“I hate this job.”
“Likewise.”
“How are you today?”
“Like any other, you?”
“Same old, same old. You going back home tonight?”
“Yeah.”
“Night Mail?”
“You got it,” Madhawa replied, their conversation flowing with no skipped beats, scripted, well-rehearsed. “What about you? Any weekend plans?”
Across the table from him, Prince Jayaseelan chuckled, eyes on his food. “My parents are still dead set on trying to find me a Sinhala Buddhist bride.”
“Ah. Still with the war mentality, hmm?”
“Turns out a surname as distinctively Tamil as mine is undesirable.”
“Maybe you should just go by your first name.”
“That’s what they’re trying.”
Madhawa let out a noncommittal grunt. Even this ‘new’ development had been ongoing for a year now. Neither he nor Prince understood the logic behind it.
“Wish I had a name as distinguished as yours, Madhawa Bamunukula.” Prince dragged out the final few syllables in mock respect.
“Well, let me know if it works out this time.”
“Maybe it will. Maybe you’ll have to find someone else to haul flour bags with you.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it.”
A flash of teeth as Prince huffed out a good-natured laugh, a finger raised in mock insult. “You should get yourself a girl too, you know.”
“We’ll see about that. Maybe I’ll be the one with a girl next week.”
But Madhawa knew this conversation would repeat next Friday on their next joint shift. After all, it always did.
He wondered what Prince would say if he knew about her.
Shift over, Madhawa walked across the crowded industrial district, past the noisy smoking vehicles, the noisy smoking vendors, and the noisy smoking city. He passed the vade stalls, got himself a piping hot snack, and watched the gaudy Lotus Tower illuminated by the sunset as he walked along the untended banks of the canal. Like every other Friday, he had gotten himself a packet of the smaller vade to share with the neighbourhood kids, who barely had clothes on their backs but who would, without fail, be playing alongside the overgrown banks, unaffected by the stench.
From there, he would walk along the streets of Pettah, by far the most crowded sector of the city, ducking inside one of the many snack bars for a lime juice, crammed inside two square feet with ten other people who also chose this fate over the threat of being trampled to death on the jam-packed streets, joining them to laugh at the idiots who drove their vehicles in their midst, too privileged to realise that the show of money would mean nothing here.
Madhawa would never be part of that elite.
Of course, he did provide for his family and was a bit of a prodigy—and an eligible bachelor, if he did say so himself—in his village. But, as typical of all village prodigies who ended up in the city, he slummed it five days out of seven, braving the heat and industrial smoke of Armour Street sixteen hours a day and the knife-wielding thieves and druggies in the shady back streets of Moratuwa in the night, all to bring back home what amounted to a mere tuppence in Colombo, while pretending he was living ‘The Life’ so as to not disappoint the shining pride-filled eyes of his parents.
It used to frustrate Madhawa, that his hard work amounted to nothing in the long run. Now he simply concentrated so that he didn’t step in dog waste.
Eventually, he reached the station. He was never in a hurry—the Night Mail only left at 8 p.m., far beyond the bulk of the rush hour. He always sat on his usual seat on the platform to wait, and if he had any vade left by this time, the strays that frequented the station knew him well enough to be waiting for him expectantly. They would sit there—man, dog, sometimes a few birds or bats—watching the ebb and flow of people, different every day, yet all the same.
If anyone were to ask, routine was the primary aspect of Madhawa’s life. A more disillusioned person would have used the words “rigid”, “monotone”, or “boring”, but Madhawa was used to—and indeed preferred—the quiet certainty of knowing exactly what would happen on any given day.
After all, his life was nothing special. He was an ordinary man living a life as ordinary as anybody else who had the misfortune of calling this tiny island their country. Once lauded as the pearl of the Indian Ocean, Sri Lanka had long lost its shine. Like most of the dull-eyed population, Madhawa lived a clockwork life dictated by work and survival.
“Hey.”
“Hey.” Settling into his usual window seat across from Sanjaya, he nodded at the gangly youth.
“How was work?”
“Fine. How was college?”
“The same.” He shrugged, as accustomed as Madhawa to scripted exchanges. “Biscuit?”
“Sure.” Accepting one, the two lapsed into their customary silence.
Friday evening was the one part of the week Madhawa felt a little more alive than usual, all because of her. He tried to ignore the way his stomach clenched pleasurably as he waited in anticipation for the train to start moving, looking out at the crowded platform and the noise of the city that never sleeps.
For all that it was his salvation, he had no love for the dirty, smelly, overcrowded city. Forever drenched in the stench of rotting vegetables and rotting minds, the air dusty with smoke and dreams long turned to dust, Colombo was a place that beat down your soul with all the mercy of a diamond-spiked heel and whisked it away before you could even sell it off as compensation for all the pain you’d borne. Sure, some found it a place of rebirth, preferring the suffocation of pollution to the suffocation of expectations, but for those like Madhawa—one foot in and one foot out, wraiths between life and death—the city was but a graveyard where hope came to die.
It did explain why so many of the neighbourhood were used to headless corpses scattered along the railway track.
For the most part, Madhawa knew he was lucky. He had never felt a desperation keen enough that he would opt to guillotine his own head—yet. In fact, he rarely felt anything keenly enough nowadays, except at this precise time on Fridays, because of her.
Every Friday night, he’d sit there and watch through the window as the scenery changed from the partygoers in the city, to the backyards of the slums, to that one house just at the city limits where she would sit outside, without fail, every Friday—right before the view shifted to shapeless greenery before fading out to darkness.
The view rarely changed. Occasionally the slum houses would have tattered clothing drying in their backyards, sometimes a stray dog or stray kid would be digging through trash bins, and once in a while it would be a holiday—the one thing this country had in abundance—and there would be bright lights and colours and even firecrackers. But for the most part, it was once again, the same old. Except for her.
Madhawa was certain no one else had noticed her, but she was there every single week, and no two weeks were the same. Sometimes she would be reading a book if the light permitted it, sometimes she’d be walking about, but most of the time she was simply sitting on the fence, watching the trains go by with a haunted, bewitching smile on her face. She was thin, as those in the slums tended to be—Madhawa no exception—and her clothing was plain, but her hair was long, her features gentle, her eyes deep, and her smile soul-shattering. Madhawa imagined his typical Sunday conversations would be very different if his mother knew of her.
“Son, you should really think about getting married.”
Madhawa hadn’t even bothered looking up from his Sunday paper, knowing very well that his mother would’ve reached the matrimonial section of hers. “Maybe.”
“Isn’t there a girl who has caught your fancy in the city?”
“Not yet.”
“I’m sure there’s plenty of them eyeing a catch like you!”
“Mmhmm.”
He’d be a fool to not admit that he’d thought about her a few times. But he didn’t know the woman, only the delusion of her he had built up every week. He had seen her a total of 119 times now; 119 glances of three seconds were all he had to show as effort in a little over two years. It would be easy, he supposed, to get off at the next station and say a hello. But for some reason, he had never done it, content, as usual, to keep things as they had always been.
Until one week, she wasn’t there.
They say you don’t recognize the value of something until it’s gone, until that pillar crumbles. That week, Madhawa didn’t expect her absence. Neither did he expect it to hit him like a truck, a battering ram, the wheels of the very train he was on as they sliced through his more desperate brethren’s necks.
In his routine life, only three seconds had changed. But those three seconds changed everything.
He didn’t take the Night Mail the next Friday.
Or the Friday after that. Or the Friday after that. He didn’t know what he would do if he were faced with her continued absence. He took the bus instead. It was slower, more crowded, there were no bathroom breaks, and the traffic was a nightmare, but in those hours he avoided the three seconds he dreaded most.
Everything was suddenly crumbling to pieces before his eyes. His mother’s smile as he reached home, every single Saturday—when would he never see that again? His father’s proud gaze as he brought them the weeks’ earnings—when would that change? The village aunties as they good-naturedly ribbed him about finding a suitable girl to marry, the overcrowded Monday train, the vehicles, the curses, the robbers, the lovers—how long would those last? The café stalls he loved, the lime juice—maybe the knowledge would be lost, or the country would run out of limes. Madhawa’s mind grew more and more paranoid.
The rest of his life continued as usual, but now it was a macabre farce, as if the world had tilted on its axis but insisted on continuing as if nothing had changed.
It was four weeks later that he walked along the canal, having procured his usual bag of vade for him, the kids, and the animals. But the canal was silent. White flags hung along the slippery banks. Faint sounds of wailing came from one of the houses.
Curiosity getting the better of him, Madhawa stepped inside, into a funeral home. He looked at the body in the coffin as the wailing grew louder around him. The canal’s banks had finally claimed a victim, a kid who had arrived at their playground early after playing hooky from school in a bout of teenage mischievousness. Madhawa looked at the body and felt another of his pillars crumble. He left the vade bag near the coffin, turned to go, when an agonised scream halted him in his tracks.
In the far corner, children and adults alike tried to comfort another kid, one Madhawa recalled from the usual vade-eaters, as he broke down, inconsolable.
“We should’ve looked for him!” he cried. “When he was missing we should’ve known something was wrong. He’s never late. But we didn’t do anything until it was too late.”
For some reason, Madhawa felt like an iron rod had been thrust into his heart, red-hot and burning.
“Let me die with him,” the child begged. “Let me meet the next train, I will take care of him in the next life.”
Madhawa forced his frozen feet to move. He stepped out of the house of broken and dead souls, drifting up the canal, a wraith without purpose.
Somehow, he ended up at the train station. Without knowing why, he got a ticket for the Night Mail. He sat in his usual seat, had his usual conversation with Sanjaya, like nothing had changed, like his world hadn’t shattered multiple times in the last month.
He stared out the darkening window, as the scenery changed from the partygoers in the city, to the backyards of the slums, to that one house just at the city limits—to her. She was there. Like nothing had changed. She was watching the trains, her hair as long, her features gentle, her eyes deep, her smile soul-shattering.
At the next station, Madhawa stepped off the train.
Paramie Jayakody