On Sal Mal Lane

by Ru Freeman

  “Can you find another bicycle, Uncle Raju?” she asked when they had taken up their previous positions, Raju on the front steps to the house, seated on a folded newspaper to protect his clothes from the red floor polish, she in the hanging chair.

  Raju shook his head. “Only bicycle I know of is in my house but it doesn’t work,” he said. “Daddy’s Raleigh, but,” he twisted his open palms in opposite directions, “not working.”

  “Can’t you make it work?”

  Raju did not know what, exactly, the matter was with his late father’s bicycle. He had never ridden the bike, it being full sized and built for a tall man, but he had imagined that he might use it someday and so he had brought it inside and leaned it up against his mother’s chest of dry goods. It got some movement every day when their servant girl struggled to push it aside to take out dried chillies and spices while shooing away cockroaches, and then dutifully returned it to the spot where Raju’s father had been accustomed to putting it; what had once belonged to the dead was sacred. He could ask Mr. Bin Ahmed, he thought, a vague memory of his neighbor once riding a bicycle rising up before him. Or perhaps he could take it to Koralé and see if he could tell him what to do about the bicycle to make it work. Or Lucas, he could ask Lucas, who might have a considered opinion, having been there when the Raleigh was first bought, brand-new and gleaming black and silver when Raju was just a teenager himself. He looked at Devi. If riding a bicycle could lighten her mood, surely it was worth trying.

  “Devi,” he said, deciding right then and there that he had not only the authority but the intelligence to make such decisions, “if you can promise Uncle Raju that you will stay inside the house with Kamala, I will go and see if I can fix the bicycle right now.”

  Devi smiled. “Of course I will stay with Kamala. It’s too hot to go outside now anyway,” she said, as further evidence of her intent to comply, such unpromising heat stacking up before her like the bars of a cage. “I’ll ask Kamala to give me kurumba and I’ll wait inside. Even if you don’t come back till after lunch I won’t come outside. I’ll read Rashmi’s Enid Blyton book. She borrowed it last week and she hasn’t even let me touch it but I know where she hides it and she’s not here, so I can read it. Okay? You go,” she finished, and gave him a push. “By the time you come back, I might have even finished the whole book!”

  Raju fairly ran down the street to fetch Lucas, whom he found sitting in the shade of an areca nut tree, his pale red sarong rolled up tight between his legs and tucked under his bottom, scratching the few hairs on his bald head and staring with some belligerence at the sky.

  “Mr. Raju,” he said and nodded, though he did not stand up.

  “Lucas Aiyya, I have come to ask if you will look at my father’s bicycle.”

  “Eh? Bicycle? What for a bicycle now? I can’t even walk!” Lucas said and chuckled, real amusement flooding his age-gray eyes and spilling over into the lines of his face. “I can’t even walk, Mr. Raju, haven’t you noticed?”

  “Not for you to ride,” Raju said. “For me. For me to take Devi Baby up and down the road.”

  Lucas continued to sit, but he stopped laughing. He shook a finger at Raju. “Devi Baby is not supposed to leave the house,” he said.

  “I know, I know, I’m the one who is looking after her. Whole family went for the big match, and I was told to look after Devi Baby because you know how she is, quite naughty sometimes,” he said, laughing, then turned serious. He corrected himself. “But only sometimes, not always. Most of the time she is a very good girl.”

  Lucas stared at his feet as he took in this sudden wealth of information: that Raju still had his father’s bicycle, that the Heraths had gone away for the day, and, most important of all, that they had left Raju, not him, Lucas, but Raju, in charge of their younger daughter. Youngests were the most beloved, the best protected. So how was it that this youngest, such a flower among all the other youngests around, had been left in the care of a spilling-all-over-the-place man like Raju? He retraced the last several weeks in his mind. Had he done something wrong?

  Yes, true, Alice had feigned a headache on the one day that Mrs. Herath had sent for her and he had taken Alice’s place to help the Heraths’ woman in the kitchen for a big party they had given for some teachers. And, true, Alice had pretended not to see Mr. Herath when his driver stopped the car on the way to work right next to them and asked after his, Lucas’s, health. What was wrong with that woman? She was constantly ruining everything. And now look, after all his hard work to cultivate his special status, the youngest had been handed over to Raju. Then again, he reasoned, maybe there was more to Raju than he had suspected. After all, look at all the things that Koralé had changed since Mr. Herath came to live. No more foreign cigarettes, donating wood to the temple once a month, paying the laborers more after Mr. Herath got Koralé a contact to bring in coconut oil and kerosene too, all these were good things, weren’t they? Even the Bolling girls seemed to be dressing properly. And Old Mrs. Joseph had told him that one of them even had eyes on a Silva boy. All these things, surely, had to do with the way the Heraths organized their world. So why not Raju? The Heraths did everything right. Raju had obviously been chosen because he was the best for the job.

  Lucas stood up and dusted off the back of his sarong. He looked approvingly at Raju’s buttoned-up shirt and his leather shoes. He saluted Raju. “Let’s go, Mr. Raju Sir. I will come and look at your bicycle.”

  When Lucas arrived and asked Old Mrs. Joseph’s servant girl to dust the cobwebs that wrapped around the wheels and between the bars of the bike, two large spiders scurried off and Raju skipped out of the way with a yelp. Even when it had been wiped down, the bike seemed crooked and insufficient to Raju. Lucas took the bicycle, looking as though he, too, did not believe it would be adequate as a vehicle for a youngest.

  As Raju watched Lucas go down the road, he experienced a disconcerting moment of imagining that it was his father, not Lucas, who was wheeling the bike as he had done each morning when he left for work, his gait erect, his handsome face ready for the day, even on that last day when he left, as usual, but did not go to work; he had simply walked the bike across the street, leaned it against the short parapet, and gone in to kill himself. Raju had been tasked with the business of removing the bike in the wake of the discovery of the two dead bodies, before the two separate funerals. Neither family had gone to pay their respects to the other bereaved, the betrayal so humiliating for both the widow and the widower left behind. And now here was the bike come out of hiding, and if it were to be repaired and if it were to be functional again, if a girl like Devi could sit astride it and be wheeled up and down the street, why then perhaps Raju could forget its previous last day of use. He continued to stand in the burning heat while he waited for Lucas, now anxious, now hopeful, until Lucas returned an hour or so later.

  “We had to wait until one of the men took it to Sunil’s shop to get the parts oiled,” Lucas said. “See how it looks now? Shining also. Koralé got his son to wipe it down properly with some kind of polish. Now it looks good enough to put Devi Baby and ride. But,” he held up a finger and made his face grave, “be careful. Youngest child, and you are in charge, Mr. Raju Sir. Anything happens, you are to blame, not me. Not Lucas Aiyya. Don’t come crying.”

  After the sun had gone down a little, but before the others came home, when the shadows filtering through the great leafy sal mal trees fell more gently on the lane, Raju escorted Devi through the gate and settled her on the seat of the bicycle, proud of the fact that the bike stood firm on its rest while he made sure she was safe. While she waited for him, her mood improved and equilibrium restored after her ride with the postman, Devi had discarded her traitorous clothes and put on a blue divided skirt and a yellow T-shirt, and looked more like herself. Raju rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, put his arms around her, kicked off the rest, and held on to the handlebars as he wheeled the bicycle up and down the road, not minding the sweat pouring down his fac
e and gathering in all the crevices and rolls of his body, not minding that his arms and legs began to quiver with the effort of supporting both her and the weight of the bike, not minding anything at all but the fact that Devi was happy, that he had been the one to drive the lost cricket match out of her mind. Neither of them paid any attention to Sonna, who sat in front of his house in a chair he had dragged out.

  An Odd Alliance and a Little Romance

  If Devi’s friendship with Raju raised any eyebrows, the one so youthful and expectant of good things, the other so devoid of symmetry and hope, we may take comfort in the fact that Old Mrs. Joseph, who knew more than most, said nothing about it. Indeed, if there was anything that eased her heart, one crushed so irreparably by the person it had chosen to love, it was the sight of her son going about his day with purpose. A purpose that was not attached to something impossible like a title he would never earn, but something simple and achievable: indulging a child who needed him in her life. So she watched Raju as she did all the neighbors, alert to any sign of things being amiss, and glad at the end of each day that nothing was. At night, on those evenings when she stayed out late on the veranda, a silver-gray cardigan wrapped around her against the slightest breeze, she watched Sonna.

  Sonna’s vigils had continued, though it seemed to Old Mrs. Joseph that the calm that had seemed to descend on him on that first night appeared to seep out of his body as the weeks and months wore on. Now, when he stood there, staring, he often seemed agitated rather than soothed by the scenes that unfolded in the lit-up rooms of the Herath household, the ones visible from the street: the veranda, the living room, the boys’ room, each its own stage with its collection of immovable props and cast of characters. She watched Sonna and wondered if it distressed him to see their sometimes routine, sometimes disarmingly affectionate interactions with each other. If, as he watched Suren help Devi practice yet another piece of music she was struggling to master, or Nihil and Rashmi laugh over some joke he could not hear, or they played cards together, what he saw was not simply four ordinary children growing up together in a family, but children whose kindness toward each other formed a wholeness that he would never experience with his own siblings. Now if he relaxed against her gate, it was only on those occasions when whichever Herath child that was visible was alone, engaging in some inward-focused activity like reading or writing or, in Rashmi’s case sometimes, sewing. He never lingered if Suren played the piano; something about that music seemed to irk Sonna.

  Soon enough, though, Old Mrs. Joseph’s passive observation of Sonna and Raju gave way to witnessing the development of an unlikely and disturbing alliance, this one forged between Sonna and Mohan Silva.

  Sonna’s small crimes had resumed, one by one, in the wake of his last exchange with Devi. Why her words and no other had convinced him that it was useless to try to be that other boy Nihil had spoken of, the good one, who could say. Whether he knew it or not, what Sonna set his heart upon now was a dismantling of harmony, which he recognized only to the extent that it did not, and clearly never would, include him. He watched his sisters seek out the safe haven of the Herath household and forgot that their visits had once seemed like a blessing to him, the way they had allowed him to experience something of the workings of that family. Lucas’s air of contentment grated on him. When Suren came to his house and played his guitar and sang his songs, all the women in his house and the Herath girls listening as they never listened to him, it was all Sonna could do not to charge into the room, grab the guitar, and smash it to pieces. He was upset most of all by the trust that allowed Raju to push Devi up and down the lane on a bicycle, a trust that no one had ever placed in him. What made Devi so blind to Raju’s ugliness? She never seemed to feel a single moment of revulsion as surely she should. What made an exacting girl like Rashmi give Raju free rein to come and go as he pleased? It confirmed what Sonna feared most: that not even the Herath children, who were so kind to everybody, found him worthy.

  “Someone left dog droppings in Mr. Bin Ahmed’s mailbox,” Mr. Niles told Nihil one afternoon. “You know, there is only one dog down this street, and he belongs to the Sansonis. Who could have done such a thing?”

  Nihil avoided Mr. Niles’s gaze when he said, “I don’t know who it could have been.”

  “And,” Mr. Niles said, keeping his eyes on Nihil’s face, “just the other day, Kala told me that the Tisseras’ paper had been stolen and that they saw it lying open on a chair in the Nadesans’ porch. They could see it from their veranda. What do you think of that?”

  “Did they get it back?” Nihil asked, avoiding the real question.

  “They did not ask, but Mr. Nadesan had taken it back and said they did not know how it got there. Someone is trying to create problems for our neighbors and I think you know who that person might be, don’t you?”

  Nihil shrugged and said he did not know, but it was clear that he did and that Mr. Niles and all the other people down the lane did too.

  In these activities, Sonna had an admirer: Mohan.

  Mohan had got into another round of trouble at school, this time during a history lesson, and over a comment he made about the Tamil king Elara, who had been defeated by the Sinhalese prince, Dutugemunu.

  “We fought that Tamil until the water around Anuradhapura turned red with blood,” he said. “That’s how much was sacrificed. In the end, Dutugemunu won. That’s what’s coming.”

  He refused to acknowledge to the class, as part of his apology, that King Elara was referred to in the chronicle of the country’s early history, the Mahavamsa, as a just monarch and one whom his Sinhalese subjects had respected, and that though the battle had been bloody, Dutugemunu himself had honored the dead ruler by building a monument to him. Instead, Mohan had simply taken the week of detention in stony silence, boasting to his father that he saw it as a price he had to pay for telling the truth.

  “You are different from these other Sinhalese boys who think the same things but have no guts to say it aloud,” his father said. “You’re a true leader. I am proud of you.” He patted his son on his back and commented on how tall he was becoming. “Beginning to look like a young man, son,” he said.

  After that incident, Mohan began to look for more ways in which he could distinguish himself further from the other Sinhalese boys, the nearest being Suren and Nihil, the Tisseras’ son being too young to count. Although he had always found Raju abhorrent, he now sharpened the barbs he flung at him, adding those that referred to his race to his usual comments about his mental disabilities and girth. Old Mrs. Joseph, like Jimmy Bolling’s father, had been born to a Tamil mother and a Burgher father, but she had claimed her mother’s Tamil race when she married Mr. Silver Joseph, himself a Tamil, and so Mohan felt justified in calling Raju a full-blooded Tamil, and crossing him off his list. Additionally, Mohan invoked Jimmy Bolling’s grandmother’s race and began to refer to the Bolling house as the half-breed house. He had never befriended the Niles family, and the Nadesans, by virtue of their privateness, were a threat. It was clear to him that the Tamils were taking over and, moreover, they were taking over his lane. He wished that the Herath boys would feel as he did if for no other reason than that there was not much fun in being a leader without anybody to lead. There was only one other possibility: Sonna.

  Now, as Sonna’s activities graduated to the sort of misbehavior that appeared small but had the potential to stir up the right type of conflagration, Mohan paid him more heed. He observed both what Sonna did to disrupt their neighborhood and his estrangement from his own family, which allowed him, Mohan, to separate Sonna from whatever aspersions Mohan cast upon the Bollings and their mixed race. He took to nodding at Sonna whenever a new prank was executed, hoping that the nod would suffice to communicate his approval. Sonna, isolated once more in a space not entirely of his choosing and yearning for an equal to call friend rather than a collection of hooligans to run amok with, was easily won over.

  And yet, though both Sonna and Mohan, ea
ch for his own reasons, were determined to stir up trouble, and though the kind of trouble they longed for would be swept away by an avalanche of violence neither could have predicted and neither would, in the end, welcome, their dissatisfactions were balanced out by the equally determined efforts of another pair of children: Jith and Dolly.

  Nobody could be certain, at first, but in the end everybody agreed that Jith had taken a real and very public shine to Dolly, a liking confirmed by his having intentionally missed getting her out during a game of French cricket, even though her plank of wood had flown out of her hands and her legs below the knees were unprotected and ripe for it. These details had only come to light because of the ruckus that had erupted between the two teams, Suren, Rashmi, Rose, and Jith on one team, Mohan, Nihil, Devi, and Dolly on the other.

  “You din’ get her out!” Rose and Rashmi screamed in unison.

  “Machang, how can we play if you won’t get her out?” Suren inquired, as if reason might be able to prevail where the visceral fighting instinct that defined the national character, particularly when it came to cricket, even this watered-down version of cricket, had obviously failed.

  Even Raju, about to turn away from watching them and go to his garage for his evening session of weight lifting, was appalled. “My god, Jith, you can’t play like that if you want to win!”

  Sonna, watching from his usual station, leaning on his father’s fence, laughed, and even he only laughed because he assumed that Jith had simply made a mistake.

  Dolly felt herself fairly levitate with delight at having caused the scene and as she turned her smile and grateful eyes to the one boy who had ever done anything nice especially for her—the Heraths did not count since their kindness was meted out universally—she appeared in the likeness of a pleasantly featured girl and not a bovine as Jith’s mother had been describing her to them since before either of her sons could talk, further cementing his affections.