by Ru Freeman
“The army? To fight?” Dolly squeaked.
“What else men, if you join the army you don’ sit and look at films, you fight!” Rose said. She shaded her eyes with her interlaced palms and continued to watch the lift of the colors in the air with a certain reverence. The kite drew complicated designs against the sky as Suren tugged it this way and that, snapping the string and making it dance, now whirling with elegant swoops, now moving forward in quick darts like a sword thrust against some unseen enemy.
Rashmi who like all of them had been shading her eyes to watch the kite, dropped her hands when she heard what Jith said and turned to stare at the Silva boys. They were wearing identical orange-and-red-plaid shirts with their jeans; they seemed particularly volatile.
“Why do you want to join the army?” she asked, the kite having faded into insignificance in the face of this troubling adult statement from Jith, who was, after all, just fourteen years old.
“We’re both going to join,” Mohan said. “First me, because I’m older, then him.”
“Why are you joining the army?” Nihil repeated Rashmi’s question.
“Yes, who is there to fight?” Devi added, all interest in her elegant kite wiped away by the vision that had replaced it with Jith’s words: the Silva boys decked out in army fatigues, carrying guns and marching up and down their street.
“Who? The Tigers! You all don’t read the news?” Mohan said, scornfully. “We haven’t heard—” Devi began, but Rashmi stopped her by putting her hand on Devi’s shoulder.
Rashmi had gathered further information about the Tigers from friends at school, a much more reliable source than her busy father, no matter what Raju believed. She had learned, for instance, that the public library in Jaffna had been burned, and though some of her friends had argued that almost all the holdings were duplicated in the archives in the capital, still, the burning of a library had struck her, a bookish girl herself, as being particularly villainous.
She had overheard Raju explaining all this to Devi just the other day, as she, Rashmi, sat in the veranda of their house. “Mama says the Jaffna library was burned because Prabhakaran is terrorizing everybody,” he had said to Devi, who was climbing the Asoka tree and hadn’t seemed in the least bit interested in the topic. Rashmi had been just about to ask Devi to have a sense of decorum (a term Rashmi had picked up from the nuns) and keep her dress between her legs as she climbed, but she had been too shocked by his words to manage Devi.
“How?” Rashmi had brought herself to ask Raju instead.
“He killed police officers,” Raju had said, but he had no response to her why, so she had asked one of the Tamil girls in her class, Kumu Jacobs, what she might know about the topic.
“Appa says that there were riots in 1956,” she had told Rashmi, her face serious as they stood together near the netball courts during the interval. She fiddled with Rashmi’s tie as she talked, trying to smooth a wrinkle that had appeared right beneath the knot under her collar. “He said it happened after the Official Languages Act. Appa says it meant Sinhala only.”
“But we have all the languages in school and everywhere,” Rashmi had countered. “It’s not Sinhala only. Everything is always in all the languages, even the road sign to Sal Mal Lane!”
“I know,” her friend had said, “that’s what I think, but when my mother tried to say that Appa shouted and said she was wrong and they didn’t talk for a lot of days.”
According to her friend’s father, all the Tamil leaders had walked out of parliament and decided on a satyagraha, and that, the announcement of a fast unto death, had made everybody unhappy and all the bad feelings had come to be concentrated on a settlement in the Eastern Province, in Gal Oya. From her social studies teacher, Rashmi had learned that the settlement was begun by building a dam across a river and creating forty thousand acres of irrigated land.
“After it was created,” Mrs. Atukoralé, the social studies teacher, had said, “the government was able to give homes and land to nearly five thousand people. Can you imagine, Rashmi? Sinhalese people, Tamil people, even the Veddas, all living peacefully in fifty small villages.” Since Rashmi had heard all the details of the riots from her friend, she was not persuaded by Mrs. Atukoralé’s description of this wonderful place. In Rashmi’s mind, such a place with so much water ought to have been able to cool whatever tempers were being stirred, but they had not; she imagined this area as being entirely dry, the water evaporated.
“It all began with rumors,” she had told her siblings that very night. “Because they were all new there, I suppose, nobody trusted anybody else. Kumu said that her father said that someone said that a Sinhalese girl was raped and made to walk naked in Batticaloa by a Tamil mob and that caused the Sinhalese to attack all the Tamils.”
“What is rape?” Devi asked as she sat across from Rashmi, fanning herself with a newspaper that she had folded into neat pleats.
“All her clothes were taken off,” Nihil said to Devi. “That’s rape.”
“I heard from Pradeep that the people were told that a Tamil army was going to take over the Sinhalese part of the settlements in Gal Oya and that was what caused all the burning,” Suren said.
“Whatever it was, it was a terrible time,” Rashmi said, remembering how she had been so deep in conversation with her friend that they had both missed the bell at the end of the lunch interval and both been punished for being late to class.
And Suren had learned, and faithfully informed his siblings, that the riots of 1956 were soon followed by widespread violence in 1958.
“At least the Gal Oya riots were only in Gal Oya,” he said to the others, who had sat in a row on Nihil’s bed to listen to this news. “Tha told me that the prime minister had tried to make peace with the Tamil leader but the UNP leaders had protested and he had to break the pact he had made. But Tha didn’t tell me that in May of that year, and even after the government declared an emergency in June, there had been problems all over the country,” he said. “Tha didn’t tell me that part. That Pradeep told me in school.”
“That’s because Tha likes the Bandaranaikes,” Rashmi said, generously. “Anyway, I heard the riots were because the government tried to resettle four hundred Tamils in Polonnaruwa among Sinhalese people, after the British closed their naval base in Trincomalee.”
“What kind of problems?” Nihil asked, the details of these goings-on too much for him to absorb, and choosing to concentrate on something easier to digest, something with a simple term like problems.
“People running around burning buildings and killing people,” Rashmi explained, though she wasn’t sure this had happened, it just seemed that if something so terrible was happening all over the country then surely it had to involve fire and murder, her two worst fears.
“In Jaffna and Batticaloa the Tamils killed Sinhalese people. In other places the Sinhalese people killed Tamil people,” Suren told Nihil, breaking it down even further as if identifying the perpetrators of these events would make it all seem a little less terrifying to all of them as they sat in their pajamas, washed and ready for the night in their mostly peaceful home.
Nihil resolved to ask Mr. Niles about all of these things, but he was unable to do so for a long time because Mr. Niles got the flu and not only was he unable to sit beside him—Mrs. Niles shooing him away with a Don’t come close, darling, you’ll catch it too—Mr. Niles himself seemed far too weak to even greet him as Nihil stood by the door, let alone talk. Had he been able to, Mr. Niles may have told Nihil the truth. He might have explained that the matter of language, not of street signs but of education and examination, had been manipulated by both Tamils and Sinhalese in turn, the one alongside the British colonizers, the other after the colonial power had been driven out. He might have told Nihil how he had felt during those riots in Gal Oya, and he might have given Nihil something else to think about, found some way of soothing his anxious mind. Without Mr. Niles to talk to, however, Nihil was left with his disquiet.
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Devi, listening to her siblings, tried to suck on her lower lip but the activity had long ceased to calm her so she pulled it out again, thinking about blood and burning buildings and women like her mother being forced to walk around naked. That night she crept into Rashmi’s bed to sleep.
All of these things and others that Rashmi had heard from her peers and her older brother had given her a picture, albeit one that was distorted in the same way any picture that is missing vast swaths of its original colors is, and she felt able to respond to Mohan with a certain aplomb.
“Yes, we know,” she said. “All the Tamil leaders have walked out of parliament. Mr. Amirthalingam and even some of the Sinhalese leaders like Mr. Muttetuwegama. His daughter knows one of the girls in my dance class. She told us. There are some Tamils fighting the government, but I think the government has enough soldiers. I don’t think they need you to join,” she said and then added, practical to the last, “You might get killed.”
Jith shuddered and Dolly looked alarmed. “Don’ get killed, Jith, let the soldiers who are already there do the fightin’.” She did not know if these allegations were true or, indeed, who was fighting whom; all she knew was that, a few weeks ago, sitting in the last row of the Tamil cinema, she and Jith had planned to elope and get to Australia somehow when they turned eighteen and how would they do that if he went and got killed?
“We aren’t cowards,” Mohan said, swaggering a little. Although all of the older boys’ voices had cracked, his had finally settled into a manly depth that gave his words more weight. He was also taller than all of them, and muscled from a year of steady work on his physique every afternoon after school in the back veranda of his house. The two, voice and body, combined to make him seem particularly authoritative. “You are too young to understand but all of us should be prepared to fight. Even Suren. You should tell him. Better get ready now.”
The three Heraths closed ranks and said nothing. To suggest that Suren do anything besides draw forth music from instruments, or by lifting his voice, was a travesty that they fought daily at home what with their mother’s constant push to turn him into an engineer. Around them Rose and Dolly, too, talked animatedly about the prospect of war and how Suren should be saved from such a fate.
Mohan took a deep breath. War could not come fast enough for him and if he could do his part to hasten its arrival then he was willing to do it. “We should stop going to the Tamil people’s houses,” he declared, pointing down the road. “All the Tamils down this lane, they are probably helping the Tigers.”
Suren, who had brought the kite down when he realized that none of his siblings were interested in flying it anymore, strolled up just in time to hear this statement. He continued to wind the line in its intricate weave around the short stick in his right hand, twisting it back and forth with an elegance at odds with the topic at hand. The kite lay on the road beside him. Devi came over and picked it up and held it before her like a shield. Suren finished winding the thread and tucked the bundle into the front appliquéd pocket of Devi’s dress.
“These are our neighbors, Mohan,” Suren said. “Why should we stop visiting them?”
“Yes, and they are our friends, too.” Nihil added. “Mr. Niles is my friend.” He surprised himself by saying the words out loud. It had never occurred to him before then that the largely stationary Mr. Niles could play that role, only that he felt comfortable in the old man’s presence, that he was the repository for all his boyish tales and questions. He considered, with growing alarm, the possibility of his time with Mr. Niles being cut short.
“Who will teach us piano if Kala Akki doesn’t?” Rashmi asked, arms crossed and standing straight in the blue jeans she now wore routinely as her stay-at-home uniform.
“And Uncle Raju is my friend and he’s Tamil. I’m never going to stop talking to him.” Devi said, peering over the top of the kite to cast a defiant look at both Mohan and Rashmi.
“You just watch what you are saying when you are with them, that’s all I’m saying,” Mohan muttered, taken aback by this show of support for people he had begun to see as enemies. He beckoned to Jith and walked back to his house, mulling over the conversation. Even though he had always had his suspicions about the Herath boys and their namby-pamby approach to life, he had thought all it would take was the right information for all the children to join him, the Herath boys, too, swept along. He had envisaged a leadership role in the war, one conveniently located, and entirely manageable, in his own neighborhood. Now what was he going to do?
On their way home, Nihil waved the others on and stopped at Mr. Niles’s house. Inside, all was quiet and Mrs. Niles opened the door to him with a finger over her lips. Mr. Niles was fast asleep.
“Is he getting better?” Nihil whispered.
“Little by little,” Mrs. Niles whispered back. “Maybe next week he’ll be able to talk.” She stroked his head and smiled but did not let him come in. Nihil walked home without being able to discuss any of the things he’d learned from his brother and sister, nor to be comforted by Mr. Niles telling him, as he was sure he would, that Mohan was wrong, there would be no war.
A Night of Rain and Talk
That night at dinner, the conversations in two of the houses unfolded with a certain similarity in their undertones of worry and concern.
“Ma, Jith and Mohan are goin’ to become soldiers an’ get killed!” Sonna announced. He had been standing just too far away to hear what the disturbance was when the discussion took place, but he had got the whole tale second hand from Rose by grabbing her by her French braids, a style Rashmi had introduced to her, and threatening to cut off her hair, something he hadn’t done in so long that she had been terrified half out of her wits and blurted out every last word to him.
“Poor Dolly. Who will take her to Australia now?” Rose teased.
“Don’ know what Jith sees in her,” Sonna said. “She’s never goin’ to Australia anyway. Who will take a mad creature like her?” It started to rain as he was talking and, mercifully, Dolly did not hear the last part of what he said. The shower deafened them all as it fell against those parts of their roof that had been fortified with sheets of takarang.
“Rose, go an’ put the buckets out,” Francie Bolling said, raising her voice. “In Sonna’s room there’s a leak, an’ in the kitchen. Check in the other rooms too. Might have to use a cooking pot if there are any other leaks.”
A drop of water fell on the table just then, followed by a quickening series. Sonna ran into the kitchen to get a pot. Before long, the rain settled in to sweep across rather than fall upon the house and the whoosh of its lashings was accented intermittently by the sharp sound and echo of the single drops of rain falling into the deep receptacle.
“Gosh, good thing we are all home,” Francie Bolling said. “In this kind of rain, there is no staying dry out there, even under a big umbrella. Comes from all sides.”
“Mama!” Dolly said, close to tears and unconcerned with their leaky roof and people caught in the rain. “Mohan says that the Tamils are gettin’ ready to attack us!”
“The Tamils?” Jimmy Bolling bellowed. “Why on earth would they attack us? If they wan’ to attack anybody they’ll be attackin’ the government jackasses.” Jimmy Bolling routinely described all politicians in any government of every party as jackasses. Whether he thought this particular set of jackasses deserved to be attacked or whether he thought they just happened to be the jackasses available to be attacked was anybody’s guess.
“Mohan says that we should stop having anythin’ to do with the Tamils down the road. Nileses, Nadesans, all of them. Even Raju!” Dolly wailed.
Rose, who had returned from her errand, flopped back down in her chair. “Those Silvas. Can never rest unless they’re angry at somebody,” she said, soothingly.
Francie Bolling sighed. She watched Sonna wipe crumbs off the table and onto the floor and she did not stop him or say anything about having to get up and sweep all that out right away o
n account of the ants. He stood up and replaced the bowl of plastic flowers, red roses and lilies, that she removed from the center of the table during meals, and though in his haste some of the sand from the bowl spilled onto the floor, she did not say anything about that either. She clutched the glass of cheap wine that Jimmy Bolling had procured for their consumption and looked at Dolly.
“Don’ worry, Dolly doll, you can still go to Australia, I’m sure, when you are big enough.” She was silent for a few moments, considering her wine. “Doin’ so well we were. Down this lane. Girls happy, boys happy.” Her eyes met Sonna’s as she said this, so she modified her statement and added, “Mos’ of the time,” which did not exclude him but did not include him either. “So well we were doin’ even Raju becomin’ decent and now this Tamil stuff. Don’ know why those Silva boys are like that.”
“Heraths made such a nice kite, have to say,” Rose said into the depressing silence that followed. “An’ din’ even get to fly it properly with all this talk about soldiers and armies.”
There was an ominous note to the next words from Sonna. “They better be careful, otherwise those Elakandiya guys from the slums might bring it down.”
With that, talk shifted to a discussion about the various problems associated with having a slum full of shanties just beyond the main road; at least that was something everybody in the household could agree upon. Even Sonna, who knew several boys his age who lived there and who called him friend, was able to say that he wished that the slums were cleaned up and the inhabitants sent somewhere else to live. Some of his associates there seemed to spend more time in jail than out of it, and he was not inclined to fall into the same pattern, though, while they continued to live so close to his house, he did not know how to extricate himself from the alliances he had made with them.
In the Herath household, after the same announcement about the intention of the Silva boys to join the army, Mrs. Herath shook her head. She served each of the children some chilled fruit salad that Mrs. Niles had sent over, the mangoes, papaws, and bananas all cut in identical squares and drizzled with the slightest touch of vanilla and sugar. It was delicious and she would have preferred not to have to discuss the Silvas just then. Her children, though, were not to be deterred by the sweet treat.