Though Mrs. Herath had shown up with a tray draped with a linen serviette and artfully arranged with cream crackers and Kraft cheese, though she had made lively conversation with the neighbors at whose center she had sat as the seemingly proud parent of the chief organizer, and though she had cheered with gusto as each trilling last note faded away and Masonic declarations hung in the air at the end of each act in Nihil’s play, though she had done all that, she was more disappointed in her children than she had ever been in her life. Of course they were all responsible for this, and each one of the four squared his or her shoulders and prepared to hoist the blame upon their backs, but she knew that the root cause was Suren. He, for reasons she could not fathom, had become the viper in their midst, who, with beatific face and dulcet tone, had lured his sisters and brother into the dark place from within which they could not just contemplate but have the brass to execute a bali-thovila—that was the only term she could use to describe it, a heathen’s salutation to the devil himself, such as they had produced on New Year’s Day.
In the interest of fairness it is necessary to note here that before she arrived on Sal Mal Lane, a long time before then, before the Herath children came into being, Mrs. Herath had been a different person. She had spent her girlhood immersed in literature and sports, her days filled with determined successes and, as the beloved firstborn of a large family, many privileges as well as indulgences. With no intimations of disaster allowed near her, these were things that had made her fearless as a young adult. If tastes lay in the direction of depth, therefore, her heart was a bottomless pit inhabited by twists and turns that only the bold would wish to traverse. If color was called for, she could have shamed a flaming tropical sunset out of the skies. But marriage and motherhood, those reliable stabilizers, had changed all that, taking her so completely out of her unfettered world and binding her so firmly and so suddenly within the one that proscribed her movements, that all she had managed to retain of her former self was a firm grasp of her mother’s values, the values of an older generation: sobriety, dignity, and overall propriety. Those turns not taken, for travel overseas to study nursing, for pursuing the life of a socialite who loved her game of tennis as much as she loved her ballroom dancing, those turns had been repaved. The footpath has become Galle Road she liked to say when old friends stopped by, gesturing in the direction of the artery that ran along the coastal city of Colombo, no time for dawdling. She did not let memory bring potential into focus: the promise of balmy lanes leading to tennis courts, the thrill of a cinder track under bare feet flying, the rhythm of her slight body dancing with island grace under the Southern Cross, these things were simply old indulgences, the sort of indulgences that could destabilize the stability she had once resisted. And this show, this production, was the worst of it, a sharp reminder of a certain kind of imprudent joy.
“Whose idea was it to go and practice at that Kala’s house?” she demanded to know, though she knew the answer, as well as the answer they were going to give.
“All of us thought of it,” Rashmi said, surprising Mrs. Herath; of all her children, Rashmi had been her one last hope.
“Okay, then whose friends were those, those, those creatures who were in the band?”
“Mine,” Suren replied, drowning out the chorus of all of us from his siblings.
“Yours. So, the practicing was for your band with your friends so it must have been your grand idea, am I right?” she asked. “Am. I. Right?” she asked again of the now silent wall of faces.
“They are my friends too,” Rashmi spoke up, her words rushing together. “Two of their sisters are in my class at school, that’s how Suren met them. When we all went to the birthday party, you remember? Sonali’s birthday party, Amma? I wore that pink dress you made for me?”
Rashmi looked down at her feet as soon as she had finished, scolding herself for her foolishness. This kind of detail was the dead giveaway of a liar. The truth required no embellishments; it was what it was. A dress, a pink dress, no less, and one that she hated as she had hated the color since the age of nine, would have been sooner forgotten than remembered. And since when did Suren and Nihil or even Devi accompany her to birthday parties? She looked forlornly at her older brother. He smiled in that new way he had, as though he was saying Never mind, cheer up, and We’ll survive this, all at the same time.
“They are my friends too,” Rashmi repeated.
Mrs. Herath sat up straight, determined to put a stop to the nonsense. “Okay, then what are their last names?”
“Adamaly, Agalawatte, Jeganathan . . .” Suren said quickly.
“I didn’t ask you. I asked her,” Mrs. Herath snapped.
“Adamaly, Agalawatte, Jeganathan, and the last is Simon,” she said, confidently, glad that Devi had taken to calling Dylan Simon “Simple Simon,” which had planted the name in her head.
“Simon, Adamaly, Jeganathan” Mrs. Herath spat out each name, her rage erasing her egalitarian worldview. “Thuppai Burghers and Tamils and Muslims whose parents we don’t even know, are these the kinds of people you should be seen with in public, let alone while prancing, half-naked, on a stage?”
The children stared at her. None of them had appeared on stage half-naked. Rose and Dolly had been tarted up, as Rose herself had put it, with clothes borrowed from their older sister, Sophia, but that was the extent of half-nakedness. Besides, if Adamalys and Simons and Jeganathans were not to be associated with when they attended the same schools and owned most of the instruments, then what on earth were Raju and the Bolling girls doing in the Heraths’ house all the time? Clearly, their mother was reaching for straws, and if she was reaching for straws then surely they were right to have done what they did. All this passed through their minds as they stood and gazed at her obediently, their mutiny safely behind them.
Mrs. Herath looked hard at them, then cleared her throat, deciding. She stood up. “There’s going to be no more band practice anywhere. If I hear that you have been going to Kala’s to play guitars and drums and nonsense, you mark my words, I will take the mirisgala and smash her piano to bits!”
This was the type of threat Mrs. Herath was used to delivering, but those threats were usually delivered with regard to things they owned. I’ll take the skin off your backside, I’ll rip that dress to shreds, I’ll burn all your books, I’ll cut off your hair, that sort of thing. But to threaten to smash poor Kala Niles’s source of livelihood with the heavy granite stone used by Kamala for grinding chillies? The very thought separated the children from their mother by a measure of deep consternation.
“How will we make sure that Kala Akki doesn’t get into trouble?” Rashmi whispered as they all gathered under the sal mal trees up the road and discussed the new rules. The trees filled the air with the smell of buds on the cusp of blooming, nature itself gathering toward the children in solidarity.
“Don’t worry about that,” Suren said, his voice grim as he leaned against one of the trees. “If it comes down to it, I’ll tell Amma that I will stop playing the piano forever if she won’t let us practice the band.”
Yes, Suren had changed. He was no longer the good boy who did what was expected, he was the boy who knew the power of promise and whom he could hold hostage by the mere threat of refusing to live up to it.
“And also if I can’t keep singing,” Rashmi added. “What?” she asked, as the other three turned to look at her. “I can sing too, not just Rose and Dolly, right?” She looked at Suren for confirmation.
Rashmi really could sing, at long last. Until then she had only possessed a beautiful voice, but she had lacked the yearning that turned a song into a story until she had performed in the variety show. Suren nodded, and Nihil and Devi looked at Rashmi with fresh regard.
Perhaps it was mere youth that made the Herath children and their friends believe that they were invincible and, also, invisible and inaudible. Or perhaps it was that the younger Heraths, Nihil and Devi, had cajoled Raju, who frankly did not require much prodding, Devi simply had to ask, as well as Lucas and Kamala—both won over by their attendance at the variety show—to assist them in their escapade by standing guard and watching for their mother’s return. Whatever it was, their practices continued, though a few times they were almost caught when Mrs. Herath got a lift back home from one student or another, and once Lucas, and another time Raju, failed to see her until the car reached the Heraths’ gate and she got out from the backseat. Those times found Raju rushing out of his house in his weight-lifting underpants, something he had given up doing after Rashmi had suggested it, trying to start up a conversation with her until Devi could alert the band members that Amma’s back! Stop! Stop! Amma’s back!
The one person who might have told their mother was Sonna, who, they had begun to notice, always seemed to be at Raju’s house when they were practicing; they could see the top of his head above Raju’s gate as they walked to the Nileses’ house. A few times Nihil had been convinced that it was the sight of him that prevented Sonna from telling their mother and he felt grateful enough to raise his hand in a wave to the older boy, even though each time Sonna only turned away without any sign that he had seen Nihil or his greeting. He did not acknowledge Rashmi, either, even though, full of excitement at having discovered the fissures in her otherwise good-girl reputation, Rashmi made a point of turning to smile and wave at Sonna as they passed.
Down Sal Mal Lane, the change in Rashmi and Suren and even in the previously dependable Lucas and Kamala went unnoticed by the working adults distracted by the constant political upheavals around them. Upheavals that the children knew about from whispered conversations at school or from the newspapers they glanced at and then discarded, their minds on music and cricket. Even Rashmi, who had so recently made it a practice to read the papers, had given it up in the wake of the variety show.
A presidential election was announced for the first time in the history of the country, and posters that carried the elephant, the symbol of the government, far outweighed those of the key, the star, the hand, and the bell, the symbols for the Lanka Sama Samaja Party, the Communist Party, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, and the Janatha Vimukthi Peremuna, respectively, and those posters with the elephant symbol remained on walls long after they were supposed to have been taken down. All the adults had opinions about this, some, like the Silvas, in favor, some, like the Heraths, against, but nobody felt able to protest.
The absorption of the Prevention of Terrorism Act into permanent legislation added another cylinder of fuel to simmering frictions. And what, exactly, did this Act prevent? It did not prevent acts of terrorism, nor vandalism, nor assassinations. It did not foster communal harmony. It was worded to aid in the detention of individuals suspected of terrorism and swiftly became a means to censorship of the press and the restriction of free speech and movement.
Nihil learned of this when he read the newspaper aloud to Mr. Niles one afternoon. “The Prevention of Terrorism Act prohibits the publication of any material, spoken word, or sign whose language could be considered to be designed to incite to violence, or which is likely to cause racial or communal disharmony or feelings of ill-will or hostility between different communities or racial or religious groups,” he read, then looked up and asked, “What does that mean?”
An agitated Mr. Niles said, “It means there will be no room for us to discuss right or wrong,” and he took the newspaper away from Nihil and flung it across the room, where it fell elegantly, like a lady’s handkerchief. Mr. Niles’s response startled Nihil and made him stay quiet for a long while until, after he was sure Mr. Niles had drifted off to sleep, he got up, picked up the paper, put it back together, and read the news quietly to himself, saving the sports pages for the end.
Nihil went home to tell his siblings that “Mr. Niles says discussions have been banned by the government,” a statement they received without much ado, there being no corresponding deprivation that they could relate the news to; all the same rules remained in effect in their house, and even the neighbors who did not talk to one another did so out of choice.
But Mr. Niles was right. Within such parameters, there was no venue for the airing of grievances or passions, all of which were now tucked away inside homes and hearts that, built as they were for other pursuits, could not contain them for long.
Far beyond their games of hopscotch, cricket, marbles, and catch, things the children of Sal Mal Lane might have paid attention to were happening. Still, they refused, whenever they could, to look up from chalk squares, keyboards, love notes, theme songs, and, in Devi’s case, her special bicycle rides up and down the road with Raju in attendance. The children’s hideout, tucked among the grove of sal mal trees, gave them an added sense of being removed even from the words of people like Mohan. They retreated there during the hottest time of the afternoons, to sit in its shade and do their homework or talk, sometimes sharing guavas from Mrs. Sansoni, a bag of sweets from Raju, or raw mangoes that Mr. Herath had brought home from the Sunday market. So long as they showed up to be together, to play together, they could pretend that all the larger concerns, which they certainly knew more about now, nonetheless had no bearing on them.
In the Silva household, what was bad intensified and Mohan brought home leaflets denouncing Tamils. This caused Jith to tremble in his presence and write to Dolly in secret. He dreamed each night of escape while the older Silvas waited for war with a certain smug satisfaction, more sure than they had been of anything in their lives that, when it came, they would be on the side of the winners, though every now and again Mrs. Silva glanced wistfully toward the Herath house and wished that she had another lady to talk to down the lane, the kind that she knew Mrs. Herath could be if she really wanted to. Until then, Mrs. Silva had to content herself in continuing to lay the groundwork, as she thought of it, making occasional small talk that skirted around the things she really wanted to say in the hope that when it was time, when the full force of evidence was before her, Mrs. Herath would come around to understanding that they, Mrs. Herath and Mrs. Silva, were on the same side. There would be gratitude on Mrs. Herath’s part then, Mrs. Silva was sure of it.
Mohan spent more time with Sonna, standing at the bottom of the lane with young men whom Sonna introduced to Mohan as his friends though one or the other of those men was constantly being locked up and bailed out of the Wellawatte prison for misdemeanors ranging from drunken fights to petty thefts. If Mohan found their behavior objectionable, he did not say. He had developed an air of bravado and laughed loudly alongside them at bawdy jokes his mother would have blanched to hear.
“Have you seen the Heraths recently?” he might ask Sonna, egging him on. “They seem to spend all their time at that Niles house.”
“Pansy fuckers,” Sonna might say, though when he said those words he thought only of Suren. “They don’ know anythin’ ’bout anythin’ but know how to sing pop songs.” They smacked each other on the back and thanked their lucky stars that they were not like them, those girly homos, those cowards.
Sonna had also taken to spending nights away from home. He left after dinner and sometimes did not return for days. Neither Francie Bolling, who was afraid of both her son and her husband, nor Jimmy Bolling, who did not care, asked Sonna where he went and what he did when he was gone, though Francie Bolling did accept the wads of money he would bring back and give to her when his father was not around.
And because he rarely saw Sonna anymore and because when he did see him, Sonna was usually in a foul mood, either scolding his mother or yelling at Raju, Nihil stopped waving to him and decided that Mr. Niles was right, Sonna was a bad boy by choice.
“I don’t think you should be waving to Sonna,” he told Rashmi one evening as they walked to the Nileses’ house, she to her lesson, he to visit Mr. Niles to discuss his progress with cricket.
“Why?” she asked, tossing her head and smiling at Nihil, at his concern about whom she chose to wave to.
“He’s a bad boy,” Nihil said.
“I don’t care,” Rashmi said. “It’s not like he’s my friend. I’m just waving to him.” And, just to harass Nihil a little, she ran back the way they had come, stood on tiptoe, and smiled and waved with even more enthusiasm at Sonna, then waited to see what he would do. He made no move in response, though he stared at her standing there, her hair brushed out and loose down her back in its waves, the teasing in her eyes, her bangles making music, lost in his own dark imaginings. Eventually, when it was clear that he would not respond, Rashmi turned away, her good humor gone.
“I told you,” Nihil said.
Rashmi did not disagree.
Despite their continued difficulties with Sonna, in the Bolling house, with two girls engaged in one way or another with “good” families, Jith having been disassociated from the politics of his parents by a sleight of mind that weighted his timidity more and his origins less, the older Bollings regarded themselves as having done well by their children. They began to dress better and speak more soberly. There were fewer arguments and more appearances in public.
In the Nileses’ house, three people were revived by the daily presence of children who slammed doors and creaked gates and muddied the floor and dropped crumbs that brought with them armies of red ants that made Kala Niles get down on her hands and knees at night, rubbing the edges of doorways with kerosene oil in a half hearted attempt to keep them away. Those children turned the house of the Unmarried and the Dying into a house full of the Future.
In the Herath household, much had changed, mostly for Rashmi, who had discovered what Devi had known all along: life was too short for rules made by nuns and older women for little girls. It took a while for her lay teachers and nuns to realize that Rashmi was no longer the golden girl she had once been, because she had earned that time by doing what every smart student knows how to do: be impeccable in behavior and superior in class-work for the first four weeks of school when teachers were distracted and welcomed any evidence of scholarship, and ride the glory until the end of the year. Not this year.
When the second-term tests came around and the report cards were handed out, the evidence was, well, evident: three B’s sat, one under the other, for Sinhala, Buddhism, and Maths.
“I am quite sure that she studied hard for these tests, Sister,” Mrs. Herath declared as she sat across the desk from the Sister Principal, Sister Stanislaus, and tried not to look at her husband. Whatever her feelings about Rashmi at home, she refused to allow someone from the outside to cast doubt on her daughter’s character.
Mr. Herath leaned forward, amicably. “Yes, there is no need for all this fuss. She always gets A’s, she’ll get A’s again.” He leaned back, satisfied with his contribution and thinking ahead to the afternoon of meetings he had to attend.
Mrs. Herath herself did not feel up to paying too much attention just then to Sister Stanislaus. Like every other adult in the country, she, too, was caught up in contemplating the outcome of the presidential elections, which were barreling toward them. Right now, her mind was on the possibility of curfews and the necessity to stock up on rice and dhal and tins of Jack Mackerel.
Sister Stanislaus picked up a stack of Rashmi’s report cards going all the way back to kindergarten, all of them pale blue, and rapped them on the desk. She then spread them out and examined each one through glasses that perched at the tip of her nose, the long golden beads of the chain on which they were hung swinging gently next to her sharp-featured face. Finding nothing there that could really qualify as a problem, but for this last set of results, she looked up finally and turned her gaze on Mr. Herath.
“Well, you must be very busy, Mr. Herath, with the elections?” she said.
Mrs. Herath stiffened. Her husband had barely made it to this appointment, brushing it off with a summons to the prime minister’s office comment that even she, despite her years of experience listening to him, could not decipher.
“I am not involved in the elections,” he said, chuckling with amusement, “I am an official. My job will be to oversee procedure and verify the count at the polling booths. And vote, of course. I’ll be doing that.”
“It is unfortunate that the country does not seem to be going the way we want it to,” Sister Stanislaus said. Neither of the Heraths said anything, and she continued. “The whole business last year with the riots, you know, it was not easy for our Tamil girls.”
“There was no rioting here,” Mr. Herath said mildly.
“No, of course not,” Sister Stanislaus said, airily, as though riots and convents would never inhabit the same universe. “Not here. Still, unrest anywhere . . .”
“Those were some isolated incidents. The army should have been dispatched right away, but these jokers . . .” Mr. Herath felt a sharp pain in his sandal-clad right foot. He glanced at his wife. “. . . anyway, we’ll see. The elections may change everything.”
“Oh, our girls come from families that support the government, no doubt about it,” Sister Stanislaus said, the note of accusation quite obvious. Her hierarchy of alignments was so clear to the Heraths it was almost as if she had listed it off: Catholics of any race, Hindu Tamils, Muslims, and last of all the group to which the two of them belonged, the anti-government Sinhalese-Buddhists.
“Of course,” Mrs. Herath said, smoothly, “and my husband works for the government too. As do I, after all, as a teacher I too am a government servant, isn’t that so? And our children are all good students,” and here she faltered before finishing, “all of them.”
“Well, Devi—” Sister Stanislaus said.
“Devi is doing quite well, according to her teachers,” Mrs. Herath said, “and we are here to discuss Rashmi.”
And though Rashmi was discussed for twenty more minutes, no compromise was struck, for the Heraths would not agree that there was anything amiss with a child with three sudden B’s after a lifetime of A’s. Fresh on the heels of this meeting, when the new class monitors were being chosen, and Rashmi was not only nominated, the nomination was seconded, and the votes were cast by an overwhelming majority in her favor, the class teacher, a nun named Sister Francesca, decided unilaterally to eliminate the function of class monitor.
“You had to go and open your mouth and talk about governments and jokers, didn’t you?” Mrs. Herath berated her husband, when Rashmi told her. “Now they’ll be penalizing the girls until they graduate.”
“They should go to a different school, then,” Mr. Herath said. “We don’t need to pay school fees to a pack of anti-Buddhist, anti-Sinhalese . . .”
“It’s not about being anti-Buddhist and anti-Sinhalese. It’s about keeping your mouth shut. Rashmi was doing so well and I’m sure she would have been made a prefect. Now even that is not certain.”
Listening hard outside the door, Rashmi tried to feel a pang of disappointment, but all she felt was sheer delight.
Yes, much had changed in the Herath family, between Nihil’s return to cricket, Rashmi’s ascent as a performer and her corresponding descent as a scholar, and Suren’s steadfast march toward the kind of independence that would never again be controlled by parental expectation, he had shrugged off that yoke conclusively. One person remained the same: Devi.