On Sal Mal Lane (9 page)

“Koralé,” he called out. Koralé came out of the back of his store where he had been arguing with his wife, who constantly wanted him to give up the wood selling in favor of a more glamorous retail business.

“Lucas Aiyya,” he said, rubbing his chest, his smile a mix of obliging and humility, the smile that most irritated his wife, who thought herself far too superior to be the spouse of a
dhara mudalali.

“I came to buy cigarettes for the new master,” Lucas said, before realizing that he did not know what brand to buy. He scanned the boxes, red, gold, blue, and glanced down at the money in his hand. There were two five-rupee notes and two one-rupee coins. “How much are the cigarettes?” Lucas asked.

“One Bristol is twenty-two cents—” Koralé began, but Lucas cut in, his brows coming together in severe disapproval.

“No, no, whole packet. This is the new family that just moved in. They are not poor people. They buy whole packets.”

“Ah,” Koralé said with the correct amount of reverence. “Then Bristol is four rupees and twenty cents, Gold Leaf is four rupees and sixty cents, and Marlboro, well, Marlboro . . .” Koralé rubbed his belly and turned down the corners of his mouth. He considered the presence of those Marlboro cigarettes in his shop to be a sort of benediction. He liked to look at them and feel their importance, heightened by their cost and overseas origin, wash over him. It made him feel weak and small and put in his place, which was exactly what good things should do. Koralé stole a quick look at Lucas. Yes, he was still waiting to know the price. “Marlboro is of course quite expensive. Most people don’t buy those,” he said, making a face as if to confirm that they were not only expensive but positively bad.

“How much?”

The words were like a whip on Koralé’s back. He sighed. “If you want to buy, then I will check the price.” He pulled out a piece of wood with chalk scribbles on it and pretended to consult it. “Marlboro is twelve rupees.”

“I’ll take Marlboro,” Lucas said, satisfied that the correlation between the money in his hand and the price of these cigarettes pointed to it being the correct choice, for, of course, Mr. Herath would have sent Raju with the exact amount of money.

The rest of the transaction was conducted in silence, both men with their mouths turned down; Koralé because of the blow he had just suffered, Lucas because of his new regard for a gentleman who smoked the most expensive foreign cigarettes available. Lucas walked back to Sal Mal Lane with renewed purpose. These were just the sort of people his wife would approve of. People with taste.

He was not prepared, therefore, for the sight of Mr. Herath, who was sitting in the front veranda of his house, bare-bodied but for a thin
banian,
and wearing a sarong. The
banian
he could excuse, given the heat, but Lucas had expected khakis at the very least. Beside Mr. Herath, on a salmon-pink formica-topped stool that did not match the deep mahogany color of the furniture inside or the cane of his chair, was a cup of tea; he held a book in one hand and moved chess pieces around the board balanced in his lap with the other. Lucas had to cough and shuffle several times before Mr. Herath looked up, even though his eye brows had risen with each cough as though the looking up was imminent for a few moments before it actually happened.

“Ah, my cigarettes,” Mr. Herath said. “Thank you.”

These words were troubling to Lucas. It indicated a chaotic mind, or, at the very least, an inattentive one. Someone who could not distinguish between Raju, who had been sent out for the cigarettes, and himself, who had returned with them, was not a good fit for Alice. Still, there was something likable about Mr. Herath’s voice right then, an affability about his clean-cut features that made Lucas want to plunge ahead anyway.

He cleared his throat and put his palm over his chest. “Sir,” he said, “I am Lucas. I live in the Ratwatte compound.” He moved his right palm, open-fingered, in a sweep up the hill beyond the Herath property and his left palm in a matching sweep down the hill toward the main road, and he stood that way for a while, for effect. “I know this whole lane. I know every body. I was here before anybody moved in. As a young man. My wife is Alice. She can cook if necessary. I am here to help you. Anything you want, you call Lucas and I will come.”

“Very good,” Mr. Herath said, putting his chess board down and picking up his tea. “I am sure you will be very useful, especially for my wife.” They both listened to the scrape of the
ekel
broom around the side of the house, where Mrs. Herath continued to contemplate the joint pleasures of gardening and the rehabilitation of the Bolling girls. “That’s the
nona.
She likes to garden,” Mr. Herath said. He put particular emphasis on the word
garden.
As if it were a foreign concept, this gardening.

Lucas tilted his head. “Any children, sir?” he asked, even though he knew there were and exactly how many.

“Yes, we have children. Four. Two boys and two girls. The boys go to school with my wife, the girls go to the convent in Colpetty. We have to find transport for them from here. That’s what we have to do,” and Mr. Herath nodded, his brow creased in three parallel horizontals.

Lucas exhaled with relief. First the cigarettes, now this. “I know a man, sir. His name is Banda. He drives a Morris Minor and takes girls to school. Bit packed, but better than putting the girls on the bus, I think. Dirty boys standing there, at the bus halt. Not good for them.” He lowered his voice and leaned in, gesturing with his finger and pointing to the house next door. “Even the Silva boys from next door, sir, not good enough for your girls. Even they are bad boys.” He straightened up. “Shall I tell Banda to come and see you?”

“Better ask him to speak to
nona.
Maybe tomorrow? She is here after about two o’clock. She is a teacher, so she goes when the children go and on most days she comes back right at the end of the school day.”

Lucas felt emboldened by his success. “Sir, where do you work?” he asked, knitting his brows and craning his neck sideways in due deference.

“I am with the government,” Mr. Herath said. “Ministry of Education.”

Lucas’s mouth dropped open. A government servant in a ministry! That would make Mr. Herath’s the most important job for the whole lane. Mr. Herath could quite possibly secure their plot from Mrs. Ratwatte so she would not evict them, something his wife worried about constantly. He could probably get a speed bump installed near the Tamil cinema to stop the buses from driving too fast around the bend. Why, he might even be able to get the Elakandiya slums that abutted the stream behind his house cleaned out. He couldn’t wait to tell Alice. He looked around the garden and the house and finally at Mr. Herath with a smile.

“Lucas Aiyya,” Mr. Herath said, and that Aiyya, the title of older brother, was the first sign that Lucas’s dreams were not to be. What kind of master referred to his servant like this? “I don’t want to trouble you but I don’t smoke Marlboro. I smoke the local cigarettes. Bristol. I wanted a packet of Bristol and a card of Disprin. Do you think you could . . .”

Lucas reeled from disappointment. “Okay, sir. I will get them. But,” he added a little bitterly, “Bristol is very bad for your health. Local things are not so good.”

“No, no, it’s the opposite, actually,” Mr. Herath said, but very slowly, the way he always spoke, as if whatever he had to say had been proved beyond a doubt and there was hardly any need to repeat all of it, though he would, as a service to humanity. He ran his hand through the masses of waves in his hair while Lucas watched, entranced, as only a bald man could. Finally, Mr. Herath spoke again. “Our researchers have done several tests on cigarettes and also other things, medicines, for example, and they have found that our local products are far superior to this junk that the Americans are dumping on us.”

Lucas hesitated. On the one hand, there was that Aiyya, but on the other was a statement that appeared to be weighted with superior knowledge. Assurance, even. Fact. He took in Mr. Herath’s clean-shaven face—at least Alice would approve of that—and shrugged. People like Mr. Herath knew things he didn’t, after all. He decided to pass that along to Koralé. Koralé was getting too self-important anyway, stocking marbles, Arpico balls, cigarettes, and things like that instead of sticking to his firewood.

“I’ll go, Sir. I’ll go and bring the proper things.”

Lucas had already turned to leave when he heard a familiar shriek of laughter from inside the house. His heart sank. He shut his eyes and listened for a moment and then turned back to Mr. Herath, who had returned to his game.

“Sir. I must tell you this. I cannot look after your family properly if I don’t tell you everything. Those Bolling children are bad,” and he made a sideways cutting motion with his palms to indicate the exact degree of worthlessness. “They are badly brought up, they have bad mouths, talking filthy words, and they go about naked in the streets. You must get them out of your house. I was here when all of them were born. Even the oldest, Sophia Miss. She was good. And the mother is not bad, I have to say, but she has done a very poor job with these children.” He took a deep breath, his wheeze coming up again due to all the stress. “They are not respectable people like you.”

Mr. Herath cocked his head and nodded. “Burgher people, I understand? Down the road?”

“Yes, they’re
lansis.
But not like Mr. Sansoni at the top of the road. These are
kabal lansis.
Mrs. Sansoni is different. She dresses nicely and goes to church. Mr. Sansoni doesn’t drink and has a proper job. Sansoni son is also a good boy. Even owns a guitar, I have heard, a musical boy. They don’t make any noise, those Sansonis, and they speak in English even to me! But this Bolling family, different kind of Burgher. Bolling name is of course a very good one, I know, I know, but even their own relatives have washed their hands of them. Don’t even visit. Mr. Bolling’s father, he was very rich, all that land, he is the one who gave to Jimmy Bolling but he never took care of it. You know, Sir, poor people and also very loud, always fighting, using bad words . . .” and Lucas fell into silence, his face crumpled into an expression of complete disgust.

Mr. Herath sighed. This was not the sort of discussion he wanted to get into right then on a holiday morning. He was looking forward to his cup of tea, his game of chess, and his cigarette. He was looking forward to settling into his new home. He had a telephone call he needed to make to his friend Vasu, a call during which they were to discuss the possibility of a national strike, all the workers in all the major industries ceasing their work together. It was going to be a difficult call and he had been grateful for this small respite, the tea, the chess, the cigarette, before having to dial that number. But now, here was Lucas and now he had to deal with class and caste and slurs and goodness knows what else. He felt burdened by the weight of all his learning, which, he knew, came with the corresponding responsibility to seize any opportunity to correct, so he reluctantly closed the book he had been using to replay a famous game between Boris Spassky and Robert James Fischer from their world championship in 1972 in Reykjavik, and began to explain class politics to a mystified Lucas.

“Lucas Aiyya,” he began, “they are children like my children. We don’t turn anybody away from our house . . .”

By the end of it, Lucas had heard all about the contributions to their beloved country of the
lansis,
the fact that the term
kabal
could be applied to anybody, even Sinhalese people like Lucas or himself, the importance therefore of understanding that everybody was equal, the value of human life, and, of course, the need to resist the Americans, whom Lucas had never met and had never known were in evidence in his orbit anyway, which made them, the Americans, seem both invisible and omnipresent and almost thrillingly maleficent, the way Mr. Herath talked about them. By the time Mr. Herath was through, Lucas had sunk to the front steps to listen, his entire body felt numb, and he had decided that he was, indeed, a foolish man, misguided and uninformed, and that he should from that day forth make a concentrated effort to care about the Bolling children. The only problem was his wife; Alice would be sorely disappointed by this turn of events. And he would never be able to tell her what he had deduced from his conversation with Mr. Herath: the Heraths were obviously Communists. Alice hated the Communists, for she had heard they even washed their own plates, which she found inappropriate and insulting to people like her who had always known and observed the proper hierarchy, sticking to her place, assured that her superiors would stick to theirs as they were supposed to do.

After he had been served a cup of tea by the Heraths’ servant, a cup, he admitted, he had needed in order to absorb all that was said, Lucas went to return the cigarettes to Koralé.

“You should stop carrying this junk,” he said to Koralé, an unusual condescension to his voice. “We should not be supporting those capitalist sons of bitches. We should be supporting ourselves.” He reached into Koralé’s case and helped himself to a packet of Bristol. “This,” he said, tapping the packet imperiously, “this is the future of our country. Right here.”

Piano Lessons

Lucas had gained much by the arrival of the Heraths, such a desirable family and one that had so swiftly accepted the offer of his services. Yet Lucas knew, having observed the difficulties of adults in charge of children, having seen the polished piano in the Herath house, having heard the music that issued forth, that if he could secure piano lessons conveniently located across the street, that would be a boon that would cement his status with the new family and make the relationship impermeable to others, including Raju, who might aspire to such an alliance.

We could say, then, that Lucas was the reason for the undoing of this family, for it was at the Nileses’ house, in the midst of discussing piano lessons, that Nihil sacrificed his own happiness for the first time, and sacrifice, no matter how pure the intention, can never guarantee outcomes, it merely lulls us into believing it can. Yes, we could blame Lucas, but we would be wrong. We will allow him, then, his good deed, exactly as he intended it. Here he stands, a few weeks after the move, informing Mrs. Herath, much to her delight, that the daughter of the family across the street, whose finger exercises and late-night performances she had been listening to, also gave private piano lessons.