Disobedient Girl: A Novel

by Ru Freeman

“Yes,” he says, twisting his wedding ring with the thumb of his left hand. He is married and has a daughter. He looks over at my children and points to my youngest. “About that one’s age.”

  “She will be five, my baby; she is four now. She is what I pictured when they told me I was pregnant, so I named her for that.” I think about that for a moment, remembering her arrival, how dear she seemed without the father who created her and without a father to claim her. My girl, my princess.

  “One day she will grow up,” he says, “just like my daughter.”

  “And she will still be my girl.”

  “Yes, you are right. They will still be our little girls.” His voice is sad. It worries me a little, because he looks over at her when he says that, as if he can see her future and it is not as I have imagined it to be. So I think of the other girl, that older-daughter-in-another-time, and imagine her safe. She must be at the convent now, and I picture her being fed, being tended to, received into a house of women. It is a beautiful thought, and I delve deeper and deeper into it, my memory of the nuns I had studied with providing the images: a room of candles and prayer, of low voices, of the deep mystery of women’s souls, forgiveness, comfort.

  Latha

  The first time they called her that, it was after a lunch. Lunch was simple and had only three curries, while a lunch had five and the fruits cut up in prespecified shapes for dessert. She had been sweeping the house. Again. It was the most useless of tasks in Latha’s mind: this endless sweeping of the dust that crept through the doors and windows of a Colombo house. Sometimes she paused, her chin on the top of the broom, and remembered the convent: its particular coolness, the absence of dust, the crispness of it all. It made her happy to think of those spaces, but only on the good days.

  On the bad days, when the memory made her feel an odd despair, she crushed the image by bringing on armies of nuns. Nun after nun after nun, their hands lifted in prayer, their skirts down to their ankles, and nothing but serenity on their countenances. Then, when she had turned the convent into a relentlessly uninspired tomb of deprivation, she rearranged her shoulders and felt happy to be in dusty Colombo. With Thara. Even if that meant not with Gehan, who now had no name, just a title: Sir.

  “I’ll ask my woman to make us some fresh lime juice,” she heard Thara say.

  And then, the comment from Thara’s new friend from the office where she worked as a secretary, after the task had been relayed to Latha by the houseboy and she had prepared the lime juice just the way she and Thara had once enjoyed it as girls—though she had only a teaspoon or two now except on the days when she felt angry about one thing or another and made herself a glass without asking for permission to use a lime—sweet and tart in perfect complement, with just the dusting of salt and enough pulp to communicate its authenticity, and after the first sip had been taken: “Your woman must be good. From where did you get her?”

  And she was still standing there! Worse, Thara had appeared not to notice. Latha had become just as invisible to Thara as she had been to Mrs. Vithanage, except for those occasions on which Thara’s mother had been told of the onset of puberty or her request for those sandals or her pregnancy, except for those times. But this person, this “woman” that Thara and her friend continued to talk about, was not like the women who became women when they lay down with a man for the first time. This particular woman had no name, no past, no future, no desire or need. She had a function: servitude. To comfort herself, Latha went back to the kitchen and made herself lime juice with extra sugar, and then she squeezed more limes and made lime juice for the houseboy as well; he grinned like a monkey when she gave him the glass. A real glass, not the tin cups reserved for the servants. And though they both gulped their drinks down, his eyes big and on the lookout, his ears pricked, she felt as though they were a team, that she had an ally, little as he was.

  As the days passed, Latha noticed other characteristics of this female called “my woman:” she had flaws and merits. Her flaws were an inability to make a proper sambol, or be deferential and grateful. Her merits included smelling fresh, having clean hands, and ironing like the dhobi at the laundry with the sir’s creases in all the right places. And because to Gehan she was not even “my woman,” she was “our woman,” and because he tried hard to avoid her, steering clear of the kitchen, Latha sometimes creased the crotch of his trousers in such a way that it looked flat, like that of a woman’s. She contemplated doing the same to his underwear but felt that might require a further insult. She held that in reserve, for the future.

  Thara’s new home was an upstairs-downstairs, modern affair, with three bedrooms and a bathroom on the upper floor and a dining room, living room, and wraparound veranda below. It even had an attached garage, unlike at the Vithanages’, where the car had to remain parked outside, and a servant’s room for Latha. The houseboy slept in the kitchen and stored his mat under the hāl pettiya, which sometimes meant that Latha had to come and spray a flying cockroach that had crawled into his mat with Baygon and wait until it squirmed itself to death so the houseboy could stop whimpering and go to sleep. There was a garden, but they did not have a gardener. Watering the plants and sweeping the outside was part of the houseboy’s job, and not one he did very well, considering that the ekel broom was twice his height and he kept being distracted by everything that was going on outside the parapet walls that enclosed their property, particularly the vendors, at whom he stared as though they were magicians or puppeteers come especially to entertain him.

  The transition to this house had not been without its moments of camaraderie. When they went shopping for the curtains, for instance, and Latha guided Thara away from the cream to the green and from there to the green and orange ones. Well, mostly orange, with a thin green stripe that you could see only if you got really close. Or when they went from the curtain place to the store for table linens, which Thara had thought should be white and Latha had told her should match the curtains, and couldn’t they be orange?

  “You’re going to make my house into a Thambi house!” Thara said at the Lanka Handloom Emporium, where the saleslady had laid out the options on top of the glass case that contained jeweled ebony elephants and sterling silver teaspoons made for disuse.

  “It’s not the Muslims, it’s the Tamils who like orange and green,” Latha countered. She dropped the “Thara Madam” when they were together alone, and Thara seemed not to mind.

  “Anh? So you think Amma would like my house to look like a Tamil house?”

  “Why care what Amma thinks? Isn’t this your house, after all? You should decorate it any way you like. You’re the mistress of this household; she can be the mistress of hers. I say we should pick orange.”

  “Your sister is right, madam,” the saleslady said, glancing from one to the other and holding up the swatch from the curtain shop next to the table linens.

  And Thara laughed and corrected her and told her they weren’t sisters, but when the saleslady apologized and referred to Latha as friend, Thara let it pass. And that was a good time, wasn’t it? To be able to be friends again? Latha thought so, particularly since Thara compromised and got six green serviettes and six orange serviettes, and Latha relented and confirmed that white Noritake dinnerware was classy. Even though she secretly thought the creeping green vine along the edges might make a meal appear unappetizing.

  And afterward, after they had selected the woven table mats—which Latha felt were not very classy and Thara had insisted were old-fashioned and therefore were classy—and the glasses in all those different sizes for purposes that had never been apparent in the time Latha had spent at the Vithanages’, but that she assumed must have been because she was uninvolved in those operations, Soma being the head servant there, Thara had taken her to Green Cabin. They had sent some food and drink to the driver (who had done all the carrying) and then sat together at a table. Thara had bought soft, creamy Chinese rolls, with their crisp brown outer skins, and pastries with bacon and eggs, and éclai
rs full of chocolate. And they had eaten and chatted about the wedding and the house and what fun it was to buy things and be out in the world and drink enormous glasses of fresh golden mango juice thick with the taste of Jaffna mangoes (for Thara) and excessively sweet pink faluda piled high with bits of square-shaped red and green jelly and black kasa-kasa seeds that slid about her tongue like tadpoles (for Latha), whose relative merits they could compare.

  But after the first few months they had nothing more to buy. The house was decorated, the furniture delivered and arranged, the paintings hung in the bedrooms. Now there was nothing to do but live, and the sort of living that happened at Thara’s house, the Pereras’ house as it was referred to, that being Gehan’s last name, was not that different from the living that had gone on at the Vithanages’. It was routine and boring, and only the pace was faster.

  Thara began working for the office of a dealer in American Standard sanitary ware. Bathtubs and washbasins and things like that, but mostly the washbasins because, Thara pointed out, but only to Latha, the Americans were crazy—very few people could afford the tubs or wanted to sit around in warm water when the temperature was consistently ninety degrees. The company also sold bidets, but those came from England and Japan. There were three other people in the office, two married girls and one unmarried man, of whom Thara liked only the younger of the married girls, who turned out to be the one who came to that first lunch. The days at the office were dull, with few purchases, fewer visitors, and too much bookkeeping. She might even quit and find something else, or go to the Institute of Chartered and Management Accountancy, which was what a lot of her friends did while waiting to get married. If she hadn’t dropped out after one year of trying the advanced level classes, she might have tried to get into law college like she had always hoped to do. But her parents had wanted her to settle down, and who cared about all this now? She hadn’t been able to study anyway, not after the whole drama of Ajith. All these things Thara told her, but only on the evenings when Gehan was late coming home.

  On the nights that Gehan was home, Latha stayed in the kitchen and pantry area, allowing the houseboy to do the table setting and the running back and forth for more water, which he invariably spilled, being some indistinguishable and equally hampered age between seven and nine years when little tasks such as these could never be completed successfully. When they finished dinner, Thara and Gehan held hands and watched TV or went upstairs to their bedroom and read books. Sometimes they shut the door to their room, which meant only one thing. When that happened Latha sat in the pilikanna at the back of the house with the houseboy and taught him to read, fiddling and fiddling with her earrings, longing for something to happen in her life to change its course and take her far away from Thara.

  She wrote to Leela and prayed that somebody would read the letters to her, though, knowing Leela, Latha could just as easily see her tucking them unopened under her coir mattress, afraid of the imagined sacrilegiousness of the contents and of revealing to the nuns her own participation in such a friendship. Latha waited all that first year for word from Leela, but none came. It was as if she, too, had disappeared into the hills that came to Latha like a dream now. When she wrote, she imagined the good things before her: those colorful vegetables, the rest she had enjoyed, Leela and her embroidery, the hymns, which she now hummed as she cooked, and the stories they had made up together. Somehow, those days, that time in the mountains, seemed, in retrospect, full of potential. It was unlike her present, with its roster of duties, which came at her without deviation.

  It did not matter that she had been elevated to the status that Soma had enjoyed, that she had a bed, and not a mat.

  It did not matter that Mr. Vithanage had given her a lump sum when she moved into Thara’s house, pressing it into her hands in Thara’s presence so there was no mistaking his intent. The sum, though large, was not equal to what they owed her, but she had used it to purchase bedsheets and two towels in navy blue and white.

  It did not matter that Thara had provided the personal introduction and the guarantor’s signature needed to open an account at the brand-new HKS Bank in her own name with the rest of that money.

  It did not matter that she received her salary from Gehan himself in an envelope he left on the kitchen table on the last day of each month, and that she sensed something soften in him in that gesture, to leave the money for her to find rather than give it to her directly and affirm their relationship as master and servant, to allow the transaction to be one of service but not necessary hierarchical. Or as if he were ashamed that they had set themselves up with this arrangement.

  It did not matter that the houseboy scurried about under her watchful eye and did her bidding, or tagged along to carry the vegetables she purchased from the Sunday market in Jawatte.

  And it did not even matter that if she bought the houseboy a yogurt with her own money he ate it slowly, as if it were a delicacy; and that watching him she would pretend that the baby she had given birth to had been a boy and this was he. This was not that baby, and that baby was not Gehan’s; it had been Ajith’s, so what did it matter to her where she or he was, except that it did. It did, it did, and that fact came back to her and punched her repeatedly in her flat stomach just when she least expected it to. Until, one day, it stopped.

  Because of the sound of Thara vomiting in the morning and looking wan in the evening and drinking nothing but that lime juice and finally saying it aloud: “Latha, I’m going to have a baby.” And those seven words became a kind of chariot that carried Latha’s lost newborn away, left it to fend for itself in the green hills, and then came back to this present, full of promise in the form of an infant she would be permitted to love, to watch grow.

  Thara’s pregnancy was different from how Latha’s had unfolded at the convent. Whereas she had been taken for quiet, contemplative walks—at least externally; internally she had been roiling with the bitter notes of her eviction from the Vithanages’ home and her arrival in that place of silence and abstention—Thara went for endless checkups at the unexpectedly quiet Joseph Fraser Hospital or lay around in bed all day. Whereas Latha had engaged her hands in making those baby clothes that nobody had told her she would never be allowed to put on her newborn, Thara shopped for stuff. Whereas Latha had gained weight slowly with the nutritious meals that had been made especially for her, a skill and prescience in the celibate nuns’ ministrations that Latha had marveled at even in her state, Thara expanded, it seemed, by the day.

  “You must not eat so much,” Latha told her one afternoon, watching Thara consume a second heaping plateful of rice. Thara’s cheeks had puffed out, and, along with her swollen fingers and feet, they made her resemble her mother more each day.

  “I have to eat for two, that’s what the books say,” Thara responded, packing well-mixed rice and curries into the puffed belly of a papadam. It finally burst, and they both laughed.

  “That’s what’s going to happen to you if you keep eating like that,” Latha told her.

  “What do you know about anything?” Thara said, still giggling, poking at her papadam.

  Latha said nothing. Thara stopped laughing. She pushed the papadam to the corner of her plate and played with the murunga, splitting them with her index finger and then scraping the flesh out with the side of her thumb. Not eating any of it.

  “What was it like when you…when you…had that baby?” she asked finally.

  “Like nothing,” Latha said. “The nuns took me to the expecting room, that’s what they called it, and I had a comfortable bed where everything smelled clean. There was an older girl who tended to me there and brought me food.” She stopped and began to clear the table, remembering Leela’s face, her competent hands, the insistent voice that had coaxed food into her, and later, most of all, Leela’s soothing quiet, which had put an end to her own silence.

  Thara put her free hand on Latha’s arm. “Did you have the baby at the convent?”

  “No, they took me to the h
ospital.”

  “What was the hospital like?”

  Why was Thara asking these questions now, after more than two years of no letters, after her return, after all the chats about her wedding, the moving, the decorating, the announcement of her pregnancy, after all that, why only now? Yes, Thara hadn’t cared for a long time. Latha was under no obligation to confide. She felt angry.

  “Are you done with the fruits?” she asked, and when Thara did not reply, she said, “I’m taking these away.” She put one hand on the plate of salt-and-pepper-flecked sliced pineapple, looking straight at Thara the way she did when she wanted to threaten her with something—stubbornness, disobedience, insolence, pride, one of those things.

  But Thara did not flinch. “I’m done with the fruits. What was the hospital like?”

  “I didn’t like it. It was cold and hard,” Latha said. But after she had said that, the rest came back and she could not stop herself, so she tried to make it brief and factual. “I was high off the ground and I felt lonely and I shivered all the time and it didn’t feel safe. The doctor barely looked at me, and the nurses had masks over their faces so all I could see was their eyes, and none of their eyes were kind. And when…when they took the baby from me…” And there she stopped, feeling the sadness untying itself easily, like it had been waiting for this moment, funneling up through her body, reaching her heart, her voice, her eyes.

  “Sit, Latha, sit here,” Thara said, standing up and guiding her to a chair at the dining table. It was the first time Latha had ever sat at a real dining table in a respectable house. She felt awkward.

  The houseboy peeped around the door leading to the dining room from the kitchen, and Thara shooed him away. She poured some water for Latha and then held out a serviette. It was orange, but Thara had used it to dry her hands after she had washed her fingers in the bowl of water next to her and so the cloth was already damp and had indul on it from the curries, and the chili got in Latha’s nose and made her sneeze six times in a row, as she did whenever she started sneezing. She giggled nervously and peered at Thara, who stood watching her.