by Ru Freeman
“I heard you singing the first day you were here, and I found myself wondering why your voice sounded different from the other ones,” Mr. Niles said. “Now, I know.” He spoke deliberately, quite as though he had been mulling the thought over for a long time. “There are very few things in life that are worth the price of giving up on your own dreams, son. Find something to keep for yourself, because in the end, that’s all you will have. What you keep for yourself. Come and talk to me when you have found something to keep. You can’t keep your little sister to yourself. She won’t stay.”
Nihil felt a foreboding pierce its way into the soles of his feet and take root there. It inched its way up through his legs, his stomach, and settled somewhere around his chest. He took Devi’s hand and turned away.
“It’s a kindness to speak the truth,” Mr. Niles said behind him, then he added softly, “especially to children.”
“We’ll go and come,” Rashmi said to Mrs. Niles.
Suren nodded his good-bye to Mr. Niles, then said, “I’ll tell my brother to come and visit you.”
Mr. Niles smiled and nodded. “That will be important for him to do.”
Nihil marched out as quickly as he could, tugging Devi along, not even stopping when Devi’s skirt caught in a thorny flowering plant placed beside the Nileses’ front door and making her cry out Wait! Nihil! Stop dragging me! After the gate had shut behind them, his mother admonished him for a multitude of sins: for his inability to conceal what he thought of Kala Niles and thereby almost jeopardizing the musical careers of his siblings, for his brazen and undiscussed decision to stop cricket, at which he was currently excelling, and for forcing his mother to leave the house without a proper conversation with Mr. Niles, who was clearly very sick and in need of companionship.
Listening to their mother as they walked in a wide row behind her, past the long hedges and under the spreading branches of the sal mal trees that hung over the lane, Suren took Nihil’s free hand in his. Rashmi took Devi’s. Nihil felt vindicated by this clear, if silent, defense of his actions, and by the added security he felt in their combined mass. Suren’s quiet fortitude and Rashmi’s sensible oversight formed a protective support to the role he, Nihil, had taken on, no questions asked, as Devi’s primary guardian. No serpent-tongued piano teacher could do her harm when they walked together like this, he thought, with a measure of pride. It was a feeling that would only last until he had to go to sleep, the time of day Nihil disliked the most, for it meant that Devi had to be given over entirely to Rashmi, who, he felt, though she certainly cared, did not display the same intensity of concern for their sister.
It would have helped Nihil greatly to know that he was mistaken in this belief, that the same fears rested equally within the minds of his older siblings, but it was the kind of information that older siblings did not share, believing it wiser to keep concern to themselves lest it lessen their vigilance. They, too, had taken the information about the fragility of Devi’s life, information that was simple superstition and conjecture, but that in their minds carried the authority of the past—when, they were sure, other children had found their lives in jeopardy thanks to a twist of fate that caused their birth to coincide with that unfortunate date—and turned it into their life’s responsibility. In fact, Rashmi woke up on most nights to ensure, with the placement of her fingers underneath her sister’s nose and the sensation of warm moisture on her skin, that Devi was still alive, and Suren put himself to sleep each night only after a recitation of a self-made prayer uttered softly but aloud in the direction of Devi’s bed. Nihil, however, had no such tricks of self-assurance. Nihil had only responsibility and fear, which made his nights fretful and his dreams unerringly morbid.
But this night, the night of meeting Mr. Niles, when time had settled his initial doubts, Nihil felt a small easing in his heart. If he could find something to keep for himself, as the old man had suggested, perhaps it would help him wear his burden with more serenity. But what was it that he could keep? He lay in his bed and pondered the question. Cricket had now been sacrificed. Chess he would willingly give up had he been of an age to demonstrate any prowess. His home-style theatrical productions were an ordinary endeavor. What else was left? Nothing, he thought, nothing at all but this sister who was a sweet-sour blessing, full of need and giving. Just as Nihil’s eyes began to well up at the particular misfortune of his birth order, the way her arrival had turned him from being a baby to being an older brother, a care giver, Suren’s voice broke in.
“What about your backwards poems?” he asked, prescient.
“What poems?”
“The ones you recite backwards for our performances,” Suren said.
Nihil watched his older brother put on a crimson sarong and remove his khaki shorts from beneath. Suren’s induction into the world of sarongs was recent, and the knot untied and the sarong fell down a few times as he executed this adult maneuver. Ordinarily, Nihil would have laughed at the sight or uttered some words about when he might be given a sarong, too, but not this time. This time he simply continued to watch as Suren straightened up and took off his shirt in preparation for bed.
“Poems are easy,” Nihil said.
“I know. But if it is easy to recite poems and speeches and sing songs backwards, then you must have a special way of looking at words.”
“I do. I see them like pictures.”
“That can be your special thing to keep for yourself. The kind that Mr. Niles said you must find,” Suren said, and lay down in his bed and covered his legs, up to the ankles but feet free, with an old sheet worn soft.
“He said that I have to find something to keep. That means it won’t come. I have to go,” Nihil said and asked at the same time, seeking assurance.
“You just think about it every day and it will come to you,” Suren said, and closed his eyes.
And that is how Nihil discovered that his keep-for-himself was words. Backward words, forward words, words in pictures, words in poetry, but most of all, words in prose. Word upon word that he read in books that Mr. Niles would gift him. Words with which to coax talk out of Mr. Niles and, also, to ease his heart to rest. Words with which to pry secrets out of Raju and good graces from Lucas and a free-pass from Sonna Bolling. Words with which to reclaim the sharp smack of red leather balls against cricket bats. Words to demand explanations and words to curse the world. Words also to soothe Devi and, later, himself, when she slipped through his fingers and passed beyond her never-uttered, constant need for his words.
.....1980
Elsewhere
While the people on Sal Mal Lane gradually adjusted to each other, the adults to their plans for furnishings and gardening, politics and work, the children to the better games that were possible with enough of them now to form teams, the main road that abutted the lane marked a boundary beyond which lay a country where trouble was brewing. It was the sort of trouble that would soon overflow its banks and flood the nation, turning the small ponds of concern and occasional tears of Sal Mal Lane into their own tributaries of discontent. Let us pause then, to take in the events that were unfolding far from the games that the children played on Sal Mal Lane.
First, the nationwide strike that Mr. Herath had tacitly supported, the one organized by his friend Vasudeva and years in the planning, was a monumental failure, and he came home to say that the decision that was made by senior government officials, to fire every person who had participated in the strike, had been discussed aboard a ship in harbor, there being no government buildings available with all the workers gone.
“They announced that every imaginable enterprise whether public or private was an essential service,” Mr. Herath told his wife, “and they fired everybody from their jobs for not showing up. Nearly eight thousand. Just like that. Bastards banned all public meetings so the workers’ rallies were illegal, but the government, they met, they had mass gatherings with their supporters.”
“What about Vasu? Can he do anything?” she asked.
/>
“Nothing. We are all finished.” And he said no more. Mrs. Herath did not have to ask who this all were. She knew that they, too, belonged to that group.
To make matters worse, in a move that few had seen coming, the former prime minister, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, was stripped of her civic rights and banned from public office for seven years, and though she remained at the helm, her party, the left-leaning SLFP, was soon in disarray. The one person who would be found to stand in for her during the elections to come, Hector Kobbekaduwa, could not dream of obtaining the stature she had commanded as the first female head of state in the world, a wholly beloved matriarch whom the citizenry had become accustomed to calling not by her name or designation but, simply, Mother, the title that was unanimously believed to belong to the unsullied.
Mr. Herath took the downfall of Mrs. Bandaranaike very personally. Lucas may have gleaned that there was something wrong from the steady increase in Mr. Herath’s consumption of cigarettes, but he said nothing, even when Koralé asked, simply repeating Alice’s mantra, the few words she knew in English: Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do and die, words he uttered with a certain degree of cheerful abandon as he took packet after packet of the right kind of cigarette back to Mr. Herath. Only Mrs. Herath knew the full extent of her husband’s despair.
“Things are going to get worse,” he said to her the day that the move was announced, speaking these words even before he had put down his leather briefcase, and in a tone that made her so anxious that she forgot to reprimand him for placing a stack of papers on her beloved piano.
She called to Kamala to bring them two cups of tea. She waited as he changed into a sarong and took his work clothes from him, and since Mr. Herath rarely wore a tie, she could be excused for having failed to notice it in the pile of clothes that she dropped into her dirty-linen basket.
“What is going to happen now?” she asked, giving her husband the opening he needed. She sat on the edge of her bed, propped up with a pillow against the window, and combed her hair while she listened as he outlined the various miseries that awaited all of them under the market-driven economic policies of the government of the United National Party, the UNP: debt, deprivation, colonization, privatization, theft of national resources, end of self-sufficiency, luxuries nobody could afford, basics nobody would have access to, and all of this resulting in a reprehensible society of need, greed, and alienation, much like what existed in America, and so on.
Mrs. Herath, accustomed though she was to her husband’s pessimistic world view about the government and his notions about the USA, felt her shoulders slump under the weight of all of this information, the sheer degradation that awaited them all, but when Nihil peered through the curtain to their bedroom to ask if something was wrong, she finished tying the end of the long braid in her hair with a length of ribbon, winding it tight, and smiled warmly.
“Everything is fine,” she told him.
Nihil glanced at his father. Devi, who had followed him into the room, also stood waiting for confirmation that all was well so they could get on with the business of playing. She squeezed a variously colored Arpico rubber ball in her hands, pulsing it as she waited, her lips tucked in.
Mr. Herath took a sip of tea. “Mrs. B has been disenfranchised.”
“These children don’t understand all that,” Mrs. Herath said. She smiled again at Nihil. “Nothing for you to worry about. Governments come and governments go, and you are not old enough to vote so you don’t have to think about these things,” she said.
“They should know—” Mr. Herath began.
“What for?” she said. “They’re too young to understand.”
Just at that moment Rose’s voice was heard, calling for Rashmi, and the younger Heraths turned away from their parents and ran to join her, and so Mrs. Herath did not have to keep her husband’s mood and politics from the children, and Mr. Herath was saved from having to rephrase his thoughts in a way that would be understandable to children whose interest in anything he said about politics was usually fleeting. But for the rest of the day Mrs. Herath pampered him with her attentive company and an oxtail stew with bread for dinner, trying in this way to soothe him.
In the end, however, though some of the workers whose suffering Mr. Herath felt at least partly responsible for were eventually reinstated in their jobs, many committed suicide, and in the despondency that followed, there was even less desire, except for the most ardent and committed on the Left, to continue to argue and fight for a consideration of the most pressing problem of the day, the felt-injustices of the Tamil minority, amply fueled by the feelings of people like Mr. Silva, who harbored their own resentments, and hardly mitigated by the feelings of people like the Heraths, who did not feel the need to reassure their Tamil neighbors of their goodwill—it existed, and that, they felt, was enough.
Terms that sprang from the thicket of cross-referenced disquiet, terms that had hardly been mentioned before, like “Tamil minority” and “Sinhalese majority,” were now becoming common parlance in drawing rooms across the country, and in the streets the words The Language Policy were repeated often and with much shaking of heads, along with rumors that forms required for obtaining this or that thing from post offices or banks were printed only in Sinhala.
“Why should we have anything in Tamil after all?” Mr. Silva inquired of his wife as he gardened. “What’s the need for it? We have it in Sinhala, and for those who can’t read it in Sinhala, we have it in English. Everybody knows English, and if they don’t, it is best that they learn.”
“English is a universal language,” Mrs. Silva agreed, having recently subscribed to a second English-language newspaper, which she forced her sons to read on the weekends; she ignored the evidence of their lack of scholarship, which found only two sections of the paper crumpled, the sports section and the cartoons.
Nihil and Suren arrived just then, both of them carrying baskets of ferns separated from some of the more rare plants in their mother’s garden.
“Amma sent the two ferns you wanted, the pineapple fern and the Japanese bird’s-nest fern, and some other ones as well,” Suren said.
“Get the boys to help you plant them!” Mrs. Herath called from where she was standing, watering the new jambu tree.
Mr. Silva walked over to the Heraths’ side of the driveway and stood there, one hand on his waist, the other holding a spade, and began to discuss the appropriate technique for planting the ferns, their requirements for shade and sun.
“Don’t you agree, boys?” Mrs. Silva said. “Shouldn’t we all just be speaking in English?”
“Amma wants us to speak very good English, but Tha would like us to also speak very good Sinhala,” Nihil informed her, handing over his collection of ferns. As soon as he was relieved of his burden he bent down and itched a mosquito bite on his calf, leaving long muddy marks on his leg.
“We also learn Tamil in school,” Suren said. “Tha thinks it is best if we learn all three languages.”
Ptha, Mrs. Silva said, clucking her tongue against her teeth, and followed that up with a pursed mouth. She thought about Mohan and how he never seemed to be able to get more than twenty or thirty marks in his Tamil examinations, how he was failing in the subject. He only had a single F on his report card, and that was for Tamil, always Tamil.
“Amma thinks that too,” Nihil said, “but most of all she wants to make sure that we are good in English.”
“Link languages are nonsense. We already have one. It is called English,” and when the boys didn’t disagree but certainly did not seem to agree, she called out to Jith and Mohan and set all of them to work. For the rest of the afternoon the boys dug in the soil, carried small pots here and there, and deposited dirt and Boma pohora as directed, chatting good-naturedly in a mix of languages that did not include Tamil.
“Maybe you should practice your Tamil a little more,” Mrs. Silva said to her son after the Herath boys had left, though she made sure that her husband was out
of hearing when she said it. “Those Heraths seem to be learning,” she added.
“What for?” Mohan asked. He rubbed his palms together to get rid of the dried mud, then wiped his hands on the front of his shorts as his mother watched.
“Don’t do that!” Mrs. Silva said. “See what those shorts look like now?”
“I’m not like Suren and Nihil,” Mohan said. “They don’t know anything.” And he stormed into the house, followed by Jith.
Mr. Silva, hearing Mohan’s last words as he came around the corner, said, “What happened?”
“No, nothing,” Mrs. Silva sighed. “I just told him he should put a little more effort into his studies, that’s all.” She, too, went inside, thinking that Mohan was probably right. The Herath parents seemed woefully ignorant about important matters, so what chance was there that the boys would know any better?
Around the city, the rumors continued. Rumor had it that the Tamil language would soon be banned altogether, that Tamil shop keepers were erasing the Tamil from their signs, that Tamil politicians addressed everybody in English and did so out of fear. While none of the rumors were entirely true, there was enough anxiety and fear to make them all believable. As a result, gauntlets were now being thrown down in board rooms across the country, all of them guaranteed to fan the flames of communal strife. Tamils, within the country and abroad, whether nourished or repulsed by the idea of separatism, diligently followed the fortunes of those self-declared leaders who swore to live by the sword, Uma Maheswaran and Kuttimani and, of course, Prabhakaran, whose followers had grown from the first, diffident, haphazard crowd that had gathered to listen to his declaration of war four years before in Jaffna into a regimented force with multiple wings including public relations, propaganda, and suicide squads in training, all of which now had a name: the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the LTTE.