I can finally post my short story The Lucky Charm which came first in the English Writers’ Collective prose writing competition this year. I had to wait till the EWC published this and other entries in their journal, which will come out shortly.
I’m pleased that this story will be included in an anthology of Sri Lankan short stories compiled by writer, publisher and song writer Sydney Marcus Dias and his Thothanna Publishers, Anamaduwa. This anthology aims to be representative of all Sri Lankan communities, and two stories written in English (mine and another representing the Burgher community) have been selected as representative of those who use English either as their first language or working language, and will be published as translations into Sinhala and Tamil.
This little known publishing house, functioning far from Colombo, has done yeoman service to indigenous literature and inter-communal harmony and understanding by translating works by Sinhala writers into Tamil and vice versa and its work is even more praiseworthy because the demand for such literature is very low key and it must necessarily at little or no profit. This particular anthology should reach bookshops by the end of this year.
This story was written in a hurry, when I wasn’t really in a writing mood, to meet the EWC competition deadline. It’s based on an ageing individual’s perception of his own vulnerable self when confronted by the pandemic, the fear and loneliness it causes, looming retirement and frighteningly diminishing means of surviving financially in the pandemic-stricken world and its unpredictable aftermath.
Winning the competition was a surprise. My last literary prize was the Gratiaen way back in 1996. I have not entered any competitions with fiction since then, though I have written three novels, at least twenty short stories and a graphic novel since. It may be that the despair caused by advancing age and the uncertainties brought about by the pandemic made me take the plunge and see if I could still write competitively. This award comes as a timely boost to my morale!
Looking for an image to go with this post, I couldn't think of anything suitable. This photo of a street vendor was taken by me last year in between lockdowns. I thought its sombre colours and ambiance might suit the mood of this story.
The Lucky Charm
I began hating masks as Coronavirus began to spread and wearing one in public became mandatory. The days were warm and the nights were warmer. My face began to itch under the mask. Bur I always wore one whenever I went outside, as I feared the virus more than anything else – age, loneliness, being swallowed up by the gaping black hole of looming retirement.
But fear of the virus faded gradually as the months passed. I learned to be careful, going through the required rituals diligently – washing hands before entering public places, doing it again after coming home. I even washed banknotes and coins at the start, but the whole thing struck me as absurd and soon I was content to sprinkle some disinfectant on my hands and purse after any transaction. I got into the habit of carrying one of those small plastic bottles with me when travelling. Once, I found myself about 500 meters away from home without my mask. Pure terror struck me, as I could get arrested for breaking the pandemic laws. But no one seemed to notice as I hurried back home to collect my mask.
After two lockdowns, I began to feel like a survivor. I didn’t lose my caution. But I no longer feared the pandemic for purely medical reasons. I dreaded it because it exposed me, as nothing had ever done before, as an ageing male who could no longer count upon vanity to protect his ever vulnerable self from the vagaries of alienation and mounting despair.
Strangely enough, my health worries were minimal. No one I know of had died of Coronavirus. Two acquaintances got infected, but both survived without much trouble. I began to believe that I wouldn’t fall victim to the virus now though the pandemic was still raging almost everywhere.
This didn’t lead to carelessness on my part, and I continued to wear the hated mask. True, I didn’t change them often. I had three different masks made of cloth, not buying surgical masks because they looked flimsy. These three were brightly coloured, which amounted to a superstition on my part, as if bright reds, blues and greens could frighten away the virus.
I also noticed one thing about my mask quite accidentally. One day, as I closed the front door behind me, I noticed that I’d forgotten my watch. As I hurriedly returned to the bedroom and opened the clothes cupboard, I saw myself in the mirror. The mask hid most of the lines on my face. With my hair dyed, that made me look a lot younger.
Instead of feeling joy, that made me feel depressed. I was living alone after my divorce ten years ago, and romance hadn’t come my way again as I hoped. Eventually, I learned to cope with being lonely, or so I thought, until the pandemic came. The days with their carelessly jostling citizens could be as illusory as that mirror image of the masked me, looking younger. It was one of those useful vanities.
The nights were different. They hacked away at my fond beliefs, that I could somehow survive and that I still had a future. I got into the habit of walking to office. That I still had my job was one of those vanities which vanished the moment I began buying groceries. Everything seemed to cost twice as much now, or more, and my greatly reduced salary was hardly enough to pay the bills. After the second lockdown, I began thinking of selling my books. There was little else I could sell.
During those nightly walks through a highly commercial, built up area of the city, I began to feel uneasiness in my bones. I left home around seven pm and the cafes and some shops were still open. But they looked desultory. There were no buses and I didn’t want to take public transport, in any case. That’s why I began walking. At first, I felt proud that I could walk nine kilometers to and fro, daily, from Monday to Saturday. But that feeling of satisfaction was soon overwhelmed by the dread caused by a shadowy city which looked dangerous and hostile, abandoned by those who could afford to leave, left to its own devices.
After the brightly lit commercial section, there was a high class residential area. The houses looked gloomy and the occasional security guard always looked like a ghost. They looked at me with suspicion, as if I was a trespasser. Vehicles passed by. But they only heightened my sense of insecurity. After all, these could be fleeing the city. At such times, I began to feel utterly alone, and this mood only got worse once I reached the public park. It was open to public once again, and there were people standing by parked vehicles while couples and families strolled inside. But it wasn’t at all like the good old pre-pandemic days that I now recall with such longing, the way one remembers falling in love, the birth of a child or a great holiday. These people looked theatrical under the circumstances. The mild bustle at the park looked increasingly unreal to me. It looked staged in a world ruled by a capricious, invisible virus.
By the time I got to office, my legs ached, and I was happy to collapse into a chair. There were only a handful of workers at night. I began to feel redundant, my looming retirement speeded up by Coronavirus. But the office was one of those shaky links I still had with the world. Home was another, but it looked increasingly untenable. There were repairs I could not afford, the bedroom began feeling empty again. But I knew that a woman would not be able to fill this emptiness. The longing for love and physical intimacy had faded. All that implied being rooted somewhere, a room, a sense of belonging and the relief of intimacy. But the pandemic had turned me into a deserter. I wanted to flee, simply to keep moving.
As much as I dreaded my nightly walks to office, I began to long for a walk that had no fixed destination. I wanted to simply keep moving. That walk would take me past beautiful landscapes, free of this modern plague, past rivers and glades and bountiful forests, pollution-free cities where people welcomed you with a smile. A stranger would offer me a bed for the night. Or I would simply curl up and sleep under a tree near a murmuring brook, to be awakened by bird cries. I dreamed of running ecstatically towards wine dark seas, where the distant dark bobs could be sea nymphs biding their time.
When such thoughts filled my head, my own bed was depressing. I used to be comforted by the book cases. These filled the bed room and much of the living room. I had lost count on the way, but I believe I have over three thousand books. It was sad to think that I would have to sell them to do mundane things – repair leaking pipes or the roof, a crumbling door and frame, or just to eat. For many months, I had postponed what I felt was the great betrayal, the idea of selling the books that I loved so much.
But there comes a day when you turn traitor to your fondest beliefs. And so I had gathered enough nerve one morning to call Jayasiri, the second hand book shop owner from whom I had bought hundreds and hundreds of books over a span of thirty years. We had both aged together. But, when he knocked on the door, I faced a moment of truth. He looked old. I looked both old and haggard.
He removed his mask the moment he entered. Should I ask him to wash his hands? But I just stood there, frozen.
He walked from one book case to another, taking his time. I began thinking of the books. The night before, I wanted to set aside a few for myself. Eventually, there were more than a hundred on the floor, and I had opened only three of the cases. It was a hopeless task. The books were still on the floor.
Jayasiri looked quizzically at them.
“What I’ve been reading,” I explained. “No time to put them back in the cases.”
Jayasiri smiled. We were secret sharers for a moment, one untidy book lover to another.
I sat on a chair and contemplated what I had taken out of the cases. Ulysses by James Joyce, the complete works of T. S. Eliot, an illustrated edition of Shakespeare’s complete works, Tolstoi, Chekhov, Gogol, Solzhenitsyn, Mikhail Bulgakov, the poetry of Wole Soyinka, Maya Angelou, Anna Akhmatova and Pablo Neruda, the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Yasunari Kawabatha, Ernest Hemingway, Ruth Prawer Jhabwala, Toni Morrison, Alberto Moravia, Thomas de Quincy, James Baldwin, short story collections, poetry anthologies, plays from all over the world, so many writers, so many….
“A lot of them came from your shop,” I said, paying a compliment.
He picked up a thick paperback volume and waved it at me.
“The William Faulkner reader,” Jayasiri laughed. “I remember that one.”
Should I change my mind? Let the roof leak, let the door collapse, I could live even more spartanly…I should tell him now I have changed my mind. This was my last vanity – that I had the best home library in the whole neighbourhood, that I had read authors even university lecturers haven’t heard of (Giuseppe di Lampedusa comes to my mind) that I was man of some learning….
But I simply sat there. Finally, Jayasiri turned towards me. He touched the nearest book case, as if for support, and said: “I can give you fifteen.”
I thought that was for just that book case. Multiply that by eight….
He must have seen something in my eyes, for he added quickly: “For the lot.”
“For everything?”
“Just the books. I don’t need the cases.”
It was apocalyptical, empty book cases and three five thousand rupee notes which wouldn’t begin to pay a month’s grocery and other bills.
“But that’s a lot of classics.”
“They are old,” Jayasiri said. “The pages are yellow. There’s a lot of silverfish. And business is down.”
On my last visit to his bookshop, he had told me business was good as people began reading more during lockdowns.
“Also,” he added, as if trying to soften the blow, “very few thrillers.”
I sat there and longed for the night, the same night that I dreaded so much. After all, it left no room for compromises and negotiations. You had to face it squarely. After Jayasiri left, I sat on the floor and began leafing through the books strewn there the night before. I began apologizing silently to them, and they stared at me compassionately.
Tonight, I’d take a book with me to office, and I would do so every night as long as the routine lasted.
I badly needed a lucky charm to protect me in the abandoned streets, and I had found one at last.
