Egg-Coffee and Other Rituals
Egg-Coffee and Other Rituals
Susan moved between the kitchen and the table, her frock swishing softly, damp at the waist from the morning’s exertions. The aroma of dhal curry hung in the air, mingling with the sharper tang of woodsmoke and coconut oil. She wielded her long-handled spoon like a conductor’s baton, orchestrating the meal while keeping one eye on the children’s plates, and the other on Thomas, who was standing and watching their children with arms crossed, his foot tapping lightly against the leg of the table.
Thomas, as always, watched everything — the children’s postures, the speed of their chewing, the quantity of food taken and left. “The boy needs to eat,” he said, not raising his voice, but directing the words at Susan. “He’s growing.”
Susan didn’t answer. She knew that he understood from her silence that she agreed. The radio read the news in a monotone in the local language of Sinhala. She leaned over her daughter and gently nudged the plate forward. “Just two more bites, Rekha,” she whispered, tucking a strand of hair behind the girl’s ear. The child lowered her eyes and picked at the slice of bread with woodapple jam without much interest.
Denzil, meanwhile, was already on his second helping, wolfing down the buttered bread and jam as if afraid someone might snatch the plate away. The boy’s appetite made Susan both glad and uneasy — glad, because it pleased Thomas, but uneasy because it highlighted the quiet refusal of the other two. The younger one, the boy, always chewed slowly, watching his father the way a mongoose watches a cobra — ready, wary.
On some mornings, Thomas made what he called egg-coffee for Denzil. He cracked a raw egg into a cup of strong, sweetened coffee, beat it briskly with a fork until it foamed, and handed it to the boy with a kind of rough pride. “Good for your strength,” he would say. “Better than all that powdered milk we buy from Lesters.” A bottle of Marmite was on the table. It was always there like the butter dish and the MD woodapple jam bottle.
On the table, too, stood the orange bottle of Haliborange — a sticky, sweet multivitamin syrup given to children. Denzil’s eyes lingered on it, knowing that before he left for school, his father would measure out a tablespoon and hold it out to him — the gesture brisk, almost ritualistic, as though strength could be poured out in bright orange doses.
That year, talk of insurrection ran like a quiet tremor through the country. There had been a bank robbery in Monaragala, and some said the rebels were hiding in the jungles. The newspapers reported arrests, university students taken away in vans, sometimes never heard from again. At dinner, Thomas said the rice queues and shortages were the price of having too many mouths and too few ideas.
Susan never replied. She cooked, served, and managed the household’s moods like a servant might handle fine porcelain — knowing how easily things chipped.
But she watched the children carefully. Watched the daughter’s silence, the younger son’s fearful eyes, and Denzil’s hunger — not just for food, but for something unnameable, something that made him gulp his father’s egg-coffee like it might fill a different kind of emptiness.
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