Saree

by Su Dharmapala

  ‘Humph! Enough cheek from you, you young rascal! And I don’t care what you do, as long as you don’t mess around with any of those foreign women!’

  ‘So you don’t mind him messing around with local women, then?’ Gauri asked with a laugh as she came into the dining room, where the servants had set a table laden with fragrant idali, pungent paripu and coconut chutney.

  ‘He should be not messing with any women at all! His marriage to the daughter from Kanchi Silks has been all but agreed to!’

  ‘I never agreed to a marriage with Shanthi Govindarajan!’ Raju growled.

  ‘But if the situation here changes, we need a base in India we can move to quickly!’ his father replied. Despite his afflictions, old man Nair still had his finger on the pulse of local politics. ‘I don’t trust J.R. Jayawardene. He is an oily, two-faced love merchant. He will destroy the relationship between Tamils and Sinhalese before he is through.’

  ‘The Tamils and the Sinhalese are capable of getting on just fine,’ Gauri said slyly. ‘Don’t you agree, Raju?’

  Raju turned to stare at his sister. His mouth was full of food so he could not respond.

  She gave him an arch look before continuing. ‘Some of our most talented saree makers at the mill are Sinhala. Take Nila Mendis, for example. I saw the toile she made for her exhibition piece. It is truly exquisite.’

  ‘Lakshmi and Hirantha had some misgivings about her, didn’t they? Didn’t Sindhu and Sakunthala ask you to take her under your wing, Raju? How is that going?’ the old man asked.

  ‘I think he’s taken her more than under a wing,’ Gauri smirked mysteriously, but before anyone could ask her what she meant, she deftly turned the conversation to innocuous topics such as the horrible weekend she’d had down in Bentota with her friends, and how they’d spent the whole time indoors with everybody’s tempers becoming increasingly frayed.

  After dinner, Raju helped his father into his night sarong and left him in his room with the old gramophone playing some Duke Ellington, then went to find his sister.

  ‘How did you find out about us, Gauri?’

  ‘Renuka. She came to me this afternoon and said that she had spotted the two of you down by the hopper hut on the beach one night last week. She hadn’t thought much of it until she spotted you again chatting by the shrine room yesterday. She was worried that Nila had taken a leaf out of her sister’s book and would trap you into marriage.’

  ‘So what did you say?’

  ‘That I wasn’t worried. That my brother was a smart man. Then she started on about favouritism, so I told her that you would not be on the panel this year, since you are focusing on other projects. I have organised Mr Pantipuram to be on the assessing panel instead. Ana, Renuka is dangerous. You will need to watch for her.’

  ‘I will. And I will tell Nila too,’ Raju agreed. ‘But what do you think? About Nila and me?’

  ‘I think it is a crying shame that you put a stupid white cord around your wife as a mangala sutra,’ Gauri said. She went to the sideboard and pulled something out of one of the drawers. ‘I went into town and got this today,’ she said, pouring a gold chain as thick as her little finger into Raju’s outstretched hand. ‘I’m dying of embarrassment that my new sister has no gold to speak of!’

  ‘You like her?’

  ‘I adore her! And I am just glad that with her being your wife, I won’t have to pay any extra wages!’

  ‘Oh, Gauri!’ Raju laughed. ‘How do you think he’ll take it?’ he added seriously, jerking his head in the direction of their father’s room.

  ‘He’ll rage for a few weeks, maybe even months. But he loves you too much. And he will love her. He won’t be able to help himself.’

  ‘She is exquisite,’ Raju sighed.

  ‘Well, go enjoy your exquisite wife. It’s dark enough for her to sneak into your home now!’ Gauri laughed.

  Nila had, of course, been a virgin before she got married. The only knowledge she’d gleaned about what went on behind the closed doors of a bedroom between a man and woman had been from the snatches of conversations she’d overhead from the ladies who came to Mrs Vasha’s house.

  ‘Thank goodness he leaves me alone a few days a month. Monthly courses are a saviour for that alone, if not anything else,’ a middle-aged mother of six had complained.

  ‘I don’t want to get married,’ a young Burgher bride-to-be had cried to her mother while Mrs Vasha fitted her wedding dress. ‘It will be painful.’

  Which was why Nila was quite confounded by what was happening between Raju and herself. For her it was pure pleasure – and yet something that needed to be done time and time again to be truly enjoyed. Sometimes slowly, sometimes fast and sometimes just before Nila slipped out of Raju’s bungalow to head to her room.

  Indeed, Nila had been so concerned by the disparity between what she’d known the act to be and what she shared with Raju that she’d voiced her concerns to him. ‘Maybe we are doing it wrong.’

  He’d smiled before slipping out of their bed to return with a stack of Indian art books he kept on the top shelf of his bookcase. Flicking through the heavy tomes, they’d found more ways to give each other pleasure than they had ever thought possible.

  ‘I had no idea,’ Raju had gasped in wonderment as Nila tried something they had seen pictured in most of the books.

  ‘But you are delicious,’ Nila had sighed from down there after she was all done.

  That was when he told her about Renuka. ‘Just as well she only saw us down by the shrine room,’ Nila giggled, slipping out of bed to start weaving. ‘Imagine her reaction if she’d seen us down by the trees beyond the river!’

  When Raju had spotted Nila by the river dyeing sarees, he’d hurried to the water’s edge. ‘Come with me,’ he’d whispered roughly, luring her to the copse of trees just beyond. When the female workers dyed cloth in the river they wore no underskirts, and Nila only had to slightly tug at Raju’s sarong for it to come apart. ‘Men who wear pants are stupid,’ Raju had muttered as he pushed her against the large kos tree and entered her in one fluid motion. They had shuddered to release in a burst of sunshine, the salty sting of the sea breeze caressing them, the soft fabric of Nila’s potta teasing Raju’s bare chest.

  Their passion was incandescent yet earthy, spilling over into every part of their lives, filling them with a creative force that neither had experienced before. While Nila weaved at the loom, Raju painted her, naked except for the saree she herself had created, draped over her body. His paintings had a new sensuality – he had suckled at those round breasts, knew the taste of the briny juices between her legs. The sound of her heartbeat was his mantra. He painted his lover with the same joy he took in pleasuring her.

  Nila’s saree making had taken on a sensual quality too. As she sat at the loom she felt the pressure of her foot on the pedal, the shift of the lamms and bobbins, and fell into an easy, assured rhythm. There was just one frustration. ‘My saree is not as beautiful as it could be,’ she complained to Raju.

  ‘Students aren’t given the best materials,’ Raju agreed as Nila started to freehand tat the lace along the bottom edge using steel bobbins. ‘We never know whether what they create will be a complete waste of time. I’ll get you the better beads and embroidery threads tomorrow.’

  ‘Don’t, Raju. I want to be selected on my own merit, like everyone else.’

  ‘You aren’t going anywhere anyway. Your place is here with me.’

  ‘But I want to know I earned my place here fairly. Not just because I am your wife.’

  ‘What will you do if you don’t get offered a place?’

  ‘Work on it until I am. I don’t expect anything for nothing, Raju. I want to work until I deserve it.’

  Raju stared at her for a moment. ‘Fine then,’ he said slowly. ‘But when we are in Madras, we’ll go to the silk market and buy the finest silk to re-weave this saree. There is a town just south of Kanchipuram where you can buy beads, too. Diamonds from Australia and sapphir
es and rubies from here in Sri Lanka.’

  ‘Why, Raju?’

  ‘Because I will re-weave this saree for you, my darling,’ he said, delicately touching the design boards that lay against the wall next to the loom. ‘And you will wear it when we celebrate our marriage. It doesn’t matter that we’ll cross the fire seven times again.’

  While Nila could not believe her luck in having married such a passionate man, it was his kindness that truly overwhelmed her. He had insisted on driving her back to her parents’ home the weekend after their marriage.

  ‘I will wait for you at the Sri Ponnambalavaneshwarar temple for an hour,’ Raju insisted as he helped her out of the car in Kotahena. ‘I’d rather you not go at all, but that would tip them off immediately. But if anything is amiss, you come back or get a message to me somehow. I won’t let anything happen to you.’

  ‘Nothing will happen,’ Nila insisted, touching him gently on the arm.

  ‘I won’t feel safe until I have you safely by my side on the plane!’

  By the middle of the following week Nila was intensely grateful that she had Raju’s bungalow to escape to. Rules were relaxed so that the students could work exclusively on their exhibition pieces. Some students had quit the mill altogether. ‘I won’t come back until the morning of the exhibition!’ Renuka had huffed, bundling her woven saree into a large bag.

  Others stayed on, but they succumbed to frequent bouts of hysteria in varying degrees of intensity. It was not uncommon to see girls sobbing in corridors or for the young men to rage out into furious arguments. Raju and the watcher took it in turns to break up the fights, which scared Nila witless.

  ‘What if one of them hit you?’ Nila worried after an altercation so nasty that Raju, Guru Hirantha and the watcher had all had to step in to calm the frayed tempers.

  ‘I’ll just step out of the way,’ Raju teased. ‘Not even two weeks married and she’s already starting to nag!’ he exclaimed to Devika.

  ‘I hope the two of you aren’t going to be like this the whole time we are in India,’ Devika said.

  Nila had confessed her secret to her best friend and invited her to work on her exhibition saree in the calm quiet of the draping master’s bungalow. Devika’s blue-green kalamkari masterpiece was nearly finished, but the final stage required inking with a steady hand, something that was near impossible with jealous classmates around.

  ‘I am afraid we’ll be like this for the rest of our lives,’ Nila laughed, turning back to her embroidery. She was working on the peacock motif, slipping sequins and beads along the threads at precise intervals to shimmer and shine in the light.

  ‘Seven lifetimes at least,’ Raju protested. He was applying the final lacquer over his canvases before taking them down to Colombo on Friday.

  He was sending Tambimuttu a series of three paintings of Nila to show Lucian Freud: one of her weaving at the loom, the evening light playing on her hair and skin, another of her dyeing fabric in the river, the dampness seeping through her saree, and a third showing her lying supine on their bed.

  Now that Nila was mistress of her own home during daylight hours, she had finally met Gauri. Properly. As a sister-in-law.

  ‘I can’t tell you how happy I am that he chose you, thangachchi, and not one of those silly white women,’ Gauri had said joyfully, adroitly slipping an extra charm onto Nila’s mangala sutra.

  ‘Gauri, stop weighing my wife down with gold – she will hardly be able to stand,’ Raju joked as his sister gave Nila more gold bangles.

  ‘You must stop, akka,’ Nila protested, for Raju had taken the opportunity to visit the gold merchants in Colombo on Friday night for yet more gold – delicate earrings, chunky rings and thick bangles – all of which he’d taken pleasure putting on her on Sunday night before making up for their two days apart.

  To Nila it all seemed too strange to be true. She who had received so few gifts in her life seemed now to be drowning in abundance. Even her parents had given her a few trinkets in honour of Rupani’s nuptials. ‘We can’t have you looking like a beggar,’ Vera had remarked sourly at the gold shops in Pettah on Saturday morning.

  ‘But no one will be looking at her,’ Rupani whined. ‘And if you don’t buy her any, I can get that extra pair of earrings.’

  In the end, a compromise had been struck and Nila was given a gold chain and earrings, though more copper than gold. ‘Make sure you’re there on time,’ her mother had said. ‘And if you are late, don’t bother coming at all.’

  If the truth were indeed to be known, Nila was considering not returning at all. She had finally realised that, other than blood, she had nothing in common at all with the people she called her family. The time she spent with them at home that afternoon with her parents and siblings did not change her mind, and the evening was no better.

  ‘I hope Malinthi from down the road is not planning on wearing that hideous saree to my wedding,’ Rupani had prated on.

  ‘I saw Albert take his mother to the doctor this afternoon,’ Vera had sniffed. ‘You’ll have to put a stop to all this wasting of money, Rupani. I don’t see why she needs a doctor when I only ever see an apothecary.’

  ‘Look, these Tamil bastards have completely taken over Jaffna,’ her father complained listening to the news on the wireless in the background. ‘Someone better trash the bloody buggers!’

  Nila had to bite the inside of her cheek to stop herself from crying out her abhorrence to his views.

  ‘Here, Father,’ Manoj smirked, handing Mervan the evening paper. ‘See, on page ten, some lads in Negombo doused the Hindu pusari with petrol and set him on fire.’

  ‘They should give those lads a medal,’ Mervan laughed.

  Nila felt sick to the stomach. ‘I haven’t seen Mrs Vasha this weekend,’ she said, excusing herself, choosing not to stay and share the meal of rotis and curry she’d spent the afternoon making for them.

  Mrs Vasha looked unwell, terribly unwell, asleep in her planter’s chair and her breath rattling slowly. She started awake at Nila’s approach. ‘I am just tired, my dear. It’s all this travelling,’ the old woman said, dismissing Nila’s grave frowns. ‘So what is that around your neck, child?’

  ‘A gift from my mother,’ Nila replied, bending over so Mrs Vasha could inspect the necklace.

  ‘It’s cheap and tacky, that’s what it is. You are their eldest daughter and should be respected as such!’

  When Nila told her what had happened the previous weekend, when she had found the house – and the street – deserted, Mrs Vasha almost had an apoplectic fit. ‘It kills me that they treat you like that. Something could have happened to you!’

  ‘Something did happen. Something amazing and wonderful,’ Nila said, sitting down close to the old woman so that she could tell her the story. She held a finger to her lips to beg for her silence, gesturing over her shoulder to her parents’ house. ‘They cannot know. He is Tamil.’

  ‘But married, Nila? To the son of the chettie of the mill?’

  ‘Yes. He loves me and I cannot imagine my life without him.’

  Nila gently pulled out the proof, in the form of the thick gold chain and the ornate pendant of her mangala sutra, tucked away in her brassiere. Next to the copper that Vera Mendis had bought her daughter, the gifts from the Nairs stood out like peacocks in a pen full of common chickens.

  ‘What sort of a man is he? Does he treat you well? What are your plans?’

  ‘He is a painter. An artist. He treats me like a queen,’ Nila assured the old woman. ‘And he says you are to come and stay with us in Panadura when we return. We will move into the chettie’s house and I can look after you.’

  ‘Is there any chance I can meet your young man before you leave for India?’

  ‘I hope so. As it is, we’ll struggle to do everything before we leave. The exhibition at the saree mill will be over by midmorning, so I should be home in time for the wedding. We need to be at the airport by six.’

  ‘You are like a daughter t
o me. I must know more about this man before I let you go off with him,’ Mrs Vasha begged.

  Nila sighed. Mrs Vasha had been more of a mother to her than Vera Mendis had ever been, and she owed her this. ‘Maybe he could sneak into the wedding. No one ever notices who is actually there. You will love him, Mrs Vasha. He is a wonderful man.’

  ‘I am sure I will. All the same child, I just need to meet him.’

  The morning of the exhibition dawned bright. The rain had been less frequent over the last week, and just the day before, the wind had changed direction to come from the north-west instead of the south-west, pushing the monsoon clouds out over the Indian Ocean instead of inland into the island. And so it would remain for the next nine months until monsoon started yet again.

  Nila had spent the night uneasily. It’d taken her till near midnight to put the finishing touches to her exhibition piece while trying to help Raju pack for their journey to India.

  ‘But do we have to take my designs for the saree? We hardly have any space left!’

  ‘Darling, how are we going to find the silk to match if we don’t take the designs with us?’

  Even so, her dreams were plagued by elusive demons of fire and blood. She woke several times before finally falling so deeply asleep in the early hours of the morning that she’d missed the alarm to sneak back into her quarters.

  ‘It’s lovely sleeping in with you,’ Raju had murmured sleepily as Nila sat bolt upright in their bed. ‘Wait till everyone heads off to prayer before you head into the mill. No one will notice where you’ve come from.’

  And everybody was too busy to notice indeed. You could have brought a two-headed cow into the compound and no one would have raised an eyebrow. There were people everywhere by the crack of dawn. Extra cooks had been brought in to help the regular staff to make celebratory cakes and tea, and professional saree models had been driven in from Colombo.