by Ru Freeman
It was true that this was the first time in a long time that she had seen Raju in his barely dressed state. She thought about that for a little while, then wondered what Raju meant by Tamil people coming. Where were they coming to? Perhaps she would ask Mrs. Niles if she knew anybody coming from the North. Then again, maybe it would be better to ask her father, as Raju had suggested. Outside, there was a sudden clap of thunder and she stood up, went to the door, and looked at the darkening sky. There was no rain yet. She hoped it would stay dry until her mother returned home from school. Now that she had taken over additional duties as the teacher in charge of several clubs, she was rarely home before three thirty or sometimes four o’clock. Rashmi sighed, wishing that her mother could just be an ordinary teacher again, the kind who boarded the school buses when their students did at the end of each day and went home to their families. Why did her mother spend so much time in school? Why did she have so many places to go to even on the weekends? If she stayed home, perhaps Devi would too. When she became a mother, Rashmi decided, she would be less careless. She would have both money and children, prestige and domesticity. All it would require were a few good choices.
Raju appeared in the doorless frame of the entry to the garage from the backyard. He was dressed in khaki longs and a yellow short-sleeved shirt. “Now better,” he said, “washed up also a little.”
Rashmi felt that, indeed, things were looking up. When he put his clothes on, Raju became the good adult, not the half-mad one. Her spirits lifted and she felt slightly kinder toward him. “Uncle Raju, I have come to ask—”
“No, no,” he corrected, his eyes grave, his palms out and facing down, “Not to ask, to tell. Because Uncle Raju doesn’t know anything. I only know when your mummy or daddy tell me. Or Lucas. Sometimes he tells also. And Mama, but she doesn’t know much about important things, about the government and all. About the neighborhood, of course, I can listen to Mama. She knows everything.”
Rashmi cut in and spoke as fast as she could. “I have come to ask you to tell Devi not to visit you here anymore,” she said. “We don’t like it.” She crossed her arms in front of her, bracing for the protest she was sure would come.
What Raju might have thought of her request, however, was not immediately shared because just then there was the sound of voices and Devi burst in, Nihil and Suren swift on her heels. Rashmi stood up and went over to them. Devi’s eyes were full of tears and the boys were simultaneously berating her, pleading with her, and attempting to console her. Devi ran over to Raju and wrapped her arms around one of his.
“Uncle Raju is my friend!” Devi wailed. “He always has time for me. He never tells me to be quiet or go away!”
To Rashmi’s surprise, Raju’s own eyes became moist. “Don’t cry, darling, don’t cry. Uncle Raju is always your friend. Come now, you sit on the chair and I will rock you,” he said, his voice reverting to its usual mellifluous cadences. Devi let herself be led to the chair, where she sat and regarded her older siblings, tears still sliding down her cheeks in erratic rivulets.
“We don’t want her coming here by herself,” Rashmi repeated with as much resolve as she could muster under the circumstances. “It is not appropriate for a little girl like her to come here. It smells bad here. Besides,” she added, “when you are in here, you are never properly dressed!”
Raju seemed to take in Rashmi’s own formal attire for the first time. He looked up and down each child in turn, then glanced around the garage as if realizing, at last, the incongruousness of the room in which he was entertaining well-dressed people like them. He shook his head from side to side. “Rashmi, you are right. This is not a place for you children. Especially not a little girl like Devi. Next time she comes, I will make sure that she sits in the veranda,” he said.
Devi said, “I will come and visit Uncle Raju there!” She wiped her face and smiled.
Rashmi looked at Devi, wondering if she or Raju remembered who else occupied that space. Either they did not or neither cared.
“It is better if you came and visited my sister at our house,” Suren said, his voice a mixture of suggestion and welcome. “You can even bring her seeni kooru there.”
Raju looked at Devi. “Even that I can do. Anything at all you ask, Uncle Raju will do for you children,” he said. And that was that.
Was he really that happy? Rashmi wondered as she walked home in her usual place, the left of the row, Nihil to her right, Devi between him and Suren. Raju had made it sound as if he had been elevated rather than demoted. Rashmi, centered as she was in her perfectly arranged world, knew as little about the desires that lived within people like Raju as she did about raising children. Year upon year upon decade of nothing but the same, the same dashed hopes, the same slights and injuries, had emptied all hope from Raju. Until the Heraths moved in, until Nihil talked to him, until tea was served to him by their mother, and until Devi visited him. His cup was brimming over, and nothing that anybody could say or do could diminish that.
Tigers
Raju kept his promise, and Rashmi had to content herself with the fact that they could now at least monitor Devi’s activities and ensure that Raju did not encourage her to do anything foolish. He arrived the very next afternoon, dressed in a purple T-shirt and an old pair of long shorts that his cousin Jimmy Bolling had discarded and that were held up by a belt. He was carrying not only a bag of seeni kooru for all of them, but also the entire hanging chair complete with its tangle of ropes.
“I brought this to hang on your Asoka tree,” he said. “Then Devi can have it.”
“It will rot when it rains,” Nihil said, stuffing his hands in his pockets, trying not to be tempted by the sweets so he could concentrate on what would be best for Devi.
Raju beamed and tapped his head. “Aha aha, but Uncle Raju has thought of everything. I went to Koralé and he took me to the burusu kadé and look, the coir man made it waterproof!”
Rashmi brushed her hand over the rattan but could not confirm that it was any different than when she had sat in it, so she said nothing. Either it would rot or it wouldn’t, but what did it matter? She had Devi under control and that was what was important. So she humored Raju while he made a great show of fetching laborers from Koralé’s wood-chopping business to shorten the ropes and hang the chair just low enough that Devi could climb into it with the aid of some of the lower branches, but too high for her feet to touch the ground when she sat in it. Rashmi glanced at the sweat glistening off the bodies of the two men who did the work and summoned Kamala to serve everybody cool lime juice instead of tea, which they sipped with their backs to her and her brothers and sister and even Raju, as if embarrassed to be seen drinking something so delicious in front of them. Mrs. Herath, who was inside, sitting at the dining table and grading papers, sent Kamala out again with a plate of pineapple sprinkled with salt and pepper, and this, too, was consumed discreetly by the men.
“First time I’m drinking cool drinks in your house,” Raju said, slurping the last of his juice. “Usually your mummy gives me tea.”
“We don’t call our mother mummy,” Rashmi said. “We call her Amma.”
“Because we are Sinhalese children,” Devi said, from her perch in the chair.
Mohan, who was listening from his veranda, called out his agreement, “Yes, real Sinhalese children know what to call their parents.” He came out and stood by the low hedge that now divided their driveway from the Heraths’, a hedge that was trimmed and watered in turn by Mrs. Herath and his father. It was due for pruning and the top layer of thin branches grazed his chin. Rashmi and Suren lifted their hands in a wave.
“But,” Raju said, frowning, “Tamils also call Amma. Both call Amma. Only Burghers like my nieces and nephew call mummy and daddy.”
“Tamils probably copied from the Sinhalese,” Mohan said, but his voice was drowned out by Nihil’s.
“Some children in my school, even if they are Sinhalese or Tamil, they call their parents mummy and daddy,” Nih
il announced, as soon as he had finished his drink, sucking the last drops out by balancing the whole glass, upside down, on his face.
Rashmi removed the glass from his face and placed it on the bright striped tray that Kamala had left behind on a stool. “We can’t control what other people do,” she said.
Raju, growing ever more comfortable as he sat with the children, almost like a close member of the family, he felt, said, “But you children don’t say akki and aiyya, no? I have noticed. Most other Sinhalese children don’t call brothers and sisters by their name.”
Rashmi drew herself up to her full height. “What we decide to do in our family is a private matter,” she said, and there was no doubt, no doubt at all, that Raju did not belong in the warm glow of that we and that our. In the silence that followed they all heard Mrs. Silva calling for Mohan from inside their house. As he turned to leave, Devi spoke.
“When are the Tamils coming, Uncle Raju?” she asked, pushing herself off from the tree and then crouching down in the chair to avoid banging her head on the trunk when the chair swung back toward it.
Rashmi looked at Raju with keen disapproval. Had he been filling Devi’s head with these nonsensical tales too? “They are not coming,” she told Devi. “I asked Mrs. Niles. She said no relatives are coming from Jaffna.”
Mohan, already halfway to his house, called out, “Yes, I’ve heard, Tamil Tigers. We have to be ready.”
“My god. Not relatives! Tamil Tigers!” Raju said at the same time. Devi erupted into laughter. “Who are Tamil tigers?” she asked, “Do these tigers speak Demala? I’ll have to go and tell the Nadesans,” she said, and hopped out of her chair. She ran to the gate. Rashmi stopped her.
“You are not to go out of this gate without one of us, remember the promise?” she said. “If you want to visit the Nadesans, you can take Nihil and go. But don’t go and tell them silly things like tigers who are Tamil. They will laugh at you.”
“Then your daddy hasn’t told you about them?” Raju asked, looking even more worried than usual. “How come? All over the news these days. Even in the papers they are writing about them. Daddy must know more than the papers, no?” He wiped the sweat off his face with the edge of his T-shirt, revealing the round hairless belly beneath. “Very strange that he hasn’t told you all about what is happening. He has even given Lucas all kinds of information, I heard. About the Americans. CIA is everywhere now. Even in the old British places!”
“Who are these tigers?” Rashmi asked, though she was loath to admit that she was lacking in any sort of knowledge that had filtered its way into a skull as thick as Raju’s, loath also to admit that their father hardly ever shared information with them if only because none of them had the patience to sit through his convoluted lectures.
Raju stood up to go. “Better ask your daddy. He must have a reason for not telling you, so I don’t want to tell you and get into trouble. Maybe they are not coming. You ask Daddy and then you can tell Uncle Raju also. Because I don’t know everything.”
Rashmi opened and shut the gate behind Raju, then opened and shut it again behind Nihil and Devi. Devi had decided that she wanted to visit the Nadesans anyway and ask if they would let her play with the powdered dyes they kept for Deepavali. For his part, Nihil hoped that there would be enough time to stop by and ask Mr. Niles about these tigers before he forgot.
“Don’t talk about tigers,” Rashmi called after them and felt gratified that Nihil turned and waved. She smiled. She liked the way he was coming along. “He doesn’t worry as much as he used to, does he?” she asked Suren, pulling her dress over her knees and to her ankles as she sat down next to him on their front steps. For a few minutes she managed to look like a little girl free of cares.
“He worries,” Suren said, “but since he started writing things down in that notebook he seems to feel more in control. Maybe that is why he doesn’t talk about those things that much now.”
“Mr. Niles helps him too, I think,” Rashmi said. She wondered if she ought to find out what exactly Nihil talked about with Kala Niles’s father, but then decided against it. What was there to trouble her about Mr. Niles, after all, a man who could not even get out of his chair without help? Worrying about Devi was difficult enough for all of them; there was no need to add a new worry about yet another sibling. She gazed absentmindedly at Suren and noted that there was a thin rip in the seam in the shoulder of his shirt. She drew her fingers over it and suggested that he give it to her to be darned when he took it off at the end of the day, her sewing was improving, her embroidery too, she would like the practice.
They were still sitting there when Sonna came into view over the top of their gate. “Mummy sent me to ask if Devi is okay,” Sonna said, though he did not meet their eyes and did not look as if he cared if their sister was well.
“She’s fine,” Suren said. “Tell your mother that Raju is visiting her here now. That will make her happy.”
Sonna nodded but did not go away. His glance met Rashmi’s and she wondered if there was something else he wanted to say. She contemplated asking him to come in, but in the wake of their recent rescue of Devi from Raju’s malodorous den, and the invitation extended to Raju to visit their house on such a regular basis, it didn’t seem prudent to invite Sonna in, too, so she said nothing. Another time, she thought, her eyes taking in what she could see over the top of the gate, his hair combed, his face at ease. When things settle down. Maybe he’s not so bad. She sat silently while Sonna’s eyes washed over them, their garden, the walls of their house, their roof, and then turned up toward the sky as if watching for rain. After a while he looked away from them and walked down the road. In the quiet he left behind, she could hear the irregular footsteps of the hand-me-down boots he had taken to wearing, one heel worn shorter than the other.
Sonna Remembers Everything and Nothing
Let us follow Sonna down the road and observe not the exaggerated swagger of his walk but rather the set of his shoulders. If we peel away the tatters with which he dresses himself, if we wash his body clean of his disguises, if we touch his scars with love and regret as a mother might as she prepares a son’s body for burial, if we listen not to the words he speaks but to the yearning in his silence, we will see that Sonna is just a boy, one poised to step away from or toward us.
Nobody had told Sonna to go and check on Devi. He had thought of it all on his own. He had wanted to reassure her that he was a responsible guardian. He had wanted to make sure that she knew that he had hurried back as fast as he could with the bottle, that he had every intention of taking her back home, unharmed, but that by the time he had wrested the bottle from Sunil after a prolonged fight, Devi had fled, gone first to Lucas, then to Raju. Why she had sought out Raju, he could not imagine; the thought of a child like her, uncomplicated, sweet, sitting around while someone like Raju, hideous and stupid, threw weights about the place made Sonna shudder. Sonna had wanted to communicate to Devi’s siblings that he had tried to prevent all of it.
As he set out for the Heraths’ house, he slowed his steps to avoid coming face-to-face with Nihil and Devi, who had just set out to walk up the street. He did not feel able, yet, to speak directly to them. The older Herath children, closer to him in age, were more likely to understand him after all. Just before he reached the Heraths’ gate and still hidden by the foliage on the Silvas’ fence, he paused again. From here, he could see Suren and Rashmi sitting on their front steps. The mandevilla that Mrs. Herath had planted on either side of the opening to their veranda when they had first moved there, and then trained along V-shaped trellises, now cascaded from the cement overhang that shielded the veranda from the rain. It provided a red-and-white bower within which the two older Herath children sat, talking. Sonna could not hear what they were saying, he could just barely hear the low tones of their voices, Rashmi’s, pitched a little higher than Suren’s, wrapping around her brother’s words, setting them in order. As he watched, Rashmi leaned toward Suren and caressed his shoulde
r. She said something to him that made Suren smile and shake his head. This was a different Rashmi. It was not how she looked when she walked down the street or came to Sonna’s house; then she seemed untouchable. Emboldened by this, Sonna stepped forward to inquire after Devi’s health, though as soon as he began to speak he lost all confidence and did not say what he wanted to but, rather, what he thought they would prefer to hear.
Lying in bed after he returned from the Herath household, ashamed of the tears he had brought to Devi’s eyes, and then the lack of welcome from the older Herath children, he tried to understand what had happened, how, exactly, his good intentions had backfired. His mother came in with a cup of tea.
“Sonna, get up and drink the tea and I will change the sheets on the bed,” she said, setting the cup on the floor beside him. “Drink soon or the ants will come.”
“I don’ wan’ new sheets now,” he said, feeling tired.
“Why? Daddy jus’ brought from the dhobi. Get up, get up. I can make it quickly, then you can lie back down.”
Francie Bolling leaned over and shook the leg nearest to her lightly, her palm over Sonna’s right ankle. Something about that gentleness enraged him. He jerked his leg and flung her hand away.
“Leave me alone!” he said. “If the sheet is filthy, let it be filthy. The whole damn house is filthy anyway. Why bother ’bout sheets?” And he scowled at his mother.
His mother straightened up. She murmured “Then nex’ time when you get up I will make the bed” as she left the room. Sonna’s outbursts had long lost their effect on her after the first few times he had set upon her, trying to assuage some other hurt that he would not share with her. She did not cry anymore.
Watching his mother leave, Sonna felt his anger dissipate. The coir fillings in the mattress poked through the thin cover and scratched his skin, and for a moment he wanted to call her back and ask her to make the bed. He waited for this feeling to pass and, after a while, his thoughts returned to the one thing that came to him when he was in this kind of mood: he remembered the way the bat had felt in his hands when he used to play cricket at his school, back when he still cared enough to wake up and make it there by seven thirty each morning. And although his parents and sisters had never attended a single game in which he had played, he could still recall what it felt like when the other boys at school cheered for him, when everything else dissolved and in its place there was only himself, a boy, and his game. This was the memory that usually took him away from the present and made him feel as though his life was other than it was, but today he could not lose himself in it. The story slipped out of his grasp and the images were replaced by a scene in which he swung his bat repeatedly at a ball that nobody he could see was bowling at him; the stands remained empty no matter how hard he looked up into them, how hard he tried to refill them with the crowds he remembered.