by Ru Freeman
“We are the first house down the lane,” Mrs. Bin Ahmed said, finally. “If people come to attack, ours, here at the bottom of the lane, will be the first one they’ll take.”
“War is for soldiers. We shouldn’t worry. We are simply living our lives,” Mrs. Herath said. “Don’t worry about these things now.”
Devi, who was still playing some game that involved hopping, chimed in with “Only Mohan and Jith are going to join the army down our lane,” but the adults paid her no heed, which made her stop moving so she could listen more carefully, to see if she could gather anything worth sharing with her brothers and sister.
Mrs. Bin Ahmed spoke up, taking Mrs. Herath’s hand to emphasize her point. “Last time when Lucas gave the alert we were all prepared to defend our lane. But this time I have heard the lane is dividing into separate groups and we are being put into the Tamil group.”
“Nonsense. We are united as always, Mrs. Ahmed. Nothing has changed.”
But things had. Everybody knew it, even those like Mrs. Herath who wanted so desperately to believe in the continuity of the old order that they repeated such words to whoever would listen. Things had changed. They had changed in these ways:
Rose told Dolly who told Jith who told Mohan that Kala Niles had told Raju not to go and watch TV in the Sinhalese people’s houses, which meant, specifically, the Tissera household, since they were the only ones who owned a TV.
The Silvas added two more feet to the L-shaped walls bordering their property and topped the back one with reels of barbed wire that kept even the birds away.
A young Tamil man who had boarded with the Sansonis after their son left for Australia, and had arrived from the North, roared up and down Sal Mal Lane on his motorbike without checking for the presence of children, making those who were playing outside leap into hedges and scratch themselves in the process.
Mohan no longer spoke to Raju, Old Mrs. Joseph, or any of the Nileses. Lucas told the Niles family that Sunil’s shop would not give them credit. He didn’t have to say why.
Lucas also told the Heraths that the Tamil owner of Sinappa Stores would no longer issue credit to them. He didn’t have to explain to the Heraths either.
Alice would not cook for anybody who had anything to do with Tamils, which meant she cooked for nobody, including, on some days, if she had seen him in active conversation with Raju or the Nileses or the Nadesans, for Lucas, who was forced to walk to the tea shop and ask for steamed bread and sambol.
Mrs. Ratwatte fired all her Tamil girls and sent them back to the estates and replaced them with Sinhalese girls from Kandy who had to be taught the art of batik making from scratch. She considered this a service to her race.
Most telling of all, it became rarer and rarer to hear Tamil being spoken in the streets. It was quite possible that, in all of Colombo, there was only one Sinhalese boy, Suren, attuned as he was to the interplay of sounds, who noticed and mourned the absence.
That year during Christmas time, when the Heraths gathered around the piano to sing the carols that they did not associate with Catholicism, just the season, no matter how many references there were to holy, god, and heaven, the voices that lifted above the top of the hedge and poured into the listeners outside—Mr. Niles, lying on his armchair, Rose, Dolly, Kala Niles, all hidden, and Raju and Mr. Tissera, standing side by side, arms crossed, staring down Sal Mal Lane—filled them not with well-being but with a disquiet at odds with the sweetness of the music.
Sonna’s Birthday Party
As if the disturbances between the families down the lane were insufficient, Sonna, about to turn sixteen, demanded a birthday party, which resulted in an exchange of ugly words that all the Herath children overheard because Francie Bolling, who chose her timing by her husband’s moods, not by her company, decided to broach the subject on a Sunday when Suren was there playing his guitar.
“What does he need a birthday party for?” Jimmy Bolling thundered, when the issue was brought up by his wife, and his voice cut through the music. Suren stopped playing and they all listened.
“Sixteenth birthday is a big one, after all,” Francie Bolling began, her voice cajoling, her eyes on Sonna, who was lurking outside the purple-striped curtain that separated their bedroom from the living room outside. “We had a nice party for Sophia when she turned sixteen even though she had already gone and eloped.”
“Shouldn’t ’ave bothered with that either,” Jimmy Bolling muttered, “runnin’ away like a common tart. Wastin’ all the schoolwork . . .” He petered out into a grumble, then raised his head. “It’s for girls anyway, these sixteenth-birthday parties.”
Francie Bolling shifted a little closer to her husband, rumpling the matching purple sheets on their bed as she did so. “But, darlin’, our only son, after all,” she said, putting her palm on her husband’s shoulder as he sat by her on the edge of their bed. The heavy costume earrings in her ears jingled as she moved.
Jimmy Bolling slapped her hand away. “Only son? Only thug! Only fool! Only idiot! You wan’ to know what sons are like, look at that Mohan Silva! Look at that Suren! Those are sons. This one is not a son, he’s a burden. Doin’ nothin’ all day long an’ comin’ here askin’ for birthday parties.”
“Sophia got so I get too!” Sonna shouted, coming into the room. Sonna, wearing his jeans, boots, and suspenders over a thin sleeveless under shirt, looked entirely disreputable and entirely undeserving of attention, let alone a birthday party, even though the shirt had been his way of covering up the worst of the pictures he kept drawing on his body.
Francie Bolling got to her feet quickly and tried to shoo him out, but it was too late. Jimmy Bolling stood up and slapped Sonna across his face, once, twice. “Who do you think you are, comin’ in here to my bedroom? Who do you think you are demandin’ things from your mother?”
Sonna’s head spun to the right, to the left, but he planted his feet and faced his father. “I’m your son,” he said. “You can’ jus’ give one person a party an’ not give the other one. Sophia got, so I should get too. I have friends I wan’ to have.” He had to stop himself from saying exactly whom he wanted at the party—Rashmi—though he intended to invite everybody down the lane to cover up that fact.
Suren began to strum his guitar to try to drown out the sound of these words, but Rashmi, shocked, put her palm over the strings of the guitar and shushed him.
“Sophia got so you should get? Friends?” Jimmy Bolling scoffed. He laughed. He put his face near Sonna’s and shook it from side to side. “Son, only son, you don’ have friends. You have other motherfuckers in those slums jus’ like you, other fools jus’ like you, doin’ nothin’ but shit all day. You hear me? Do shit, are shit. That’s what you have.”
No amount of pleading from Francie Bolling would change his mind. To circumvent her husband, a few weeks later, Francie Bolling invited the Herath children—and Jith and Mohan, though those two did not come—to a dinner she had prepared. Just to share a meal with you children for a change, she said to them, not daring to divulge her intention to celebrate her son’s sixteenth birthday in this fashion. She added turmeric to the expensive muthu samba rice she had begged from Koralé, tempered it with onions, called it yellow rice, and served it up with a chicken curry she got Alice to cook and didn’t even mix it all together before she served them her treat on Sonna’s birthday.
Since the children had not been told of the significance of this day, they did not wish Sonna a happy birthday or bring him any gifts, they simply washed their hands and sat on either side of Mr. and Mrs. Bolling, that being the last available seating at the table. Rashmi, seated across from Sonna, tried to smile at him but he would no more meet her eyes than smile at her so she gave up and tended to Devi instead, deboning her chicken and reminding her to keep the indul from moving above the second manogamy in each of her fingers as she ate, in the same way her mother had taught her.
“Make sure you use just the tips of your fingers to pick up your rice and c
urry!” she whispered to Devi and, a few moments later, “Tiny bites! Don’t eat like some ill-bred villager!”
None of the Herath children, not even Rashmi, paid attention to the grime and disarray of their surroundings; all their weekend visits to play and sing in secret had made cleanliness and order irrelevant. Francie Bolling, however, noticed, because when the Herath children were seated at her table, they threw her dining room furniture and her family into unflattering focus. She rubbed surreptitiously at a stain on the red-and-white-checked plastic tablecloth she had flipped over to the cleaner side just that morning; she kept getting up to rewash first one cloudy glass, then another; finally she scooped up all their glasses and went to the kitchen, where she rinsed them again by pouring the water she had boiled for drinking onto them, and carried them back steaming, scalding herself in the process.
“Mummy, why don’ you sit down!” Jimmy Bolling said to his wife. “Been workin’ since mornin’ an’ still runnin’ around,” he explained to the Herath children. “Nice to have you come for a meal,” he added, as he served more rice onto each of their plates. When he ate, his arms concealed in a long-sleeved shirt, both Suren and Nihil noticed that the fact that Jimmy Bolling could only hold his left hand in a fold was not apparent. It rested, like their left forearms did, on the table between his chest and his plate of rice, looking for all the world as though nothing was wrong with it.
“How come we’re havin’ yellow rice?” Rose asked, unable to contain her curiosity. She was sitting across from Suren and trying to be lady like, keeping just the tips of her fingers in her rice, just like Devi and Rashmi were doing.
Francie Bolling did not answer, but her eyes flew to Sonna’s face and then back again.
“Yes, how come? Times are so troubled these days also,” Dolly said, having heard about the troubled times from Jith and assuming that such times must also be associated with a lack of money, since, in her experience, things always became particularly bad in her house when her parents were short of money.
Francie Bolling looked around the table. Sonna was staring at her, but so was her husband, who seemed equally curious about the feast. She said, “No, no reason. Jus’ felt like doin’ somethin’ a little different, keep us all happy.” She looked at Sonna when she said that all. “Herath children also here,” she said, nervously, as Jimmy Bolling continued to look at her.
“No reason, Mummy? Really? We’re rich now, so you are cookin’ fine things for no reason?” Sonna said, his voice full of bitterness.
“Shut up and eat,” Jimmy Bolling said.
“You eat,” Sonna said and rose from the table. “Herath children are here so better have enough to feed them. Can’ let them go hungry. Might go an’ tell everybody we don’ have food.”
Nihil looked at Sonna and tried to understand when and why Sonna’s gentleness toward him, such as it was, had faltered. Sonna had always spared a look or a wave and sometimes a smile for him. Now, he treated Nihil with disinterest. He didn’t watch them at play, either, as though he didn’t care about their games or how fast Nihil ran or anything at all. It made Nihil sad, and he tried to think of something to say but nothing came except kced gninrub eht no doots yob eht, so he said that, hoping to communicate something to Sonna, some sympathy, or to recall that other moment they had shared.
“What is that?” Dolly said, and shrieked with laughter.
“God! Sounds like priests in churches. I never understand when the father starts talkin’ in Latin!” Rose said. “You know Latin?”
Nihil shook his head. Rashmi looked concerned. Suren continued to eat. Devi spoke up. “He can say things backward,” she said. “He’s just saying something backward.”
“What did you say, darlin’?” Francie Bolling asked, relieved that Sonna’s disruption was being drowned out by this new conversation and trying to ignore the fact that Sonna was still standing by his plate, watching Nihil.
“Nothing,” Nihil said, looking up at Sonna. Sonna did not acknowledge Nihil’s gesture but he left the table more quietly than his mother expected him to.
As the children left after the dinner, they noticed Sonna standing at the very end of the lane staring at the main road. He was lit in silhouette from the lights of the cars that passed by. Next to him there were two other boys they did not recognize but whose attire, shorts and bare upper bodies, made it safe to assume that they came from the slums beyond the bridge.
“There’s Sonna,” Nihil said, pointing to him. Sonna was standing so close to the main road that every time a bus went by the hair on his head blew back off his forehead and he seemed to tilt back a little.
“Someone should tell him not to stand near the main road like that,” Devi said. “Right, Nihil? Remember that boy you told me about? Down the other lane?”
Nihil looked down at his feet and did not answer her.
“Today is Sonna’s birthday,” Rose said, gazing at her brother. “I completely forgot.”
“Today? Why didn’t Aunty tell us?” Rashmi asked, dismayed that they had come to Sonna’s birthday celebration without bringing a gift for him.
“What for? You don’ need to know,” Dolly said, then, “Oh! No, I don’ think the nice dinner was for that.”
“Yes, definitely not for that. Daddy wouldn’ allow, an’ if Daddy says no, nothin’ happens,” Rose said.
Still, as they walked home, the children, Rashmi and Nihil in particular, talked about Sonna’s birthday and each wondered aloud if there was something they could give him. The things they thought of were gifts they could not afford to buy: a shirt (Rashmi), a can of Fa spray (Devi), a cricket bat (Nihil).
“We can buy him a chocolate,” Suren said at last. “He must like chocolate.”
The next evening, Rashmi, the only one who saved her allowance, counted out all the coins and crumpled notes, though she allowed Devi to hold on to one square bronze five-cent coin, which was becoming a rarity, and they sent Kamala to the store to buy the chocolate, which they put into a shiny brown paper bag that Devi had been saving for something special and that she gave up a little reluctantly. Suren and Rashmi walked down to the Bollings’ house to hand over the gift, but when they got there Rose said Sonna was not home, he had not come back, even to sleep, the previous night.
“Give this to him when he comes,” Rashmi said, and handed over the chocolate. “For his birthday. Tell him we said happy birthday. It’s a chocolate.”
“But will melt, no, if we keep?” Rose said. “We don’ have a fridge.”
So they took the chocolate back and put it in their own fridge with every intention of giving it to Sonna, but the next day Mr. Herath, rummaging in the refrigerator for something sweet after lunch, saw the chocolate and opened it up and the children were too afraid to say anything about it lest their mother find out that they were fraternizing with that boy, and they had no more money to buy another chocolate so they reconciled themselves to feeling ashamed and let it be.
.....1982
The Cricketer and the Old Man Talk of War
Nihil walked silently beside Devi to the Nileses’ house, hoping that Mr. Niles would be well enough to talk to him. He tried to quieten the anxiety that had settled in his chest ever since Suren and Rashmi had talked of troubles, and that rose to the surface every time he stepped beyond the gates of their house without his older brother and sister. Now that someone in their own neighborhood, Mohan, had spoken of war, Nihil felt a sense of danger wrap itself around even their most harmless activities. When he stepped into the Nileses’ veranda and saw Mr. Niles looking alert and in good spirits, therefore, Nihil could not help the grin and the relief that flooded his face. As soon as he had shut the door leading from the veranda to the living room, where Devi was having her lesson, Nihil blurted out his question.
“What will happen when the war starts?” he said, before he had even sat down.
The old man narrowed his eyes slightly as he watched Nihil settle down, his books at his feet, his body leaning forw
ard. Mr. Niles’s thoughts went often these days to the home he had left behind in Jaffna when he met and married the Colombo-born Rita Schoorman and turned her into Mrs. Niles. He wanted to return to Jaffna to revisit the places that had hosted his childhood, one last time, before it was all over, and the contemplation of war before this could happen was troubling to him. War was an impossibility along such quiet cobbled streets. Men, women, and children who traveled so frequently on bicycles between libraries and schools and markets and places of work, such people did not go to war. What would stir up the passions of people like his mother had been, people who cooked sambaaru thick with vegetables, brinjal, pumpkin, and okra, the roasted mustard and curry leaves floating in a broth so delicious that nothing else was necessary? No, war was irreconcilable with what he knew of the North. And yet here was this boy, whose usual preoccupations veered between his young sister and lost games of cricket, here he was, right before him, speaking of war.
“I wanted to ask you about it before but you were too sick to talk then,” Nihil said, as he wiped his hands on his jeans; they were clammy from anxiety. “I didn’t want to worry you. Aunty told me you needed to rest. But Mohan told us that the war is coming. They are going to join the army and go to war. That is what they said. First Mohan, then Jith.” Nihil sat back. Already he felt his fears dissipating. He waited for Mr. Niles to reassure him that there would be no war, but that is not what Mr. Niles said, not exactly.
He said, “People do not go to war, Nihil, they carry war inside them. Either they have the war within them or they don’t have it. The thing to think about is do you and I have war inside us?”