On Sal Mal Lane (45 page)

“I don’t think he was JVP,” she said, wanting to think the best of everybody for as long as was possible. “Why would they want to stir up trouble like that?”

She comforted her children with these words and they returned to watch the rest of the parade, commenting on this drummer, that flag bearer, the impossibly straight lines of so many young people, and they ate lunch, which was followed by a sweet dessert of fruit salad and ice cream, and then they went home to wait for their father, who returned much later, crestfallen over matters he would not share with anybody in the family, his brow furrowed, and who drank half a bottle of
arrack
over several hours all by himself, after even his wife gave up trying to cheer him up and went to bed.

On the rest of Sal Mal Lane, the mood was a variation on Mr. Herath’s, if not quite so mournful. Jimmy Bolling held a party with cheap alcohol in honor of May Day, which to him was a holiday, not an expression of commitment to ideologies. Alcohol was imbibed by everybody, including his son and daughters, and this led to the type of brawl for which they had once been famous because Sonna, too inebriated to remember his father’s sensibilities, made one of his customary remarks about
bloody Tamils.

“Who are you callin’ bloody Tamils, you fool?” his father said. “You also have Tamil blood.”

“We are not Tamil, we are Burghers,” Sonna corrected, raising his right index finger high in the air as though he were presenting himself to be counted among the non-Tamils. He laughed.

“We are Burghers,” his father repeated, with disgust. “Fuckin’ great-grandmother was Tamil and this fucker is talkin’ about Burghers.”

“Tamils should all bloody move to Jaffna,” Sonna said, after nursing this fact for a while. His voice slurred. He pointed in the direction that he believed was north. “Even you, if you think you’re Tamil, move to Jaffna. You should take Raju an’ that mad woman an’ go!”

And though he pushed off his chair and stood to meet his father’s oncoming bulk, imagining himself sufficient to withstand the blow, Sonna was soon not merely felled to the ground but dragged to his bed, roped to it, and beaten with one of Jimmy Bolling’s belts until he whimpered. That ended the party for the Bollings, who finished their drinks, ate the last of the now cold bits of stringy meat that had been fried up with chillies and capsicums to go with their drinks, and went to sleep without washing any of the dishes.

Rose crept up as soon as she was sure that her father was asleep and untied the ropes around Sonna, for which she received first a fresh bout of cursing from Sonna and then, between more curses, a series of drunken mutterings during which he mentioned all of the Herath children by name, called Mohan
that fucker,
and said Dolly would be far better off if she took up with Suren instead of a rotten Silva. Dolly, listening, only shrugged and asked if Sonna wanted some tea, she could make some for him.

Lucas had been unhappy to hear, given his alliance with the Heraths and his now well absorbed knowledge of the equality of all human beings, particularly those human beings who populated his country, and of the villainy endemic to America and Americans, that his party of long preference, which was also the Silvas’ party of preference, the UNP, was talking about banning the JVP, the very party that the Herath children loved to see each May Day, and, worse, were hobnobbing with Americans and luxury goods.

“
Pchah,”
he said to Alice, as he sank his bony body down onto the edge of their bed and unwrapped the spare sarong he had tied around his head to keep it safe from the sun, “country is going to the dogs. Ever since . . .” and here he paused, for he could not quite put his finger on when, exactly, this going to the dogs had begun. “We should never have had a president,” he said after some thought. “That was the beginning of all the trouble.”

“Not the president, the people are the trouble,” Alice said from her corner of the room, hunching as she combed the brittle edges of her hair in preparation for bed. She was in a chatty mood, having spent the whole day in happy solitude. “If not for the people there would be no trouble.”

“How can you say that? People are led by the leaders. Leaders have to lead properly. When the president is getting things from America . . .” And he shook his head, at a loss for words to describe what misery might await them with the influx of such goods as had been spoken of by various people he had met at the rally that afternoon. Goods such as fabric that did not need ironing, and boxes of cereal that did not require cooking, and milk powder that would help women preserve their breasts for better things, and on and on until he had felt that his whole life had been lived in a state of lack, a lack he had never felt before this day.

“Go to sleep. We can’t worry about leaders and presidents,” Alice said, kindly. “I can bring you another cup of plain tea if you like.”

“I don’t think I can go to sleep,” Lucas said, putting his head in his hands. “Too much trouble everywhere. Raju Sir told me whole lane is getting ready for Tigers, and Silva sons told me that Tigers are definitely coming to fight with us. Where will we go?” And saying this he lay back in his bed in hopelessness where, despite his best efforts to focus on all the worrisome things he could not control, nor even understand, Lucas fell asleep.

Mr. Niles did not sleep. He had spent the day listening to the news on the radio and was disturbed by an Incident that had been reported, in which two Sinhalese seniors at the University of Peradeniya, from Arunachalam Hall, named in honor of Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam, a Tamil statesman who had been one of the first to lead the demand for a University of Ceylon—albeit one that his brother, Ramanathan, had wanted located in Jaffna, where access to it would be largely limited to Tamil students—led a group of other students in an assault against Tamil students at the university. As if that were insufficient information to trouble their listeners, both newscasters, in English and in Tamil, reminded everybody of an earlier incident, some years back, when all the Sinhalese students had fled the national university in Jaffna after the students there had beaten up its Sinhalese registrar, Wimal Sundara. The two events, set next to each other in that way, painted a picture that was unremitting in its bleakness, and Mr. Niles found himself unable to sleep.

He hobbled around the house, sliding his feet forward in small steps, lurching as he clutched one piece of furniture or the other, seeking stability where he was used to being stabilized, on either side, by his wife and daughter. At the piano he stopped for a moment, lost in thought. Sinking onto the bench, he opened the cover. There was only the faint light of the moon through the windows and the shadows cast by the red bulb in his bedroom that Kala Niles lit each night beneath her pictures of Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the goddess Saraswati, though a picture of Sai Baba, given to her by Mrs. Herath, was also tucked between them. In that luminous dark, Mr. Niles laid his fingers gently on the keys of the piano. He closed his eyes and felt their soft-hard pressure against the underside of his fingers. He moved his hand up toward the ebony keys and felt them on either side of each of his fingers, like a glove. He had never learned to play the piano, had never touched these keys, and yet the music of this piano had been the music of his life. How little he had loved it, how sparing he had been with his praise for his daughter. And yet it had been her skill that had brought Nihil to him, a son whom he loved wholly and with uncomplicated gratitude. He opened his eyes and brushed his fingers along the length of the piano, reaching first to the right, all the way to the end, and then to the left. He leaned forward and rested his forehead on the upper panel above the music rest, feeling the smooth polish of the wood releasing resonance and secrets against his skin.

And that was the last time that Mr. Niles would walk, with or without help, for as he lifted his head and turned his gaze, his eyes caught the edge of the guitar that stood in its case against the wall, and the sight of that guitar reminded him of the variety show that had taken place in his house. It reminded him of all his neighbors, their individual faces as they waited and listened and applauded, as they milled about and shared the food that had no ordained form or taste, for even though it had been New Year they had each brought what they had or what they cooked best. And as those faces settled around him, into their chairs, he heard again the particular solo that Suren had sung, his voice sweet and pure and such words on his lips, words that had fallen lightly on his ears then, Suren’s voice and the guitar overwhelming the words. But he remembered now that Suren had sung of regret, about time stolen from children, and blood that is spilled like wine. Was it the words, or was it the sound of those words in a voice as young and sure as Suren’s, or the fact that such words should exist? Whatever it was, it made Mr. Niles stand up with an urge to do something, anything, anything at all to keep all of them safe, to keep them singing and making music and talking about cricket.

When Kala Niles and Mrs. Niles came running, they found Mr. Niles crumpled in a heap by the piano, his long legs bent crookedly underneath him.

“Go and get Mr. Herath!” Mrs. Niles said, and Kala Niles ran, not caring that she was in her nylon nightdress which was entirely transparent, to bang on the gate and wake up the Heraths.

“Daddy has fallen down, Uncle, need to take him to the Sri Lanka Nursing Home! Come soon! Come soon!” and she turned away with a sob.

Mr. Herath, returned quickly to sobriety, paused to pull on trousers and a shirt and wake up his wife, as well as Suren and Nihil, which meant that there was enough noise made that soon the whole family was up and Suren was sent to wake up Raju as well. Raju carried Mr. Niles almost single-handedly to the car in his arms, the old man’s head resting against his face, the body curled over his belly, and Nihil and Suren holding Mr. Niles’s legs.

“I have to come!” Nihil said.

Mr. Niles gritted his teeth and managed to reach over and hold Nihil’s hand, giving him permission to squeeze himself into the space between the two front seats from where he held on to the back of the driver’s seat with one hand and Mr. Niles’s hand with the other.

At the Sri Lanka Nursing Home, Mr. Niles’s legs were bandaged with splints to hold them straight, and he stayed there overnight. With the aid of half a Valium that Mr. Herath slipped to him, taking it out of his own purse and snapping it in half with the edge of a fingernail, he fell asleep with Nihil lying next to him and his wife sitting beside him, and Mr. Herath drove Kala Niles home to prepare the house for her father’s new level of immobility.

And so, May Day, and the night that brought it to a close, was full not of celebration but of the lit ends of concerns that nudged and burned everyone in equal measure, even the children.

July

Second Lieutenant A. P. N. C. De S. Vaas Gunawardene, Sergeant S. I. Thilekaratne, Corporals G. R. Perera and R. A. U. Perera, Lance Corporals Sumathipala and G. D. Perera, and Privates A. J. R. Fernando, M. B. Sunil, D. N. A. D. Manapitiya, G. Robert, A. J. Wijesiri, N. A. S. Manutange, S. S. Amarasinghe, S. P. G. Rajatilleke, and K. P. Karunaratne

On the evening of the twenty-third of July, thirteen Sinhalese soldiers, a number so well placed in the human psyche that it arranges itself, as though in symmetry, in the mind, were ambushed and killed in Thirunelveli, outside Jaffna, by a group led by Velupillai Prabhakaran. Four mines were planted in a ditch intended for the installation of telecommunications equipment and detonated, from the balcony of a nearby house, under a jeep that was leading a convoy. When the soldiers who were in a half-truck behind got down to help, they, too, were attacked with automatic weapons and grenades. The bodies of those thirteen soldiers, as well as two more who succumbed later, were brought to an undertaker who had embalmed the bodies of statesman and pauper alike, the establishment of A. F. Raymond. They were brought there instead of being sent to their individual villages and towns, to be buried together at the cemetery in the capital city. This group burial was a way of avoiding the possibility of riots breaking out in the fifteen individual villages of the fifteen individual soldiers, but it could have been said that fifteen funeral pyres in one place would raise the heat of the country far more assuredly than any number of simple village ceremonies, no matter how great the provocation.

Everyone would agree afterward that it was a series of events that caused what later came to be known as Black July, but it was the murder of those soldiers that was brought up repeatedly as the reason for what happened next.

If room were made for grieving individual deaths, for remembering the conduct of the lives lost as well as the lives left behind, for sister, for neighbor, for father, perhaps there would have been no crowds pouring out from buildings, from homes, from businesses and train stations and buses. No crowds searching for fact, for direction, for an answer to the
What is to be done?
which, throughout the country’s history, had only been uttered as a graceful nod to the fact that nothing, nothing can ever be done for our human circumstances. But there was no time allowed, no time taken. There were only the bodies of fifteen young soldiers, and somebody who had directed their killing.

On that Monday morning, the morning of the twenth-fourth, the children of Sal Mal Lane woke up, got dressed, and went to their respective schools or other activities.

Suren, on study leave for his Ordinary-Level examination, was at the Young Men’s Buddhist Association playing in a chess tournament that was called off when one of the parents, arriving breathlessly to take his son home, said,
Thirteen soldiers have been killed and their bodies have been brought to Colombo, there are people everywhere.
He walked out of the building and into the buzz and scream and threat of panic.

Suren walked through it to A. F. Raymond, where the buses were stopped and where the doors were blocked by a large crowd. People pushed against each other, swaying as if they were a single organism, first this way, then another, on their toes, their arms outstretched or wrapped around the shoulders of strangers. He squeezed out from between them and went, as calmly as he could, toward a place from which he might find a bus to take him home. He was jostled by crowds advancing on one side, crowds fleeing in the other, and so many children in their school uniforms, crying, their heads turning from left to right, looking up into the faces of the adults around them, then wailing afresh when they discovered that they were not their father, their mother, their known caregiver. He joined a group of people to stare up at two fire fighters trying to rescue two Tamil men and one woman trapped at the top of a building that was referred to by one and all as the BCC building. One of the men was screaming along with the woman, but the other man, the other man was silent and hung back as though he would rather burn down with the building than be saved. Next to the BCC building an upturned vehicle burned furiously as though the fire itself had business elsewhere and was racing to finish. The two shops behind the vehicle were gutted and destroyed. He came upon a single man being assaulted by a group of at least a dozen men, but he did not know to whom he could go for help, for the only people who were not running were the men who were perpetrating the violence and though he screamed
Stop! Stop!
his words came out in a whisper.