by Ru Freeman
“There’s Aiyya!” Loku Duwa shouts, and we have to abandon the discussion.
I watch my son scramble, then slide down the hill toward us. He’s smiling. “I found the road, Amma,” he says. “It’s not far from here.”
“Stay there,” I tell him and pick up both bags, hold them for a moment, and then put them down. Of course, I cannot climb the hill with the bags.
“Amma ohoma inna,” he yells to me, and we both smile. “Stay there. I’ll come down and help you with the bags.”
It takes us a long time to climb out of the shallow valley, through which the train tracks meander, to the crest of the hill. First I hoist the little one up so Loku Putha can help her establish her footing.
Then I do the same with Loku Duwa, which requires more effort. Then I throw my handbag up, and the children pass it along to Chooti Duwa, now farthest ahead. Next I heave the heavier bag over to my son, who hugs it, panting, proud of his superior agility. Somehow he seems to be able to manage to climb and haul that bag. For my part, I am forced to hitch my sari up and tie it around me at knee length like a man’s sarong so I won’t trip. Even then I fail. I take off my slippers and throw them, one at a time, toward the top of the hill, hoping that they will land somewhere in our path. Halfway up I lose the bag I am carrying, and it rolls back toward the tracks.
“You go, Amma. I will climb back down and get it,” Loku Putha says.
“We should just leave the bag there,” I say in exasperation. “All that’s in it are drink bottles and other things we can manage without.” But he doesn’t listen. By the time I reach the top, where the girls are waiting, he is already halfway down the slope. We are all out of breath, me especially. Still, I shade my eyes with my palm and look around. From this vantage, I can see the road winding through the hills below. I see one of the half buses that serve these parts and a lorry, both traveling away from us. They look like toy vehicles. Far below in the distance, I see a red car coming toward us.
Latha
Latha had never gone anywhere in a car with Daniel, so it seemed all the more egregious that the first time she did so, and in such a clean and nice-smelling car painted in such a bright color, it was in such somber silence.
No, he had never taken her anywhere in his fancy red car. Not even that time not so long ago when she stayed the night. Despite how happy he had said he was that she was able to stay, when she finally arrived, the weekend had not been that different from any other time when she had visited. She had been given tea with which he had served the packet of Lemon Puff biscuits she had brought with her, she had looked at books and photographs, she had eaten unfamiliar food, and she had slept with him. On Saturday night she had drunk sweet and heady drinks that had made her feel dizzy, and yes, that had been a departure from the norm. And it had been fun when Daniel played music and made her dance around the living room, even though she hadn’t known what he expected her to do, and after a few minutes of holding on to her hands and tugging her this way and that he had eventually given up and sat down. He hadn’t been upset, she didn’t think, he had just smiled and patted the seat beside him; and for dinner he had served food that had been delivered from outside.
“This is Thai food, Latha-girl,” he had said, opening round plastic containers with transparent lids and rectangular boxes made of rigiform and packed with flavored rice with peas and carrots and bits of onion and flaked chili and fat, slobbery noodles unlike the Harischandra kind that she cooked at home.
“Thai food,” she had repeated, doing what she usually did when she felt something was required of her, verbally, but she wasn’t sure what.
“Thai food is from Thailand,” Daniel had said, then paused in his serving to point out the two statues he had of the Buddha. “Those are from Thailand, from when I lived there,” he had said and sighed. “I liked Thailand a lot,” he said, after a long silence that made her think that he would rather be there than here.
She had gazed at those heads again this morning before they left, Daniel opening and closing the door to the house behind her, then opening and closing the door of the car for her. The heads were so different from the Buddha statues in her country. These had crowns, and the tops were almost as high as the heads themselves, with concentric circles that grew smaller and smaller until they tapered off in sharp points. Like the cups of Angelina bras. They had given her no solace.
Yes, that night had been different, she thought now, the drinking, the music, the food. But the highlight, the one thing for which she had been truly grateful, was the experience of going to sleep in that colorful bed, cozy under the blankets and safe from the icy, air-conditioned outside, and then waking up with somebody next to her. And for once she had not minded that Daniel was foreign, odd, unknowable, and not Gehan. He was a man, and there was his arm, flung around her body the same way it had been flung in his sleep the night before. She had lain in the meditative quiet of the early morning—having woken at five the way she did at Thara’s, an hour earlier than anyone else there, even the houseboy—with a deep sense of pleasure. She had lain there trying to imagine what it would be like to do that every day. To go to sleep with a man and wake up with him. What it would be like to care so little about this moment that she could simply slide away from such an embrace and go to the kitchen and make herself tea, open a window, sit by herself, not wait, as she had done, barely breathing, enjoying every second of that one morning. What would it be like to curse and scream at a man as Thara did so regularly, and still have him come home every night to climb into the same bed?
“Are you okay?” Daniel asked now, next to her, making the humidity and buzz of the city jar against that remembered moment.
She nodded and fiddled with the edge of her blouse.
“It’s the best thing,” he said. He glanced at her and patted her thigh, then returned his hands to the steering wheel.
Yes, it was the best thing. He had said that several times. He had said it for two whole weeks, until she had agreed. She had agreed because she had seen, finally, that it was the best thing for him, and if that was the case, then there was no option for her but to agree. Agree, not only to his persuasions to rid her body of a second indictment of her character, but also to rid herself of this man, who, she now realized, had been exactly as she had once imagined him to be: like Ajith, just lighter-skinned.
Outside, the city passed by slowly. Daniel was not accustomed to driving his own car and was clearly unhappy about having to do it at all, but alerting the driver to their predicament was out of the question, he had said. He cursed intermittently under his breath, and even though she could see the sources of his irritations—the scooter taxis that veered without warning inches from his elbow; the erratic pedestrians who darted past the hood of the car like the colored fish among the artificial fronds of the fish tank he had installed recently in the dining room; the buses that huffed and snorted their way to the front by sheer dint of overpowering fumes; the wall upon wall of posters protesting this, condemning that, advocating something else over the occasional photographs that still remained of the fallen trade towers by the Colombo harbor that had been blown apart by suicide bombers in February of that year; the way all of it must have reminded him of the chaos that was her country—despite all that, she could not shake the feeling that some of the curses were directed at her. The absence of concern for her sensibilities indicated the presence of antipathy. Simple as that.
Part of her wished that she had never told Daniel she was pregnant; part of her knew there had been no option but to do so. Who else could she have told? How else would she have had a chance to be a mother, a real mother, with a real child, no matter its color? But after a great deal of quiet between tea drinking and hand-holding and little else, he had finally said it.
“I think we should arrange for you to have an abortion.”
Abortion. This was a new word in her vocabulary. It sounded so disconnected from the physical process of being pregnant, carrying a child. He had to show
her what he meant with his hands, an ugly gesture that looked like he was washing her vagina for her and throwing away the water. He even had a sound, a sibilant hiss, to go with it. In her language, the process was referred to as nathikireema, an end to being. How much closer that was to the truth of it all: an end to being.
“It’s not so bad,” he had said. “It’s very quick. You’ll be in and out within a few hours. I’ll take you myself.” She had forced herself to feel better that he hadn’t snapped his fingers.
Odd how a man who knew so little about her country, who had treated her like she was an ordinary girl and believed all her little lies and the big ones too, who had seemed so charmed by her and so happy with himself, would know where to go to rip babies out of the bodies of pregnant women. Maybe that was how he remained so happy. He knew how to do away with complications. He lived easily in the web that was her country, moving around it like a spider. No wonder he liked it here. She wished she knew who caught the spiders. Which made her think of God. God, who seemed so real to virtuous people like Leelakka and gave her that look of serenity, that peace which made her voice so soft, her needs so few. No gods for her, Latha thought, for women like her who wanted things from people, from men like Daniel or Ajith or even Gehan.
“We’ll be there soon,” Daniel said.
Again, she nodded. They had left the Galle Road, with its hubbub and horns, and turned down a residential lane. She didn’t recognize the roads, only the feeling of the spaces: it was Colombo 7. Somewhere close to Thara’s home and also the Vithanages’, surely. She cringed low in her seat. That would be the end of it all, to see Mr. Vithanage now. This would be more than even he could forgive, she was sure of it.
“You don’t have to hide. This is a private appointment,” Daniel said, smiling at her good-naturedly. “Nobody else will be there.”
What was it about men that made them believe they knew what women thought? She had never paid much attention to Daniel, content as he had been with her occasional visits. She had not been attentive to his character, or his misunderstanding of her, except in the last month, when she had needed to gauge the extent of his fondness for her, to evaluate how much his good humor was tied to her arrivals and departures. And he had fared poorly under her scrutiny.
“Is it a doctor?” she asked, finally.
“Absolutely! He’s a specialist in doing this, in doing abortions, and he’s expecting us. I’ve already paid for everything. You don’t have to worry about a thing. You caught it so early that it’s just a womb wash, really. Not a big fuss. That’s what the doc said.”
She didn’t even try to look grateful. It wasn’t his fault, really. He could hardly get married to her. But with all the money a foreigner like him must have and the private life he told her he led, surely he could have found a way for her to keep the child. If not with him, then somewhere else? Somewhere she could stay and still remain involved in the lives of her girls, so she could escape being banished as she had been before, for Thara surely would banish her if she knew. And a second child! How could she stand to lose another one? She felt panic rising in her body, and she turned to Daniel and clutched at his sleeve. He swerved the car to the side of the road, scraping the underside against the pavement, and reached past her to open the door. She hung her head out, but all that came out of her was a thin stream of transparent bile. And when she turned back in, there was a quick flash of disgust in his blue eyes before he handed her some tissues from the box between them. It was a look that matched the voice when he had said, “What’s the matter? Oh, Jesus. Are you going to be sick?” before he stopped the car.
“Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus…,” she said aloud, after she had wiped her mouth and thrown the crumpled tissue on the floor in flagrant disregard of courtesy.
He laughed. “That’s the Hail Mary! I thought you were Buddhist!”
“I am Buddhist,” she said. But sometimes Jesus seemed more accessible to her. To yell at the traffic with, like Daniel did. Or to invoke with words overlaid by implication with a sort of curse in moments such as this: to speak of wombs and fruit and death as the father of her child drove her to wash it out of her body. Womb wash. Wasn’t that what he had said? As though she were a vehicle or a vegetable, a pathola perhaps, some sort of watery gourd that had been muddied in the rain. There was nothing clean about what they were going to do to her. She could tell that much from how quickly he had arranged it all. If anything was being washed, it was his hands.
He turned down a gravel path that led to a house hidden behind a wall. The black, wrought-iron gates swung open as if he had uttered some magic words. And again, Daniel grinned at her. “See? I told you they were expecting us.”
How important he must be in his world to make arrangements such as these with local doctors. She prayed that the doctor was a woman; then she remembered that Daniel had said he. Of course. What woman would build a house like this, with gateposts topped by ugly concrete animals and bright electric lanterns, with money earned through such butchery?
Daniel parked the car and came around to help her out. She didn’t need any help walking; it made her feel managed to have him hover there, although she might as well not have made such a point of walking forward by herself for, after that first moment, Daniel seemed to have no problem maintaining a particularly meaningful distance between them.
“Doctor Sir will see you in a moment,” a servant man said to Daniel after they had been served tall glasses of passion fruit juice—freshly squeezed, she could tell from the quality of the pulp—on the cool veranda.
There were large palms and thick-leaved begonias around the front that shaded them from the neat gardens beyond. The plants had been recently watered, so that even the slightest breeze that blew through them was refreshingly cool. She shivered suddenly, a living-walking-over-her-grave shudder. Maybe it was just the cold drink. Or what was about to happen to her. She looked at Daniel without seeming to. He sat with his legs crossed, the picture of decency in his khaki longs and maroon cotton shirt, a leather belt. She wondered absently about the ironing. Who ironed those shirts, and how often were they delivered to him? She had visited him a dozen times maybe during the past year and a half, and she had never opened a cupboard. Odd that she had never thought to explore, or even to ask. Looking back, she realized that she had asked so few questions. There was so much more she had hoped to know, things she would need for the life she imagined for herself. But time had stretched out interminably then, the future holding many other hours like those few she had spent in his company.
Daniel looked up at her and smiled. It was more like a grimace. “It’s quite hot here, isn’t it? Even though we’re in the shade.” He gripped the edges of his cane chair and pushed himself up, swiveled his head around, and peered through the foliage. “Must be that high wall. It blocks the air.” He eased himself back down and tugged at the top of his shirt, trying to cool himself.
Latha didn’t feel hot. She felt cold. “Use a magazine to fan,” she said.
“Yes, right,” he said and looked about for one.
“The newspaper can be used also,” she said, eyeing the daily paper beside her with its big red title and slogan. Like it was painted with a thick brush. She was still getting her tongue around the word circulation when the doctor came rushing in, preceded by the sound of quick yet authoritative footsteps. He walked straight over to Daniel, who had stood up, and took his hand in both of his, as if he needed to be comforted or reassured or something. He didn’t look at Latha, though she had stood up, and after a few moments she sat back down.
“Good morning, Daniel, good morning. Sorry, I was a bit tied up. After a long time, isn’t that so? Last time was where? That Super Bowl party at The Blue? How are you?”
“Fine, fine, Sarath, you know, the usual work. I was up in Kandy for a couple of weeks, and then I had to go down South.”
“South is a bit troublesome these days, no? Better avoid it if you can, too many educated riffraff thinki
ng they know what’s what,” he said and laughed like this was a huge joke, and it must have been because Daniel joined in.
“Yes, I know what you mean…but…work’s work. I have to go where they tell me to go…”
“I say, don’t listen to those government buggers telling you to go here and there, Danny boy. You should watch your own back. Tell them you got local information that the South is dangerous!” Still holding one of Daniel’s hands in his own, the doctor thumped Daniel on the back like he himself was the Local Information and repeated himself. “The South is dangerous!”
“You crack me up,” Daniel said, and they laughed again.
Crack. Me. Up. Crackmeup. It wasn’t hard enough of a thumping to break him, surely, but maybe he was feeling breakable too, though he wasn’t showing it. That thought didn’t last very long, as the two men continued to talk about various things to do with the government and the South that they both seemed to find hilarious. Neither acknowledged her until finally they both, in a moment of agreement whose coming she hadn’t been able to gauge, looked over at her, both men still smiling, neither seeing her. It was as if they were frozen, hand in hand, like lovers united against an unpleasant confrontation they were trying to postpone.
“This is…this is Latha,” Daniel said, finally. “Latha, this is the doctor I told you about.” And he gestured from one to the other. It was a proper introduction, and she tried to be gracious about it by nodding. She even attempted to smile.
“Oh, your woman speaks English!” the doctor said, glancing with approval at Daniel. “Good. Hondha mahaththayek ehenang, ingreesi ugannalath dheela nedha?”
She disagreed with his pronouncement by staring straight at him. Daniel had not taught her English, and even if he had, that did not make him a good master. To begin with, he was not her master. She didn’t work for him.
