A Disobedient Girl (6 page)

“There are no pickpockets here. You can worry about them when we change trains in Colombo. Just go and get the tickets and be quick about it. The train will be here any minute.”

He runs away from me, and I wish I could follow him, just to make
sure that he knows where to go, that he won’t leave me stranded with his two sisters and our bags and nothing left to do but return home. I bite my lower lip and try to find him over the heads of strangers. I want to trust him, to be confident that he can look after himself, that he will come back, but I can’t. He is too young for that. Too young to be sent away for errands like this in such busy places.

“Amma, I like this sari,” my Loku Duwa says, pressing her face into my waist and distracting me. “It’s soft and clean.” Instantly, I forget my son’s youth, consider instead my older daughter’s age: seven, almost eight. I stroke her head and kiss it.

“And yellow and white,” Chooti Duwa adds, joining her sister and rubbing her face on my sari. My little one’s eyes shine with excitement. She has never ridden a train, only counted carriages as they whipped by the shore and practiced balancing on the looping tracks that carried other people to adventures somewhere that required speedy travel. Her sister, too, is smiling.

“Amma, where are we going?” Loku Duwa asks, her fingers caressing the fabric of my sari, judging by my expression that it is safe, now, to ask me such a question.

“We’re going to my mother’s sister’s house in the hills,” I say, proud of the words: my mother’s sister’s house. They sound rooted and safe.

“Where are the hills?” she persists.

“Up-country, where the tea is grown.”

“But you never took us there before,” my little one says, her voice a perfect illustration of the innocence of the question. “How do you know it’s there?”

“Oh, the hills are always there, baba, just like the sea is always there. It’s people who move about.”

“Like us,” she says. She grins at her older sister and takes her hand. “Like us, Akki. We are moving to the hills.”

“We’re visiting,” Loku Duwa says, looking up at me.

I return her gaze. She looks good, my older girl, in her pale yellow dress with the embroidery on the white collar that I had to pay extra to have done. Apart from the money, that had cost me another beating, but it was worth the price: with her hair combed back into
the two plaits I put in and tied up in matching ribbons before we left, she looks clean, from a good family.

“We’re visiting, aren’t we, Amma?” she says.

“No, we’re moving,” I say, taking her chin in my palm, bracing for the reproach in her eyes, for the protests, but they don’t come. Instead she shuffles her feet and tucks a stray hair behind her ear.

“Do you want me to hold the bag?” she asks me at last.

“No, just keep Nangi close to you. I should go and see what Aiyya is doing.”

But I don’t have to. When I turn around, I see him coming toward us, the tickets in hand. Just in time. The train howls around the bend, long and insistent, then comes into view, the smoke spewing from its chimney, the wheels turning slow and slower till it comes to a looming halt with a final belch:
mphghhww…hiss…hiss…

We join the surge of people. My son picks up the baby, and she holds on with arms tight around his neck. I take Loku Duwa’s hand. We are absorbed by the machine, and it leaves the station before we can even find seats, while we are still figuring out how to stand in its juddering belly.

S
he knew why she did it. She did it to
show them.

“What do you need your money for? It’s safer in the bank.” That was what Mrs. Vithanage had said when she’d asked for her money. She had worked it out in her head: after ten years of paid work with them (she didn’t get paid those first two years, when she was four and five and still considered a child, even by Mrs. Vithanage), and with the New Year and Christmas bonuses that she had been told she was given, she should have eleven thousand and seven hundred rupees in the bank.

“I want to buy some sandals, madam,” she said, assuming the position least likely to offend Mrs. Vithanage: looking down at her feet, her hands clasped in front of her.

It was Sunday, and Mrs. Vithanage was sitting on the front veranda, having already read both the weekend papers, the
Silumina
and the
Sunday Observer,
and measured out the rice and dhal and dried spices for Soma so she could get started on cooking lunch. She was waiting for the fishmonger to come with the daily catch. She wore her morning look: authoritative yet calm, the weight of household matters heavy on her mind, but more than equal to the task.

“Are your slippers broken?” she asked, glancing at Latha, then turning away.

“No.” But they were old and her feet were too big for them, and in any case, it wasn’t about what she had but about what she wanted
and should be allowed to buy with her own money! Besides, hadn’t she waited for a whole year and a half until Thara’s latest heeled sandals, with the looped clasps on the sides, had long been discarded, for there to be no chance of Mrs. Vithanage mistaking her request for a claim to equality? Even for those kinds of sandals to be out of style? Well, all right, she did have her eye on the ones that were in style now, but still.

“Then don’t waste your money.” Mrs. Vithanage even sounded motherly, the tone she used on Thara when she wanted unreasonable things.

Latha continued to stand, wondering if perhaps Thara could be enlisted on her behalf. Probably not; Thara barely had time for her these days, with the O/L exams looming on her horizon. She saw Ajith with her school friends now, at cricket matches and rugger matches and parties that started at 10:00
PM
where they served something called punch and for which Thara left and from which she returned in good-girl dresses but to which she actually wore short red skirts and tight black tops that showed off her new breasts; all of which Latha had heard about from the otherwise-faithful driver whose sworn-to-secrecy lips could be so easily undone by her presence and conversation as he reveled in being able to give her something she truly wanted: knowledge of that after-hours world.

Frankly, Latha was tired of yearning for the things she felt should be hers, like the soap she still helped herself to, or the teaspoons of mango jam she hid on her tongue, scooped as she carried the bottle from the fridge to the breakfast table, or the milk powder she stole for her tea. She hated plain tea. She hated plain anything! And why shouldn’t she? She reasoned that she had acquired tastes, and with those tastes, longings, particularly for the things that were paraded so relentlessly before her day after day on the body of her friend, Thara, the most difficult to resist being shoes. Everything else she could, by careful dressing, by pinning and tucking of hand-me-downs, contrive to present as her own, made-especially-for-her attire. But real brand-new footwear was different: it was what set the blessed apart from the unspared. Her own feet, no matter how clean, how fragranced with
Lux,
how softened with cooking oil and polished with the stone
she kept for that purpose by the well, were no match for the feet that came clad in new shoes. It didn’t matter that nobody else seemed to notice. What was important was that she did.
She
always looked at feet when she walked;
she
knew how to tell character from the way people presented their feet, wealth from the cut of their shoes.

Besides, she didn’t want to go back to the cobbler who lived his life, it seemed, crouched into a corner between the
People’s Bank
and the
General Photo
place with its glass windows full of black-and-white photographs of radiant brides. How could she? The last time she went there, her old slippers in hand, asking him to paste the sole back again, he had looked sorry for her. He had called her duwa and tried to give her some coins for sweets. Yes, she had gone to him all her life, year after year, holding one old discarded slipper or another, asking for a stitch here, a bit of gum there, a clasp maybe. They were almost friends. But no matter how kind he had always been to her, how amused she had been by his mouth with its few teeth and more betel juice, to think that a man like that, all hunched and as leathery as his wares, his tiny old backside planted in a bundle of cloth, who charged people cents—cents!—to fix their footwear, would pity her? It was too much. No, she would not go back there. From now on, she would buy her own shoes. Brand-new. In style. Today. But how?

Mr. Vithanage came into the room just as she was about to give up hope that the sandal war could be waged and won right then. He had developed some kind of chronic back pain, which, instead of making him curmudgeonly, had only made him kinder; it was as though he believed that meeting the injustice the world had dealt him with an excess of goodwill would somehow relieve him of his pain. Now he eased himself into the chair on the other side of the floor-to-ceiling doors that Latha had to open and dust each morning before leaving for school, the doors to the sitting room that was surrounded by the wraparound veranda. They looked like benign sentries: Mrs. Vithanage in her pastel yellow cotton sari, Mr. Vithanage in his worn brown sarong and white shirt. Odd how his clothes always looked old even when they were brand-new. He was the kind of person who had been born looking old and largely unthreatening.

Latha picked up the Sunday newspaper and gave it to him, her
left palm holding the wrist of her right hand to signify the correct amount of decorous deference.

“I would like to buy some sandals, sir,” she said, desperate enough to risk raising her eyes to Mr. Vithanage.

“Will you stop talking about the sandals? Didn’t I just tell you there was no need for sandals? What is the matter with you?” Mrs. Vithanage rarely had to raise her voice to reprimand any of her servants; the tilt of her head and the slant of her eyes were quite sufficient to achieve the desired effect. But this time, the first time, really, she was loud. She sounded a little bit like Thara did when things did not go her way.

“Let the girl have sandals. What’s wrong with that?” Mr. Vithanage said, but it was hopeless. He said it so mildly, disinterestedly.

“Go and tell Soma to make tea for the master,” Mrs. Vithanage said, and that was that. There were no possible openings for further requests. And the very fact that she continued talking, that she knew Latha could hear her, effectively ended the argument.

“I manage the servants, and that one needs to be reined in,” Latha heard her say. “All this government nonsense about sending servants to school, that’s what has ruined her. It’s time for that to stop. Ten years of reading and writing is good enough for her. I mean, what is this house? An orphanage? No, when this year is over, I’m going to take her out of school. She’s getting too old for that anyway. Before long some betel seller will knock her up on her way there. Much better for me to pull her out of that place now so she can start learning how to cook and clean and get ready to be a proper servant.”

And that was what made her do it. Be a proper servant indeed. Her math was better than Thara’s, her social studies and science were better than Thara’s too, and she didn’t even get extra tuition like Thara did. Even her handwriting, curving with perfect
ispili
and
pāpili,
was better than Thara’s. In fact, the only things Thara had that were better than Latha’s were her clothes and her fancy boyfriend. And even Thara’s fancy boyfriend looked at her, Latha, in
that
way. Proper servant? Ha!

It took her a while to figure out how best to go about getting her
revenge, but when she did, Latha knew her plan was foolproof. Ajith came because she sent a message through Gehan: Thara wanted to meet him urgently; would he come to the back gate around 9:30 that night? A one-line plea signifying all manner of possibilities, some more dire than others.

Latha leaned on the gatepost as she waited, knowing—the way fifteen-year-old girls know these things, even those who have never had the need to put their theories to the test because there were always enough men in their worlds to let them know in subtle and not so subtle ways that they
would
be proved right if they
did
have the chance to do it—that this would be easy. And it was. All she had to do was wait for him to come, to be alone with her for a while, to be forced to make small talk with her while he waited, for their talk to be necessarily quiet, and therefore intimate, for the proximity born of that and the darkness that enveloped them to override the social norms that worked only in the dread light of day, and eventually no longer even then.

It was easy to make him forget who she was, or why it was that he had come. And so much easier than even she could have imagined for her to forget who he was and why she had wanted this, and whether it was worth the pain the first time or the longing and heartache all the other nights of that year or the fact that her days had turned into miserable drudgery now that she was not allowed to go to school, that she could not see Gehan or even get word to him to come and see her, that she had to steal Thara’s textbooks and read them in secret to stop herself from losing her mind, and that at the end of it all she still did not have new sandals. The only thing that she told herself mattered was this: she became an addiction for Ajith, which meant that Thara had no boyfriend and that she wilted and waned until her B pluses turned into Cs and then into Fs and she failed her O/L exams. And Mrs. Vithanage was crushed by that.

Yes, Latha had her revenge, and she enjoyed it and held on to it for as long as she could, even afterward. After the driver found out and she had to keep him quiet, her body still and soundless as he groped her and ogled her with derision as she went about her day and there was nothing she could say to stop him; she had given that right away for a pair of shoes that she could not have.

After Soma found out and stopped talking to her, but only after she called her
vesi,
and Latha didn’t know what that word meant but she knew she deserved it, the way Soma said it.

And after Gehan found out because Ajith told him.

“Gehan wasn’t happy about this for some reason,” he whispered to her one night, and she felt her desire fly up into the mango trees and hang there out of reach and she had to pretend the whole rest of the way, with soft, seemingly heartfelt moans, that nothing was wrong. But why should it have mattered? Because Gehan had never said he loved her, and he had never promised her anything. All he had ever said was that she was beautiful, unlike Thara, who was only pretty because of her good fortune. And he hadn’t had to talk about her body or her hair or any one part of her; she had known what he meant. It was the difference she had always seen when she and Thara stood side by side, pushing against each other for a fuller look in Mrs. Vithanage’s oval mirror, which tipped upward and made them seem taller: a girl of privilege could never possess the deep longings that just ripened Latha’s own looks into a luminous, irresistible heat.

And even though she knew that nothing about her appearance had changed, that those longings were still there, still coursing through her blood and making her more desirable than Thara could ever be, even to this boy, Ajith, for whom she was his first love, knowing in that instant that she had lost Gehan’s regard pained her from within in ways that made her no longer a child but an adult. And all the nights after with Ajith could not erase the loneliness of her walks to the small shops outside the gate for one thing or another, remembering him and feeling the lack; no bicycle beside, no teasing voice to make her feel like a girl with no chores.

And after that until the end, there was no relief from being a girl with chores that she wasn’t being paid for, a girl with no new sandals, and a friend who wasn’t a friend but a mistress, and a family that wasn’t a family but people who owned her and ordered her about, and nothing at all but her pretty breasts and her round bottom and her misbehaving hair to help her feel any different.

Nothing and nobody could change the way things were going to be. The only person who had advocated on her behalf had been the
school principal, who had walked up the driveway early one morning and asked to see Mr. Vithanage, who had already left for work, and so got Mrs. Vithanage instead.

“It’s against the law to keep a child under bondage like this, without sending her to school,” he had said. “Against the law!”

“Until grade eight,” she had said, and refused to listen to any further arguments or chastisements, and laughed when he had compared Latha with her own daughter and asked Mrs. Vithanage if she wasn’t ashamed to send a child of hers of the same age to school while depriving another, and a smart one at that, a chance to finish her education. Instead, Mrs. Vithanage had called out to Latha, herself, to bring her principal a cup of tea.

He had not drunk it. “You keep reading your textbooks,” he had told Latha, pushing the cup of tea away. “You are an intelligent child, and you should not forget that. You are too good to be working for people like this. Do well in life. Somehow, do well in life.” And then, he had left.

The sisters at the convent weren’t unkind. They had seen everything before, heard everything before. They asked no questions of Mr. Vithanage, simply filled out columns of information in a thick binder with fine yellow paper edged in red. Her name, her age, her height, her weight, Mr. Vithanage’s address, and her medical history, which was mentioned and written down as being “clean,” in clear, flowing blue script, all of it pouring onto the page along the space allocated for Entry No. 1193. After he left and they settled her in, they taught her to pray, kneeling and standing, morning, noon, and night. She had tasks but not too many, just enough to be useful but not enough to be harmful to her. It was like a holiday. At first, they took her for walks in the convent gardens, to see and smell roses again. But the scent of real roses made her feel ill and the walks tired her out, so they gave up on that and taught her to sew instead.