Chinaman

by Shehan Karunatilaka

They say in a mixed marriage children are beautiful. This is true if you get a pleasing combination of white features and black complexion. Not so, if vice versa.

It’s an old joke. Sobers never was sober. W.G. did not have any grace.

She is in her nightdress and even though she is shaped more like an alarm clock than an hourglass, I see beauty in her.

The kindest thing I can say about women’s cricket is that it’s better than women’s rugby.

A former southern belle, now sporting a bell-shaped body.

The fool had made a vow to Manouri and his five daughters that if Lanka won the Cup, he would give up booze and cigarettes. Instead of doing what any red-blooded, lily-livered man would do, that is, find a loophole to wiggle out of, Ari kept his word. ‘A Thomian’s word is his honour.’

The cracks in Ms 2ndGeneration’s political regime, which we voted in three years earlier to deliver us from civil war and economic ruin, are starting to show.

Kumaratunga

Kiriella works in finance, sweats a lot, and gives the impression that he sleeps in his tie. He is a busy man so I have to go to his office, where I am served biscuits and given fifteen minutes.

‘As long as you don’t call it Chinaman. That is a racist term. Would you call a book Nigger?’ ‘Joseph Conrad did,’ I say, showing off. ‘So did Agatha Christie.’

Sri Lanka is considered the land of long names, long waits, and long promises. But, contrary to popular belief, most pages of Colombo’s phone book are taken up by shorter Portuguese derivatives like de Silva, Perera, and Fernando.

Most Sinhalese and some Tamil names follow the adjective–noun formation: Jaya-suriya: Victory-Hero Guru-singhe: Learned-Lion Rat-nayake: Golden-Captain Siva-nathan: Shiva’s-General Karuna-sena: Benevolent-Army The only nation that can rival us for name length is Thailand.

And as we enter the gates, we see that we are not the only visitors that day. A crowd is gathered and the garden is filled with vehicles. We are informed by a distraught servant that the master was found dead in his bedroom the night before. The death was not unexpected.

It begins under a bo tree, early morning, in a rainstorm. The bo tree is on the side road connecting the cricket ground with the town of Moratuwa. There I am, asleep under the bo tree, about to be woken up by rain. Two millennia ago a man, just like me, abandoned his wife, son, and responsibilities to go sit under a bo tree. Unlike me, that man wasn’t drunk after a cricket match. And so he ended up becoming the Buddha.

I believe the history of the world can be explained by climate. Year-round sunshine makes you want to sit under trees or dance in loincloths. Bitter winters make you want to invent heaters and guns and sail to warmer climes and scalp natives. The comfortable get docile, the uncomfortable get busy.

‘Unmarried women tend to lose weight in their thirties. So let us drop the plump bit.’

Like our technology, our racist stereotypes are decades, sometimes centuries, out of date. In the 1950s, prosperous post-war Ceylonese would refer to slums and shanties as Koreawas.

Colombo has become a city of camouflage and guns. When exactly it went from town by the sea to city under siege is unclear. Possibly, not too long after the LTTE’s suicide attack in April 1987 that killed 113 and cut short a potentially enthralling New Zealand tour.

It was a farce of a match, but it was also perversely compelling. The same fascination that makes me stare at road accidents and peek at my hanky after blowing my nose.

Gijon

‘These are my boys. This is Sudu. That is Chooti.’ I peek through my blindfold. Chooti is a giant, Sudu is as black as a crow’s rectum.

Sri Lanka falls short by 6 runs, and the crowd hoots. Unlike our subcontinental brothers, we do not throw bottles or light fires. We save our barbarism for the north and the east.

Jonny taps a wooden elephant with a curved trunk freshly purchased from Paradise Road and winks. I am glad the colour has returned to his cheeks and the twinkle to his eye.

‘I’m serious, WeeGee. You thought about getting counselling?’ Jonny is getting on my nerves. ‘Discuss with a quack why I shat in my bed when I was two? Whether my ayah tickled my balls when I was three? Fine. Sign me up.’ ‘Don’t be a twat. What about those letters to your brothers?’

can move my ears without touching them. I discovered this skill in the playground as a child. I don’t know how I do it. I just empty my mind, flex my scalp muscles, and wiggle like a rabbit. It is my party trick, though the last time I went for a party was when Ronald Reagan was in office.

ask him what the difference between a Geordie and a Manc is and he starts explaining the accents, both of which I find equally incomprehensible.

He begins in Scotland with Kenny Dalglish, takes me through the North East, via Messrs Boycott, Trueman, and Clough. Then we visit Atherton’s Manchester, the Midlands courtesy of Mansell, and end up in the east of London with Phil Tufnell.

could start with the stereotypes. Sinhalese are lazy, gullible bullies. Tamils are shrewd, organized brown-nosers. Tamils have moustaches and chalk on their foreheads. Sinhalese are less dark, though not as fair as Muslims or Burghers.

The Sinhala language is sing-songy, Tamil is more guttural. Tamil names end in consonants, Sinhalese in vowels. Tamils are Hindu, Sinhalese are Buddhist. Tamils mispronounce the word baaldiya. Sinhalese eat kavum and don’t like people getting ahead unless it is them.

Despite the existence of a Sinhalese Sports Club, a Tamil Union, a Moors SC, a Burgher Recreation Club, and a perversely christened Nondescripts Cricket Club, cricket as a sport refuses to be segregated.

After the Indian People Killing Force came in, I had to take a break.

IPKF

Cowardly is when the US sit in an ocean 75 miles from Baghdad and fire smart missiles into the town. Those missiles aren’t very smart. They hit hospitals, schools, shopping malls. With suicide bombing you look into the eyes of the man you kill. You don’t flatten a city to punish a handful.

I reply that if three tailenders fall in the outback and there is no one to hear them, then no sound is made. And to attempt to convince an audience ten years later that such a sound existed is an exercise in foolishness.

‘What’s Adolf and Eva?’ ‘You know. You were there.’ ‘Was I drunk?’ ‘Probably.’ ‘I can’t remember.’ Ari puts on the radio and curses the traffic. ‘It’s what the LTTE wear around their necks. And I’m not getting it for him.’

Interesting

What’s the capital of Sri Lanka? What’s our national sport? Neither answer begins with C. Volleyball is our national sport,

When kadale is boiled and tempered with onion and chilli it becomes more than just a serving of chickpeas. It transforms into a high-protein snack, perfect for both athletes and drunkards.

We hear an Australian wicketkeeper describe a young Pakistani’s girlfriend in the most obscene language. There is no retaliation, due either to the Pakistani’s sage-like patience or his ignorance of English.

This suicide bomber was unique amongst assassins for (a) being a woman and (b) not having a middle name. In fact many assassins are known by three names. John Wilkes Booth. Lee Harvey Oswald. James Earl Ray. Mark David Chapman. I’m sure there are more.

One of the wittier Sri Lankan banners of recent times had the caption, ‘Sri Lanka will win faster than you can say Warnakulasuriya Patabendige Ushantha Joseph Chaminda Vaas.’

My favourite sledge is from Zimbabwean tail-ender Eddo Brandes when ill-tempered Aussie pacey Glenn McGrath, unable to penetrate the chicken farmer’s defence, decides to turn on the belligerence: McGrath: Oi Eddo. Why are you so fat? Brandes: ’Cos every time I f your wife she gives me a biscuit.

Pakistanis sing, chant, argue, swear, and soliloquize in raw Urdu right in the batsman’s face and nothing can be done. To the untrained ear, even a love song in Urdu can sound like a threat to rape one’s mother. Yet it is impossible to bring accusations against a tongue you don’t understand. A fact the Pakis are well aware of.

Monolingual New Zealanders would combat this by stringing Maori place names together in aggressive, haka-like phrasing: Wasim Afridi (at first slip): ‘Behen Chod. Gadha. Tattai Chooso.’ Nathan Parore (Kiwi batsman): ‘Tamaranui-waipukarau. Rangate-keinelson.’ Afridi: ‘Teri Ma kutti. Is this batsman? Gandu.’ Parore: ‘Urupukapuka-whakatane. Ekatahuna-ugly cunt.’

Item 9 on the list was to give up smoking. I lasted from January 1 to January 5. I have now downgraded from Gold Leaf to Bristol, hoping that a drop in quality may reduce quantity.

He has three servants to cook and tend the bungalow, and two cows in the backyard named Ranil and Chandrika.

New Zealand rugby, cricket, and basketball teams are respectively called the All Blacks, the Black Caps, and the Tall Blacks. The New Zealand badminton team call themselves the Black Cocks. (This is not a joke, look it up.) When asked why by the press, the NZ badminton chief shrugged and replied that in fifteen years of holding that post, he had never seen a journalist. Since the rebranding, he has seen over twenty. As the Americanos would say, go and figure.

‘Damn good for the bugger,’ chuckles Reggie. ‘Thought he could be Wasim Akram. In the end he runs in like Waqar and bowls like Inzamam. Got hammered.

It is then that I notice that her features are almost African; maybe she has Kaffir blood. Kaffirs are descendants of Africans, brought here by the Portuguese. Negroid Sri Lankans who are found in villages around Puttalam, just near Lanka’s left elbow.

I suspect our nation’s greatest female sprinter may have Kaffir blood in her.

Susanthika Jayasinghe or Damayanti Darsha?

Grant died aged eighty-two, Darwin was seventy-three when he passed on. Why do we remember one as an old man and the other as a dapper fellow? Who is in control of our legacies and is there any way we can influence them? For those of us who are neither movie stars nor scientific visionaries, I fear the answer may be no.

He leaves and it dawns on me that if I am soon to be dead, then I had better get used to not having the last word.

Like India’s spin quartet and the three Ws from the Caribbean. Teams that become superhuman before your very eyes. Like Dalglish’s Liverpool, Fitzpatrick’s All Blacks, and Ranatunga’s Lankans.

In thirty years, the world will not care about how I lived. But in hundred years, Bulgarians will still talk of Letchkov and how he expelled the mighty Germans from the 1994 World Cup with a simple header.