by Ru Freeman
“To pick flowers, Amma,” Thara said, her voice all girl and honey. Latha stifled her giggle.
Mrs. Vithanage frowned. “You’re too old to do that. You don’t need to go picking flowers anymore. Let the gardener do it.”
“Amma! The gardener doesn’t know how to do it. We know all the houses, and they know us!”
“Exactly. You have become common in this area. Soon they’ll be talking about you like they really know you. Yes, no more picking flowers. Get back inside and practice the piano.” Practicing the piano was Mrs. Vithanage’s idea of a solid punishment, which made Latha wonder if she was actually invested in Thara’s acquiring skill in playing the instrument or if all the piano lessons were merely serving some lesser role, as an excuse for Mrs. Vithanage to keep her daughter from other, more desirable, activities. This sort of banishment to the piano was becoming far too frequent to do Thara any good, since she went to it only in anger and banged furiously at the keys with no thought to the pieces she was playing.
“Latha, you go to the kitchen,” Mrs. Vithanage continued. “I will tell the gardener to get the flowers from now on.”
Mrs. Vithanage stared into the distance over their heads, down the driveway, past the garden, beyond the gate that was wheeled into the wall and wheeled back shut by the driver each time the car passed through. She could probably see the future too, Latha thought, with that amount of focus. She squinted her own eyes and tried to copy the look: seeing but not seeing, here but actually there.
“Amma!” Thara’s voice broke Latha’s concentration.
“Kollo!” Mrs. Vithanage’s voice was strident, summoning the gardener. An end-of-discussion voice. Latha flinched.
The gardener came running from behind the poinsettias, his hedge clippers in hand. What had he been clipping? Latha was sure the gardener did nothing most of the time. He just carried his tools around, wheeling his barrow here and there as if he were engaged in something. It was always empty. Didn’t anybody notice that it was always empty? Mrs. Vithanage assigned him the task as Latha and Thara listened, their heads cast down in perfect imitation of each other, their long braids—these days Mrs. Vithanage insisted that Thara braid her hair too—hanging to the same length down their backs. Thara had new white sandals with heels. The heels clacked when she walked. Latha didn’t like the sound of the clacking, only the height that the heels gave Thara, who now appeared older and more ladylike. She curled her toes in her own slippers. Maybe she could ask Mrs. Vithanage to buy some sandals for her with her pay. Better still, maybe she could ask Mrs. Vithanage to give her the money directly, instead of depositing it in the bank every month.
“Latha! Stop daydreaming! What are we going to do?”
Latha looked up. Mrs. Vithanage and the gardener had disappeared. Thara looked miserable.
“I don’t know what to do. We’ll let him pick the flowers, I suppose.” Latha’s mind was still on the white sandals as she looked—up, for now—at Thara’s face.
“Not the flowers, you fool! How will I see Ajith?”
“Maybe he can come here,” Latha said thoughtfully, crossing her arms in front of her. She was sure she didn’t strike quite the same pose as Mrs. Vithanage. She needed a bigger bosom for that. Her arms slipped down to her waist.
“When? Amma is always here.”
“Yes, but she’s not in the garden, is she? They can come to the back gate, and we can hide behind the garage and talk.” The plurals had slipped out, but Thara hadn’t noticed. She never seemed to notice.
“But what about the driver?” Thara stood in front of her and jiggled up and down in anxiety. She looked older than Latha right then, her smooth brown skin creased around her mouth and eyes, the eyes full of worry, pleading for help.
“He won’t tell,” Latha said, feeling secure all of a sudden about the driver’s allegiance.
“How do you know?” Thara grabbed Latha’s arms and undid them, holding on.
“I don’t know how I know, but I don’t think he will tell.”
“Amma will kill me if she finds out.”
“I thought you said he was the right kind of boy. Won’t she be glad that you found him by yourself?” Latha smiled.
Thara hit her playfully on her arm, then squeezed her. Latha grinned.
The next day, Thara rewarded her further with a strip of glittery gold paper from a roll, about three feet long, for which she had traded three felt pens, including red, in school. The paper rustled and glittered in their hands, and the very best part of it was that, when they rubbed it against their bodies, the gold shimmer came off on their skin and lips. Then, when they took orange star toffees and sucked on them until they were all sticky and put that on their mouths, it looked like they had lip gloss on! Fair’s fair, and Latha set about assisting Thara in her quest for privacy with renewed resolve. For a time, between the fake lipstick and the constant scheming required to avoid Mrs. Vithanage, both of them were either blissfully happy or inconsolably miserable. In short, they were in heaven.
But, of course, that spell had to be followed by the biggest change of all, and after that, everything was different: Thara attained age.
For months, it seemed, Thara had talked of nothing else but how many girls in her school were wearing bras.
“We call them holes so the nuns don’t know,” she confided to Latha, sitting on the well and swinging her legs as Latha squatted beside her and scrubbed the clothes with a wedge of hard white Sunlight soap she had hacked off a long bar, peeling the yellow wrapper back so she left the rest unblemished. She didn’t like Sunlight soap. It never washed things properly. She had seen something called Sunflakes in the stores, bright blue packets with pictures of basins full of suds, hanging down the sides of the shops from black ropes. The shopkeepers had told her that they made washing clothes easier; you just had to put a little bit into a big tub and shake the water, they said. But when Latha told Mrs. Vithanage, she had scoffed and refused to buy them. We do things the old way in this house is what she had said, and Latha had felt particularly outraged at the use of the we in that sentence, given that it was only she who did the washing. This was why she had taken to bringing a knife down to the well and making flakes out of the bars, not caring that it would be considered wasteful by Mrs. Vithanage, and rejoicing in the fact that indeed it did make it easier to wash the clothes, so long as she used the hard soap after the first soak.
“Latha! Listen to me instead of staring at those stupid clothes! We call them holes because you can’t see the bra but you can see the little hole-shaped imprint on the back of the uniform where the straps come down.”
Latha bunched the pile of white, box-pleated, sleeveless uniforms she was washing and beat them repeatedly on the flat stone put there for that purpose. She imagined bras inside them. She disentangled one of Mrs. Vithanage’s enormous bras from a soapy pile of underwear and put it underneath a uniform, then held it up. “Like this?”
“Yes! Exactly like that!” They both laughed. “And we know that she has got her period because that’s when you get the bra. First, the girl is gone for seven days from school, then when she comes back she has all new clothes. New uniform, new shoes, new ribbon in her hair, and”—she paused for effect—“the bra.”
Latha considered this information, thinking about how everything in her school was different from Thara’s, beginning with the gravel path, instead of paved asphalt, that led to it, and ending with this latest bit of information about seven-day absences on account of a first period. She had visited Thara’s school once to pick her up after a sports meet, and Thara had walked her around the spacious grounds: the auditorium, with its dressing rooms and black curtains on either side of a curving stage for entrances and exits; the chapel, full of quiet and cool, its courtyard flooded with the voices of an after-school choir practice singing harmoniously in English about a river called the Blue Danube; even the administrative building, where the principal sat and made announcements over a sound system fed into every singl
e classroom filled only with girls from good or rich families. Latha’s school had none of that, wedged as it was behind storefronts and facing the back of a church. She learned everything in one classroom, and intervals were spent standing around chatting with other students or writing notes to be given to Gehan. Nobody had lunch boxes or drink bottles. Every once in a while some girl or boy would bring in a rupee or two and buy bright pink pori from the barefooted street boys who loitered at the entrance to the school, but that was the extent of it.
Well, what did it matter? Her principal had assured them that everybody learned the same thing, using the same government textbooks, and took the same national exams, so they should not feel less than anybody else. And he was right: she and Thara studied together sometimes, and the only difference between what they learned was that Thara read it all in government textbooks that always seemed brand-new while Latha read textbooks that were always dog-eared and battered.
“Nobody in my school is absent for that long,” Latha said. “We only know because they walk all grown-up, looking for boys.”
“How strange,” Thara said, looking genuinely puzzled. “I wonder why they don’t get to take a holiday.”
Latha shrugged. It seemed pointless to stay home for seven days, for her, anyway. If she stayed home, she’d only have to do more work. More laundry, more fetching and carrying, more of the driver and his stupid comments. May as well go to school. Besides, she got to see Gehan on her way to school and on her way back. He met her each morning and cycled next to her down two entire streets in the middle of her walk; a few times he’d even let her ride with him, seated on the middle bar, her legs twisted tight together and away from the pedals, her head not touching but, still, only inches from his chin, near enough to feel his breath. Too close to home and someone would tell the Vithanages. Too close to school and someone would tell the teachers. But in the middle they were invisible. That anonymous time was what she woke up for each morning these days, for those twice-daily meetings with Gehan, whose interest in her had not wavered even after he realized that she and Thara did not share the same social status though they emerged and disappeared behind the same walls. She wished she could tell Thara, but some unspoken agreement made both Gehan and her remain quiet about their more-than-a-friend friendship.
Once, she had tried to bring it up with him. “I wonder if Thara Baba knows…” and she had faded off, assuming he knew what she meant. But he had taken her down another trajectory of thought, musing instead about the relative worth of the Vithanages.
“Families like hers always try to be better than they are by surrounding themselves with people they can bully. If you take all those people away, Thara is the same as you and me, Latha. Worse, even. How would they ever look after themselves if they didn’t have somebody to order about to do it for them? I’m telling you, they are the ones the JVP is after. When they get into power, it’ll be all over for people like them.”
Latha had neither agreed nor disagreed; she didn’t care about politics anyway. She was content simply to listen to him put the two of them on the same side of this equation and happy to join him in that space. She thought, also, that the school principal would approve of her choice had he known of it, the same way Thara was sure her mother, Mrs. Vithanage, would approve of Ajith if she knew of him. And standing next to Gehan that day, Latha had conjured up a wedding she had seen in a teledrama just that week and let it play in her head, substituting herself for the heroine and imagining the whole thing: herself decked in white, with those seven necklaces, including the gold jewelry around her forehead, jewels on her feet and over her arms, a bouquet of yellow araliya clasped in her hands, and Gehan dressed up like a nilamé, four-cornered turban and all, his thin body plumped by the forty-eight yards of cotton cloth in his costume, a glittering silver knife tucked into his belt, and proud to extend his hand and watch the kapumahaththaya tie their little fingers together while the voices of nine little girls all dressed in white half saris washed over them with their blessings.
She smiled to herself now as she remembered this, seeing those little girls all over again, hearing those first lines, Bahoong sahassa mabinim…mitha sā yudanthang…
Next to her, Thara sighed. “I can’t wait to wear a bra.”
Latha stared at her for a few moments, reluctantly letting go of her secrets so she could consider Thara’s latest dilemma. “You don’t have anything to put into a bra!” she said, feeling cruel, and started laughing.
“Neither do you,” Thara said, tightening her lips in annoyance.
“Yes, but at least I’m not like you, Thara Baba, hankering after one. I don’t want to look like this.” She got up and held Mrs. Vithanage’s gigantic wet bra in front of her chest with soapy hands, then popped the centers of the cups. “Thok! Thok!” she said. Thara laughed and picked up another bra. They chased each other around the well, shrieking with delight, puffing out Mrs. Vithanage’s bras and taking turns deflating each other’s “breasts.”
But some goddess must have been watching, because just as they ran out of steam, Thara said, “I think I just got it.” She said it in a quiet voice. She bent her knees open, reached under her skirt, and pulled down her panties, and sure enough, there It was: a red smudge. Thara looked up at Latha, her yellow skirt with white poodles embroidered all along the hem clutched in one hand, her white underwear still held out, as if she expected Latha to add her to the pile of laundry. She was going to cry; Latha could see it coming.
“Wait right there, baba, I’ll go and tell madam,” Latha said, washing her hands in a fresh bucket of water and drying them on the edge of her dress. She turned the bucket over and told Thara to sit on it. “It’s a good thing this old well is still surrounded by albesia, isn’t it?” she said, wanting to be helpful, comforting. “Nobody can see you through the leaves.”
The next few minutes were a blur. Mrs. Vithanage came hot-footing it down to the well and covered Thara with the bedsheet that she had grabbed from the almirah. Latha liked making beds because the sheets (and towels) were done by the dhobi and the dhobi used starch and then pressed them with an iron the size of a stool and it gave them a wet-in-the-rain-burnt-in-the-sun smell. But Thara didn’t seem to care about the smell. She whimpered from under the sheet, walking like she had shit smeared between her legs, stepping with her feet wide apart, hopping from one side to the other on tiptoes as if the ground was muddy.
Latha had to miss seven days of school after all because Thara had to and she couldn’t see anybody but other females and her mother wasn’t about to sit in a room all day long and she didn’t want to see Soma, so it became Latha’s task. It wasn’t so bad because she got to chat and play cards with her friend, though while they did, the country went up in flames, with riots and looting and people burning in the streets, and neither of them knew about it until after it was all over because no bad news was shared with Thara or Latha during that time. And though it wasn’t a happy time for anybody when they returned to school, Latha was glad that Thara had escaped having to absorb such things in the middle of becoming a Big Girl.
Mrs. Vithanage went with the driver to fetch Soma from her village, and goodness knows what she was promised because Soma came back, but she brought a certain air with her. Mrs. Vithanage made lots of telephone calls and took lots of short trips, and everything was said in hushed tones. Thara and Latha played cards, mostly 304, and Thara showed Latha the sanitary pads, which was tolerable, and then she had to take the outer wrappings off and flush the cotton down the toilet, which was not, but all in all it wasn’t so bad. Even if Latha couldn’t see Gehan, think about what she could tell him when she went back to school!
“What are they doing out there?” Thara asked on the third afternoon.
“Lots of telephone calls and lots of trips to the market for food,” Latha said, picking up the tall, narrow bedside table that always seemed on the verge of collapsing and scraped the floor with a piercing sound if she dragged it, which, of course, she did
n’t, having learned through hard experience not to, and putting Thara’s plate of rice in front of her.
“For whom?”
“Not for baba, clearly,” Latha said, laughing at Thara’s face as she surveyed her latest meal of rice with ash plantains and okra, both cooked white, gotukola mallum, and no meats. “I can smuggle some dried fish for you if you like,” she offered, feeling sorry for Thara.
“No. Amma says it’s bad to eat fried things and meats and chili and sweets until the seven days are over.”
“Then what?”
“Then I can eat,” Thara said, stuffing a ball of rice into her mouth.
“Do you have to do this every month?”
“No, you fool! This is special because it’s the first time. You don’t know anything, do you?”
Well, it had been only three days since Thara knew nothing either, but Latha was willing to believe in the power of blood between her legs to enlighten her too. She wondered when she would get hers. Soon, she hoped. Then, not too soon, because Mrs. Vithanage would make her stay home like this, and who would keep her company? Not Thara, that was clear. Thara would go back to school. Soma, perhaps? Latha pictured the portly, uni-breasted—that’s what she and Thara called breasts like that: breasts so large they seemed to have merged like the trunks of ancient trees—old woman unfolding her mat next to hers on the floor of the storeroom instead of on the raised platform in her own room. She had a room because she was old; that’s what Mrs. Vithanage had told Latha once. She was old and she had looked after Mrs. Vithanage as a girl, so she had earned the right to her room and her bed. Frankly, Latha could not imagine either of those women as girls, but particularly not Mrs. Vithanage, because what girl could turn into such a solid, feet-firmly-planted woman? A woman with so little understanding of girls? Besides, that was not a bed Soma had; it was just a plank of wood. Beds had mattresses, didn’t they? And did Soma have a mattress? No, she didn’t. It was better to sleep on the floor, like Latha did, and not have to be grateful for a plank of wood—that’s what she thought as she lay down on the cool concrete each night, her face to the ceiling, and traced the felt definition on her body: her collarbones, her rib cage, the slope toward her belly button, the rise to the bones beneath.
