On Sal Mal Lane (7 page)

Next to Nihil, Suren began humming, and then, softly, to sing:

“
In Days of yore,

From Britain’s shore

Wolfe the dauntless hero came

And planted firm Britannia’s flag

On Canada’s fair domain.

Here may it wave,

Our boast, our pride

And joined in love together,

The thistle, shamrock, rose entwined,

The Maple Leaf Forever.”

“Nice voice!” Dolly said, not smiling, which, in the Bolling twins’ case, bespoke awe. “Down our lane only Kala Niles has music. They’re Tamil people. Her father doesn’t go anywhere, but Raju says he can hear even better because he can’ move. Kala Niles gives lessons. Children come from other places to their house to learn. And the Sansonis’ son, Tony Sansoni, at the top of the lane? Suppose’ to have a guitar but we have never heard him play. We only hear Kala Niles.”

“Every day she practices and we listen,” Rose added. “We don’ go too near. They don’ like that. Have you heard her playing?”

Suren nodded. Kala Niles’s piano playing had been the first thing that had reassured him that their move had been a good one, and though he had not met Kala Niles yet, he had divined in the arrangements she favored—Beethoven’s
Pathétique
Sonata, for instance, with its repeated dissonance and resolutions—a keen ear and a complex personality.

Dolly asked him to sing another song, and Suren obliged with a few bars of “Hey Jude” and “Yesterday,” two songs that Nihil and he had learned by listening to the radio during the
Beatles Hour,
for one entire week.

“So nice. Makes me feel sad.” Dolly said, sighing. “With that voice must ’ave won prizes an’ everythin’, no? Can be on the radio even. You tried? Mus’ tell your parents to try, no. They can probably send you there. To the radio people. To the SLBC.”

Rose, who had been alternately tapping and caressing the green cotton sheet on Devi’s bed, joined in. “
Velona Hit Parade
has all the hit songs. All from pop stars in America. But you can sing nicely. When you get big an’ all you can start a group. You can sing, we can dance,” she pushed her sister as she said this. “Yes, she can dance. I can too. Like this, see?” Rose stood up and began moving her hips in a circle, her hands raised in the air.

Rashmi did not care for the look of this dance. It was far too something. Far too vulgar, she decided. That was the word for it. Of the Herath children, Rashmi excelled in the pursuit of perfection; her fingers curved just so on the piano, her voice rose but only as much as was required by each note, and when she danced, as she did in her Oriental dancing classes, her steps moved precisely to the drums. But, as perfection usually goes, her performances lacked joy. For their part, Rose and Dolly had an excess of free spiritedness and moved like reeds in the wind, dipping and swiveling to a completely tuneless rendition of “Ra Ra Rasputin,” by Boney M., which was currently dominating the
Velona Hit Parade.

“I don’t think our parents want me to be in a band,” Suren said now, in his soft voice. He had always spoken that way, having figured out at a very young age that the softer his own voice, the greater the attention he commanded from his siblings and even, sometimes, his parents.

Rose stopped dancing. “Then don’ wait for parents!” she declared. “Our sister, Sophia, she din’ wait for our parents. She got a boyfriend, not even Burgher, a Tamil Hindu boy, and ran away in the middle of the night. An’ she was only fifteen.” Rose flopped down onto Devi’s bed as she said this and began cooling herself by flapping the front of her top. She sagged her shoulders, and the part of her belly that protruded over the waistband of Rashmi’s old skirt rested gently in her lap like a comfort-seeking mammal. “You heard? That’s what Sophia did. You can too. With a voice like that, sky would be the limit for me. Right, Dolly? I would be in the films. I would be in Hollywood!” She flung herself back on the bed, cackling with laughter.

Devi reached around Rose to rearrange her tank top properly over her belly, then pushed her up to a sitting position so she could resume combing her hair. Once again, however, she was thwarted in her recommendation of the use of shampoo by an interruption, this time from her older sister.

“Did Sophia come back?” Rashmi asked, her voice betraying her shock.

“Sophia came back all right,” Dolly said. “She is always comin’ back. Whenever she fights with the man, she’s back but she won’ stay. Comes for the day and goes before night. They are madly in love. Can tell. All the marks on her arms. She says he’s always grabbin’ an’ tellin’ her not to go. Three kids even already. An’ another one comin’. We’re hopin’ twins. Like us.”

The curtain to their doorway fluttered and all the children looked up. Kamala poked her head in. Her eyes washed over the six faces, but her question was directed to Rashmi: “
Baba,
shall I bring some tea for them?”

“Yes, Kamala. Bring some tea and . . . are there any biscuits?”

Kamala shook her head from side to side in agreement and left. The tea had already been made, the question being simply a courtesy, and she returned almost immediately with six cups of tea and Maliban biscuits arranged in a pretty circle on a pale-blue plate. Rashmi noted with the satisfaction of a true lady of the house that there were six each of every kind, chocolate biscuits, cream wafers, lemon puffs, and plain milk.

The twins looked at each other. They had never had a proper servant, and had never served anybody tea in matching cups and saucers or bothered to place biscuits on a plate, and they certainly did not own a tray. Furthermore, at their house, food was always a problem because there was never enough of one thing to be shared equally among all, which meant that, as their parents insisted, they were left to
sort it out
among themselves. Now, arrayed before them, was an equal part of everything. They sat up straight and crossed their legs the way Rashmi had been doing until she had risen to hand the cups to each of them and her siblings before taking her own.

“If you use some shampoo like Sunsilk Egg Protein, then your hair will be much nicer!” Devi burst out, only to be shushed by her three siblings.

“That’s not a nice thing to say, Devi,” Rashmi said. “You should apologize to Rose. At once.”

Devi hung her head, hiding her eyes behind waves of hair. “I’m just trying to help her to be like us,” she said.

Rose laughed, “My god, can’ be like you all even in a million years! No need for sorry. My hair is like this all the time. Don’ have shampoo, got to use soap even that only if we’re lucky, Rexona. Otherwise, Lifebuoy.”

All the Heraths grew quiet in the face of this information. Not having shampoo was one thing, but to have to use what their mother referred to as
laborers’ soap
on one’s hair, this was out of the realm of imagination. Devi resolved to give the twins the two special packets of Sunsilk that had come with the bottle her mother had bought for them and that Devi had been saving just for the sheer delight of feeling the soft-bellied pouches between her palms. It didn’t matter what Rashmi said, if she were Rose or Dolly she’d want someone to give her some Sunsilk too. She arranged her treats in a circle in her saucer and separated the two halves of the chocolate biscuit. She brought it to her mouth to scrape the cream off with her teeth, but Rashmi touched her arm and shook her head, no, and Devi obeyed, pasting the biscuit together again and taking a well-mannered bite off one edge.

“Do you have brothers or just Sophia?” Nihil asked after a long silence during which he, too, put his chocolate biscuit back together again before Rashmi could catch him misbehaving.

“Have one brother. Sonna. But he’s rotten.” Dolly said.

“Rotten? How?” Suren asked.

Dolly shrugged.

“Is he the tall boy who was standing with Uncle Raju?” Devi asked.

“If he was shoutin’ or looked angry, then that’s him,” Dolly said. “Was he shoutin’?”

“No, he wasn’t shouting,” Rashmi said, thinking about the boy she had seen staring at them during the late morning and part of the afternoon too. She wanted to say she had thought he was handsome but that seemed inappropriate in the presence of the boy’s sisters. So she simply mentioned the other thing she had noticed. “He looked sad.”

At this the twins broke into a gale of laughter so fierce that the Herath children too began to grin. “Our Sonna sad? You mus’ be crazy!” Rose said through her laughter.

“Two things for him,” Dolly added, “bullyin’ us and fightin’ with our father.”

“An’ hittin’ Raju, don’ forget that!” Rose said.

Their conversation drifted on to other things and before long they fell into the pattern of all children, sharing secrets unabashedly, secure in the knowledge that what was told would remain confidential.

Rose revealed that her greatest fear was that Sonna would pick a fight with their father and be beaten to death, and that her big dream was to break the Guinness World Record for standing on one foot on a stage in Viharamahadevi Park, a task that she felt was well within her sights.

Dolly said: “I don’ like the Silvas nex’ door, but I like Jith. But I never get to talk to him because Mrs. Silva won’ let him come and play with us. An’ Mohan too, he won’ let Jith talk to us either. I like Jith. I like him a lot.” Rose giggled at this “secret,” with which she was obviously very familiar, and Dolly pinched her arm and told her to stop it. “Also, I wish Sophia would come back to stay,” Dolly continued, “but since she’s not there I’m happy to be a twin,” for she did not like her brother, no, she did not like him at all.

Suren’s statement was so clear that nobody asked him to explain: he wanted his life to begin and end each day with music and nothing else, and not maths not chess in between but more music.

Rashmi said with great confidence that she intended to rise to the rank of head prefect at her convent, go to university to become a doctor, then get married and raise a family of two boys and two girls with her engineer husband, who would make sure her house would be big enough to include her aging parents, whose senility and deaths she would nurse and mourn accordingly.

“Someday, I’m going to play cricket for the first eleven at Royal,” Nihil said into the silence that followed Rashmi’s words, which were more revelation than aspiration. “Also, I want Devi to grow up to be fifty soon so I can stop worrying about her.” And as he said this he avoided looking at either Suren or Rashmi, but he put his arm around Devi, who was now seated next to him, and those words and that gesture made the Bolling twins feel as though they had been let into a very private club and so they said they, too, would look after Devi since she obviously needed it, being the youngest and all.

“I have three notebooks, one for flowers, one for pictures torn out of the Kiddie Page in the
SatMag
that comes on the weekend, and one for writing, but it’s still empty because I don’t know what is important enough to write,” Devi said, followed by a confession that came out in a rush: “I once ate the whole bag of
hoonu bittara
that Aunty Saddha gave me to share with all of you but now I have been sorry about it for two whole years so you shouldn’t be angry,” and she flung her head into Rashmi’s lap, making everybody laugh.

While these stories were shared inside the girls’ bedroom, Mrs. Herath, feeling herself elevated slightly upon the prospect of future merit, sang an old love song as she gardened, Kamala, the servant woman, busied herself washing the teacups and, upon the insistence of his wife, Lucas prepared to venture forth and introduce himself to the new arrivals.

The Keeper of Sal Mal Lane

Sal Mal Lane was named for the trees that surrounded the neighborhood and collected in a grove at the closed top end of it. At the time the Heraths moved in, the grove was visible but not accessible. It was cordoned off by a barbed-wire fence while the local authorities debated the possibility of turning the road into a throughway, a discussion that would be decided favorably for Sal Mal Lane thanks to those trees, whose beauty and religious significance ultimately stopped the plans for expansion, though it would be quite a while before the fence would be taken down. It was located a half mile away from the Pamankade-Dehiwela bridge, which placed it within the capital city of Colombo, but just barely. It was a quiet, residential neighborhood, made even more so by the heavy traffic on the main road that met Sal Mal Lane in a T intersection. The vehicles that moved fast along that road almost never turned into the lane; they simply sped by, taking the furious sound of their speed with them. To the right, on that main road, was a hairpin turn around which the buses raced each other, eager to take on passengers, barely slowing to let any off. To the left was the bus halt where the 120 bus stopped, and also the somewhat more infrequent 135, 116, and 107, and the near-mythical 109, whose route nobody knew but into whose empty belly all the children yearned to climb, even if only to travel two stops they didn’t care in which direction they went.

Right across that main road was an empty lot continuing from day to day in the state of dirt and general ugliness preferred by its owner, a widow, Mrs. Ratwatte, who ran a batik business. She wanted to maintain an illusion of decay and lost fortunes even as she chased down her workers with a bandy-legged gait that made them, mostly young Tamil girls from the tea estates up-country, sea sick to observe, and raked in cash from her commissioned creations, depicting blue-green peacocks and red-orange Kandyan dancers, for tourist boutiques. Part of Mrs. Ratwatte’s stage set,
to ward off the evil eye,
was the donation of a shack to Lucas and his wife, Alice, in the farthest corner of her property and a meager stipend. In her mind, they were respectable beggars, the kind who, she imagined, accrued daily merit for her prospects in the next life and yet were able, by virtue of their impoverished appearance, to dissuade anybody else from setting up camp in the unused portions of her land.