On Sal Mal Lane (28 page)

“I’m going to visit Old Mrs. Joseph,” Mrs. Silva said, one day in July, raising her voice slightly so that her husband, tending as he did incessantly to their garden, could hear her.

Mr. Silva stood up and wiped his hands on a rag hanging from the pocket of his old blue denim long shorts. The ferns that Mrs. Herath had given him, and that his sons and the Herath boys had planted, were thriving, and he had just separated a few of the plants and put them in a bag to be shared with one of his colleagues when he went to work the next day. Looking at the bag now, he wondered if the building of the wall would affect the sharing of plants; he had been following Mrs. Herath’s success with a hybrid Elaine with iridescent leaves that turned crimson as it matured, and a pale-green echeveria with pink outlines, and he had been hoping to be the happy beneficiary when the time came for her to whittle them down. He was grateful that he had got a Brazilian snapdragon from Mrs. Herath before the whole business of the wall.

“Did you hear me?” Mrs. Silva asked.

“Yes, yes,” Mr. Silva said. “Old Mrs. Joseph. Is she sick?”

“No, I just thought it would be good to visit her, you know.” And she stopped.

Mr. Silva nodded slowly and continued to wipe his hands, looking down and away from his wife. Hearing the concern in his wife’s voice, he forgot his plants and instead felt a sudden surge of regret that he had encouraged her to befriend the Heraths that first afternoon, that they had aided and abetted in the whole sorry business of their arrival. Well, there was nothing that could be done about it. He sighed and looked approvingly at his wife, her prejudices and pompousness suddenly appearing as virtues that he deserved to have in a spouse.

“Yes, better go and have a talk with her. Get to the bottom of this.”

Mrs. Silva brightened and rose from her chair. She went into her pantry, unlocking it with a key from a bunch she carried tucked into her waistband, and chose a tin of Maliban cheese buttons, a nice cheerful blue tin with a trim of red diamonds that would surely delight Old Mrs. Joseph.

“Good afternoon, good afternoon, coming for some information?” Old Mrs. Joseph said, her mouth tilting with more than a little scorn at her visitor and her offering. She was seated in her chair, dressed in her usual garb of a long pastel skirt and top covered by a blue floral floor-length housecoat that had buttons from collar to hem.

“No, what nonsense! I just wanted to drop in and see how you are doing. Haven’t seen you in a while, after all,” Mrs. Silva said and glanced toward the nearest mussaenda, which had filled out considerably, as if blaming the tree for the dearth of neighborly conversations between them.

Old Mrs. Joseph wondered if she should offer Mrs. Silva a cup of tea and some of her own cheese buttons from a tin that she had been saving, just to make Mrs. Silva uncomfortable. Just then, Raju, hearing voices, came out onto the veranda and swept them up in an effusive welcome.

“Oh! Aunty! So good of you to visit here. My goodness, brought biscuits also. What for? We are neighbors, no? You shouldn’t have to bring gifts to visit neighbors!”

“Hello, Raju,” Mrs. Silva said, wincing at the title of
Aunty
being given to her by a man who was only a few years younger than she was but thoroughly satisfied by the look of withering disapproval that crossed Raju’s mother’s face.

Raju, too, noticed and back tracked. “Of course, not to say that we must not be formal. It is good to be formal. More civilized. After all, we are not like my cousin, Jimmy Bolling, their type of Burgher people, no, Mama?” He felt a little thrill uttering those words, thinking specifically about Sonna. He warmed to the topic. “Yes. We shouldn’t even be interacting with those types. But what to do, Aunty, when we are related like this? You understand, no? Not like you all, we can’t avoid, no?” He turned his palms upward, fingers spread, and twisted them away from each other to demonstrate the exact degree of helplessness in this matter of being related to undesirables.

“Raju, go and ask the girl to make some tea for us,” his mother cut in. “And ask her to bring some cake!” she added to his retreating back.

Raju flinched as he shuffled off. If his mother didn’t tell Mrs. Silva, he would, he thought. Yes, as soon as he gave the order for tea he would go right back out and tell her everything. Serves her right, thinking she’s above everybody, never even looking at him when he stood by the gate each evening, acting like he wasn’t there. So unlike Mrs. Herath, who always stopped to say hello, called him by his name, and even gave him tea. See how things worked out? Did the Herath boys run after his shabby nieces? No, it was a Silva boy who got caught.

“How are things with you, with the house?” Mrs. Silva was saying when Raju reappeared.

“The house?” his mother asked, incredulous. “What could be the matter with the house? It’s been standing all these years, hasn’t it? And after I’m dead it will still be standing. Why, are you thinking of buying it after I’m gone?”

Mrs. Silva looked fondly over at her own house, regretting her visit, regretting the expensive tin of biscuits.

“Aunty, you must be worried about your son, about Jith and Dolly,” Raju began, unable to contain himself. “But don’t worry. Soon it will be over I’m sure. I will keep an eye on the situation. I am always here. See how nicely I look after the little Herath girl?”

“What situation? There’s no situation that I know of,” Mrs. Silva said, shocked by the very thought of it and, worse, by the idea that other people might be assuming there was a situation when she was quite sure there was none. She had only come here to confirm the non existence of a situation.

“Well then, if there is no situation, we can talk about something else,” Old Mrs. Joseph said, choosing a topic with no clear margins possible: “Did you hear what happened last week? Some Sinhalese hooligans belonging to the police and army burned down the Jaffna Public Library. Nearly one hundred thousand documents, hear that?
One hundred thousand
documents. Palm leaves, manuscripts, gone. Poof!” And Old Mrs. Joseph flung her hands into the air, indicating the papers, the smoke, the disappearance.

“Yes, Aunty, did you hear that?” Raju asked, reminded now and freshly upset over the news of all that mayhem. He pulsed his knees together, apart, together, apart. “Two police officers killed, and for that they burned the library, I heard.”

“Not just the library. The Tamil party head office there. The office of the local paper there,
Eelanaadu,
was also destroyed. Even statues in the town, of Thiruvalluvar, Auvaiyar, Arumuga Navalar, all gone, knocked down!” Old Mrs. Joseph continued. She leaned forward toward Mrs. Silva, her tone accusatory. “You heard about all this? Ah? You heard?”

Mrs. Silva said nothing and Old Mrs. Joseph continued bitterly. “Bloody fools looking for trouble. That Velupillai Prabhakaran, calling himself the leader of the Tamil people, pah! Not
our
leader,
we
didn’t vote for him. Who asked him to be
our
leader? He’s behind the
whole
thing, instigating violence everywhere. I am positive. Otherwise who killed those police officers? See what happened after that? He’s looking for a war. Going to get a war, too.”

Mrs. Silva was silent for so long that Raju felt obliged to answer even though he could not figure out if his mother was more upset about Velupillai Prabhakaran claiming to lead the entire Tamil race or the burning of a library and the dismantling of the statues of Tamil luminaries. “No, Mama,” he said, as soothingly as he could, “I hadn’t heard all these details. I only heard they were having little little problems,” and he rubbed the tips of his fingers to give her a visual, how tiny were his imaginings of these problems. “What will happen now?”

“Nothing will happen. Nothing ever happens except that we have the same people shouting about this and shouting about that, then we have posters and elections, and then, once more, nothing happens.”

“But this time around I think definitely the country is—”

“What is this thing, this situation, between my son and Dolly?” Mrs. Silva said, cutting Raju off with what she hoped was an air of brusque competence, as if the tone would be sufficient to squelch the whole business. The fate of the Jaffna Public Library was not her concern. Nor was the fate of the statues of Tamil philosophers and poets. What mattered was the here and the now, and that consisted of Jith and, god forbid, Dolly.

“Oh, I’m sure there is no situation, none at all,” Old Mrs. Joseph said, leaning back with great pleasure. “Only situation for us to worry about is trouble brewing in the North. Soon, I’m told, it will all come spilling here, to Colombo. To our streets too!” As if in confirmation, a sudden gust of wind sent a flurry of sal mal petals and leaves drifting down the lane to settle in difficult corners like gutters and windowsills.

Raju, as usual, betrayed the old lady. “No, no, there is!” he said, glad to return to a topic close at hand and entirely manageable, unlike that of marauding gangs in faraway Jaffna, buildings in flames and falling statues. “Whole lane is talking about it. Even Koralé. I heard they are meeting at the bus stop before school and also after school. One time, Sonna said, because he sees everything, you know how he is, watching the whole lane like a hawk, he said Jith even cut his after-school maths class and they went to see the Tamil film at the Empire Theatre!”

“Tamil film?” Mrs. Silva fumed. “What Tamil film? My sons don’t even know Tamil.” Her tone of voice implied that mastery of the Tamil language would have been considered a blotch upon their character.

“That’s the thing,” Raju intoned, wonder in his voice at the depths to which the Silva boy had sunk. “Back-row seats.”

Mrs. Silva was both mightily roused and as deeply weakened. Was that pity in Old Mrs. Joseph’s eyes, or scorn? And Raju, was he savoring this delivery of information or petrified at having to be the bearer of such tidings? With him, one could never tell. The Josephs’ servant, a wiry dark-skinned girl from the estates, brought a pot of tea and a plate of cake out to the veranda and held the tray out to Mrs. Silva. Mrs. Silva helped herself to a piece of cake, but she balanced it on the edge of her saucer; she neither ate nor drank. Old Mrs. Joseph, on the other hand, slurped the tea through her dentures with gusto. Raju, too, made unseemly noises as he ate and drank, smacking his fleshy lips together after each sip.

“I will put a stop to it,” Mrs. Silva said, her eyes moving from one to the other. “Ginger, if you don’t mind, I will ask Raju to report everything to me, straight to me, as soon as he hears.”

If Mrs. Silva had imagined that using the pet name that Old Mrs. Joseph’s late husband had used would soothe the old lady, she was mistaken.

“You can ask him anything. He’s an adult. You don’t need my permission,” Old Mrs. Joseph said, her voice hard, looking away from them.

Raju sank farther into his chair, an expression of grim solidity, welcoming the weight of the responsibility that was being offered him. “I will do it every hour if I have to, Aunty,” he said, looking soulfully at Mrs. Silva, who cringed. “Already I know almost everything up and down the lane.”

“Knowing is one thing, preventing is quite another,” Old Mrs. Joseph said. The ominous silence that followed her statement lasted until Mrs. Silva rose, without having drunk her tea, and left their house, bidding them a short and begrudging good-bye.

But what, exactly, were Jith and Dolly up to? At the Tamil theater, while they did sit in the back row, the one reserved for lovers, all they managed was a brush of hands and a resting of heads. At the bus stop—before and after school—their communication was almost entirely silent, there being no privacy possible among the school children who gathered in their various school uniforms, season tickets for the school buses in hand. When they played cricket as they now did only until that hour of the day when Mrs. Silva returned from her job at the People’s Bank, Thimbirigasyaya branch, they continued to favor each other until the rest of the children decided, unanimously, to avoid the ensuing trouble by putting them on the same team. Their affection was communicated primarily through notes that they gave each other. Dolly, by leaving hers wedged under a brick at the far end of her father’s aluminum fence, Jith, by leaving his in a split of a branch in the anchoring tree of his father’s garden, a still-young araliya, a branch that reached out to the lane as though aching to break free of the confines of that household and the ideas of its inhabitants. It was a reflection of their innocence that they had not been more careful.

Darling Dolly, Yesterday I had a term test and got half of the questions wrong because I was thinking of you! Tomorrow I have another test. I might fail. I am going to have to study today, otherwise the teacher will tell my mother! So I can’t come to play French cricket. I hope you score a lot! I’ll watch from the window when you go up the road to play. If you see me, you can wave. But only if my father is not there! If you like, you can send me a reply today. I can pick it up when I go to buy bread in the evening. Love, Jith

This was the first note that Mr. Silva dug out. He folded it back in its careful quarters and eighths and put it back in the tree. To tell his wife would be the right thing to do, but then again, what was there to even talk about? The kids were just being kids, talking about term tests and games. The two words of concern were, of course,
darling
and
love,
but even those were standard issue. Had there been some kind of originality apparent, something to suggest that their infatuation had given rise to some greater expression than they had previously been capable of, then he would worry, then he would tell her. This, he decided to keep to himself. But as a concession to his wife, Mr. Silva decreed that his boys were no longer to join in the games of cricket.

“You are getting too old for that anyway. You should be practicing to try out for the first eleven,” he said, uttering the words even though he knew that neither of his sons possessed the level of discipline or talent to even make the B team.