by Ru Freeman
In the halls of government a constitutional amendment was passed requiring the declaration of allegiance to a unitary country: No person shall directly or indirectly, in or outside Sri Lanka, support, espouse, promote, finance, encourage, or advocate the establishment of a separate State within the territory of Sri Lanka. Which meant that the Tamil party, whose manifesto expressly declared such a desire to divide, resigned in protest. The government also banned all the left-wing parties.
The Tamils, who continued to live among the Sinhalese all over the island, turned a little more inward, their suspicions confirmed, their prejudices now necessary, and, all around them, the Sinhalese, too, grew harder in their resolve. Prabhakaran will never win. The country will never be divided, they reassured each other. No matter what they do, in the end we’ll win. And though in the decades to come, much was, indeed, done, with towers and hotels crashing to the ground, airports and seaports bombed, buses set on fire, and even the country’s most sacred temple attacked by suicide bombers, and thousands upon thousands of innocents both Sinhalese and Tamil murdered, they were right about two things: Prabhakaran lost and the country was not divided.
Whether the war was won, however, was another matter altogether. And peace, the kind that ordinary people had once known, that was not so easy to come by. For even in the aftermath of all that they had witnessed together, Suren still heard Mohan say good riddance when speaking about yet another Tamil student whose family had decided to leave the country, and even though Mohan did not sound as sure of himself as he had been in years past, Suren realized that he did not understand the source of Mohan’s prejudices nor ever would. He contented himself with the results of the national exams instead, for though he was proud of his four distinctions and four credits, he was even happier to announce to Kala Niles, as though in gift, that the thirty-three students who had achieved either five, six, seven, or eight complete distinctions were all Tamil.
As Mrs. Niles and Kala Niles tended to the slow repair of their house, Suren helped his father to supervise the return of Mr. Niles, who was carried with a further heaviness of heart as though they were not one-less but one-more, Devi with them within each of the people who bore him thus, Mr. Herath, Suren, Jimmy Bolling, and Mr. Tissera. Nihil did not accompany them, and when Suren returned from the Nileses’ house and looked for his brother, he found him in the Silvas’ garden, systematically ripping up every fern and flowering shrub their mother had given to Mr. Silva.
“Why, Nihil?” Suren asked, his voice weary.
“These are our plants,” Nihil said, standing up to face Suren, his face calm.
Suren said, “Leave what is still good alone,” and he took Nihil home and left him with Rashmi. He went back and knocked on the Silvas’ door and said he would come back and help to put the plants back in the ground and though he brought both Rose and Dolly with him to do this work, none of the Silvas said anything; they simply stayed out of sight until Suren and the girls were gone.
In his own house, Suren found that the mood was ever quiet, even when they spoke, because each member of the family was always in two worlds: the present, which unfolded relentlessly and required routine and schedule and work, and the one that remained within, the one in which Devi was not where she had once been. In that half world Suren posed questions.
To his mother: “They say the school results will be out soon. Do you know when?”
To his father: “I hear that the JVP has gone underground. Do you know anything about the Communist Party members, where they might be?”
To Rashmi: “Are you going to be singing at the ballad festival? There’s going to be tough competition, and the boys’ and girls’ sessions are on separate days.”
To Nihil: “I’m going with a friend to watch the match on Saturday. Do you want to come with us?”
They replied, each in turn. His mother said she did not know when the results were going to be out but she was sure he had done well. His father talked about the government, the mess they had made of the country, the violence of it all, but his replies were brief now, they never spoke of anything too far into the future. Rashmi said yes, she had a solo in the Joan Baez ballad and afterward the teachers were going to escort them to listen to the boys when they were performing. Nihil only shook his head.
But in Kala Niles’s house, he did not have to work so hard on reminding his family of life and each other. He did not have to wish that someone, Rashmi, his father, anyone, might help him out and take their turn in posing these unimportant questions. All he had to do when he was at Kala Niles’s house was to sit at the piano and play while she listened. When he played, and while she listened, Devi was not gone, she was beside them both, impatient for him to finish, impatient to find out what beautiful composition he might make of her life.
An Embroidered Shirt
Rashmi had always had intimations of what her life might be as an adult: secure, successful, and beset by responsibilities to which she would be equal. Nothing would overwhelm her. But that was before she had discovered the pleasure of singing in a band and being a little less good in school, before watching her neighbors’ houses burn, before burying the last dog left, and before she had to learn to cook and serve food. Before Devi had left her without a backward glance. Well, that was not entirely true; there had been a backward glance, even if she hadn’t looked up to notice it.
“Kamala got cashews. Want to make milk toffee?” Devi had asked Rashmi that day, while Rashmi lay on her belly in her bed in their shared room and wrote about a boy she was getting to know, the brother of a friend. She had shaken her head, no.
“Want to play battleships?” Devi had asked a few minutes later. She had wrapped herself up in the curtain of their room, twisting and twisting until her body hung like a large lime with legs. Rashmi had given her the same reply. No! With emphasis.
“You never want to do anything fun,” Devi had said. “All you do is sit and read books and write in that stupid diary.” And she had unwound herself and stood up. “Nobody here wants to play with me. Everybody’s sad all the time, even Raju. All Suren does is bang bang bang on the stupid piano, all Nihil does is talk to Mr. Niles, who won’t even talk back to him, and all you do is this. What’s the use of brothers and sisters if they don’t even play?”
Had she looked back, to see the impression her words had on her sister, Rashmi tried to remember, or had she imagined that look as she watched Devi storm away, dragging the curtain behind her as far as it would go, then sending it flying back in an utterly unsatisfying flutter of green? Had she called out to her and said she would play, just let me finish, or had she only thought that she would and had not said it, thinking why did she have to say it because intention had always been accompanied by time. She would play, after. After she had finished describing her last conversation with that boy in her book, after she had got it all down. All she could bring back now were Devi’s words, those words uttered in that voice, What’s the use of brothers and sisters if they don’t even play? And all she could find in her memory of that day were Devi’s feet in red rubber slippers, poking out from underneath her balled-up body wrapped in the green curtain, her footsteps leaving, and then, and then, there was nothing but herself kissing those feet, which no longer had slippers on them.
Rashmi thought about this every morning when she woke up, squashed next to Nihil because she could not bear to sleep in her own room. There was nothing to do about the memory, it was both wound and balm, so she would put her arm around Nihil and wait for him to wake up, listening to his breath come and go, watching his back lift and fall.
“I think of her every morning, as soon as I wake up,” she told Suren one morning when it had become unbearable to keep this to herself.
Suren said, “She would like that.”
As if Devi were in another room, as if they could share these thoughts with her. “She doesn’t know,” Rashmi said, softly, so as not to wake up Nihil, who was still asleep.
“She does,” S
uren said.
“How do you know?” Rashmi asked.
There was silence and then Suren said, “I can feel her here, with us.”
“I can’t,” Rashmi said, feeling more sad than ever. Surely if Devi were in their presence she ought to feel her spirit, she was the sister. How could Suren feel her and how could she not? “Why do you think I can’t feel her here?”
“Do something for her,” Suren said.
“Like what?”
“You could make something for her. Sing for her. Or you could cook for her.”
Rashmi did all these things. She made milk toffee with cashews that she roasted with Kamala watching on, stirred the condensed milk and cream and poured it out into plates lined with wax paper, and cut the toffee into neat squares. Then she gave them away to the Bolling family because nobody in hers wanted to eat milk toffee, which had been Devi’s favorite of all the sweets she ate. She sang for Devi, the songs that Devi had always begged her to sing and that she often had refused to sing, not because she wished to be unkind but because a song had to be felt to be sung and on some nights she hadn’t felt like singing. She sang when she took her body-wash, her voice echoing in the room as the water splashed over her, and she sang in Kala Niles’s house, accompanying herself on the piano with chords that made Kala Niles shudder. As she sang she began to feel Devi with her, listening to her voice, her mouth closing over the impossible sweetness of her toffees, blissful in the knowledge that she was completely loved, but it was her making of something that permitted her to forgive herself.
She was sitting on the front steps to their house when the postman came one day, bringing her two letters, one from the boy whom she barely spoke to anymore, and another from her grandmother, with some money inside.
“Every day I think I see her standing here,” the postman said, sympathetically. “I remember like yesterday letting her ride this bicycle,” and he patted the seat of his bike. “Chah. If only I had not offered. I blame myself.”
And Rashmi, who was wise now in the way adults are, not with surety but with helplessness, knew that this was his way, as it was the way of all the other people who blamed themselves as he was doing, of carrying away at least a little bit of the guilt that she and her brothers felt. So she didn’t tell him he was not to blame, she merely said, “She loved riding that bicycle. It was her biggest treat.”
As they stood there for a few moments, heads bowed, Raju came to his gate. The postman looked up. “I feel sorry . . .” he said, looking at Raju then back at her, but he didn’t finish the sentence, for how could he tell her that he felt sorry for the man who had not kept her sister from flying down that street and out of their lives? So he pushed his bike up the street, to finish delivering letters to all the houses on the left before returning to deliver the letters to those on the right. And he tried, as all the neighbors on Sal Mal Lane did, to pretend that the Niles and Joseph houses were not still singed and broken, they were exactly as they had once been.
Rashmi stared at Raju. It was the first time she had seen him since the funeral, though Kamala had told her that he had attended the ceremony, listened to the chanting from afar, walked in the funeral procession, far away from those who were close and unsullied, behind those who had known Devi only in passing and even behind those who had not known her at all. Rose had told Rashmi about Sonna, and how Raju had bludgeoned him to death, and how her father, Jimmy Bolling, had said he did not care, Let the son of a bitch rot. I will not bury him, I will not press charges, I should have done it myself, and how Francie Bolling had cried and cursed Raju. She also knew that Raju no longer lifted weights, that the weights had been returned to Jimmy Bolling—they sat in the kitchen and were now used as benches by Rose and Dolly when they went in there to help Francie Bolling cook—that Raju rarely left the house, or read the papers, he just stayed beside his mother, who never spoke.
Looking at Raju now, Rashmi tried to feel some anger toward him, but she could not. He was as he had always been, a sad, deformed man whose life had been charmed by the friendship of children such as they were, such as Devi had been, a man who had spent a few years, out of all the years he had lived and all those yet remaining, when life had seemed to offer him something more than mere existence in the company of his hopeless, hopeless dreams.
“Can you take me to a shirt place in Wellawatte?” she asked Suren the next morning as they left for school.
“We will have to go before Amma gets home,” Suren said, not asking why she wanted to go, or for what, “and we will have to ask Kamala to keep an eye on Nihil.”
“Kamala and maybe Lucas can also come and wait with him,” Rashmi said.
That afternoon, Lucas came and sat on the steps to the front veranda ostensibly to read the Silumina, but really to make sure that Nihil remained at home, for that is what their parents had asked of them, to Keep your brother in sight always. Rashmi and Suren walked all the way to the top of the hill, past the shop where Sonna had died, which was now boarded up, and took the 141 bus to Wellawatte. Most of those shops were still shut, and many of them were gaping holes lined by blackened walls, open to the elements.
“I hope they open these shops again soon,” Rashmi said. She saw a nun hurrying down the opposite side of the street and was grateful for the T-shirt she had thrown on to disguise her uniform; they had been in such a hurry to leave the house there had been no time to change.
“The refugees will have to come back from the North first and their houses will have to be rebuilt,” Suren replied.
“Do you think they will come back? Will they return to the same houses?” Rashmi asked, stepping around a pile of half-burnt, half-torn notebooks and shelving that must have come from a bookshop.
“I hope so,” Suren said. “Otherwise what will happen to the teachers in the Tamil classes? There would be nobody to teach.”
“It is sad here without the shops open. Even the market is gone. And look at the kovil. There is nobody outside stringing flowers.”
They paused for a while to press their faces to the gate. The kovil was littered with the debris left behind by the refugees, with bundles of rags and shreds of saris and siri-siri bags blowing in the breeze coming in from the sea. The kiosk at which they had last seen the flower men, as they referred to them, was now a pile of wood. There were rolls of red thread ground into the sewer drains and tangled on the sharp edges of the broken booth.
“What are you trying to get here?” Suren asked, tearing Rashmi away from the kovil.
“I want to get a shirt for Raju,” Rashmi said.
“Then we’ll have to go to the fabric part of Sellamuttu Stores, but I don’t know if it is open.”
“But you didn’t ask me why,” Rashmi said.
“You must have a good reason,” Suren said. “If it is for Raju, it must be for Devi too.” He put his hand on her back and guided her across the road between cars and buses that all moved slowly, the drivers curious to see what could be seen.
Sellamuttu Stores was, miraculously, open. Inside, though, there was a Sinhalese man.
“Where’s the owner?” Suren asked him.
“They have gone to Jaffna,” he said. “I am only a friend. I said I will open the shop and run it till they come back. But I don’t know if they will come back. Who would want to?”
“Do you send them money?” Suren asked.
“Not many people come here, so there hasn’t been much money. But if it picks up then I’ll be able to send money.” They both nodded.
“Did they go by ship?” Suren asked, having heard of the transport of Tamils from the refugee camps to the villages in the North.
“Yes,” the man replied. “They were at a church in Kotahena and I went to see them there. After a few days they went to Jaffna on the Lanka Kalyani. A cargo ship. I heard it took a long time to get there. I hope there was food on the ship.”
Suren and Rashmi shared in the silence that followed the man’s statement. All three of them wondered about such a
trip, what the owners of Sellamuttu Stores might have taken with them, if anything, whether they were relieved to escape or fearful of a journey over the ocean. They considered what they might do under such circumstances and, in the deepening quiet, they settled instead on the feelings each of them carried within, for lost neighbors, for a dead sister.
Rashmi spoke first. “What size is Raju?” she asked Suren.
Suren spoke slowly as though coming out of a deep reverie. “His neck is probably eighteen and a half and sleeves are probably about thirty-four,” he said.
“My god. Very strange size,” the man said, standing up straight and looking alarmed. “I am not sure I’ll even be able to find a shirt like that!” Still, after much searching, which included climbing on stools and ladders, he found a light-blue shirt with just such measurements and Rashmi paid him all the money she had received from her grandmother, which wasn’t quite enough but which the man accepted, brushing away her concern with a sideways shake of his head and a kamak neha.
Lucas had left before they got home because Nihil had fallen asleep. Nihil spent much of his time at home sleeping; his silences would grow longer and longer until he shut his eyes and lay down and fell into sleep that was so deep that it was often hard to wake him up, a job that Suren undertook. The one time Rashmi had tried to do it he had woken up looking crazed, clutched her arms, and said Devi! Devi!
Over the next weeks, Rashmi spent her time after school, and every late-night hour she could manage to spend before she had to go to sleep, embroidering the shirt with blue and yellow threads. In doing so she was reminded of the person who had first taught her to embroider, Mrs. Silva. She felt grateful for that first day, the day when she and Devi had sat with Mrs. Silva and learned how to embroider on small squares of old cloth, the fabric soft in their fingers, the scent of the still young creeping jasmine strong in the early-morning hours and surrounding them all in a cocoon of fragrance.