The Defending Champions” a short story from “Rainbows in Braille” – A collection of short stories – By Elmo Jayawardena
This is a story, fictitious and with no reference to anyone. Of course if it angers someone, then perhaps the cap might be fitting.
“Ramaneee!”
The yell comes from somewhere upstairs and Ramani scrambles out of the kitchen wiping her palms on her buttocks, the hands are wet, needs wiping, she’s been cutting cucumber for the Madam’s salad breakfast.
“Bring my things, bring my things, I am running late,” yells the Madam on fast forward, similar decibels as the name call and then adds the mandatory order, “find my gym card, find my gym card, I don’t know where the hell it is!”
Ramani now having transferred her cucumber wetness to her shrivelled posterior grabs the Lance Armstrong-type water bottle and fills it with the precise instructed measurements, one half cold and the other half warm water to make it lukewarm. This happens to be the latest gimmick going around on liquids, half cold and half hot, supposed to burn the unwanted fat. A new manthara had been discovered in the slimming gimmicks of impossible possibles and is spreading around the coffee morning circuit where Defending Champions gather.
“Ramaneee, hurry up, it’s time to leave, where’s my salad?”
All in one go and the minion domestic Ramani goes ‘multi-tasking’ like they teach you in modern-day management schools. Water in the Armstrong container, gym card found from where ever it was hiding, fresh face-towel to wipe the sweat while mauling the machines. The cucumber concoction is served in a take-away plastic box with a plastic fork to munch as this Defending Champion is chauffeured in her Hubby’s company car.
Ramani breaths a sigh of relief as the vehicle moves out. The pentathlon is over, in the evening it is the decathlon with the entire family – to be at their beck and call.
It is from the Queen’s Court condominium to the Planet Fitness gymnasium they drive. This is where the once golden semi-oldies gather at nine in the morning to begin their daily workout. Bar none these Champions are all ‘born-again’ fitness freaks who have reluctantly arrived at the forty mark and ‘U’ turned hopefully seeking the vital statistics of their former days of glory. They are doing their utmost to defend themselves against the younger generation competition of mini-skirted new kids on the block, the secretaries and the personal assistant types who have ascended into the limelight with nothing but age and certain ‘karma sutra’ tactics to their credit. A fight has to be given, though the odds seem slim to a truthful onlooker. It is paramount to defend the once held titles before the curtain falls and the once-upon-a-time Prima Donnas become permanently pastured.
The dress-code could be anything from the Wimbledon center court to what they wear in ski slopes, warmer the better; more sweat means more loss of weight. The fitness kit is certainly adequate to compete in the best arenas where they have the world’s best sponsored sports.
The pink line in the cotton socks matches the Reebok running shoes. The Yonex shorts bought a size too small for imagination clings on tight and blends well with the Nike top from Odels. Of course the latest with the “just do it” tick that Michael Jordan made popular. Then there is the Casio watch, capable of splitting time to one hundredth of a second strapped to time the two kilometer treadmill crawl. This is boasted at the dinner table to the not-so-interested hubby boy as a Marion Jones sprint, of course sans the drugs. A Nadal type colourful headband keeps in place the Sony headphones that are belting Eagles and their ‘Tequila Sunrise’. The show is about to begin. Out goes the Defending Champion for the morning workout, age forty something and the weight a ten plus kilos over the limit. As for the mountains and the valleys, it is all one plateau now; the top guns are still there it is only the mid-riff that has expanded into an embarrassing thirty six. This is a scenario as common as grass-blades on a lawn. The “hit-paraders of the past” who gather outside the many and more mushrooming fitness parlours that convert well fattened Bette Midlers to perfectly sculptured Venus de Milos.
At least that is the promise.
It’s five of them in the group, all well established Defending Champions.
“You really have slimmed Honey!!” Seeta greets our cucumber Patsy as she gets off the car.
“You look fit as a fiddle,” comes the instant return compliment. God knows how hard Seeta’s fiddler hubby would have to work to make any music off that old fiddle.
“Look at your skin, how smooth it is!”
The comment is graciously reciprocated in a matching make-believe note, “look at your waist, so slim, like an ice skater’s.”
The exchange is normal, the casual morning talk. It did not matter that the skin was not cured overnight by some fairy Godmother’s intervention or that the waist simply melted from a baker’s girth to that of an ice-rink ballerina from one sunrise to another, as if such things were ever possible.
One has to praise to get a return compliment. It certainly is the norm among Defending Champions.
A car turns in, a sports type in tomato red with the top down; self driven by another champion. It is Violet, Vio for short, who parks and opens the low slung half door and descends with a flash of knickers under a flared mini skirt that bellows out of well fattened legs.
“Three down and two to come, they are always late aney,” one or two arrows of discontentment must be shot at random before the team is set to full complement. There is a quiver-full, anytime to pull and shoot the absentee purely for the perverse pleasure, rightly or wrongly.
“She has to call him every morning,” Vio knows the story; the whole world will know the story.
“She has to wait till that old fool leaves home,” the arrows do hit the mark on some illicit romance of one of the compatriots yet to come.
“She is nuts,” adds cucumber, “that fellow wags his wand everywhere, tried me too, with his smooth you are Preeni’s friend talk.”
“Thinks he has a magic wand and everyone is queuing for it,” Patsy loads another arrow. “Only our idiot thinks she owns the patent!”
“What magic wand? Must be more like a burnt-out matchstick.
A midnight blue Cefiro comes in with a withered family driver at the wheel. It stops at the gate and allows two rag-tag people to pass.
A young boy in tattered shorts and a dirty sleeveless vest with a Coca-Cola print pushes his crippled father in a wheelchair. He turns his head and glances at the fitness palace and the waiting ladies. The old man sits crumpled up, folded along with his worldly belongings, crutches on his lap as if to tell the world he can’t walk. The rickety old chair rolls on warped wheels.
“Donated by the Lions” announces the back of the chair.
The Cefiro enters the yard and the driver stops and jumps out to open the door. Preeni and Millie get off with their “not so sorry” apologies.
“Traffic was terrible, and to add to that some idiot had rammed his lorry into a three wheeler and that blocked us for almost half a mile,” the matchstick owner gives her excuse.
Millie grins and flashes them a ‘you know the score smile.’ Lorry and three-wheeler accident; they all know Preeni’s fables. The Champions are well aware that the delay was no three-wheeler lorry bash on the road but more to do with hanging on the telephone talking sweet nothings with that rotten ‘matchstick’ Romeo of hers.
Preeni’s morning melody was nobody’s secret. Phone love was better than no love at all. It’s her much needed ignition and the flame certainly lasted the whole day. She had long lost any claims to what the world calls beauty. It was simply the bags of money that trimmed and toned her body to make her somewhat sexy. Even so, she could never be more than a far off tenth runner-up in any gathering that sprouted average beauty. Preeni looked more like a vintage Mercedes that had been well maintained. Her team mates were no better, no less either. All of them put together were nowhere near the poise and svelte that the present-day younger ones possessed.
But, that is another story.
After all, these are the Defending Champions, each of them being someone who ruled and reigned in royal fashion in the yesteryear. Of course the roles have now changed, certainly not for the better, but for a perpetual worse that keeps worsening as the years roll on and the inches become increased in unwanted places. Any gimmick is worth to change the course of the unacceptable disaster. The decay must be halted and the spell prolonged in the ever so important limelight. That’s the motto of the modern-day Defending Champion. Get better; be better, even if the tale is only a ‘fair and not so lovely’ fancy in everyone’s mind.
So who cares about little matchsticks and the waving of lousy magic wands, as long as there is a little delinquent diversion? Who cares whether it is a bandicoot or a hic-meeya? So long as the few and far between homemade nocturnal nourishments are supplemented by a princely paramour who promises some extra attention and maybe some possible illicit action playing hide-and-seek.
The Fitto-Boys are all there in the gym, the Planet Fitness muscle makers, Sisyphus shoulders and iratu legs, possibly a few faded ex-body builders who had managed to build their paan and parrippu muscles in some run of the mill weightlifting club. They are the experts who will transform flab and fat to sinewy muscle and do the sculpturing to re-produce the Venus de Milos. The Fitto-Boys stand at the entrance in their lily white shorts and Tee shirts brandishing “Planet Fitness” waiting for the morning rush of Defending Champions. Already some of the machines are groaning under the weight of over-weights who had started early.
The regulars are all there, sweating away, including the ever-present Lieutenant-Colonel who they call ‘Donkey Serenade’. He is labouring like an old Sherman tank, one degree uphill on his treadmill.
“I love him,” quips Patsy as they enter and see the puffing ex-military man.
“That Poosari moustache and the Mudalali bandiya,” wonder what army he is from?”
“Must be from the Salvation Army dear,” answers Millie in ridicule.
“He reminds me of those South Indian kovil-keepers,” adds Patsy. “He only needs three white bars on his forehead and an indigo pottu to make it complete, Colonel in the army? My foot, he must have been pushing a pen and hiding in Colombo.”
The Champions spread out, each with her temporary tormentor, the Planet Fitness Personal Trainer. These boys know their business. They are paid to compliment and agree with anything the Defending Champions say to ensure their pupils come back for more. It’s almost like those cathouses famous for whore’s groans. Make sure the customer comes back to hear more moans.
This is what it is all about, the gym junky fairy tale. Balding hubby makes it to the higher echelons of management where free club memberships are part of the deal. Ideal for the eroding once upon a time ‘priceless’ spouse to get to the fitness factories and bring some stature to her now ‘spice-less’ frame.
“Anil, where do I start today?” Anil is one of the Sisyphus shoulders and iratu legs.
He is ready with his clipboard and pen to jot down and follow the exercise routine. Anil knows that the bullshit has to be there, the sheet must be marked, of course with added repetitions at each machine to make the score look good. She knows it; he knows it; and the secret is shared sacredly with the clipboard and the pen.
“Let’s start with the stepper Madam, one hundred times and then a two minute break and another hundred.”
Anil counts and it is Cucumber on the machine. He juggles the numbers so that at sixty seven she has leapt to a hundred.
“Well done, Madam, two minute break and we go again.”
She is happy, Sisyphus is happy and the clipboard is happy.
A few feet away Preeni of matchstick fame is peddling away for dear life on a stationery bicycle. All pumped up and nowhere to go. She looks at herself in the wide mirror and grimaces; Preeni is riding Tour de France and climbing the Pyrenees. The wheels spin at breakneck speed as the resistance is at minimum. Her Planet Boy times and gives her a well done call with a broad smile and a ‘give me five’ on the palm as she reaches the ten minute mark.
Again, the clipboard is marked, great start for a great day.
Seeta hits the rowing machine with gusto plus whim and vigor.
“You do this right Madam you will have abs like shrink-wrapped sausages,” promises her Sisyphus.
Seeta takes a breath and tucks in her tummy and imagines Keells’ products bulging out of her 34 inch midriff, a six pack like the juicy sausages that Aravinda de Silva swallowed on roadside billboards after Sri Lanka won the Cricket World Cup.
“Time to start,” says Iratu Sisyphus.
Arms pull the cable handles, which represent the oars. It is connected to the resisting wheel that spins depicting waves and water. Seeta pulls and the wheel spins while her legs pump up and down on the flat pedals like pistons in a Tata bus engine. One, two, three, four the count goes on, thirty-five, forty-seven, fifty-nine and the hundred comes in double quick time. As the count increases, her silent grunts at the beginning rises to a Sharapova shriek that annoys the entire gym. Row, row, grunt and shriek and row again, the routine is almost a replica of those Royal Thomian ‘Michaels’ who row on the Beira Lake, flexing muscles in their pencil thin kayaks.
The other two are on an exercise routine, its yoga time; palms together, knees tucked to knock and eyes closed. It is bending and kissing the knee, a subdued aspect of the suriya-namaskar. Unfortunately only the instructor does the proper thing and certainly not the Defending Champions. Yes of course their faces touch the knees, but it is more like the head looking down and the knees getting bent to meet the head and all this gets a great counterfeit cheer from the Yoga Sisyphus who has to earn his keep.
As for bending backward, it is supposed to make them look like horseshoes. Forget it, these are forty plus willows and their bending days are long over, now it is more like a lean to the rear with the face facing the ceiling rather than the wall behind as Sisyphus demonstrated.
Still, it is yoga time. Good for the soul and great for the ego and the ‘pranee’ and ‘branee’ stuff with the breathing is excellent medicine to keep the sinuses at bay.
The tour takes the entire hour, machine to machine and break to break.
“I love your cycling Preeni you should enter a road race.”
“You bend like a cane dear, you too Millie, almost like Nadia Comaneci” the usual trite from Cucumber.
“The rate you go on the stepper, you could climb Sigiriya in one go.”
Nothing like compliments; that’s for sure, especially among the Defending Champions, soul-mates or for the want of a better descriptive phrase, let us call them comrades in distress.
The Lieutenant-Colonel with the Poosari Moustache and the Mudalali Bandiya joins the champions at the water fountain. The man from the Donkey Serenade, so called in jest, behind his back.
“An army of lions led by a donkey,” they always laugh of him in witticism. “No wonder the war never stops, what else with fools like this leading the battles.”
That’s why they named him Donkey Serenade; donkey leader of the lion army fighting tigers.
“Anyone playing Bridge today? Or is it golf?” The Colonel brays in his military baritone.
“Not today, not today,” chorus some, and Millie takes the lead role, “Sorry Colonel, it is girls lunch-date at the Paradisco.”
Donkey baritone is shot to smithereens at first charge. But he is amused and mutters under his breath with a farcical face as he moves on. “Girls, sure they are,” and wonders why women always refer to themselves as girls, be they as old as the hills and look like sun scorched deserts.
“True,” he mutters to himself, “true they are aiming at youth, but they sure have shot beyond it a long time ago.” That is all military jargon for the Lieutenant-Colonel, about aiming and firing and missing targets.
Donkey Serenade goes away to rest before his afternoon golf or if it rains it would be Bridge at the Club. Some way to pass the time, maybe find an audience to talk of the imaginary battles that he fought in his military days. He takes real good care to conceal the truth. Many were the medals and promotions he pretends he won in the long suffering northern battles that he never fought.
One has to have something to bray about at Bridge tables and Golf Clubs. That certainly was the norm. Brass and braid and mock battles fitted in fine.
They meet at noon at the Paradisco Club. Outside the gate is a blind man and his blind woman sharing their leaf wrapped lunch. The grimy pavement where they sit is their table. Someone had been generous, they have something to eat. The woman, withered and wasted, raises a bath kata to her toothless mouth and hears the world with sightless eyes, whilst the husband awaits his turn, scratching his mottled skin.
Just outside the Paradisco Club.
The place is spacious and tastefully decorated and generously air-conditioned. It is also a non-smoking place and a strict vegetarian restaurant. At Paradisco Club they have taken this ‘green-green’ business to such an extent that even the customers looked like cows. This is the lunch haunt of the Defending Champions twice a week; garden salads and mushroom soup for Tuesday and penne pasta with basil leaves on Thursday; always with green tea to wash off the toxins.
“Girls, Girls hand-phones off please,” reminds Millie. They do not want their juicy conversations disturbed by trivia that spills out of their Motorolas. This was agreed sometime back as one of the five phones always rang disturbing the all important gossip at the lunch table.
They all agreed to keep the world silent whilst they ate and babbled.
This worked well, no disturbance, Motorolas are silent.
“She could have made it to Oxford if not for that roster,” Preeni defends her daughter who barely made the grades to go overseas for her international education.
“God knows what he was up to; my one is so very innocent.”
Everyone nods ‘Amen’. They all know how innocent Preeni Junior is. The parables are almost mythological, for one of that age. The love stories floating around of Preeni junior are straight from Mount Olympus, divine romances. The Champions listen to their friend’s rattle feeling almost sorry for her.
“Now she is going to Latrobe, it is better there, almost like Oxford.”
“Amen”
“Must be better than Oxford,” mutters Seeta and gulps the words.
“We tried the Crescat but they are asking for the moon,” Millie changes into property talk, that’s a new fad; everyone is scrambling to buy high rise apartments.
“That fat fellow who sells flats, he is cute, but the rascal wouldn’t give an inch.”
“One of these days there will be a bomb in Colombo and then he’ll have to poke his Crescat up his arse, including the lobby, the gym and the car park.”
The food comes, it must be Tuesday; it is garden salad and mushroom soup.
They talk through the clatter of cutlery; mouths munching and words spitting out in nonstop banter.
“She didn’t divorce him,” Soup finished, salad on folk and Patsy on stage.
“He is the one who ditched her for that scraggy secretary of his.” Patsy knows the entire script of the latest soap opera concerning one of their outer-circle champion friends.
“She had gone to his office and played the merry devil, caught them red-handed doing a Clinton under the desk. Pulled her by the hair and slapped her.”
“Which hair?” they all roll in fits of laughter.
The green tea is served in funny half-cups.
“Why can’t we Sri Lankans have a nice time and enjoy life?” This is Vio of the sports car and flashing knickers. Her hubby is well knitted with foreign buyers and factories that represent the global garment industry; bald and short and rich, the latter compensates for all. Well!! Nothing wrong with that and as for want, Vio has none, except to get the layers of fat off her log like legs.
“Give them their goddamn Eelam and we can have peace,” the tragedy of the nation is brought out, it is almost a compulsion in any conversation, even among Defending Champions.
“For that matter, who wants to go to Jaffna? Would you? As long as they allow us to go to Trinco and stay at the Anglers’ Club and get to eat their heavenly food,” adds Patsy.
“They can have that too if they want,” Millie adds. “We can always go to Galle and eat baked crab at the Light House.”
“Hope the Air Force bombs the shit out of them,” Preeni purrs.
“One thing we must admit, our moustache has taken the country by storm,” Seeta comes with a new concept. “He is a lot wiser than we thought; a lot shrewder too, much better than the bunglers we had before.”
The lunch is over and the Champions head home. The afternoon nap is also a must. The children will come and the children will go; international school and international living; cared and fed by the Ramanis and the Anulas of the kitchen clan and taken about by the Piyatissas and the Jayatissas of the driving crew. That part has very little to do with Defending Champions other than to brag about how good is Latrobe.
The afternoon passes, there are phone-calls to make, chit-chatting and gossiping to update the day’s events. There are always other also-rans from the Defending Brigade who similarly have nothing to do and love to hang on the phone.
What happened at the Bridge Cub or at Water’s Edge needs to be discussed? Who won and who lost in anything and everything matters to the Defending Champions; losses and gains in the opinion poll define the thin line of superiority they crave for. The rungs of the ladder to the top are steep, like in a snakes and ladders game; as much as you ascend, the serpents are there too, with open mouth, to traduce you with fog horn clarity, waiting for that one wrong move to bring you crashing down. It is indeed a hard task to be a Champion. There is fierce competition with each other for supremacy, rarely fairly but at most times, very very unfairly.
The sky darkens and the last lap of the day is about to begin. It is menu planning and dinner difficulties; Ramani this and Ramani that and Anula come and Anula go or Selva run to the Pizza Hut or Tissa bring the Chinese take-away. That is house work and drudgery for the Defending Champion.
Beyond what was said there is very little to do in a day in the life of a Defending Champion. Like Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich. Old Solly would have done well in Sri Lanka instead of Siberia replacing Ivan with one of the Defending Champions to narrate what takes place from a sunrise to a sun set. Write about her gym, the lunch, the chat, the nap and the phone calls and the meal arrangements. That’s a day; how demanding and how tiring and so full of unavoidable stress.
The hubby boy gets home late, war weary after his hard day’s work at making money and fighting fate. There’s so much to take care of, the world is aflame and the dollars dance the ‘hip-hop’ day to day and needs to be watched lest your inherited empires crumble like Rome did. One false move and you lose everything. The markets and the shares do swing and jingo and need constant monitoring. Watch them like hawks or like an umpire watching run-outs. No third man on a screen here to clear the doubts and give the ‘out’ or ‘not out’. It is all on poor Hubby Boy’s not so broad shoulders to weather the storms.
That is why he comes home late.
Then there is the TV and the Scotch or the Bacardi to sip, eat and sleep and only sleep.
The day rolls to an end. Life goes on, another day is done.
Tomorrow would be the same; gym-card lost and cucumber salad; train with the machines and then maybe Bridge or Golf with Donkey Serenade.
Mini Glossary
Mudalali Bandiya – a fat stomach of a prosperous man
Bath Kata – mouthful of rice
Poosari – a holy man
Hic-meeya – a very small rat
Pottu – dot on forehead
Paan and Parrippu – bread and dhal
Manthara – gimmick
