Disobedient Girl: A Novel

by Ru Freeman

  I hear my youth in their voices, see it in their quick smiles, their delight in this new journey. I imagine that my parents must have watched me, too, that way. I had been a girl whose yearnings had been the measure of their days. On Poya, I had stood in front of our lit lamps, causelessly devout. On holidays, they had taken me to the fairs and other entertainments that came through our town and bought me thick, sweet drinks in small, ice-cold bottles from the Muslim shops, which had refrigerators. When I came home at the end of each term with a report card full of the evidence of my scholarship, it had been to the fragrance of sweet, sticky black kalu dodol studded with cashews.

  I shrug. Such bliss is not meant to last. In my husband’s house, my children were my real gifts: the older ones had turned fear over and over in my stomach until it molted into rage, and perhaps it was that rage, that sudden fearlessness in me, that had caught Siri’s eye and brought me my youngest, the second daughter, who finally gave wings to my feet. Wings. Or rails. I am grateful for this chance, for the future, for the train that is carrying us there, its carriages full of strangers, kind to one another, kinder than anyone had been to me in my husband’s village. I am grateful for its spaces, which fill up and release people, empty of fear.

  There are few stations left now: seven before ours, eight after. I feel at peace in this train, in this empty car, this booth, my children all accounted for, safe, even the girl, safe with the nun. I don’t want to get off. I want to keep going to Badulla. But then what? I don’t know anybody in Badulla. I think about my aunt, her family, what they looked like when I last saw them, all those years ago. I picture her the same, but aged. I try to imagine what her grandchildren might look like now, but I cannot. I have received only an occasional letter, and never any photographs, which, even if they had been taken at a studio during a wedding, are too rare and too precious to send to anybody else. Only the two oldest were born when I visited as a newlywed, still enamored with my role as a grown woman and wife, and they were just four and one.

  The last I had heard of them was a year ago, when another cousin passed through our village, stopping at the house, unannounced, and staying the night to drink with my husband, who was interested only in that sort of company. Before he left the next morning, he had said that they were doing well, my cousin and her children. He said that she had a job at a place called the Farr Inn, where she works at a desk. Her husband was still employed by the government, as a ranger in the park, he had said. Anyway, I hope they have turned out like my cousin, their mother, and not their father, who was dull and sullen. Perhaps it is the fate of women in my family to marry such men. Perhaps it is also our fate to leave them. I hope that she has not left hers, though, for where would I go then?

  I am still drifting about in these scenarios, following one possibility, reversing and going down a different path, when we reach Thalawakele. The station is 4000 feet above sea level, and there is a cheerful signpost announcing the location of the St. Claire Waterfall and a bungalow named St. Andrew’s. There’s a photograph of it, and it looks beautiful, with terraced gardens and lavish flowers. In the picture there’s a train winding its way far below, and I wonder if it is this same train we are riding on. I poke my head out and look up, but all I see is the station and the shrubbery to my left, and nothing but tea sloping away to my right. Dotted here and there down the tea-covered hillsides I can see the colorful saris of the tea pluckers, their cane baskets strapped onto their backs, their fingers flying over the bushes, somehow managing to find, at that speed, the tender, light green leaves. They look like birds to me, those women. Bright birds doing honest and useful work. I watch the tea pluckers for a long time, fascinated by their diligence and concentration. They do not seem to mind the sun, or perhaps they have no freedom to consider the inconveniences that people with time on their hands, like us, trapped inside trains, do.

  The stationmaster announces that the train will be delayed for a short while until the tracks are cleared. There has been a demonstration, he says, by the plantation workers. It is clearly over now; the tea pluckers are back at work and there is nobody on the platform but two lonely policemen, who do not look agitated. I am glad that nothing disturbs them. Policemen are bad enough without them having any reason to be suspicious or feel more powerful than they already do, particularly with regard to those like us.

  To pass the time, I call to my children and try to direct their attention outside. “See those tea pluckers? Without them we wouldn’t be able to drink any tea anywhere in the country,” I tell them.

  “But this tea is green colored. This cannot be that tea. That tea is black,” my Loku Duwa says.

  “That’s because it is dried, duwa. But when it is first plucked, it is green, like these bushes.”

  They talk about tea for a little while, and then my little one wants to climb out and pick tea. I tell them they can. Loku Putha jumps out first, takes his little sister in his arms, carries her across the other set of tracks, and wades into the row of bushes closest to the station. They snatch a few leaves each and come running back as though the train is about to leave. I laugh, sharing their excitement at this unexpected foray and their delight in holding real tea leaves in their palms. They taste the leaves and wrinkle their faces. I beckon to them to climb back aboard, for though they are safe there, and in no danger of being left behind, I am uneasy with the thought of them being separated from me even by that improbable possibility.

  When I pull my head back in, there’s a man in our car. He is sitting across the aisle from me. He looks like a government agent, formal but unimposing, straight-bodied as his job demands, but with the heavy head of someone employed at an unending task. His hair is parted carefully on the side. He must be in his thirties, perhaps only a year or two older than I am. He glances at my children and smiles at me. It is such a genuine smile that I have to return it. The train begins to move again, gathering speed. It is empty enough now for the children to sit in one booth and me to sit in the one across from them; it is as though they are traveling alone, unattended, and I am traveling with the pleasant newcomer.

  “Good thing it is not raining. The train ride is not comfortable with the windows shut,” he says.

  “Yes, I can imagine it must not be,” I say.

  “Are you going home after the Poya holiday?” he asks.

  The children turn around at the sound of our conversation. They all stare at him, then look over at me, waiting for my story.

  “We are visiting my aunt. In Ohiya.”

  He nods to himself. He is from Colombo, he tells me, and stares out the window as he says that, as if he regrets the fact. Perhaps he wishes he lived out here. I feel sorry for him. He looks like the sort of man who, though competent and good, will never be happy.

  “Look, Amma!” my little one says, tugging at my sleeve and pointing out her window on the opposite side, sheer amazement in her voice.

  “Isn’t it beautiful,” I say, gazing at the white streams of water falling over the side of the green mountain, its source a mystery. “Now that is a waterfall,” I add. “Remember how we talked about waterfalls when we were still in Colombo?”

  “That is St. Claire’s,” says the man from behind us, and this time the children smile politely and listen as they take in the spectacle. “That waterfall is about two hundred and sixty-five feet high and is the widest waterfall in the whole country.” He leans forward and describes it to us. “That is Maha Ella,” he says, pointing alternately to the large and small sections of the falls. “It has three cascades. The little one is Kuda Ella. They both flow down to the Kotmale area. I have heard that the government wants to build two reservoirs there, but I hope they don’t. It would ruin the beauty of these waterfalls, wouldn’t it, children?”

  “Yes,” Loku Putha says slowly, sounding concerned, “that would be bad.”

  “Do you know what a reservoir is?” he asks my son. “It’s a lake to collect all the water, with a dam to keep it in.”

  “Wh
ere would the water come from? For the lake?” Chooti Duwa asks.

  “That’s it. The water for the Upper Kotmale dam would come from the same river that feeds these falls, and then we wouldn’t have a beautiful waterfall, would we?”

  He sounds like a schoolteacher; perhaps that is why he is ill at ease, perhaps he has failed to realize some youthful dream of living in cold places, educating small children, listening to their questions, watching them change.

  We gaze at the scene from our various perches. I half-listen as he continues to talk to my children, my eyes on the waterfall. It is pretty and unthreatening. The waters seem happy to be going where they are going, not like the ocean beside which I have spent my adult life, restless waters that always seemed to be flung or returning for something lost. The times when the ocean was still I had sensed as rest, a brief truce while they conspired among unseen islands and reef. I never felt safe by the sea; I am glad to be done with it.

  I return to my seat and look up and out of the window again. We have passed the falls and now it is simply more of the green hills. The children go on talking about the waterfall, about what it might feel like to have the water fall upon their heads, whether it is deep at the bottom, whether the earth could crack open if the water grew strong enough, and what would happen then to the people standing below.

  I sit and listen, made slightly anxious by their conjectures and how quickly they swerve from beauty to practicality to disaster and back again. “My children have never seen a waterfall,” I say to the man, explaining, excusing their fertile imaginations, their comfort with the prospect of doom.

  He nods and smiles. “All children are like that, isn’t that so?” He sits there for a while, the smile still on his face, and then he speaks again. “Where is your village?” he asks.

  I keep my silence for a long moment. Where is my village? Where do I live? I live on this train. I used to live in one place and I will live in another but now I live in this perfect place between the past and the future, the known and the unknown, the bad and the good.

  “Are you from these parts?” he asks, prompting me to look up. There’s a quality to his voice that expects truth and offers kindness in return.

  “No,” I say at last. “We are from the South. I was raised in Hambantota, but I lived as a wife in Matara. My father was a farmer and toddy tapper, and my mother helped him with our land; my husband was a fisherman.”

  He nods. “Beyond the Benthara,” he says, smiling, acknowledging my pure Southern credentials.

  I want him to think well of me. Of me being more than a woman caught between my father and my husband, between the distilling of alcohol and the killing of fish. “I was convent educated,” I tell him. “The nuns took care of my education after my mother passed away. She was of a higher caste, from a good up-country family.”

  He tilts his head to one side and looks at me, but he doesn’t ask for further clarification. When we stop at Great Western, he asks for permission to buy my children wrapped sweets from the lone vendor on the platform, and, as the train moves on from there, he asks me if I have family up-country.

  “Yes,” I tell him in response. “My mother’s sister lives there.”

  “Then you must be going for a visit?”

  “No, I’m hoping to stay there with my aunt and my cousin’s family. Maybe get some work.”

  “What about the children’s father? Is he still in Matara?”

  “No,” I say, and glance over at the children. They are occupied by their own conversations and do not pay heed. I say the words, my voice low and intimate: “My husband passed away.”

  “That is unfortunate. I am sorry to hear that. Was he ill?”

  I tell him part of my story, changing what needs to be changed. When I speak of my husband, it is Siri’s name I mention. I describe Siri as he was, with all his hopes, the way he was going to be something other than a fisherman someday, the way he argued and fought with his father to stay earthbound, resisting the sea every chance he could get. I tell him about how Siri worked to organize that long-lost political campaign, about all that I had come to hear about the government, about the working classes and the strength and power we had, even small people like us, how those conversations lit something inside me. And because I have to explain this journey, the loss of Siri, I tell him something more he can believe: I say that Siri disappeared along with some university students who were his friends. He murmurs when I say that, names that year of destruction, and I nod, though Siri was already dead when the government came after his friends. I tell the man these details softly, sitting across from him on his side of the train, my head in my palm, my elbow on the window. And he sits across from me in a mirror image, and listens.

  Does he believe me? I cannot tell from the expression on his face. Maybe he imagines that I am making up this history, which I have, and yet have not. Siri was the husband of my heart, and what other kind is worth mentioning to strangers?

  “Your relatives must be expecting you, then?” he asks.

  “No, there was no time to tell them.” I repeat that untruth again, though I hadn’t told them because I had wanted to feel possibility, had been scared. “They won’t turn me away,” I say. “They are family, after all.”

  “Sometimes family does not step forward the way they should,” he says, as if he has learned of betrayal firsthand and more than once.

  “I am not worried about that. They will help me. I don’t expect to live with them forever, just for a little while, until I get the children into school and find some work.”

  “There isn’t much work up here,” he says. “But, if you find yourself unable to get anything else at the factories, you may be able to get a job at one of the bungalows.”

  “Doing what?” I ask, curious and interested in any information he can give me. I am determined to be self-sufficient, to look after my children on my own.

  “As a domestic servant,” he says. I lower my eyes and look at my hands.

  He must feel ashamed for suggesting it, or be embarrassed by the look on my face, for he pulls out a piece of paper from his pocket and writes down his name and phone number in Colombo. His next words come quickly, as if he does not want to give me time to reflect on what he has just suggested. “If nothing works out, give me a call at this telephone number and perhaps I can find something better for you in Colombo, maybe working at one of the big fabric shops or at The Joseph Fraser, The Lady Ridgeway…or one of the other hospitals. I have friends there who would be willing to help out, especially an intelligent mother like you with some convent background and a pleasant manner.” He smiles as he says these things, broader and broader, piling on the possibilities as though that would erase the insult.

  “My children are all bright. They will do well in school. My son, he talks of becoming a lawyer. And my older girl, she says she’ll study medicine and look after me. We’ll be all right. They have been brought up well, like my mother raised me, not like the common people.”

  “I can see that,” he says, his face genuinely apologetic. “You must forgive me. I was simply trying…It is only because I know these parts…Just keep the number for an emergency.”

  I gaze at the writing on the paper. I should be grateful for his offer, but the idea of doing anything in Colombo seems offensive. Even the word sounds all out of balance, unlike the names of the towns we have been passing and the ones yet to come, or even Hambantota and Matara. Colombo is like someone hacking out phlegm and throwing it on the pavement to lie shining in the sun till it is fried. Still, what is there to do but incline my head a little in gratitude and fold the piece of paper and place it with great reverence in the center compartment of my purse like it means something to me? He bought my children sweets. He listened to my story. Surely I owe him this bit of grace.

  “Whom are you visiting?” I ask after I have gone through those motions, changing the subject to spare him from his embarassment.

  “I am going to see a friend in Pattipola
. Usually, I would have driven, but I wanted to get off the road for a change, and be by myself. I was in another compartment up front, but there was some trouble there, somebody was drunk and threw up, so I moved.”

  We both grow quiet as the train draws into the station at Nanu Oya and then moves on. Not far from there I see the peak of Sri Pāda come into view once more, reminding me of our temple, of the pilgrimages that people make toward the divine. I imagine the slow trail of devotées climbing up to the mountain to gaze at the footprint of the Buddha. I have never had the good fortune to make that climb, though it would not have been difficult to get to Ratnapura, our city of precious gems, from the South and climb from there. I have only heard of the mystery of this journey, the coolness of the stream, which exists as though only for the relief of the pilgrims, halfway to the summit, the way the sun pierces the eastern horizon at the same moment that the sacred mountain casts its conical shadow for the fortunate few to see on the western side.

  “It is said that when the sun comes up over Sri Pāda, it offers its irasevaya in worship to the mountain,” the man says, observing my intent contemplation of the view.

  “I have never been able to go,” I say, “but someday I wish to take some kapuru and add it to the lamp that burns on the top of that mountain. I would like to do that in memory of my parents, and of my husband too.”

  “It will bring you great merit,” he tells me. “I would like to do the same one day.”

  “Do you have children, sir?” I ask. I do not know why I added that mahaththaya to my words; it slipped out of my lips as though he might deserve the title.