On Sal Mal Lane (36 page)

Out of the Blue, a Variety Show

If Nihil had found some comfort in Mr. Niles’s agreement that neither he nor Nihil had war within them, even if the old man had not stated explicitly, as Nihil had hoped, that Mohan’s war was nothing but a figment of a bellicose imagination, then he was merely affirming what Suren already felt. For him, the Nileses’ home was a place that kept him safe not only from the political storms that were gathering in skies he had no inclination to watch, but those difficulties he was experiencing at home from his engineering-obsessed mother and his otherwise occupied father. Kala Niles’s devotion to his piano playing notwithstanding, a devotion he rewarded by his continuing ability to best his previous performances, what Suren really wanted was to introduce her to his new love, the guitar, and, eventually, to move it from the increasingly disharmonious Bolling household to the quiet of Kala Niles’s home. He chose to tell her about this in incremental doses.

“Tony Sansoni gave me his guitar to play, Kala Akki,” he said as he was gathering up his books to leave one Tuesday afternoon.

“Huh-oh?” Kala Niles made the breath-inhaled-and-held sound she was wont to make when taken by surprise.

“Tony Sansoni told me to keep the guitar now that he’s going away to study abroad,” he said as he sat down to play a few weeks later.

“Huh-oh? Going abroad? Must be to Australia, no? Burghers, no?” And Kala Niles nodded sagely and smoothed the pleats on the front of her durable blouse.

“I can bring the guitar to show you if you like,” he said a few months later, after Tony Sansoni had left in a whirl of farewell parties to which nicely dressed fair-skinned Burgher couples came walking arm in arm like people in English magazines, and one young man came all by himself looking teary-eyed.

“Bring, bring, haven’t seen a guitar in so many years now,” and Kala Niles chuckled and shook her head, thoroughly amused by Suren’s offer.

At last the guitar made a quiet transition from the top of the undusted almirah, where it had been placed by his mother, to the Nileses’ house, where it sat in a welcoming corner right next to the piano and waited each day for Suren to come and play it. It was an indication of Mrs. Herath’s own growing preoccupation with the news outside Sal Mal Lane that she did not even notice that the guitar was gone.

To understand Kala Niles’s response to Suren, we need to understand that there were very few things in her life that gave her much joy. The tennis lessons, though fun and glamorous, made her anxious each time she ran from one end of the court to the other. She imagined, and she was right, that her bottom and her bosom bounced at exactly the same time in exactly the same way and that her tennis teacher’s glance flitted from one roundness to the other. The Women’s Federation meetings had dissolved in a flurry of drama over a suspected affair between the brother of one of the piano teachers, himself a lay music teacher at the school, and the Sister Principal at the convent down the street. She imagined that a gay life of parties and frolicking awaited her after her conservative mother had passed on and she had found a man worth her while, but, for now, while she bode her time, she loved her garden and she loved Suren. Of these two, she would give up the garden but not Suren.

And why was it that Suren, of all the students she had ever taught, captured her imagination in this way? Sometimes the answer is simple: he made her feel that she was a good teacher whose instructional skills he, gifted though he was, needed and valued. When he sat down on the piano stool, he did so with reverence. When a new piece was placed before him, he listened carefully to what she said about its history, and whenever he finished playing a piece of music, after they had both held their posture for a few moments, his hands hovering over the keys, hers over the metronome, their very bodies hearing the final note until it had receded into silence, he would turn to her and smile. And that smile was worth every incorrigible, talentless child she had ever had to suffer in her fifteen years as a teacher. That smile told her that one good thing was enough to make a life remarkable.

If Suren had asked to bring her a full set of percussion instruments including cymbals, xylophone,
and
a snare drum, she would have said yes. A guitar by comparison was, as far as she was concerned, a sweet instrument, one made for young boys like him to strum while singing love songs to young girls his age. It held no threat to the piano that he had mastered, indeed, she saw it as a relaxing cool-down after an hour of finger exercises followed almost religiously by Chopin, Scarlatti, and Rachmaninoff before any other composers, by Suren’s own insistence. So Kala Niles let him play for her, and as he played, she was not the only one who listened. Mrs. Niles listened, the music reminding her of a time before wife, mother, old lady. And Mr. Niles, too, shut his eyes and listened with a full heart, as only someone forced to hear a piano every day for the last twenty-five years could, and, listening, Mr. Niles returned once more to Jaffna, not because the music that was played or the songs that Suren sometimes sang had anything to do with the coastal town of his youth, but because the happiness he felt, sudden, swift-rising, that happiness was one he had only experienced in the North. Sometimes when Nihil came around the corner to alert Suren that their mother was home and he had to stop playing and put away the guitar, Mr. Niles would reach for his handkerchiefs to wipe away tears that had nothing to do with his cataract operation. And in those moments he would feel that he was neither full of war nor full of peace, he was simply lost.

Suren broached the topic he had been toying with for weeks after one of these sessions. “Kala Akki,” he began, “would it be okay if some of my friends came and we practiced here?”

Kala Niles, who always sat beside Suren while he practiced, had just taken the guitar from him to place it against the wall. The word
practice
was associated, in her mind, with one instrument: “Practice? They also play piano?” she asked, curious.

“No, no, well, one of them plays keyboards, but actually we are starting a band and we have no place to practice. You know my mother . . .”

Kala Niles knew full well what
you know my mother . . .
meant. Indeed, it had delighted her to know that Suren’s guitar playing was a secret being kept from Mrs. Herath, who got on Kala Niles’s nerves by being too tidy, too compact, too perfect, and not even miserable-without-a-man to make up for it. It was unfortunate that Kala Niles knew nothing of the brittle disharmonies between Mr. and Mrs. Herath, the kind of disharmonies common to so many long-married couples, for if she had, Kala Kiles may have embraced Mrs. Herath with a warm heart, finding that blissful common ground between single women who wanted something that married women were trying to escape, and both women would have been the happier for it.

“Huh-oh! You want to bring the boys and practice for the band here?” she asked, shaking her head from side to side and squinting while also clasping and unclasping her hands.

“We don’t have to come every day—”

“No, can’t come every day, no. I have pupils. But you can come on Monday or Thursday,” she said.

“Can we come on both Monday and Thursday?” Suren asked.

“Of course!” Mrs. Niles, listening from near the kitchen door, said. “Come and play anytime. After school you’ll come?”

“Yes Aunty, after school. If we can play even for one hour that will help us to get better.”

“Band, ah?” Kala Niles asked, smiling, “But mustn’t stop practicing the piano, okay? If you stop practicing then I will have to put a stop to the band!” She laughed as she said this, at how unthinkable it was that such a thing would come to pass.

The first time Suren came to play with his friends, it was a Thursday and rainy and the practice dissolved into drinking tea—made by Mrs. Niles—and conversation—instigated by Mr. Niles—not to mention too much attention paid to Devi, whom none of the other boys had met before and whom they coddled because they all found Rashmi too intimidating and could think of nothing to say to her. The other Herath children had come to listen to the inaugural practice and, though there was no music played, they were not disappointed; four guitars, keyboards, and a set of drums, these were a sight to behold as they were unpacked by the older brother of one of the boys, Sanaka, and set up in the Nileses’ storeroom at the back of the house. The storeroom had been cleared so that the safe and shelves were against one corner of the back wall.

“This way you can practice and even the noise we won’t be able to hear too much,” Kala Niles said, ushering them into the room, which had no windows but which smelled of incense. “Lit for Saraswati,” she explained, pointing to the poster on the wall, as the boys sniffed and looked for the source. “Can’t start music without lighting for the Goddess, after all, even band music, any music, we should do it properly.” She nodded toward Suren. “Suren knows, isn’t that so?”

Suren smiled and nodded. He did know. He would have asked for incense for the Hindu goddess who blessed the arts had there been none lit, sure in the knowledge that a teacher of music, even a Catholic one like Kala Niles, would know all the important rituals and would observe them no matter her own daily religious practices. As he looked around the room, Suren did not feel light hearted, that was not a way of being that he would ever know, but he felt a lack of tension that made him happy here, in this house, with all his siblings around him, with two old people who welcomed them and cared for them and a music teacher who had space in her heart for all kinds of music.

At the other end of the street, Sonna and Mohan had finally and officially solidified their unusual friendship. Their nods slowly turned into verbal greetings and from there to commiseration and on to discussions of the various people they disliked down the road. To Mohan, that would be anybody who was Tamil, and for Sonna it was his own father, Lucas, Raju, and, for reasons he could not explain, Suren. Mohan justified his prejudices with ease, and though Sonna could illustrate his dislike for Lucas—those insect legs, that balding head—and Raju—such a tangle of ugliness, such cowardice—when it came to his father and to Suren, Sonna felt his words get twisted into knots, so he did not try. Raju, therefore, was the center of the Venn diagram of hate that the two boys put together, but in the empty spaces around, there was plenty of opportunity to torment Suren at the bus halt.

“I saw your girlfriend going for tennis,” Mohan might say to Suren, referring to Kala Niles.

Or, from Sonna, “Saw Rashmi talkin’ to boys up the hill.”

These kinds of slurs were designed, by Sonna at least, not so much to insult Rashmi, about whom he remained conflicted, nor Kala Niles, whom he cared nothing for, as they were to trouble Suren. They failed. The words entered Suren’s consciousness then left as though they had never been uttered. The only things that stayed were the references to the future that Sonna and Mohan made and that Suren knew carried some truth.

“When the Tigers attack, only person to help your house will be mad Lucas! And bugger will fall over an’ die before he can even cross the road!” Sonna said this just as Suren boarded the bus to school and so it followed him all day long and made him extremely anxious for his family.

“Someday we’ll get rid of all these bloody Tamils.” Mohan said this at the end of a game of marbles that Suren had won, which soured both victory and game.

“When I am in the army nobody will touch my parents. Who is going to look after your parents? Not you. You’ll be playing
band-chune
somewhere,” he added.

“Yes, who will look after your precious sisters? Think they’re too good to even talk to us. Wait an’ see what will happen to them.” Sonna said this with a mixture of anger and hurt that Suren picked up on and therefore was particularly troubled by; it was the kind of combination, he had learned from listening to his parents, that made ordinarily harmless people turn cruel.

Taken together, these utterances clouded Suren’s usually calm mind and made him feel alternately angry, sad, and despairing, not one of which was an antidote to their barbs. It was Rose who came to his rescue, albeit unintentionally. As he stood at the bus halt one morning listening to the relentless jibes, Rose began to sing.

“Suren, listen, I am in the chorus at Methodist now. Listen to this, our new song:

Flow gently, sweet Afton, amang thy green braes;

Flow gently, I’ll sing thee a song in thy praise;

My Mary’s asleep by thy murmuring stream,

Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream.

What do you think? Beautiful, no?”

Suren was tongue-tied. She sang with perfect diction. So what if the vowels dragged and the high
c
on that second
Afton
was reached for but not found, Rose was really singing! The strange nasal blockage that made her snort when she spoke disappeared when she sang and also made her voice naturally low and rich. It was the sort of voice that his band members and he had been looking for. Rashmi sang like an angel, but who wanted an angel in a band? And Devi, who could also sing, was far too young and pampered for the work that was needed. But Rose was just that right kind of tattered girl who could make it work.

“What men, don’ like?” Rose asked, smiling in her habitual way but crestfallen by his lack of response. “You don’ like the singing? Teachers said I’m good!”

“No, no, you are good!” Suren said, as he ran for the school bus. “I’ll talk to you after school.” From the window of the bus he looked out to see Rose’s face bedecked in real smiles, while Sonna said something obviously spiteful to her.

So it was that the band expanded and the Nileses’, who before the advent of the Herath family had little to do with the children down the lane and would never have considered opening up their home to its least savory residents, found themselves at the center of all their after-school activities and the wildest of their plans, the most exciting one being the variety show that Rose decided should be organized to celebrate the coming New Year in April. She sat, her heart full as they gathered in the living room around Kala Niles’s piano and discussed her plans. She had made sure to take a body-wash and powder her underarms with the Gardenia Talc that she had been given by her mother, and, now that she combed her hair regularly, she looked and smelled positively decent.