Marriage and the devil both play prominent roles in this new comic novel from Sri Lanka

I won’t lie to you about this marriage thing. It is bloody difficult. Each of us expects something different from it, so it is a war of attrition: a question of grinding down your partner, of wearying her into submission, so you can exist smoothly, side by side, while all the time she is doing the same to you. No, it isn’t quite as bad as this, but you get the general idea.

Marriage is like murder.

(Some people say it is murder.) By committing this heinous act of union you become desensitised to your partner, throwing out of the window all the tact and delicacy and solicitousness that went before. There are no secrets between murderers: you have seen each other at your worst, there is nothing more to hide. And like murder, it gets easier the more you do it. It was a rare enough act when we committed it, but a once-and-just-once-in-a- lifetime marriage was a very rare fish indeed. The few friends we had were either unmarried or much married.

In a way, it was easier for Luisa, who went out to work every day. She had another life she could escape to, an unmarried one at work. The marriage stayed at home with me, with last night’s unwashed dishes in the sink, the radio endlessly on, and other minute and incremental additions to the status quo within the four walls of this Putney jail that I had constrained myself to. It was of my own choosing, so I could not complain. Writers are solitary people, they say, prone to brooding. I had plenty of time to brood upon my own marriage; in fact, we became quite close, this marriage and I, as we waited at home together every day for the wife to come back from work.

By the way, a word about my writing. I have not mentioned it much because there is actually not much to say. Somebody had told me at one of those crazy Oxford parties that the only writers who made money were children’s writers. I had begun a book about Rathu Catherine and the Amberalla Tree. Around page twenty I came to realise that, perhaps, I was not cut out to be a children’s writer. I didn’t really like Rathu Catherine. She was an awfully presumptuous plump girl who ate too many milk toffees. I was seriously considering having her murdered halfway through. A child’s murder mystery – would that work? It was earth-shattering questions such as these that kept me going through those long empty mornings in the Putney flat.

Of course, it was not all gloom and doom with Luisa and me.

On the contrary, we had the best time of our lives, all alone with no one else to interfere. And, as time went on, the daily abrasions we caused each other – the cap of the toothpaste left open, the long hairs in the bath, the snoring (her, not me, ha!) – began to hurt less and less. So, if it was a difficult time, it was not a desperate one. And, as time went by, we became garrulous and over-familiar with each other, like two old whores sharing a cup of tea in between clients. It was only that between the two of us, we had successfully managed to murder romance.

I began to think more and more – anything to avoid writing – about the medieval life I had left behind in the process. I had been in an awful hurry to get away from it then. I was only just beginning to become aware of the gravitational pull Sri Lanka exerts on all its children, silent and inexorable like the moon’s pull on the tides, making us sway this way and that throughout our lives, powerless though we might be to respond to it fully. I had not called my mother since that day, nor she me. I should have liked to have taken Luisa to Kandy just the once, if only to show her my curious and quaint pre-Luisa life, now a thing of the ancient past, if only to show her who I had been: a murderer proudly showing police the scene of his first-ever crime. It was just not to be, I realised, and that was that.

The Devil was having a hard time of it.

He had been sent upstairs to drum up business as a one-man trade delegation, and Sri Lanka had been the obvious choice. (If that fine and upstanding cleric Bishop Heber had noted in the nineteenth century that in Ceylon’s fair isle only man was vile, and if Ceylonese themselves were fond of singing this hymn ad nauseam in their churches and chapels, who was he, a mere Devil, to contradict it?) But he had found soon enough that things on the ground were different.

The Civil War had been going on for twenty years, and all manner of evil had been practised on both sides, which the Devil’s bosses down under had noted with approval; but evil itself ceases to have validity if the intention is missing, and it was very difficult to keep people’s evil intentions up to the mark, so to speak, over a long period of time. They became desensitised, so that after one or two bombs, one or two judicious assassinations, they ceased to care at all: they just turned the page and carried on reading. It seemed to him that Sri Lankans had no stamina for wickedness – all too soon they would subside into that morally parched no-man’s-land of the don’t-know-don’t-care variety.

“Remember, it’s the souls we’re after,” his trainer had thundered at that last three-day intensive workshop. “Not the number of deeds themselves.” Ten people each committing a single murder were far more valuable to his firm than one committing ten.

So far, the Devil had identified two people at the walauwa worthy of attention. The Kumarihamy, though an absolute given, had been something of a disappointment.

“Stop twirling that cape!” she had snarled at him only the other day. “People will think you’re a nancy boy. Remember you’re Australian. Try to be a man.”

The Devil did not exactly know what a nancy boy was, but it did not sound good. Clarice seemed to be a thoroughly nasty woman. She managed to put the very devil into him each time they met. His nerves were all in shreds.

Then there was Pandu, the garden boy, who exhibited great potential for wickedness. He spent most of his afternoons weeding the flower beds that dotted the terraces around the big house. Since there are only so many weeds you can pull out, and Pandu was bored much of the time, he turned his attention to the flowers themselves.

“When in doubt, pull it out,” he sang to himself, as he hurled perfectly good flowers over the terrace edge.

“Ahem,” said the Devil, who had been watching this wanton destruction for a little while. “I see you have green fingers.”

Pandu looked at his fingers. They looked perfectly normal to him. “Are you a goat?” he asked.

“Don’t be an ass!” hissed the Devil. “Now listen to me closely. You like to earn a bit of pocket money?”

Pandu nodded. This was more like it. The Devil began whispering in Pandu’s ear, outlining his fiendish plan.

There was a sudden click of the walker and the Kumarihamy stood above them, swaying gloriously and blocking out the sun, majestic and forbidding like some hairy old prophetess from the Old Testament.

“Ha!” she cackled. “Caught you!”
Pandu and the Devil sprang apart guiltily. “Watch out for him,” said the Kumarihamy to Pandu. ‘He has wandering hands. He’s Australian.”

Excerpted with permission from The Ceaseless Chatter of Demons, Ashok Ferrey, Penguin Books.