That night at dinner, the conversations in two of the houses unfolded with a certain similarity in their undertones of worry and concern.
“Ma, Jith and Mohan are goin’ to become soldiers an’ get killed!” Sonna announced. He had been standing just too far away to hear what the disturbance was when the discussion took place, but he had got the whole tale second hand from Rose by grabbing her by her French braids, a style Rashmi had introduced to her, and threatening to cut off her hair, something he hadn’t done in so long that she had been terrified half out of her wits and blurted out every last word to him.
“Poor Dolly. Who will take her to Australia now?” Rose teased.
“Don’ know what Jith sees in her,” Sonna said. “She’s never goin’ to Australia anyway. Who will take a mad creature like her?” It started to rain as he was talking and, mercifully, Dolly did not hear the last part of what he said. The shower deafened them all as it fell against those parts of their roof that had been fortified with sheets of takarang.
“Rose, go an’ put the buckets out,” Francie Bolling said, raising her voice. “In Sonna’s room there’s a leak, an’ in the kitchen. Check in the other rooms too. Might have to use a cooking pot if there are any other leaks.”
A drop of water fell on the table just then, followed by a quickening series. Sonna ran into the kitchen to get a pot. Before long, the rain settled in to sweep across rather than fall upon the house and the whoosh of its lashings was accented intermittently by the sharp sound and echo of the single drops of rain falling into the deep receptacle.
“Gosh, good thing we are all home,” Francie Bolling said. “In this kind of rain, there is no staying dry out there, even under a big umbrella. Comes from all sides.”
“Mama!” Dolly said, close to tears and unconcerned with their leaky roof and people caught in the rain. “Mohan says that the Tamils are gettin’ ready to attack us!”
“The Tamils?” Jimmy Bolling bellowed. “Why on earth would they attack us? If they wan’ to attack anybody they’ll be attackin’ the government jackasses.” Jimmy Bolling routinely described all politicians in any government of every party as jackasses. Whether he thought this particular set of jackasses deserved to be attacked or whether he thought they just happened to be the jackasses available to be attacked was anybody’s guess.
“Mohan says that we should stop having anythin’ to do with the Tamils down the road. Nileses, Nadesans, all of them. Even Raju!” Dolly wailed.
Rose, who had returned from her errand, flopped back down in her chair. “Those Silvas. Can never rest unless they’re angry at somebody,” she said, soothingly.
Francie Bolling sighed. She watched Sonna wipe crumbs off the table and onto the floor and she did not stop him or say anything about having to get up and sweep all that out right away on account of the ants. He stood up and replaced the bowl of plastic flowers, red roses and lilies, that she removed from the center of the table during meals, and though in his haste some of the sand from the bowl spilled onto the floor, she did not say anything about that either. She clutched the glass of cheap wine that Jimmy Bolling had procured for their consumption and looked at Dolly.
“Don’ worry, Dolly doll, you can still go to Australia, I’m sure, when you are big enough.” She was silent for a few moments, considering her wine. “Doin’ so well we were. Down this lane. Girls happy, boys happy.” Her eyes met Sonna’s as she said this, so she modified her statement and added, “Mos’ of the time,” which did not exclude him but did not include him either. “So well we were doin’ even Raju becomin’ decent and now this Tamil stuff. Don’ know why those Silva boys are like that.”
“Heraths made such a nice kite, have to say,” Rose said into the depressing silence that followed. “An’ din’ even get to fly it properly with all this talk about soldiers and armies.”
There was an ominous note to the next words from Sonna. “They better be careful, otherwise those Elakandiya guys from the slums might bring it down.”
With that, talk shifted to a discussion about the various problems associated with having a slum full of shanties just beyond the main road; at least that was something everybody in the household could agree upon. Even Sonna, who knew several boys his age who lived there and who called him friend, was able to say that he wished that the slums were cleaned up and the inhabitants sent somewhere else to live. Some of his associates there seemed to spend more time in jail than out of it, and he was not inclined to fall into the same pattern, though, while they continued to live so close to his house, he did not know how to extricate himself from the alliances he had made with them.
In the Herath household, after the same announcement about the intention of the Silva boys to join the army, Mrs. Herath shook her head. She served each of the children some chilled fruit salad that Mrs. Niles had sent over, the mangoes, papaws, and bananas all cut in identical squares and drizzled with the slightest touch of vanilla and sugar. It was delicious and she would have preferred not to have to discuss the Silvas just then. Her children, though, were not to be deterred by the sweet treat.
“Mohan said he would join the army first and Jith would follow after,” Nihil said.
Mrs. Herath sat down with her own bowl of fruit salad, resigned to the fact that talk about the Silvas was going to disrupt her evening. “They are getting old enough to make such decisions,” she said, “and it is not as though they will make it to university, unfortunately. I suppose it is better that than doing nothing at home and getting into trouble.”
“But fighting is trouble, Amma,” Devi said, shouting over the sound of the rain that began just then, going in seconds from a few quiet drops, each with its own individual plink, to a roaring downpour that drowned out her voice. “You always tell us not to fight.”
Nihil, Suren, and Rashmi got up and ran around the house shutting the windows and pulling the chairs away from the edges of the veranda, stopping briefly to watch the rain that was coming down in an angry, slate-colored slant, like the kind of drawing a child hurrying to complete a picture might scribble with his pencil. Ordinarily, this would be their cue to get out pieces of old cardboard and pages from exercise books and begin to build the paper boats they could track from their windows along the clean, shallow drains that bordered their house, rescuing the soggy vessels with sticks and rulers pushed through the bars of windows from within the dry safety of their bedrooms. But this was not an ordinary conversation, and Nihil, in particular, wanted to clear up any misperceptions that Devi might have about the nature of Mohan’s comment.
“This is a different kind of fighting,” Nihil said after they all returned to the table. “With guns.”
“I know with guns. I know soldiers means guns,” Devi responded, piqued.
“Is it true that there is going to be a war with the Tamil Tigers?” Rashmi asked, taking the matter into her own hands and looking directly at her father, who was sitting by the brass chess table and squinting at a newspaper that he had, surely, already read.
This was the type of question that the Herath children rarely put to their father. It was the kind of opening through which he would stroll, in excruciatingly slow motion, dragging them this way and that through arcane historical fact and anecdote until, seemingly hours later, their mother rescued them with a sharp summons to undertake some other onerous chore that would appear to them to be a delight by comparison. Yet now, her siblings rightly assumed, Rashmi had asked one of those questions because there was no help for it. That in itself was disconcerting.
“Hmmm,” Mr. Herath began, but was rendered silent by a long burst of lightning that lit up the outdoors like strobe lights signaling distress. All of them, even the adults, put their palms over their ears in anticipation of the thunder that would follow. After it had passed, Mr. Herath spoke again.
“You know about the TULF, the Tamil United Liberation Front? All the Tamil political parties are now united under that one name. They came to the forefront in 1977. You were too young to remember,” he said, looking at Nihil and Devi in turn. His brow furrowed as he looked at Rashmi. “Maybe even you, Rashmi, you may have been too young. But that was the year in which they got eighteen seats in parliament and Amirthalingam became the leader of the opposition—”
“God, yes,” Mrs. Herath interrupted. “I remember even my Amma cursing Mrs. Bandaranaike. She said, See what happens when you vote for those left types? Leader of the opposition is now a Demalā! She was so upset about the whole thing!”
“We shouldn’t call them Demalās,” Devi said, thinking in particular of Raju. “That’s not nice.”
Mrs. Herath clucked her tongue, half-apologetic. “Demalā just means Tamil person,” she said, stroking her daughter’s hair. “It’s just a word. We don’t have problems with Tamils after all.”
Devi moved away from her mother, sure that she was aware of the disparagement intended by the insertion of the twisted Sinhala term into the English. Even the term Tamils was bad enough, Devi thought. Something about the way it took away the precise up and down relationships she had with Raju and Kala Niles, and merged them into a group that she could not recognize, upset her.
“Anyway, it was not their fault, those Tamils,” Mrs. Herath said quickly. “It’s the fault of the SLFP. If they hadn’t messed up this country with all their Communist nonsense from ’70 to ’77, then the Tamils wouldn’t have got in.”
Whether this was enough apology for the Demalā comment was not clear because Mr. Herath resumed talking after a relatively brief digression in support of the SLFP, its leader, Mrs. Bandaranaike, and the policies of nationalism so harshly denigrated by his wife.
“The Tamil parties gained real power only after they met in Vaddukoddai, the year before the 1977 elections, and adopted a resolution announcing that they support a separate state. That is what led to Amirthalingam’s victory,” he said, and drew deeply on his cigarette. “Big promises to the Tamil youth if the TULF gained significant power.”
“So is there going to be a war?” Nihil asked, seizing the opportunity to speak when his father paused to take a long drag on his cigarette. As usual, he wasn’t interested in these details. He just wanted to know for what eventuality he needed to prepare himself and Devi. “When is it going to start? Where will they fight? Will they close the schools?”
Mr. Herath continued, in his fashion, as though nothing had been said to interrupt his flow of thought. “In 1975, Velupillai Prabhakaran killed a former member of parliament, who was also the mayor of Jaffna. That man had done a lot of good for the people in that area. He got them better prices for their agriculture, built the roads, built the stadium.” He took several more drags on his cigarette and considered how best to describe the complexities of communal politics and guerrilla warfare to his children, all four of whom were looking at him with such quiet intensity, Nihil and Rashmi in particular. Suren was listening, but his was a reflective kind of listening, not demanding answers but also not willing to accept any given at face value; he would walk away from the discussion coming to his own conclusions. Mr. Herath let his eyes drift over to his younger daughter, who seemed poised to hear something simple from him, something comprehensible that she could relate to her own life, to her small frivolities, and, of course, to Raju. Mr. Herath pictured her relating all their conversations to Raju. He looked up at the ceiling with a little anxiety, then he settled on a one-line, watered-down version of the truth.
“Prabhakaran, whose whole premise was armed struggle, was not happy with all that because the mayor belonged to Mrs. B’s party, the SLFP, and he favored the parliamentary process. Alfred Duraiappah. That was his name.”
“Poor man,” Mrs. Herath interjected. “Wasn’t he entering a Hindu kovil for prayers when he was killed? Imagine, how vicious, to kill a man on his way to a temple?” She rested her forehead on the tips of one hand as she said this, imagining.
The children too imagined, each according to age and reading, Suren seeing the mayor of Jaffna beheaded with a glittering sword that caught the sun, his head rolling toward the steps of a bright Hindu kovil adorned with carved gods and goddesses; Nihil picturing him stabbed to death, an Et tu, Brute on his lips; Rashmi, thanks to all the talk of soldiers earlier that day, seeing Mr. Duraiappah shot in the heart by a firing squad. Only Devi imagined the mayor intact and unblemished, simply alive one moment, dead the next.
Like his children, Mr. Herath was quiet for a little while, contemplating the villainy of the murderer and his wife’s penchant for interrupting. “Anyway,” he said at last with a sigh, “the Vaddukoddai resolution fired up the Tamil youth and in 1977 we had those riots.”
The power flickered and died just then in the wake of another round of lightning and thunder. There was a general stirring and much bumping into each other, as well as the usual screams of fear and delight from Devi, until Kamala brought a flickering light to the table, the candle stuck on the top of a bottle full of cumin, for which she was berated, which was then replaced by an empty upturned bottle that had once contained, the frayed old label declared, wood-apple jam.
Staring at the soft light, Suren remembered hearing about the riots. He was nine years old and two Tamil boys in his class had started fighting over the question of who had begun it all. One boy, he couldn’t remember his name, said it was the fault of the Sinhalese police officers who were demanding to be let into a carnival without tickets, somewhere in the North. The other boy, Pradeep, had said no, it was the Tamil people who beat up the Sinhalese officers first. The thing Suren hadn’t been able to figure out was how anybody could be so angry at a carnival whether they had or did not have tickets, so angry that they could bludgeon, loot, and murder, as the boys said they had done.
Mr. Herath addressed Suren. “You remember, Putha, some years later, when we went to play that chess tournament at St. John’s in Jaffna, how much tension there was in the air?”
Suren had not noticed anything in the air. He had been paying attention to the ocean, whose waters rippled in shallow waves for miles of a kind of green-flecked blue he had never seen anywhere since. A piece of music had come to him as he watched the movement of sunlight upon the pebbles and smooth sand below the water. A song sung by a mother about a son whose father was unknown. The idea that the gift of shells from one father and the gift of beads from the other could be threaded together to adorn the same child soothed him, particularly within the drift of this particular dinnertime conversation:
veralen kiri kavadi soya kenek puthuta gena denava
thavath kenek paata paata pabalu kaden gena enava
e kavadiy e pabalui eka noolaka amunanava
evaayin havadi sadaa puthuge ine palandinava
“I remember the tension!” Nihil spoke up. “I remember that everybody was looking at us when we got down from the buses and also when we got back into the buses. There were even soldiers at the Jaffna fort.”
“I don’t remember anything but the boring boring boring chess and the loud loud loud chess clocks, and we only stayed at the ocean for a little while,” Devi said sadly.
“We didn’t go there to have fun, that’s why,” Rashmi said. “We went to watch the tournament.”
“So boring to watch chess,” Devi said, and smiled when her mother laughed beside her. She stole a look at her mother, forgiving her for her earlier comment and, seeing that it was permissible, even while Kamala was still clearing the dishes, slumped toward her into a cuddle.
Rashmi looked over at her father. “Why did the Tamils kill the mayor when the mayor was Tamil too?”
“Not the Tamils, Prabhakaran,” Mr. Herath said, after a deep inhale and exhale of cigarette smoke. “Velupillai Prabhakaran, who was leading a terrorist outfit from the jungles of Jaffna. Prabhakaran is Tamil, Prabhakaran’s group is Tamil, but not all Tamils support Prabhakaran.”
Devi said, “Uncle Raju is not Prabhakaran,” and wiggled with cozy satisfaction in her mother’s lap.
“The mayor was killed because he represented the old way, trying to make changes through politics, through parliament. Prabhakaran’s lot don’t think that is working.”
“Is it working?” Nihil asked.
“And now we have to have a war?” Rashmi asked at the same time. “No, there won’t be any war,” Mr. Herath said, gauging the level of interest as well as the available answers and choosing Rashmi’s question. “The Tamil moderates in Jaffna will get rid of the bastard; the TULF will return. They’ll continue negotiating.”
“Good, then the Silva boys won’t have to join the army. I’ll tell them tomorrow,” Devi said.
Rashmi was not convinced. She was not convinced because her father continued to smoke and think and think and smoke and didn’t pick up one bit of reading from the stacks of material around their house. This was not the behavior of a man who was sure of anything. And Suren was not convinced because, while he had not felt tension in the air in Jaffna, he had felt tension in the air around Mohan, and that was much closer to home and seemed to carry with it the malice of intention. Nihil was neither convinced nor unconvinced. He sat through the rest of dinner wondering about the soldiers at the fort in Jaffna. Several of them had been Tamil. If both Tamils and Sinhalese were guarding the same public fort, how could there be war?
Ah, the conversations between parents and children, the way they unfold, always with good intentions, rarely with complete honesty. Which of these stories that the adults told was true, which false, which details spun to fit a certain way of seeing the world, which to fit another, we cannot say with any degree of surety. To know what effect the murder of that mayor of Jaffna, Mr. Alfred Duraiappah, had, we would have to ask his family, his neighbors. To know what effect the burning of recorded history had on the world, we would have to inquire of generations as yet unborn. For now, there was a man who had taken up arms in Jaffna, a mayor who had been assassinated, a library that was gone, and the only verifiable thing was this: there was trouble, and it was drawing close, for in the Silva house, the conversation went differently.
“Those fools don’t believe that there’s going to be a war,” Mohan scoffed as he served himself a pile of rice and curry by the light of an oil lamp they had placed in the middle of the table.
“Which fools?” Mrs. Silva asked, shivering a little in the algid air brought on by the rain outside. She wrapped the fall of her sari over her shoulders and poured herself a glass of still-warm water from the guruleththuwa on the table.
“The Heraths. They think they know everything. About kites and war and everything. But they don’t. They don’t know anything. Wait until the war comes here, then they’ll come running to us for help,” Mohan said, though his hand shook a little as he added extra gravy to his plate.
“Maybe they will come around when they have all the information,” Mrs. Silva said. Lately, despite the evidence of the Heraths’ lack of judgment regarding matters of race and class, as evidenced by their continued involvement with the wrong kinds of people down the lane, Mrs. Silva realized that she missed the small chats she had once enjoyed with her neighbor.
“Maybe there won’t be a war,” Jith volunteered, a little timidly. Frankly, he wasn’t a war going type, though he had not argued when Mohan had told him they were both expected to join the army. He was happy having a nearby girlfriend and planning his life in Australia with Dolly. Thanks to star struck descriptions that Dolly had culled from various friends who had heard of people like herself, Burghers, who had made the great migration Down Under, Australia had taken on the form of a great escape, unthreatening and simple, exactly the opposite of the future painted for him by his fight-ready older brother. He listened to the rain outside and wondered if Dolly had made any paper boats. He couldn’t wait to get up from the table and make one of his own. He had been saving a sheet of glazed red demi paper just for this purpose.
“There is going to be a war. Definitely. Good thing we’ll have the two of you in the army,” Mr. Silva said, tampering with, though not entirely ruining, Jith’s pleasant thoughts of rain, Dolly, and paper boats.
Mr. Silva’s knowledge of this war came from conversations at his place of work, from the resentful mutterings of some of his colleagues, mostly Sinhalese, and the anxiety and bravado among the rest of them, mostly Tamil. To these conversations Mr. Silva added his own daily observations. He noticed when a Tamil man gave up his seat more readily for a Tamil lady on the bus in a gesture that communicated an alliance to which he was not privy, and although he did not patronize their shops, he was sure that the Tamil shop keepers served their Tamil customers before they tended to the Sinhalese ones. He noted that there were more Sinhalese beggars than Tamil ones. He counted and was satisfied to note that his suspicions were right: the Tamils owned the most lucrative businesses in the country. Clearly, they had it coming.
“Yes, bloody Tamils need to be put in their places,” Mrs. Silva added. “The more who join, the bigger the army, the better off we’ll all be. Keep them where they belong. Have you seen the shops in Pettah? All the best ones owned by Tamils.”
“Why go to Pettah? Even here, down this lane, the Nadesans have the best property,” Mr. Silva said. “Thought we were lucky getting the Heraths but come to see, even they are like the Tamils.”
Indeed, it was the Silvas and the Bollings who had the largest acreage, and, since the Bollings’ compound was a simple area of space unadorned with plants, except for their share of sal mal trees, it was the Silvas’ garden that could claim to be the best property, stretching as it did in all its verdant and well-tended splendor, all the way down to the end of the lane, enabling Mr. Silva to have space for a grove of plantains and two mango trees—the fruits of which had only been shared with the Heraths—in addition to a large pond bordered by sugarcane, into which he had introduced goldfish. The reference to the Nadesans’ being in possession of a superior property was, therefore, a blantant untruth, though neither Mrs. Silva or the boys contested his statement.
The following day, as if to give them all a visual reminder that the end of innocence was near, Sonna’s predictions about the delinquents in the slums came true; they brought down the blue-and-silver kite. He took it upon himself to tell the Herath children about it.
“Those fellows roll the top of the thread, near the kite, ’bout three or four feet in glue, then crushed glass, then send it up. No chance agains’ that.” He grinned as he said it. “Not jus’ yours, all the kites aroun’ here they got.”
Devi cried and Nihil put his arm around her. Rashmi wondered why anybody would come up with such a vicious pastime, but she didn’t ask. Sonna, having said what he had wanted to, the news so hurtful, found that the satisfaction he had felt evaporated as soon as he stopped speaking and merely left him feeling empty and desirous.
“Let’s go home,” Suren said. “I learned a new song and I will play it for you.” And in this way he soothed his brother and sisters.