On Sal Mal Lane

by Ru Freeman

  “That’s okay, I’ll get out,” Dolly said, sacrificing her stay at the wicket on the altar of his honor. The game resumed but there was a certain electricity to the air that reached beyond the strip of road on which they were playing and found its way into all the houses down the street. It was a disturbance, the shape-shifting kind that, if not curtailed, would, without a doubt, lead to nothing but chaos.

  In the Bolling house that night, Rose made the announcement right after the bread and dhal were dished onto their plates: “Dolly is smiling all the time because Jith likes her.”

  Both Francie and Jimmy Bolling looked up with great interest. One of their daughters had snagged a Silva? A real, solid Silva boy? Francie Bolling re evaluated the features of Dolly’s face, the potential curves of her body, found them favorable, and exchanged looks with her husband.

  “Don’ go an’ act like a tart now,” Francie said, finally. “If he likes you then he can come an’ talk near the gate. You are not to go to his house, I’m tellin’ you. If I find out—”

  “Mrs. Silva will be shot with her own shit before she lets Dolly near her house, Mummy, don’ worry!” Sonna said and laughed, though with a certain bitterness. First the Heraths had welcomed his sisters into their home as easily as their Muslim neighbors folded roasted cashews into the watalappan during Ramazan, and now Jith was interested in Dolly? He decided to visit Raju after dinner, see how far he had got with his stupid weight lifting.

  “A very strange thing happened today,” Rashmi said in the Heraths’ house as the children sat with their mother—their father was held up at yet another ministerial meeting—and waited for Kamala to clear away the plates after dinner. “Jith didn’t throw the ball at Dolly to get her out even when he could have.”

  “She agreed to be out anyway, so what does it matter?” Suren said, amicably, sopping up the last of his soup with a chunk of bread and handing his plate to Kamala. He washed his hands in the bowl of water that she placed before him.

  “Jith likes Dolly,” Devi said. She shared her mother’s enthusiasm for the rehabilitation of the Bolling girls; she was particularly happy that the French Cricket incident had occurred while Dolly was wearing one of her old Alice bands, a red-black-and-white-striped one.

  “There’ll be hell to pay when Aunty Rani finds out,” said Mrs. Herath, not imagining that she would in any way be associated with Jith’s choice of a girlfriend.

  “What was all that noise I heard?” Mr. Silva asked, after his wife had walked around the table serving everybody. She settled down in front of her plate of noodles and salmon curry and began picking out the green chillies, which she did not like but he loved, and putting them on his plate. He passed the MD chilli sauce to his older son. “Was there some trouble?”

  “Nothing,” Jith said, and rubbed his palms nervously on the front of his shorts. He knew what would be in store if his mother found out.

  “Jith didn’t get Dolly out, that’s why. Everybody started shouting,” Mohan explained.

  Mrs. Silva felt the vaguest touch of anxiety. She swallowed her first mouthful of food quickly. “Didn’t get her out? Why not?”

  Jith did not reply, so his brother did. “Nobody knows. She had no bat or anything, she was just scoring with her hands and her legs were all bare and he could have reached over and touched her leg with the ball but instead he threw it up the lane so Dolly was able to bend almost to the ground and get her bat back.” Clearly, at this early juncture, Mohan’s concern was more with the sad outcome of the game than the disappointing preferences of his brother, let alone the fate that awaited Jith.

  Mrs. Silva, who had stiffened at the mention of bare legs and touch in the same sentence describing the proximity of her son to one of the Bolling urchins, felt a well-nursed rage rise in her chest.

  “That damn Savi! She’s the one who started all this with her English lessons and giving them clothes and everything. From Bernard’s she bought those clothes! Now they must be thinking they are fit for anybody. Even my sons!”

  The inhabitants of Sal Mal Lane all spent a restless night, the degree of unrest depending upon closeness to the subject. The next morning, everybody woke up in a bad mood.

  “If you hadn’t been letting those creatures into your house, getting them all dolled up like one of our children, my boys would never have paid any attention to them!” Mrs. Silva suggested to Mrs. Herath from her veranda the next morning, her voice far louder than necessary.

  “If your boys were a little smarter and spent more time with their books and less time on the roads, then they wouldn’t have been interested in them in the first place,” Mrs. Herath countered from her perch in her veranda, surprised that she had been implicated in the whole affair.

  “I knew this would happen. I told my husband from the start that your family was trouble,” Mrs. Silva continued, tugging the hem of her white blouse until it sat straight and smooth over her chest. “Singing hymns and running around with that mad Raju, sending the children to a Tamil teacher for music when there are so many good Sinhalese teachers around, not to mention entertaining those half-breed urchins in your house. Now see what you have done.”

  Both Old Mrs. Joseph, who was riveted to these goings-on, and Mr. Niles, who could not help but hear, listened to the raised voices. Mr. Niles, who had no view of the lane, could only imagine what had taken place, and would have to wait for Nihil to come and tell him all about it, but Old Mrs. Joseph, who had seen this coming for a long while now, was delighted by the scene. She could tell that though Mrs. Herath and Mrs. Silva continued to throw barbs at each other, neither of them was sure, exactly, if anything had transpired between the children, but they were certain of one thing: the usual lines had been crossed to who knew what end.

  There was no help for it and, truth be told, it was probably for the best anyway, but a few hours after that sharp exchange of words when it was clear that both parties were still simmering, there were two surveyors measuring the shared driveway between the Heraths’ and the Silvas’ homes and by afternoon there was a baas hired by the Silvas to build a five-foot wall, which meant that the hedge that Mrs. Herath had planted there, and that had served them so well as a friendly separation, had to be cut down. To console herself, Mrs. Herath hired some baases of her own and added a higher dividing wall between their house and both the adjoining houses behind and to the left so that, in effect, the Heraths would dwell in a U-shaped compound bordered by three walls, one of which—the one that separated them from the neighbors they had never met behind their house—was embedded with broken glass to ward off whatever feet might climb over such certain demarcations. The hedge in front completed their voluntary incarceration.

  A week later, upon the advice of Kala Niles, Mrs. Herath brought the baases back and had them put up a fourth wall—albeit one that was short enough to mirror the Silvas’ wall—on the outside of her front hedges. And though it had the unfortunate outcome of hiding her beautiful gardens from her neighbors, Mrs. Herath consoled herself with the fact that the hedge kept the front wall hidden from her view. She also made it a point to invite the ladies down the lane, with the notable exception of Mrs. Silva, to have tea, and had Kamala serve it to them on the veranda so that they could enjoy the sight of her outdoor spaces, and pressed small bunches of flowers or cuttings from her plants into their hands before they left.

  “House looks much better now,” Raju said to Suren as he joined the two older children, who were standing on the road gazing at the changed landscape. “Now all you children will be much safer, and anyway all the posh people have walls and gates. Good that your father got it put in.”

  “My mother is the one who got it put in,” Rashmi said, wishing that Raju would go back to his weights and stop staring at their house, their cricket matches, and them. Try as she might, Rashmi had yet to shake her disapproval of Raju.

  In the weeks that followed, there was no interaction between the Silva and Herath adults, but the children continued their games, t
hough with one modification: they moved French cricket to the top of the lane, right in front of the grove of sal mal trees whose barbed-wire fence had recently been removed. And while this meant that Raju could no longer see them, which made Rashmi glad, it also meant that, much of the time, the ball ended up in the grove of trees and play had to be stopped while they all searched for it, moving piles of leaves and flowers with their feet as they went. This activity gave Jith and Dolly many opportunities to interact, and, since the exploration of this space was still a novelty, none of the other children paid them much heed, not even Mohan. Indeed, the children began to find reasons to not find their missing ball, but rather to dangle from the ropey twists that made up the branches of the sal mal trees, the upper part of the trunks entirely hidden by the cascading tangles of bark and leaf and flower, which, in an arrangement, would look overblown, but which in their grove seemed merely an appropriate abundance, a benediction of their play.

  “Look how the branches pour down, like hair,” Devi said, and reached up to tug at the lowest tendrils. She dragged one thin and tender loop from the nearest tree and tied it to another from the tree next to it. Her knot held for a few moments, then snapped as the branches sprang back.

  “Like curly an’ wavy hair,” Rose said, “won’ stay straight like that.”

  Old Mrs. Joseph could not see up the road, and Mr. Niles could only hear faint sounds of their play, and both of them had to imagine what it might look like up there, at the top end of their road. Mr. Niles had some assistance in this from Nihil.

  “Rose takes the fallen flowers and picks off the tops and plays he loves me, he loves me not,” Nihil told Mr. Niles.

  “Who is the ‘he’?” Mr. Niles asked. “Is it you?”

  “Suren,” Nihil said. “I’m not old enough for her. But he doesn’t love her.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Suren loves music,” Nihil said, simply.

  So Mr. Niles closed his eyes and imagined Rose, alone, whispering to herself as she went, not looking where she was stepping, trampling dozens of other possibilities as she focused on the one flower in her palm, taking in its complexity, the yellow-tipped pink stamens at the ends of the cobra head–shaped center guarding the miniature white dagoba at its heart. He imagined the powdery feel of the butter-yellow florets around that dagoba, the way they were supposed to represent a crowd of worshippers, and although it was a flower sacred to Buddhists, not to a Catholic like himself, Mr. Niles was soothed by this image.

  Old Mrs. Joseph, who had once enjoyed walking up and down the road in the evenings, and who had always lingered among the sal mal trees, felt that it was fitting that the children had discovered the shady grove.

  “Half the time they don’t play,” Raju told her. “They walk about under the trees. Sometimes, if it has been dry for a few days, they even take a mat and sit and do homework there. Not Mohan, but the other children.”

  And Old Mrs. Joseph pictured the children sitting beneath the trees, open books and papers rustling in their laps, their pencils and erasers lost among the flowers. She imagined the children not caring about such things, knowing that that they were replaceable.

  Mrs. Herath and Mrs. Silva did not break their silence toward each other until Vesak day in May. On that day, Mrs. Herath supervised not only the hanging of colored paper lanterns with their lit candles on the trees and bushes of her garden, but the lining of the top of the new wall between the two houses with a row of oil lamps. Not to be outdone, Mrs. Silva dispatched Mohan to find some for their house as well.

  “Koralé’s shop will be closed. Just go to the back door,” she said.

  While she waited, Mrs. Silva moved the Heraths’ lamps farther toward their side to make room for hers. But though Mohan was able to persuade Koralé to sell them enough lamps, there was no time to immerse them in water, which meant that the new clay absorbed all the coconut oil poured into them and Jith and Mohan were kept busy refilling the lamps through the night, an extravagance that drained some of the pleasure she felt from Mrs. Silva.

  “It looks quite nice with all these lamps, doesn’t it?” Mrs. Herath said from her side of the wall, after the lamps were arranged. She was standing by her gate, watching Mrs. Silva’s activity.

  Mrs. Silva, caught by surprise, was terse. “Yes, it does,” she said.

  “Have you all gone to temple yet?” Mrs. Herath asked, noting that Mrs. Silva, too, was already dressed in white.

  “We go early,” Mrs. Silva replied, as she fussed with a wick. “Fewer crowds and we can see everything.”

  Mrs. Herath thought that the beauty of Vesak was to be part of the crowds in the streets, and to see the lights, both on the pandals illuminated with bulbs and in the temples filled with thousands of lamps, lit and relit by waves of children and adults, but she decided, in the interest of reconciliation, to keep these thoughts to herself. She was about to say something else, comment on the pleated lanterns the Silvas had used, perhaps, or the neatness of the arrangements her sons had made with them, when Dolly and Rose came out of the Herath house, where they had gone to wash their hands after helping with the oil for the Heraths’ lamps. Mrs. Silva, too, had been trying to think of something pleasant she could say, but the sight of the twins rendered her speechless. She turned and went back into her house and as a result she missed what she looked forward to most during Vesak: to sit in her veranda and look at her lit-up garden while listening to pirith from the temple.

  For the third year in a row, the twins, in borrowed white dresses, went to temple with the Heraths. Though they had to be reprimanded once by Mrs. Herath for ogling a boy, the rest of the time they lit incense and lamps, placed their share of flowers on altars already piled high, and brought their palms together in prayer though what they prayed for, and to whom, the Heraths could only guess. The Herath children and the twins talked animatedly as they walked home afterward, begging Mrs. Herath to let them stop at a dhansala here for a drink, a dhansala there for some food, neither approved, but when they reached the quiet of their own lane, they fell silent, their eyes on the flickering candles and lamp lights they could see in the Silvas’ garden.

  After seeing the twins to their house, the four Herath children lingered by the dividing wall talking, their heads swiveling first to one garden, then to the other, their faces illuminated by the double row of lamps on the wall. Some of the lanterns held candles that sent out sparks as they burned, some defect of the wick or touch of moisture preventing them from settling down; others held candles that burned with a steady flame, and those would last through the night; still others held candles that tipped, slightly, threatening to set their wax-paper cages on fire. Yet, though several lanterns did fall to the ground in a sudden burst of flame, their wire edges hot to the touch, none burned as the children watched and their last image of the evening was one of tranquility as they left the fairy-tale gardens behind and reluctantly went to bed.

  In the dead of night, unseen even by Old Mrs. Joseph, who was already asleep, Sonna walked up the street. He had been offered kassippu for the first time by one of the men in the slums, and he staggered a little as he walked. He saw Mrs. Silva alone by the wall, filling both her lamps and those of the Heraths with fresh oil, her face reflecting the peace of the night. Though most of the candles had gone out in the hanging lanterns, thanks to her effort the wicks still burned brightly in the lamps on the wall. Sonna slid to the ground along the side of Old Mrs. Joseph’s gate and watched them long after the last chants of pirith were over and the roads themselves had grown still, right until the last lamp went out.

  Old Mrs. Joseph’s Triumph

  By the time the Heraths had grown accustomed to the walls, and the long-promised ivy had been planted along the length of the one facing the Nadesans’ house, Mrs. Herath had tired of Jesus Christ. The advent of Sathya Sai Baba and the accompanying bhajans became, therefore, the theme song of conflict to Mrs. Silva. Unlike the Heraths’ other activities, their music could not be con
tained by the freshly painted walls and the brand-new roll-in, roll-out gates that shut off the entire section of their driveway.

  Though they had recovered a semblance of cordiality toward each other, Mrs. Silva continued to disapprove of Mrs. Herath’s haphazard pursuit of strange religions and, more importantly, her continued encouragement of the Bolling twins, which spoke to her not of Mrs. Herath’s kindness to them but of her disloyalty to the Silvas. The music that came pouring out therefore found Mrs. Silva nearly constantly in a state of both shock and dismay, at the center of which sat her younger son. Whether Jith had given up his—clearly fleeting, it had to be—interest in Dolly or not, Mrs. Silva could not find out; holding herself above the rest of the residents had the unfortunate side effect of making them inaccessible to her. It was another month before Mrs. Silva, reconciled to the move, announced her intention to visit the one person down the lane who would be able to give her the full story about her son.

  “I’m going to visit Old Mrs. Joseph,” Mrs. Silva said, one day in July, raising her voice slightly so that her husband, tending as he did incessantly to their garden, could hear her.

  Mr. Silva stood up and wiped his hands on a rag hanging from the pocket of his old blue denim long shorts. The ferns that Mrs. Herath had given him, and that his sons and the Herath boys had planted, were thriving, and he had just separated a few of the plants and put them in a bag to be shared with one of his colleagues when he went to work the next day. Looking at the bag now, he wondered if the building of the wall would affect the sharing of plants; he had been following Mrs. Herath’s success with a hybrid Elaine with iridescent leaves that turned crimson as it matured, and a pale-green echeveria with pink outlines, and he had been hoping to be the happy beneficiary when the time came for her to whittle them down. He was grateful that he had got a Brazilian snapdragon from Mrs. Herath before the whole business of the wall.