Disobedient Girl: A Novel

by Ru Freeman

  The police run toward the center of the train, to the shattered tracks and debris from the innards of the crushed compartments. Through the smoke I see them carry a few people out; they seem to be alive, still. I shade my eyes and try to focus on the activity, but nothing more is clear. Just that there are injured people, that the train is spewing smoke and now, suddenly, as if in a rage of its own, gusts of fire. The policemen step away from the train, blown back by the heat and intensity of the flames. The captain in the hat with all those badges shouts something, and two policemen run part of the way toward us, waving their arms and yelling. I can’t hear the words, but I join the crowd when everybody turns and continues their journey farther down the track and away from the front of the train, too, where we had gathered.

  Nobody seems to know what we should do, but eventually our steps become slower until we’re simply shifting from foot to foot, looking back at the train. I listen to the outraged hiss of water touching fire as the policemen pass buckets of water to one another down an oddly, given the circumstances, orderly line stretching from the blast site back along the train and over the hill to some unseen spring. I picture a hose such as I had seen along the tracks in some places, reaching down through time-thickened trunks of tall trees and low bushes to spill clear and icy mountain water onto flat slabs of rock where travelers perch to catch it, their skirts, saris, and sarongs clenched between their knees. I feel thirsty. Unbearably thirsty. I swallow spit, but it is thick and unsatisfactory.

  Around me, the crowd is settling. We look at one another and then away, eavesdrop on discussions, contribute a word or two, and slowly become united in the way people do at scenes such as this: bomb blasts, accidents, a hanging suicide in the village. We become a joint entity, a single family. There is a sort of solace in these measures we take; someone holds her baby for a moment to relieve the new mother when the father walks away for a brief absence and returns with a sheepish smile, which tells us all that somewhere in that sundried grass along the track is a patch of wet grass. Other men nod and smile at him, then drift away themselves. The older women exchange glances that communicate their feelings about relieving themselves in public, perhaps their wish that they could, too. I join them in the quick succor we gain from strangers, in our trust that when disaster strikes, we are all family. Someone brings out a packet of Marie biscuits and passes it around. Again, the older women decline, and the young people eat. My children are delighted, and, noticing their smiles, the man who helped me before gives his two biscuits to my girls.

  “Putha,” I say, “do you know what will happen now, son?”

  He shrugs. “No. I think the police will get our names down and then we’ll have to wait and see what they want us to do. The tracks are going to be blocked, so there won’t be any other trains coming this way for the rest of the day. By tomorrow morning, probably. Sometimes they use the same track to run the trains both ways, but I don’t know if they will do that this time, with the bomb—”

  “Then how will I…how will we get out of here?” I ask, panic setting in.

  “Don’t give it too much thought. They will tell us what to do,” he says, gesturing with his head at the police. But then he looks at each of my children, and he purses his mouth, contemplating my predicament; his lack of hope is palpable.

  I turn to the train. It looks like a stopped animal, a wounded one. If it could, I imagine that it would be screaming some discordant howl aimed down the tracks toward where we stand. I half-wish that I could make that sound on its behalf, this train that had been my hope. My fingers, fiddling with the back of my neck, brush against my earlobes, and the absence of my earrings reminds me of the pregnant girl. How simple that moment had been, in retrospect: a meeting, our conversations, the exchanging of confidences, a brief wait, an arrival, and then that parting. How gracious and perfect. I had thought it monstrous that a pregnant woman, just recently a child herself, had to be delivered to a nun, had to go, motherless and afraid, trusting in the grace of a half-woman. And yet I would exchange the rest of my journey to walk within the comfort of that woman’s care, my children and I, headed somewhere clean and quiet and peaceful. Hatton. Almost seven stations before this. How would we ever get there? Certainly not by train. I sigh. I reach into my blouse and look at the paper with the name and number on it, the only thing I have from the train. Pattipola, surely, is not that far off by road, barely a single station. Perhaps I can find the gentleman there. But where would I look for him? The number I have is for a home in Colombo, and he won’t be there for another two weeks. Family is better, surely. I look down the opposite side of the tracks, away from the train, pointing myself in the direction in which I should be going, toward my aunt’s house.

  A policeman comes over to us with a notebook and fountain pen. “I need to take down your names and addresses,” he says, and he sounds as though he is in control. Immediately everybody clusters around him and asks questions. Some of the men demand answers. “Back away!” he yells, finally. “One at a time. I can’t do this if all of you talk at once.”

  They all move away, and, as should be the order of things, the young mother comes first, followed by the oldest men and women. I count myself among that latter group though my hair is untouched by gray, and I am not yet thirty years of age. I ignore the sideways glances that judge me as an upstart, an opportunist, for clutching my three children to me as I step forward and claim the rare perks of age, for surely I have earned the additional years through the hardships I have endured. Those waiting their turn murmur to one another about the strikes and the political disquiet they have all experienced in their lives. As usual, the most bitter remarks are reserved for the government, which has neglected the railways.

  “Name?” the policeman asks brusquely when I get to the front.

  “Dissanayake Appuhamilage Biso Menike,” I say, “but I’m known as Biso.”

  “Is that your married name?”

  “No, rālahamy, that is my given name.” I hope the deferential title will save me from having to say more, but I am wrong.

  “What is your current name? That is what we need.” His impatience is like a slap.

  “Biso. The children’s father’s name was Samarakoon. Daya Samarakoon.”

  “Then your married name was Biso Menike Samarakoon. All right,” he says, shaking his head from side to side, accepting this answer and expressing his sympathy at the same time. Next to my name he writes, within brackets, “husband, Daya Samarakoon, deceased.” I am glad that even my son is too short to see what has been written. But I smile and give the rest of my responses with speed and accuracy: my children’s names, and then my aunt’s address as my own.

  Latha

  At first, Latha was amused by Daniel’s fascination with her stories of her family. She was an orphan who could not vouch for any reality that had ever contained a mother or a father; she had a sister she told him was at a convent she had visited only once and wouldn’t be able to find again on her own; she had another sister with whom she lived, but she would not say where. Besides these unusual declarations, she had other, more practical, limitations on what she could give him: she decided when she could see him, she would not accompany him to public places, and she could never stay the night. She chalked it up to his nationality that he could tolerate these restrictions. No local man would have; jealousy would have outed her lies, the questions would have been relentless. Daniel was truly fond of her, she thought. That, or Daniel felt no jealousy, which was not a possibility she truly wished to entertain, since it reflected not so much on him but on her own desirability.

  She sometimes wondered if she should tell him how her life beat a path bordered by the doings of the Vithanages and the Pereras, but he never inspired her to go that far. Far enough to risk losing this chance to be someone unfettered from her present circumstances. Furthermore, the more captivated he became with the mystery that she seemed to be, the less likely it was that she would ever tell him the truth. His lack of probin
g wasn’t a burden to Latha. He was a good host, a happy lover, and he made her forget that she was still a servant and, worse, that she was Gehan’s servant. And, it was particularly disarming to make herself comfortable in a house that had no servants at all.

  “They had a servant all lined up for me when I got here,” he had told her the first time she came, apologizing for the rather weak tea he brewed for her, and repeating everything many times, and slowly, so she could understand. “But that was very awkward for me, so I told them that I didn’t want her. Then they brought a man, but that was just as bad. So, finally, they let me be. Now I just have the driver, and he doesn’t stay here. I have the place all to myself.”

  He had spread his arms wide and turned around in a slow circle as if inviting the room to dispute his claim. Latha had said nothing, only crossed her legs the way she had seen Thara and her friends do, trying to feel comfortable in the brocade-covered, cushioned chair into which she had sunk, hoping that she looked appropriately delighted with his choice to fend for himself in the domestic arena. It had been hard to both concentrate on creating the right impression and stop wondering if he could tell that she looked out of place among his furnishings.

  But her fears had disappeared more quickly than she could have imagined. She grew to like the thick curtains that shut out the sun, and the array of soft-bulbed lamps that made the interior glow in a way that changed time so that sometimes she was surprised that it was one or two o’clock in the afternoon when she opened the doors to go back home, not late at night. It was magical and so unlike the naked sixty-watt bulb that swung from a single rope in the middle of her room; she resolved to get herself a lamp someday, something to re-create the particular lack of urgency of Daniel’s rooms. She enjoyed gazing at the huge black-and-white photographs of foreign places in the hallways. She liked to touch the cold stone of the sculptures he had sprinkled throughout his house, some mounted on steel posts, some leaning against bookshelves and, in some cases, books, which she forgave, though it meant that the books were clearly never read, and that seemed like a waste of money and space, because they were so beautiful.

  But among the things she learned to like, there was one thing about Daniel’s home that she loved: its colors. He had bright tapestries that hung from the ceiling to the floor in his bedroom and behind the settees in his living room. And his bed was a mattress with dark blue coverings centered over a brilliant orange carpet that looked like it was on fire when he turned the lamps on. She liked to lie there by herself, letting the color enter her body and light her up.

  On those days that she was allowed to be alone in that bed, which usually happened only when Daniel made phone calls abroad and typed on something called a computer, when she could gather those colors inside her, she left him and went home in great spirits. She would stop to buy chocolates for the children, including the houseboy, who came running to her and always reached her before her girls but who always stopped short and put his hands behind his back though she could tell that he, too, wanted to dig through her bag the way they did, looking for treats. Sometimes, she would hide an extra sweet for him, young as he was, just eight years old, just so she could watch his delight. She would feel virtuous and motherly, and that feeling would erase any doubts she had about conducting her secret life and lying to Thara, and keeping the truth from Daniel.

  The first time she dialed the number for Daniel had been after Thara and Gehan had fought about what to do over New Year. Thara had refused to go to his parents’ house for kiributh for the Sinhala and Tamil New Year. Why this should have caused the old wound to be opened afresh, Latha could not say. After all, they had not visited the previous years either. But perhaps, she had told herself, it was because so much time had passed since the original fight that Gehan thought Thara should forget about it. Which wasn’t like him, clearly, given the fact that he had gone from being her boy-who-was-more-than-a-friend to treating her as a servant over one, albeit egregious sin, and had never once, by look or word or deed, indicated that the future might contain even a fleeting reference to their romantic past.

  “My whole year will be ruined if I step into that house to begin it,” Thara had said at the dining table, and Latha had agreed with the houseboy, whom she had brought up to speed on the long list of disagreements between the Vithanages and the Pereras, that this was reasonable, given the history. They did this often, she and the houseboy; they conducted a parallel commentary to the conversations at the dining table or lack thereof. It helped them both, particularly Latha, to feel as though they were in control of things.

  “Then I will take my children and go without you,” Gehan had said, also quietly, which Latha knew to read as a sign of an impending fight. She had uttered a few prayers to an assortment of deities, both Buddhist and Catholic.

  Thara had tossed her hair and poured herself a glass of water from the glass decanter, then poured it back in. “No bloody way,” she had said. “I’m going to take the children and go to my parents’ house like we have always done. That’s where the New Year begins, particularly now that they don’t visit this place after all the insults they suffered—”

  “Okay, then if I have to go to your parents’ house, we will all go to mine afterward,” Gehan had said, cutting into the speech that Thara was always ready to deliver and was never allowed to finish.

  “Nobody invited you to come along. You might think you’re wanted because they are too decent to be rude to you when you go, but personally I don’t think my parents wanted to see you step into their house ever again after all that was said by that foolish bloody woman that you call a mother,” Thara had said.

  And, listening from the kitchen, Latha had struck her own forehead with the heel of her palm and pursed her mouth, knowing what was going to follow that remark. From the scraping of the chairs she had been able to tell that Thara had stood up and Gehan had followed suit. She had hurried to the dining room, where the conflagration was about to start, and hustled the girls away into the kitchen, where she had told them they could help her cook lunch—even though they had just finished breakfast—and followed this statement up by emptying a nebiliya full of coconut she had scraped for a sambol into the blender with a cup of water and pressing the button. By the time the girls had tired of watching the blender turn the gray water to a thick milky white, the slapping, scratching, and screaming had been over.

  Latha had developed a keen intuition about when, exactly, she should get her babies away from their fighting parents. She often imagined that it would be far better if she left Thara’s house with them. Once, she almost had. The idea had come to her one evening when she accompanied the girls and the houseboy, who, but for his dirty feet, was like an older brother to Madhavi and Madhayanthi, to Galle Face. They had eaten kadala and ice palams, and she had even paid for horse rides for all three of them, the driver looking on from the vehicle parked along the edge of the green. The ocean had seemed so serene to her, so soothing with its comings and goings, the long, expected tosses and turns it made over and over again; it had mesmerized her. For days after that, she had thought that if she could make it toward the South, where the ocean was surely even better, there would be a place for her, a home where the girls could be kept happy far away from their inattentive parents, each of them wound up in a cycle of bitterness and cries of unfair. She could get work in a hotel where the foreigners would find her charming just as the man in the store had, and she could take the girls for long walks at dawn where they would pick up beautiful shells and buy new fish from the fishermen who worked by night. Her girls could be happy.

  And so, one afternoon, just to take a closer look, she had taken the girls and the houseboy to the railway station and got on a train, telling them they were going to see a cleaner ocean, somewhere near Matara, which was the place that Thara had mentioned to her, the place she had said she wanted to visit again with Ajith. But they had got off long before then, somewhere not far out from Mount Lavinia, because the girls had wante
d to. When they got to the beach there, Latha had realized the absurdity of her plan.

  The ocean had been gray and choppy, though the beach was sandy. At first Latha had watched the children play together as they never did at home, the dancing salt water erasing the distinctions between them just as smoothly as it took away their footprints. The three children had lengthened out from the rounder, softer babies she had tended: two girls and a sun-soaked brother, darkened the way boys ought to be. She had liked the way they held each other’s hands as they went toward and fled from the little waves that came ashore where they stood, far from the crashing swells farther away. They had paddled in the water for an hour or so, picked up a few stray shells that had been overlooked by the collectors who had scoured the beach before the sun rose, and eaten some pineapple in big chunks. But then, as they grew bored, the girls had become irritable and clung to her skirts, and the houseboy had kept asking when they were going back home.

  “Latha, I’m hot, and I don’t like all the people staring at us,” Madhayanthi had said in her complaining voice. “I don’t like foreigners either.”

  “Latha, are we lost?” Madhavi had asked.