Disobedient Girl: A Novel

by Ru Freeman

  People always told me what a decent family we were, how my mother must have good blood, because she was quiet. She had the qualities that set her apart in our village: the pastel-colored osariya she put on every morning as soon as she rose, the pleats and fall neat, her unhurried walk, her soft voice, the way she knew how to be present and absent in the same moment. On the rare occasions when one of my father’s friends visited, my mother cooked simple but well-balanced meals, served them unobtrusively, and attended to their conversations, but never participated, not that I can recall. And yet, she made all the decisions. My father gave her his earnings to spend as she thought best; he asked her for money when he wanted it. Sometimes she would persuade him that he did not need what he said he did. And he would cajole and she would remain firm but there were no arguments. What my mother said was respected. I assumed that was what marriage was, providing and obedience on the part of the husband, good conduct and power on the part of the wife.

  Was that what my mother wanted from her life? I wonder now. She had not married within her caste, or among her people, but she had always seemed content, almost willfully so. She was gracious, and did what was right. Was that her choice or her upbringing or her circumstance? I had never asked her these questions, if her life was unfolding as she had imagined it would, if what was, was as her own mother may have imagined for her. I had simply assumed that all was as it should have been, with myself in the center of her life, my father’s life, I their sole delight, their sole hope. How easily I had stepped away from the path that my mother had walked. How swiftly I had turned from that model of duty to desire, from caring about others to caring for myself. Would she have approved?

  I wipe my eyes. I hadn’t thought about my mother’s quiet admonishments, her expectations of me, to be good, to do right, to live without shame, for a long time. I had taught myself to stand alone after she died, and continued to live that way after I was disabused of my childhood ideas of matrimony. And now, here she is on my mind, carried to me on the wings of my memory of my father. I realize that my journey up-country is a journey toward her, toward whatever grace she hailed from, a hope held tight to my chest that in these cold mountains there will be some refuge for me.

  A child brushes past me in the narrow corridor, and I remember why I am here. The vendor has some kind of bread-roll sandwiches in his basin and a small pile of hard issa vadai. A few flies have found their way under the plastic covering. I tap the basket to get rid of them, and he is startled awake.

  “Madam…,” he says.

  It’s the first time I have been addressed this way. Even the schoolteachers never called me that. They never called me anything but Mrs. Not even a real name after that. Just Mrs. I smile at him.

  “I was wondering if you were still selling these,” I say, pointing to his basket. Two flies have returned, and he shoos them away with exasperation and a click of his tongue, as if this were unheard of: flies on a train! On unsealed food, no less! I want to laugh, so I just tuck my upper lip in and wait. He looks up and sees my expression.

  “Yes, these flies. They get in everything, madam, no matter how hard I try! Even up-country. In Colombo you can expect such things, but here?” And he pulls down the corners of his mouth and looks disappointedly out the window. I follow his gaze. It is true. There is something about beautiful places like this where ordinary displeasures have no place. Or shouldn’t. Ordinary things, like flies, and hunger, certainly not murder; some perpetual serenity ought to attend.

  I nod in agreement. “Eka thamai…,” I say, and he smiles.

  “How many do you want, madam?” he asks, recalling me to the task. “These egg ones are twenty-five cents. They have green chilies. If you like I can give you plain ones with no chilies for twenty cents. I also have sambol ones; those are only ten cents.”

  “Three…four,” I say, feeling hungry now. Hungry and determinedly alive. “The egg ones.”

  He shakes his head sideways at me. “One rupee then, madam.” He wraps them in newspaper and gives them to me. I thank him and am already three steps away when he starts talking again.

  “It’s a terrible thing that happened, isn’t it?” he says behind me, and I stop and turn to face him. “Did you hear, madam? About the accident? Whole family.” He clucks his tongue, slack lips reaching down on either side. “Apparently the woman was having an affair with her husband’s brother. Their uncle. Can you imagine? When the husband confronted her, she poisoned him and the children. They say she tied them all to the train tracks. At the last minute, must have felt bad, she flung herself under the train!”

  And he spits in disgust. It is as if he is spitting at me.

  I feel it evaporate, that comparison I had made so recently between this man and my father, my honorable father, who loved his wife and cared for his daughter and did the best he could. “Did you see them?” I ask.

  “No, no, what to see? But I heard them talking. They said that’s what the conductor told them when they asked.”

  “I saw them,” I say, and my voice has recovered its former strength. “She was tied to the track along with the children. He had put poison in their drinks. He had taken their shoes off. He had tied his wife and children to the tracks. They were split open. It is he who did it. He killed them. She was just a young girl. They were little children.”

  He stares at me, confused by the anger that rises from my body, but he says something else, something unconnected to his lies. “Madam saw? Madam went to see the accident?”

  “A mother would never do such a thing to her children.”

  “They let you see the bodies?”

  His words have made me so angry that my hands are shaking. I put the parcel of buns back in his basket and I walk away. I don’t need his poisonous food. Better that my children starve than that they eat the food of a fool, an ignorant, stupid man who will believe the worst a person can say about a woman they don’t know.

  When I reach our compartment, the children look up at me, eyes expectant. I shrug my shoulders and feel a keen twinge in my heart at their crestfallen faces. Still, I won’t go back. Not even for my precious rupee. They leave me alone, the children, sensing my distress, and again I feel that prick inside me, for all the times they had to practice this art of becoming invisible because of my husband, because of me. I make an attempt to reach out to them, stroking their heads one by one, but they are unmoved. They glance back but turn just as swiftly to their own conversations, the sights outside the window, the hunger in their bellies reminding them to leave me behind and alone. I take a sip of the little thambili we have left and imagine what stories are being told of me in the village.

  Everybody knew, of course. I wasn’t the only woman there who had a lover, but I was the first who didn’t care what people said, who didn’t try to hide how I felt. I walked just as straight as I ever did, and I went to every public gathering that was held. To school, to meet the teachers, to market, to the well, to temple, and to observe Sil, to the Avurudhu festivals and to the weddings and funerals that took place during that year. I met Siri’s eyes in the presence of other people; I smiled at him. When my husband was at sea, we even stood together as though we were the real family. They didn’t like that, those women, but they admired me for doing it, even wanted to be friends with me, letting the power I so clearly felt creep into their bones too. The people who hated me for it were the men. No wonder they goaded my husband the way they did. They didn’t want me to contaminate their women, that’s what they said. Those men wanted lovers to remain sordid, affairs to be conducted underground, like their own with women at brothels and taverns and with the wives of their friends.

  They called me a slut in my hearing. They muttered vile epithets under their breath when I walked by. They even tried to keep their children from mine. But I was too full of the beauty of what I loved for the children to stay away; they were perpetually in my house. They came with their mothers. What could those men do but try to end it all? And still, it was I
who won. My round belly and lifted chin, the lack of any traces of sadness on my face even after all that blood and mayhem, and later the baby herself, so perfect, so innocent, so beautiful, these were my weapons. And while I wielded those weapons, I robbed them of their filthy words.

  I wonder what they call me now. The usual slurs, but what more? The conductor had done so much damage to that woman in a matter of minutes. What other despicable history have they constructed about me in these past two days? I try to imagine it, but I cannot conceive of my life as anything less than it has been.

  And here’s the vendor before me as if in answer to my dilemma. “Samawenna, madam,” he says, bending from his upper shoulders, his hunch accentuating the apology. “I’m an old man. I believe what people tell me.” He holds out the package of food to me. “Here, your children must be hungry. It’s close to eleven now.”

  He has left his basket unattended to look for me, and that touches my heart. The children look from his face to mine, waiting for permission. I nod.

  Latha

  For months after that fight, Thara did nothing but eat, Christmas and New Year and then the Sinhala New Year coming and going in a blur of food, food, and more food. She was constantly hungry. She ate mountains of string hoppers from the carryout joint on Jawatte, sending the driver out for three bundles all for herself. Every morning Latha had to boil eggs and make white curry and sambol for her strings. She ate fruits and Chicken in a Biskit from the boxes that had been bought for Madhavi as snacks and huge piles of rice and curries for lunch. In the evening the houseboy had to go and buy the vegetable rôti hot-hot from the saiwar kadé all the way near the cricket grounds so she could have them with tea. She demanded steamed bread every night for dinner, still warm from the bakery, and devoured at least half a loaf at each sitting. She did not serve Gehan, nor did she wait for him. She ate alone. And in that time, her voluptuous curves turned into matronly spreads.

  Latha, the guilt of those unpinned belly wraps still prickling her conscience, felt duty bound to stop Thara’s descent. Not only that, she had her own guilt to nurse. On the one hand, she felt vindicated by Thara’s defense of her, of Gehan having clearly lost the battle to evict her from their home. That served him right, she thought, because in all his dealings with her, he had not given her any indication, not once, that he remembered their past. It served him right, then, to know that Thara cared more about her than she did about his feelings or the visits of his mother. On the other hand, she felt it only right that she repay Thara with some tangible gift, something to replace the regard she had lost from her husband at least in part on her, Latha’s, account.

  But in the end, she had to postpone her intervention because not long after the New Year, an opposition political leader, a relative of the Vithanages, was murdered at a rally and even Thara was moved to action and went to protest and mourn and came back haggard and shocked after the funeral procession, in which she was participating, was teargassed by the police. That meant that Latha had to spend days listening to her, comforting her, and agreeing with her that the whole country was a disaster because of the corrupt president and finding creative ways not to agree with her that the reason for his corruption was his fisher caste. Mercifully, he was killed too, just a week later, because by that time Latha had no more excuses left and felt that soon she would have to say yes, yes, his caste was the reason for his deviant and morally repugnant behavior, and she didn’t want to do that. And although that second period of bedlam also had the effect of giving Thara reason to fret and fume, at the very least she seemed to gather in strength every time she could say, “Bloody low-caste bastard, he had it coming,” which she did quite regularly, particularly when Gehan was within earshot. And by the time things had died down and even Thara had stopped passing on all the ugly rumors and crude remarks about the dead man to her friends on the telephone and Gehan seemed no longer to care what she said about any caste at all, Latha was glad to be able to offer Thara something more uplifting than the timely death of her love-to-hate president.

  Latha had known how things would play out when she told Thara about her meeting with Ajith. Of course she would want to know everything, all the details, from that logo on his shirt pocket to the leather of his sandals, the still-the-same questions that would come tumbling out of her unloved body and heart. What Latha hadn’t anticipated were her own feelings: the strength of her motivation to help Thara, to effect her happiness. All she needed to see was the light unfurling inside her friend, from an ember so well hidden that it barely gave out any warmth at all until her mention of Ajith ignited it and warmed Thara from inside so she shone, from her eyes, from the suddenly girlish corners of her mouth, from the very tips of her fingers as they grabbed Latha’s hands and squeezed them with excitement. It made Latha feel young again, too, and important in that youthfulness, a sensation so different and so satiating and quite unlike the responsibility, and therefore importance, she had as the de facto manager of a household. Yes, there was no reason to resist the tug of Thara’s call for help. Who could be harmed?

  She gave Thara an ultimatum: two months to make up for the damage she had done to her own body and mind, and then she would do it: she would get Ajith back for her. And when the months had passed and Thara had adhered to Latha’s prescriptions for the entirety of it, all of it, including nothing but fruits and a single pol rôti and tea for breakfast, one cup of rice and only vegetable curries for lunch, and thambung hodi and plain bread without even Astra margarine for dinner, Latha did it. She strapped Madhayanthi into Madhavi’s old pram, took Madhavi by the hand, and—dressed in the new green midi-skirt she had asked Thara’s tailor’s assistant to stitch for her, and the recently donated hand-me-down black cotton blouse from Thara, and her new open-toed sandals with a heel on them—she went back to the Independence Square Park for a walk.

  Ajith was there, as he had been nearly every evening for the past year or so, and this time, unlike all those other evenings, Latha stopped in front of him without being asked. And he must have known that she finally had the news he’d been hoping for, because he stood up and there was a mixture of gladness and hope in his face that touched Latha, albeit fleetingly, and made her believe that even he could change.

  “She wants to see you” is what Latha told him, requesting discretion with a glance toward each of the children.

  “When? Where? I can come anywhere she wants,” he said.

  Latha unstrapped Madhayanthi and told Madhavi to take her sister to the rectangular ponds where the fountains were lit by colored lights. “Go and watch the water, my little pets,” she said, “but don’t lean over the sides. Madhavi Baba, look after your nangi, okay? I will watch from here. Hold her hand and go.”

  “Latha, come with us,” Madhavi said, tugging at her hand, her eyes wide and clear as she looked up at Latha, though not with much expectation. “Latha, you have to stay with us. We’re too small to go alone.”

  “I have to talk to this nice uncle, baba. Go, I will be right here,” she said, unclasping the fingers that held hers, one by one, and then giving the whole hand a last kiss of apology. “Don’t worry. I’ll be watching.”

  “He’s not a nice uncle, he’s a bad uncle,” Madhavi said, not looking at either of them; she took Madhayanthi’s hand and walked away.

  “Walk slowly, petiyo,” Latha called after Madhavi. “Nangi can’t walk that fast!”

  Ajith laughed. “What a precocious child! Just like Thara!”

  Of course he had it wrong. Madhavi was like her father; she objected to Ajith for reasons that were innocent in their clarity: he was preventing Latha from taking care of them. It was Madhayanthi who would be like Thara, that much was clear even now, when all she could say was “Amma,” “Thāththa,” “Latha,” “Kolla,” and, of course, “no,” “can’t,” and “won’t.”

  “Madhavi Baba is right,” Latha said, frowning at Ajith, “but her mother thinks differently, so that’s why I’m here talking to you. Thara Madam said s
he would meet you on Saturday at the Plaza in the coffee shop downstairs. She said nobody goes there anymore and Gehan and his friends will all be at the cricket match.”

  “What time?”

  “In the morning, at about ten thirty,” Latha said and, her work done, began to walk toward the children.

  “I am in your debt, Latha…,” he said, his voice following her.

  Latha shook her head. “You are indebted to her, not to me,” she said over her shoulder.

  “I just want to say—”

  “For what purpose, to say anything after all this time?” Latha said, turning around fully and facing him to deliver her reprimand and to preempt the easy apology she knew was on his tongue, waiting to deliver him from his guilt. No, it was better that it be stopped before it could be uttered; apologies like his only passed over the insult of the original injury. She walked on, frowning now. There was something more she had wanted to say, but it hovered just out of reach of her vocal cords.

  At the fountain, she watched the children for a while. She had dressed the girls especially well, matching their ribbons to their dresses, puffing up their cotton skirts. She took care with them every day, indeed, all day long; she wanted them to look the part of good children from a decent family, of course she did. But more than that, she wanted to teach them to care about how they looked, how they appeared to the world. She wanted them to learn the value of such things early, before they became corrupted by Thara’s haphazard way of dressing, her mood sending her out either dressed to the nines or thrown together like the half-breed Lansi girls, careless and unkempt. No, that would never do for her girls. They had to learn that mood had nothing to do with presentation and that presentation was the foundation of everything.