A Disobedient Girl (38 page)

He steps back and flings up his hand as if to deflect an assault. “What? What? Where are you running to?”

“Sir, I am trying to catch the train.”

“Are you from the convent? Did they send you to meet someone off the train?”

I suppose I do not look like the woman he met here before. Why would he remember? “Yes. I came from there. I need to fix a tear in my sari, sir. Do you have a box of matches? I can hold it to the flame and fix it; it’s just some kind of nylon…”

“The train is coming soon.” He checks his watch and glances down the tracks. “It will be here in a few minutes. You might miss it.”

“Please, sir, I cannot go like this. Can I use the lavatory to fix my sari?”

He clucks and takes out a key from his pocket. “Here, be quick! You don’t have much time at all.”

“Sir, matches?”

He looks doubtfully at me. I look down and away from his feet. He shrugs and gives me a box of
Elephant
matches and looks away. It feels solid in my hand, a full box. I go into the station and to the bathroom at the back. I can barely see my face in the mirror, but I wash it with ice-cold water from the tap. Why shouldn’t I clean myself up? I undo my sari and drape it again, my pleats neat, the wrap ending straight along the side of my body, the fall touching the ground. This is how my mother wore her sari. This is the way good women wear their saris. And I am not a bad woman.

I light the matches one after another. First the edge of the fall, then in a circle around the hem. Then the pleats that offset my waist. The fall burns slowly; it is still damp from tears and the plants and whatever is left of the blood of small wounds, but those things are no match for the fire. By the time I open the door and step around the back of the building toward the tracks, I can feel the flames reach tender parts of my body, my midriff, my ankles, the nape of my neck. This pain is bearable. This one I can tolerate. Nobody will need to light a pyre for me.

I walk along the tracks toward the sound of the approaching train. I hear the stationmaster from a distance now, and I begin to
run, burning faster as I go. I picture them beside me, running, and I make them stop, grateful that they listen, this time they listen: Not you, Loku Putha, not you either, Loku Duwa. Nobody for me. None of you must come with me. Kumari. My Latha Kumari. My Chooti Duwa. Petiyo. No! Stop here! Go back! I close my eyes and let my feet take me toward the train. I will not think of them, no. These are not tears. Nothing will put out this fire. I will remember nothing. I am already dead.

T
he smell of smoke must have brought Mr. Vithanage into the room, she thought, for the first thing he did when he came in was to throw the purple silk to the ground and stamp all over it. She continued to pack, ignoring him until she couldn’t anymore. He would not stop stamping on the sari with his feeble feet, like a child throwing a tantrum. But when she turned to look, she could see that it was not age that was making his feet lack the punch the job required. It was sorrow. The old man was actually crying, mopping at his face with a gray handkerchief.

Latha had never seen a man cry. She had seen Podian cry, but that was more like bawling, and in any case he was a boy, and, being slow in the head as he was, he would remain a boy. She had seen Thara cry, but those tears had seemed like whining to Latha. The only tears she had truly wanted to wipe dry, or whose unchecked pain she had felt in her very body, had been Madhavi’s. Even Madhayanthi she had treated with some skepticism, her artful, careful eruptions so patently full of some ulterior design. But what could she do with old Mr. Vithanage?

“Mahaththaya,” she said, “sit down, sit here,” and she dragged over the chair from her table and helped him to sit down, wondering if he might have a heart attack from all the emotion swirling around the usually easygoing man, or at the very least from his own exertions over the sari. She put out the small flames that she had created
with a few strong stamps from her own feet. It wasn’t that hard. The sari was a heavy natural silk and did not burn easily.

Behind her, Mr. Vithanage blew his nose loudly, signaling recovery. She turned. He looked around the room and made a vague gesture with his hand to encompass everything in her space, including herself. Then he blew his nose again. “Latha, child, this is, all this…it is my doing.”

“Sir, I will leave as soon as I finish packing. Then you won’t have to blame yourself. And nobody will be able to blame me anymore for the things that have happened in this household.” She emptied everything out of her bags and began repacking them neatly.

“Where are you going?”

“I am going to the convent,” she said. “To where Leelakka is.”

“Who? Who is that? Leelakka?”

“My sister.”

Mr. Vithanage stopped blowing his nose. “You found your older sister?”

“Yes, when I went…When Vithanage Madam sent me to the convent, I met her there. Her name is Leela. We agreed. We promised.”

“Does she know where your brother is?”

“Brother?”

“Yes, your older brother?”

Latha sat on the edge of her bed, still holding on to a sandal. It was a dark brown sandal with a silver buckle. She had bought it recently, and Gehan had been with her. He had taken her to the place where he went to get his shoes made, and he had seen her admiring it and offered to buy the pair for her. She was so glad she had said no, she could pay for them herself.

“I opened my purse and bought my shoes with my own money,” she said to Mr. Vithanage, holding out the sandal for him to look at. “See? This is made of real leather. It says ‘genuine leather’ inside. Made at the
Leather Corporation.
This is very good quality. These kinds of shoes won’t break, and that’s why I didn’t mind paying extra for them.”

Mr. Vithanage took the sandal from her and examined it all over.
Strange how quiet the room seemed right then. Outside there were voices, Mrs. Vithanage’s and Thara’s, and every now and again Gehan’s, but they were the kind that were used to fill uncomfortable space. The girls must have gone to their room, and yes, she could hear Podian clearing things, scraping, sweeping, rinsing, restoring. Inside her space there was the smell of singed fabric. She pushed at the sari with her foot. How powerful it had once felt to her, this same silk.

“Do you remember your brother?” Mr. Vithanage asked gently, giving the sandal back to her. “Do you remember anything at all?”

“She is not a real sister, she is someone I met there,” Latha said, wanting very much to say it differently, to claim Leela as a blood relative. She shrugged. “But she said we could be sisters. I asked her, actually; I wanted someone for me. She said yes. She didn’t have any family either.”

Mr. Vithanage raised his eyebrows and blew his nose again, so vigorously this time that his head shook. He put his handkerchief away in his pocket. “Do you remember anything about the convent? How you got there?”

She shook her head.

“Do you remember when I came to get you?”

Again, she shook her head.

“You don’t remember riding in the train with me? The noise in the tunnels? The chocolate?”

Chocolate! She remembered that. “
Cracker Jack
chocolate!” she said, smiling. “I remember, Vithanage mahaththaya, you bought me that. A whole one.” Then she frowned. “Then you gave me money, didn’t you?”

“No, Latha, I didn’t give you money then. That was two different times. I…I knew your mother,” he said. And there before her was a picture of Mr. Vithanage with her mother, some lovely creature whom he had loved and discarded like Gehan had discarded her, a woman whose daughter he had forced her to abandon.

“You are all the same.” She spat and stood up. “Your kind—”

Mr. Vithanage looked mortified. “No! Not like that. I didn’t know your mother like that! Stop…child, sit, please sit!” He clasped at his chest and coughed vigorously and then pounded his brow gently
with his fist. She would have offered him water from her glass, it was sitting right there on the table, but that would have been insulting. So she sat down again and waited for his troubles to subside.

“I met your mother,” he said, finally, “on the train up-country. I was going to visit my friend in Pattipola. I take the train once or twice a year, and one day I met your mother.”

What did she want to know anyway about a mother? And a mother known to the Vithanages at that. Something vile must have clung to her, too, to allow her to let a daughter become what she had permitted Latha to become. And yet, “What was she like?” Latha asked, cautiously.

“She was, or she seemed to me to have been, an honorable woman,” Mr. Vithanage said. “She was clearly from a respectable family, and she took good care of her children. Your father, too; he sounded like he had been an intelligent man. He had worked hard to try to change our country for the better, she told me. He had connections at the universities, and he was going to work for the government. He gave his life for his principles.” He looked searchingly at Latha like he was testing her, or expecting her to pounce on him. “You were one of three children,” he said at last. “You were the youngest.”

Three children. Three. Herself and two others. Siblings. A brother and a sister. She tried to say the words to herself, silently, testing their merit. Aiyya, Akki, Aiyya, Akki, Aiyya, Akki…“Raji Aiyya…Mala Akki…,” she said suddenly, aloud. The names felt like sharp glass, except that, after the cut, there was only cool comfort, the soothing flow of blood.

“Yes,” he said.

“They got lost,” she said suddenly and closed her mouth with the palm of her hand, trying to take it back, that information that she had not known she had.

He held out his hands, palms up. “I don’t know what happened to them.”

“They got lost,” she said again, feeling the knowledge seep out of some secret place and permeate her being, bringing pieces of memory with it, the smell of things: antiseptic and oils and rich soil,
the sensation of some fragile dead thing, large and beautiful in her hands, the color red, the sound of explosions, the voices of strangers, soft, plump arms holding her and letting her go, the crisscross press of a bicycle rack against her bottom, the warmth of food against her chest, sharp fingers against her cheek, warm ones cupping her face, prayers, blue beads.

“The foreigners took them. My mother left me to go and find them, she said. She said she would come back.”

“Your mother committed suicide,” he said and waited a moment to see if that had any effect on her. It didn’t. “She set herself on fire and threw herself in front of a train.”

Latha stared at him. She tried to picture that, but all she could see was a ball of fire rolling like a wheel toward a train. “Where is my brother? And my sister, where is she?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “The nuns said that some old couple had come to the convent saying they knew your mother, and they wanted to take you with them, but they couldn’t give any information that was useful and they were very poor, so they were sent away. I meant to try to find out about your brother and sister. When I came for you, the nuns told me that you had mentioned foreigners. But the police, even my friends in the government, couldn’t do anything. They said it was useless to try to chase down foreigners…” He had been talking to his shoes, and he stopped and looked up at her, his face heavy with regret. “But I should have tried harder. If I had tried harder back then, when I first heard about you…”

“How did you know where to find me?”

“The nuns called. They had my name and number. I had written it down for your mother in case she needed help. I told you I was struck by her. She seemed so competent and gentle. I cannot believe…I intended only to give the nuns some money to look after you, to bring you up as a lay novice there.”

Latha listened to Mr. Vithanage tell her how he couldn’t bear to leave her. How they had called his house in Colombo and Mrs. Vithanage had contacted him in Pattipola. How he had gone to the convent right away, and how, when he realized that she was the same age as his own daughter, and that she had no mother or any family
left, he had felt compelled to take her with him. He had thought that this was what the gods wanted from him. It was fate that he had changed compartments, gone to the one in which her mother had been. He had seen how her mother had seemed to care especially for her. Back then he had fought for her, having not even asked Mrs. Vithanage before he returned to Colombo, bringing her with him. He had not allowed his wife to talk him out of keeping her. He had meant to look after her only until she came of age, he said, until she could be married off. He had planned to tell her all this at that time.

“But after all that happened, you know, with…with…Ajith…we had to send you back to the convent, and then you were too old to be married, not good enough, that’s what they said. Thara wanted to keep you for herself, to help her cope with…Gehan, I suppose, and help her raise her girls.” She had grown up beyond his reach, become a young woman so fast, almost overnight, and he could no longer intervene in the direction of her life, he told her. That was why she’d had to stay with Thara.

Latha wanted to sit there and listen to him for a long time. To have the story of her life repeated to her, with new details to fill up and color the blank spaces, and to make it seem as though life had once been full of other possibilities, full of other people who had loved her and only her. But she wouldn’t ask him for that. She did not want to give any of them, even Mr. Vithanage, the opportunity to refuse her anything ever again. So she simply sat and listened so long as he kept talking.

Podian came into the room. “Mahaththaya, Vithanage Madam wants you to come. She wants to go home now.”

“Tell madam that I will go home after I have settled this,” he said. Podian glanced at Latha, at the open half-packed suitcases, and backed away.

“You may not remember, Latha, but we tried to take you back to the nuns when you were very small, I don’t remember how old now, but by that time it was hopeless. Thara would not let me leave you there. So we went to the Hakgala gardens instead and to the Diyaluma Falls and pretended it was an up-country trip. Thara got attached to you. You were…her friend.”

“And now she can’t wait to get rid of me,” Latha said.

“We all pay for what we have done,” Mr. Vithanage said, nodding.

“I have lost two children who should have been born to me, and two who came to me from the gods. Those children, those girls, they were my gift for staying here. But even they have finished with me. It is all right. We all pay. So must they.”

“I no longer know where you could go to,” he said after a long silence. “I don’t know where they scattered your mother’s remains. Even that, I didn’t find out.”

Amma. She hardly knew how to say that word without it being a reference to someone else’s mother. What did she need of a mother’s ashes now? Of a grave site? What would she do with one? No, it was better that she had never remembered the woman who had left her at that convent to find her own way. If this was where that path had led her, she would keep going forward, taking only herself.

“I have no use for the past,” she said.

She got up and finished packing while he continued to sit there, in a not uncompanionable silence. She left some things: the sheets, the towel she had been using, shoes that Madhayanthi had broken when she played with them, old clothes, the string of twine behind the door on which she dried her underwear, the old mat she had once slept on, and also other bits of things that did not pack well, like oil and half-opened packets of shampoo. She took everything out of the suitcases and repacked them twice.

Her journey was deliberate. She was not running away and she was not being thrown out; she had a destination and an intention. When she was done, she swept the room and put all the dust and the ash and the destroyed sari into the wastepaper basket by the door. Then she took a fresh set of clothes and went to the servants’ bathroom to wash and change.

When she returned to the room, Mr. Vithanage was still sitting there. She had combed and knotted her hair and dressed herself in the one sari that she owned, the one she had permitted Gehan to buy for her and, even then, only because it had been given to her as a gift. Had she been there, she would have paid for it herself. It was red and
white cotton, hand-loomed. She wore it like the Southerners did, not like the Vithanages.

Mr. Vithanage sat there watching her put on her fine brown leather shoes and slide two thin bangles on, one on each wrist. Gold. Real gold bangles that she had got made at the jewelry store only this last year. She had traded in her star-shaped child earrings and Thara’s little-girl bangles to do it, melting those down and paying only a little more for these two new bangles. They were like the two of them, she thought, herself and Thara, blended together, created out of the past but inhabiting a new incarnation. She touched her earrings to make sure they were there.