by Ru Freeman
“Good,” Mr. Niles said, though he did not smile. A tear escaped from his eye and he dabbed at it with a worn white handkerchief that had a light gray line running around the borders.
“Kced gninrub eht no doots yob eht,” Nihil recited. “‘The boy stood on the burning deck.’”
This time, Mr. Niles smiled. “So you read other things besides those Hardy Boys books you keep appearing with?”
Nihil nodded. “I read poetry,” he said. “Amma makes us all read poetry.” Mr. Niles raised his eyebrows. “What is your favorite poem?” he asked, with some amusement.
“‘O Captain! My Captain!’” Nihil said without a second thought, the rest of the first lines of the poem flooding into his head even as he named the title.
“Whitman,” Mr. Niles said, nodding. “Abraham Lincoln. War.” He rested his eyes on Nihil, who sat attentively before him wondering why his favorite poem rather than his backward recitation had caught Mr. Niles’s imagination. “Celebrations at the end of a war are still marred by the memory of the dead,” Mr. Niles said.
Nihil, whose preoccupations were so close to his heart and to his physical being, Devi uppermost among them, did not understand. He had learned to recite the poem with great feeling, the aabb, xcxc of the rhyme scheme clear in his delivery, his The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won arriving with uplifted voice and bright eyes, his Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills full of pleading, and his fallen, cold and dead uttered with the requisite degree of bitter sorrow. But all of it was learned-art, not felt-art, for none of the realities that the poem spoke of, and that resonated with generations since, were realities Nihil could understand.
Mr. Niles, on the other hand, to whom the newspapers were read each day, who listened to the radio in two languages each day, grew quiet as he contemplated the poem in light of the things he had recently heard. For weeks now, there had been fresh reports of Tension in the North with the assassination of people who were standing up to Prabhakaran. These murders were mentioned alongside references to Tension in the halls of parliament, where the Tamil leaders were caught between two untenable propositions, neither wishing to support the terrorist group led by Prabhakaran nor able to wrest any assurances from the government regarding the particular concessions they demanded for the Tamil citizens whom they represented.
In print and on the airwaves, several dates were mentioned: 1956, 1958, 1977. It was as if these were the only years that counted. What had happened to the things that truly mattered? The New Years, Deepavalis, Vels, Ramazans, and Christmases for which the entire country had come to a halt and lightened everybody’s spirits? Where was the country in which there were purchases of new school books with their fresh and promising scent, a scent that children like Nihil inhaled, breathing deeply, eyes shut as they imagined a new grade, a new teacher, the possibility of shaking off earlier reputations for good or bad? What had happened to the country with its parades and cricket matches and its marriage of church bell and the call to prayer, its soothing chants of pirith wrapping around minaret, steeple, and stupa alike? That country seemed to have fallen silent, taking all its traditions with it, for the newspapers and radio mentioned only those dates that referred to episodes of violence and upheaval, when ordinary people became extraordinarily angry, when they wielded machetes, guns, and fire as though murder and arson were the norm and not the exception.
“Yes, war,” Mr. Niles said, “nobody ever wins.” And he said nothing more until it was time for Nihil to take Devi home and return for his own lesson.
A few weeks later when Nihil arrived, however, he was rewarded both with a heartening stack of handkerchiefs—Mr. Niles was clearly doing well—and an immediate greeting.
“So, Nihil, those backward lines,” he began, “you are saying each word backward but also each sentence, am I right? You could then begin the song or the poem with the last word and work back to its start, I suppose?”
“I could,” Nihil said, frowning a little. “I’ve only done lines so far, but I suppose I could do it from the very end. Then I’d have to picture the whole poem in front of me, to see what I’m saying.”
Mr. Niles nodded. “So you see the words as you are speaking or singing?”
“I have to see them, otherwise I don’t know how they are spelled. I have to pronounce each letter, which means I have to see each letter.”
“Remarkable,” Mr. Niles said. The middle finger of his left hand drew circles on the red cement floor as he said it again and then again, “Remarkable. Remarkable.”
During a subsequent visit, Mr. Niles handed Nihil two books. “The Twain book was the first I bought with my own money,” he said. “The second one, Harper Lee, that one was sent to me by a friend who left back in 1958 to live in America. I don’t know if there are other copies of it anywhere in this country.”
Nihil sat and examined the books. He had read an abridged version of Huckleberry Finn and liked it well enough but not as much as he liked the mysteries he preferred. He thought he might begin with the second, To Kill a Mockingbird.
“‘The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience,’” Mr. Niles said. “Best sentence I have ever read.”
Nihil held it up to his nose and flipped the pages of the book. The air that brushed his face seemed to be speaking to him with a scent of cinnamon and camphor. He wondered where Mr. Niles had stored the book. He turned to the last page.
“Gninrom eht ni pu dekaw mej nehw ereht eb d’eh dna,” he said. “‘And he’d be there when Jem waked up in the morning.’”
Mr. Niles laughed. “Son, you need to learn how to listen to the story as it is told. Start from the beginning, read to the end. That is how you learn the reasons for the way things are.”
Nihil, too, laughed. “I will,” he promised. “I just wanted to show you how I see words sometimes.”
“What else do you see, Nihil?” Mr. Niles asked, looking intently at him.
“Nothing,” Nihil said, putting the books on the floor beside him. “That’s all I can see. Words.” He felt slightly crestfallen that his remarkable skill had been so swiftly set among prior accomplishments and that new work was expected.
“You see other things, son,” Mr. Niles said, squinting at him, “you just don’t call it seeing. You call it knowing, am I right?”
Nihil said nothing. The hesitant notes produced by Devi’s fingers picking out the first notes of a simple allegro filled the silent air, suddenly loud. He wondered if she had improved since the last time, or whether he was simply willing that she had. She should practice more. Maybe he would draw up a time table for them, study time, cricket time, piano practice, all evenly placed between lunch and dinner. Then again, would the studies have to be broken down by subject or just amorphous time? Would Devi do the required work if she was left to her own devices, just a block of time and instructions to finish homework? Besides, cricket would soon give way to kites and that could not be controlled by time tables, but by the quality of the winds. And he knew she would want to follow them when he and Suren started flying those kites, tagging along and begging to hold the strings. She would not know how to twist those strings back and forth, and in the end their kite would be stolen by the slum boys who would send their fighter kite to bring it down. All the neighborhood children would blame her and begin to resent her. Better that he keep her home, even if it meant that he, too, would not be able to participate in the flying. That’s okay, he would content himself with helping to build the kites, with making the warm glue in the kitchen with Kamala’s help, with stretching the pieces of tissue across the frames that Suren and Rashmi would make. That should placate her.
“She needs to practice more,” Mr. Niles said, gesturing slightly toward the inner room from which the music escaped, startling Nihil. “And you need to think about the things you know so you can tell me when you come back next week.”
How did Mr. Niles know that he could sense wh
at the future held? Nihil mulled over this question as he walked back home alone after his own lesson. Did it show on his face? Had his older brother or sister told Mr. Niles of the way his fears overwhelmed him? What exactly had they said? He was so deep in thought that he walked past his house and almost to the end of the road and would have kept on walking had Sonna not stopped him.
“Goin’ to buy bread?” Sonna asked Nihil. Did such civil words spring to his lips because first his misshapen uncle and then his idiot sisters had been embraced by the Heraths? Did Sonna imagine that there was room in that circle for him too? “Nihil, no? Younger one? Goin’ to buy bread?”
Nihil had never gone to buy bread in his life and with his head full of Mr. Niles’s question, he did not understand, at first, what Sonna was talking about. He cocked his head and considered what Sonna had said.
“Bread?” he finally asked.
“Yeah men, bread. Paan!” And Sonna laughed, a little awkwardly.
“I don’t have any bread,” Nihil told him.
If Sonna had not been wearing a shirt over his jeans, Nihil may have been frightened by the sight, up close, of the skull and cross bones drawn into his forearm in ballpoint pen and the blood-dripping head held by its hair in a fist which an acquaintance of his had painted onto his entire back using mehendi, stealing the henna from his own sister. But all Nihil could see was Sonna looking simply unkempt and a little rakish, asking him about bread.
Sonna’s smile left his face, albeit slowly, as though regretting both its own disappearance and its having ventured forth. “You laughin’ at me?” Sonna asked.
“No, I’m not laughing,” Nihil said. “You asked if I have bread. I don’t have bread.”
“I din’ ask if you have bread. I asked if you are goin’ to buy bread,” Sonna clarified.
Nihil, now fully within the conversation, smiled disarmingly. “Oh! I didn’t hear you properly. I was thinking about something else.” He ran his fingers through his hair sheepishly. “I was on my way home and I didn’t even realize that I had passed the gate and walked all the way here.”
He looked back up the road, at the distance he had walked. All the way down his quiet street, its cul-de-sac and Mr. Niles’s one barely driven car keeping it that way, safe for pedestrians and safe for children like him, all the way past the edge of Kala Niles’s hedges, past his mother’s garden anchored at each corner that faced the road with her new flamboyant and her red-fruited jambu tree, all of which were no longer visible from where he stood, past Raju’s house and past the Silvas’ compound with its araliya at one end and its cane and bark fence filled to capacity with shrubs, past the Bollings’ long line of aluminum and almost past the Bin Ahmeds’ house. He looked back at Sonna, amazement on his face.
“Good thing you stopped me. Otherwise I might have kept on walking all the way to the main road!” A bus rounded the corner at a tear, its exhaust belching fumes, and after it passed, Nihil said, “Imagine? I might have even got hit by a bus! Good thing you were there.”
What grace there is to give if only the givers knew that they had the privilege of bestowing it. What grace is often given without intention.
Good thing you stopped me. Good thing you were there. The word good had never been applied to Sonna. Nobody had thanked him for anything he had ever said or done. No thanks had been deserved, but, on some long-ago occasion, before he had developed the knots and twists that hurt him from within, surely he had deserved one word of kindness? Sonna frowned and pressed his lips together to quieten the odd softening he felt within him. He stared at Nihil, who was still shaking his head at his own foolishness and smiling, now glancing at the main road where the bus had gone, now looking back at Sonna. There he stood, a good boy from a good home where doing nothing was a choice, not a predicament. A boy who was coming from a piano lesson on his way to a house where he did not have to be sent to dodge buses and drunkards on the way to buy the cheaper bread. Good thing you stopped me. Good thing you were there. Sonna squared his shoulders and strode up to Nihil, who stood a head shorter than him, still holding on to his Easy Piano Sonatas and Music Theory Workbook and his freshly sharpened black-and-yellow-striped Staedtler pencil and his soft Staedtler eraser.
He placed his hands on either side of Nihil’s shoulders and bent down. “Don’ walk like that again,” he said. “Nex’ time what if I’m not here? You might go straight an’ hit the bus. Thinkin’ an’ walkin’ you cannot do at the same time.” He ruffled Nihil’s hair and straightened up.
Nihil, his hair now disheveled, grinned. “I know. I know,” he said. He looked at his sandals then looked up at Sonna. “I can say things backward,” he said, wanting to reward Sonna for his narrow escape.
“Backward? Why?”
“‘Kced gninrub eht no doots yob eht,’” Nihil said. “That means, ‘the boy stood on the burning deck.’”
“Why he’s standin’ like that?” Sonna asked, leaning back and crossing his arms over his chest. He pulled his chin into his neck and looked skeptical.
“It’s a poem about a boy who drowned with his burning ship because his father couldn’t hear him. ‘Casabianca.’”
“Tell again.”
“‘Kced gninrub eht no doots yob eht.’ Here, I’ll write it for you. Then you’ll see.” Nihil handed his books to Sonna, flipped to the back of the first one, and tore out a scrap of paper. Balancing it on the stack in Sonna’s hands, his head bowed, he wrote in capital letters, KCED GNINRUB EHT NO DOOTS YOB EHT. Then he handed the paper to Sonna.
“What to do with this?” Sonna asked.
“Nothing. Just keep it,” Nihil said. And then because such meetings were not unusual in his life, nor momentous, he turned to go.
Sonna did not know if he wanted Nihil to stay. Did not know what they might have talked about had he lingered a while longer. And most of all, he did not know what he could say to make Nihil stay. So he just called out, “Be careful nex’ time!” as Nihil half turned and waved.
Jimmy Bolling only heard those words as he approached the door to his house, swearing about something. By the time he came out, Nihil had broken into a run. He watched Nihil for a few moments, then turned to Sonna and said, “You pick someone your own age to fight with. Why are you pickin’ small fry like that?”
Sonna said nothing. He put the piece of paper in his pocket and went back inside to lie down and think about boys on burning decks, about Nihil, about himself as an older boy with the wisdom to guide children like the Heraths.
That night at dinner, while everybody chattered about school and friends as they passed around warm loaves of steamed bread and dipped their fingers in fish curry and sambol, Nihil was quiet, keeping a secret from his siblings for the first time. He was too afraid to mention that he had escaped being hit by a bus, and there was no way to speak of Sonna and his good work without referring to the circumstances. In private, while he did not tell Devi the exact details of the story (he substituted some unknown boy for himself), he talked to her at great length about the dangers of day dreaming when walking down not only their street but any street at any time.
“Buses could hit you!” Nihil said, and felt satisfied that Devi seemed suitably impressed with the dangers that awaited people who weren’t paying attention.
The Magic of the Stolen Guitar
For a few weeks after that conversation with Sonna, Nihil did not have to time to dwell on Mr. Niles’s question, for there was fresh commotion in the Herath household thanks to the discovery, by Mrs. Herath, of Suren’s no-longer-on-loan guitar. Nihil stood together in a row with his siblings as Suren answered the questions that were asked at top speed, one after another, as if haste might yield a firmer truth.
“When did you stop borrowing and decide to keep it?”
“Where is that Sansoni boy now? Gone to Australia?”
“Why would he give you the guitar? Did he ask for payment?”
“Did his parents give him permission?”
“When were you going
to tell me about this guitar?”
These were the sorts of questions that, Nihil knew, could elicit little more than easy answers, the kind of answers that explained nothing. He listened to his brother’s replies: seven months ago, I don’t know, I don’t know, he had no use for it, no, I don’t know, I don’t know. He wished his mother were not so afraid of his brother’s talent. He wished that she could see that being good at something, as Suren was in all his academic work, was a confirmation of intelligence whose reward should be an untethering from the usual in favor of pursuing the as-yet-unknown. But these were not things that he could articulate, they were things he felt, and so he stayed silent, his sisters on either side, waiting for the questions to cease.
In the absence of what she termed concrete information, his mother placed the guitar on top of her almirah. It was a confiscation that was supposed to be honored by virtue of her having said so, but it was one designed to fail by virtue of her children’s joint understanding, unspoken but known, that it was a travesty to deprive their older brother of an instrument that belonged in his hands. That even Rashmi was outraged by the punishment was sufficient validation of their feeling that this was an injustice that could not be tolerated.
“We will take it in turns to get the guitar down from the almirah for Suren,” Rashmi declared.
They were sitting in their usual way, Rashmi and Suren on one bed, his, Devi and Nihil across from them on Nihil’s bed. The latest setback had upset them all so much that they had carried their tea into the bedroom and sat drinking it, flecks of sugar dropping off the surfaces of their biscuits onto the bed and not one of them seeming to care about the ants that the crumbs would attract.
“I don’t care if I get into trouble,” Devi declared, which made the others laugh and lightened their mood, for hardly a day went by when Devi was not being pulled up by a parent or a teacher or even, sometimes, Lucas or Kamala, for engaging in some shenanigan or other—helping herself to sticks of cinnamon, for instance, or making pools of mud in her mother’s garden.