by Ru Freeman
“If she finds out, I will say it was my idea,” Suren said.
“No, I will say that I asked you to teach me,” Nihil said, which brought another round of laughter, Nihil’s general antipathy to music being so well known that everybody, even the Bolling twins, teased him about his forced piano lessons.
So they took turns to stand on stools and chairs, each according to his or her height, to fetch the guitar from the top of the almirah every other afternoon when their mother stayed late at school to give private lessons to students who needed extra help, and, in exact backward rotation, to replace it before she returned. On the weekends, Suren himself took it off the top of the almirah while his parents rested and went to the Bollings’ house. There, in the side-yard that stretched from the end of the house to the wall bordering Old Mrs. Joseph’s property, where there was grass but only the most hardy plant—a single orange bougainvillea—had survived, creeping in fits and starts, blooming lushly in one spot, languishing in mangy despair in another, the twins had created a refuge of sorts. They had hauled unused furniture from around their house and from Old Mrs. Roberts’s, made a table by stacking a plank of wood over two piles of bricks and covering it with a tablecloth, and even persuaded Jimmy Bolling to construct a “roof” for them from sheets of aluminum rigged between the gutters of his house and Old Mrs. Joseph’s wall. It was a makeshift shelter that threatened to keel over during a hard rain, but it was all theirs, and when Suren practiced there, he played the pop songs that the twins requested, one after another until they were drunk with adoration.
“Play ‘I Want You to Want Me!’” Rose would yell, only to be drowned out by Dolly.
“No no no! Not that again! Play ‘We’ve Got Tonight!’” Dolly would beg. “Play ‘The Rose,’” Rashmi would say, which made Suren happy, for he liked the slow melody, and it made Rose grow all quiet and dreamy as she listened.
On more than one of those occasions, Jith, the younger of the Silva boys, accompanied them, and though he sat twitching nervously the whole time, beside himself with anxiety that his mother would find out, he did not leave until they did.
“Tell me if you see my brother coming to look for me, Aunty,” Jith would whisper to Francie Bolling as he scurried indoors, and she would nod and send him along to find a place to sit next to the other children.
Since his courtyard abutted Raju’s house, Sonna, too, was able to listen from his uncle’s veranda, alongside Raju, without giving away the fact that he was even remotely interested in the music. This music that Suren played was, to Sonna, a simple extension of the music in the books that he had held in his hands while Nihil wrote out his strange words. And though he wished that it was Nihil, not Suren, who was playing, he felt a sort of kinship with Nihil as he listened, moved this way and that by the rhythms of the guitar, his mind now filling with images of throngs of people and dancing, now emptying out into a sweet sort of sadness that still left him feeling at ease.
Whenever his sisters or any of his fellow hooligans down other streets annoyed him now, he took to simply saying Kced gninrub eht no doots yob eht! and stalking off, and because nobody knew what those words meant, they assumed it was a superior curse they were not smart enough to under stand. This gave Sonna both more power for himself and created more affection for Nihil, which meant that Sonna no longer harassed his sisters when they went to the Heraths’ house, and he restricted himself to tormenting them with questions when they returned, hoping, though he did not know that he hoped for this, that Nihil might have told them of his good deed, that some further emphasis had been placed on this part of his character, the part that looked after the children on the street rather than bullied them. There had been nothing, and so he tried to content himself by listening to the music, and though Suren’s skill, a skill that made his sisters worshipful, sometimes made him angry when he thought about it, for now the music itself never failed to calm his heart.
Eventually, though he tried to resist it, even Mohan was drawn into the appreciation of music when, sent to look for his brother, he walked right past Francie Bolling, who had fallen asleep, and found Jith sitting with the twins and the Herath children in the Bollings’ backyard.
Mohan was not in a good mood that day. The past Friday, he had got into an argument with a classmate that had ended in blows. He had used a string of epithets, called the boy, Jehan, a name that referred to his race, and said that he should bugger off to Jaffna. He had thought that the punishment from his teacher, twenty cuts with a ruler, was worth having been able to scream words he had kept bottled up inside, but he had not bargained for further reprisals, which had come in the form of a visit to his home by Jehan’s parents. They had arrived with a comb of plantains and sat down to discuss the matter with his mother just that afternoon.
“We did not know anything about this,” Mrs. Silva said.
She served the Canagaratnams their tea in her best cups and saucers, and even offered them imported tea biscuits. She glared at Mohan, who had been directed to sit beside Jehan, and wondered where on earth he could have picked up such common language.
“Why would you say such an ugly thing?” Mrs. Silva asked.
There really was no reply that Mohan could articulate except what he believed, he deserved it, which, Mohan knew, could not be said in front of the boy’s parents nor his mother, who had not expected him to be familiar with the kind of language he had used. He wished fervently that his father were there for surely Mr. Silva would have taken his side, would have understood the provocation, as he often put it, but his father had gone to visit his sister. Mohan shrugged.
“I am sure he did not mean it,” Mrs. Canagaratnam said. “Boys, you know . . .” And she was quiet for a few moments. Then she cleared her throat and said, very quickly, “It is just that, in these times, I think this sort of thing must be dealt with right away. That’s why we came.” And she looked at her husband, who nodded.
“Of course,” Mrs. Silva said, “I am sure he did not mean it. We are very decent people. He has not been raised to use language like this.”
“Yes, the language,” Mrs. Canagaratnam said, and drank her tea.
After the Canagaratnams left, his mother cuffed Mohan on the side of his head and asked him where he had learned to talk like that. “From the Bollings?” she asked, and when he shook his head, “From where then?” followed by, “I’m so embarrassed. To have Tamil people come in here telling me that I’ve raised a son who talks filth!” She all but sobbed as she explained the shame of this many times over to Mohan.
Mohan stood there feeling a little sorry for his mother and trying, but failing, to regret what he had done and what he had said. All he could think was that it stood to reason that a mealy mouthed ponnaya like Jehan would run crying to his mother. So when he was dispatched to find his brother, Mohan was grateful to leave, and each step away from the sight of his mother, and how much he had upset her, made him feel as though he was escaping both his transgression and the fallout.
When he walked in to the Bollings’ house, Suren was playing “Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da” and all of them were singing. The Bolling twins were twirling around with Devi, clapping their hands, and even Jith and Rashmi were swaying in time to the beat. Suren looked up and took his right hand off the guitar for an instant to wave him over, saying, Come in, machang! And Mohan felt that it was completely natural for him to walk over and join them, to leave his troubles and concerns behind for a while. He didn’t sing, but when Jith glanced over at him, Mohan smiled and tapped his brother lightly on his shoulder.
It would not last, this armistice, and both Mohan and Sonna would find themselves on the outside looking in again, one by choice, one unwittingly, and the Herath children, too, would drift away from the Bolling girls, but, for a while, Suren’s guitar brought all the children of Sal Mal Lane together, and we can be grateful for that.
A Visit to the Accident Service
After Mrs. Herath was reassured that she had got Suren’s disobedience u
nder control, and after the children were just as reassured that they could outwit their mother, things settled down in the Herath household and every body returned to their routines.
Suren, comforted by his small brigade of admirers and fellow miscreants, concentrated on improving his skill at the piano and the guitar. Furthermore, when his talent with the guitar and vocals was revealed at a birthday party of a friend, Faizal Adamaly, Suren found yet another way in which he could flout his mother’s rules, this time in the form of a pop band he named “White Lies.”
Rashmi, who had taken up needlework in earnest, used her spare time to make dresses for Devi’s doll and embroider designs into her mother’s serviettes, an activity that made Mrs. Silva draw herself up to her full height and say to Rashmi, and whoever else was near, It all started with me on that very first day, isn’t that so, darling?
Devi, who did not like being still for long, spent much of her time climbing the Asoka tree, which was now such an important part of her play that its life was guaranteed. In its lower branches she would sit to read and suck on sweets or eat olives and mangoes with chillies and salt, her face puckering from the sourness. From its highest branches she would look up and down the street and in through windows and doors, alternately pretending that she was a princess surveying her kingdom, or a spy. Every now and again, she pretended to be a ghost, not answering when her name was called, staying absolutely still. If some unknown person walked by on the road below, she would rustle the leaves, though she could not keep from laughing out loud when her victim stepped back and away from the noise, searching the branches.
Nihil continued to visit with Mr. Niles with a small change. Whereas he used to sit and read in silence, now, on those days when Mr. Niles’s pile of handkerchiefs was high enough to indicate a favorable disposition, he sat and read To Kill a Mockingbird aloud to him while Mr. Niles listened, a smile playing upon his lips, now and then a murmur of appreciation escaping. Still, it wasn’t until Devi tripped as she was coming into the house with her music books and cut her lip, that Nihil remembered to tell Mr. Niles about what else he could see besides his backward words.
Devi tripped over the garden hose that had been left out by Mrs. Niles earlier that afternoon because it had begun to rain just as she started to water her flowers. Nihil’s immediate concern for his sister was drowned out by Mr. Niles yelling something very loudly in Tamil, which brought Mrs. Niles running to the front door, her arms outstretched, before Nihil could even pick up Devi’s books from among the row of red ixora bushes where they had landed when they flew out of her hands. By the time he gathered the books and rescued the pencil he had sharpened for her just before they left their house from where it was lying in a shallow ditch at the edge of the Nileses’ garden, Devi was limping away without a backward glance, the upper half of her body wrapped up in Mrs. Niles’s yellow sari pota.
“Put the books near the piano and come and sit, son,” Mr. Niles said, his voice back to its usual low, soothing depth. “Aunty will take care of her.”
Nihil knew the truth of this immediately. Yes, Mrs. Niles would mend his sister, put some balm on her mouth, give her one of her mint lollies, and Devi would finish her lesson in high spirits, the drama of her story clenched tight and ready to be unfurled at the dining table that night. Her swollen lip would be the end of her childhood habit, the raggedy salt-sour taste of it the antidote to her lip-sucking, succeeding where all the lectures and prescriptions tried thus far had failed.
Nihil wiped his palms on the front of his denim shorts. “I sometimes know, I think I know, what is coming in the future for my sister, for Devi,” he said, trying to be as precise as he could. “I can tell what is going to happen before it does.”
“Did you see that she was going to fall?” Mr. Niles asked, his fingers reaching for one of the handkerchiefs stacked next to his bed. Today, the pile was low and his speech was effortful.
Nihil frowned. “No,” he said, defensive. “I don’t know what is going to happen, exactly, just what happens right afterward. If it is very bad, like falling, I don’t know it.”
“And do you see anybody else when you see these things, or do you only see your sister?”
“My sister. The other people come as names. Only Devi comes as her whole self.”
Mr. Niles was quiet for a while and Devi’s music took up the space between them once more, interspersed with the sound of Kala Niles’s palm against the side of the piano; she reserved the use of the metronome for Suren and Rashmi. When the music stopped while some instruction was being imparted, Mr. Niles gestured to the handkerchiefs with his eyes.
“These are washed every night by Aunty. She hangs them up to dry and wakes up at five to iron them. Every morning when the two of them, Aunty and Kala Akki, help me to this chair, I find these handkerchiefs here. It doesn’t make me more comfortable, or prevent the tears, or cure me.” He held Nihil’s gaze for a long while, then asked a question. “Why then do they do it?”
Nihil regarded Mr. Niles; he had no answer. Furthermore, having asked to be told what he knew, he could not imagine why the old man was ignoring what he had said. He decided to try again.
“I know the things that I can help her with,” Nihil said. “I know what to do to help her with her tests, with music, with the children in the neighborhood or my parents or her friends. I know what she will do after something has happened, like today. I know that she will stop sucking her lower lip and that she will talk in a certain way about it tonight.”
Mr. Niles sighed and it was a painful, broken sigh. “These things you know, they come from being afraid, do they not?” He nodded his head slowly, up down, up down. Then he reached up and drew the fingers of both hands through his hair, sinking them an inch or two into the soft waves, then drawing them back toward the back of his neck and repeating the move until he had massaged his entire head.
Nihil considered the question. Was it fear that made him know what was in store for Devi? If it was, then he would be instrumental, he felt, in causing things to be.
“No, Uncle, it’s not because I’m frightened. I just know things,” he said, finally, deciding to come down on the side of what he sensed was the truth. As he sat quietly, thinking about what Mr. Niles had said, Mrs. Niles brought out two cups of tea on a tray and set them down on the high table next to her husband. But when she had left and Nihil tried to give Mr. Niles his cup of tea, he waved him away. Nihil sat back down. He said, “I know what Devi is going to do and what people might do to her.”
Mr. Niles, who had shut his eyes, was quiet for so long that Nihil decided he had grown tired and fallen asleep. He passed over the Harper Lee book and picked up the Archie comic book he had borrowed from Mohan, who had shelves of them, and began to read. Then Mr. Niles spoke, pausing once to beckon Nihil to get his cup of tea for him.
“I need these handkerchiefs, but I don’t need them to be ironed and placed here, so neatly, with such order that it seems that they are unnecessary or are not intended for such a thing as wiping these tears. I don’t need as many as I see here each day. Two would probably suffice, maybe three. If two or three were given to me each day, that would be a sufficient quantity of caring. All of the rest, the washing, the drying, the ironing, the neatness within which I begin each quiet day, that, son, is love. Love is for the person who loves, not for the one who is loved.”
Nihil listened intently. Somehow, what was said about the handkerchiefs was really being said of him, but he did not understand, so he stayed quiet. Devol si ohw eno eht rof ton, he pictured, not for the one who is loved. Devol si ohw eno eht rof ton, devol si ohw eno eht rof ton, he said in time to their steps as he walked Devi home and then returned for his own lesson.
After that conversation, he decided to keep a notebook in which he could record everything he knew, and when the knowledge came to him, as a way of quantifying the extent and depth of his prescience. At first he drew four columns, one for each of his siblings and one for himself, but by the en
d of a month the one column that had anything in it was Devi’s, so he turned to a fresh page and drew three columns: What I know, When I Knew It, What Happened. Some things he wrote down:
Devi was going to get caught passing a note in class and be sent to the principal’s office, where she would have to stand facing the wall through an entire period and miss PT, which she loved because she was such a good runner and didn’t ever mind sweating.
Raju and Sonna were fighting, and he was not certain what this might have to do with Devi but because they appeared, he wrote their names down.
Devi was going to get hit on the back of her head and have to get two stitches.
Devi was going to have an accident.
Devi was going to have an accident.
Devi was going to have an accident.
“I think Devi is going to have an accident,” he told Suren at last, not knowing what else to do with this repetitive bit of knowing that had no accompanying details.
“Yes, she will,” Suren said, mildly. “She is always having accidents.”
“This is a real one,” Nihil said, “a very bad one, I think.”
“Do you think or do you know?” Suren asked, looking up from the paper airplane he was folding; he was sitting on his bed, his chin resting on one knee, the other tucked under his hip.
Nihil squinted his eyes against the sun, which was coming through the thick yellow curtains in their room and covering his brother and his airplane and bed in golden light. It seemed to be a time for positive thoughts, not negative ones. “I think I know,” Nihil said, trying to incorporate the best of both possibilities.
“Let us see if you only know.”
“Then what?”
“Then I suppose we can be extra careful of her.”
Nihil lay down on his own bed, arms under his head, and considered this option. It seemed wise, after all, to wait until things were more certain. She had been doing fairly well these past few months, and except for the possible stitches, there was nothing to worry about. The principal, well, that was ordinary stuff, the kind of thing all of them had suffered, with the exception of Rashmi; she never transgressed.