On Sal Mal Lane (55 page)

“When are we going to practice band again, Suren?” Rose would ask in days to come, hoping, wishing that the band had survived. “I found a new cassette tape in Sonna’s room with all the top hits from last year. Even “Jack and Diane” and “Physical” it has. Someone must ’ave given him, but he never liked music so it wasn’ even open. I took it before Daddy saw. He would have thrown it. We can play it for the band.”

“No more of the band, Rose. I am working on something else now,” Suren said, as they sat together in the sal mal grove, he with his ruled manuscript paper, composing, she, watching. And though he said this quite kindly, he knew that it was unkind to a girl like Rose, a girl whose voice could only grow in the company of a boy like him. Still, he did not try to do more than he could.

“Never the band then?” she asked.

“I am not interested in the band anymore,” Suren said, “but maybe they can play with you once they get new instruments. Do you want me to ask them?”

Rose said, “No, don’ worry. Better with you in it,” and hid her disappointment with muted laughter and a shove against Suren’s arm, the one time she had ever touched him. Rose understood it was the end of things, for without Devi the Heraths were not simply three-left, they were one-missing, a circumstance that none of them would ever overcome. So she walked home silently and sat beside Dolly on Sonna’s bed, feeling that in some similar way, she and Dolly too had been lessened by Sonna’s death. Thinking this, she finally gave in to the tears that their father had refused to permit, and Francie Bolling joined her, not minding the slam of the door as Jimmy Bolling left the house.

Kala Niles did not ask Suren why he no longer wanted to play Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Bach, why he only practiced scales, arpeggios, chord progressions, finger exercises, why he listened, again and again, to the few records that had survived, Mozart’s Concerto no. 23, Chopin’s D-flat Major Prelude, and, on the other side, the E-minor Prelude, a single Debussy, Arabesque no. 2, and Brahms’s 6 Pieces, op. 118, Ballade in G Minor. She did not express regret over her dozens of other records that had been destroyed; she only said, “Whenever you want, come. Come for free.”

Her invitation to Suren came after the moving of her piano, a second time, down the road and in through her gates and back to its old space, which now smelled of fresh paint. The corner next to it remained empty; the guitar was gone. She did not ask about his changed preferences, so Suren told her: “I am composing a piece for my sister.”

Kala Niles twitched her lips and blinked her eyes and she said, “I will listen.”

In the midst of Devi’s funeral and the seventh-day almsgiving, which sapped almost all the strength he had left in him, Suren had learned to navigate between caring for his family and tending to his own heart. Yet though he tried to ignore what was going on around him, Suren could not keep himself from reading the news, which he now knew could never be ignored.

In the halls of government a constitutional amendment was passed requiring the declaration of allegiance to a unitary country:
No person shall directly or indirectly, in or outside Sri Lanka, support, espouse, promote, finance, encourage, or advocate the establishment of a separate State within the territory of Sri Lanka.
Which meant that the Tamil party, whose manifesto expressly declared such a desire to divide, resigned in protest. The government also banned all the left-wing parties.

The Tamils, who continued to live among the Sinhalese all over the island, turned a little more inward, their suspicions confirmed, their prejudices now necessary, and, all around them, the Sinhalese, too, grew harder in their resolve.
Prabhakaran will never win. The country will never be divided,
they reassured each other.
No matter what they do, in the end we’ll win.
And though in the decades to come, much was, indeed, done, with towers and hotels crashing to the ground, airports and seaports bombed, buses set on fire, and even the country’s most sacred temple attacked by suicide bombers, and thousands upon thousands of innocents both Sinhalese and Tamil murdered, they were right about two things: Prabhakaran lost and the country was not divided.

Whether the war was won, however, was another matter altogether. And peace, the kind that ordinary people had once known, that was not so easy to come by. For even in the aftermath of all that they had witnessed together, Suren still heard Mohan say
good riddance
when speaking about yet another Tamil student whose family had decided to leave the country, and even though Mohan did not sound as sure of himself as he had been in years past, Suren realized that he did not understand the source of Mohan’s prejudices nor ever would. He contented himself with the results of the national exams instead, for though he was proud of his four distinctions and four credits, he was even happier to announce to Kala Niles, as though in gift, that the thirty-three students who had achieved either five, six, seven, or eight complete distinctions were all Tamil.

As Mrs. Niles and Kala Niles tended to the slow repair of their house, Suren helped his father to supervise the return of Mr. Niles, who was carried with a further heaviness of heart as though they were not one-less but one-more, Devi with them within each of the people who bore him thus, Mr. Herath, Suren, Jimmy Bolling, and Mr. Tissera. Nihil did not accompany them, and when Suren returned from the Nileses’ house and looked for his brother, he found him in the Silvas’ garden, systematically ripping up every fern and flowering shrub their mother had given to Mr. Silva.

“Why, Nihil?” Suren asked, his voice weary.

“These are our plants,” Nihil said, standing up to face Suren, his face calm.

Suren said, “Leave what is still good alone,” and he took Nihil home and left him with Rashmi. He went back and knocked on the Silvas’ door and said he would come back and help to put the plants back in the ground and though he brought both Rose and Dolly with him to do this work, none of the Silvas said anything; they simply stayed out of sight until Suren and the girls were gone.

In his own house, Suren found that the mood was ever quiet, even when they spoke, because each member of the family was always in two worlds: the present, which unfolded relentlessly and required routine and schedule and work, and the one that remained within, the one in which Devi was not where she had once been. In that half world Suren posed questions.

To his mother: “They say the school results will be out soon. Do you know when?”

To his father: “I hear that the JVP has gone underground. Do you know anything about the Communist Party members, where they might be?”

To Rashmi: “Are you going to be singing at the ballad festival? There’s going to be tough competition, and the boys’ and girls’ sessions are on separate days.”

To Nihil: “I’m going with a friend to watch the match on Saturday. Do you want to come with us?”

They replied, each in turn. His mother said she did not know when the results were going to be out but she was sure he had done well. His father talked about the government, the mess they had made of the country, the violence of it all, but his replies were brief now, they never spoke of anything too far into the future. Rashmi said yes, she had a solo in the Joan Baez ballad and afterward the teachers were going to escort them to listen to the boys when they were performing. Nihil only shook his head.

But in Kala Niles’s house, he did not have to work so hard on reminding his family of life and each other. He did not have to wish that someone, Rashmi, his father, anyone, might help him out and take their turn in posing these unimportant questions. All he had to do when he was at Kala Niles’s house was to sit at the piano and play while she listened. When he played, and while she listened, Devi was not gone, she was beside them both, impatient for him to finish, impatient to find out what beautiful composition he might make of her life.

An Embroidered Shirt

Rashmi had always had intimations of what her life might be as an adult: secure, successful, and beset by responsibilities to which she would be equal. Nothing would overwhelm her. But that was before she had discovered the pleasure of singing in a band and being a little less good in school, before watching her neighbors’ houses burn, before burying the last dog left, and before she had to learn to cook and serve food. Before Devi had left her without a backward glance. Well, that was not entirely true; there had been a backward glance, even if she hadn’t looked up to notice it.

“Kamala got cashews. Want to make milk toffee?” Devi had asked Rashmi that day, while Rashmi lay on her belly in her bed in their shared room and wrote about a boy she was getting to know, the brother of a friend. She had shaken her head, no.

“Want to play battleships?” Devi had asked a few minutes later. She had wrapped herself up in the curtain of their room, twisting and twisting until her body hung like a large lime with legs. Rashmi had given her the same reply.
No!
With emphasis.

“You never want to do anything fun,” Devi had said. “All you do is sit and read books and write in that stupid diary.” And she had unwound herself and stood up. “Nobody here wants to play with me. Everybody’s sad all the time, even Raju. All Suren does is bang bang bang on the stupid piano, all Nihil does is talk to Mr. Niles, who won’t even talk back to him, and all you do is this. What’s the use of brothers and sisters if they don’t even play?”

Had she looked back, to see the impression her words had on her sister, Rashmi tried to remember, or had she imagined that look as she watched Devi storm away, dragging the curtain behind her as far as it would go, then sending it flying back in an utterly unsatisfying flutter of green? Had she called out to her and said she
would play, just let me finish,
or had she only thought that she would and had not said it, thinking why did she have to say it because intention had always been accompanied by time. She would play,
after.
After she had finished describing her last conversation with that boy in her book, after she had got it all down. All she could bring back now were Devi’s words, those words uttered in that voice,
What’s the use of brothers and sisters if they don’t even play?
And all she could find in her memory of that day were Devi’s feet in red rubber slippers, poking out from underneath her balled-up body wrapped in the green curtain, her footsteps leaving, and then, and then, there was nothing but herself kissing those feet, which no longer had slippers on them.

Rashmi thought about this every morning when she woke up, squashed next to Nihil because she could not bear to sleep in her own room. There was nothing to do about the memory, it was both wound and balm, so she would put her arm around Nihil and wait for him to wake up, listening to his breath come and go, watching his back lift and fall.

“I think of her every morning, as soon as I wake up,” she told Suren one morning when it had become unbearable to keep this to herself.

Suren said, “She would like that.”

As if Devi were in another room, as if they could share these thoughts with her. “She doesn’t know,” Rashmi said, softly, so as not to wake up Nihil, who was still asleep.

“She does,” Suren said.

“How do you know?” Rashmi asked.

There was silence and then Suren said, “I can feel her here, with us.”

“I can’t,” Rashmi said, feeling more sad than ever. Surely if Devi were in their presence she ought to feel her spirit, she was the sister. How could Suren feel her and how could she not? “Why do you think I can’t feel her here?”

“Do something for her,” Suren said.

“Like what?”

“You could make something for her. Sing for her. Or you could cook for her.”

Rashmi did all these things. She made milk toffee with cashews that she roasted with Kamala watching on, stirred the condensed milk and cream and poured it out into plates lined with wax paper, and cut the toffee into neat squares. Then she gave them away to the Bolling family because nobody in hers wanted to eat milk toffee, which had been Devi’s favorite of all the sweets she ate. She sang for Devi, the songs that Devi had always begged her to sing and that she often had refused to sing, not because she wished to be unkind but because a song had to be felt to be sung and on some nights she hadn’t felt like singing. She sang when she took her body-wash, her voice echoing in the room as the water splashed over her, and she sang in Kala Niles’s house, accompanying herself on the piano with chords that made Kala Niles shudder. As she sang she began to feel Devi with her, listening to her voice, her mouth closing over the impossible sweetness of her toffees, blissful in the knowledge that she was completely loved, but it was her
making of something
that permitted her to forgive herself.

She was sitting on the front steps to their house when the postman came one day, bringing her two letters, one from the boy whom she barely spoke to anymore, and another from her grandmother, with some money inside.

“Every day I think I see her standing here,” the postman said, sympathetically. “I remember like yesterday letting her ride this bicycle,” and he patted the seat of his bike. “
Chah.
If only I had not offered. I blame myself.”

And Rashmi, who was wise now in the way adults are, not with surety but with helplessness, knew that this was his way, as it was the way of all the other people who blamed themselves as he was doing, of carrying away at least a little bit of the guilt that she and her brothers felt. So she didn’t tell him he was not to blame, she merely said, “She loved riding that bicycle. It was her biggest treat.”

As they stood there for a few moments, heads bowed, Raju came to his gate. The postman looked up. “I feel sorry . . .” he said, looking at Raju then back at her, but he didn’t finish the sentence, for how could he tell her that he felt sorry for the man who had not kept her sister from flying down that street and out of their lives? So he pushed his bike up the street, to finish delivering letters to all the houses on the left before returning to deliver the letters to those on the right. And he tried, as all the neighbors on Sal Mal Lane did, to pretend that the Niles and Joseph houses were not still singed and broken, they were exactly as they had once been.