On Sal Mal Lane

by Ru Freeman

  “Uncle Raju! Uncle Raju!” Devi yelled, and then, when he did not reply, she glanced back at her house to make sure that nobody was watching, and she crossed the street and slipped in through Old Mrs. Joseph’s gate and yelled some more, standing outside his garage.

  “I don’t know where he has gone, child,” Old Mrs. Joseph said, her forehead knitted with worry, when Devi finally climbed the steps to the veranda and asked. “He left around two thirty to go and get a bicycle bell from the shop at the junction and I haven’t seen him since. Getting a bit worried.” She rubbed her furrowed brow and stood up to lean against one of the pillars that supported the roof of the veranda and looked down the road.

  “I will go and see,” Devi said, though she was not sure how she would do this since she was not allowed to cross the big road with all the traffic or, indeed, go anywhere by herself. She went back to her house and tried to get Kamala to come with her.

  “Aney Baba, I can’t come,” Kamala said, pulling her upper lip over her large front teeth. “Madam will be angry if I take you and go down the road!”

  Kala Niles, when asked, said, “Don’t worry, darling, he’ll come home. Must have gone to see the new Tamil film or something like that. You practiced today?” Which made Devi back away and leave because she knew Raju did not go to see Tamil films and no, she had not practiced today or yesterday either.

  “If Nihil was here, he would come with me to look for Uncle Raju,” she said in Rashmi’s hearing, but got no response.

  At Jimmy Bolling’s house she heard a terrible argument before she even reached the door and did not dare go inside.

  So there really was no help for it but to go next door and see if Jith would agree to look for Raju. “Jith!” she called, “Jith! Jith!” and when he came out, “I can’t find Uncle Raju. Can you find him for me?”

  And because his parents had gone Christmas shopping, and, more importantly, because Mohan had gone out with Sonna and this had been troubling him, Jith agreed to go. When he returned, almost an hour later, however, all he would say to her was that Raju was sick and in the hospital, and then he went to Old Mrs. Joseph and told her which hospital.

  If Devi were older, wiser, she would have known immediately from the look on his face that Jith was terrified and upset and that the cause of those feelings was something new, some fresh viciousness that he had not previously entertained but with which he was now acquainted and would be for the rest of his life. But she was neither, so she merely tagged along with him to visit Old Mrs. Joseph, and tagged along with Old Mrs. Joseph and Jimmy Bolling when they borrowed Mr. Niles’s Morris Minor and set off for the nearest hospital, which happened to be the privately run Sri Lanka Nursing Home on High Street, not far from their lane. Since neither Rashmi nor Kamala had been willing to participate in the search for Raju, Devi decided that there was no reason to tell them where, exactly, she was going, for which she was forgiven after the fact, given the gravity of the situation.

  To see Raju on any usual day before or after weight lifting, before or after brushing his teeth and getting ready for the day, anytime, really, was disconcerting to those who were not accustomed to the composition of his face and form and unfamiliar with his benevolence. But to see Raju as he lay on a stark hospital bed, a needle in his arm and every part of his limbs crisscrossed with bandages, to see the brace that separated his neck from his head for, quite possibly, the first time in his life, to see the forearm that was in a cast, and the face that was so bruised no bandages had been applied, only minuscule stitches and clear ointments that glistened and sparkled like unctuous tears, this was a sight for the brave of heart.

  Devi stood quite still by the door when she saw him. “What happened to you, Uncle Raju?” she asked in a quiet voice.

  “He can’ talk,” Jimmy Bolling said, his mouth turned down. Old Mrs. Joseph merely sank into a chair and put her head in her hands and began to pray.

  Devi stepped forward and touched the cast on Raju’s left hand. “Uncle Raju,” she whispered, “I went to look for you but you were not there. Then Jith helped me,” she said, “Silvas’ Jith. He’s the one who found you.”

  Raju’s eyes opened and shut once, and no matter what else was said or by whom, they remained closed until it was time for them to leave. He listened to the sound of their footsteps, to Devi’s voice, which cut over those of the adults, asking when he might come back home. If he was touched by that voice, those words, he did not express it. He took in the empty room and remained quite still, letting the pain in his body pin him down, lying there as though he were already dead.

  Nothing that is good happens because of rumor; rumor is the harbinger and mascot of evil. And rumor had it that evening that Raju had molested a young Tamil girl who lived on Kalyani Avenue, and that unknown people in that neighborhood had caught him and beaten him up and left him for dead, which is how Jith had found him, lying face down, whimpering in pain, while a crowd of people from the houses on Kalyani Avenue gathered: Indian Tamils, the kind who dressed with fastidious care and lived conservative and private lives, their voices kept low, their evenings ending early, people who rarely fraternized with anybody outside their quiet neighborhood, which consisted entirely of others like themselves who lived by the same decorous rules. Nobody asked how Jith might have known to look for Raju down Kalyani Avenue, nobody wondered why the thugs on Sal Mal Lane—for Mohan and Sonna were thugs, everybody agreed—had no knowledge of the thugs who might be living on Kalyani Avenue, which was, after all, just two streets away from theirs. Nobody asked why Sonna and Mohan grew even more cocky as they talked together, or why several men, not boys, from the slums behind Lucas’s house, took to standing at the end of their road, making lascivious remarks at Rashmi and Devi and dark statements about Tamils in the hearing of Kala Niles. Or they did ask, but in a silence decked in horror and fear.

  By the time Raju returned to Sal Mal Lane from the hospital, Christmas had come and gone, and though he could now speak, he would say nothing about the assault he had suffered except I never went to Kalyani Avenue. They took me there, but who they were he did not know and would not guess at though by the way he said all those things it was clear that he had his suspicions and that they were correct.

  “Don’ know why Raju had to go to Kalyani Avenue,” Francie Bolling said, the night he came home from the hospital.

  “Bugger is crazy, that’s why! Crazy and girl-mad!” Sonna, home for one of his increasingly rare visits, and this one had been long, said. “I always knew it.”

  “But he’s not like that,” Rose insisted.

  “If I ever find out that you were there that day . . .” Jimmy Bolling said, and the trembling of his hand as he served himself a soup with very few vegetables was enough to end all conversation for the rest of that meal and for many meals after that.

  “Damn good someone taught him a lesson,” Mrs. Silva said, watching Mr. Niles’s Morris Minor turn into Old Mrs. Joseph’s driveway with Raju in the backseat. “Now maybe the Heraths will stop having him kusu-kusufying with that Devi all day long!”

  She and Mr. Silva and Mohan were all standing in the veranda peering through the jasmine plants that now completely wreathed the surrounding trellises, providing scent, shade, and absolute privacy while also enabling them to watch the activities of her immediate neighbors. Jith was nowhere to be found; unbeknownst to anybody, including Rose, he was meeting Dolly on the road leading to the temple, where, incense and oil in hand, they planned to spend an hour or so inside the temple grounds.

  “I’m not at all surprised that he got beaten up by the people on Kalyani Avenue. That place is full of Tamils,” Mr. Silva said. “All thugs, obviously.”

  “But he deserved it,” Mohan said. “Even Tamils have to fight back.”

  Neither of his parents questioned Mohan’s moment of charity toward the Tamil people against whom he had been conducting such an unrelenting and personal crusade.

  In the Herath household, Mrs. Herath prefaced he
r words with a regretful sigh. “Anyway, Devi, you are getting old enough to look after yourself now, so better stay away from Raju.”

  “Uncle Raju did not do anything wrong,” Devi said, as she bent to fasten her sandals, ready to run out of the door to check in on Raju.

  “I know, I know, I am sure he didn’t do anything wrong, but in any case it is not appropriate for you to spend so much time with him.”

  Nihil remembered the references to Raju in his notebook, the notebook that he rarely looked at anymore, his mind so full of cricket, but that he had opened again in the wake of Raju’s hospitalization. “Yes, better that you stay here,” he concurred.

  “Even the Bin Ahmeds say it was Tamil people,” Mrs. Herath said, as if Devi’s disassociation from Raju had been decided. “They never speak ill of anybody, so they must be right.”

  “Bloody nonsense,” Mr. Herath said, “I don’t believe that Raju is capable of doing what they said he did. Lucas told me that it was Sonna and Mohan and some thugs from the Elakandiya.”

  And Devi knew right then that what Lucas had said was true. That Day came back to her in a flash, and that other day when Jith had gone to find Raju, and this day, today, when she was being told she could not see her Uncle Raju. As she listened, some innocence slipped away from her, a sloughing that she was too young to regret, for she knew that she could no more mention That Day than she could announce that she had kept a secret from her siblings, no more mention That Day than crucify Raju with yet another mark against him. She remained silent and vowed to choose disobedience. Nobody, not Nihil, not her mother, would be able to stop her from talking to Uncle Raju, from sharing information about politics, which she did not understand, and asking for sweets, which she understood with every part of her being, and learning, as she had resolved to do from the very first day, how to ride that bicycle, the one bicycle that existed down the entire lane, the bicycle that interested none of the other children, except in passing, their worlds full of music, cricket, and yearnings that she was still too little to care about.

  By the time Raju was free of his bandages, but not of his cast, the Herath children had followed in Devi’s footsteps, taking him back into their fold as though his character had never been defamed. Raju, for his part, kept a certain respectable distance that he felt was called for under circumstances he could not control. Which is why Devi was finally able to ride the bicycle without his shuffling step beside her, without his awkward but strong hands on the handlebars, and without his constant instruction.

  “The bike is too big for you,” he began, holding on to it with his right hand while Devi waited. “Still, with my cast, Uncle Raju cannot take you on the bike. So I am going to show you how to ride it without sitting.”

  Devi did not need to be shown. She knew how to do the things that all children know how to do without being taught: to climb a tree, to jump into deep water, to break rules, to hide, to take without asking. “I know, Uncle Raju,” she said, impatient to get her hands on the bicycle. She bent down and cuffed the bottoms of her new jeans, rolling them midway up her calf.

  “I’m ready, let go,” she said.

  “I got Lucas to take it and get it nicely polished again. Even that noise is now a little less.”

  “Okay okay.” She tossed her ponytail as she said this. These days, when she returned from school, she combed her hair into a ponytail that swung left to right as she walked, the happy result of night after night of braids so tight they hurt her head.

  She placed her foot on the pedal, swung her leg over the bar, and took off up the road with Raju yelling “No coming down! Only ride up! Wheel the bike down!”

  Which she did, not wanting to upset him, his arm still in a cast, and also because he stood and blocked the way right on the center of the road between his house and hers so that there would have been no way for her to ride the bike down without crashing into him. It was sufficient, this amount of freedom, this forward motion as the wheels turned before her pedals, as the bike carried her up the road, farther and farther, and it seemed that she herself was a kite whose ascent would go on and on.

  Mohan and Jith Are Punished

  Nothing particularly bad had happened in school that day. Mohan was simply bored. He doodled in his exercise book when he was supposed to be constructing grammatically correct sentences in Tamil, while, next door, the Tamil students did the same in Sinhala during the mandatory period of instruction designated for the study of a Link Language. Mohan refused to study Tamil. Instead, he looked around the classroom and considered the backs of the thirty-five boys who sat in front of him. Now that they were in the upper school, all of them wore long white pants and short-sleeved white shirts, and, from where he sat, they looked identical. He decided to classify them. He drew two columns. The first for the Definitely Sinhalese, the second, Definitely Tamil, each subdivided into rich/poor. As he expected, most of the Tamil students were wealthy, and most of the Sinhalese students were poor. Among the poor Sinhalese students he further categorized the Sinhalese-Buddhist students as being the poorest of them all. He included himself in that latter group.

  The trouble began when he shared his list with his band of friends during the interval, when the classrooms in the redbrick buildings were abandoned and the children rushed the grounds to play, kicking up the dust and beginning to sweat almost immediately in the heat. Before long, a large area of the school yard was abuzz with the information that new statistics had come to light about the social discrepancies between the Tamils and the Sinhalese in the school. Not much later, half a dozen fistfights had broken out over this information, some Sinhalese-Buddhist children claiming they were just as wealthy as if not more wealthy than their Tamil classmates, some Burgher-Catholics asking why there was no information about them. For the most part, the Tamil students remained silent, neither in affirmation nor in denial, but that did not matter, even the ones who said nothing were drawn into the melee anyway.

  Mohan wished that he had been the only one to be hauled before Mr. Gunasekara, the headmaster, when the source of the information was discovered, but no. When he paused to glance through the glass doors before entering the headmaster’s office, there stood his tremulous brother, eyes wide with fear, looking like he would piss in his pants. Mohan straightened his collar, smoothed his hair down, and strode into the office. He was thankful that he had recently got it cut even shorter, a buzz like the soldiers he had seen in an American magazine. He looked neither to the left nor to the right, at the shelves packed with books and the filing cabinets full of student records and the walls with framed photographs of groups of prefects whose behavior had been impeccable, who were destined to bring nothing but credit to the school. He stared straight ahead at the brown desk and did not meet the eyes of the headmaster. As he came to a stop next to Jith, he had a powerful wish that the room was larger, that his shoulder was not quite so close to that of his younger brother; he had to resist the urge he felt to shove Jith away.

  The headmaster looked up. “Mohan Silva?” And that voice, the clarion voice of Mr. Gunasekara, which had reduced many a stronger boy to tears, instantly halved Mohan’s bravado.

  “Yessir!”

  “Don’t run your words together like a damn dolt. Yes, Sir! Try it again.”

  “Yes. Sir!”

  “Better. So you think you are a statistician, do you?”

  “Yes, no Sir. I don’t, Sir. Not a statistician, Sir,” Mohan said, feeling his brother’s eyes on him and trying to regain his courage.

  “Then are you aspiring to run a security agency of some sort, providing bodyguards to people in fear for their lives?” Mohan, unable to follow the thread of these questions, replied in the negative, no, he was not aspiring to run a security agency.

  The headmaster turned to Jith. “Jithendra Silva, is your big brother a statistician, a school principal, or a member of government?”

  “No, Sir,” Jith replied. Mr. Gunasekara had not acquired his stature within the school by being me
rciful when punishment had been earned, and although Jith had, truly, done nothing to earn any part of the chastisement that was surely awaiting Mohan, he trembled right then mostly on his own behalf. Despite having known through anecdote and rumor that peeing before seeing Mr. Gunasekara was a wise course of action, Jith felt that his previously empty bladder had miraculously refilled, and for one traitorous moment he wished he was not related to the boy next to him.

  “Then how do you think he got these numbers?” the headmaster asked. “I don’t know, Sir. He must have guessed, Sir.”

  The headmaster turned to Mohan. “Guessed? Is that what you did, you fool? Because you don’t have an ounce of intelligence in that thick head you stopped trying to learn anything during Tamil class and decided not only to guess the demographics of the students at my school, you decided to share your bogus information? Is that what you did?”

  Mohan knew there was no good response to this question. He kicked himself for not having erased his name on the piece of paper that had been passed around. He had been so proud of his calculations, the nice, even numbers.

  “Answer me!” The headmaster’s voice made his ears ring.

  “NO, SIR!” Mohan yelled, his anger rising to the surface.

  The headmaster’s voice grew soft and low. “Did you just raise your voice at me, Silva?”

  His anger subsided just as fast as it had risen and Mohan felt a warm rush of urine in his underwear. He clenched his fists behind his back and willed it to stop, relieved momentarily when it did. Next to him, his brother’s eyes widened in alarm as the headmaster stood up, walked over to them, and slapped Mohan across his face, once, twice, thrice, four times, five times, ceaselessly, Jith stopped counting.

  Mohan did not want Jith to wait for him, but Jith did, and so Mohan had to endure his punishment in full view of all the other boys leaving home for the day as well as his younger brother, who stood by the school gates, staring up at the balcony on which Mohan knelt in the full and merciless heat, copying out twenty-three tables detailing the last census taken in the city of Colombo, the previous year. It was a document that the headmaster had secured by calling up a past student, now a minister, and having him deliver it within the hour, so he could teach Mohan something worth learning about his fellow countrymen, besides their race. By the time Mohan was done he had acquired a fresh hatred against the Tamil boys for having caused his punishment, for having been among all the rest who had glanced up as they went home. When he finally stood up to leave, his knees crusted from the crumbling cement of the balcony, scratched in some places, his entire body aching, his face smarting, he realized the headmaster had not even stayed to end his punishment. He had simply told his peon, Nagalingam, a Tamil man who lived in the hostel at the school, to Take the sheets of paper from that boy, damn fool would have learned his lesson by then, and left to watch the cricket match, a home game. Mohan refused to look at Nagalingam as he conveyed this message and he pretended not to hear the trace of laughter in the peon’s voice. He shoved the papers at him and left.