On Sal Mal Lane (19 page)

Devi and Minoli walked silently out of the classroom and down the corridor outside. As soon as they were out of sight of their classmates, they became conscious, without being able to put a finger on it, of time and authority. Row upon row of classrooms were filled with the industry of schoolwork, each child and each teacher playing their role, each human being somehow entirely cocooned in their own pod of understanding. Everybody else was in their place, doing what they were supposed to do, the whole combining into a sort of impermeable, yet transparent, bubble of good sense. Except for the two of them. They had been sent out to wander down hallways where they had no business being. They held hands and turned a corner before they opened the note:
Caught Copying. Also Disobedient. Needs Punishment—Yours Sincerely, Mrs. Sylvester,
the note read, and, the damning
P.S. Rashmi Herath’s Sister!

“Every first letter does not have to be in capitals,” Devi said, sullen and unrepentant, her voice clear in the silent hallway, “just the first letter of the first word of a sentence. Or names.”

“Now don’t go and say that to Sister Principal. You’ll get it,” Minoli advised, both in awe of her friend’s grasp of the language and fearful for her fate in the dreaded confines of The Office.

They took the long route past the tuck shop and paused to breathe in the smell of the savory buns and pastries being produced by the convent staff. Then they stopped to hold their noses and use the bathrooms before, having run out of ways to delay the inevitable, they reached their destination.

“Copying?” Sister Principal looked up from the note. She adjusted the band across her forehead that held her veil in place over her long, serious face. “Why would you do such a thing? From whom did you copy?”

Devi made no reply. She was a Herath; they did not betray their friends. She flashed a look at the photograph of Jesus Christ that hung above the principal’s desk, a blue rosary draped reverently over it. Beneath it, on a shelf set into the wall, was a stack of novenas printed on tissue-thin paper. She did not dare turn her head, but she turned her eyes as far as they could go and looked through the window. There was the stone grotto that held a life-size statue of the Virgin Mary, a flickering blue bulb lit before it all day and all night long. A carved inscription read
Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows.
She enjoyed sitting with Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows for a few minutes before school began, liked the notion of endless sorrows, which sounded both desperate and strangely soothing. She also liked to touch the “magic” stone at the foot of the statue, the one rubbed smooth from decades of school girls caressing it, asking for good grades, boyfriends, and breasts. She made a mental note to touch it again tomorrow. She would not ask for anything—she rarely did—she would simply thank Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows for friendship. Friends from whom to copy mathematics.

The Sister Principal turned to Minoli, when it was clear that Devi would not answer. “From whom did she copy?”

Minoli’s lower lip trembled, as though she too were being implicated. “Not me!” she said before bursting into tears.

“See now? You’ve made her cry,” Sister Principal said, beckoning the other girl over, taking her hand and soothing her against her body. “Don’t cry, darling, you haven’t done anything wrong. Come now, don’t cry.” She turned to Devi. “If you had to go to confession you wouldn’t be sinning like this, lying and cheating and then not even having the humility to be sorry for it. I don’t know what this school is coming to,” and she petered out into muttering about religions that had no standards for their followers.

Devi regarded the scene with stubborn equanimity. Crying was not an option she would choose, ever. She held out her palms before she was even asked to do so and braced herself for the sharp hurt of the foot ruler that landed five times on each, clenching her teeth and widening her eyes, which remained dry. Then she walked back to her class without even rubbing her palms together once.

Rashmi made Kamala boil water and then applied warm compresses to Devi’s hands as soon as they got home, even before lunch. They sat together on the steps outside the back door, still in their white uniforms and their striped school ties.

“You don’t need to copy. You just do it because you are lazy,” Rashmi said, though not as if she expected any change in Devi’s behavior. This Devi took as Rashmi’s good-girl way of condoning what she had done.

“I don’t like maths or science or Sinhala or Buddhism. I only like English and social studies,” Devi said, as though this expression of preference were sufficient to release her from the usual rules for those other, less desirable, subjects.

“You can’t choose like that in grade three. You can pick what you like when you finish your O-levels.”

Devi looked at her sister and marveled at the way in which she conducted her life, free of tribulations, and never ruffling anybody’s feathers; not their parents’, not the teachers’, not Sister Principal’s, not the neighbors’, not Mrs. Silva’s, or even Sonna’s, who, Devi had noticed, though he did not speak to them, looked at Rashmi with a disturbingly longing expression whenever she walked by. She wondered if it took work or if it came easy to Rashmi, this way in which she flowed through the days, competent and serene.

Later that day, Nihil commiserated as they sat on the back porch, dipping Marie biscuits into their evening tea, staring at the brown-orange brew and the way it swirled inside their white porcelain teacups. They had to raise their voices a little to be heard above the sound of Kamala’s
ekel
broom as she swept the pink and yellow flowers and leaves that drifted down from the sal mal trees and settled in the gardens of all the homes down the lane, work that had to be done twice each day.

“It’s okay. You didn’t really get into trouble anyway,” Nihil said, and Devi felt happier. This was her kind of response, to be grateful for the worse that had been avoided rather than bemoan the bad that had happened.

“I wanted to tell her that friends help friends, but I don’t think Sister Principal has any friends, so I didn’t,” she said, sure that Nihil would understand this line of reasoning, that had the Sister Principal experienced real friendship, she would have understood the copying.

“Don’t try to talk to principals. If you do they’ll tell Amma and Tha and then you’ll be in real trouble.”

They sat and chewed, thinking about Real Trouble: wordy sentences of remorse re written one hundred times, always one hundred times, no playing outside, and, when things were really bad, the sensation of their mother’s school slippers on bare skin. Yes, there was no need to bring that to pass, Devi thought. Maths was not worth that.

“Can you help me with the stupid subjects?” she asked Nihil, who nodded and continued to drink his tea.

“Helping” became, like everything else, a joint effort. Suren taught her maths, patiently breaking every sum into its composite parts until she no longer saw them as problems but rather as patterns. Rashmi taught her Sinhala and Buddhism, tying them together with Jathaka tales full of princes and vanquished demons until the language became an expression of faith, and scripture a version of known fairy tales intended to soothe pain rather than dictate life. Nihil sat beside her and listened to her repeat the stories that she made up from the facts passed down to her in social studies, the other foot of the compass she used to outline her world, its better half being the language she chose to describe it. Her parents responded to her advancement into the rank and file of their gifted older children, each according to their own preoccupations.

“All A’s and B pluses!” her mother exclaimed, holding Devi close on the day the report card came home. “Even a B plus in maths! I’m so proud of you, darling.” She kissed the top of Devi’s head, breathing in the smell of sweat and play.

“Why no A in Sinhala?” her father asked, ever conscious that mastery of the native tongue was a pre requisite for true nationalism.

Suren, Rashmi, and Nihil, whose own report cards barely elicited a response—they were expected to be superior—stood by and said nothing; they had already decided exactly how they would indulge their sister as a reward for her achievements.

Devi’s Report Card

And here it was: Devi’s day of rebellion had arrived. The report card, which had finally turned from an embarrassment—a feeling that Devi had religiously expressed, but only because she understood that it was expected that she would be ashamed—into a source of pride, made Devi bolder. She had information she wanted to share with the neighbors that she did not feel required the accompanying voices of her siblings or even their presence. She waited until Rashmi was deeply absorbed in the Nancy Drew mystery she was reading, ducked behind the fridge to hide from Kamala as she passed by on an unknown errand, opened and shut the heavy front door, holding the new brass handle in her hand and turning the latch soundlessly into its groove, tip toed through the front veranda, opened the gate, and ran down the road.

“I got six A’s and three B’s!” she announced to the Bolling girls, who were taken aback by her sudden arrival in their midst, bursting through the half-shut door to their compound without even pausing to knock.

“Gosh! How did you manage?” Rose said through a mouthful of rice. They were still in their school uniforms, though they had loosened their ties and unfastened some of the buttons. “In my class mostly Tamil girls get such good marks.”

“We barely got two C’s each and all the rest D’s!” Dolly informed her, following that up with her customary gale of laughter.

“Sit, darling, sit. Where’s your brother?” Mrs. Bolling buttoned the top of her bright red shirtdress before stepping out to look up the road. She shut the door and came back in. “Never see you without Nihil. Takes good care of you, doesn’t he? Such a nice boy,” she said and smacked Sonna lightly on his head, as though it were a deserved reprimand for a crime he was sure to commit sooner rather than later.

“Oww, Mama!” Sonna rubbed his head and frowned. “You’re always comparing me to them! But I’m not like them!” he said.

“I know,” his mother replied, and smacked him again to confirm her agreement as well as her disapproval of this difference between her son and the Herath boys.

A small argument erupted as Mrs. Bolling and the twins discussed in which ways, exactly, Sonna was different from the Herath boys, and in the ensuing noise, Sonna, who happened to be sitting right next to Devi, looked at her curiously. He had never been this close to one of the Herath girls before. Devi, dressed in a drop-waisted blue-and-white-striped stay-at-home dress and a matching Alice band on her head, looked like a well-loved doll. She had taken her body-wash before going on her adventure, and she smelled fresh, a mix of baby powder and sandalwood soap. Something about that scent stirred Sonna. He felt an overwhelming urge to take her hand and lead her back to her home where she would be safe. Safe from dust and dirt, from cars and buses, from rude boys and crude words, safe from the people in his house. He offered her his glass of water and breathed out.

“Where’s Nihil?” he asked at last.

Devi took a sip, then tucked her lips in as if this could excuse her from answering, but he asked the question again. “He’s at home,” she said. “He’s very, very busy today. And Rashmi is busy and Suren is also busy. Even Kamala is busy. That’s why I came alone.”

“Don’ go walkin’ aroun’ by yourself. It is not safe. Nihil must ’ave told you, no, about the bus an’ everythin’?”

“Yes, he told me, but I’m not going near the buses. Don’t worry. I just came here to tell everybody about my report card.”

Sonna glanced around the table at his family. He smiled, filled with pride, though none of them could have known why he was so pleased.

Devi turned fully to face Sonna and made her announcement again. “I got six A’s and three B’s.”

“Those are very good marks. Nihil mus’ be very proud of you,” Sonna said, smiling.

“Yes, he taught me, and Suren and Rashmi too. They all taught me.”

“Then you wait here, I will go an’ get a strawberry milk for you,” Sonna offered, surprising himself. He had no money and he would have to steal the bottle, but what was that compared to being able to bring a treat for a girl like her? “I’ll go an’ come then I will take you back home, okay? Mustn’ walk by yourself,” he said, and got up from the table, feeling important. He pictured himself, Devi’s hand in his as he walked over to the Heraths’ house and returned her to her family. They might invite him for tea, offer him biscuits on a tray. He whistled a tune as he went, a melody he had heard Suren play and that had caught his imagination though he did not know its name, “The Skye Boat Song.”

Devi, who would ordinarily have cheered up at the thought of the sweet drink, had just had a glass of fresh lime juice at home, a drink she had cajoled out of Kamala on the merits of her report card, and so she simply watched him leave. It would not do to wait for him to take her home; if he did, everybody would know she had crept out of the house by herself. Real Trouble reared its ugly head. Devi tuned in to the voices left behind.

“Wonder what the Silvas got,” Dolly said.

“Not Silvas, you are only wonderin’ what Jith got!” Rose teased her sister.

Dolly tried and failed to hide her smile. “Must ’ave done well, no?” she said.

“Gosh, I don’ know about Jith, but Suren must ’ave got good marks for music again this term,” Rose said, her thoughts fleeing from the boy her sister had a crush on to the one who was always on her mind. “When he plays his music it’s so nice, no, Mama?”

Devi listened to the discussion, which revolved entirely around Suren’s music, his voice, and his long list of desirable traits, a conversation conducted with each person around the long table shouting louder than the next. Nobody here, it seemed, was interested in her grades but for Sonna, and even he had left. She cracked the door just wide enough for her to squeeze out and stood contemplating where she could go next.

She gazed down the lane and thought about visiting the Silva boys, who had become much more friendly with her and her siblings, but then decided against it; they lived too close to her own home. Next door to the Bollings were the Bin Ahmeds, but they were so quiet and kept to themselves and in any case she only met them during Ramazan and the Sinhalese and Tamil New Year when the families exchanged sweets. She continued to stand, weighing her options. The wide, main road beyond the Bin Ahmeds’ house was uncharacteristically quiet and empty for a few moments before three vehicles went roaring by. She was almost about to turn back when, in the distance, she saw Lucas shuffling toward his hut. She ran to the edge of the road, her heart picking up its beat at the prospect of crossing the busy road that she had never been permitted to even stand beside without each of her hands being held by a sibling, one on either side. She had to try several times before she managed to dart across between a motorcycle, two buses, and a car. To avoid walking along the road, which had even less space that could be described as a pavement on this side, she stepped carefully through the loose barbed-wire fence that bordered the property, holding the wires apart and still managing to scrape herself slightly. She rubbed the scratch with spit.