A Disobedient Girl (7 page)

She sewed and prayed, sewed and prayed, sitting by the window of the stone wing in which they all lived. She embroidered stacks of clothes: doll clothes, with three holes in each for a newborn’s arms
and head, and a ribbon to tie it on at the back. Pale green, pale yellow, pale pink, pale blue, white, like Mrs. Vithanage’s saris, which she no longer saw because she was at the convent and thankful to be there after all the trouble she had caused.

“Who did this?” Mrs. Vithanage had asked when Soma told her about the early morning vomiting and the craving for pickled mangoes. “Who? Do you know, Soma?”

“Ajith, sir,” Soma had said. “He’s the one who did it.”

“Ajith? Who the hell is Ajith?” Mr. Vithanage had demanded, the angriest she had ever seen him.

“A boy who lives down the next lane,” the driver had told them, standing by and sucking his back teeth like he had always known this would happen. Disgusting.

“A Colombo Seven boy?” Oh, Latha was evil to have felt—and still feel—that momentary flash of glee at the horror in Mrs. Vithanage’s voice. And when Mrs. Vithanage had yanked her out of the storeroom by her hair, her hands and body shaking with rage—was it because of the inconvenience? the shame? or because Colombo 7 was just as crass and vile as the worst of slums?—and screamed at her and asked her what she had been thinking to repay their kindness with her whoring, she had taken pride in her defiance, and in the absence of a single tear.

“I wanted a pair of sandals and you wouldn’t let me have my money,” she had said, which was the absolute truth. Then Mrs. Vithanage had slapped her. Once, so hard her face spun on her neck. And she still had not cried, but turned to her and said, “He was Thara’s boyfriend, but he preferred me.”

“Thara? Did you say
Thara
? She’s madam to you. Do you understand? You filthy bitch, you—”

But Mr. Vithanage had stepped forward and taken his spluttering, weeping wife away, and yes, Latha had felt remorseful at the look he gave her: disappointed in her behavior, as if he had expected more of her than that, as if he had believed her to be capable of something higher. And she had cried then, heaving and sobbing on the mat in the storeroom because of that look and because of Gehan, but not even Soma had come to comfort her this time.

The Vithanages hadn’t even told Thara the truth when she came
home from school. They had blamed it all on the driver, for whom Latha had felt sorry for the first time, for having been sacrificed in the name of the Vithanage family honor that way, and for not blaming her for her role in bringing about his fall from grace.

“That’s how it is,” he had said bitterly to her. “They have to find someone to pile their filth on. This time it’s me. Nevermind. I can always find another family, but let’s see if they can find a better driver.” He had looked back at the house and spat on the ground before he walked out of the gate.

As soon as they had dismissed him, they had prepared to take her to the convent. “For training,” they had told their friends and relatives, who had nodded as if they believed that story though they all knew what that meant and that it had nothing to do with improving Latha’s skills as a servant and everything to do with getting rid of the result of nefarious activity between Unequals and who, therefore, looked knowingly at each other.

Everybody assumed it was Mr. Vithanage who had done It. Wasn’t that how it was always rumored to be in such cases? The man of the house unable to resist the seduction of the servant woman who prowled his kitchen, waiting for the moment to strike? It was the sort of story the girls in her, Latha’s, school had related, and she had laughed at, about the goings-on in houses where they or their mothers worked, about how the men came after them and how, invariably, it was the servant who got blamed. About how even when somebody else—a driver or a gardener—had been responsible, the girls blamed the master of the house, knowing that he would survive the accusation but that their fellow servants could not afford to lose their jobs. So many lies that it was impossible for anybody but the two people involved to know the truth. And even if the truth was told, who could believe it?

Everybody who heard of the impending trip to the hill country and visited the Vithanages had felt sorry for Mrs. Vithanage, Latha could tell, by the way they glanced at her and then at Mrs. Vithanage and looked pointedly away when she brought them their tea. Yes, they sighed, it happened to the best of them, and by that they meant nobody else but Mr. Vithanage. And that was the real reason, Latha
knew, that Mrs. Vithanage could not forgive her, and swore that she would not let her step into the Vithanage house ever again.

The convent was good for her, she supposed, in those months that they cared for her and waited for her baby to be born. But then, she hadn’t known what it would feel like after: the pain, the hospital, the sterile room they left her in, the utter quiet after all that noise, the emptiness after a presence that held her so close and then let her go, taking its comfort-seeking cries with it. It was only natural that she should hold on to that silence, at least for a while, to say nothing more; her prayers inside, her hands sewing, sewing, while her breasts swelled up and hardened into a heart-blaming pain and soaked the gauze tied around them with milk again and again until at last they softened to ineffectual pliancy. Sewing as she sat at the window, looking down at cascading mountains filled with tea bushes and a scent in the air that she recollected but could not place exactly. The sound of raised voices, the sound of women and men and children, of doors shutting, and gusts from the top of a train, of perilous cliffs that hung over mists so cold and clean that she felt like her body would freeze if she breathed.

L
oku Duwa says, “Colombo stinks.”

Chooti Duwa says, “Can I have a Colombo?” her eyes on a basin of freshly cut pineapple that a vendor is holding almost up to our noses; if he lifts any higher on his toes, he will either empty the basin into our laps or fall between the platform and the train.

“That’s
annasi,
not Colombo,” Loku Putha tells her, his eyes catching mine, laughing. “Colombo is the city. That’s where our last train stopped and this train starts. My friend said that it’s the biggest city in the whole world, and the only problem with it is that it’s dirty. If it were clean, then it would be the best city too. My friend came here with his father for a wedding at a big hotel. The hotels are very clean, not like the city. They stayed in the hotel for two days.”

“I know that’s a pineapple. Can I have a pineapple?” Chooti Duwa says, clearly unable to absorb all this information about cities and hotels and weddings and focusing on the one sure thing right before her eyes, the luscious yellow wedges of fruit that take even my fancy: their careless patterns, the flecks of salt and chili on them. It is not how my mother served pineapple—we ate pineapples fresh and without spices—but I have learned to love them this way. Siri taught me, laughing at my high-caste ways and coming at me with pieces of pineapple clenched between his teeth, offering a new savor and himself too. Pineapples with salt and chili, they are the taste of memory and happiness and now, perhaps, also the taste of our
future. I unwrap the end of my sari again, but my son beats me to it. How did he get money?

“I took it from him while Thāththa was still asleep,” he says, his eyes nasty again, and I am sorry I asked. Well, what is to be done? A last transgression can be forgiven, after all. Soon he will be in a clean place, cool and fresh and healthy from the inside all the way out.

I have already asked him twice to get down and check the name written on the side of the train:—Udarata Menike—even though I know we are on the right train. I had asked a stationmaster to point it out to us after we got down from the Matara–Colombo train along with everybody else, and the stationmaster, perhaps recognizing that I had not traveled much, or maybe seeing how distressed I was by the number of policemen on guard along the platforms, had walked us over to this train and waited until we climbed aboard. Yes, Loku Putha has told me, both times, this is our train, the
Up-Country Lady.
Already we have sat here for so long now, through lunch, when I bought a packet of cream crackers for them to eat, and afternoon tea, which I bought for them from a young boy who poured the dark, sweet water into smoky glasses from a simple tin kettle, that I feel nervous. As if he might have time to follow us, or that I might have forgotten how to be cautious and let a stranger persuade me to climb aboard the wrong train.

“Check again, Loku Putha,” I say. “Please, one last time? I won’t ask again.”

He climbs down for a third time and chants the name of the train, slapping each carriage on its side as he walks, up and down the length of it:
“Udarata Menike!
This is our train!
Udarata Menike!
This is our train!
Udarata Menike!”
The people around us stir and peer out of the windows on the platform side, laughing, pointing at him, happy to find a way to keep their own children amused.

“Aiyya shouldn’t be out there. People are laughing at him,” Loku Duwa says.

“I like when Aiyya sings,” Chooti Duwa says, slapping the windowpane in time to the rhythm of her brother’s song.

I see a policeman accost him when my son reaches the front of the train. I don’t know what he tells him, but my boy stops singing
and comes back to us, walking quickly as if he regrets having wandered so far.

“What did the rālahamy say?” I ask, anxious.

Loku Putha shrugs. “Nothing. He just told me not to loiter on the platform.”

I don’t believe him, because he looks scared. I despise the police, for the way they stoke the fears that people have of the prospect of tragedy, for the way they always seem to collude with the worst elements of our government, for the way they disregard the murders of some people, allow thuggery to go unpunished. For letting my husband live. I try to get my son to tell me if the policeman threatened him or in some other way made him feel unsafe, but he shakes his head repeatedly.

After that bit of excitement, I put my head out of the window only to hail a man selling thambili so we can refill our bottles. It is so hot that even the one he cuts and pierces for us is warm. After I have drained the water into our bottles, the man splits the king coconut in half and we use the scoop he fashions for us from the husk to scrape out the soft flesh. That at least is sweet and filling, and the children are happy, so I try not to worry about the germs that are probably getting into their bodies, or to berate myself for not having thought to bring a spoon along for this purpose. I hope that the goodness of the thambili itself will keep them from falling sick on our journey.

The wait is impossibly long for those of us who have already traveled far to get to this station, and, after all this time, we still have to wait for an hour and a half before our train leaves. By that time Loku Duwa has vomited once, Chooti Duwa has had to go to the bathroom in the station twice, and my son has flashed his money three times, responding to the relentless vendors who ply their wares among the weary and the bored:

“Kadalai! Kadalai! Kadalai!”
mostly for Loku Duwa, who loves roasted chickpeas or roasted anything, really.

“Annasi! Annasi! Annasi!”
mostly for Chooti Duwa, who has eaten pineapples only in round slices, not in huge quarters like this.

“Ice palam! Ice palam! Ice palam!”
for all of us to cool down, but
especially for the little one, whose tongue is on fire from the spices on her pineapple. The children enjoy that last purchase the most, the sight of those cardboard triangular cylinders nestled in the rigiform box, the sudden cooling of the air near their knees when the vendor sets his box down and opens it, the taste of those sweet, cold blocks of flavored
Elephant House
ice.

I try to be patient with them and content, to enjoy the time between one life and another. I bring up the past so I may leave it behind, to take myself adequately into the future.

It wasn’t because of the drinking that I went with Siri, though that was enough of an excuse. It was simply because he was young and I was too and he asked repeatedly. Isn’t that, in the end, why any woman does anything with any man? He was a choice and he was mine to make. Of course I would choose him. What woman wouldn’t? He was young and present and he had eyes that looked for me.

Siri looked for me at market when I went to meet my husband as he came off the largest boat, standing on the prow in front of his crew of men like he owned the ocean itself, broad-shouldered and square like a lump of sod, brutal and arrogant. He even looked for me when I went with my children to watch them play with the waves. He watched me when I went to the well at dawn those times when there was a water-cut and that was our only source, and he watched me when I went to temple on full-moon days. In the end I found that all I was doing was watching him watching me, and then it was not clear who had begun this game in the first place.

But more than his pursuit was the fact that he had turned away from his father’s fishing trade, and that made him everything my husband was not. Other women doubled their prayers when their husbands went out to sea by the light of the moon, but I, I sang. I sang because Siri was not among those men whose boats blinked on and off on the horizon heavy with their nets and gathered on the shore in the morning to pull the
mā-dal
in, hand over fist. He stayed with me, beside me, inside me, and I did not care that my children were asleep, alone at home, or that the neighbors might come to
know. He burned the fear out of me until all that was left was desire. And I took it wherever I could, whenever I could, not caring anymore what anybody thought or said or might do. Siri was like his name to me, happiness. And I, who had never known happiness as a woman, why would I say no to that?

It filled me with hope that, when he went to work, it was to a clean-kept Muslim store frequented by the students who came back to this town from the universities in Colombo and Peradeniya. He didn’t earn much there, bringing plain tea and godhamba rôti stuffed with curries cooked with too much pepper to his customers, but he learned about matters that had nothing to do with the sea from the students who knew what was going on all over the country. That’s where he learned about the leader of a movement who paid attention to everybody, even the lower castes, who was so intelligent he had been offered a scholarship to study medicine in the Soviet Union, and who had returned home to lead the people in revolution. He told me that this leader had united young people from everywhere—from the universities, from the unemployed, even from the military forces!

I was proud that my Siri was going to join such a man, and that he was going to help bring our lady prime minister back into power. I was proud that the leader of our movement came from my father’s town, the place where I, too, had been born. How could Siri and I have known what would happen after the elections, how our Mathiniya would turn her back on us, how she would put his leader in prison, how the people would rise in revolt, and how they would die as the army returned to her fold? All those young people, felled in groups, falling headfirst into shallow graves.

“Biso, my Menike, someday I will be in a good position with a new government,” he told me. “My campus friends have assured me of this.” Dreaming with me, the sand beneath us, the skies above, and only the sound of the waves to argue against the things he told me, my husband out at sea. I believed in that future the way he did, unable to imagine that we would be wrong, unable to know that when Siri was gone that future would mean nothing to me.

Siri started to meet his university friends by the boats late at night, and too often, though that was dangerous: there were always infor
mants, there in our South, where the plans were being drawn; the police were everywhere, and they could never be trusted, even when they claimed to be with us. I used to go there sometimes, against Siri’s wishes, bringing a flask of tea as an excuse or a treat I had made with the money from the sale of the small, leftover fish my husband had no use for. I wanted to put myself in harm’s way, to join them in taunting something corrupt and deadly so that my other imprudence would pale and somehow escape the notice of the gods, that Siri and I would be safe.

One of Siri’s friends was a Buddhist monk, his saffron robes thrown on without care, quite unlike the priests at our local temple. Revatha Sādhu looked as though he might catch on fire himself at any moment; he was energetic and restless and moved too fast for me to imagine that he had done anything meditative in his life. I recall the thrill I felt in my spine to be in the presence of a priest without the requirement of devoutness. It was heretical, that behavior, but once we had dispensed with the usual taboos, what more was there to do or be but worse? Worse than could have been thought of me, worse than I could have imagined of myself.

They were young, even the priest, and they had opinions about everything, things I had never considered before. I listened as they shouted at one another, as they fought, and announced truces, and loved one another with a fierceness I had never seen among men. Even the sādhu, roaring right alongside them, the future almost here, their plans for things I didn’t quite understand laid out, nearly complete. They didn’t treat Siri differently. He was one of them. That’s how he moved in their midst, contributing his thoughts, cajoling them to stop smoking or drinking, advising them about some absent girlfriend or other. I was fascinated. I sat beside him and was content to be there, like him, learning, absorbing, hiding from my real life.

But then, in one night, four of them disappeared. My Siri and three of his friends, Thilak, Priyantha, and Gamini. I think those were their names. Or maybe it wasn’t them. Maybe it was some other boys, some boys whose names I hadn’t caught. When Siri returned to me, limping, bleeding, all of them stopped coming to the boats
and went into hiding. He grew quiet about his hopes after that. He loitered on the beach whenever he could, hoping one or another would show up, but they did not. There was only the sea, and the sea betrayed us. The sea brought a body to shore.

“Menike,” Siri called to me that morning. Menike. Lady. The other half of my given name. “Menike, come down to the boats.”

“Tonight? He’s home tonight. I can’t come,” I said. I had just returned home after leaving my children at school—my son at the
Rahula Vidyalaya
and my daughter at the girls’ school,
St. Mary’s Convent,
where I had begged the nuns to take her without payment, persuading them by dint of my mother’s education and my own association with the convent in Hambantota.

“Our sādhu’s body has come to shore, bloated and full of holes.”

I did not need to know more. I was familiar with the sensation of futures ending, of hopes dissolving like the froth of the waves. And because he called me, because I went to comfort him, to comfort myself, risking everything, with my husband at home to notice my leaving, to follow me, because of this, my Siri died, with a knife in his back, his life easing out of his body into me. If he could have chosen an end, I know this would have been the way for him. In my arms, beside those boats he would not step into, on that soft sand, not far from where his friends had once stood with him, convinced of success. And I am grateful, still, despite all of it, that I had one year in which I got to be a woman. Not a daughter, not a wife, not a mother.

News of his murder spread through the neighborhood like the cholera that came and went in faraway places, or the droughts we heard about on our radios. Siri’s body was dragged and left in our front yard, and his parents came, weeping, to collect their dead son to the sound of curses from my husband’s drunken mouth, the whole neighborhood watching, relishing my punishment. And even though they knew, his parents knew, nobody would accuse my husband. It must have been easier for them, too, to believe their son had died at the hands of the police, whom everybody despised, and for a cause that was more noble, grander, more lasting, in their minds, than love for another man’s wife.