by Ru Freeman
“He knows all that,” Nihil said, irritated by this long speech; the passing of information ought to be left to one’s elders.
“No, no, no, I didn’t know anything! I didn’t know anything about this,” Raju said, looking very alarmed, the second, they learned in due course, of his two most frequent expressions. “When did this happen?”
“Tha says that it’s a good thing,” Nihil said, reassuringly, “so that every body can learn their own religions and nobody can be forced to learn anybody else’s religion.”
“Your father works for the government? Is he a big man?”
“Tha is in the Ministry of Education, that’s why he knows everything,” Devi said, not knowing if this would bestow the title of “big man” on her father, but feeling proud of the weight of the Ministry of Education in her mouth.
“Tha is a civil servant,” Nihil volunteered, having learned quite recently that to be one of those was considered an honor and that there were no more civil servants left in the country other than those of his father’s generation. It seemed that being part of a dwindling brigade of anything should elevate a person in rank, and he felt glad that his father had become one of this group before whatever it was that had happened to put an end to enrollment or selection or other process that conferred such honorifics upon adults.
“Oh! Civil servant?” Raju pouted, and pulled his lips down on either side with great seriousness. He shook his head from side to side, suitably impressed. He glanced up toward their house, so recently painted in a soothing custard color, the sort of color that only refined people like these might choose, and then back at the children with renewed respect. He shuffled from foot to foot, trying desperately to think of something further to say, something that would endear him to these new children and their respectable father. They seemed good to him, polite and forthcoming, and he needed some relief from the children who pre dated them, the ones who mocked him even when they talked to him, asking him questions about his weight lifting and his garage as though they cared. For his part, Nihil wished that Raju would say something adult like, something about their new neighborhood, himself, the other children, anything that would add to his own stature at the dining table that night when he might share what he and Devi had learned about their new environment.
“We have to go back inside,” he said to Raju after waiting a few moments to see if the power of his wish would cause Raju to stop shuffling and speak. “Come,” he said to Devi. He took her hand, which he did not do very frequently; his affection for her was something to be hidden with mild berating rather than demonstrated by kindness or care, which, if shown, might bring his fears forth in an unstoppable flood. Devi knotted her fingers around his and Nihil felt their thinness, the lighter weight of her hand. He held it firmly and led her away from Raju.
“Go and come!” Raju called after their retreating backs. “Come and talk again! I’m always here. Uncle Raju. You can call me Uncle Raju.” He said all this, but he wasn’t sure they heard. He wished that he had thought to introduce himself that way right at the start. Uncle Raju. It had a magnanimous ring to it. He wished he had thought to tell them about Kala Niles and how she gave piano lessons. Surely the children would have been delighted to hear that and to know that he was, himself, someone who appreciated music and understood its importance in the lives of growing children. They might even have asked him to introduce them to Kala Niles, and how fine would that have been, to be the one to make such introductions between good children and a good teacher? He cursed softly to himself as he went back to his gate, thinking of all that he had not said. He hung there for a few minutes, burning in the sun and wishing for rain and replaying the conversation he had just had and mulling over the information he had received. But, momentous though it felt to him, this extraordinarily civil and, he felt, equal exchange with the two new children, nothing further followed, so Raju went back to his garage. Sonna be damned, he thought, these are nice children and I will be their friend. I will be Uncle Raju. He heaved a forty-pound dumbbell several times as a bonus step toward his future, then dropped it and went to the main house looking for the white curries and glutinous rice his mother always insisted on for lunch.
Sonna’s Sisters Pay a Visit
Nihil and Devi could not have known that Sonna, whom they had yet to meet, would one day, uttering words of hurt yet innocent of premeditation, pierce the sweet sphere of their lives. On this first day, their thoughts on Raju, his form, his voice, the children were contentedly distracted and when Sonna’s sisters came to visit that evening, even Nihil felt no cause for alarm. The simpleminded Bolling twins, Rose and Dolly, would, in fact, become closest to the Herath children, and it happened that way not just because they were deserving of such friendship, a gift for the absence of malice on their part in thought or deed, but because they made the first move to visit and that set them apart from the too-timid children, including the Silvas, who had stayed away.
If Sonna had imagined that his sisters would be welcomed into the Herath household by the girls as well as the boys, the boys whose source of strength he did not know, he would have kept the twins home by force, for what was denied to him should, he believed, be also denied to them. Or, if he had imagined that within the grace of their friendship much of what was wrong in his life might have turned right, he may have accompanied them. As it was, the girls did not tell him where they were going, nor ask for his permission as he had taught them to do; they simply slipped out while Sonna was away and went to see for themselves. They came in the evening, which meant that they wore long, thin, sleeveless tanks but no skirts over their underwear.
Mrs. Herath was sweeping the garden when they arrived, and at first she did not notice them. She tugged at old leaves and long-dead roots with the edges of her ekel broom, seeing not dirt and decay but potential fertility. She saw green buffalo grass that she would uproot from her own mother’s garden and repatriate into hers, she saw a hedge exactly like the one she had grown up with, she saw a wall going up between her new home and that of her neighbors to the left, the Nadesans, with whom she had already broached this topic. Just that morning, when Mrs. Nadesan had brought her husband over to meet the new neighbors, carrying a comb of plantains and a packet of ginger biscuits wrapped in brown paper, Mrs. Herath had steered the conversation to landscaping and from there to the possibility of building a wall.
“I have always wanted to have a bordering wall covered with ivy,” she said, while discussing her plans for the garden.
“A climbing flower?” Mrs. Nadesan asked in her low, accented voice, her head moving slightly to the beat of her words. “Like Kala’s rose vines?” She pronounced the v like a w.
“No, no,” Mrs. Herath said kindly, putting her palm on Mrs. Nadesan’s soft upper arm. She could smell and see the faint traces of Gardenia Talc that the older lady had applied to her face and neck. “Ivy doesn’t have flowers, but it is very pretty, you’ll see. You know, Mrs. Nadesan, all the English cottages have them. And in our country we can grow anything. Once I plant it, the ivy will climb the walls and eventually it will cover your side too. It will be like having a wall made of plants!”
Mrs. Nadesan had nodded in agreement with a slightly furrowed brow, impressed both by Mrs. Herath’s knowledge of growing things and by the idea of a green wall. She was glad that she had retouched the red pottu on her forehead and worn a good sari, her emerald green one that she generally reserved for visiting relatives. Her thali, too, the gold necklace resting with weight and importance, signifying both wealth and marriage, had made her feel grounded, a worthy neighbor to someone like Mrs. Herath who knew so much about English gardens.
“That Mrs. Herath will soon have a beautiful garden,” she told her husband that evening as she served him tea without sugar but with a piece of kitul jaggery on the side, all the better to counter his diabetes. “With ferns and flowers and hedges. Just like the English cottages.”
Mr. Nadesan had only smiled. Whatever happened with
the garden, he was happy that the new neighbors, though not Hindu Tamils as he had hoped, were good people and clearly without prejudice, so warm had been their welcome to him and his wife. To add to that, Mrs. Herath had not even asked them to share in the cost of putting up the wall. That was a good sign.
Now, standing in her garden, Mrs. Herath remembered that conversation with Mrs. Nadesan. She paused for a moment and surveyed the one tree that stood in the center of her front yard: an Asoka tree, with its dense green foliage and clusters of white flowers whose nectar Nihil and Devi had already discovered, sucking at the thin sweetness like birds. She contemplated the miracle of its survival in the midst of such neglect and considered the impact of its shade on the new grass she was going to plant. Clearly, the Asoka tree would have to go. But with what would it be replaced, and where? She glanced at the far corner, the one closest to the Nadesans’ house, and pictured a fruit tree. Jambu, she thought. The red jambu, which usually veered between watery tastelessness and acidic sourness, would give her garden color without its having to translate into plebeian consumption. Moreover, it would provide the right degree of shade for her succulents and potted ferns. It was when she was swiveling back to the corner that bordered the driveway on the Silva side, a flamboyant already taking root there in her imaginings, that she saw the twins. They were standing side by side, each with her weight on one foot, left hand in her mouth, gnawing at the edges of their fingernails. She was so taken aback by their presence and their concentrated activity that it took her a few moments to realize they were mostly naked below the hem of their tops.
“Who are you?” she asked, now taking in the less obvious aspects of their appearance, the big shoulders and knobbly knees, the stringy, light-brown streaked hair, the oval faces grimed with a recent meal, and, could that be, yes it was, mud.
“I’m Rose, she’s Dolly,” one of them said, and they both grinned. Their smiles were sheepish and challenging at the same time.
That their lives were not going to contain what they perceived as normalcy in other people’s houses was something the Bolling twins took for granted. They were not poor enough to accept charity, Only the servants take hand-me-downs, their mother, Francie, would say, but not rich enough to possess complete wardrobes, so on weekends they wore skirts by morning and then hung them up to dry and went without. Their father and brother only wore shirts on those Sundays when they all went to the nearest church. Sex was neither special nor secret; it was conducted like daily business, if not exactly in full view then in full knowledge of the children, a favor their oldest had grown up to return before moving away. Yet, despite all this, they were children, and they were here to seek out the new members of their tribe with an interest heightened by difference.
“Where are the children?” Rose asked, nudging Dolly as she spoke. Mrs. Herath, though seemingly benign in her Kandyan sari, and probably only because of her daily life as a school teacher, gave out a certain aura of reprobation that was hard to miss.
Just then the Silva boys came out of their house, rattling coins in the pockets of their shorts. They whispered to each other, the older one pointing to Rose’s hips. His brother averted his gaze after a quick smile at Dolly, who looked over her shoulder at them and waved with good cheer.
“Hello, Jith! Goin’ to the bakery?” she asked him.
“No,” Jith said, his eyes never dipping below the hem of her tank top and the effort making him tip his head back and look bug-eyed. He tugged at the hem of his own shirt, a washed-out blue plaid hand-me-down from his brother. “Going to Koralé’s shop to see if he has got new marbles. Couldn’t go earlier.”
“Show us when you get,” Dolly said. “Las’ ones you got were so pretty. I liked the purple-an’-yellow one the best.”
Jith grinned and started to speak but Mohan cuffed his brother on his head and Jith’s smile vanished. He followed his brother down the driveway and they disappeared from view. Dolly turned back to Mrs. Herath.
“That Mohan, he doesn’ like us, not like Jith, the younger one. Jith is nice. He always talks.”
“Talks to you,” Rose said and smiled at Mrs. Herath. “Jith likes Dolly, that’s why,” she explained.
“What do you want, girls?” Mrs. Herath asked, feeling just a little overwhelmed by these complexities that were being inflicted upon her and hoping against hope that these urchins would ask for a handout of some sort, something manageable like ice cubes or a telephone call.
“Wan’ to play with your children, Aunty,” Dolly said, glancing at the house.
“Nice house you have, Aunty,” Rose added, “nice chairs an’ everythin’ no?” She lifted up on her toes and, balancing herself with a hand on her sister’s shoulder, peered into the house.
“Do you live here?” Mrs. Herath asked, softening just a little, though she left one hand on her hip, the other keeping the ekel broom at arm’s length for balance and, also, as a stand-in for her feelings about the girls.
Rose waved her head back over her shoulder, gesturing down the street, “We are Bollings, from down the road. First house on your right when you come. Big fence? Daddy’s father and Raju’s mother were brother and sister an’ when property got divided, our gran’father got more, that’s why we have the big piece. That whole fence, behind that is all ours.”
“We’re the second house,” Dolly corrected. “First house is Bin Ahmeds, Muslim people right near the big road. Mr. Bin Ahmed is retired and Mrs. Bin Ahmed never worked but makes very tasty watalappan at Ramazan. They have a grown-up daughter who works in a bank. They’re nice an’ all but don’ talk much, that’s why Rose din’ count them. We’re next. Our fence is aluminum, can’ miss.”
Mrs. Herath digested all of it: the girls, their garb, their terrible English, that staccato speech, and, worst, their proximity. She knew the place and she knew the story. Mrs. Silva had told her about the Bolling children and their parents and all of their doings after she had finished her lecture on the Tamils down the lane, but, unfortunately, Mrs. Silva had also warned her about them, and Mrs. Herath did not like to be warned about anything. So though she did not like the look of the girls, nor their apparent disregard for social norms, and though something told her that encouragement was the last thing that should be given to them, she decided to be kind.
“So, Rose? How old are you?”
“We’re almos’ ten. Nex’ month. How old are they?” and she nodded back toward the Heraths’ house. Rose spoke through her nose as though she had a very bad cold. Her words sounded thick and after every two or three, she made a snorting sound as though she were clearing her sinuses. Mrs. Herath’s regrets began to mount. Now she was going to expose her children to sickness. She made a mental note to ask her servant woman, Kamala, to put some kottamalli on for the children to drink instead of evening tea, as a prophylactic.
“Well, we have four children. The oldest is Suren, who is twelve, and then we have Rashmi, who is ten, and then Nihil and Devi. Nihil is now nine, and the little one is seven and a half. I’ll call them.” She turned to go, then paused and faced them again. “Girls, wait right there. I’ll go and get them.”
The twins looked at each other and then back at Mrs. Herath. She had an elegant line, Mrs. Herath did. She was not tall, but she was lean and compact, like a small animal with well-exercised muscles. She moved up the steps straight and deliberate, holding the front of her sari away from the mud with her fingers. Her hips did not sway and tempt a smack the way their own mother’s bottom did; Mrs. Herath’s backside was a well-brought-up one, they could see. Still, despite the evidence of her sensibilities and refinement, they figured she must have a good heart, for hadn’t she almost invited them in? Nobody had ever invited them into their home down that lane. Even Old Mrs. Joseph, their own grand aunt, even she shooed them away when they came begging for ice. Now they would have friends, fresh new ones, and their own age, too.
“Think they’ll like us?” Dolly asked her sister, spitting out a bit of nail that she hadn�
��t been able to break down.
Rose laughed, “You? Nobody could like you! Even your face is crooked.”
“At leas’ I don’ have aluhung like you.” Dolly laughed also, at their shared misfortunes, the ludicrousness of their hope for solid friendship.
“Anyway, I’m getting better,” Rose said, holding out some hope for the Ayurvedic treatment her mother had found for the patches of discolored skin on her back, their lighter pigment spreading erratically, a tracery of torn lace. She turned away from her sister and as she did so, she caught a movement out of the corner of her eye; it was a movement of color and peace. “They’re coming. My god. Look, Dolly, look how nicely dressed. But why only the girls?”
“Where are the boys, Aunty?” Dolly asked, grinning.
Mrs. Herath ignored her question. “Girls, I am going to give you some extra skirts in case you need—”
“No need, Aunty. We have. We only wear in the mornin’. If we came in the mornin’ then would have had skirts,” Rose said before bursting into a prolonged bout of giggling. “Why? You don’ believe?” she asked through mirthful gusts. “You don’ believe no, Aunty? But it’s true! That’s how we are. Can ask Mummy if you wan’. She’ll tell.” And she laughed again.
“Never mind if you have, but for now, put these on,” Mrs. Herath said, holding the skirts out to them. They hesitated, looking from the garments to the children as if wondering whether the bargain was worth it. Then Dolly stepped forward and took the skirts. She handed one to her sister and pulled one on herself.
“We can return them later,” Dolly said.
“No, no, girls. You can keep those. Just to have an extra one. For the evening, that is, since you already have for the morning.” Mrs. Herath was irritated by the lilt and lapses in her own sentences. She was mimicking them in an effort to influence them and this was not usual for her. Her more common pattern was to say something and have her students and children, and even her husband, simply up and do her bidding. What was it about these girls? She flung a bitter thought toward Mrs. Silva for having forced this course of action upon her. She waited impatiently until the clothes were on, the girls balancing against each other, and then she called out to the boys.