A Disobedient Girl (8 page)

And now I remember how my husband looked this morning when I left him. How I stood and watched the rise and fall of his body, the breath leaving and entering him. I looked at him, but it was Siri I saw. The way the breath left his lips in a whistle when I walked by, so soft that only I could hear; the way the breath left his lips when we stood together in the dark; the way the breath came out of his body, all of it, leaving him behind, and me, never to return on that last night.

The train lurches forward without preamble, jerking me out of my mixed-up reverie with its passions and losses and hopelessness and pride. As we crawl sluggishly out of the station, comfortable in our relatively empty carriage, the rain begins. It looks dreary outside.

“I am glad we are not staying in Colombo,” Chooti Duwa says, pronouncing the word with aplomb, now that she knows what it means.

“Good. You will like the hills.”

“How big are they?”

“They are not hills, they are mountains,” her brother tells her, warming to his role as the deliverer of information. “We learned about them at school. It’s where all the tea in the country comes from, and the land is so good that the vegetables are bigger than any you’ve ever seen. And there are waterfalls.”

“What are waterfalls?”

“Waterfalls are when the water in a lake is falling down from one high mountain to a smaller mountain,” Loku Duwa says, trying to restore some balance to the usually shared role of knowledgeable older siblings. She has always managed to sound older than her years. It’s the curse of the oldest girl in the family, I suppose. And a blessing, too, for me, for any mother, for how can one woman take all the responsibility for a family? No, there must be help, and I am glad for my older girl. I take her hand in mine and hold it. She has small hands and her fingers are short, like her father’s. She is small, too, with lots of soft flesh to keep her small bones safe, not good for manual labor. Siri’s daughter, on the other hand, is like him and me:
lean and strong and somehow, even at this age, peculiarly capable. I take her hand in mine too and compare my girls, tracing the lines on their palms as if I were like one of the Tamil fortune-tellers from Kataragama who pass through town, their dark green and orange cotton saris tight around them, their mouths red with betel stains, their nose rings and their baskets of potions and papyrus and twine balanced on their heads, always grateful for plain tea.

“Will the water fall on our heads if we stand under it?” Chooti Duwa asks, a baby again.

I smile. “The water in the mountains is very cold, not like the ocean. You can bathe in it, but you have to get used to it, and unless it is a very small waterfall, you don’t stand right underneath it. You stand in the pool at the bottom, away from the falls, on the rocks in the river.”

“I want to go to a proper school, not a Montessori school,” she says, after a few moments of quiet.

“You’ll be five soon and then you can go to a proper school, although in those parts it might be a mixed school.”

“What is a mixed school?” Loku Duwa asks.

“Both girls and boys, not separate like our schools now,” my son tells her.

“
Chee!
I don’t want to go to school with boys!” Loku Duwa says.

“I don’t want to go to school with girls either!” Loku Putha adds, as if he means only one girl and that would be his own sister.

I laugh. “It is not so bad. If there is a private convent, I will try to get you girls there, but if not, you will be fine. When we get to my aunt’s house, I will enroll you in school with her daughter’s children, your second cousins.” I can share these details with them now, of relatives I had rarely mentioned before, wanting more than anything to protect them from the misery of knowing there were options we could not follow, people we could be with, trapped as we were by our reliance on their untrustworthy father. But no longer. Now, we are free.

“How old are they?” my son asks.

“She has three sons and a daughter. The oldest is thirteen; that’s the girl. The boys must be nine, seven, and five.”

Chooti Duwa claps her hands. “One for me!”

“He’ll want to run away from you. You’re such a pest,” her sister says, but she’s smiling and I can tell she is happy to hear there will be “one for her” as well, and an older sister at that. They notice my amusement, and their own grins broaden until I can see their teeth, crookedly perfect. My little one’s smile is particularly childish, with two early gaps, which her first permanent teeth are beginning to fill.

My children, who have never been anywhere beyond our town, are excited by everything, even the long stretches of paddy on either side of the train as we approach and pass Ambepussa. When night falls, they talk loudly about the patches of forest, thrilled by the way the clumps of trees look dangerous in the dark. We are fortunate enough that I am able to show them Bible Rock and even a glimpse of Sri Pāda, both of which appear and disappear from our view like mirages in the moonlight. I consider these to be signs of blessing and bring my palms together as we pass.

I put off dinner for as long as they can stand it, hoping that sleep will follow soon after. When I finally relent, I am slightly embarrassed that our food smells so good that several passengers glance over at us. Still, I am glad we have it…, that the plaintain leaves have kept it from spoiling, and that we did not have to purchase buth packets from the Colombo railway station. I have never bought cooked rice from the Muslim stores, although, on occasion, to demonstrate his distaste for anything associated with me, my husband has returned home with a single packet of biryani rice and curries for himself and my mouth has watered at the fragrance. The children eat with haste and enjoyment; it is something to do, I suppose, eat, on a journey whose length I can only guess at, having learned early to think of trips such as these in terms of time, not distance. These days, even that measurement is unreliable. Timetables are for us, but it is fate that decides. Electrical outages, skipped tracks, derailments, delays—that is what we are trained to expect under our present government, nothing too bad, just enough of everything inconvenient to small people like us, people without power and wealth. Still, watching my children, their contentment, I am convinced that our journey is blessed.

I wish I had added some washed green chilies and onions to spice my own packet of rice, but I was in too great a hurry to think that far
ahead. I eat my food quickly and finish before they do so I can help Chooti Duwa with hers.

“Here, hold your hands out of the train window so I can wash them,” I say when they are done, and each one complies. I pour a little water on each right hand to wash the
indul
away.

“Amma, can I drink the rest of the thambili now?” Chooti Duwa asks.

“Yes, but not all of it. We still have a whole night to travel.”

The small basket is no longer full. Only the almost-empty drink bottles and a packet of
Maliban
lemon puffs remain, along with the remnants of unfinished wedges of pineapple. It is very late when we get to Gampola, and there is nothing to see but the people inside the train. It is packed, and we have had to squeeze in against one another’s bodies to accommodate each new group that climbs in with the same focus and effort that we ourselves must have displayed at the start of our journey. I try to keep the children from pressing too close to the windowsills, leaning too heavily against the sides. This is a cheaper compartment, and who knows what kind of illness has rested in its corners? The overhead luggage racks are jammed with bags, and ours sits between our feet. I am grateful for our arrangement, my two older ones in front of me, the little one and I across from them; at least we are together, at least we have the window. When people cough or sneeze, I motion with my eyes so the children lean out and breathe in fresher air, giving their lungs a fighting chance against whatever colds and fevers might have climbed aboard.

All along our journey there are points where solid ground seems so far below our carriage that I hold my breath, expecting some kind of punishment. Some divine blow that would put an end to me and my children. But the train passes over them again and again and it is gone, that sensation of guilt and foreboding, and I am glad. At Nawalapitiya, the train sits for what seems like a long time. I hear a rumor, confirmed by a sharp jerk of the train, that they are adding on a
pusher
for the up-country climb. We are still stopped, but at least the air is cooler now and my children can sleep.

“Can I shut this window a little?” I ask an older woman sitting next to my son. She nods and smiles at me.

“Your children must be cold,” she says. She has gray hair and wears a cheap red sari. There’s a smear of red in her hairline too. I wonder if she is returning from visiting relatives in Colombo or if she is on her way to visit family on the tea estates.
The tea estates are full of Tamil tea pluckers,
my mother had once told me, something in her voice conveying a criticism of them,
and they often send their children to work as servants,
she had murmured, which was what had prejudiced me, too, toward these people. But this woman looks decent. I can’t picture her sending a child to slave at some house far away. Maybe my mother did not know all there was to know about these parts. She had grown up in a good home, sheltered from the world; how could she have picked up facts like that? But I don’t want to think less of my mother, so I shake the thought and smile at the woman.

The older ones are fast asleep, and I have to dislodge my Chooti Duwa from my lap to shut the window. Sensing my predicament, a young man next to me holds out his arms and takes her from me. I stand at the window and try to figure out how to shut it. Our train rounds a bend, and, with my face so close to the window, I see that, in place of the forests my children had been looking at with such wonder, there are now plantations of pine and tall eucalyptus alongside the hills that I assume must be covered with tea. I am sorry that the children are asleep, and I consider stirring them awake. But they will wake up soon enough, by dawn anyway, and there will still be beautiful sights outside for them. For now, I decide that I should let them sleep. I ease the window down as far as I can. It is stuck and creaks when I move it.
Creak-creak, creak-creak.
My struggle and the sound my efforts produce have a comical effect on me, and I start giggling, my back to the other passengers. I lean against the window and laugh. It is the first time I have laughed in this way, silly, unafraid, since Siri was murdered and so I feel the tears come through as well, along with the laughter. Behind me I hear the young man and then the Tamil woman and then others across the aisle join in the laughter.

When I get the window closed and turn around, wiping my eyes and then covering my still smiling mouth with the edge of my sari pota, I see a young girl standing by the door, watching me. She is
pregnant, about five months by the look of it. Her face is long and serious, and though her body is swollen, she is beautiful. She seems so young to be taking on such responsibility. I am immediately sober.

“Come and sit here, duwa,” I say, holding out my hand and gesturing to my seat. She must have just climbed aboard at the last station, for otherwise someone would have given up a seat for her already.

She steps forward through the crowds, her light blue dress soft and at odds with the garish overhead lights. She is wearing new sandals, and her feet are clean, a well-brought-up girl. She takes my hand and eases into our small space. I help her to sit down. Someone else passes the girl’s suitcase to us. It is square and has green checks on it. The young man beckons to me to take his seat. He stands up, holding my sleeping girl, waits for me to sit, then lays her down gently in my arms. I thank him profusely and call him son. He blushes, and I realize that he is not that young.

“How old is she?” the girl asks, caressing my baby’s arm gingerly, as if she is asking to be forgiven for touching her at all.

“Four,” I say, stroking my daughter’s hair, marveling at how perfect she is, how beautifully her features sit on her small face, her upper lip sloping down like a steep hill on each side, the bottom one full and round, her lids held down by thick lashes, something definite and confident about their straightness, the way they press against the tops of her cheeks. “But she will be five soon.”

H
ail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb: Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now, and at the hour of our death. Amen.”

The
Amen
always gave her pause. It reminded her of men. Our men. Or, to be more precise, her men, the ones she had known in one way or another: Mr. Vithanage, the driver, the gardener, the fishmonger, Ajith, Gehan. Okay, so the boys weren’t men the way Mr. Vithanage was a man, but still, they weren’t women. Now that she had Become a Woman—which was a term that appeared from nowhere and stuck to her body the minute a penis came into contact with her vagina, like an unwieldy wand—surely they had Become Men? How was it, though, that men and women became so only by bringing those parts together? What happened to those who didn’t? Did they stay girls forever?

Latha stole a surreptitious look at the nuns on either side of her. Definitely not girls; no, definitely women. But how had they done it? What had touched them? She lifted her eyes, the pupils rolling upward under her soulfully lowered lids, her eyebrows arching to accommodate the move, to gaze at the figure of Christ that hung, bloodied and barely robed, above the altar. Yes, she thought, there was something decidedly attractive about Jesus: arms outstretched, eyes half-closed, the face dipping down, that meager bit of cloth over—

“Latha! Prayers are over!” It was Leela. Leela was not a nun, but she was somehow wedded to the convent in the incarnation of a devout liaison between the nuns and the laypeople. Leela sat in the parlor all day long except during mealtimes and prayers. She sat there and embroidered. She produced slim rectangular boxes of white cotton days-of-the-week handkerchiefs (which seemed a trifle excessive to Latha, for who could handle a grief requiring so many handkerchiefs?) and table linens with hand-crocheted lace edging. The table linens were always cream or white. If she ever had a home, Latha had decided, she would have orange table linens. She wondered sometimes if she should learn to crochet so she could make them herself. Then again, why bother? There was, surely, some place where people like Leela produced orange table linens.

“I’m coming,” Latha said, replacing her prayer book in the wooden slat in front of her. She crossed herself three times, then unwound the rosary from her hand and put it into her pocket. She liked that rosary: it was like jewelry, smooth and pearly and pale blue. It reminded her of luxuries and new things and, of course, Mrs. Vithanage’s saris. There was no escape, she had found, from the memory of Mrs. Vithanage’s saris. In a way she didn’t really mind that, because Mrs. Vithanage came complete with Mr. Vithanage and Thara and even Soma, and all of them came with Ajith, who, of course, came with Gehan.

“Were there any letters for me today?” Latha asked. She always asked.

“No.” Leela shook her head. “But we can’t say that you won’t get one tomorrow, isn’t that so? We can always check tomorrow.”

“Yes,” Latha said, acknowledging the possibility and the kindness of a friend who would utter it against all evidence to the contrary.

“I came here about eleven and a half years ago,” Leela had told her one day when Latha asked, sitting next to her in the parlor, sorting through her skeins of embroidery threads. The thread had been so bright and pretty, and so little of it was allowed on each hankie. It was a crying shame!

Latha had been sitting there for weeks. The nuns had thought it would be good for her, after the baby had come and gone, leaving
behind only stitches in her vagina, the sound of things ending, and the silence she would not give up. She had not spoken in almost eight months; months during which the nuns had tried to shock her into speech, bringing her news of the world outside the convent, about new political parties and assassinations of one leader or another, of a peacekeeping force from India occupying the north and bombs going off everywhere. None of it had persuaded her to break her silence. What did any of it matter to her, locked up as she was, robbed of her past life and of her baby? But that day, looking at those brilliant and colorful threads, all bound together yet coming apart with such ease, the words had just fallen out of her.

“Why did you come?” she had asked.

“For the same reason you did,” Leela had said.

“I came from Colombo. That’s the big city,” Latha had told her and pulled in the corner of her mouth like she had seen Soma do when she returned to the house after the row with Mrs. Vithanage. It had made Soma look like she knew exactly what she was worth and not a rupee less. And now she, Latha, did too. She knew what she was worth and what fires she could play with and how much of a house she could burn down with her newfound skills. And she wasn’t going to forget that, even if she got covered with soot in the process or had nothing but ashes to look at afterward or even, yes, even if she had to burn down with it.

“I used to live in a house by the sea,” Leela had told her. “It had so many windows on the sea side, and a big rooftop with a balcony all around it. I used to love to go there at night and watch the lights in the harbor.”

“Were you near the harbor?” Latha had asked, though she wished she hadn’t as soon as the words were out of her mouth; the harbor seemed so much more important than even Colombo itself.

“No, but I could see the ships because the house had many stories. Sir and madam had a TV and a VCR, and they were the only people in the whole building with those things. We didn’t have a big garden, but the rooftop was filled with potted plants with fat leaves and few blooms, and a fountain with a naked baby with a bow and arrow on it, and there were benches and everything. The people had
lots of parties there with music and dancing. When they had those parties they lit candles inside big glass bowls so they wouldn’t go out, from the sea breeze…” She had paused and looked at Latha, clearly assessing the extent of her experience, then decided to tell all. “They were
posh.
I heard their guests say that when the sir and madam were not nearby. Sometimes it sounded like an insult because they would nudge each other and laugh when they said it. But only sometimes.”

That was quite a long speech from Leela, whose unthreatening, unexpectant quietness had served to lessen Latha’s own, and Latha had been impressed. She’d thought about the Vithanages’ house and the one real celebration she had witnessed there: Thara’s coming-of-age party. The only other times they had parties were for Thara’s birthday, and even then only boring dinners with chicken curry and seeni sambol and fruit salad and ice cream afterward for relatives they never saw the rest of the year. There were never any young people and certainly no music and dancing like Leela said there had been at her house.

“Were there children?” Latha had asked, hoping to score at least one point for herself.

“No, only a madam and a sir who worked all day and had parties.”

“Still, must have been nice with all those parties,” Latha had said, charitably.

Leela had been silent, and Latha had understood. That’s what it did to you, being a woman, not a girl; it made you understand things that weren’t said. She’d picked up an orange skein and offered it to Leela. “I think you should put more orange in,” she had said, “orange is a happy color.”

Walking back to the dining room for breakfast now, Latha wondered who had brought Leela to the convent. Had it been the madam or the sir?

“Nobody,” Leela said when she asked. “I came by myself.”

Latha stopped midstride. “By yourself? How did you know where to go?”

“They drove me as far as a town where they had relatives, then
they took me to the station and bought me a ticket, and told me where I was going, and said the nun would meet me when I got off in Hatton.”

They had reached the dining room, and Latha waited with Leela while the girl behind the counter served them their string hoppers with white potato curry and coconut sambol. They picked up their mugs of plain ginger tea and made their way to the table in the corner right near the entrance to the kitchen but overlooking the convent vegetable garden. The nuns at the center table watched her closely as she passed, and Latha took pains to look drawn and put upon. Since the delivery of her baby and her withdrawal, her silence, her fasting, her refusal to attend mass, all the things that had made them give her to Leela for care, Latha had been allowed all sorts of exceptions to the usual rules of the convent, and, quite frankly, she was enjoying them. Especially not having to look grateful for her food through each entire meal three times a day, when the meals weren’t really tasty enough to be grateful for in the first place. She often wished they would stop teaching people how to sew and perhaps teach some of the girls how to cook.

“Weren’t you scared to come by yourself?” she asked, when all danger of being mistaken for having recovered had passed. She looked searchingly at Leela, who was full of grace in a virginal sort of way: clear-skinned, tender, and quietly resigned. Certainly not the kind of girl Latha could picture traveling anywhere by herself.

“I was. They put me on a train, and I sat on my suitcase between the compartments by the door, because it was very crowded and I was nauseous and needed fresh air. But somewhere near Gampola, I made my way into a third-class carriage, and there I met a woman who gave me a seat. She was the kind of woman everybody wants to be good to, you know, right? The kind even rowdy teenagers on the street corners call ammé? She called me duwa. That made me feel as though things would turn out all right, and they did.”

“That’s nice,” Latha said. “I remember going on a train once when I was a child.”

“Where did you go,” Leela asked, smiling a little, “when you were a child?”

“I think I went to the hill country. It was like this.” Latha looked
out of the window to confirm this assertion, then nodded at Leela. “That’s why I don’t mind it too much here.”

“Why didn’t you stay?”

“In the hills? I couldn’t stay by myself, could I? The Vithanages brought me, and we went to those gardens with the big roses in all colors. The whole garden smelled wonderful then. I had never seen so many flowers in one place, not even on calendar pictures. I had one picture that came close, but they were tulips from a place called Holland, abroad-flowers, not from our country.”

She tried to like those flowers again, the way they had dug themselves a little hole under her skin and made her yearn for their scent as a child, the way she had stolen those bars of soap just to bury her face in them again. She tried, but she couldn’t. Roses now reminded her of her body, the way it had been used and twisted and turned inside out and abandoned afterward; they smelled of the bile she had emptied along the paths planted with the thorny bushes at the convent.

“What are you thinking about?” Leela asked.

“Nothing,” Latha said and sighed. She looked up at Leela and wished she could add something more to her story, now that her up-country trip had petered out into a mere visit, and one leached of its magic. “Can you get me more tea?” she asked. More tea was also a perk of ailing, and Latha felt as though she was ailing right then, and honestly this time. But Leela didn’t get up.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Seventeen I think.”

“You don’t look seventeen. You look younger; fifteen maybe.”

“No, I’m definitely seventeen,” Latha said, using her pursed mouth as added evidence of maturity.

“How would you know?” Leela asked, swirling the tea in her cup, round and round and round like she was agitated.

“I counted,” Latha said, majestically.

“From when?”

“I counted my birthdays.”

“Birthdays?” Leela asked, real awe in her voice. “Did your family celebrate your birthdays?”

“No,” Latha said, thoughtfully, “but I did. I didn’t know when I was born, so I just picked a date. I chose the first of May because the school principal told us that it was the most important day of the year and he was right because it was always a holiday and we sometimes watched the JVP parades with all the red flags, because that one almost always went by our house, but when I was bigger they stopped marching in the parades and so I changed it to the first of July because I read that the princess of England, Diana, was born on that date, and I felt that suited me better because she used to be poor before she became a princess. And Thara agreed too, and she gave me old things wrapped in newspaper sometimes. Her old books and pictures torn from magazines that I would like, pictures of food, mostly, but sometimes clothes and even houses in foreign countries with big gardens full of hedges and berries and even snow!” Latha warmed to her topic and continued with pride. “Once, Thara gave me a chocolate! That’s how I know.”

Leela put her palm on the side of Latha’s cheek and smiled. It was a smile of pity, and it irked Latha. She was about to say something irritable, but just then Leela poured her own tea into Latha’s empty cup. Latha tasted it. It was not hot, but she didn’t feel like pressing for a new cup; it would have been rude.

“When is your birthday?” Latha asked, hoping for the right answer, that Leela would not know either, for sure anyway.

“I don’t know. I know the years pass, that is all. My people told me they got me from this convent and that’s why they were sending me back. They told the nuns that I was the wrong kind for them. Odd how they didn’t think that for all those years when I was doing all their work for them, cooking for their parties, washing their clothes, polishing their floors.”

Latha considered this revelation and tried to imagine Leela being born at the convent and living the rest of her life here. She looked around her and took in her new home for the first time with an open heart, searching for the best of it, making it perfect for Leela.

The rooms were spare, yes, but they were clean and decent. She liked the high roofs with the immense exposed beams and, come to think of it, she even liked the chapel. It was full of colors, all over the
windows, and there was something comforting about that and the sonorous sound of the masses they held there once a day and twice on Sundays. The pews, those too were not so bad when she gave it some thought. It was good, wasn’t it, to slip forward from them onto the cushioned knee rest below, to feel that smooth wood beneath her elbows? Yes, she enjoyed that; it felt like sleep, the seated prayers and then the languorous slide into the kneeling prayers, when she could give herself over to all her longings while the music rose around her. Most of the nuns had good voices, and they pitched them toward heaven together, one voice rising and falling like a velvety sheet whipped over a bed. Or like the hills themselves, dipping and climbing around the convent, they sounded like that, those nuns. True, Latha didn’t much like singing herself, but it was good to be at the center of it, buffeted and buoyed by the nuns’ fervor. She nodded to herself; yes, Leela was fortunate to have a life unfold to the accompaniment of those voices.