On Sal Mal Lane (41 page)

And perhaps it was a collective despair that lurked about the streets that turned mean and unsafe for ordinary people, people like those on Sal Mal Lane, or perhaps it was only that good attracts the countervailing force of bad, that some people are born to suffer and others not, for, a few days before Christmas, Raju was beaten within an inch of his life.

Revenge

Devi did not know why Raju did not come that day when she called out to him. The Christmas holidays had begun, but nobody else was available to play with her. Nihil had left to play cricket with his teammates at Royal, Suren was deep into practicing a difficult piano piece whose name she could not pronounce but that sounded so agitated that it made her anxious, and Rashmi was writing letters to all her friends, crossing each one off on a list before her.

“Uncle Raju! Uncle Raju!” Devi yelled, and then, when he did not reply, she glanced back at her house to make sure that nobody was watching, and she crossed the street and slipped in through Old Mrs. Joseph’s gate and yelled some more, standing outside his garage.

“I don’t know where he has gone, child,” Old Mrs. Joseph said, her forehead knitted with worry, when Devi finally climbed the steps to the veranda and asked. “He left around two thirty to go and get a bicycle bell from the shop at the junction and I haven’t seen him since. Getting a bit worried.” She rubbed her furrowed brow and stood up to lean against one of the pillars that supported the roof of the veranda and looked down the road.

“I will go and see,” Devi said, though she was not sure how she would do this since she was not allowed to cross the big road with all the traffic or, indeed, go anywhere by herself. She went back to her house and tried to get Kamala to come with her.

“
Aney Baba,
I can’t come,” Kamala said, pulling her upper lip over her large front teeth. “Madam will be angry if I take you and go down the road!”

Kala Niles, when asked, said, “Don’t worry, darling, he’ll come home. Must have gone to see the new Tamil film or something like that. You practiced today?” Which made Devi back away and leave because she knew Raju did not go to see Tamil films and no, she had not practiced today or yesterday either.

“If Nihil was here,
he
would come with me to look for Uncle Raju,” she said in Rashmi’s hearing, but got no response.

At Jimmy Bolling’s house she heard a terrible argument before she even reached the door and did not dare go inside.

So there really was no help for it but to go next door and see if Jith would agree to look for Raju. “Jith!” she called, “Jith! Jith!” and when he came out, “I can’t find Uncle Raju. Can you find him for me?”

And because his parents had gone Christmas shopping, and, more importantly, because Mohan had gone out with Sonna and this had been troubling him, Jith agreed to go. When he returned, almost an hour later, however, all he would say to her was that Raju was sick and in the hospital, and then he went to Old Mrs. Joseph and told her which hospital.

If Devi were older, wiser, she would have known immediately from the look on his face that Jith was terrified and upset and that the cause of those feelings was something new, some fresh viciousness that he had not previously entertained but with which he was now acquainted and would be for the rest of his life. But she was neither, so she merely tagged along with him to visit Old Mrs. Joseph, and tagged along with Old Mrs. Joseph and Jimmy Bolling when they borrowed Mr. Niles’s Morris Minor and set off for the nearest hospital, which happened to be the privately run Sri Lanka Nursing Home on High Street, not far from their lane. Since neither Rashmi nor Kamala had been willing to participate in the search for Raju, Devi decided that there was no reason to tell them where, exactly, she was going, for which she was forgiven after the fact, given the gravity of the situation.

To see Raju on any usual day before or after weight lifting, before or after brushing his teeth and getting ready for the day, anytime, really, was disconcerting to those who were not accustomed to the composition of his face and form and unfamiliar with his benevolence. But to see Raju as he lay on a stark hospital bed, a needle in his arm and every part of his limbs crisscrossed with bandages, to see the brace that separated his neck from his head for, quite possibly, the first time in his life, to see the forearm that was in a cast, and the face that was so bruised no bandages had been applied, only minuscule stitches and clear ointments that glistened and sparkled like unctuous tears, this was a sight for the brave of heart.

Devi stood quite still by the door when she saw him. “What happened to you, Uncle Raju?” she asked in a quiet voice.

“He can’ talk,” Jimmy Bolling said, his mouth turned down. Old Mrs. Joseph merely sank into a chair and put her head in her hands and began to pray.

Devi stepped forward and touched the cast on Raju’s left hand. “Uncle Raju,” she whispered, “I went to look for you but you were not there. Then Jith helped me,” she said, “Silvas’ Jith. He’s the one who found you.”

Raju’s eyes opened and shut once, and no matter what else was said or by whom, they remained closed until it was time for them to leave. He listened to the sound of their footsteps, to Devi’s voice, which cut over those of the adults, asking when he might come back home. If he was touched by that voice, those words, he did not express it. He took in the empty room and remained quite still, letting the pain in his body pin him down, lying there as though he were already dead.

Nothing that is good happens because of rumor; rumor is the harbinger and mascot of evil. And rumor had it that evening that Raju had molested a young Tamil girl who lived on Kalyani Avenue, and that
unknown people
in that neighborhood had caught him and beaten him up and left him for dead, which is how Jith had found him, lying face down, whimpering in pain, while a crowd of people from the houses on Kalyani Avenue gathered: Indian Tamils, the kind who dressed with fastidious care and lived conservative and private lives, their voices kept low, their evenings ending early, people who rarely fraternized with anybody outside their quiet neighborhood, which consisted entirely of others like themselves who lived by the same decorous rules. Nobody asked how Jith might have known to look for Raju down Kalyani Avenue, nobody wondered why the thugs on Sal Mal Lane—for Mohan and Sonna
were
thugs, everybody agreed—had no knowledge of the thugs who might be living on Kalyani Avenue, which was, after all, just two streets away from theirs. Nobody asked why Sonna and Mohan grew even more cocky as they talked together, or why several men, not boys, from the slums behind Lucas’s house, took to standing at the end of their road, making lascivious remarks at Rashmi and Devi and dark statements about Tamils in the hearing of Kala Niles. Or they did ask, but in a silence decked in horror and fear.

By the time Raju returned to Sal Mal Lane from the hospital, Christmas had come and gone, and though he could now speak, he would say nothing about the assault he had suffered except
I never went to Kalyani Avenue. They took me there,
but who
they
were he did not know and would not guess at though by the way he said all those things it was clear that he had his suspicions and that they were correct.

“Don’ know
why
Raju had to go to Kalyani Avenue,” Francie Bolling said, the night he came home from the hospital.

“Bugger is crazy, that’s why! Crazy and girl-mad!” Sonna, home for one of his increasingly rare visits, and this one had been long, said. “I always knew it.”

“But he’s not like that,” Rose insisted.

“If I ever find out that you were there that day . . .” Jimmy Bolling said, and the trembling of his hand as he served himself a soup with very few vegetables was enough to end all conversation for the rest of that meal and for many meals after that.

“Damn good someone taught him a lesson,” Mrs. Silva said, watching Mr. Niles’s Morris Minor turn into Old Mrs. Joseph’s driveway with Raju in the backseat. “Now maybe the Heraths will stop having him
kusu-kusufying
with that Devi all day long!”

She and Mr. Silva and Mohan were all standing in the veranda peering through the jasmine plants that now completely wreathed the surrounding trellises, providing scent, shade, and absolute privacy while also enabling them to watch the activities of her immediate neighbors. Jith was nowhere to be found; unbeknownst to anybody, including Rose, he was meeting Dolly on the road leading to the temple, where, incense and oil in hand, they planned to spend an hour or so inside the temple grounds.

“I’m not at all surprised that he got beaten up by the people on Kalyani Avenue. That place is full of Tamils,” Mr. Silva said. “All thugs, obviously.”

“But he deserved it,” Mohan said. “Even Tamils have to fight back.”

Neither of his parents questioned Mohan’s moment of charity toward the Tamil people against whom he had been conducting such an unrelenting and personal crusade.

In the Herath household, Mrs. Herath prefaced her words with a regretful sigh. “Anyway, Devi, you are getting old enough to look after yourself now, so better stay away from Raju.”

“Uncle Raju did not do anything wrong,” Devi said, as she bent to fasten her sandals, ready to run out of the door to check in on Raju.

“I know, I know, I am sure he didn’t do anything wrong, but in any case it is not appropriate for you to spend so much time with him.”

Nihil remembered the references to Raju in his notebook, the notebook that he rarely looked at anymore, his mind so full of cricket, but that he had opened again in the wake of Raju’s hospitalization. “Yes, better that you stay here,” he concurred.

“Even the Bin Ahmeds say it was Tamil people,” Mrs. Herath said, as if Devi’s disassociation from Raju had been decided. “They never speak ill of anybody, so they must be right.”

“Bloody nonsense,” Mr. Herath said, “I don’t believe that Raju is capable of doing what they said he did. Lucas told me that it was Sonna and Mohan and some thugs from the Elakandiya.”

And Devi knew right then that what Lucas had said was true.
That Day
came back to her in a flash, and that other day when Jith had gone to find Raju, and this day, today, when she was being told she could not see her Uncle Raju. As she listened, some innocence slipped away from her, a sloughing that she was too young to regret, for she knew that she could no more mention
That Day
than she could announce that she had kept a secret from her siblings, no more mention
That Day
than crucify Raju with yet another mark against him. She remained silent and vowed to choose disobedience. Nobody, not Nihil, not her mother, would be able to stop her from talking to Uncle Raju, from sharing information about politics, which she did not understand, and asking for sweets, which she understood with every part of her being, and learning, as she had resolved to do from the very first day, how to ride that bicycle, the one bicycle that existed down the entire lane, the bicycle that interested none of the other children, except in passing, their worlds full of music, cricket, and yearnings that she was still too little to care about.

By the time Raju was free of his bandages, but not of his cast, the Herath children had followed in Devi’s footsteps, taking him back into their fold as though his character had never been defamed. Raju, for his part, kept a certain respectable distance that he felt was called for under circumstances he could not control. Which is why Devi was finally able to ride the bicycle without his shuffling step beside her, without his awkward but strong hands on the handlebars, and without his constant instruction.

“The bike is too big for you,” he began, holding on to it with his right hand while Devi waited. “Still, with my cast, Uncle Raju cannot take you on the bike. So I am going to show you how to ride it without sitting.”

Devi did not need to be shown. She knew how to do the things that all children know how to do without being taught: to climb a tree, to jump into deep water, to break rules, to hide, to take without asking. “I know, Uncle Raju,” she said, impatient to get her hands on the bicycle. She bent down and cuffed the bottoms of her new jeans, rolling them midway up her calf.

“I’m ready, let go,” she said.

“I got Lucas to take it and get it nicely polished again. Even that noise is now a little less.”

“Okay okay.” She tossed her ponytail as she said this. These days, when she returned from school, she combed her hair into a ponytail that swung left to right as she walked, the happy result of night after night of braids so tight they hurt her head.

She placed her foot on the pedal, swung her leg over the bar, and took off up the road with Raju yelling “No coming down! Only ride up! Wheel the bike down!”

Which she did, not wanting to upset him, his arm still in a cast, and also because he stood and blocked the way right on the center of the road between his house and hers so that there would have been no way for her to ride the bike down without crashing into him. It was sufficient, this amount of freedom, this forward motion as the wheels turned before her pedals, as the bike carried her up the road, farther and farther, and it seemed that she herself was a kite whose ascent would go on and on.

Mohan and Jith Are Punished

Nothing particularly bad had happened in school that day. Mohan was simply bored. He doodled in his exercise book when he was supposed to be constructing grammatically correct sentences in Tamil, while, next door, the Tamil students did the same in Sinhala during the mandatory period of instruction designated for the study of a
Link Language.
Mohan refused to study Tamil. Instead, he looked around the classroom and considered the backs of the thirty-five boys who sat in front of him. Now that they were in the upper school, all of them wore long white pants and short-sleeved white shirts, and, from where he sat, they looked identical. He decided to classify them. He drew two columns. The first for the Definitely Sinhalese, the second, Definitely Tamil, each subdivided into rich/poor. As he expected, most of the Tamil students were wealthy, and most of the Sinhalese students were poor. Among the poor Sinhalese students he further categorized the Sinhalese-Buddhist students as being the poorest of them all. He included himself in that latter group.