The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje Read Free Book Online

on my open palm. He moved on, picked up some slaked lime from a cache and combined it with slivers of areca nut he had in a jute bag, and handed the mixture to Cassius.
    Within minutes we were proceeding along that modestly lit path chewing betel. We were familiar with the mild street intoxicant. And as Mr Daniels had pointed out, it was safer for Ramadhin than smoking a cane chair. ‘If you go to a wedding, they sometimes add a sliver of gold to the cardamom and lime paste.’ He gave us a small hoard of these ingredients, along with some dehydrated tobacco leaves, which we decided to save for our predawn strolls, when we could spit the red fluid over the railings into the rushing sea or down into the darkness of the foghorns. The three of us walked with Mr Daniels along the various paths. We had been at sea for days, and the range of colours had been limited to white and grey and blue, save for a few sunsets. But now, in this artificially lit garden, the plants exaggerated their greens and blues and extreme yellows, all of them dazzling us. Cassius asked Mr Daniels for more details about poisons. We were hoping he might tell us about a herb or a seed that could overpower an unlikeable adult, but Mr Daniels would say nothing about such things.
    We left the garden and returned through the blackness of the hold. When we passed the mural of naked women, Cassius once again asked, ‘What is that , Uncle?’ Then we climbed the metal ladder back to deck level. It was more difficult going up. Mr Daniels was almost a flight above us, and by the time we got to the top he was outside smoking a beedi that was rolled in white paper rather than a brown leaf. He stood with it cupped in his left hand and seemed suddenly keen to lecture us about palms from all over the world. He imitated how they stood and how they swayed, depending on heritage or breed, how they would bend with the wind in their submissiveness. He kept showing us the various palm postures until he had us laughing. Then he offered us the cigarette and demonstrated how to inhale it. Cassius had been eyeing it, but Mr Daniels gave it first to me and the beedi went back and forth among us.
    ‘Unusual beedi,’ Cassius said slowly.
    Ramadhin took a second puff and said, ‘Do the palm trees again, Uncle!’ And Mr Daniels proceeded to distinguish for us more of the various postures. ‘This of course is the talipot, the umbrella palm,’ he said. ‘You get your toddy from it, and jaggery. She moves this way.’ Then he imitated a royal palm from the Cameroons, which grew in freshwater swamps. Then something from the Azores, followed by a slender-trunked one from New Guinea, his arms becoming its elongated fronds. He compared how they shifted in the wind, some fussily, some with just a sidelong twist of the trunk, so they could face the strongest winds with their narrowest edge.
    ‘Aerodynamics … very important. Trees are smarter than humans. Even a lily is better than a human. Trees are like whippets …’
    We were laughing and laughing at all the poses he struck. But suddenly the three of us ran away from him. We screamed as we raced through the women’s badminton semi-finals, and leapt cannonballing, with all our clothes on, into the swimming pool. We even got out and dragged a few deckchairs back in with us. It was the popular hour, and mothers with infants were trying to avoid us. We released all the breath from our bodies and sank to the bottom and stood there waving our arms softly like Mr Daniels’s palm trees, wishing he could see us.

The Turbine Room
     
    WE NEEDED TO stay up to witness what took place on the ship late at night, but we were already exhausted from waking before sunrise. Ramadhin proposed we sleep in the afternoons, as we had done as children. At boarding school we had scorned these afternoon naps, but now we saw that they might be useful. However, there were problems. Ramadhin was billeted next to a cabin where, he claimed, a couple were