Rashmi had always had intimations of what her life might be as an adult: secure, successful, and beset by responsibilities to which she would be equal. Nothing would overwhelm her. But that was before she had discovered the pleasure of singing in a band and being a little less good in school, before watching her neighbors’ houses burn, before burying the last dog left, and before she had to learn to cook and serve food. Before Devi had left her without a backward glance. Well, that was not entirely true; there had been a backward glance, even if she hadn’t looked up to notice it.
“Kamala got cashews. Want to make milk toffee?” Devi had asked Rashmi that day, while Rashmi lay on her belly in her bed in their shared room and wrote about a boy she was getting to know, the brother of a friend. She had shaken her head, no.
“Want to play battleships?” Devi had asked a few minutes later. She had wrapped herself up in the curtain of their room, twisting and twisting until her body hung like a large lime with legs. Rashmi had given her the same reply. No! With emphasis.
“You never want to do anything fun,” Devi had said. “All you do is sit and read books and write in that stupid diary.” And she had unwound herself and stood up. “Nobody here wants to play with me. Everybody’s sad all the time, even Raju. All Suren does is bang bang bang on the stupid piano, all Nihil does is talk to Mr. Niles, who won’t even talk back to him, and all you do is this. What’s the use of brothers and sisters if they don’t even play?”
Had she looked back, to see the impression her words had on her sister, Rashmi tried to remember, or had she imagined that look as she watched Devi storm away, dragging the curtain behind her as far as it would go, then sending it flying back in an utterly unsatisfying flutter of green? Had she called out to her and said she would play, just let me finish, or had she only thought that she would and had not said it, thinking why did she have to say it because intention had always been accompanied by time. She would play, after. After she had finished describing her last conversation with that boy in her book, after she had got it all down. All she could bring back now were Devi’s words, those words uttered in that voice, What’s the use of brothers and sisters if they don’t even play? And all she could find in her memory of that day were Devi’s feet in red rubber slippers, poking out from underneath her balled-up body wrapped in the green curtain, her footsteps leaving, and then, and then, there was nothing but herself kissing those feet, which no longer had slippers on them.
Rashmi thought about this every morning when she woke up, squashed next to Nihil because she could not bear to sleep in her own room. There was nothing to do about the memory, it was both wound and balm, so she would put her arm around Nihil and wait for him to wake up, listening to his breath come and go, watching his back lift and fall.
“I think of her every morning, as soon as I wake up,” she told Suren one morning when it had become unbearable to keep this to herself.
Suren said, “She would like that.”
As if Devi were in another room, as if they could share these thoughts with her. “She doesn’t know,” Rashmi said, softly, so as not to wake up Nihil, who was still asleep.
“She does,” Suren said.
“How do you know?” Rashmi asked.
There was silence and then Suren said, “I can feel her here, with us.”
“I can’t,” Rashmi said, feeling more sad than ever. Surely if Devi were in their presence she ought to feel her spirit, she was the sister. How could Suren feel her and how could she not? “Why do you think I can’t feel her here?”
“Do something for her,” Suren said.
“Like what?”
“You could make something for her. Sing for her. Or you could cook for her.”
Rashmi did all these things. She made milk toffee with cashews that she roasted with Kamala watching on, stirred the condensed milk and cream and poured it out into plates lined with wax paper, and cut the toffee into neat squares. Then she gave them away to the Bolling family because nobody in hers wanted to eat milk toffee, which had been Devi’s favorite of all the sweets she ate. She sang for Devi, the songs that Devi had always begged her to sing and that she often had refused to sing, not because she wished to be unkind but because a song had to be felt to be sung and on some nights she hadn’t felt like singing. She sang when she took her body-wash, her voice echoing in the room as the water splashed over her, and she sang in Kala Niles’s house, accompanying herself on the piano with chords that made Kala Niles shudder. As she sang she began to feel Devi with her, listening to her voice, her mouth closing over the impossible sweetness of her toffees, blissful in the knowledge that she was completely loved, but it was her making of something that permitted her to forgive herself.
She was sitting on the front steps to their house when the postman came one day, bringing her two letters, one from the boy whom she barely spoke to anymore, and another from her grandmother, with some money inside.
“Every day I think I see her standing here,” the postman said, sympathetically. “I remember like yesterday letting her ride this bicycle,” and he patted the seat of his bike. “Chah. If only I had not offered. I blame myself.”
And Rashmi, who was wise now in the way adults are, not with surety but with helplessness, knew that this was his way, as it was the way of all the other people who blamed themselves as he was doing, of carrying away at least a little bit of the guilt that she and her brothers felt. So she didn’t tell him he was not to blame, she merely said, “She loved riding that bicycle. It was her biggest treat.”
As they stood there for a few moments, heads bowed, Raju came to his gate. The postman looked up. “I feel sorry . . .” he said, looking at Raju then back at her, but he didn’t finish the sentence, for how could he tell her that he felt sorry for the man who had not kept her sister from flying down that street and out of their lives? So he pushed his bike up the street, to finish delivering letters to all the houses on the left before returning to deliver the letters to those on the right. And he tried, as all the neighbors on Sal Mal Lane did, to pretend that the Niles and Joseph houses were not still singed and broken, they were exactly as they had once been.
Rashmi stared at Raju. It was the first time she had seen him since the funeral, though Kamala had told her that he had attended the ceremony, listened to the chanting from afar, walked in the funeral procession, far away from those who were close and unsullied, behind those who had known Devi only in passing and even behind those who had not known her at all. Rose had told Rashmi about Sonna, and how Raju had bludgeoned him to death, and how her father, Jimmy Bolling, had said he did not care, Let the son of a bitch rot. I will not bury him, I will not press charges, I should have done it myself, and how Francie Bolling had cried and cursed Raju. She also knew that Raju no longer lifted weights, that the weights had been returned to Jimmy Bolling—they sat in the kitchen and were now used as benches by Rose and Dolly when they went in there to help Francie Bolling cook—that Raju rarely left the house, or read the papers, he just stayed beside his mother, who never spoke.
Looking at Raju now, Rashmi tried to feel some anger toward him, but she could not. He was as he had always been, a sad, deformed man whose life had been charmed by the friendship of children such as they were, such as Devi had been, a man who had spent a few years, out of all the years he had lived and all those yet remaining, when life had seemed to offer him something more than mere existence in the company of his hopeless, hopeless dreams.
“Can you take me to a shirt place in Wellawatte?” she asked Suren the next morning as they left for school.
“We will have to go before Amma gets home,” Suren said, not asking why she wanted to go, or for what, “and we will have to ask Kamala to keep an eye on Nihil.”
“Kamala and maybe Lucas can also come and wait with him,” Rashmi said.
That afternoon, Lucas came and sat on the steps to the front veranda ostensibly to read the Silumina, but really to make sure that Nihil remained at home, for that is what their parents had asked of them, to Keep your brother in sight always. Rashmi and Suren walked all the way to the top of the hill, past the shop where Sonna had died, which was now boarded up, and took the 141 bus to Wellawatte. Most of those shops were still shut, and many of them were gaping holes lined by blackened walls, open to the elements.
“I hope they open these shops again soon,” Rashmi said. She saw a nun hurrying down the opposite side of the street and was grateful for the T-shirt she had thrown on to disguise her uniform; they had been in such a hurry to leave the house there had been no time to change.
“The refugees will have to come back from the North first and their houses will have to be rebuilt,” Suren replied.
“Do you think they will come back? Will they return to the same houses?” Rashmi asked, stepping around a pile of half-burnt, half-torn notebooks and shelving that must have come from a bookshop.
“I hope so,” Suren said. “Otherwise what will happen to the teachers in the Tamil classes? There would be nobody to teach.”
“It is sad here without the shops open. Even the market is gone. And look at the kovil. There is nobody outside stringing flowers.”
They paused for a while to press their faces to the gate. The kovil was littered with the debris left behind by the refugees, with bundles of rags and shreds of saris and siri-siri bags blowing in the breeze coming in from the sea. The kiosk at which they had last seen the flower men, as they referred to them, was now a pile of wood. There were rolls of red thread ground into the sewer drains and tangled on the sharp edges of the broken booth.
“What are you trying to get here?” Suren asked, tearing Rashmi away from the kovil.
“I want to get a shirt for Raju,” Rashmi said.
“Then we’ll have to go to the fabric part of Sellamuttu Stores, but I don’t know if it is open.”
“But you didn’t ask me why,” Rashmi said.
“You must have a good reason,” Suren said. “If it is for Raju, it must be for Devi too.” He put his hand on her back and guided her across the road between cars and buses that all moved slowly, the drivers curious to see what could be seen.
Sellamuttu Stores was, miraculously, open. Inside, though, there was a Sinhalese man.
“Where’s the owner?” Suren asked him.
“They have gone to Jaffna,” he said. “I am only a friend. I said I will open the shop and run it till they come back. But I don’t know if they will come back. Who would want to?”
“Do you send them money?” Suren asked.
“Not many people come here, so there hasn’t been much money. But if it picks up then I’ll be able to send money.” They both nodded.
“Did they go by ship?” Suren asked, having heard of the transport of Tamils from the refugee camps to the villages in the North.
“Yes,” the man replied. “They were at a church in Kotahena and I went to see them there. After a few days they went to Jaffna on the Lanka Kalyani. A cargo ship. I heard it took a long time to get there. I hope there was food on the ship.”
Suren and Rashmi shared in the silence that followed the man’s statement. All three of them wondered about such a trip, what the owners of Sellamuttu Stores might have taken with them, if anything, whether they were relieved to escape or fearful of a journey over the ocean. They considered what they might do under such circumstances and, in the deepening quiet, they settled instead on the feelings each of them carried within, for lost neighbors, for a dead sister.
Rashmi spoke first. “What size is Raju?” she asked Suren.
Suren spoke slowly as though coming out of a deep reverie. “His neck is probably eighteen and a half and sleeves are probably about thirty-four,” he said.
“My god. Very strange size,” the man said, standing up straight and looking alarmed. “I am not sure I’ll even be able to find a shirt like that!” Still, after much searching, which included climbing on stools and ladders, he found a light-blue shirt with just such measurements and Rashmi paid him all the money she had received from her grandmother, which wasn’t quite enough but which the man accepted, brushing away her concern with a sideways shake of his head and a kamak neha.
Lucas had left before they got home because Nihil had fallen asleep. Nihil spent much of his time at home sleeping; his silences would grow longer and longer until he shut his eyes and lay down and fell into sleep that was so deep that it was often hard to wake him up, a job that Suren undertook. The one time Rashmi had tried to do it he had woken up looking crazed, clutched her arms, and said Devi! Devi!
Over the next weeks, Rashmi spent her time after school, and every late-night hour she could manage to spend before she had to go to sleep, embroidering the shirt with blue and yellow threads. In doing so she was reminded of the person who had first taught her to embroider, Mrs. Silva. She felt grateful for that first day, the day when she and Devi had sat with Mrs. Silva and learned how to embroider on small squares of old cloth, the fabric soft in their fingers, the scent of the still young creeping jasmine strong in the early-morning hours and surrounding them all in a cocoon of fragrance.
“You have to hold the needle firmly but the thread lightly, that’s the trick to embroidery,” Mrs. Silva had said, her own beautiful embroidery set aside while she unpicked the knots from Devi’s work and hers.
Devi, irritated by the difficulty of the work, complained. “Why do I have to learn this?”
“Someday when you are a fine lady you’ll want to embroider your own linens and baby clothes, won’t you?” Mrs. Silva asked.
“No. I don’t want to be a fine lady. Rashmi is going to be a fine lady. That’s enough.”
If Rashmi had known then that she would be embroidering something to remember Devi by, using her skill long before she became A Fine Lady, in fact after she, too, like Devi, had decided that being fine about anything was not that important after all, what would she have done? She looked at the cloth and thread in her hands and felt overwhelmed by the past and by the present. Suren came in and found her, the shirt and skeins laid out neatly on Devi’s bed, her hands quite still as she observed the arrangement before her.
“What’s the matter?” Suren asked, picking up a few skeins to make room for himself and sitting down on the bed.
“Don’t sit on her bed,” Rashmi said.
Suren got up and moved to Rashmi’s bed. “What are you thinking about?”
“Mrs. Silva,” Rashmi said. “She taught me to embroider, and now I’m using it to make a shirt for Raju, but Mrs. Silva is not a good person.”
“But she taught you something good,” Suren said, playing with the skeins of thread that were still in his hand. “Maybe that will help erase some of the bad things she has done.”
“I don’t think it happens that way. I think all the bad we do remains next to all the good we do. I don’t think you can change one by doing the other.”
“Then all you need to think about is doing more good than bad,” Suren said. “This shirt that you are making, that is a good thing. Just think about that. Forget about Mrs. Silva.”
So she tried. Rashmi embroidered flowers that she copied off one of Devi’s dresses, taking one from the box into which they had been packed to be given away, one of her favorites, in green and white; she embroidered chariots she traced off of Suren’s and Nihil’s blue-and-gold shirts; she embroidered balls balanced on cricket bats; she embroidered kites and hopscotch squares and skipping ropes and, along the hem, with some difficulty, she embroidered the outlines of bicycles.
“When do you plan to give this to Raju?” Suren asked.
“I thought I could give it to him after the three-month almsgiving,” Rashmi said.
Suren smiled. “That would be a good time to do it. It would make her happy.”
Rashmi did not tell Nihil about the gift she was making, the whys and wherefores. Nihil was untouchable. He was with them and yet absent; he spoke and yet said nothing that anybody could pin a thought to. He went to school, he studied, he took tests, and he slept and slept and slept. His appetite neither waxed nor waned, it was sufficient. Sometimes his friends would visit him and he would talk to them, even laugh with them, but the visits were always short, as if neither he nor his friends could keep up the pretense. So Rashmi was surprised when Nihil offered to help with cooking for the three-month almsgiving.
“Tell me what to do,” he said, coming into the kitchen where she was standing peeling onions and garlic and potatoes.
“You don’t need to cook,” Mrs. Herath said. “It’s okay.”
“I want to cook. Tell me what to do.”
“Here, you can peel these,” Rashmi offered, wanting to seize the opportunity to bring him out of the silences he preferred.
“After that?” he asked.
“After that you can help me cook the potatoes and make the mallun and prepare the cutlets for frying,” she said.
In the kitchen that afternoon and evening, with Nihil beside her, Rashmi listened to her mother and Mrs. Niles and Kala Niles and Mrs. Nadesan talk. Kamala, dismissed from the kitchen, stood nearby just in case she was needed to fetch and carry things.
“We have decided to go to India,” Mrs. Nadesan said.
“Really? For good?” Mrs. Niles asked, as she stopped stirring the curry she was making and turned around.
“For good,” Mrs. Nadesan said. “Might as well, if we have to leave, to leave for good. That’s what my brothers all say. They always said it was better to live with our own people. I wish we had listened.”
“You don’t have to leave. We are not leaving,” Kala Niles said, “even though our house was burnt, not like yours. At least yours was still the same.”
“We have no place to go even if we want to leave,” Mrs. Niles said.
“I don’t want to leave,” Kala Niles said firmly, glancing at Mrs. Herath, who had remained silent.
“I don’t want to leave either,” Mrs. Nadesan said. “This is where we have lived all our married lives, and our girls before they grew up and left, but with all this trouble, better to go now than later.” None of the neighbors responded and after a while Mrs. Nadesan clucked her tongue and said, “I almost forgot.” She undid a knot at the edge of the fall of her sari and unwrapped a pair of earrings. “These I want Rashmi to have. She saved my thali. Come, take them, darling.”
Rashmi stretched out her hand and took the earrings, and she did not know if Mrs. Nadesan had forgotten that it had been Devi who had crawled back into her house to rescue her gold wedding necklace, so beautiful and heavy she had to pass it to Suren before she could climb out of that window. Suren had told her that Devi had asked to hold the necklace again, after, wanting to feel that weight in her hands, pausing even in the middle of all that chaos to admire its beauty. Or maybe Mrs. Nadesan did remember but did not want to mention Devi’s name.
“They are beautiful, Aunty,” she said, and gave them to her mother, who took them from her and tied them into the edge of the fall of her own sari. And then, not knowing how else to thank Mrs. Nadesan, Rashmi felt compelled to say, “There won’t be any more trouble.”
“There will always be trouble when we have people like the next-door neighbors around,” Mrs. Herath said at last. “But for what it is worth, I want to say that we, our whole family, will be very sad to see you go.”
Mrs. Nadesan went over to Mrs. Herath and put an arm around her. Mrs. Herath was smaller, so her mother was completely hidden from Rashmi’s view. “Don’t be sad, Savi. All of us have cried enough now. We must stop thinking about the past and face what we have to face,” she said, but Rashmi could tell that Mrs. Nadesan, too, was crying.
If Nihil was moved by these expressions of regret, he did not make it known. He simply bent further into his task, as he sat on a low stool and made small round balls with mashed potatoes and carrots and finely chopped leeks that had been fried with onions and green chillies and garlic. Rashmi watched his relentlessly methodical work and the exactly spaced time between scooping a bit of the mixture, shaping it into a ball, and placing it in the dish of beaten egg whites, and, after a while, she felt the sadness lift, and she mimicked his pace until all the cutlets were coated with bread crumbs and fried and set out to cool on sheets of newspaper.
Late that night, as she swept the front veranda one last time in preparation for the next day, Mohan came to the doorstep.
“Amma sent these for the almsgiving tomorrow,” he said, holding a covered dish out to her. “She made macaroni with cheese.”
Rashmi leaned the broom on the wall and walked over to him. She had to tilt her head back to look at him, even when he stood one step lower. His voice, too, seemed much deeper than she remembered. She realized she had not spoken to him in a while. She took the bowl from him and set it on a side table.
“Are you and Jith still going to join the army?” she asked. “Now there’s a real war, it would mean fighting.”
Mohan looked down at his feet. “Jith is not going to join. I told him he shouldn’t do it. He is going to study computers instead. But I have to join. I don’t have . . . I am not good . . . my teachers . . . I am not a good enough student to stay at school,” he finished in a rush.
Alice came out of the house, on her way home after helping with the cleaning of the house, and Rashmi and Mohan moved aside to let her pass. They both watched her.
“But there are other things to do without joining the army,” Rashmi said, after Alice had shut the gate behind her.
“Like what?” Mohan asked, but not like he thought she might know, more like he was incredulous that she would suggest that there were options he hadn’t considered.
Rashmi shrugged. “I don’t know. You could learn accounting or shorthand and typing,” she said, since these were the things she had heard of, as options, for those who didn’t go to university.
“Those are for girls, not for boys.”
“Oh,” Rashmi said.
There was nothing more to talk about, then, for the two of them. The scent of her mother’s roses, grown from cuttings she had got from Kala Niles in gratitude for Mrs. Herath’s advice regarding the proper placement of ferns, wafted across the garden. Rashmi inhaled deeply, filling her body with the smell. Mohan shifted his weight from foot to foot, his eyes moving around the room, to the floor, the chairs, the ceiling, and the mandevilla vine that framed the doorway. Rashmi considered asking after Jith but didn’t know how to do so without sounding as though she had run out of things to talk about with Mohan, and so, when the silence had stretched out longer than was tolerable, she picked up the dish he had brought, ending the conversation.
“I hope they are all right,” he said quickly, “the Niles family and the Nadesans.”
“No,” Rashmi said, simply, “but they are alive.”
Mohan put his hands in his pockets and looked at her. He said, “I miss hearing Devi. She always yelled for Raju at the same time. I would listen for her voice. I didn’t know that I had been doing that until—” And he stopped there.
Was Mohan asking her to forgive him? If so, for what? Everybody was responsible for what had happened to their street, so everybody was responsible for Devi. Herself most of all, she thought. Devi was her sister.
“If you study harder you can stay in school,” she said. She turned and went inside and didn’t come back out for a long time to finish sweeping because she knew without having to see him that Mohan was still standing there, standing on the steps to their house, waiting for something none of them could give.
On the morning of the almsgiving, Rashmi stood and listened for the drums that heralded the priests’ coming, and watched as Suren washed the feet of each of the eleven priests and Nihil dried them before they stepped into the house. The chanting of the Mahapiritha soothed them all then, again in the evening, and once more on the morning of the next day, and when the priest tied the threads around each of their wrists, she felt as though indeed some of their pain had been soothed.
After the priests had been served from the bowls that covered the tables before them, and after her parents and their sisters and brother and relatives and Mr. Tissera too, even though he was Catholic, had offered three sets of the eight requirements for monks, including cloth for their garments, she, Rose, Suren, Nihil, and Dolly stepped forward to donate smaller gifts to the younger monks: pencils and erasers and crisp exercise books. As Rashmi placed the last of these offerings before a young monk, younger than Devi had been, and as she knelt and bowed her head and brought her hands together in worship, she remembered the other offering she had prepared.
Nothing about Old Mrs. Joseph’s house looked the same, and in many ways it was worse off than the Nileses’ house, which, complete as it was, with a set of parents and a competent child, had slowly had its exterior and some of the interior restored. She and Suren, along with Lucas and Kamala, had gone over and helped Kala Niles to scrub the walls outside, as high as they could reach. The Bolling twins had borrowed Mrs. Herath’s garden shears and Mr. Silva’s too, though in that case Jith had simply sneaked them out to Dolly, and spent a weekend clipping all the singed and dried rosebushes and vines, and dragging the branches over to the back of their own house to set them on fire, far away from where Kala Niles could see them. Nobody had gone to Raju’s house. In that house, much was still unhinged, the doors, the windows, the mussaenda, Old Mrs. Joseph herself, her movements even more restricted than they had been before with only Raju to tend to her, their help from the estates having run away as soon as the last curfew was lifted. Jimmy Bolling brought food for his aunt and for Raju, but Francie Bolling, though it was the food she cooked that was taken in this manner, refused to go near Raju.
The gate to Raju’s house was cool under her palm and Rashmi remembered that the last time she had stepped through this gate had been when Devi herself had called out to her to Come and touch the gate, it is still hot! She paused for a moment at that gate, neither going in nor leaving. The smells from the warm basket of food in her hand wafted up, each separate curry releasing its own mix of spices. She thought about the special curries each of the neighbors had brought, the eggplant curry from Mrs. Nadesan, the garlic curry from Mrs. Tissera, the dhal from Mrs. Niles, the watalappan from Mrs. Bin Ahmed, and she felt hungry for the first time. When she looked up she saw that Raju was sitting by himself in the front veranda. As she pushed the gate open and went in, he stood up, anxiety creasing his face.
“Rashmi, you have come! Is everything okay?”
She said, “I brought you and Aunty some food.”
Raju took the basket from her, shaking his head from side to side, and placed it carefully on the ledge that surrounded Old Mrs. Joseph’s veranda. He said, “It is kind of you.”
“And this,” Rashmi started, and stopped. She handed the shirt, in its brown paper bag, to Raju. She knew what she wanted to say, but she did not trust herself to say it.
“What is this?” he asked, and then when she did not say anything further, he opened the bag and drew out the shirt, which unfolded awkwardly in his hands until he smoothed the edges and held it up.
Was it a shirt that he would ever wear? Or was it a shirt meant for looking at? A shirt not for displaying in public but for reading and memory? Would Raju understand its significance? Did he deserve such a gift? Rashmi did not know the answers to these questions. She only knew that whatever Raju did or did not deserve, Devi, lost to them all, would know that Raju was not abandoned to his loneliness.
“This is for you to remember Devi,” Rashmi managed to say.
And though she never asked Raju what he thought of her giving, though he did not thank her, as she walked away from him, Rashmi felt that she walked in the company of her sister.