
‘You woke that bastard up, Maali.’ Sena grabs you by the hair and drags you from the room.
The Minister crawls from the bathroom. ‘You are the reason that scum still breathes.’
The spirits cheer Sena’s entrance. Sena raises his fist and nods. ‘We got three and lost one,’ he proclaims with a smile and pulls tighter on your hair.
You spy a foot wearing a high heel buried under rubble that used to be a wall. You see a tie with Stanley’s shattered body attached to it.
‘You got a lot more than three, you prick,’ you spit back.
‘Mr Photographer is mine,’ says a voice from the smoke. The Mahakali emerges, a bull on two legs. It is pointing at you. ‘You better not run. Runners never get far.’
Sena pulls you by your hair and walks you toward the beast. You try to break free but you are as feeble as you were when you had breath. A lover not a fighter.
‘Sorry, Maali,’ says Sena. ‘Maybe I’ll see you in a thousand moons. Maybe never. Whichever takes longer.’
The Mahakali grabs you with a clawed fist and pulls you towards the faces on its skin. You howl. but your cries are drowned by the wails.
They come from the fire and crawl from the smoke. Major Raja Udugampola, the Mask, the ASP and Stanley Dharmendran. Their bodies are bloodied and tattered and their feet do not touch the ground.
The spirits descend on them and there is a struggle and then the Minister’s Demon breaks through the scrum and jumps on the Mahakali, who lets you out of its grasp. The Minister’s Demon blows you a kiss and says, ‘I owed you one. Now I owe you none.’
It pushes the Mahakali’s head of snakes into a wall. ‘Thank you for protecting my watch. Now we are even. Run, you fool!’
The Mahakali reaches for the Minister’s Demon’s throat. The Dead Bodyguard buries a punch in the beast’s gut. The faces scream in different keys.
‘You are no Mahakali. You think I don’t recognise you without your robes? Talduwe Somarama! You got past me once. Never again!’ And the demon’s fist collides with the Mahakali face.
The wind sails in from the flames down the emergency staircase and out the third floor windows. You jump it and pass the Minister sprawled on the stairs. You see bodies on the third and fourth floor not moving. There are not many of them, but there are enough.
The wind carries you down to the streets, where you spy ghosts by the roadside, some you have spoken to and some you have avoided.
You float over the fading rooftops and see your seventh moon hiding behind a cloud, waiting for the sun to disappear. You fly through tangled electricity cables that weave past old churches, shabby balconies, trees that whisper and half-built skyscrapers. You hear the shrill screech of the Mahakali behind you, bouncing from roof to street.
Sena rides a swifter wind and snarls curses at your heels. You keep running, colliding with ghosts blown across your pathway.
As you approach the canals, you spy the Dead Atheist saluting you and the Snake Lady laughing with her mob. You see the Dead Dogs howling from the bus stand, the Dead Suicides jumping off roofs and the drag queen waving at you mid-jump. You ride on towards the muddy waters and you wait for the weakest wind.
You hope the Mahakali has not followed you here, but you feel whispers and expect it to materialise from behind each tree you pass. You hop the weakest wind and let it carry you gently along the canal, scrutinising the overhanging branches for spears and fangs.
The sky clears itself of clouds and the sun breaks out in orange acne. You are glad that it has not yet set. Your seventh moon is peeping from the clouds and about to raise its head. And there, by the bank, you see a kumbuk tree, and you see Dr Ranee, He-Man and Moses, all in priest garb waving to you. They point to a second kumbuk and then to the cross stream next to a third.
From behind this steps out the Mahakali. Its eyes are blazing and its fingers exhaling smoke. It appears to have devoured the blast and its victims, and seems ready for dessert.
‘Jump in the water!’ shouts He-Man in his squeaky steroid voice. ‘It can’t follow you there.’
The Mahakali leaps from the tree and you dive into the whirlpool, and the last thing you feel is a claw being dragged across your spine.
As you fall towards the water, you see the many eyes looking up at you, eyes that once belonged to you and, for now at least, they are all white. The water is the white of frosty bulbs. And, as you hit the surface, you hear the breaking of glass. You no longer care if your photos are seen or not. Because Jaki and DD still have breath and, even though that won’t make up for this whole damn mess, it is something. And, without a doubt, that is the kindest thing you can say about life. It’s not nothing. The River of Births
This river is as wide as the pool at Otters but there are no diving boards at its end. It stretches along endlessly, like roads through Australian deserts or American cornfields, which you have seen in National Geographic and never got around to visiting. You watch the river stretch through coconut groves and paddy fields and disappear over a hill in the distance. You think of other things you will never get to do.
As per Dr Ranee’s directions, the weakest wind from the Beira has delivered you here, and the demons are no longer in sight. The river is not deep; you can feel the bottom with your toes. It is sludgy and booby-trapped with rocks. The sun has now set and the moon is in the sky. The water is as warm as the air is cool. You are not alone at this river; all around you are swimmers braving the currents and hugging the banks.
You pass each swimmer, noticing their eyes and their chatter, how they all talk at once, some to each other, some to themselves, and you find yourself muttering in languages you didn’t know you knew. ‘You are not the you that you think you are.’ ‘You are everything you have thought and done and been and seen.’
The other swimmers are looking at you and through you, and at each other and through each other. They have your face, though some have messier hair and some are women and some have no gender.
You swim towards the horizon, you pass a Tamil plantation worker arguing with a Kandyan nobleman, you drift past a Dutch schoolteacher chatting with an Arab sailor. Similar faces, identical ears.
So this is it? This is The Light? This is the place where demons cannot follow? You let the waters wash over you and you sink beneath the surface. You do not have to hold your breath and you do not have breath to hold you.
You sink to the bottom and there it is. The thing that had eluded you all these moons. The last thing you did, the last thing done to you, the thing you forgot to recall. The truth you avoided seeing, the answer you feared the most.
You breathe in the clean water, wipe the mud from your lens, and remember the last breath you took as Malinda Almeida Kabalana. Your Price
When the figure emerged from the shadow of that rooftop, you realised how much Stanley Dharmendran resembled his son. The sloping gait, the symmetrical skull, the dark skin, the white teeth, the bounce in the step, the swivel in the hip. He said something short and sharp to the bartender, the ox-boy who you had just been touching. And then he turned to you.
From the shadows, two men brought a plastic table and then two Formica chairs. You recognised these men. They were not waiters or bar staff; they were employed by casinos to beat those who beat the house and collect from those the house had beaten.
Stanley motioned for you to sit, and you had a choice between facing Colombo or facing the staircase and the thugs in the shadows. You chose to face the threat and sat with your back to the view. Stanley leaned back and you saw in his hand a pink note with your handwriting on it.