A Disobedient Girl (30 page)

“Do you have a comb?” Thara asked and didn’t wait for an answer. “Podian!” she yelled and sent the boy scurrying to Latha’s room to
fetch her comb. “What are you staring at? Grinning like an idiot? Go! Go and do something useful in the kitchen,” she said, shooing Podian away when she noticed him peering at them from behind the curtain even after she had dismissed him. First she tried to pull Latha’s hair up in a bun, and, when that didn’t work, not being accustomed to combing any hair but her own, she told Latha it looked better loose and let it go. Then she applied a maroon lipstick with her fingers, choosing one after rejecting a dozen others and flinging them half-open to the bed, where, Latha couldn’t help hoping, they wouldn’t stain the white sheets; it would be terrible to try to get such stains off, even in the washing machine.

“Look in the mirror now, Latha,” she said.

What Latha saw in the mirror was not Latha the servant but Latha the mistress of the house. She stood up straight and moved her body this way and that, taking in the sight. She looked like the women she saw on TV, the ones in the Indian films that she now watched with Podian late on Friday nights, the ones who knew how to sing and dance and shimmy their shoulders and always got caught in the rain in plain sight of handsome men. Yes, she was beautiful. And Thara, standing a full four inches shorter beside her, barefoot and ordinary in sweatpants and a baggy shirt, her hair uncombed after her stop at the new gym she had joined, could not quite compare. But the way Thara was looking at her, her eyes shining with goodwill and humor, a slight pride in her achievement tightening the corners of her smile, made Latha want to weep. It was too late now for her to step back to the place she had once inhabited, uncomplaining if not exactly retiring, leaving Gehan safe with his unused loyalty to his wife by law. It was much too late for this sudden kindness from Thara, for this moment from the past now that the past had returned to her through the most improbable of people, Gehan, and for that Latha was truly sorry.

“Let’s take this off now before sir gets home,” Latha said, tugging at the pleats tucked into her underskirt without much enthusiasm.

“No! Stop! Let’s take pictures before we put it all away,” Thara said. “This is the most fun we have had together since we went shopping for curtains for this stupid old house of Gehan’s!”

Do this, hold up your hair, sit here, lift your shoulders, lie down. It was almost as though Thara wanted to apologize to Latha for having mocked her earlier, or perhaps for never having allowed her to display her beauty, by finding the perfect pose, the one that she could hold up and say, “Look! Look here! You are beautiful.” And Latha complied. She did as she was told, and the pleasure she felt in this late-bloomed, borrowed-feather loveliness mixed so efficiently with the feelings she was trying to recapture for her lost friend who had drifted off to the scent of coriander and ginger that, unknown to her, the camera caught Latha in a particularly wistful radiance. And so taken was Thara with her activity, so enamored with this forbidden enjoyment of a servant, and their rekindling of a preadult girlhood, that she shot almost an entire roll of film and still would not let Latha undress. Which is how Gehan, having returned with two sleeping girls and come in before them to put away the usual food-based gifts from his parents before going out to waken and coax his daughters in, and having come upstairs to discover the origin of the unusual sounds of mirth that were floating from his own bedroom, managed to witness the cruel beauty of love shared between the two women in his world, the wrong one and the wrong one, and the relative value of each to the fulfillment of his life.

I
t is far too early when I wake up. It is still dark, the outside illuminated by what must be moonlight. The room itself feels anxious, as though it is waiting for something, and perhaps it is this disturbance in the air that has woken me.

Around me, on the floor, I sense my sleeping children. When my eyes accustom themselves to the dark light, I can make out the bodies of my daughters, dressed, still, in the clothes we came in. They are motionless but noisy, their full natures revealed in the artlessness of sleep. I gaze at the girls, the way each of them rests, one, my Loku Duwa, on her belly, curled in, fearful of the world, the other on her back, fearless and inviting. They are both wrong. They should be cautious yet open, confident of their strength yet wary of strangers. I know they are young and that time may change these things about them, but character is like a second, hidden skin: what you are born with is what you have. I wish I could realign them somehow, fix this, change that, mix them up. I turn them both so they face each other; now they are halves, and I comfort myself with this small intervention in the course of their lives.

Loku Putha is gone. I am so absorbed in my contemplation of my incorrectly arranged daughters that it takes me a while to notice my son’s absence. He was sleeping on the other side of Loku Duwa, his head facing the same direction as mine was, her feet between our two faces. That’s how we had gone to sleep, like the miniature fish in
a flat tin box that one of the Irish nuns at the convent had once shown me;
These are herring,
she had said and explained that the name on the box, “sardines,” came from a Mediterranean island called Sardinia, where every eating house serves them. I remembered the nuns last night as we lay down, end to end, taking up no more space than two adults would on the thin mattress that Sumana dusted out for us.

I get up with some difficulty, easing myself from the floor, registering the aches that have crept up my back as I slept. The house is quiet, but I can hear insect sounds outside. Small ones, like crickets and fruit bats. Perhaps he, too, could not sleep. The back door is pulled shut, but it is not latched. The smooth, long beam that serves as a barricade—against what? I had wanted to ask, as I watched Sumana slide it into place the night before but didn’t, knowing that such visual reminders are necessary to guard against both what comes in and what might go out—is leaning against the wall. Outside, the air is so cold my body folds into itself.

He is standing at the top of the dirt steps leading down to the vegetable garden. He is looking at something I cannot see from where I stand, and I am about to call his name when the moon slides out from behind a cloud and he is in silhouette. He is peeing, the urine arching the way it does without effort for little boys. It makes a quick moonlit fountain full of separate particles, and he wiggles his hips, writing something in the air. It makes me smile, the way my son looks: like a small child, unburdened in every way, safe even among strangers in this unfamiliar darkness. When he finishes, he shakes off the last of it and pulls up his shorts. He continues to stand, suddenly feeling the cold, it seems, for he shivers and clutches his elbows. I want to stay there, watching him, but I know this time is precious to him. He is gaining something from his solitude, strength, perhaps, or vision or a dream. So I leave him and go inside.

I must have been more tired than I thought, or fallen into a far deeper sleep than I intended to, for when I wake up for the second time, it is to the sound of shrieking. The girls are screaming.

Chooti Duwa: “Aiyya!
Aiyya!
”

Loku Duwa: “Amma!
Amma!
”

And a mix of other voices. In the time it takes me to get up, untuck
the fall of my sari from my waist and draw it over my left shoulder, and scoop my braid into a bun, I have heard what has transpired: my son has fallen down the hill below the vegetable garden. He had been trying to reach a moon moth perched on a dewy plant and slipped.

“Amma!” he sobs from the ledge below, where he lies looking as though all that he has hurt is his sense of himself. “My leg hurts…my leg…awww…” And in his wet voice there is an unmistakable slurry of pain, thick and desperate.

“Don’t move, putha,” I say, as calm as I can manage to be with an injured child I cannot comfort or even reach to touch. “Our nice seeya is coming, and he will get you out of there, my sweet son, my fair-skinned one, don’t cry…” I can’t stop myself from uttering the words that only make him cry more because this is all I can do from where I stand, hunched over the unsteady earth that has already betrayed him. And I know it helps him, this crying and crying unlike any grief he has ever expressed. Years of it come out of his body as he lies there, stroking his own leg, his eyes only on my face, crying.

It takes a long time for Veere’s Father to get my boy up from where he is. First he has to enlist the help of a faraway neighbor’s teenage son, left alone at home. They construct a sort of stretcher with a long stick and the handle of an
ekel
broom looped with three sarongs. The neighbor’s son slides down to where my child lies, and the old man follows after, more slowly, grasping at roots and bushes as he goes. It is not that far, this distance that my son has fallen, yet he seems so badly and so invisibly hurt. I whisper prayers to myself as I watch them lift him onto the stretcher and struggle every inch of the way up the slope. Sumana and Dayawathi stand behind me, each with her arms around one of my daughters, protecting them from the sight, from my concern, from their brother’s pain. When they get halfway up, Veere’s Father says something to the teenager, and they stop.

“Get that for the child,” he tells the young man, pointing to the moth.

“It’s dead now,” the boy says.

“I know,” he says, “but only recently. If you reach out you can pick the leaf he is lying on.”

“Don’t!” I yell to the teenager. “You might drop my son!” But he has already reached past my boy and picked the leaf. He deposits it on Loku Putha’s stomach.

Loku Putha stops crying. When they get up to the top and lay the stretcher down, he won’t let them take the moth away. “I want to keep the moth!” he says, protecting the carcass with his fingers knitted around it. I have never seen one so close, and I, like my son, am struck by its beauty. It is several inches across, with a delicately curved tail that parts decorously at the bottom like a young dancer’s feet. Each purple-edged wing is translucent, milky like moonlight, yet tinged with pale green, like morning grass. This one has four unseeing eyes drawn on the back of its body.

“Can I keep this moth?” he asks me.

I stroke the damp hair off his forehead and nod. I turn to Dayawathi. “Do you have something…”

“I already sent Sumana to get a plastic bag for him,” she says, and her smile, though barely apparent, is kind.

As soon as the moth is taken away from him by Sumana, lifted along with its leaf and placed inside a clear plastic sleeve that must once have covered an English-language greeting card, it is as though a spell has been broken. The pain returns, and with greater intensity. His leg is broken; this much is clear from the way his left leg looks shorter, and from the heat around the swelling on the shin.

“I will make a poultice for him,” Dayawathi says and walks away.

“Let’s take him inside,” Veere’s Father says and picks up his end of the stretcher. The teenager picks up the other side and they go in, taking the steps through the vegetable garden carefully, talking to each other. I am left alone to follow. Alone except for a daughter on either side, one hand to hold in each of mine. I feel judged, as though it is I who pushed him, I who had raised my son to desire something he should have left alone.

“Will Aiyya’s leg get better? Will he be able to walk?”

“Yes, Chooti Duwa, we have to get him to a doctor…” I trail off, feeling hopeless.

“How will we do that? Where’s the hospital?” Loku Duwa asks.

“That seeya will tell us,” I say, trying to sound reassuring, knowledgeable.

“What if it is far away? Too far to walk? Can they carry him all that way?” my little one asks and doesn’t wait for the answer. “They can’t carry our aiyya that far. See? That seeya can’t breathe from all that work, and he only carried Aiyya this short way!” She looks back at where her brother had been lying and traces the path to the back door of the house with an open palm, showing me the evidence of our collective helplessness. Perhaps it is her voice, the way it is pitched, high and upward arching with every statement, the way small children speak, afraid to lose their audience, afraid that the importance of their words might escape an adult’s mind, but whatever it is, it makes my eyes well up.

“I’ll find a way,” I say. “Go and clean yourselves up for the day at the tap.” I watch the girls go around the side of the house to the washing area, Chooti Duwa in front, Loku Duwa behind. I go inside. They have laid my son down on the mattress, and his face is scrunched in pain.

“Duwa, give him this,” Dayawathi says, following me in and giving me a tin cup with about an inch of dark oil flecked with white in it.

“What is it?” I ask, cautious.

She just gestures toward him with her head. “It will make the pain go away.”

“Will it make him sleep?” I ask, smelling the liquid. It is not unpleasant, but it is strong, like crushed sweet herbs and something else, something bitter like the taste of the powder inside the antibiotics I once took after a nail from a boat gouged the side of my leg as I stood there with Siri. I hesitate, not wanting to put the cup to his mouth.

“It will be like he’s sleeping,” she says. “We can give him something else later. Right now he should have something to help him become numb, to not feel the pain.”

“Here’s the poultice,” Sumana says and waits, without asking, for her mother-in-law to step aside.

I put the drink down and try to apply the poultice to my son’s leg.
The scream that comes from him brings the girls running back, their faces wet. I am afraid to touch his leg to remove the steaming-hot, garlic-steeped bread, soggy in the long strip of cloth. I can barely think with the sound of his screams. I grab the cup and hold it to my son’s lips, cradling his head in my arm. “Drink this, Putha, drink it quickly. It will make the pain go away.” He swallows it in a gulp, and Dayawathi is on hand with a glass of water.

“Rinse the rest out and make him drink it,” she says, and I do. I am willing to do anything she tells me so long as my son stops screaming. He does as he is asked, and I lay him back down, loathe to remove my arm from under his head but knowing I should let him rest. I stroke his hair, his arm, whatever I can, trying to make him stop whimpering until, at last, only the tears are left, dripping silently from the corners of his eyes, and, minutes later, not even those. He has fallen asleep.

I clean myself at the tap outside; I wash my hands and feet and face. I ask Dayawathi for some oil, and I make a wick out of a strip of old cloth from the underskirt I had torn for this same purpose when we were still on the road. This time, my little one does not volunteer to help, and the wick is made quickly and efficiently, though, I feel, with less faith and delight held within it. I light the lamp underneath the family’s pictures of the Buddha and stand there, waiting for some relevant prayer to come to me. I wait, but there is no prayer I can think of for my circumstance. I can think only of the story of Kisa Gothami and her dead son, and the Buddha’s request that she find mustard seeds from a house that had withstood no death; I picture her running from door to door in her fruitless search, until at last her footsteps cease and she returns to acknowledge the lesson of impermanence. But my son is alive! He is only damaged, he can be mended, I know this. But what prayer? What prayer?

“Don’t cry, Amma,” Chooti Duwa says, startling me. She begins to recite Pansil. I want to tell her those words are useless. I want to tell her there must be some prayer that will bring grace to us, but her voice stops me. It is sweet and innocent and full of belief. So I join her in uttering the precepts, vowing to show compassion toward living things, to refrain from taking that which is not given, to ab
stain from sexual misconduct, to devote myself to truth and clarity in thought and expression, to refuse to imbibe drinks that would impair my judgment.

Loku Duwa joins us in the middle of our chanting, and when we are done she hands me a flower. I don’t know what it is called, but it is large and purple with soft, lush petals that look like a child’s drawing, so perfectly pointed and shaped, so neatly arranged, I am shocked that she has picked it, but when I turn around to see if anybody has noticed, I find that both Dayawathi and Sumana are standing behind us.

“It’s okay,” Dayawathi says, gesturing with her head toward the shrine. I place the flower next to the lamp. I let her lead us in the familiar meditation:

I close my eyes as I make the offering, and I want to release myself into this simple prayer about the ending of all life or, if nothing else, at least the already fading life of the flower we have placed before us. I want to be at peace, but it eludes me. What I see when I close my eyes is the flower, radiant in its purple color and unpicked; the moth, not dead but alive, returning again and again to that same plant; and my son, whole and striding before me, helping me show us the way forward, flagging down a car with a driver whose help I should have accepted.

And just as the last words are uttered, we all hear the sound of a car pulling up, drowning whatever private hopes we had taken out to gaze at in that moment, sending all of them and us scattering.

When I finally make it up the stairs to the storefront, I see the driver of the red car. “This boy stopped us,” he says, gesturing toward the teenager. “We were on our way back to Thalawakele. What has happened?”