On Sal Mal Lane (48 page)

Kala Niles did not know that the piano would take a long time to return to her home, but then, nobody was thinking beyond that evening.

“We have to carry Papa,” Kala Niles said, once the piano was safely situated against the living room wall of the Tissera household as though music was a part of their daily lives, not something of which they partook by standing outside their neighbors’ houses, and after her record player had been taken to the Heraths’ house. “He stays on that bed now, so we will have to carry the whole bed.”

Once more the neighbors gathered, and Jimmy Bolling delayed returning to his post to help carry the old man, who was disappearing into the thin mattress that topped the plank of wood on which he now spent every moment of every day, being turned and moved by others, never of his own volition. They carried him down the street but held low, unlike a coffin, down and in through the gates to the Heraths’ house and all the way through it to the dining room next to the kitchen, which was the only place where such a long bed would fit.

As he was moved down that road, Mr. Niles looked up at the sky. He looked up and he said, “The last time I saw that sky was when I watched Nihil play his cricket match.” He said that and he began to cry and he said nothing for a long time after, not even when Nihil spoke to him.

Fire

The third mob arrived just after sunset. Kamala and Rashmi were busy trying to make their guests comfortable when they stopped, cups of plain tea and towels in hand, words fading on their lips at the sound of the men moving inexorably up their road. Perhaps they stopped at Jimmy Bolling’s house, for there was a change in the sound made by their feet and voices, a pause of some sort before they resumed their march up the road.

Devi, still small enough to creep through a bathroom window, was just returning from rescuing Mrs. Nadesan’s gold wedding necklace from her almirah. After climbing back onto the top of the wall, on Suren’s instructions, she pushed the ladder away from the wall so nobody would know that the Nadesans were hiding with her family. She climbed down along the ivy, her body light enough to be held by the still-young roots. She heard the first voices as she began her descent and it made her scramble and slip and scrape herself until she fell into Suren’s arms. She gave the necklace to Rashmi, then ran to find Nihil and put her arms around him.

“I’m scared!” she said.

“Don’t be scared, they’re not coming here.”

“How do you know?” she asked. She pressed her face against his chest. She could hear the beat of his heart and it was too loud and too fast for her to be reassured by his words.

“I know,” he said, and he was filled with a feeling of remorse, for he did know, now, why they would not stop at his house and that Mohan had been right all along, the war had come. He removed Devi’s arms from around his body, but he took her hand and went to join Rashmi and Suren, who were standing at the front window watching their parents, who were now outside their gate.

“What are you doing?” Mr. Herath shouted, pushing at some of the men advancing up the road. “Stop this! These are innocent people, they are our neighbors!”

The children saw a member of the mob break away and come toward their father. The man wore a peacock-blue sari around his neck. The man grabbed their father by the front of his shirt and shook him. They saw their mother plead with the man, her palms together, and they heard her woman’s voice high over the others as she turned away from them and called out to the Silvas. They heard their father again, his words, uttered in a familiar voice, clear. “I will not let you do this!” He raised his voice louder and called for help, “Raju! Jimmy!” even though neither of them could have heard him over the sound of the mob.

Nihil, his fists clenched, said, “I can run and get them!” He started for the door, but Suren pulled him back, saying no, he would not be allowed past the gate anyway.

The man shouted something else at their parents and they could not hear what was being said in all the commotion, but they could see the expression on his face; a look of such deep scorn that Nihil felt ashamed for his family. Whatever the man said seemed to take the fight out of their father and they watched as the man pushed him and he did not stand his ground, so he fell against their mother, who pulled him away from the road and shut the gate with a padlock. They listened as each member of the mob outside rattled their gate as they passed, some so fiercely they were sure it would come off its hinges, the air rent with the sound it made, like a giant cymbal beating time. They watched their mother run her hand over and over down their father’s back as he leaned against the wall, his face turned to it.

Suren closed his eyes for a few moments as if he were reaching deep within himself for something, understanding, wisdom, anything that would tell him how to help his parents and siblings. When he opened his eyes, he turned to Rashmi and said, “Rashmi, go and make sure the Nadesans and the Nileses are okay.” Then he turned to Nihil and asked him to check on Mr. Niles. Devi, he dispatchd to the kitchen, to ask Kamala to make some ginger tea.

Rashmi went and found Mrs. Nadesan rocking back and forth, talking softly in Tamil, her face wet.

“Don’t worry, Aunty,” she said, “you’ll be safe here. Devi brought your
thali,
see?” and she drew the heavy gold necklace out of her pocket and fastened it around Mrs. Nadesan’s neck, all the time trying not to hear the sounds outside, of shattering glass and voices lifted in triumph. Mrs. Nadesan only rocked faster.

“Thank you, thank you,” Mr. Nadesan said, and Rashmi knew that they would prefer to be left alone, so she went to check on Mrs. Niles instead.

Nothing in the boys’ room was rumpled or disturbed. The beds, made by Kamala just that morning, were still neat and creased, the floors swept, the curtains drawn against the heat. It was a serenity that startled Rashmi, who was, herself, in a state of deep agitation though she tried to hide it with a calm expression, the one she felt was required of her at this moment. Mrs. Niles was reciting a rosary, her eyes shut, her mouth moving, her fingers caressing each clear bead, the silver cross resting in her other hand. She looked odd sitting there, bolt upright on Suren’s bed as if she were merely visiting, even as she mouthed her prayers.

“Rashmi, tell me, what is happening?” Kala Niles asked, her eyes full of concern.

“Don’t worry, Kala Akki,” Rashmi said, “you’re safe.”

Kala Niles nodded and was quiet for a few moments. Rashmi sat down next to her on Nihil’s bed. They both listened to the mob outside. There was something particularly wrong, Rashmi thought, with a room that could be this quiet, prayerful thoughts releasing into it, while a few yards away bedlam reigned.

As they listened there was a long series of crashes and Rashmi winced and drew closer to Kala Niles, who said, “Everything will be lost.”

Rashmi composed herself. “The piano will be safe,” she said, softly. “The record player will be safe. And you are safe.”

Kala Niles took Rashmi’s hand in hers and stroked it. She tried to imagine if this was true, if the piano, the record player, her parents, herself, if these were the only things that could be lost. She tried to make the guarantee of their safety loosen the tightness in her chest. It did not. For she knew that across the street, what was being erased was the conduct of their lives, and who could ever bring that back?

Rashmi listened to the sound of Nihil’s voice as he talked to Mr. Niles, explaining, as though he hadn’t done this already, that he would be safe there, that his parents would look after him.

“We will say you are our grandfather,” she heard Nihil say, and she wondered if Nihil only cared about Mr. Niles, whether he had forgotten all the other people they were sheltering. She hoped that none of those others were listening to Nihil and was glad when she heard his quick footsteps pass by the door on his way to some other part of the house.

The Heraths, the Tisseras, the Sansonis, Jimmy Bolling, and the Silvas, each family in their own house, listened to the sound of looting. Nihil joined Suren to stand together by the window closest to the Nadesans’ house, as though their nearness could provide comfort to the house itself. They stood, their bodies tense, their ears alert, trying to separate the sounds they could hear, one from the other. Voices carried over walls. Voices rejoicing in some particularly precious item, an especially heavy sari rich with embroidery, a set of glass bangles, voices warning each other to watch out, there was broken glass there, step back, be careful. There was no fear in those voices.

Nihil, grown wiser, said, “Sonna could stop these people. He could control them. He’s the one who knows them.”

“Maybe,” Suren said, thinking about the last time he had seen Sonna, earlier that day, at the center of a mob just like this one, “but he’s not here.”

They continued to listen to the sounds around them, the tinny crash of ornaments hitting the floor, the thud of furniture pushed over, the sound of breaking crockery. These were the types of sounds that ordinarily would have startled them, made the adults around them take a sharp breath before scolding them for being careless. Now Nihil and Suren stood, unable in the excess of sounds to pick out one whose making they could regret in greater measure.

A man called out that he had found two sets of silver knives, did the other men want some? Nihil leaned forward and gripped the bars of the window, the skin on his knuckles tight. “Do you think if we had the Silvas’ guns, we could stop them?” Nihil asked.

“We aren’t the type of people who own guns,” Suren said.

“But if we had them? If someone gave them to us? If we could get the Silvas’ guns, do you think Tha could stop these men?” Nihil persisted.

“Maybe,” Suren said after some thought. “But it is those types of people, people with guns, who prepare for war. I prefer to be like us.”

Nihil did not know what
people like us
meant anymore. He had thought that he belonged to the group he referred to as
good people.
But of what use were good people if they could not prevent the bad people from robbing their neighbors? He wished he had a gun. He would have shot the man who attacked his father, he would shoot everybody. His body began to heave. He wondered if this was what Mr. Niles had meant when he talked about people having war within them. He wondered if he was like Mohan now, a vessel of war.

Suren put his arms around Nihil and stroked his head until he stopped shaking. “It is better that we don’t have guns,” Suren said. “It is better to save our neighbors than to attack other people’s neighbors.”

Nihil tried to hold on to his anger but felt it abate as he rested in his brother’s arms. He put his own arms around Suren and embraced him. Rashmi came into the room where they were standing, still wondering how a house so full of people, as theirs was now, could be so silent.

“Are they gone?” she asked. “It seems quieter.”

They all listened. The sound was growing less, a stray crash here and there, the sound of feet running, this time, away. Then they heard their mother’s footsteps. She came into the house, her eyes wet, and said, “They’ve started to burn the houses down,” and she didn’t stop any of them as they ran outside, all of her children, she simply kept walking until she reached Mrs. Niles and put her arms around her.

Devi climbed the Asoka tree, Nihil behind her.

“What can you see?” Rashmi asked from below.

“They’re setting fire to Uncle Raju’s house!” Devi shouted down to them.

“And now the Nileses’ house!” Nihil said.

Devi, watching from her perch in the tree, was glad, in the way that only children can be glad, that Raju was not there, that he was safe and being guarded by someone as formidable as Jimmy Bolling. Nihil, sitting on a lower branch, watched with her, and was glad that Mr. Niles was not there, nor the piano, that they were both safe. But even though they tried to hold on to that gladness, they were stirred from within by the sense of their own impotence and that feeling, that helplessness, eventually took over as they watched, unable to do anything but watch, as the two houses filled with smoke from fires lit in different rooms.

Nihil inched higher on his branch. “Kala Akki’s rose vines are on fire!” he said, his memory tricking him into smelling not fire but the fragrance of the roses.

Devi and Nihil watched the flaming bushes, transfixed by the way the fire, with its crepitant song, climbed from root, along each twisting limb to flower and on up to the roof of the veranda. It looked like someone was writing in an elegant script, a strange beauty marking the destruction as it went. But when it reached the gutters, which must have held some residual rain, it stopped, and the sound of crashing beam and falling tiles, from Raju’s house this time, broke the spell for them both.

Nihil looked up at Devi, who seemed, herself, to be half floating away on the heavy threads of smoke that were now making their way into the neighboring gardens. Parts of her body were obscured and Nihil felt an acute sense of pain as the smell from the burning and the smoke conjured up a vision of a funeral pyre. He tried to console himself once again with the thought that no, Mr. Niles and all their Tamil neighbors were safe, there was no pyre, nothing that was burning mattered. He called up to his sister and asked her to climb down.

“You are too high,” he said, “climb down next to me.”

“I want them to go!” Devi cried, tears escaping from her smoke-filled eyes, as she climbed part of the way down the tree and balanced herself on the same branch on which he was standing.

“We can’t make them go,” Nihil said, turning his face away from her so she would not see that he, too, was crying. He wondered if Jith was worrying about Dolly, if the other Silvas were safer from all that he felt knotted and painful inside him because they had never cared about any of the other people down the lane. He wondered again about those guns, for what use they were being reserved.

“Have they gone?” Suren called from below.

Nihil shook his head. “No. There are some left. Others are still running away with things. I can’t see what they are taking, there’s too much smoke.”