A Disobedient Girl (25 page)

“Loku Putha, see if there is an easy path to get to the road,” I tell him, after we have walked far enough to put several bends in the tracks behind us. I balance on the rails and watch him, the bags at our feet, the girls, too, with their faces upturned as we wait to see what he might be able to find. I am glad that he has proved to be responsible enough to be trusted alone, young enough to be as sure-footed as he is. I have thought a lot about my children, learned a lot about them during this journey of ours, difficult though it has been. Loku Putha slips a few times as he clambers up the side of the hill, but I am confident that he can make it to the top, and I am proved right when he disappears from view.

After a few minutes, the girls get tired of watching for him. They wander away to examine the area immediately around us, the foliage, the dried mud. I watch her as Loku Duwa opens each of our bottles and confirms that they are empty, pressing her eye to the opening and then shaking the last drops into her mouth, her head flung back. When I look down, I see that Chooti Duwa is hacking with a stone at the side of a huge, red-brown anthill that seems to grow out of the side of the mountain. It has two uneven round holes. Snakes.

“Stop that!” I tell her.

“Why?” she asks, still carving out a picture of some sort on the side of the anthill.

“Because that’s where snakes live,” I tell her.

“Can I look inside, Amma? To see if there is a snake?”

“No! Just get up and come here.”

She drops her stone reluctantly but continues to squat next to the anthill. I keep watching her to make sure that she doesn’t put her face up to one of the holes or, worse, put her hand down it to see if she can feel a snake. I can tell that she wants to by the way she sits. Her age and lack of experience make her unafraid, of unexplained journeys, of derailments on account of bombs, of snakes. She gives up when she sees that I will not look away. She stands and dusts her palms on the edge of her dress. Red dirt flies off her hands and settles on the dress, and now it is filthy. I sigh. I open my bag and take out the dress
that the pregnant girl gave me. I take off the dress Chooti Duwa is wearing, shake it to get rid of the dirt, and stuff it into the bag. I put her in the new white one. It is a little large for her, but at least it is clean, and she looks sweet in it. The only clean one in our group.

“Amma bought me a new dress!” she tells her older sister in a singsong.

“It’s not new. Someone gave it to me to give to you,” I say, smoothing the skirt.

“It is new. It is a new dress for me,” she insists.

“Promise me that you will never put your hand into an anthill like that,” I say to her, holding her chin in my hand and forcing her to look at me. “Chooti Duwa, promise me. It is not a joke. Snakes are dangerous and many of them are poisonous and you are too small to know the difference.”

She looks defiant. “Snakes are beautiful.”

“Where have you seen snakes?”

“At school, in the teacher’s book.”

“Snakes in books are beautiful,” I say, stroking the thick hair gathering in waves at the nape of her neck. I should let her grow her hair, now that she is older. I unfasten the two silver-colored hair clips shaped like fish, comb the hair with my fingers, such beautiful hair, like her father’s. I put the clips back in so there are no stray strands covering her eyes. “Snakes in real life are poisonous and can kill you.”

“There’s Aiyya!” Loku Duwa shouts, and we have to abandon the discussion.

I watch my son scramble, then slide down the hill toward us. He’s smiling. “I found the road, Amma,” he says. “It’s not far from here.”

“Stay there,” I tell him and pick up both bags, hold them for a moment, and then put them down. Of course, I cannot climb the hill with the bags.

“Amma ohoma inna,”
he yells to me, and we both smile. “Stay there. I’ll come down and help you with the bags.”

It takes us a long time to climb out of the shallow valley, through which the train tracks meander, to the crest of the hill. First I hoist the little one up so Loku Putha can help her establish her footing.

Then I do the same with Loku Duwa, which requires more effort. Then I throw my handbag up, and the children pass it along to Chooti Duwa, now farthest ahead. Next I heave the heavier bag over to my son, who hugs it, panting, proud of his superior agility. Somehow he seems to be able to manage to climb and haul that bag. For my part, I am forced to hitch my sari up and tie it around me at knee length like a man’s sarong so I won’t trip. Even then I fail. I take off my slippers and throw them, one at a time, toward the top of the hill, hoping that they will land somewhere in our path. Halfway up I lose the bag I am carrying, and it rolls back toward the tracks.

“You go, Amma. I will climb back down and get it,” Loku Putha says.

“We should just leave the bag there,” I say in exasperation. “All that’s in it are drink bottles and other things we can manage without.” But he doesn’t listen. By the time I reach the top, where the girls are waiting, he is already halfway down the slope. We are all out of breath, me especially. Still, I shade my eyes with my palm and look around. From this vantage, I can see the road winding through the hills below. I see one of the half buses that serve these parts and a lorry, both traveling away from us. They look like toy vehicles. Far below in the distance, I see a red car coming toward us.

L
atha had never gone anywhere in a car with Daniel, so it seemed all the more egregious that the first time she did so, and in such a clean and nice-smelling car painted in such a bright color, it was in such somber silence.

No, he had never taken her anywhere in his fancy red car. Not even that time not so long ago when she stayed the night. Despite how happy he had said he was that she was able to stay, when she finally arrived, the weekend had not been that different from any other time when she had visited. She had been given tea with which he had served the packet of
Lemon Puff
biscuits she had brought with her, she had looked at books and photographs, she had eaten unfamiliar food, and she had slept with him. On Saturday night she had drunk sweet and heady drinks that had made her feel dizzy, and yes, that had been a departure from the norm. And it had been fun when Daniel played music and made her dance around the living room, even though she hadn’t known what he expected her to do, and after a few minutes of holding on to her hands and tugging her this way and that he had eventually given up and sat down. He hadn’t been upset, she didn’t think, he had just smiled and patted the seat beside him; and for dinner he had served food that had been delivered from outside.

“This is Thai food, Latha-girl,” he had said, opening round plastic containers with transparent lids and rectangular boxes made of
rigiform and packed with flavored rice with peas and carrots and bits of onion and flaked chili and fat, slobbery noodles unlike the
Harischandra
kind that she cooked at home.

“Thai food,” she had repeated, doing what she usually did when she felt something was required of her, verbally, but she wasn’t sure what.

“Thai food is from Thailand,” Daniel had said, then paused in his serving to point out the two statues he had of the Buddha. “Those are from Thailand, from when I lived there,” he had said and sighed. “I liked Thailand a lot,” he said, after a long silence that made her think that he would rather be there than here.

She had gazed at those heads again this morning before they left, Daniel opening and closing the door to the house behind her, then opening and closing the door of the car for her. The heads were so different from the Buddha statues in her country. These had crowns, and the tops were almost as high as the heads themselves, with concentric circles that grew smaller and smaller until they tapered off in sharp points. Like the cups of
Angelina
bras. They had given her no solace.

Yes, that night had been different, she thought now, the drinking, the music, the food. But the highlight, the one thing for which she had been truly grateful, was the experience of going to sleep in that colorful bed, cozy under the blankets and safe from the icy, air-conditioned outside, and then waking up with somebody next to her. And for once she had not minded that Daniel was foreign, odd, unknowable, and not Gehan. He was a man, and there was his arm, flung around her body the same way it had been flung in his sleep the night before. She had lain in the meditative quiet of the early morning—having woken at five the way she did at Thara’s, an hour earlier than anyone else there, even the houseboy—with a deep sense of pleasure. She had lain there trying to imagine what it would be like to do that every day. To go to sleep with a man and wake up with him. What it would be like to care so little about this moment that she could simply slide away from such an embrace and go to the kitchen and make herself tea, open a window, sit by herself, not wait, as she had done, barely breathing, enjoying every second of that one morning. What would
it be like to curse and scream at a man as Thara did so regularly, and still have him come home every night to climb into the same bed?

“Are you okay?” Daniel asked now, next to her, making the humidity and buzz of the city jar against that remembered moment.

She nodded and fiddled with the edge of her blouse.

“It’s the best thing,” he said. He glanced at her and patted her thigh, then returned his hands to the steering wheel.

Yes, it was the best thing. He had said that several times. He had said it for two whole weeks, until she had agreed. She had agreed because she had seen, finally, that it was the best thing for him, and if that was the case, then there was no option for her but to agree. Agree, not only to his persuasions to rid her body of a second indictment of her character, but also to rid herself of this man, who, she now realized, had been exactly as she had once imagined him to be: like Ajith, just lighter-skinned.

Outside, the city passed by slowly. Daniel was not accustomed to driving his own car and was clearly unhappy about having to do it at all, but alerting the driver to their predicament was out of the question, he had said. He cursed intermittently under his breath, and even though she could see the sources of his irritations—the scooter taxis that veered without warning inches from his elbow; the erratic pedestrians who darted past the hood of the car like the colored fish among the artificial fronds of the fish tank he had installed recently in the dining room; the buses that huffed and snorted their way to the front by sheer dint of overpowering fumes; the wall upon wall of posters protesting this, condemning that, advocating something else over the occasional photographs that still remained of the fallen trade towers by the Colombo harbor that had been blown apart by suicide bombers in February of that year; the way all of it must have reminded him of the chaos that was her country—despite all that, she could not shake the feeling that some of the curses were directed at her. The absence of concern for her sensibilities indicated the presence of antipathy. Simple as that.

Part of her wished that she had never told Daniel she was pregnant; part of her knew there had been no option but to do so. Who else could she have told? How else would she have had a chance to
be a mother, a real mother, with a real child, no matter its color? But after a great deal of quiet between tea drinking and hand-holding and little else, he had finally said it.

“I think we should arrange for you to have an abortion.”

Abortion. This was a new word in her vocabulary. It sounded so disconnected from the physical process of being pregnant, carrying a child. He had to show her what he meant with his hands, an ugly gesture that looked like he was washing her vagina for her and throwing away the water. He even had a sound, a sibilant hiss, to go with it. In her language, the process was referred to as
nathikireema,
an end to being. How much closer that was to the truth of it all: an end to being.

“It’s not so bad,” he had said. “It’s very quick. You’ll be in and out within a few hours. I’ll take you myself.” She had forced herself to feel better that he hadn’t snapped his fingers.

Odd how a man who knew so little about her country, who had treated her like she was an ordinary girl and believed all her little lies and the big ones too, who had seemed so charmed by her and so happy with himself, would know where to go to rip babies out of the bodies of pregnant women. Maybe that was how he remained so happy. He knew how to do away with complications. He lived easily in the web that was her country, moving around it like a spider. No wonder he liked it here. She wished she knew who caught the spiders. Which made her think of God. God, who seemed so real to virtuous people like Leelakka and gave her that look of serenity, that peace which made her voice so soft, her needs so few. No gods for her, Latha thought, for women like her who wanted things from people, from men like Daniel or Ajith or even Gehan.

“We’ll be there soon,” Daniel said.

Again, she nodded. They had left the Galle Road, with its hubbub and horns, and turned down a residential lane. She didn’t recognize the roads, only the feeling of the spaces: it was Colombo 7. Somewhere close to Thara’s home and also the Vithanages’, surely. She cringed low in her seat. That would be the end of it all, to see Mr. Vithanage now. This would be more than even he could forgive, she was sure of it.

“You don’t have to hide. This is a private appointment,” Daniel said, smiling at her good-naturedly. “Nobody else will be there.”

What was it about men that made them believe they knew what women thought? She had never paid much attention to Daniel, content as he had been with her occasional visits. She had not been attentive to his character, or his misunderstanding of her, except in the last month, when she had needed to gauge the extent of his fondness for her, to evaluate how much his good humor was tied to her arrivals and departures. And he had fared poorly under her scrutiny.

“Is it a doctor?” she asked, finally.

“Absolutely! He’s a specialist in doing this, in doing abortions, and he’s expecting us. I’ve already paid for everything. You don’t have to worry about a thing. You caught it so early that it’s just a womb wash, really. Not a big fuss. That’s what the doc said.”

She didn’t even try to look grateful. It wasn’t his fault, really. He could hardly get married to her. But with all the money a foreigner like him must have and the private life he told her he led, surely he could have found a way for her to keep the child. If not with him, then somewhere else? Somewhere she could stay and still remain involved in the lives of her girls, so she could escape being banished as she had been before, for Thara surely would banish her if she knew. And a second child! How could she stand to lose another one? She felt panic rising in her body, and she turned to Daniel and clutched at his sleeve. He swerved the car to the side of the road, scraping the underside against the pavement, and reached past her to open the door. She hung her head out, but all that came out of her was a thin stream of transparent bile. And when she turned back in, there was a quick flash of disgust in his blue eyes before he handed her some tissues from the box between them. It was a look that matched the voice when he had said, “What’s the matter? Oh, Jesus. Are you going to be sick?” before he stopped the car.

“Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus…,” she said aloud, after she had wiped her mouth and thrown the crumpled tissue on the floor in flagrant disregard of courtesy.

He laughed. “That’s the Hail Mary! I thought you were Buddhist!”

“I am Buddhist,” she said. But sometimes Jesus seemed more
accessible to her. To yell at the traffic with, like Daniel did. Or to invoke with words overlaid by implication with a sort of curse in moments such as this: to speak of wombs and fruit and death as the father of her child drove her to wash it out of her body. Womb wash. Wasn’t that what he had said? As though she were a vehicle or a vegetable, a pathola perhaps, some sort of watery gourd that had been muddied in the rain. There was nothing clean about what they were going to do to her. She could tell that much from how quickly he had arranged it all. If anything was being washed, it was his hands.

He turned down a gravel path that led to a house hidden behind a wall. The black, wrought-iron gates swung open as if he had uttered some magic words. And again, Daniel grinned at her. “See? I told you they were expecting us.”

How important he must be in his world to make arrangements such as these with local doctors. She prayed that the doctor was a woman; then she remembered that Daniel had said
he.
Of course. What woman would build a house like this, with gateposts topped by ugly concrete animals and bright electric lanterns, with money earned through such butchery?

Daniel parked the car and came around to help her out. She didn’t need any help walking; it made her feel managed to have him hover there, although she might as well not have made such a point of walking forward by herself for, after that first moment, Daniel seemed to have no problem maintaining a particularly meaningful distance between them.

“Doctor Sir will see you in a moment,” a servant man said to Daniel after they had been served tall glasses of passion fruit juice—freshly squeezed, she could tell from the quality of the pulp—on the cool veranda.

There were large palms and thick-leaved begonias around the front that shaded them from the neat gardens beyond. The plants had been recently watered, so that even the slightest breeze that blew through them was refreshingly cool. She shivered suddenly, a living-walking-over-her-grave shudder. Maybe it was just the cold drink. Or what was about to happen to her. She looked at Daniel without
seeming to. He sat with his legs crossed, the picture of decency in his khaki longs and maroon cotton shirt, a leather belt. She wondered absently about the ironing. Who ironed those shirts, and how often were they delivered to him? She had visited him a dozen times maybe during the past year and a half, and she had never opened a cupboard. Odd that she had never thought to explore, or even to ask. Looking back, she realized that she had asked so few questions. There was so much more she had hoped to know, things she would need for the life she imagined for herself. But time had stretched out interminably then, the future holding many other hours like those few she had spent in his company.

Daniel looked up at her and smiled. It was more like a grimace. “It’s quite hot here, isn’t it? Even though we’re in the shade.” He gripped the edges of his cane chair and pushed himself up, swiveled his head around, and peered through the foliage. “Must be that high wall. It blocks the air.” He eased himself back down and tugged at the top of his shirt, trying to cool himself.

Latha didn’t feel hot. She felt cold. “Use a magazine to fan,” she said.

“Yes, right,” he said and looked about for one.

“The newspaper can be used also,” she said, eyeing the daily paper beside her with its big red title and slogan. Like it was painted with a thick brush. She was still getting her tongue around the word
circulation
when the doctor came rushing in, preceded by the sound of quick yet authoritative footsteps. He walked straight over to Daniel, who had stood up, and took his hand in both of his, as if he needed to be comforted or reassured or something. He didn’t look at Latha, though she had stood up, and after a few moments she sat back down.

“Good morning, Daniel, good morning. Sorry, I was a bit tied up. After a long time, isn’t that so? Last time was where? That Super Bowl party at
The Blue
? How are you?”