On Sal Mal Lane (10 page)

“Kala Madam only gives private classes to children who come in cars from outside, not lane children, but,” and here he cast an approving look at Mrs. Herath’s Kandyan sari and measured its grace with a sweep of his palm to take in the air between her shoulders and her feet, “for Herath Madam, I think she will make an exception. Definitely. I, Lucas, can promise. I can go and ask if you like,” he said, trying to add further value to his clearly welcome role as the primary source of useful information. He twitched his face from side to side and up and down in a birdlike manner, trying to nudge Mrs. Herath into giving him the job.

They were standing outside in the Heraths’ garden, and Mrs. Herath swiveled slightly away from Lucas and then turned back to him. “No, that’s okay, Lucas,” she said, without the Aiyya at the end. Mrs. Herath had never fully absorbed her husband’s socialist tendencies though she was not averse to acknowledging a good deed when it was obvious. “You have been of great use to us already, I am sure you know. This is very good news for my children. I will go and speak with her. What is her name?”

“Miss Kala Niles. But one thing,” he said, clearing his throat, “Tamil people, Catholics, I have to tell you that.” Lucas turned down the corners of his mouth while keeping an eye on Mrs. Herath to see if this mattered to her. It seemed it did not, and so he brightened. “Mr. Niles is now retired, but used to be a Government Agent. Always wore white, always walked very straight down this lane to catch the bus. He only drove his Morris Minor to take Mrs. Niles somewhere. Tamil, yes, but very decent old gentle man.” Lucas stared at his feet for a few seconds and frowned. “But he never walked up the lane, though, now that I think of it, only down the lane. Everybody up the lane walked down to talk to him. Very odd. All these years, and never up the lane!” he exclaimed and looked up at Mrs. Herath as if expecting her to explain it all to him.

Mrs. Herath had her own theories about the implications of walking up to greet people and walking down toward them or to leave a place, but she knew that, for a man of Lucas’s disposition and circumstances, her thoughts would do more harm than good, so she simply murmured assent and said, “That is indeed very odd, but if he’s a good man it doesn’t matter, does it?”

Lucas smiled. “No, you are right. If he’s good, we won’t worry. I don’t worry. You don’t have to worry either. I promise it. No worries from Mr. Niles.”

“I will go this afternoon, then,” Mrs. Herath said and, after some consideration of all the assistance the old man had provided as well as with a view to retaining his loyalties, a while later she sent him on his way with a five-rupee note adorned with pale snakes and birds, a note pressed into his palm so quickly that the transaction might never have taken place, their eyes meeting and then fleeing to opposite corners of the doorway as they chatted about her garden and the wisdom of cutting down a flower-producing Asoka tree, a pruning that was still in her plans.

Mrs. Herath took all her children with her when she went to visit the Niles family because they were her strongest advocates. Unbeknownst to her, the younger Heraths were incubating assertiveness, but, for now, Mrs. Herath continued to be soothed by what was on the surface. Reliably well behaved, they went everywhere with their parents, even to the dullest or most boisterous of engagements, where they sat in a row, flipped open a borrowed or found book, and began to read from the moment they arrived until the moment they left. This was a more innocent time in their circles, very few having ventured abroad to learn otherwise, so such behavior was considered, by other parents, a gift to be coveted, something to be emulated by their own children rather than a veneer of functionalism that intimated of difficulties yet to come. For now, as a way of disarming an unmarried thirty-seven-year-old woman who lived with her parents and had definite ideas about child rearing, they were unassailable.

“Kala, if I may call you that,” Mrs. Herath began, a little taken aback by the speed with which they had been ushered from the front door, through the veranda and to the living room, the bottle of mango cordial she had brought been taken from her, the plastic covers whisked off the living room furniture, and they were seated on the cushioned settee and matching dark-blue chairs that all squeaked in the same key. “I have been thrilled to hear the music coming from your home and felt I had to say hello to the pianist. The neighbors told me it was the young daughter of the house.”

Kala Niles smiled with a coy primness. “Oh, I’m not so good, not so young either!” she laughed. She fingered the thick long braid that lay over her bosom and reached her hips and then tossed it over her shoulder with a certain degree of gaiety that did not go with her sensible black shoes and her sensible bottle-green skirt and white pin-tucked blouse.

“No, Mama? I’m not that young,” she said to the slightly hunched lady who had come out of the kitchen wiping her hands on a faded pink-checked serviette. She put the cloth down, pried loose the fall of her sari from where she had tucked it into her waistband, and smiled and nodded through the introductions. Mrs. Herath noted with some interest that Mrs. Niles’s solid-colored yellow sari was made of good-quality cut lawn fabric, and not the kind usually chosen by women who wore their saris in the Indian fashion. Had it been a mistake or a deliberate choice? Mistake, she decided, taking in the haphazard way in which Mrs. Niles had draped her sari, the pleats uneven, the fall barely reaching her hips. Mrs. Herath smiled indulgently at her new neighbor.

“Quite young, she is,” Mrs. Niles asserted, after everybody had sat down again, gesturing toward her daughter, whose few gray hairs had been dismissed as a fluke, by Mrs. Niles herself, just that morning as she plucked them away with a pair of tweezers. “Kala is a piano teacher at St. Margaret’s and now ready to settle down. Good at embroidery too. See these lace curtains? All done by her!”

Kala Niles flushed. Her mouth twitched in various directions as though looking for a place to settle. She squeezed her eyes several times instead and smiled, her lips stretching so far that her cheeks became taut. The children watched these facial tics with interest. Clearly there was more to Kala Niles than had first seemed apparent from the well-played classical notes that floated out of her window each evening. They couldn’t see themselves, but they would not have been surprised to be told that their heads were cocked at identical forty-five-degree angles, presenting to Kala Niles an impression at once disconcerting in its undiluted intensity and soothing in its chord like symmetry.

“So, Aunty, these are the children?” she asked Mrs. Herath.

Mrs. Herath, who had let her eyes wander over to the pale, peach walls and the scenes of English pastoral life that were framed and hung in the living room, swallowed hard. Flattery was expected on the part of a supplicant, and certainly, in this instance, she was here as the devotee, but to be referred to as
aunty
by a woman her own age required a sacrifice she was not sure she wished to make. She glanced at her children, at their compliant hands, their variously elongated artistic fingers. She sighed, looked up at Kala Niles, and smiled with a slow open-shut of her eyelids to communicate the burden and grace of motherhood. “Yes, these are the children. Suren, Rashmi, Nihil, and Devi. They are twelve, ten, nine, and the youngest is seven and a half.”

“Must be busy, no?” Kala Niles said, sounding as though she hoped this were the case. She had not yet heard Suren play, not yet turned her home into a haven for the neighborhood children, and so she was only what she had been thus far: a usually pleasant woman who was, nonetheless, given to the irritations and little cruelties that are born of boredom and being single in a world where marriage was an expected, if somewhat Herodotean, digression on your way to the grave.

“Yes, but you can see, they are so well behaved I don’t have to worry about a thing with them,” Mrs. Herath said, without thinking. She recollected herself quickly. “But, you are right, not for me the gay life of a single girl like you!” she said, and laughed as heartily as she could, registering not so much the satisfaction in Kala Niles’s face but rather the curious interest of her own children, who had never heard her be this obviously false before.

Kala Niles felt up to making a few concessions in the wake of this last remark. “Your children seem very nice. Much nicer than the Bolling kids down the road. Those ones are just no good. Nicer even than the Silva boys. Have you met them yet? That Mohan, particularly, I get a very bad feeling about him. Something a little hard about both of them, don’t you agree?”

Mrs. Herath would have liked to agree, but she was practiced in the art of Setting an Example for children, the ones she taught at school and the ones at home. She fell back on a slight shrug of her shoulders (to let Kala Niles know that she did agree), and an apologetic, “Well, we haven’t really got to know them yet,” (to communicate to her children the value of refraining from judgment).

Kala Niles pressed on with anecdotes about the various children who lived down Sal Mal Lane, from the worst, Sonna, to the quietest, the Tisseras’ son, and even a few who had once lived there but had moved away.

“One time, I saw that Mohan imitating Raju from behind all the way down the street,” she said. “And that Sonna, never up to any good. If you see him, you can be sure that he has just done something wrong or is about to. Bolling girls, too, like ragamuffins, no?”

The children listened, curious about the stories, reconciling what they heard with what they knew of the children that they had already met.

“Have some tea,” Mrs. Niles said, appearing again though nobody had seen her leave. “Children must be thirsty. Have. Have.” She picked up a Maliban lemon puff and held it out to Devi. She complied, and her siblings followed her example, helping themselves to biscuits and balancing their cups of tea on their laps without spilling a sip.

The return of her mother seemed to agitate Kala Niles, whose voice now took on its former sharpness. “What do the children do, Aunty? Boys must be playing cricket, no?” she inquired at last, getting to this question of extracurriculars when it was impossible to delay inviting the request she knew was coming.

Mrs. Herath took a sip of tea to clear her throat and then launched into her sales pitch. “Oh, they are involved in all kinds of things. All of them take elocution classes, and the older two play chess . . .”

“Chess?” Kala Niles exclaimed with a slip of outrage under the awe. “Such young children. Must be brainy. Are you brainy?” Kala Niles asked Rashmi, who shrugged noncommittedly and looked sideways at Suren.

“We just like chess,” Suren said mildly. “Our father taught us.” He liked Kala Niles, not because of what she said but because of the elegance of her hands, which sat, folded, in her lap. The way she held them implied reverence for their work.

“And the other two?” Mrs. Niles inquired, more impressed with every bit of new information she was gathering for the price of tea and biscuits, and eager for more, particularly as related in the crisply articulated English that Mrs. Herath used, all the
t
’s hit and
o
’s rounded in a way that slowed her speech and made her sound regal.

“They are also quite creative,” Mrs. Herath said. “Nihil and Devi are constantly inventing new games. They put on concerts—”

“I direct and produce them,” Nihil interrupted his mother. Interrupting was not something usually tolerated in the Herath household, but under the guise of enhancing a narrative being related by an adult it was permissible, even welcome. Mrs. Herath smiled warmly at him.

“Ah? You direct them, darling?” Mrs. Niles said, charmed. “So talented.”

“Odd, no? The older three have names beginning with the soft sounds,
su, ra,
and
ni,
but not the youngest. She got the hard sound. Why? Couldn’t find an appropriate one?” Kala Niles said, using her voice to take the venerating wind out of her mother’s sails.

“Of course
you
would notice, with your ear for music!” Mrs. Herath said, trying not to rise to the bait. “The first three were fortunate, and the
akshara
that were found for them by the astrologer were the softer ones, as you say. But the youngest was born on the seventh of July and had a different sound,
de,
which is why we named her that way.”

“Seventh of July? Unlucky date, no? What is that local saying?” Kala Niles pretended to think hard. “About how children born on the seventh of July will have nothing but misfortune?”

“
Chee,
Kala. Mustn’t say things like that in front of the little one!” Mrs. Niles reprimanded.

Kala Niles was not to be stopped. “Death, even, I have heard,” she continued. “Remember, Mama? Your cousin’s daughter, unlucky her whole life and then died in a car accident? Remember her?” She turned to face Mrs. Herath. “Just nineteen years old she was, about to get married too. And not so long ago, in the slums past the bridge, in the Elakandiya, a little boy died from cholera. Born in July on the seventh. So many stories I have heard. What
is
that saying? You know what I’m talking about, right? Oh yes,
jooli hathay mala keliyay.
You know what it means, Aunty? July seventh terrible tragedy—”

“Kala!” Mrs. Niles said and smacked her daughter on her shoulder. She turned to Mrs. Herath. “All nonsense. There are always people who come up with these superstitions. Only some,” and she turned back to her daughter as she said this, “only some
foolish
ones believe such tales.”

Mrs. Herath squared her shoulders but allowed a mellow note into her voice, which fell, soothing in its ebb and flow, into the room. “Oh, don’t worry, Mrs. Niles. We aren’t a superstitious family. Why, Nihil’s birthday is on the ides of March! A most unfortunate date, according to the Romans.”

Kala Niles felt a strange and delightful prickling in her stomach as she pressed on, ignoring the sharp pain in her shoulder and aiming for what she could tell was a fear lurking just beneath that serene voice.