On Sal Mal Lane (20 page)

“Lucas Seeya!” she called out, catching up with Lucas just before he stepped into the wattle-and-daub veranda of his hut. She couldn’t see Alice, but she could hear her voice and the sound of her washing a pot somewhere behind a grove of plantain trees.

“
Appoi!”
Alice said. “Good that the Tamils are being taught a lesson. Should have thrown them out long ago. Think they own this country. Have you noticed, all the good shops are Tamil. Cloth shops. Goods shops. All Tamil.”

Devi, confused for a moment, wanted to ask Lucas how a shop could be Tamil, a detail that she felt could be introduced to her social studies teacher since it had not thus far been discussed in class. Perhaps her teacher didn’t know this; it would be another opportunity to impress her. But she was prevented from asking the question by the barrage of scolding that spilled out of Lucas’s mouth, which frightened her into simply nodding or shaking her head in affirmation and denial.

“Devi Baby! What are you doing here? By yourself?” he asked. He stepped carefully down the uneven steps to his house and walked a little way past her to stare up Sal Mal Lane, which was visible from the Ratwatte compound. “Is something wrong?” he asked when he returned. “Then why are you here without Nihil Baby? You are not supposed to cross that road! You know that, right? And anyway, why are you coming to our house? This is not a place for you to be! Okay, okay, don’t look so scared. Here, come, come,” he said, and escorted her up the steps, taking her hand in his. “I’ll give you ginger beer. You sit, and I will go and come with ginger beer.”

Devi was too afraid to say that she did not like ginger beer, its sting and fizz far too strong for her taste, or that her belly was already full with her lime juice. Besides, Alice, dressed in her customary soot-and curry-stained cloth and blouse, had emerged with two pots, one in each hand, consternation further souring her already disapproving features.

“Ah, this is Devi Baby, no. What are you doing here? Where is that man? Lucas Aiyya!” she called out. “Lucas Aiyya!”

“Lucas Seeya went to bring ginger beer.”

Alice spat a stream of betel out the side of her mouth. “Ginger beer? Did he offer tea?”

Devi shook her head, though she did not want to cast any blame on the old man. She wished she had not come. She should have turned around and gone home. Or to Kala Niles. But no, she would have to get past Mr. Niles and he would definitely notice if she showed up without Nihil. Uncle Raju, she thought, her face brightening, she should tell him! He was always so impressed with everything that her family did, but he was clearly most especially fond of her. Why hadn’t she gone to see him first and saved herself all this trouble?

“Everything is good, Devi Baby?” Lucas asked, holding out the lukewarm bottle of ginger beer that he had already had opened at Koralé’s shop. “Bring a glass! Bring a glass!” he said to Alice, as though delay combined with a lack of finesse might make Devi decide against the beverage.

“I got six A’s and three B’s!” she said, sipping the ginger beer through a straw and deciding that she would at least thank the old couple by sharing her good news.

“Not like that, must get all A’s, no, Devi Baby? Like your
aiyyas
and your
akki.
I have heard that they never get even B’s!” Lucas said.

Devi swallowed the rest of her drink in several long gulps, holding the glass in both hands and wheezing from the effort between mouthfuls. She wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her dress and giggled after the burp that followed. “I’ll go now,” she said, standing up.

“
Deiyyo saakki!
You can’t go like that. I must come and put you to the other side,” Lucas said. “Wait a bit, I will go and get a shirt and come.”

Devi sat back down to wait. She listened to Lucas bickering with Alice, a low resonance of voices that were most unthreatening as though this was a form of communication, not disagreement. Nothing like when her parents argued, she thought. Their arguments, always about the government or each other’s families, woke her from deep sleep and made her get up and pour water from the boiled and cooling bottles in the fridge or pee with the door to the bathroom open, making as much noise as she could in the hope that they would stop. Sometimes they did, other times they did not. When they did not, she woke up Rashmi and the two of them woke up the boys and sometimes Devi would cry and ask Suren to go and stop the arguing. He never did. He simply sat next to her and stroked her head. She wondered if Lucas and Alice had ever had that kind of fight. She doubted it. There was an air of calm about their hut. She looked up at the thatched roof and counted four
beedi
and one cigarette tucked in between the woven coconut fronds that made up their roof. The bench she sat on was lined with an old sari and several mats so that it was almost like a cushioned sofa. The flies buzzed outside and there was a quick smell of sewage that came and went and then came back to linger a while longer.

“Okay, now I’m ready. Let’s go,” Lucas said, holding out his hand. He was wearing a smart striped shirt in blue and white that Devi recognized as one that had once belonged to her father, and he had unrolled his sarong so it fell to his feet. He shuffled into his slippers, which had been repaired multiple times and quite crudely, the string all in different colors.

“That stink is back,” Alice said, coming out from the dark room from which Lucas had just appeared. “Those slum people are constantly throwing their dirt into the canal and that’s why. Devi Baby, maybe your father can fix this problem for us?”

“Don’t ask these questions from Devi Baby!” Lucas said. “I will ask Master Sir. These things men must talk between men.”

When Devi looked back, Alice was still standing on the top step, her hands planted on her waist. She had resumed muttering.

“I can walk from here,” Devi said after they had crossed. As far as she could tell, it had taken Lucas just as long to get across as it had taken her, but she was grateful for his help nonetheless.

“No, no, I will take you all the way home,” Lucas said, eyeing Sonna, who had just arrived at the bottom of the lane. He was carrying a bottle of pink milk that, even from afar, looked deliciously cool to Lucas, whose mouth watered at the thought. He swallowed and glared at Sonna, who was staring at them in a way that made Lucas uneasy.

Devi’s concerns were elsewhere. “If you take me home then they will know I crossed the road and I will be in trouble,” she pleaded in a whisper. “Please, Lucas Seeya, don’t tell.”

Lucas looked down at her. “Okay. But then you must promise me. Promise Lucas Seeya that you will never cross that road again. You understand? Never again.”

“I promise,” Devi said, her convincement absolute; the things she needed, her siblings, her friends, her home, they were all on this side of the street after all. And school and birthday parties she was taken to, so there was no chance that she would ever want to cross that street again. “I really promise, Lucas Seeya,” she said again.

“I will walk you past Mr. Bolling’s house,” Lucas said, glancing back again at Sonna, who was still watching them, and Devi relented. When they reached the end of the Bollings’ aluminum-bordered compound, she ran up the road and turned and waved, then hid herself in the Silvas’ fence, pressing herself into the plants until she was sure Lucas had gone back home before darting back across the lane and opening the gate to Old Mrs. Joseph’s house.

The sand and gravel driveway had been swept clean in patterns and she didn’t want to disturb it, but she couldn’t linger there or else Old Mrs. Joseph would summon her to the main house and she would never be able to tell Raju about her report card. She decided to make a run for it, but did so along the zigzag path made by the broom, so she would make the least possible disruption before arriving at the garage, where, she hoped, Raju could be found. She was elated to hear his grunts and the thud of bar bells. Raju’s weight lifting generated a sound that the Herath children had, as all the children of Sal Mal Lane had before them, grown to find comforting. Behind his mother’s gray painted gate, at the end of the sand and pebbled driveway, inside the garage that had never sheltered a car, Raju grunted and heaved and dropped weights so reliably that it had become the music of their last games of cricket, their last run down the lane with their kites, or their last whispered conversations with their new friends, before they had to go back into their respective houses. For Devi, so full of need at this particular moment, the familiar sounds were like a favorite bit of music.

The front of the former garage was a wall with a door that was set into one corner. She knocked on the door and waited, clapping her hands together several times very softly as she listened for a response.

“Coming! Coming!” Raju yelled from inside before he opened the door.

Devi considered the possibility that this was one of those moments when her mother would have said that she, Devi, had lost her
common sense.
For there stood Raju not merely in the same exercise trunks in which he had first greeted her and Nihil when they moved in, but, additionally, glistening with what appeared to be oil and sweat, rivulets dripping down from his hairline and his belly. The trunks were soaked. She arched her body back slightly at the pungent odor that permeated the space, but before she could think of an excuse to leave, Raju spoke.

“Devi! Come come come! Come inside and sit!” he said, looking past her and then seeming to accept the fact that she was, indeed, alone. He cleared a space for her on a rattan chair that hung from a rafter at one corner of the garage, moving ceaselessly as though fearful that she might leave if he stood in one place. “My goodness. Didn’t expect a visitor. Normally don’t come, no, normally only I come to visit your place. Mummy’s home?”

Raju always referred to her mother as
mummy
whenever he spoke of her to them. Even though Rashmi had told him several times that they did not call their mother mummy but, rather, Amma,
like good Sinhalese children should.

“Don’t know,” Devi said, realizing that she had been gone for a while between the visit to the Bolling girls and the one to Lucas, and that it was quite possible that her mother had come home already from her after-school classes. She regarded Raju, who had sat down on the top of two steps leading down into the garage from the backyard of the house. He wiped himself with a towel, mopping his face and chest and under arms that were thick with hair.

“I came to tell you that I got six A’s and three B’s,” she blurted out because, though some bit of good sense and intuition was telling her that her presence here alone was entirely inappropriate, she couldn’t help but deliver her news. “That’s the first time that I got such good marks. They all taught me, that’s how. Otherwise, I usually only get an A for English and an A for social studies because those are the only ones I like.”

Raju’s eyebrows arched in wonder. “Ah? Really? Now you get such good marks? From a school like that, with all those good teachers, such good marks are a big thing, you know.” His mouth turned down even farther than usual to express the degree of awe that he clearly felt. “You must be very proud. Mummy also must be proud. And Daddy must have got you chocolates and everything? Ah? Got chocolates?” Raju smiled.

Raju’s smile, despite the grotesque nature of its separate parts, conveyed genuine gladness, and Devi concentrated on that. She could no longer smell the stench that had repulsed her before, and now that Raju’s towel was draped across his knees and covered the lower half of his body, he looked as though he was halfway dressed. She relaxed into her chair and answered him.

“I didn’t get chocolates, but Nihil said that later after homework, he would give me two of his Marie biscuits when we have tea. And I am sure if he gives me two, then Rashmi and Suren will give me two also. Then I’ll have six. Plus I’ll have my five and that way I will have eleven Marie biscuits!” She grinned at the prospect.

Raju shook his head from side to side, obviously as delighted as she was about the bounty that awaited her. “Now what can Uncle Raju give you? I must also give you something. I’m also proud of you. Such a small girl and you have done such a big thing!”

Devi’s fears evaporated and her grin widened. This was exactly the kind of reception she had hoped for and been unable to secure from Rose or Dolly or Lucas. Here was a person who understood the magnitude of her achievement. She drew her legs up and tucked them under her, then reached out and pushed herself off the solid punching bar that had been mounted on the side of the post next to her. She swung back and forth, content.

Raju Refuses to Be Demoted

If in the wake of Devi’s newfound status as a sibling worthy of her older brothers and, especially, older sister, all that happened was that Rashmi no longer had to murmur in commiseration on those occasions when she had to go to the staff room to deliver a message and when Sister Helen Marie drew her aside to share some misdeed traced back to Devi, or when Miss Atukoralé beckoned her over to show her the ugly script that Devi had produced, Rashmi would have been satisfied. But no, Devi’s good work at school had resulted in her turning into a peregrinating menace at home. The tale of her crossing the road without permission and all that had followed had been relayed to them by Sonna, who came right up to them as they played French cricket to share the details:

—One of his friends had told him that Devi had almost got hit by a bus when she ran across the main road to see Lucas. The fact that the bus was a 109 had seemed particularly relevant, as if the gods themselves had sent the rarely seen bus as warning.

—Lucas had served her drinks.

—She had spent half an hour visiting Raju, who, they all must know by now, was not to be trusted.

Whether Sonna shared all this out of real concern for Devi’s wellbeing, or whether he shared it because he knew, everybody down the lane knew, how closely the older Herath children, but particularly Nihil, guarded their younger sister, or whether he wished to get Raju and Lucas into trouble, the Heraths could not decide. Nihil believed fervently that it was the second of those reasons. Rashmi believed just as ardently that it was the last of those reasons. Nobody imagined that it was the first reason, that Sonna was genuinely concerned for Devi, that having already saved one Herath child from an accident, he felt responsible for the safety of another as well, particularly this one who had sat and shared her important news with him. Nobody thought that Sonna had, himself, been just as terrified as Nihil might have been to see Devi cross the road with the frail old Lucas, and to realize that she had, indeed, gone across that road by herself. To believe that would require the sort of generosity that Sonna had not had enough opportunities to earn and, in any case, everybody was more concerned with Devi’s safety than with the bearer of the news, and so Sonna went back to his house without so much as a thank-you, all the Heraths turning away, intent on demanding an explanation from Devi. Even Devi, Devi on whose behalf he had quarreled with Sunil after having been caught stealing the bottle of strawberry milk for her and on whose behalf he had then earned a beating from his father when the incident was reported to him, even she did not look at him once.