A Disobedient Girl (10 page)

“Were the nuns good to you?” she asks.

“Yes, they were. They treated me like a special student, teaching me a little bit more than they taught the other girls. Maybe they wanted me to become a novice, even though I was Buddhist.” I hadn’t gone to temple when I lived at the convent; I had prayed with those nuns. I hadn’t minded that, I tell her. Wherever we kneel, we look toward the gods, after all, and what does it matter by what name they are known? And hadn’t I grown up to learn the truth of it? To watch the Catholic fishermen visit the temples and the kovils as well as the churches before they set sail, the same way the Buddhist fishermen did? Kneeling and praying to every deity, asking for guidance and help from them all?

She laughs. “My sir and madam went to a Sathya Sai Baba center,” she tells me. “But they also had a Buddhist shrine and sometimes went to the novena at the All Saints’ Church in Borella. I have gone there with madam. I liked that church. She used to buy me candles made of melted wax. She said those were better, because other people had already prayed over them before they were melted down.”

“That is the way it is with all of us, I suppose,” I say. I, too, had sometimes lit candles and recited Pansil instead of the Catholic prayers while kneeling in the pews. But I had been a good novice. “The nuns were very upset when my father came one day to take me home for good. He had found a prospect for me, he told them, and he had to do his duty by his wife and marry his girl properly.”

“Was he handsome, your husband?” the girl asks, fancy in her eyes.

I shake my head. “No, he was not handsome. He was quite ordinary, but big.” I bulk up my arms to show her and turn my mouth down in a grimace; that makes her giggle. “Big, like this. It wouldn’t have mattered, what he looked like, or that he was low caste, from
the fishing village. My father was low caste too, but he was a good man and he was devoted to my mother. My husband was not like him. He had some money when he first met my father and arranged the marriage; he even owned a big boat, unlike most of the fishermen in our village. Later, he pawned most of my furniture, my mother’s furniture, to buy a motor and a freezer, but he was not a good businessman. He drank. And he didn’t care for me.”

“Couldn’t you make him love you?” she asks.

The question reminds me again of her youth, her experience limited to beautiful women and handsome actors who overcome all odds on television screens. I give up on the idea of burdening her with confidences, for how would I explain the ill will inside my husband’s house? The dank misery that sullied the curtains I hung up, the way even incense could not drive out the spite that pressed down on us all?

“No,” I tell her. “I could not. Some things are the way they are, there is no help for it, there is no reason, they are as they are.” We are both silent for a while. “Tell me, where are you going now?” I ask, at last.

“I’m going to a convent in Hatton,” she says. “They said that’s where I came from. I was an orphan and I lived there. People come there for servants sometimes, I hear. Somebody came for me. When we got to Colombo, the madam’s mother came to live with them for a little bit to train me, but after that I was fine. I don’t remember the convent, though.” She touches a mole on her neck.

“Are you going to stay there after the baby is born?”

“I don’t know. The next-door servant said that sometimes girls come back after they go up-country like this, but madam said that nobody will want me now, not with my history, she said.” She looks down and smoothes the fingers of one hand with the other, over and over.

She has nice hands. There is just enough space between her fingers that they look trustworthy, like they are ready for work, but neat work, like embroidery and smocking. My own hands are callused and scratched from all the sorting and drying of fish. And children, too. Children age hands somehow, even when they are not near their
mothers. As if their very being requires draining what is tensile and soft from our skins. Like the way kites cut your hands, and cut and cut until you let them go and you fall away, resigned at last to simply witnessing their flight.

“I am afraid,” she says, speaking to her hands; her mouth trembles.

I do not want to curse her with untruths, so I take her hand in mine and hold it. I wish I had a home to offer her, or some advice as to how she could make a life for herself, but I don’t. She is an orphan; there is no place for an orphan to go to for help, except to strangers.

T
hey had told her that nobody would ever want her again. That’s what happened to little whores like her, Mrs. Vithanage had said. She had said it calmly and without acrimony, so it had sounded true. What had she meant by nobody, though, Latha wondered; did it mean no other family, or no other man? These were not the same things. One she could live with, but the other was an entirely different proposition.

She knelt in the pew and mouthed prayers as she tried to imagine life without a man. All she could see was Leela by a parlor window with her might-as-well-be-white-on-white embroidery. Sister Helen-Marie passed by to receive communion, and now Latha’s picture of Leela was joined by a retinue of praying nuns in gray and white habits. No, it just would not do to live that way. There would be no hope of orange serviettes in this place. Ever. She sighed, and Sister Francesca, in the pew beside her, looked up and across at her disapprovingly. Latha sighed again, louder this time, and the two nuns in the pew in front of hers, she couldn’t remember their names, tightened their shoulders and bent further into their reverence. Latha contemplated a third sigh, but prayers ended and she was relieved from having to demonstrate that her soul had not yet been saved and, what’s more, that she had no intention of letting it be salvaged now and forevermore, amen. She made the sign of the cross over her chest—which was a gesture she actually liked, the grace of it, and the fact that she
felt that it was she herself, not any God wherever he may be, who was doing the blessing—and stood up.

Through one of the arched doorways bordered by the dark, deep cups with their icy cold holy water, she could see Leela beckoning to her. Well, it must have been her fervent prayers that had done it, for Leela had a letter in one hand.

“Where is it from?” Latha asked, stopping by the door and helping herself to some dabs of the holy water, hoping for good news and also wanting to prolong the thrill of not knowing.

“I don’t know.”

“Read the envelope, Leelakka!” She had amalgamated the two words after the first couple of tries and now Leela Akka was simply Leelakka.

“I can’t read.”

Latha heaved that last sigh and took the letter from Leela. It was postmarked Colombo, and the writing was Thara’s. “It’s from Thara,” she said, feeling nonplussed yet curious. What would Thara want to write to her about? In all the hours she’d spent waiting for something—a messenger, a telephone call, a letter, a visitor—she had pictured only one person: Gehan. Only he had it in him to forgive her. Mr. Vithanage did too, but he would never step beyond the requirements of his wife, and his wife required loyalty. He had been kind to Latha, once, she knew he had; somewhere in her subconscious was a memory of a chocolate he had bought for her. Not chocolate that Thara had shared with her but a whole bar, just for her. But when and why she could not remember, all the events of her life marked only by the highs and lows experienced with Thara and, later, Gehan, to all of which Mr. Vithanage was little more than a compassionate, if unimpressive, background. It was a dream, she knew, one made up of all the stories she had heard from Thara and those she had watched on TV, but she had sometimes taken it out and dwelled within it. Of course, all that remained now was just the past year, with its fury and lack of remorse and the loss that lay unmourned and pointless in the deepest part of her soul.

But despite her hope and forward-looking projections for rec
onciliation with Gehan, it had not come. And now here in her hands, in place of Gehan, was Thara. She had been at the convent for almost two years now and she had heard not one word from Thara. She had often wondered if Thara knew what she had done to her. But it wasn’t to her, no, it wasn’t, it was the Vithanages to whom she had done it, Mrs. Vithanage in particular. But was that entirely true? Sometimes, when she sat in those pews, she thought back to that time and about Ajith and Thara. How easy it had been not to care that, in punishing Mrs. Vithanage, she would lose Thara, who would, in the end, suffer the most. Or to consider how deeply Thara loved Ajith, underneath all that sassy bravado when she was not yet twelve, underneath the yearning for bras at thirteen and the duping of her mother at fourteen and the partying and dancing at fifteen. How easy to remember what she had disregarded so deliberately then: that Thara had loved Ajith through her year of misery when he couldn’t bring himself to see her, content with his nightly trysts with Latha, and loved him even after her failed exams.

And now, with this letter in her hand, come so belatedly, how easy it was also to remember the pleasure Latha had got from being unseduced by Thara’s boyfriend and his good looks, his little-boy smile and strong body, nothing shuffling or uncertain about his gait or his words, that upper-class cleanliness that always came with a store-bought fragrance. She had enjoyed that, hadn’t she? The way she had stood there, on so many nights, letting her body feel pleasure, peak, and release without ever giving up her heart, her mind constantly on that other boy, Gehan, the one who had nothing with which to woo a girl of Thara’s circumstances, or keep the friendship of someone like Ajith, neither of whom had ever paid him any real heed. Hadn’t she avenged them both, herself and Gehan, for that neglect by the people closest to them? Wasn’t that the real truth? And hadn’t she been right? If Thara had cared, or if Ajith had, why had neither of them tried to contact her before this? No, there was only one person who could be forgiven for having stayed away, and that was Gehan.

Latha continued to examine the writing on the envelope. Thara
had not said a word when she left, not one word of sympathy. She had simply stood next to her mother and waved good-bye to her father and stared and stared as Mr. Vithanage drove away with Latha in the back of a taxi, a vacant look in her eyes, hair unkempt, biting her nails as if
she
were the one who was growing an unwanted child in her belly, not Latha. Her face had not seemed to register the fact that something was being broken, a friendship, their combined history. She had just stood there! As if she, Latha, didn’t exist; as if they had never been one and the same. Yes, Latha thought, she had been right to do what she had done. At least she could be certain of that.

“Open it and see what it says,” Leela said.

“It’s just a letter, not a present or anything like that. I’ll open it later.”

“When?”

“After breakfast, maybe. Don’t worry, I’ll tell you what it says. I’ll read it aloud.”

But when she did read it, Latha was glad that she was alone and that she hadn’t read it aloud. It was so short and to the point: Thara was getting married and she wanted Latha to come back; she would send the driver for her. There was no reason, no excuse, no apology, not even a please; it was almost a command. As if she owned her. Still, Latha told herself, sitting on her bed and reading the words over, if nothing else, she would not have to be surrounded by nuns and embroidery. That was worth something.

Leela said she was happy for her that her madam and sir had wanted her back, though she also added various cautionary words about things, like political skirmishes, which had never worried Latha. She warned her to be careful, because the JVP leader had been killed and all the young people who had fought for him so many years ago were going to be agitating and things were bound to get bad in Colombo, and Latha needed a good house to live in, with people who wanted her. That was the only way, Leela said, that she would be safe in such a city in these bad times.

“And anyway, it isn’t this way for everybody, Latha Nangi, even if nobody was fighting and there was peace in the country, not every girl gets this chance to go back and set things right. You must be grateful and not make any mistakes this time around,” she said. She was sitting on Latha’s bed, helping her pack her suitcase. It wasn’t as if she had that much, but certainly by Leela’s standards, she had enough to turn packing into an event.

Latha had washed her clothes in twos and threes over the past week, a couple of dresses here, a skirt there. The pieces of underwear in particular had to be washed well in advance so they could be dried discreetly, hung on her foldout rack, hidden between the blouses in the front rows and the convent walls behind. It didn’t matter that they were all discards passed on to her from somebody else; they were just not convent-quality. It was what had brought trouble her way, the nuns had said, when she first got there and they looked through her belongings, dressing for somebody other than herself underneath her school uniforms and servant-girl dresses. They had kindly gifted her with two yards of white cotton fabric, which she had dutifully sewn into the panties of their dreams: bunched up high around the waist and ballooning like mushrooms, only to be cinched again at the tops of her thighs, which, after inspection and approval, she had sent away with the cooking girl. They had also given her, still in their pink and white boxes and plastic wrappings, two new
Angelina
bras, which were the kind Mrs. Vithanage wore; their support came entirely from concentric circles of threads, which grew ever smaller until they reached sharp points. Latha could not imagine any human breasts fitting into such contraptions, and she wasn’t going to subject hers to them. She had passed them on to Leela, who accepted them with gratitude, and she had continued to wear her old underwear, hiding her sin under two slips instead of one.

Watching Leela touch these things, Latha felt her loyalty to her own notions of right and wrong waver. Her clothes looked obscene in Leela’s hands. Leela was right; she should be careful of her second chance. She reached over and crammed the underwear into a siri-siri bag. “I’m not going to wear these, Leelakka, I’m just going to take them and give them to somebody else.”

“That’s a good idea,” Leela said, smiling indulgently, “but keep something to wear home.”

They continued to work quietly, sitting side by side, the cardboard suitcase open between them.

“My suitcase had green and white checks,” Leela said, stroking the side of Latha’s bag, “but when I knew I was going to stay, I gave it to the kitchen girl.”

“How did you know you were going to stay?” Latha asked, absently, smoothing her hands over the pleats of a yellow and black dress that had belonged to one of Thara’s aunts and was clearly of another era, stitched from a
Butterick
magazine pattern, the kind that were stacked in Mrs. Vithanage’s house.

Mrs. Vithanage. Latha wondered why Mrs. Vithanage had decided to let her come back, knowing that everybody assumed her own husband had been responsible for the pregnancy. Latha had listened to the convent cooks talk, after her baby had been born and when she was still spending time alone in the vegetable gardens. Just like the students at her old school, the cooks had been talking about the girls who came and delivered babies under the care of the nuns. When she overheard their voices, she had stopped to listen.
They come here making all kinds of excuses, all kinds of stories, but I believe what the nuns say, it is always their own fault,
she had heard the oldest of them, a hunchbacked woman named Maggie Achchi, say.
They go to work in Colombo houses and before long they want to take their madams’ place.
And even though the youngest among them, the kitchen girl, had tried to argue that perhaps it was the other way around, that perhaps it was the masters who forced themselves on their servant girls, Maggie Achchi had insisted that the girls were to blame:
If it isn’t the master, then it is their own bad character. They are nothing but whores, running around with drivers and gardeners and then blaming it all on the head of the household, the good man who pays their salaries, and for what? Nothing but spite.
She had fallen silent only when Latha turned the corner and stood there, saying nothing, staring at all of them until the kitchen girl had stepped forward and led her back inside the convent. Latha felt glad to be leaving a place where everybody from the nuns to the cooks believed the worst of her, and where there was
no place for the complexities of a life like hers within their limited experience of the world.

“When I stepped into this place, I felt at peace,” Leela said, reminding Latha of the question she had asked. Leela had tucked her hands underneath her hips, and she was smiling. She looked young and innocent.

“How could you feel that with all these rules?” Latha asked, because Leela was clearly aching to explain. She folded the dress and laid it in the suitcase, wondering if the clothes would get crushed when she set it upright.

“Here at the convent my rules are only to do with discipline and prayers. I work, but my work is between me and my cloth and threads. Nobody can find fault with me for anything I do, not even I. The city is different. I could never go back to it.” Leela looked so contented that Latha felt sad. What was wrong with her that she could not feel that same sense of peace?

She sat down next to Leela, thinking about how quiet and restful her room was, even with two people in it. At the Vithanages’ her sleep had never come gently to her, finding her stretched out, clean, and hardly ever tired, like it did here. She had been used to nights coming upon her like a storm, making her curl up to ride them out, making her wake up still tired, her bones stiff from the floor. She had a bed here, and they had just given it to her the day she came; she hadn’t had to be somebody’s servant for most of her life to earn her bed and privacy.

She stood up and walked around the room, touching one thing and another. The brown wooden shelf over her bed with the requisite picture of Jesus and a pointy red bulb, which stayed lit through the night; the switch by the door, which was a little grimy from the many hands that had searched for it in the dark, and, beside it, the rectangular mirror, which showed her face; the rack by the window with her nightdress and the pair of socks that she wore for sleeping folded neatly over it; the simple latched cupboard, which now stood empty of all her belongings save the last.

She put her palm over her box of treasures. The box had once contained chocolates. Mr. Vithanage had got a Christmas hamper
one year from somebody in the government. It was the only such delivery the family had ever received, and what excitement it had caused her and Thara! It had come full of foreign things:
Kraft
cheese in a round blue tin, black Christmas pudding in a ceramic bowl, Christmas cake wrapped in red cellophane and tied with a gold ribbon, packets of fancy tea biscuits from England, a blue tin of butter cookies separated from one another by crisp, pleated, transparent wax paper, a bottle of scotch whiskey, a bottle of rum, and the best thing of all: a wooden box packed with twelve slabs of
Kandos
cashew chocolate. In the biggest size. Her mouth watered once more at the memory of that day, the evening when all of it had been opened, the small tastes she had received when Mrs. Vithanage, obviously swept up in generosity at the sight of this feast, had sent a single plate to the kitchen with the thinnest of samplings for the servants: herself, Soma, the gardener, and the driver.