On Sal Mal Lane

by Ru Freeman

  “I don’t have war,” Nihil said immediately, as if he had already pondered this very question, “and my brother and Rashmi and Devi, they don’t have it either. Or Rose or Dolly. I don’t think they have war. Mohan, though, I am sure he has it. Jith, I’m not sure. And Sonna also I’m not sure . . .”

  “Sonna is still a good boy in your opinion, then?” Mr. Niles asked mildly.

  Nihil shrugged. “I don’t think he’s a good boy, but he hasn’t done anything bad to me or my sisters and brother so I cannot call him a bad boy.”

  “That’s a fair way of looking at things,” Mr. Niles said, and smiled.

  “My parents . . .” Nihil began and paused, “I’m not sure if they do or if they don’t.” Nihil pursed his lips and frowned as he weighed the facts against his parents. They sometimes fought, which put them in the “have war” column, but they also took care of people like Lucas and Rose and Dolly, and that set them in the “don’t have war” column.

  Mr. Niles continued to smile as he watched Nihil trying to figure out the complex nature of his parents. “Your parents are like you, they don’t have war in them,” he said, deciding for Nihil.

  “Yes, I don’t think they do. They’re good people,” Nihil said and was about to ask about Mr. Niles, to force him to say that no, he did not have war within him either, when Mr. Niles dispatched him on one of his routine errands.

  “Son, could you go inside and ask Aunty to make me another cup of tea? Get one for yourself too,” Mr. Niles said.

  Nihil rose obediently and went to the kitchen to look for Mrs. Niles, who kept him talking while she poured the tea and put two stainless steel mugs on a stainless steel tray for him to carry back out to her husband.

  “Uncle loves when you come, doesn’t he?” she said. She smiled and patted his head. “Here, I just made these. Take two and eat one. Keep one for Devi.” She put two fragrant vadai on the plate and Nihil’s mouth watered at the sight of them, bits of curry leaf and green chilli poking through the crisp ball of fried lentils and flour.

  “These are my favorite kind of vadai,” he said. “Devi’s too.”

  She stroked his face, once on each cheek, and then, drawing her caress to a point, she held his chin in the tips of her fingers. Nihil breathed in the indul smell that permeated her hands. She always smelled like that, a scent of curries and water clinging to her, making her seem earthy, somehow, and unlike her husband. Mr. Niles’s clothing was kept so fresh and his scent, as far as Nihil could tell, was always a mix of sandalwood soap and Old Spice, both overlaid by the blooms on Kala Niles’s rose vines.

  “You are a good boy. He has been much happier since you started coming to sit with him. Talks more, laughs more, even eats better.” And because saying thank you, like saying sorry, was not part of her culture or his, she left it at that and let Nihil smile his acknowledgment and leave, the tray balanced carefully in his hands.

  After he had served Mr. Niles and sat down with his treat, Nihil returned to his topic. “And you?” he asked. “Do you have war inside you?” He wanted to make quite sure that should the Tamil and Sinhalese families down his lane divide into their own groups, Mr. Niles would not be part of it.

  This was a difficult question for a man of Mr. Niles’s age, who had lived both among those who were exactly like him and also among those who did not share his traditions and beliefs. It had been a good life, a life of public stature absent of humiliations, a life within a community that held him in respect. A life in which a child like Nihil would listen with rapt attention to what he had to say, who would follow direction, seek him out. But it was also a life during which there had been upheavals that had stirred him to anger. Mr. Niles looked at Nihil, taking in his waiting eyes, the legs grown too long for his jeans, his aspect of trust, and he considered the question. To answer it truthfully he would have to ask himself other, more complicated questions.

  What was his life like, say, in 1956, the year of the first riots that gripped the Eastern Province? His one child, Kala, was just fourteen years old and his days were full of her doings, his wife’s conversations, and the directed-journeys of a husband, father, bread winner. He stamped seals on official documents, signed his name to bulletins about this and that, and watched the world turn. There was the Official Languages Act with reasonable use allowed for his language, Tamil, there were amendments to the act, there was a satyagraha, the nonviolent protest continuing on and on.

  And in June? On June 11 of that year? Had he done anything different on that day when the entire country separated like yolks and whites into their own ethnic groups as they responded to the news of the carnage in the faraway town of Gal Oya? Mr. Niles thought hard. He had placed a trunk call to his parents, still living in Jaffna, to inquire about their safety. Neither he nor they had referred to the reason for that call, they had let the long silences in between the Is everything okay? and the Maybe ask Appa to stay home tomorrow, reveal their worries.

  But even from that distance he knew, as the other Tamil inhabitants of Sal Mal Lane, the Nadesans and Old Mrs. Joseph and her husband, knew, what terror had gripped the settlements in the dry zone of Gal Oya, because the compositions of those settlements had resembled the composition of Sal Mal Lane, a mix of Tamils, Sinhalese, and Muslims. How quickly Gal Oya had disintegrated under rumor-fueled chaos, the people arming themselves against butchery with kris knives, their very preparedness guaranteeing the fulfillment of their fears. That year, as though the elements themselves were in agreement that no hope was possible, the South-West monsoons had blown over the Gal Oya reservoir, bringing not a drop of rain but only the scorching named winds that depressed Sinhalese and Tamil peasant alike, making them curse the same winds in separate languages: yalhulanga for one, kachchan for the other.

  What could he know of the hardship of starting from scratch, planting in the earth, manning a boundary, he with his government job, set free to feel only safety and guilt? There had been a brief moment of possibility, he recollected it now, with the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam Pact, the possibility of dignity, but it did not last. Nothing seemed to last, to take hold, except fear and people on every side who thrived not on harmony but on disunity.

  Two years later, 1958, and twin attacks on trains, one in Vavuniya, one in Batticaloa, one aimed at Tamils, another at the Sinhalese. Somewhere out there the sugarcane fields had burned furiously, and Mr. Niles had wondered about that, that sugarcane burning, whether the air had smelled sweet while all around machetes did their work, all around the train stations ablaze while carved pillars and statues, themselves thousands of years old, looked on.

  There was his home, his family, to consider when all the news from the North came not as information but as incitement, and mobs roamed the streets of every town throughout the island, including this capital city where he lived. To barricade the doors and stay inside, or to go out and confront the thugs? To be a householder or to be a Tamil, that had been the choice. And he had chosen his family. Listening to tales of brutality, of burning temples, burning kovils, of men with shirts tucked in who attacked those whose shirts were untucked, of people running, running, he stayed inside.

  When the call to his parents brought the sound of fear and desperation to him over a distance that rendered him impotent, what had he done then? He had made calls to his colleagues in parallel posts, those with last names that were like his and those that were not, in Batticaloa, in Jaffna, asking them for their help, learning that help was not possible, everybody was afraid, everybody was being attacked, when there was both a Hindu temple and the Buddhist Naga Vihara burning, when Sinhalese Marxists lay dead beside Tamil civilians, there was no trust left.

  But then he remembered the words he had uttered in 1977, just two years before the Heraths had moved in. And, remembering, Mr. Niles squeezed his eyes shut against the boy sitting before him. He squeezed them and still Nihil remained on his mind, Nihil and his question about war. He had said those words in the quiet of his home, let us move back wh
ere we belong, but he hadn’t meant them, not the way they had to be meant for his family to uproot themselves and leave with him. He had not been able to say them with enough force, with finality, because the place that he wanted to return to had been tarnished by the murder of Alfred Duraiappah, the mayor of Jaffna, a man he had admired, and the rise of Prabhakaran, a militant he loathed. Everything was muddied, between his anger at the thugs who belonged both to “his” people who were Tamil and “their” people who were Sinhalese, and all the people he loved who crossed between those two categories, the racial distinctions blurring again and again. And as if all that were not enough, his daughter now grown up and unmarried, his wife moving toward reconciliation to that fact, himself sick. Yes, he had sent up that feeble cry, though he had known even then that there was no home left to go back to, his parents gone, his sisters relocated and living in Batticaloa for two decades.

  In the end his own answer had been no. He had built a life here in the city and there was no reason to abandon it. But what had he done with those feelings of disquiet? Where had he put them? It agitated him to ponder these questions, to remember such moments, when to answer no to moving had not necessarily translated into an yes for staying, only an acknowledgment of reality.

  “You don’t have war in you either,” Nihil interrupted his thoughts, forcing the answer he wanted Mr. Niles to give him. “If you did, I would know,” he said. Saying the words aloud, Nihil knew they were true and the last remnants of his fears left his body as he uttered them.

  Mr. Niles wiped his face, glad that Nihil could not tell that this time he really was crying. He picked up a fresh handkerchief, blew his nose, and said as clearly as he could, “Yes, you would know, Nihil. You would know if I did, that is true.” He remained silent for a while, his eyes closed, slowly turning his back on the upheavals he had just revisited. When he opened his eyes again, Nihil was reading a Hardy Boys book that he had brought with him. Mr. Niles watched him, and as he did so the images in his head receded further in his memory. He was here now, this was his life, the whole and the end of it, in the company of this boy. Nihil, feeling his gaze, looked up.

  “Put the book away, Nihil,” Mr. Niles said at last, and Nihil obliged right away. When he was in a talkative mood, Mr. Niles was likely to open yet another window into his life by giving Nihil one thing or another from his past: a silver comb that fit into his pocket, a Parker pen with a bottle of purple-blue ink, and books. Always, books.

  But this time, Mr. Niles did not share a memory. He said, “I have something important to discuss with you. We know you don’t have war inside you, so let us see what you do have in you.”

  “Nothing,” Nihil said, disappointed, twisting his hands, palms up. “I just study and go to school and come home and play the piano and fly kites even though we don’t fly kites anymore these days because of what happened with Devi’s blue-and-silver one. And I take care of Devi.”

  “Ah yes, you take care of Devi.”

  The sentence hung in the air between them. Nihil thought about Devi. He did take care of her, but since her stumble and the resulting placement into Mrs. Niles’s arms, he had felt less insecure about her well-being when she came for her piano lessons. Besides, his book of what he knew had remained blank for weeks, except, now and then, something about Uncle Raju. But the something about Uncle Raju was not anything to be taken seriously for, after all, Uncle Raju was everybody’s worry. He was Suren’s worry for fear that their mother would discover that Devi had traipsed all over the neighborhood and ended up in his stinking garage; he was Rashmi’s worry because she didn’t like the way he dressed, though even that had ceased to worry her as much since he began wearing his khakis at all times; and he had always been Nihil’s worry because, well, Raju was Raju. The one person for whom Raju was not a worry was Devi herself.

  “I don’t worry about her so much anymore,” Nihil said. “Nothing has come to me recently. Nothing bad is going to happen to her.” He considered that for a moment then added, “Nothing yet,” just in case he was tempting fate by making an all-encompassing statement.

  “Then, Nihil, it is time you went back to cricket.” Mr. Niles leaned forward as he said this, then leaned back again and waited to see what effect it would have.

  Nihil regarded Mr. Niles in the quiet accented by the piece that Devi was now playing: Bagatelle in A Minor, op. 59, a safely watered-down version of “Für Elise.” This was something he had wanted to bring up with Mr. Niles himself, this matter of going back to cricket. Two of his best friends were now staying after school to practice with the junior team. One cricketer, Ranjan Madugalle, had made the first eleven at the age of fifteen, and he was not only talented but beautiful. Nihil did not feel he was either, though he did think he had some potential on the talent front, certainly more than either of his friends.

  “Ranjan Madugalle went on to play for the national team in our first Test match against England,” he said, continuing his thoughts aloud. “Once, when he was playing for Royal, I got his autograph and because he knew my mother, he let me wear his colors cap, just for a few minutes while he was signing autographs for the girls . . .” and he stopped there, adoration for the older cricketer fairly seeping out of his body.

  Mr. Niles laced his long fingers together and contemplated Nihil. “Long ago, he was just a boy like you,” he said.

  “I don’t think so,” Nihil said. “I think he was always a star batsman.”

  “Nonsense. Nobody gets to be good without wanting it badly enough. How badly do you want it?”

  Nihil flattened his back against the woven cane. How badly did he want it? Had Mr. Niles not heard his footsteps as he bowled while one or the other of the children of Sal Mal Lane waited by a makeshift crease? Had he not heard the children cry out in admiration when he, Nihil, batted? Could he not feel his dreams of not merely driving the ball with such elegance that people would refer to him as a young Madugalle, but also bowling a fast delivery to a nine-man slip cordon as Australia’s Dennis Lillee had done in 1977 against New Zealand and keeping wickets like England’s Alan Knott and fielding like India’s Sunil Gavaskar, flying through the air to make the game-winning catch? Yes, he had Devi to watch over, but how could Devi compare with that moment?

  “I was thinking that Devi is probably safe to come here for piano without me,” he breathed out at last, knowing that this was what he needed to say, and this was the person in whose presence he could say those words. Then, caught up in the enthusiasm that followed from Mr. Niles, he forgot entirely that he had come to this decision alone.

  “Good!” Mr. Niles fairly shouted as he clapped his hands, once, together, his past with its many capitulations forgotten. “Then next time, you stay at school for practice and she can come alone.”

  “Uncle Raju can bring her,” Nihil said, thinking aloud, realizing that neither Rashmi nor Suren was home on Fridays, when he and Devi had their lessons, Rashmi having taken up netball too. “Or Kamala, but I think she would prefer Uncle Raju.”

  “Yes, Raju is a good person,” Mr. Niles said. “You know, he and Kala were children together down this lane just like you are now.” His eye began to run again and he paused to rub it with a handkerchief. When he looked up from dropping the cloth into the wicker basket that sat on a stool beside his chair for this purpose, he noticed that Nihil had slumped his shoulders down. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “Kala Akki won’t change my lesson, and she can’t move Suren or Rashmi because Suren’s lesson is too long and Rashmi has other activities after school,” he said, his voice, which had taken on a timbre of shy excitement, now flat, “and anyway, Amma will be annoyed if I stop music.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about Kala Akki! I will manage her. She will take you on another day, and you can tell your mother that Uncle Niles arranged the whole thing because he thinks you are a good cricketer! No, tell her I know that you are going to be a great cricketer!”

  “Tha is buying me a leather ball for my
birthday when I’m thirteen,” Nihil said. “Next year I’ll get it. I can’t wait to take it to school and show everybody.”

  “Well then, young man, there is one more thing you need.”

  “What is that?”

  “Go quietly past Kala Akki, so you don’t disturb the lesson, go into my room, open the drawer at the bottom of the chest there with all those medicines, and take out your new gloves!”

  Nihil jumped up from his chair, ran, screeched to a halt before he opened the connecting door, then tip toed through the rooms that contained so much still air, the Nileses preferring to keep their windows shut against dust and insects. He could smell the mild frankincense scent of the sambrani that Mrs. Niles lit each afternoon to keep the mosquitoes away, throwing the crushed resinoid into the coals that glowed in the hand-held metal pan she kept for this purpose. He had some difficulty getting the last drawer opened, the handles having come off. He had to slide his hand underneath the bottom of the chest and ease the drawer out a little bit at a time until he could create enough space on top to grasp it from the front and pull it open.

  The gloves were not new, they were white and worn, a little big for his hands, but who cared? He put them on and off a few times, imagining himself putting them on as he walked toward the pitch, his bat tucked under his arm, and taking them off as the crowd cheered when he walked back to the pavilion after. The gloves, with their mix of cloth and cotton and rubber, felt as though they were full of history, full of skill.

  When he returned he was grinning, as was Mr. Niles. He felt his heart swell as he looked at the old man; Mr. Niles was more animated than he had ever been during any of their discussions over the past three years. Nihil felt pleased to have brought this much excitement into Mr. Niles’s otherwise calm life. It made the old man seem younger. He looked like he could get up and walk.

  “Can you walk?” Nihil asked, a question that he had always wanted to ask before but that had never seemed permissible until today.