On Sal Mal Lane (5 page)

“Hullo! That’s the thing, yes I know, you are new, I saw. I have been watching all this time. Two weeks now there have been preparations, painters and everything. Today, no? You children came today?” He smiled at Devi, “I saw you skipping rope earlier.”

Raju’s shockingly melodious voice washed over the children. It lifted and cuddled its consonants and aired its vowels; it was unlike anything Nihil and Devi had heard and though they had heard a lot of music in their lives, nothing had ever sounded quite like Raju’s voice, the way it rose out of the relentless ugliness of his body and issued forth from his vaguely deformed mouth like an ethereal being released into the world by an enormously charitable god.

“We came from Colombo Seven. My brother and I go to Royal College,” Nihil said. “My sisters go to the Convent of the Holy Covenant,” he added, and then gave away a little more information, just in case Raju was out of touch with this sort of thing. “The convent is in Colombo Three, by the sea.”

“Oh! Oh!” Raju said, his voice rising upward at the end of each word and covering, to the best of Nihil’s knowledge, at least a middle C, D, E, and F sharp if not something more complicated. “Those are good schools. The best schools. I went to St. Peter’s, but my mother went to that convent too. She tried to enroll me at Royal but they wouldn’t take me. We lived too far, and anyway,” he added, matter-of-fact, shaking his head sideways, “we were Catholics.”

“Catholics also go to my school,” Nihil said, not wishing to let a slight go uncorrected. He began to list the Catholic boys in his class for Raju. “David Roberts, Tissa Vancuylumberg, Frank Speldewinde, Dimuth de Fonseka, Norbert Pereira—”

Devi interrupted in her own sing song style, her voice sweet and earnest; she had another two years of this before she would learn to speak like her siblings. “And my school is full of them and I’m one of the few girls who are Buddhist and Muslim and Hindu. We used to sit together during religion and the Catholic girls used to study the Bible. I think. But Tha, that’s my father, our father, he said that they made a law and now they have to teach all the religions in all the schools. Some schools don’t do it, but recently my convent has started to do it. So now they teach me Buddhism at my convent and all the Muslim girls learn Islam and—”

“He knows all that,” Nihil said, irritated by this long speech; the passing of information ought to be left to one’s elders.

“No, no, no, I didn’t know anything! I didn’t know anything about this,” Raju said, looking very alarmed, the second, they learned in due course, of his two most frequent expressions. “When did this happen?”

“Tha says that it’s a good thing,” Nihil said, reassuringly, “so that every body can learn their own religions and nobody can be forced to learn anybody else’s religion.”

“Your father works for the government? Is he a big man?”

“Tha is in the Ministry of Education, that’s why he knows everything,” Devi said, not knowing if this would bestow the title of “big man” on her father, but feeling proud of the weight of
the Ministry of Education
in her mouth.

“Tha is a civil servant,” Nihil volunteered, having learned quite recently that to be one of those was considered an honor and that there were no more civil servants left in the country other than those of his father’s generation. It seemed that being part of a dwindling brigade of anything should elevate a person in rank, and he felt glad that his father had become one of this group before whatever it was that had happened to put an end to enrollment or selection or other process that conferred such honorifics upon adults.

“Oh! Civil servant?” Raju pouted, and pulled his lips down on either side with great seriousness. He shook his head from side to side, suitably impressed. He glanced up toward their house, so recently painted in a soothing custard color, the sort of color that only refined people like these might choose, and then back at the children with renewed respect. He shuffled from foot to foot, trying desperately to think of something further to say, something that would endear him to these new children and their respectable father. They seemed good to him, polite and forthcoming, and he needed some relief from the children who pre dated them, the ones who mocked him even when they talked to him, asking him questions about his weight lifting and his garage as though they cared. For his part, Nihil wished that Raju would say something adult like, something about their new neighborhood, himself, the other children, anything that would add to his own stature at the dining table that night when he might share what he and Devi had learned about their new environment.

“We have to go back inside,” he said to Raju after waiting a few moments to see if the power of his wish would cause Raju to stop shuffling and speak. “Come,” he said to Devi. He took her hand, which he did not do very frequently; his affection for her was something to be hidden with mild berating rather than demonstrated by kindness or care, which, if shown, might bring his fears forth in an unstoppable flood. Devi knotted her fingers around his and Nihil felt their thinness, the lighter weight of her hand. He held it firmly and led her away from Raju.

“Go and come!” Raju called after their retreating backs. “Come and talk again! I’m always here. Uncle Raju. You can call me Uncle Raju.” He said all this, but he wasn’t sure they heard. He wished that he had thought to introduce himself that way right at the start. Uncle Raju. It had a magnanimous ring to it. He wished he had thought to tell them about Kala Niles and how she gave piano lessons. Surely the children would have been delighted to hear that and to know that he was, himself, someone who appreciated music and understood its importance in the lives of growing children. They might even have asked him to introduce them to Kala Niles, and how fine would that have been, to be the one to make such introductions between good children and a good teacher? He cursed softly to himself as he went back to his gate, thinking of all that he had not said. He hung there for a few minutes, burning in the sun and wishing for rain and replaying the conversation he had just had and mulling over the information he had received. But, momentous though it felt to him, this extraordinarily civil and, he felt, equal exchange with the two new children, nothing further followed, so Raju went back to his garage.
Sonna be damned,
he thought,
these are nice children and I will be their friend. I will be Uncle Raju.
He heaved a forty-pound dumbbell several times as a bonus step toward his future, then dropped it and went to the main house looking for the white curries and glutinous rice his mother always insisted on for lunch.

Sonna’s Sisters Pay a Visit

Nihil and Devi could not have known that Sonna, whom they had yet to meet, would one day, uttering words of hurt yet innocent of premeditation, pierce the sweet sphere of their lives. On this first day, their thoughts on Raju, his form, his voice, the children were contentedly distracted and when Sonna’s sisters came to visit that evening, even Nihil felt no cause for alarm. The simpleminded Bolling twins, Rose and Dolly, would, in fact, become closest to the Herath children, and it happened that way not just because they were deserving of such friendship, a gift for the absence of malice on their part in thought or deed, but because they made the first move to visit and that set them apart from the too-timid children, including the Silvas, who had stayed away.

If Sonna had imagined that his sisters would be welcomed into the Herath household by the girls as well as the boys, the boys whose source of strength he did not know, he would have kept the twins home by force, for what was denied to him should, he believed, be also denied to them. Or, if he had imagined that within the grace of their friendship much of what was wrong in his life might have turned right, he may have accompanied them. As it was, the girls did not tell him where they were going, nor ask for his permission as he had taught them to do; they simply slipped out while Sonna was away and went to see for themselves. They came in the evening, which meant that they wore long, thin, sleeveless tanks but no skirts over their underwear.

Mrs. Herath was sweeping the garden when they arrived, and at first she did not notice them. She tugged at old leaves and long-dead roots with the edges of her
ekel
broom, seeing not dirt and decay but potential fertility. She saw green buffalo grass that she would uproot from her own mother’s garden and repatriate into hers, she saw a hedge exactly like the one she had grown up with, she saw a wall going up between her new home and that of her neighbors to the left, the Nadesans, with whom she had already broached this topic. Just that morning, when Mrs. Nadesan had brought her husband over to meet the new neighbors, carrying a comb of plantains and a packet of ginger biscuits wrapped in brown paper, Mrs. Herath had steered the conversation to landscaping and from there to the possibility of building a wall.

“I have always wanted to have a bordering wall covered with ivy,” she said, while discussing her plans for the garden.

“A climbing flower?” Mrs. Nadesan asked in her low, accented voice, her head moving slightly to the beat of her words. “Like Kala’s rose vines?” She pronounced the
v
like a
w.

“No, no,” Mrs. Herath said kindly, putting her palm on Mrs. Nadesan’s soft upper arm. She could smell and see the faint traces of Gardenia Talc that the older lady had applied to her face and neck. “Ivy doesn’t have flowers, but it is very pretty, you’ll see. You know, Mrs. Nadesan, all the English cottages have them. And in our country we can grow anything. Once I plant it, the ivy will climb the walls and eventually it will cover your side too. It will be like having a wall made of plants!”

Mrs. Nadesan had nodded in agreement with a slightly furrowed brow, impressed both by Mrs. Herath’s knowledge of growing things and by the idea of a green wall. She was glad that she had retouched the red
pottu
on her forehead and worn a good sari, her emerald green one that she generally reserved for visiting relatives. Her
thali,
too, the gold necklace resting with weight and importance, signifying both wealth and marriage, had made her feel grounded, a worthy neighbor to someone like Mrs. Herath who knew so much about English gardens.

“That Mrs. Herath will soon have a beautiful garden,” she told her husband that evening as she served him tea without sugar but with a piece of kitul jaggery on the side, all the better to counter his diabetes. “With ferns and flowers and hedges. Just like the English cottages.”

Mr. Nadesan had only smiled. Whatever happened with the garden, he was happy that the new neighbors, though not Hindu Tamils as he had hoped, were good people and clearly without prejudice, so warm had been their welcome to him and his wife. To add to that, Mrs. Herath had not even asked them to share in the cost of putting up the wall. That was a good sign.

Now, standing in her garden, Mrs. Herath remembered that conversation with Mrs. Nadesan. She paused for a moment and surveyed the one tree that stood in the center of her front yard: an Asoka tree, with its dense green foliage and clusters of white flowers whose nectar Nihil and Devi had already discovered, sucking at the thin sweetness like birds. She contemplated the miracle of its survival in the midst of such neglect and considered the impact of its shade on the new grass she was going to plant. Clearly, the Asoka tree would have to go. But with what would it be replaced, and where? She glanced at the far corner, the one closest to the Nadesans’ house, and pictured a fruit tree. Jambu, she thought. The red jambu, which usually veered between watery tastelessness and acidic sourness, would give her garden color without its having to translate into plebeian consumption. Moreover, it would provide the right degree of shade for her succulents and potted ferns. It was when she was swiveling back to the corner that bordered the driveway on the Silva side, a flamboyant already taking root there in her imaginings, that she saw the twins. They were standing side by side, each with her weight on one foot, left hand in her mouth, gnawing at the edges of their fingernails. She was so taken aback by their presence and their concentrated activity that it took her a few moments to realize they were mostly naked below the hem of their tops.

“Who are you?” she asked, now taking in the less obvious aspects of their appearance, the big shoulders and knobbly knees, the stringy, light-brown streaked hair, the oval faces grimed with a recent meal, and, could that be, yes it was, mud.

“I’m Rose, she’s Dolly,” one of them said, and they both grinned. Their smiles were sheepish and challenging at the same time.

That their lives were not going to contain what they perceived as normalcy in other people’s houses was something the Bolling twins took for granted. They were not poor enough to accept charity,
Only the servants take hand-me-downs,
their mother, Francie, would say, but not rich enough to possess complete wardrobes, so on weekends they wore skirts by morning and then hung them up to dry and went without. Their father and brother only wore shirts on those Sundays when they all went to the nearest church. Sex was neither special nor secret; it was conducted like daily business, if not exactly in full view then in full knowledge of the children, a favor their oldest had grown up to return before moving away. Yet, despite all this, they were children, and they were here to seek out the new members of their tribe with an interest heightened by difference.

“Where are the children?” Rose asked, nudging Dolly as she spoke. Mrs. Herath, though seemingly benign in her Kandyan sari, and probably only because of her daily life as a school teacher, gave out a certain aura of reprobation that was hard to miss.

Just then the Silva boys came out of their house, rattling coins in the pockets of their shorts. They whispered to each other, the older one pointing to Rose’s hips. His brother averted his gaze after a quick smile at Dolly, who looked over her shoulder at them and waved with good cheer.

“Hello, Jith! Goin’ to the bakery?” she asked him.