On Sal Mal Lane (39 page)

“Have you seen the Heraths recently?” he might ask Sonna, egging him on. “They seem to spend all their time at that Niles house.”

“Pansy fuckers,” Sonna might say, though when he said those words he thought only of Suren. “They don’ know anythin’ ’bout anythin’ but know how to sing pop songs.” They smacked each other on the back and thanked their lucky stars that they were not like them, those girly homos, those cowards.

Sonna had also taken to spending nights away from home. He left after dinner and sometimes did not return for days. Neither Francie Bolling, who was afraid of both her son and her husband, nor Jimmy Bolling, who did not care, asked Sonna where he went and what he did when he was gone, though Francie Bolling did accept the wads of money he would bring back and give to her when his father was not around.

And because he rarely saw Sonna anymore and because when he did see him, Sonna was usually in a foul mood, either scolding his mother or yelling at Raju, Nihil stopped waving to him and decided that Mr. Niles was right, Sonna was a bad boy by choice.

“I don’t think you should be waving to Sonna,” he told Rashmi one evening as they walked to the Nileses’ house, she to her lesson, he to visit Mr. Niles to discuss his progress with cricket.

“Why?” she asked, tossing her head and smiling at Nihil, at his concern about whom she chose to wave to.

“He’s a bad boy,” Nihil said.

“I don’t care,” Rashmi said. “It’s not like he’s my friend. I’m just waving to him.” And, just to harass Nihil a little, she ran back the way they had come, stood on tiptoe, and smiled and waved with even more enthusiasm at Sonna, then waited to see what he would do. He made no move in response, though he stared at her standing there, her hair brushed out and loose down her back in its waves, the teasing in her eyes, her bangles making music, lost in his own dark imaginings. Eventually, when it was clear that he would not respond, Rashmi turned away, her good humor gone.

“I told you,” Nihil said.

Rashmi did not disagree.

Despite their continued difficulties with Sonna, in the Bolling house, with two girls engaged in one way or another with “good” families, Jith having been disassociated from the politics of his parents by a sleight of mind that weighted his timidity more and his origins less, the older Bollings regarded themselves as having done well by their children. They began to dress better and speak more soberly. There were fewer arguments and more appearances in public.

In the Nileses’ house, three people were revived by the daily presence of children who slammed doors and creaked gates and muddied the floor and dropped crumbs that brought with them armies of red ants that made Kala Niles get down on her hands and knees at night, rubbing the edges of doorways with kerosene oil in a half hearted attempt to keep them away. Those children turned the house of the Unmarried and the Dying into a house full of the Future.

In the Herath household, much had changed, mostly for Rashmi, who had discovered what Devi had known all along: life was too short for rules made by nuns and older women for little girls. It took a while for her lay teachers and nuns to realize that Rashmi was no longer the golden girl she had once been, because she had earned that time by doing what every smart student knows how to do: be impeccable in behavior and superior in class-work for the first four weeks of school when teachers were distracted and welcomed any evidence of scholarship, and ride the glory until the end of the year. Not this year.

When the second-term tests came around and the report cards were handed out, the evidence was, well, evident: three B’s sat, one under the other, for Sinhala, Buddhism, and Maths.

“I am quite sure that she studied hard for these tests, Sister,” Mrs. Herath declared as she sat across the desk from the Sister Principal, Sister Stanislaus, and tried not to look at her husband. Whatever her feelings about Rashmi at home, she refused to allow someone
from the outside
to cast doubt on her daughter’s character.

Mr. Herath leaned forward, amicably. “Yes, there is no need for all this fuss. She always gets A’s, she’ll get A’s again.” He leaned back, satisfied with his contribution and thinking ahead to the afternoon of meetings he had to attend.

Mrs. Herath herself did not feel up to paying too much attention just then to Sister Stanislaus. Like every other adult in the country, she, too, was caught up in contemplating the outcome of the presidential elections, which were barreling toward them. Right now, her mind was on the possibility of curfews and the necessity to stock up on rice and dhal and tins of Jack Mackerel.

Sister Stanislaus picked up a stack of Rashmi’s report cards going all the way back to kindergarten, all of them pale blue, and rapped them on the desk. She then spread them out and examined each one through glasses that perched at the tip of her nose, the long golden beads of the chain on which they were hung swinging gently next to her sharp-featured face. Finding nothing there that could really qualify as a problem, but for this last set of results, she looked up finally and turned her gaze on Mr. Herath.

“Well, you must be very busy, Mr. Herath, with the elections?” she said.

Mrs. Herath stiffened. Her husband had barely made it to this appointment, brushing it off with a
summons to the prime minister’s office
comment that even she, despite her years of experience listening to him, could not decipher.

“I am not involved in the elections,” he said, chuckling with amusement, “I am an official. My job will be to oversee procedure and verify the count at the polling booths. And vote, of course. I’ll be doing that.”

“It is unfortunate that the country does not seem to be going the way we want it to,” Sister Stanislaus said. Neither of the Heraths said anything, and she continued. “The whole business last year with the riots, you know, it was not easy for our Tamil girls.”

“There was no rioting here,” Mr. Herath said mildly.

“No, of course not,” Sister Stanislaus said, airily, as though riots and convents would never inhabit the same universe. “Not here. Still, unrest anywhere . . .”

“Those were some isolated incidents. The army should have been dispatched right away, but these jokers . . .” Mr. Herath felt a sharp pain in his sandal-clad right foot. He glanced at his wife. “. . . anyway, we’ll see. The elections may change everything.”

“Oh,
our
girls come from families that support the government, no doubt about it,” Sister Stanislaus said, the note of accusation quite obvious. Her hierarchy of alignments was so clear to the Heraths it was almost as if she had listed it off: Catholics of any race, Hindu Tamils, Muslims, and last of all the group to which the two of them belonged, the anti-government Sinhalese-Buddhists.

“Of course,” Mrs. Herath said, smoothly, “and my husband works for the government too. As do I, after all, as a teacher I too am a government servant, isn’t that so? And our children are all good students,” and here she faltered before finishing, “all of them.”

“Well, Devi—” Sister Stanislaus said.

“Devi is doing quite well, according to her teachers,” Mrs. Herath said, “and we are here to discuss Rashmi.”

And though Rashmi was discussed for twenty more minutes, no compromise was struck, for the Heraths would not agree that there was anything amiss with a child with three sudden B’s after a lifetime of A’s. Fresh on the heels of this meeting, when the new class monitors were being chosen, and Rashmi was not only nominated, the nomination was seconded, and the votes were cast by an overwhelming majority in her favor, the class teacher, a nun named Sister Francesca, decided unilaterally to eliminate the function of class monitor.

“You had to go and open your mouth and talk about governments and jokers, didn’t you?” Mrs. Herath berated her husband, when Rashmi told her. “Now they’ll be penalizing the girls until they graduate.”

“They should go to a different school, then,” Mr. Herath said. “We don’t need to pay school fees to a pack of anti-Buddhist, anti-Sinhalese . . .”

“It’s not about being anti-Buddhist and anti-Sinhalese. It’s about keeping your mouth shut. Rashmi was doing so well and I’m sure she would have been made a prefect. Now even that is not certain.”

Listening hard outside the door, Rashmi tried to feel a pang of disappointment, but all she felt was sheer delight.

Yes, much had changed in the Herath family, between Nihil’s return to cricket, Rashmi’s ascent as a performer and her corresponding descent as a scholar, and Suren’s steadfast march toward the kind of independence that would never again be controlled by parental expectation, he had shrugged off that yoke conclusively. One person remained the same: Devi.

An Election

Well, one thing had changed for Devi. Thanks to Nihil’s return to cricket, Raju was now her constant guardian. Each afternoon, when she returned home from school, and after she had her lunch, and finished her homework according to Nihil’s timetable, she went to the gate to holler for him.

“Uncle Raju! Uncle Raju!” she would call, waiting until she could see him to dart outside her gate.

“Coming coming, Uncle Raju is coming,” Raju would say, shuffling into his slippers and buttoning up his shirt as though he had been surprised, though he had been sitting on his front veranda since half past noon, a full hour and a half before Devi even got home, reading and re reading the newspaper and waiting for purpose.

Most days, Devi’s request was for the bicycle, which had first rested against the wall just inside the door to Raju’s weight-lifting room and then, because he was worried that he might trip and break it with one of his barbells, had been moved to the Heraths’ unused garage. On those days the procedure was always the same.

“I can ride the bike without you, Uncle Raju,” Devi would say, after Raju wheeled the bike out for her. She would stand there, her hands behind her back, dressed in some outfit that Kamala had laid out for her, a freshly ironed T-shirt and pedal pushers usually, brown sandals on her feet, the picture of competence.

“My god, no!” Raju would respond as though this had never been suggested before. “Youngest child, you fall, what will your mummy say? And daddy? Mummy and daddy will kill me! I have to hold the bike.”

And hold it he would, pushing the bike up and down the road, sweating and huffing as Devi, now ten and a half and lankier by the day, with her hair pulled into tight braids as she joined her older sister in trying to make her hair grow as long as possible as fast as possible, sat on the bumpy seat with her toes clutching the center bar. The bike, which had developed a thin creak that sounded with each revolution of the wheels, a sound that no amount of oil would fix, provided its own music.

On Fridays he walked Devi over to Kala Niles for her piano lessons and sat and waited in the enclosed veranda with Mr. Niles—who never spoke to him but was, nonetheless, companionable in his silence—until her lesson was over; if Mr. Niles missed Nihil’s company, he kept it to himself. He contented himself with listening to the children, their comings and goings, their faraway voices, imagining their out-of-sight play.

On some days it was a walk to Koralé’s shop to buy sweets, crossing the main road with Devi carried on his back. On others it was playing 304 with a pack of cards depicting the Indian Pacific rail line, a pack of cards that Raju’s father had brought back from a trip to Australia, a trip after which Raju had been convinced that nothing less than a sixty-five-hour train journey over 4,352 kilometers from Sydney to Perth would suffice to distinguish the blessed from the ordinary. Some days there was nothing to do but sit in the swinging chair and talk. On those days Raju would forget himself and bring up the topics that made Devi’s siblings reconsider the wisdom of leaving her with Raju every afternoon.

“Elections are coming. Daddy told you who is going to win? He must be knowing by now, no?” Raju asked as he stood up from his usual spot on the front steps and dusted the seat of his pants.

“How would he know? They haven’t even voted yet!” Devi said, climbing her bare feet up the rope of her swing. She flexed her toes and wondered if she could get Rashmi to paint her nails pink with the bottle of nail polish that she had got as a birthday present from the Bolling girls.

Raju’s eyes widened in alarm. “Big people in the government know everything. Then definitely Mama is right. Bad things are coming.” Which sent Devi talking nineteen to the dozen at the dining table about all the trouble that was soon to be upon them.

On another occasion Raju said, “It seems that we are going to have no more elections in our country. People are going to be asked, do you want elections or do you not want elections, yes or no,” he said, wagging his index fingers, first the right, then the left. “Then it will be over.”

“Only parties have elections, Uncle Raju,” Devi said. “There are no question elections.” She pushed off the Asoka tree with her feet so her swinging chair spun and spun tighter and then unwound itself at top speed.

“Even Lucas has heard this. You ask him. No, you ask Daddy when he comes and tomorrow you can tell me.”

But Mr. Herath was not forthcoming. The question annoyed him and, catching a frown from her mother and warning glances from all three of her older siblings, Devi gave up trying to find out about the new kind of election of which Raju had spoken. Instead, she took to counting the number of times each of the party symbols appeared on the posters plastered on the walls of the Empire Theatre, which she had to pass on her way to school and back, the one that showed Tamil films, the only facing wall big enough to take such abuse even though there was a clearly written statement on each section of that wall, in neat red letters in all three languages, Tamil, English, and Sinhala, that read:

Vilambarangal otta koodathu

POST NO BILLS

Danveem Alaveema Thahanam

On the day of the presidential elections, the Herath children spent the day at home, coloring maps, listening to coverage of the event on the radio, and watching their father, when he returned after his election duties, for his reaction to the results. They listened as their mother tried to draw him out with various statements.