On Sal Mal Lane (29 page)

Without the Silva boys, and with the ever more diffident Devi, who, in the wake of her head injury seemed jumpy around the bat and ball, the game spluttered and eventually petered out, and the children threw themselves with gusto into kite season, turning their faces away from the uneven slope of the road and toward the smooth potential of heat-filled skies as if by choice, not necessity.

Kite Season

The gusty wind that dominated a short respite from the monsoons was beginning to tease the children of Sal Mal Lane. It tugged at their school uniforms, inverted umbrellas held against the sun, and combed and re combed their hair, first this way then the other. It whispered
stay! stay!
to them as they stood waiting for their school buses, shivering in the cool morning hours, a request they tried not to hear. They giggled as their skirts and shirts lifted this way and that, their books fell out of their careless hands, and the ribbons tied into their braids and pony tails, blue and white for the Herath girls, green and white for the Bolling twins, refused to stay in their knots. But each evening the children acquiesced. They put down their books, put on their home clothes, and went outside. They went to fly kites.

On the first of those afternoons, Nihil turned to the back of Devi’s
parisaraya
book and, after carefully placing a half ruler against the side to leave a margin big enough so that the soon-to-be-torn paper would not disengage its partner on the opposite end, carefully removed a page from it while Devi watched. Both their tongues poked out from the sides of their mouths as the delicate task was accomplished, even though it was Nihil who was in charge of the execution. He drew three columns, marked them morning, afternoon, and evening, and then wrote out a schedule for Devi that included studying her times tables and reading in Sinhala in the morning before school, practicing her piano pieces, homework, and studying after school, and reciting her
gāthā
and reading in English in the evening. Devi read the instructions over his shoulder, her face more grave by the second.

“There is nothing for me to do but study study study!” she exclaimed at last and threw up her hands and stamped her foot for emphasis.

“No, I have left plenty of time for you to play,” Nihil told her, directing her attention to chunks of time that she had missed under the overwhelming press of even larger blocks of time dedicated to homework and refinement. Not only was Nihil proud of his neat time table, this was just the sort of protest that he had been expecting, so he was prepared. “Today, for example, during your free time, you can help me to build the new kite!” he offered. “It’s going to be your kite. I already got tissues in your favorite kite colors and the frame is ready too.”

Devi, the future forgotten in the face of the fun to be had
right now,
clapped her hands and set off in the direction of the kitchen, calling out to Kamala to “boil some water and get some flour and salt, we are going to make kites!”

The construction of Devi’s kite was something to behold, with its layers of blue and silver tissue papers to one side, the frame—prepared by Suren and Rashmi in advance—on the other, and the still-steaming homemade glue in between. The kite, when it was finished and decorated with tissue-paper tassels cut a little raggedly by Devi, and with neat tissue-paper bows made with her usual flair by Rashmi, was by far the most elegant of the kites that the children brought out to fly that year.

“Nihil, you hold the kite and I will throw the stone,” Suren said.

“I want to hold the kite!” Devi complained. She looked at Rashmi, who was leaning against the parapet wall outside the Sansoni house. She was there along with all the neighborhood children, even Sonna, who, though he was standing apart from the rest, had shown up for the launch of this particularly beautiful kite. Rashmi, watching Sonna and lost in her own thoughts, did not come to Devi’s assistance.

“Once I get the kite up you can hold the string and fly it,” Suren promised, as he positioned the tips of Nihil’s fingers on the kite that he was holding aloft. When he was sure that Nihil had the kite just right, Suren walked down the street throwing the reel of kite string over the telephone wires that crisscrossed overhead to and from the houses that were fortunate enough to own telephones. He stopped when he reached the last lines, those that ran between their home and the Nileses’, and called out that he was ready. “On three!”

The kite lifted cleanly and without fuss from Nihil’s outstretched hands while all the children turned their faces skyward.

“Suren really knows how to fly kites,” Rose said and fiddled with the red plastic belt she had put on over the pink dress that Mrs. Herath had donated to her. Dolly, also clad in a hand-me-down, hers in mauve with white edging around the collar and sleeves, wished to add a similar compliment but refrained for fear of hurting Jith’s feelings. She glanced quickly at him and looked away; he was scowling.

“When I’m big I’m going to join the army,” he blurted, saying it as though he had been wanting to say it for a good long time.

“The army? To fight?” Dolly squeaked.

“What else men, if you join the army you don’ sit and look at films, you fight!” Rose said. She shaded her eyes with her interlaced palms and continued to watch the lift of the colors in the air with a certain reverence. The kite drew complicated designs against the sky as Suren tugged it this way and that, snapping the string and making it dance, now whirling with elegant swoops, now moving forward in quick darts like a sword thrust against some unseen enemy.

Rashmi who like all of them had been shading her eyes to watch the kite, dropped her hands when she heard what Jith said and turned to stare at the Silva boys. They were wearing identical orange-and-red-plaid shirts with their jeans; they seemed particularly volatile.

“Why do you want to join the army?” she asked, the kite having faded into insignificance in the face of this troubling adult statement from Jith, who was, after all, just fourteen years old.

“We’re both going to join,” Mohan said. “First me, because I’m older, then him.”

“Why are you joining the army?” Nihil repeated Rashmi’s question.

“Yes, who is there to fight?” Devi added, all interest in her elegant kite wiped away by the vision that had replaced it with Jith’s words: the Silva boys decked out in army fatigues, carrying guns and marching up and down their street.

“Who? The Tigers! You all don’t read the news?” Mohan said, scornfully. “We haven’t heard—” Devi began, but Rashmi stopped her by putting her hand on Devi’s shoulder.

Rashmi had gathered further information about the Tigers from friends at school, a much more reliable source than her busy father, no matter what Raju believed. She had learned, for instance, that the public library in Jaffna had been burned, and though some of her friends had argued that almost all the holdings were duplicated in the archives in the capital, still, the burning of a library had struck her, a bookish girl herself, as being particularly villainous.

She had overheard Raju explaining all this to Devi just the other day, as she, Rashmi, sat in the veranda of their house. “Mama says the Jaffna library was burned because Prabhakaran is terrorizing everybody,” he had said to Devi, who was climbing the Asoka tree and hadn’t seemed in the least bit interested in the topic. Rashmi had been just about to ask Devi to have a sense of
decorum
(a term Rashmi had picked up from the nuns) and keep her dress between her legs as she climbed, but she had been too shocked by his words to manage Devi.

“How?” Rashmi had brought herself to ask Raju instead.

“He killed police officers,” Raju had said, but he had no response to her
why,
so she had asked one of the Tamil girls in her class, Kumu Jacobs, what she might know about the topic.

“Appa says that there were riots in 1956,” she had told Rashmi, her face serious as they stood together near the netball courts during the interval. She fiddled with Rashmi’s tie as she talked, trying to smooth a wrinkle that had appeared right beneath the knot under her collar. “He said it happened after the Official Languages Act. Appa says it meant Sinhala only.”

“But we have all the languages in school and everywhere,” Rashmi had countered. “It’s not Sinhala only. Everything is always in all the languages, even the road sign to Sal Mal Lane!”

“I know,” her friend had said, “that’s what I think, but when my mother tried to say that Appa shouted and said she was wrong and they didn’t talk for a lot of days.”

According to her friend’s father, all the Tamil leaders had walked out of parliament and decided on a
satyagraha,
and that, the announcement of a fast unto death, had made everybody unhappy and all the bad feelings had come to be concentrated on a settlement in the Eastern Province, in Gal Oya. From her social studies teacher, Rashmi had learned that the settlement was begun by building a dam across a river and creating forty thousand acres of irrigated land.

“After it was created,” Mrs. Atukoralé, the social studies teacher, had said, “the government was able to give homes and land to nearly five thousand people. Can you imagine, Rashmi? Sinhalese people, Tamil people, even the Veddas, all living peacefully in fifty small villages.” Since Rashmi had heard all the details of the riots from her friend, she was not persuaded by Mrs. Atukoralé’s description of this wonderful place. In Rashmi’s mind, such a place with so much water ought to have been able to cool whatever tempers were being stirred, but they had not; she imagined this area as being entirely dry, the water evaporated.

“It all began with rumors,” she had told her siblings that very night. “Because they were all new there, I suppose, nobody trusted anybody else. Kumu said that her father said that someone said that a Sinhalese girl was raped and made to walk naked in Batticaloa by a Tamil mob and that caused the Sinhalese to attack all the Tamils.”

“What is rape?” Devi asked as she sat across from Rashmi, fanning herself with a newspaper that she had folded into neat pleats.

“All her clothes were taken off,” Nihil said to Devi. “That’s rape.”

“I heard from Pradeep that the people were told that a Tamil army was going to take over the Sinhalese part of the settlements in Gal Oya and that was what caused all the burning,” Suren said.

“Whatever it was, it was a terrible time,” Rashmi said, remembering how she had been so deep in conversation with her friend that they had both missed the bell at the end of the lunch interval and both been punished for being late to class.

And Suren had learned, and faithfully informed his siblings, that the riots of 1956 were soon followed by widespread violence in 1958.

“At least the Gal Oya riots were only in Gal Oya,” he said to the others, who had sat in a row on Nihil’s bed to listen to this news. “Tha told me that the prime minister had tried to make peace with the Tamil leader but the UNP leaders had protested and he had to break the pact he had made. But Tha didn’t tell me that in May of that year, and even after the government declared an emergency in June, there had been problems all over the country,” he said. “Tha didn’t tell me that part. That Pradeep told me in school.”

“That’s because Tha likes the Bandaranaikes,” Rashmi said, generously. “Anyway,
I
heard the riots were because the government tried to resettle four hundred Tamils in Polonnaruwa among Sinhalese people, after the British closed their naval base in Trincomalee.”

“What kind of problems?” Nihil asked, the details of these goings-on too much for him to absorb, and choosing to concentrate on something easier to digest, something with a simple term like
problems.

“People running around burning buildings and killing people,” Rashmi explained, though she wasn’t sure this had happened, it just seemed that if something so terrible was happening all over the country then surely it had to involve fire and murder, her two worst fears.

“In Jaffna and Batticaloa the Tamils killed Sinhalese people. In other places the Sinhalese people killed Tamil people,” Suren told Nihil, breaking it down even further as if identifying the perpetrators of these events would make it all seem a little less terrifying to all of them as they sat in their pajamas, washed and ready for the night in their mostly peaceful home.

Nihil resolved to ask Mr. Niles about all of these things, but he was unable to do so for a long time because Mr. Niles got the flu and not only was he unable to sit beside him—Mrs. Niles shooing him away with a
Don’t come close, darling, you’ll catch it too
—Mr. Niles himself seemed far too weak to even greet him as Nihil stood by the door, let alone talk. Had he been able to, Mr. Niles may have told Nihil the truth. He might have explained that the matter of language, not of street signs but of education and examination, had been manipulated by both Tamils and Sinhalese in turn, the one alongside the British colonizers, the other after the colonial power had been driven out. He might have told Nihil how he had felt during those riots in Gal Oya, and he might have given Nihil something else to think about, found some way of soothing his anxious mind. Without Mr. Niles to talk to, however, Nihil was left with his disquiet.

Devi, listening to her siblings, tried to suck on her lower lip but the activity had long ceased to calm her so she pulled it out again, thinking about blood and burning buildings and women like her mother being forced to walk around naked. That night she crept into Rashmi’s bed to sleep.

All of these things and others that Rashmi had heard from her peers and her older brother had given her a picture, albeit one that was distorted in the same way any picture that is missing vast swaths of its original colors is, and she felt able to respond to Mohan with a certain aplomb.

“Yes, we know,” she said. “All the Tamil leaders have walked out of parliament. Mr. Amirthalingam and even some of the Sinhalese leaders like Mr. Muttetuwegama. His daughter knows one of the girls in my dance class. She told us. There are some Tamils fighting the government, but I think the government has enough soldiers. I don’t think they need you to join,” she said and then added, practical to the last, “You might get killed.”