cat table

Author's name: Michael Ondaatje

“I walked into a bathroom full of mirrors and suddenly saw fleeing images of myself, half-naked and covered in black oil. I looked like I had only a brown face and spiky hair. There was a naughty boy there, someone from one of the stories in “The Jungle Book.” His eyes watched me, white as two torches. It was the first reflection or image I could remember of myself. It was the image of my youth that I had clung to for years, a dazed person in the making, not yet someone or something. I became aware of the Baron at the edge of the mirror frame, watching me. He had a considerate look. He seemed to understand what I was seeing in the mirror, as if he had done so once. He threw me a towel and told me to clean myself up and put on the rest of my clothes, which he had brought in his gym bag.” * In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy boards a steamer leaving Sri Lanka Going to Britain, it crosses the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. The boy witnesses the ports of Aden, Abha, Jeddah, and Port Said. At mealtimes, he sits at the "cat's table"—the furthest table from the captain's. Also sitting at it are a group of "adults" with eccentric personalities, and two boys: Cassius and Rameddine. The boys venture aboard the ship, free as liquid mercury, knowing the rich and the thieves, the scholars and the reclusive, and tracking down the prisoner who is not allowed out until midnight, exposing themselves to danger of which they are unaware. It is a journey of storms and suns that will remain in their imaginations for the rest of their lives. They will doubt its occurrence, but the strange characters they have encountered have taught them things that will shape their personalities forever. They boarded the ship as children and disembarked as adults.