On the second day of the match Mr. Herath, Lucas, Raju, the Niles family, and the Bolling girls, stayed behind, Mr. Niles in some considerable discomfort from all his exertions the day before, though he shook Nihil’s hand and sent him on his way to the game with a pat on his back when Nihil went to bid him good-bye. And because they stayed home, their day was experienced differently, for they read the newspapers and heard the gossip and had nothing to distract them from the fear and anger that clouded the skies above them.
In the papers, a plethora of Incidents were discussed. More than fifty individuals, mostly Tamil but also Sinhalese who belonged to the left-leaning parties, had now been detained under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. K. Navaratnarajah, one of those taken in under the act, had died in detention, the papers said. Meanwhile, editorials discussed how followers of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the man who had stood in that jungle seven years before then and declared his disinterest in elections, had bombed five polling booths in Jaffna.
There was an Incident mentioned regarding a government official using the phrase Para Demellu during a speech and another official demanding an apology for that insult on behalf of the Tamil members of government. No apology had been forthcoming. An Incident was mentioned about the death of two members of the armed forces in the North, which was an Incident reported along with a cumulative number of those in the armed forces who had been killed since 1981: twenty-two. As though the deaths of people in uniforms merited aggregation, as if any day now, these deaths would round out to a number that would prompt some more severe reprimand, something more visceral than consternation or even sympathy.
A State of Emergency had been called upon, once more, the left-wing papers said, to shroud the nation in further misinformation and fear, and two newspapers, the Saturday Review and the Suthanthiran, both of which were Tamil-language newspapers critical of the government, were accused of inciting separatist sentiments, and shut down.
The direction in which the country was heading were discussed by ordinary people, the slant of their words depending upon the things that they read in their choice of newspaper, what they heard from each other, and, sometimes, their ethnicity. People looking for less specific reasons, intellectuals writing in multiple languages, brought up other facts to explain what was happening around them: government corruption, the impoverishment, as a direct result of that corruption, of the general populace, the lack of work in rural areas, the impotence felt by workers due to the violent breakup of that nation wide strike not long ago, and the systematic strangulation of the democratic process what with the self-appointment of an executive president and the carrying out of a referendum. These were all brought up and heads were bowed or shaken depending on the political persuasion of the intellectual.
The Incidents mentioned were not all in the same newspaper. The newspapers that carried the news in Tamil had one set of stories, those that were in Sinhala carried another set of stories, and, why not say it, each of those newspapers tended to favor the virtue of those who spoke its own language of print and question the moral fortitude of those who did not. If some balance of perspective were possible, then it would have been possible in English-language newspapers but, alas, those newspapers were filled with the thoughts of people, both Sinhalese and Tamil, whose identities flavored their opinions but who had learned to present their arguments with more spit and polish, which meant that nothing was said overtly, though the implications behind what was said were the same. Ranting about one party or militant group or another was deemed adequate expression of civic duty by all the people writing in all three languages in all the major newspapers, and worse, their predictions of the future were nothing like the one that was coming. Not even close.
For those on Sal Mal Lane, those who were not watching a cricket match, there was the additional difficulty of weighing what was read with what was heard, particularly for those who listened more than they read.
“They say the Tigers are gathering for a big strike,” Lucas said, shaking his head. “Maybe it is good that the Silva sons are going to join the army.” He had taken to wearing his sarong rolled up at all times in anticipation of some difficulty that would demand swift movement.
“When are they coming?” Rose asked him when she ran into him after a day that seemed depressing and dull after the one spent playing truant and sitting through a cricket match, boys everywhere they looked.
“Soon, they say. Better go and warn Koralé also.”
“Tigers are coming in a few months!” Rose said to Dolly.
“What are we going to do when the Tigers come next month?” Dolly asked Jith, after giving him a gift she had made for him, a navy-blue handkerchief on which Rashmi had helped her to embroider his initials, JS, in a flowery monogram script done in hot pink.
“We are ready. We have our Seeya’s guns,” he said through cheeks bulging with not one but two Delta toffees, a sweet-tooth habit that made his face break out but that he would not give up.
“Guns you have?” Dolly asked, her eyes widening. “Bullets an’ all?”
Jith did not know if the guns were loaded, only that they hung on the wall over their dining table. “Yes, of course. All guns are loaded, otherwise what’s the use of having them?”
“Silvas have already bought guns,” Dolly told Sonna, who said he already knew, though he had not known. He stormed off down the road to see what kind of weaponry he could rustle up, fuming that he had not been told about the guns by Mohan.
“Silvas have gone and bought guns,” Sonna told Raju when he almost collided with him coming out of Koralé’s shop, Mr. Herath’s cigarettes in one hand, his change in the other. “Now you’ll see.”
“All the Sinhalese houses are getting guns these days,” Raju told Kala Niles, worry deepening all of his mismatched features, as they stood together next to the bakery man, buying loaves of fresh warm bread, something they had been doing since they were children, children as young as Nihil and Devi were now.
“Yes, everywhere now people are getting ready,” the bakery man said and then, to Mr. Tissera when he came out to buy their bread, “Sir, you got guns ready?”
“Guns? What for?” Mr. Tissera asked in some alarm, and he began to crack the knuckles on his fingers one after the other.
“For anything, better be prepared when the Tigers come,” the bakery man said.
“Don’t be foolish. Nobody is going to buy guns. From where to buy them anyway?” Mr. Tissera said, but when he went inside he said to his wife in a low voice, “Whole lane is getting ready for Tigers. We also should do something.”
“What is there to do?” his wife asked as she sat at the dining table wearing her housecoat and peeled clove after clove of garlic for a garlic curry that she knew Mr. Niles liked to eat and that she made for him now and then, even though it left her fingers raw and aching for days after.
“Better go and ask the Silvas,” he said, “they always seem to know everything about troubles.” But when he stepped outside he ran into Mr. Nadesan, coming home from visiting his sister, and when Mr. Tissera asked him if he had heard that the Tigers were coming, Mr. Nadesan shook his head sadly and said We are thinking of going to India, we have family there. And Mr. Tissera felt too despondent to keep walking down the street to the Silvas and instead came home and lay down in his armchair wondering what kind of uncivilized family might move into the house next door when the Nadesans left because they, the Nadesans, had always been his kind of neighbor, quiet, polite, there when needed, asking for help when necessary, never imposing.
Yes, down Sal Mal Lane there was more talk of weapons and preparations and Tigers than there had ever been. Big words like atrocities and disenfranchisement were tossed over plates of rice and curry during the midday meal, and nobody at all, not the Bin Ahmeds, not the Nadesans, not the Nileses, not the Tisseras or Mr. Herath and Kamala—for only they were at home that day—not the Bollings, certainly not the outliers, Lucas and Alice and Raju, and not even the Silvas felt safe.
So it was a good thing that the Herath children were able to spend that day watching one of them take the field in a second innings. And even though when the game ended, it did not end with Nihil making the game-winning catch he had hoped to make, his contribution had been steady, he had taken one catch, aided in a run-out, and stopped three fours, nonetheless, when the game ended he was close enough to the wicket to grab the bails and thereby had a precious reminder of the game, this game.