Royce Mahawatte teaches in the department of cultural and historical studies at the London College of Fashion and Central Saint Martin’s School of Art. He has published on 19th-century fiction, with a particular interest in George Eliot and the Gothic novel, and is a contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and the Financial Times books pages.
“What happened on the mountain” is adapted from a novel-in-progress, The Awareness and the Emptiness, due to be finished in early 2010. “Sexual awakening and the mayhem of adolescence have always been fertile subjects for writers,” he told Prospect. “I suppose that this book is a twist on the ‘coming out’ novel but taken to other-worldly and literary extremes. I like to think that we can learn about life from things that can only happen in novels.”
Harischandra Gunasena stood on the top of a seven-thousand foot mountain. By his watch it was five-forty in the morning. He had climbed Sri Pada, or Adam’s Peak, in Rathnapura, in the southwestern region of Sri Lanka. And he had brought his son, Lucas. On this special spot, the Buddha stepped down from heaven and placed his left foot on the top of the mountain. He made it across to Siam, in one step, where he left the mark of his right. That he managed to make it without tripping or stumbling was a sign of his enlightenment.
To be here for the start of the Sinhala new year, to be surrounded by so many other pilgrims was a great thing. In a few moments, the sun would push its way out of the horizon and perform an alchemy on the rocks, on the air, and on the pilgrims too. Haris’s thick and angular features, his wave of silver hair, his morning jawline shadow—they would all become bright, completed somehow.
Normally, Haris liked to welcome the morning with a lotus position, a good motion and a glass of milk with an egg cracked into it. On Sri Pada he had to make do with a gulp from a bottle of warm drinking water.
“So… Lucas,” he spoke loudly to make himself heard over the noise. “This is where the Lord Buddha came to get rid of all the creatures and ghosts that lived here. He stood and raised his palm,” Haris demonstrated, his fingers and thumb in a single plane pointing heavenwards, “and all the demons went careering up into the sky! The ones that remained sought refuge in his teachings… and now the god Saman watches over the mountain on his great white tusker. A good story, huh?… Your mummy hates all this… hates it all. If she was here… there would have been no end of trouble… no end. The Wickramasinghes are too lah-di-dah for this kind of thing. Best if it’s just the men… Water?”
While he had been speaking, Haris was certain that he could see his son’s profile just to his left, but when Lucas did not take the water bottle he jerked round to find that he had been speaking to a man’s upturned collar that he had mistaken for the Gunasena nose. There were plenty of heads, chattering, munching; some looking very solemn, but no Lucas. For how long had he been standing there while his son was gone? He started moving round, trying to make his way to a raised verge where he could see more. His calls extended up from the side of the mountain and out into the night.
“Lucas! Where are you?! Puttaaaaaaa.” Harischandra rarely used puta, the Sinhala word for son, but he thought he might get more help that way. It just looked better.
A few people did look up in his direction, but the sun was about to rise. The pilgrims had all been trailing up the mountain: venerable monks, clerics, novices, a small number of nuns, musicians, tourists, gap year students, chancers, beggars, a few sociologists, tourist board ushers and medics. They made a stream of mainly white robed dots covering an imperfect and solitary pyramid. One man had lost his son. What to do? The daylight makes all things visible.
The man with the collar came over, and tapped Haris’s elbow with a forefinger and asked for a description of the missing person.
“My son is a tall and slim young man,” said Haris hurriedly, and then added. “He does not speak any Sinhala… only a few words.”
The man’s eyelids drew back. He was weaselly looking with uncontrolled expressions, the kind of man who is easy to laugh at if you come from Wallerton-on-Thames.
“Anay! Why not teach him?”
Accustomed to this reaction, Haris shrugged like an innocent bystander. “We live in England. He doesn’t need it.”
“You have no pride?” asked the man gravely.
“What ‘pride’?” breathed Haris looking out to the crowd. “Lucaaaas?” he called; and the man copied, adding “where-are-you?” in the clearest English.
Overhead, the sky was like a backlit cloth and Haris cursed his plan to immerse his son in the cultural practices of Sri Lanka. Only three days ago, father and son, wife and daughter had left their semi in Wallerton-on-Thames, on the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire border in the south of England. Now after a flight and a series of madcap drives, father and son were up a chilly mountain in the early hours of the morning that was really the middle of the night. Haris was not even sure what time it was in Sri Lanka as the national time had been changed by half an hour in order to save daylight and electricity. Haris’s watch said five forty-five, but it might have been five-fifteen. Not knowing the correct time was a barda, a bad omen. From behind the safety of the Oxon and Bucks border, a trip to Adam’s Peak seemed like a good lesson for a boy sadly starved of his own history. As well as being a line on the personal statement of his son’s university application form; the journey earned a person merits in incarnations to come. Haris’s Buddhism was spiritual and pragmatic. He was not the kind of man to go on pilgrimages though, precisely because of the kind of stress he was experiencing right now. But after seeing an article in the National Geographic: “In Search of Big Foot,” Lucas had kept on about it. Rani, Haris’s wife, had looked horrified at the idea. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly with a raised hand, “it will be teaming with… godeyas. Count me out! I worship in my own way. It’s good for the kids, but I can’t see me up there.” By godeyas, she meant something like country-bumpkins, a sentiment she would never have displayed in England. But Haris did have a duty to his son; after all, raising a boy in England was difficult, he did not want him turning out like English boys, running around on a Friday night with alcopops. Immersing his son in culture and religion was the appropriate thing to do.
Lucas’s Sri Lankan holidays were generally spent tumble-turning in the Mount Lavina Hotel pool and guzzling mangosteens with his sister. A pilgrimage was a new kind of challenge. But there was something in the quality of the night that made Haris think that this was not how Easter holidays or New Year pilgrimages should start. You should never go to Sri Pada if you are not wholly committed to the idea.
***
Not far from the situation just described, a seventeen-year-old boy lay face up on the ground, surrounded by a circle of swaying white sarongs. Lucas Gunasena knew he was not dead, but he felt that there was a thinning blackness spreading away from him in all directions. A splash of water hit his cheek and he opened his eyelids. The sky was many shades of grey mixed with a faint lilac—it stood as a reminder that Wallerton-on-Thames was miles away. He stared upwards. You would think that the sky must look the same wherever you stand.
Contrary to his position at this moment, Lucas was mainly an upright son of the obedient variety. He was considered happy enough and mild in temperament, his eyebrows shot up cartoonishly when he spoke sometimes. Even now, stretched out in the dust, his face and body had a shining kind of geometrical handsomeness, but not enough to be distracting. From his size eleven feet, with their enviable freestyle kick, to his determined right-angle triangle nose, which rose steeply to meet his forehead, everything was generally in the right place and the right length. He was able to differentiate and integrate almost as well as he could swim, and he could swim almost as well as he could please his parents. Apart from an abysmal wrist spin, which Mr Amos, his PE teacher, thought extremely aberrant for “a lanky Sri Lankan… See what I did there, Gunners?” Lucas Gunasena was a presentable example of everything his school in England endeavoured to produce.
The name written on his birth certificate was Lucius—light, bringer of. He was named after Haris’s father, the pot-bellied Lucius Tudor Gunasena, or “ell tee,” as he was generally remembered. LT had been named after Lucius Cornelius Sulla, or Felix the Fortunate, the Roman general. In his grandfather’s time, even for the poorest families, English names were useful and Latinate ones eternal. But two generations later, little Lucius was having problems saying his own name and could only manage the first two syllables. This was charming at the time but, by nursery school, mispronunciation became a source of worry—how could the parents have given the boy a name he could not pronounce? “Lucas” was decided upon—it hooked itself into the back of the mouth and stayed there. Of course with school being school and young minds being rather literal, “Lucas” was far too simple. Gunasena became Gunners; Gunners became Gunner, and Gunner, for the military pedants, of which there were a fair number at Wallerton Boys’, became Private or just PVT. Here the name ran aground and was changed no more.
Some of the water had, by now, entered Lucas’s right nostril and he blew it out and pulled himself up onto his elbows. With his first inhalation the world came back to him: shouts, calls, chatter, the smell of petrol, burning flour, cotton and fresh perspiration. Two dusty feet with nicely spaced toes stood to his side, they were connected to a girl with sleek rope plaits. She was holding her trainers in her hand. A small gabbling crowd had formed around him, the girl said “are you orrkey?” Someone else was calling for a doctor. Disorientation had brought a contentment to Lucas, hearing words he could recognise caused it all to evaporate into the night. With an exasperated sigh, he fell on his back again.
Haris’s palpitating concerns were justified. The boy was lost, and he had not been feeling well. Lucas had not had a motion since England. He had been costive, and not just in terms of his digestion. Over the past few weeks, days, moments, opportunities, had all whizzed by in a blur. Lucas could not find a suitable gap through which he could burst through and say: “Dad, Mum, oh, Kalpana… you might as well hear this too… I have something to tell you…” At home he was watchful and tense.
All teenagers withhold information, but Lucas Gunasena did not believe in teenagers. Neither did he believe in owning more than four pairs of shoes. Every time his parents asked him why he was so quiet, he remained so. The entreating pain on his father’s face was poisoning to watch, the scrutinising concern on his mother’s made Lucas anxious. Haris and Rani’s concerns were real. Had they been pushing too hard by encouraging him to take maths a year early when he was training for inter-county trials? Lucas did not wish to be a secretive boy. And so, for this reason, he had decided that he would tell his father—on their pilgrimage—that he was physically and romantically attracted to members of his own sex. Having done this, he would return to the holiday home in Colombo and tell his mother and sister.
And how did he know, or even dare admit, that he was gay? “Gay” was not a word he was using yet, at least not in this context. In his schoolroom vernacular the word, at this point, meant “mawkish,” “overly sentimental,” “cheesy,” or just plain old “silly.” The story of how Lucas Gunasena became sexually aware though was short on incident, but ongoing in its effects. He had hoped that Adam’s Peak would bring things into focus, but here he found himself, lying on the ground, looking at crusty heels, confused to the point of exhaustion.
For the last year and a half Lucas had spent his time in the changing rooms definitely not looking at Alex Norton or Laurence Lancer as they hopped into their underpants. Before that he had not been captivated by Victor Earnshaw from the year above as he had jangled around on the benches, freckled and fiery, after practice. Being both perspicacious and logical, Lucas noticed what he was not doing. But his thoughts undercut any audacity he might have had. So this leads us to the second reason. If there was ever a classroom “bundle,” you could be certain that Lucas Gunasena would be crushed somewhere at the centre. What finally tipped the scales was that he had spent most of his Christmas revision sessions in a top bunk with the naked Laurence Lancer, the son of a psychologist mother and a physicist father, who had been seconded for a year to a laboratory on the outskirts of Wallerton. Laurence was thick-thighed and lipless and his developed body was clearly a metaphor for his proficiency in discourses around gender and sexuality. He had observed Lucas avoiding boys. One November, he invited Lucas over to do some structured questions; and to smoke a j; and over a diagram of a spectrometer he lunged. With freezing fog outside, they had faced each other like marble and bronze statues with human eyes and pulsating hearts. It was one of those moments when the anticipation of a young lifetime makes the air tangible. But when they put their work aside and made it to the bed, Lucas refused to take his pants off.
“It’s probably just your ethnicity, Gunners…” said Laurence in his bunk, iridescent in his own nudity and hair gel. “You have a fair bit to work on because the non-white body is permanently eroticised, in the media, in society, by reason of its difference... You have cultivated shyness and modesty to offset hegemonic forces. Back in the States, the black guys rarely parade themselves around the changing rooms like their white counterparts…”
“Oh, shut up with your ethnic! Bloody be’ave…” said Lucas who, when away from his family liked physicality, boisterousness and dropping his ‘h’s in the right places. In his mind there was no such thing as ethnicity there were just people and their goals. Race was not important to him or to any of his family—ethnicity was a word associated with community centres and burkhas. He had nothing to do with either. “I’m not ethnic… I’m a Sinhala Sri Lankan,” and he proceeded to climb onto Laurence’s chest, “…and I’m English.”
“You’re Sringlish,” Laurence said, pleased with himself.
“I’m unique.”
“Yes, of course you are. That’s fantastic,” said Laurence, “but—oww, oww, ease off a bit. I think you have to move beyond that. You are a south… Gaysian—just get into it. Enjoy it—what’s the worst that can happen?”
“Everything,” said Lucas, restraining Laurence’s hands. “What are you trying to turn me into?”
“Oh God. I always pick the complex ones. Just be safe, know your boundaries. Remember the safe sex imperative…You’ll be fine. I’ve seen you messing around with Earnshaw—he checks you out.”
“I was defending myself. It was just once.” Lucas shot him a look through a gap in his fringe, but it revealed nothing.
“Look, Gunners—don’t even start trying to deny things with me… just don’t! Vic Earnshaw is way hot.”
“Earnshaw is crazy—he’s obsessed with his cock. Do you think ’e’s…?”
With a masterful arm, Laurence rocked Lucas as he went into his grand reading. “I think Victor’s gone beyond being gay—he’s just a force. Some people are like that. Gay/Straight it’s all made up. People just have sex—we make it all mean something. Victor is trouble—the quiet ones always are. It’s a good thing he’s left school.” Laurence tried not to sound indignant because somewhere in all of this, there was a rejection. Lucas wanted the avoidant Victor and not the developed Laurence Lancer, who was naked and aroused and lying right next to him. He changed the subject.
“Now, don’t you think this would be better if you got your pants off? No pressure. Or just pull the leg hole up. I need to find out how Sri Lankan you really are… I’ve seen it anyway…”
Laurence was a trier, Lucas, a resister. It was a harmony of sorts. A few weeks later, they had found the surprisingly well-stocked “Lesbian Gay Bi-sexual” shelf in the local library and scribbled out the “Wo” on the title page of a fashionable reprint copy of Women in Love. And during all this, amidst and after all their tongue-tied kissing and the doobidge, Lucas kept his briefs on. Although he was clearly happy, he refused to be pressed on the matter, at least not too hard. And he never seemed to get high. Ever.
Now affairs like this do not last long. The advanced and the innocent. It was a miracle that the pair had found each other in the first place. Wallerton Boys’ was not the homoerotic idyll Lucas’s story would suggest. And before the first apple blossom of spring had landed on the tarmac, the affair was over. Laurence Lancer’s parents were returning to Santa Cruz. Lucas’s in-school adviser on sexual cultures left for America and a course in liberal arts.
“You need to do something to assert yourself. You are locked down,” said Laurence on their last day. “I think that you are experiencing erotophobia—don’t look at me like that—it’s diagnosable—my mom went to a conference on it last year—ask her! I think it is the fear of living within the realm of the senses, the erotic.”
Lucas looked on glumly. There was no way that he would speak to Laurence Lancer’s mother about erotophobia.
“You’re heading for asexual twinkdom… You want that?”
“Not at all,” said Lucas, not understanding what he meant. After a pause, he added, “I’ll talk to my parents.”
“Woah!” said Laurence. “Let’s go slow. Why don’t you wait a year—till you go to college? Not all parents are like mine, you know. We have gay people coming through the house all the time… Statistics show that south Asian parents are very homophobic. It’s all because of the arranged marriage system, which makes heterosexuality systemic.”
The image of Lucas’s father locking him up in a cupboard until a wife arrived, or his mother incinerating herself in Wallerton market square were valid only to Laurence, who had a staggering sense of his own importance and a part of this was tied up with the controlling dictates of multicultural sexual politics. Lucas wanted to prove him wrong. With a clenched fist that was not as resolute as it looked, Lucas put forward his case. “Coming out” was the right thing to do—psychologically, politically. “Systemically.”
Laurence was doubtful, “I know you are trying to claim your alterity, but I think you should develop yourself, work on yourself. You need to get integrated. You are a person who wants to be liked. I’d be careful with that. Have you thought about getting your hair cut, or having a tattoo? Nothing big. I’m thinking of getting a snake across my back—it’ll make me a hit in freshman year.”
“Buddhists aren’t encouraged to change their bodies for superficial reasons,” Lucas replied.
He wanted to prove Laurence wrong, he was 17 and sometimes could not tell the difference between wanting to love someone and trying to compete with them. He had also come to hold an external view of his sexuality. This came partly from Laurence’s tutelage, but also from Lucas having the only brown face at Wallerton Boys’. Race was sometimes important, but only because he felt it was a phenomenon viewed only from the outside and so it was a part of the world he had to move through in order to get from one point to another. Sexuality was the same. If his society knew about him, then the chances were that he might know more about himself. His first society was his family.
So here, on top of a seven-thousand foot mountain, he was trying to get integrated, preparing to tell his father that he was alterior. Was that even a word?
On their first stop of the climb, Lucas opened his mouth… and then changed the subject. He decided it might be better to speak higher up, otherwise his father might want to return to the foot in order to have it out more fully. On the second stop, the words would not come out. The same happened on the third. On the fourth, an English girl came up to them and asked for cigarettes. She came from East Grinstead and started a conversation about how beautiful and spoiled the country was by the war. When they finally reached the summit, Lucas found that he was alone. He did not know how it happened. The crowd surged and he could not see his father any more, it was too dark. He was jostled, giddy; surrounded by screams, shoving shoulders. And from the centre of this kaleidoscope of people he heard his name, not Lucas, but “Lucius,” a name now only used by new teachers when they read from the register. He heard it once more. “Lucius.” A sudden wash of fear came over him when he thought—he did not know what to think! Something settled over his mouth like a pad—it was just the hand of a fascinated toddler. “Lucius.” Lucas could not breathe. What happened next, happened so fast. He was falling down, or the earth was rising up. Amongst the faces in shadow, he saw a particular face shine out. The blue-pink skin, the freckles, grey in the dimness. The ginger hair. Green eyes. It was Earnshaw, from the year above him, in the crowd nearby. Lucas was rational enough to know that his world was caving in, that his memories, and his desires, were seeping outwards. Thunder clapped on the surface of his skin. More fear shot up and he knew no more… until the splash of water that was.
“Lucius…”
The circle of pilgrims was caught between looking down at Lucas and waiting for the sun to rise. The girl with the plaits waved her trainers in the air, hoping to catch the attention of a paramedic. The crowd acted as if it were an organism. It was as if it reflected on Lucas and exclaimed from a group consciousness: “He looks like us; but the hair cut—it’s a mess, the woolly clothes, the walking boots, the disbelieving expression—he does not understand how life moves on this side of the Earth. He has the form, but God knows what is happening inside him.” And the circle around Lucas glided, like a small vesicle to the edge of the crowd, taking him with it. When the pilgrims receded Lucas was left on the path, a little way from the feet of his astonished father.
Haris pulled his son upright and checked for broken limbs.
OK? Nauseous? Light-headed? Dehydrated? Constipated? Mugged?
“I’m not concussed, Dad,” said Lucas irritably to his father’s fingers as they clicked in front of his face.
“Are you thirsty? Have a drink. Fluids. What a relief. Your mother would have…”
Lucas watched his father as he dug around in his rucksack for tissues, he rarely saw him on his haunches. The weasel- faced man came forward, he was a little disappointed that Lucas had been delivered by the crowd and not by himself.
“You-are-very-lucky,” he carefully mouthed his words as if Lucas’s lack of Sinhala might have affected his ability to understand English. “The-mountain-has-looked-after-you.”
They had little time to collect themselves. There was a startling silence as light appeared in dank and sad little blotches lighting up the tree tops down below. The crowd moved forward and the idea of losing his son again made Haris reach out for the fleece and pull Lucas towards him. The sun appeared as a gold coin, then as a glistening cluster of beams. And then there was the day all around, timid and soft.
“This is a wonderful place,” Lucas said reverently as he and his father sat on some steps. Nearby a group of Europeans dressed as Tibetan peasants dozed with roll-ups burning between their fingers. “A pilgrimage is good for us—it brings compassion and tenderness into our lives. In England, we need compassion for all the poverty that is invisible. Is that not so, Dad?”
Haris looked at his son’s eyes for signs of concussion.
“Yes, you are right. But there is a lot of superstition here too. That man…”
One of the European party started playing some bouncing psychedelic trance music through mini-speakers. Haris heaved himself up and asked them to turn it down. When he came back, Lucas’s face was straight and serious.
“What?” Haris asked.
“I… have to tell you something, Dad. It’s important.”
Lucas peered into his father’s face, as if trying to divine what his reaction would be. After inhaling, he said, “I’ve been meaning to tell you this for a long time. I’m sorry I’ve not mentioned it before—I was not sure how you’d react. I don’t want you to think that not telling you was because I don’t trust you or Mum or Kalpana. It’s not that. I just needed to tell you in my own time… when it was right…”
A formal address from his son, on a mountain top, what could this be?
Lucas pulled his sleeves up.
“I feel I should be honest with you—I do not want to be dishonest…”
Concern developed into near hyperventilation, but Haris kept himself steady. With his silver ringlet to-ing and fro-ing before his eyes, he did not interrupt. He was seven thousand feet above the sea, where the Buddha had put his foot down. Lucas spoke with his usual care, swallowing after full stops, nodding thoughtfully. He said what few fathers think they will ever hear. The man with the collar went to the shrine in search of someone else to help, and on some high grassy steps green eyes lingered on Lucas and his father as they spoke. They were miles away from the insurgents in the north of the country. They were unheard by wife and daughter, who had chosen to forgo merits in their future lives, in favour of catching up on lost hours and a day in the markets shopping for sari material and spoons made from coconut shells. But a dawn deprived of an awakening is no worse than a sleep denied night. The Lord Buddha and the god of the mountain try to protect all pilgrims. Most of them, anyway.
