A Disobedient Girl (26 page)

“Fine, fine, Sarath, you know, the usual work. I was up in Kandy for a couple of weeks, and then I had to go down South.”

“South is a bit troublesome these days, no? Better avoid it if you can, too many educated riffraff thinking they know what’s what,”
he said and laughed like this was a huge joke, and it must have been because Daniel joined in.

“Yes, I know what you mean…but…work’s work. I have to go where they tell me to go…”

“I say, don’t listen to those government buggers telling you to go here and there, Danny boy. You should watch your own back. Tell them you got local information that the South is dangerous!” Still holding one of Daniel’s hands in his own, the doctor thumped Daniel on the back like he himself was the Local Information and repeated himself. “The South is dangerous!”

“You crack me up,” Daniel said, and they laughed again.

Crack. Me. Up. Crackmeup. It wasn’t hard enough of a thumping to break him, surely, but maybe he was feeling breakable too, though he wasn’t showing it. That thought didn’t last very long, as the two men continued to talk about various things to do with the government and the South that they both seemed to find hilarious. Neither acknowledged her until finally they both, in a moment of agreement whose coming she hadn’t been able to gauge, looked over at her, both men still smiling, neither seeing her. It was as if they were frozen, hand in hand, like lovers united against an unpleasant confrontation they were trying to postpone.

“This is…this is Latha,” Daniel said, finally. “Latha, this is the doctor I told you about.” And he gestured from one to the other. It was a proper introduction, and she tried to be gracious about it by nodding. She even attempted to smile.

“Oh, your woman speaks English!” the doctor said, glancing with approval at Daniel. “Good.
Hondha mahaththayek ehenang, ingreesi ugannalath dheela nedha?”

She disagreed with his pronouncement by staring straight at him. Daniel had not taught her English, and even if he had, that did not make him a good master. To begin with, he was not her master. She didn’t work for him.

The doctor looked at Daniel and shook his head slowly, his mouth pulled down in sympathy. “Trouble, I can tell.”

Daniel shuffled a little but did not contradict him. “I told her everything will be taken care of.”

“Oh yes, Danny boy, leave it to me. It is very good of you to take care of your domestic this way, I must say that. Even bringing her here yourself.” He looked approvingly at Daniel for a moment, genuine respect in his eyes, and then glanced over at her, pointed to Daniel, and nodded. “You are very lucky. Most other men…” Then he turned back to Daniel. “Anyway, you can wait here, Daniel. Come!” And he beckoned to Latha.

Fifteen minutes by the clock on the wall behind the doctor’s head, the one she focused on the whole time she was there, her skirt lifted up, her body gaping open for him. Five before for her to remove her underwear and climb up there and five afterward to absorb the words that it was done. The doctor said what he was doing before he did it. “I will be stretching the cervix,” he said before he went between her legs with an instrument he waved so briefly in front of her that she could not describe it after. “This is the tube,” he said, and this registered with her: the length, the milky color of it, how harmless it looked. She felt the scraping inside, and she listened to the sound of the second hand ticking and tocking relentlessly, and the doctor’s breathing, wheezy through the gauze pad over his mouth and nose. He gave her some moist cloths to wipe herself with, and a large pack of
Free ’N Easy
like the ones she had seen on TV and the ones that Thara used. Then he was gone.

When she came out, an hour after he had walked in front of her, leading her to his examination room—the doctor had said half an hour of rest and then she could go home—Daniel was still sitting there. There was something different about him, though.

“Let’s go,” he said, and he didn’t help her to the car though this time she was dizzy and wished he would. He started the car and reversed without throwing his arm over the back of the seat and turning to look behind him as he had done when he had backed out of the house. When they reached his house, he pulled into the porch and sat silently. Then he turned to her. “The doctor told me your medical history,” he said. “This is your second pregnancy.”

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t remember saying that to the doctor, but she must have, she must have said it as she lay there, tears dripping without clamor in two narrow streams toward the pillow.

Daniel shifted his weight in his seat to reach for his purse. The same one he had opened to give her his card at
The Palace of Fashion.
There it was, still smooth and light brown, like her skin. He handed her a sheaf of thousand-rupee notes, all the money that was there. “This is for any medications, or…anything…you might need,” he said. “You should not come here again. I thought you were a decent girl, a good girl.”

Decent. Good. What words at a time like this! What words for someone who treated decent girls, good girls, as he had done. Latha wished for the strength to get up and slam the car door in his face the way she had seen Thara do so many times to Gehan. But she felt too weak. She got out of the car slowly, carefully, taking just herself. She left the sanitary pads and the money behind. Daniel said nothing more, but she knew his silence was fleeting. She knew what real silence meant, the kind that was impervious. She touched her earrings.

That night at home she tried to direct the houseboy to complete the daily tasks, and he did so, glancing at her with a concern that she appreciated. The girls, however, clung to her, some primitive instinct making them aware of her state of mind, her private suffering, and persuading them that they should distract her in the ways they knew best.

“Latha, come and play!”

“Latha, braid my hair!”

“Latha, I can’t sleep! Pat my bottom so I can sleep!”

Latha this and Latha that until even their parents began to chime in, taking on Madhavi’s and Madhayanthi’s needs as their own, absorbing them, augmenting them.

“Latha! Bring me some lime juice!”

“Thara! Tell the woman to iron my shirt. I have an early meeting tomorrow.”

“Latha! Iron this shirt and come and rub my feet. They’re aching from walking around the
Freedom Plaza
all day long with Amma, looking for shoes…
Lathaaa!
Where the hell are you? God, this woman is becoming a real burden now. I should have listened when Amma told me how to handle her. Now it’s too late, I suppose.”

Latha heard that last muttered observation from Thara even as she brought the lime juice, and something in the tone of her voice, the way it reminded her so much of Mrs. Vithanage, made her pause before she entered. And perhaps it was the sadness that poured into her with those words, or the anger that rose up with them, or both, and the loss of blood that had been going on all day, so much so that she had no more dry cloths left and had to rip lengths of rag from her one little girl dress that she had kept for sentimental reasons, and she felt herself beginning to fall and grabbed the curtain, bringing it down with her. She heard the glass shatter and felt the shards enter her in pinpricks wherever they could find her. And between those moments, between the touch of the new curtain with its green on green pattern and the sharpness of the glass, she remembered that long ago she had felt such pain, but not from glass. Something had scratched her then, fingernails from a hand she was trying to hold on to? Thorns on a bush by the road on which she stood? And through that memory came Daniel’s words, and she reached once more for the earrings, for a time of pain erased by the presence of her own family, found or otherwise.

Thara was bending over her when she recovered consciousness. She helped Latha up and led her to her room. “Latha? Are you okay? Come, I’ll take you to your room. Here, lie down…lie down on the bed.”

She didn’t answer the question about why she felt sick or why she had fainted, but when Thara saw the bloodstains on her skirt, she went away and came back with sanitary pads. “You take the strip off like this and stick it in there,” Thara said, demonstrating on some old underwear of her own, perhaps not wanting to violate her privacy by going through Latha’s things, or maybe not wanting to touch them. “I’ll help you to put this on.”

It was awkward to stand, and worse to have Thara see the mess she had made of herself, the blood everywhere, on her skin and down her legs. Latha tried not to feel ashamed, but she did because Thara wrinkled her nose as she tried to clean her up, and finally, after all her efforts seemed to produce little result, she gave up and took Latha, step by careful step, to their bathroom, not the servants’ one.

“Latha, sit here,” she said, pointing to the commode. “I will have to wash you properly.”

Latha sat on the commode and let Thara remove her clothing piece by piece until she was completely naked. She sat there and let Thara rinse her off like she was watering plants, with the handheld shower. At first, Thara sprayed from a distance, as if she did not want to get wet, but little by little she moved closer until Latha felt herself being washed by genuinely kind hands. Hands that cared to put shampoo in her hair, soap on her body, holding her up by her arms while she scrubbed herself between her legs, and even stooping to smear some soap on her feet, which Thara then proceeded to clean with her own, their toes catching and separating and making the suds on their feet bubble. She listened to Thara’s voice issuing the same instructions she, Latha, gave to the girls when she washed them—“close your eyes,” “open your eyes,” “bend forward,” “hold the soap”—and it was like a lullaby, so she kept her eyes closed, not caring which way her head was moved, which of her limbs was being scrubbed or rinsed. Nobody had ever washed her before, she knew that. She could not remember hands such as Thara’s, which were soft and gentle, or any voice that sounded like hers did just then. It seemed to Latha that Thara washed her more than once, for they were in there a long time before she said that they were done.

Thara wiped her dry with a towel that was hanging there. “Now you must feel better, right, Latha? Do you feel better? Come, here, put these clothes on and I’ll take you back to the room,” she said and helped Latha to get dressed in the old panties lined with a real sanitary pad, and a nightdress that she pulled over Latha’s outstretched arms. Once Latha had lain down, Thara went away again and came back with a
Disprin
dissolved in water, and held it to her mouth so she could drink it. It was sour and acidic and sweet and comforting.

She was not alone so long as she had Thara. If nobody loved her, surely Thara did, for why else would she, this mother who relinquished all care of her own children even when they lay pale and sweaty and recovering from some fever or cold, who never wanted to clean their soft, untarnished bodies, why would Thara do all that she had done for her? For three days, Thara tended to her, more fre
quently at first and then less, her visits more to check on her progress than to offer solace. But those three days healed Latha in new ways, her body and her mind sealing off the wounds she had received, closing them to thought, to violence, opening her heart once more to the past, to a time of friendship and sisterhood and a world uncomplicated by their love of men.

A
s I watch the red car approach, I wish, briefly, that I had my earrings, something to pawn or exchange for grace in our circumstances.

“Amma, are we going to stop that car?” my son asks, beside me, noting with what rapt attention I have been focusing on the vehicle.

“No, I wasn’t thinking of stopping it, but…what do you think, Loku Putha? What do you say?” I look down at him, suddenly confident that he will have an answer.

The question makes him look up at me with just a faint touch of anxiety. Is he really being asked to decide? There are rivulets of sweat dripping down the sides of his hairline. I reach over and wipe his face with the edge of my sari pota. He smiles, perhaps remembering that he already helped us climb out of the mess that was the train journey and find our way to solid ground, and one with a vantage at that. When he realizes that, yes, I am asking him for his opinion, he pulls his lower lip in and frowns as he stares down the road.

“I think we should walk for a while and then see,” Loku Duwa says. “We should ask someone who lives here. How do we know if those people live here?” She is holding her sister tightly by the hand, so tightly I am not sure if it is out of concern for her younger sibling or to quell some fear inside herself. I want to smooth her brow, erase the furrows, even trust whatever female instinct makes her scared, but I resist. My older daughter is too timid, too fearful, and more pander
ing would only harm her. How would she ever learn to manage if she found herself in a situation like this, alone with children of her own, if she is allowed to entertain demons as constantly as she demands it? No, I turn away and look at my boy, waiting for his answer.

“Let’s stop the car and ask for directions,” he decides, glancing from his sister’s perturbed face to my resolved one, and, without hesitating for my permission or approval, he raises his arm and waves his hand in the air. It’s like the movement of a bird, that hand, the rapidness with which he shakes it. Almost like a tremble.

The car looks so much smaller as it approaches, tiny and rounded like the old ones. There’s a
V
and a
W
in silver on the front of it. It reminds me of the expensive, dinky cars in the rich shop in Galle with all the imported things, the one that was closed down after the Mathiniya took over the country and made us all wear the same blue and white flowered cloth and buy everything on ration cards. I used to like looking in that window, to see what was in the world even if nobody I knew could afford to go in, even if Siri himself denounced it as being full of unnecessary luxuries. At least it was colorful! Not like the bare storefronts that came after, with only the necessary things, rice, dhal, coconuts, the tins of powdered milk with no labels, the rack upon rack of clay and coal cookers. I am delighted by the look of this car; it has reminded me of a happier time.

It slows down as it nears us, and now we can see the driver, a young man with a mustache, maybe in his twenties, and a foreigner beside him. It is only when it stops and rolls down the window that we see another man in the backseat, a boy, really, or a man who looks like one, fair and thin. He is playing with a toy in his hand that makes faint beeping sounds, and every now and again he exclaims in annoyance or smiles.

The driver looks me up and down, glances at the children and then back at me. He lifts his chin and jerks his head at me. “What’s the trouble?”

“Our train,” I begin, gesturing down to the tracks even though they cannot see the train from inside their car, “had an accident…”

“A bomb blast,” my son says, in English, and they all look at him, their eyes alert with interest. He holds the small bag behind his back,
arms crossed, and lifts his eyes to mine, shyly, swaying a little from side to side. My heart, I feel it in my heart, a sudden accidental skip of a beat, and regret: I shouldn’t have asked him to decide. I see him clearly now, such a little boy, a child. I stroke his head.

“Bomb?” asks the foreigner, frowning. “Where?”

“Down there,” I answer him, also in English, feeling proud of ourselves. We are not ordinary people, though we may look it. We are educated, decent. I smile to express cordiality, and then I continue to talk to the driver in our language. “That’s the thing, malli. A whole compartment blew up, and we had to get out and wait for the police to clear everything. But I have to get to my aunt’s place in Ohiya…”

“So what’s the trouble? Ohiya is the next town.”

“It’s just that I only know how to get there from the train station. I don’t know how to by the bus road.”

“I thought you said this is your aunt’s house. Where are you from?”

“Oh, we’re from the South. We don’t come here much. This is only my second time as an adult, and the children have never been. That’s why…so…” I look up the road as it rises and disappears around the mountain and then back down toward the way the car had come. The half bus has made a turn, and now it looks even smaller than it did before. I look back at the driver. He must be younger than I had imagined, for I see him waver between sympathy for us, who are of his kind, and arrogance because of his status as a driver for these white people. I try to concentrate on the kindness. “Do you know if there is a bus going this way?”

The driver nods and motions to me to wait. Then he rolls up his window and consults with the people in the car. They keep looking back at us, and the foreigner, he seems encouraging, for he smiles often at me. He leans forward quickly, all of a sudden, like he forgot something. He reaches into the cubbyhole and pulls out a packet of chewing gum. He leans past the driver, rolls down the window just a little, and pushes it out to my son, a yellow pack of
Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit.

My mouth waters; I remember when my mother was still alive, my father and she had bought me a pack of that during New Year’s
time in April. I remember the way the taste had felt, the soft-but-hard package, the way it had a paper cap of its own, the silver-foil-wrapped sticks inside. My mother had had to show me how it opened. The dull cream chewing gum, with its wriggly zigzag pattern, had felt like an unlikely treat in my hand. But the first bite, the way the flavor of something otherworldly took over my mouth! It was as though sweetness was singing from every pore and tooth with my tongue conducting the song. My mother had laughed as she watched me, her head tilted a little, her chin resting in her open palm. She had looked beautiful to me right then: her slim, tall presence, the neat hair pulled back in a bun at the nape of her neck, her cotton sari and her laughter all complemented by that taste.

I hear my son’s exasperated voice. “Amma! Can I take the chewing gum?” he asks.

I smile. “Of course. And say thank you to the white uncle.” I glance over at my girls, particularly the little one, who seems crestfallen that things have not gone the usual way, with strangers singling
her
out for special favors as the most adorable, as the youngest. “Aiyya will share,” I whisper to her.

“Thank you,” my son says to the foreigner and grins. Such a grin for the infrequency with which he lets us all see that he has it in him, that boyish delight. Even the foreigner responds through the window he has rolled back up, and although I want to be grateful, I don’t like his smile because it reminds me of the way the white people smiled at our children on the beach. Something both covetous and condescending, as if they had the right to either emotion when we can take care of ourselves and have so much to be proud of. I don’t like foreigners. They come and go so quickly, and they don’t inspire trust. I don’t want to be reminded of these seaside concerns. I want to forget that we ever lived in such places, exposed to such people. Now I regret that I let my son accept the sweet.

“Here, the white gentleman said to give you some money to help you on the way,” the driver says at last, rolling down the window again. For the third time now we can all feel the gush of cold air as it escapes from the interior of the car and fondles us, briefly, before it is absorbed by the heat around us. It seems to come at us in waves
that break in time to the rhythmic turning over of the engine. Brr…brrr…brr…that’s how it sounds to me. Like the ocean that I will never set eyes on again. Not I, not my children.

“That’s okay. We don’t need any money,” I tell the driver. “I just wanted to ask the way to Ohiya. Can you get there on this road?”

“Don’t be foolish,” the driver says, gesticulating with the money, his kind face gone, his own lost dignity rising up before him, perhaps, in the shape of my words. “Take this money. He has plenty more. You’re by yourself and you have three children with you.” And now he laughs. “Think of it as winning the Mahajana lottery!”

“No, thank you very much, please tell the white gentleman that I am very grateful, but—”

“Malli! Come here and take this money and keep it for your mother,” the driver says to my son, trying to woo him by calling him that, little brother. “Come! Come and take this. Put it in your pocket. Keep it for later.”

But my son knows better than to go against my sense of pride, I know, even though in his heart he wants very much to protect us with the fistful of money that is being offered for no good reason when we haven’t even asked for it. That is the other thing that gives me pause, this offer of money. Why would we need money when we are but a village away from family? No, I have never been under obligation to people, and I won’t have my children being so either. I lay my hand on my Loku Putha’s shoulder just in case he is tempted to disobey me, and he looks up at my face. I smile to reassure him, maintaining courtesy. My son knows that I have two faces, this one, which I am presenting to strangers who have offended me, and the other, of disdain and indifference, which I show to those about whom I care enough that I want them to know what I think of them. The village people back home, for instance; those people knew exactly what I thought of them even when I was a kind guardian to their children, my children’s playmates, or neighbor when neighborliness was called for, during childbirth, after a death.

I lower my head a little so that the foreigner can see my face. “Thank you, sir,” I tell him in English, my voice soft. “We are all right. My aunt is in the next village; they will look after us.” I shake
my head at him and smile as I say all this. It feels important that I let him know that it is not simply pride that keeps me from taking his money, but that I truly have no need for it. As I speak I am aware of the driver’s eyes on my face, of my children listening to me. They have rarely heard me speak to people in English. The only time they hear me is when I read my old books to them. When I stop speaking, I realize that my heart is beating fast. As if this foreigner has threatened me with his money, or as if he could. He only nods.

“Then we can’t help,” says the driver, shifting the gears, and now his voice is kind again, respectful. I have not jeopardized his relationship with these white men by rudeness, and, indeed, perhaps he thinks they will treat him with more regard now that they know that his people aren’t all beggars; that in between the ones who ask for school pens and those who spit on the white people, there are multitudes of people like me, who are courteous but in no need of being rescued by them.

“Keep walking down this road,” he continues. “It is a little far, but eventually you will come to a crossroads. One side is just a dirt road, no tar. I don’t know where that goes. Anyway, there’s a thé kadé at that junction. Ask them for directions on how to get to your aunt’s place. If nothing else, they’ll be able to tell you how to get to the railway station, and you can go from there.” He doesn’t look at me.

“Thank you,” I say, but he has already shut the window. I watch the car hesitate for a moment and then move down the road and away from us, returning to its deep sounding but unhurried pace. Maybe the foreigners don’t like speed on these sharp turns.

“Amma! Why didn’t you take the money?” my boy asks me, already unwrapping the package of chewing gum. He takes out one piece and breaks it into four, one for each of us, then puts the pack into the pocket of his shorts.

“Do we need money?” I ask him. “We are going to my aunt’s house. You don’t need to take money when you are going to family for help. Money is not going to persuade them to help us.”

“Persuade? Why do we have to persuade them to help us?” he asks. “Then Amma, why did you tell us that they would help us?”

“Can I have more of that toffee he gave?” the little one says.

“Did you swallow it already? Don’t swallow it, you fool.”

“It’s stuck,” she says. “In the back.”

Loku Putha puts his fingers into his sister’s mouth and finds the bit of gum. He peels it off his finger and puts it back in her mouth. “You are supposed to just bite it, like this, see?” My son opens his mouth, sticks his bit of chewing gum between his teeth, and chews ferociously for his sister, with loud smacking sounds. Chooti Duwa laughs. “You can’t have any more until that has finished tasting sweet,” he tells her. “Then we can add a new bit and the old piece will be tasty again. That way we won’t waste it.”

“What if they don’t help us?” Loku Duwa asks in her timid voice, returning me to our larger concerns.

I am immediately sorry for the words I chose. After all, it is not that they would not help; yes, they would. It is just that I have not visited my aunt in so many years, so many countless, silent years, and I do not know my cousin’s situation. What is her husband like? After all, mine had not seemed as bad when I visited with him. And yet even then hers had appeared to me to be ridden with flaws. Perhaps she had looked at mine with the same harsh eyes with which I had viewed hers.

But I have to admit now that in fact our visit had not been greeted with as much hospitality as I had hoped for. They had welcomed us, of course, and served us tea and made a special lunch for us. It had been a good lunch, too, with even a chicken that my cousin’s husband had killed to be cooked just for us. Still, that is what they were expected to do by tradition. And we had arrived unannounced, so there was no time for them to prepare a colder reception. But my aunt had remained quiet in the background, and when I worshiped her, she had cried a little and murmured regrets, about my mother, about how she had left, and what she might have done to persuade her to stay. That had surprised me. I had thought that my mother had a good relationship with her sister although they did not visit, and that she had eloped with my father for love. If she had lived, I would have been able to ask her these questions, but when my mother fell ill I was far too young to be concerned about such things. I was still
content with the life that was being presented to me by my parents, still unaware of the secrets they might keep.