Free The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje Page A

no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves.

The Girl
     
    IF ANYONE APPEARED to be the most powerless person on the ship it was the girl named Asuntha, and it was only gradually that we became aware of her. She seemed to own just a faded green dress. It was all she wore, even during the storms. She was deaf, and that made her seem even more frail and alone. Someone at our table wondered how she had managed to pay for her passage. We watched her once, exercising on a trampoline, and when she was in mid-air, with all that silent space around her, we felt we were witnessing a different person. But as soon as she stopped and walked away, you were not conscious of any agility or strength in her. She was pale, even for a Sinhalese girl. And slight.
    She was scared of water. If she was walking past the pool we’d taunt her by threatening to shove handfuls at her, until Cassius had a change of heart and stopped our doing it. We glimpsed a little mercy in Cassius then, and noticed he began to watch over her shyly from that point on. Sunil, The Hyderabad Mind from the Jankla Troupe, seemed to be looking after her. He sat beside her at meals, at the table where Emily also sat, and he’d glance over to the Cat’s Table, horrified at the amount of noise being made by our group.
    Asuntha had a specific way of listening. She could hear only with her right ear, and then only if someone spoke clearly and directly into it. In this way she would take the tremor of air and interpret it into sound, then words. You could not communicate except by coming intimately close. During lifeboat drills a steward took her aside to explain rules and procedures, while the rest of us were told the same information from a loudspeaker. It felt there were barriers all around her.
    It was chance and nothing more that Emily was sitting at the same table as the girl. And if Emily was the glittering public beauty, this girl was the reclusive one. Gradually they seemed to become friends, and we began to see an intensity in their conversations – the whispers, the holding of hands. It was Emily as a very different soul, when she was with the deaf girl.
     

 
    A THIN WASH of morning rain on the decks was perfect. Between Exit B and Exit C was a twenty-yard stretch unhindered by deckchairs. We raced towards it in our bare feet and let ourselves go, sliding along the slippery wood till we crashed into the railing or a door being suddenly opened by a passenger coming out to check on the weather. Cassius felled the ancient Professor Raasagoola Chaudharibhoy during one record-setting projection of his body. The distance could be improved during deck scrubbing. Once the layer of soap was down and not yet mopped, we could slide twice the distance, overturning pails, colliding into sailors. Even Ramadhin participated. He was discovering that more than anything he loved the sea wind in his face. He would stand for hours at the prow, his gaze locked into the distance, hypnotised by something out there or held in some thought.
     
    If anyone wished to capture the daily movements on our ship, the most accurate method might be to create a series of time-lapse criss-crossings, depicted in different colours, to reflect the daily loitering. There was the path Mr Mazappa took after waking at noon, and the stroll the Moratuwa ayurvedic made when free of his duties with Sir Hector. There were the two dog walkers, Hastie and Invernio; the slow perambulation to and from the Delilah Lounge by Flavia Prins and her bridge-playing friends; the Australian circling on skates at dawn; the Jankla Troupe’s official and unofficial activities; as well as the three of us bursting all over the place like freed mercury: stopping at the pool, then the ping-pong table, watching a piano class with Mr Mazappa in the ballroom, a small