On Sal Mal Lane (47 page)

Neither Devi nor Rashmi said another word until they reached home, their hands sweating, and the memory of the tightness of their father’s grip making everything else recede.

Home

Sal Mal Lane seemed ominously quiet as they turned into it off the main road, which, too, was empty of vehicles. There was a gray pallor to the air and the smell of burning from somewhere close by. There was nobody outside and, except for the shouts of mobs far away, the only sound was their footsteps. The girls dropped their father’s hands and ran the rest of the way home.

“Four people went into Kala Akki’s place and robbed things,” Suren told his father in a state of distress that overwhelmed him again after the initial relief he had felt when he saw his sisters come in. “I told them not to go there, I told them there’s an old man there, but they went anyway!”

“Who were they?” Mr. Herath asked.

“Thugs from the slums, I think,” Mrs. Herath said, standing on tiptoe on the top step leading to their front door and looking anxiously up and down what she could see of the road. She had tucked the edge of her sari into the waist of her underskirt, something she did when she was agitated. “Same fellows who used to hang around at the bottom of the lane with that Sonna.” She called out to Kamala and asked her to shut all but one of the windows in each room.

“I heard them talking to the Silvas before going to the Nileses’,” Nihil said. “I heard them say they knew that Mohan and Jith were going to join the army soon. And when they passed our house I told them not to go and they called me bad names and asked if I wanted to die too.” Nihil’s eyes filled up with tears as he said this.

“Raju is the one who got rid of them,” Mrs. Herath said. “He ran inside and I heard him shouting at them and eventually they went away. But I’m afraid they are going to come back in the night.”

“Can I go and see Mr. Niles now to make sure he’s okay?” Nihil begged.

But he was not permitted to go out until Mr. Herath had sat by the telephone and called people in the police and people in the army and people in government both in Colombo and elsewhere and discovered that, yes, it was true, there was rioting all over the capital and in Kandy and in Bandarawela and everywhere else and there was nothing at all that anybody could do. Nobody, not the inspector general of the national police, who was Tamil, nor the commander of the army, who was Sinhalese, nor anybody else could do anything to stop it. The thugs roaming the streets were people nobody seemed to know and therefore nobody could control. The wealthiest Tamils were safe, barricaded behind sharp, pointed steel gates, walls, and security guards, but no Tamil was safe from fear, not even them. The only places where anything had been done or was being done to save anybody were places where the Sinhalese people themselves, the
we
that certain of his friends mentioned, had gathered in force to prevent the rioting.
We
put up a blockade,
we
evacuated the neighborhood and helped our Tamil friends to find places of safety, they said, and Mr. Herath hung up the phone hoping that the
we
in his neighborhood would have the courage to do likewise.

Throughout that day, the Silvas remained indoors.

At four o’clock the mob returned.

Mr. Herath dropped the phone and went out carrying Nihil’s cricket bat, and Mrs. Herath shut the door and sat inside with Kamala, their arms around the children, listening to the voices outside. The children, corralled in this manner, waited, their eyes moving from each other’s faces to half focus on pieces of furniture or other items in the room before returning again to a brother or a sister, searching for relief. Devi, still in her school uniform, took off her tie and began to wind and unwind it around her forearm, providing all of them with some respite as they watched her trying to align the stripes just so. She stopped when the noise grew louder and they could hear the sound of a tussle and cries of pain.

Kamala began to recite
pirith,
her voice close to tears, her palms stroking the two heads beside her, but Mrs. Herath pulled Suren and Rashmi closer to her and said, “Don’t be afraid, children, he is not alone. Raju is out there.”

When Mr. Herath opened his gate, he saw that Raju, brandishing his lightest barbell, had felled one of the men but now was surrounded by the other men, who were screaming at him though they were keeping a safe distance from the swinging barbell.

“I didn’t mean to hit him, Uncle,” he shouted to Mr. Herath, “I just wanted him to go away. Go away from our lane!” He turned to the men and yelled, his voice hoarse from all the screaming he had already done, first at the Nileses’ house and now here,
“Palayang!”

“Bastard deserved it,” Mr. Herath said quickly, then turned to the group of men. “Don’t you live in the Elakandiya behind Lucas’s house?” he asked in Sinhala.

“What is it to you where we live? Think you own this road?” one of the men said, stepping menacingly toward Mr. Herath, who stood his ground.

“Don’t touch him!” Raju yelled. “You touch him and I’ll land this on your head too!”

Just at that moment Jimmy Bolling came jogging up the road with two belts in his good hand. “You fuckers, you stay away from my cousin!” he screamed.

Raju, though he had not won the title of Mr. Sri Lanka, won Jimmy Bolling’s respect that afternoon for the way he used his barbell, knocking first one then another of the men to the ground while Jimmy himself whipped them with his belt until at last the men, singly and then in groups, ran away.

“They’ll come back, I’m sure of it,” Mr. Herath said, wiping his face, his voice shaky. They dropped their weapons, the bat, the barbells, the belts, and all three of them examined their own bodies for cuts and bruises. Jimmy Bolling had a thin long gash on his bad upper arm from a knife, Mr. Herath had several sharp incisions and his shirt was torn, the buttons ripped, one sleeve hanging by threads. Raju alone had suffered no injuries.

“We have to get you out of here, Raju,” Jimmy Bolling said. “Get your mother an’ come, we’ll go to my house.”

Raju, his shirt stuck to his body with sweat, his face a mix of pride and fear, tried to resist. “I have to stay and guard the house,” he said. “Otherwise they’ll take everything.”

“There’ll be no use for the things in the house if you’re dead, you idiot, go!” And Jimmy Bolling shoved Raju toward the gate to his house. “They’ll be comin’ back to look for you after what you did to them. Go now. Fill a bag with a few things an’ come.”

And though Raju resisted as much as he could, citing first his previous success at saving the Nileses’ house and then the rebuttal of this second attack, in the end, Jimmy Bolling took Old Mrs. Joseph and Raju as well as their servant girl to his house, barricaded them and his whole family, except for Sonna, who was nowhere to be found, behind his doors, and sat outside his aluminum fence with Sonna’s old bat, which was child sized, a knife, and two of his belts. He held those weapons and he thought that if his oldest son showed up from wherever he had gone to, he would be the first to beat him, for Jimmy Bolling knew without a doubt that Sonna was in the thick of looting. From outside, he listened to his aunt talk bitterly about terrorists and the prevention of terrorism and
Where,
she asked,
Where were the people to arrest the terrorists who were terrorizing people in the full light of day?
He listened to his wife stirring sugar into glasses of plain tea, and he listened to Rose and Dolly relating, yet again, the difficulties they had experienced trying to get home from school.

When Mr. Bin Ahmed came, carrying a suitcase containing irreplaceable documents, photographs, jewelry, and the two trophies his daughter had won for debating, as a child, a suitcase he had packed months ago, during a time when nobody on Sal Mal Lane had expected any disturbances, and when he said, “Mr. Bolling, can we also come and stay in your house? My wife and daughter are very scared. We are right by the road and thugs are going up and down, please Mr. Bolling,” Jimmy Bolling yelled at his wife to open the door and shoved them inside. Francie Bolling gave them Sonna’s room, and although the Bin Ahmeds had always lived in an impeccably kept house, for as long as they sat there they saw nothing of the grime and mess, their minds entirely on safety.

Lucas and Alice went to Mrs. Ratwatte’s house and sat on a bench in her back veranda, alternately mourning the events of the day and talking about the families on Sal Mal Lane, about who among them might be safe, who protected and who betrayed. Of one thing they were sure: Raju and Jimmy Bolling would be able to look after their own houses. It was the Niles family that they worried about the most, even Alice, who, in the face of all that was happening, abandoned the harmless antipathies with which she had entertained herself for most of her adult life.

As the day wore on and the sounds of rioting grew louder, the Nadesans called out to Mrs. Herath from the other side of their half-green wall. Their two servants had climbed to the top of the wall using a ladder and were crouching there, looking terrified.

“Amma! Nadesans are coming,” Devi cried, running to her mother when she saw them.

“Open the gate, quick!” her mother replied.

“Not at the gate, over the wall behind,” Nihil said, and ran to open the back door. “My mother is coming, don’t worry,” he said to the Nadesans.

Mr. and Mrs. Herath came out, along with Kamala and the rest of the children, and the Nadesans, dressed as usual in their formal clothes, he in his pressed shirt and khaki trousers, she in a deeply colored sari, a red
pottu
in the part of her hair, were helped down the Heraths’ side of the wall by Suren and Mr. and Mrs. Herath, who stood on chairs, all of them turning their faces away to spare Mrs. Nadesan, who was attempting to hold her sari wrapped close around her legs as she struggled in their various arms. The Nadesans filed wordlessly into the Heraths’ house and were shown to Rashmi and Devi’s room, where they sat, silent and still, their eyes on the floor. They had brought nothing but their national identification cards, their checkbooks, and their passports.

At last Nihil was allowed to leave, and he ran to Mr. Niles’s house, Suren close on his heels. “We have to take Uncle to our house,” he said, bursting in through the doors that Kala Niles only opened after she heard Suren’s voice.

“All of you must come,” Suren said.

Kala Niles rubbed her shoulders repeatedly as though she were cold, paced back and forth, and began to cry. “I can’t go anywhere. I can’t leave my piano. Take Mama and Papa. I will stay here and save my piano.”

Nihil went over to Mr. Niles and took his hand, seeing that he was far too agitated to speak. He tried to comfort him, saying, “Raju and my father and Uncle Jimmy are all going to look after the lane,” but Mr. Niles shook his head, no, so Nihil fell silent. Instead, he reached up and stroked Mr. Niles’s head. He was struck by how clean that hair felt, silken and soothing to his touch, something soft in the midst of all that was going on. He continued to run his fingers through Mr. Niles’s hair, half mesmerized, half hoping that his presence would be enough to calm the old man.

Behind him, Nihil heard Suren reassuring Kala Niles. He said, “Don’t worry, Kala Akki, we will find a house that has no piano and move your piano there,” and he turned and ran and went from house to house asking which family might make room for the piano. And Suren, being Suren, included the Silvas in his rounds.

The door to the Silvas’ house was shut and it took a long while for them to come to the door though he could hear them whispering on the other side. Finally Suren yelled, “Mohan! Jith! Open the door!”

Mr. Silva opened the door when he heard Suren’s voice. “Can we bring Kala Akki’s piano here? The mobs might come back and if they do they might destroy it,” Suren explained.

Mrs. Silva, listening from inside, walked to the door and stood beside her husband. She looked scared. “My god! We can’t take the piano, Suren. If they see that piano here they will know we are helping Tamil people. Might come and loot our house too! We are just going to shut our door and stay inside. You had better do the same. I don’t know what your parents are doing, letting you run around like this!” And Mrs. Silva began to shut the door.

Jith stepped forward. “Are the Bollings okay?” he asked Suren in as low a voice as he could manage while still being audible.

“I don’t know. I think so. Yes,” Suren said.

“Get inside!” Mrs. Silva said, the fear gone from her voice. She grabbed Jith by his arm and yanked him inside. Before the door shut, Suren caught sight of Mohan, and in his eyes Suren saw all the threatening remarks that Mohan had ever made to him, about wars and his inability to help anybody, including his sisters, all condensed into this one moment. He turned around and ran with renewed resolve. Mohan was wrong. He
could
do something.

The Sansonis and Heraths already had pianos. He found that the Bollings’ house was far too full, and besides it was too close to the main road and visible to any of the thugs still roaming the streets. That left only the Tissera family, who, after some initial consternation—
Would the mobs come while they were in the middle of the move? Would they come to their house too?
—began to make room for the piano.

“Uncle Raju,” Suren said, after he’d knocked on Jimmy Bolling’s door and been let in by Rose, “we’re going to need your help. We need to get Kala Akki’s piano to the Tisseras’ place.”

Raju, who had spent his time pacing this way and that in the Bollings’ dining area, shuffled into his slippers and marched out with purpose. “I need to go and help the Heraths,” he said to his cousin as he passed him. “They need my help,” he added, in case this had not been made clear enough. Jimmy Bolling nodded and kept on walking; he was already on his way to join in the effort.

It was a sight to behold, that piano being moved with such care from Kala Niles’s house to the Tissera house. For several minutes, while the people on all sides caught their breath, Suren and Mr. Tissera and Raju on one end and Mr. Herath and Jimmy Bolling and Rashmi and Nihil on the other, that piano sat, for all the world as though there was no better place on earth to be but right in the middle of a curving road under skies graying with the smell of loss, and it seemed as though if Suren had sat on the piano bench and begun to play the saddest piece of music he had ever heard, Chopin’s Nocturne no. 21 in C Minor, nobody would have asked him to stop, they would have all simply sunk to their knees and let the whole world burn.