On Sal Mal Lane (25 page)

“I can hear the postman,” she said suddenly, looking up, “can you? Maybe I’ll get a letter from someone. That will be exciting.”

“Do you have a pen pal from abroad? From Australia?” Raju asked, even that being possible for the Herath children. He pulled out a handkerchief and mopped his forehead and neck. He considered rolling up the sleeves of his shirt but decided he would hold that in reserve for when the heat got worse.

“No,” she replied. “Only Rashmi and Suren. Not even Nihil gets letters. Not even from our grandmother. She only writes to Rashmi.” She added this fact to the list of injustices perpetrated against her by her family.

“How about we write a letter to Nihil then?” Raju said, his face brightening. “That way he’ll be happy when he gets a letter and maybe he’ll write you one.”

Devi considered this and then shook her head. “He already lives here,” she said. She popped another Delta toffee into her mouth and tucked it into the back of her cheek, letting the melting caramel syrup drip through her mouth, waiting for it to make her feel better.

Raju could not find anything wrong with this line of reasoning so he planted his chins in the palm of his right hand and stared glumly toward the gate, listening to the postman’s bell drawing near and then nearer until it stopped in front of the Heraths’ house. He stood up and went to meet him. He opened the gate and greeted the postman noncommittally.

“Ah, Mr. Raju, you also have moved houses now?” the postman asked slyly, looking through the bundle of letters in his hand, very slowly, before extracting several bills and letters and tapping them together on the handlebar of his bike.

Raju was too preoccupied to catch the postman’s jibe at the way in which he, registered-mail-signature-required letter in hand, had discovered Raju’s father, Silver Joseph, with his mistress in this same house the afternoon before they had committed suicide together.

“No,” Raju said. “I’m looking after the youngest while the Herath family is at the big match. She is a bit sad and I’m trying to think of something to cheer her up.” Raju contemplated Devi from afar.

The postman peered over the gate at Devi, who spun slowly in her chair. “Ah, Baby! Why you sad, Baby?” he asked in English, then reverted to Sinhala. “Baby, if you sit crying like that all day, your face will become sour like a billing fruit!” he said. “Then what will your Amma say when she comes home and finds a billing and no little girl? Ah? Ah?”

Devi tightened her lips but the smile leaked out nonetheless. “Then she’ll have to make billing
achchaaru,
” she called out. “And nobody will know where I am and they’ll all be looking for me and in the end they’ll be so sad that they left me here to become billing.”

The postman laughed along with Raju. “You want to come for a ride with postman uncle?” he asked. “I will take you up the lane on the handlebar,” he said. He turned to Raju. “Shall I take her?”

Raju’s face went through several changes as he considered the wisdom of allowing Devi out of the gate. If he ran behind the bicycle, then he would be keeping her in sight, wouldn’t he? Besides, here was Devi running up to them, already kicking off her sandals and slipping out of the gate. And here was the postman, wiry as he was, with his trousers held in place by a thick belt tightened around his narrow waist, strapping his stack of mail to the rack of his bike and hoisting her up onto the handlebars.

“Yes,” Raju said, quickly, just before the grinning postman took off up the road with the happy, laughing child. “Yes, I will let you take her once only, up the street,” he said, starting to walk quickly behind the bicycle, his arms flapping at his sides, the fingers spread wide, a frown on his forehead, his head, too, tipped over even farther than usual with worry.

“Uncle Raju, look! I can go without even holding!” Devi said, lifting her hands in the air.

“No! No!” Raju yelled. “You madman, tell her to hold on!”

The postman laughed and said something to Devi, who shook her head and held on to the handle behind her back. Not that it provided much support, but it was better, Raju felt, than being completely out of control. The postman took her up the lane to the Sansoni house and then down the road to the gate of her house and back again several times before he stopped.

“Now that’s enough, Baby,” he said, panting, over her pleas for more. “Postman uncle will faint if I try to pedal one more time.”

Devi slipped off the handlebars reluctantly and stood beside Raju to watch the postman wheel his bike away, his shirt plastered to his back, to resume his work. There was no trace of sadness left in her face and Raju felt extremely glad about that. As they stood there, Sonna, wearing a dirty white shirt that flapped in the breeze, strode out from Raju’s gate, leaving it unlatched behind him.

“Ai! Sonna!” Raju called out, feeling respectable and responsible and in full control. He gestured toward his house. “Lock that gate behind you!”

“You lock it,” Sonna said, coming to a stop.

“Always causing problems,” Raju muttered as he left Devi’s side and crossed the street to latch the gate. It had been a long while since he’d felt the brunt of Sonna’s bullying. He had almost forgotten what it felt like.

“Don’ know who is causin’ problems,” Sonna said, “puttin’ a small girl like her on the pos’man’s bike. Left to look after her but don’ even know how to look after yourself.”

Raju had crossed back to stand next to Devi, who took his hand in commiseration, instantly comforted by the familiarity of his palm, the odd softness of its fleshy mounds. “Uncle Raju looks after me properly,” she said, addressing Sonna. “He brings me sweets and he dresses nicely and he comes to our house and has tea and sits with me.”

“Wait till your brother hears that he put you on the pos’man’s bike. That will be the end of your Uncle Raju.” Sonna glared at her, wondering if she was sufficiently scared, enough to stay out of trouble until her sister and brothers got home. No, she didn’t look it. “Good thing too,” he added, “otherwise one of these days he’ll get you into real trouble. Don’ know how you can stand to have an ugly man like him nex’ to you all day long.”

At this Devi’s face screwed up into a glower. “He’s not ugly.
You
are ugly,” Devi said, stamping her foot at him as if she was trying to scare away an insect.

Sonna stood rooted to the spot and looked at her in genuine amazement. Then he turned on his heel and stalked off. “Do what you like,” he said, though they could not hear the words, all they could hear was muttering: “You go an’ ride aroun’ with the pos’man. I don’ care. Did it once, did it twice, three times already I tried. For what? You stay with that fuckin’ fool. See what happens.” He broke off a sprig from the araliya branch that was hanging over the road from the tree at the edge of the Silvas’ garden and flung it away, his hand covered with the milk-white sap that continued to drip from the broken limb behind him. “
I’m
ugly?
I’m
ugly?”

He reached his house, kicked the front door open, and went inside. He strode up to the long mirror in his mother’s room. In his state of agitation, his eyes on fire, he did look frightening. The precise ballpoint pen drawings he had made on his body now seemed uneven, the design blotchy in parts where the ink had smeared. He hit himself several times in his stomach, bracing for each punch. He buttoned up his shirt. He tried to calm his face. He was
not
ugly! He wanted to scream it out loud; instead he began to cry, sharp tears evaporating on his cheeks before they had even registered their arrival.

Raju, who had waited until Sonna was out of sight, looked down and stroked the hair off Devi’s face and tucked a stray tendril behind her ear, grateful for her support, thankful that Sonna had left. He opened the Heraths’ gate and took Devi inside.

“Can you find another bicycle, Uncle Raju?” she asked when they had taken up their previous positions, Raju on the front steps to the house, seated on a folded newspaper to protect his clothes from the red floor polish, she in the hanging chair.

Raju shook his head. “Only bicycle I know of is in my house but it doesn’t work,” he said. “Daddy’s Raleigh, but,” he twisted his open palms in opposite directions, “not working.”

“Can’t you make it work?”

Raju did not know what, exactly, the matter was with his late father’s bicycle. He had never ridden the bike, it being full sized and built for a tall man, but he had imagined that he might use it someday and so he had brought it inside and leaned it up against his mother’s chest of dry goods. It got some movement every day when their servant girl struggled to push it aside to take out dried chillies and spices while shooing away cockroaches, and then dutifully returned it to the spot where Raju’s father had been accustomed to putting it; what had once belonged to the dead was sacred. He could ask Mr. Bin Ahmed, he thought, a vague memory of his neighbor once riding a bicycle rising up before him. Or perhaps he could take it to Koralé and see if he could tell him what to do about the bicycle to make it work. Or Lucas, he could ask Lucas, who might have a considered opinion, having been there when the Raleigh was first bought, brand-new and gleaming black and silver when Raju was just a teenager himself. He looked at Devi. If riding a bicycle could lighten her mood, surely it was worth trying.

“Devi,” he said, deciding right then and there that he had not only the authority but the intelligence to make such decisions, “if you can promise Uncle Raju that you will stay inside the house with Kamala, I will go and see if I can fix the bicycle right now.”

Devi smiled. “Of course I will stay with Kamala. It’s too hot to go outside now anyway,” she said, as further evidence of her intent to comply, such unpromising heat stacking up before her like the bars of a cage. “I’ll ask Kamala to give me kurumba and I’ll wait inside. Even if you don’t come back till after lunch I won’t come outside. I’ll read Rashmi’s Enid Blyton book. She borrowed it last week and she hasn’t even let me touch it but I know where she hides it and she’s not here, so I can read it. Okay? You go,” she finished, and gave him a push. “By the time you come back, I might have even finished the whole book!”

Raju fairly ran down the street to fetch Lucas, whom he found sitting in the shade of an areca nut tree, his pale red sarong rolled up tight between his legs and tucked under his bottom, scratching the few hairs on his bald head and staring with some belligerence at the sky.

“Mr. Raju,” he said and nodded, though he did not stand up.

“Lucas Aiyya, I have come to ask if you will look at my father’s bicycle.”

“Eh? Bicycle? What for a bicycle now? I can’t even walk!” Lucas said and chuckled, real amusement flooding his age-gray eyes and spilling over into the lines of his face. “I can’t even walk, Mr. Raju, haven’t you noticed?”

“Not for you to ride,” Raju said. “For me. For me to take Devi Baby up and down the road.”

Lucas continued to sit, but he stopped laughing. He shook a finger at Raju. “Devi Baby is not supposed to leave the house,” he said.

“I know, I know, I’m the one who is looking after her. Whole family went for the big match, and I was told to look after Devi Baby because you know how she is, quite naughty sometimes,” he said, laughing, then turned serious. He corrected himself. “But only sometimes, not always. Most of the time she is a very good girl.”

Lucas stared at his feet as he took in this sudden wealth of information: that Raju still had his father’s bicycle, that the Heraths had gone away for the day, and, most important of all, that they had left Raju, not him, Lucas, but Raju, in charge of their younger daughter. Youngests were the most beloved, the best protected. So how was it that
this
youngest, such a flower among all the other youngests around, had been left in the care of a spilling-all-over-the-place man like Raju? He retraced the last several weeks in his mind. Had he done something wrong?

Yes, true, Alice had feigned a headache on the one day that Mrs. Herath had sent for her and he had taken Alice’s place to help the Heraths’ woman in the kitchen for a big party they had given for some teachers. And, true, Alice had pretended not to see Mr. Herath when his driver stopped the car on the way to work right next to them and asked after his, Lucas’s, health. What was wrong with that woman? She was constantly ruining everything. And now look, after all his hard work to cultivate his special status, the youngest had been handed over to Raju. Then again, he reasoned, maybe there was more to Raju than he had suspected. After all, look at all the things that Koralé had changed since Mr. Herath came to live. No more foreign cigarettes, donating wood to the temple once a month, paying the laborers more after Mr. Herath got Koralé a contact to bring in coconut oil and kerosene too, all these were good things, weren’t they? Even the Bolling girls seemed to be dressing properly. And Old Mrs. Joseph had told him that one of them even had eyes on a Silva boy. All these things, surely, had to do with the way the Heraths organized their world. So why not Raju? The Heraths did everything right. Raju had obviously been chosen because he was the best for the job.

Lucas stood up and dusted off the back of his sarong. He looked approvingly at Raju’s buttoned-up shirt and his leather shoes. He saluted Raju. “Let’s go, Mr. Raju Sir. I will come and look at your bicycle.”

When Lucas arrived and asked Old Mrs. Joseph’s servant girl to dust the cobwebs that wrapped around the wheels and between the bars of the bike, two large spiders scurried off and Raju skipped out of the way with a yelp. Even when it had been wiped down, the bike seemed crooked and insufficient to Raju. Lucas took the bicycle, looking as though he, too, did not believe it would be adequate as a vehicle for a youngest.

As Raju watched Lucas go down the road, he experienced a disconcerting moment of imagining that it was his father, not Lucas, who was wheeling the bike as he had done each morning when he left for work, his gait erect, his handsome face ready for the day, even on that last day when he left, as usual, but did not go to work; he had simply walked the bike across the street, leaned it against the short parapet, and gone in to kill himself. Raju had been tasked with the business of removing the bike in the wake of the discovery of the two dead bodies, before the two separate funerals. Neither family had gone to pay their respects to the other bereaved, the betrayal so humiliating for both the widow and the widower left behind. And now here was the bike come out of hiding, and if it were to be repaired and if it were to be functional again, if a girl like Devi could sit astride it and be wheeled up and down the street, why then perhaps Raju could forget its previous last day of use. He continued to stand in the burning heat while he waited for Lucas, now anxious, now hopeful, until Lucas returned an hour or so later.