A Disobedient Girl (18 page)

Latha, listening in the kitchen, put the kettle on to boil even though nobody had asked for tea. As the water warmed, she peeled and sliced a bit of ginger. She could feel a long night coming, a night of acrimony and tears and regret, and it all felt oddly familiar to her. Thara’s words, Gehan’s slaps, even the determined thud of the rain that finally let go all over Colombo, but most especially, it seemed to Latha, over this particularly sad home. There was a known quality to the evening, an inevitable end to anything vaguely connected to happiness. Maybe that was how it was with women, she thought, whatever their status; eventually their men would be found unworthy.

T
he children are hungry; they have not had any breakfast other than the slices of mango and sweets that they have shared with one another, haggling and bartering until I almost intervened. I yearn for a cup of ginger tea, sweet and strong, but for now I am glad that my children have something to occupy themselves with; it lets me disappear, leaving just the ever-watchful eyes and ears of a mother on guard. I sit quietly and retreat inside my head.

I take out the images of the family still under the train and examine them, one by one. I go over the details of their white clothing, the condition of their feet, clean but for a dusting of dirt, their food. It must have been breakfast, this early. The children would have been happy to be given
Portello
for no good reason that they could see. It was because they were good at temple, he may have said. That’s where they must have spent the previous day, observing Sil, attending an all-night Pirith for an almsgiving, perhaps, that coincided with a Poya day, then staying for some other observance afterward. I imagine the moon bright and full of benign peace as it floated over the temple where they must have sat, close along the boundary walls with the other devotees. I remember our own visit to the temple, and so this temple becomes that temple. Their story, ours. But for the father in theirs, the absence of one in ours.

My last visit to the temple, just two nights ago, was full of concern and fear, but our lives have turned out differently. Here I am,
my children beside me. And there they were, that woman and her children, after all the peace of their devout meditations, the bliss of that meal together, and all for what? To be dragged and tied down, to be lying split apart, their insides out like forked eggs, to be so irreversibly over.

What does my escape mean in the face of such endings?

“Amma, I’m hungry, Amma, Amma.” Chooti Duwa taps my chest with the flat of her palm. She looks tired and dehydrated, and the word,
badagini,
sounds more appropriate than it ever has before; she looks as though her stomach is smoldering with hunger.

“Me too. I’m also hungry.” Loku Duwa looks positively robust by comparison.

“What can we eat?” my son asks.

What indeed. I don’t recall any vendors on the train other than the man with the fruit and sweets.

“Putha, could you ask that uncle who took me to see the…accident…if he knows how much longer we’ll have to wait?”

“Where is he?”

“He should be just around the corner, standing on those steps.” I gesture with my head. He goes, and comes back almost immediately.

“He doesn’t know, but he says that he saw an ambulance come and go. Why would they need an ambulance?”

“Somebody must have been sick on the train,” I say.

He frowns a little and glances over at Loku Duwa. She frowns in response, but hers is more perplexity, less accusation. “Is it the driver? Is the driver dead?”

“Nobody is dead! Don’t say things like that. It’s inauspicious!” I spit three times out the window to take away the curse of his statement. “Nobody’s dead,” I say again, very firmly. My agitation has rubbed my body free from the heaviness that descended upon it the moment I sat down. I get up. I feel energetic and determined. “I will go and find something for you to eat,” I say.

When I look back from halfway down the compartment, they are all staring after me, their faces curious and worried. I smile and send them an eyes-squeezed-shut-puckered-mouth embrace, and the girls giggle. Even my boy smiles a little. I used to do that when I dropped
them at school. We used to call it the pinch-and-kiss kind of love; our name for it. What we women do to babies, gathering the soft folds of skin on plump cheeks and backsides and thighs and squeezing, just a little harder than we should, then kissing them; because really what they make us want most is to swallow them whole and keep them very, very safe. So, from afar, I convey that desire with my eyes and mouth, and their smiles reward me. I keep standing there for a few moments, enjoying the sight of that trust. I cannot put them back into my body, but they know I will keep them safe. I smile back at them, then turn away to go on with my search. Food. Where will I find food in this nearly empty train?

In the third carriage away from the back of the train, I come upon a vendor, squatting by an empty seat, dozing over his wares. Strange how even in a carriage full of vacant seats, he chooses the floor, content with where he belongs. He is one of those men who grow old fast, then stay that way until they pass. He could be fifty-five; he could be seventy-five. The hair on his unshaven chin and on his head is a mix of black and gray. I can tell from the way his mouth caves in just a little that he doesn’t have all his teeth. His gray sarong is tucked carefully between his legs, and he wears tennis shoes with no socks. The stripes on his green, long-sleeved shirt are faded; he has wrapped a woolly length of brown cloth around his neck. I stand for a long time, staring at him, lost in the memory of my own father. A similar man but cleaner, distinguished in his own fashion, particularly when my mother was alive.

People always told me what a decent family we were, how my mother must have good blood, because she was quiet. She had the qualities that set her apart in our village: the pastel-colored osariya she put on every morning as soon as she rose, the pleats and fall neat, her unhurried walk, her soft voice, the way she knew how to be present and absent in the same moment. On the rare occasions when one of my father’s friends visited, my mother cooked simple but well-balanced meals, served them unobtrusively, and attended to their conversations, but never participated, not that I can recall. And yet, she made all the decisions. My father gave her his earnings to spend as she thought best; he asked her for money when he wanted
it. Sometimes she would persuade him that he did not need what he said he did. And he would cajole and she would remain firm but there were no arguments. What my mother said was respected. I assumed that was what marriage was, providing and obedience on the part of the husband, good conduct and power on the part of the wife.

Was that what my mother wanted from her life? I wonder now. She had not married within her caste, or among her people, but she had always seemed content, almost willfully so. She was gracious, and did what was right. Was that her choice or her upbringing or her circumstance? I had never asked her these questions, if her life was unfolding as she had imagined it would, if what was, was as her own mother may have imagined for her. I had simply assumed that all was as it should have been, with myself in the center of her life, my father’s life, I their sole delight, their sole hope. How easily I had stepped away from the path that my mother had walked. How swiftly I had turned from that model of duty to desire, from caring about others to caring for myself. Would she have approved?

I wipe my eyes. I hadn’t thought about my mother’s quiet admonishments, her expectations of me, to be good, to do right, to live without shame, for a long time. I had taught myself to stand alone after she died, and continued to live that way after I was disabused of my childhood ideas of matrimony. And now, here she is on my mind, carried to me on the wings of my memory of my father. I realize that my journey up-country is a journey toward her, toward whatever grace she hailed from, a hope held tight to my chest that in these cold mountains there will be some refuge for me.

A child brushes past me in the narrow corridor, and I remember why I am here. The vendor has some kind of bread-roll sandwiches in his basin and a small pile of hard issa vadai. A few flies have found their way under the plastic covering. I tap the basket to get rid of them, and he is startled awake.

“Madam…,” he says.

It’s the first time I have been addressed this way. Even the schoolteachers never called me that. They never called me anything but Mrs. Not even a real name after that. Just Mrs. I smile at him.

“I was wondering if you were still selling these,” I say, pointing to his basket. Two flies have returned, and he shoos them away with exasperation and a click of his tongue, as if this were unheard of: flies on a train! On unsealed food, no less! I want to laugh, so I just tuck my upper lip in and wait. He looks up and sees my expression.

“Yes, these flies. They get in everything, madam, no matter how hard I try! Even up-country. In Colombo you can expect such things, but here?” And he pulls down the corners of his mouth and looks disappointedly out the window. I follow his gaze. It is true. There is something about beautiful places like this where ordinary displeasures have no place. Or shouldn’t. Ordinary things, like flies, and hunger, certainly not murder; some perpetual serenity ought to attend.

I nod in agreement.
“Eka thamai
…,” I say, and he smiles.

“How many do you want, madam?” he asks, recalling me to the task. “These egg ones are twenty-five cents. They have green chilies. If you like I can give you plain ones with no chilies for twenty cents. I also have sambol ones; those are only ten cents.”

“Three…four,” I say, feeling hungry now. Hungry and determinedly alive. “The egg ones.”

He shakes his head sideways at me. “One rupee then, madam.” He wraps them in newspaper and gives them to me. I thank him and am already three steps away when he starts talking again.

“It’s a terrible thing that happened, isn’t it?” he says behind me, and I stop and turn to face him. “Did you hear, madam? About the accident? Whole family.” He clucks his tongue, slack lips reaching down on either side. “Apparently the woman was having an affair with her husband’s brother. Their uncle. Can you imagine? When the husband confronted her, she poisoned him and the children. They say she tied them all to the train tracks. At the last minute, must have felt bad, she flung herself under the train!”

And he spits in disgust. It is as if he is spitting at me.

I feel it evaporate, that comparison I had made so recently between this man and my father, my honorable father, who loved his wife and cared for his daughter and did the best he could. “Did you see them?” I ask.

“No, no, what to see? But I heard them talking. They said that’s
what the conductor told them when they asked.”

“I saw them,” I say, and my voice has recovered its former strength. “She was tied to the track along with the children. He had put poison in their drinks. He had taken their shoes off. He had tied his wife and children to the tracks. They were split open. It is
he
who did it.
He
killed them. She was just a young girl. They were little children.”

He stares at me, confused by the anger that rises from my body, but he says something else, something unconnected to his lies. “Madam saw? Madam went to see the accident?”

“A mother would never do such a thing to her children.”

“They let you see the bodies?”

His words have made me so angry that my hands are shaking. I put the parcel of buns back in his basket and I walk away. I don’t need his poisonous food. Better that my children starve than that they eat the food of a fool, an ignorant, stupid man who will believe the worst a person can say about a woman they don’t know.

When I reach our compartment, the children look up at me, eyes expectant. I shrug my shoulders and feel a keen twinge in my heart at their crestfallen faces. Still, I won’t go back. Not even for my precious rupee. They leave me alone, the children, sensing my distress, and again I feel that prick inside me, for all the times they had to practice this art of becoming invisible because of my husband, because of me. I make an attempt to reach out to them, stroking their heads one by one, but they are unmoved. They glance back but turn just as swiftly to their own conversations, the sights outside the window, the hunger in their bellies reminding them to leave me behind and alone. I take a sip of the little thambili we have left and imagine what stories are being told of me in the village.

Everybody knew, of course. I wasn’t the only woman there who had a lover, but I was the first who didn’t care what people said, who didn’t try to hide how I felt. I walked just as straight as I ever did, and I went to every public gathering that was held. To school, to meet the teachers, to market, to the well, to temple, and to observe Sil, to the Avurudhu festivals and to the weddings and funerals that took place during that year. I met Siri’s eyes in the presence of other people; I smiled at him. When my husband was at sea, we even stood to
gether as though we were the real family. They didn’t like that, those women, but they admired me for doing it, even wanted to be friends with me, letting the power I so clearly felt creep into their bones too. The people who hated me for it were the men. No wonder they goaded my husband the way they did. They didn’t want me to contaminate their women, that’s what they said. Those men wanted lovers to remain sordid, affairs to be conducted underground, like their own with women at brothels and taverns and with the wives of their friends.

They called me a slut in my hearing. They muttered vile epithets under their breath when I walked by. They even tried to keep their children from mine. But I was too full of the beauty of what I loved for the children to stay away; they were perpetually in my house. They came with their mothers. What could those men do but try to end it all? And still, it was I who won. My round belly and lifted chin, the lack of any traces of sadness on my face even after all that blood and mayhem, and later the baby herself, so perfect, so innocent, so beautiful, these were my weapons. And while I wielded those weapons, I robbed them of their filthy words.

I wonder what they call me now. The usual slurs, but what more? The conductor had done so much damage to that woman in a matter of minutes. What other despicable history have they constructed about me in these past two days? I try to imagine it, but I cannot conceive of my life as anything less than it has been.

And here’s the vendor before me as if in answer to my dilemma.
“Samawenna,
madam,” he says, bending from his upper shoulders, his hunch accentuating the apology. “I’m an old man. I believe what people tell me.” He holds out the package of food to me. “Here, your children must be hungry. It’s close to eleven now.”