A Disobedient Girl (13 page)

Latha overheard all the bitter remarks about Gehan as she went about her work, fetching this and carrying that for Mrs. Vithanage, her last duties in the house before she could leave with Thara for the new home. The only respite she had that day was when Gehan and Thara climbed the poruwa together and everybody grew silent and watched and nobody needed anything from her. Then Latha felt dizzy with all the mixed-up emotions that came over her. Tenderness, at the sight of her friend, who looked too young to be getting married, to be dressed up like that, with all those heavy jewels and her hair pulled back and too many sheaves of betel to be passed around, and not her, Latha, but only girls who barely knew her beside Thara to hold her bouquet and hand her a wedding ring to slip on a man’s hand, the hand of a man she did not love. Tenderness, at the sight of Gehan, who had not worn the grand costume she had imagined him in once long ago but rather wore the official national dress, a simple white kurta and sarong, and so managed to look even less deserving than ever of his future wife. She stood as long as she could, the
magul bera
and flutes filling her ears, but when it came time for the tying of their little fingers, she left her post by the door and went to the old storeroom, where she sat, pretending that the sadness she felt was something outside her body, like the sack of rice in the corner, or her rolled-up mat, something that she could look at and even touch but that she could, she would, leave behind when she had to go back outside and tend to Thara.

“I hope they taught you how to cook at that convent,” Mrs. Vithanage said as Latha passed by with a fresh glass of lime juice for Thara, who was being dressed in her going-away sari.

“No, madam, they didn’t teach me anything,” Latha said, her mouth adding the insult “They wanted me to rest.” And she kept on going, knowing that today was one day she could get away without
an earful, with all those people in attendance. “They said I had been through enough,” she tossed over her shoulder before she nipped into the room where Thara was.

Inside the room there was dizzying color and movement. The bridesmaids were arrayed at the edge of Thara’s double bed, still covered with the familiar pink and white bedding, chatting, while a collection of aunts and older relatives came and went, checking their reflections in the mirrors set up to lean along one wall. The mirrors had been ordered by Mrs. Vithanage, her kindness to all of the women who had attended weddings with her in the past and who, banished from the bedroom or hotel room of the bride, had been forced, like her, to primp themselves in front of TVs and tinted car windows. Thara sat quietly at the center of everything, resplendent in turquoise blue and gold, in front of her kidney-shaped dressing table, with its sets of curved drawers on either side and the three mirrors that could be moved to show her upper body from all directions. Three Tharas.

“Thara Baba, here’s your juice,” Latha said, holding out the damp glass on a small silver tray.

The real Thara glanced sideways at her from kohl-rimmed eyes without moving her head. “Where’s the straw?” she asked.

“Straw?” Latha repeated, so taken aback by Thara’s voice that she pronounced it
is-strow,
like the girls who didn’t know how to speak their English words properly. She corrected herself. “Straw?”

“All my lipstick will come off if I drink this from the glass, you goat. Go and get a straw for me.” She returned her gaze to the mirror, and the three Tharas glared at the three Lathas reflected behind her. Latha glared back. Her lipstick was all wrong. Orange was not the color for Thara to wear, particularly with that blue. She should be wearing red. Latha’s eyes softened, and she was about to reach for the red tube that sat on the dressing table when someone spoke up.

“My god, you will have your hands full trying to train this one to be a proper housekeeper.” It was Mr. Vithanage’s sister, speaking through a mouthful of hairpins, with which she was attempting to keep Thara’s floral headpiece of baby’s breath and red rosebuds in place.

“Is she the one you’ll be taking with you to the new house?” That was the bridesmaid who was a friend, and who sat like a pudding on the edge of the bed, her waist spilling in all directions between the embroidered bottom edge of her sari blouse and the top of her waistband. She reminded Latha of the old driver. Latha expected her to suck her back teeth. She sucked her back teeth. So disgusting.

“Yes, Latha will be coming with me to the new place.”

“You are lucky to be going to a new house with madam,” the aunt said, taking the last of the pins out of her vermilion mouth and speaking loudly. They always spoke loudly when they addressed servants directly; that’s what Latha had learned at this wedding. As if the rest of the time the servants had been deaf to their conversations.

“You’ll have to get used to calling me madam, Latha,” Thara said, standing up and giggling, nervous and haughty at the same time. She turned around to face her.

Madam? Latha looked straight at her friend. Was she really going to be madam? Thara? Who could do so little without her help? She stared at Thara, seeing Gehan instead, hearing his words so long ago, telling her how people like Thara thought themselves better than people like them only because they had the power to order them about. How they could not survive without their retinue of doers. Thara’s own eyes narrowed in the silent room, the other women watching this battle of wills.

“Go and get me a straw,” she said,
“palayang.”
The other conjugation. The one used for common servants and strays. The first time she had ever spoken to Latha with such anger, such condescension.

Latha wondered if this was how Mrs. Vithanage, too, had become the kind of woman she was. Perhaps long ago, the same kind of disappointment, a wrong turn, the wrong husband, had whittled her high spirits into derision. Thara had certainly found a way to get her through this evening. Well, Latha would too.

She dropped her eyes, then raised them again to Thara. “I’m going,” she said. Then,
“Gehan
sir is waiting for you. He said to hurry up.” She felt vindicated when Thara’s face flushed, when the corner of her mouth dipped down, discernible only to Latha from where she stood.

And then, just as swiftly, because Thara suddenly looked like the girl who had asked Latha to help her when Mrs. Vithanage gave their flower-picking task over to the gardener, she felt bad for Thara. She felt bad for reminding her of whom she was not marrying, having spent so much time that day herself trying to overcome the same disappointment in her own heart. And so, when she returned with a straw, also on a silver tray, and found everybody fussing over their own hair and makeup while Thara sat quietly in a corner with a fan on low aimed at her midriff, which was where her perspiration always gathered, Latha swiped the correct lipstick off the counter and gave it to her friend.

“You look beautiful, Thara Baba,” she said, “but this lipstick would be much better with that sari.” She reached underneath her own sari pota and pulled a handkerchief out of the top of her bra. “Here, take this and wipe that other color off.”

Thara gifted her with a genuine smile, the warmth spreading from her lips to her eyes, which filled up with tears.

“Everything will be all right,” Latha whispered so that the others could not hear.

Thara dabbed at her mouth and then at the corners of her eyes with the handkerchief. “Do you think so?” she asked, her voice trembling.

“Yes, I am sure of it.” Latha applied the new lipstick on her. “I’ll be there, Thara Baba,” she said, recalling Thara to the present moment. “Don’t worry. What can go wrong? Think about all that happened to me, and yet here I am. I’m back and I’m fine. We’ll be together, that’s what matters. I will help you to cope with whatever comes our way.”

Outside, the conch shell was blown, and Mrs. Vithanage came into the room as if propelled by its sound. Thara gripped Latha’s wrist, her voice full of panic. “Promise me that you won’t run away again, Latha; everything fell apart when you left here. If you had stayed, maybe you could have got Ajith to come back to me. If you had stayed, I would not be marrying…marrying…him. Promise me.”

“I promise,” Latha said, but she could not meet Thara’s eyes.
Everything had fallen apart long before then, and she could not guarantee that it would not again. She was too grown-up to be sure of things. More grown-up even than she had been the morning she left Leela, new earrings in her ears.

Thara was bustled out of the room, and she went, looking back more than once, seeking reassurances from the only person in the room who could give her any, but all Latha could do was wave. Alone in the room full of nauseating fragrances, the sound of the happy commotion outside as everybody jostled for the confetti she had helped to make, cutting up shiny bits of paper night after night and bagging them into mesh cloth, tying them with ribbons, Latha reached up, this time with both hands. She walked over to the mirrors and stared at herself. She was grown up, but who was she? She turned to the first mirror: a mother with no daughter? The second mirror: a daughter with no mother? The last: a woman with no man?

“Latha Nangi,” she whispered, her eyes shut. “I am Latha Nangi, and I have an older sister. My older sister gave me these earrings.” Then she stepped out.

She could see the couple where they stood. Gehan’s eyes washed over the room and held hers, briefly, before he lowered them and dropped to his knees, along with Thara, in respect to Mr. and Mrs. Vithanage, to touch their feet, to worship them, and to receive their blessings.

W
hy did you give her your earrings?” my son asks, as soon as I get back in. Even the little one is up, and they are all sticking their heads out of the window, waving to the girl and the nun on the platform the way children do. I join them, and I watch the two figures go from intimate clarity to representations to insignificance on a fading landscape as the train carries us forward and away. I do not wave.

“Why, Amma?” Loku Duwa repeats her brother’s question. Chooti Duwa touches my ears with her still-a-baby-soft fingers. They feel tender and ticklish and warm from her long sleep.

“Because she needed them,” I say, stroking her hair but looking at Loku Duwa.

“Why did she need them? Is she poor?” Chooti Duwa asks me.

“No, she is not poor. People do not need earrings because they are poor,” I say. What I cannot say is this: a young woman needs earrings to show that she is proud to be a woman and that she has a family. Earrings are not decorations. They are a statement of legitimacy, of dignity, of self-worth. Ask any woman, and she would tell you that she would pawn everything she has before she gave up her earrings. Even her wedding band. For what is a wedding band worth except to say that a man coveted your children and wanted to claim them for his own? A wedding band can come from any man, just like children. Earrings, a real pair of earrings, come only with love. And that girl
needs someone to love her, some way to feel worthy and dignified where she is going. She needs them more than I do.

“Amma, your face looks odd without earrings,” Loku Duwa says. “I don’t like that you don’t have earrings.”

“I’ll borrow some when we get to my aunt’s house,” I tell her, my voice soothing.

“Earrings aren’t important,” my son says. He has always resented these female conversations that exclude him.

“Aiyya, you’re just jealous because you can’t wear any,” Loku Duwa says and ducks her brother’s palm.

“Men can wear earrings,” Chooti Duwa says. “I saw men with earrings on the beach.”

“Those are bad men,” he says, “or they are not real men.”

I still the fear in my heart. I hope that my son has never been near those men who used to come grazing for little boys like him, their skin shining pink beneath the oils they rubbed on one another lying almost naked outside our hotels. I remember how they talked to other little boys, coaxing them with round, colored sweets or chocolate in long cylinders and pyramid-shaped tubes; how well they knew the way our children craved those foreign tastes. I used to shoo those children away, pretending I was doing those men and women a favor, keeping the children from bothering them. I would have said something to them if I could, but I never wanted to get in the way of white people, who always seemed to have too much of everything, even of the good things in our own country, our best fruits and fish, our hotels, our power, doing things we wouldn’t dream of doing, disregarding our customs and laws.

My son sees me watching him, and he comes over to me and grins. “Don’t be troubled, Amma,” he says. “I never went near those men. I got money from picking up the tennis balls and handing out towels at the
Blue Lotus Hotel.
Only those two things, you can believe me.”

I believe him. What else is there to do? I am glad that we are far away, so far in the hills that no salt water can get near us with its deadly currents, tempting my children with its froth and shells, luring them into evil. I shepherd them back to our seats, but we are still in motion when we enter the longest tunnel we will go through
in our journey, a full third of a mile long. All my children grab my body, pressing close to me, screaming with fake terror. I listen to the echoes of other children’s voices from compartments to either side of ours. These shrieks that I have heard each time we pass through a tunnel lift my spirits. They are the sounds of childhood and innocence. When we are out of the tunnel and my children let go of me, I feel unmoored.

In our booth, the children entertain themselves by building bridges with their legs for a while, then fight over the window seats. In the end, the girls get them. Their brother makes a chair for himself with his legs, bending the left and balancing on the ankle with the shin of his right. It’s uncomfortable, and I watch him switch from side to side and finally give up and persuade his baby sister to let him hold her on his lap. She pouts until he tickles her belly with his free hand and makes her wriggle and laugh. What bliss, that sound of laughter, the absence of fear.

I hear my youth in their voices, see it in their quick smiles, their delight in this new journey. I imagine that my parents must have watched me, too, that way. I had been a girl whose yearnings had been the measure of their days. On Poya, I had stood in front of our lit lamps, causelessly devout. On holidays, they had taken me to the fairs and other entertainments that came through our town and bought me thick, sweet drinks in small, ice-cold bottles from the Muslim shops, which had refrigerators. When I came home at the end of each term with a report card full of the evidence of my scholarship, it had been to the fragrance of sweet, sticky black kalu dodol studded with cashews.

I shrug. Such bliss is not meant to last. In my husband’s house, my children were my real gifts: the older ones had turned fear over and over in my stomach until it molted into rage, and perhaps it was that rage, that sudden fearlessness in me, that had caught Siri’s eye and brought me my youngest, the second daughter, who finally gave wings to my feet. Wings. Or rails. I am grateful for this chance, for the future, for the train that is carrying us there, its carriages full of strangers, kind to one another, kinder than anyone had been to me in my husband’s village. I am grateful for its spaces, which fill up and release people, empty of fear.

There are few stations left now: seven before ours, eight after. I feel at peace in this train, in this empty car, this booth, my children all accounted for, safe, even the girl, safe with the nun. I don’t want to get off. I want to keep going to Badulla. But then what? I don’t know anybody in Badulla. I think about my aunt, her family, what they looked like when I last saw them, all those years ago. I picture her the same, but aged. I try to imagine what her grandchildren might look like now, but I cannot. I have received only an occasional letter, and never any photographs, which, even if they had been taken at a studio during a wedding, are too rare and too precious to send to anybody else. Only the two oldest were born when I visited as a newlywed, still enamored with my role as a grown woman and wife, and they were just four and one.

The last I had heard of them was a year ago, when another cousin passed through our village, stopping at the house, unannounced, and staying the night to drink with my husband, who was interested only in that sort of company. Before he left the next morning, he had said that they were doing well, my cousin and her children. He said that she had a job at a place called the
Farr Inn,
where she works at a desk. Her husband was still employed by the government, as a ranger in the park, he had said. Anyway, I hope they have turned out like my cousin, their mother, and not their father, who was dull and sullen. Perhaps it is the fate of women in my family to marry such men. Perhaps it is also our fate to leave them. I hope that she has not left hers, though, for where would I go then?

I am still drifting about in these scenarios, following one possibility, reversing and going down a different path, when we reach Thalawakele. The station is 4000 feet above sea level, and there is a cheerful signpost announcing the location of the
St. Claire Waterfall
and a bungalow named
St. Andrew’s.
There’s a photograph of it, and it looks beautiful, with terraced gardens and lavish flowers. In the picture there’s a train winding its way far below, and I wonder if it is this same train we are riding on. I poke my head out and look up, but all I see is the station and the shrubbery to my left, and nothing but tea sloping away to my right. Dotted here and there down the tea-covered hillsides I can see the colorful saris of the tea pluckers, their
cane baskets strapped onto their backs, their fingers flying over the bushes, somehow managing to find, at that speed, the tender, light green leaves. They look like birds to me, those women. Bright birds doing honest and useful work. I watch the tea pluckers for a long time, fascinated by their diligence and concentration. They do not seem to mind the sun, or perhaps they have no freedom to consider the inconveniences that people with time on their hands, like us, trapped inside trains, do.

The stationmaster announces that the train will be delayed for a short while until the tracks are cleared. There has been a demonstration, he says, by the plantation workers. It is clearly over now; the tea pluckers are back at work and there is nobody on the platform but two lonely policemen, who do not look agitated. I am glad that nothing disturbs them. Policemen are bad enough without them having any reason to be suspicious or feel more powerful than they already do, particularly with regard to those like us.

To pass the time, I call to my children and try to direct their attention outside. “See those tea pluckers? Without them we wouldn’t be able to drink any tea anywhere in the country,” I tell them.

“But this tea is green colored. This cannot be that tea. That tea is black,” my Loku Duwa says.

“That’s because it is dried, duwa. But when it is first plucked, it is green, like these bushes.”

They talk about tea for a little while, and then my little one wants to climb out and pick tea. I tell them they can. Loku Putha jumps out first, takes his little sister in his arms, carries her across the other set of tracks, and wades into the row of bushes closest to the station. They snatch a few leaves each and come running back as though the train is about to leave. I laugh, sharing their excitement at this unexpected foray and their delight in holding real tea leaves in their palms. They taste the leaves and wrinkle their faces. I beckon to them to climb back aboard, for though they are safe there, and in no danger of being left behind, I am uneasy with the thought of them being separated from me even by that improbable possibility.

When I pull my head back in, there’s a man in our car. He is
sitting across the aisle from me. He looks like a government agent, formal but unimposing, straight-bodied as his job demands, but with the heavy head of someone employed at an unending task. His hair is parted carefully on the side. He must be in his thirties, perhaps only a year or two older than I am. He glances at my children and smiles at me. It is such a genuine smile that I have to return it. The train begins to move again, gathering speed. It is empty enough now for the children to sit in one booth and me to sit in the one across from them; it is as though they are traveling alone, unattended, and I am traveling with the pleasant newcomer.

“Good thing it is not raining. The train ride is not comfortable with the windows shut,” he says.

“Yes, I can imagine it must not be,” I say.

“Are you going home after the Poya holiday?” he asks.

The children turn around at the sound of our conversation. They all stare at him, then look over at me, waiting for my story.

“We are visiting my aunt. In Ohiya.”

He nods to himself. He is from Colombo, he tells me, and stares out the window as he says that, as if he regrets the fact. Perhaps he wishes he lived out here. I feel sorry for him. He looks like the sort of man who, though competent and good, will never be happy.

“Look, Amma!” my little one says, tugging at my sleeve and pointing out her window on the opposite side, sheer amazement in her voice.

“Isn’t it beautiful,” I say, gazing at the white streams of water falling over the side of the green mountain, its source a mystery. “Now that is a waterfall,” I add. “Remember how we talked about waterfalls when we were still in Colombo?”

“That is
St. Claire’s,”
says the man from behind us, and this time the children smile politely and listen as they take in the spectacle. “That waterfall is about two hundred and sixty-five feet high and is the widest waterfall in the whole country.” He leans forward and describes it to us. “That is Maha Ella,” he says, pointing alternately to the large and small sections of the falls. “It has three cascades. The little one is Kuda Ella. They both flow down to the Kotmale area. I have heard that the government wants to build two reservoirs there,
but I hope they don’t. It would ruin the beauty of these waterfalls, wouldn’t it, children?”

“Yes,” Loku Putha says slowly, sounding concerned, “that would be bad.”

“Do you know what a reservoir is?” he asks my son. “It’s a lake to collect all the water, with a dam to keep it in.”

“Where would the water come from? For the lake?” Chooti Duwa asks.

“That’s it. The water for the Upper Kotmale dam would come from the same river that feeds these falls, and then we wouldn’t have a beautiful waterfall, would we?”

He sounds like a schoolteacher; perhaps that is why he is ill at ease, perhaps he has failed to realize some youthful dream of living in cold places, educating small children, listening to their questions, watching them change.

We gaze at the scene from our various perches. I half-listen as he continues to talk to my children, my eyes on the waterfall. It is pretty and unthreatening. The waters seem happy to be going where they are going, not like the ocean beside which I have spent my adult life, restless waters that always seemed to be flung or returning for something lost. The times when the ocean was still I had sensed as rest, a brief truce while they conspired among unseen islands and reef. I never felt safe by the sea; I am glad to be done with it.

I return to my seat and look up and out of the window again. We have passed the falls and now it is simply more of the green hills. The children go on talking about the waterfall, about what it might feel like to have the water fall upon their heads, whether it is deep at the bottom, whether the earth could crack open if the water grew strong enough, and what would happen then to the people standing below.