The Flower Boy

by Karen Roberts

  And while tea was the Sudu Mahattaya’s business, flowers were Chandi’s.

  APRIL WAS THE Nuwara Eliya season, when the Colombo social set arrived en masse to escape the stifling heat of the capital. Some stayed with planter friends or at their privately owned hill cottages. Others stayed at the Hill Club or at the Grand Hotel in Nuwara Eliya.

  They spent the next couple of months playing golf at the golf club, trout fishing at Lake Gregory, horse riding at the racecourse and down Lady McCallum’s Drive, or sipping Pimms and martinis in the shade of massive, flamboyant trees.

  In the evenings, they donned white ties, tails and evening dresses and congregated at the Hill Club or the Grand Hotel for an evening of dining and dancing.

  As the influx began, the mountain roads which wound round the hills like sleepy snakes would wake up to the sounds of coughing, spluttering automobiles struggling up the hills in second gear.

  When they began the climb up the mountain on which Glencairn sat, Chandi would be waiting, a huge bunch of flowers in his arms. As the cars chugged past, Chandi would thrust his flowers through their windows and pipe, “Flowers, lady? You want flowers?”

  The ladies would be enchanted by the grinning little flower boy. The men, who didn’t like being thus upstaged, usually growled, “Be off with you, you little scamp!”

  The cars would disappear, leaving Chandi clutching at his precious booty.

  When they came round the next bend, he would be there again, holding out his flowers and saying, “Only twenty-five cents, lady! Nice, pretty flowers?” in a hopeful voice. His endearing grin would be firmly in place.

  “Oh, where did he come from?” the ladies would exclaim, thoroughly entertained. Chandi would be out of breath from running up and then down the mountain to catch up with the cars, but the prospect of the twenty-five cents would lend wings to his feet.

  About two appearances later, Chandi would be off to pick more flowers, the shiny twenty-five-cent coin feeling pleasantly heavy in his shirt pocket.

  Visitors to Glencairn often showed up with bunches of flowers remarkably similar to the ones growing in the garden outside.

  In the first week of April, Chandi had made two rupees this way. Because of the slightly illegal nature of his business, he told nobody about his little fortune, which lay buried in a corner of the garden, carefully marked by a large flat stone.

  Now he sat and wondered if the stone had been washed away by the rain, or been buried by mud. He hoped not. He had plans for that money.

  He had originally intended to buy his mother a new reddha or two. He had wanted to buy Rangi a schoolbag so she didn’t have to carry her books in the crook of her arm, where they dug into the soft flesh there and left red welts. He had wanted to buy himself a bicycle so he could use it for his flower business; running was hard work.

  Now he was saving it to go to England.

  It seemed like the best thing to do. He didn’t want to stay there. He just wanted to go and then come back, because everyone who came from England seemed to have huge bungalows and beautiful books and red-and-green-checked shorts. Those were reasons enough.

  He wanted a house of his own, not a room off the kitchen. He wanted his mother to wander through gardens picking flowers, and for Leela and Rangi to have their own rooms. He wanted to sit at a big dining table and have an Appuhamy bring unlimited quantities of food in to him. And he wanted his father to be able to live with them.

  His mother often told him that if he studied hard and did well in school, he could get a good job and look after them all. He had decided long ago that England was a far faster and less tedious way.

  He wondered if he would meet the Sudu Mahattaya’s son while he was there. He knew his name was Jonathan although he never called him that. Actually, he never called him anything because Jonathan had never spoken to him. He, like his sister Anne, was a quiet child, and spent his time reading or kicking a ball around the lawn by himself. Once Chandi had seen Jonathan and had wished he would ask him to come and play, but Jonathan had not even noticed him. So Chandi had stood there quietly and watched.

  Jonathan had seemed lonely.

  RIGHT NOW, CHANDI was lonely.

  The rain was still lashing down like a thousand whips on a buffalo’s back. He crept out, made his way to the drain and stepped into it. He almost lost his balance but managed to steady himself. The water rushed in its haste to make way for more rushing water, and the drain seemed wider and deeper than he remembered.

  At the kitchen steps, the drain continued but Chandi stopped. He cocked his head like Buster sometimes did, and listened hard, but all was quiet. Straightening up, he dashed inside the kitchen and into their room. Thankfully, it too was empty. If Rangi had been there, it would have been okay. Leela would have gone straight to Ammi and told her.

  Shivering now with cold and reaction, he hastily dried himself and pulled on another pair of shorts and another too-small shirt. This pair of shorts was brown. The shirt had once been gaily striped in sky blue and white. Many washings and dashings against the stone at the well had faded it to a watery blue. There were two buttons missing midway and his stomach showed through the gap.

  Chandi felt better. Then he remembered the red-and-green-checked shorts on the croton hedge. His shirt would have long been buried by mud, but the shorts would be lying there like the proud standard of a rebel army. He wondered if they could be seen from the house. He hoped not, because if they could, he would have a lot of explaining to do. He almost started out again to retrieve them, but then thought it better to lie low for a bit, so he sat on the kitchen step and stared out at the rain.

  AT THE FAR corner of the back garden, the vegetables gave way to dense green foliage near the gray cemented well. The trees grew close and blocked out the sun, ferns of different kinds grew out of the cracks in the cement, and vines and creepers twisted languidly around the trees, some hanging down like leafy green curtains.

  Frogs croaked, lizards lifted their chameleon heads to listen, and the gentle rustle of the trees was occasionally broken by the sudden flight of some exotic bird. One almost expected to see a gnome scuttling away into the undergrowth, or a couple of fairies swinging from the vines.

  This was where Chandi washed in the mornings, and bathed in the afternoons with his mother. Leela and Rangi bathed later in the day, after their housework was finished.

  Chandi loved his baths. For about half an hour each day, he had his mother’s undivided attention. And at the well, she changed.

  Not into her diya reddha, which she wore while bathing, but into another person. A person who talked and listened and laughed. Maybe pulling up water in the leaky aluminum bucket helped rid her of the tensions of the day. Perhaps it reminded her of when she was young and her mother had bathed her, probably at a well just like this one; whatever it was, Chandi loved her. Not that he didn’t anyway.

  He would strip naked and watch while she wriggled, with skill born of years of practice, out of her blouse and brassiere and reddha and underskirt, into her old tattered diya reddha, her bathing cloth. She would lift up her arms and slowly, gracefully release her long black hair from its tight knot. Then he’d crouch down on the clean concrete and watch her drawing up the water, the muscles of her strong brown arms rippling with the effort of pulling.

  The first bucketful was always a shock, and he would gasp and blow as the ice-cold water rained on him. Ammi would laugh at him, with him. She’d pretend to pour slowly, and then suddenly empty the bucket on him, her dark brown eyes dancing with mischief. He’d squeal and she’d laugh some more. When he was wet through, he would soap himself while she bathed.

  Her wet diya reddha outlined every contour of her slim, supple body. At the well, she looked her age and not a day older.

  She was twenty-eight.

  She was not beautiful, but her olive skin was smooth and clear, and her eyes were like cinnamon stones, dark brown sometimes, lightening to dark gold at others.

  Under the
m, her nose was too small and her mouth was too wide. While she wasn’t strictly beautiful, she was at least unstrictly so.

  With water dripping down her body and slivers of sunlight on her face, Chandi thought she looked like a laughing brown goddess.

  After he had lathered himself, she would take her pol mudda and scrub him from head to toe. The rough fiber sometimes made his back sore but mostly it tickled, especially when she got to his feet.

  After they had both finished, she washed the clothes.

  He enjoyed that part too. Watching her lay each piece of laundry down, rub it with soap, gather it into a bunch and scrub it, then dash it against the washing stone. He helped her hang them out on the two long clotheslines near the well. This was their talk time.

  “School okay?” she asked.

  “Mmmm,” he mumbled back, reluctant to get into school talk.

  “Been studying hard?”

  “Mmmm.” He wished she would talk about other things, tell stories about her childhood in her village of Deniyaya, like she did sometimes.

  “You have to study hard if you want to be somebody. Look at your father and me. You don’t want to be like us. You should be a doctor or something,” she said.

  He didn’t know exactly what he wanted to be besides a rich England returnee, but he definitely knew he didn’t want to be a doctor.

  The only doctor he knew was Dr. Wijesundera at the free Nuwara Eliya clinic, and everyone said he was a quack. His own mother said if a person was not already dead, a visit to Dr. Wijesundera would kill him. He smiled a lot, displaying dirty yellow teeth. He had long, dirty fingernails too, and from the way he dressed, he didn’t make much money either.

  No. Medicine was not an option for Chandi.

  However, he had had this conversation with his mother enough times to know the dangerous direction it went in—bad report cards, too much playing and not enough studying, complaints from teachers, etc.

  It was time to change the subject.

  “Ammi, look! There’s Krishna peeping from behind the kumbuk tree!” he exclaimed.

  She swung round angrily. “Krishna! You worthless lecher! I told you the next time I caught you peeping, I’d tell Appuhamy! Get back to your work, you shameless animal! Just wait and see what I’ll do to you!”

  Krishna slunk off sulkily. There was always tomorrow.

  Premawathi would carry on hanging out the clothes, muttering to herself. Chandi would feel sad that the precious time of closeness was gone, but it was better than the school talk.

  Once the last bit of laundry was swinging lazily in the afternoon breeze, she returned to her brisk, busy self.

  “Hurry up, hurry up. We can’t stay out here all day. I’ve got my work and you’ve got your homework,” she’d say.

  And so Chandi, like Krishna, would wait patiently for tomorrow.

  THE SKY WAS still a dull gray, so he had no idea what time it was. He wondered if Ammi would bathe him today, although he doubted it. Besides, he had already had a bath. Sort of.

  Through the veil of rain he could see the mountains rising like vague specters, their tops thickly swathed in mist. Down the path, he could see the smaller mountain of muddy earth that had slipped down the hillside. He could just make out the tiny figures of the people clearing it.

  Most of them wore colorful sweaters to ward off the chill; they looked like a colony of exotic ants crawling around a giant anthill.

  His mother rushed into the kitchen, startling him. She dumped her arm-load of bedsheets in a corner, lifted the big iron kettle from the woodstove and was on her way out when she saw him.

  “What are you doing?” she asked suspiciously.

  “Nothing,” he replied in an aggrieved tone. Couldn’t a person just sit without being asked why?

  “Well, don’t get into trouble and don’t go inside the house,” she instructed.

  “Ammi?”

  She looked back at him.

  “Has the baby come yet?”

  She shook her head in exasperation. “What’s it to you? Now stay out of trouble,” and she was gone.

  It was everything to him. There hadn’t been a new baby in the house as long as he could remember, and he was excited. He had already decided that this baby was going to be his special friend. He thought about digging up his two rupees and buying the baby a present, but then changed his mind. England was more important. Besides, when he got back he could buy the baby all the presents it wanted.

  He stood up. There was still the business of the red-and-green-checked shorts on the croton hedge to take care of.

  THE CORRIDOR WAS long and dark. Chandi edged his way along until he reached the dining room. The dining table was there, a huge ebony affair with six carved legs that ended in lions’ paws. The twelve chairs around it also had lions’ paws. He was slightly afraid of those paws although he knew they were wood, because once he had dreamed that they had come to life and grabbed him.

  In spite of the large vase of fresh flowers on the sideboard, the dining room looked dark and gloomy. It was deserted.

  There were four doors leading off the dining room. One to the side veranda where the ginger beer was, one to the far end of the driveway, one to the pantry and one to a small guest bathroom. They were all closed. The long corridor that connected the dining room to the drawing room, the one where the bedrooms led off, was dark and silent.

  Chandi tiptoed to the bay of windows that overlooked the garden, trying not to make his ankles creak, which they did anyway. He slid behind the curtains and pressed his nose on the thick glass windowpanes, trying to spot the croton hedge. The still-pouring rain made visibility difficult and he couldn’t see very far, which was both good and bad. It was good because nobody looking out of the dining room window would see his shorts. It was bad because it meant he had to venture even farther into forbidden territory.

  Everyone had to be somewhere, and if they were not in the kitchen and not in the dining room, then they had to be down the other corridor.

  Having come this far, he knew he had to keep going. He silently slipped down the dark corridor like a small ghost. Past Anne’s room, the door to which was shut, past Jonathan’s room, which was empty, past the seven other bedrooms used for guests who arrived in their loud cars with their loud offspring. Then the set of rooms that the Sudu Mahattaya and Sudu Nona slept in. After that, the corridor widened into the large, formal sitting room, where the Sudu Nona held court on evenings when people came to visit.

  Everything was quiet, even his ankles thankfully.

  The scream was so sudden that it made him scream in fright too, but it was so loud that it drowned out his own scream. A spider scuttled out of a corner and made its indignant way to another corner. Chandi pressed himself against the wall, trembling, as the scream tapered away into a thin, high wail.

  Quietness descended on the corridor again, like a thick choking cloud. It was almost as terrifying as the scream. He felt a coldness on his legs and discovered he had wet himself.

  The kitchen was too far away now, so he had to keep going toward the living room. He took two trembling steps forward, and froze as the darkness ahead was suddenly broken by a tiny, trembling light.

  He had just enough time to make out the Sudu Mahattaya’s dim form before the match went out.

  And then another scream split the silence open.

  Chandi pulled open the door behind him and ran inside the empty room, searching wildly for its windows. For a brief moment, he thought there weren’t any, and then he saw them, shrouded by curtains.

  The window hadn’t been opened in quite some time; after much struggling and a set of bruised fingers, he finally yanked it open, climbed out and let himself drop down to the ground below.

  The impact jarred him and the pain temporarily took precedence over his fear. He covered his face with his hands and sat there, wishing he hadn’t gone out in the rain, wishing he hadn’t taken off his clothes, wishing he hadn’t left his shorts on the croton hedge. Mos
t of all, he wished he was back in their little room off the kitchen.

  After a minute or so, he opened his eyes, brushed away his tears and looked around. The first thing he saw was his shorts on the croton hedge, in plain view of the world. He ran over, grabbed them and flew around the outside passageway to the back garden. He didn’t stop running until he was inside their little room.

  “Chandi, what happened?”

  He yelled in fright, and spun around to see Leela sitting in a dark corner of the room.

  “Nothing, nothing. Buster scared me, that’s all,” he managed, trying to hide his wet shorts behind him.

  “You’re all wet. You shouldn’t have gone out in the rain,” she said.

  He looked down at himself. She was right. He was wet and he didn’t even remember getting wet. Then he looked at her. She didn’t sound loud and bossy like she usually did. This was a softer Leela. A frightened Leela, he realized suddenly.

  He dropped his shorts in a soggy heap behind the door and went over to sit with her. She absently rubbed his wet head, not seeming to mind that the sleeve of her dress was getting damp from his shirt. They sat there for a while, each with their own thoughts, united by their individual fears. He was afraid even to speak, but he had to know.

  “Leela.”

  “Hmmm?”

  “What’s happening? Where’s Ammi?”

  She still rubbed his head. “With the Sudu Nona.”

  “Is she all right?” he asked.

  “Who, Amma?”

  “No, the Sudu Nona,” he said.

  “I think so,” she said uncertainly.

  He looked up at her.

  “Did you hear?” he asked.

  “Hear what?”

  “You know, the noises,” he said, “like when Krishna kills the turkey at Christmastime.”

  “Yes,” she murmured.

  “Were you afraid?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I’ll look after you.”

  She laughed shakily.

  He sat quietly, relieved that she hadn’t asked how he had heard the noises. He breathed in the smell of her deeply, as if that would unwind the impossibly tight coil of fear that hurt his stomach. Her smell was like Ammi’s: a mixture of freshly washed clothes, Pond’s talcum powder and coconut oil.