There was no need to read newspapers. What was happening was happening to them.
In the late hours of that first night, Mr. Herath, Mr. Sansoni, and Mr. Tissera walked silently down the street. Their footsteps were recorded as they went, traced into the thin layer of ash and dirt that covered the lane in places. Nothing stirred though all around them they could feel alertness, everybody listening, watching, waiting behind closed doors and latched gates. A curfew had been imposed and so they moved quickly and did not speak to each other as they walked under cover of darkness, past Jimmy Bolling, who had fallen asleep still seated in his chair, the belts fallen to the ground beside him. They crossed the road, slipped behind the barbed wire around his property, and knocked on Koralé’s back door.
“We need to buy rice,” Mr. Tissera said. The Tisseras’ house, too, now held its own refugee, the Tamil wife of the editor of a Communist newspaper, who had arrived hiding her face under a helmet and seated on the back of a motorbike driven by a friend. Ever a fearful man, Mr. Tissera had insisted that he would stay up all night playing carrom with his son to keep watch, but had abandoned this post to his wife at Mr. Herath’s request.
Koralé poured the rice into three bags and then added tins of canned fish though nobody had asked him for that. No money was taken, though Mr. Sansoni offered and Mr. Herath insisted and Mr. Tissera nodded.
“No, no,” he said, pushing the money away. “Not for this.”
They thanked him and went back the way they had come, though their first attempt was aborted when an army truck came patrolling slowly down the streets, the soldiers inside looking more scared than any they had ever seen. They stopped beside Jimmy Bolling, hushing him quickly when he cursed at them, startled out of his sleep. They gave him a bag of rice and fish, which he stood up to take. As they walked on they heard him rap on the door to his compound, the sound carrying clear down the silent road, and all three men looked back the way they had come. The other bags of rice and fish were taken to Mr. Herath’s house and given to Mrs. Herath, who had made plain ginger tea for them all. After she left, carrying two cups of tea for Mrs. Niles and Kala Niles, who were still up, the men huddled in the kitchen. Mr. Sansoni was given a chair on account of his age and girth, but Mr. Herath leaned on the table on which their gas cooker sat, and Mr. Tissera crouched on a low stool. Kamala, not knowing what to do if she was not needed in the kitchen while food and drink were being prepared, took a broom and began to sweep the veranda, even though it was now close to midnight, pausing every few steps to stamp lightly on the floor to dust off her bare feet.
It was Mr. Sansoni who said it: “We will have to set up a neighborhood watch.” And that was what was discussed in whispers in the kitchen whose light would not reach the road outside, but whose light and the whispers did reach the ears of Mr. Niles, who lay far from repose in the area just outside. If he was inclined to talk, Mr. Niles may have asked what they were planning to protect, but Mr. Tissera did that for him.
“Everything is looted, and the houses are damaged. What is there to protect now?” He turned up his palms. “Maybe only our own houses. They may come back for us.”
“We have to protect whatever is left,” Mr. Sansoni said, running his fingers through the gray curls on his head. He hadn’t washed since morning and he could smell the sweat on himself.
“In other places, people have been killed. Our neighbors are still here with us. We have to protect them,” Mr. Herath said. “Not only from the thugs who come from outside,” he added.
Nobody said anything further as they all sipped their tea and considered this. And if, in ostracizing that family, these neighbors could set themselves apart from the things that the Silvas had encouraged, then let us allow them this relief, for it would not last; deep down, they knew that the Silvas were no more wholly guilty than they themselves were wholly innocent, for guilt and innocence lived within them all, even their guests.
The next morning the children came out of hiding, and because their lane was so small, a dead end after all, and their lives so tight, they were allowed to walk outside as a group, and walk they did, marveling at what had taken place, awe as much a part of their impression as horror. They passed beneath the sal mal trees, whose lower branches were laden with singed leaves and flowers as though a fall season the tropical island had never known had chanced upon them. Their lane was littered with items that had been dropped or abandoned, skeins of embroidery threads, aluminum molds for making string-hoppers, even an upholstered chair that they did not recognize.
“Must ’ave been the Nadesans’,” Rose said.
Suren picked it up and tried to forced the top of the backrest together, but try as he might he could not make it look whole again and he had to leave it lying on its side exactly as they had found it. He said, “We can try to clean Kala Akki’s house,” and everybody fell in line with him, sweeping charred bits of this and that to the side of the road with their rubber slippers as they walked.
They opened the gate and went in, their nostrils flaring at the scent of singed brick and furniture. The rosebushes closest to the house, not just the vine that Devi and Nihil had seen from their tree, were curled and burnt, but the plants farther away stood lush and green, reminding them all of what had once been. The curved door hung open, half wrenched out of its posts. There was no sound inside except that made by their feet and breath, though outside the birds chirped. Mr. Niles’s veranda was littered with ash and wood. A path of torn music books and saris and photograph albums led from the front door to the kitchen. The kitchen was strewn about with rice and dhal and dried spices spilled as though in a curse, a curse for no more cooking, no more meals, no more entertaining, no more existence, no more of anything, not even a backward glance. Except that, in their hurry, the mob had missed the storeroom. Though this space, too, smelled of smoke, the children felt as though they were peering into a cordoned-off room in a museum, the band instruments still set up, the chairs and cushions untouched. Suren shut the door and slipped the bit of wood back through the latch as Kala Niles had always done to hold the doors together.
“What about Uncle Raju’s house?” Devi asked him, her brows furrowed. She had tried to open Raju’s gate on her way to Kala Niles’s house, and the gate, rumpled and curled at one end, had been warm to the touch.
“We will go there, don’t worry,” Rashmi said. She picked up a painting that had not broken and looped the mount back on the nail from which it had hung, though the wall behind it was now grimy. She went over to the soot-stained window of Kala Niles’s bedroom and looked over at the Nadesans’ house. “Thank goodness they didn’t burn the Nadesans’ house,” she said, practical. “We can get some of their pots so they can eat proper food again.”
“Maybe we won’t have to clean there,” Devi said, as she looked about the Nileses’ house, at all the things that could perhaps be salvaged and all that would have to be swept up. She dusted off the skirt of her dress, unsuccessfully trying to get rid of some black ash that covered a part of it.
But they did have to clean the Nadesans’ house, for nothing was where it should have been, everything standing was now not standing, everything full was spilled out, even the flowering begonias were lying face down beside shattered clay pots.
“Nihil and Rose and I can clean Kala Akki’s house,” Suren said.
“Then I’ll take Devi and Dolly and go to Old Mrs. Joseph’s house,” Rashmi said.
As they left the Nileses’ house, they saw Jith standing outside their gate and Rashmi asked him if he wanted to help. He looked relieved and came running up to them, shaking his head in agreement, but he was only able to help them for a short while, for as soon as Mohan realized where he had gone, he came out and ordered him to stop being a fool and to get back in the house before their mother found out, she would be furious.
While the adults engaged in their adult concerns, glad that the children were not underfoot, that is how the children spent that day, wiping and sweeping and scrubbing and trying, as best as they could, to erase what had happened from their surroundings, though what could they do about black tiles and charred walls and what could they do about the tears that poured down Mr. Niles’s face and what could they do about the way in which Mrs. Nadesan held Mr. Nadesan’s hand with such fear that even they could taste it?
In each house they saw things they had never seen before. In Kala Niles’s house they found a carved figurine of the Buddha tucked behind the photograph of Sai Baba, and a locket that contained a twist of fine hair and a baby tooth. There was an old cricket bat made of white willow, signed by someone whose name, Mahadevan Sathasivam, they did not recognize, that had escaped notice because it was tucked far underneath Mr. Niles’s bed. The bat was tagged with a note that said in stern yet shaky script, the top arm of the F drawn far to the right, and the whole message underlined twice: For Nihil, on his fourteenth birthday. They also found two bottles of pills labeled morphine 30 mg, one half-empty, one full.
In Old Mrs. Joseph’s house they found a wedding photograph in which she looked surprised and delighted. They found silver spoons engraved with the letter J and a rubber-corked bottle in which was preserved the appendix that had been removed from Raju when he was nine, a fact only clear from the labeling. Inexplicably, both by virtue of its having survived the looting and its very presence, they found a gift-wrapped box of watercolor paints. Every now and then, Devi picked up a playing card with a picture of the Indian Pacific train on the back of it and she began collecting these as though they were treasures, her eyes searching for them alone and skipping over everything else.
In the Nadesans’ house, to which they all went later in the day, they found nothing that made them pause because, while they had shared celebrations, they had never spent much time inside this home. They moved quickly through it, replacing what was fallen, sweeping what was broken and irreparable, organizing on the table those things that were clearly personal, folding saris and shirts. Suren stacked all the family pictures from the living room on the dining table, then systematically shook out the cracked glass from each frame into a wide-mouthed pot. When he had finished, he called Rose and Devi over to show them how much glass there was in the pot and the girls took turns shaking it to listen to the sound it made. And if during all of this work not one of the children, not even Devi, suffered from a wound, a finger cut on a bit of broken glass, a foot pierced by a nail, it was perhaps because they moved through the houses slowly, as through in a trance, the frivolity and foolish haste of the days past suddenly and utterly beyond their reach.
Later that day, while the others continued in these activities, moving back and forth between houses, Nihil was selected by Mr. Herath to accompany him on visits that he made by walking and taking the bus, to check on their friends in other places. The roads they took were mostly empty, the usual collection of dropped bus tickets and receipts, fly-away paper bags and discarded newspapers augmented manifold by the debris of hurried departures, open suitcases and boxes, not all of them empty, even the occasional abandoned bicycle, the handlebars or tires twisted as though by force to prevent escape. One thing had returned to normal: the smell of the city’s air, the ocean breezes, undisturbed in their routines by the events of the previous days, having blown away the evidence of fire.
Mr. Herath took Nihil first to the Hindu kovil in Colombo 4, which had been set up as a refugee center, to see the Selvadurai family, who huddled in a square of space in the far corner of a room filled end to end with people sitting, bewildered, among their possessions. When the Heraths reached them, Mrs. Selvadurai clutched Mr. Herath’s hand and asked him if he would take a note to his wife.
“Our children were visiting Sinhalese friends in Nuwara Eliya,” she said. “I need to let them know we are safe.” She searched in a bag for a piece of paper and wrote a note that Nihil read as he walked beside his father to their next stop.
Dearest Savi, Please call our children and tell them we are safe. The number to the place they are staying (Seneviratne) is 0945793. Here, in case you need them, are the national ID numbers for Murugan and for me. 367521974 V (Murugan), 383311907 V (me). I give them to you because I do not know what will happen now and you are my closest friend. —Sylvia
“Why would we need their identity card numbers?” Nihil asked.
“For identifying them, to say they are citizens,” Mr. Herath said.
“But if they have their cards can’t they just show them?”
“She is worried that the cards will be stolen,” Mr. Herath said, and he did not tell Nihil that Mrs. Selvadurai feared more bloodshed, that their property would be seized, that their children would be orphaned and hosts of other things that he couldn’t even comprehend, and that she was simply sharing the one thing that she had to share, the numbers that proved that she existed, that she belonged.
They went to Joseph Lane, where Mr. Vaseeharan, Suren’s advanced maths teacher, lived. He was standing near his gate with his head bandaged.
“I told those bloody thugs—they were about to hit me with a broomstick—I told them to find a more noble implement for their brutality,” he said, touching his head with pride though his voice shook. Mr. Herath nodded and patted him on the back and they talked at some length about the events of that day. As they walked away, Mr. Herath explained to Nihil that Vaseeharan was the son of the Tamil leader who had first called for separatism, S. J. V. Chelvanayakam.
“The good son,” he said, “the brother, Chelva’s other son, Chandrahasan, is not a good person.” Mr. Herath, as was his practice, looked down as he walked.
“Are we going to see the brother?” Nihil asked, his eyes meeting the eyes of strangers as he went, a trait he shared with his mother. “If they beat up this son, then the other son, the bad one, must be really suffering.”
“No, I only wanted to make sure that Vaseeharan is being looked after. Chandrahasan will be fine. He has friends.” And Mr. Herath said no more about why he cared about one son, not the other, and why the one who was bad had suffered less than the one who was good, and Nihil himself did not know what questions to pose, in a situation where two brothers could evoke such different sympathies in his father. He walked beside him with many a backward glance at the man he would come to refer to as the Good Son, who waved each time Nihil turned around.
That night, the Herath girls participated in cooking dinner for the first time, using the Nadesans’ pots. In the kitchen they peeled and chopped onions and garlic, they learned how to use the tin cutter to open the tins of fish, they were shown how to scrape coconut and how to make two kinds of milk with it, one thin, one thick, and in what order, exactly, to add the spices to the curries that were being prepared by Kamala.
For a second night in a row they served their quiet neighbors, whose diminishment was so apparent, whose anger there was no space for, and whose sadness they could not ameliorate. For a second night, Mr. Herath, Mr. Sansoni, and Mr. Tissera walked up and down the street in turn, torch in hand, waiting for daybreak.
And, for a second night in a row, Nihil sat beside Mr. Niles, with Devi for company, and the two of them talked about the things that Nihil had seen that day, but he would not let Devi say anything about the houses down their lane or what everything looked like outside the walls of their own home, its quiet and its regrets.