If the Herath children were gifted, like all children, to see through the facades created by adults, there was one adult on Sal Mal Lane who had learned to see through everybody: Old Mrs. Joseph, who lived in the pale pink and gray house directly opposite the Heraths’ and spent much of each day on her veranda, watching the goings-on. Her gardens consisted entirely of washed-out salmon-pink mussaendas except for a single white bush that claimed the center of the mangy lawn, where it flourished beside a crumbling bird bath that was routinely emptied of rain water so as not to breed mosquitoes. The largest of the vastly overgrown mussaendas provided both shade and cover as she surveyed her neighbors.
On this particular afternoon, Old Mrs. Joseph had taken in the tableau of Mrs. Silva’s arrival at the Herath house, the presentation of tea, and the commencement of conversation, as well as Mrs. Silva’s hurried departure afterward. She also noticed the two Silva boys watching from their veranda as their mother went over to the neighboring house.
“That older boy is no good,” she said, speaking in Tamil to the servant girl, who sat beside her on the floor, waiting for Old Mrs. Joseph to finish her tea.
The girl said nothing and Old Mrs. Joseph searched her face, wondering if the girl was interested in Jith or Mohan Silva, there being no other boys her age for her to consider; well, there was Sonna, but he was an undesirable even for a servant like her.
“The new family has two sons and two daughters,” the girl said quietly, itching the back of her head with the fingernail she kept long for this purpose, the one on the little finger of her right hand. “Maybe they are good.”
The older two of the Herath children came out of the house and left with their father, cane baskets in hand, obviously to go to the Sunday market.
“A little late in the day for them to get anything good,” Old Mrs. Joseph said. “By this time all the fresh mallun and fish would be gone.”
“Maybe they are just going for dry goods. Or bread,” the girl said. She swatted at a fly that buzzed around the spill of tea on the tray next to her. Several red ants were clustering around the Nice sugar biscuit that Old Mrs. Joseph had not eaten, and the girl pressed down lightly on each ant, half taken by the way they felt under the pad of her index finger, grainy and rubbery at the same time, then flicked each one away toward the mussaenda, seemingly unconcerned that most of them fell on the ground near her, unfurled, and scurried back to the biscuit.
After a while, the younger Heraths came out and perched on the parapet bordering one side of their house. Old Mrs. Joseph stretched to her fullest height in her chair to examine them, then slurped the last of her tea in disapproval; if the girl had not been wearing a dress, she could have been mistaken for a boy with that dark skin and short hair. She handed the empty cup and saucer to the servant girl, who had stood up to take it.
“Well, we won’t know for a while,” Old Mrs. Joseph said, trying to be fair, “but surely they will be an improvement on the Silvas. We’ll just have to wait and see what kind of people they are.” She let the girl help her to her feet and shuffled indoors to clean her dentures as she did every time she ate anything, quite as though the dentures, like teeth, were irreplaceable.
Old Mrs. Joseph, who wasn’t all that old—she had acquired this moniker in deference to the tragic circumstances of her marriage—excelled in the diligent observation of what her neighbors did when they were out of sight of their families. If her neighbor Mr. Niles had transferred his lack of mobility into sharpening his powers of hearing and sight and, therefore, intuition, Old Mrs. Joseph had turned her complicated feelings of shame and anger over the loss of her husband, first to another woman and then to suicide, into a rhadamanthine assessment of people, one based entirely upon concrete and visible evidence of wrongdoing. She knew that Mohan, the Silvas’ older boy, did not like the Nadesans or Kala Niles or Raju, because on more than one occasion she had observed him making faces at them behind their backs while his brother looked on. She knew that Kala Niles, who lived next door to her, shortened her skirts by rolling up the waistbands as soon as she reached the edge of her parents’ house, an act that belied her air of modesty. And she knew that Mr. Sansoni’s son, Tony, was homosexual, because he always walked up the road with his arm around the same boy, but dropped his arm as he drew near to his own house. Though she did not put her knowledge of these things to regular good use—it was sufficient to her that she would never be hoodwinked again—Old Mrs. Joseph had power and it lay in the fact that when she did emerge onto the street to walk over to a neighbor, whatever she whispered usually turned out to be the gospel truth. The children stayed away from her. Her son, Raju, could not stay away from the children.
Raju would not have imagined in his most ardent dreams, and his dreams could make that claim, that the Herath children and, of those, the most treasured of the Herath children, the youngest, Devi, would let him into her world. If he had been only a weak man or only a strong one, this may not have happened, and many highs but also desperate lows might have been avoided. But Raju was both a weak man and a strong one. In his moments of weakness, he cowered and groveled and splattered his speech with the pleases and don’ts that were the very things that spurred Sonna to torment him. In his moments of strength, however, Raju felt deserving. He felt that he could not only strive but be rewarded for his hope. In those moments he didn’t worry about Sonna, he didn’t worry about what other people might think of him, he didn’t worry about the past or the future, he simply was, here and now, available and prepared. It was this latter iteration of Raju that the younger Heraths first encountered.
“Who is that man?” Nihil, the nine-year-old Herath, asked his younger sister, Devi, aged seven and a half. He didn’t ask because she was a font of information—she was usually unaware of anything that was going on unless he had explained it to her—but because she was the only available sibling, the other two having accompanied their father to buy vegetables from the Sunday pola.
“That’s Raju. He’s Old Mrs. Joseph’s son, Amma told me,” she said, swinging her legs in time to his as they sat on the half parapet that served some unclear purpose at one edge of their yard. The pleasures of Devi’s life revolved around her siblings, but most particularly this sibling. Anytime she could do what he did, she was happy. If he threw a ball, she imitated him when she caught it and threw it back. If he rolled his rice and curry into identical spheres, she followed suit. If he walked ahead of her, she liked to place her feet in the impressions made by his.
“Why do you think he looks like that?” Nihil asked, halting the movement of his legs.
She halted her swinging legs and shrugged. “Maybe he’s mad.”
“He doesn’t look mad. He looks like he is going to cry.”
Devi looked up from comparing their rubber-slippered feet—Nihil’s as always in dark blue, hers as always in red, her one point of diversion from her brother—and gazed at Raju. It was true. Raju did look like he might cry, but he continued to look like that for several minutes so she assumed, correctly, that this was simply how his features were arranged, not an indication of some greater despondency. The latter was incorrect. Raju had wishes, and wishes as grand as his were usually accompanied by despondency.
What did Raju wish for? Raju wished that his father had not committed suicide along with the wife of the previous owner of the Heraths’ house. He wished for a more beautiful mother, the kind of charming woman who might have prevented his father from straying to begin with. He wished that he could migrate to Australia, where, he believed, all was forgiven and anything was possible. But more than all this and despite being very round and just five feet and two inches tall no matter how many novenas he uttered to St. Jude, on his knees, he wished that he could have the physique of a bodybuilder to rival that of his cousin, Jimmy Bolling, who had accrued such credit to his family with his coronation as Mr. Sri Lanka. To this end Raju had converted his mother’s garage into a weight-lifting studio and retired there to practice whenever he could. Indeed, he had just completed a session in the garage to cheer himself up after Sonna had left him. He had merely come outside to get some air and to check if there had been any developments with the new family.
“Do you think he had an accident?” Devi asked Nihil, the two of them still staring at Raju.
His face gave them pause. Raju’s face was disproportionately large and very odd. It sat barely an inch above his shoulders, an upside-down cone with rumpled, indistinct edges, like a just-ripening jack fruit that had fallen too fast and too long onto the ground below. He had small eyes, and his wide mouth was hung about with thick, loose lips that turned down even when he was laughing, as he had been doing when he had first walked up to his gate and into their line of sight.
“I don’t know. Maybe we can ask him.”
“Shall we talk to him?” Devi asked. Devi trusted Nihil to guide her in her activities, whether the activity was sanctioned by adults or not. Stealing from other people’s fruit trees, for instance, something she did remarkably well, her lithe form balancing with ease on the smallest of tree branches, was an art she had honed under his direction.
“Yes, let’s go,” Nihil said, deciding for them both by hopping down off the parapet.
Those were the only words that could have been uttered by a child like Nihil, one raised to refrain from judgment until judgment was necessary. By the time Nihil came to regret their friendship with Raju, so much would have happened that even he would forget that the first decision, the one to befriend, had been his, not Devi’s. And perhaps it is such lapses of memory that are proof that there is some divine hand in human life, some unseen benevolence that protects child and adult alike, allowing them to believe that what occurs in this world is inevitable and pre ordained and that nothing that had been done could have been done otherwise.
As they approached, Nihil noticed that all Raju was wearing was a pair of very tiny briefs and, furthermore, that what they covered was a very small bottom and a very large front. He hesitated and ran his fingers through his hair, messing it up and making parts of it stand up on end. He looked down at Devi, who looked up at him, her face tilted, eyebrows raised in expectation. She had tucked her lower lip into her mouth and from this angle, her chin in the air, her face looked even more heart-shaped than usual.
“Stop sucking your lip!” Nihil said to her, which was something the entire family said to her all day long and which had failed to achieve the desired result; saying it now, though, bought him a few seconds.
Devi pulled her lip out and waited for him to look away, then tucked it in again. She usually did it when she was anxious or sleepy, and right now she was very worried. Raju just did not seem to present the possibility of a favorable nod from her mother, who, though generous to strangers, practiced discernment, as she often told them. They reached the gray gate over which Raju was hanging and through whose bars they could see the rest of his body in meaty stripes and slices, parts of it pressing toward them and the road.
Nihil considered what he could say to introduce themselves. The thought that was always uppermost in his mind, Devi’s birth date, the seventh of July, which foretold misfortune whose magnitude was only increased by the very vagueness of the prediction, was not one he could share with someone he barely knew, and he certainly would not utter it aloud in Devi’s presence. He thought hard, wondering what shareable anecdote might set them apart from other, less interesting siblings or, indeed, from any other child down this lane.
“We’re new,” Nihil said at last, from where they stood halfway between the driveway they shared with the Silvas, and Old Mrs. Joseph’s property, settling on something that was both true and indisputably different.
Raju, available prepared hopeful Raju, opened the gate and stepped onto the road, the flesh on his thighs and upper body streaked with sweat from lifting weights. The children were taken aback; if it seemed inappropriate for Raju to be visible to them in his barely clothed state, it seemed ill-bred to emerge onto the center of their lane in what they assumed was his underwear. They hoped that their mother would not decide to sweep her garden just then. They also hoped that Mrs. Silva hadn’t seen Raju, for they knew, without having had cause to know this yet, that Mrs. Silva would disapprove. They glanced about nervously, but the road remained empty and hot and unchanged and they took some unspoken comfort in the fact that on these sorts of days when the heat seemed virulently desirous, nobody came out of their homes unless they had to. Except, of course, children.
“Hullo! That’s the thing, yes I know, you are new, I saw. I have been watching all this time. Two weeks now there have been preparations, painters and everything. Today, no? You children came today?” He smiled at Devi, “I saw you skipping rope earlier.”
Raju’s shockingly melodious voice washed over the children. It lifted and cuddled its consonants and aired its vowels; it was unlike anything Nihil and Devi had heard and though they had heard a lot of music in their lives, nothing had ever sounded quite like Raju’s voice, the way it rose out of the relentless ugliness of his body and issued forth from his vaguely deformed mouth like an ethereal being released into the world by an enormously charitable god.
“We came from Colombo Seven. My brother and I go to Royal College,” Nihil said. “My sisters go to the Convent of the Holy Covenant,” he added, and then gave away a little more information, just in case Raju was out of touch with this sort of thing. “The convent is in Colombo Three, by the sea.”
“Oh! Oh!” Raju said, his voice rising upward at the end of each word and covering, to the best of Nihil’s knowledge, at least a middle C, D, E, and F sharp if not something more complicated. “Those are good schools. The best schools. I went to St. Peter’s, but my mother went to that convent too. She tried to enroll me at Royal but they wouldn’t take me. We lived too far, and anyway,” he added, matter-of-fact, shaking his head sideways, “we were Catholics.”
“Catholics also go to my school,” Nihil said, not wishing to let a slight go uncorrected. He began to list the Catholic boys in his class for Raju. “David Roberts, Tissa Vancuylumberg, Frank Speldewinde, Dimuth de Fonseka, Norbert Pereira—”
Devi interrupted in her own sing song style, her voice sweet and earnest; she had another two years of this before she would learn to speak like her siblings. “And my school is full of them and I’m one of the few girls who are Buddhist and Muslim and Hindu. We used to sit together during religion and the Catholic girls used to study the Bible. I think. But Tha, that’s my father, our father, he said that they made a law and now they have to teach all the religions in all the schools. Some schools don’t do it, but recently my convent has started to do it. So now they teach me Buddhism at my convent and all the Muslim girls learn Islam and—”
“He knows all that,” Nihil said, irritated by this long speech; the passing of information ought to be left to one’s elders.
“No, no, no, I didn’t know anything! I didn’t know anything about this,” Raju said, looking very alarmed, the second, they learned in due course, of his two most frequent expressions. “When did this happen?”
“Tha says that it’s a good thing,” Nihil said, reassuringly, “so that every body can learn their own religions and nobody can be forced to learn anybody else’s religion.”
“Your father works for the government? Is he a big man?”
“Tha is in the Ministry of Education, that’s why he knows everything,” Devi said, not knowing if this would bestow the title of “big man” on her father, but feeling proud of the weight of the Ministry of Education in her mouth.
“Tha is a civil servant,” Nihil volunteered, having learned quite recently that to be one of those was considered an honor and that there were no more civil servants left in the country other than those of his father’s generation. It seemed that being part of a dwindling brigade of anything should elevate a person in rank, and he felt glad that his father had become one of this group before whatever it was that had happened to put an end to enrollment or selection or other process that conferred such honorifics upon adults.
“Oh! Civil servant?” Raju pouted, and pulled his lips down on either side with great seriousness. He shook his head from side to side, suitably impressed. He glanced up toward their house, so recently painted in a soothing custard color, the sort of color that only refined people like these might choose, and then back at the children with renewed respect. He shuffled from foot to foot, trying desperately to think of something further to say, something that would endear him to these new children and their respectable father. They seemed good to him, polite and forthcoming, and he needed some relief from the children who pre dated them, the ones who mocked him even when they talked to him, asking him questions about his weight lifting and his garage as though they cared. For his part, Nihil wished that Raju would say something adult like, something about their new neighborhood, himself, the other children, anything that would add to his own stature at the dining table that night when he might share what he and Devi had learned about their new environment.
“We have to go back inside,” he said to Raju after waiting a few moments to see if the power of his wish would cause Raju to stop shuffling and speak. “Come,” he said to Devi. He took her hand, which he did not do very frequently; his affection for her was something to be hidden with mild berating rather than demonstrated by kindness or care, which, if shown, might bring his fears forth in an unstoppable flood. Devi knotted her fingers around his and Nihil felt their thinness, the lighter weight of her hand. He held it firmly and led her away from Raju.
“Go and come!” Raju called after their retreating backs. “Come and talk again! I’m always here. Uncle Raju. You can call me Uncle Raju.” He said all this, but he wasn’t sure they heard. He wished that he had thought to introduce himself that way right at the start. Uncle Raju. It had a magnanimous ring to it. He wished he had thought to tell them about Kala Niles and how she gave piano lessons. Surely the children would have been delighted to hear that and to know that he was, himself, someone who appreciated music and understood its importance in the lives of growing children. They might even have asked him to introduce them to Kala Niles, and how fine would that have been, to be the one to make such introductions between good children and a good teacher? He cursed softly to himself as he went back to his gate, thinking of all that he had not said. He hung there for a few minutes, burning in the sun and wishing for rain and replaying the conversation he had just had and mulling over the information he had received. But, momentous though it felt to him, this extraordinarily civil and, he felt, equal exchange with the two new children, nothing further followed, so Raju went back to his garage. Sonna be damned, he thought, these are nice children and I will be their friend. I will be Uncle Raju. He heaved a forty-pound dumbbell several times as a bonus step toward his future, then dropped it and went to the main house looking for the white curries and glutinous rice his mother always insisted on for lunch.