by Ru Freeman
“Sonna!” he shouted, as people, angry with his immobility, shoved him, pushing to get past. “Sonna! Over here!”
But Sonna did not hear. He stepped forward into the crowds and a few moments later Suren saw him in the midst of a mob of men who did not look like they would provide a safe escort. He turned away and kept walking alone; the music returned, and the guilt with it.
Nihil was still at school when the prefects were sent up and down the hallways to tell the teachers that school was being closed, they had to leave and go home because the bodies of fifteen soldiers have been brought to Colombo and there is trouble everywhere. Though his first thought was to run out with his classmates and find a way to get to the convent to take Devi and Rashmi home, he decided to go to the staff-room and tell his mother first, and when she saw him she held on to him and would not let him leave.
“We will go home with Mr. Pieris,” she said. “He has a car and he has promised to take us home. I called the convent. The girls are safe.”
The car moved slowly, pushing past pedestrians who were filling up the streets. As they turned the first corner, Nihil saw that the statue in the center of the roundabout was smashed. The shop where he and his teammates liked to drink plain tea and eat hot hoppers was on fire. People were running down the road toward some sort of refuge, though where that refuge was or who was promising it, he could not see from where he sat. As their vehicle passed the University of Colombo he saw youth amassing in groups, separating and gathering again on the grounds of the campus. He saw a few students clustered around a Tamil girl. They hastily unbraided her hair and tied it into a knot at the nape of her neck. Another girl took her bag of books from her and gave her a different one. She said something to the Tamil girl and he watched her wipe her face. The two girls walked toward the center of the field hand in hand while the other students drifted away. Nihil craned his neck to watch them long after the car had moved on, picking out the purple skirt that the Tamil girl had been wearing, seeing it now in the midst of one group, now in another, until he lost her altogether.
“Don’t look too long at anybody,” Mrs. Herath said from the front seat.
“I hope they don’t stop me and ask for petrol,” Mr. Pieris said. “The headmaster said that they were stopping cars everywhere.” He was sweating profusely; he had insisted that they leave the shutters up and the car was unbearably hot.
Everywhere Nihil looked now, people were crying out for help, which he could hear but could do nothing about as the car moved inexorably toward home, and Nihil wondered ceaselessly if the other members of his family had made it home safely.
They were stopped twice by mobs who pressed against the car on all sides. The first time it was because Mr. Pieris, accelerating into what he thought was a patch of clear road, almost hit a man who ran across in front of the car. He braked so hard that Nihil’s head whipped back against the seat. The man came over to the driver’s side, followed by a group of people. Mr. Pieris rolled down the window and Nihil saw that he was trembling.
“Samavenna,” Mr. Pieris said, apologizing, but the men told him to shut up.
The car rocked from side to side in the arms of the mob, and Nihil did not feel the welcome rush of fresh air, he felt the heat of their bodies seep into the car in the sweat dripping from their hairlines and in the nervous, angry energy of their movements. Lips drawn away from teeth stained with betel, with nicotine, a few pure white, mouths throbbing with angry words that were so loud that Nihil could not decipher what they were saying. Some of the men seemed unsure of what they were doing, a few looked embarrassed and stood back a little, but they did not leave, no, they continued to stand with the other men. Where had they come from? Who were these men? Nihil did not recognize a single one. But Nihil had met some of these men. He had sat at adjoining tables at that same store where he and his teammates had drunk that plain tea. He had boarded buses with them. He had walked beside them. But the people we understand are those with whom we live, not the ones whom we brush past, unaware of their circumstances. Yes, to Nihil there was an us and a them, as these men put it, but his us did not divide along the lines of race, the line that was now being drawn, his us lived down his lane, his them were screaming at his mother.
“Sinhalada demalada?” a man in a blue checked shirt yelled, his voice sharp and hoarse.
“We are Sinhalese,” Mrs. Herath said. “This is my son. We are Heraths.”
It made Nihil’s heart ache to listen to his mother’s voice, so full of pleading, so desperate to prove their worth by virtue of their race, their name. He wanted to tell her not to be afraid, he was there beside her, but he dared not speak.
“Poth pennanna!” a second man yelled.
Nihil did as the man asked and brought out his exercise books from his bag to demonstrate that they were Sinhalese, not Tamil, and though he also had an exercise book that had Tamil in it, he did not take that one out of his bag.
The second time, he and his mother and Mr. Pieris had to recite Buddhist verses to prove that they were not only Sinhalese but Buddhists as well.
“Namo thassa—” his mother began, speaking the opening lines of prayer, the ones every child was taught as soon as they could speak, but she was stopped with the smashing of the window on her side of the car.
The face of the leader of the mob was instantly distorted by the hairline cracks that ran away from where his hammer had hit the pane of glass. He yelled, “Not that! That’s too easy! The Karaniya Metta Sutraya!”
And so they began to recite the sutra that spoke the Buddha’s words on the matter of loving-kindness, a sutra that they had only ever recited within the meditative quiet of temples, each to him-or herself, or in the company of monks, their musical up and down intonations guiding them from distraction to inner stillness.
Karaniya matthakusalena
Yam tam santam padam abhisamecca
Sakko uju ca suju ca
Suvaco c’assa mudu anatimani
As his mother recited the opening stanza, her voice shaking, Nihil joined in along with Mr. Pieris, until the verse began to take hold, their voices steadied, and the mob let them pass, quietened, it seemed, by their chanting; they did not stop reciting the sutra until they reached the end. And all this while he could not shake off the thought that Devi was not safe.
But Devi was safe. She was walking, even as Nihil reached home, in the company of her father and sister.
Devi had seen nothing so long as she and Rashmi sat within the high gray walls of the convent, behind the massive steel gate that had a smaller door cut into it and that was opened to allow parents in, but one by one, so their identity could be verified, before each child, one by one, could be handed into their care. While they waited, Devi played beside the grotto of Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows, making wishes and trying to cajole Rashmi to do the same though Rashmi, more attuned to the disturbing energy she felt beyond those gates, refused, she just sat and stared at the gate, willing her father to come for them, her heart sinking a little each time the gate opened and some other girl’s father or mother appeared.
“Colombo is burning. We have to be careful getting home,” Mr. Herath said to Devi and Rashmi, when he was finally allowed in, the last to get there. He took a hand in each of his and walked away from the gates. The girls looked at their father and were frightened by the anxiety on his face, his brow wrinkled as he glanced this way and that.
When they reached the end of the lane that ran alongside the gray walls of their convent and looked down the road that lead toward Galle Face Green, Devi saw high flames, the buildings beneath now handing off now accepting batons of fire. A bus and a car were both lying on their sides, their innards twisted. Right ahead of them she saw a man being pulled off a bicycle and beaten. She knitted her brow, went inward and silent as she marched by her father’s side, running every now and again to keep up with his pace and asking no questions but thinking These are the troubles that Uncle Raju spoke of. How had he known? She held tight
to her father’s hand and thought only of reaching their peaceful lane where everything was going to be where it should be, nobody was injured, nothing was burning.
“Will we be able to get home?” Rashmi asked, her backpack bouncing on her shoulders, her steps quick, her voice urgent. “Where is Amma? Where are Nihil and Suren? Who is burning everything? Why is this happening?”
“Thirteen soldiers have been killed,” her father replied, but wearily, as though he too knew that surely the death of thirteen soldiers could not explain this degree of anarchy.
“Where? In Colombo?” she asked, but he did not answer. “Where, Tha? Where?” she asked again, shaking the hand that was holding hers, but he did not respond and she stopped asking.
Mr. Herath was dispirited by the little he felt he had been able to achieve to counter the waves of violence that were sweeping through the city. He had directed his secretary, a Tamil lady, to pick up her daughters from their schools and go home, he had asked his driver to take the chief clerk, another Tamil, back to his home, and he had waited with his friend Mahadeva for the car to return so he could take him, Mahadeva, too, to safety. He had not called the convent until all these things were done, and had extinguished the twinge of guilt he felt when he was told by the Sister Principal, in a voice that betrayed how little she thought of him, that his daughters were the last remaining students waiting to be picked up. Still, he thought, he could have done more and now he felt only two things as he walked. He felt the weight of his daughters’ hands in his, the immensity of that responsibility, and he felt the weight of history. First, he had promised his children that there would be no war, that the Tamils themselves would rid the country of Prabhakaran. Next, throughout his life, stuck in what he saw now as a bookish understanding of political movements and their ideologies, he had truly believed that the parliamentary system would prevail, the sharing of wealth and rights would become reality, the people would own and rule the country. Yet around him now, people, those very people he had counted on to stand up for social justice, to march out peacefully someday, en masse, to demand equality for all of them, they were running wild, shattering buildings, overturning vehicles. Around him people were on fire.
An old woman ran past them, her sari coming undone in a stream of red, her hand going from her mouth to the parting in her hair, rubbing, rubbing, trying to wipe away the telltale smudge. He dropped the children’s hands and hurried forward to catch up to the woman, to calm her, help her in some way though in what way he did not know, but, hearing the sound of his footsteps, she screamed and ran faster. Mr. Herath fell back. Beside him, Rashmi resumed her questions and to them she added another one.
“Tha, why is she running away from us when we are good people?” she said, and he could find nothing to say.
How strange that they walked, those girls, one silent, one talking, as though such sights were insufficient to root them to the earth and make movement impossible. How strange and yet how natural that their father would keep them moving forward, one step at a time, toward home. Home where safety was guaranteed.
There were very few private vehicles on the road now, and even the buses, when they came by, were packed. When they finally managed to cram themselves into one, the conductor, who took no money, reached half out of the bus to pick Devi up and push her in so she stood on the steps, her face up against the sweaty legs and torsos of strangers. Mr. Herath began speaking in Sinhala to the children.
“Issarahata yanna,” he said to Rashmi and Devi, pushing them in. “Tha! There’s no room here!” Devi replied in English, squirming toward him. Her father looked distraught.
“Do not speak to me in English,” he hissed at her, in English, as they got down from the bus and started walking again. Up ahead of them a group of men dressed in sarongs and wielding clubs made their way toward them.
“Do you have a lighter?” one of them asked Mr. Herath, in English.
The girls listened as Mr. Herath referred to the man as brother, and offered him a box of matches. “Naa sahodaraya, gini kooru vitharay thiyenne,” he replied in Sinhala. The man leaned forward with his cigarette in his mouth and the girls watched their father light it, his hands steady, his palm keeping the flame safe.
Neither Devi nor Rashmi said another word until they reached home, their hands sweating, and the memory of the tightness of their father’s grip making everything else recede.
Home
Sal Mal Lane seemed ominously quiet as they turned into it off the main road, which, too, was empty of vehicles. There was a gray pallor to the air and the smell of burning from somewhere close by. There was nobody outside and, except for the shouts of mobs far away, the only sound was their footsteps. The girls dropped their father’s hands and ran the rest of the way home.
“Four people went into Kala Akki’s place and robbed things,” Suren told his father in a state of distress that overwhelmed him again after the initial relief he had felt when he saw his sisters come in. “I told them not to go there, I told them there’s an old man there, but they went anyway!”
“Who were they?” Mr. Herath asked.
“Thugs from the slums, I think,” Mrs. Herath said, standing on tiptoe on the top step leading to their front door and looking anxiously up and down what she could see of the road. She had tucked the edge of her sari into the waist of her underskirt, something she did when she was agitated. “Same fellows who used to hang around at the bottom of the lane with that Sonna.” She called out to Kamala and asked her to shut all but one of the windows in each room.
“I heard them talking to the Silvas before going to the Nileses’,” Nihil said. “I heard them say they knew that Mohan and Jith were going to join the army soon. And when they passed our house I told them not to go and they called me bad names and asked if I wanted to die too.” Nihil’s eyes filled up with tears as he said this.
“Raju is the one who got rid of them,” Mrs. Herath said. “He ran inside and I heard him shouting at them and eventually they went away. But I’m afraid they are going to come back in the night.”
“Can I go and see Mr. Niles now to make sure he’s okay?” Nihil begged.
But he was not permitted to go out until Mr. Herath had sat by the telephone and called people in the police and people in the army and people in government both in Colombo and elsewhere and discovered that, yes, it was true, there was rioting all over the capital and in Kandy and in Bandarawela and everywhere else and there was nothing at all that anybody could do. Nobody, not the inspector general of the national police, who was Tamil, nor the commander of the army, who was Sinhalese, nor anybody else could do anything to stop it. The thugs roaming the streets were people nobody seemed to know and therefore nobody could control. The wealthiest Tamils were safe, barricaded behind sharp, pointed steel gates, walls, and security guards, but no Tamil was safe from fear, not even them. The only places where anything had been done or was being done to save anybody were places where the Sinhalese people themselves, the we that certain of his friends mentioned, had gathered in force to prevent the rioting. We put up a blockade, we evacuated the neighborhood and helped our Tamil friends to find places of safety, they said, and Mr. Herath hung up the phone hoping that the we in his neighborhood would have the courage to do likewise.
Throughout that day, the Silvas remained indoors.
At four o’clock the mob returned.
Mr. Herath dropped the phone and went out carrying Nihil’s cricket bat, and Mrs. Herath shut the door and sat inside with Kamala, their arms around the children, listening to the voices outside. The children, corralled in this manner, waited, their eyes moving from each other’s faces to half focus on pieces of furniture or other items in the room before returning again to a brother or a sister, searching for relief. Devi, still in her school uniform, took off her tie and began to wind and unwind it around her forearm, providing all of them with some respite as they watched her trying to align the stripes just so. She stopped when the noise grew louder and they
could hear the sound of a tussle and cries of pain.
Kamala began to recite pirith, her voice close to tears, her palms stroking the two heads beside her, but Mrs. Herath pulled Suren and Rashmi closer to her and said, “Don’t be afraid, children, he is not alone. Raju is out there.”
When Mr. Herath opened his gate, he saw that Raju, brandishing his lightest barbell, had felled one of the men but now was surrounded by the other men, who were screaming at him though they were keeping a safe distance from the swinging barbell.
“I didn’t mean to hit him, Uncle,” he shouted to Mr. Herath, “I just wanted him to go away. Go away from our lane!” He turned to the men and yelled, his voice hoarse from all the screaming he had already done, first at the Nileses’ house and now here, “Palayang!”
“Bastard deserved it,” Mr. Herath said quickly, then turned to the group of men. “Don’t you live in the Elakandiya behind Lucas’s house?” he asked in Sinhala.
“What is it to you where we live? Think you own this road?” one of the men said, stepping menacingly toward Mr. Herath, who stood his ground.
“Don’t touch him!” Raju yelled. “You touch him and I’ll land this on your head too!”
Just at that moment Jimmy Bolling came jogging up the road with two belts in his good hand. “You fuckers, you stay away from my cousin!” he screamed.
Raju, though he had not won the title of Mr. Sri Lanka, won Jimmy Bolling’s respect that afternoon for the way he used his barbell, knocking first one then another of the men to the ground while Jimmy himself whipped them with his belt until at last the men, singly and then in groups, ran away.
“They’ll come back, I’m sure of it,” Mr. Herath said, wiping his face, his voice shaky. They dropped their weapons, the bat, the barbells, the belts, and all three of them examined their own bodies for cuts and bruises. Jimmy Bolling had a thin long gash on his bad upper arm from a knife, Mr. Herath had several sharp incisions and his shirt was torn, the buttons ripped, one sleeve hanging by threads. Raju alone had suffered no injuries.