On Sal Mal Lane (18 page)

“Let us see if you only know.”

“Then what?”

“Then I suppose we can be extra careful of her.”

Nihil lay down on his own bed, arms under his head, and considered this option. It seemed wise, after all, to wait until things were more certain. She had been doing fairly well these past few months, and except for the possible stitches, there was nothing to worry about. The principal, well, that was ordinary stuff, the kind of thing all of them had suffered, with the exception of Rashmi; she never transgressed.

The stitches, however, qualified as The Accident when it happened.

“Fifty-two, fifty-three, fifty-four, fifty-five!” Rose yelled as she passed the plank of wood from one hand to another, behind, then in front of her body. Suren threw the ball underarm and she hit it down the road, the most desirable location for a hit since the natural incline made the ball gather speed as it went, taking the corner at a regular pace then ricocheting off Old Mrs. Joseph’s gate and careening away as though possessed. Nihil chased after the ball. Up ahead of him, Sonna was standing in his usual place, leaning against the side of his front door, his arms crossed in front, balancing his weight on one leg, the other braced behind him on the door frame, watching their game.

“Got to pump the arms. Make you run faster!” he called to Nihil. “Go! Go!”

Nihil tucked his lip in, pumped his arms, and speeded up, wondering if the others would let Sonna join their games. He picked up the ball and turned to throw it. “Maybe you can join us when we play cricket,” he shouted over his shoulder to Sonna.

Sonna pushed himself off the door and began to walk toward Nihil. “I use’ to play . . .” he began, but Nihil did not hear the rest for there was a commotion up the road where Rose had been calling out her runs and where now everybody was gathering in a clump around Devi, including a very agitated Raju.

Mohan called down the road to Nihil and beckoned him over with his arm. “Devi has cracked her nut!”

Cracked her nut. Those were the words that he used. As if Devi were to blame for it. Nihil ran back, knowing, knowing, that she would need those stitches, that forever and ever there would be a raised ridge on the back of her head, that his younger sister would become a timid player at these kinds of outdoor team games, more and more so until she gave them up altogether and took to something else, something that would involve only her own body, only the things she could control. Like dancing, or riding a bicycle, or running.

If Sonna followed, and he did, part of the way, Nihil did not notice. By the time Nihil reached her, Devi was crying, but not as much as she would have if she could see the quantity of blood that was seeping down along her thick but boy-short hair and turning the white dots on the back of her dress completely red. Their parents were not home, and so Nihil ran to Mr. Niles and begged for help.

“I can’t drive anymore, son,” Mr. Niles said, speaking quickly. “Go and ask Jimmy Bolling to come and take my car. The keys are on top of the fridge. Go!”

It was still a time of neighborliness and small hurts, the kind of reparable injuries that everybody understood and wanted to heal and so they all went together to the Accident Service with Devi. Sonna did not go; he kicked the dirt and said nothing as he watched the car roar down the street, his father at the wheel, steering with his right hand, the top of his left arm propped in the open window. Suren and Mohan sat in the front seat, while the rest of them, Jith, Rose, Dolly, and Nihil, sat in the back, Devi balanced on Nihil’s lap while he pressed an old pillow case to the back of her head, and Jimmy Bolling swore and cursed his way through traffic and, once he got to the hospital, swore some more until he had half a dozen attendants running this way and that wondering how on earth they could appease such a large and disgusted and quite possibly foreign man and make him stop. Nihil waited outside with the others until Devi emerged again, walking hand in hand with Jimmy Bolling, who was swaying a little, both of them beaming.

“Icy chocs for everybody, what do you say?” Jimmy Bolling said, chucking Devi under her chin.

“For everybody,” Devi said and laughed. “I got two stitches but I didn’t even feel anything,” she said proudly, showing off the back of her head, where, in a small square section where her hair had been shaved off, there was now a plump dressing held in place by a bandage that ran across her forehead.

So this must have been the accident he had foreseen, Nihil thought. He felt someone watching him and when he looked up, saw that Suren too was smiling. His grin widened as he realized that his brother was thinking the same thing, sharing in the relief that The Accident was one that was entirely manageable.

When they returned to Sal Mal Lane, Raju, called back into service to his great delight, was sent off to fetch the icy chocs, for which he had to go beyond the bridge, since the one store that carried things that needed to be frozen was Sunil’s shop, and where he added the eight chocs to the ever-growing list of items that had already been sold on credit to Jimmy Bolling.

While they waited, the children discussed the visit to the Accident Service, a place they had never seen, the violence and sudden tragedies that were required to enter it being so far out of the normal course of their lives. They talked about all that they had observed while they were there, crouched into one corner in fear as people were rushed in on stretchers, screaming in pain, with broken bones and one alarmingly silent man with a knife wound who only grimaced, baring all his teeth as he clenched his fists. The sight of so much that was worse than what had brought
them
there made them less anxious about Devi, who joined in by relating the stories from inside the surgical ward. Around them, the road, still fresh from a downpour that they had missed while they were at the hospital, released steam as if in good humor, the smell of asphalt and damp earth mingling. There was a lush humidity in the air, everything washed clean but in a child like fashion, a quick bath to take away the most obvious dirt that still left the scent of play and the outdoors untouched. Above them, the skies clouded and broke in uncertain streaks and tinged the evening with a purple glow. The lateness of the hour and the excitement of the evening made the Herath children call out for more games and though Devi could only watch, they played for a while longer, running barefoot up and down the road, playing impromptu made-up games. They laughed at having escaped with such a small injury, without knowing that this is why they all felt so giddy, wrapped up in the euphoria of the unscathed.

Raju, when he returned, took great pleasure in handing out the icy chocs to the children, making a show of serving the Herath children first, and of them all, Devi, with an overwhelming display of deference. It was not until Raju was almost done that Jimmy Bolling realized that he had forgotten to buy one for his son, which did make him feel bad, so he covered it up by yelling at him.

“Where for me, Daddy?” Sonna Bolling asked as they all crowded around the
siri-siri
bag full of the already softening rectangular green-and-silver packages of ice cream. He asked this from a safe distance, but then, overcoming his fear of his father in the presence of a such a special treat, he came forward and reached into the bag.

Jimmy Bolling used his good arm to shake Sonna’s hand until he dropped the ice cream back into the bag. “You don’ need icy chocs. These are for the kids.”

Nihil, unwrapping his own icy choc, watched Sonna walk away down the road. “Uncle Jimmy, I can give him my one and I can share with Suren,” he said, already deciding and beginning to follow Sonna.

“No! No! Don’ be silly,” Jimmy Bolling said. He grabbed Nihil roughly by the arm and hauled him back to the group of children, who were now deep in their enjoyment of the white insides of their chocolate-coated blocks of ice cream. “He’s a bloody thug! Thugs don’ eat icy chocs!” And Jimmy Bolling laughed heartily and tipped his cowboy hat, quite as though he spoke from personal experience. Nihil, though he would have chosen to share his treat with Sonna if he had been allowed to do so, was just as easily caught up in the delight of the other children, and so he, too, turned his back on Sonna.

And even though the Silvas were not in the least bit happy, and they said so, that their sons
Had taken off like hooligans with that mad man,
and also, to Mrs. Herath,
Gosh, Savi, should put a stop, no, to all this fraternizing between our Sinhalese boys and those Burghers and Tamils?
even they could not dampen the excitement that their sons felt at having participated in such a momentous occasion and one celebrated by icy chocs.

The next time Nihil went to piano lessons, he felt cheerful as he chatted to Mr. Niles, describing the day’s events, the ride to the hospital, the sweet taste of icy chocs afterward, even the care with which Raju had unwrapped Devi’s icy choc for her.

“Everything feels better now,” he said. “I knew she was going to have an accident and now she has had it and it was okay,” he added.

“What else do you know these days?” Mr. Niles asked, smiling. “Do you know who will win the election? Tell me it isn’t JR.” He shook his head gravely. “I don’t like the way he talks about the country, you know. Tamils this and Sinhalese that. Those are not the words of a peacemaker. Those are not the words to use when you want to have a single country, and I think we’re headed for real trouble if we end up with that man.”

“No, I don’t know those things, only my father does,” Nihil said, “but he doesn’t like JR either so that’s good.”

“Yes,” Mr. Niles chuckled, “that’s good. Maybe there are more people like your father and me than there are people like those Silvas and that boy, Sonna, Jimmy Bolling’s son.”

“Sonna is not a bad person,” Nihil said, slowly, remembering.

Mr. Niles raised his eyebrows. “He has been harassing everybody down this road, son. You must watch out for him. I can’t go out but, sitting in this veranda, I can hear more than most people think I can. I hear the way he talks to his sisters when they are next door at his uncle’s house. And I know how he talks to Raju, too. It’s a shame.”

“He talks like that but he’s not bad,” Nihil insisted, his brow furrowing as he tried to decide how much to reveal to Mr. Niles. “He saved me from being hit by a bus,” he said, finally, sensing that the full drama of what could have happened might persuade Mr. Niles.

Mr. Niles nodded and lowered his eyebrows. He pulled his shoulders toward his ears in an exaggerated shrug. “Perhaps he’s not as bad as he seems. But I still expect you to be careful, son. There’s a bad strain in him.”

Nihil wished that Mr. Niles did not believe the worst of Sonna. Sonna had quite possibly saved his life; besides, he seemed nicer overall. Sometimes, if nobody else was looking, Sonna would even wave to him as they all waited for the school buses. Still, something in Mr. Niles’s watery eyes told him that he was not ready to be convinced, so he said no more about Sonna.

“What do you know about your sister these days?” Mr. Niles asked again soothingly, as though he understood that he had upset Nihil.

“I know one more thing right now, and that is that Devi is going to get in trouble at school.”

“Can you help her, then?”

“No need to,” Nihil said, feeling sanguine for a change, Sonna, too, forgotten. “We all get into trouble at school, it’s nothing special. She will be fine.”

Mr. Niles tapped his pile of handkerchiefs and nodded. “It is good that you don’t try to save her from everything. Otherwise, how would your sister ever know what to do when she is alone?”

Nihil said nothing. Devi was never alone except for when she was at school, where the most that could happen was a trip to the principal or the whispering of jealous girls, but he did not feel the need to correct Mr. Niles.

Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows

Nihil was right. Devi was never alone. Or, at least, she had never been alone. However, Devi, like all the children down Sal Mal Lane, including Raju, who was to all intents and purposes not much more than a child himself, only played by the rules so long as she had no reason to disobey them. Thus far, nothing had happened in her life to make it necessary for her to step outside the neat boundaries set for her by her sister and brothers. Not far away, though, a day of half-truths and secret journeys was waiting.

In her heart of hearts, Devi knew that her brothers were made unique by certain imperfections, Suren who preferred to lie rather than to face conflict, Nihil who spent too much time reading about cricket, revisiting scores and calculating batting averages rather than playing the game. Yet the sibling she went to school with was Rashmi and, therefore, her daily reality was not a comforting sense that she, too, could be permitted a few imperfections but rather Rashmi’s unblemished record elevated by repetition—as comparison and standard—by the nuns. Being marginally accomplished in the laudable skills, maths and science, and gifted in the one usually consigned to the lowest rung, creativity, Devi was not destined to become the haloed favorite that Rashmi had been from the minute she had first sat down in her pre school class with her neatly filled notebooks, rarely the trace of an eraser mark, and deferential manner. Devi did not have the sixth sense that would tell her when a lay teacher or a nun was walking to class, her arms laden with books, so she could do what was expected: leap out of her chair and offer to help. She spent more time decorating her curvy Sinhala script than she did in making her sentences grammatically correct, constantly mixing up her
mi
’s and
mu
’s until her Weerodara exercise book was a blur of red ink. She shone only in her English class with efforts that went unremarked upon since they exceeded the expectation of rudimentary competence, as well as the understanding of the teacher assigned to instruct them in Basic English. Was it a surprise, then, that she copied her answers during mathematics? She did not think so, but nobody was asking her.

“Minoli Nugegoda!” The teacher’s voice summoned the class monitor with obvious disapproval. “Take Devi to Sister Principal’s office. Right now. With this note.”