On Sal Mal Lane (52 page)

And since this kind of rupture between father and son was foreign even to Suren, who certainly had accumulated his share of grievances, as all sons did, against his own father, he suggested that they go to Kalyani Avenue, where, if they were fortunate, Sonna could be found, as Raju had once been found.

Imagine a place isolated by design, nobody there to cry out to for help. Imagine fires unhurriedly set at two ends and a neighborhood uncomplicated by difference left to burn. Imagine a ghost town constructed entirely of ash. Imagine houses, still standing, but not one among them that displays signs of human struggle or salvage. Houses whose walls are entirely gray, full of form yet without substance, for if the children touched one thing, a fence post, a door, it disappeared with soft relief like dreams that fade into the dawn, barely a sound that rose like a sob and enveloped the children in gray powder. Imagine the road itself, covered with blown ash, and their footsteps falling in clear outlines as they walk down the road that no one has visited except, for a last time, with fire. Nothing here has been taken. Everything remains as was, the tables upright, the chairs too, the windows opened, lunch boxes packed, handbags on bureaus, suitcases under beds, all of it either burnt through, as far as the fire could go until there was nothing left to feed it, or covered in ash. Imagine all this, then listen to the voices of these children.

“Where did the people go?” Devi asked for them all.

“The people must have gone before they came,” Nihil said, and they all knew who that
they
were.

“Were the people saved?” Devi pressed on.

“How would we know?” Suren asked.

“The people were saved,” Rashmi said, deciding for them all on a version of a tale that they could live with. “They left and they took nothing, so they must be safe.”

None of them could know for sure if this was true, whether the inhabitants of Kalyani Avenue, just up the road from theirs, with nobody to speak for them, had survived, whether all of them were hiding in one of the houses into which they had not gone, or crouching in heaps on the floors of the refugee camps they had been told were set up in government buildings and schools and all the places of worship, the temples, mosques, churches, and kovils. They clumped together in a circle, their backs to each other as though they were under siege from all sides. While they stood there, each of them trying to convince themselves of an everything-is-all-right in the face of nothing-is-as-it-should-be, they were startled by the sound of a dog, its bark unnaturally alive in the midst of the destruction around them.

“Sounds like a small dog,” Rose said, as they listened.

“Yes, but from where is it coming? Can’t be a house. There isn’t even one that is not burnt,” Rashmi said, and they all looked down the part of the street they had just walked, and up the next section of it, which went, equally straight, in an L shape.

The dog was found in the very last house, and it was a Pomeranian, formerly white, now singed and covered with ash. A dog that was both scared and happy to see them. A stainless steel bowl was found and washed and filled with water for it, but when they tried to coax the dog to come with them, it refused to go, scampering out of one set of arms after another, yelping. So, to the routine of cleaning houses and cooking, it seemed, the same food over and over again, was added a visit to Kalyani Avenue in between curfews, a visit they undertook as a group that on two occasions even included Jith, to feed the Pomeranian, which waited for them and welcomed them and partook of their offerings but would not leave the house, not even to relieve itself, until one day, when they arrived, they found it lying on its side, dead.

“How could he have died?” Rashmi asked. “Of what?”

Suren wanted to tell them that the dog died of a kind of heartache, but even he could not find a way to say those words without placing some of the blame on themselves, so he let the question remained unanswered.

At the back of the house, Nihil and Dolly, the most determined two of the group, squatted and began digging a hole with nothing more than spoons, pausing to wipe the sweat off their faces and necks. Though the others joined them eventually, it took them over an hour to make a hole wide enough and deep enough for the dead Pomeranian, which they wrapped in one of Mrs. Herath’s old saris that they took without bothering to ask.

“Good dog,” Suren said, as they stood over the grave, which they had marked by pressing the stainless steel bowl into the soft, loamy earth under a charred guava tree. None of the other children said anything, for what was there to say? Nothing had been saved, not even the last creature left alive down that road, not even when they had done their best to try to make it stay. They walked home silently and did not visit Kalyani Avenue again until, eventually, the ash blew over and covered their footprints too.

Because there was no more to do, nothing more to be cleaned or kept, nothing more that could be said or done, and because all that remained was an overwhelming sense of inadequacy, and because, of all of them, it was Devi who understood the least, she finally went to see Raju. She did not ask for permission to go, for she knew, having asked before, that she would be denied for reasons nobody would share with her.

Raju had not been seen for several days because Jimmy Bolling would not permit him to leave the house. Jimmy Bolling believed that if he did let Raju leave, Raju would walk down to his own house and see what had been done to it and he would tell his mother, Old Mrs. Joseph, and Jimmy Bolling could not have that, not until he could fix up the place a little. That was what he thought. He had not bargained for Devi.

“I need to talk to Uncle Raju,” she said, her hair still dripping wet after a bath, the back of her dress damp from it. “I want to see how he is doing.”

“He is fine,” Jimmy Bolling said, “we are looking after him well.”

“I want to see him,” she persisted.

“Daddy, she can come an’ see,” Rose said.

“Nothin’ wrong with comin’ and talkin’,” Dolly added. “All these days they wouldn’ let her come.”

Devi felt a surge of affection for Dolly who had suffered the loss of Jith, who was no longer permitted to speak to her after Mrs. Silva had discovered that he had joined them to visit Kalyani Avenue. Nobody spoke of or to the other Silvas, who remained indoors except for when Mohan, never Jith, was sent to buy bread or rice, and when he went, he avoided eye contact.

“I can give a message to Jith,” Devi offered, when Jimmy Bolling finally let her in.

Dolly only smiled and said, “No, it’s okay. Better like this. Daddy doesn’ like.”

And Devi might have spent some time talking to Dolly about Jith and her father and all the things that had changed but there was her friend running out from Jimmy Bolling’s bedroom, a wide grin on his face.

“Devi! I thought nobody would come to see Uncle Raju! To see how Uncle Raju is doing! Every day even Rose and Dolly kept going out with you Herath children. I thought everybody had forgotten us!” He would have enfolded her in an embrace but for the fact that he was not given to doing that sort of thing, his sense of propriety too well hewn now, so Raju contented himself with flapping his monkey-long arms and pacing and being now cheerful, now sad as he asked for news from the outside.

“What is happening outside, Devi? My cousin Jimmy won’t let me go out. He won’t tell me, girls won’t tell me, nobody will talk. Bin Ahmeds also want to know. We have been sitting here for so many days now, listening, smelled smoke even, but nobody will talk!”

And Devi, because she was a child, told him.

And because Raju was, himself, a child, he ran sobbing to his mother and told her, cursing his cousin for having lied to him, for having answered, repeatedly,
Only the Nileses’ house was burnt,
when he had asked if their house had been safe from the fires he knew had been set down that lane, he knew it.

“I have to go home!” Old Mrs. Joseph screamed, tugging at her housecoat. “Let me out! I have to go to my home!”

“Stay here and I will take Raju,” Jimmy Bolling said, pleading with his aunt and trying to force her to sit back down on the chair in which she had spent most of the past days, hardly eating, sipping cup after cup of plain tea without milk and without even sugar as though in penitence for some crime she had committed, some atonement she was making to unnamed gods.

“You can’t keep me here,” she said, pushing back against him with remarkable strength. “I have to go home. Raju, son, come! Take me home!”

And Raju, who always obeyed his mother, did. Against his cousin’s wishes, against his cousin’s strength.

When Old Mrs. Joseph stepped out from behind the aluminum doors of her nephew’s house, what did she expect to see? Only what she had always seen. Children playing, hedges growing, the floral litter created by the sal mal trees, Lucas shuffling up or down the street, Kala Niles or Mrs. Herath hurrying to one teaching engagement or the other, Mr. Herath being driven to work, Mohan and Sonna lurking, each in his own corner of the lane. But what she saw that day was not any of those things. What she saw with each weakening step was a lane where the children did not play but, rather, stood in a group and talked about things that clearly upset them, a lane that carried, despite its best efforts, a streak of malice, a lane where, behind singed mussaendas that had lost their foliage, stood a house that was unrecognizable, the one untouched part of it being the garage in which Raju lifted weights, and the side of the house that faced Jimmy Bolling’s property; that had been saved by Raju having spent so much uneasy time watering it with the Bin Ahmeds’ hose.

Nobody blamed Devi, directly, for the stroke that Old Mrs. Joseph suffered, nobody told her that she should not have gone to see Raju, that she should have stayed away until Jimmy Bolling had been able to do something to restore the house, but she knew that she had been culpable. So she avoided Raju and did not accompany her parents and her siblings when they went to visit Old Mrs. Joseph, who could only move one side of her face and whose speech was slurred and whom Raju tended night and day, wiping the drool off her chin and the curries off her lips.

It was only his way of forgiving her, his way of offering her a little bit of happiness in the midst of so much unhappiness, that made Raju, seeing Devi standing alone by her gate, come to the Herath household while his mother dozed and say to her, “Devi, come, I will let you ride the bicycle all the way to the bottom of the road.”

Who knows how things might have turned out had this been a different time, a time when peace was not something to hope for or talk about, but was something that was simply taken for granted. Who knows how things might have turned out had Sonna not come home, not fought with his father, if Devi had not come down the road, her hands tight on the handle bars, her hair flying, her face full of smiles for the one-last-time toward Raju before she went inside to help cook dinner? For Sonna was there and Devi was there and Raju was there, where they should not have been, in a time when no mercy was left.

Flight

There are no houses built of ash on Kalyani Avenue, there are no hot-wet houses down Sal Mal Lane, there are no neighbors grieving, there are no thugs, nothing has been taken that was not willingly given, no flower unearthed that was still in fair bloom, there are no walks down the street in the dead of night, her mother does not cry over a letter she reads over and over again, Nihil does not spend every spare moment beside Mr. Niles’s bed, Suren has not given up playing everything but the same piece of music each night on the piano, and Rashmi has not grown older with adult concerns.

Everything is as it once was.

The tennis ball bounces against the walls, Nihil yells
Howzat?
Dolly and Jith exchange letters and smiles. There are band practices at Kala Niles’s house and nobody knows too much about the Nadesans but what they do know is sufficient and pleasing. Mr. Niles still sits outside on his veranda; his legs are not broken, nor his spirit, and his voice gladdens as he speaks to Nihil. Lucas comes and goes, Alice complains, and Rose and Rashmi dream of singing and dancing to raucous applause.

This is how the world is as Devi rides the old Raleigh bike that used to belong to Raju’s father but that has now been gifted, once and for all, to her. This is how it appears as her legs stretch and reach to push the pedals, now on one side, now the other, and she perches over the center bar. There is freedom from fear, and a sense of flying as she turns the bike at the top of the road and comes down, her feet holding steady as the slope of the road carries her forward, gathering speed, to where Raju waits at the bottom to catch her when she brakes.

Raju, waiting at the bottom of the road, sees Devi no longer as she once was but as she has become, a young girl. Her hair has grown long and is pulled back from her brow with a white Alice band. The wind lifts the loose strands off the back of her shoulders. Her arms, always thin, are filling out. Her calves have a curve to them. In her eyes is a little girl and a girl almost grown, for the days of sadness have matured her, too. Soon she will be tall enough to sit when she rides the bike, to come off the seat only to help her get up the steeper part of the road on the old-fashioned bicycle. And as he absorbs these impressions of Devi, Raju tries not to be distracted by the sound of the brawl that is taking place in his cousin’s house.

“Get out of my house, you fucker, you piece of shit!” Jimmy Bolling yells, and there is the sound of crockery smashing, the sound of Francie Bolling screaming
Stop! Stop!
and the sound of Rose and Dolly crying.

Devi reaches the end of the road and the bike comes to a stop in front of Raju, his hands reaching out to grip either side of the handlebars to hold it steady for her in case the brakes fail. As she tips toward him, Raju inhales the scent of oranges and roses, the perfume she has stolen from her mother for this occasion.

“Devi, now better stop for today,” Raju says, as the fury unfolding nearby continues and makes him sweat. He undoes the top button of his untucked shirt.