Continued from yesterday

He turned round and saw the pasty-faced, portly Jayawardene roll up the freshly swept driveway.

Light from the bright, sunny morning glistened on the newly trimmed shrubbery and luxuriant trees and shrubs.

To Amerasinghe everything seemed to become overcast instantly.

So what did this plotter want now? What further foreboding of tragedy and disquiet could he bring?

On the contrary he had come on a legitimate mission, to obtain some medicine for his wife.

Local physicians were often asked to prescribe remedies for patients who were not too ill but sufficiently indisposed to make the visit themselves. Physicians asked for symptoms and wrote down the ingredients for some noxious potion.

This time Jayawardene's wife had merely sprained her foot on the slimy slab edging the domestic well. A prepared oil was readily supplied with the necessary instructions.

Jayawardene was making ready to depart when Amerasinghe enquired quite directly: "I heard Somarama speak of some shooting practice. What's it all about? Is the man out of his mind?"

Jayawardene turned his chubby face. His eyes were grave behind their thick eyeglasses and his face was devoid of any expression.

He took a white handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face with his pudgy hands.

"That's all nonsense," he said. "There's no truth in it. There may have been such insane notions at one time. But all that has been given up now. Don't think any more about it."

And he was gone.

Amerasinghe returned to his surgery somewhat reassured and certainly feeling a little more peaceful than before.

But there were still questions stirring in his mind.

Why had they come to his house to discuss the matter at all? Why had they repeatedly used his car? Why did they share such a terrible plan with him?

The deep frown on his brow was in place again.

Chapter11
It wouldn't do, he thought, to be late, if the man coming from seventy two miles away was on time.

He lay in his bed, all drowsiness gone from his eyes, all tiredness from his body, looking up at the raftered roof; and watched a couple of rats, bloated with plenty from the largesse of the adjoining bakery squeeze past, their soft, grey bellies clear against the blackened tiles.

He listened to the dull, uneven clatter of rain on the tiles, a heavy fall sometimes and a lifting, driven by the wind. All night he had heard, in spasms of intermittent waking, the whistling passage of the wind and the dull rainfall especially in the galvanised iron gutter. The room was moist and chill.

The rest of the household was still asleep in an almost hermetically sealed house.

It was one of a long row of houses in a slummy suburb which consisted largely of such rows constructed by separate landlords maximising space for maximum profit.

A fire in one house could demolish an entire row. Epidemics, likewise, mostly chicken pox, mumps and measles, and occasionally the dreaded small pox, swept through these houses carried by air, mosquitoes, flies and rats. The great cathedral, the central edifice constructed nearly a hundred years earlier, as a modest, shadowy reflection of St Peter's Basilica in Rome, towered over the sprawling cluster of the ill-planned untidy suburb.

It was just a quarter past six and he didn't need to leave until a quarter past nine.

He pulled a thin cotton sheet over his ears and drew up his legs to gather more warmth from the cotton mattress. It could get cold during the monsoons and people wore woollen sweaters when they went out. That, anyway, would be the limit of coldness in Colombo, which usually sweltered in the mid-eighties.

Eventually his father awoke and rinsed his mouth, then lit the hearth with three sets of fireplaces each with a tripod of bricks covered with clay.

It took a while to kindle the wood, especially when it was damp. The wood was cut into thin strips for easy kindling and suspended over the fireplace with bands of wire. That way they stayed dry.

The man poured a little kerosene over the wood and held a lighted match to it. When the fire blew up with a whoof, he added a couple of dry coconut shells to the wood. When these were fired, they burned with a fierce, sibilant fervour. The lighted shell was hotter by far than the kindled wood, and it retained the heat much longer.

The man then placed a kettle full of water and began his morning's toilet.

When he had done it was time to heat the milk in a small blackened saucepan. And then, by some in-built alarm, Raj's mother would wake up and start the ritual of making tea for all, the most salient part of which would be the allocation of the meagre supply of milk.

Then Raj woke and drank his tea while it was yet hot. It tasted strong with the milk barely masking the tang of the brewed leaves and the sugar softening it. It was not the way discerning tea-drinkers like it. It was the way almost all Ceylonese liked it.

There was still a slight drizzle when Raj set out. He wore a dark blue plastic mackintosh over his cotton suit and let it fall over his feet to protect his socks and shoes. He also wore a dark blue cap.

He knew some mud would spray him from the front of the scooter but then there it was. What could one do?

When he reached his office, the rain had ceased and a mild sun was making puddles and suspended raindrops dazzle. It was going to be a good morning. He felt good.

He parked his scooter and walked up the steps to the foyer of the building before he took off his mac.

It was while he was folding the mac that Tony Miguel passed him. There was no doubt that each was aware of the other's presence though their eyes did not meet.

"So when is the operation?"

In a moment he was gone. He had stood on the top step, his eyes darting this way and that, and then swiftly descended the steps and on to the street.

Raj had the uneasy feeling that he had heard the hiss of a snake and seen it slither past.

There was no secret about Raj needing surgery for his hernia. Reporters had to plan months ahead for such an eventuality. Appointments had to be re-scheduled, cancelled, assignments re-allocated.

He had been compelled, much against his will, to use his hospital connections to get a bed in the main State General Hospital; but even with the current hospital reporter using his influence, there had been unforeseen delays. There had been no general and widespread interest in his hernia. Far more exciting matters filled a newspaper's day and a journalist's mind.

However, the apparently innocent enquiry coming from an apparently casual source was filled with menace.

Raj was convinced that underneath that enquiry lay a sinister move.

He met the man from Kandy, an elderly man, a retired teacher with a grievance, took him to a visitor's parlour, interviewed him with his full attention: journalists hone the capacity to enter such vacua of the mind, and then began to ponder the problem encased in the query.

He had not long to wait.

Within an hour he had a call from the Foreign Ministry.

A person who identified himself, but who was not known to Raj, was on the line. He had a smooth, civil service voice.

"Is it true you have a hernia problem?"

"Well, it's not a problem."

"You have been trying to have surgery for it for some time."

"Yes."

"So why not get it done?"

"I'm trying to get a bed."

He paused for effect. He didn't think anyone would rush to get him off the queue. He wasn't Auggie Gabriel. He was only taking his place.

"Well, get it over and done with." Long pause. "We can't have a case of strangulated hernia while we are in New York. Let me know how it goes."

And he rang off.

Raj met Ishak and told him of the developments.

The news editor kept writing but Raj felt electricity crackle on the starched white shirt. The line of his mouth grew taut.

He rang the bell on his desk and told the peon who materialised to fetch the hospital reporter if he was about.

Mark de Silva turned up.

"What the bloody hell have you been doing about getting a bed for Raj?"

"I spoke..."

"I don't care what you have been doing, get on the phone and speak to the Superintendent, tell him I want a bed fixed today."

He turned to Raj. "Get your things packed to go tomorrow."

"I have another..."

"Drop everything, you got that? Don't let that bastard trip you on this one. Go on, get moving."

He opened a pack of cigarettes. Raj noted his hands were shaking as he fumbled for one.

Raj looked down at the man's glossy hair and smiled with some affection.

That evening there was a telegram waiting for him informing him that a bed was ready. He was required to report to Ward 37 by ten the following day.

His father took a day off from work, his sister took a day off from school, his mother woke up before the birds and cooked a meal Raj could take with him to hospital.

When it had been finally decided that Raj should undergo surgery, all other options having been exhausted, he had met, by appointment, a well known surgeon, Mr Thaddeus Juriansz, in his rooms. He was kindly, British-qualified, skilful, notoriously successful and eminent. A Burgher of Dutch extraction, he lived in an exclusive, residential part of Colombo. He was one of the country's best surgeons, particularly renowned for the dexterity of his hands.

It was common knowledge among the medical faculty that he kept his fingers supple by knitting daily.

He led Raj into a small room and examined him. Raj smelt the soap and shaving lotion coming out strongly.

When he had diagnosed that Raj, indeed, had hernia and that surgery was the only way to remedy the condition, the practicalities were discussed.

Which private nursing home would they choose? Private hospitals were called nursing homes at the time. They charged exorbitant fees, even those with Christian sounding names, owned and administered by people with very Christian reputations but who built their fortunes by keeping God and Mammon severely apart for business purposes. Raj told him he would be going to the State General Hospital. Dr Juriansz did not mind. He had a ward there, too. For every surgical operation he was paid by the State.

What he didn't mention specifically was that he had two wards at the State hospital. One a public, free ward, and the other a private, subsidised one. Apart from these he could take a patient at one of the full paying wards at the State hospital.

People of modest means made all sorts of sacrifices to be admitted to the subsidised ward, because this had one toilet to eight beds and was kept quite clean.

The public wards had a couple of toilets to about twenty beds and these were far from clean. Only rank necessity compelled people to use them.

Except in the case of full paid wards, the subsidised ward had a long waiting list, often running into several months.

On Raj's salary he could not have afforded even the subsidised ward but his father, with his modest income, had allocated some money to cover Raj's stay in a subsidised ward.

Whither Raj, in his ignorance, believed he was being led as a result of the hospital reporter's influence.

Chapter 12
At the main entrance to the hospital the orderly stopped pushing the wheel chair. "Methanin leddu vitharai," he said.

It was true that outside of stipulated times, visitors were not permitted to enter. But it spoke highly of the compassion of gate keepers or the ancient tradition of palm-greasing that at any time there were a couple of hundred unauthorised visitors entering and departing through those gates under the averted gaze of otherwise vigilant gate keepers.

Raj's father decided that there was no need for everyone to enter. He alone would accompany the patient, see that he was duly installed and then come away to return at the lunch break, an hour later, at noon.

Signalling his wife and daughter to remain outside and slipping a rupee coin to the gate keeper, he walked a little distance away from the wheel chair to save the face of the orderly. Soon they were trundling through a series of corridors, already redolent with the familiar smells of antiseptics, chlorine, formalin as they passed the morgue, and the sick smell of mass cooking. The locals had a name for it, calderang buth, meals cooked in huge cauldrons, the smell of indifferent, impersonal, soul-less cookery, a term of derision heaped on a wife's cooking when it was insipid.

Nor was the passage easy. There were doctors passing with a dignified ease, their white suits stiff with starch, their morning faces fresh from the razor, looking suitably solemn and formal. Others with stethoscopes round their necks could not be mistaken for doctors because of their informal, casual dress and manner. They were medicos, the students and interns making their ward rounds, nurses of all ages, shapes, heights and widths, some young and very comely to behold, others otherwise.

There were other wheel chairs to avoid, hurrying stretcher bearers, trolleys of soiled linen, the occasional corpse with the sheet over the head followed by relatives weeping softly, stunned by the first blow of grief.

The ward to which Raj was finally led was a very large one, a standard non-paying overcrowded one with about forty beds in two rows in one long hall and with extra beds placed in single rows in the corridors outside as well, and with an equal number of patients sleeping under beds.

At the head of the ward, as in every other ward in all State hospitals, a framed photograph of a smiling Prime Minister was hung. Mr Bandaranaike, a liberal minded and refined man, was not stirred by such stark sycophancy.

Raj was led to another room adjacent to the main ward, past patients who looked up with a kind of passive curiosity at the newcomer who was to share their misery for a while. In this room there were about forty patients, about ten against each wall, half of whom were seated on chairs, the others either standing or slouching on the tiled floor. The walls were painted a dirty green on the lower half, while the upper half was covered with white tiles.

The orderly waited for Raj to get off, which he did hastily. The orderly, still holding the small kit bag containing a few clothes and personal belongings, waited for some monetary reward. This was duly given, and then without a further word, the man spun round and sped through the ward.

"But Papa," said a very surprised looking Raj, "this is not the ward. We had booked into Ward 37. That's near the Clock Tower. And this is a non-paying ward..."

"You just wait here" said Papa, "wait here till lunch time. I'll come and we'll get it fixed. Some misunderstanding." And he turned round and left without a further word. And Raj placed his brown kit bag and wrapped lunch plate on the floor to await further developments.

(C) E. C. T. Candappa

Continued tomorrow