by Ru Freeman
Mrs. Herath, seeing how Nihil’s shoulders had suddenly slumped, laughed. “Don’t be silly. How can we be late? It is not even eight yet and the match doesn’t start until ten. We’ll leave in about half an hour,” she said.
Nihil sighed, unable to tell her where his thoughts had taken him, for surely that would earn an I warned you, didn’t I? Instead he stood in front of his mother, staring at his reflection in the mirror. He ran his hand over the fabric of his shiny dark-blue shirt with its motif of golden chariots. Suren came in and stood beside him, his arm around Nihil’s shoulder.
“See how nice both of you look in those shirts?” Mrs. Herath said. “This way, I can always tell exactly where you are.”
“Don’t worry, Amma, I will look after Nihil,” Suren said.
Mrs. Herath finished strapping her wristwatch on and spoke brusquely. “Yes, but I’ll also be using the binoculars!” She rummaged in the almirah for a few moments and turned around holding aloft a pair of binoculars.
“But those are Tha’s! He won’t want you to take them to the match,” Nihil whispered.
Mrs. Herath glanced over at her husband, who was, miraculously, still sleeping through all the excitement, and pressed her fingers to her lips. “Shh. He won’t know we took them,” she said.
The borrowed driver eased the borrowed car slowly down the narrow road, conscious of the importance of his cargo both human and inanimate. As they passed the Bollings’ house, Sonna crossed in front of their car.
“That boy never seems to be at school,” Mrs. Herath said, thoughtfully. “At least Rose and Dolly go to school.”
“Maybe he’s going to the match too,” Rashmi said. “He might be going with friends.” She said this though she knew that Sonna would hardly be going to a match that did not involve his own school and that, further, he did not seem to have any friends. Although she had wanted to defend him, the words only made her feel worse about the water-ice.
“Like us,” Devi said, considering that she and her sister had no business being out of school either.
Nihil, Devi, and Rashmi twisted in the back seat to observe Sonna, who had crossed back and was standing in the middle of the road, staring at the slow-moving car. Nihil waved, a small and cautious wave, and though Devi followed suit, Sonna did not wave back.
“I feel sorry for him,” Rashmi said, feeling as though she had added to Sonna’s troubles somehow.
“I think he could be better,” Nihil offered cautiously, sitting back down, “even if he’s not very nice now. Maybe if he joined us when we play he might learn how to behave—”
“I want you to stay clear of that boy, you hear me?” Mrs. Herath said, cutting short Nihil’s good intentions. “No good can come of him. Francie told me just the other day that they even had the police come and visit them because he had stolen a bottle of milk from Sunil’s shop. Nothing but trouble, she said.”
The children said no more, in unspoken agreement that if Sonna’s mother herself had complained to theirs, there was no argument they could come up with on Sonna’s behalf.
Mrs. Herath felt compelled to add, “A mother knows,” the sort of enigmatic statement that had always been useful in the corralling of children. The first day of the match came and went in its usual manner, the backs of the stands filling with boys and men waving flags and dancing in time to the music being belted out by hastily hired “bands.” Since payment came in both money and alcohol, fairly quickly the music was hardly recognizable as such and the singing more caterwaul than song. Devi joined in, raising her voice with glee as she sang her brothers’ school song, stretching out her e’s and a’s until Rashmi thought she sounded more like a villager just learning English than a convent-educated girl from a good family like theirs. When lunch was called, Suren and Nihil went by in a blur of blue and gold during the boys’ parade around the grounds.
“Look! Rashmi, look!” Devi yelled. “They are carrying Suren and Nihil on their shoulders like flags! I want to go in the parade,” she added, after they had passed, fingering the trim on her dress. “I want to go with Nihil.”
“Don’t be silly,” Rashmi said. “Bad enough we are here with bogus excuse letters. Imagine if the match nun saw us in the parade?” She shivered, picturing the particular nun assigned to monitor the activities of convent girls at the match, her eyes glued to the television to see what she could see. “Just be happy that we get to come.”
But confining Devi took more than common sense. On the morning of the second day, while her mother was wrapped up with her friends and Rashmi was busy storing their baskets of food and drink under their seats, Devi slipped under the ropes and out of the short gate separating the grounds from the stands and tried to blend in with all the little boys fielding the leather balls while the cricketers warmed up. She was so thrilled with herself that she was completely unaware that the boys were nudging each other and laughing at her until Nihil came up and called her name just as she braced herself to catch a ball that had rolled toward her. Hearing his voice, she forgot to fold one knee sideways and cup her palms. Instead, she squatted. The ball rolled between her legs and toward another boy.
“Bokku! Bokku!!” a boy yelled next to her, the visor of his blue cap tipped up.
“Girls can’t play cricket!” another added.
“What are you doing here?” Nihil asked, taking her hand. Devi broke away from him, flew at the boy who was nearest to her, and kicked him in the shins.
“You are stupid idiots. I can catch balls too.” She aimed kicks at any boy who came near her. She was like a resplendent yellow wasp, a flash of color amid a field of green and white.
In the end it took two cricketers to break up the melee, which concluded with one of them carrying a squirming Devi back to her mother.
For the rest of that day Devi was forced to sit between her siblings, the two boys voluntarily giving up their boys-tent life to manage their difficult sister. On Saturday, the final day of the match, thanks to her complete lack of regret about what had happened, Devi was left behind.
Raju’s Gift
If only Devi had behaved that day at the match. If only she had been content to respect the boys-only boundaries that had been set up and venerated for a century and two years. If only Lucas, not Raju, had been left in charge of her on the third day of the match. But it all happened this way and not in those other ways. Devi misbehaved, Raju was chosen.
Mrs. Herath summoned Raju to watch over Devi like a hawk, the little vixen, she’ll be off like a bullet if you take your eyes off her, and he took the task so seriously that he ran home, showered, and, despite the heat, returned dressed in a long-sleeved button-down shirt and his best belted khakis and his late father’s polished leather shoes with laces, his sparse hair wet and slicked back.
Nihil told Raju confidentially, before they left for the game, that he had gone over early morning to tell Mr. and Mrs. Niles about this punishment, just in case Raju had any need to get additional help from them.
“Devi just would not listen,” Nihil had told the old couple. “Now maybe she will learn. I don’t like to leave her, but there is nothing to be done. She is too stubborn.”
“You run along and enjoy the match, son,” Mr. Niles had said. “Tell Raju to come and talk to Aunty if he needs anything. And Kala will be home after school as well.”
“It’s not fair,” Devi confided to Raju when the flurry of departures was behind them and the reality of her punishment had set in. “They all get to do what they like and only I never get to do what I want.” She was wearing Nihil’s clothes, a pair of black shorts and a dark-blue shirt, the colors of the rival school. It was a protest that none of her family had commented on, not even Nihil, which had stung her most of all.
“They are just trying to take good care of you, darling, because you are so special, that’s all,” Raju said, using his gentlest voice. “Isn’t it better to stay at home and have fun than to go and sit in the hot sun all day long watching cricket?”
“I love cricket!” Devi said, looking at Raju as though he had lost his mind. “I love to go to the big match. And now I will have to wait a whole year to go again. And they may not even take me.”
Raju watched her swinging back and forth in the chair hanging from the Asoka tree, her hands clasped around the paper bag of Delta sweets he had brought for her. Clearly the swing and the toffees were insufficient to make up for the egregious sin of having been left behind. He racked his brains for something else that he could do for her, something wonderful that would make having had to stay home with him to watch her seem just as exciting as being allowed to go to the cricket match with her mother and her siblings.
He could get her hair clips, he considered, then rejected that idea. Devi was not the kind of girl who cared for that kind of thing; she was an Alice band kind of girl. Icy chocs, he mused, gazing at the sad face before him. No, that had already been used up when she got stitches; it had to be something new. He entertained the idea of taking her up the road to the Sansoni house and helping her to climb the wall so she could pick a ripe guava, but then put that thought out of his mind, berating himself for even considering such corruption of innocence. He let his gaze wander around Mrs. Herath’s splendidly maintained garden, all along the stiff and neatly pruned hedges, winding in and around her pride of Japan, her ixora, her jasmine and gardenia, the spotted mauve, yellow, and white dancing orchids hanging from lined coconut husk pots from the jambu tree, her collection of citrus bushes, limes and oranges, the fruity scent of those flowers designed to remain a safe distance from the rose bushes she had grown with Kala Niles’s help, the mandevilla flowers hanging above him, her feathery green and white and purple ferns, up the Asoka tree, and back to Devi without anything of worth coming to mind. Devi continued to sit, rubbing and clacking the nails of her fingers together. Rub rub, clack clack, rub rub, clack clack.
“I can hear the postman,” she said suddenly, looking up, “can you? Maybe I’ll get a letter from someone. That will be exciting.”
“Do you have a pen pal from abroad? From Australia?” Raju asked, even that being possible for the Herath children. He pulled out a handkerchief and mopped his forehead and neck. He considered rolling up the sleeves of his shirt but decided he would hold that in reserve for when the heat got worse.
“No,” she replied. “Only Rashmi and Suren. Not even Nihil gets letters. Not even from our grandmother. She only writes to Rashmi.” She added this fact to the list of injustices perpetrated against her by her family.
“How about we write a letter to Nihil then?” Raju said, his face brightening. “That way he’ll be happy when he gets a letter and maybe he’ll write you one.”
Devi considered this and then shook her head. “He already lives here,” she said. She popped another Delta toffee into her mouth and tucked it into the back of her cheek, letting the melting caramel syrup drip through her mouth, waiting for it to make her feel better.
Raju could not find anything wrong with this line of reasoning so he planted his chins in the palm of his right hand and stared glumly toward the gate, listening to the postman’s bell drawing near and then nearer until it stopped in front of the Heraths’ house. He stood up and went to meet him. He opened the gate and greeted the postman noncommittally.
“Ah, Mr. Raju, you also have moved houses now?” the postman asked slyly, looking through the bundle of letters in his hand, very slowly, before extracting several bills and letters and tapping them together on the handlebar of his bike.
Raju was too preoccupied to catch the postman’s jibe at the way in which he, registered-mail-signature-required letter in hand, had discovered Raju’s father, Silver Joseph, with his mistress in this same house the afternoon before they had committed suicide together.
“No,” Raju said. “I’m looking after the youngest while the Herath family is at the big match. She is a bit sad and I’m trying to think of something to cheer her up.” Raju contemplated Devi from afar.
The postman peered over the gate at Devi, who spun slowly in her chair. “Ah, Baby! Why you sad, Baby?” he asked in English, then reverted to Sinhala. “Baby, if you sit crying like that all day, your face will become sour like a billing fruit!” he said. “Then what will your Amma say when she comes home and finds a billing and no little girl? Ah? Ah?”
Devi tightened her lips but the smile leaked out nonetheless. “Then she’ll have to make billing achchaaru,” she called out. “And nobody will know where I am and they’ll all be looking for me and in the end they’ll be so sad that they left me here to become billing.”
The postman laughed along with Raju. “You want to come for a ride with postman uncle?” he asked. “I will take you up the lane on the handlebar,” he said. He turned to Raju. “Shall I take her?”
Raju’s face went through several changes as he considered the wisdom of allowing Devi out of the gate. If he ran behind the bicycle, then he would be keeping her in sight, wouldn’t he? Besides, here was Devi running up to them, already kicking off her sandals and slipping out of the gate. And here was the postman, wiry as he was, with his trousers held in place by a thick belt tightened around his narrow waist, strapping his stack of mail to the rack of his bike and hoisting her up onto the handlebars.
“Yes,” Raju said, quickly, just before the grinning postman took off up the road with the happy, laughing child. “Yes, I will let you take her once only, up the street,” he said, starting to walk quickly behind the bicycle, his arms flapping at his sides, the fingers spread wide, a frown on his forehead, his head, too, tipped over even farther than usual with worry.
“Uncle Raju, look! I can go without even holding!” Devi said, lifting her hands in the air.
“No! No!” Raju yelled. “You madman, tell her to hold on!”
The postman laughed and said something to Devi, who shook her head and held on to the handle behind her back. Not that it provided much support, but it was better, Raju felt, than being completely out of control. The postman took her up the lane to the Sansoni house and then down the road to the gate of her house and back again several times before he stopped.
“Now that’s enough, Baby,” he said, panting, over her pleas for more. “Postman uncle will faint if I try to pedal one more time.”
Devi slipped off the handlebars reluctantly and stood beside Raju to watch the postman wheel his bike away, his shirt plastered to his back, to resume his work. There was no trace of sadness left in her face and Raju felt extremely glad about that. As they stood there, Sonna, wearing a dirty white shirt that flapped in the breeze, strode out from Raju’s gate, leaving it unlatched behind him.
“Ai! Sonna!” Raju called out, feeling respectable and responsible and in full control. He gestured toward his house. “Lock that gate behind you!”
“You lock it,” Sonna said, coming to a stop.
“Always causing problems,” Raju muttered as he left Devi’s side and crossed the street to latch the gate. It had been a long while since he’d felt the brunt of Sonna’s bullying. He had almost forgotten what it felt like.
“Don’ know who is causin’ problems,” Sonna said, “puttin’ a small girl like her on the pos’man’s bike. Left to look after her but don’ even know how to look after yourself.”
Raju had crossed back to stand next to Devi, who took his hand in commiseration, instantly comforted by the familiarity of his palm, the odd softness of its fleshy mounds. “Uncle Raju looks after me properly,” she said, addressing Sonna. “He brings me sweets and he dresses nicely and he comes to our house and has tea and sits with me.”
“Wait till your brother hears that he put you on the pos’man’s bike. That will be the end of your Uncle Raju.” Sonna glared at her, wondering if she was sufficiently scared, enough to stay out of trouble until her sister and brothers got home. No, she didn’t look it. “Good thing too,” he added, “otherwise one of these days he’ll get you into real trouble. Don’ know how you can stand to have an ugly man like him nex’ to
you all day long.”
At this Devi’s face screwed up into a glower. “He’s not ugly. You are ugly,” Devi said, stamping her foot at him as if she was trying to scare away an insect.
Sonna stood rooted to the spot and looked at her in genuine amazement. Then he turned on his heel and stalked off. “Do what you like,” he said, though they could not hear the words, all they could hear was muttering: “You go an’ ride aroun’ with the pos’man. I don’ care. Did it once, did it twice, three times already I tried. For what? You stay with that fuckin’ fool. See what happens.” He broke off a sprig from the araliya branch that was hanging over the road from the tree at the edge of the Silvas’ garden and flung it away, his hand covered with the milk-white sap that continued to drip from the broken limb behind him. “I’m ugly? I’m ugly?”
He reached his house, kicked the front door open, and went inside. He strode up to the long mirror in his mother’s room. In his state of agitation, his eyes on fire, he did look frightening. The precise ballpoint pen drawings he had made on his body now seemed uneven, the design blotchy in parts where the ink had smeared. He hit himself several times in his stomach, bracing for each punch. He buttoned up his shirt. He tried to calm his face. He was not ugly! He wanted to scream it out loud; instead he began to cry, sharp tears evaporating on his cheeks before they had even registered their arrival.
Raju, who had waited until Sonna was out of sight, looked down and stroked the hair off Devi’s face and tucked a stray tendril behind her ear, grateful for her support, thankful that Sonna had left. He opened the Heraths’ gate and took Devi inside.