May 1958 Watakälé
The shrill clamour of the wall-mounted telephone sliced though the stillness of the Tea-maker’s house. Lilly sat up in bed and rubbed her eyes. It was still dark and the room was chill.
‘Get up, Appa!’ She shook Rajan.
Rajan groaned, turned over and pulled the blanket back over his head.
Lilly continued to shake him. ‘Telephone, Appa. Take it, will you?’
‘What time is it? It’s freezing!’ Rajan grumbled.
The telephone continued braying.
‘Answer it, Appa,’ Lilly patted her husband on the shoulder again.
Rajan groaned, sat up and lurched off the bed to his feet. Shivering and coughing he dragged the blanket and coverlet off the bed, wrapped them around him and stumbled across the room towards the light switch. He switched on the light and staggered into the corridor, swearing when he tripped on the rug.
The telephone continued its clamour. ‘I’m coming, I’m coming!’
Lilly sat up in bed. She wrapped the remaining blanket tightly around her and squinted at the clock on the table by the bed. Five-thirty am? Who could be calling at this hour?
She heard Rajan shout into the telephone. ‘I can’t hear you. What did you say?’ There was a pause. She could hear his grunts and heavy breathing. ‘Race riots started in Colombo yesterday?’ He sounded panicked and frightened. ‘Trains being stopped and Tamils killed?’ There was another pause. Rajan continued, his words now slow, laboured and ragged. ‘Are you okay?’
Colombo? Race riots? Her two boys were in the city! Lilly flung off the blanket and leapt out of bed. Grabbing her housecoat off the bed end, she threw it over her nightclothes and ran down the corridor to the sitting room. Raaken, wrapped in a threadbare blanket, was already there. Shiro and Lakshmi came dashing in just after her.
Rajan put the receiver back on the phone cradle and turned to face the gathered group. ‘That was George,’ he said. ‘The Sinhalese are rioting against the Tamils in Colombo. It’s bad, very bad. The boys, mother and George are okay – for now. But Paul didn’t come home last night after dinner with friends.’
Rajan started panting, as if he had just run a race. His face was pale, his lips drawn down in a grimace. ‘They’re trying to trace him through his Sinhalese friends. But his friends say they don’t know.’ He paused and sighed. ‘Or maybe they won’t tell.’
Lilly’s body burnt hot and then cold. The stark horror in Rajan’s eyes made her burst into tears. Rajan’s arms went around her. Such public demonstration of affection was not correct in front of the servants and children, but today she needed it and she knew Rajan wanted it too.
‘George wanted to get to us before we left for the railway station,’ he said, holding her close and rocking back and forth. ‘Thank God they were able to. George said they are -’ He dropped his voice so the others could not hear. ‘They are raping and murdering people on the trains.’
Lilly’s head spun with even greater fear. She and Shiro had planned to take the early morning Uderata Maniké train down to Colombo. Shiro was scheduled to start as a student at the Bambalawatte Girls’ boarding school next week. The phone call had saved their lives – and more. Little Shiro and herself, at the mercy of rioters. Her mind recoiled at the thought.
Lilly saw the fear and vulnerability on her husband’s face. She felt faint but she knew that her husband needed her to be brave. Their two boys were still down there. Breaking convention, she cradled his head in her hands. ‘Don’t worry Rajan. The children will be all right. God is good. He has protected us this far. Trust him.’
‘George said he’s trying to get everybody out of Colombo and come here,’ Rajan whispered in her ear. ‘He has some Sinhala friends who might help them.’
The look of anguish in his eyes sent a chill through her body. She could tell he knew more than he was willing to say to her. Lilly broke out of his embrace, ran to the study and flung herself on her knees.
The study was a special family room for the Rasiahs. The furniture in the study belonged to Rajan’s parents. It had been moved to Watakälé when his father died fifteen years ago. A small, round, mahogany table stood in the middle of the study with the family bible on it. The roll-top desk that Rajan worked at stood on one side of it. On the other was the equally old but comfortable rocking chair where Lilly sat to knit. A small, wooden cross hung on the wall above the family bible. Lilly flung herself on her knees before the cross. ‘Oh dear God …’ She hesitated. Words would not come. She burst out in tears again. Laying her head on her arms, she continued kneeling, her body wracked with sobs.
She heard Shiro’s voice – soft and hesitant. ‘Lakshmi, maybe it’s my fault?’ Lilly looked up. Shiro was seated on the trunk packed with her things for school. Lakshmi stood by her, holding her hand. Lilly looked at the tear stained faces. Shiro sobbed. ‘Maybe I brought this on by praying that I don’t have to go to school?’
Lakshmi sat down on the trunk and put her arm around her friend’s shoulders. ‘Don’t cry, Chinnamma,’ she said. ‘I am here with you.’
‘Did you hear what Daddy said about Uncle Paul? I love Uncle Paul.’
Shiro couldn’t see the cloud that crossed Lakshmi’s face when she mentioned Paul but Lilly did. Neither of them had spoken again about what happened last Christmas.
Now he was, in all probability, dead.
Lilly got off her knees. She bent and kissed Shiro. ‘We won’t be going to Colombo today.’
***
Lilly spent the day praying. Tea-maker Aiya went to work as usual, but didn’t get much done.
As evening fell, Shiro and Lakshmi stood at the front of the house, watching the winding road across the valley, waiting, longing for the car which would bring the rest of the Rasiah family out from the savagery that had fallen on the rest of the country. Day slipped into night. The temperature plummeted. The wind whipped around the girls, making them shiver. Nobody called them into the house.
Lilly prayed and prayed and prayed.
Rajan sat in his favourite armchair with an open newspaper, listening to the radio.
And then they saw it – the headlights of a vehicle snaking down the mountain. Everyone rushed out to the front veranda.
The minivan drew up at the front door. The Rasiah clan stumbled out of the vehicle, their faces drawn. Lilly hugged Victor and Edward. ‘Thank God, thank God,’ she kept repeating between gasped sobs. Rajan held his weeping mother in his arms, talking to his brother George over her shoulder.
The stories tumbled out of them. Rape, stabbing, people in boiling tar, dismembered bodies lying on the road, burning tyres around bodies, houses burning with people still in them. Above it all, the sound of screaming and the shouts of the mobs. The things they’d seen in Colombo and on the drive up to the tea plantation poured from their lips. The usually impeccable George Rasiah sobbed as he described the scenes to his older brother. The boys clung to Lilly.
Lilly looked over her sons’ shoulders at the two men standing by the car. They looked tired and yet they were both smiling. One, dressed in a white shirt and belted sarong, was by the driver’s door. The other man wore a white shirt, dark tie and slacks. The clothes of both men were crumpled.
Shiro walked over to the man in slacks and took his right hand in hers. ‘Thank you for saving my brothers,’ she said, looking up at him and the driver. ‘I prayed to Jesus to send a guardian angel to look after them. He sent both of you.’
The man squatted down so his eyes were level with Shiro’s. ‘God heard your prayers, darling,’ he said. ‘We were protected by a whole army of angels.’
This conversation made the adults aware of the two men. ‘Annai, this is Mr Ranasinghe,’ George said to Rajan. ‘He and his driver are both Sinhalese. They risked their lives to get us here.’
Lilly moved away from her sons. ‘Oh, Mr Ranasinghe,’ she mumbled, tears sliding down her cheeks again, ‘how can I – how can we …’
Mr Ranasinghe waved a hand in the air. ‘It’s the least we could do. I think it’s sickening, what my people are doing. Disgusting doesn’t begin to describe it.’
Lakshmi hurried into the house to help prepare a hot meal for everyone.
***
No one sent Shiro to her bedroom that night. She sat on her father’s lap and listened to her family, and their guest Mr Ranasinghe, discuss the turmoil in the capital. This was the first she’d heard of the long-standing rivalry between the Tamil and Sinhalese people of Sri Lanka. She hadn’t known that Sinhalese were Buddhists and Tamils were Hindus.
For once, overawed by what was being said, she kept silent, storing up words to ask her mother about later: looting, rape, murder. The exact meanings puzzled her, but the hushed and broken voices told her that they were bad things to happen to anyone.
‘It’s all the bloody Britishers’ fault,’ her father groused. ‘The divide and rule policy over the last fifty years. Putting Tamils in administration and giving the Sinhalese land to farm.’
‘Yes,’ Mr Ranasinghe nodded. ‘Pretty much guaranteed the dissent after the 1948 independence. The Sinhalese majority were never going to be happy that way.’
The white man’s empire again, thought Shiro. No wonder Daddy hates the British.
‘It was only a matter of time after Prime Minister Solomon Bandaranaike declared Sinhala the official language in 1956. We could all sense the racial tensions between Tamils and Sinhalese at work,’ George said.
The only ministers Shiro knew were nice, old gentlemen who talked about Jesus at church. Why did they go around changing languages and upsetting people?
‘It’s a good thing our school’s trilingual and made us study Sinhalese, Tamil and English. The rioters were in the buses picking out people who couldn’t read the Sinhalese newspapers.’ Victor’s voice was rough with emotion. ‘Won’t help us get into university, however.’
Mr Ranasinghe sighed. ‘A recipe for disaster. Trying to make sure that more Sinhalese get into university than Tamil kids.’
Exhausted by the fears she had faced that day and the conflicts she had learned of that night, Shiro drifted off to sleep, still cradled on her father’s lap. The last thing she heard was her grandmother’s cry, ‘Sinhalese bulls have killed my son!’
That is so rude, Shiro thought as she dropped off to sleep. A couple of those bulls just saved your life.