The cat's table

I entered a bathroom full of mirrors and suddenly saw fleeting images of myself, almost naked and covered in black oil, appearing with a brown face and spiky hair, nothing more. There was a mischievous boy there, a character from one of "The Jungle Book" stories, his eyes watching me, white as two lamps. That was the first reflection or image I remember of myself. It was my image in my youth, which I clung to for years, a stunned person, in the process of formation, not yet becoming anyone or anything. I realized the baron was at the edge of the mirror frame watching me. He had a caring look. It seemed as if he understood what I was seeing in the mirror, as if he had done it himself once. He threw me a towel and ordered me to clean my body and put on the rest of my clothes that he brought in his sports bag. In the early fifties, an eleven-year-old boy boards a ship departing from Sri Lanka heading to Britain, crossing the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, witnessing the ports of Aden, Abha, Jeddah, and Port Said. During mealtime, he sits at the "Cat's table" — the furthest table from the captain’s table — and also sits with a group of "adults" with strange personalities, and two boys: Cassis and Ram Al-Din. The boys venture freely on the ship like liquid mercury, closely knowing the rich and the thieves, scientists and hermits, and they pursue the prisoner who is only allowed out at midnight, exposing themselves to an unknown danger. A journey of storms and suns that will stay in their imagination for a lifetime, they will doubt its occurrence, but the strange characters they encountered taught them things that would shape their personalities forever. They boarded the ship as children and disembarked as grown-ups.