On Sal Mal Lane (26 page)

“We had to wait until one of the men took it to Sunil’s shop to get the parts oiled,” Lucas said. “See how it looks now? Shining also. Koralé got his son to wipe it down properly with some kind of polish. Now it looks good enough to put Devi Baby and ride. But,” he held up a finger and made his face grave, “be careful. Youngest child, and you are in charge, Mr. Raju Sir. Anything happens, you are to blame, not me. Not Lucas Aiyya. Don’t come crying.”

After the sun had gone down a little, but before the others came home, when the shadows filtering through the great leafy sal mal trees fell more gently on the lane, Raju escorted Devi through the gate and settled her on the seat of the bicycle, proud of the fact that the bike stood firm on its rest while he made sure she was safe. While she waited for him, her mood improved and equilibrium restored after her ride with the postman, Devi had discarded her traitorous clothes and put on a blue divided skirt and a yellow T-shirt, and looked more like herself. Raju rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, put his arms around her, kicked off the rest, and held on to the handlebars as he wheeled the bicycle up and down the road, not minding the sweat pouring down his face and gathering in all the crevices and rolls of his body, not minding that his arms and legs began to quiver with the effort of supporting both her and the weight of the bike, not minding anything at all but the fact that Devi was happy, that he had been the one to drive the lost cricket match out of her mind. Neither of them paid any attention to Sonna, who sat in front of his house in a chair he had dragged out.

An Odd Alliance and a Little Romance

If Devi’s friendship with Raju raised any eyebrows, the one so youthful and expectant of good things, the other so devoid of symmetry and hope, we may take comfort in the fact that Old Mrs. Joseph, who knew more than most, said nothing about it. Indeed, if there was anything that eased her heart, one crushed so irreparably by the person it had chosen to love, it was the sight of her son going about his day with purpose. A purpose that was not attached to something impossible like a title he would never earn, but something simple and achievable: indulging a child who needed him in her life. So she watched Raju as she did all the neighbors, alert to any sign of things being amiss, and glad at the end of each day that nothing was. At night, on those evenings when she stayed out late on the veranda, a silver-gray cardigan wrapped around her against the slightest breeze, she watched Sonna.

Sonna’s vigils had continued, though it seemed to Old Mrs. Joseph that the calm that had seemed to descend on him on that first night appeared to seep out of his body as the weeks and months wore on. Now, when he stood there, staring, he often seemed agitated rather than soothed by the scenes that unfolded in the lit-up rooms of the Herath household, the ones visible from the street: the veranda, the living room, the boys’ room, each its own stage with its collection of immovable props and cast of characters. She watched Sonna and wondered if it distressed him to see their sometimes routine, sometimes disarmingly affectionate interactions with each other. If, as he watched Suren help Devi practice yet another piece of music she was struggling to master, or Nihil and Rashmi laugh over some joke he could not hear, or they played cards together, what he saw was not simply four ordinary children growing up together in a family, but children whose kindness toward each other formed a wholeness that he would never experience with his own siblings. Now if he relaxed against her gate, it was only on those occasions when whichever Herath child that was visible was alone, engaging in some inward-focused activity like reading or writing or, in Rashmi’s case sometimes, sewing. He never lingered if Suren played the piano; something about that music seemed to irk Sonna.

Soon enough, though, Old Mrs. Joseph’s passive observation of Sonna and Raju gave way to witnessing the development of an unlikely and disturbing alliance, this one forged between Sonna and Mohan Silva.

Sonna’s small crimes had resumed, one by one, in the wake of his last exchange with Devi. Why her words and no other had convinced him that it was useless to try to be that other boy Nihil had spoken of, the good one, who could say. Whether he knew it or not, what Sonna set his heart upon now was a dismantling of harmony, which he recognized only to the extent that it did not, and clearly never would, include him. He watched his sisters seek out the safe haven of the Herath household and forgot that their visits had once seemed like a blessing to him, the way they had allowed him to experience something of the workings of that family. Lucas’s air of contentment grated on him. When Suren came to his house and played his guitar and sang his songs, all the women in his house and the Herath girls listening as they never listened to him, it was all Sonna could do not to charge into the room, grab the guitar, and smash it to pieces. He was upset most of all by the trust that allowed Raju to push Devi up and down the lane on a bicycle, a trust that no one had ever placed in him. What made Devi so blind to Raju’s ugliness? She never seemed to feel a single moment of revulsion as surely she should. What made an exacting girl like Rashmi give Raju free rein to come and go as he pleased? It confirmed what Sonna feared most: that not even the Herath children, who were so kind to everybody, found him worthy.

“Someone left dog droppings in Mr. Bin Ahmed’s mailbox,” Mr. Niles told Nihil one afternoon. “You know, there is only one dog down this street, and he belongs to the Sansonis. Who could have done such a thing?”

Nihil avoided Mr. Niles’s gaze when he said, “I don’t know who it could have been.”

“And,” Mr. Niles said, keeping his eyes on Nihil’s face, “just the other day, Kala told me that the Tisseras’ paper had been stolen and that they saw it lying open on a chair in the Nadesans’ porch. They could see it from their veranda. What do you think of that?”

“Did they get it back?” Nihil asked, avoiding the real question.

“They did not ask, but Mr. Nadesan had taken it back and said they did not know how it got there. Someone is trying to create problems for our neighbors and I think you know who that person might be, don’t you?”

Nihil shrugged and said he did not know, but it was clear that he did and that Mr. Niles and all the other people down the lane did too.

In these activities, Sonna had an admirer: Mohan.

Mohan had got into another round of trouble at school, this time during a history lesson, and over a comment he made about the Tamil king Elara, who had been defeated by the Sinhalese prince, Dutugemunu.

“We fought that Tamil until the water around Anuradhapura turned red with blood,” he said. “That’s how much was sacrificed. In the end, Dutugemunu won. That’s what’s coming.”

He refused to acknowledge to the class, as part of his apology, that King Elara was referred to in the chronicle of the country’s early history, the
Mahavamsa,
as a just monarch and one whom his Sinhalese subjects had respected, and that though the battle had been bloody, Dutugemunu himself had honored the dead ruler by building a monument to him. Instead, Mohan had simply taken the week of detention in stony silence, boasting to his father that he saw it as a price he had to pay for telling the truth.

“You are different from these other Sinhalese boys who think the same things but have no guts to say it aloud,” his father said. “You’re a true leader. I am proud of you.” He patted his son on his back and commented on how tall he was becoming. “Beginning to look like a young man, son,” he said.

After that incident, Mohan began to look for more ways in which he could distinguish himself further from
the other Sinhalese boys,
the nearest being Suren and Nihil, the Tisseras’ son being too young to count. Although he had always found Raju abhorrent, he now sharpened the barbs he flung at him, adding those that referred to his race to his usual comments about his mental disabilities and girth. Old Mrs. Joseph, like Jimmy Bolling’s father, had been born to a Tamil mother and a Burgher father, but she had claimed her mother’s Tamil race when she married Mr. Silver Joseph, himself a Tamil, and so Mohan felt justified in calling Raju
a full-blooded Tamil,
and crossing him off his list. Additionally, Mohan invoked Jimmy Bolling’s grandmother’s race and began to refer to the Bolling house as the
half-breed house.
He had never befriended the Niles family, and the Nadesans, by virtue of their privateness, were a threat. It was clear to him that the Tamils were taking over and, moreover, they were taking over his lane. He wished that the Herath boys would feel as he did if for no other reason than that there was not much fun in being a leader without anybody to lead. There was only one other possibility: Sonna.

Now, as Sonna’s activities graduated to the sort of misbehavior that appeared small but had the potential to stir up the right type of conflagration, Mohan paid him more heed. He observed both what Sonna did to disrupt their neighborhood and his estrangement from his own family, which allowed him, Mohan, to separate Sonna from whatever aspersions Mohan cast upon the Bollings and their mixed race. He took to nodding at Sonna whenever a new prank was executed, hoping that the nod would suffice to communicate his approval. Sonna, isolated once more in a space not entirely of his choosing and yearning for an equal to call
friend
rather than a collection of hooligans to run amok with, was easily won over.

And yet, though both Sonna and Mohan, each for his own reasons, were determined to stir up trouble, and though the kind of trouble they longed for would be swept away by an avalanche of violence neither could have predicted and neither would, in the end, welcome, their dissatisfactions were balanced out by the equally determined efforts of another pair of children: Jith and Dolly.

Nobody could be certain, at first, but in the end everybody agreed that Jith had taken a real and very public shine to Dolly, a liking confirmed by his having intentionally missed getting her out during a game of French cricket, even though her plank of wood had flown out of her hands and her legs below the knees were unprotected and ripe for it. These details had only come to light because of the ruckus that had erupted between the two teams, Suren, Rashmi, Rose, and Jith on one team, Mohan, Nihil, Devi, and Dolly on the other.

“You din’ get her out!” Rose and Rashmi screamed in unison.

“
Machang,
how can we play if you won’t get her out?” Suren inquired, as if reason might be able to prevail where the visceral fighting instinct that defined the national character, particularly when it came to cricket, even this watered-down version of cricket, had obviously failed.

Even Raju, about to turn away from watching them and go to his garage for his evening session of weight lifting, was appalled. “My god, Jith, you can’t play like that if you want to win!”

Sonna, watching from his usual station, leaning on his father’s fence, laughed, and even he only laughed because he assumed that Jith had simply made a mistake.

Dolly felt herself fairly levitate with delight at having caused the scene and as she turned her smile and grateful eyes to the one boy who had ever done anything nice especially for her—the Heraths did not count since their kindness was meted out universally—she appeared in the likeness of a pleasantly featured girl and not
a bovine
as Jith’s mother had been describing her to them since before either of her sons could talk, further cementing his affections.

“That’s okay, I’ll get out,” Dolly said, sacrificing her stay at the wicket on the altar of his honor. The game resumed but there was a certain electricity to the air that reached beyond the strip of road on which they were playing and found its way into all the houses down the street. It was a disturbance, the shape-shifting kind that, if not curtailed, would, without a doubt, lead to nothing but chaos.

In the Bolling house that night, Rose made the announcement right after the bread and dhal were dished onto their plates: “Dolly is smiling all the time because Jith likes her.”

Both Francie and Jimmy Bolling looked up with great interest. One of their daughters had snagged a Silva? A real, solid Silva boy? Francie Bolling re evaluated the features of Dolly’s face, the potential curves of her body, found them favorable, and exchanged looks with her husband.

“Don’ go an’ act like a tart now,” Francie said, finally. “If he likes you then he can come an’ talk near the gate. You are not to go to his house, I’m tellin’ you. If I find out—”

“Mrs. Silva will be shot with her own shit before she lets Dolly near her house, Mummy, don’ worry!” Sonna said and laughed, though with a certain bitterness. First the Heraths had welcomed his sisters into their home as easily as their Muslim neighbors folded roasted cashews into the
watalappan
during Ramazan, and now Jith was interested in Dolly? He decided to visit Raju after dinner, see how far he had got with his stupid weight lifting.

“A very strange thing happened today,” Rashmi said in the Heraths’ house as the children sat with their mother—their father was held up at yet another ministerial meeting—and waited for Kamala to clear away the plates after dinner. “Jith didn’t throw the ball at Dolly to get her out even when he could have.”

“She agreed to be out anyway, so what does it matter?” Suren said, amicably, sopping up the last of his soup with a chunk of bread and handing his plate to Kamala. He washed his hands in the bowl of water that she placed before him.

“Jith likes Dolly,” Devi said. She shared her mother’s enthusiasm for the rehabilitation of the Bolling girls; she was particularly happy that the French Cricket incident had occurred while Dolly was wearing one of her old Alice bands, a red-black-and-white-striped one.

“There’ll be hell to pay when Aunty Rani finds out,” said Mrs. Herath, not imagining that she would in any way be associated with Jith’s choice of a girlfriend.

“What was all that noise I heard?” Mr. Silva asked, after his wife had walked around the table serving everybody. She settled down in front of her plate of noodles and salmon curry and began picking out the green chillies, which she did not like but he loved, and putting them on his plate. He passed the MD chilli sauce to his older son. “Was there some trouble?”