Cooking for Love

There must have been a thousand books in the sitting-room by the end, each a doorway leading somewhere I had never been before. And even after I had read all of them, each time I looked I would find something new. A play of light and shadow; something flitting in and out of a story I knew by heart.

Each time I read Reef – the story of a boy, Triton, growing up as a servant and cook in Sri Lanka in the late 1960s – I find something new. I think the way that The Tempest flits in and out of the novel is one of the things that keeps me rereading it. Another is the play of light and shadow in Romesh Gunesekera’s prose. I lived in Colombo from 1992 to 1994, teaching English, and my first home was on Havelock Road where, only the year before, a bomb had exploded, throwing severed heads and body parts into the air. This, by Sri Lankan standards, was nothing. Like many others, I was struck by the incongruity of such horror in a country so deceptively gentle, one that looked so much like the Garden of Eden. In Reef Gunesekera seduces you with a charming depiction of a lost era, but underlying it all is the knowledge of the killing that came later. The novel is framed in the early 1990s but recalls, through the eyes of a boy on the brink of adulthood, a period when the island was on the verge of its first insurgencies. Triton, its narrator, and his master, Mister Salgado, eventually flee Sri Lanka for a new life in London after the ‘disappearance’ of Mister Salgado’s closest friend. So it is from England, after twenty years of ‘staggering brutality’ in Sri Lanka, that Triton looks back on their life there; an encounter with a Tamil refugee in a petrol station takes him back to ‘a bay-fronted house six thousand miles away’. When I first read Reef, I was taken back all those miles too. I felt a surge of joyful familiarity with the scarlet-flowering rathmal and the jasmine, the ‘reddish clay curls’ of the roof tiles, the crows, the fish and the fishermen, and the hawkers who come singing down Mister Salgado’s lane. I re-tasted the sweetness of pineapple jam and the fieriness of seeni sambol. I recognized the furniture and the polished floors of the house, and the rhythms of Sri Lankan voices. I remembered a hot Christmas of my own. Actually, the Sri Lanka of the 1960s was as distant to me, in 1992, as the old cook Lucy-amma’s past was to Triton – ‘She had seen monkey suits give way to Nehru shirts; Sheffield silver replaced by coconut spoons.’ But because everything is explored through the eyes of a young servant, attentive to the smallest of domestic details, this gives a very intimate picture. And I admit that, somehow, Mister Salgado’s house merged in my imagination with another house down another lane that I had known, a house that it could almost have been. I have never read a more haunting re-imagining of The Tempest than Reef. Gunesekera plucks certain ingredients from the play and stirs them into the story as deftly as Triton/Ariel whips up his delicacies in the kitchen. Mister Salgado makes a wonderful Prospero. He’s ‘a real gentleman’, a marine biologist, an expert on the fast-disappearing coral reef, who smells of cinnamon bushes and has a voice so ‘captivating’ that it enables Triton to see the whole of their world: ‘the great tanks, the sea, the forests, the stars . . .’ The Tempest allusions ebb and flow throughout, giving the whole book a touch of magic. Triton is 11 and still believes in magic when he comes to work for Mister Salgado. He has been brought by an uncle after accidentally setting fire to one of the huts of his rural school and has been told to do ‘whatever the hell he tells you’. At first the house is the centre of Triton’s universe – ‘Even the sun seemed to rise out of the garage and sleep behind the del tree at night.’ But Mister Salgado is Triton’s teacher as much as his master. Triton falls under his spell and he watches him ‘unendingly’. Mister Salgado makes lists while listening to The Mikado, and Triton copies him and learns to write. He watches Mister Salgado reading, feeling ‘the air move when he turned a page, each one catching the lemony light, slice by papery slice’. Likewise, Triton also reads alone, ‘unfettered’, swept up in other worlds, forgetting where one story ends and another begins, the ‘only sound the sound of onion-skin rustling from story to story’. In 1992, all I saw of Sri Lanka was the richness and strangeness of everyday life in a tropical paradise. My view, like Triton’s, was a narrow one that only gradually widened. Only later was I fully aware of the bloodbath, ‘hidden from the eyes of the world’ by ‘the sun and the wind and the dirty blue sky’. One day, Triton recounts for Mister Salgado the Anguli-maala story of the prince who was punished by being made to collect a thousand bleeding fingers and turn them into a garland. Each time he threaded on a new one, ten old ones fell off. He could not stop killing. ‘Down on the beach, the bodies of men and boys who had disappeared from their homes . . . slaughtered by him . . . were washed in by the tide.’ If anything can come close to conveying the tragedy of Sri Lanka, it is this macabre allegory, as told by Triton. In Triton’s own sphere, he learns that ‘what has happened has happened’, that it ‘hangs on the robes of the soul’. When he looks at Mister Salgado he realizes that it ‘takes time, years, to learn how other people cope with themselves, how they come to terms with the changes that happen, always happen around them’. The parallel with Sri Lanka itself makes this very moving. A decade on, with the long ceasefire said to be under threat, Reef has lost none of its resonance. It is a book about change, about shifting boundaries, about what happens when things are lost or destroyed and about how people carry on in whatever way they can. It is a love story too. Exquisitely pretty, but thoroughly modern, Miss Nili (who works at the Sea Hopper Hotel) interrupts Triton’s own love for Mister Salgado when she comes to tea and turns their world upside down. Poignantly, it is Triton who seduces her for Mister Salgado with the richest, juiciest ‘love cake’ ever made. Mister Salgado watches her in awe, unable to eat a crumb. ‘He makes a lovely cake,’ says Miss Nili, endearing herself to Triton for the rest of his life. Triton learns to be a marvellous cook, and he learns about love, discovering that food and love are strangely intertwined. By the end of the novel, he understands at last who he really is, and finds his own place in the world. The descriptions of food in Reef are so delicious that I cannot resist giving you Triton’s recipe for an egg flip – a ‘mixture of high-grown coffee, cocoa, raw egg, vanilla and brandy whisked with hot milk and butter and stirred with a cinnamon stick; sprinkled with ground nutmeg’. But the magnificent Christmas dinner Triton cooks up at the heart of the book, during which so much changes for all the characters, I will leave you to discover and relish for yourself.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 5 © Katharine Davies 2005