On Sal Mal Lane (24 page)

Perhaps it was because Old Mrs. Joseph, too, had been changed somewhat by the new family that she did not tell anybody, not Raju nor Jimmy Bolling nor even Sonna, that she saw him standing there on that night and on many other nights to come, gazing at the Herath household, waiting for someone or something. And if Rashmi sensed that he was there, she, too, said nothing, keeping this first secret from her brothers and sister as if in regret for the fact that she was not the kind of girl who would ever be able to accept the kind of treat a boy like him could give her.

.....1981

Blue and Gold

With a brother like Nihil as her guiding star, it stood to reason that the biggest excitement in Devi’s life thus far would take place during the 102nd Battle of the Blues, the annual cricket match between Royal College (public, Buddhist), and St. Thomas’ College (private, Catholic), and that it would begin with a disagreement over cricket.

On the first day of the three-day match, everybody in the Herath household was up by dawn except for Mr. Herath, who only appeared at the match halfway through the second or third day if he appeared at all. He didn’t participate in these kinds of bourgeois capers. He participated in things where his presence was distinctive and noticed and where it could, conceivably, alter the course of affairs. Appearing at a cricket match to cheer and get drunk with half of the thirty thousand other people there was not one of those occasions so he rarely indulged himself in it.

“Amma, Kamala has packed all the food but I wanted iced drinks, not iced water!” Devi said, coming into her mother’s room. She stopped short at the sight of her mother, who was dressed in a turquoise blue silk with tiny yellow peacocks embroidered over the fall and the
palu.
“You are wearing blue and gold!” she said, clapping her hands.

Mrs. Herath smiled at her daughter. “Yes, darling, today’s the day to wear these colors, after all.”

Devi clapped her hands again. “Yes! We are going to win! Nihil gave me his old flag so I have my own flag now,” she said. She ran away, then came back to show her mother the bright flag with its three broad stripes of blue, gold, blue.

Mrs. Herath smiled at her, then looked back in the mirror. She bent her knees slightly, stepped on the edge of her sari, and straightened up again. She turned around and looked over her shoulder so she could see the back. “Devi, can you kneel and pull down the edge of my sari? It’s too short.” Devi came closer, breathing in the orange, rose, and sandal scents of her mother’s Elizabeth Arden perfume, Blue Grass, which she reserved for special occasions, for events that were more important even than weddings. Pausing, before she knelt down, to take another deep breath of the perfume and let it fill her up, Devi felt immediately that this match was going to be momentous in her life. She knelt beside her mother and tugged at the sari until it was the right length. Then, still holding the memory of that scent in her nose, she wandered out, the soft drinks forgotten.

Nihil came into the room. “Amma, can we go? We’ll be late. The Silvas have already left. I saw them go and they waved and said we would be late and that we should hurry!”

Indeed, Mohan had said, “If you don’t hurry, you’ll miss everything,” by which he meant the time when the cricketers came out to throw and play a few balls right beside the stands.

“I’m taking a special pen to get my souvenir signed,” Jith had added, and flashed a smart-looking click-on, click-off biro at Nihil. He let Devi play with it for a few moments before he snatched it back and ran away to catch up with Mohan.

As far as Nihil was concerned, being at the match a few hours before it began was not only desirable but necessary. Although he no longer went to cricket practice, he went to watch every game he could, copying the moves and replaying them in his head until he was convinced that were someone to hand him a bat or a leather ball he could save any game. Another young Royalist had once saved the big match by batting for four hours straight when even the spectators had given up and defeat was all but expected. Nihil had always imagined that someday he would become such a player, the one a team could rely on, but that could not happen until Devi was old enough. By then it would probably be too late.

Mrs. Herath, seeing how Nihil’s shoulders had suddenly slumped, laughed. “Don’t be silly. How can we be late? It is not even eight yet and the match doesn’t start until ten. We’ll leave in about half an hour,” she said.

Nihil sighed, unable to tell her where his thoughts had taken him, for surely that would earn an
I warned you, didn’t I?
Instead he stood in front of his mother, staring at his reflection in the mirror. He ran his hand over the fabric of his shiny dark-blue shirt with its motif of golden chariots. Suren came in and stood beside him, his arm around Nihil’s shoulder.

“See how nice both of you look in those shirts?” Mrs. Herath said. “This way, I can always tell exactly where you are.”

“Don’t worry, Amma, I will look after Nihil,” Suren said.

Mrs. Herath finished strapping her wristwatch on and spoke brusquely. “Yes, but I’ll also be using the binoculars!” She rummaged in the almirah for a few moments and turned around holding aloft a pair of binoculars.

“But those are Tha’s! He won’t want you to take them to the match,” Nihil whispered.

Mrs. Herath glanced over at her husband, who was, miraculously, still sleeping through all the excitement, and pressed her fingers to her lips. “Shh. He won’t know we took them,” she said.

The borrowed driver eased the borrowed car slowly down the narrow road, conscious of the importance of his cargo both human and inanimate. As they passed the Bollings’ house, Sonna crossed in front of their car.

“That boy never seems to be at school,” Mrs. Herath said, thoughtfully. “At least Rose and Dolly go to school.”

“Maybe he’s going to the match too,” Rashmi said. “He might be going with friends.” She said this though she knew that Sonna would hardly be going to a match that did not involve his own school and that, further, he did not seem to have any friends. Although she had wanted to defend him, the words only made her feel worse about the water-ice.

“Like us,” Devi said, considering that she and her sister had no business being out of school either.

Nihil, Devi, and Rashmi twisted in the back seat to observe Sonna, who had crossed back and was standing in the middle of the road, staring at the slow-moving car. Nihil waved, a small and cautious wave, and though Devi followed suit, Sonna did not wave back.

“I feel sorry for him,” Rashmi said, feeling as though she had added to Sonna’s troubles somehow.

“I think he could be better,” Nihil offered cautiously, sitting back down, “even if he’s not very nice now. Maybe if he joined us when we play he might learn how to behave—”

“I want you to stay clear of that boy, you hear me?” Mrs. Herath said, cutting short Nihil’s good intentions. “No good can come of him. Francie told me just the other day that they even had the police come and visit them because he had stolen a bottle of milk from Sunil’s shop. Nothing but trouble, she said.”

The children said no more, in unspoken agreement that if Sonna’s mother herself had complained to theirs, there was no argument they could come up with on Sonna’s behalf.

Mrs. Herath felt compelled to add, “A mother knows,” the sort of enigmatic statement that had always been useful in the corralling of children. The first day of the match came and went in its usual manner, the backs of the stands filling with boys and men waving flags and dancing in time to the music being belted out by hastily hired “bands.” Since payment came in both money and alcohol, fairly quickly the music was hardly recognizable as such and the singing more caterwaul than song. Devi joined in, raising her voice with glee as she sang her brothers’ school song, stretching out her
e
’s and
a
’s until Rashmi thought she sounded more like a villager just learning English than a convent-educated girl from a good family like theirs. When lunch was called, Suren and Nihil went by in a blur of blue and gold during the boys’ parade around the grounds.

“Look! Rashmi, look!” Devi yelled. “They are carrying Suren and Nihil on their shoulders like flags!
I
want to go in the parade,” she added, after they had passed, fingering the trim on her dress. “I want to go with Nihil.”

“Don’t be silly,” Rashmi said. “Bad enough we are here with bogus excuse letters. Imagine if the match nun saw us in the parade?” She shivered, picturing the particular nun assigned to monitor the activities of convent girls at the match, her eyes glued to the television to see what she could see. “Just be happy that we get to come.”

But confining Devi took more than common sense. On the morning of the second day, while her mother was wrapped up with her friends and Rashmi was busy storing their baskets of food and drink under their seats, Devi slipped under the ropes and out of the short gate separating the grounds from the stands and tried to blend in with all the little boys fielding the leather balls while the cricketers warmed up. She was so thrilled with herself that she was completely unaware that the boys were nudging each other and laughing at her until Nihil came up and called her name just as she braced herself to catch a ball that had rolled toward her. Hearing his voice, she forgot to fold one knee sideways and cup her palms. Instead, she squatted. The ball rolled between her legs and toward another boy.

“
Bokku! Bokku!!”
a boy yelled next to her, the visor of his blue cap tipped up.

“Girls can’t play cricket!” another added.

“What are you doing here?” Nihil asked, taking her hand. Devi broke away from him, flew at the boy who was nearest to her, and kicked him in the shins.

“You are stupid idiots. I can catch balls too.” She aimed kicks at any boy who came near her. She was like a resplendent yellow wasp, a flash of color amid a field of green and white.

In the end it took two cricketers to break up the melee, which concluded with one of them carrying a squirming Devi back to her mother.

For the rest of that day Devi was forced to sit between her siblings, the two boys voluntarily giving up their boys-tent life to manage their difficult sister. On Saturday, the final day of the match, thanks to her complete lack of regret about what had happened, Devi was left behind.

Raju’s Gift

If only Devi had behaved that day at the match. If only she had been content to respect the boys-only boundaries that had been set up and venerated for a century and two years. If only Lucas, not Raju, had been left in charge of her on the third day of the match. But it all happened this way and not in those other ways. Devi misbehaved, Raju was chosen.

Mrs. Herath summoned Raju to
watch over Devi like a hawk, the little vixen, she’ll be off like a bullet if you take your eyes off her,
and he took the task so seriously that he ran home, showered, and, despite the heat, returned dressed in a long-sleeved button-down shirt and his best belted khakis and his late father’s polished leather shoes with laces, his sparse hair wet and slicked back.

Nihil told Raju confidentially, before they left for the game, that he had gone over early morning to tell Mr. and Mrs. Niles about this punishment, just in case Raju had any need to get additional help from them.

“Devi just would not listen,” Nihil had told the old couple. “Now maybe she will learn. I don’t like to leave her, but there is nothing to be done. She is too stubborn.”

“You run along and enjoy the match, son,” Mr. Niles had said. “Tell Raju to come and talk to Aunty if he needs anything. And Kala will be home after school as well.”

“It’s not fair,” Devi confided to Raju when the flurry of departures was behind them and the reality of her punishment had set in. “They all get to do what they like and only I never get to do what I want.” She was wearing Nihil’s clothes, a pair of black shorts and a dark-blue shirt, the colors of the rival school. It was a protest that none of her family had commented on, not even Nihil, which had stung her most of all.

“They are just trying to take good care of you, darling, because you are so special, that’s all,” Raju said, using his gentlest voice. “Isn’t it better to stay at home and have fun than to go and sit in the hot sun all day long watching cricket?”

“I love cricket!” Devi said, looking at Raju as though he had lost his mind. “I love to go to the big match. And now I will have to wait a whole year to go again. And they may not even take me.”

Raju watched her swinging back and forth in the chair hanging from the Asoka tree, her hands clasped around the paper bag of Delta sweets he had brought for her. Clearly the swing and the toffees were insufficient to make up for the egregious sin of having been left behind. He racked his brains for something else that he could do for her, something wonderful that would make having had to stay home with him to watch her seem just as exciting as being allowed to go to the cricket match with her mother and her siblings.

He could get her hair clips, he considered, then rejected that idea. Devi was not the kind of girl who cared for that kind of thing; she was an Alice band kind of girl. Icy chocs, he mused, gazing at the sad face before him. No, that had already been used up when she got stitches; it had to be something new. He entertained the idea of taking her up the road to the Sansoni house and helping her to climb the wall so she could pick a ripe guava, but then put that thought out of his mind, berating himself for even considering such corruption of innocence. He let his gaze wander around Mrs. Herath’s splendidly maintained garden, all along the stiff and neatly pruned hedges, winding in and around her pride of Japan, her ixora, her jasmine and gardenia, the spotted mauve, yellow, and white dancing orchids hanging from lined coconut husk pots from the jambu tree, her collection of citrus bushes, limes and oranges, the fruity scent of those flowers designed to remain a safe distance from the rose bushes she had grown with Kala Niles’s help, the mandevilla flowers hanging above him, her feathery green and white and purple ferns, up the Asoka tree, and back to Devi without anything of worth coming to mind. Devi continued to sit, rubbing and clacking the nails of her fingers together. Rub rub, clack clack, rub rub, clack clack.