air was heavy and hot.
That morning the Captain had announced the rules about entering the city. Passengers were allowed just six hours of shore leave. Children could go only if accompanied by ‘a responsible male adult’. And women were forbidden to go at all. There was the expected outrage at this, especially among Emily and a group of her friends by the pool who wished to disembark and take on the citizens with their beauty. And Miss Lasqueti was annoyed, for she wished to study the local falcons. She had hoped to bring a few of them blindfolded on the ship. Cassius, Ramadhin and I were concerned mostly with finding someone who was not a responsible male, who could be easily distracted, to take us along. Mr Fonseka, in spite of his curiosity, had no plans to leave the ship. Then we heard that Mr Daniels was eager to visit the old oasis to study its vegetation, where, he said, every blade of grass was swollen with water, and thick as your finger. He was also interested in something called ‘khat’ that he had been talking to the ayurvedic about. We offered to help him transport any plants back to the ship, and he agreed, and we went with him down the rope ladders into a barge as quickly as we could.
We were surrounded instantly by a new language. Mr Daniels was busy negotiating a fee with a hackney to transport us to where the great palms were. His authority seemed diminished by the crowd, so we left him there arguing and slipped away. A carpet salesman gestured to us, offered us tea, and we sat with him for a while, laughing whenever he laughed, nodding when he nodded. There was a small dog that he indicated he wished to give us, but we moved on.
We began to argue about what to see. Ramadhin wanted to visit the aquarium that had been built a few decades earlier. It was obviously something Mr Fonseka had told him about. He was sullen about having to see the markets first. In any case we entered the narrow shops that sold seeds and needles, made coffins, and printed maps and pamphlets. Out on the street you could have the shape of your head read, your teeth pulled. A barber cut Cassius’s hair and poked a vicious pair of scissors quickly into his nose to clear away the possibility of any further hair in the nostrils of a twelve-year-old.
I was used to the lush chaos of Colombo’s Pettah market, that smell of sarong cloth being unfolded and cut (a throat-catching odour), and mangosteens, and rain-soaked paperbacks in a bookstall. Here was a sterner world, with fewer luxuries. There was no overripe fruit in the gutters. There were in fact no gutters. It was a dusty landscape, as if water had not been invented. The only liquid was the cup of dark tea offered to us by the carpet salesman, along with a delicious, permanently remembered almond sweet. Even if this was a harbour city, the air held hardly a particle of dampness. You had to look closely, for what might be buried away in a pocket – a petite vial of oil for a woman’s hair, folded within paper, or a chisel wrapped in oilcloth to protect its blade from the dust in the air.
We entered a concrete building at the edge of the sea. Ramadhin led the way through a maze of mostly subterranean tanks. The aquarium appeared deserted except for a number of garden eels from the Red Sea and a few colourless fish swimming in a foot of saltwater. Cassius and I climbed to another level, where there were taxidermic examples of marine life, lying in dust alongside whatever technical equipment was being stored – a hose, a small generator, a hand pump, a dustpan and brush. We gave the whole place five minutes and revisited all the stores we had been into, this time to say goodbye. The barber, who still had no other customers, gave me a head massage, pouring unknown oils into my hair.
We reached the wharf before the deadline. Out of a too-late courtesy we decided to wait for Mr Daniels on the dock, Ramadhin wrapped up in a djellaba, and Cassius and I hugging ourselves in the
That morning the Captain had announced the rules about entering the city. Passengers were allowed just six hours of shore leave. Children could go only if accompanied by ‘a responsible male adult’. And women were forbidden to go at all. There was the expected outrage at this, especially among Emily and a group of her friends by the pool who wished to disembark and take on the citizens with their beauty. And Miss Lasqueti was annoyed, for she wished to study the local falcons. She had hoped to bring a few of them blindfolded on the ship. Cassius, Ramadhin and I were concerned mostly with finding someone who was not a responsible male, who could be easily distracted, to take us along. Mr Fonseka, in spite of his curiosity, had no plans to leave the ship. Then we heard that Mr Daniels was eager to visit the old oasis to study its vegetation, where, he said, every blade of grass was swollen with water, and thick as your finger. He was also interested in something called ‘khat’ that he had been talking to the ayurvedic about. We offered to help him transport any plants back to the ship, and he agreed, and we went with him down the rope ladders into a barge as quickly as we could.
We were surrounded instantly by a new language. Mr Daniels was busy negotiating a fee with a hackney to transport us to where the great palms were. His authority seemed diminished by the crowd, so we left him there arguing and slipped away. A carpet salesman gestured to us, offered us tea, and we sat with him for a while, laughing whenever he laughed, nodding when he nodded. There was a small dog that he indicated he wished to give us, but we moved on.
We began to argue about what to see. Ramadhin wanted to visit the aquarium that had been built a few decades earlier. It was obviously something Mr Fonseka had told him about. He was sullen about having to see the markets first. In any case we entered the narrow shops that sold seeds and needles, made coffins, and printed maps and pamphlets. Out on the street you could have the shape of your head read, your teeth pulled. A barber cut Cassius’s hair and poked a vicious pair of scissors quickly into his nose to clear away the possibility of any further hair in the nostrils of a twelve-year-old.
I was used to the lush chaos of Colombo’s Pettah market, that smell of sarong cloth being unfolded and cut (a throat-catching odour), and mangosteens, and rain-soaked paperbacks in a bookstall. Here was a sterner world, with fewer luxuries. There was no overripe fruit in the gutters. There were in fact no gutters. It was a dusty landscape, as if water had not been invented. The only liquid was the cup of dark tea offered to us by the carpet salesman, along with a delicious, permanently remembered almond sweet. Even if this was a harbour city, the air held hardly a particle of dampness. You had to look closely, for what might be buried away in a pocket – a petite vial of oil for a woman’s hair, folded within paper, or a chisel wrapped in oilcloth to protect its blade from the dust in the air.
We entered a concrete building at the edge of the sea. Ramadhin led the way through a maze of mostly subterranean tanks. The aquarium appeared deserted except for a number of garden eels from the Red Sea and a few colourless fish swimming in a foot of saltwater. Cassius and I climbed to another level, where there were taxidermic examples of marine life, lying in dust alongside whatever technical equipment was being stored – a hose, a small generator, a hand pump, a dustpan and brush. We gave the whole place five minutes and revisited all the stores we had been into, this time to say goodbye. The barber, who still had no other customers, gave me a head massage, pouring unknown oils into my hair.
We reached the wharf before the deadline. Out of a too-late courtesy we decided to wait for Mr Daniels on the dock, Ramadhin wrapped up in a djellaba, and Cassius and I hugging ourselves in the
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