Colombo. The Galle and Pallakele matches lately over, the series lost, and the selectors falling back on Maitland Place in hopes of inspiration for the third and final test.

The last of the erratic rains now gone, the water in the half-uncovered sewers stagnant, rank with garbage. One might not be surprised to see a starving crocodile shamble desperately inland from the Beira Lake. Sea-misted smog drapes, sulkily, along the coast, the Chinese dock work hurling dust into the air as it claws land back from the ocean’s warm insistence.

The sun still harshly present, if hardly visible. The town about its routine business. Stray dogs, all indistinguishable pariahs, lying panting on the pavements; the beggars scarcely better, heat-blasted, all-too-grateful for the slightest splash of generosity. Foot passengers in moistened Bata slippers, keeping extremities beyond the reach of swerving auto-rickshaws and on-rushing omnibuses; office secretaries in saris, umbrellas jostling with a cordial lack of urgency; clerks in unsympathetically-soled city shoes, tripping occasionally on broken paving slabs and buckled tree roots, like thousands of their countrymen before them. Leather-faced, rough-stubbled sweepers fighting valiantly to remove the day’s detritus (if indeed this day is distinct from the one before it), crows, bats and other fauna adding new deposits to the crust, the compound interest of existence.

But cricket – everywhere. Cricket from the high Anglican environs of Mount Lavinia to the long-venerable sports clubs of Havelock Town and Cinnamon Gardens; cricket at the well-kempt forces grounds across Slave Island, and on north to the Premadasa stadium, which casts its shadows on the shunting yards. Cricket up the Galle Road, in narrow lanes and private driveways, and over empty strips of road at poya; cricket down the Baseline Road, at union workers’ grounds and prison yards, in the college and the vidyalaya sports facilities, and on the hardened dirt tracks of the public playing fields.

Cricket drifting in and out of windows on the airwaves; cricket dressing building sites, on half-torn fliers; cricket wrapping short eats in stapled newsprint. Cricket in the ears of the bus conductor as he counts out change; cricket in the day-dreams of white-bearded elders as they journey homeward; cricket in the oversize bags of tiny schoolboys, conveniently kitted out in pristine white.

Cricket in the afternoon on Galle Face Green, and in the lobbies of two- and three-star boarding houses. Illicit early-evening cricket in the temple courtyard, played by the young monks, after duties. Night cricket on the roofs and in the gardens round the international schools. Cricket the length and breadth of this sprawled, and sport-obsessive city.

Come rain or shine, defeat or victory, cricket on billboards, bus shelters, projector screens in pool halls. Cricket in bookies’ shops (the formal and the more informal kind), cricket on telephones, cricket in conversations at the grills of bottle stores, and in communications outlets. Cricket as a base commodity – as film, as hardware, as ritual vestment – in commercial streets, department stores and markets. And cricket peddling in its turn: the heroes of the bygone age, their names and faces writ large on the sweetshop hoardings, street signs, walls of emporia, viaducts, lending their lustre to the jewellery trade, assurance firms, vendors of soft drinks, chain stores, and providers of sundry other services.

But when the hot afternoon is at its hottest, and the bright glare is brightest, and the thirsty cricket-loving gentleman is at his thirstiest, there is, in truth, but one appropriate destination. Here, hard by the Bambalapitiya Junction – well-served by railway and stagecoach, equipped with automobile spaces, and known to every hansom driver – just across from the stately, vaulting dignity of the British Council, on Queen’s Road, at the very beating heart of all this cricket – here sits The Cricket Club Café.

Never can there come a cricketing occasion too big, never can there be a match too early or too late, which The Cricket Club, this primary temple to the gods of cricket – itself pre-eminent among the sports – is not ten times more than a match.

On such a day, as on so many like it, the Proprietress will herself be bustling about – as indeed she is now – within her avocado-painted palisade, in the garden beneath the flowering frangipani, or inside the white-walled, red-roofed bungalow, endeavouring to attend to the administration of her establishment without being drawn into a conversation with a journeyman of the enthusiastic class, who thinks – and talks, need it be said – of nothing but the cricket. On such a day – as here they are – some twenty or so members of an English village touring side will be dining at one agglomerate, unwieldy table, attempting to trip one another up over technicalia, reminiscing, in detail, on their own and international lifetime batting figures, feigning ignorance of their own grosser misdemeanors in preceding seasons, and all in all pretending to a comradeship that might be even less sincere than it is mutual. On such a day – as are they not? – at least one large Sri Lankan family birthday party will be in progress, some two or three perhaps contending to take on the business from their father, who made a fortune by it, ranged in a line, discussing legal and financial quandaries, the aptness of their academic training, headmasters’ reports, their mountainous expenditure on tuition classes, their swimming certificates… the younger offspring keeping their eyes on the unfolding innings – or folding up, as might too often be the case.

Well may the back bar be ill lit, and pervaded with the stale fug of cigarettes; well may the propinquity of the front parlour be so cheek-by-jowl that one’s conversation is clearly audible to every man, woman and child seated therein; well may the chilly, over-punkah-wallah’d family room, on the East side, be deleterious for anyone not drinking hot soup; well may each and every room have conflicting journalistic coverage (present or archival) of two or more unrelated sporting contests performed at any given time; and well, indeed, as the hours wear on, may the assembled drivers, vagabonds and passers-by out on Queen’s Road be decidedly deterred from entrance by the hearty chuntering of much-contented, moneyed folk.

But this is The Cricket Club, which has its signposts directing travellers to Newlands, Lord’s and Eden Gardens; which has its vitrines stocked with Botham’s bat, Greg Chappell’s shoes, Wasim Akram’s shirt, and caps from every franchise on the subcontinent; which has long-sleeved jumpers worn through yeoman innings; which has its signed photographs of youthful Indian legends and hard, West Indian enforcers; which has its telegrams from national premiers to their leading batsmen; which has its clocks telling the time in cricketing capitals (sometimes as much as twice a day); which has its framed newspapers celebrating Sri Lanka’s World Cup victory; which has virtual shrines to Bradman, Warne and Muralitharan; which has its punning menus, randomly apostrophised and intermittently updated, but never – like the laws of the great game – changing too radically in the fundamentals; which has its ‘slash outside the off stump’ mural in the gents; which even has that tea towel explaining cricket to ‘a foreign visitor’ (though who has given that a second glance?). From floor to ceiling, North to South, and port to starboard, these are the glories – howsoever intangible and fleeting – of cricket, the whole cricket, and nothing but the cricket, which among lesser men exhausts the finances, patience, courage, and hope, but which among heroes so overflows the brain and impassions the heart that there is not an one among the patrons here who would not – does not – hasten in and cry, with heedless confidence: “I’ll have the ‘Punters’ Pepper Chicken, please. And a pint of Lion Larger.”

—
Also published at The Oldie

(* Bear with me, please, while I endeavour to explain what is going on here.)

.
Twelve years ago, I wrote, with considerable emotional anguish, a long novel about a war against the languages. It took place in an alternate universe, in a wordless desert, where language-soldiers had outlawed any elaborate vocabulary, and where underground forces were busy planning their counteroffensive. Interpreters sat in grammar shelters, cutting up explosive adjectives; professors of rhetoric sharpened their arguments for battle; bands of editors roamed about, smuggling subversive nouns into children’s books.

I pitched it as a ‘linguistic sci-fi thriller’ in my covering letter to the publishing houses, and, convinced that the book would mark the outbreak of my literary career, was awash with expectations for publishers’ phone calls, sizeable advances, international sales, book festivals, and weeks spent in anticipation of the day when the Secretary of the Swedish Academy would emerge from behind closed doors, blinking blearily against all the flashing cameras, and saying: ‘It is no ordinary occurrence that we should give the Nobel Prize for Literature to a first-time novelist. But this year we have made an exception!’

The first rejection letter came after a few weeks. It was rather personal. ‘Hi. Thanks for giving us the opportunity to read your manuscript… afraid it seems a little overwrought… didactic rather than imaginative… bloodless… academic… Sadly we feel it’s not really right for us.’ Letter number two was both shorter and more critical. The third was a proforma: ‘thanks but no thanks.’ All the publishers responded, though. All of them except you.

Twelve years passed – and occasionally I thought of you. I wondered what could have happened. Why had I never heard from you? Of course, I assumed that my manuscript had ended up at the bottom of a pile; or lay unattended on a shelf somewhere; or had slipped into a packing crate and been spirited away into the bowels of a distant warehouse. But I consoled myself that sometime in the future, soon, any day now, in fact, one of your interns would almost certainly happen upon the dusty bundle and think: ‘Wow! A linguistic sci-fi thriller! This is precisely what our autumn catalogue has been missing!’

But that did not happen. The years went by, and I had to start taking on whatever work I could find, if only to pay off my student loan. Receptionist in a dental clinic; window-dresser in a new and shiny shopping mall. I stopped writing.

Then – this is seven years ago, now – a friend of mine reminded me that I owed him money, and told me about a translation agency that was on the lookout for new talent. That’s exactly how he put it, ‘new talent’, and I remember I was so bowled over by the fact that anyone could think of me as a ‘talent’ of any kind that I contacted them immediately.

After a short interview and a couple of assessed translations (duly approved), I got my first real commission: a tractor manual. The regulator can be controlled by one hand and by the foot-throttle. The hydraulic jack is operated by a lever mounted on the left side of the lifting platform, easily accessible from the driver’s seat. I loved it!

The second assignment was the instruction booklet for an orange squeezer. Cut the oranges into equal halves [sic] and place one half at a time onto the centre of the pressing tray. Check that the voltage indicated on the appliance corresponds to the voltage of the mains supply before connecting. NB The cut side of the orange should be facing down. It was so easy! Finally, I felt at home, and for the first time in years I found I actually enjoyed the writing. No strings attached. Well paid. OK, maybe not well paid. But paid, at least.

It soon became clear that I was pretty good at this. Better than good, actually. I was quick and efficient, I had both precision and feeling, I was careful and thorough. Customers began to ask for me specifically; but I never took on more work than I could deal with. Naturally, this meant I could also increase my rates, doing fewer but more-prestigious jobs. A sales catalogue for an exclusive wine importer; an awards committee’s commendation for a chemistry prize; publicity materials for a big American toy company. My most recent job was a promotional film for a large consulting firm: Join us on our worldwide journey as we enter the global world in which we as global businesses have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to influence the worldwide market. Globally.

The only time I’ve ever worked for nothing was when a relative of mine came out of the woodwork to tell me, re. his impending indictment, that he’d been let down by his lawyer, and that he didn’t trust the man’s interpreter. So I helped him out. I translated his appeal for him, pro bono. Or only for a nominal fee, anyway. At any rate, I didn’t charge any more than he afford. Your honour, I hope that in your assessment of my case it will be taken into account that my mother was old and sick when it happened, and neither she nor I were aware that those were real weapons. We thought the ski-masks were just part of some fancy-dress costume. And we never knew a thing about the dye-marked banknotes in the attic!

And then, one day last week, I did hear from you. And I must admit I thought you had finally discovered my novel, and now wanted to publish it!

Instead, you asked if, at extremely short notice, I was available to translate into Swedish some kind of ‘literary essay’. I explained that I do not usually undertake ‘literary’ projects, and also that I already had a jam-packed schedule. But you did not give up so easily. You insisted that it was an emergency: one of your writers needed help. He had accepted an invitation to take part in a ‘super-prestigious’ project (your word), but the tragic death of a friend had suddenly befallen him, and now it was ‘super-urgent’ (your word again). The deadline was only a few days off, and was there any chance that I would be able to assist with this? I had total editorial independence, you assured me. And the remuneration (I enquired)? Well, of course you only had a ‘very limited budget’.

Anyway, I said yes.

What I would like to say by way of introduction to my essays on the art of writing, by A.B.C.D.E.F. Godthaab. A self-important hack bangs on about the art of writing, the state of literature, and the nature of contemporary existence in general. He talks about literary ‘form’, and ‘style’, and other such trifles; he snivels and begs before his prospective future readership; he barks abuse at his poor, browbeaten secretary.

Well, it’s not like I was nervous about the project. I knew it would be easy. After all, if I’ve done this once then I’ve done it a hundred times. You start with the first word, and you end with the last, working calmly and methodically, from the opening line through to the finish. The only real trick is to make oneself invisible.

Well, the title was obvious enough, certainly. What I would like to say by way of introduction to my essays on the art of writing. Or maybe the craft of writing. But then came the author’s name. That was slightly trickier. According to the textbooks, everything in the world is not only fixed but also carefully calibrated. There is a right word and a wrong word, and the goal is to replace the latter with the former. But this was a whole other problem altogether: Literature with a capital L, a matter of such great importance that it was apparently ‘not worth anything’… Suddenly I felt rather unsure of myself.

The name of the author was obviously some sort of code – nobody is called ‘A.B.C.D.E.F. Godthaab’ in real life. And yet ‘Godthaab’ is not only supposedly a surname, but also the ancient name of Nuuk, the capital of Greenland (est. 1728; pop. 15,000). Moreover, a rearrangement of the letters turns this surname ‘Godthaab’ into ‘Bath Goad’ – i.e. someone who encourages you to take a bath. Are we to understand this, too, in terms of some relationship to Greenland? That the city itself would like us to ‘swim’ to some alternative location? Perhaps some altogether different type of ‘swimming’ is intended. Or are we meant to recognise some allusion to the currency of Thailand (with or without inferring some kind of direct pecuniary incentive)? Or should we jumble the letters again, and extract from ‘Godthaab’ the cry of a man who suddenly appreciates the distinction between two different species: ‘Ah! Bat/Dog!’

Again and again I went back to the original text, scouring it for clues, hoping to decipher its hidden meaning. Soon enough, religious interpretations began to suggest themselves. ‘Godthaab’ is just one transpositioned H away from ‘God T[o] Ahab’ – ‘God will speak unto Ahab’, the son of Israel (just as the author of this essay intends to speak unto his readers).

But, I confess, I was at a dead end. I had progressed no further than the name of the author. Sure, I had reread the Old Testament, researched extensively the cost of package holidays to Greenland, and even made some preliminary enquiries into the anatomical structures of dogs vs. bats – but then the deadline was upon me, and all of my considerations had been wasted. The only thing left for me to do was to write you this short letter of apology. I understand how frustrating it must be for you to hold your breath for something that has not turned out as you’d expected.

Still, now we’re even.

—
Unauthorised translation, arrived at with the considerable Swedish-English assistance of Google Translate and additional editorial contributions from Madelaine Carlander. None of the aforementioned to be held responsible … etc. Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s original can be found in Multiples: 12 Stories in 18 Languages by 61 Authors (ed. Adam Thirlwell), where it is, in itself, a translation of the work of no fewer than six preceding authors.