On Sal Mal Lane (16 page)

“She needs to practice more,” Mr. Niles said, gesturing slightly toward the inner room from which the music escaped, startling Nihil. “And you need to think about the things you know so you can tell me when you come back next week.”

How did Mr. Niles know that he could sense what the future held? Nihil mulled over this question as he walked back home alone after his own lesson. Did it show on his face? Had his older brother or sister told Mr. Niles of the way his fears overwhelmed him? What exactly had they said? He was so deep in thought that he walked past his house and almost to the end of the road and would have kept on walking had Sonna not stopped him.

“Goin’ to buy bread?” Sonna asked Nihil. Did such civil words spring to his lips because first his misshapen uncle and then his idiot sisters had been embraced by the Heraths? Did Sonna imagine that there was room in that circle for him too? “Nihil, no? Younger one? Goin’ to buy bread?”

Nihil had never gone to buy bread in his life and with his head full of Mr. Niles’s question, he did not understand, at first, what Sonna was talking about. He cocked his head and considered what Sonna had said.

“Bread?” he finally asked.

“Yeah men, bread.
Paan!
” And Sonna laughed, a little awkwardly.

“I don’t have any bread,” Nihil told him.

If Sonna had not been wearing a shirt over his jeans, Nihil may have been frightened by the sight, up close, of the skull and cross bones drawn into his forearm in ballpoint pen and the blood-dripping head held by its hair in a fist which an acquaintance of his had painted onto his entire back using
mehendi,
stealing the henna from his own sister. But all Nihil could see was Sonna looking simply unkempt and a little rakish, asking him about bread.

Sonna’s smile left his face, albeit slowly, as though regretting both its own disappearance and its having ventured forth. “You laughin’ at me?” Sonna asked.

“No, I’m not laughing,” Nihil said. “You asked if I have bread. I don’t have bread.”

“I din’ ask if you
have
bread. I asked if you are goin’ to
buy
bread,” Sonna clarified.

Nihil, now fully within the conversation, smiled disarmingly. “Oh! I didn’t hear you properly. I was thinking about something else.” He ran his fingers through his hair sheepishly. “I was on my way home and I didn’t even realize that I had passed the gate and walked all the way here.”

He looked back up the road, at the distance he had walked. All the way down his quiet street, its cul-de-sac and Mr. Niles’s one barely driven car keeping it that way, safe for pedestrians and safe for children like him, all the way past the edge of Kala Niles’s hedges, past his mother’s garden anchored at each corner that faced the road with her new flamboyant and her red-fruited jambu tree, all of which were no longer visible from where he stood, past Raju’s house and past the Silvas’ compound with its araliya at one end and its cane and bark fence filled to capacity with shrubs, past the Bollings’ long line of aluminum and almost past the Bin Ahmeds’ house. He looked back at Sonna, amazement on his face.

“Good thing you stopped me. Otherwise I might have kept on walking all the way to the main road!” A bus rounded the corner at a tear, its exhaust belching fumes, and after it passed, Nihil said, “Imagine? I might have even got hit by a bus! Good thing you were there.”

What grace there is to give if only the givers knew that they had the privilege of bestowing it. What grace is often given without intention.

Good thing you stopped me. Good thing you were there.
The word
good
had never been applied to Sonna. Nobody had thanked him for anything he had ever said or done. No thanks had been deserved, but, on some long-ago occasion, before he had developed the knots and twists that hurt him from within, surely he had deserved one word of kindness? Sonna frowned and pressed his lips together to quieten the odd softening he felt within him. He stared at Nihil, who was still shaking his head at his own foolishness and smiling, now glancing at the main road where the bus had gone, now looking back at Sonna. There he stood, a good boy from a good home where doing nothing was a choice, not a predicament. A boy who was coming from a piano lesson on his way to a house where he did not have to be sent to dodge buses and drunkards on the way to buy the cheaper bread.
Good thing you stopped me. Good thing you were there.
Sonna squared his shoulders and strode up to Nihil, who stood a head shorter than him, still holding on to his
Easy Piano Sonatas
and
Music Theory Workbook
and his freshly sharpened black-and-yellow-striped Staedtler pencil and his soft Staedtler eraser.

He placed his hands on either side of Nihil’s shoulders and bent down. “Don’ walk like that again,” he said. “Nex’ time what if I’m not here? You might go straight an’ hit the bus. Thinkin’ an’ walkin’ you cannot do at the same time.” He ruffled Nihil’s hair and straightened up.

Nihil, his hair now disheveled, grinned. “I know. I know,” he said. He looked at his sandals then looked up at Sonna. “I can say things backward,” he said, wanting to reward Sonna for his narrow escape.

“Backward? Why?”

“‘
Kced gninrub eht no doots yob eht,’”
Nihil said. “That means, ‘the boy stood on the burning deck.’”

“Why he’s standin’ like that?” Sonna asked, leaning back and crossing his arms over his chest. He pulled his chin into his neck and looked skeptical.

“It’s a poem about a boy who drowned with his burning ship because his father couldn’t hear him. ‘Casabianca.’”

“Tell again.”

“‘
Kced gninrub eht no doots yob eht.’
Here, I’ll write it for you. Then you’ll see.” Nihil handed his books to Sonna, flipped to the back of the first one, and tore out a scrap of paper. Balancing it on the stack in Sonna’s hands, his head bowed, he wrote in capital letters, KCED GNINRUB EHT NO DOOTS YOB EHT. Then he handed the paper to Sonna.

“What to do with this?” Sonna asked.

“Nothing. Just keep it,” Nihil said. And then because such meetings were not unusual in his life, nor momentous, he turned to go.

Sonna did not know if he wanted Nihil to stay. Did not know what they might have talked about had he lingered a while longer. And most of all, he did not know what he could say to make Nihil stay. So he just called out, “Be careful nex’ time!” as Nihil half turned and waved.

Jimmy Bolling only heard those words as he approached the door to his house, swearing about something. By the time he came out, Nihil had broken into a run. He watched Nihil for a few moments, then turned to Sonna and said, “You pick someone your own age to fight with. Why are you pickin’ small fry like that?”

Sonna said nothing. He put the piece of paper in his pocket and went back inside to lie down and think about boys on burning decks, about Nihil, about himself as an older boy with the wisdom to guide children like the Heraths.

That night at dinner, while everybody chattered about school and friends as they passed around warm loaves of steamed bread and dipped their fingers in fish curry and sambol, Nihil was quiet, keeping a secret from his siblings for the first time. He was too afraid to mention that he had escaped being hit by a bus, and there was no way to speak of Sonna and his good work without referring to the circumstances. In private, while he did not tell Devi the exact details of the story (he substituted some unknown boy for himself), he talked to her at great length about the dangers of day dreaming when walking down not only their street but any street at any time.

“Buses could hit you!” Nihil said, and felt satisfied that Devi seemed suitably impressed with the dangers that awaited people who weren’t paying attention.

The Magic of the Stolen Guitar

For a few weeks after that conversation with Sonna, Nihil did not have to time to dwell on Mr. Niles’s question, for there was fresh commotion in the Herath household thanks to the discovery, by Mrs. Herath, of Suren’s no-longer-on-loan guitar. Nihil stood together in a row with his siblings as Suren answered the questions that were asked at top speed, one after another, as if haste might yield a firmer truth.

“When did you stop borrowing and decide to keep it?”

“Where is that Sansoni boy now? Gone to Australia?”

“Why would he give you the guitar? Did he ask for payment?”

“Did his parents give him permission?”

“When were you going to tell me about this guitar?”

These were the sorts of questions that, Nihil knew, could elicit little more than easy answers, the kind of answers that explained nothing. He listened to his brother’s replies:
seven months ago, I don’t know, I don’t know, he had no use for it, no, I don’t know, I don’t know.
He wished his mother were not so afraid of his brother’s talent. He wished that she could see that being good at something, as Suren was in all his academic work, was a confirmation of intelligence whose reward should be an untethering from the usual in favor of pursuing the as-yet-unknown. But these were not things that he could articulate, they were things he felt, and so he stayed silent, his sisters on either side, waiting for the questions to cease.

In the absence of what she termed
concrete information,
his mother placed the guitar on top of her almirah. It was a confiscation that was supposed to be honored by virtue of her having said so, but it was one designed to fail by virtue of her children’s joint understanding, unspoken but known, that it was a travesty to deprive their older brother of an instrument that belonged in his hands. That even Rashmi was outraged by the punishment was sufficient validation of their feeling that this was an injustice that could not be tolerated.

“We will take it in turns to get the guitar down from the almirah for Suren,” Rashmi declared.

They were sitting in their usual way, Rashmi and Suren on one bed, his, Devi and Nihil across from them on Nihil’s bed. The latest setback had upset them all so much that they had carried their tea into the bedroom and sat drinking it, flecks of sugar dropping off the surfaces of their biscuits onto the bed and not one of them seeming to care about the ants that the crumbs would attract.

“I don’t care if I get into trouble,” Devi declared, which made the others laugh and lightened their mood, for hardly a day went by when Devi was not being pulled up by a parent or a teacher or even, sometimes, Lucas or Kamala, for engaging in some shenanigan or other—helping herself to sticks of cinnamon, for instance, or making pools of mud in her mother’s garden.

“If she finds out, I will say it was my idea,” Suren said.

“No, I will say that I asked you to teach me,” Nihil said, which brought another round of laughter, Nihil’s general antipathy to music being so well known that everybody, even the Bolling twins, teased him about his forced piano lessons.

So they took turns to stand on stools and chairs, each according to his or her height, to fetch the guitar from the top of the almirah every other afternoon when their mother stayed late at school to give private lessons to students who needed extra help, and, in exact backward rotation, to replace it before she returned. On the weekends, Suren himself took it off the top of the almirah while his parents rested and went to the Bollings’ house. There, in the side-yard that stretched from the end of the house to the wall bordering Old Mrs. Joseph’s property, where there was grass but only the most hardy plant—a single orange bougainvillea—had survived, creeping in fits and starts, blooming lushly in one spot, languishing in mangy despair in another, the twins had created a refuge of sorts. They had hauled unused furniture from around their house and from Old Mrs. Roberts’s, made a table by stacking a plank of wood over two piles of bricks and covering it with a tablecloth, and even persuaded Jimmy Bolling to construct a “roof” for them from sheets of aluminum rigged between the gutters of his house and Old Mrs. Joseph’s wall. It was a makeshift shelter that threatened to keel over during a hard rain, but it was all theirs, and when Suren practiced there, he played the pop songs that the twins requested, one after another until they were drunk with adoration.

“Play ‘I Want You to Want Me!’” Rose would yell, only to be drowned out by Dolly.

“No no no! Not that again! Play ‘We’ve Got Tonight!’” Dolly would beg. “Play ‘The Rose,’” Rashmi would say, which made Suren happy, for he liked the slow melody, and it made Rose grow all quiet and dreamy as she listened.

On more than one of those occasions, Jith, the younger of the Silva boys, accompanied them, and though he sat twitching nervously the whole time, beside himself with anxiety that his mother would find out, he did not leave until they did.

“Tell me if you see my brother coming to look for me, Aunty,” Jith would whisper to Francie Bolling as he scurried indoors, and she would nod and send him along to find a place to sit next to the other children.

Since his courtyard abutted Raju’s house, Sonna, too, was able to listen from his uncle’s veranda, alongside Raju, without giving away the fact that he was even remotely interested in the music. This music that Suren played was, to Sonna, a simple extension of the music in the books that he had held in his hands while Nihil wrote out his strange words. And though he wished that it was Nihil, not Suren, who was playing, he felt a sort of kinship with Nihil as he listened, moved this way and that by the rhythms of the guitar, his mind now filling with images of throngs of people and dancing, now emptying out into a sweet sort of sadness that still left him feeling at ease.

Whenever his sisters or any of his fellow hooligans down other streets annoyed him now, he took to simply saying
Kced gninrub eht no doots yob eht!
and stalking off, and because nobody knew what those words meant, they assumed it was a superior curse they were not smart enough to under stand. This gave Sonna both more power for himself and created more affection for Nihil, which meant that Sonna no longer harassed his sisters when they went to the Heraths’ house, and he restricted himself to tormenting them with questions when they returned, hoping, though he did not know that he hoped for this, that Nihil might have told them of his good deed, that some further emphasis had been placed on this part of his character, the part that looked after the children on the street rather than bullied them. There had been nothing, and so he tried to content himself by listening to the music, and though Suren’s skill, a skill that made his sisters worshipful, sometimes made him angry when he thought about it, for now the music itself never failed to calm his heart.