by Ru Freeman
“They will call madam and she will be angry,” she says. “She could not have children, and she would not want me to keep a child who should have been hers.”
I understand now. We are both quiet. The sun has risen higher, and the scenery outside has lost its magical quality. It is just an ordinary day, dry to the touch, and we are in a passenger train going only so far. Two more stations and we will be in Hatton, where she and I will part. I feel responsible for her, and sad. I want to give her something, my first friend in our new life, a friendship restricted to a single journey. I want to ensure that the gods will look favorably upon me, too, for my kindness toward this girl. But I have nothing to give her, not even food. I fiddle with the two bangles on my wrist, but they are gold and I have two daughters…
“The next station will be mine,” she says, disturbing my thoughts. She is regretful.
“I will get down and hand you over to the nuns,” I say, “and I will give you my aunt’s address, so if you need to, you can come and find us.”
“Aney nendé, you will be blessed. I was worried about getting down alone.” How grateful she is for such a simple gesture. I feel tears in my eyes, and I distract myself with the task of easing myself out from under my sleeping children. I gesture wordlessly to the girl, and she opens the bag at my feet and takes out one of my saris. Chooti Duwa stirs in her sleep but does not wake up when I lift her slowly off my lap and slide the folded cloth under her head. I open my handbag and pull out a stray scrap of paper, some receipt for a once essential purchase, and write down my aunt’s name and the road on which she lives. The girl takes it from me and looks at it.
“I can’t read, nendé,” she tells me, not ashamed, just stating the fact.
“That’s okay. Keep it. If you need to find me, you can ask someone to write a letter for you.”
I watch her fold the paper and tuck it into the top of her bra. The place where we put our most precious things: love notes and money and handkerchiefs for when we cry. It makes me smile. My legs are stiff from sitting, and I sway unsteadily on my feet when I stand up. The girl holds my shoulder to balance me. She seems happier now, forward looking. She has not lost hope in the bright light of the sun, when everything is only as it is. She is still traveling toward a sanctuary.
When the train stops, I step down first with her bag, then turn and help the girl. The conductor walks by us and takes a leather purse looped on a stiff handle from a man who must be an official though he doesn’t look like one in his maroon cardigan and white wool cap pulled down close to his head. A couple, one child, and an old man appear before us, one behind the other, and just as quickly pass us by. They must have got down from other carriages. Nobody climbs in.
I must have expected the station to be special, somehow, for I feel worse now than I did when the train first came into the station, the announcement still ringing in the air. It is not that it is any more desolate than the other stations we have passed, and I can imagine this very platform bustling with the pilgrims who visit Sri Pāda when it is the season for such things. It is just that the black-and-white board, with “Hatton” written in three languages, seems to offer so little to a newcomer. “4143 feet above mean sea level,” I read at the very bottom of the sign, also in all three languages. Then I notice a smaller sign pasted on the glass window of the ticket booth, which appears to be closed. The names of three schools, a hospital, and The Convent of St. Bernardine. That at least is hopeful.
“The convent is named for a saint,” I say to her, then, “Ay mé duwa? What’s the matter?”
“There’s nobody here,” she says, and now she is crying.
I look up and down the platform. She is right. We are the only two standing in the cold air; we and the train, which belches almost gently, wheezing as if it needs to catch its breath after the long climb. I remember an odd bit of information that the nuns had told me in grade school: Hatton is predominantly Tamil if one counts the plantations. I hear this fact again now, uttered in their cautionary voices. I don’t want to leave this girl alone. The train toots and shudders, but halfheartedly.
A man comes out of the main building carrying a green flag and walks toward the edge of the platform. He is wearing an old black coat that is short at the sleeves, and white trousers. He must be the stationmaster. The girl begins to sob audibly. I turn away from her and grab his sleeve.
“Wait!” I say, to the man. “This child is waiting for the nuns from the convent, but I cannot leave her alone.”
He glances at her disinterestedly. “The train has to go. You can stay with her and catch the next one tomorrow…”
“My other children are asleep inside this train! Please, sir, please, could you delay for a few minutes?” I bring my palms together. “The blessings of the Buddha upon you, sir!”
“For two minutes,” he says and puts the flag behind his back. The train appears to rock back on its wheels, changing its mind. He takes out a cigarette and lights it with a match, then he waves the match in the air till the flame goes out and inserts it back into the same box.
I turn away from him. “Sit here, duwa,” I say and lead the girl to a smooth wooden bench. I walk the length of the entire platform, searching for some sign of life beyond the station, but find nothing. There is only what is already there: the old, low white building, the platform that stops without notice at each end, the man, the girl, the train. I come back and sit next to her, and take her hand.
“If nobody is here by the time the train leaves, you come with me,” I say. “We will know then that it is what the gods wish for you.”
She nods and stares at her hands. When I look up, I see my Loku Putha and Loku Duwa standing at the top of the steps that we climbed down.
“Amma, what are you doing?” Loku Putha asks.
“Amma, who is that?” Loku Duwa asks.
“Go inside and wait with Chooti Nangi,” I say to my daughter, then, knowing she will not listen to me, I turn toward my son and use his name so he understands that this is important to me, “Raji…Putha…”
“I’ll go,” he says, looking from the girl to me, and turns to his sister. “Come.”
They disappear, and I can see them inside the train, a red shirt, then the pale yellow dress, moving past the empty seats, still staring at me through the windows.
The man looks at his watch and then at me. “I have to release the train,” he says. “You have to decide what you want to do. The girl can stay with me. I will be here for another hour or so. Goods train is coming, that’s why. I can make sure she gets to the convent.” He raises his palm before I can ask him. “She’s not the first, and won’t be the last.”
“Come,” I say to the girl, standing up. I pick up her bag. We are about to get back into the train when she appears, a nun unlike the nuns I’ve known, who all dressed in white. This one wears gray and her head scarf is black, and though I want to believe otherwise, she looks harmless and even apologetic. Almost maternal.
“Mr. Coorey, I’m sorry I was late,” she says to the man.
“She was about to get back in,” he says to her, bowing slightly, showing her the kind of respect he hadn’t found for me.
The girl turns from me, though I am still holding on to her bag.
“I’ll take her bag,” the nun says, and I give it to her.
The girl folds into my arms and sobs.
“There’s no need for that,” the nun says. “You will be happy here at the convent. We will look after you well. Come now, child, we have to go.”
“Wait,” I say. I take off my earrings, not caring that they are gold, or that they are the only things I now have from my mother. I press them into her palms. “Keep these.”
I don’t know how she finds grace, in her condition, but when she falls to her knees and worships me, it is as though she is lighter than the araliya that used to fall without a sound into my open bag when I picked flowers for the temple.
“The blessings of the Triple Gem upon you, duwa,” I
say, touching her head with my palms. “Do not be afraid.”
PART II
Latha
Latha had developed a new habit: touching her ears. Whenever she felt upset, whenever things did not pan out as she hoped they would, no matter how small the disappointment—a burnt mal-lung, a particularly gray afternoon, a severe reprimand for some task left undone—she fingered the earrings that Leela had given her just before she got into the Vithanages’ car with its new driver, who, middle-aged and round, unlike the previous one, seemed incapable of swift or threatening movements.
“Latha Nangi! Wait a little!” Leela had yelled. It was the first time Latha had ever heard that voice raised beyond the murmur she used for communication with everybody other than God, to whom she spoke with a bowed head and no words.
“I am waiting,” Latha said, but mostly to herself. She didn’t feel like shouting just then, particularly after she heard the new driver sigh and turn the key in the ignition, the car sound dying and leaving a singular reprimand behind along with the silence. Clearly, there were ways to compensate for age and rotundity. She watched Leela come, shuffling a little to keep her rubber slippers on her feet as she ran, hugging her pale gray cardigan to herself, her arms crossed and gripping her elbows on either side, her hips swaying. Tendrils of hair came undone in the breeze as she made her way from the dark mahogany double doors of the convent, down the front steps to the car parked well outside the circular driveway. She looked youthful and pretty. Latha tilted her head to the side, taking it in, considering.
“Take these,” Leela said, when she got to her, pressing a pair of earrings into her palm. They were grown-woman earrings, heavy, intricately designed in the shape of a flower unlike any that could grow on earth: smooth and round, and full of history as they rested in her open palm.
“But these are your earrings, Leelakka,” she said, “and I already have some.”
“You will need these now that you are going back. Something of your own, passed down so you won’t forget your older sister.”
Latha laughed. “We’re not really sisters, you don’t have to give me your jewelry, Leelakka. And I don’t need earrings to remember you by, how can I ever forget you?”
“Keep them. When that mother on the train gave them to me, they made me feel cared for and bound to her, as though she were my own family. And now that you are going away without knowing what awaits you, you should have them. Please take them.”
“I’m going back to Thara. I’ll be all right,” Latha said, and then, because Leela stood there without saying anything more, “All right, I’ll exchange mine for yours.” Latha removed the ruby earrings that had once belonged to Thara, twisting the stems out of their grooved clasps, and dropped them lightly into Leela’s hand. “I don’t need them anymore.” She felt happy saying that; it was as though she were saying farewell to one chapter of her life and embracing a new one.
“They are like earrings for a small child,” Leela said, curling her fingers so the earrings sank into the careful well of her palm, creased with fortune lines and heart lines and a line of fate that was entirely pointless in lives such as theirs.
But she had been right, Leela had. Her foreboding had been the accurate measure of what awaited Latha, whose own optimism had dropped from her shoulders like a sack of jewels turned to coal when she got to the Vithanages’ house.
Of course she should have known that Ajith’s family would never consent to a marriage between their precious son and the daughter of a family where the servant girl had to be sent away. How could she ever have imagined otherwise? The Vithanages had refused to listen to the truth, or haul the real culprit out of hiding. They had thought that all the usual adjustments, the usual smoke and mirrors, sending her, Latha, away, dismissing the driver, would work. They had trusted in the invulnerability of their social status over engaging in a battle with another family of their means. In fact, they had probably thought they were protecting not simply their daughter but also that other family’s son. They had been wrong. They had lost. And why should she be surprised? Hadn’t she seen and heard the false narrative that was spun around her pregnancy with her own ears? First before she left the Vithanages and then at the convent? That somehow all of it would come to lay at Mr. Vithanage’s blameless feet, and that in their circles that was the ultimate downfall, the one scandal that would cling to them and to their daughter like hot tar the rest of their lives?
How could she have pictured only feisty Thara and her childhood love ascending the jasmine-drenched poruwa from opposite sides, decked with smiles, all the colorful manipuri saris and smooth suits watching? She had seen all of that, all the little details, all the lies uttered by the priests about virginity and chastity and unblemished children nurtured by unsullied parents, all the drums and the decorations and the tables upon tables of luxuries seen only on such occasions, and the great rooster-topped brass oil lamps that would stay lit long after the couple had left. She had even pictured the walk up the Colombo 7 block to Ajith’s house seven days later, the white cloths on the ground beneath Thara’s jeweled feet, even a temple elephant dressed in bright satin in front, the fanfare that announced to anybody who cared that Thara had been proven to be above reproach thanks to a red stain on a piece of white cloth taken from their nuptial bed the morning after the first night of their honeymoon. She had annoyed the driver all the way to Colombo with her inwardly focused smiles, picturing herself in some carefully chosen hand-me-down from Thara that would allow her to look just a little better off than all the attendants who would surely come to tend to other people’s children during these celebrations. She had seen herself standing just outside the gate, watching Thara arrive in her glory to step into the house from which she had stolen those first flowers, and Ajith with them. She had planned to wave at Thara, for surely Thara would catch her eye as she passed, uniting them for a moment in that shared past.
But Thara was not going to marry Ajith. She was going to marry Gehan. Latha’s Gehan. Gehan who had once been hers but was no longer and would never be hers. Ever again. That’s when the jewels turned to coal. That’s when she knew that somewhere at the back of her mind her imaginings of Thara and Ajith on their wedding day had hidden her longing for a day that would belong to her and Gehan.
It was too late now to have regrets, to reconsider the magnitude of what she’d brought to pass, to hope that the gods would not have noticed or that, if they had, they would forgive her, for having been no more than a child with a child’s quickness of temper, a child’s inability to hide the desire for self-respect, a child’s need to fight back somehow, anyhow, a child’s comprehension of retribution. Too late now for her to remember that, no matter her motives, whatever cruelty had been done, some countervailing cruelty would come to attend her too. Wasn’t that what she had spent so many days meditating upon, all those years ago with Thara beside her, flowers in their open palms, the scent of incense and the smell of a burning wick above their heads, the serene face of the Buddha looking down at their upturned faces?
“Amma says I’m lucky to make a match with someone like him,” Thara confided to her the very night she got back there. Latha was lying on the new mat that Mrs. Vithanage had bought for her and that she had flung on the floor of the storeroom; apparently, Soma told her, her old one had been burned after she left. She had been told to sleep there, in the storeroom, but Thara had insisted that she sleep on the floor of her bedroom, and nobody argued with Thara now that she had finally stopped throwing tantrums and agreed to this latest marriage proposal.
Latha was shocked by how Thara had changed. She looked the same as she always had, the same height, the same wide-set almond eyes beneath the eyebrows that shaped upward like wings, the same curves and graces. But Thara’s precociousness had turned into something harder, something that sharpened her tongue, her words falling like tiny wounds, the kind whose pain was out of proportion to their size. She had learned how to embarrass her parents, saying things that were not m
eant to be uttered in public; she had worn them down with her ridicule and her slights, taunting them for how they looked, for their concern, for their fallen fortunes, for their inability to change the way things had turned out. She had learned how to hide her life’s disappointment: that Ajith had not chosen to rescue her from her plight, not looked for her and fought for her and turned on his parents the way she had turned on her own, if that was what it would have taken, not even when she had gone to his house herself to beg. Their servant woman had come to the door to tell her he was not home. She had learned how to hide that pain with unpredictable invective that she hurled at Mr. and Mrs. Vithanage.
That story, too, was told to Latha as she lay on the floor, culminating with Thara’s revelation about her future groom. All these tales, everything that had happened to Thara during those last years, had been related, one after the other, without pause, as though this alone, to be told these stories, was the sole purpose for Latha’s return.
“Do you want to marry him?” Latha asked. “He used to…” She paused, struggling to find the words to describe her relationship with Gehan, which had been almost more of an understanding, an expectation of each other than a relationship. Thara interrupted impatiently.
“Yes, I know he used to be Ajith’s friend, but they are not friends anymore. Besides,” she added bitterly, “who cares about what Ajith thinks? Why should it matter to him whom I marry?” And Latha knew with a jolt of shock that all the time she had lived as though they were two girls in love with two boys, she had been invisible to Thara. An add-on meant only to further her affair with Ajith, not to have one of her own with Gehan. No wonder Gehan had hidden their relationship from Thara. No wonder nobody had suspected anything when he agreed to marry her in the end. Whose idea…?
“It was Gehan’s idea that we get you back to come with us to the new house when we move. I told him about you, stuck in that convent after the fuss with the driver and all and how I wished you were back. So he told me to ask Amma to get you back to work in our house. He felt bad for me, that’s what he said. He said that if it would make me happier, then I should just ask you to come back, he didn’t mind.”
