This is the first chapter of my historical romance novel The Shark Binder. It's set in colonial Sri Lanka  (then Ceylon). It's a story of tragic love, between a French girl trying to recover from the trauma of World War I and a Ceylonese pearl diver.

It's set in Mannar in northwestern Sri Lanka, fabled since ancient times for the pearls (Bizet wrote an opera about the pearl fishers). I couldn't visit Mannar when I wrote this novel because it was then controlled by the Tamil Tigers fighting the government. There was a brief lull when a peace accord was signed in 2004, and I went there to take these photographs. These show the ruins of Doric, the British governor's official residence when he came to inspect the fisheries.

I'll be posting a video soon on my You Tube channel with the full story of my visit there. I'll keep you posted.

I'm trying to attract a publisher for this novel. Anyone? My email is:

ga3004@gmail.com

 

 Chapter One

 

 

It was a world of wind and sun. Many people lived in it, eating and sleeping and working when the time came to dive and catch pearl oysters. That was when the blue ocean was calm. The men called it the sea, because they knew its depth better than its breadth. And when the time came to harvest pearls, it was the only ocean they knew, the only sea.  During the other months, which were long and hard, they talked, laughed, quarelled and sulked. They stayed on land, watching the fishermen put out their boats to sea. They were divers, not fishermen, and many of them would go away, back to the distant lands they came from. Most of them went away as poor as they’d come, some poorer. But, no matter who they were and where they came from, they always dreamed of pearls. They dreamed of the next season. That was the big dream.

 

It had to be big because it didn't happen every year. It happened once in a lifetime for many divers, because the oysters took a long time to mature. A lifetime was a long time, but only if you were lucky. The odds were always against a baby growing into a child, a child growing into a man and a man living long enough to live his dream.  There were many diseases that claimed the lives of little children. Even adults died in their hundreds when these epidemics swept along the coast. But it was the children who died very easily.

 

Or it may have been that oysters did not die so easily, if only because they lived in the sea. The sea could heal. It healed skin rashes and the wounds, cuts and bruises of daily squabbles and dreams gone sour. Of course, the sea killed, too, dragging down to the bottom whoever it desired. Children enjoying a swim and the challenging waves as well as wizened fishermen in their boats – in their sturdy catamaran outriggers as well as those flat and low theppams, no more than a few logs tied together – all these disappeared as the sea wished it. In fact, few people, if any, who lived along the coast thought of the sea as a friend. A provider, yes, but you paid dearly for what it gave you. But it was the sea that bred the pearl oysters, so slowly that you could have died from the agony of waiting.

 

The children who survived childbirth, hunger and disease were not thought of as lucky. But few along the coast thought of them except for their mothers and fathers. The children were noisy, and always beautiful.  They grew  fast, and girls were given away in marriage early, because the task of feeding so many mouths daily exhausted their parents and made them old before their time. The husbands fed their wives, who in turn fed them when the men were enfeebled soon by drink and what they cannot have. The children then became what the women lived for. As the white man came and started schools for everyone, even the very poor, it became the dream of every mother along the coast to see their sons educated. But it was the dream of every boy along the coast of Mannar, in the island’s northwestern coast, to become a pearl diver. Education brought respectability but not riches. Find a few pearls, though, a few hundred, a few thousand - then the insignificant little dark fellow would be rich and would have no problems feeding his wife and children.

Once again, there was talk of the next oyster harvest. It would happen the next year. No, the year after. If not, why had the white man on the dark brown horse, the government agent, come to inspect the coast? Everyone waited eagerly for the next pearl fishery to begin. But there would be no fishery. The baby was born, and the father was happy that it was a boy. If it had been a girl, he would have had to make a pair of earrings, and they barely had enough to eat, let alone buy jewellery. But the disease, one of many, came along, and took the baby boy away. He would be buried in the sand while the sea murmured - just a mound, no tombstone, and soon there would be nothing left of the baby boy but the memory.

 

Raju was luckier. He was one of those who survived. His father wasn't even a fisherman. He and his wife worked for a man who manufactured dried fish. When the fishermen returned with mackerel and trevally, Raju's parents cleaned them, salted them and laid them out to dry in the sun. From a tender age, Raju, his two brothers and three sisters began to help their father and mother to make dried fish. What they were paid was a pittance, but even this was a great thing, because they would have starved without it.

 

What was available abundantly was sunlight. It burned, toned and tanned everything. From an early age, Raju believed that people who lived along the coast turned black because the sun burnt them every day of their lives. As a toddler, he had crawled along the warm sand and it burnt his back,  until he was very dark, a softer darkness that contrasted nicely with the burnt sand and blue sky. It was not hard and unwelcoming as the night. Nor was it the black of his eyes, which were brilliant and voluble. As he grew up, they glistened not with the simple and stark emotions of childhood, but with a hunger for things beyond his reach, for things beyond the known and the knowable. 

 

This village of theirs wasn't anywhere near the pearl fishery. It was much further up north from the coast. (As he grew up, Raju heard people talking about it. They spoke in the evenings, when the sun had gone down and they were glad if the day had given them something to fill their stomachs with. They spoke of divers, poor men who had become wealthy. They spoke of divers who died while diving, and many years afterwards. They spoke of divers who'd lost their money as quickly as they had earned it, men who had died of too much drink,  dissipation and their inability to cope with their new lives. They spoke too, of the shrewd ones who managed to keep what they'd gotten, and even improve on it.

 

They spoke as if the seabed at the fisheries was paved with pearls. You only had to tuck your feet up and dive to become fabulously wealthy. Of course, no one from this village had ever become rich that way. Or any other way, for that matter. All they ever  ever got from the sea was fish, which they dried and sold. That didn't make anyone rich, except the mudalali who was not from the village. He lived in the town of Mannar. All the same, many people were much better off than Raju's father. He was among the poorest of the poor.

 

Perhaps that was why he came home drunk and beat his mother. This did not happen often, but when it happened everyone felt bad. Raju didn't quite understand why it had to happen. He began to offer himself simple answers to such questions. People were dark because of the sun. His mother got beaten now and then because his father was a very poor man, not because he was bad. If he became bad now and then, it was because he didn't have money.

 

As he grew up, Raju  dreaded poverty because of this. He knew that if he came a poor man like his father, then he would come home drunk and beat his wife. He didn't want that to happen. He wanted to study hard, become a learned man and stop being poor. But he didn't dream of riches. That was quite beyond him. He merely wished to stop being poor, so that he could help his parents and brothers and sisters. And be nice to his wife, whoever she might be, so that she would love him very much.

 

 

 

The strange thing was that, even though Raju's father was sometimes unkind to his mother, she remained very good to him. During those nights when he complained of pain in his feet, she would squeeze them till he went to sleep. Perhaps this was because he was kind  to her on most days, kind and good, and the bad days were exceptional, like rainy days. At night, during those nights when everything wasn't too dark and the night floated about like smoke in the wind and you could see shapes and you waited with a beating heart for them to move, Raju could hear them giggling and whispering to each other in their corner of the hut.

 

 He had gone to school for nine years, far longer than any of his brother and sisters. He had walked barefoot, and barebodied except for a cloth which covered his legs up to his knee, hugging his exercise books with both hands. The mission school was a mile away and Raju walked the mile every day along the beach, from the time  he was a small boy frightened of the roaring surf to the time when he could feel the down of his mustache on his upper lip. He saw it on the little round mirror that hung on the wall that faced the entrance to their four-walled hut. It was the most precious object in it, which had no furniture except a few boxes which held their few belongings.

 

Raju's mother considered cleaning this mirror as one of her primary duties. She would remove it carefully from the nail on which it was hung, sit at the doorstep with a piece of crisp white cotton cloth woven by a friend in the village, and wipe it carefully all over - the mirror surface, the back, the shiny metal rim. The children were not allowed to touch it. Sometimes, when Raju's sisters insisted noisily and cried, she would hold it up so that they could see themselves in it. But allow them to hold it in their own slender hands - never.  It was a long time before Raju was tall enough to see himself in it. He was tall enough now, and he could see the soft feathery down above his upper lip. Once, his elder sister caught him at it, his nose almost touching the mirror surface, and she ran  out laughing to tell everyone about it. Feeling humiliated, Raju ran out of the house and did not come back till  it was almost dark.