On Sal Mal Lane

by Ru Freeman

“I have to go home!” Old Mrs. Joseph screamed, tugging at her housecoat. “Let me out! I have to go to my home!”

  “Stay here and I will take Raju,” Jimmy Bolling said, pleading with his aunt and trying to force her to sit back down on the chair in which she had spent most of the past days, hardly eating, sipping cup after cup of plain tea without milk and without even sugar as though in penitence for some crime she had committed, some atonement she was making to unnamed gods.

  “You can’t keep me here,” she said, pushing back against him with remarkable strength. “I have to go home. Raju, son, come! Take me home!”

  And Raju, who always obeyed his mother, did. Against his cousin’s wishes, against his cousin’s strength.

  When Old Mrs. Joseph stepped out from behind the aluminum doors of her nephew’s house, what did she expect to see? Only what she had always seen. Children playing, hedges growing, the floral litter created by the sal mal trees, Lucas shuffling up or down the street, Kala Niles or Mrs. Herath hurrying to one teaching engagement or the other, Mr. Herath being driven to work, Mohan and Sonna lurking, each in his own corner of the lane. But what she saw that day was not any of those things. What she saw with each weakening step was a lane where the children did not play but, rather, stood in a group and talked about things that clearly upset them, a lane that carried, despite its best efforts, a streak of malice, a lane where, behind singed mussaendas that had lost their foliage, stood a house that was unrecognizable, the one untouched part of it being the garage in which Raju lifted weights, and the side of the house that faced Jimmy Bolling’s property; that had been saved by Raju having spent so much uneasy time watering it with the Bin Ahmeds’ hose.

  Nobody blamed Devi, directly, for the stroke that Old Mrs. Joseph suffered, nobody told her that she should not have gone to see Raju, that she should have stayed away until Jimmy Bolling had been able to do something to restore the house, but she knew that she had been culpable. So she avoided Raju and did not accompany her parents and her siblings when they went to visit Old Mrs. Joseph, who could only move one side of her face and whose speech was slurred and whom Raju tended night and day, wiping the drool off her chin and the curries off her lips.

  It was only his way of forgiving her, his way of offering her a little bit of happiness in the midst of so much unhappiness, that made Raju, seeing Devi standing alone by her gate, come to the Herath household while his mother dozed and say to her, “Devi, come, I will let you ride the bicycle all the way to the bottom of the road.”

  Who knows how things might have turned out had this been a different time, a time when peace was not something to hope for or talk about, but was something that was simply taken for granted. Who knows how things might have turned out had Sonna not come home, not fought with his father, if Devi had not come down the road, her hands tight on the handle bars, her hair flying, her face full of smiles for the one-last-time toward Raju before she went inside to help cook dinner? For Sonna was there and Devi was there and Raju was there, where they should not have been, in a time when no mercy was left.

  Flight

  There are no houses built of ash on Kalyani Avenue, there are no hot-wet houses down Sal Mal Lane, there are no neighbors grieving, there are no thugs, nothing has been taken that was not willingly given, no flower unearthed that was still in fair bloom, there are no walks down the street in the dead of night, her mother does not cry over a letter she reads over and over again, Nihil does not spend every spare moment beside Mr. Niles’s bed, Suren has not given up playing everything but the same piece of music each night on the piano, and Rashmi has not grown older with adult concerns.

  Everything is as it once was.

  The tennis ball bounces against the walls, Nihil yells Howzat? Dolly and Jith exchange letters and smiles. There are band practices at Kala Niles’s house and nobody knows too much about the Nadesans but what they do know is sufficient and pleasing. Mr. Niles still sits outside on his veranda; his legs are not broken, nor his spirit, and his voice gladdens as he speaks to Nihil. Lucas comes and goes, Alice complains, and Rose and Rashmi dream of singing and dancing to raucous applause.

  This is how the world is as Devi rides the old Raleigh bike that used to belong to Raju’s father but that has now been gifted, once and for all, to her. This is how it appears as her legs stretch and reach to push the pedals, now on one side, now the other, and she perches over the center bar. There is freedom from fear, and a sense of flying as she turns the bike at the top of the road and comes down, her feet holding steady as the slope of the road carries her forward, gathering speed, to where Raju waits at the bottom to catch her when she brakes.

  Raju, waiting at the bottom of the road, sees Devi no longer as she once was but as she has become, a young girl. Her hair has grown long and is pulled back from her brow with a white Alice band. The wind lifts the loose strands off the back of her shoulders. Her arms, always thin, are filling out. Her calves have a curve to them. In her eyes is a little girl and a girl almost grown, for the days of sadness have matured her, too. Soon she will be tall enough to sit when she rides the bike, to come off the seat only to help her get up the steeper part of the road on the old-fashioned bicycle. And as he absorbs these impressions of Devi, Raju tries not to be distracted by the sound of the brawl that is taking place in his cousin’s house.

  “Get out of my house, you fucker, you piece of shit!” Jimmy Bolling yells, and there is the sound of crockery smashing, the sound of Francie Bolling screaming Stop! Stop! and the sound of Rose and Dolly crying.

  Devi reaches the end of the road and the bike comes to a stop in front of Raju, his hands reaching out to grip either side of the handlebars to hold it steady for her in case the brakes fail. As she tips toward him, Raju inhales the scent of oranges and roses, the perfume she has stolen from her mother for this occasion.

  “Devi, now better stop for today,” Raju says, as the fury unfolding nearby continues and makes him sweat. He undoes the top button of his untucked shirt.

  “But I have only gone a few times!” Devi says. Does she not hear? Does she not care?

  “No, no, you have gone seven times already, I counted!” Raju tells her, still holding on to the bike.

  “One last time then?” she asks, her voice so sweet, so sweetly reminiscent of a time gone by. “Please, Uncle Raju. Now it’s my bike. One last time?”

  And he shakes his head, regretfully, unable to say anything else but yes to such words, to a request for such a small thing. He helps her wheel the bike around to turn it facing up the road, and then he gives her a little push and she is off.

  “This is going to be the best one, Uncle Raju!” she calls out over her shoulder and he can hear the thrill in her voice.

  “All this time only reason they din’ come here and set fire to this dump is because of me! I saved this! I saved the Nadesans’ house too! An’ I saved the Heraths! I saved all of you!” Sonna yells as Raju watches the bike turn the corner past the Heraths’ house. From there he has to imagine her progress, for the rest of the road is not visible from where he stands at the bottom of Sal Mal Lane.

  “You saved us? You weren’ even here to help! You were too busy loo-tin’. I’ll pull a knife and slice you! I’ll slice you to pieces!” Jimmy Bolling shouts and now Raju can hear the sound of flesh meeting flesh, of struggle and slap and grunt and the dry heaving of rage, a struggle that Jimmy Bolling is having trouble winning this time.

  “Kill me? You fat fuck? You can’ kill me, I’ll kill you! I’ll kill them all! I’ll kill them with my hands. I don’ need a knife! Come here, you Thambiya. I’ll kill you too!”

  There’s a commotion right outside the door and Raju sees the Bin Ahmed family come running out of Jimmy Bolling’s house and flee toward their own. And behind them he sees Sonna, and behind Sonna, Jimmy Bolling, reaching out and grabbing Sonna by his hair while he thrashes and screams words that Raju is not used to hearing, not even from his cousin in his most drunken state. Words so raw and vile that a
ll he can think of is that Devi will be turning around, coming back, and that she should not be defiled by hearing such things.

  Nihil, for no reason that he knows, gets up from where he is sitting next to Mr. Niles and goes outside. He goes outside in time to see Devi, perfect, whole, and filled with happiness as she sails past him on the old bike. I’m flying! she calls out to him, and it makes him smile to hear that. I’m flying! For an instant he wants to run, to catch her at the bottom and ask if he can ride the bike too, so he, too, can be as lifted as she is, as forgetful of their collective undoing as she is. To fly. And he does run, as fast as he can, because that thought has been replaced by another, a vision of loss so terrifying that he knows it is true and he is crying before he has run ten steps, crying for what he knows is coming and what he knows he cannot stop.

  At the bottom of the road, Jimmy Bolling and Sonna continue to fight. Raju braces to catch Devi, who pedals down the road though she has been told she shouldn’t, she shouldn’t ever pedal down a hill, she should hold the pedals still, though she has been warned by him, and Raju thinks, I am going to take the bike away from her until she is old enough. And he thinks this and watches her, something precious, something meant to be cherished and kept forever, and so he does not see Sonna raise his head from beneath his father’s arms, the arms that are keeping him locked in place, he does not see Sonna look at Devi and her lovely face, at Nihil, who is already crying, at Raju, who is so protective, so ready to stop the bike with his own body if he must. He only hears what Sonna screams, a string of sounds more than words, sounds tearing out of his throat like those made by a wild animal trapped too far out of sight and hearing to be released, an animal fighting to last through the night.

  “Raju! Run! They’re behind you!”

  And he, poor man, always so nervous, so routinely harassed, so recently broken, turns away from Devi to look behind him and therefore he does not catch her, he does not place his body before the bicycle. She goes past him in a flash of bright yellow, the cotton of her dress so airy and light as it brushes his face, herself so weightless when the bicycle meets the bus with a sound that is too loud and she is carried like a feather, back toward Raju, past him, and falls, shattered and bloody, at the feet of the brother who will never reach her in time.

  What does it feel like to hold a body so young? What does it feel like to hear the cries that go up from Raju, from Jimmy Bolling, but most of all from Nihil, who has not kept his sister safe? It is to know the suffering of all human life, whose conduct it is to protect but whose natural order is to end. It is to know what it is to love a human being who has ceased to know what shape that love might take.

  Nihil holds his sister in his arms and cajoles her to return. “Come back! Devi! Come back! Come back! Come back! Come back!” And he touches her face as he utters these words, and strokes her hair and straightens her dress over her scraped knees, which do not require dressing, and wipes the blood that spills from the back of her head and seeps out through her ears, and he says them as though there are no other words to say but those words, “Come back! Come back!” even though he knows she will not. “Come back!” he cries as he presses his face to her body, his tears falling through her dress and slipping over the ribs below.

  It falls upon Jimmy Bolling to find Mr. Herath and tell him about his daughter. And it falls upon Mr. Herath to tell his wife, and he can find no right words but the truth, Devi is dead.

  In days to come, some would whisper that it was a good thing that Nihil was there when they came out of the house running, though of what use was speed anymore, for what they found was not only a child who was gone but a child who was half-gone, and that half-goneness that Nihil embodied gave them something to focus on. A child half-alive was still recoverable; it was still possible to imagine him being sent forth into the world to live his life, to be, whereas the child lost took up residence within their hearts that would forever be full of memory and devotion to finite time, eleven and half years and not one day more.

  Mrs. Herath puts her arms around the body of her younger daughter and Mr. Herath puts his around his younger son. Suren and Rashmi sink to their knees, weeping, kissing Devi’s feet, redoing all that Nihil has already done, making her neat, wiping her neck, her head, and saying her name, Devi! Devi! Little Devi! And there is longing in their voices, as though they wish they had spoken that way to her before then, this day, yesterday, every day that she had not been lying before them so utterly still.

  Other people gather. Kamala and Alice, who cling to each other and scream out their pain as women of their status are wont to do.

  Lucas comes and weeps and says “Aiyyo! Aiyyo! Devi Baby! Aiyyo!” over and over again until he is led away by Mr. Tissera.

  And all the neighbors who were still in the Herath household, all except Mr. Niles, come out of those rooms in which they had sat for days, for no house that was burnt, no jewelry that had been stolen, no albums destroyed, no, not even fear for their own lives can keep them from feeling this pain, this despair that overwhelms them all, so tangible is its presence, so eternal its promise.

  Inside the Herath household, the one person left behind, Mr. Niles, tilts his head to listen to the distant voices down the street. And in those voices he hears the unmistakable note of lamentation reserved for mourning the death of a child, and he turns onto his side, the first movement he has made on his own in months. He calls out Son! Son! Nihil! He calls and calls though Nihil is not in the house. Though Nihil, even if he were in the house, would not come.

  And where is Raju? He is not among those who stand or kneel around Devi’s family. He is not on the road, or in any of the houses. Raju is not going to look upon the dead face of this girl he loves, the one who had loved him back, who had considered him her friend, her guardian, her family. He will not look upon her face. Up the main road he runs, a piece of the broken handlebar in his hand, up he runs, no fatigue to stop him, no word of caution, nothing at all until he catches up with Sonna, who has been cowering alone at a tea shop at the top of the hill though he longs, oh how he longs, for his family, for a single friend, and oh how he grieves for Nihil. Nobody stops Raju, no one calls for help, no voice begs for mercy, not even Sonna’s. If a doctor happened by afterward, they would have been hard pressed to find where joint met joint, where cheekbone drew away from jaw. When Raju drops the piece of metal in his hand at last, its surfaces slick with blood and hair, not far from where Devi still lies, so loved, so missed, another dead body lies, as deeply unloved, as deeply unsung.

  If Only

  Devi rests as if in a deep sleep in a casket that her parents have chosen. White satin, pleated and ruffled, and floral wreaths of jasmine, orchid, and rose, frame her entire body. It seems as though she rests not in something made of kaluwara, the swift-burning wood of the South, but rather in a bower of cloud and flower. Her head faces west, there is an oil lamp lit at her feet, and beside the coffin, on a tall curved stand, is a photograph of her in which she looks at the world with a slight smile, though her eyes are full of laughter.

  Mrs. Niles sits beside Mrs. Herath, accompanying her through the wake. Every now and again Mrs. Herath begins to talk to Devi, saying a variation of the same words. “Uncle Niles got you this casket, darling. Because of the riots. There was nothing good enough in Colombo, but Uncle Niles—” She does not finish even though this is the one piece of information that she seems to want to share with Devi and even though Mrs Niles takes her hand every time and says It’s all right, she knows.

  Suren and Rashmi sit on either side of Nihil in the chairs arranged along the wall nearest to the front door. Nihil stares at his hands as they rest in his lap, his fingers laced together. What if, he thinks, of course he thinks it. And, also, if only. These are the only thoughts possible.

  What if I had not been sitting beside Mr. Niles?

  If only I had not stopped paying attention.

  What if I had not played cricket?

  If only I had heard her go out.


  What if when she passed me, knowledge had preceded the happiness that came over me?

  What if, instead of letting her voice lift my spirits, I had let the sight of her make me afraid?

  What if.

  And, always, if only Raju had not. If only Raju had not owned a bike. If only Raju had not given it to her. If only Raju had not looked away. If only Raju had not existed.

  At first he does not notice Raju come into the room where his sister lies. And he may not have noticed Raju at all had Raju not, upon reaching the casket, fallen to his knees in a fit of sobs, half inhaled, half exhaled, and said, in his musical voice, “Forgive me! Forgive me! Devi, who will forgive your Uncle Raju now?”

  In that instance, the words that nobody in his family would ever have uttered, that nobody in their family would have tolerated being uttered by anybody else, escape Nihil’s lips, for there are no other words he can think of with which to abuse this man who has taken his sister away.

  “Para Demalā!” he screams. He leaps out of his chair and grabs Raju by the collar of his shirt, and Raju struggles to his feet. “You have no right to be here! Get out of our house!”

  He shoves Raju, shoves him and hits him with his fist, and kicks at his legs with his bare feet while Raju staggers and does not even try once, not with one lifted arm, to protect himself, he only says, “I am sorry Nihil, I am sorry, I am sorry.”

  And Nihil would have said more and done more if not for the fact that Suren has pulled him away from Raju, and if not for the fact that Rashmi has said, “Shh, shh, Nihil, don’t say such things. Don’t say such things.”

  “Raju was her friend,” Suren says, his arm around his brother as they take him into their parents’ bedroom and try to make him stop trembling. They cover him with whatever they can find, their father’s sarong, the sheet off the bed, as though Nihil has a fever, as though if they could only wrap him up tight enough, hold him close enough, they could contain his grief, they could prevent him from breaking apart.