by Ru Freeman
And the houseboy, with his “Madam will be waiting,” and his “Mahaththaya will be worried,” and his “Don’t the babas have music lessons today?” had finally taken his toll, and even Latha had wondered what on earth she had been thinking. So they had caught a train back to the station in Colombo and ridden a scooter taxi home. When they reached the house, she had told the girls to keep the whole thing a secret, bribing them with chewing gum and spoonfuls of sugar, scolding herself again and again as their stomachs turned that night, holding them as they threw up bits of pineapple at the tail end of the rice and curry dinner she had forced them to eat. Then she had returned to the job she knew how to do: creating a refuge for her girls inside Thara’s home, just out of reach of either parent.
The only thing she had not been able to spare them from this time was the slamming of the front door and the sound of their mother sobbing. So she had made a glass of lime juice, told the houseboy to let the children eat as much sukiri as they wanted, and taken the drink to Thara. Then she had sat on the floor and massaged Thara’s feet while she wept at what life had dealt her, called Gehan every foul name she could think of, and waxed lyrical about how different things would have been with Ajith.
Latha had sat there listening, wondering for the umpteenth time what it was that Thara and Ajith saw in each other. Besides his looks, obviously he had a job that allowed him to pay for the expensive trinkets and perfumes he bought for Thara. But there had to be something else, she thought, because those things were available from any similar man. What made Ajith special? He had no particular sexual expertise that she, Latha, could attest to anyway, so it couldn’t be that, unless he had learned something besides banking in that cold part of America to which he had been banished by his parents. She concluded, again, that it had to be nothing more than the fact that Ajith reminded Thara of her resolute past, the way she had once ordered life to suit her, picking everything from flowers to her future husband with a quixotic sparkle in her eye. Perhaps Ajith made her feel that she was still the same girl who had once had her entire future planned, who had predicted her name in headlines at the age of thirteen. And perhaps what he loved was the part of her that had remained that girl, with that nerve and those plans.
And while she had sat there and wondered about Thara, and whether she had, in fact, reclaimed that girlish past with Ajith, Latha had begun to entertain the possibility that perhaps she could do the same. So when Thara had ended her monologue about Gehan and how reprehensible he was, and given Latha the key to the lock on the telephone and made the inevitable request that she call Ajith and tell him she needed to see him right away, Latha had dialed Daniel’s number instead.
She had arranged to meet with him, then returned to tell Thara that there was no answer from Ajith’s phone, which was really his parents’ phone. And though that had meant more wailing and massaging, she had felt better about it all, knowing that there was something good waiting for her even if only in the short term, though what that was she hadn’t been able to say, never having had a conversation with Daniel outside of the one in the lingerie section of the Palace of Fashion. She hoped that, whatever it was, it would be good, stilling the misgiving that had quickened her heart momentarily when Daniel answered the phone and had to be reminded who she was and where they had met.
“Who is this?” he had asked, sounding as though he was very busy.
“Latha, I am Latha. You met me in the Palace of Fashion—”
“Where?”
“The Palace…You gave me a card and told me to call anytime. You said girl ekak. A girl. I’m Latha—”
“Yes, of course!” he had said and laughed, his voice growing warm and louder, as if he had brought his mouth closer to the telephone, as if he had abandoned whatever it was he had been doing to make him so irritated when he answered the phone. He was a foreigner, after all, and it must be difficult for them to remember all the native people they met, she had reasoned, though she had imagined herself to be rather more memorable than the usual well-met woman. “Are you still there?” he’d asked.
“Yes. I am here.”
“Good, good. I can’t hear you very well,” he had said.
“Thank you,” she had whispered, not wanting Thara to hear. She couldn’t think of anything else to say now that she had done the work of calling him like he had asked her to. It was his turn to offer himself to her.
“No, thank you for calling me! I remember you. The girl with the long hair and the very pretty smile,” he had said. “I remember you. Latha. I’m glad you called.”
Finally, after too many rounds of telling her what she looked like, which she didn’t need to hear since she already had a pretty good idea, he had suggested they meet, and talked about when and where, which was far more useful.
And when Daniel had welcomed her into his home whenever she could go there as if she were, indeed, just another girl with a family and a respectable history to justify the lift of her chin and the straightness of her walk, she had been delighted. It was as easy for her as it was for Thara, she thought; they could both go back in time. And if her own version of that past was not quite true—she could not go back to Gehan—she could at least go back to her girlhood fantasies of the hardscrabble gains reserved for difficult women like herself. Women who were not ordinary but whose presence in the world was more affirming of its vitality, and also more entertaining, to her imaginary audience, than that of legions of virtuous bores in the form of women who never asked why and always chose the known over the unknown. Yes, she could go back. How easy then to pretend that, indeed, she was that girl. That girl with a real home and a real family and a real life, which she sometimes left behind to be with him because she could.
It was not hard to arrange those brief yet soul-sustaining meetings. Madhavi and Madhayanthi were both at the Girls’ Preparatory School now, which released Latha from her duties at least during the mornings and sometimes, on the days when they went to ballet or swimming, in the afternoons. Yes, she did think it was odd to squeeze their sweet bodies into tight, scratchy costumes and even tighter shoes, but so long as they did not complain when she had to get them ready, she was willing to keep her thoughts to herself. She did not have strong opinions about swimming, though, which, she felt, might someday save their lives should they ever have to go somewhere in a boat. Besides, both activities allowed her to vary her meetings with Daniel so that, at least by time of day or day of the week, she could imagine that spontaneity was possible in an otherwise routine arrangement: greet him with a smile, accept the offer of tea, use the bathroom to freshen up while he poured it, listen to him talk about life in America, which she liked, and sometimes about government officials and garment factories in her own country, which she didn’t, stand up to put the cup away and protest a little when he offered to do it for her, and then let him lead her to the bedroom.
The only thing that diminished these meetings was the fact that after their first time, when he asked her all those questions and listened patiently to the answers she had to repeat many times, with lots of nervous laughter due to the sparseness of her vocabulary and her pronunciation, he didn’t seem that interested in what she had to say unless she recited scraps of the poetry that Thara had taught her when they were both girls, and then he was thoroughly amused.
Still, he seemed content enough with her occasional visits and, she felt, the quick and unnecessarily tumultuous rolling around in his bedroom, which clearly constituted lovemaking in his book. In that way, he reminded her of Ajith; never really looking at her while he ransacked her clothing and body at top speed, as if he were about to be caught or merely easing an itch. She had never had the opportunity to consummate her feelings for Gehan, and their physical contact had been limited to the merest of touches, yet those had been more passionate and lasting than anything she had experienced with either of these two men who had familiarized themselves with her body.
She treated her visits as little respites from the diurnal grind, op
portunities to experience some sensual pleasure, for, despite the brevity, she did like the aftermath of the activities in which she engaged with Daniel, and a furthering of her own education about the world. And eventually his habit of comparing the colors of their skins (he especially liked to line up their forearms, white brown white brown, or sometimes their legs, white brown brown white) became irrelevant to her enjoyment of those other things, particularly the learning.
“Do you not want to go back to your country?” she asked him one day, sitting on the floor and looking through a book of photographs by someone called Ansel Adams, one out of a stack of photography books he had under the long, low table where they usually drank their tea. The pictures showed a large and empty land, unpopulated by the kinds of crowds that she battled every time she went shopping or marketing.
“That’s not my country,” he said.
She flipped to the back and slowly read the details in the short paragraph explaining the contents of the book, trying to find in the words she did not quite understand some clue as to why his assertion might be true. Then she looked up at him. He was sitting with his legs outstretched, his fingers clasped together over his chest. Like a corpse, she thought. She wondered whether Americans buried their dead or held funerals. She wanted to find out but didn’t want to jump around from topic to topic. He accused her of doing this sometimes, not unkindly but as if he observed her closely, which made it feel as though he was criticizing this mental twitch. “This book says this is America. On the back. Look.”
He took the book from her and flipped the pages with one hand, like a deck of cards, not even opening it fully. “This is Ansel Adams’s America,” he said, “not mine.” Then he laughed. He still laughed more than anybody she knew.
She shook her head. How many could there be? Maybe Americans owned parts of their country. She thought about the pictures in the book. It made sense. Such a big country and so few people; each person could have a large piece of it. But then he confused her again.
“My city, New York, is full of people. There’s people everywhere all day and all night long. And when I go out of the city, there are fewer people, but I can’t see them because they all live by themselves in big houses. Big,” he nodded. “Lots of bathrooms,” he laughed, “yeah, lots of those. And we are all very rich. That is why I’m here. I prefer to be in a place where people are not rich and where everything is connected”—he unclasped his fingers, spread his arms out, and then brought them back together again so his fingers laced into a fist—“like this. Tight.”
Latha sighed. She thought people were quite rich in her country, but perhaps he had some other yardstick. And she for one could do with a little less tightness. She could do with some freedom. Maybe he would find her country to be just as stifling soon enough. He had not been here very long after all, just a year and most of that spent moving in, settling down, getting familiar with whatever work he did. And she was the only gateway she could see him moving through to gain that understanding; everything else he did, he seemed to do with people from other countries, so how could he tell?
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “You look disappointed.”
“No, no, I’m not disappointed,” she said, gagging a little over that long word, and smiled to prove it.
“Why doesn’t your sister want you to go out at night?” he asked her, then, “Surely you are old enough to decide.” He did that every now and again, asked her some old question in different ways.
“No, no. Girls who are not married don’t go out at night in our country,” she said, wondering all over again if he was really as gullible as he seemed. “That’s why.”
He laughed out loud at that. “Well, that must just be a rule for respectable unmarried girls, my Latha-girl,” he said. “Because I have seen quite a few unmarried girls around way past midnight at the dance clubs.”
So, of course she wanted to know what a dance club was, but how could she ask? She imagined it was like the parties that Thara had gone to as a teenager, to meet Ajith, and it made her a little wary of hanging around a man who went to such places so often and with unrespectable girls. She wished, fleetingly, that she could stay the night, if not actually visit a dance club, at least place herself into that time of day in his mind. Not because she was jealous, she wasn’t; it simply irritated her that there were women—not girls, like he said—who could be where she couldn’t be. That even after all she had done to escape the gilded cage of Thara’s house, with its little birds and their sweet music, and even risen a bit above the ordinary with her foreigner, there was so much more territory to be conquered. But she couldn’t stay the night, so she let it go.
Well, some god must have felt sorry for her and wanted to give her a way to correct that imbalance in her experience, a way to feel that, despite her lack of familiarity with dance clubs, she could break another rule or two, because that was the same evening Gehan finally looked her full in the face again.
It happened because he and Thara were going out to a cocktail party, and since Thara had seen Ajith that morning, and was therefore in a generous mood, she wanted to wear a turquoise blue sari that matched Gehan’s tie.
“Latha! Go and get my turquoise shoes!” she yelled.
When Latha came into the bedroom, Thara was standing in her sari blouse and matching underskirt, tying the patiya for her pleats around her waist, and Gehan was already knotting his tie. Latha knelt on the floor and pulled out the first row of boxes. The shoes were not in any of them. She had to lie on the floor to reach farther and retrieve the next row. And in the third box from the right was the pair of turquoise shoes and, looped through the heels and straps, a coiled karawala. Thara must have been looking over her shoulder because she screamed, a high-pitched and bone-scratching sound that startled the snake and Latha. Gehan swore at Thara to stop screaming. The children came running, along with the houseboy. Somewhere Latha could hear a pounding on the front door. It must be the driver, she thought. All this in the split second it took for the krait to raise its head and seem to look right at her, its long black body tensing, the white rings seeming to rock back and forth in slow motion, and the instinct that made her slam the box shut and grip it at both ends and hold it steady despite the desperate movements inside.
She stood up with the box, and that was when she noticed that Gehan was looking at her as if time had moved backward and they were on their way to their respective schools again. He was looking at her as though she were somebody worthy of attention and respect. So she continued to stand there and enjoy the exquisite moment: the memory of the past, herself and Gehan within one pair of parentheses, with the warped and bittersweet present of Thara and the girls and the houseboy outside that space, and all of time suspended because in her hands she held a box that was alive with the writhing of one of the most poisonous snakes in the country. It was heavenly, and she was filled with gratitude that it had come, and that she had been the one to discover it.
Of course, it ended almost as soon as she could name the scene and her emotions. Gehan’s fingers dropped from his necktie to his sides, taking his glance with them, Thara declared it a bad omen and refused to go to the party, and the girls had to be sent to watch TV so Latha and the houseboy and the driver (she was right, it had been the driver hammering on the door) could dispose of the snake.
The driver got the fire started in the garden, almost at the edge of the back wall, the houseboy got the can of kerosene oil, and then the two of them tied the box with rope, round and round and round until they could be assured that the snake could not escape. Latha stood with it in her hands, following the slow movements of the snake, imagining it coiling and uncoiling itself inside the small space that had been its refuge, unaware of the preparations. Then the houseboy, talking nonstop in his slow, dim-witted manner, the words full of lisps and too much tongue, doused the box with kerosene and the oil poured over Latha’s hands and it took her days to get the stench off her skin, and even longer to erase the way it
felt, the snake, now disabused of its innocence, thrashing madly in the box when the kerosene touched its body. Finally she handed the box to the driver, who tossed it into the flames, because even though they told her she should do it, she could not. And when he did it, it was awful. The stench of flame and kerosene and burning leather. They watched, all three of them, and she wanted to believe that the movement she saw in the fire was the snake escaping, but she knew better. So she wiped her face and blew her nose and washed her hands and washed them and washed them and held on to one fact: that after all the years that had passed, eleven to be precise, she had touched Gehan’s heart again.
She should have been glad for Thara for what followed, but she wasn’t, because Gehan turned that moment into renewed attention to his wife and marriage, which meant that now Thara had both Ajith, whom she loved, and Gehan, whom she did not, and all Latha had was the houseboy, the children, and Daniel. And moreover, Gehan announced, after a few weeks of devoted attention to Thara, which she clearly found stifling but in which he persisted, that the family was going to take a vacation at Kandalama—a place that sounded so exotic Latha knew Thara would never be the same after going there—and that the trip did not include servants.
Latha knew she had not imagined the meaning of that moment when Gehan had acknowledged her, or the fact that he, too, had remembered that once they had hoped to be more than they had become to each other. The only way she could make sense of what he chose to do afterward, being so firmly and pointedly affectionate to Thara, planning this trip, running away, was by realizing fully that Gehan was only trying his best to be loyal to the woman he had married, and perhaps there was no other reason than that for the way in which he had conducted himself, aloof and far from her, all these years, and surely there was some redeeming grace in knowing that.
Still, it did not erase how she felt, abandoned yet again, and so, after they left, packed into the car like plantains with their fancy luggage in the way back and the grinning driver, who had driver accommodations lined up, she told the houseboy that she was going to visit relatives and, not trusting him with the stove, told him to eat nothing but bread, butter, and the eggs she had already boiled for him, packed a bag with a few things, and got ready to go.
