On Sal Mal Lane (58 page)

Nihil stood up and came over to the piano. Suren moved to the side of the bench and Nihil sat down beside him. “Are you just making it up as you go along?” Nihil asked. He played a few notes, then the C-sharp major scale in chords, his fingers hesitating as he struggled to remember the correct placements.

“No, I sit before the keys and I let thoughts of her fill my mind,” Suren said, simply, “and then at the right time when I place my fingers on the keys,

I know how to arrange them and even though the notes don’t make sense in small sections, when I put them all together they do.” They sat like that in silence for a while, and it was not a sad silence. Then Suren said, “Find some way to remember her, Nihil.” And that was all he said.

But could Nihil do that? If there was a way to remember her in such ways as Rashmi and Suren had found, he did not know what that was. If there was a way to turn back these last months, he did not feel he was blessed with the knowledge of how to do that.

Then, in the dead of one night, Nihil found himself sitting at his desk, the lamp on it casting a rectangle of light. He opened his drawer and there, as though someone had taken it out and placed it on top of all the other books so he might notice it, was his book of worries. He flipped through the written pages, so few! He read and reread the entries, the words about Devi’s accident when she had to have stitches and her fall when Mrs. Niles took care of her and of her getting into trouble at school. Why, he wondered, had he never imagined that all these separate things might be simply one thing? One way of living in the world, one set of circumstances that would come together to form what was her life and her death? He turned the last page on which he had written, and smoothed it down. He picked up a pen and wrote
Everything I Remember About Devi.
He underlined it. He left the next line blank and then, in neat and even writing and with a steady hand, he began to write.

Did he remember everything about Devi? Does it matter? What he did remember was enough, for he wrote through the quiet hours, he wrote until he filled the pages of that ruled notebook, the notebook he had started out to fill for all four of them, then just for her, the notebook so thick and solid because he had imagined not only that his fears for his sister would require such a thick book, would require that many pages, but also that such diligent entry would keep her from harm. But it had not. All there was left for him to fill it with was her, as she had been, as he had known her, precocious and smart in some things, not in others, defiant, kind, untroubled by the things that concerned the rest of them—the future, political events, dreams of performance—happy with life, sweet simple life, a devotee of play, and, most of all, beloved, more than all of them, beloved. He wrote of her as he imagined she might have become had she stayed, tall and slender, still as feisty, still as full of girlhood and laughter, still waiting to be told what was what, still disregarding what was told to her. In this life, this life she did not have, she remained as perfect, as incomparable, and as unbroken as she was in the life he knew she had lived. In his version there was no fault line between these two lives. There was only Devi as she had been, Devi as she would be.

There were still many pages left to that book when he finished. And he accepted those empty pages as being not an indication of the lapses of his memory but, rather, the fact that there was no more to be said. When he rose from his chair, the dawn was just breaking.

Outside he could hear the earliest birds singing. In the pink glow of the coming day, Nihil stood underneath the Asoka tree and dug a hole with his hands. He placed the book inside and set it on fire. He sat back on his heels and watched it burn, and the smoke of this small fire, so unlike the fires that had burned the houses down that lane, this smoke did not sting his eyes, it simply lifted and rose between the leaves of the tree she had loved to climb, up and through its branches, up and into the skies. He covered the ashes with earth and he lit a stick of incense over it. Then he stood up and went inside.

“Where is Nihil?” Mr. Niles would say to Suren as he came and went, or to Rashmi when she stopped to say hello to him.

“He’s at home,” Suren might say, or, more specifically, “He’s reading.”

“What is he reading?”

“Poems by R. L. Stevenson,” Suren would say, or
Red Sky at Morning,
or
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,
or
The Catcher in the Rye,
but never the books of easy, down-to-earth mystery and adventure that he had once loved.

“Is he playing cricket?” Mr. Niles asked this of Rashmi, not Suren, not because he hoped it was true, but because he had to ask, had to know if there was even the faintest possibility that Nihil would go back to what he had loved.

“No,” Rashmi said, “nobody plays cricket down our lane anymore. Everybody is growing up.” She used that word because that is what she had heard said of them,
All our children are growing up,
by the adults on Sal Mal Lane whenever they spoke about the quietness of the road.

And that growing up, what was it, for the children were still children, full of wishes, wish-fulfillment still imaginable. The growing up was this: each of them had moved away from a simpler past, one where nothing that happened beyond Sal Mal Lane had ever seemed to apply to them. Some had shifted a small distance, like Mohan and Jith; some much further, like Rose and Dolly, who mourned for the brother they had always feared but who had, nonetheless, been a part of them; and still others, like Suren and Rashmi and Nihil, with the wide-open space left behind by Devi, had traveled an even greater distance away from childhood.

“Not even for practice?” Mr. Niles asked, for he knew without having to be told that there would be no more games of cricket played down that road, not for a long time, and that when those games resumed, with other children, he would be gone.

“No, he hasn’t gone for practice since—” and Rashmi stopped there.

“Ask him to come and see me.” Mr. Niles asked this of Suren.

And because asking was possible though forcing him to come was not, Suren said, “I will ask him to come.”

Mr. Niles waited: that day, the next, the following week, the week after that. Nihil did not come.

“It would be a good thing if you went to see Mr. Niles,” Suren said.

Nihil looked up from the book he was reading. “I don’t want to see Mr. Niles. I don’t play the piano anymore and there is no reason for me to go there.”

“He is an old man, and he won’t be here much longer,” Suren said.

Nihil had turned back to his book and this time he did not look up, but he heard. And when he heard those words that alluded to death, he thought of Devi. He thought about the words he might have said to her,
Don’t go so fast!
or even
Stop!
He thought of what he might have done as he watched her come, so light and happy, of how he might have thrown himself in front of the bike and how she might have flown off the bike, and she might have hit Old Mrs. Joseph’s gate, or might have simply crashed to the ground and bruised her knees and shins and her elbows and palms and might have even hit her head, but she would not have died. He was sure of it, she would not have died.

And if she had lived, what would he have said to her? He would have said what he needed to say to her, the words of chastisement that would keep her safe.

“You were going too fast! I had to stop you!”

“No more of this bike! I’m going to ask Raju to take it back!”

“What is the matter with you? Do you think this is a time to be riding bikes up and down the road? Have you forgotten that our neighbors’ gardens are still filled with ash? Have you forgotten that Raju’s mother is half paralyzed?”

Ah, yes, those are the words he would have said. He would not have said other words, the words he wanted to say after, after she could no longer hear him.

“Come inside, I will play battleships with you.”

“I’ll double you on the bike until you can ride it alone.”

“You can bring me my lunch at the next match I play.”

“I will buy you an icy choc and an ice-palam and a cold bottle of Coca-Cola too.”

“You can hold the kite.”

How could he have known that they were the words, the only ones, that were worth saying? How could he know, being just a child, being just human with human sight?

And what would Devi have said had she been able to speak? Nihil wondered. If she had been able to say anything at all, what is it she would have said to him?

“I am sorry.”

“I was happy.”

“It was not your fault.”

Nihil closed his book as those words came to him, hearing them in Devi’s voice, understanding at last that the love he felt for Devi had always been equaled by the love she had for him. Understanding that she would have kept herself safe had her safety guaranteed his happiness. Understanding also that no such guarantees can ever be made.

The last voice that Mr. Niles heard as he slipped out of consciousness and into the death that had been promised him, the one that had not arrived within the six months given, that had waited long enough for him to meet a boy, such a boy as this, to love him and lose him and have him returned to him again, the last voice he heard was Nihil’s. For a day and into the best part of that night, pausing only for the soup and tea that Mrs. Niles brought for him, Nihil read aloud to Mr. Niles.

“Go and fetch the two gray covered books on top of my chest of drawers, son.” That was the first thing he said when Nihil pushed open the door and came into the house. He had said that even as he lay there, his eyes shut, knowing who had come though Nihil had not said a word.

Nihil went into Mr. Niles’s bedroom, the one in which he hadn’t slept for almost a year. He breathed in the smell of clean things, freshly washed, the bed so crisp as though Mrs. Niles expected that on any given evening, her husband might stand up and retire to sleep in his own bed and not remain in quiet rest on the mattress in the veranda. There was no dust there, not on the bureau, or under the bed. Nor on the bat that was laid at the bottom of the bed, the bat that he saw was still tagged with his own name, but that he did not pick up.

“My mother and father gave these books to me when I took my university entrance examinations. We were still living in Jaffna, in my childhood home. These books, they were new then,” Mr. Niles said when Nihil gave him the books.

“You were young then,” Nihil said, and those were his first words. When he said them, Nihil found that they did not sound loud and strange as he had imagined they would, they sounded as though he had never left this place, this place beside Mr. Niles, who had listened to him and heard him and who had always, even on the first day they met, told him the truth.

Mr. Niles handed the books back to Nihil. “They were written by the Knight of Newbold Revel, Sir Thomas Malory. They are for you.”

He did not ask Nihil to read to him, but Nihil did. The tale that he read was one he understood. It was a tale of striving for high ideals amid human frailty, turmoil, and change. It was a tale of betrayal and love. And though he wanted, very much, to start with the last word and read it backward, to say
ruhtra fo htaed eht fo dne eht si ereh dna,
he began with the first words,
It befell in the days,
and he read them forward, whole, as they had been written.

Glossary

achchaaru
- pickle

ado
- dude (slang)

Aiyya
- older brother

aiyyo/aney
- Oh dear, or oh no, or, simply, oh

Akki
- older sister

akshara
- plural form of
aksharaya;
the sound of a letter; usually refers to the sound or letter suggested by an astrologer upon the birth of a child, to guide the parents in naming the baby

Allah hu Akbar
- God is great

almirah
- a large wardrobe or cupboard used for storing clothes

aluhung
- a generally harmless skin fungus that causes patches of discoloration

Ammata hukana keri vesige putho, thavath kunuharapa ahagannethuwa apita ape paaduwe yanna deepang hukanne nethuwa. Pakaya!
- You motherfucking sons of whores, unless you want to hear more filth from me, let us go where we are going without fucking with us. Fucker!

Aney Devi Baba! Devi Baba genavane!
- Oh, Devi Baby! They have brought Devi Baby!

Aney putha, mage putha.
- Oh son, my son.

Appa
- Father (Tamil)

Appoi!
- Goodness!

arrack
- coconut-based local alcohol

baas
- laborer, usually carpenter or builder

baba
- baby

bali-thovila
- technically an exorcism or the invocation of demons using dance, but often used to refer to any unruly activity, particularly if it involves music

band-chune
- minimizing the activity of playing in a band; literally, like “band-shmand”

banian
- a thin sleeveless undershirt

beedi
- a curl of dried tobacco filled with equally dried, coarse flakes of tobacco

bhajan
- song of praise to Hindu deities

Bokku!
- literally, “ditch”; used as an insult to a fielder when a ball rolls between his legs instead of being caught

brinjal
- eggplant

Burgher
- mixed-race Sri Lankans; descendants of European colonists from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries from Portugal, Holland, and England

burusu kadé
- shop that sells products made with coir

chah
- damn (slang)

chee
- yuck

dagoba
- a dome-shaped structure built over the relics of the Buddha

Deepavali
- Hindu festival of lights

Deiyyo Saakki!
- May the gods be witness!