On Sal Mal Lane (40 page)

“Kobbekaduwa didn’t have a chance without the Bandaranaikes’ support,” Mrs. Herath said, and the children felt that this was meant to console their father. “See what happened to the old Left? If Colvin and Wijeweera and Kobbekaduwa had all joined together, they could have beaten JR. Ponnambalam would have taken the Tamil vote and we could have still won the elections.” When even this drew no response, she said, “Executive President, that’s all we need,” and her voice carried more disgust than the children had ever heard in it before, even with regard to the variety show.

And still their father said nothing and they were not sure if he agreed or disagreed or whether there was some other relevant information that they were missing, so they put away their neatly printed election-day map of the country that had come as an insert with the morning paper, and the crayons that Rashmi had been using to color parts of it in like this:

as they listened to the news, and went about their business as though it was just an ordinary day that had ended.

Devi, mimicking her siblings and their noncommittal expressions, announced to Raju that, “JR has won, but we will have to wait and see if that is a good thing or a bad thing.”

“I don’t like JR,” Raju told her, shaking his head. He was leaning against the door to his mother’s living room while Devi and Old Mrs. Joseph listened. He was wearing a green shirt that day and Devi had assumed that he was a supporter of the new president, since she herself shunned the colors of cricket teams she did not support, so she was a little taken aback. “Mama also doesn’t like. Nobody likes except,” and he lowered his voice to a whisper, “the Silvas.”

“Why do the Silvas like JR?” Devi asked, whispering back.

“Silvas like JR because they don’t like us Tamils, that’s what,” Old Mrs. Joseph said. She looked away from Devi and loosened and then reset her dentures with two sharp clicks.

Devi, who was sitting on the front steps to Old Mrs. Joseph’s veranda, turned her face toward the Silvas’ house and pointed in that general direction. “They are going to be army boys,” Devi said, feeling quite sure that this information was fresh and liking how it all sounded coming out of her mouth,
army boys.

“Hah. Army boys? That’s all that’s missing,” Old Mrs. Joseph said. “You know what has happened now? JR is going to change the constitution so he and his thugs can stay in power for another six years. Until 1989 we will be under his thumb!” She made the sound of spitting, though no spit emerged from between her lips, and jabbed the thick pad of her right thumb hard onto her left palm. “I’ll be dead by then and thank god!”

“I don’t think so. I don’t think things like that will happen,” Raju said, shifting from side to side in a state of agitation while Devi watched first one face, then the other. She liked the thumb gesture and planned to use it on her siblings later that day.

“Happened happened. Already said and done. November fifth. Even our Tamil party, supposed to speak for us, those TULF cowards abstained from even voting, they just let it pass. Only four votes, can you believe it? Four votes against, and those also from the Sinhalese people! Where were the Tamil leaders?” She counted off on her hand, tapping the fingers of her left hand with the index finger of her right hand, “Mrs. B’s son Anura, of course, then Lakshman Jayakody, Ananda Dassanayake, and Sarath Muttetuwegama from the Communist Party! Only those four voted against. So who is going to help us now? You tell me.” She swiveled around to look at Devi, fixing her with a glare. “Go and ask daddy.
Who
is going to help us now?”

“Tha does not like JR,” Devi said quickly, not liking the look on Old Mrs. Joseph’s face. “He likes Mrs. B. Since Mrs. B is not there now I don’t think he cares.”

“Nice not to care, I suppose, for some people.” And Old Mrs. Joseph said no more.

Devi’s Secret

On a Saturday afternoon in November, after the presidential elections that had disappointed most of the inhabitants of Sal Mal Lane, but before the referendum—yes, there was one, and Raju was right, about the process if not about the question, the question being
Should the present parliament be extended for another six years, yes or no?,
a question that could loosely be translated by most people to mean just about the same thing that Raju had imagined it to be—Mr. Herath borrowed Mr. Niles’s Morris Minor to drive Raju to his body-building competition.

Given that members of the armed forces consistently won these events, only Devi imagined that Raju Joseph was going to tear up the competition. Before they left, she gave Raju a medal she had designed and colored in, complete with pin, that read
No. 1 Mr. Sri Lanka
with the word
Champion
below it underlined three times in blue and gold, these being the most glorious colors she could think of.

Mr. Herath simply said, “Just do your best,” and patted Raju congenially on his back as he they parted company, Raju to walk toward where the competitors gathered, he to the spectator stands.

The fact that Raju did not place in any category—he belonged neither in the under twenty-one nor in the over forty-five age groups and had to compete with the military men in the seventy-five-kilogram category—and the fact that the other men, by and large, had laughed when Raju strode up dressed in what they called
jungi,
and attempted to pick up his second barbell and failed—these facts were quickly carried aloft by Sonna, who had made it a point to be present at the debacle, riding three buses to get there. They were repeated every time Raju stepped out of his house and walked past Jimmy Bolling’s house. Raju took all this in stride, determined to try again, determined to better himself through reading the news and listening to the Heraths, and, most of all, determined to uphold his end of the bargain of looking after Devi. It was that last determination that resulted in Devi nearly losing her guardian altogether.

One day when he was pushing her up and down the road on the old bicycle, Sonna came out of his house and began to tease him.

“Go go go! Build up some leg muscles at leas’. Can’ even get a woman so pushin’ a girl here an’ there, no?” He looked at Devi and hesitated, then said, very quickly, “Better be careful. Might try some funny business with you.”

Raju came to a stop, wheeled the bicycle back to the Heraths’ gate, and quietly asked Devi to dismount. “Raju Uncle has some work to do darling. I will come and wheel you tomorrow,” he said, after he put the bike away.

Something in his tone worried her. She climbed the Asoka tree and balanced on its farthest branch so she could peer down the otherwise hidden part of the road to watch what would happen next.

She saw Raju walk up to Sonna and say something inaudible. Sonna laughed and then Raju punched Sonna in his face. Sonna tried to back off and Raju continued punching and punching and punching Sonna until he was up against the aluminum fence, and with each punch Devi cringed and tears sprang to her eyes because she suddenly felt sorry for Sonna, who looked skinny and weak and just a boy next to Raju, and soon there were Mr. and Mrs. Bolling running out, Mrs. Bolling picking up Sonna but Mr. Bolling, Mr. Bolling only shaking Raju’s hand and slapping Sonna across his cheek with his good hand before going back into their house. Sonna shoved his mother away and ran down the street and out of Devi’s sight. Mrs. Bolling, who had fallen against the fence, stood up and brushed the front and back of her dress and glanced up and down the road before she went back into their house. Devi watched Raju walk slowly back up the road, and she could see from her perch that when he came up to his gate he started crying. He looked shamefaced and angry and he stood there wiping his tears with the sleeves of his shirt like a child and then opened the gate and went into his garage.

Devi did not know, and why should she, what to do when an adult cried. She and her brothers and sisters had lain awake at night listening to their mother cry sometimes, not often, but even once was too often, wasn’t it? And in their company she had felt assured that whatever it was that made her mother cry, she was not to blame for it. But Raju’s tears, she was convinced, had something to do with her. What was it that Sonna had said? She couldn’t remember. She had always been afraid of him, his way of turning up just when she was doing something wrong, so she avoided him, shut out his words so she wouldn’t have to listen. Besides, when she was being looked after by Raju, she only concentrated on her own activities, not his. And now this had happened.

She dried her eyes and stayed a long while up in the tree, grateful for the way it hid her in its firm branches, among foliage and flowers that matched the green-and-white floral print of her skirt and blouse. She picked flower after flower and sucked on them, her thirst unslaked by the minuscule drop of syrup within each bloom, alternately wondering if she should go and see if Raju was okay, though something told her she should not, and peering down the road to see if Sonna had returned from wherever it was he had run to, and wondering whether anybody had tended to his wounds. She watched Nihil go to the gate and look up and down the road, and she listened as he asked Rashmi, who had come outside, if she knew where Devi was. Finally, when she heard Nihil calling for her from somewhere inside the house, she slid down the tree and went inside, not knowing whom to tell or what question to ask.

“Where were you? I was looking all over for you!” Nihil said, when she came inside.

She poured herself a glass of water and took her time drinking it, noisily, with pauses accentuated by the kind of gulps and wheezes that she was far too old to be making. “Nowhere,” she said when there was no more water left and she was forced to put the glass down. “I was just in the tree.” And she slipped away from him before he could ask her why she had been hiding.

After that incident, though she did not call it that, she called it
That Day,
Raju became despondent. He still arrived, reliably flustered and in his shabby spruced-up state, he still delivered bits of information that Devi carried in turn to the Heraths’ dining table, and he still brought her sweets, but there were fewer and fewer occasions on which he would agree to push her up and down the road on the bicycle, her favorite pastime.

“Can’t today Devi, didn’t you hear? Vijaya Kumaranatunga has been put in jail,” and he explained, mournfully, that the handsome and popular actor whom Devi only knew as a film star was also the husband of Mrs. Bandaranaike’s daughter, and that the government—JR, to be precise had put him in jail so he could not campaign for the opposition party.

Devi practiced all day so she could make the announcement at dinner: “Raju says that JR says that Vijaya Kumaranatunga is in a Naxalite conspiracy,” she said, making Mr. Herath smoke an entire cigarette and light another one and finish that too before he sat down to dinner and launched into a lecture that referred to multiple political parties by their initialisms, the NSSP, the SLFP, the TULF, the JVP, and the LSSP, not to mention the CP and the ACTC, and which was so rich in anecdote and cross-reference and digression that it wore them down and stripped his children—but not his wife, who did listen to these lectures—of any modicum of knowledge and every last shred of interest they may have possessed to begin with.

“Too complicated,” Devi said to Raju the next day. “We have too many parties in our country, that’s what I think. Better if we just had SLFP and JVP, because Tha likes the SLFP but I like the JVP because of their parade.”

“Ah? You like the JVP?” Raju asked, smiling a little and no longer quite so crestfallen. “I don’t like them much. Anyway, now even they have been banned from the elections. Government is banning everybody. Soon we’ll have nothing but the UNP,” he said.

“Then the Silvas will be happy,” Devi said in a whisper, though she did not care either way whether there was one party or ten so long as her world was bordered by flowering trees with branches for her to climb or gather under with her sister, her brothers, and her friends, so long as her swing hung in the same way it did, so long as Nihil kept getting better at cricket, so long as Suren and Rashmi never got caught with their band practices, and so long as Raju kept showing up to take care of her.

This last Raju did, though he did not walk down the street to buy sweets for her if Sonna was outside the Bollings’ house, and though he still pushed her on the bicycle, whenever he saw Sonna about the place he found an excuse to put the bike away and play cards.

The referendum, held three days before Christmas, turned out far too many people who remembered the austerity of a previous government, or far too many people willing to intimidate this one or that one or steal ballot boxes or stuff them, or far too many who mistook the symbol the government used, a lamp, for something illuminating and good, because it resulted in a 54 percent win for the government. It gave legitimacy to the executive president, a man who had, upon winning the general election five years before, first amended and then replaced the constitution, to pave the way for an executive presidency—one that would allow him to serve as the head of state, the head of the executive and of the government and the commander in chief of the armed forces—a man who was despised by too many to be effective and too many for the elections to be deemed free and fair, all of which meant that already simmering resentments began to be voiced more loudly.