On Sal Mal Lane (23 page)

Watching his mother leave, Sonna felt his anger dissipate. The coir fillings in the mattress poked through the thin cover and scratched his skin, and for a moment he wanted to call her back and ask her to make the bed. He waited for this feeling to pass and, after a while, his thoughts returned to the one thing that came to him when he was in this kind of mood: he remembered the way the bat had felt in his hands when he used to play cricket at his school, back when he still cared enough to wake up and make it there by seven thirty each morning. And although his parents and sisters had never attended a single game in which he had played, he could still recall what it felt like when the other boys at school cheered for him, when everything else dissolved and in its place there was only himself, a boy, and his game. This was the memory that usually took him away from the present and made him feel as though his life was other than it was, but today he could not lose himself in it. The story slipped out of his grasp and the images were replaced by a scene in which he swung his bat repeatedly at a ball that nobody he could see was bowling at him; the stands remained empty no matter how hard he looked up into them, how hard he tried to refill them with the crowds he remembered.

Outside his door, he could hear the radio, and the singing made him think of Suren, the way he strummed that guitar and sang his songs. He had picked up Suren’s guitar once, the one time he, Suren, hearing the sounds of a temple parade passing by on the main road, had left it on the dining table and gone out with the other children to watch. Sonna remembered how the guitar felt, bulky yet light, an utter mystery. He had held it up in his arms to feel the weight of it, held it against his body to feel its lightness, but when his fingers caught in the strings and released an unfamiliar note, it had sounded discordant. And still he had held it, tracing its lines, until he heard Rose’s voice outside and he put the instrument down and went to his room.

Rose’s voice. Why had there never been music in his life when even she had found a way to celebrate hers with song and dance? Why did his mother treat him like a problem that she had not asked for and did not deserve? Why was it that, for as long as he could remember, his father had been disappointed in him? No matter what he did or did not do, the one emotion Sonna could see in his father’s eyes was a cruel sort of anger, an anger that seemed to have everything and nothing to do with him. And there he was again, fending off the first memory he had of his childhood. He was seven years old and chasing Rose in a game of catch. He saw, again, his arm outstretched and almost on her, Rose tripping and falling on her face, a cut above her lip, a tooth being knocked out and his mother shrieking.

“My god! My god! Come, Jimmy, come and see! Rose is bleeding!”

His father, still lean then, came striding out of the house, where he had been drinking since morning with a friend who had stopped by, and yanked Sonna by his hair and shook him in midair like a squirrel, bellowing in his face, “What have you done, you little shit? What have you done to your sister?”

His head ached when he remembered this. It ached from the hair being pulled out of his head, it ached from the pounding inside it as he struggled to explain that she had tripped, that was all.

“That is all?” his mother shrieked. “You have ruined her life! Now forever she will have a scar! How will she enter the pageants like that? She’s ruined!” And more tears.

“She’s not pretty enough to be in beauty pageants,” his father said, his voice soothing, but this merely angered his mother more, rousing her to such a pitch that she slapped her husband across his face.

They had fought for the first time, Jimmy Bolling dropping Sonna to grab Francie and drag her into the house and then to leave in a further rage, driving off with his friend, only to have the vehicle turn over before it reached the bottom of Sal Mal Lane. Sonna remembered that sound, the immense thud with which it overwhelmed all the other sounds around him, including his own cries, and how brief that deafening had been. He heard his father cursing, the words unintelligible, the sounds guttural and fierce, and himself standing still for what seemed like a long time, listening. When he finally ran over, he had seen that his father’s upper body was twisted back and he was pinned underneath his friend’s jeep, the front passenger side of the vehicle flattening his left arm. Above his elbow the strong muscle that his father had flexed so often to his delight seemed flat and bloodied, the rear view mirror crushed and twisted around it, the weight of the jeep pressing down. A section of flesh from his forearm was caught between the glass on the window and the bottom half of the door, that mysterious sliver of space into which the glass moved when the window was opened. Sonna had felt that pain, the sharpness of it, the way there was nothing he could do to alleviate it. The flesh above and below that vice bulged unnaturally, and blood, neither bright nor dark, just strangely ordinary, dripped and ran over all of it. And he remembered wondering when his father had cut his finger, for he noticed that he had a thin antiseptic sticking plaster around the index finger of his left hand, which now lay twitching in the dust before him.

He lay there, screaming, looking up, his eyes fixed on Sonna’s face. “Get this off me, you motherfucker. Get this off me! Get this fuckin’ jeep off of me!”

Sonna pushed against the vehicle with all his might, the wheels now still. The driver’s side of the vehicle was up in the air and his father’s friend, Denton was his name, was trying to climb out of the open window. Each time he tried, the jeep rocked and seemed to press down further on his father.

“Stop, Uncle, stop!” Sonna said, panting with effort, and, even after his mother and the Bin Ahmeds and even Lucas had joined in and not even all the combined strength of the adults could get the jeep off Jimmy Bolling, and they had to wait until Lucas brought help from some men in the Elakandiya, Sonna had understood that somehow it was he alone who had failed his father.

Sonna trembled as he relived that day, a day from which, no matter how many other days had followed, he could not drain the slightest emotion. All of the anger, the screaming, the accusations, the very ugliness of his sister, her face swollen, her mouth open in a ragged square of piercing wail, the bloody, crumpled muscle and sinew of his father’s arm, his howls of pain, all of it had taken up residence inside his head. And though Sophia picked him up and wiped his tears, he had not even known that he was crying, and though his mother never mentioned the incident again, after that day, everything changed in the house.

His father stopped trying to teach him how to be a strong man, filling small pots with sand and gravel, testing his tiny biceps, correcting the sway of his walk, the pitch of his voice. His father simply ignored him. It was as though Jimmy had decided that if his daughters were not beautiful enough for pageants, then his son was never going to amount to anything he might respect, and, further, that if he himself would never be able to use one of his arms, then Sonna need not try to impress him by using either of his. There was nothing to do but figure out what a boy could do if he were no longer preparing to turn into his father. Nothing Sonna studied at school gave him an answer. The books were full of stories about other kinds of people, the maths he struggled with, his home work was left undone, the writing, though passable, was only that. Nobody cared. He stopped going.

Sonna drew his palms down over his chest, over his belly, and back again to where his skin, smooth and untouched one moment, turned into four thin paths the next. Whenever he asked his mother about them she only said soothingly,
Scars will fade, Sonna, don’ worry
and turned away. He had asked his father once, and only once, and his father had said
Because you deserved them, that’s why.
Sophia always said
Don’ you remember?
He remembered hunger, a child-voiced request for food and a fork in his father’s hand. He remembered bleeding. He was almost certain that it had been his father who had drawn that fork across his stomach in one quick, vicious movement, a movement so instinctive that surely it had not been premeditated. But nobody would confirm that story for him and he had come to see those scars as being his. He was born with them, and that was an easier story.

He curled into a ball, his fingers knotted together and held tight against his stomach. He could hear movements outside, footsteps, someone putting down a comb, the gate open and shut, water poured into a glass. The day felt late. He had curled up this way the first time his father had beaten him, when Sonna was nine. He had made it through by fixing his gaze and concentrating not on the strength of his father’s raised right fist but, rather, on the stub of his half arm, something about its helplessness serving to make the beating less hurtful.

“Sonna, you sleepin’?” Rose’s voice.

His mother’s, cajoling, “Suren an’ Rashmi came an’ gave us some pineapples an’ some chocolates also.”

And now, Dolly. “Uncle had got from somewhere an’ they had extra. You wan’?” She came into the room, holding a chocolate set in its own pleated gold foil cup, something so elegant it did not belong in his sister’s palm.

Back into his mind came the scent of sandalwood and baby powder, light-blue-and-white stripes, a clear voice telling him about grades and eyes filling with tears. And with it came a sudden sweetness to imagining what might have been possible, so he continued to lie there, within that memory, thinking about all that he was powerless to change but wondering if this gift of luxury was a sign of better things to come. He reached out his hand and took it.

And so, despite the unfortunate events that led him to be seen not as he wanted to become, a responsible, caring boy, but rather as he had always been, a ne’er-do-well the neighborhood was forced to tolerate, Sonna continued to try. Each morning he stood outside and watched the children leave for school. He waved to Nihil when he could, and he nodded to Suren, though he never smiled, even when Suren did. In the evenings he was back at his post to watch the children play. Which is how he saw Rashmi run down the lane toward him, leap into the air, and take a catch. Mohan was now out and Sonna, observing, cheered.

“Nice catch!” he called to her.

She smiled with real delight, a rare thing for Rashmi, a smile that transformed her entire demeanor.

“You’re a good player,” he added. “Rashmi, no?” And he felt light-headed, being able to call her by her name.

She wasn’t ordinarily a good player, this was a fluke, but no fifteen-year-old boy like Sonna had ever had the nerve to talk to Rashmi. She smiled again, tossing the ball from hand to hand, listening, thinking Sonna wasn’t half so bad, especially when he was properly dressed as he was right now. Like Raju, she thought, when they are clean and dressed they don’t seem so bad. She wondered if she should invite Sonna to join their game. She looked at the ball in her hands and she looked back at Sonna. Just then, they both heard the sound of the water-ice man. Sure enough, there he came, his sarong tucked under, his wooden box balanced on the back of his bicycle.

“You like
ice-palam?
” Sonna asked.

Rashmi nodded, caught up in the moment, this half-captivated, half-imprudent exchange, and because it was the polite thing to do. The man did not sell Elephant House
ice-palam,
he sold water-ices. Water-ices were not to be purchased, let alone consumed. They were made of unboiled tap water. Probably from the nearby river. Rashmi shuddered, stuck in her predicament. She looked up the road. The others were arguing about scores. Sonna stopped the man and bought a twenty-five-cent serving of bright-blue water-ice. The man scooped it onto a wafer using his hand and gave it to Sonna, who carried it reverently over to Rashmi. Her hand slipped a little as the exchange was made and she dropped the ball. Sonna caught it. He took her outstretched hand in his and he placed the ball delicately in the center of her palm as though it were a treasure he had found for her. His hand was different from anything Rashmi had ever felt. It was neither gentle nor hard, not soft like hers nor competent like Suren’s, it was warm and ragged and full of some nameless longing. There was a world behind that fleeting touch that disconcerted her. He seemed suddenly too-much-boy to her, with his boy voice, his boy clothes, his boy hair, and his boy smells. She was suddenly too-much-girl.

“Thank you,” she said, at a loss now for what else she should say, though she wanted to stay in that moment, too much of everything around her, including herself, which meant she could not bring that water-ice, that unknown water-ice made with unfamiliar water, to her lips. “Don’t you want some?”

Sonna shrugged. “No, I don’ like,” he said, though he did like it and wanted it, he just did not have another twenty-five-cent coin with which to buy some for himself.

“Goin’ to melt if you don’ eat it soon,” he said, smiling, trying to sound as if it was just good advice, not like he cared.

Behind her the teams divided again and she heard Jith call out her name, startling her back into her ordinary life, the life where nothing was too much, everything was in balance. She thanked Sonna once more and began to run up the road, the ball in one hand, the water-ice in the other. Did she trip or did she drop it on purpose? Sonna could not tell. All he could see was that before she had taken even a single mouthful, the water-ice dropped from her hand and she turned, shrugged apologetically, waved, and then picked up her pace to run back to the game. The neon-blue lump stayed long enough to imprint itself in his head then melted swiftly into the hot asphalt.

Sonna was still thinking about that moment when he walked up the lane that night to ask his grandaunt, Old Mrs. Joseph, for some cubes of ice for his father’s drink, an errand he had grudgingly agreed to perform because the twins were not at home. He was about to open the gate to Old Mrs. Joseph’s garden when he glanced over at the Herath house and saw Rashmi seated in a chair on the veranda, reading a book. She played with a strand of hair as she read, absently twining it around each of the fingers in her right hand, passing it from one to the other in a mesmerizing sequence. She stopped only when she had to turn a page. And though he could hear faint end-of-day noises from other houses, the shooing of a stray cat, the shutting of a creaking window, a hand jerking it shut in sharp squeaks, even the sound of the Silva boys being called by their mother, Rashmi’s quiet activity made the evening feel calm and manageable to Sonna, and he did not take his eyes off her. Once, she looked up from her book and stared out into the darkness, narrowing her eyes as though she could sense that she was being watched, but she did not leave. Sonna stood there until someone called her name from inside the house and she got up to go and he stood awhile longer, until the light in the veranda was switched off.