On Sal Mal Lane (15 page)

As a further rebellion, therefore, Suren began to borrow Tony Sansoni’s guitar, Tony being the only one in the Sansoni family who interacted with the children. Tony Sansoni, who couldn’t play the guitar himself, looked forward to lending it whenever Suren asked. Suren’s request and careful return of the instrument elevated the transaction and made Tony feel as though he must have once known how to play it even if he could not remember it now since why else would this musical boy bring the guitar back with such reverence? Over time, he came to see the ridiculousness of holding on to an instrument he did not use, one that someone else clearly loved.

“Why don’t you keep it, Suren,” Tony said one Saturday morning. “I don’t need it today.” He leaned toward Suren, overwhelming him with the scent of Azzaro Pour Homme, a gift Tony had recently received from his boyfriend.

“I can’t play it for the rest of the day anyway, Tony Aiyya,” Suren replied, his schedule now further complicated by his math lessons with the tutor. His words were soft and polite, but, Tony noticed, he continued to hold the guitar in his arms.

Tony rearranged a curl that had crept over one eye. “Then tomorrow. You can play tomorrow when you have time.”

Suren hesitated for a moment. On Sundays he went with his sisters and brother, all of them dressed in white, to the temple for Dhaham Pāsal, and the rest of the day was usually devoted to getting ready for the next week of school. To bring the guitar back would mean risking more of his mother’s interventions, for surely she would trace any new transgressions to his music, and to the guitar in particular, an instrument she found inexplicably crass. He shook his head and laid down the guitar, in its case, on the cane settee in the Sansoni veranda.

His resolve lasted for one more month. Four weeks later, thanks to Tony’s feeling increasingly guilty that the guitar belonged to a no-longer-boy who never played it, and to Suren’s habit of taking longer and longer to refuse to keep it for an extra day and to lay the instrument down on that settee, the guitar went home with him to stay.

“When you have finished playing, you can give it back if you like,” Tony said, understanding that this might be the extra nudge that Suren needed. “But I would really prefer if you kept it. I am going abroad for studies and can’t take it with me anyway.”

Two facts played in Suren’s head and beat in time to his footsteps as he walked back home:
going abroad for study
and
I now have a guitar.

Nihil’s Secret

Kala Niles’s affection for Suren had the effect of softening her aspect; she had taken to wearing pastel-colored flared skirts rather than the severely pleated ones she had always favored, and she had gradually become more generous toward all the children. So much so that even Nihil came to look forward to going to the Nileses’ house for lessons. Just this past Christmas she had allowed all four of the Herath children to help chop dried fruits, small piles of sultanas, dates, and preserves as well as the nuts, and add them to the batter for the Christmas cake she was making. And before that, during Deepavali celebrations, she had agreed to reschedule their lesson for another day so that Nihil and Devi could go over to the Nadesans and help them decorate the entryway in front of their house for the Hindu festival of lights.

“Take these flowers too,” Kala Niles had said, giving Devi a brown paper bag filled with the tiny variety of jasmine that grew at the back of her house, in the kitchen garden. “They will be able to use them for garlands and things.”

Devi had stolen a few flowers, one to tuck into her blue Alice band and some extras to press between the covers of her still-blank exercise books. At the Nadesans’ house they had crouched for hours on the ground next to Mrs. Nadesan and the Tisseras’ son, helping to create the elaborate paisley and swan motifs, carefully outlined with colored rice and filled in with powdered dyes and flower petals. It was slow work, but immensely rewarding for the younger Heraths, who watched the design take shape and marveled at what they were able to create with Mrs. Nadesan’s expert guidance. They whiled away the afternoon as they sipped hot plain tea with ginger, and said yes more than once to handfuls of warm, spicy chickpeas.

“So pretty I wished I could take a picture!” Devi said when Nihil and she went back to Kala Niles to hand over the plate of floury sweets that the Nadesans had sent in thanks.

“Better go home and take a nice body-wash to get all the dyes off your face and hands before Amma gets home,” Kala Niles said good-naturedly, wiping a particularly large stripe of vermilion on Devi’s cheek and getting her own fingers smeared with it in the process.

Yes, Kala Niles had warmed to Suren’s siblings, and this warmth had the unintended effect of not only making Nihil feel more relaxed around her, but making him realize that coaxing words out of her father, Mr. Niles, was neither as onerous nor as unrewarding as he had imagined it might be. Indeed, even though some of the time when Nihil came in, the old man seemed to be in considerable pain and he only turned his head slowly toward Nihil, sighed, and said nothing at all, Nihil still found that the most comfortable place to spend the time between the beginning of Devi’s lesson and the start of his own was beside Mr. Niles. It was a pleasant place to sit, for Mr. Niles’s corner of the partially closed veranda was next to his daughter’s lush rose vines and their bright colors, yellow and red, and their thick untroubled fragrance overwhelmed, for the most part, the appearance and smell of age and decay.

Understanding that rituals were important to Mr. Niles, Nihil observed a routine. He sent Devi in for her lesson with a little push between her shoulder blades, then walked over to Mr. Niles, silently counting the handkerchiefs remaining in the stack on the floor next to the old man. He found this to be a good gauge of Mr. Niles’s degree of discomfort: the fewer the handkerchiefs, the deeper the sighs; on those days he would sit on a chair and read, after Mr. Niles’s breathy acknowledgment of his arrival. Sometimes Mr. Niles would ask him about school, about the world outside, about his parents, but mostly he remained silent.

At last, when the weight of those sighs fell more gently upon him, and after nights of careful consideration, Nihil felt that the time was right to share his keep-for-himself secret. He waited until Mr. Niles had finished his meager contortion toward him before speaking into a silence punctuated by Devi’s jerky F-sharp major scale.

“I can say any word backward,” he said. “I can sing songs, recite poems, write sentences, all backward. Like this. Instead of singing ‘my bonnie lies over the ocean,’ I can sing it like this,
naeco eht revo seil einnob ym.
” He sang the line and smiled at Mr. Niles.

“Good,” Mr. Niles said, though he did not smile. A tear escaped from his eye and he dabbed at it with a worn white handkerchief that had a light gray line running around the borders.

“
Kced gninrub eht no doots yob eht,”
Nihil recited. “‘The boy stood on the burning deck.’”

This time, Mr. Niles smiled. “So you read other things besides those Hardy Boys books you keep appearing with?”

Nihil nodded. “I read poetry,” he said. “Amma makes us all read poetry.” Mr. Niles raised his eyebrows. “What is your favorite poem?” he asked, with some amusement.

“‘O Captain! My Captain!’” Nihil said without a second thought, the rest of the first lines of the poem flooding into his head even as he named the title.

“Whitman,” Mr. Niles said, nodding. “Abraham Lincoln. War.” He rested his eyes on Nihil, who sat attentively before him wondering why his favorite poem rather than his backward recitation had caught Mr. Niles’s imagination. “Celebrations at the end of a war are still marred by the memory of the dead,” Mr. Niles said.

Nihil, whose preoccupations were so close to his heart and to his physical being, Devi uppermost among them, did not understand. He had learned to recite the poem with great feeling, the
aabb, xcxc
of the rhyme scheme clear in his delivery, his
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won
arriving with uplifted voice and bright eyes, his
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills
full of pleading, and his
fallen, cold and dead
uttered with the requisite degree of bitter sorrow. But all of it was learned-art, not felt-art, for none of the realities that the poem spoke of, and that resonated with generations since, were realities Nihil could understand.

Mr. Niles, on the other hand, to whom the newspapers were read each day, who listened to the radio in two languages each day, grew quiet as he contemplated the poem in light of the things he had recently heard. For weeks now, there had been fresh reports of Tension in the North with the assassination of people who were standing up to Prabhakaran. These murders were mentioned alongside references to Tension in the halls of parliament, where the Tamil leaders were caught between two untenable propositions, neither wishing to support the terrorist group led by Prabhakaran nor able to wrest any assurances from the government regarding the particular concessions they demanded for the Tamil citizens whom they represented.

In print and on the airwaves, several dates were mentioned: 1956, 1958, 1977. It was as if these were the only years that counted. What had happened to the things that truly mattered? The New Years, Deepavalis, Vels, Ramazans, and Christmases for which the entire country had come to a halt and lightened everybody’s spirits? Where was the country in which there were purchases of new school books with their fresh and promising scent, a scent that children like Nihil inhaled, breathing deeply, eyes shut as they imagined a new grade, a new teacher, the possibility of shaking off earlier reputations for good or bad? What had happened to the country with its parades and cricket matches and its marriage of church bell and the call to prayer, its soothing chants of
pirith
wrapping around minaret, steeple, and stupa alike? That country seemed to have fallen silent, taking all its traditions with it, for the newspapers and radio mentioned only those dates that referred to episodes of violence and upheaval, when ordinary people became extraordinarily angry, when they wielded machetes, guns, and fire as though murder and arson were the norm and not the exception.

“Yes, war,” Mr. Niles said, “nobody ever wins.” And he said nothing more until it was time for Nihil to take Devi home and return for his own lesson.

A few weeks later when Nihil arrived, however, he was rewarded both with a heartening stack of handkerchiefs—Mr. Niles was clearly doing well—and an immediate greeting.

“So, Nihil, those backward lines,” he began, “you are saying each word backward but also each sentence, am I right? You could then begin the song or the poem with the last word and work back to its start, I suppose?”

“I could,” Nihil said, frowning a little. “I’ve only done lines so far, but I suppose I could do it from the very end. Then I’d have to picture the whole poem in front of me, to see what I’m saying.”

Mr. Niles nodded. “So you see the words as you are speaking or singing?”

“I
have
to see them, otherwise I don’t know how they are spelled. I have to pronounce each letter, which means I have to see each letter.”

“Remarkable,” Mr. Niles said. The middle finger of his left hand drew circles on the red cement floor as he said it again and then again, “Remarkable. Remarkable.”

During a subsequent visit, Mr. Niles handed Nihil two books. “The Twain book was the first I bought with my own money,” he said. “The second one, Harper Lee, that one was sent to me by a friend who left back in 1958 to live in America. I don’t know if there are other copies of it anywhere in this country.”

Nihil sat and examined the books. He had read an abridged version of
Huckleberry Finn
and liked it well enough but not as much as he liked the mysteries he preferred. He thought he might begin with the second,
To Kill a Mockingbird.

“‘The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience,’” Mr. Niles said. “Best sentence I have ever read.”

Nihil held it up to his nose and flipped the pages of the book. The air that brushed his face seemed to be speaking to him with a scent of cinnamon and camphor. He wondered where Mr. Niles had stored the book. He turned to the last page.

“
Gninrom eht ni pu dekaw mej nehw ereht eb d’eh dna,”
he said. “‘And he’d be there when Jem waked up in the morning.’”

Mr. Niles laughed. “Son, you need to learn how to listen to the story as it is told. Start from the beginning, read to the end. That is how you learn the reasons for the way things are.”

Nihil, too, laughed. “I will,” he promised. “I just wanted to show you how I see words sometimes.”

“What else do you see, Nihil?” Mr. Niles asked, looking intently at him.

“Nothing,” Nihil said, putting the books on the floor beside him. “That’s all I can see. Words.” He felt slightly crestfallen that his remarkable skill had been so swiftly set among prior accomplishments and that new work was expected.

“You see other things, son,” Mr. Niles said, squinting at him, “you just don’t call it seeing. You call it knowing, am I right?”

Nihil said nothing. The hesitant notes produced by Devi’s fingers picking out the first notes of a simple allegro filled the silent air, suddenly loud. He wondered if she had improved since the last time, or whether he was simply willing that she had. She should practice more. Maybe he would draw up a time table for them, study time, cricket time, piano practice, all evenly placed between lunch and dinner. Then again, would the studies have to be broken down by subject or just amorphous time? Would Devi do the required work if she was left to her own devices, just a block of time and instructions to
finish homework?
Besides, cricket would soon give way to kites and that could not be controlled by time tables, but by the quality of the winds. And he knew she would want to follow them when he and Suren started flying those kites, tagging along and begging to hold the strings. She would not know how to twist those strings back and forth, and in the end their kite would be stolen by the slum boys who would send their fighter kite to bring it down. All the neighborhood children would blame her and begin to resent her. Better that he keep her home, even if it meant that he, too, would not be able to participate in the flying. That’s okay, he would content himself with helping to build the kites, with making the warm glue in the kitchen with Kamala’s help, with stretching the pieces of tissue across the frames that Suren and Rashmi would make. That should placate her.