On Sal Mal Lane (30 page)

Jith shuddered and Dolly looked alarmed. “Don’ get killed, Jith, let the soldiers who are already there do the fightin’.” She did not know if these allegations were true or, indeed, who was fighting whom; all she knew was that, a few weeks ago, sitting in the last row of the Tamil cinema, she and Jith had planned to elope and get to Australia somehow when they turned eighteen and how would they do that if he went and got killed?

“We aren’t cowards,” Mohan said, swaggering a little. Although all of the older boys’ voices had cracked, his had finally settled into a manly depth that gave his words more weight. He was also taller than all of them, and muscled from a year of steady work on his physique every afternoon after school in the back veranda of his house. The two, voice and body, combined to make him seem particularly authoritative. “You are too young to understand but all of us should be prepared to fight. Even Suren. You should tell him. Better get ready now.”

The three Heraths closed ranks and said nothing. To suggest that Suren do anything besides draw forth music from instruments, or by lifting his voice, was a travesty that they fought daily at home what with their mother’s constant push to turn him into an engineer. Around them Rose and Dolly, too, talked animatedly about the prospect of war and how Suren should be saved from such a fate.

Mohan took a deep breath. War could not come fast enough for him and if he could do his part to hasten its arrival then he was willing to do it. “We should stop going to the Tamil people’s houses,” he declared, pointing down the road. “All the Tamils down this lane, they are probably helping the Tigers.”

Suren, who had brought the kite down when he realized that none of his siblings were interested in flying it anymore, strolled up just in time to hear this statement. He continued to wind the line in its intricate weave around the short stick in his right hand, twisting it back and forth with an elegance at odds with the topic at hand. The kite lay on the road beside him. Devi came over and picked it up and held it before her like a shield. Suren finished winding the thread and tucked the bundle into the front appliquéd pocket of Devi’s dress.

“These are our neighbors, Mohan,” Suren said. “Why should we stop visiting them?”

“Yes, and they are our friends, too.” Nihil added. “Mr. Niles is my friend.” He surprised himself by saying the words out loud. It had never occurred to him before then that the largely stationary Mr. Niles could play that role, only that he felt comfortable in the old man’s presence, that he was the repository for all his boyish tales and questions. He considered, with growing alarm, the possibility of his time with Mr. Niles being cut short.

“Who will teach us piano if Kala Akki doesn’t?” Rashmi asked, arms crossed and standing straight in the blue jeans she now wore routinely as her stay-at-home uniform.

“And Uncle Raju is my friend and he’s Tamil. I’m never going to stop talking to him.” Devi said, peering over the top of the kite to cast a defiant look at both Mohan and Rashmi.

“You just watch what you are saying when you are with them, that’s all I’m saying,” Mohan muttered, taken aback by this show of support for people he had begun to see as enemies. He beckoned to Jith and walked back to his house, mulling over the conversation. Even though he had always had his suspicions about the Herath boys and their namby-pamby approach to life, he had thought all it would take was the right information for all the children to join him, the Herath boys, too, swept along. He had envisaged a leadership role in the war, one conveniently located, and entirely manageable, in his own neighborhood. Now what was he going to do?

On their way home, Nihil waved the others on and stopped at Mr. Niles’s house. Inside, all was quiet and Mrs. Niles opened the door to him with a finger over her lips. Mr. Niles was fast asleep.

“Is he getting better?” Nihil whispered.

“Little by little,” Mrs. Niles whispered back. “Maybe next week he’ll be able to talk.” She stroked his head and smiled but did not let him come in. Nihil walked home without being able to discuss any of the things he’d learned from his brother and sister, nor to be comforted by Mr. Niles telling him, as he was sure he would, that Mohan was wrong, there would be no war.

A Night of Rain and Talk

That night at dinner, the conversations in two of the houses unfolded with a certain similarity in their undertones of worry and concern.

“Ma, Jith and Mohan are goin’ to become soldiers an’ get killed!” Sonna announced. He had been standing just too far away to hear what the disturbance was when the discussion took place, but he had got the whole tale second hand from Rose by grabbing her by her French braids, a style Rashmi had introduced to her, and threatening to cut off her hair, something he hadn’t done in so long that she had been terrified half out of her wits and blurted out every last word to him.

“Poor Dolly. Who will take her to Australia now?” Rose teased.

“Don’ know what Jith sees in her,” Sonna said. “She’s never goin’ to Australia anyway. Who will take a mad creature like her?” It started to rain as he was talking and, mercifully, Dolly did not hear the last part of what he said. The shower deafened them all as it fell against those parts of their roof that had been fortified with sheets of
takarang.

“Rose, go an’ put the buckets out,” Francie Bolling said, raising her voice. “In Sonna’s room there’s a leak, an’ in the kitchen. Check in the other rooms too. Might have to use a cooking pot if there are any other leaks.”

A drop of water fell on the table just then, followed by a quickening series. Sonna ran into the kitchen to get a pot. Before long, the rain settled in to sweep across rather than fall upon the house and the whoosh of its lashings was accented intermittently by the sharp sound and echo of the single drops of rain falling into the deep receptacle.

“Gosh, good thing we are all home,” Francie Bolling said. “In this kind of rain, there is no staying dry out there, even under a big umbrella. Comes from all sides.”

“Mama!” Dolly said, close to tears and unconcerned with their leaky roof and people caught in the rain. “Mohan says that the Tamils are gettin’ ready to attack us!”

“The Tamils?” Jimmy Bolling bellowed. “Why on earth would they attack us? If they wan’ to attack anybody they’ll be attackin’ the government jackasses.” Jimmy Bolling routinely described all politicians in any government of every party as jackasses. Whether he thought this particular set of jackasses deserved to be attacked or whether he thought they just happened to be the jackasses available to be attacked was anybody’s guess.

“Mohan says that we should stop having anythin’ to do with the Tamils down the road. Nileses, Nadesans, all of them. Even Raju!” Dolly wailed.

Rose, who had returned from her errand, flopped back down in her chair. “Those Silvas. Can never rest unless they’re angry at somebody,” she said, soothingly.

Francie Bolling sighed. She watched Sonna wipe crumbs off the table and onto the floor and she did not stop him or say anything about having to get up and sweep all that out right away on account of the ants. He stood up and replaced the bowl of plastic flowers, red roses and lilies, that she removed from the center of the table during meals, and though in his haste some of the sand from the bowl spilled onto the floor, she did not say anything about that either. She clutched the glass of cheap wine that Jimmy Bolling had procured for their consumption and looked at Dolly.

“Don’ worry, Dolly doll, you can still go to Australia, I’m sure, when you are big enough.” She was silent for a few moments, considering her wine. “Doin’ so well we were. Down this lane. Girls happy, boys happy.” Her eyes met Sonna’s as she said this, so she modified her statement and added, “Mos’ of the time,” which did not exclude him but did not include him either. “So well we were doin’ even Raju becomin’ decent and now this Tamil stuff. Don’ know why those Silva boys are like that.”

“Heraths made such a nice kite, have to say,” Rose said into the depressing silence that followed. “An’ din’ even get to fly it properly with all this talk about soldiers and armies.”

There was an ominous note to the next words from Sonna. “They better be careful, otherwise those Elakandiya guys from the slums might bring it down.”

With that, talk shifted to a discussion about the various problems associated with having a slum full of shanties just beyond the main road; at least that was something everybody in the household could agree upon. Even Sonna, who knew several boys his age who lived there and who called him friend, was able to say that he wished that the slums were cleaned up and the inhabitants sent somewhere else to live. Some of his associates there seemed to spend more time in jail than out of it, and he was not inclined to fall into the same pattern, though, while they continued to live so close to his house, he did not know how to extricate himself from the alliances he had made with them.

In the Herath household, after the same announcement about the intention of the Silva boys to join the army, Mrs. Herath shook her head. She served each of the children some chilled fruit salad that Mrs. Niles had sent over, the mangoes, papaws, and bananas all cut in identical squares and drizzled with the slightest touch of vanilla and sugar. It was delicious and she would have preferred not to have to discuss the Silvas just then. Her children, though, were not to be deterred by the sweet treat.

“Mohan said he would join the army first and Jith would follow after,” Nihil said.

Mrs. Herath sat down with her own bowl of fruit salad, resigned to the fact that talk about the Silvas was going to disrupt her evening. “They are getting old enough to make such decisions,” she said, “and it is not as though they will make it to university, unfortunately. I suppose it is better that than doing nothing at home and getting into trouble.”

“But fighting
is
trouble, Amma,” Devi said, shouting over the sound of the rain that began just then, going in seconds from a few quiet drops, each with its own individual plink, to a roaring downpour that drowned out her voice. “You always tell us not to fight.”

Nihil, Suren, and Rashmi got up and ran around the house shutting the windows and pulling the chairs away from the edges of the veranda, stopping briefly to watch the rain that was coming down in an angry, slate-colored slant, like the kind of drawing a child hurrying to complete a picture might scribble with his pencil. Ordinarily, this would be their cue to get out pieces of old cardboard and pages from exercise books and begin to build the paper boats they could track from their windows along the clean, shallow drains that bordered their house, rescuing the soggy vessels with sticks and rulers pushed through the bars of windows from within the dry safety of their bedrooms. But this was not an ordinary conversation, and Nihil, in particular, wanted to clear up any misperceptions that Devi might have about the nature of Mohan’s comment.

“This is a different kind of fighting,” Nihil said after they all returned to the table. “With guns.”

“I know with guns. I know soldiers means guns,” Devi responded, piqued.

“Is it true that there is going to be a war with the Tamil Tigers?” Rashmi asked, taking the matter into her own hands and looking directly at her father, who was sitting by the brass chess table and squinting at a newspaper that he had, surely, already read.

This was the type of question that the Herath children rarely put to their father. It was the kind of opening through which he would stroll, in excruciatingly slow motion, dragging them this way and that through arcane historical fact and anecdote until, seemingly hours later, their mother rescued them with a sharp summons to undertake some other onerous chore that would appear to them to be a delight by comparison. Yet now, her siblings rightly assumed, Rashmi had asked one of those questions because there was no help for it. That in itself was disconcerting.

“Hmmm,” Mr. Herath began, but was rendered silent by a long burst of lightning that lit up the outdoors like strobe lights signaling distress. All of them, even the adults, put their palms over their ears in anticipation of the thunder that would follow. After it had passed, Mr. Herath spoke again.

“You know about the TULF, the Tamil United Liberation Front? All the Tamil political parties are now united under that one name. They came to the forefront in 1977. You were too young to remember,” he said, looking at Nihil and Devi in turn. His brow furrowed as he looked at Rashmi. “Maybe even you, Rashmi, you may have been too young. But that was the year in which they got eighteen seats in parliament and Amirthalingam became the leader of the opposition—”

“God, yes,” Mrs. Herath interrupted. “I remember even my Amma cursing Mrs. Bandaranaike. She said,
See what happens when you vote for those left types? Leader of the opposition is now a
Demalā! She was so upset about the whole thing!”

“We shouldn’t call them
Demalās,
” Devi said, thinking in particular of Raju. “That’s not nice.”

Mrs. Herath clucked her tongue, half-apologetic. “
Demalā
just means Tamil person,” she said, stroking her daughter’s hair. “It’s just a word.
We
don’t have problems with Tamils after all.”

Devi moved away from her mother, sure that she was aware of the disparagement intended by the insertion of the twisted Sinhala term into the English. Even the term
Tamils
was bad enough, Devi thought. Something about the way it took away the precise up and down relationships she had with Raju and Kala Niles, and merged them into a group that she could not recognize, upset her.

“Anyway, it was not their fault, those Tamils,” Mrs. Herath said quickly. “It’s the fault of the SLFP. If they hadn’t messed up this country with all their Communist nonsense from ’70 to ’77, then the Tamils wouldn’t have got in.”

Whether this was enough apology for the
Demalā
comment was not clear because Mr. Herath resumed talking after a relatively brief digression in support of the SLFP, its leader, Mrs. Bandaranaike, and the policies of nationalism so harshly denigrated by his wife.