On Sal Mal Lane (38 page)

In the interest of fairness it is necessary to note here that before she arrived on Sal Mal Lane, a long time before then, before the Herath children came into being, Mrs. Herath had been a different person. She had spent her girlhood immersed in literature and sports, her days filled with determined successes and, as the beloved firstborn of a large family, many privileges as well as indulgences. With no intimations of disaster allowed near her, these were things that had made her fearless as a young adult. If tastes lay in the direction of depth, therefore, her heart was a bottomless pit inhabited by twists and turns that only the bold would wish to traverse. If color was called for, she could have shamed a flaming tropical sunset out of the skies. But marriage and motherhood, those reliable stabilizers, had changed all that, taking her so completely out of her unfettered world and binding her so firmly and so suddenly within the one that proscribed her movements, that all she had managed to retain of her former self was a firm grasp of her mother’s values, the values of an older generation: sobriety, dignity, and overall propriety. Those turns not taken, for travel overseas to study nursing, for pursuing the life of a socialite who loved her game of tennis as much as she loved her ballroom dancing, those turns had been repaved.
The footpath has become Galle Road
she liked to say when old friends stopped by, gesturing in the direction of the artery that ran along the coastal city of Colombo,
no time for dawdling.
She did not let memory bring potential into focus: the promise of balmy lanes leading to tennis courts, the thrill of a cinder track under bare feet flying, the rhythm of her slight body dancing with island grace under the Southern Cross, these things were simply old indulgences, the sort of indulgences that could destabilize the stability she had once resisted. And this show, this production, was the worst of it, a sharp reminder of a certain kind of imprudent joy.

“Whose idea was it to go and practice at that Kala’s house?” she demanded to know, though she knew the answer, as well as the answer they were going to give.

“All of us thought of it,” Rashmi said, surprising Mrs. Herath; of all her children, Rashmi had been her one last hope.

“Okay, then whose friends were those, those, those creatures who were in the band?”

“Mine,” Suren replied, drowning out the chorus of
all of us
from his siblings.

“Yours. So, the practicing was for
your
band with
your
friends so it must have been
your
grand idea, am I right?” she asked. “Am. I. Right?” she asked again of the now silent wall of faces.

“They are my friends too,” Rashmi spoke up, her words rushing together. “Two of their sisters are in my class at school, that’s how Suren met them. When we all went to the birthday party, you remember? Sonali’s birthday party, Amma? I wore that pink dress you made for me?”

Rashmi looked down at her feet as soon as she had finished, scolding herself for her foolishness. This kind of detail was the dead giveaway of a liar. The truth required no embellishments; it was what it was. A dress, a pink dress, no less, and one that she hated as she had hated the color since the age of nine, would have been sooner forgotten than remembered. And since when did Suren and Nihil or even Devi accompany her to birthday parties? She looked forlornly at her older brother. He smiled in that new way he had, as though he was saying
Never mind, cheer up,
and
We’ll survive this,
all at the same time.

“They are my friends too,” Rashmi repeated.

Mrs. Herath sat up straight, determined to put a stop to the nonsense. “Okay, then what are their last names?”

“Adamaly, Agalawatte, Jeganathan . . .” Suren said quickly.

“I didn’t ask you. I asked her,” Mrs. Herath snapped.

“Adamaly, Agalawatte, Jeganathan, and the last is Simon,” she said, confidently, glad that Devi had taken to calling Dylan Simon “Simple Simon,” which had planted the name in her head.

“Simon, Adamaly, Jeganathan” Mrs. Herath spat out each name, her rage erasing her egalitarian worldview. “
Thuppai
Burghers and Tamils and Muslims whose parents we don’t even know, are these the kinds of people you should be seen with in public, let alone while prancing, half-naked, on a stage?”

The children stared at her. None of them had appeared on stage half-naked. Rose and Dolly had been
tarted up,
as Rose herself had put it, with clothes borrowed from their older sister, Sophia, but that was the extent of half-nakedness. Besides, if Adamalys and Simons and Jeganathans were not to be associated with when they attended the same schools and owned most of the instruments, then what on earth were Raju and the Bolling girls doing in the Heraths’ house all the time? Clearly, their mother was reaching for straws, and if she was reaching for straws then surely they were right to have done what they did. All this passed through their minds as they stood and gazed at her obediently, their mutiny safely behind them.

Mrs. Herath looked hard at them, then cleared her throat, deciding. She stood up. “There’s going to be no more band practice anywhere. If I hear that you have been going to Kala’s to play guitars and drums and nonsense, you mark my words, I will take the
mirisgala
and smash her piano to bits!”

This was the type of threat Mrs. Herath was used to delivering, but those threats were usually delivered with regard to things they owned.
I’ll take the skin off your backside, I’ll rip that dress to shreds, I’ll burn all your books, I’ll cut off your hair,
that sort of thing. But to threaten to smash poor Kala Niles’s source of livelihood with the heavy granite stone used by Kamala for grinding chillies? The very thought separated the children from their mother by a measure of deep consternation.

“How will we make sure that Kala Akki doesn’t get into trouble?” Rashmi whispered as they all gathered under the sal mal trees up the road and discussed the new rules. The trees filled the air with the smell of buds on the cusp of blooming, nature itself gathering toward the children in solidarity.

“Don’t worry about that,” Suren said, his voice grim as he leaned against one of the trees. “If it comes down to it, I’ll tell Amma that I will stop playing the piano forever if she won’t let us practice the band.”

Yes, Suren had changed. He was no longer the good boy who did what was expected, he was the boy who knew the power of promise and whom he could hold hostage by the mere threat of refusing to live up to it.

“And also if I can’t keep singing,” Rashmi added. “What?” she asked, as the other three turned to look at her. “I can sing too, not just Rose and Dolly, right?” She looked at Suren for confirmation.

Rashmi really could sing, at long last. Until then she had only possessed a beautiful voice, but she had lacked the yearning that turned a song into a story until she had performed in the variety show. Suren nodded, and Nihil and Devi looked at Rashmi with fresh regard.

Perhaps it was mere youth that made the Herath children and their friends believe that they were invincible and, also, invisible and inaudible. Or perhaps it was that the younger Heraths, Nihil and Devi, had cajoled Raju, who frankly did not require much prodding, Devi simply had to ask, as well as Lucas and Kamala—both won over by their attendance at the variety show—to assist them in their escapade by standing guard and watching for their mother’s return. Whatever it was, their practices continued, though a few times they were almost caught when Mrs. Herath got a lift back home from one student or another, and once Lucas, and another time Raju, failed to see her until the car reached the Heraths’ gate and she got out from the backseat. Those times found Raju rushing out of his house in his weight-lifting underpants, something he had given up doing after Rashmi had suggested it, trying to start up a conversation with her until Devi could alert the band members that
Amma’s back! Stop! Stop! Amma’s back!

The one person who might have told their mother was Sonna, who, they had begun to notice, always seemed to be at Raju’s house when they were practicing; they could see the top of his head above Raju’s gate as they walked to the Nileses’ house. A few times Nihil had been convinced that it was the sight of him that prevented Sonna from telling their mother and he felt grateful enough to raise his hand in a wave to the older boy, even though each time Sonna only turned away without any sign that he had seen Nihil or his greeting. He did not acknowledge Rashmi, either, even though, full of excitement at having discovered the fissures in her otherwise good-girl reputation, Rashmi made a point of turning to smile and wave at Sonna as they passed.

Down Sal Mal Lane, the change in Rashmi and Suren and even in the previously dependable Lucas and Kamala went unnoticed by the working adults distracted by the constant political upheavals around them. Upheavals that the children knew about from whispered conversations at school or from the newspapers they glanced at and then discarded, their minds on music and cricket. Even Rashmi, who had so recently made it a practice to read the papers, had given it up in the wake of the variety show.

A presidential election was announced for the first time in the history of the country, and posters that carried the elephant, the symbol of the government, far outweighed those of the key, the star, the hand, and the bell, the symbols for the Lanka Sama Samaja Party, the Communist Party, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, and the Janatha Vimukthi Peremuna, respectively, and those posters with the elephant symbol remained on walls long after they were supposed to have been taken down. All the adults had opinions about this, some, like the Silvas, in favor, some, like the Heraths, against, but nobody felt able to protest.

The absorption of the Prevention of Terrorism Act into permanent legislation added another cylinder of fuel to simmering frictions. And what, exactly, did this Act prevent? It did not prevent acts of terrorism, nor vandalism, nor assassinations. It did not foster communal harmony. It was worded to aid in the detention of individuals
suspected
of terrorism and swiftly became a means to censorship of the press and the restriction of free speech and movement.

Nihil learned of this when he read the newspaper aloud to Mr. Niles one afternoon. “The Prevention of Terrorism Act prohibits the publication of any material, spoken word, or sign whose language could be considered to be designed to incite to violence, or which is likely to cause racial or communal disharmony or feelings of ill-will or hostility between different communities or racial or religious groups,” he read, then looked up and asked, “What does that mean?”

An agitated Mr. Niles said, “It means there will be no room for us to discuss right or wrong,” and he took the newspaper away from Nihil and flung it across the room, where it fell elegantly, like a lady’s handkerchief. Mr. Niles’s response startled Nihil and made him stay quiet for a long while until, after he was sure Mr. Niles had drifted off to sleep, he got up, picked up the paper, put it back together, and read the news quietly to himself, saving the sports pages for the end.

Nihil went home to tell his siblings that “Mr. Niles says discussions have been banned by the government,” a statement they received without much ado, there being no corresponding deprivation that they could relate the news to; all the same rules remained in effect in their house, and even the neighbors who did not talk to one another did so out of choice.

But Mr. Niles was right. Within such parameters, there was no venue for the airing of grievances or passions, all of which were now tucked away inside homes and hearts that, built as they were for other pursuits, could not contain them for long.

Far beyond their games of hopscotch, cricket, marbles, and catch, things the children of Sal Mal Lane might have paid attention to were happening. Still, they refused, whenever they could, to look up from chalk squares, keyboards, love notes, theme songs, and, in Devi’s case, her special bicycle rides up and down the road with Raju in attendance. The children’s hideout, tucked among the grove of sal mal trees, gave them an added sense of being removed even from the words of people like Mohan. They retreated there during the hottest time of the afternoons, to sit in its shade and do their homework or talk, sometimes sharing guavas from Mrs. Sansoni, a bag of sweets from Raju, or raw mangoes that Mr. Herath had brought home from the Sunday market. So long as they showed up to be together, to play together, they could pretend that all the larger concerns, which they certainly knew more about now, nonetheless had no bearing on them.

In the Silva household, what was bad intensified and Mohan brought home leaflets denouncing Tamils. This caused Jith to tremble in his presence and write to Dolly in secret. He dreamed each night of escape while the older Silvas waited for war with a certain smug satisfaction, more sure than they had been of anything in their lives that, when it came, they would be on the side of
the winners,
though every now and again Mrs. Silva glanced wistfully toward the Herath house and wished that she had another lady to talk to down the lane, the kind that she knew Mrs. Herath could be if she really wanted to. Until then, Mrs. Silva had to content herself in continuing to
lay the groundwork,
as she thought of it, making occasional small talk that skirted around the things she really wanted to say in the hope that when it was time, when the full force of evidence was before her, Mrs. Herath would come around to understanding that they, Mrs. Herath and Mrs. Silva, were on the same side. There would be gratitude on Mrs. Herath’s part then, Mrs. Silva was sure of it.

Mohan spent more time with Sonna, standing at the bottom of the lane with young men whom Sonna introduced to Mohan as his friends though one or the other of those men was constantly being locked up and bailed out of the Wellawatte prison for misdemeanors ranging from drunken fights to petty thefts. If Mohan found their behavior objectionable, he did not say. He had developed an air of bravado and laughed loudly alongside them at bawdy jokes his mother would have blanched to hear.