On Sal Mal Lane (56 page)

Rashmi stared at Raju. It was the first time she had seen him since the funeral, though Kamala had told her that he had attended the ceremony, listened to the chanting from afar, walked in the funeral procession, far away from those who were close and unsullied, behind those who had known Devi only in passing and even behind those who had not known her at all. Rose had told Rashmi about Sonna, and how Raju had bludgeoned him to death, and how her father, Jimmy Bolling, had said he did not care,
Let the son of a bitch rot. I will not bury him, I will not press charges, I should have done it myself,
and how Francie Bolling had cried and cursed Raju. She also knew that Raju no longer lifted weights, that the weights had been returned to Jimmy Bolling—they sat in the kitchen and were now used as benches by Rose and Dolly when they went in there to help Francie Bolling cook—that Raju rarely left the house, or read the papers, he just stayed beside his mother, who never spoke.

Looking at Raju now, Rashmi tried to feel some anger toward him, but she could not. He was as he had always been, a sad, deformed man whose life had been charmed by the friendship of children such as they were, such as Devi had been, a man who had spent a few years, out of all the years he had lived and all those yet remaining, when life had seemed to offer him something more than mere existence in the company of his hopeless, hopeless dreams.

“Can you take me to a shirt place in Wellawatte?” she asked Suren the next morning as they left for school.

“We will have to go before Amma gets home,” Suren said, not asking why she wanted to go, or for what, “and we will have to ask Kamala to keep an eye on Nihil.”

“Kamala and maybe Lucas can also come and wait with him,” Rashmi said.

That afternoon, Lucas came and sat on the steps to the front veranda ostensibly to read the
Silumina,
but really to make sure that Nihil remained at home, for that is what their parents had asked of them, to
Keep your brother in sight always.
Rashmi and Suren walked all the way to the top of the hill, past the shop where Sonna had died, which was now boarded up, and took the 141 bus to Wellawatte. Most of those shops were still shut, and many of them were gaping holes lined by blackened walls, open to the elements.

“I hope they open these shops again soon,” Rashmi said. She saw a nun hurrying down the opposite side of the street and was grateful for the T-shirt she had thrown on to disguise her uniform; they had been in such a hurry to leave the house there had been no time to change.

“The refugees will have to come back from the North first and their houses will have to be rebuilt,” Suren replied.

“Do you think they will come back? Will they return to the same houses?” Rashmi asked, stepping around a pile of half-burnt, half-torn notebooks and shelving that must have come from a bookshop.

“I hope so,” Suren said. “Otherwise what will happen to the teachers in the Tamil classes? There would be nobody to teach.”

“It is sad here without the shops open. Even the market is gone. And look at the kovil. There is nobody outside stringing flowers.”

They paused for a while to press their faces to the gate. The kovil was littered with the debris left behind by the refugees, with bundles of rags and shreds of saris and
siri-siri
bags blowing in the breeze coming in from the sea. The kiosk at which they had last seen the flower men, as they referred to them, was now a pile of wood. There were rolls of red thread ground into the sewer drains and tangled on the sharp edges of the broken booth.

“What are you trying to get here?” Suren asked, tearing Rashmi away from the kovil.

“I want to get a shirt for Raju,” Rashmi said.

“Then we’ll have to go to the fabric part of Sellamuttu Stores, but I don’t know if it is open.”

“But you didn’t ask me why,” Rashmi said.

“You must have a good reason,” Suren said. “If it is for Raju, it must be for Devi too.” He put his hand on her back and guided her across the road between cars and buses that all moved slowly, the drivers curious to see what could be seen.

Sellamuttu Stores was, miraculously, open. Inside, though, there was a Sinhalese man.

“Where’s the owner?” Suren asked him.

“They have gone to Jaffna,” he said. “I am only a friend. I said I will open the shop and run it till they come back. But I don’t know if they will come back. Who would want to?”

“Do you send them money?” Suren asked.

“Not many people come here, so there hasn’t been much money. But if it picks up then I’ll be able to send money.” They both nodded.

“Did they go by ship?” Suren asked, having heard of the transport of Tamils from the refugee camps to the villages in the North.

“Yes,” the man replied. “They were at a church in Kotahena and I went to see them there. After a few days they went to Jaffna on the
Lanka Kalyani.
A cargo ship. I heard it took a long time to get there. I hope there was food on the ship.”

Suren and Rashmi shared in the silence that followed the man’s statement. All three of them wondered about such a trip, what the owners of Sellamuttu Stores might have taken with them, if anything, whether they were relieved to escape or fearful of a journey over the ocean. They considered what they might do under such circumstances and, in the deepening quiet, they settled instead on the feelings each of them carried within, for lost neighbors, for a dead sister.

Rashmi spoke first. “What size is Raju?” she asked Suren.

Suren spoke slowly as though coming out of a deep reverie. “His neck is probably eighteen and a half and sleeves are probably about thirty-four,” he said.

“My god. Very strange size,” the man said, standing up straight and looking alarmed. “I am not sure I’ll even be able to find a shirt like that!” Still, after much searching, which included climbing on stools and ladders, he found a light-blue shirt with just such measurements and Rashmi paid him all the money she had received from her grandmother, which wasn’t quite enough but which the man accepted, brushing away her concern with a sideways shake of his head and a
kamak neha.

Lucas had left before they got home because Nihil had fallen asleep. Nihil spent much of his time at home sleeping; his silences would grow longer and longer until he shut his eyes and lay down and fell into sleep that was so deep that it was often hard to wake him up, a job that Suren undertook. The one time Rashmi had tried to do it he had woken up looking crazed, clutched her arms, and said
Devi! Devi!

Over the next weeks, Rashmi spent her time after school, and every late-night hour she could manage to spend before she had to go to sleep, embroidering the shirt with blue and yellow threads. In doing so she was reminded of the person who had first taught her to embroider, Mrs. Silva. She felt grateful for that first day, the day when she and Devi had sat with Mrs. Silva and learned how to embroider on small squares of old cloth, the fabric soft in their fingers, the scent of the still young creeping jasmine strong in the early-morning hours and surrounding them all in a cocoon of fragrance.

“You have to hold the needle firmly but the thread lightly, that’s the trick to embroidery,” Mrs. Silva had said, her own beautiful embroidery set aside while she unpicked the knots from Devi’s work and hers.

Devi, irritated by the difficulty of the work, complained. “Why do I have to learn this?”

“Someday when you are a fine lady you’ll want to embroider your own linens and baby clothes, won’t you?” Mrs. Silva asked.

“No. I don’t want to be a fine lady. Rashmi is going to be a fine lady. That’s enough.”

If Rashmi had known then that she would be embroidering something to remember Devi by, using her skill long before she became A Fine Lady, in fact after she, too, like Devi, had decided that being fine about anything was not that important after all, what would she have done? She looked at the cloth and thread in her hands and felt overwhelmed by the past and by the present. Suren came in and found her, the shirt and skeins laid out neatly on Devi’s bed, her hands quite still as she observed the arrangement before her.

“What’s the matter?” Suren asked, picking up a few skeins to make room for himself and sitting down on the bed.

“Don’t sit on her bed,” Rashmi said.

Suren got up and moved to Rashmi’s bed. “What are you thinking about?”

“Mrs. Silva,” Rashmi said. “She taught me to embroider, and now I’m using it to make a shirt for Raju, but Mrs. Silva is not a good person.”

“But she taught you something good,” Suren said, playing with the skeins of thread that were still in his hand. “Maybe that will help erase some of the bad things she has done.”

“I don’t think it happens that way. I think all the bad we do remains next to all the good we do. I don’t think you can change one by doing the other.”

“Then all you need to think about is doing more good than bad,” Suren said. “This shirt that you are making, that is a good thing. Just think about that. Forget about Mrs. Silva.”

So she tried. Rashmi embroidered flowers that she copied off one of Devi’s dresses, taking one from the box into which they had been packed to be given away, one of her favorites, in green and white; she embroidered chariots she traced off of Suren’s and Nihil’s blue-and-gold shirts; she embroidered balls balanced on cricket bats; she embroidered kites and hopscotch squares and skipping ropes and, along the hem, with some difficulty, she embroidered the outlines of bicycles.

“When do you plan to give this to Raju?” Suren asked.

“I thought I could give it to him after the three-month almsgiving,” Rashmi said.

Suren smiled. “That would be a good time to do it. It would make her happy.”

Rashmi did not tell Nihil about the gift she was making, the whys and wherefores. Nihil was untouchable. He was with them and yet absent; he spoke and yet said nothing that anybody could pin a thought to. He went to school, he studied, he took tests, and he slept and slept and slept. His appetite neither waxed nor waned, it was sufficient. Sometimes his friends would visit him and he would talk to them, even laugh with them, but the visits were always short, as if neither he nor his friends could keep up the pretense. So Rashmi was surprised when Nihil offered to help with cooking for the three-month almsgiving.

“Tell me what to do,” he said, coming into the kitchen where she was standing peeling onions and garlic and potatoes.

“You don’t need to cook,” Mrs. Herath said. “It’s okay.”

“I want to cook. Tell me what to do.”

“Here, you can peel these,” Rashmi offered, wanting to seize the opportunity to bring him out of the silences he preferred.

“After that?” he asked.

“After that you can help me cook the potatoes and make the
mallun
and prepare the cutlets for frying,” she said.

In the kitchen that afternoon and evening, with Nihil beside her, Rashmi listened to her mother and Mrs. Niles and Kala Niles and Mrs. Nadesan talk. Kamala, dismissed from the kitchen, stood nearby just in case she was needed to fetch and carry things.

“We have decided to go to India,” Mrs. Nadesan said.

“Really? For good?” Mrs. Niles asked, as she stopped stirring the curry she was making and turned around.

“For good,” Mrs. Nadesan said. “Might as well, if we have to leave, to leave for good. That’s what my brothers all say. They always said it was better to live with our own people. I wish we had listened.”

“You don’t have to leave. We are not leaving,” Kala Niles said, “even though our house was burnt, not like yours. At least yours was still the same.”

“We have no place to go even if we want to leave,” Mrs. Niles said.

“I don’t want to leave,” Kala Niles said firmly, glancing at Mrs. Herath, who had remained silent.

“I don’t want to leave either,” Mrs. Nadesan said. “This is where we have lived all our married lives, and our girls before they grew up and left, but with all this trouble, better to go now than later.” None of the neighbors responded and after a while Mrs. Nadesan clucked her tongue and said, “I almost forgot.” She undid a knot at the edge of the fall of her sari and unwrapped a pair of earrings. “These I want Rashmi to have. She saved my
thali.
Come, take them, darling.”

Rashmi stretched out her hand and took the earrings, and she did not know if Mrs. Nadesan had forgotten that it had been Devi who had crawled back into her house to rescue her gold wedding necklace, so beautiful and heavy she had to pass it to Suren before she could climb out of that window. Suren had told her that Devi had asked to hold the necklace again, after, wanting to feel that weight in her hands, pausing even in the middle of all that chaos to admire its beauty. Or maybe Mrs. Nadesan did remember but did not want to mention Devi’s name.

“They are beautiful, Aunty,” she said, and gave them to her mother, who took them from her and tied them into the edge of the fall of her own sari. And then, not knowing how else to thank Mrs. Nadesan, Rashmi felt compelled to say, “There won’t be any more trouble.”

“There will always be trouble when we have people like the next-door neighbors around,” Mrs. Herath said at last. “But for what it is worth, I want to say that we, our whole family, will be very sad to see you go.”

Mrs. Nadesan went over to Mrs. Herath and put an arm around her. Mrs. Herath was smaller, so her mother was completely hidden from Rashmi’s view. “Don’t be sad, Savi. All of us have cried enough now. We must stop thinking about the past and face what we have to face,” she said, but Rashmi could tell that Mrs. Nadesan, too, was crying.

If Nihil was moved by these expressions of regret, he did not make it known. He simply bent further into his task, as he sat on a low stool and made small round balls with mashed potatoes and carrots and finely chopped leeks that had been fried with onions and green chillies and garlic. Rashmi watched his relentlessly methodical work and the exactly spaced time between scooping a bit of the mixture, shaping it into a ball, and placing it in the dish of beaten egg whites, and, after a while, she felt the sadness lift, and she mimicked his pace until all the cutlets were coated with bread crumbs and fried and set out to cool on sheets of newspaper.