On Sal Mal Lane

by Ru Freeman

  “Karma Chameleon” by Culture Club

  “Forever Young” by Alphaville

  “Where the Streets Have No Name” by U2 (Suren’s favorite)

  “Ebony and Ivory” (this was Rose’s choice and her solo)

  “Yellow Submarine,” by the Beatles (a special request from Kala Niles)

  “Tennessee Waltz” the Anne Murray version (in the hope that it would cheer up the old people)

  “Kalu Kella” (for Devi, for whom the song had often been sung as a lullaby by their mother, because she wanted to hear it sung by a real band)

  “Shouldn’t we ask Ranil to join?” Rashmi asked, as she tapped her pencil on the pad of paper in which everything was being written. The pad was left over from Mr. Niles’s days as a Government Agent and had his name, title, qualifications, and official address printed in flowing script on the top right corner. “He’s so close in age to Devi and maybe he can do something together with her,” Rashmi continued. She tapped Devi’s head.

  Devi, who was sitting on the floor, resting against Rashmi’s legs, looked up at her sister. “He can sell tickets,” Devi said. She had never quite mended her relationship with the Tissera boy after having bitten him on his arm, and was not inclined to be forced to spend what promised to be such a wonderful evening in his company.

  “But he might also want to perform,” Rashmi said.

  “We can give him a chance at the end. If he wants to, he can sing,” Nihil suggested. “Otherwise, if we go and tell him now he’ll tell his parents and it won’t be a surprise. In any case, he doesn’t even play with us anymore.” Nobody could dispute that so Devi had her way.

  Suren looked around at the assembled group. Every one of them was excited except for Dolly, who remained silent. He knew that she would have liked to ask Jith to join these discussions, to sit in the Nileses’ house, which was now the place where all of them gathered after school every day even if they had to come late after chorus rehearsals and cricket practices and a half a dozen other activities, but she could not. Suren had heard Jith tell her at the bus halt that Mohan had prohibited him from speaking to Tamil people and the Nileses were Tamil people, so that was that. Even you, I don’t know, he might say, because of your father’s grandmother . . . and Jith had stopped at that. Love, Suren felt, was spoiled when statements like that were made, but Dolly lacked the language to make such arguments. Suren had watched, saddened on her behalf, as she just looked down at her bright-red painted toenails and sucked on one of the pineapple star toffees Jith had bought for her.

  “Dolly, do you have something special you want to do alone?” Suren asked.

  Dolly stopped chewing her fingernails and looked up. “Like what, men? I don’ have any talent, no.”

  “There must be something you can do.”

  “No, can’ do anything,” she said and giggled. “I’m useless!”

  Rose looked over at her sister. Since she had joined the band, she and Dolly had drifted away from each other, she to Suren’s world, Dolly to Jith’s. “You can dance,” she said. “You can dance that dance we learned from the Tisseras’ TV, remember? The one from the Pop in Germany show, to that song ‘I Will Survive?’”

  Dolly giggled again. “Yes, you can dance,” Suren said. “We don’t have enough dances.”

  Dolly smacked her sister on the arm. “Don’ have the song also. Need the song to dance.”

  “I have the song,” one of the other boys said. “I’ll bring it on a cassette for you.”

  And Dolly smiled and agreed to dance for their show.

  “My job will be to make milk toffees and I will buy cool drinks,” Mrs. Niles said when they shared the final details of their evening with her.

  “Make fish cutlets too, Mama,” Kala Niles pleaded, with her arms around her diminutive mother who was dwarfed in her embrace. She turned to the children, “Mama’s cutlets are the best in the whole country, I can tell you. So tasty!”

  Cutlets, milk toffee, cool drinks. Song, dance, instrumentals, plays. An MC (Nihil), a band leader (Suren), a decorator (Rashmi), and a mascot (Devi). Everything for the variety show was put down on paper, a program drawn up, and Kala Niles went about trying to find someone who could lend them a microphone and speakers (for the singing) and a cassette player (for the dancing) that could be taken outdoors. There was one problem: nobody knew how to tell Mrs. Herath.

  “Amma will be furious,” Rashmi said to Suren as they put their heads together in their oldest-children way, to figure out how to circumnavigate the issue.

  “Let’s not tell until the day of the show. No, no, the evening of the show!” Devi suggested, ever willing to put off what she called ugly business, a phrase she had picked up from her mother.

  “Maybe Kala Akki can tell her,” Nihil said. “She’s the one who has been letting us practice and everything, so maybe she can tell her.”

  “We can’t expose Kala Akki to Amma like that. That’s not fair,” Suren said.

  They went around like this in circles that grew and shrank every time they came up with yet another person to be the bearer of the news until they decided, in the way children always will, to ignore the problem. And it remained that way until the fourteenth of April that year, which was the day on which the Sinhalese and Tamil New Year officially concluded with the end of a day of fasting and the sharing of food and a long list of auspicious times and auspicious directions and auspicious colors, all of which were observed to the last detail in the two Sinhalese-Buddhist households, the Silvas and the Heraths, and the Hindu-Tamil household, the Nadesans, though Old Mrs. Joseph, in memory of her mother, always produced a few treats of her own as well, which allowed Raju to join in the general festivities.

  And it was Raju, not out of choice but because he was that type of adult who found himself at the center of conflict, it was Raju who broke the news to Mr. and, more importantly, Mrs. Herath.

  “So so, Aunty, are you ready for the variety show tonight?” he asked, as he dropped off his mother’s offering of sweet milk-rice made with red rice and white rice and cashews, cardamom, and sultanas, a recipe that the Sinhalese families did not use, a good thing, since otherwise the same kind of milk-rice would float between the nine houses and make them all ill from lack of variety. “You can bring some of the milk-rice to have afterward, Mama put extra,” he added, and then added further, “Mrs. Niles is making her famous cutlets and even, I hear, patties as well as the milk toffee. Milk toffee of course I’m not a fan,” he said, making a face, all that sweetness, “but can’t wait for the cutlets and the patties. Mrs. Niles makes the best ones down the whole lane. All the parties when we were small, she’s the one who always made them. Even Alice can’t make them like that.”

  Mrs. Herath absorbed all this with a held breath. The words What variety show? obviously could not escape her lips without voluntarily demoting herself in Raju’s eyes. And if cutlets and patties were being produced by Mrs. Niles, then she would have to get Kamala to produce something of equal measure, Chinese rolls perhaps, and that would be difficult under the time constraints, not to mention the fact that every self-respecting shopkeeper for miles around had closed their business to celebrate the New Year.

  “We are bringing cheese and biscuits,” she said sweetly, remembering with a rush of gratitude that her husband had purchased two tins of Kraft cheese and several packages of Maliban Cream Crackers, just before the shops closed, as gifts for each of their mothers when they went to visit them for the New Year.

  “Oh, cheese and biscuits!” Raju said, delightedly. “Mouth is watering! Then I’ll go, Aunty, and get ready. Even Mama is going to come. So nice that Suren organized all this. And my nieces also, Rose and Dolly, also helped, I hear.” And he was gone, shuffling down the front steps, struggling with the large gate, escaping into his own world.

  Suren knew, when he heard his mother calling him, that the moment had come. She had been told, she had discovered, she had guessed, he didn’t know what, but she knew. She called
his name in a way that made it sound as though the name itself was responsible for the debacle in which she found herself, as though she felt that if he had been named something else, Senerath, for instance, or Arjuna, he would not have subjected her to this day. But here he was, he was Suren and he loved music and what is more, he loved it enough to lie to his parents. No, not his parents, to his own mother. Why was that considered even worse than lying to his father, or to the combined unit? Suren distracted himself with such thoughts as he buckled his belt, tied his shoelaces, ran his fingers through his hair, bowed with a debonair devil-may-care attitude to his three stricken siblings, who, each dressed for the evening, were sitting in a row on his bed, and went out to meet his fate.

  No night before then or since can compare. Such music in the voices of children, such laughter in the air, such life. No day in the history of Sal Mal Lane had ever seen a spectacle like that one. The sound of a band playing, a band that was made up of one Muslim boy, two Sinhalese boys, two Tamil boys, and one Burgher girl, Rose, singing her heart out, a girl singing like she knew this was it, this moment, this day, this performance, it was all she was ever going to have to remember when she was old, that kind of music was not of this world. It was the music of days past and days that would never be. The music of still-fast friendships and the absence of tragedy. It was music that Raju might have made had he been differently born, and music that Suren carried in his soul, and music that made Mr. Niles think no longer of Jaffna but of this road, this house, this life, and these children. And though in time to come Kala Niles would feel the whiplash of Mrs. Herath’s acerbic comments about having turned your mother’s home into a clubhouse, on that evening even Mrs. Herath was moved to silence. On that night Mr. Herath listened to all of his children sing, watched all of them perform, and he did not get up even once to smoke a cigarette. Francie and Jimmy Bolling came out dressed in a sari and a suit, respectively, and walked up the road to the Nileses’ house arm in arm like the Sansonis did. The Tissera and Nadesan families came, and Mrs. Tissera held her son in her lap, murmuring her commentary into the little boy’s ears. The Bin Ahmed and Sansoni families sat together in the dining room chairs that had been collected from all their houses and arrayed in rows by none other than Raju, who sat with his mother in a front-row seat. Even Lucas and Alice were there, sharing the back row with Kamala and Old Mrs. Joseph’s Tamil servant girl and the Nadesans’ two Tamil servants, who, though they did not understand any of what was being said or sung, cheered doubly hard to make up for it.

  Mr. and Mrs. Silva did not attend. They had another engagement for which they left early, though their sons couldn’t help listening from their veranda, particularly Jith, who longed to watch Dolly dance. And Sonna did not attend, though he, too, listened as he sat in Old Mrs. Joseph’s veranda, next door to where the performance was taking place.

  From the front of the stage, which was no more than a set of planks laid side by side against the doors of the Nileses’ garage at the end of their gravel driveway, the scent of mosquito coils and incense in the air, with his guitar in hand and a microphone near his face, Suren felt that the conduct of his life was finally aligned with his spirit.

  Changes

  Though Mrs. Herath had shown up with a tray draped with a linen serviette and artfully arranged with cream crackers and Kraft cheese, though she had made lively conversation with the neighbors at whose center she had sat as the seemingly proud parent of the chief organizer, and though she had cheered with gusto as each trilling last note faded away and Masonic declarations hung in the air at the end of each act in Nihil’s play, though she had done all that, she was more disappointed in her children than she had ever been in her life. Of course they were all responsible for this, and each one of the four squared his or her shoulders and prepared to hoist the blame upon their backs, but she knew that the root cause was Suren. He, for reasons she could not fathom, had become the viper in their midst, who, with beatific face and dulcet tone, had lured his sisters and brother into the dark place from within which they could not just contemplate but have the brass to execute a bali-thovila—that was the only term she could use to describe it, a heathen’s salutation to the devil himself, such as they had produced on New Year’s Day.

  In the interest of fairness it is necessary to note here that before she arrived on Sal Mal Lane, a long time before then, before the Herath children came into being, Mrs. Herath had been a different person. She had spent her girlhood immersed in literature and sports, her days filled with determined successes and, as the beloved firstborn of a large family, many privileges as well as indulgences. With no intimations of disaster allowed near her, these were things that had made her fearless as a young adult. If tastes lay in the direction of depth, therefore, her heart was a bottomless pit inhabited by twists and turns that only the bold would wish to traverse. If color was called for, she could have shamed a flaming tropical sunset out of the skies. But marriage and motherhood, those reliable stabilizers, had changed all that, taking her so completely out of her unfettered world and binding her so firmly and so suddenly within the one that proscribed her movements, that all she had managed to retain of her former self was a firm grasp of her mother’s values, the values of an older generation: sobriety, dignity, and overall propriety. Those turns not taken, for travel overseas to study nursing, for pursuing the life of a socialite who loved her game of tennis as much as she loved her ballroom dancing, those turns had been repaved. The footpath has become Galle Road she liked to say when old friends stopped by, gesturing in the direction of the artery that ran along the coastal city of Colombo, no time for dawdling. She did not let memory bring potential into focus: the promise of balmy lanes leading to tennis courts, the thrill of a cinder track under bare feet flying, the rhythm of her slight body dancing with island grace under the Southern Cross, these things were simply old indulgences, the sort of indulgences that could destabilize the stability she had once resisted. And this show, this production, was the worst of it, a sharp reminder of a certain kind of imprudent joy.

  “Whose idea was it to go and practice at that Kala’s house?” she demanded to know, though she knew the answer, as well as the answer they were going to give.

  “All of us thought of it,” Rashmi said, surprising Mrs. Herath; of all her children, Rashmi had been her one last hope.

  “Okay, then whose friends were those, those, those creatures who were in the band?”

  “Mine,” Suren replied, drowning out the chorus of all of us from his siblings.

  “Yours. So, the practicing was for your band with your friends so it must have been your grand idea, am I right?” she asked. “Am. I. Right?” she asked again of the now silent wall of faces.

  “They are my friends too,” Rashmi spoke up, her words rushing together. “Two of their sisters are in my class at school, that’s how Suren met them. When we all went to the birthday party, you remember? Sonali’s birthday party, Amma? I wore that pink dress you made for me?”

  Rashmi looked down at her feet as soon as she had finished, scolding herself for her foolishness. This kind of detail was the dead giveaway of a liar. The truth required no embellishments; it was what it was. A dress, a pink dress, no less, and one that she hated as she had hated the color since the age of nine, would have been sooner forgotten than remembered. And since when did Suren and Nihil or even Devi accompany her to birthday parties? She looked forlornly at her older brother. He smiled in that new way he had, as though he was saying Never mind, cheer up, and We’ll survive this, all at the same time.

  “They are my friends too,” Rashmi repeated.

  Mrs. Herath sat up straight, determined to put a stop to the nonsense. “Okay, then what are their last names?”

  “Adamaly, Agalawatte, Jeganathan . . .” Suren said quickly.

  “I didn’t ask you. I asked her,” Mrs. Herath snapped.

  “Adamaly, Agalawatte, Jeganathan, and the last is Simon,” she said, confidently, glad that Devi had taken
to calling Dylan Simon “Simple Simon,” which had planted the name in her head.

  “Simon, Adamaly, Jeganathan” Mrs. Herath spat out each name, her rage erasing her egalitarian worldview. “Thuppai Burghers and Tamils and Muslims whose parents we don’t even know, are these the kinds of people you should be seen with in public, let alone while prancing, half-naked, on a stage?”

  The children stared at her. None of them had appeared on stage half-naked. Rose and Dolly had been tarted up, as Rose herself had put it, with clothes borrowed from their older sister, Sophia, but that was the extent of half-nakedness. Besides, if Adamalys and Simons and Jeganathans were not to be associated with when they attended the same schools and owned most of the instruments, then what on earth were Raju and the Bolling girls doing in the Heraths’ house all the time? Clearly, their mother was reaching for straws, and if she was reaching for straws then surely they were right to have done what they did. All this passed through their minds as they stood and gazed at her obediently, their mutiny safely behind them.

  Mrs. Herath looked hard at them, then cleared her throat, deciding. She stood up. “There’s going to be no more band practice anywhere. If I hear that you have been going to Kala’s to play guitars and drums and nonsense, you mark my words, I will take the mirisgala and smash her piano to bits!”

  This was the type of threat Mrs. Herath was used to delivering, but those threats were usually delivered with regard to things they owned. I’ll take the skin off your backside, I’ll rip that dress to shreds, I’ll burn all your books, I’ll cut off your hair, that sort of thing. But to threaten to smash poor Kala Niles’s source of livelihood with the heavy granite stone used by Kamala for grinding chillies? The very thought separated the children from their mother by a measure of deep consternation.