On Sal Mal Lane (14 page)

In this case, Mrs. Herath accused her husband with great drama of having destroyed her life, a destruction that, it seemed, had preceded the birth of her older son, though the exact details of how this destruction was effected were not revealed; of interfering in matters he knew nothing about, i.e., the raising of children; and of being in all things, but particularly in the business of family life, incompetent at best and routinely absent at worst for—and could he deny it?—he cared more for politics than he did for them. Mr. Herath in his turn cast aspersions on her mothering and accused her of lacking the foresight necessary to recognize talent when she saw it, of ruining her children’s lives, and of forcing them to live not as they chose but as she dictated. These were not new statements, but they had a new source and though none of the things they said were altogether true, none of it was entirely false, and so they both went to bed with bruised hearts.

In the boys’ bedroom, where the children had gathered, there was a sense that this latest disappointment for one of them had only tightened their bonds with each other. Somewhere during that prolonged argument, the first one that spilled over into the hours that followed the children’s bedtime, Suren and his siblings divined that he would never go to Bhatkhande, not because either of his parents said so, explicitly, but because they realized that Suren’s desire to immerse himself in music would, in this house, forever be subsumed by whatever it was that stirred the emotions of adults.

Not Only the Piano

Nothing remained for Suren, it seemed, but the piano lessons that were sanctioned by both his parents, and so off he went to Kala Niles, his music books tucked under his arm, resigned to his fate. Had he been paying closer attention, Suren might have guessed that while Kala Niles knew the extent of his aptitude she also knew the hurt of his disappointments, for when she decided to share her collection of records with him, the first she chose was Brahms 3 Intermezzi, op. 117.

“Brahms referred to the intermezzi as his lullabies to his sorrows,” she told him. She handed him the record and pointed out the two lines inscribed on the label at the center:
Schlaf sanft mein Kind, schlaf sanft und Schön! Mich dauert’s sehr, dich weinen sehn.
And because she did not translate those lines for him, because she did not say,
sleep softly my child, sleep softly and well, it hurts my heart to see you weeping,
Suren simply listened to the music, a gentle glide between what is heard and what is remembered, each note opening in small blooms, and touched the record with reverence when it finished playing.

“You have to be very careful, Suren, when you use this,” she said each time she took off the cloth she used to cover her record player, one that she had embroidered with colorful musical notes when she was just a teenager.

Seated cross-legged on the floor of her bedroom, Suren listened to composers he had only heard of and as he listened he felt that they spoke to him of the lives of his brother and sisters, the difficulties and ease of their daily infatuations. In Debussy’s Arabesque no. 2 he heard Devi’s footsteps, in Brahms’s 6 Pieces, op. 118, Ballade in G Minor he saw the movement of kites, and listening to Chopin’s “Ocean Waves” Etude op. 25 no. 12 HQ he sensed his own and his siblings’ fears. In the music that lifted so majestically off the spinning grooves of the records, he found his favorite keys, the heroic E flat, the gentle G minor, and the perfection of C-sharp major, the keys he would return to one day when he composed his first piece of music.

What Suren did know, however, was that in Kala Niles he had an adult who embraced him fully, who was ready to support him as well as to let his talent guide her. He knew, because he had been told, by Mrs. Niles, that Kala Niles talked about him with her peers who also taught the piano, and that when she described his skill, she referred to him as
my prodigy.
Suren’s fingers had the twice-blessed curvature of strength and restraint. His
impetuoso
evened out with
incalzando
to draw forth if not the half notes of the ragas he had begun listening to thanks to his father, then at least interpretations hitherto concealed from his teacher. He arrived serious-faced and determined to conquer whatever musty pages she had chosen to set before him. He returned having transformed them into pieces whose notes corresponded with his fingers but whose hesitations and reprieves were foreign to her ears. At his touch, demi-semi-quavers rippled and staccatos clapped with an urgency that, once a week, brought Kala Niles to a state of ecstasy that could only be grounded with the heartbreak of his elongated
breves,
quivering in the silence of a remembered note and making the tick-tock of her metronome sound like guns.

Kala Niles’s anticipation of Suren’s lessons grew to such a pitch that she took to hovering at the farthest edge of her garden, where, hidden by the bushes that formed her hedge, she could hear him practice, waiting to catch the moment when the taught-piece became his. She would try to guess which piece he had chosen by the scale he first practiced to warm up his fingers. She would close her eyes and picture the piece of paper on which he had dissected the music, the tonic, dominant, and subdominant chords neatly arranged and memorized; if the piece was in the key of A major, she could see the A, D, and E chords written out. She had taught him that trick and he had absorbed it easily, using it to master every piece. But most of all, she listened simply to hear him play. In this, she had company.

The Bolling girls had seamlessly added a new routine to their days: crouching in front of the hedge along Mrs. Herath’s garden to listen to Suren practice, though whenever any of the other neighbors appeared they would stand up and pretend to be deep in discussion, faces close together, heads bent, fiddling with their own or each other’s fingers as though they were whispering secrets.

“Like heaven,” Rose breathed.

“Even better. Like hell!” Dolly murmured, without her usual shriek of laughter.

Suren’s music was both inspiration for and antidote to their girlish crushes, but it was a game they could play only as long as he was seated at the piano. The moment he stopped, banality returned and they were left to hope against hope that the decency of his upbringing, which would require him not to dismiss them outright, combined with the purity of their need, would secure Suren for one or the other of them. They agreed that with Dolly’s attentions already focused on Jith, Rose was the more likely candidate. In this, despite all that was shabby and by-the-seat-of-their-pants about their existence, the twins were not unlike the Herath children: when it came down to it, they wished the best for each other for they knew that luck, should it find them, would neither tarry nor multiply.

This listening that they did, however, could only occur when Sonna was out of the house. He had greeted their friendship with the Heraths first with astonishment and then with rage.

“They probably think of you like servants!” he had yelled that first day as he cornered them behind Raju’s gate.

“No, they gave us biscuits on a tray!” Rose wailed as she tried to get away from Sonna, who held her close with her recently combed and braided hair twisted around his fist. The farther she moved her feet away from him, the more she arched her neck, trying desperately to ease the sharp pain that was shooting through her head.

“On a tray?” Sonna spluttered. “On a tray?”

“Yes! An’ had enough for all!” Dolly howled in turn, her head, too, yanked back by Sonna.

“You can’ stop us from being friends,” Rose sobbed when he finally released them, unable to think of a rejoinder to their claim of biscuits served on trays.

“If I see you there I’ll drag you back by your hair like the
vesi
up the street. That’s what you are like. Two of you. Like fuckin’ prostitutes.”

These altercations, which became frequent and painful for them, were never reported to their parents. Both Rose and Dolly believed, and they were right, that should their father find out that Sonna had appointed himself the arbiter of their lives, he would either drive him out of their house to live on the streets or fight him until he was too broken to be mended. And because they wanted Sonna to stay as far away from the Heraths as possible, in the beginning Rose and Dolly came to listen and sometimes talk when there was no chance of Sonna returning to discover their fraternity. Eventually however, they grew bolder and set up their own games in the full light of the neighborhood with not only the Herath children but the Tisseras’ quiet son and even the Silva boys, who were lured away from their parents’ advice, so delightful were their shouts of play.

To all of this, Sonna had no response.

Meanwhile, Suren’s resentment at his parents, both of them, the one for having described a dream for him and the one for having crushed it, had taken root in a corner of his heart. It expressed itself occasionally, in the mid term test that he contrived to fail, for instance, or the fact that he forgot to bring home the results of his London Music School exams, for which his mother had paid extra and to which she had chaperoned him, sitting outside the Masonic Hall while the British examiners, flown in for the occasion, administered the tests in theory and music.

“I had a meeting with your class teacher today, Suren,” his mother said one evening. After dinner.

Suren said nothing as his mother watched him. Mrs. Herath found his calm face disconcerting. He had the untroubled look of the blameless, further enhanced by its suggestion of an unshared inner life. No child in her knowledge—and hundreds of them had passed through her hands by then, arriving in their tumbled, mismatched groups and leaving as a single unit, lockstep in their admiration for her—could be as good as Suren appeared to be. Of course, she was right. None of the children were. Not Suren, with his saintly face; certainly not Devi, whose only preoccupation was extracting the maximum amount of fun from each day, and fun is rarely all good; not Nihil, who would willingly trade good for safety; not even Rashmi, who, though she appeared to be given over entirely to the matter of good and perfection, would soon be cozy with the delight of bad behavior.

“Consi tells me that you answered almost half the questions wrong on the math test last week,” Mrs. Herath continued. “She took me aside in the staff room. She was quite concerned about you. She said you had finished the paper before anybody else and handed it in. She was shocked to discover that it was mostly wrong.”

Suren said nothing, since what he wanted to say could not be uttered. He had decided to cut back on the regurgitation of facts. He was tired of it, and bored. He had tried, and succeeded, in answering the 1979 copy of the national grade 10 GCE O/L paper in mathematics the previous week, and so it seemed pointless to convince his teacher in grade 7A that he knew how to divide and multiply and figure out logarithms when he knew much more than that. Even if his maths teacher
was
his mother’s best friend.

“What’s the matter? Didn’t you study? How could you get so much wrong?” his mother asked, frowning.

Suren shrugged. Divulging his experiment would smack of arrogance. His continued yearning to dedicate his life to the study of music was even more untranslatable to his practical, strong-willed, and devoted mother. How could he explain that his love of music stemmed from a mind that craved harmony but was constantly in tension with the practical realities of living his life, of minding his siblings, of navigating the thousand bromidic requirements of his birth order?

“I don’t know,” he said.

“How can you not know?” Mrs. Herath rested her chin in her hands. Her forehead knit itself together in genuine concern. She had neglected him, she thought, that was the only explanation for the dismaying situation in which she found herself. She had simply set him aside as soon as his intelligence and forbearance had been confirmed, like a freshly ironed suit of clothes, and moved on to the next of her children. Rashmi she had not even had to consider: that child had been born perfect. She had been distracted by Nihil, who was constantly throwing one worry or another her way, and by Devi, what with all the terrible things that had been said about her at birth by the astrologer, who reaffirmed his predictions every time she visited him and he unfolded the brown parchment etched with symbols and letters that nobody but he could understand. Warnings seconded by every relative, friend, and stranger over the age of forty. Even the ladies of Sal Mal Lane had echoed Kala Niles’s dark predictions about Devi just the other evening when they had stopped by to have a cup of tea with Mrs. Herath after taking a look at the latest addition to her garden, a gorgeous flamboyant, destined to sit a little awkwardly among the graceful sal mal trees that dominated the neighborhood, not unlike a road-tart at a gathering of chaste goddesses.

“Not that there should be anything to worry about,” Mrs. Nadesan said, “but it is something all of us have heard at one time or another, this seventh of July business.”

“We Muslims don’t believe these things,” Mrs. Bin Ahmed had said, “but it is always best to be careful. Prevention is better than cure, after all.” And she had nodded sagely.

“The first time I heard of anybody dying it was when I was just a child, about nine years old,” Mrs. Tissera had added, crossing her legs and rearranging her slight frame until she took up even less space than usual. “The woman who used to cook for us, her son, born on the seventh of July, fell into our well and drowned.”

These kinds of conversations, which seemed to occur more and more frequently, had distracted her and kept her from realizing that her older son was at risk, Mrs. Herath thought, still gazing at Suren.

“I’m going to ask Mr. Pieris to give you after-school classes. That will fix this problem. Soon you’ll be back on your feet again, Putha. Don’t worry.”

Suren watched as his mother stood up, strode to the living room, where she picked up her soft brown leather handbag, recovered from it a very small red notebook stuffed with bits of papers, and made a series of phone calls. He listened for the reliable musicality of the whirring dial, his mother’s index finger inserted into each numbered section with crisp authority, willing the telephone to speed up. He listened as she discussed his downturn with a clutch of her best friends: Consi, Monica, Lakshmi, and Chubba. She referred to it as a stumble, a little stumble, to be precise. She would muster the forces of private classes and restore him to his former glory. By the time she was done, Suren wondered if the better part of valor might not have been to simply answer the question paper correctly, but it was too late now to harbor regret. Mr. Pieris was coming to regenerate his math skills and he would begin the very next day.