Empire's Children

by Patricia Weerakoon

  Lakshmi brought in mugs of Ovaltine for the family. After she had served them, she made one for herself in her tin cup.

  The family sang carols late into the night. Shiro cuddled up on her Uncle Paul’s lap, and Lakshmi sat on the floor by Periamma’s seat. At one point they sang what Lakshmi knew to be Shiro’s favourite song.

  ‘Jesus loves the little children,

  All the children of the world;

  Red and yellow, black and white,

  All are precious in His sight,

  Jesus loves the little children of the world.’

  Shiro had once told Lakshmi that she was a black child and the Irvine girls were white. Shiro had decided that as God’s princess, she did not need a colour. The two of them had puzzled over what a red or yellow child would look like. Finally, Shiro decided that the boy Anthony who came last year was a red child since he seemed to go red easily. They never worked out what a yellow child was.

  The grandfather clock whirred and chimed eleven times. Everyone was droopy-eyed and yawning. Tea-maker Aiya’s mother was asleep and snoring on the sofa. Shiro had transferred herself from Paul’s lap to her father’s. She was more than half asleep, but keeping herself awake because she didn’t want to miss a moment of the fun. Lakshmi was still at her spot by Periamma’s seat. She leaned her head against its cool polished oak arm, longing for some sign of affection from Periamma, but there was none.

  ‘I think that’s enough for now,’ Tea-maker Aiya announced. ‘We have to leave early for church tomorrow.’ Weary nods and grunts came from everyone else. Well, nearly everyone.

  Paul threw up his arms. ‘The night is still young. Let’s sing something different. Anyone for a baila? Everyone ignored him and filed out of the room. Soft good nights and God-bless-you’s were exchanged.

  The room emptied. Tea-maker Aiya led a sleepy Shiro into her bedroom. Lakshmi walked around picking up the dirty mugs.

  ‘You can clean them in the morning, Lakshmi.’ Periamma smothered a yawn.

  ‘They might attract cockroaches, Periamma,’ Lakshmi replied, continuing to pile the mugs on the tray. ‘It will only take me a few minutes to wash them.’

  Periamma put her hand on Lakshmi’s shoulder. ‘You are so hardworking, dear girl. Good night.’

  Lakshmi carried the tray of mugs out of the room. She passed Paul, asleep and snoring in the armchair. Lakshmi walked down the corridor and into the pantry. She set the tray by the side of the sink, opened the tap and started rinsing the mugs one by one. Lights were switched off across the house. The house was now completely dark except for the single bulb in the pantry.

  ‘You are certainly grown up now, Lakshmi.’ She heard a gruff voice behind her. Before she could turn around she felt arms reach out from behind her and pull her away from the sink. She could smell alcohol and stale beef curry on his breath.

  Although she could not see him, she knew the man’s voice. ‘Paul Aiya, what are you doing?’ she gasped. ‘Let me go!’

  ‘Why sleep on the ground in Shiro’s room, Lakshmi?’ She heard his heavy breathing and felt the roughness of his unshaven cheek against her own. ‘Come sleep on my bed tonight.’ She felt a sharp sting as his teeth closed on her earlobe.

  ‘Let me go!’ Lakshmi cried out and struggled. He grunted and held her tighter. His hand reached under her blouse and squeezed her breast. Lakshmi gasped in pain. His mouth was wet on the back of her neck. He groaned and pressed his body against hers. Holding her tight with one hand, he pulled her skirt up with the other. His hand was rough on her thighs. Squeezing, pinching and sliding upwards. ‘Please please let me go,’ she begged and wriggled. He growled and dragged her around to face him.

  The door to the pantry flung open. ‘Let go of the girl, you idiot!’ Periamma’s voice was low and angry, almost a hiss.

  Paul released his grip. Lakshmi staggered and then sprang away from him. She pulled her skirt down and clutched her arms around her body. Shivering, she sank to her haunches by the door.

  Periamma stood in the doorway of the pantry. Her hands were folded in front of her. ‘You fool! Keep your philandering to the whorehouses in Colombo. In my house you will behave like a gentleman!’

  Paul put his hands on his hips and laughed. ‘Come on acca, she’s only a coolie.’ His laugh grew louder. ‘Pretty and fairer than most I accept, but a coolie nevertheless.’

  Periamma turned briefly to the sobbing Lakshmi, crouched by the door. ‘Go to bed, Lakshmi.’

  Lakshmi ran out of the room. She heard the sharp sound of an open palm strike a cheek. ‘Your brother slaved and sacrificed to give you an education and this is what you end up as?’ The anger was gone and in its place was sadness and tears. ‘How dare you do this? She’s only a few years older than our Shiro. How can I trust you with Shiro when she goes to Colombo? Wait till I tell annai about this.’

  ‘No. no, please don’t tell annai!’ Lakshmi peeped back into the pantry. Paul was on his knees in front of Rasiah Periamma. ‘Acca, acca, please. I’ll never harm Shiro. She’s my angel, my princess.’

  Lakshmi turned and ran into Shiro’s room, flung herself onto the mat and covered her head with her arms, cutting off the voices from the pantry. She squeezed her eyes shut, curled up like a ball and lay there, choking her sobs so as to not disturb Shiro.

  Her eyes were still shut, her arms still over her head, when she felt another presence in the room. Had Paul returned, to finish what he had started? Trembling, she opened her eyes to see the shadowy figure of Periamma standing over her.

  Periamma frowned. Her eyes in the dim moonlight filtering into the room were sad and seemed to have aged ten years.

  ‘It’s all right Lakshmi,’ she whispered. ‘Go to sleep, he won’t come near you.’

  She stood there for a few seconds, walked out and then did something Lakshmi had never seen her do before. She shut Shiro’s bedroom door.

  Lakshmi lay in the darkness, curled up tight. Her mind filled with fear, misery and memories of Paul’s rough hands on her body. So this was the life of a coolie girl, was it? Clean up other people’s dirty dishes and then be used by men for their pleasure? Maybe that was what her mother meant when she said no good would come of her?

  No. She wouldn’t live like that, she couldn’t. Surely Periamma would look after her. Wouldn’t she?

  But what choice did a coolie girl have? Maybe she could be a servant in someone’s house, but there was no safety there either. She thought of the girl who had gone to Colombo to be a cook. She had returned a year later, pregnant. She wouldn’t talk about what happened. She lost the baby. A few months after that, she killed herself by drinking kerosene.

  Lakshmi could hear Shiro’s steady breathing and the occasional rattle and rustle of insects in the garden outside. The moon slipped behind a cloud, leaving the room almost pitch black. She wrapped her arms around her knees and rocked back and forth. Fresh tears trickled down her cheeks.

  She was cursed.

  She heard the grandfather clock in the corridor chime. Midnight – Christmas day.

  Chapter 6

  May 1958 Watakälé

  The shrill clamour of the wall-mounted telephone sliced though the stillness of the Tea-maker’s house. Lilly sat up in bed and rubbed her eyes. It was still dark and the room was chill.

  ‘Get up, Appa!’ She shook Rajan.

  Rajan groaned, turned over and pulled the blanket back over his head.

  Lilly continued to shake him. ‘Telephone, Appa. Take it, will you?’

  ‘What time is it? It’s freezing!’ Rajan grumbled.

  The telephone continued braying.

  ‘Answer it, Appa,’ Lilly patted her husband on the shoulder again.

  Rajan groaned, sat up and lurched off the bed to his feet. Shivering and coughing he dragged the blanket and coverlet off the bed, wrapped them around him and stumbled across the
room towards the light switch. He switched on the light and staggered into the corridor, swearing when he tripped on the rug.

  The telephone continued its clamour. ‘I’m coming, I’m coming!’

  Lilly sat up in bed. She wrapped the remaining blanket tightly around her and squinted at the clock on the table by the bed. Five-thirty am? Who could be calling at this hour?

  She heard Rajan shout into the telephone. ‘I can’t hear you. What did you say?’ There was a pause. She could hear his grunts and heavy breathing. ‘Race riots started in Colombo yesterday?’ He sounded panicked and frightened. ‘Trains being stopped and Tamils killed?’ There was another pause. Rajan continued, his words now slow, laboured and ragged. ‘Are you okay?’

  Colombo? Race riots? Her two boys were in the city! Lilly flung off the blanket and leapt out of bed. Grabbing her housecoat off the bed end, she threw it over her nightclothes and ran down the corridor to the sitting room. Raaken, wrapped in a threadbare blanket, was already there. Shiro and Lakshmi came dashing in just after her.

  Rajan put the receiver back on the phone cradle and turned to face the gathered group. ‘That was George,’ he said. ‘The Sinhalese are rioting against the Tamils in Colombo. It’s bad, very bad. The boys, mother and George are okay – for now. But Paul didn’t come home last night after dinner with friends.’

  Rajan started panting, as if he had just run a race. His face was pale, his lips drawn down in a grimace. ‘They’re trying to trace him through his Sinhalese friends. But his friends say they don’t know.’ He paused and sighed. ‘Or maybe they won’t tell.’

  Lilly’s body burnt hot and then cold. The stark horror in Rajan’s eyes made her burst into tears. Rajan’s arms went around her. Such public demonstration of affection was not correct in front of the servants and children, but today she needed it and she knew Rajan wanted it too.

  ‘George wanted to get to us before we left for the railway station,’ he said, holding her close and rocking back and forth. ‘Thank God they were able to. George said they are -’ He dropped his voice so the others could not hear. ‘They are raping and murdering people on the trains.’

  Lilly’s head spun with even greater fear. She and Shiro had planned to take the early morning Uderata Maniké train down to Colombo. Shiro was scheduled to start as a student at the Bambalawatte Girls’ boarding school next week. The phone call had saved their lives – and more. Little Shiro and herself, at the mercy of rioters. Her mind recoiled at the thought.

  Lilly saw the fear and vulnerability on her husband’s face. She felt faint but she knew that her husband needed her to be brave. Their two boys were still down there. Breaking convention, she cradled his head in her hands. ‘Don’t worry Rajan. The children will be all right. God is good. He has protected us this far. Trust him.’

  ‘George said he’s trying to get everybody out of Colombo and come here,’ Rajan whispered in her ear. ‘He has some Sinhala friends who might help them.’

  The look of anguish in his eyes sent a chill through her body. She could tell he knew more than he was willing to say to her. Lilly broke out of his embrace, ran to the study and flung herself on her knees.

  The study was a special family room for the Rasiahs. The furniture in the study belonged to Rajan’s parents. It had been moved to Watakälé when his father died fifteen years ago. A small, round, mahogany table stood in the middle of the study with the family bible on it. The roll-top desk that Rajan worked at stood on one side of it. On the other was the equally old but comfortable rocking chair where Lilly sat to knit. A small, wooden cross hung on the wall above the family bible. Lilly flung herself on her knees before the cross. ‘Oh dear God …’ She hesitated. Words would not come. She burst out in tears again. Laying her head on her arms, she continued kneeling, her body wracked with sobs.

  She heard Shiro’s voice – soft and hesitant. ‘Lakshmi, maybe it’s my fault?’ Lilly looked up. Shiro was seated on the trunk packed with her things for school. Lakshmi stood by her, holding her hand. Lilly looked at the tear stained faces. Shiro sobbed. ‘Maybe I brought this on by praying that I don’t have to go to school?’

  Lakshmi sat down on the trunk and put her arm around her friend’s shoulders. ‘Don’t cry, Chinnamma,’ she said. ‘I am here with you.’

  ‘Did you hear what Daddy said about Uncle Paul? I love Uncle Paul.’

  Shiro couldn’t see the cloud that crossed Lakshmi’s face when she mentioned Paul but Lilly did. Neither of them had spoken again about what happened last Christmas.

  Now he was, in all probability, dead.

  Lilly got off her knees. She bent and kissed Shiro. ‘We won’t be going to Colombo today.’

  ***

  Lilly spent the day praying. Tea-maker Aiya went to work as usual, but didn’t get much done.

  As evening fell, Shiro and Lakshmi stood at the front of the house, watching the winding road across the valley, waiting, longing for the car which would bring the rest of the Rasiah family out from the savagery that had fallen on the rest of the country. Day slipped into night. The temperature plummeted. The wind whipped around the girls, making them shiver. Nobody called them into the house.

  Lilly prayed and prayed and prayed.

  Rajan sat in his favourite armchair with an open newspaper, listening to the radio.

  And then they saw it – the headlights of a vehicle snaking down the mountain. Everyone rushed out to the front veranda.

  The minivan drew up at the front door. The Rasiah clan stumbled out of the vehicle, their faces drawn. Lilly hugged Victor and Edward. ‘Thank God, thank God,’ she kept repeating between gasped sobs. Rajan held his weeping mother in his arms, talking to his brother George over her shoulder.

  The stories tumbled out of them. Rape, stabbing, people in boiling tar, dismembered bodies lying on the road, burning tyres around bodies, houses burning with people still in them. Above it all, the sound of screaming and the shouts of the mobs. The things they’d seen in Colombo and on the drive up to the tea plantation poured from their lips. The usually impeccable George Rasiah sobbed as he described the scenes to his older brother. The boys clung to Lilly.

  Lilly looked over her sons’ shoulders at the two men standing by the car. They looked tired and yet they were both smiling. One, dressed in a white shirt and belted sarong, was by the driver’s door. The other man wore a white shirt, dark tie and slacks. The clothes of both men were crumpled.

  Shiro walked over to the man in slacks and took his right hand in hers. ‘Thank you for saving my brothers,’ she said, looking up at him and the driver. ‘I prayed to Jesus to send a guardian angel to look after them. He sent both of you.’

  The man squatted down so his eyes were level with Shiro’s. ‘God heard your prayers, darling,’ he said. ‘We were protected by a whole army of angels.’

  This conversation made the adults aware of the two men. ‘Annai, this is Mr Ranasinghe,’ George said to Rajan. ‘He and his driver are both Sinhalese. They risked their lives to get us here.’

  Lilly moved away from her sons. ‘Oh, Mr Ranasinghe,’ she mumbled, tears sliding down her cheeks again, ‘how can I – how can we …’

  Mr Ranasinghe waved a hand in the air. ‘It’s the least we could do. I think it’s sickening, what my people are doing. Disgusting doesn’t begin to describe it.’

  Lakshmi hurried into the house to help prepare a hot meal for everyone.

  ***

  No one sent Shiro to her bedroom that night. She sat on her father’s lap and listened to her family, and their guest Mr Ranasinghe, discuss the turmoil in the capital. This was the first she’d heard of the long-standing rivalry between the Tamil and Sinhalese people of Sri Lanka. She hadn’t known that Sinhalese were Buddhists and Tamils were Hindus.

  For once, overawed by what was being said, she kept silent, storing up words to ask her mother about later: looting, rape, murder.
The exact meanings puzzled her, but the hushed and broken voices told her that they were bad things to happen to anyone.

  ‘It’s all the bloody Britishers’ fault,’ her father groused. ‘The divide and rule policy over the last fifty years. Putting Tamils in administration and giving the Sinhalese land to farm.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mr Ranasinghe nodded. ‘Pretty much guaranteed the dissent after the 1948 independence. The Sinhalese majority were never going to be happy that way.’

  The white man’s empire again, thought Shiro. No wonder Daddy hates the British.

  ‘It was only a matter of time after Prime Minister Solomon Bandaranaike declared Sinhala the official language in 1956. We could all sense the racial tensions between Tamils and Sinhalese at work,’ George said.

  The only ministers Shiro knew were nice, old gentlemen who talked about Jesus at church. Why did they go around changing languages and upsetting people?

  ‘It’s a good thing our school’s trilingual and made us study Sinhalese, Tamil and English. The rioters were in the buses picking out people who couldn’t read the Sinhalese newspapers.’ Victor’s voice was rough with emotion. ‘Won’t help us get into university, however.’

  Mr Ranasinghe sighed. ‘A recipe for disaster. Trying to make sure that more Sinhalese get into university than Tamil kids.’

  Exhausted by the fears she had faced that day and the conflicts she had learned of that night, Shiro drifted off to sleep, still cradled on her father’s lap. The last thing she heard was her grandmother’s cry, ‘Sinhalese bulls have killed my son!’

  That is so rude, Shiro thought as she dropped off to sleep. A couple of those bulls just saved your life.

  Chapter 7

  Seven years later ... December 1965 Watakälé