A Disobedient Girl (27 page)

“People leave home for many reasons, Duwa,” my aunt had whispered to me. “They leave because they love the wrong people, or they leave because the right people don’t love them,” she had continued, and her eyes had welled up again.

I hadn’t had the opportunity to ask her anything more, because my cousin and her husband had asked us to stay another day, but when we’d protested and said we didn’t want to inconvenience them that long, they had chosen to believe our story, that we had someone else to visit in Nuwara Eliya that day, and they hadn’t argued with us as they should have. My husband and I had ended up taking our leave and spending the night on the benches inside the railway station, he smoking to stay warm, and I curled against his bulky frame. Maybe it was that unfortunate visit that had persuaded my husband that I was not worthy of his care; he had seemed less interested in me already by the time we climbed aboard for the long train journey home.

And now here I am again, and not simply with a husband who did not have the kinds of graces my mother’s family might have expected but with three children with many needs. It is so much more complicated—marriage, parenthood, family—than children could ever know. Nor should they understand the misgivings, the ruptures, the disappointments that cast their pall over women and men tied irretrievably to each other’s fortunes and loss of prospect. I can only hope that they, my children, make unsanctioned unions like I had with Siri and, perhaps, my mother had with my father, for I have come to know that those are the only kind that allow love to take us by her hand, to visit with us for a while. In a way, now that it is over, now that I have my little girl beside me, I am glad that he is dead. Yes, glad that Siri is dead. For how would I have borne the end of that illusion too?

“Amma,” she says, as if she hears my thoughts, “Akki says they won’t help us!”

“No, I didn’t say they won’t help us, Nangi. I only asked what if they don’t help us,” Loku Duwa says, trying to set everything straight.

I look at each of their questioning, troubled faces, imagine how careworn we will seem to my cousin when we arrive. That is good: people always help the destitute. That is the nature of our people. The last time I went I must have seemed prosperous and conceited to them, with all the gifts my husband and I had brought for them and my gold jewelry that he had forced me to wear over my protests. Jealousy or embarrassment may have played a part in the failure of their grace. Now I have nothing, and, if nothing else, they will want to relish that, keep me close to reassure themselves of my fallen fortunes, to content themselves that they have done better, are better. And I will tolerate that for the sake of my children until I can find employment. I can withstand anything at all if it means I do not have to return to my husband.

“They will help us,” I say to my children. “I just said that we don’t need to take money to them to ask for help. We have our strength and good strong legs and we can walk there, can’t we?”

They murmur their agreement, but I know they are tired. Tired of this journey, weary with the idea of a place of rest that they cannot reach no matter how they try, how far we go. And what if they had seen the dead family? Here I am, I can barely keep all my sorrows in check—those that came before our early morning departure, and those that have happened since: the dead family, the burning train, the departure of the one gentleman who had been kind to me on the train, and the pregnant girl. Oh, to have her with me now. A girl of her age, pregnant or not, someone to bridge the years of innocence that separate me and my children.

“Remember how they said there’s a tea shop down this road? When we get there, we can rest,” I tell them. “We can buy hoppers and hot plain tea and rest our legs.”

“Our good, strong legs,” Chooti Duwa says, giggling, game again for another adventure, this time with crispy hoppers at the end of it.

“Can I have an egg hopper?” Loku Putha asks. He rarely asks for anything. He rarely expresses a preference. I am relieved by the changes in him, the way he has let down his guard, most of the time anyway, how he lets me know that he has desires and that they are simple ones: for chewing gum, a chocolate, egg hoppers, for a sense
of responsibility, and for pride in being able to take care of his mother and sisters as all young boys should.

“You can have two egg hoppers,” I tell him. “Three if you like. A whole stack of egg hoppers.” They all laugh.

Chooti Duwa says, “We’ll tell them to bring only egg hoppers to our table. We’ll say we don’t want any plain hoppers.”

“I want at least one plain hopper to eat with jaggery,” her sister says, tentatively, as if she is afraid that her request might be too mundane to be included in this feast.

“Yes, we must have some plain hoppers with jaggery too,” I say, smiling at her. “That can be our dessert.”

“And plantains,” Loku Putha says, his voice trailing off as he looks down the road.

We all follow his gaze. The road is empty, the car long since gone. Nothing else, no other vehicle moves toward us from either direction. Everything feels quiet. We sigh, contemplating the walk, which feels long despite the promise of the food and drink that wait for us at the tea shop.

“Let’s go,” I say and pick up the heavy bag. “Loku Duwa, could you help me?” She picks up the other handle. It is helpful to have her on the other side of the bag, but not as much as it was when my boy helped me. I am glad that I have one strong child with me, one grown old enough to be useful in that way. The heat scorches the top of my head as we walk. I take the fall of my sari and drape it around my head and the head of my little one, walking right by me. “Hold the other side, Chooti Duwa,” I tell her, “and you will have some shade.” She treats it like a new game; unburdened by bags and age, she is free to be happy. Loku Duwa looks at me, and I see reproach in her eyes. I try to avoid the judgment, but I can’t.

“Loku Putha! Stop and wait a moment!” I call to my son, walking purposefully some distance ahead of us. I open the bag and get his two long-sleeved shirts out. I unbutton them and drape one over my Loku Duwa’s head, tying the sleeves over her brow to keep it in place. I call to my son so I can tie the other on his, but he shakes his head.

“It looks silly,” he yells back at me. “Nangi looks silly with her head bandaged like that!”

I offer it once more, and argue with him for a few minutes, but he does not relent. I put the shirt back in the bag. We start walking again. It seems even hotter after all that effort. We have not gone too far before we hear a boom in the valley below us. It sounds like thunder, but we know it isn’t. Somewhere on that train, there must have been another bomb. Good. I hope those people who judged me realize that the old man was innocent. As innocent as I am of causing things to explode and burn.

W
hen the school bus exploded, the flames a dull gold behind curtains of soot and smoke, Latha had already picked up the girls with the driver. She still went with the driver to pick up the girls. Thara, with her growing list of associations and committees and clubs, appeared to have meetings with somebody or the other every day. Whether she met Ajith or not, Latha was no longer involved; Thara was out and about under her own steam, with a new group of friends in a city full of clubs and bars and malls and restaurants and foreign things and billboards full of blue-eyed people advertising cell phones and
Pantene
shampoo. Yes, Thara didn’t need Latha even to get in touch with Ajith now; in fact she barely needed Latha at all, except on those days when she could not meet him. When that happened, Latha was summoned to rub feet, make telephone calls, squeeze limes. Otherwise, all her time was for the girls.

But now, with the bomb blast so near the school, wedged as it was in the crowded city between the American Center and the Russian Embassy, not to mention the Japanese Consulate, Latha was needed by everybody. By Thara, not to comfort her daughters but to deal with the aftermath of a canceled meeting with Ajith; by Gehan, to ensure that the car came directly from the school to pick him up at work; and, reliably, by the girls, who ran to Latha’s room as soon as they reached home and insisted that they be served lunch there by
the houseboy, not Latha, to whom they clung, hanging on either arm like refusing-to-be-ripened fruit.

Before everything, nobody went into Latha’s room, a converted storeroom really, accessed by the passage between the garage and the kitchen, unless she invited them. The only people she used to invite were the girls, and usually it was to save them from proximity to the quarrels that unfurled without fanfare like tattered flags between their parents. But after that, after the future had been washed out of her body, after those three days of bliss when Thara had bathed her and tended to her as true as any sister at her side, after those days had come and gone as quickly as the city dried up the rains, the fights between Gehan and Thara escalated because of Latha’s inattention to them, and the girls came more and more frequently to her room until it seemed it was a mere extension of their own spaces. And among the furnishings in Latha’s room, what captivated them the most was her collection of sandals and shoes.

Even today, with the terror they had just barely escaped so fresh in their minds, they discussed her acquisitions between the balls of rice and curry that she was feeding them with her own hand, a special treat, often requested and usually denied in the interest of maturing them.

“Why do you have so many shoes?” Madhayanthi asked her again, as if she divined that the answer Latha gave her the first time, because she had the money to buy them, could not be the whole story; she kept repeating this question, clearly hoping for some new bit of information about Latha’s love of footwear.

“Latha hasn’t bought any new ones, Nangi,” Madhavi observed, sitting on the edge of Latha’s bed and watching her sister try on sandals one after another, almost as though she wanted to find one that would fit her nine-year-old feet. “Those won’t fit you,” she added.

Madhavi sat with her legs crossed, like a lady. Eleven now, tall like Gehan and slender, chaste in all her choices, she was, without a doubt, Latha’s favorite. Latha squandered hours on Madhavi’s concerns. If she wanted her special cotton-polyester blend uniform washed and ironed before wearing it a second time, it was done; if she wanted a French braid, Latha was on hand to loop the long,
thick ropes of hair into its complicated twists in time for her to be ready for school; and if she wanted money, which she seemed to with regularity now, Latha gave it to her. The things Madhavi bought filled Latha with girlish happiness, and she loved looking at the treasures that her older girl, which is how Latha considered her, brought home: stickers that puffed up, pink gum she blew into bubbles that exploded on her face, hair ribbons with edging, an autograph book with space on the cover for a photograph.

Latha gave money to Madhayanthi too, but with a less generous heart, and Madhayanthi knew it. It made her jealous, possessive, and sometimes sharp-tongued. Like now: “You don’t need all these shoes, you don’t have anywhere special to go wearing them anyway,” she said.

“I don’t own them because I need them, Chooti Baba, I own them because I like having them. I like buying what I want when I want it. Don’t you like buying what you want when you can with your pocket money that Thāththa gives you?” Latha said, and went to wash her hands and put away their empty plates.

“It’s silly to buy what you don’t need,” Madhayanthi said, as soon as Latha returned, a statement that was laughable coming from a girl who owned more glass baubles and hair ornaments than her entire class of girlfriends combined.

Latha, however, didn’t laugh. She shrugged. She refused to be moved by Madhayanthi’s running commentary on her doings. Instead she smiled at Madhavi and stroked her hair. “Loku Baba, what is happening with the debate tournament?” she asked her.

“We’re winning. Today we won two debates. Tomorrow we will have another one.” She thought a moment, then frowned. “Although, maybe we won’t have school tomorrow because of the bomb and everything. What do you think?”

Latha sighed, concerned more with a small blemish that had appeared on Madhavi’s forehead than with the reality of bombs. She didn’t know, of course, but she also didn’t care very much either way. Bombs went off these days, it seemed, without rhyme or reason, killing people she didn’t know. Yes, she did feel sorry for the living when the dead—a student going to her A/L examination, a father of three,
and so on—were described on the television, but there was something surmountable about bombs and their aftermath. There was something insurmountable about not having family to lose. She stared at the girls and wondered how she would feel if they were lost to her. At first it made no impression on her, that thought, given that they were sitting there, pretty and well-fed, cocooned in her room with its assortment of colorful decorations bought at church fairs and Sunday markets, her simple bedding, her rows of sandals, but then something changed in the air. A picture of an empty room, empty of these two girls. And the pain that rose up within her took Latha by surprise and she cried out to the gods,
Deiyyo!
that it should never come to pass.

“What, Latha? What?” Madhavi asked, concerned. She stood up and put her palms on either side of Latha’s face. Madhayanthi dropped the sandal in her hand and rushed to join her sister and clutch at Latha, looking over her shoulder to see what terrible thing might have lurked behind her.

“Nothing, petiyo, nothing,” she said, holding the girls close to her body, grateful for their soft solidity. “Nothing at all. I thought…I saw…a cockroach…”

Of course, that was enough. The girls screamed and leaped onto her bed, fearful yet laughing, and Gehan came stalking in, uninvited, to see what was going on.

“What’s the matter? What is happening here, Latha?” he asked. He asked the question, but his eyes were glancing around the room, taking it in: the pile of sandals along the wall, where Madhayanthi had made her usual mess, the simple table where Latha had a kerosene
kuppi
lamp, which she liked to light at night. She liked the way it made her room seem mysterious and refugelike, that wavering lamplight, as if hideous crimes were being perpetrated outside, as if she was lying low in a safe house. She liked to read by it, glancing over whatever came her way, usually the children’s textbooks and the ones they borrowed from their friends, comic books like
Tintin,
and
Amar Chitra Katha,
and others by Enid Blyton, books with words that she didn’t fully understand but that she enjoyed sounding out, sometimes with help from Madhavi, words like
Mar-ple, dis-trust-ing, bar-na-cle, sus-pi-cious,
and so on. In fact, there was one open to a page
right now:
Astérix and Cleopatra.
Latha was glad it was there even though she had never read it. Madhavi had borrowed it and had been reading it earlier in the afternoon. Still, it showed that she was no ordinary servant woman, and he should be reminded of that.

She crossed her arms and waited as his eyes rested on the book, then continued their journey, across her walls, hung not with pictures of useless film stars but with watercolor paintings of the hill country that she had saved from a fancy calendar Thara had got from a director of the Tourist Board one Christmas, and that she had paid to have framed behind thin glass, in Wellawatte, passing up new sandals in favor of this preference; her neatly made bed, the corners creased at each visible edge, the woven mat beside it; the Buddha statue and the tray before it, brushed clean and waiting for the evening’s flowers, the incense ready, no dust in sight. Even the open windows were dressed with a bit of bargain lace. She was glad that she had replaced the old mosquito coils with a repaired net over her bed, one of the family ones that Thara had thrown out. Latha had always disliked the reedy, acidic smell of the coil smoke, the way it clogged up her throat and got into her clothes, and at night when she went to sleep, the net draping to the ground from above her head made her feel hot but grand. She hoped he could see that, too, how grand she felt in her own room.

Gehan’s eyes returned to the cause of his intrusion: his daughters. They lingered on the three faces, the younger ones frozen midgiggle, waiting to be chastised, their hands on Latha’s shoulders, balancing, and the older face gazing with such pride and composure at his own.

“Don’t make so much noise…I’m trying to get some work done. Latha…get the children to take a nap; they should rest after all the troubles of this afternoon.”

“Take a nap?” Madhayanthi snorted, after her father was safely out of earshot. “We haven’t taken a nap for five years now!”

“He’s right, you should rest for a little bit,” Latha said, feeling tired now the way she did whenever she had to interact with Gehan, all the unsaid words and unmet needs rising up all over again. “I’ll come and wait with you till you fall asleep.”

“Can we sleep here?” Madhavi asked.

“No, you have to sleep in your own room.”

“But yours is more comfortable,” Madhayanthi whined, flopping down on the neat bed and burrowing into the pillow. “It smells better.”

“Your pillows would smell better too if you washed more often,” Madhavi said and ran out of the room before Madhayanthi could respond, barely missing the pillow that she threw. “You can’t get me!” she yelled.

And they were gone, leaving behind that same odd absence again that Latha knew they would leave permanently someday, now that she had thought about it, had let it enter her consciousness. She neatened up her room, straightening the sandals on their shelf, pulling the sheets tight on her bed. Perhaps she should write to Leela again, she thought. Maybe she would reply this time.

She did write to Leela, but not right away. She wrote because Gehan whipped the houseboy. And the reason that moved her so greatly was that she had taken the girls to Galle Face that evening and thought she had lost them forever. One minute they had been standing beside her, the next they were gone. She had torn around the green looking for them, her insides churning with fear, with grief, but they hadn’t been lost, they had been standing close by, watching a magician performing tricks on a raised stage. She had grabbed their hands and scolded them and then pressed them to her body, dwelling within loss and keeping until her whole being seemed ready to explode.

And right in the wake of that, the whole matter with the houseboy. It wasn’t his fault, really. How could he—who was not sent to school as she had been in the Vithanages’ house, Thara announcing that he was too stupid to benefit from school and saying screw the government, which couldn’t make her send him—how could this boy know the things that children find out only from one another? About how to fly a kite, for instance, or play marbles, like the other boys did. But most of all, how would he know how to watch his step around girls, particularly those who could not, would never belong to him?

Madhavi came of age. It happened in Latha’s room, and without the hysteria that had accompanied her mother’s advent into puberty.

“Latha, I’ve got my period,” she said, and Latha felt a stab of pain in her side, so she laughed and clapped and rubbed their foreheads and noses together and planted breathed-in kisses on Madhavi’s cheeks and pretended to be thrilled.

Madhavi agreed to observe her first period in the traditional way but insisted that her solitary time should be spent in Latha’s room while she was confined to the house. The houseboy, invisible to everybody except when something went wrong, was doing his usual chores, which included sweeping the house and cleaning the family bathroom and kitchen, and, on his way out of the kitchen that Saturday, day three of Madhavi’s confinement, he saw her through the bars on the window in Latha’s room. It was a window that she usually left closed since it offered no vista other than the corridor, but since Madhavi had taken up residence there, she had forced it open, mostly to entertain herself by booing at and scaring her sister when she came by to see her.

And so, in order to banish whatever ill had been ensured for Madhavi’s future because she had been seen by a boy while observing her period of seclusion, the houseboy was whipped by Gehan. His screams were terrible; Latha knew the lashes that fell upon the boy, free to run but too scared to do so, came from some deep, vengeful place in Gehan’s heart, some anger at somebody else, something—at his daughter for growing up, at his wife for her caste, at Latha for setting up a room truly her own, at the way the women in the house twined together, at the way they had space in their world for the houseboy but not for him.

“Stop it!” she screamed at Gehan. “
Deiyyané
mahaththaya, please stop it!”

And she could not be sure whether it was accidental or whether he meant it, for the belt, looping above his head like an airborne reptile, came down on her body. Once, yes, but it was enough. It stopped both her and Gehan, the rage draining from his face, she struck dumb. She turned away and gathered the houseboy to her, where he fell, broken and sobbing, murmuring “Amma, Amma, Amma,”
even though he was an orphan, an orphan who had been brought to them by somebody on some estate somewhere, another anonymous donation to the Vithanage-Perera families, like she had been. A child when he came, a child now, and from that time, her child.