His mind surges with a mix of sayings from his mother. Love your neighbour, but don’t take down the dividing wall. In a treeless country the castor plant is a big tree. Dig your well before you are thirsty. During the daylight a person will not fall into a pit that he fell into during the night. The poor search for food and the rich search for hunger.
When well united and together, one plus one equals eleven, thinks Shan. But he and Devaki are apart.
‘Mama!’ shouts the boy as Shan walks past them. The kid is staring back at the display of frames in the optician’s window.
‘Can I have a eye test, Mama?’ he shouts, little voice in an agile somersault over the traffic. And then, again, high flute of a sound. ‘CAN I HAVE A EYE TEST! A EYE TEST!’
Shan closes his eyes against the force of memory, takes the free newspaper at the underground ticket barriers and returns to the bus stop. He is still early enough to eat something in the kitchen before his shift at the restaurant begins. The sky is viscous and turquoise: the hot, demented turquoise of a day filled with promises.
Nia
In those days they were all a bit in love with Tuli, everyone who worked for him in the restaurant. They couldn’t help it, somehow it came with the territory: a solid admiration leavened with a kind of vulnerable unrequited romance. Nia considered this oddity often: she really did mean all of them – male or female, front of house or in the kitchen, take your pick – the waiting staff (Ava from Spain), the gaggle of South Asian cooks (Shan, Rajan, Guna, Vasanthan), even Ashan, the clipped French Tamil guy who shared the lease with him, purveyor of crucial expertise from working at ‘the Pizza Express’. This is how they appeared to her, even though, or maybe because, Tuli was so infuriating and endearing in equal measure. It wasn’t just because they were beholden to him. You could argue that he had rescued everyone who was there from something or someone, but this was more to do with his manner, his way of being.
When Nia started working there she was proud of the fact that he didn’t affect her, but soon enough this indifference to his charms was undermined by the fact that she envied him – she wanted to be him rather than the object of his affection. He was so expansive, a bit arrogant with it sure, but that heart … To possess such a heart, to look outward like that, rather than inward to the hidden pockets of the self as she did. An audacious heart. It seemed to thud against his lanky frame with its own strength and vibration, exulting in a freedom from the scrutiny of others.
Oh, it was an emotional time of ups and downs and she would often veer from her happy chatty persona at work to such a loneliness when the sun went down, as though the whole of the day’s cheer had been an elaborate gossamer web and now the web was ripped, there was nowhere to hide. She would spend her days off without speaking to anyone and there was a kind of bruise in her speech when she tried to talk upon return to the restaurant. But it was always there, solid and accommodating, happy for her to slide back in once she had pinned her apron and hair.
She stared at everything and everyone in the beginning, ignoring the veneer of detachment that protected other commuters in the mornings. It was the summer of 2003 when Nia joined the restaurant, and that particular part of south-west London was just beginning to gear up for gentrification. You could see the bankers – male and female alike – dipping their toes in, walking past the burger joints and chicken shops with appraising gazes, bodies taut with the effort of remaining open-minded. Tentatively making it down to the imposing residential squares they had heard about, and staring up at the red-brick and stucco mansion blocks and sliding timber sash windows. They would go up to the hushed communal gardens that lay at the centre of these squares, and lean on the railings, not worried by the locked gates that always caught her out. Instead they seemed to be practising for a lifestyle that appeared to be entirely up to them. She saw them on her way to and from the restaurant and marvelled at this idea radiating out from them, that the responsibility of shaping a life was all down to the choices you might make. They seemed full to bursting with choices.
She had loved the place instantly, in fact she loved the whole process – walking from the tube and turning down the small road, past the greasy spoon, the betting place, the Australian pub on the corner, till she was right there, standing at the panelled glass doors and looking up at ‘PIZZERIA VESUVIO’, each word hammered in gold and angled to form two sharp mountain slopes. They were warm days at the start of that summer, and these huge baroque capitals would be flashing with reflected sunlight against a vermilion background, whilst underneath you had all the offerings in a humble white font: ‘Caffè, Restaurant, Pizza, Pasta. Vesuvio: Your home from home!’
Inside, the space was laid out pretty traditionally: twenty small square tables on the ground floor with the till, counter and wine racks at the back, near the kitchen. Diaphanous white tablecloths, small accordions of folded paper printed with photos of diners and the splashy headline: ‘Welcome to the magic of Vesuvio!’ One candle per table, along with single stems in water – a pink rose or carnation usually. A spiral staircase at the front led up to a function room, with the bar at one end and leather sofas at the other – this was the area where Tuli entertained guests, unless it was hired out for a private party, but also where the staff mostly had their meals between shifts.
Some of the Sri Lankan cooks lived above this first floor in a flat that Nia had heard about, and she’d witness them disappearing at the end of the night through another door near the bar. She’d watch them go through a dark portal into relative privacy, one or two guys at a time, catch a glimpse of an impossibly steep flight of stairs, register the knitted warmth of their murmurs after the door was locked from the inside and they were no longer visible. There was something fascinating about the definitive way in which they sealed themselves off. They were different from her, in that they had a clear end to the day, some place that they wanted to go when work was done, even if it was just upstairs.
In contrast, she always lingered when her hours were through, unsure as to what she should do next. There was a perk for staff: on your day off you could come to the restaurant with a friend and both eat a meal for free – you knew not to choose the steak of course, and to stick to pizza or pasta, at most a glass or two of house wine, but it was still pretty generous. Nia was aware that she didn’t have anyone to bring with her on these days, but Ava would swing by with a different friend from a different country each week for lunch it seemed, before heading out to comb the sights and sounds of London. The cooks preferred to avail themselves of the promised meal at night – hanging out and chattering on crates in the kitchen as usual, directing those on duty to cook their favourites. Sometimes Tuli would send in a bottle of whisky for those who were off duty and everyone would be happy.
Nia was pretty sure that Tuli was a Catholic even though he wasn’t often at church; he was all bound up with Patrick, the priest from Laurier Square. They had a thing going on Fridays at closing where they gathered leftover sandwiches from the supermarkets and bundled them with a batch of pizzas from the restaurant, leaving by midnight to distribute the goods on the streets. One time she even found herself going to Tuli in a state of chaos, asking him to help convert her to Christianity. He sent her on her way, shaking his head in mock sorrow and ruffling her hair at the nonsense of it.