On Sal Mal Lane (42 page)

The trouble began when he shared his list with his band of friends during the interval, when the classrooms in the redbrick buildings were abandoned and the children rushed the grounds to play, kicking up the dust and beginning to sweat almost immediately in the heat. Before long, a large area of the school yard was abuzz with the information that new statistics had come to light about the social discrepancies between the Tamils and the Sinhalese in the school. Not much later, half a dozen fistfights had broken out over this information, some Sinhalese-Buddhist children claiming they were just as wealthy as if not more wealthy than their Tamil classmates, some Burgher-Catholics asking why there was no information about them. For the most part, the Tamil students remained silent, neither in affirmation nor in denial, but that did not matter, even the ones who said nothing were drawn into the melee anyway.

Mohan wished that he had been the only one to be hauled before Mr. Gunasekara, the headmaster, when the source of the information was discovered, but no. When he paused to glance through the glass doors before entering the headmaster’s office, there stood his tremulous brother, eyes wide with fear, looking like he would piss in his pants. Mohan straightened his collar, smoothed his hair down, and strode into the office. He was thankful that he had recently got it cut even shorter, a buzz like the soldiers he had seen in an American magazine. He looked neither to the left nor to the right, at the shelves packed with books and the filing cabinets full of student records and the walls with framed photographs of groups of prefects whose behavior had been impeccable, who were destined to bring nothing but credit to the school. He stared straight ahead at the brown desk and did not meet the eyes of the headmaster. As he came to a stop next to Jith, he had a powerful wish that the room was larger, that his shoulder was not quite so close to that of his younger brother; he had to resist the urge he felt to shove Jith away.

The headmaster looked up. “Mohan Silva?” And that voice, the clarion voice of Mr. Gunasekara, which had reduced many a stronger boy to tears, instantly halved Mohan’s bravado.

“Yessir!”

“Don’t run your words together like a damn dolt. Yes, Sir! Try it again.”

“Yes. Sir!”

“Better. So you think you are a statistician, do you?”

“Yes, no Sir. I don’t, Sir. Not a statistician, Sir,” Mohan said, feeling his brother’s eyes on him and trying to regain his courage.

“Then are you aspiring to run a security agency of some sort, providing bodyguards to people in fear for their lives?” Mohan, unable to follow the thread of these questions, replied in the negative, no, he was not aspiring to run a security agency.

The headmaster turned to Jith. “Jithendra Silva, is your big brother a statistician, a school principal, or a member of government?”

“No, Sir,” Jith replied. Mr. Gunasekara had not acquired his stature within the school by being merciful when punishment had been earned, and although Jith had, truly, done nothing to earn any part of the chastisement that was surely awaiting Mohan, he trembled right then mostly on his own behalf. Despite having known through anecdote and rumor that peeing before seeing Mr. Gunasekara was a wise course of action, Jith felt that his previously empty bladder had miraculously refilled, and for one traitorous moment he wished he was not related to the boy next to him.

“Then how do you think he got these numbers?” the headmaster asked. “I don’t know, Sir. He must have guessed, Sir.”

The headmaster turned to Mohan. “Guessed? Is that what you did, you fool? Because you don’t have an ounce of intelligence in that thick head you stopped trying to learn anything during Tamil class and decided not only to guess the demographics of the students at my school, you decided to share your bogus information? Is that what you did?”

Mohan knew there was no good response to this question. He kicked himself for not having erased his name on the piece of paper that had been passed around. He had been so proud of his calculations, the nice, even numbers.

“Answer me!” The headmaster’s voice made his ears ring.

“NO, SIR!” Mohan yelled, his anger rising to the surface.

The headmaster’s voice grew soft and low. “Did you just raise your voice at me, Silva?”

His anger subsided just as fast as it had risen and Mohan felt a warm rush of urine in his underwear. He clenched his fists behind his back and willed it to stop, relieved momentarily when it did. Next to him, his brother’s eyes widened in alarm as the headmaster stood up, walked over to them, and slapped Mohan across his face, once, twice, thrice, four times, five times, ceaselessly, Jith stopped counting.

Mohan did not want Jith to wait for him, but Jith did, and so Mohan had to endure his punishment in full view of all the other boys leaving home for the day as well as his younger brother, who stood by the school gates, staring up at the balcony on which Mohan knelt in the full and merciless heat, copying out twenty-three tables detailing the last census taken in the city of Colombo, the previous year. It was a document that the headmaster had secured by calling up a past student, now a minister, and having him deliver it within the hour, so he could teach Mohan something worth learning about his fellow countrymen, besides their race. By the time Mohan was done he had acquired a fresh hatred against the Tamil boys for having caused his punishment, for having been among all the rest who had glanced up as they went home. When he finally stood up to leave, his knees crusted from the crumbling cement of the balcony, scratched in some places, his entire body aching, his face smarting, he realized the headmaster had not even stayed to end his punishment. He had simply told his peon, Nagalingam, a Tamil man who lived in the hostel at the school, to
Take the sheets of paper from that boy, damn fool would have learned his lesson by then,
and left to watch the cricket match, a home game. Mohan refused to look at Nagalingam as he conveyed this message and he pretended not to hear the trace of laughter in the peon’s voice. He shoved the papers at him and left.

“I waited for you,” Jith said, hopping off the wall on which he had been sitting, as Mohan approached and then walked past him. “I didn’t want you to be alone,” he said, running to keep up with Mohan.

“I didn’t ask you to wait, you idiot,” Mohan snarled. “You should have gone. You should have run home to your stupid Dolly and told her all about this.”

“I won’t tell anybody,” Jith said.

Mohan swirled around and Jith bounced off his brother’s chest. “I don’t care who you tell!”

Jith shook his head, no, he wouldn’t tell anybody at all.

Mohan turned away from his brother and wiped a few bitter tears as he walked. “Tamil bastards. Everywhere. Headmaster’s pets. Fucking donations. They should get out! Get out of our school. Get out of our country. If I catch a single one of them so much as looking at me tomorrow . . .”

Jith listened to all this and said nothing, not understanding what his brother wanted. It seemed as though if there were no Tamil students for him to be angry at, he would be lost. And yet it seemed he also wanted every one of them to disappear. To where? Sitting on the wall, Jith had composed a fresh letter to Dolly. In this letter he did not talk about love, games, or failed tests.

I am waiting for my brother after school and so I thought I will write to you. I am afraid that bad things are going to happen very soon and I don’t know if you and I can be together anymore. My brother gets angry when he sees me talking to you and he does not want me to play with the Herath children either. He says they are traitors. I wish he wasn’t so angry all the time. In some ways he reminds me of Sonna. It seems to me that they don’t want anybody around them to be happy. It seems to me that if they could make our lane silent with nobody talking to anybody else they might be happy. But I don’t think they could be happy even then. Maybe they were born to be angry. I feel sorry for my brother because he doesn’t have someone like you to talk to. Sometimes I think he is angry because I have you and he has nobody. I hope I see Rose or Devi today so I can send this note to you. —Jith

Mohan said nothing else to Jith on the way home and Jith did not dare to offer him any further solace. He sat beside his brother and tried not to breathe in the faint smell of dried urine on his brother’s trousers. As they walked home from the bus halt, Jith was glad to see Rose. He beckoned her over and gave her the note for Dolly. Up ahead of them, Mohan glanced back once then kept on walking.

Sonna came around the corner, and Mohan’s spirits lifted. He raised his hand in a wave. “Where are you going?” he asked Sonna.

“Nowhere, just walkin’ toward the bakery.”

Behind him Mohan heard Jith’s voice, calling to him to wait. He turned to Sonna. “I’ll come with you,” he said.

“Maybe we can go an’ see what is happenin’ on Kalyani Avenue,” Sonna said.

Mohan hesitated. The bakery was one thing, but Kalyani Avenue was quite another. The last time he had been there was when Raju was taken there and much as he had truly relished that moment, he didn’t feel like revisiting the place today. He might have changed his mind if Jith had been standing beside him, but he had left Jith behind and when he looked back now, Jith was walking with Rose as if they were a couple, chatting. He was probably telling her what had happened, why they were late, everything. Little shit. Looking up, Jith saw Mohan staring and a moment later Rose picked up her pace and ran ahead of him.

“Come on,” Sonna goaded. Sonna’s face still carried a faint bruise near his left ear from the beating he had received from Raju, and he touched the spot tenderly, out of habit, as he spoke. “We’ll go an’ come soon. Won’ take long.”

“I have to leave my books,” Mohan began.

“Brin’ the books,” Sonna said.

They crossed paths with Jith just then and Jith put his hand out to stop his brother. “Where are you going, Mohan? Nobody is home. You haven’t got permission,” he said.

Mohan sneered. “I’m not a baby like you. I don’t need permission.

“We’re goin’ to see a girl on Kalyani Avenue, a nice
Letchumi
” Sonna said, and laughed. He reached over and grabbed the backpack off Mohan’s shoulder and gave it to Jith. “You take this.”

Jith took the bag and walked home slowly, mulling over the day’s events. He hoped that the headmaster would not tell his parents. He hoped the other children would not tell their parents. He wanted the incident forgotten. He wanted to be Jith Silva again, not Mohan Silva’s brother. And he wanted Mohan to stop going to Kalyani Avenue or anywhere else with Sonna. He looked up as he passed the Bollings’ house, but Dolly was nowhere to be seen. He looked back down the road, and since Sonna and Mohan were no longer in sight, he contemplated knocking on the door and asking for her. Nobody was home except for him now, and he wanted to show her the inside of his house, the room he shared with his brother, the music box that had belonged to his grandmother, the goldfish in his father’s pond, and the snake skins that he had found wrapped around his father’s sugarcane bushes. He wanted to show her the map of Australia that he had stolen out of a
National Geographic
magazine at the library so they could pick out the exact town where they would live. These were things he’d told her about and this would be a chance to show her. Just then he heard Jimmy Bolling curse at Francie Bolling, and the sound of his approaching footsteps.

Jith turned and hurried up the road, went inside, and did not come out again, though he lay on his bed wishing he had the courage to get up, walk back down the road, and ask Dolly if she wanted to come and see his house, which was not a bad place, especially when he was alone in it.

.....1983

The Last Perfect Day

Nobody could begrudge Nihil his moment. Hadn’t he once given up the one thing that delighted him on account of something as unglamorous as looking after his younger sister? Hadn’t he been the one, of all the Herath children, to change Mr. Niles’s state of mind for the better, a change that, nobody would dispute this fact, had prolonged his life? Tall for his age, with talent that surpassed even Mr. Niles’s lofty expectations, Nihil became the youngest player to be selected not for the first eleven but, not far behind, for the second eleven, the A team, as the last in the batting lineup in the upcoming Mini Battle of the Blues.

“Good, good, congratulations!” Mr. Niles said, when Nihil burst into the veranda with the news. Mr. Niles half rose out of his reclining position in excitement, then fell back against his pillows.

“On Friday we are going to play against St. Thomas’s A. You’ll be there?”

“Yes, of course I will be there,” Mr. Niles said, marveling at the fact that he could utter such certainties. Although the initial prognosis regarding his life had been amended in light of the health he had regained during the past years, he knew he had begun to lose the fight. He had kept this knowledge from his wife and daughter by enlisting Lucas to go to the pharmacy at the top of the main road and fill a prescription for a pain killer that he had wrangled out of an old friend, and that he administered himself. This moment, however, called for such utterances.

“We will all have to go then, Papa,” Kala Niles said. “Can’t send you alone, no?”

“Who will drive?” Mrs. Niles asked, her brow furrowed.

“Kala will drive,” Mr. Niles said, surprising his daughter, who wreathed her face in smiles; though she had passed the driving test eight years ago, the occasions on which she had been allowed to take the wheel had been rare.

It was decided. The Niles family would travel together, and the Bolling girls were being allowed to accompany the Heraths, who had hired a van to transport themselves as well as Lucas and Raju, both of whom wanted to witness this magnificent event. Of course all the girls would have to skip school.

The first day of the match dawned long after Nihil had woken up, unable to sleep, gone to the bathroom, drunk water, lain back down, and returned to the bathroom at last to give up on sleep altogether and take his body-wash so he could don the whites that had been laundered and waited for him on the edge of the ironing board. Because he was up that early and dressed that early, he was the first one of all those who lived on Sal Mal Lane to read the news about unrest at the University of Peradeniya, on the main campus tucked into the hills of Kandy. And because he was about to play the most important cricket match of his life, this news was read swiftly and discarded equally swiftly as he turned to the last page of the paper, the sports page, to read what might have been written about him.