On Sal Mal Lane (4 page)

Mrs. Herath listened to Mrs. Silva go on for a while longer about the villainy of the Tamil shop keepers, every single one of them, from those who sold fabric to those who sold electronics to those who sold jewelry and dry goods. She listened to Mrs. Silva mention, as if this were some particular depravity of the Tamil people, that
they always go for the non perishable businesses, have you noticed?
She didn’t know what to say in response, never having considered that anyone in her acquaintance would subscribe to such opinions as these, and even when she did try to counter Mrs. Silva’s arguments about the non perishable items, saying,
But what about the betel sellers and the fortune tellers and the garland makers?
she was firmly re butted by Mrs. Silva. But when Mrs. Silva moved on from the Tamils to the Muslims and Burghers, she stopped her by calling out to her children in an unnaturally loud and cheerful voice.

“Children! Come and see, Aunty Rani has brought tea and biscuits for you. Go wake your father. Tell him there’s tea.”

None of the children went to check on their father, being far more curious about their guest and all the things they had listened to her say, from inside their front door, in her deep and authoritative voice. Furthermore, though they murmured their thanks and waited politely as their mother conversed with Mrs. Silva, who sat so stiffly in a perfectly stitched creamy yellow
lungi
and blouse, her knees together, her back straight, they were sure, one and all, that the visit from Aunty Rani did not bode well. They sat while tea was taken, the biscuits exclaimed over, and much was said about the good fortune of securing a house
in these times
by their mother, and each of them resolved, privately, to discuss all of it, the visit, the biscuits, and such
times
with their siblings when they went to bed that night.

Raju

If the Herath children were gifted, like all children, to see through the facades created by adults, there was one adult on Sal Mal Lane who had learned to see through everybody: Old Mrs. Joseph, who lived in the pale pink and gray house directly opposite the Heraths’ and spent much of each day on her veranda, watching the goings-on. Her gardens consisted entirely of washed-out salmon-pink mussaendas except for a single white bush that claimed the center of the mangy lawn, where it flourished beside a crumbling bird bath that was routinely emptied of rain water so as not to breed mosquitoes. The largest of the vastly overgrown mussaendas provided both shade and cover as she surveyed her neighbors.

On this particular afternoon, Old Mrs. Joseph had taken in the tableau of Mrs. Silva’s arrival at the Herath house, the presentation of tea, and the commencement of conversation, as well as Mrs. Silva’s hurried departure afterward. She also noticed the two Silva boys watching from their veranda as their mother went over to the neighboring house.

“That older boy is no good,” she said, speaking in Tamil to the servant girl, who sat beside her on the floor, waiting for Old Mrs. Joseph to finish her tea.

The girl said nothing and Old Mrs. Joseph searched her face, wondering if the girl was interested in Jith or Mohan Silva, there being no other boys her age for her to consider; well, there was Sonna, but he was an undesirable even for a servant like her.

“The new family has two sons and two daughters,” the girl said quietly, itching the back of her head with the fingernail she kept long for this purpose, the one on the little finger of her right hand. “Maybe they are good.”

The older two of the Herath children came out of the house and left with their father, cane baskets in hand, obviously to go to the Sunday market.

“A little late in the day for them to get anything good,” Old Mrs. Joseph said. “By this time all the fresh
mallun
and fish would be gone.”

“Maybe they are just going for dry goods. Or bread,” the girl said. She swatted at a fly that buzzed around the spill of tea on the tray next to her. Several red ants were clustering around the Nice sugar biscuit that Old Mrs. Joseph had not eaten, and the girl pressed down lightly on each ant, half taken by the way they felt under the pad of her index finger, grainy and rubbery at the same time, then flicked each one away toward the mussaenda, seemingly unconcerned that most of them fell on the ground near her, unfurled, and scurried back to the biscuit.

After a while, the younger Heraths came out and perched on the parapet bordering one side of their house. Old Mrs. Joseph stretched to her fullest height in her chair to examine them, then slurped the last of her tea in disapproval; if the girl had not been wearing a dress, she could have been mistaken for a boy with that dark skin and short hair. She handed the empty cup and saucer to the servant girl, who had stood up to take it.

“Well, we won’t know for a while,” Old Mrs. Joseph said, trying to be fair, “but surely they will be an improvement on the Silvas. We’ll just have to wait and see what kind of people they are.” She let the girl help her to her feet and shuffled indoors to clean her dentures as she did every time she ate anything, quite as though the dentures, like teeth, were irreplaceable.

Old Mrs. Joseph, who wasn’t all that old—she had acquired this moniker in deference to the tragic circumstances of her marriage—excelled in the diligent observation of what her neighbors did when they were out of sight of their families. If her neighbor Mr. Niles had transferred his lack of mobility into sharpening his powers of hearing and sight and, therefore, intuition, Old Mrs. Joseph had turned her complicated feelings of shame and anger over the loss of her husband, first to another woman and then to suicide, into a rhadamanthine assessment of people, one based entirely upon concrete and visible evidence of wrongdoing. She knew that Mohan, the Silvas’ older boy, did not like the Nadesans or Kala Niles or Raju, because on more than one occasion she had observed him making faces at them behind their backs while his brother looked on. She knew that Kala Niles, who lived next door to her, shortened her skirts by rolling up the waistbands as soon as she reached the edge of her parents’ house, an act that belied her air of modesty. And she knew that Mr. Sansoni’s son, Tony, was homosexual, because he always walked up the road with his arm around the same boy, but dropped his arm as he drew near to his own house. Though she did not put her knowledge of these things to regular good use—it was sufficient to her that she would never be hoodwinked again—Old Mrs. Joseph had power and it lay in the fact that when she did emerge onto the street to walk over to a neighbor, whatever she whispered usually turned out to be the gospel truth. The children stayed away from her. Her son, Raju, could not stay away from the children.

Raju would not have imagined in his most ardent dreams, and his dreams could make that claim, that the Herath children and, of those, the most treasured of the Herath children, the youngest, Devi, would let him into her world. If he had been only a weak man or only a strong one, this may not have happened, and many highs but also desperate lows might have been avoided. But Raju was both a weak man and a strong one. In his moments of weakness, he cowered and groveled and splattered his speech with the
pleases
and
don’ts
that were the very things that spurred Sonna to torment him. In his moments of strength, however, Raju felt deserving. He felt that he could not only strive but be rewarded for his hope. In those moments he didn’t worry about Sonna, he didn’t worry about what other people might think of him, he didn’t worry about the past or the future, he simply was, here and now, available and prepared. It was this latter iteration of Raju that the younger Heraths first encountered.

“Who is that man?” Nihil, the nine-year-old Herath, asked his younger sister, Devi, aged seven and a half. He didn’t ask because she was a font of information—she was usually unaware of anything that was going on unless he had explained it to her—but because she was the only available sibling, the other two having accompanied their father to buy vegetables from the Sunday
pola.

“That’s Raju. He’s Old Mrs. Joseph’s son, Amma told me,” she said, swinging her legs in time to his as they sat on the half parapet that served some unclear purpose at one edge of their yard. The pleasures of Devi’s life revolved around her siblings, but most particularly this sibling. Anytime she could do what he did, she was happy. If he threw a ball, she imitated him when she caught it and threw it back. If he rolled his rice and curry into identical spheres, she followed suit. If he walked ahead of her, she liked to place her feet in the impressions made by his.

“Why do you think he looks like that?” Nihil asked, halting the movement of his legs.

She halted her swinging legs and shrugged. “Maybe he’s mad.”

“He doesn’t look mad. He looks like he is going to cry.”

Devi looked up from comparing their rubber-slippered feet—Nihil’s as always in dark blue, hers as always in red, her one point of diversion from her brother—and gazed at Raju. It was true. Raju did look like he might cry, but he continued to look like that for several minutes so she assumed, correctly, that this was simply how his features were arranged, not an indication of some greater despondency. The latter was incorrect. Raju had wishes, and wishes as grand as his were usually accompanied by despondency.

What did Raju wish for? Raju wished that his father had not committed suicide along with the wife of the previous owner of the Heraths’ house. He wished for a more beautiful mother, the kind of charming woman who might have prevented his father from straying to begin with. He wished that he could migrate to Australia, where, he believed, all was forgiven and anything was possible. But more than all this and despite being very round and just five feet and two inches tall no matter how many novenas he uttered to St. Jude, on his knees, he wished that he could have the physique of a bodybuilder to rival that of his cousin, Jimmy Bolling, who had accrued such credit to his family with his coronation as Mr. Sri Lanka. To this end Raju had converted his mother’s garage into a weight-lifting studio and retired there to practice whenever he could. Indeed, he had just completed a session in the garage to cheer himself up after Sonna had left him. He had merely come outside to get some air and to check if there had been any developments with the new family.

“Do you think he had an accident?” Devi asked Nihil, the two of them still staring at Raju.

His face gave them pause. Raju’s face was disproportionately large and very odd. It sat barely an inch above his shoulders, an upside-down cone with rumpled, indistinct edges, like a just-ripening jack fruit that had fallen too fast and too long onto the ground below. He had small eyes, and his wide mouth was hung about with thick, loose lips that turned down even when he was laughing, as he had been doing when he had first walked up to his gate and into their line of sight.

“I don’t know. Maybe we can ask him.”

“Shall we talk to him?” Devi asked. Devi trusted Nihil to guide her in her activities, whether the activity was sanctioned by adults or not. Stealing from other people’s fruit trees, for instance, something she did remarkably well, her lithe form balancing with ease on the smallest of tree branches, was an art she had honed under his direction.

“Yes, let’s go,” Nihil said, deciding for them both by hopping down off the parapet.

Those were the only words that could have been uttered by a child like Nihil, one raised to refrain from judgment until judgment was necessary. By the time Nihil came to regret their friendship with Raju, so much would have happened that even he would forget that the first decision, the one to befriend, had been his, not Devi’s. And perhaps it is such lapses of memory that are proof that there is some divine hand in human life, some unseen benevolence that protects child and adult alike, allowing them to believe that what occurs in this world is inevitable and pre ordained and that nothing that had been done could have been done otherwise.

As they approached, Nihil noticed that all Raju was wearing was a pair of very tiny briefs and, furthermore, that what they covered was a very small bottom and a very large front. He hesitated and ran his fingers through his hair, messing it up and making parts of it stand up on end. He looked down at Devi, who looked up at him, her face tilted, eyebrows raised in expectation. She had tucked her lower lip into her mouth and from this angle, her chin in the air, her face looked even more heart-shaped than usual.

“Stop sucking your lip!” Nihil said to her, which was something the entire family said to her all day long and which had failed to achieve the desired result; saying it now, though, bought him a few seconds.

Devi pulled her lip out and waited for him to look away, then tucked it in again. She usually did it when she was anxious or sleepy, and right now she was very worried. Raju just did not seem to present the possibility of a favorable nod from her mother, who, though generous to strangers,
practiced discernment,
as she often told them. They reached the gray gate over which Raju was hanging and through whose bars they could see the rest of his body in meaty stripes and slices, parts of it pressing toward them and the road.

Nihil considered what he could say to introduce themselves. The thought that was always uppermost in his mind, Devi’s birth date, the seventh of July, which foretold misfortune whose magnitude was only increased by the very vagueness of the prediction, was not one he could share with someone he barely knew, and he certainly would not utter it aloud in Devi’s presence. He thought hard, wondering what shareable anecdote might set them apart from other, less interesting siblings or, indeed, from any other child down this lane.

“We’re new,” Nihil said at last, from where they stood halfway between the driveway they shared with the Silvas, and Old Mrs. Joseph’s property, settling on something that was both true and indisputably different.

Raju, available prepared hopeful Raju, opened the gate and stepped onto the road, the flesh on his thighs and upper body streaked with sweat from lifting weights. The children were taken aback; if it seemed inappropriate for Raju to be visible to them in his barely clothed state, it seemed ill-bred to emerge onto the center of their lane in what they assumed was his underwear. They hoped that their mother would not decide to sweep her garden just then. They also hoped that Mrs. Silva hadn’t seen Raju, for they knew, without having had cause to know this yet, that Mrs. Silva would disapprove. They glanced about nervously, but the road remained empty and hot and unchanged and they took some unspoken comfort in the fact that on these sorts of days when the heat seemed virulently desirous, nobody came out of their homes unless they had to. Except, of course, children.