On Sal Mal Lane (49 page)

Nihil and Devi climbed down and stood with Rashmi and Suren inside their veranda, waiting. After a long time, the mob left and they heard Mr. Sansoni calling them.

“Come soon! We can still put out this fire!” he said, as he ran down the street with a bucket of water. He kept the index and middle fingers of his right hand on his nose as he went, holding his glasses in place. Everybody rushed out at the sound of his voice, even though Mr. Sansoni was so rarely a part of any activity that took place down Sal Mal Lane.

Mr. Tissera came swift on his heels, carrying his own buckets of water, which he filled and refilled at the tap in Kala Niles’s house. The buckets dragged Mr. Tissera’s arms down on either side and he, a thin man, looked like he might, himself, split in half. It was not until Mrs. Herath asked Suren to get the hose from their garden that it occurred to Mr. Tissera to look for the one that Kala Niles used to water her flowers and use that instead.

“Bring the hose!” Mrs. Herath said to Suren, who was already dragging it out of its muddy inertia, and she stood with the pipe aimed now at one house, now the other, her spray of water crossing every now and again with Mr. Tissera’s, while all around her the children, Mr. Herath, Kamala, and the other neighbors threw buckets and pots and bowls of water against the walls until the fires were put out, leaving behind the soggy charred smell of their good intentions married with the ill will that had caused the fires. None of them knew that two of the buckets they were using belonged to the Silvas, nor that it was Mrs. Silva who had brought them out and left them on the street for them to find.

That night, Mr. and Mrs. Herath sat in the front veranda as they always did during the late evenings, pretending to chat. Inside, in the boys’ room, where Mrs. Niles and Kala Niles sat, and the girls’ room, where the Nadesans and their servants sat, all was quiet. When Kamala and Rashmi served rice and dhal and dried fish and sambol, which, though nobody wanted to eat, was the right thing to serve because it was the food of the soul, the food that everybody no matter where they were from, no matter the circumstances of their hunger or lack thereof, could eat, the Nadesans refused. They were Indian Brahmins and would not eat food cooked in the Heraths’ pots. So a packet of Marie biscuits was offered, along with fruit juice made by diluting a mango concentrate that had been in the fridge, and this they accepted.

Nihil sat next to Mr. Niles, feeding him soup whose vegetables had been mashed with a fork in the grooved
nebiliya
that Kamala used to wash and destone the rice. Devi sat beside him and they both tried to get Mr. Niles to talk, but he would not. He simply opened his mouth for his food, wiped his eyes with the one handkerchief he had with him, even though it was completely damp, and remained silent, and Nihil told Devi to go find their father’s handkerchiefs and bring them for Mr. Niles, which she did, glad for a task she could manage.

Nothing was communicated during the serving of this first meal except with murmurs and silent offerings of one thing or another, a head shaken here, a nod there, and when the spoons and plates were collected after, the ordinary sounds of clearing dishes seemed unnaturally loud.

Which is why Mrs. Herath asked Suren to play the piano that night. “Play Beethoven,” she said, “perhaps that will help them to sleep.”

As that night in July came to a close, the strains of Piano Sonata no. 14 in C-sharp Minor, op. 27, no. 2, a piece so familiar it fairly breathed, lifted off the keys and floated tenderly through the house and down the silent street where nobody was listening.

Where Sonna Went

Jimmy Bolling did not, ordinarily, care where Sonna went. Ordinarily he would have been glad if Sonna never returned. But this had not been an ordinary day.

First, Rose and Dolly had barely made it to safety. On their way home, the girls had been confronted by a group of men.

“Nice skin but hair is brown,” one of them said, stroking her cheek as Dolly cringed.

“What school?” another said, yanking Dolly’s tie.

“Methodist,” she replied, beginning to cry.

“Not Buddhist school?” the man yelled.

“We’re Burgher,” Rose said, taking Dolly’s hand in hers.

“
Lansi?
Then why not fairer skin?” another yelled. Despite the time of day she could smell alcohol on his breath.

“Our father’s great-grandmother,” Dolly began, her voice quivering, but Rose dug her fingers into her sister’s palm and stepped toward the men.

“We are Sinhala mix.
Ammata hukana keri vesige putho, thavath kunuharapa ahagannethuwa apita ape paaduwe yanna deepang hukanne nethuwa. Pakaya!”
In a moment of inspiration that sprang not from fear but from fury, Rose unleashed a string of filth that made the men first fall back at the sound and sight of it, this light-skinned girl hurling such raw words at them, then burst into laughter.

“Go, go, go home quickly!” one man said in English.

“If someone else catches you, you won’t be so lucky,” another one said, pushing them roughly down the road. They had stood there laughing as the girls ran away from them.

Their story when they got home added to Jimmy Bolling’s fear. For the first time in his life, he wished his son would come home. He needed Sonna the way any man who has to protect a household of women, children, and an old man, needed the kind of strapping son that Sonna had become. Seeing Jimmy Bolling’s distress as he listened to Rose’s story, Raju had tried to help. He had brought the Bin Ahmeds’ hose into their house and spent more than an hour watering the boundary walls of the Bolling compound, saying helpfully,
If they come with kerosene, we must be prepared,
while aiming the hose methodically in stripes along the fences and onto the walls. He then climbed up on a chair he dragged to the corner of the compound, where the Bolling girls had sat so often while Suren played the guitar for them, and aimed the hose over the fence and onto the side of his mother’s house, which sat adjacent.

But, having stomped through the mud and yelled
Enough!
at Raju, and having forced everybody indoors again, and locked the front door, Jimmy Bolling felt the weight of his solitude return. Although he had uttered a few strong words as the looters passed him, he had not tried to prevent them from swarming into the houses up the road, and he had not been able to help his neighbors put out even the smallest fires he could see from where he sat, for fear that Raju or his mother would come out and see what was happening. He had been forced to watch as groups of men ran past him, more than a few of them calling him a
lansi ponnaya
as they went, knowing that for one reason or another, no matter how many knives and belts he had beside him, he would not leave his post to attack them. When first Raju and then Old Mrs. Joseph had asked about the smoke, calling to him from inside, he had yelled
Some trouble down the next lane
and summoned his wife to move Raju and his mother to the farthest room, theirs, and make sure they stayed there, the only protection he could offer them from what was happening outside.

Now, after all that, here he was again, sitting outside his flimsy aluminum fencing, having to guard all these people, and where was Sonna? A curl of fear rose inside him, and with it came an image of his son as a child. Sonna was seven, standing silently by the fence while Rose sat on the ground wailing. Jimmy Bolling remembered that face, Sonna’s, the way it had looked, as though the world itself had shifted, somehow. He had watched that face in the side-view mirror as his friend reversed the car and he had watched Sonna kneel down in the dirt and pull Rose close to him. He had held her face and stroked her hair. By the pursing of his mouth he had been able to tell that Sonna was hushing her, whispering
shh . . . shhh.
Jimmy Bolling remembered asking his friend to stop the car, he wanted to go and comfort his son, to tell him it wasn’t his fault, and when his friend would not listen, too drunk to care, Jimmy Bolling had lunged at the steering wheel. After that there was nothing but the memory of pain and rage.

Dolly’s voice rose up from inside and startled Jimmy Bolling. He jumped as though he had been caught in the midst of some cowardice. He looked up and down the silent lane, then moved his head, stretching out the muscles of his neck. He glanced at the sky. Evening was falling. What would the night bring? Sonna would have the connections to intervene on behalf of his family, he thought bitterly. Bastard knows everybody. Where the fuck was he?

Yes, where was Sonna?

On the morning of the riots, while all the other children got ready and went to school, Sonna woke up in the house of a new friend he had fallen in with a few weeks earlier. They had come together to steal plants from the nursery beyond the bridge and then sell them to households in neighborhoods in Dehiwala. Together, they also stole pawned jewelry from a broker on High Street and sold it to young women on their way to work, accosting them at the bus halt near Russell Stores. Sonna had three hundred rupees so far, from his commission on the sales. When he had enough he was going to start a security business. He had heard from Mohan that this was an up-and-coming industry.
People are scared these days,
Mohan had said,
security businesses will be starting everywhere.
While Sonna did not know exactly how such a business might be set up, he felt he had the necessary credentials to provide security to people. He was street smart, he was strong, he could frighten people.

He was still in that half-awake, half-dreaming state that morning when his friend shook him. “Sonna, wake up, dead soldiers have been brought to Colombo. They’re saying riots!” the boy said.

“Riots? Where?”

“Here!”

Sonna sat up quickly and dressed. If there were riots, he knew the Elakandiya mobs would go to Sal Mal Lane. He had to get home quickly. He buckled his belt, threw on his shirt, stuffed his feet into his boots, no socks, and strode down the road. If Sonna had left earlier he would have made it back to Sal Mal Lane, but by the time he got out of his friend’s house the streets were filled with people, half of them terrified, the other half terrifying. He saw Suren in that former group. He wanted to call out to him, to ask if he knew if everybody was all right on Sal Mal Lane, but between him and Suren there was a crowd of men among whom Sonna saw people from the slums near his house, their known faces coming into sharp focus against masses of features he could not recognize.

“Ah! Sonna Sir! Come and join us!” they shouted. Two of the men broke off from the gang and came over to Sonna, put their arms around him and half dragged him into their midst.

“
Machang,
I have to go home—” Sonna began, but he was shouted down. “Home? Now is not the time to go home, Sir! This is the time we have to save our people!”

“We’re going to Wellawatte and then coming back this way. You can go home then. Come, come, hurry up!” And Sonna found himself jostled and pulled along by the crowd. He kept glancing back, hoping to see Suren again, but when he finally did see him, Suren was much farther along the road, too far away to hear him even if he called out. He reconciled himself to being swept along by the mob. On the way Sonna learned of the bomb that had killed the soldiers, the transportation of their bodies, and the rioting that followed.

“
Demala huththo,”
they said angrily, “think those bloody Tamil Tigers can kill our soldiers? We’ll see about that. There won’t be one left when we finish.” And they smashed the fronts of stores that belonged to Tamil merchants, and if they could not, if there were steel doors that sealed the store, they poured kerosene under the doors and set the oil alight, never pausing to see if the fire would take hold, or if anyone was inside, moving so ceaselessly from one establishment to the next that it seemed to Sonna that they would not stop until there was nothing left to burn.

During all his declamations against the Tamils, a dislike he had acquired through his association with Mohan and one he had made his own solely to add to the ways in which he could infuriate and distinguish himself from his father, during all that time, Sonna had never conceived of a day like this. He had spoken, as Mohan did, of
troubles
and
someday
and
bloody Tamils,
but his animosities lay closer to home, the bloody Tamils of his words just a stand-in for his father, the person he could not curse quite so readily or quite so freely.

Now, caught in the madness around him, there was nothing for him to do but join in, though he couldn’t let go of his fear for Sal Mal Lane and all its inhabitants, though all he wanted to do was run home. He screamed at people he saw along the way, sending them scattering this way and that, he pushed two young boys off their bicycles, he slapped a middle-aged man until he fell to the ground, and he tore through shops sweeping inventory to the floor. Each time he did these things he imagined the Herath children watching and the image of those faces saddened him, and so he bared his teeth and his voice came out louder. He did everything harder, more wild than all the rest, setting fire to rooms before any of the men had a chance to loot. Deep within himself, Sonna was occupying a different frame; he was charging through streets to rescue, not harm, and he came at people like an avenging god until he could no longer tell the difference. He paused once; in the one open shop that the men got to before he did, the owner long since fled, he saw a shrink-wrapped cassette tape of top-twenty songs from 1982 in a pile of cassettes that the men were about to burn and it reminded him of Rose, so he picked it up and put it in the back pocket of his jeans, the one thing he stole that day.

“Kalyani Avenue!” the men yelled as they turned back. “Lane is full of Tamils. Not one Sinhalese house!”

“Let’s go there then. Leave the rest to others.”

On they stormed, on back down High Street, and on down the hill toward Kalyani Avenue. Sonna, instantly sobered, grabbed the shirt of the man nearest to him, a man whose skin was such an unusual shade of dark that he was named for it. “Kalu Aiyya,” he panted as they ran, “I must go home now.”