Cinnamon Gardens (27 page)

Her unhappiness had been observed by both Mary Sisler and her cook. They tried in their different ways to remedy it. The cook would approach her each morning and, under the guise of narrating his life history, describe all the delicious meals he had prepared for the various masters and mistresses he had worked for. Annalukshmi, finally taking pity on him, would ask a question about a particular meal, knowing that she would be sure to find it waiting for her at the table. Mary Sisler, a kind but rather shy woman, had her own remedy. Every evening, she would insist that Annalukshmi sit in the drawing room with her husband and her and listen to their Gilbert and Sullivan records. “Nothing like a jolly old tune in the evening,” she would say at the end of every record, and Annalukshmi would nod in agreement.

Annalukshmi eagerly awaited Miss Lawton and Nancy’s arrival. From Friday afternoon, she went to the top of the driveway every hour or so and scanned the road to see if a taxi was approaching, hoping that, somehow, they had left Colombo earlier.

As it happened, Annalukshmi missed them when they finally came, having gone into the house briefly. But when she heard a car door slam, she hurried through the drawing room and out to the front. Miss Lawton and Nancy were at the centre of a flurry of activity as the various houseservants handled their luggage, supervised by Mary Sisler. When Miss Lawton and Nancy saw Annalukshmi, they both cried out. Miss Lawton hurried to her and grasped her hands. “Anna, dear Anna, there has been a very, very strange development in Colombo.”

Miss Lawton put her arm around Annalukshmi’s shoulders. She led her inside to the drawing room and made her sit down in a chair. Then she silently handed her a letter. “I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “I took the liberty of reading it in case there was an emergency that required your return.”

Annalukshmi opened the letter and recognized Kumudini’s writing.

When Annalukshmi finished the letter, questions crowded her mind. One thought, however, dominated. She had to return home. She turned to Miss Lawton. “I must go back,” she said.

Miss Lawton nodded to say that she had expected she would. “A train leaves from Nanu Oya early tomorrow morning,” she said. “I have already asked Mr. Jayaweera to meet you at the Fort station with a taxi.”

Nancy offered to accompany Annalukshmi; Miss Lawton, at Mary Sisler’s insistence, would stay the balance of the weekend.

On the train back to Colombo, Annalukshmi still felt stunned by the contents of Kumudini’s letter, and by her sister’s astonishing decision.

“I don’t understand it at all,” she said at one point. “I fear that Kumudini’s desire to marry Muttiah comes out of desperation.” She told Nancy now about the failure of the Nesiah proposal.

“I’m not disagreeing that she might feel desperate,” Nancy said, “but on the other hand you can’t ignore the possibility that she might actually like him.”

Annalukshmi looked out at the green hills of the tea plantations. “I hope she knows what she’s getting into,” she said. “My mother has had such misery in her marriage because of religious differences.” She turned to Nancy. “It was because of those differences and the trouble it caused that we finally came back to Ceylon.”

Nancy nodded for her to go on.

“My father and I … at one time, were devoted to each other. People used to say they were sorry for him because he didn’t have a son. But my father said he did not care at all about it, that I was better than a son. He took me with him to the rubber estate, instructed me how to do the accounts, showed me how rubber was made. He even taught me to swim in the river that ran through our estate. He told me that, because there was no son in the family, he was training me to do the job, so that, when he was gone, I would be in charge. Then my Aunt Parvathy arrived in Malaya.”

Annalukshmi was silent, thinking back to that time. “She brought with her the news that my grandfather had died. This changed my father. He became filled with remorse that he and his father had never reconciled, that he had not been there to do the most important task a son does for his father – light his funeral pyre. I think he began to regret his conversion to Christianity, his marriage to a Christian. My parents had a stormy marriage, always yelling at each other, but it was clear that underneath they loved each other. Now he began to treat my mother with the politeness one uses on strangers. I felt so sad for him because I could tell he was miserable, so I tried to be more affectionate, to
do the little things he loved like massage his head with coconut oil. But he slowly began to change towards me too.

“A few weeks after my aunt arrived, he took us to visit her for the first time. We were sent to the back room where the other women were. Of course, in our house we sat wherever we wanted, so, after some time, without even thinking, I went into the front room to ask him a question. When I walked in, all the men became silent. My father looked away from me as if I had shamed him. On the way home that day he rebuked me. He told me I was uncouth, that he wanted me to learn from my aunt how to behave like a proper Jaffna Tamil woman. When he went to the estate the next time, he took my cousin Muttiah instead. I came back from school to find out that he had gone, without telling me.

“A few weeks later, my mother sent me to the shop to buy some rice for her. On my way back I took a shortcut that led past the local Hindu temple. I couldn’t believe what I saw. Among the devotees leaving the temple, there was my father. He was furtively wiping the holy ash from his forehead so we wouldn’t see it when he came home. It was at that moment that he looked up and saw me. He turned quickly and walked in the other direction, as if he hadn’t seen me. It was then that I truly knew that the foundation of my parents’ marriage was breaking. From then onwards, my father and I were locked together in this deception. An uneasy silence had fallen between us. Whenever he would try to approach me, to talk to me, ask me to do some chore, I held myself stiffly back. One day, he began to scold me because it was my turn to sweep the drawing room and I had forgotten. I let him go on for a while and then I said very quietly, ‘Don’t try to pretend we didn’t see each other. At least have the decency to respect my intelligence.’ Then he went mad. He grabbed me by
the hair and began to hit me on my face and hands and shoulders. If my mother had not come in and stopped it, he might have seriously hurt me. When he finally let me go, my mother said to him, ‘This is enough. I will not let our unhappiness affect the girls.’ A few months later, we came to Ceylon.”

By now the train had pulled into a station. Both of them watched the activity on the platform, Annalukshmi thinking about that difficult time in Malaya, Nancy considering what her friend had told her.

Once the train was moving again, Annalukshmi turned to Nancy. “I’ve never talked about this to anyone before.”

“I, too, have things in my life that I keep hidden from others,” Nancy said. “I have never told you the real story about my own family.

“My parents did not die of cholera. In fact, they didn’t die of anything.” She looked down at her hands. “They were murdered.”

Annalukshmi drew in her breath, aghast.

“During the 1915 riots between the Muslims and Sinhalese.”

“I … I don’t know much about it. We were in Malaya then.”

“I was a girl at the time, thirteen years old. A rumour came to our village that Muslims had murdered a Buddhist monk and hanged him from a tree. Of course this was not so at all, as I was to learn later. There had simply been some disagreement between Muslims and Sinhala Buddhists about parades and playing music in front of each other’s places of worship. There was only one Muslim family in our village and they owned the village shop. A group of thugs attacked the shop that night, they looted the goods, then burned it down once they had locked the family inside. It was so terrible. It still comes back to me from time to time, the faces of that family in the window, their
cries begging us villagers to unbar the door. But nobody did. The thugs were employed by the village headman who wanted to start up a shop of his own.

“Our village had just one Muslim family. In others there were many and in the towns whole sections were Muslim. So you can only imagine the carnage. The British, however, misinterpreted the whole thing as being an anti-colonial protest. So they armed British planters with guns and told them to go into the villages and shoot on sight. One night they came to our village.

“We were awakened by the sound of shouting and then there were shots. My mother immediately pushed me into a large wooden chest that was in our hut and shut the lid. From there I heard it all,” Nancy’s voice shook. “The harsh command of the planter, his servants dragging my parents from the house. Then there was silence and that was followed by gunfire. I don’t know how long I stayed there. I think I fainted at one point, for when the villagers who had survived came to get me, the dawn was already breaking.”

Annalukshmi placed her hand on her friend’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Nancy. You should have told me before. Does Miss Lawton even know?”

“Oh, yes,” Nancy said after a moment. “The planter who killed my parents was someone she knew. He felt remorseful, I suppose, and asked her to adopt me. I was always told by Miss Lawton that when people asked me about my parents, in order not to upset myself, or them, it was best to say that they had died of cholera. Why stir up a hornet’s nest, etc. As a young girl, I accepted that Miss Lawton was right. Over the years, I admit I have felt resentful about the lie she asked me to tell.”

Annalukshmi shook her head, amazed by what her friend was telling her.

Nancy smiled ruefully. “It’s the British way. I suppose when you think you have the right to rule half the world for its own good, it’s hard to admit that you are capable of making mistakes, that you are sorry and in need of forgiveness.” She turned to Annalukshmi. “Whatever the circumstances, it was an act of benevolence on Miss Lawton’s part. I don’t want you thinking horribly of her, turning on her or something like that. She has loved me almost as she would a daughter. She has never made me feel like an object of charity or a burden. And just think of how my life would have been otherwise. Some poor girl in an orphanage, or sent off to work as a servant in some house.”