On Sal Mal Lane (46 page)

Suren did not find a bus to take him home. He experienced many other such sights intimately, the shrillness of screams as well as the softer cries for help abrading his innately peaceful mind, the sounds like small knives piercing his skin. He answered some of the calls, to pick someone up, to hold aloft a lost child, to carry the bags of a mother moving in the same direction as he was going, but more often than not the task was beyond what he could manage as he walked and walked and walked all the way home, his eyes taking in everything that was in flux before him, the people, the buildings, the vehicles, even the singed trees. The marker that remained unchanged was the street itself, its potholes and pavements, its discarded posters and litter and grime a reminder that, just an hour ago, nothing extraordinary was happening. Suren filled his head with music as he went, trying to block out the things he could not control, trying not to see the things he could not bear to see, but this did not help; it only set all the terrible events to music, and Suren felt that he had grown corrupt, that he had participated in all the cruelties along the way.

As he drew close to home he saw Sonna, who was standing by the side of the road, looking bewildered. Suren wondered if he, too, was trying to get home. He wondered if they could walk together, to gain some strength from each other’s company as they made their way back to Sal Mal Lane.

“Sonna!” he shouted, as people, angry with his immobility, shoved him, pushing to get past. “Sonna! Over here!”

But Sonna did not hear. He stepped forward into the crowds and a few moments later Suren saw him in the midst of a mob of men who did not look like they would provide a safe escort. He turned away and kept walking alone; the music returned, and the guilt with it.

Nihil was still at school when the prefects were sent up and down the hallways to tell the teachers that school was being closed, they had to leave and go home because
the bodies of fifteen soldiers have been brought to Colombo and there is trouble everywhere.
Though his first thought was to run out with his classmates and find a way to get to the convent to take Devi and Rashmi home, he decided to go to the staff-room and tell his mother first, and when she saw him she held on to him and would not let him leave.

“We will go home with Mr. Pieris,” she said. “He has a car and he has promised to take us home. I called the convent. The girls are safe.”

The car moved slowly, pushing past pedestrians who were filling up the streets. As they turned the first corner, Nihil saw that the statue in the center of the roundabout was smashed. The shop where he and his teammates liked to drink plain tea and eat hot hoppers was on fire. People were running down the road toward some sort of refuge, though where that refuge was or who was promising it, he could not see from where he sat. As their vehicle passed the University of Colombo he saw youth amassing in groups, separating and gathering again on the grounds of the campus. He saw a few students clustered around a Tamil girl. They hastily unbraided her hair and tied it into a knot at the nape of her neck. Another girl took her bag of books from her and gave her a different one. She said something to the Tamil girl and he watched her wipe her face. The two girls walked toward the center of the field hand in hand while the other students drifted away. Nihil craned his neck to watch them long after the car had moved on, picking out the purple skirt that the Tamil girl had been wearing, seeing it now in the midst of one group, now in another, until he lost her altogether.

“Don’t look too long at anybody,” Mrs. Herath said from the front seat.

“I hope they don’t stop me and ask for petrol,” Mr. Pieris said. “The headmaster said that they were stopping cars everywhere.” He was sweating profusely; he had insisted that they leave the shutters up and the car was unbearably hot.

Everywhere Nihil looked now, people were crying out for help, which he could hear but could do nothing about as the car moved inexorably toward home, and Nihil wondered ceaselessly if the other members of his family had made it home safely.

They were stopped twice by mobs who pressed against the car on all sides. The first time it was because Mr. Pieris, accelerating into what he thought was a patch of clear road, almost hit a man who ran across in front of the car. He braked so hard that Nihil’s head whipped back against the seat. The man came over to the driver’s side, followed by a group of people. Mr. Pieris rolled down the window and Nihil saw that he was trembling.

“
Samavenna,”
Mr. Pieris said, apologizing, but the men told him to shut up.

The car rocked from side to side in the arms of the mob, and Nihil did not feel the welcome rush of fresh air, he felt the heat of their bodies seep into the car in the sweat dripping from their hairlines and in the nervous, angry energy of their movements. Lips drawn away from teeth stained with betel, with nicotine, a few pure white, mouths throbbing with angry words that were so loud that Nihil could not decipher what they were saying. Some of the men seemed unsure of what they were doing, a few looked embarrassed and stood back a little, but they did not leave, no, they continued to stand with the other men. Where had they come from? Who were these men? Nihil did not recognize a single one. But Nihil
had
met some of these men. He had sat at adjoining tables at that same store where he and his teammates had drunk that plain tea. He had boarded buses with them. He had walked beside them. But the people we understand are those with whom we live, not the ones whom we brush past, unaware of their circumstances. Yes, to Nihil there was an
us
and a
them,
as these men put it, but his
us
did not divide along the lines of race, the line that was now being drawn, his
us
lived down his lane, his
them
were screaming at his mother.

“
Sinhalada demalada?”
a man in a blue checked shirt yelled, his voice sharp and hoarse.

“We are Sinhalese,” Mrs. Herath said. “This is my son. We are Heraths.”

It made Nihil’s heart ache to listen to his mother’s voice, so full of pleading, so desperate to prove their worth by virtue of their race, their name. He wanted to tell her not to be afraid, he was there beside her, but he dared not speak.

“
Poth pennanna!”
a second man yelled.

Nihil did as the man asked and brought out his exercise books from his bag to demonstrate that they were Sinhalese, not Tamil, and though he also had an exercise book that had Tamil in it, he did not take that one out of his bag.

The second time, he and his mother and Mr. Pieris had to recite Buddhist verses to prove that they were not only Sinhalese but Buddhists as well.

“
Namo thassa
—” his mother began, speaking the opening lines of prayer, the ones every child was taught as soon as they could speak, but she was stopped with the smashing of the window on her side of the car.

The face of the leader of the mob was instantly distorted by the hairline cracks that ran away from where his hammer had hit the pane of glass. He yelled, “Not that! That’s too easy! The Karaniya Metta Sutraya!”

And so they began to recite the sutra that spoke the Buddha’s words on the matter of loving-kindness, a sutra that they had only ever recited within the meditative quiet of temples, each to him-or herself, or in the company of monks, their musical up and down intonations guiding them from distraction to inner stillness.

Karaniya matthakusalena

Yam tam santam padam abhisamecca

Sakko uju ca suju ca

Suvaco c’assa mudu anatimani

As his mother recited the opening stanza, her voice shaking, Nihil joined in along with Mr. Pieris, until the verse began to take hold, their voices steadied, and the mob let them pass, quietened, it seemed, by their chanting; they did not stop reciting the sutra until they reached the end. And all this while he could not shake off the thought that Devi was not safe.

But Devi was safe. She was walking, even as Nihil reached home, in the company of her father and sister.

Devi had seen nothing so long as she and Rashmi sat within the high gray walls of the convent, behind the massive steel gate that had a smaller door cut into it and that was opened to allow parents in, but one by one, so their identity could be verified, before each child, one by one, could be handed into their care. While they waited, Devi played beside the grotto of Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows, making wishes and trying to cajole Rashmi to do the same though Rashmi, more attuned to the disturbing energy she felt beyond those gates, refused, she just sat and stared at the gate, willing her father to come for them, her heart sinking a little each time the gate opened and some other girl’s father or mother appeared.

“Colombo is burning. We have to be careful getting home,” Mr. Herath said to Devi and Rashmi, when he was finally allowed in, the last to get there. He took a hand in each of his and walked away from the gates. The girls looked at their father and were frightened by the anxiety on his face, his brow wrinkled as he glanced this way and that.

When they reached the end of the lane that ran alongside the gray walls of their convent and looked down the road that lead toward Galle Face Green, Devi saw high flames, the buildings beneath now handing off now accepting batons of fire. A bus and a car were both lying on their sides, their innards twisted. Right ahead of them she saw a man being pulled off a bicycle and beaten. She knitted her brow, went inward and silent as she marched by her father’s side, running every now and again to keep up with his pace and asking no questions but thinking
These are the troubles that Uncle Raju spoke of. How had he known?
She held tight to her father’s hand and thought only of reaching their peaceful lane where everything was going to be where it should be, nobody was injured, nothing was burning.

“Will we be able to get home?” Rashmi asked, her backpack bouncing on her shoulders, her steps quick, her voice urgent. “Where is Amma? Where are Nihil and Suren? Who is burning everything? Why is this happening?”

“Thirteen soldiers have been killed,” her father replied, but wearily, as though he too knew that surely the death of thirteen soldiers could not explain this degree of anarchy.

“Where? In Colombo?” she asked, but he did not answer. “Where, Tha? Where?” she asked again, shaking the hand that was holding hers, but he did not respond and she stopped asking.

Mr. Herath was dispirited by the little he felt he had been able to achieve to counter the waves of violence that were sweeping through the city. He had directed his secretary, a Tamil lady, to pick up her daughters from their schools and go home, he had asked his driver to take the chief clerk, another Tamil, back to his home, and he had waited with his friend Mahadeva for the car to return so he could take him, Mahadeva, too, to safety. He had not called the convent until all these things were done, and had extinguished the twinge of guilt he felt when he was told by the Sister Principal, in a voice that betrayed how little she thought of him, that his daughters were the last remaining students waiting to be picked up. Still, he thought, he could have done more and now he felt only two things as he walked. He felt the weight of his daughters’ hands in his, the immensity of that responsibility, and he felt the weight of history. First, he had promised his children that there would be no war, that the Tamils themselves would rid the country of Prabhakaran. Next, throughout his life, stuck in what he saw now as a bookish understanding of political movements and their ideologies, he had truly believed that the parliamentary system would prevail, the sharing of wealth and rights would become reality, the people would own and rule the country. Yet around him now, people, those very people he had counted on to stand up for social justice, to march out peacefully someday, en masse, to demand equality for all of them, they were running wild, shattering buildings, overturning vehicles. Around him people were on fire.

An old woman ran past them, her sari coming undone in a stream of red, her hand going from her mouth to the parting in her hair, rubbing, rubbing, trying to wipe away the telltale smudge. He dropped the children’s hands and hurried forward to catch up to the woman, to calm her, help her in some way though in what way he did not know, but, hearing the sound of his footsteps, she screamed and ran faster. Mr. Herath fell back. Beside him, Rashmi resumed her questions and to them she added another one.

“Tha, why is she running away from us when we are good people?” she said, and he could find nothing to say.

How strange that they walked, those girls, one silent, one talking, as though such sights were insufficient to root them to the earth and make movement impossible. How strange and yet how natural that their father would keep them moving forward, one step at a time, toward home. Home where safety was guaranteed.

There were very few private vehicles on the road now, and even the buses, when they came by, were packed. When they finally managed to cram themselves into one, the conductor, who took no money, reached half out of the bus to pick Devi up and push her in so she stood on the steps, her face up against the sweaty legs and torsos of strangers. Mr. Herath began speaking in Sinhala to the children.

“
Issarahata yanna,”
he said to Rashmi and Devi, pushing them in. “Tha! There’s no room here!” Devi replied in English, squirming toward him. Her father looked distraught.

“Do not speak to me in English,” he hissed at her, in English, as they got down from the bus and started walking again. Up ahead of them a group of men dressed in sarongs and wielding clubs made their way toward them.

“Do you have a lighter?” one of them asked Mr. Herath, in English.

The girls listened as Mr. Herath referred to the man as brother, and offered him a box of matches.
“Naa sahodaraya, gini kooru vitharay thiyenne,”
he replied in Sinhala. The man leaned forward with his cigarette in his mouth and the girls watched their father light it, his hands steady, his palm keeping the flame safe.