On Sal Mal Lane (34 page)

“No reason, Mummy? Really? We’re rich now, so you are cookin’ fine things for no reason?” Sonna said, his voice full of bitterness.

“Shut up and eat,” Jimmy Bolling said.

“You eat,” Sonna said and rose from the table. “Herath children are here so better have enough to feed them. Can’ let them go hungry. Might go an’ tell everybody we don’ have food.”

Nihil looked at Sonna and tried to understand when and why Sonna’s gentleness toward him, such as it was, had faltered. Sonna had always spared a look or a wave and sometimes a smile for him. Now, he treated Nihil with disinterest. He didn’t watch them at play, either, as though he didn’t care about their games or how fast Nihil ran or anything at all. It made Nihil sad, and he tried to think of something to say but nothing came except
kced gninrub eht no doots yob eht,
so he said that, hoping to communicate something to Sonna, some sympathy, or to recall that other moment they had shared.

“What is that?” Dolly said, and shrieked with laughter.

“God! Sounds like priests in churches. I never understand when the father starts talkin’ in Latin!” Rose said. “You know Latin?”

Nihil shook his head. Rashmi looked concerned. Suren continued to eat. Devi spoke up. “He can say things backward,” she said. “He’s just saying something backward.”

“What did you say, darlin’?” Francie Bolling asked, relieved that Sonna’s disruption was being drowned out by this new conversation and trying to ignore the fact that Sonna was still standing by his plate, watching Nihil.

“Nothing,” Nihil said, looking up at Sonna. Sonna did not acknowledge Nihil’s gesture but he left the table more quietly than his mother expected him to.

As the children left after the dinner, they noticed Sonna standing at the very end of the lane staring at the main road. He was lit in silhouette from the lights of the cars that passed by. Next to him there were two other boys they did not recognize but whose attire, shorts and bare upper bodies, made it safe to assume that they came from the slums beyond the bridge.

“There’s Sonna,” Nihil said, pointing to him. Sonna was standing so close to the main road that every time a bus went by the hair on his head blew back off his forehead and he seemed to tilt back a little.

“Someone should tell him not to stand near the main road like that,” Devi said. “Right, Nihil? Remember that boy you told me about? Down the other lane?”

Nihil looked down at his feet and did not answer her.

“Today is Sonna’s birthday,” Rose said, gazing at her brother. “I completely forgot.”

“Today? Why didn’t Aunty tell us?” Rashmi asked, dismayed that they had come to Sonna’s birthday celebration without bringing a gift for him.

“What for? You don’ need to know,” Dolly said, then, “Oh! No, I don’ think the nice dinner was for that.”

“Yes, definitely not for that. Daddy wouldn’ allow, an’ if Daddy says no, nothin’ happens,” Rose said.

Still, as they walked home, the children, Rashmi and Nihil in particular, talked about Sonna’s birthday and each wondered aloud if there was something they could give him. The things they thought of were gifts they could not afford to buy: a shirt (Rashmi), a can of Fa spray (Devi), a cricket bat (Nihil).

“We can buy him a chocolate,” Suren said at last. “He must like chocolate.”

The next evening, Rashmi, the only one who saved her allowance, counted out all the coins and crumpled notes, though she allowed Devi to hold on to one square bronze five-cent coin, which was becoming a rarity, and they sent Kamala to the store to buy the chocolate, which they put into a shiny brown paper bag that Devi had been saving
for something special
and that she gave up a little reluctantly. Suren and Rashmi walked down to the Bollings’ house to hand over the gift, but when they got there Rose said Sonna was not home, he had not come back, even to sleep, the previous night.

“Give this to him when he comes,” Rashmi said, and handed over the chocolate. “For his birthday. Tell him we said happy birthday. It’s a chocolate.”

“But will melt, no, if we keep?” Rose said. “We don’ have a fridge.”

So they took the chocolate back and put it in their own fridge with every intention of giving it to Sonna, but the next day Mr. Herath, rummaging in the refrigerator for something sweet after lunch, saw the chocolate and opened it up and the children were too afraid to say anything about it lest their mother find out that they were fraternizing with
that boy,
and they had no more money to buy another chocolate so they reconciled themselves to feeling ashamed and let it be.

.....1982

The Cricketer and the Old Man Talk of War

Nihil walked silently beside Devi to the Nileses’ house, hoping that Mr. Niles would be well enough to talk to him. He tried to quieten the anxiety that had settled in his chest ever since Suren and Rashmi had talked of troubles, and that rose to the surface every time he stepped beyond the gates of their house without his older brother and sister. Now that someone in their own neighborhood, Mohan, had spoken of war, Nihil felt a sense of danger wrap itself around even their most harmless activities. When he stepped into the Nileses’ veranda and saw Mr. Niles looking alert and in good spirits, therefore, Nihil could not help the grin and the relief that flooded his face. As soon as he had shut the door leading from the veranda to the living room, where Devi was having her lesson, Nihil blurted out his question.

“What will happen when the war starts?” he said, before he had even sat down.

The old man narrowed his eyes slightly as he watched Nihil settle down, his books at his feet, his body leaning forward. Mr. Niles’s thoughts went often these days to the home he had left behind in Jaffna when he met and married the Colombo-born Rita Schoorman and turned her into Mrs. Niles. He wanted to return to Jaffna to revisit the places that had hosted his childhood, one last time, before it was all over, and the contemplation of war before this could happen was troubling to him. War was an impossibility along such quiet cobbled streets. Men, women, and children who traveled so frequently on bicycles between libraries and schools and markets and places of work, such people did not go to war. What would stir up the passions of people like his mother had been, people who cooked
sambaaru
thick with vegetables, brinjal, pumpkin, and okra, the roasted mustard and curry leaves floating in a broth so delicious that nothing else was necessary? No, war was irreconcilable with what he knew of the North. And yet here was this boy, whose usual preoccupations veered between his young sister and lost games of cricket, here he was, right before him, speaking of war.

“I wanted to ask you about it before but you were too sick to talk then,” Nihil said, as he wiped his hands on his jeans; they were clammy from anxiety. “I didn’t want to worry you. Aunty told me you needed to rest. But Mohan told us that the war is coming. They are going to join the army and go to war. That is what they said. First Mohan, then Jith.” Nihil sat back. Already he felt his fears dissipating. He waited for Mr. Niles to reassure him that there would be no war, but that is not what Mr. Niles said, not exactly.

He said, “People do not go to war, Nihil, they carry war inside them. Either they have the war within them or they don’t have it. The thing to think about is do you and I have war inside us?”

“I don’t have war,” Nihil said immediately, as if he had already pondered this very question, “and my brother and Rashmi and Devi, they don’t have it either. Or Rose or Dolly. I don’t think they have war. Mohan, though, I am sure he has it. Jith, I’m not sure. And Sonna also I’m not sure . . .”

“Sonna is still a good boy in your opinion, then?” Mr. Niles asked mildly.

Nihil shrugged. “I don’t think he’s a good boy, but he hasn’t done anything bad to me or my sisters and brother so I cannot call him a bad boy.”

“That’s a fair way of looking at things,” Mr. Niles said, and smiled.

“My parents . . .” Nihil began and paused, “I’m not sure if they do or if they don’t.” Nihil pursed his lips and frowned as he weighed the facts against his parents. They sometimes fought, which put them in the “have war” column, but they also took care of people like Lucas and Rose and Dolly, and that set them in the “don’t have war” column.

Mr. Niles continued to smile as he watched Nihil trying to figure out the complex nature of his parents. “Your parents are like you, they don’t have war in them,” he said, deciding for Nihil.

“Yes, I don’t think they do. They’re good people,” Nihil said and was about to ask about Mr. Niles, to force him to say that no, he did not have war within him either, when Mr. Niles dispatched him on one of his routine errands.

“Son, could you go inside and ask Aunty to make me another cup of tea? Get one for yourself too,” Mr. Niles said.

Nihil rose obediently and went to the kitchen to look for Mrs. Niles, who kept him talking while she poured the tea and put two stainless steel mugs on a stainless steel tray for him to carry back out to her husband.

“Uncle
loves
when you come, doesn’t he?” she said. She smiled and patted his head. “Here, I just made these. Take two and eat one. Keep one for Devi.” She put two fragrant
vadai
on the plate and Nihil’s mouth watered at the sight of them, bits of curry leaf and green chilli poking through the crisp ball of fried lentils and flour.

“These are my favorite kind of
vadai,
” he said. “Devi’s too.”

She stroked his face, once on each cheek, and then, drawing her caress to a point, she held his chin in the tips of her fingers. Nihil breathed in the
indul
smell that permeated her hands. She always smelled like that, a scent of curries and water clinging to her, making her seem earthy, somehow, and unlike her husband. Mr. Niles’s clothing was kept so fresh and his scent, as far as Nihil could tell, was always a mix of sandalwood soap and Old Spice, both overlaid by the blooms on Kala Niles’s rose vines.

“You are a good boy. He has been much happier since you started coming to sit with him. Talks more, laughs more, even eats better.” And because saying thank you, like saying sorry, was not part of her culture or his, she left it at that and let Nihil smile his acknowledgment and leave, the tray balanced carefully in his hands.

After he had served Mr. Niles and sat down with his treat, Nihil returned to his topic. “And you?” he asked. “Do you have war inside you?” He wanted to make quite sure that should the Tamil and Sinhalese families down his lane divide into their own groups, Mr. Niles would not be part of it.

This was a difficult question for a man of Mr. Niles’s age, who had lived both among those who were exactly like him and also among those who did not share his traditions and beliefs. It had been a good life, a life of public stature absent of humiliations, a life within a community that held him in respect. A life in which a child like Nihil would listen with rapt attention to what he had to say, who would follow direction, seek him out. But it was also a life during which there had been upheavals that had stirred him to anger. Mr. Niles looked at Nihil, taking in his waiting eyes, the legs grown too long for his jeans, his aspect of trust, and he considered the question. To answer it truthfully he would have to ask himself other, more complicated questions.

What was his life like, say, in 1956, the year of the first riots that gripped the Eastern Province? His one child, Kala, was just fourteen years old and his days were full of her doings, his wife’s conversations, and the directed-journeys of a husband, father, bread winner. He stamped seals on official documents, signed his name to bulletins about this and that, and watched the world turn. There was the Official Languages Act with reasonable use allowed for his language, Tamil, there were amendments to the act, there was a
satyagraha,
the nonviolent protest continuing on and on.

And in June? On June 11 of that year? Had he done anything different on that day when the entire country separated like yolks and whites into their own ethnic groups as they responded to the news of the carnage in the faraway town of Gal Oya? Mr. Niles thought hard. He had placed a trunk call to his parents, still living in Jaffna, to inquire about their safety. Neither he nor they had referred to the reason for that call, they had let the long silences in between the
Is everything okay?
and the
Maybe ask Appa to stay home tomorrow,
reveal their worries.

But even from that distance he knew, as the other Tamil inhabitants of Sal Mal Lane, the Nadesans and Old Mrs. Joseph and her husband, knew, what terror had gripped the settlements in the dry zone of Gal Oya, because the compositions of those settlements had resembled the composition of Sal Mal Lane, a mix of Tamils, Sinhalese, and Muslims. How quickly Gal Oya had disintegrated under rumor-fueled chaos, the people arming themselves against butchery with kris knives, their very preparedness guaranteeing the fulfillment of their fears. That year, as though the elements themselves were in agreement that no hope was possible, the South-West monsoons had blown over the Gal Oya reservoir, bringing not a drop of rain but only the scorching named winds that depressed Sinhalese and Tamil peasant alike, making them curse the same winds in separate languages:
yalhulanga
for one,
kachchan
for the other.

What could he know of the hardship of starting from scratch, planting in the earth, manning a boundary, he with his government job, set free to feel only safety and guilt? There had been a brief moment of possibility, he recollected it now, with the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam Pact, the possibility of dignity, but it did not last. Nothing seemed to last, to take hold, except fear and people on every side who thrived not on harmony but on disunity.

Two years later, 1958, and twin attacks on trains, one in Vavuniya, one in Batticaloa, one aimed at Tamils, another at the Sinhalese. Somewhere out there the sugarcane fields had burned furiously, and Mr. Niles had wondered about that, that sugarcane burning, whether the air had smelled sweet while all around machetes did their work, all around the train stations ablaze while carved pillars and statues, themselves thousands of years old, looked on.