On Sal Mal Lane

by Ru Freeman

  The pitch when he reached it was hard. There was a high but even bounce and although he had practiced before on just such a pitch with just such a bounce, he was cautious. He tried to concentrate, seeing not only the bowler but the ball, picturing its polished side angled one way and not the other, picturing the seam side catching the airflow, making it spin this way and not that. Still, the ball came at him much more quickly than he expected, the bat felt heavy in his hands, and suddenly every boy around him seemed to have turned into a giant. No matter, they cheered, out there in the stands, every time he met the ball and hit it, though he was yet to score and though even his hits were few thanks to the consideration of the senior player across from him who ensured that he, not Nihil, remained on strike as often as possible, artfully hitting a single with every last ball of an over so he could cross the pitch and bat, again, until Nihil became comfortable.

  Around him the field changed and changed again as the captain of the opposing team tried first a fast bowler then a medium pacer. Each time Nihil and his teammate stood firm. Each time the ball was hit, Nihil did not miss a beat, running when a run was safe, running again if two runs were possible, but staying close, his bat inside the crease as soon as he crossed the pitch. And as the game went on, as the bowlers crossed from side to side and the field rearranged itself and he and his partner met in the middle and exchanged tips and cautions and returned to their wickets, something wonderful happened to Nihil: the game became a game again. He relaxed. His shoulders lost their tightness, his gloved hands their anxiety, and his mind its worry.

  Mr. Niles’s words rang in his ears: Long ago, he was just a boy like you.

  He had dreamed of hitting sixers or driving boundaries and he had imagined that such moments would come once he had the power to hit the ball hard enough, but standing there that day, Nihil realized that strength had far less to do with playing the game well than mind did. Did he have the necessary inner quiet that would help him separate the tricky delivery from the easy one, that would give him the ability to time, not force, the shot, to know that at exactly the right time with exactly the right delivery, grace could take a ball farther and faster than brute force?

  He did. And he did again and twice more before play was called off for the day. He took his time walking over to his partner and then set off at a slow jog back to the pavilion as the spectators poured out of the stands and he did not mind, not one bit, that the fan running first and fastest was none other than his sister, a streak of golden yellow, the small but significant comet in his life, the one who had stayed safe so he could play cricket.

  The People Who Stayed Home

  On the second day of the match Mr. Herath, Lucas, Raju, the Niles family, and the Bolling girls, stayed behind, Mr. Niles in some considerable discomfort from all his exertions the day before, though he shook Nihil’s hand and sent him on his way to the game with a pat on his back when Nihil went to bid him good-bye. And because they stayed home, their day was experienced differently, for they read the newspapers and heard the gossip and had nothing to distract them from the fear and anger that clouded the skies above them.

  In the papers, a plethora of Incidents were discussed. More than fifty individuals, mostly Tamil but also Sinhalese who belonged to the left-leaning parties, had now been detained under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. K. Navaratnarajah, one of those taken in under the act, had died in detention, the papers said. Meanwhile, editorials discussed how followers of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the man who had stood in that jungle seven years before then and declared his disinterest in elections, had bombed five polling booths in Jaffna.

  There was an Incident mentioned regarding a government official using the phrase Para Demellu during a speech and another official demanding an apology for that insult on behalf of the Tamil members of government. No apology had been forthcoming. An Incident was mentioned about the death of two members of the armed forces in the North, which was an Incident reported along with a cumulative number of those in the armed forces who had been killed since 1981: twenty-two. As though the deaths of people in uniforms merited aggregation, as if any day now, these deaths would round out to a number that would prompt some more severe reprimand, something more visceral than consternation or even sympathy.

  A State of Emergency had been called upon, once more, the left-wing papers said, to shroud the nation in further misinformation and fear, and two newspapers, the Saturday Review and the Suthanthiran, both of which were Tamil-language newspapers critical of the government, were accused of inciting separatist sentiments, and shut down.

  The direction in which the country was heading were discussed by ordinary people, the slant of their words depending upon the things that they read in their choice of newspaper, what they heard from each other, and, sometimes, their ethnicity. People looking for less specific reasons, intellectuals writing in multiple languages, brought up other facts to explain what was happening around them: government corruption, the impoverishment, as a direct result of that corruption, of the general populace, the lack of work in rural areas, the impotence felt by workers due to the violent breakup of that nation wide strike not long ago, and the systematic strangulation of the democratic process what with the self-appointment of an executive president and the carrying out of a referendum. These were all brought up and heads were bowed or shaken depending on the political persuasion of the intellectual.

  The Incidents mentioned were not all in the same newspaper. The newspapers that carried the news in Tamil had one set of stories, those that were in Sinhala carried another set of stories, and, why not say it, each of those newspapers tended to favor the virtue of those who spoke its own language of print and question the moral fortitude of those who did not. If some balance of perspective were possible, then it would have been possible in English-language newspapers but, alas, those newspapers were filled with the thoughts of people, both Sinhalese and Tamil, whose identities flavored their opinions but who had learned to present their arguments with more spit and polish, which meant that nothing was said overtly, though the implications behind what was said were the same. Ranting about one party or militant group or another was deemed adequate expression of civic duty by all the people writing in all three languages in all the major newspapers, and worse, their predictions of the future were nothing like the one that was coming. Not even close.

  For those on Sal Mal Lane, those who were not watching a cricket match, there was the additional difficulty of weighing what was read with what was heard, particularly for those who listened more than they read.

  “They say the Tigers are gathering for a big strike,” Lucas said, shaking his head. “Maybe it is good that the Silva sons are going to join the army.” He had taken to wearing his sarong rolled up at all times in anticipation of some difficulty that would demand swift movement.

  “When are they coming?” Rose asked him when she ran into him after a day that seemed depressing and dull after the one spent playing truant and sitting through a cricket match, boys everywhere they looked.

  “Soon, they say. Better go and warn Koralé also.”

  “Tigers are coming in a few months!” Rose said to Dolly.

  “What are we going to do when the Tigers come next month?” Dolly asked Jith, after giving him a gift she had made for him, a navy-blue handkerchief on which Rashmi had helped her to embroider his initials, JS, in a flowery monogram script done in hot pink.

  “We are ready. We have our Seeya’s guns,” he said through cheeks bulging with not one but two Delta toffees, a sweet-tooth habit that made his face break out but that he would not give up.

  “Guns you have?” Dolly asked, her eyes widening. “Bullets an’ all?”

  Jith did not know if the guns were loaded, only that they hung on the wall over their dining table. “Yes, of course. All guns are loaded, otherwise what’s the use of having them?”

  “Silvas have already bought guns,” Dolly told Sonna, who said he already knew, though he had not known. H
e stormed off down the road to see what kind of weaponry he could rustle up, fuming that he had not been told about the guns by Mohan.

  “Silvas have gone and bought guns,” Sonna told Raju when he almost collided with him coming out of Koralé’s shop, Mr. Herath’s cigarettes in one hand, his change in the other. “Now you’ll see.”

  “All the Sinhalese houses are getting guns these days,” Raju told Kala Niles, worry deepening all of his mismatched features, as they stood together next to the bakery man, buying loaves of fresh warm bread, something they had been doing since they were children, children as young as Nihil and Devi were now.

  “Yes, everywhere now people are getting ready,” the bakery man said and then, to Mr. Tissera when he came out to buy their bread, “Sir, you got guns ready?”

  “Guns? What for?” Mr. Tissera asked in some alarm, and he began to crack the knuckles on his fingers one after the other.

  “For anything, better be prepared when the Tigers come,” the bakery man said.

  “Don’t be foolish. Nobody is going to buy guns. From where to buy them anyway?” Mr. Tissera said, but when he went inside he said to his wife in a low voice, “Whole lane is getting ready for Tigers. We also should do something.”

  “What is there to do?” his wife asked as she sat at the dining table wearing her housecoat and peeled clove after clove of garlic for a garlic curry that she knew Mr. Niles liked to eat and that she made for him now and then, even though it left her fingers raw and aching for days after.

  “Better go and ask the Silvas,” he said, “they always seem to know everything about troubles.” But when he stepped outside he ran into Mr. Nadesan, coming home from visiting his sister, and when Mr. Tissera asked him if he had heard that the Tigers were coming, Mr. Nadesan shook his head sadly and said We are thinking of going to India, we have family there. And Mr. Tissera felt too despondent to keep walking down the street to the Silvas and instead came home and lay down in his armchair wondering what kind of uncivilized family might move into the house next door when the Nadesans left because they, the Nadesans, had always been his kind of neighbor, quiet, polite, there when needed, asking for help when necessary, never imposing.

  Yes, down Sal Mal Lane there was more talk of weapons and preparations and Tigers than there had ever been. Big words like atrocities and disenfranchisement were tossed over plates of rice and curry during the midday meal, and nobody at all, not the Bin Ahmeds, not the Nadesans, not the Nileses, not the Tisseras or Mr. Herath and Kamala—for only they were at home that day—not the Bollings, certainly not the outliers, Lucas and Alice and Raju, and not even the Silvas felt safe.

  So it was a good thing that the Herath children were able to spend that day watching one of them take the field in a second innings. And even though when the game ended, it did not end with Nihil making the game-winning catch he had hoped to make, his contribution had been steady, he had taken one catch, aided in a run-out, and stopped three fours, nonetheless, when the game ended he was close enough to the wicket to grab the bails and thereby had a precious reminder of the game, this game.

  May Day

  March, the month of cricket, came and went, and the April New Year after. While the children spoke fondly of the previous year, when they had all grown up and into their future selves in significant ways over the matter of the variety show, no new show was put on. Mrs. Herath was still under the impression that her word was law, the Nileses, though they made their home available for the rehearsals and welcoming to the children, were privately anxious about the news in the papers, and the children themselves had begun to settle into a state of cautious vigilance. It was understandable then that the people of Sal Mal Lane were grateful for the holiday that arrived in May, for the parades and speeches and sense of festivity that came with it were universal and not specific to one family or another.

  The banners that unfurled on the first day of May each year were shown on TV, and most of the people on Sal Mal Lane felt that it was adequate participation to watch the day’s events from the safety of their drawing rooms. Not Lucas, who always set off to watch the parade organized by the right, the United National Party, with its acres of green, and not Mr. Herath, who went off not merely to observe but, indeed, to march with his fellow Communists of various stripes in the one parade that had space for their kind, the one held by the blue-hued Lanka Sama Samaja Party.

  “Long time ago I used to march in the Viplavavadi Communist Sangamaya, VIKOSA, and the Revolutionary Communist League, the RCL. Now they just have a meeting, no marches,” he told his children, reminded each year of their dwindling numbers.

  “So who goes in your parade?” Nihil asked, but mostly as a courtesy.

  “Very few. For old times’ sake I would say that the Communist Party May Day parade took an hour to pass by, but it is now probably far less,” and Mr. Herath shrugged his shoulders, trying to act like it did not matter.

  It was not so much an acknowledgment of defeat as it was a statement about the immense intellectual lack that defined a populace unable to espouse his views. He combed the sparse beard that he grew each April for this occasion and then trimmed to resemble Lenin’s on the first of May, though, thanks to his full head of hair and temperate features, Mr. Herath hardly looked the part. The children nodded and avoided their upcountry mother’s gaze, for she cared little for their father’s politics, and even less for Communists, her few words about either summoned only to soothe some charge in her husband who did care, and deeply, about both.

  Despite the fact that every party organized its own parade, the group that eclipsed all the other parties was the red of the JVP, drawing crowds to its parade by the awe-inspiring precision of its armies of identically dressed marching members, holding aloft a sea of red flags emblazoned with the yellow sickle and hammer, their advance slow and inexorable around corner after corner after corner, a seemingly unending stream of virility, color, and command. All the Heraths, except of course Mr. Herath, went each year to watch the JVP parade.

  “I see the red! I see it!” Devi yelled, her body leaning half over the balcony of the house where they had gathered, the home of a friend of Mrs. Herath’s, which happened to be along the parade route.

  “Don’t lean so far out,” Nihil said, his fingers tight over the bow tied around his sister’s waist. He could feel the hard scrape of her backbone through the red blouse she had put on to match the red pedal pushers she had borrowed from Rashmi to confirm her support of the JVP, her skinny body hanging like a pillow over a clothesline. He wished he could go and join his older siblings who were standing by the gate, even though the gate itself was barely cracked wide enough for their bodies to squeeze through.

  “Nobody stands in front,” Mrs. Herath had said. “If all hell breaks loose I want you to be able to come in and shut the gate.” She used that phrase on them, if all hell breaks loose, each year that they waited for this parade, and if asked she probably would have said that all hell was no more than a few fistfights but, since nobody asked, the possibility of unimaginable chaos loomed large in her children’s minds.

  In the year of this particular parade, while the children gasped and pointed to the advancing rows, Mrs. Herath considered the fact that they had lived almost as long under a regime determined to fill the shops with things people could ill afford as under the previous one whose reign had been characterized by the rationing of all staples including milk powder, dhal, and rice, and not one imported item to be found except through connections that led to stashes revealed in black-market storerooms. She felt a stab of remorse over those Dankotuwa Porcelain plates her husband had secured for her through just such a deal, regretting her part in causing this blemish on his otherwise untarnished image as an incorruptible civil servant. Thinking about the plates, she also felt bad about her argument with him just that morning.

  “At least the children can have cotton-polyester uniforms now,” she had said to her husband as they prepared to head in opposite directions, he to
his rally of principles and she to her rally of display. “Remember when they had nothing but poplin? What a nightmare for that Kamala to wash and iron every day.”

  “Better uniforms, yes, at the cost of massive debt,” Mr. Herath replied, bending his knees slightly to see his face in the mirror, which was too short for him, and combing his hair. His remarks lacked flair and punch. They were relentless statements of facts. No sarcasm enlivened his speech, no well-turned phrase was summoned to turn the description of some event, some person or circumstance, into anything very memorable. That was his wife’s skill.

  “Debt or no debt, at least we are living like human beings now, not like beggars, standing in line for everything. Bread lines, ration lines, kerosene lines. Thank god somebody drew the line!” she said and powdered her face.

  Mr. Herath said no more. He gathered the keys to the official car he kept for use on May Day and election day—the rest of the time it was returned to the ministry in the care of his chauffeur—and went out. He often wished that his wife would decide, one way or another, whether she supported the same people he did, the Left, or not. It would be far easier than having to listen to her commiseration on some occasions, her denouncements on others. As he drove away in a temper, he had to swerve to avoid hitting Sonna, who was wrestling Rose and Dolly on the street in a manner that indicated that the blows and grasps were not in jest.

  “Funny how you Communists are still able to travel in cars,” she called after him, even though he could not hear her.