Disobedient Girl: A Novel

by Ru Freeman

  “What, Latha? What?” Madhavi asked, concerned. She stood up and put her palms on either side of Latha’s face. Madhayanthi dropped the sandal in her hand and rushed to join her sister and clutch at Latha, looking over her shoulder to see what terrible thing might have lurked behind her.

  “Nothing, petiyo, nothing,” she said, holding the girls close to her body, grateful for their soft solidity. “Nothing at all. I thought…I saw…a cockroach…”

  Of course, that was enough. The girls screamed and leaped onto her bed, fearful yet laughing, and Gehan came stalking in, uninvited, to see what was going on.

  “What’s the matter? What is happening here, Latha?” he asked. He asked the question, but his eyes were glancing around the room, taking it in: the pile of sandals along the wall, where Madhayanthi had made her usual mess, the simple table where Latha had a kerosene kuppi lamp, which she liked to light at night. She liked the way it made her room seem mysterious and refugelike, that wavering lamplight, as if hideous crimes were being perpetrated outside, as if she was lying low in a safe house. She liked to read by it, glancing over whatever came her way, usually the children’s textbooks and the ones they borrowed from their friends, comic books like Tintin, and Amar Chitra Katha, and others by Enid Blyton, books with words that she didn’t fully understand but that she enjoyed sounding out, sometimes with help from Madhavi, words like Mar-ple, dis-trust-ing, bar-na-cle, sus-pi-cious, and so on. In fact, there was one open to a page right now: Astérix and Cleopatra. Latha was glad it was there even though she had never read it. Madhavi had borrowed it and had been reading it earlier in the afternoon. Still, it showed that she was no ordinary servant woman, and he should be reminded of that.

  She crossed her arms and waited as his eyes rested on the book, then continued their journey, across her walls, hung not with pictures of useless film stars but with watercolor paintings of the hill country that she had saved from a fancy calendar Thara had got from a director of the Tourist Board one Christmas, and that she had paid to have framed behind thin glass, in Wellawatte, passing up new sandals in favor of this preference; her neatly made bed, the corners creased at each visible edge, the woven mat beside it; the Buddha statue and the tray before it, brushed clean and waiting for the evening’s flowers, the incense ready, no dust in sight. Even the open windows were dressed with a bit of bargain lace. She was glad that she had replaced the old mosquito coils with a repaired net over her bed, one of the family ones that Thara had thrown out. Latha had always disliked the reedy, acidic smell of the coil smoke, the way it clogged up her throat and got into her clothes, and at night when she went to sleep, the net draping to the ground from above her head made her feel hot but grand. She hoped he could see that, too, how grand she felt in her own room.

  Gehan’s eyes returned to the cause of his intrusion: his daughters. They lingered on the three faces, the younger ones frozen midgiggle, waiting to be chastised, their hands on Latha’s shoulders, balancing, and the older face gazing with such pride and composure at his own.

  “Don’t make so much noise…I’m trying to get some work done. Latha…get the children to take a nap; they should rest after all the troubles of this afternoon.”

  “Take a nap?” Madhayanthi snorted, after her father was safely out of earshot. “We haven’t taken a nap for five years now!”

  “He’s right, you should rest for a little bit,” Latha said, feeling tired now the way she did whenever she had to interact with Gehan, all the unsaid words and unmet needs rising up all over again. “I’ll come and wait with you till you fall asleep.”

  “Can we sleep here?” Madhavi asked.

  “No, you have to sleep in your own room.”

  “But yours is more comfortable,” Madhayanthi whined, flopping down on the neat bed and burrowing into the pillow. “It smells better.”

  “Your pillows would smell better too if you washed more often,” Madhavi said and ran out of the room before Madhayanthi could respond, barely missing the pillow that she threw. “You can’t get me!” she yelled.

  And they were gone, leaving behind that same odd absence again that Latha knew they would leave permanently someday, now that she had thought about it, had let it enter her consciousness. She neatened up her room, straightening the sandals on their shelf, pulling the sheets tight on her bed. Perhaps she should write to Leela again, she thought. Maybe she would reply this time.

  She did write to Leela, but not right away. She wrote because Gehan whipped the houseboy. And the reason that moved her so greatly was that she had taken the girls to Galle Face that evening and thought she had lost them forever. One minute they had been standing beside her, the next they were gone. She had torn around the green looking for them, her insides churning with fear, with grief, but they hadn’t been lost, they had been standing close by, watching a magician performing tricks on a raised stage. She had grabbed their hands and scolded them and then pressed them to her body, dwelling within loss and keeping until her whole being seemed ready to explode.

  And right in the wake of that, the whole matter with the houseboy. It wasn’t his fault, really. How could he—who was not sent to school as she had been in the Vithanages’ house, Thara announcing that he was too stupid to benefit from school and saying screw the government, which couldn’t make her send him—how could this boy know the things that children find out only from one another? About how to fly a kite, for instance, or play marbles, like the other boys did. But most of all, how would he know how to watch his step around girls, particularly those who could not, would never belong to him?

  Madhavi came of age. It happened in Latha’s room, and without the hysteria that had accompanied her mother’s advent into puberty.

  “Latha, I’ve got my period,” she said, and Latha felt a stab of pain in her side, so she laughed and clapped and rubbed their foreheads and noses together and planted breathed-in kisses on Madhavi’s cheeks and pretended to be thrilled.

  Madhavi agreed to observe her first period in the traditional way but insisted that her solitary time should be spent in Latha’s room while she was confined to the house. The houseboy, invisible to everybody except when something went wrong, was doing his usual chores, which included sweeping the house and cleaning the family bathroom and kitchen, and, on his way out of the kitchen that Saturday, day three of Madhavi’s confinement, he saw her through the bars on the window in Latha’s room. It was a window that she usually left closed since it offered no vista other than the corridor, but since Madhavi had taken up residence there, she had forced it open, mostly to entertain herself by booing at and scaring her sister when she came by to see her.

  And so, in order to banish whatever ill had been ensured for Madhavi’s future because she had been seen by a boy while observing her period of seclusion, the houseboy was whipped by Gehan. His screams were terrible; Latha knew the lashes that fell upon the boy, free to run but too scared to do so, came from some deep, vengeful place in Gehan’s heart, some anger at somebody else, something—at his daughter for growing up, at his wife for her caste, at Latha for setting up a room truly her own, at the way the women in the house twined together, at the way they had space in their world for the houseboy but not for him.

  “Stop it!” she screamed at Gehan. “Deiyyané mahaththaya, please stop it!”

  And she could not be sure whether it was accidental or whether he meant it, for the belt, looping above his head like an airborne reptile, came down on her body. Once, yes, but it was enough. It stopped both her and Gehan, the rage draining from his face, she struck dumb. She turned away and gathered the houseboy to her, where he fell, broken and sobbing, murmuring “Amma, Amma, Amma,” even though he was an orphan, an orphan who had been brought to them by somebody on some estate somewhere, another anonymous donation to the Vithanage-Perera families, like she had been. A child when he came, a child now, and from that time, her child.

  So she went back to explain to Madhavi that she should return to her room, but she didn’t
have to. Madhavi had been removed forcibly by her parents and sent, crying, to her own room, where she waited, Latha knew, for her to come and make things better again. Instead, Latha helped the houseboy in and laid him down on her bed, which he filled with his body grown gangly over the thirteen years of his life, and she cleaned the stripes, some smaller, some like bands around his back and legs. She cleaned them with Dettol, hushing him when he winced. She got Cicatrin powder and covered the soft oozes with it. There were no bandages in the house, so she tore up the rest of the white little girl dress and wrapped those strips around the wounds. And since he was lying on her bed and she liked it to be clean, she washed his dirt-caked feet, bringing basin after basin of water into the room and scrubbing them till they were as spotless, though not as soft, as hers. Then she went to the kitchen to make koththamalli.

  Something in the aroma of the coriander seeds, popping and dancing over the high heat, and the sweetness added on by the ginger she threw into the water, cleared her head. It was like the whole house was being fumigated of old ideas, old hopes. It was such a strong sensation that she grabbed a tea cloth and held her own head over the steam, inhaling and inhaling the sharp scents, as if her whole body could be cleansed by the strength of this one simmering pot. Of everything that was leaving her, the hardest to let go was her bond with Thara, the sense she had that they were united in some way, tied together even though she had glimpsed it only in flashes in the years after her return from the convent. So she forced herself to stay under the cloth, the heat burning her nostrils until she could be rid of that last illusion, and though she couldn’t be sure that it had left her entirely, when she pulled her head back out, the pores of her face open, perspiration beading on her upper lip, her brow, she felt renewed.

  When the brew was ready, boiled down to a single cup, she strained it into a glass, put a spoonful of sugar into it, and took it to the boy along with a dissolved Disprin in an old cup. She watched him drink it and then told him to lie down and go to sleep. Then she got dressed, put on her best shoes, and went out to buy him a pair of DSI sandals for his own. On her way out she threw his old rubber slippers, held together between the toes by a rusted safety pin, in the kitchen dustbin.

  “Podian will be sleeping on the floor in my room until he gets better,” she told Thara later that night. “Whatever happens, someone needs to look after him after all.”

  Thara pursed her mouth and looked away. How thick her neck had become, like her mother’s, except with much less poise. Latha felt pity for her, for the way her transgressions kept her away from her children, for the lack of courage to stand up to a man who beat her or to go to the man she loved, for not remembering their friendship enough to at least go and look at Podian’s wounds. Latha felt sorry that what kindness Thara had to offer had been used up over her, with those few days of care. It made Thara seem barren, that lack in her psyche, which had only a finite amount of goodwill to bring to the world.

  Which is why Latha wrote to Leela. To tell her about Podian, who had no family and who had been ordered about all his life, certainly ever since Latha met him. She wrote about what it felt like when she moved into the new house, Gehan bringing his servants, first one houseboy, then this second one, Thara bringing hers. We were like the dowry, I suppose, she wrote, except we couldn’t be put in the bank or marked off with barbed wire or pawned. She smiled as she wrote that, anticipating a smile when Leela heard those words read out to her by someone at the convent, even though it wasn’t funny. It was the truth. Now we are three, she wrote: Leelakka, Latha Nangi, and Podian.

  But after she had sealed the letter and walked down to the sub–post office run out of a house behind the New Eros Theater, which showed only Tamil films that Podian longed to see and had never been allowed to, she walked home musing over those words. They were three, but they were really five. Somewhere in the country were two children, hers and Leela’s, two daughters without the benefit of her resourcefulness or Leela’s kindness. In a few years, wherever she was, her daughter would be as old as Latha had been when she had given birth to her, alone except for the waiting nuns. Her daughter would be fourteen years old now, only a little older than Madhavi, the daughter she had been given to love. So Latha went to the temple on the way home, in the middle of the hot day, and poured oil into five lamps, one for each of them. She lit incense and waved them over the lamps until the smoke from the fire and that from the incense mingled and floated above her head. And though she was not given to asking for things, or praying for them, that day she did. She hoped that something in all their characters would see them through life, together or apart. She hoped that their daughters were part of their own families, not serving those to which they would never belong. Then she stood there for a long time, trying to put her finger on why she always felt a sense of foreboding when she stood before a real shrine in a temple, why the way the air moved around her head, the stillness, and the sensation of inevitability disturbed her. So she brought her palms together again and stayed that way, reciting every fragment she knew: precepts, prayers, sutras, and even, at the very end, tagged on like a small decoration, the Our Father and the Hail Mary she had been taught at the convent.

  And after all that she went home to tend to Madhavi, to tell her stories about how things were when she was a little girl, growing up with her mother at the Vithanages’, about how Thara came of age and how she bathed her.

  “I can’t imagine it,” Madhavi said. “I can’t picture you bathing Amma, Latha.”

  “I did. She wouldn’t have anybody else come near her.”

  “Can you bathe me too?”

  Latha gazed at the child before her. Madhavi was sweeter than any child she had met. She had grown from being a serious-faced little girl with strangely adult cares and worries into a serene-eyed eleven-year-old. Everything about her was simple, which only accentuated how truly lovely she was. Latha felt she had played a role in that transformation, in drawing out and discarding the fears and nurturing the inner calm that Madhavi now possessed. She would have liked to bathe this girl, the one who was closest to her heart, but she knew better. “I don’t think so, petiyo,” she said. “I think Amma has made plans for you. Or if not her, then your grandmother would have.”

  She was right and wrong. Thara had made plans, and Mrs. Vithanage had endorsed them, but Madhavi suddenly proved to be just as obdurate as her mother had been, and no amount of cajoling or threats could convince her that anybody but Latha should bathe her.

  And so Latha did. She woke up early, boiled the water, carried it in, prepared the herbs and flowers, and washed the child. This time Latha’s admiration was wrapped in her recognition of her innocence, and that misted her eyes and made her get soap in Madhavi’s so that she ran around the bathroom hopping her reed-thin body up and down on both feet and turning around in circles shouting, “Ahh! Ahh! Wash it out! Latha, wash it out! Auw auw auw!” and that made Latha laugh. So it was a happy morning, a happy girl stepping out toward her mother and grandmother, who waited, one with a coconut and the other with a carved knife, safe in the knowledge that she, Latha, stood behind.

  Latha took Madhavi to the shops one afternoon that week and bought her a new pair of shoes, with a heel on them. It was a pair that Madhavi had been hoping for, to wear with the baggy jeans and hooded shirts that were all the rage among the girls at her school. And Latha bought her a bar of chocolate from Podian, who had, of his own accord, given her ten rupees for it, understanding at last that something of significance had taken place in Madhavi’s life, and finding generosity now that he had someone to emulate.

  And perhaps that was why Madhavi came into her room one night before going to bed, dressed in her baby blue pajamas, her hair in two long braids, and worshiped Latha.

  “What is it that you are doing Madhavi baba?” Latha asked, backing away, alarmed.

  “My Buddhism teacher said that it was better to worship the servants who work in our houses than the politicians and people that we are s
upposed to at the prize givings and other events at school. She said the servants actually do something for us. So that’s what I’m going to do from now on. I’m going to worship you, Latha.”

  Politics, Latha thought. What right had that teacher to insert politics into her class? Still, it was the first time anybody had ever worshiped her, and if that was Madhavi, well, it wasn’t so bad after all. She had looked after this girl for almost twelve years, watched her, fed her, protected her, and taught her. Yes, it was all right. So she let the girl bow before her, and she laid her hand on Madhavi’s head and blessed her.

  Biso

  The children look over their shoulders at the sound of the explosion, but they don’t stop walking. It is as if this too is now just old experience to them. I am amazed at their resilience. It must be their youth, for I feel my heart thudding in my chest in time to our steps. There’s a small temple on the side of the road when we take the next bend, walking single file just in case some vehicle comes speeding by, a silly thought, I know, on a mountain like this, where the air is so quiet that an engine can be heard miles away.