A Disobedient Girl (3 page)

L
atha!”

“Enava,
madam!” She always had to yell just as hard as Mrs. Vithanage in order to be heard, and she was still working on finding a way to infuse reverence into her screams. Mrs. Vithanage was becoming testy with her.

“This girl is always somewhere else. She used to hover next to me like a cat. Now I never know where she is. Latha!
Mehe vareng!”

Latha cringed. She hated it when Mrs. Vithanage used the derogatory conjugation of verbs on her, the
vareng, palayang, geneng
that was the lot of laborers. She stopped running and began to walk. If she was going to be insulted, she was going to deserve it. Let her wait. Latha passed the driver, who stood by the family car, a sedate black
Peugeot
with white, plastic-covered interior that had arrived in the country in a fleet that had been imported by the government seven years earlier for something called the Non-Aligned Conference; she had learned about that at school because it was one of her principal’s favorite topics, the conference, not the cars, which latter he had condemned bitterly. All day the driver loitered there, next to that car, even though he knew exactly when he was needed and even though that schedule never changed: take Thara to school at 7:00
AM
, take Mr. Vithanage to the Ministry—whatever that was—at 8:30
AM
, bring Mr. Vithanage home for lunch at 12:30
PM
and return him to the Ministry after, and bring Thara home from school
at 1:30
PM
; on Tuesdays, take Thara to elocution lessons (where she had learned, and subsequently taught Latha to recite parts of
“The Lake Isle of Innisfree”
and
“The Song of Hiawatha”
and
“The Highwayman,”
which last was her, Latha’s, favorite, what with the maiden and all) at 3:00
PM
; on Wednesdays, pick up and drop off the piano teacher at 4:00
PM
and 5:00
PM
respectively; on Fridays, take lunch for Thara at school and wait until she finished swimming lessons to bring her back, smelling of chlorine, ravenous; and every day, bring Mr. Vithanage home at 5:30
PM
. Thursday mornings he took Mrs. Vithanage to the market, with her hair in a bun.

“Latha?” the driver said as she passed, a greeting and an acknowledgment of her existence.

She stopped. “What?”

“No…nothing. Why in such a bad mood?” He snapped a green twig from a bush of poinsettia (there were poinsettias all along the driveway, and personally, she thought they were ugly: pale, undecided colors and too much foliage) and began to pick at his teeth, sucking bits of lunch out from behind his jaws. Disgusting. He wasn’t bad-looking despite the fact that he was short, and the dark skin, but
chih
, what terrible manners. “Too much work?” he asked her, after a particularly robust, and clearly productive, suck.

She scowled. Why he insisted on talking to her as if she were an equal she had no idea. Didn’t he notice that she sat in the backseat with Thara when she accompanied her on occasion? Not next to him, like the gardener did?

“I don’t know why you suck your teeth like that. It’s such an ugly habit.”

The driver snorted. “Madam is in for trouble with you, isn’t she? Sending you to school and all that. You better watch your attitude. Soon…”

Mr. Vithanage came onto the veranda, dabbing at the perspiration on his face with a creased brown and white checked handkerchief. She had washed and ironed it just yesterday. Washing. She hated having to do the washing, but since Mrs. Vithanage’s row with Soma, the old servant, Latha was the only one left. She wished Soma would come back. In her absence Latha had become the cook, cleaner, and
laundress, and while she didn’t mind the ironing, she detested the washing. It made her hands sore. It made her back ache. Most of all, she had no time to pick flowers with Thara, which meant…

“Latha! Child, can’t you hear madam calling you? What are you doing standing here? Go and see what she wants.” Mr. Vithanage gestured vaguely into the house, shook his head, and stepped down to the portico.

The driver held the back car door open for him and then shut it. He leaped up the steps, picked up Mr. Vithanage’s briefcase from the cane chair between the mahogany pedestal table and the matching urn with its arrangement of fake ferns the likes of which Latha had never seen in nature, and deposited it with great respect on the front seat. He got in on his side, stroked the steering wheel three times, and brought his hands together in worship. He touched the picture of the Buddha that he had cut out of a Vesak greeting card and hung from the rearview mirror with a bit of black cord, then started the car. He caught Latha’s eye and held her gaze as he drove slowly down the curving driveway. Latha rearranged her body, pulling it up to its fullest height, and shouted, this time with more deference.

“Madam, I’m here. I’m coming.”

Well, it couldn’t last, could it? She should have known it. One day they were picking flowers and eating ice palams out of green and white striped pyramid-shaped boxes, pushing the sweet bars out with their fingers on the one side, groping for them on the other with their wet tongues—she, Thara, the Boy, and Gehan—and the next it was done. They were all ready to go when it happened.

“Thara! Latha! Come back in here. Where are you going?” Mrs. Vithanage was standing at the top of the steps on the veranda, her arms crossed. She was wearing one of her hand-loomed cotton saris with
Guippio
lace edging on her blouse. A bad sign. She was most virulently Radala bearing when she wore
Guippio
lace. Latha did not know where it came from, that lace. It was stronger than the local kind, though if she had to choose, she’d pick the latter because of the way it felt against her skin, soft and imperfect, like the work of human hands.

“To pick flowers, Amma,” Thara said, her voice all girl and honey. Latha stifled her giggle.

Mrs. Vithanage frowned. “You’re too old to do that. You don’t need to go picking flowers anymore. Let the gardener do it.”

“Amma! The gardener doesn’t know how to do it. We know all the houses, and they know us!”

“Exactly. You have become common in this area. Soon they’ll be talking about you like they
really
know you. Yes, no more picking flowers. Get back inside and practice the piano.” Practicing the piano was Mrs. Vithanage’s idea of a solid punishment, which made Latha wonder if she was actually invested in Thara’s acquiring skill in playing the instrument or if all the piano lessons were merely serving some lesser role, as an excuse for Mrs. Vithanage to keep her daughter from other, more desirable, activities. This sort of banishment to the piano was becoming far too frequent to do Thara any good, since she went to it only in anger and banged furiously at the keys with no thought to the pieces she was playing.

“Latha, you go to the kitchen,” Mrs. Vithanage continued. “I will tell the gardener to get the flowers from now on.”

Mrs. Vithanage stared into the distance over their heads, down the driveway, past the garden, beyond the gate that was wheeled into the wall and wheeled back shut by the driver each time the car passed through. She could probably see the future too, Latha thought, with that amount of focus. She squinted her own eyes and tried to copy the look: seeing but not seeing, here but actually there.

“Amma!” Thara’s voice broke Latha’s concentration.

“Kollo!”
Mrs. Vithanage’s voice was strident, summoning the gardener. An end-of-discussion voice. Latha flinched.

The gardener came running from behind the poinsettias, his hedge clippers in hand. What had he been clipping? Latha was sure the gardener did nothing most of the time. He just carried his tools around, wheeling his barrow here and there as if he were engaged in something. It was always empty. Didn’t anybody notice that it was always empty? Mrs. Vithanage assigned him the task as Latha and Thara listened, their heads cast down in perfect imitation of each other, their long braids—these days Mrs. Vithanage insisted that
Thara braid her hair too—hanging to the same length down their backs. Thara had new white sandals with heels. The heels clacked when she walked. Latha didn’t like the sound of the clacking, only the height that the heels gave Thara, who now appeared older and more ladylike. She curled her toes in her own slippers. Maybe she could ask Mrs. Vithanage to buy some sandals for her with her pay. Better still, maybe she could ask Mrs. Vithanage to give her the money directly, instead of depositing it in the bank every month.

“Latha! Stop daydreaming! What are we going to do?”

Latha looked up. Mrs. Vithanage and the gardener had disappeared. Thara looked miserable.

“I don’t know what to do. We’ll let him pick the flowers, I suppose.” Latha’s mind was still on the white sandals as she looked—up, for now—at Thara’s face.

“Not the flowers, you fool! How will I see Ajith?”

“Maybe he can come here,” Latha said thoughtfully, crossing her arms in front of her. She was sure she didn’t strike quite the same pose as Mrs. Vithanage. She needed a bigger bosom for that. Her arms slipped down to her waist.

“When? Amma is always here.”

“Yes, but she’s not in the garden, is she? They can come to the back gate, and we can hide behind the garage and talk.” The plurals had slipped out, but Thara hadn’t noticed. She never seemed to notice.

“But what about the driver?” Thara stood in front of her and jiggled up and down in anxiety. She looked older than Latha right then, her smooth brown skin creased around her mouth and eyes, the eyes full of worry, pleading for help.

“He won’t tell,” Latha said, feeling secure all of a sudden about the driver’s allegiance.

“How do you know?” Thara grabbed Latha’s arms and undid them, holding on.

“I don’t know how I know, but I don’t think he will tell.”

“Amma will kill me if she finds out.”

“I thought you said he was the right kind of boy. Won’t she be glad that you found him by yourself?” Latha smiled.

Thara hit her playfully on her arm, then squeezed her. Latha grinned.

The next day, Thara rewarded her further with a strip of glittery gold paper from a roll, about three feet long, for which she had traded three felt pens, including red, in school. The paper rustled and glittered in their hands, and the very best part of it was that, when they rubbed it against their bodies, the gold shimmer came off on their skin and lips. Then, when they took orange star toffees and sucked on them until they were all sticky and put that on their mouths, it looked like they had lip gloss on! Fair’s fair, and Latha set about assisting Thara in her quest for privacy with renewed resolve. For a time, between the fake lipstick and the constant scheming required to avoid Mrs. Vithanage, both of them were either blissfully happy or inconsolably miserable. In short, they were in heaven.

But, of course, that spell had to be followed by the biggest change of all, and after that,
everything
was different: Thara attained age.

For months, it seemed, Thara had talked of nothing else but how many girls in her school were wearing bras.

“We call them holes so the nuns don’t know,” she confided to Latha, sitting on the well and swinging her legs as Latha squatted beside her and scrubbed the clothes with a wedge of hard white
Sunlight
soap she had hacked off a long bar, peeling the yellow wrapper back so she left the rest unblemished. She didn’t like
Sunlight
soap. It never washed things properly. She had seen something called
Sunflakes
in the stores, bright blue packets with pictures of basins full of suds, hanging down the sides of the shops from black ropes. The shopkeepers had told her that they made washing clothes easier; you just had to put a little bit into a big tub and shake the water, they said. But when Latha told Mrs. Vithanage, she had scoffed and refused to buy them.
We do things the old way in this house
is what she had said, and Latha had felt particularly outraged at the use of the
we
in that sentence, given that it was only she who did the washing. This was why she had taken to bringing a knife down to the well and making flakes out of the bars, not caring that it would be considered wasteful by Mrs. Vithanage, and rejoicing in the fact that indeed it did make it easier to wash the clothes, so long as she used the hard soap after the first soak.

“Latha! Listen to me instead of staring at those stupid clothes! We call them holes because you can’t see the bra but you can see the little hole-shaped imprint on the back of the uniform where the straps come down.”

Latha bunched the pile of white, box-pleated, sleeveless uniforms she was washing and beat them repeatedly on the flat stone put there for that purpose. She imagined bras inside them. She disentangled one of Mrs. Vithanage’s enormous bras from a soapy pile of underwear and put it underneath a uniform, then held it up. “Like this?”

“Yes! Exactly like that!” They both laughed. “And we know that she has got her period because that’s when you get the bra. First, the girl is gone for seven days from school, then when she comes back she has all new clothes. New uniform, new shoes, new ribbon in her hair, and”—she paused for effect—“the bra.”

Latha considered this information, thinking about how everything in her school was different from Thara’s, beginning with the gravel path, instead of paved asphalt, that led to it, and ending with this latest bit of information about seven-day absences on account of a first period. She had visited Thara’s school once to pick her up after a sports meet, and Thara had walked her around the spacious grounds: the auditorium, with its dressing rooms and black curtains on either side of a curving stage for entrances and exits; the chapel, full of quiet and cool, its courtyard flooded with the voices of an after-school choir practice singing harmoniously in English about a river called the Blue Danube; even the administrative building, where the principal sat and made announcements over a sound system fed into every single classroom filled only with girls from good or rich families. Latha’s school had none of that, wedged as it was behind storefronts and facing the back of a church. She learned everything in one classroom, and intervals were spent standing around chatting with other students or writing notes to be given to Gehan. Nobody had lunch boxes or drink bottles. Every once in a while some girl or boy would bring in a rupee or two and buy bright pink pori from the barefooted street boys who loitered at the entrance to the school, but that was the extent of it.