Disobedient Girl: A Novel

by Ru Freeman

  “This is not my baby,” she said at last. “This is Gehan’s…Thara’s baby.”

  He crossed his arms in front of his chest, and something inside him seemed to slump. He started to say something, then stopped and stood there nodding at her, gazing at Madhavi.

  “I heard that they got married,” he said finally, “a year or so ago, right?”

  “Three years ago,” Latha said. “They’re expecting another baby any day now.” Madhavi began to hurl herself forward in the pram, making it jerk back and forth. Latha bent down to her. “We’ll go soon, baba, stop doing that, you’ll fall out.”

  He shifted his weight from foot to foot, as if trying to find something to say that would make her listen for a little longer. “I was abroad,” he blurted. “My parents sent me to America to go to university there,” he said. “To Michigan,” he added, after a pause, “a place called Michigan.”

  “Michigan,” she repeated and nodded.

  “It’s a cold part of America.”

  A car pulled up not far from where they were standing, and two young girls got out. Ajith glanced over at them, and Latha seized the distraction to try to get away.

  “I have to take the baby back home now,” she said, trying to seem regretful.

  “Have things been well for you, Latha?” he said, turning back to her and staring at her face with eyes that, precisely because he was so clearly not looking at her body, were doing just that. Latha nodded again. She could have been polite, asked the same question of him, but she had no interest in him, his body, his story, or making him feel good about any of it. He hadn’t even asked about the child she had borne. It was as it had always been; she was a means to an end, no more, no less. The thought must have shown on her face because he sounded awkward when he began speaking again. Good.

  “I used to come here to run when I was home for holidays, Latha, but this is the first time I’ve visited since I came back for good. I am back for good now. I’m at the Central Bank…my father got me a job there.”

  “That’s good, isn’t it? I’m happy to hear that.” She didn’t even try to make it sound like she meant it. Looking at him objectively, she thought how well he suited Thara. The two of them, something they called decency dripping off their shoulders like magic capes, the weight of their upper-class families almost a visible backdrop to their movements no matter what they did. How right Thara had been to choose another like herself, and how unlucky to have misjudged his character. In the end, coming from the “right family” had been his undoing. No, on second thought, they were not the same, Thara and Ajith, Latha thought. Thara had fought off her parents and turned down all the proposals, one after another, gone to Ajith’s house to plead with him, and finally chosen the one who had been closest to Ajith, marrying not Gehan but his association with the one she had loved since she was eleven years old. Was it love? Perhaps, or not. Perhaps it was just habit, or want. Ajith was the one she had chosen, the one she had wanted, and maybe Thara, who had been told so relentlessly that the most important choice, her husband, would not be hers to make, had wanted to force her parents to learn otherwise. But Ajith had listened to his parents, let them send him to this cold place he talked about, and come back to his good job carrying nothing but guilt. Latha turned the pram around to go back the way she had come. She didn’t want to be reminded of the past. Didn’t she live with it every day?

  “Latha, wait. Tell me, are you keeping well? Do you need any help or anything?” he asked.

  “I work for the Pereras now. I’m not at the Vithanages’,” she said.

  “How is Gehan?”

  She shrugged. “He’s the same, I suppose.”

  “And how is…how is Thara, Latha?” He touched the top of her shoulder. “Can you tell me?”

  She glanced down at his hand and waited until he dropped it. “Different,” she said and felt oddly pleased to be able to leave him standing there, staring after her, wondering what she meant. The real para balla, she thought to herself. He’s the one who deserved to be called that, not Gehan.

  She didn’t decide to tell Thara until the day of Madhayanthi’s first birthday party, a whole year later. That was on the eighth of September, and the last of the monsoon rains were threatening the skies even as the birthday cake was cut, but they held off until the last furious guests, the two sets of grandparents, had left. And the only reason she did it was because that was the day Gehan and Thara had their ugliest fight.

  It began because, at the party, Mrs. Vithanage made a disparaging remark about the fact that they never seemed to see their daughter and son-in-law at the big house anymore.

  “It’s as if you live in the outstations! I mean after all, we are just around the corner from you, and surely you could visit more often.” Mrs. Vithanage was laid out in the reclining armchair at the end of the side veranda, one of two such chairs Thara had been given by the old couple when she got married. Latha liked those chairs. They were smooth to the touch from the years that separated them from their former life as magnificent teak trees on the family estate, which Latha had visited with Thara when they were girls, playing in the dark green paddy fields, eating raw mangoes and raw wood apple with vinegar and chili and salt until the kahata made them hoarse, all the while studiously avoiding eye contact with any of the laborers, the coconut pluckers and paddy farmers, with their bare upper bodies and servile manners that Mrs. Vithanage had pointed out to them, as a warning.

  “Maybe you should visit us,” Gehan said, smiling just a little.

  “Children should be visiting the parents, not the other way around,” Mrs. Vithanage said, preceding her words with the slightest of wheezes; she could have been beginning an attack of asthma, but Latha knew from long experience that it was more likely to have been an intended adjective. “That’s how it was in the old days.”

  “We barely have time to manage the simple things, let alone go visiting various people. The old days are gone,” Gehan said, the modifier leaving his expression and a dark glare coming into its own.

  “Hmmm. That much is certainly clear to us all,” Mrs. Vithanage said. She could never let things go. “We can see that things are not the way they used to be. Particularly when parents are referred to as ‘various people.’”

  Of course Mrs. Perera, who was within earshot, had to leap to her son’s defense; this was the moment that every mother of a son waited for, particularly those whose offspring had married up, and she was clearly relieved that it had finally arrived.

  “My son is very busy, working morning, noon, and night to support the wife and the children,” she said. “If the wife was working, then perhaps he would have more free time and they could do all these visits. Otherwise, at this rate, with one person doing all the work…”

  The trail-off was the biggest insult of all, and Latha braced herself on Mrs. Perera’s behalf. Not because there was any love lost between herself and Gehan’s mother but because Thara’s marriage down, on top of her own to Mr. Vithanage, whose caste was one step lower already, was the sort of inward-burrowing humiliation that lurked just behind the throat of someone like Mrs. Vithanage. An internal hemorrhage that made everything she said sound like a gurgle until the day it could all come spilling out. At that moment, this moment, she could be free from its malignance because after she said What Needed to Be Said, and People Were Put in Their Places, her daughter, and therefore herself and her family, would be restored to their former status as people not to be trifled with. So, Latha waited.

  “If Gehan had a proper job in the government, like Thara’s father, then perhaps he could afford a wife from Thara’s background. After all, she is not accustomed to this kind of life. She comes from a different sort of family.” Mrs. Vithanage stood up and yelled for Latha as if she, Mrs. Vithanage, was the real mistress of the house. “Latha! Come and clear this table!” Then she turned and fixed Mrs. Perera with the full force of her Kandyan stare. “A very different sort of family.”

  Mrs. Perera rose to her
feet. Latha had to agree that, when they stood up together, Mrs. Vithanage was at an advantage. But, not having the curse of the Kandyan Govigama caste Buddhist (or the KGB, as Gehan called it), Mrs. Perera had never had to be concerned with what people might think. So what she lacked in height she had in lungs. And lungs were heavy artillery in a Colombo 7 neighborhood.

  First, she snorted. Then, she spat. Even Latha considered that beyond the pale and rushed forward to wipe the floor with a serviette she grabbed off the table. She also made a last-ditch effort to save Mrs. Vithanage, but only because she saw Mr. Vithanage approaching from the garden and she wanted to protect him from hearing the vitriol she knew was coming.

  “Perera Nona, can I get you some passion fruit juice?” she asked. But the moment she said it, she regretted her words, because Mrs. Perera spat again, this time in her direction and called her what Soma had, six years ago: whore.

  “Vesi! I cannot believe you are here in my son’s house, looking after him and my two innocent grandchildren!”

  “She’s here, like all the other servants, including the driver who takes that son of yours to work, because we pay them. Otherwise I can’t imagine what my poor Thara would be forced to do in this house that we bought for them,” Mrs. Vithanage said, snorting in turn. This was the only time she had ever defended Latha, however backhandedly and, come to think of it, falsely, Latha thought, since it was Gehan himself who paid her salary.

  Mrs. Perera turned to Mrs. Vithanage, and her voice rose and shrieked at such a pitch that Latha was sure she could be heard three houses away in every direction.

  “It was an act of charity on the part of my family to let Gehan marry into yours. Into a family where the master of the house was fucking the servant girl, who was young enough to be his child. Who knows? Maybe that is why you want to keep her so close. Maybe she is his child from some other woman up in the estates where she came from. I heard it was he who brought the little bitch into the house in the first place.”

  Latha didn’t know what possessed her. Later she told herself it must have been the look on Mr. Vithanage’s face as he reached the top step just in time to hear this speech, and the way his eyes flew to her face and then looked down at his shoes. She didn’t know if it was because she believed what Mrs. Perera had just said, or whether it was the memories that came back to her in quick flashes and then were gone: a memory of that just-for-her bar of a Kandos Cracker Jack chocolate, and the voices. The voice of a woman telling her that she was an orphan, and then Mr. Vithanage’s voice saying, Come, daughter, come; and the voices of nuns soothing her and promising her things even though she wasn’t afraid at all of Mr. Vithanage.

  Whatever it was that made her do it, this much was clear: it felt good. She spat right back at Mrs. Perera, and not away from her, in her face. And then, just because that felt so perfect, she slapped her.

  So Mrs. Perera shrieked, and Mrs. Vithanage said it served Mrs. Perera right that she was slapped by a servant woman, and Mr. Perera and Mr. Vithanage bundled their respective wives into their respective vehicles and sent their respective drivers back for their wives’ handbags and the party was well and truly over because Madhayanthi screamed and screamed and wouldn’t stop until Latha went and picked her up and took her to the kitchen. And after she had helped her out of the absurdly puffy pink nylon dress that Mrs. Vithanage had given her for her birthday even though it was scratchy and hot, and taken off the squeaky shoes that Mrs. Perera had given her even though she wasn’t walking yet, and filled a basin on the back porch and brought Madhavi and put both girls in there to play, Madhayanthi stopped her crying, and Latha was resolved.

  She was resolved, but her resolution only grew as she listened to Thara defend her when Gehan told her they had to get rid of Latha or else his mother would never visit them again.

  “Good, I hate your mother,” Thara said and screamed, twice, as Gehan’s hand fell first on one side of her face and then on the other. She screamed and then she started yelling at Gehan and that was the end of Thara’s former life as an upper-class, Colombo 7, KGB princess. She was now most definitely not a Vithanage; she was a Perera. And the more she said to Gehan, the further she stepped from her blessed childhood and the angrier she got until at last she hurled words so crass and raw at him that even he, an ordinary Perera, backed away from her and left the house.

  Latha, listening in the kitchen, put the kettle on to boil even though nobody had asked for tea. As the water warmed, she peeled and sliced a bit of ginger. She could feel a long night coming, a night of acrimony and tears and regret, and it all felt oddly familiar to her. Thara’s words, Gehan’s slaps, even the determined thud of the rain that finally let go all over Colombo, but most especially, it seemed to Latha, over this particularly sad home. There was a known quality to the evening, an inevitable end to anything vaguely connected to happiness. Maybe that was how it was with women, she thought, whatever their status; eventually their men would be found unworthy.

  Biso

  The children are hungry; they have not had any breakfast other than the slices of mango and sweets that they have shared with one another, haggling and bartering until I almost intervened. I yearn for a cup of ginger tea, sweet and strong, but for now I am glad that my children have something to occupy themselves with; it lets me disappear, leaving just the ever-watchful eyes and ears of a mother on guard. I sit quietly and retreat inside my head.

  I take out the images of the family still under the train and examine them, one by one. I go over the details of their white clothing, the condition of their feet, clean but for a dusting of dirt, their food. It must have been breakfast, this early. The children would have been happy to be given Portello for no good reason that they could see. It was because they were good at temple, he may have said. That’s where they must have spent the previous day, observing Sil, attending an all-night Pirith for an almsgiving, perhaps, that coincided with a Poya day, then staying for some other observance afterward. I imagine the moon bright and full of benign peace as it floated over the temple where they must have sat, close along the boundary walls with the other devotees. I remember our own visit to the temple, and so this temple becomes that temple. Their story, ours. But for the father in theirs, the absence of one in ours.

  My last visit to the temple, just two nights ago, was full of concern and fear, but our lives have turned out differently. Here I am, my children beside me. And there they were, that woman and her children, after all the peace of their devout meditations, the bliss of that meal together, and all for what? To be dragged and tied down, to be lying split apart, their insides out like forked eggs, to be so irreversibly over.

  What does my escape mean in the face of such endings?

  “Amma, I’m hungry, Amma, Amma.” Chooti Duwa taps my chest with the flat of her palm. She looks tired and dehydrated, and the word, badagini, sounds more appropriate than it ever has before; she looks as though her stomach is smoldering with hunger.

  “Me too. I’m also hungry.” Loku Duwa looks positively robust by comparison.

  “What can we eat?” my son asks.

  What indeed. I don’t recall any vendors on the train other than the man with the fruit and sweets.

  “Putha, could you ask that uncle who took me to see the…accident…if he knows how much longer we’ll have to wait?”

  “Where is he?”

  “He should be just around the corner, standing on those steps.” I gesture with my head. He goes, and comes back almost immediately.

  “He doesn’t know, but he says that he saw an ambulance come and go. Why would they need an ambulance?”

  “Somebody must have been sick on the train,” I say.

  He frowns a little and glances over at Loku Duwa. She frowns in response, but hers is more perplexity, less accusation. “Is it the driver? Is the driver dead?”

  “Nobody is dead! Don’t say things like that. It’s inauspicious!” I spit three times out the window to take away the curse of his statement.
“Nobody’s dead,” I say again, very firmly. My agitation has rubbed my body free from the heaviness that descended upon it the moment I sat down. I get up. I feel energetic and determined. “I will go and find something for you to eat,” I say.

  When I look back from halfway down the compartment, they are all staring after me, their faces curious and worried. I smile and send them an eyes-squeezed-shut-puckered-mouth embrace, and the girls giggle. Even my boy smiles a little. I used to do that when I dropped them at school. We used to call it the pinch-and-kiss kind of love; our name for it. What we women do to babies, gathering the soft folds of skin on plump cheeks and backsides and thighs and squeezing, just a little harder than we should, then kissing them; because really what they make us want most is to swallow them whole and keep them very, very safe. So, from afar, I convey that desire with my eyes and mouth, and their smiles reward me. I keep standing there for a few moments, enjoying the sight of that trust. I cannot put them back into my body, but they know I will keep them safe. I smile back at them, then turn away to go on with my search. Food. Where will I find food in this nearly empty train?

  In the third carriage away from the back of the train, I come upon a vendor, squatting by an empty seat, dozing over his wares. Strange how even in a carriage full of vacant seats, he chooses the floor, content with where he belongs. He is one of those men who grow old fast, then stay that way until they pass. He could be fifty-five; he could be seventy-five. The hair on his unshaven chin and on his head is a mix of black and gray. I can tell from the way his mouth caves in just a little that he doesn’t have all his teeth. His gray sarong is tucked carefully between his legs, and he wears tennis shoes with no socks. The stripes on his green, long-sleeved shirt are faded; he has wrapped a woolly length of brown cloth around his neck. I stand for a long time, staring at him, lost in the memory of my own father. A similar man but cleaner, distinguished in his own fashion, particularly when my mother was alive.