A Disobedient Girl (21 page)

Well, what was she supposed to do? In one hand she held Madhayanthi close to her, in the other a set of lacy purple underwear. He finally looked down and saw both the child and the garments.

“Oh,” he said and laughed. What an oddly happy man. He had so much to smile about. She wondered what he did with his time that he seemed so easily given to merriment. “Is this your daughter?” He talked like the men on the
ITN
program called
Sesame Street,
which came on at 5:00
PM
on Tuesdays at home, so that meant he was probably American. Maybe it was being American. All the American people on that TV program seemed happy too. And usually without any cause that she could figure out, even though she watched it every week with the children.

“No,” she said, correcting his mistake, her heart beating fast, “not my daughter.” She said the words but drew Madhayanthi closer to her as she spoke as if to belie the fact.

“Oh,” he said, and smiled again, then reached over and patted Madhayanthi’s head. “She is a cute kid.”

“Cute kid,” she repeated and nodded. “My friend’s daughter,” she added.

“You shopping with your friend?” he asked and glanced about,
over her shoulder, behind him, as if his gestures would help translate the question for her. She almost smiled.

“Yes.” She found herself looking everywhere but at this man who seemed to think nothing of staring straight at her face as though they were lovers. It was not that she disliked the implication of such intimacy; far from it. She felt giddy at this confirmation of her appearance. It was just that it seemed inappropriate in the presence of a small child and with a purple bra and panties in her hand, not to mention the bulging assortment of other bras and panties arrayed about them in all the colors of the rainbow.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“My name is Latha,” she said.

“Oh, Latha means ‘girl’!” he said and laughed again. “See? I’m learning Sinhala and I’m quite good at it.”

She doubted that. He probably added
ekak
to the ends of his English words and deluded himself into thinking he spoke the language because everybody understood. That’s what Thara had told her the Americans at her old job used to do when she still worked among all that bathtub equipment that nobody wanted to buy in their hot country.

“Girl
ekak,”
he said. “See? A girl!” He raised his eyebrows, waiting for applause.

“That means one of a girl,” she said. “To say ‘a girl,’ or ‘girl child,’ you have to say
lathava,
or
kellek,
or
gehenu lamayek.
That is most respectful, especially if you don’t know the girl.” She felt pleased with herself. Some of the men outside their area were staring at her, some women too. She was talking with a foreigner as if she did this every day, not as if this was her first time.

“Girl child! You look like a girl child,” he said, nodding enthusiastically and raising his eyebrows again. They were bushy and dark and very expressive.

She smiled, no teeth. She wasn’t a girl child, no matter what her name implied.

He shook his head. “See? I have even learned how to do that thing people do here, saying yes like you’re saying no. This is it, right?”

Latha stared at him. Instead of the delicate side-to-side move that
could convey everything from “Yes, I’ll do it” to “Oh, I understand,” he looked like a man with an elastic neck, his face thrusting in all directions as though he was possessed. She laughed out loud, then stopped. A smile escaped.

“You have a beautiful smile.”

Her smile broadened into the grin she knew he was waiting for, staring at her mouth. She was rewarded by that laugh again. She sighed. This was all very well, and it had been nice to be singled out in this way by a respectable man, albeit a foreign one, but she had to get back to Thara. Odd that they hadn’t found each other in this section. She had been sure Thara would be there.

“I have to go now,” she said.

“Oh, that’s too bad,” he said, and his mouth turned down even though he did not look sad.

Well, what did he expect? That she would pick up a small child and walk out with him into the burning sunlight? Perhaps go off to
Gillo’s
in a scooter taxi for an ice cream sundae that cost three quarters of her monthly salary? That’s what Thara and Ajith did sometimes. They went to
Gillo’s
and ate things called pizza and sundaes that Thara swore were the best food she’d ever tasted, which was absurd because how could anything taste good at that price?

“I could take you to
Gillo’s,
” he said, cocking his head.

“I must find my friend now,” she said. “I must go.” But she didn’t know how to take leave of a foreigner. It seemed unlikely that he would understand the meaning of the glances, the backward looks, the hidden smiles that were her native language and worked on local men like Gehan. That made her feel crestfallen. Not that he didn’t understand, this man called Daniel, but that Gehan had once treasured those moments of parting with her and now barely looked at her at all. His voice made her look up again.

“Don’t look sad,” the foreign man was saying. He took out a smooth brown purse from his pocket and extracted a card. “Here, this is my number. Call me anytime and I will come and meet you.” He reached for her hand and she dropped the underwear. He closed her fingers over the card, then squeezed her fist in both of his palms. He had big, warm hands. She had never been in the presence of such
enormous hands, let alone been held by them. Her own hand felt protected and threatened at the same time. And her skin! How dark she was!

“Anywhere at all,” he added and was gone.

Latha stooped and picked up the underwear, gave it to Madhayanthi to hold. Then she looked down at the card:
Daniel Katzen-Jones, Public Relations Specialist, WB Asia. 581914.

M
y head hurts. I reach into my handbag for a
Disprin,
but my fingers find the piece of paper from the gentleman instead. I unfurl it:
“Don Mohan Victor Vithanage.”
I wish he were still sitting here, on this train, across from me. I don’t need his help, just his presence. He had a solid presence, that gentleman, tired though he seemed, and solidity is what I need now. The events of the past hour or two have shaken my faith in our future, my children’s and mine. How can this mass murder, the suicide, these things, be anything but bad omens? But what message they carry for me I cannot discern. I unfurl and close, unfurl and close the paper. I wonder if we would be safer if I asked Mr. Vithanage for help. There is his phone number:
“871101.”
But what would I say? I rub my fingers over the numbers, wondering how long it will take for him to reach Colombo after he finishes his visits. I don’t remember what he said. Was he leaving for home in a week or two weeks? Two weeks, I think he said that. I feel even more anxious. Why hadn’t I paid attention? A woman alone, with three children to look after, I should have listened to his offer when he made it, if for no reason than to reserve that option for another day.

“Amma, what is that?” Chooti Duwa asks, next to me, touching the paper. Loku Putha turns his attention to us at the sound of her voice, or perhaps my silence, and finally all three are staring at me. They can tell that I am not as sure as I was when we left. I can see it
in their eyes: they have withdrawn some of their faith in my promise of change, of a better life. They may even welcome the intervention of someone more confident, more capable than I probably seem to them now.

“What is that?” my son asks this time.

“The gentleman gave me his phone number in case we needed help,” I say. I watch his eyes narrow, so slightly, some memory of Siri filling them up, making him judge me for the past, for making it impossible for him to love his own father, for this present; so I add, “But I told him we don’t need any help. We’ll be at my aunt’s soon.”

They turn away from me, one by one, and I tuck the piece of paper into my sari blouse, inside my bra, hiding it from them. Having uttered the words, I am suddenly surer of it: yes, we will be all right.

But not yet.

The train has been creeping through a tunnel as if in mournful regret, or in anticipation of further tragedies. It has seemed tired, and, as a result, the few passengers left seem weary too. Maybe the slowness of the train prompted them to pick it as a possible candidate, or maybe they had simply been waiting for it. The train is stopped, and it fills from end to end with police. I have never seen so many in one place. And I have never seen any who look quite as grim and ruthless as these.

“Get up! Get up! Everybody out of the train!”

And once again, I am back on the shores of Matara, the salt air and the dark skies, the night lit by a single kerosene lamp, listening to Siri talk, his friends talk. I am standing on the fringes of their impassioned circle and letting their words enter my body through each willing pore of my skin, learning their fear, repeating it, memorizing it by heart. I can see again the welts on Siri’s back and on the undersides of his knees, his calves, where the police had beaten him. For nothing. He had done nothing and they had beaten him, screaming, he told me, screaming so loud and asking questions for which he had no answers. It was the police who turned him quiet, who put a stop to those meetings by the boats, who took his friends from him, who ended the life of the one priest I had felt was not
better than I was but simply a human like me, searching for some closer truth.

“Amma! What is happening?” My little one asks me this, but I am too frightened to think, to answer. All I want is to get off the train with my children. Together. Having lived through these past years, having attended the funerals I have, the ones with and without a body to mourn, I know not to get in the way of the police. Sensing my distress, Loku Putha steps forward.

“Let’s get down,” he says. “We’ll find out after we get down!” He hustles Chooti Duwa in front of him. Loku Duwa follows in her usual manner, neither concerned nor unperturbed but something in between, perpetually waiting to be told which emotion to express.

I bend down to pick up our bags, but a policeman raps a baton on the handle of the larger one. “Leave it.” And then, maybe because I look sufficiently harmless or perhaps deserving of a little respect, his voice softens and he says, “We’re checking the train. We need to check all the bags. There’s a rumor of a bomb.”

I am so taken aback that I forget my caution and engage him instead. “On this train?” I ask, amazed. “A bomb? Why would someone put a bomb on this train?”

“Hurry up and get down,” he says, and I am surprised at the sudden change in his tone. So harsh and inconsiderate, this man who could be a brother or a cousin. He averts his gaze and glances at someone behind me. I look back as I follow the children and see a man with many medals and a grand hat, some superior officer, staring at us. I shake my head sideways in understanding and agreement and conciliation, whatever it is they want from me, I make sure all three are apparent in that one gesture. I hurry down the aisle between the seats. My Loku Putha is waiting to help me get down off the train. I don’t need his help, and his offer makes me feel old, and sad.

I hesitate for a moment on the lowest rung, contemplating the scene. There is nowhere to stand, really, but the slight rise of green beside the tracks and the soft red earth of the hill, which seems about to reclaim its connection to the rest of the earth across the railway lines. If no trains passed in a week, it seems, the two sides would
merge and be one again, a steel track running inside the heart of the mountain, unused.

Outside, I linger apart from the others who have dismounted. There are about twenty to thirty of us left now, including our family. We all move with the same slow manner of disbelieving mourners. But I feel different from them. For one thing, I’m the only woman in a Kandyan sari; the others all wear theirs like the women on the estates. There are only two other children: the one who had pushed past me that time when I went searching for food and an infant in the arms of a small, newly rounded woman. Her husband hovers close, a rattan basket, filled with baby-related things that the police have not taken from him, in his hand. I suppose they decided that nobody would plant a bomb near a young family like that.

Someone must have given us directions to move on, because now I see that there is some movement toward the front of the train. “Come,” I say to the children, “we should start walking along with the rest.”

“Amma, I heard that man say that there’s a bomb on the train,” my son says to me.

“Which man?” I ask, buying time. I breathe slowly, trying to still the thudding of my heart.

He points to the man who had helped me earlier, the one with whom I’d walked toward those bodies, not knowing, and who had helped me back to my children afterward. “That one.” He is a little farther along the straggling line that has formed and that we are yet to join.

Loku Duwa asks, “Will our train blow up? How will we get to their house then?”

The little one starts to cry and curls herself into the fall of my sari. I unwrap her and pick her up. She is so light in my arms still. She tucks her face into my neck and lies there, and there is no sound, but I feel the tears slide down my neck. I stroke her hair and kiss her, breathing in the smell of
Pears
baby soap, coconut oil, and an assortment of sweet things: pineapple, bombai mutai, chocolate, and bread.

I coat my voice with the ineffable calm that they need from me
now. “They think someone may have left a bomb on the train and got off, but that doesn’t mean there is one. They just have to check, that is all.”

“How do they know?” Loku Duwa asks.

“Someone gave them a tip,” says her brother. “That’s what he said.”

Chooti Duwa perks up in my arms and wriggles to be set free. I let her go, reluctant to lose the weight of her, those perfumes.

“Aiyya, what’s a tip?” she asks.

“When someone tells the police about something bad before it happens,” he says, “that’s what they call a tip.”

She mouths the new word over and over, rocking back and forth on her feet, seemingly unconcerned with the subject of the tip, the bomb, more enamored now with the notion of secrets. How quickly young children reset their realities. And how quickly they lose the ability to do that. My son, I can tell, has almost given up the habit entirely, and again I feel sad. For not having been wiser, stronger, more courageous, for not having made this same choice when he was still not old enough to understand. Surely it was just as possible then as it is now. What had I waited for? I had always known that there would be no change in our circumstances. Not before Siri, but especially not after, and even less so with his death. And still, I had waited. The first year I was preoccupied with tending to my pregnancy, the free will that she, my unborn daughter, represented to me. Then, I had to keep her safe until she was strong enough to walk, to speak to me. But why had I continued to wait, even after that?

I shake my head at my own foolishness. I had waited until the last fight. The one where he threatened to kill me in my sleep and send my bastard child—that’s what he’d called her—to the hotel owner’s house to be a servant. Those coarse hands gripping my arms, pinching the skin, that voice, slurred with drink and hatred in my ear.

“You know, that large house, with so many people for her to cook and clean for? Where they would beat her, like this, like this, like this…you hear me?”

I had resisted shouting because I never wanted to wake my children up. I always tried to keep it quiet so they would think it was
not so bad, only bad enough to wake up, not so bad that they had to come and see, see this, the ripping and tearing, the struggles, the flailings, the arms over my face, the feet kicking.

“That place…where when she is old enough, you know what they will do to her. What they always do to all the girls who come to work there…”

And I had screamed then and not stopped despite the beating, despite the fists on my face, despite the glimpses I had of my children appearing and disappearing at the doorway, their fearful faces, their impotent presence. I had screamed until she flew into the room propelled by her love for me, some instinct, also, for her own survival, her fingers clawing at the beast, screaming in her little girl voice,
Get off my mother! Get off her!
and all the rest of the words I don’t know where she had heard or learned or known to keep hidden until then. Those words just before I saw it: the sight of her body hurled so effortlessly across the room, the sound of it hitting the wall, her silence.

Why had I waited for that? Hadn’t I known it would come? He had watched me without expression when I picked her up off the floor and ran all the way to the dispensary, not caring how I looked, not caring that my older children trailed behind, my Loku Duwa whimpering now and again. As soon as her stitches were taken out, we would leave, I had told them. But I had waited longer, waited for her hair to grow back, for the scar to heal and become a smooth ridge under my searching fingers, my guilt looking for it on her head each night until she learned to fall asleep to that touch, for her birthday to draw near and then pass. For a final visit to our temple…

My son’s voice again. “Amma, look! They’re taking all the bags…” And then, there’s an explosion. A sound that is a boom more than an eruption, held in and made doubly loud by the echoing hills. Once more I am surrounded by screaming people, and I can’t tell which came first, the screams or the blast. I scoop up my Chooti Duwa, and we start running now, behind the others who have a head start on us, along the tracks toward the front engine. I look back and see the center of the train shatter outward, almost like fireworks, colored chips flying everywhere. I picture lettered metal wedging itself into that
yielding earth. I picture scars left. And twisted seats and dead bodies. But no, there can be no dead bodies; we all got off the train! A sudden happiness darts across my chest. All this passes so quickly through my mind, in the time it takes to catch up to the other passengers, to keep pace until we arrive in the blessed openness beyond the engine, to the train tracks, which afford us all a clean platform for our feet.

The police run toward the center of the train, to the shattered tracks and debris from the innards of the crushed compartments. Through the smoke I see them carry a few people out; they seem to be alive, still. I shade my eyes and try to focus on the activity, but nothing more is clear. Just that there are injured people, that the train is spewing smoke and now, suddenly, as if in a rage of its own, gusts of fire. The policemen step away from the train, blown back by the heat and intensity of the flames. The captain in the hat with all those badges shouts something, and two policemen run part of the way toward us, waving their arms and yelling. I can’t hear the words, but I join the crowd when everybody turns and continues their journey farther down the track and away from the front of the train, too, where we had gathered.

Nobody seems to know what we should do, but eventually our steps become slower until we’re simply shifting from foot to foot, looking back at the train. I listen to the outraged hiss of water touching fire as the policemen pass buckets of water to one another down an oddly, given the circumstances, orderly line stretching from the blast site back along the train and over the hill to some unseen spring. I picture a hose such as I had seen along the tracks in some places, reaching down through time-thickened trunks of tall trees and low bushes to spill clear and icy mountain water onto flat slabs of rock where travelers perch to catch it, their skirts, saris, and sarongs clenched between their knees. I feel thirsty. Unbearably thirsty. I swallow spit, but it is thick and unsatisfactory.

Around me, the crowd is settling. We look at one another and then away, eavesdrop on discussions, contribute a word or two, and slowly become united in the way people do at scenes such as this: bomb blasts, accidents, a hanging suicide in the village. We become a joint entity, a single family. There is a sort of solace in these measures
we take; someone holds her baby for a moment to relieve the new mother when the father walks away for a brief absence and returns with a sheepish smile, which tells us all that somewhere in that sundried grass along the track is a patch of wet grass. Other men nod and smile at him, then drift away themselves. The older women exchange glances that communicate their feelings about relieving themselves in public, perhaps their wish that they could, too. I join them in the quick succor we gain from strangers, in our trust that when disaster strikes, we are all family. Someone brings out a packet of
Marie
biscuits and passes it around. Again, the older women decline, and the young people eat. My children are delighted, and, noticing their smiles, the man who helped me before gives his two biscuits to my girls.