Jimmy Bolling did not, ordinarily, care where Sonna went. Ordinarily he would have been glad if Sonna never returned. But this had not been an ordinary day.
First, Rose and Dolly had barely made it to safety. On their way home, the girls had been confronted by a group of men.
“Nice skin but hair is brown,” one of them said, stroking her cheek as Dolly cringed.
“What school?” another said, yanking Dolly’s tie.
“Methodist,” she replied, beginning to cry.
“Not Buddhist school?” the man yelled.
“We’re Burgher,” Rose said, taking Dolly’s hand in hers.
“Lansi? Then why not fairer skin?” another yelled. Despite the time of day she could smell alcohol on his breath.
“Our father’s great-grandmother,” Dolly began, her voice quivering, but Rose dug her fingers into her sister’s palm and stepped toward the men.
“We are Sinhala mix. Ammata hukana keri vesige putho, thavath kunuharapa ahagannethuwa apita ape paaduwe yanna deepang hukanne nethuwa. Pakaya!” In a moment of inspiration that sprang not from fear but from fury, Rose unleashed a string of filth that made the men first fall back at the sound and sight of it, this light-skinned girl hurling such raw words at them, then burst into laughter.
“Go, go, go home quickly!” one man said in English.
“If someone else catches you, you won’t be so lucky,” another one said, pushing them roughly down the road. They had stood there laughing as the girls ran away from them.
Their story when they got home added to Jimmy Bolling’s fear. For the first time in his life, he wished his son would come home. He needed Sonna the way any man who has to protect a household of women, children, and an old man, needed the kind of strapping son that Sonna had become. Seeing Jimmy Bolling’s distress as he listened to Rose’s story, Raju had tried to help. He had brought the Bin Ahmeds’ hose into their house and spent more than an hour watering the boundary walls of the Bolling compound, saying helpfully, If they come with kerosene, we must be prepared, while aiming the hose methodically in stripes along the fences and onto the walls. He then climbed up on a chair he dragged to the corner of the compound, where the Bolling girls had sat so often while Suren played the guitar for them, and aimed the hose over the fence and onto the side of his mother’s house, which sat adjacent.
But, having stomped through the mud and yelled Enough! at Raju, and having forced everybody indoors again, and locked the front door, Jimmy Bolling felt the weight of his solitude return. Although he had uttered a few strong words as the looters passed him, he had not tried to prevent them from swarming into the houses up the road, and he had not been able to help his neighbors put out even the smallest fires he could see from where he sat, for fear that Raju or his mother would come out and see what was happening. He had been forced to watch as groups of men ran past him, more than a few of them calling him a lansi ponnaya as they went, knowing that for one reason or another, no matter how many knives and belts he had beside him, he would not leave his post to attack them. When first Raju and then Old Mrs. Joseph had asked about the smoke, calling to him from inside, he had yelled Some trouble down the next lane and summoned his wife to move Raju and his mother to the farthest room, theirs, and make sure they stayed there, the only protection he could offer them from what was happening outside.
Now, after all that, here he was again, sitting outside his flimsy aluminum fencing, having to guard all these people, and where was Sonna? A curl of fear rose inside him, and with it came an image of his son as a child. Sonna was seven, standing silently by the fence while Rose sat on the ground wailing. Jimmy Bolling remembered that face, Sonna’s, the way it had looked, as though the world itself had shifted, somehow. He had watched that face in the side-view mirror as his friend reversed the car and he had watched Sonna kneel down in the dirt and pull Rose close to him. He had held her face and stroked her hair. By the pursing of his mouth he had been able to tell that Sonna was hushing her, whispering shh . . . shhh. Jimmy Bolling remembered asking his friend to stop the car, he wanted to go and comfort his son, to tell him it wasn’t his fault, and when his friend would not listen, too drunk to care, Jimmy Bolling had lunged at the steering wheel. After that there was nothing but the memory of pain and rage.
Dolly’s voice rose up from inside and startled Jimmy Bolling. He jumped as though he had been caught in the midst of some cowardice. He looked up and down the silent lane, then moved his head, stretching out the muscles of his neck. He glanced at the sky. Evening was falling. What would the night bring? Sonna would have the connections to intervene on behalf of his family, he thought bitterly. Bastard knows everybody. Where the fuck was he?
Yes, where was Sonna?
On the morning of the riots, while all the other children got ready and went to school, Sonna woke up in the house of a new friend he had fallen in with a few weeks earlier. They had come together to steal plants from the nursery beyond the bridge and then sell them to households in neighborhoods in Dehiwala. Together, they also stole pawned jewelry from a broker on High Street and sold it to young women on their way to work, accosting them at the bus halt near Russell Stores. Sonna had three hundred rupees so far, from his commission on the sales. When he had enough he was going to start a security business. He had heard from Mohan that this was an up-and-coming industry. People are scared these days, Mohan had said, security businesses will be starting everywhere. While Sonna did not know exactly how such a business might be set up, he felt he had the necessary credentials to provide security to people. He was street smart, he was strong, he could frighten people.
He was still in that half-awake, half-dreaming state that morning when his friend shook him. “Sonna, wake up, dead soldiers have been brought to Colombo. They’re saying riots!” the boy said.
“Riots? Where?”
“Here!”
Sonna sat up quickly and dressed. If there were riots, he knew the Elakandiya mobs would go to Sal Mal Lane. He had to get home quickly. He buckled his belt, threw on his shirt, stuffed his feet into his boots, no socks, and strode down the road. If Sonna had left earlier he would have made it back to Sal Mal Lane, but by the time he got out of his friend’s house the streets were filled with people, half of them terrified, the other half terrifying. He saw Suren in that former group. He wanted to call out to him, to ask if he knew if everybody was all right on Sal Mal Lane, but between him and Suren there was a crowd of men among whom Sonna saw people from the slums near his house, their known faces coming into sharp focus against masses of features he could not recognize.
“Ah! Sonna Sir! Come and join us!” they shouted. Two of the men broke off from the gang and came over to Sonna, put their arms around him and half dragged him into their midst.
“Machang, I have to go home—” Sonna began, but he was shouted down. “Home? Now is not the time to go home, Sir! This is the time we have to save our people!”
“We’re going to Wellawatte and then coming back this way. You can go home then. Come, come, hurry up!” And Sonna found himself jostled and pulled along by the crowd. He kept glancing back, hoping to see Suren again, but when he finally did see him, Suren was much farther along the road, too far away to hear him even if he called out. He reconciled himself to being swept along by the mob. On the way Sonna learned of the bomb that had killed the soldiers, the transportation of their bodies, and the rioting that followed.
“Demala huththo,” they said angrily, “think those bloody Tamil Tigers can kill our soldiers? We’ll see about that. There won’t be one left when we finish.” And they smashed the fronts of stores that belonged to Tamil merchants, and if they could not, if there were steel doors that sealed the store, they poured kerosene under the doors and set the oil alight, never pausing to see if the fire would take hold, or if anyone was inside, moving so ceaselessly from one establishment to the next that it seemed to Sonna that they would not stop until there was nothing left to burn.
During all his declamations against the Tamils, a dislike he had acquired through his association with Mohan and one he had made his own solely to add to the ways in which he could infuriate and distinguish himself from his father, during all that time, Sonna had never conceived of a day like this. He had spoken, as Mohan did, of troubles and someday and bloody Tamils, but his animosities lay closer to home, the bloody Tamils of his words just a stand-in for his father, the person he could not curse quite so readily or quite so freely.
Now, caught in the madness around him, there was nothing for him to do but join in, though he couldn’t let go of his fear for Sal Mal Lane and all its inhabitants, though all he wanted to do was run home. He screamed at people he saw along the way, sending them scattering this way and that, he pushed two young boys off their bicycles, he slapped a middle-aged man until he fell to the ground, and he tore through shops sweeping inventory to the floor. Each time he did these things he imagined the Herath children watching and the image of those faces saddened him, and so he bared his teeth and his voice came out louder. He did everything harder, more wild than all the rest, setting fire to rooms before any of the men had a chance to loot. Deep within himself, Sonna was occupying a different frame; he was charging through streets to rescue, not harm, and he came at people like an avenging god until he could no longer tell the difference. He paused once; in the one open shop that the men got to before he did, the owner long since fled, he saw a shrink-wrapped cassette tape of top-twenty songs from 1982 in a pile of cassettes that the men were about to burn and it reminded him of Rose, so he picked it up and put it in the back pocket of his jeans, the one thing he stole that day.
“Kalyani Avenue!” the men yelled as they turned back. “Lane is full of Tamils. Not one Sinhalese house!”
“Let’s go there then. Leave the rest to others.”
On they stormed, on back down High Street, and on down the hill toward Kalyani Avenue. Sonna, instantly sobered, grabbed the shirt of the man nearest to him, a man whose skin was such an unusual shade of dark that he was named for it. “Kalu Aiyya,” he panted as they ran, “I must go home now.”
“Why are you going home, Sonna Sir?” the man asked, keeping pace, “there’s work to be done.”
“I have done enough. I have to go and see if my family is okay.”
The man stopped. “Why would your family not be okay? Aren’t they Burgher?”
“Yes, Burgher, but my father’s aunt, others down the road—”
“Then you come with us when we go there to get rid of them,” the man said, resuming his jog, his rolled-up sarong bouncing against his thighs as he ran.
Sonna left Kalu Aiyya behind and ran faster until he came to the front of the group. “Stop!” he said, holding up his arms. “Stop!”
The men bumped into each other as they came to a slow stop. Around them other smaller groups of men and some women were tearing through the streets. There were no Tamils to be seen on the streets now; they had all gone into hiding or run away or were trapped in their homes. An egg-shaped van came speeding up the road and one of the men pulled another away from its path, his arm around his shoulder. Both men shouted at the driver to watch where he was going, couldn’t he see he could kill somebody driving like that?
“What, Sonna Sir? What? Tell quickly!” one of the men shouted. One of his forearms sparkled with several gold bangles and he had a peacock-blue silk sari wrapped around his neck. His pockets bulged.
Sonna looked around. The rest of them, too, were carrying their loot upon their bodies, in their clothes. One man kept patting his shirt pocket, which was filled with hair clips and ribbons for some beloved female in his life. Another had a child’s yellow-and-green drink bottle slung around his neck. A third had dressed himself in shirts and women’s blouses to the point that the upper half of his body seemed bloated in contrast to his thin legs. In one corner there was a man who was using the edge of a sleeve to wipe the blood off a young boy who had suffered some injury along the way. He spat into the shirt and wiped again, then pressed the shirt into the wound. The boy grimaced in pain and the man uttered some soothing words. None of them carried weapons. Weapons, Sonna supposed, were always easy to find. They lay in every house so long as the inhabitants were too scared to pick them up themselves. Any chair, any knife, any bat, any bar in any window. That and the power of numbers. He shuddered.
“What?” the same man yelled. “If there’s nothing to say, let us keep going. We’re wasting time.”
“My lane, Sal Mal Lane, must not be touched,” Sonna said, making his voice as powerful as he could, some of the depth of his father’s voice suddenly coming out of his mouth.
The men started shouting, arguing. “What is so great about your Tamils? You have Tamils, they must also go,” one said. He had sat down on a suitcase stuffed with stolen goods, saris, cutlery, picture frames, even a bell that he had yanked off a tricycle.
“My family is there,” Sonna said. “I don’t want my family harmed. And there are Sinhalese families there. Tisseras, Silvas, Heraths.” He paused and drew a deep breath, “Heraths specially, they will be helping Tamils. They must be safe.”
“Who is this Herath fucker?” one man asked, spitting. “Who is this huththa who is helping Tamils?”
“He deserves to burn,” said another, a man who looked eminently decent except for the dirt and sweat on his khaki trousers and white shirt, someone who obviously held a desk job. Sonna wondered how he had got involved with this particular group.
“We should burn the whole lane,” a teenaged boy said. His voice cracked in the middle of the sentence and he finished on a high whine. He glanced at Sonna and added, “Except Sonna Sir’s house. He’s with us.”
“Are you with us?” the man with the sari around his neck asked Sonna. “Because if you aren’t with us then you must be like this Herath fool. Helping Tamils. Sounds like that is what is happening here.” He used the edge of the sari to wipe the sweat, ash, and dirt off his face, and the blue sari came away creased and grimed.
Another man spoke up. “Sonna Sir has always been with us. If he’s asking, we should listen.”
The men broke into argument again, some wanting to forget Kalyani Avenue and go straight to Sal Mal Lane to torch all the houses, others saying no, there was more to be done on Kalyani Avenue, those Indian Tamils who thought they were too good for everybody, and what kind of barbarians would burn the houses of Sinhalese people? Their own race? No, this was a time to protect our people, wives, children, homes, this was a time to make it clear that not one more Sinhalese soldier would ever be touched by those Tamil devils in Jaffna. If any of the men remembered an attenuating fact, some kindness done or received, some sweet shared, some marriage made within their families with the Tamils, not in faraway Jaffna, which none of them had ever visited, but those who lived among them, they did not mention it. This was a time of just deserts and lessons taught and believing without a shadow of doubt that whatever was done was deserved.
Sonna listened, his whole body alert. If the men decided to turn toward Sal Mal Lane, he would have to outrun them. He did not know what he would do when he got there. Mohan’s guns came to mind. If he could reach Mohan, the two of them could get those guns and stand at the bottom of the road. None of the marauding crowds had that kind of weapon. He could keep the lane safe. His father might join them. His heart lifted then resettled at this prospect. He thought of Devi, Rashmi, Nihil, how grateful they would be that he had saved not just one house but the whole lane. He could taste it, that moment, it was so close. He braced himself to start running.
Then the leader of the group, a man who had suffered burns over most of his body as a child, and whose limbs were covered in large patches of pink flesh, and who was, on account, called Sudhu Aiyya, spoke. “You come with us to Kalyani Avenue,” he said. “After that we will have to go to Sal Mal Lane. We can’t leave out certain Tamils like you are saying. No, listen! Listen!” he said, as Sonna protested. “We will go to Sal Mal Lane but we will not touch the Tamils.” A dissatisfied murmur rose up. “All of you listen to me,” he yelled. “We will not touch them, but we will have to destroy their houses, there’s no help for that. That son of a whore Prabhakaran asked for this, killing our soldiers. Now, they will get it.”
“I’m asking for a favor, Sudhu Aiyya,” Sonna said, his voice lower now, the threat gone out of it. “Please, you can take everything from Kalyani Avenue—”
“Oy! Sudhu Aiyya has decided, didn’t you hear?” The man nearest to him pushed Sonna in the chest.
“I will do anything,” Sonna begged, “I will burn every house on Kalyani Avenue, anything, but please save Sal Mal Lane.”
“Enough!” Sudhu Aiyya said. “You want to burn houses? You tell us which houses to burn. Pick two.”
“On Kalyani Avenue?” Sonna asked. “Burn everything! Give me the kerosene and I will burn them!”
“No, on Sal Mal Lane. Pick two.”
Sonna felt the world tip and blur before his eyes. Pick two? Which two houses could he pick? What right had he to pick any? If the men were unwilling to leave his lane alone, what hope was there that once they got there they wouldn’t attack his mother and sisters, the Heraths, everybody?
Sonna calculated quickly. Raju, how he hated him, how he hated the way he fraternized with the Herath children, the way he held himself straight and seemed to have a purpose in his life. How he hated that he had competed in that weight-lifting tournament even if he had lost. And the Niles family. What was the appeal of a family like that to all of the children, including Rose and Dolly? Had they invited him to come to the variety show? Had they asked if he might like to sing? No, they hadn’t. They had left him out as if he was just a mangy stray, unwanted and despised by everyone. But even they had room for Raju. And the Nadesans, who had never spoken a single word to him in their life, who did they think they were? Indian Tamils, they called themselves, high caste, better even than Raju’s mother. What right did they have to treat him that way? Did they talk to his sisters? To the Heraths? He did not know. As far as he knew, they spoke to nobody. And yet. Their house sat next door to the Heraths’. If it burned, so would the Herath home. He pictured it, the flames leaping over that wall, setting everything alight. He pictured the children screaming, running out onto the street. He pictured Rashmi. He pictured Nihil. He made up his mind.
“Then burn Raju’s house and the Niles house, the two houses past my father’s house,” he said. “Burn those. Leave the others alone. Leave the people alone. They will all be in the Herath house. Do not touch them.” He said this last with a dark passion that seemed to convince the men that he knew what he was asking and what he was willing to sacrifice to make sure they listened.
They turned away more quietly and walked in silence for a while, but when they got to Kalyani Avenue they found their voices again. Sonna did not have to join them in burning the houses down that road. When they got there, the entire street was already on fire. Sonna stood before it and the fear he had for Sal Mal Lane drained out of him. There was nothing he could do to stop any of it. Eht yob, he whispered. Eht yob, eht yob.