by Ru Freeman
“You have to hold the needle firmly but the thread lightly, that’s the trick to embroidery,” Mrs. Silva had said, her own beautiful embroidery set aside while she unpicked the knots from Devi’s work and hers.
Devi, irritated by the difficulty of the work, complained. “Why do I have to learn this?”
“Someday when you are a fine lady you’ll want to embroider your own linens and baby clothes, won’t you?” Mrs. Silva asked.
“No. I don’t want to be a fine lady. Rashmi is going to be a fine lady. That’s enough.”
If Rashmi had known then that she would be embroidering something to remember Devi by, using her skill long before she became A Fine Lady, in fact after she, too, like Devi, had decided that being fine about anything was not that important after all, what would she have done? She looked at the cloth and thread in her hands and felt overwhelmed by the past and by the present. Suren came in and found her, the shirt and skeins laid out neatly on Devi’s bed, her hands quite still as she observed the arrangement before her.
“What’s the matter?” Suren asked, picking up a few skeins to make room for himself and sitting down on the bed.
“Don’t sit on her bed,” Rashmi said.
Suren got up and moved to Rashmi’s bed. “What are you thinking about?”
“Mrs. Silva,” Rashmi said. “She taught me to embroider, and now I’m using it to make a shirt for Raju, but Mrs. Silva is not a good person.”
“But she taught you something good,” Suren said, playing with the skeins of thread that were still in his hand. “Maybe that will help erase some of the bad things she has done.”
“I don’t think it happens that way. I think all the bad we do remains next to all the good we do. I don’t think you can change one by doing the other.”
“Then all you need to think about is doing more good than bad,” Suren said. “This shirt that you are making, that is a good thing. Just think about that. Forget about Mrs. Silva.”
So she tried. Rashmi embroidered flowers that she copied off one of Devi’s dresses, taking one from the box into which they had been packed to be given away, one of her favorites, in green and white; she embroidered chariots she traced off of Suren’s and Nihil’s blue-and-gold shirts; she embroidered balls balanced on cricket bats; she embroidered kites and hopscotch squares and skipping ropes and, along the hem, with some difficulty, she embroidered the outlines of bicycles.
“When do you plan to give this to Raju?” Suren asked.
“I thought I could give it to him after the three-month almsgiving,” Rashmi said.
Suren smiled. “That would be a good time to do it. It would make her happy.”
Rashmi did not tell Nihil about the gift she was making, the whys and wherefores. Nihil was untouchable. He was with them and yet absent; he spoke and yet said nothing that anybody could pin a thought to. He went to school, he studied, he took tests, and he slept and slept and slept. His appetite neither waxed nor waned, it was sufficient. Sometimes his friends would visit him and he would talk to them, even laugh with them, but the visits were always short, as if neither he nor his friends could keep up the pretense. So Rashmi was surprised when Nihil offered to help with cooking for the three-month almsgiving.
“Tell me what to do,” he said, coming into the kitchen where she was standing peeling onions and garlic and potatoes.
“You don’t need to cook,” Mrs. Herath said. “It’s okay.”
“I want to cook. Tell me what to do.”
“Here, you can peel these,” Rashmi offered, wanting to seize the opportunity to bring him out of the silences he preferred.
“After that?” he asked.
“After that you can help me cook the potatoes and make the mallun and prepare the cutlets for frying,” she said.
In the kitchen that afternoon and evening, with Nihil beside her, Rashmi listened to her mother and Mrs. Niles and Kala Niles and Mrs. Nadesan talk. Kamala, dismissed from the kitchen, stood nearby just in case she was needed to fetch and carry things.
“We have decided to go to India,” Mrs. Nadesan said.
“Really? For good?” Mrs. Niles asked, as she stopped stirring the curry she was making and turned around.
“For good,” Mrs. Nadesan said. “Might as well, if we have to leave, to leave for good. That’s what my brothers all say. They always said it was better to live with our own people. I wish we had listened.”
“You don’t have to leave. We are not leaving,” Kala Niles said, “even though our house was burnt, not like yours. At least yours was still the same.”
“We have no place to go even if we want to leave,” Mrs. Niles said.
“I don’t want to leave,” Kala Niles said firmly, glancing at Mrs. Herath, who had remained silent.
“I don’t want to leave either,” Mrs. Nadesan said. “This is where we have lived all our married lives, and our girls before they grew up and left, but with all this trouble, better to go now than later.” None of the neighbors responded and after a while Mrs. Nadesan clucked her tongue and said, “I almost forgot.” She undid a knot at the edge of the fall of her sari and unwrapped a pair of earrings. “These I want Rashmi to have. She saved my thali. Come, take them, darling.”
Rashmi stretched out her hand and took the earrings, and she did not know if Mrs. Nadesan had forgotten that it had been Devi who had crawled back into her house to rescue her gold wedding necklace, so beautiful and heavy she had to pass it to Suren before she could climb out of that window. Suren had told her that Devi had asked to hold the necklace again, after, wanting to feel that weight in her hands, pausing even in the middle of all that chaos to admire its beauty. Or maybe Mrs. Nadesan did remember but did not want to mention Devi’s name.
“They are beautiful, Aunty,” she said, and gave them to her mother, who took them from her and tied them into the edge of the fall of her own sari. And then, not knowing how else to thank Mrs. Nadesan, Rashmi felt compelled to say, “There won’t be any more trouble.”
“There will always be trouble when we have people like the next-door neighbors around,” Mrs. Herath said at last. “But for what it is worth, I want to say that we, our whole family, will be very sad to see you go.”
Mrs. Nadesan went over to Mrs. Herath and put an arm around her. Mrs. Herath was smaller, so her mother was completely hidden from Rashmi’s view. “Don’t be sad, Savi. All of us have cried enough now. We must stop thinking about the past and face what we have to face,” she said, but Rashmi could tell that Mrs. Nadesan, too, was crying.
If Nihil was moved by these expressions of regret, he did not make it known. He simply bent further into his task, as he sat on a low stool and made small round balls with mashed potatoes and carrots and finely chopped leeks that had been fried with onions and green chillies and garlic. Rashmi watched his relentlessly methodical work and the exactly spaced time between scooping a bit of the mixture, shaping it into a ball, and placing it in the dish of beaten egg whites, and, after a while, she felt the sadness lift, and she mimicked his pace until all the cutlets were coated with bread crumbs and fried and set out to cool on sheets of newspaper.
Late that night, as she swept the front veranda one last time in preparation for the next day, Mohan came to the doorstep.
“Amma sent these for the almsgiving tomorrow,” he said, holding a covered dish out to her. “She made macaroni with cheese.”
Rashmi leaned the broom on the wall and walked over to him. She had to tilt her head back to look at him, even when he stood one step lower. His voice, too, seemed much deeper than she remembered. She realized she had not spoken to him in a while. She took the bowl from him and set it on a side table.
“Are you and Jith still going to join the army?” she asked. “Now there’s a real war, it would mean fighting.”
Mohan looked down at his feet. “Jith is not going to join. I told him he shouldn’t do it. He is going to study computers instead. But I have to join. I don’t have . . . I am not good . . .
my teachers . . . I am not a good enough student to stay at school,” he finished in a rush.
Alice came out of the house, on her way home after helping with the cleaning of the house, and Rashmi and Mohan moved aside to let her pass. They both watched her.
“But there are other things to do without joining the army,” Rashmi said, after Alice had shut the gate behind her.
“Like what?” Mohan asked, but not like he thought she might know, more like he was incredulous that she would suggest that there were options he hadn’t considered.
Rashmi shrugged. “I don’t know. You could learn accounting or shorthand and typing,” she said, since these were the things she had heard of, as options, for those who didn’t go to university.
“Those are for girls, not for boys.”
“Oh,” Rashmi said.
There was nothing more to talk about, then, for the two of them. The scent of her mother’s roses, grown from cuttings she had got from Kala Niles in gratitude for Mrs. Herath’s advice regarding the proper placement of ferns, wafted across the garden. Rashmi inhaled deeply, filling her body with the smell. Mohan shifted his weight from foot to foot, his eyes moving around the room, to the floor, the chairs, the ceiling, and the mandevilla vine that framed the doorway. Rashmi considered asking after Jith but didn’t know how to do so without sounding as though she had run out of things to talk about with Mohan, and so, when the silence had stretched out longer than was tolerable, she picked up the dish he had brought, ending the conversation.
“I hope they are all right,” he said quickly, “the Niles family and the Nadesans.”
“No,” Rashmi said, simply, “but they are alive.”
Mohan put his hands in his pockets and looked at her. He said, “I miss hearing Devi. She always yelled for Raju at the same time. I would listen for her voice. I didn’t know that I had been doing that until—” And he stopped there.
Was Mohan asking her to forgive him? If so, for what? Everybody was responsible for what had happened to their street, so everybody was responsible for Devi. Herself most of all, she thought. Devi was her sister.
“If you study harder you can stay in school,” she said. She turned and went inside and didn’t come back out for a long time to finish sweeping because she knew without having to see him that Mohan was still standing there, standing on the steps to their house, waiting for something none of them could give.
On the morning of the almsgiving, Rashmi stood and listened for the drums that heralded the priests’ coming, and watched as Suren washed the feet of each of the eleven priests and Nihil dried them before they stepped into the house. The chanting of the Mahapiritha soothed them all then, again in the evening, and once more on the morning of the next day, and when the priest tied the threads around each of their wrists, she felt as though indeed some of their pain had been soothed.
After the priests had been served from the bowls that covered the tables before them, and after her parents and their sisters and brother and relatives and Mr. Tissera too, even though he was Catholic, had offered three sets of the eight requirements for monks, including cloth for their garments, she, Rose, Suren, Nihil, and Dolly stepped forward to donate smaller gifts to the younger monks: pencils and erasers and crisp exercise books. As Rashmi placed the last of these offerings before a young monk, younger than Devi had been, and as she knelt and bowed her head and brought her hands together in worship, she remembered the other offering she had prepared.
Nothing about Old Mrs. Joseph’s house looked the same, and in many ways it was worse off than the Nileses’ house, which, complete as it was, with a set of parents and a competent child, had slowly had its exterior and some of the interior restored. She and Suren, along with Lucas and Kamala, had gone over and helped Kala Niles to scrub the walls outside, as high as they could reach. The Bolling twins had borrowed Mrs. Herath’s garden shears and Mr. Silva’s too, though in that case Jith had simply sneaked them out to Dolly, and spent a weekend clipping all the singed and dried rosebushes and vines, and dragging the branches over to the back of their own house to set them on fire, far away from where Kala Niles could see them. Nobody had gone to Raju’s house. In that house, much was still unhinged, the doors, the windows, the mussaenda, Old Mrs. Joseph herself, her movements even more restricted than they had been before with only Raju to tend to her, their help from the estates having run away as soon as the last curfew was lifted. Jimmy Bolling brought food for his aunt and for Raju, but Francie Bolling, though it was the food she cooked that was taken in this manner, refused to go near Raju.
The gate to Raju’s house was cool under her palm and Rashmi remembered that the last time she had stepped through this gate had been when Devi herself had called out to her to Come and touch the gate, it is still hot! She paused for a moment at that gate, neither going in nor leaving. The smells from the warm basket of food in her hand wafted up, each separate curry releasing its own mix of spices. She thought about the special curries each of the neighbors had brought, the eggplant curry from Mrs. Nadesan, the garlic curry from Mrs. Tissera, the dhal from Mrs. Niles, the watalappan from Mrs. Bin Ahmed, and she felt hungry for the first time. When she looked up she saw that Raju was sitting by himself in the front veranda. As she pushed the gate open and went in, he stood up, anxiety creasing his face.
“Rashmi, you have come! Is everything okay?”
She said, “I brought you and Aunty some food.”
Raju took the basket from her, shaking his head from side to side, and placed it carefully on the ledge that surrounded Old Mrs. Joseph’s veranda. He said, “It is kind of you.”
“And this,” Rashmi started, and stopped. She handed the shirt, in its brown paper bag, to Raju. She knew what she wanted to say, but she did not trust herself to say it.
“What is this?” he asked, and then when she did not say anything further, he opened the bag and drew out the shirt, which unfolded awkwardly in his hands until he smoothed the edges and held it up.
Was it a shirt that he would ever wear? Or was it a shirt meant for looking at? A shirt not for displaying in public but for reading and memory? Would Raju understand its significance? Did he deserve such a gift? Rashmi did not know the answers to these questions. She only knew that whatever Raju did or did not deserve, Devi, lost to them all, would know that Raju was not abandoned to his loneliness.
“This is for you to remember Devi,” Rashmi managed to say.
And though she never asked Raju what he thought of her giving, though he did not thank her, as she walked away from him, Rashmi felt that she walked in the company of her sister.
A Small Boy, an Old Man
Nobody knows what is to come, not even those so tied together in spirit that they are able to persuade themselves that they do know. Yet Nihil felt that he had known, all along, and that it had been his dismissal of what he had known that had made Devi ride so fearlessly down their lane. Because he blamed himself, he blamed others, all the others except for Sonna. He could not blame Sonna no matter how many times he tried.
Nihil blamed Raju, for having taken on the business of caring for Devi when he knew how lacking he was. He blamed Rashmi, for not playing with Devi that day or on any other day so that she would not have wanted, not have needed to seek out a companion so flawed and foolish as Raju. He blamed Suren, for not having saved him from this moment, for not having reminded him of his book of worries, for wasn’t that his job, to nudge him to wonder why he had written Raju, Raju, Raju so often in that book? He blamed his parents for everything; he did not know what specific blame to lay at their feet, so everything fulfilled that requirement. Most of all, Nihil blamed Mr. Niles. For who else but Mr. Niles, with his yellowing white hair and his sharp gaze and seemingly sensible observations about war and peace, his batting gloves and talk of the Oval, had made him let down his guard? He must have known what would come to pass, for hadn’t it been Mr. Niles who had said to him, all those months and years ago, the words that he had set aside and only n
ow remembered and called forth to damn the old man: You can’t keep your little sister to yourself. She won’t stay. And if he had known, why had Mr. Niles not warned him of the day when Devi would step away from him, not just as a sister might, shrugging off his concerns, but forever, like a spirit who had never intended to stay?
The people around him tried many things to ease his mind.
His grieving mother, who wore nothing but white saris day after day, all the other ones moved to a place where she could no longer even see them, planned a Seth Pirith, which was supposed to placate whatever demons had possessed him and set him free to live again. Nihil listened dutifully while the priests chanted, and uttered the stanzas he was required to utter, but when it was all over nothing had changed.
His father took him to the Soviet-run People’s Publishing House, which had not been shut down even though the Communist Party was now banned, and he tried to interest Nihil in books about dragons and people named Baba Yaga and Vasilissa the Beautiful, and he was successful, he thought, when Nihil picked out a book and brought it home. Except that the book was about a brother and a sister called Tutti and Suok who had been separated by force and their story plunged Nihil into a further spell of withdrawal.
Rashmi tried, but only indirectly, by asking Nihil to help her in the kitchen whenever she cooked, and she cooked frequently since that was her solace, and Nihil was happy enough to participate. Still, although he chatted with her as they cooked, and that was reward enough, when the cooking was done he folded into himself and went away to read the same books over again, and did not pick up on any of their conversations during any other time. Not even as they ate the food they had cooked together.
The twins tried, asking for his help with one thing or the other, a maths problem, an essay, even moving their furniture, when they decided that they would occupy Sonna’s room, the one farthest from their parents’ bedroom. Nihil helped them with whatever they asked—he even advised them how they might arrange their beds—but when Rose gave him a tattered bit of paper she had found in one of Sonna’s shirts, and when he opened it up and read it, he grew quiet and went away.