Disobedient Girl: A Novel
Page 29
“Let’s stop here and light a lamp for the people on the train,” I call out to my boy, who has already passed it by. It’s not a real temple, just a little white-tiled ledge set into the earth in the shade of a Bo tree. There’s a spring nearby, and two old clay pots. I put our bags down and fill the pots so each of the children can water the tree. Then we find an unlit lamp and pour the oil out of another that has gone out into ours. I tear a strip of cloth from an old underskirt, and the little one helps me make a wick, standing opposite me and twisting the cloth in reverse to my direction. She puts her finger in the middle and I let mine go, watching her delight as our separate parts wind around each other in a loving embrace. It is peaceful, standing there shoulder to shoulder before our lamp, under that tree. I feel grateful.
We recite Pansil, and then I bless each of them, my fingers grazing the smoke from our lamp before I place my warm, hopeful palms on each of their heads. Chooti Duwa imitates me, gathering something—I don’t know what she imagines she is gathering—from the air around her and blessing us with a pouring motion over each of our faces, bent low to receive her piety. The older children laugh.
“Amma, can we wash here?” my son asks.
“I suppose it is okay, if we make sure that the water runs away from the Bo tree,” I tell him.
The water is cold, very cold, on our skin, but it feels good to wash ourselves, finally. Wash the dust, the tiredness, the anxiety, everything, and then to wipe it all away with our towel. I drape the towel around Loku Putha’s shoulders.
“It will keep you cool for a while, and it will dry it out too.”
“Aiyya is a rack,” Loku Duwa says.
“Aiyya looks like an old man,” the little one says. “He looks like the old man who gave us bread.”
Loku Putha smiles but doesn’t argue, happy to be within our happiness. I let each of them drink a fistful of water from the stream to quench their thirst, trusting that they will not fall sick.
“Let’s get going now,” I say, though I don’t want to leave the shade of the tree or the coolness of the water. I don’t want to pick up the bags or keep walking.
“How far do we have to go?” Mala asks.
I look ahead to where the road takes a turn around the mountain and goes who knows where; the world seems to end where my line of vision does, a sudden, precipitous termination to the forward motion of our life. “I don’t know, Loku Duwa,” I tell her, “but it can’t be far.”
“I’m tired of this trip,” Chooti Duwa says, and none of us responds, seconding her statement with our silence. I pick up the big bag, and Loku Duwa reluctantly takes the other side. After a few turns, Loku Putha walks back to where we are and squats beside the little one. Wordlessly, she climbs up on his back and puts her arms around his neck. He holds on to the feet she has wrapped around his waist and struggles to his feet. He continues to walk, still ahead of us but slower now. I am happy for my Chooti Duwa, that he is there to take care of her in this way. And happy for him that he knows to be mindful of her.
At each turn we expect to see the thé kadé that the driver told us about. Each time, we are disappointed: vistas drop and rise to our right, and the thick foliage, some with thorny flowers, crowds us to our left, short, sturdy bark glistening with numerous greens, but ahead of us there is nothing but the road, hot and unending. Nineteen such turns before the mountain begins to gain ground with the road beside us so that I no longer feel the need to watch my children quite so closely, afraid that their feet might slip and they themselves be lost in the tumbling forests beneath. Now the road is sheltered on both sides.
At the twenty-seventh turn we see it: the shop, a portion of it beside the road, the rest stuck in the earth behind, like an inverted L. It sits at the end of this stretch of road. I wish it were brighter, painted in some fresh color, this beacon of ours. But it is dark and old, part stone, part brick, part wattle and daub; something that seems to have risen from the unseen ground and clawed its way up onto the road, where it stakes the barest of claims upon the progress implied by broken granite and rolled tar.
“Amma, there it is!” Loku Putha says, pointing at the shack. “It doesn’t look like it sells egg hoppers,” he adds, a little sadly.
“We’ll see, you never know. They might make some just for us.”
“I can see plantains!” Chooti Duwa says, contented, at least for now, by that prospect. “I hope they are seeni kesel. I don’t want any other kind.”
“You always want sugary things,” Loku Putha says to her, putting her down and stretching his shoulders, “even with your plantains! You’ll get worms soon, and then you’ll see. Ambul kesel is better for you. I hope they’re ambul.”
“I won’t get worms,” Chooti Duwa says, unperturbed. “I never get worms.” It is the gift of a youngest child, this conviction that ordinary difficulties will pass her by, and I am glad she has that. I secretly hope that the shop sells sugar plantains, a little bonus for my baby, who has traveled so far without complaint. And ambul too, for my Loku Putha, who has done so much to help me and his sisters.
“Let’s get there and see what they sell,” Loku Duwa says, practical.
Loku Putha takes the towel off his shoulders and carries it in his hand. He gets there first, Chooti Duwa close behind; my Loku Duwa keeps pace with me. By the time I get there, the owner has come out. He gestures with his head toward my son and speaks in the gurgling, curved-jaw speech of a betel chewer.
“This son of yours doesn’t say much,” he says, teasing my boy.
I smile. “My Loku Putha is tired, isn’t that so? And hungry.”
I follow the man’s gaze toward the shady interior of his shop, and it takes a few moments for my eyes to adjust to the darkness within and the one glass cupboard that sits next to his counter. Arrayed on the topmost shelf is an assortment of chocolates, their wrappers dusty, their faces pressed against the glass, a clear indication that the inventory is both low and old. A short pile of steamed bread leans against one corner on the second shelf; next to it are two round cutlets on an enamel plate. Besides those, there are two plates of string hoppers and two bowls each of sambol, kiri-hodi, and fish in a heavily peppered brown gravy on the third shelf, and, on the last, four plain hoppers. I look back at him. He is an older man, closer to sixty than fifty, though who knows how the chilly up-country life weathers a person. I wonder if there is a wife or a daughter somewhere in the house.
“We have been walking for a long time,” I say, “and the children…I was hoping that there would be some food for them here.”
He shrugs and gestures with his hand toward the display of food, his mouth turned down in regret. He picks up a tin and spits out a stream of red juice. “This is what we have left from the morning.” His voice is clear and sounds heartlessly matter-of-fact now that his mouth is free from spit.
The children look at the food, Loku Duwa biting the fingernail on her left thumb, anxious and hungry and disappointed, but not as much as Loku Putha, who looks like he might cry. My Chooti Duwa is in imminent danger of actually doing so. The plantains are neither the sweet kind nor the sour kind; they are the long, pasty aanamaalu. The man must feel sorry for me, for he says, “We don’t sell lunch here. Nobody comes this way at that time, but my family, we’ll be eating soon. I can ask my daughter-in-law to cook some extra rice for you as well. The children might like hot food. You can sit there and wait while I go and ask what is available.”
“Thank you,” I say, sinking down onto the smooth bench on his veranda. The children join me, casting their belongings to the ground, glad for the rest. They look haggard again, the wash back at the Bo tree having completely evaporated off their skins, off their minds. Off mine, too.
“Here,” the man says, coming into view in the relatively bright light of the veranda, and holding out a comb of sugar plantains that he has brought from inside. “Give the children some of these while they wait. They must be hungry.”
Chooti Duwa beams at him and helps
herself to the fruit without waiting for my permission, and the others follow her lead. I am too tired to reprimand them, mother them, coach them on proper behavior; I just murmur my thanks and take one and hold it in my hand, too tired to peel it or eat.
“Where are you coming from?” the man asks.
“We are traveling from Matara,” I tell him. “It’s a long way, I know, but I didn’t expect it to be this long for us. We had to get to Colombo and then switch trains from there. Our second train had trouble on the tracks, and then it got stopped, a long way back it seems now, somewhere after Pattipola—”
“Deiyyo sākki! Were you on the train with the bomb?” I nod, and he calls out loudly to someone in the house below. “Sumana!”
Sumana, when she comes, is about my age, though her manner is that of an older woman. She is fair-skinned and homely. She wears a long skirt like a sarong and a blouse with a cardigan over it. She looks intently at me. She must be the daughter-in-law, for, right behind her, is a formidable woman who is clearly the lawmaker in the house. The storekeeper’s wife is round-faced with a trickle of tiny warts between her left ear and her throat, and she is three times as large as he is, the way wives are supposed to be in these parts. She stands there with her hands on her hips, the fingers twitching compulsively. Their poverty is visible. Sumana’s ill-fitting clothes, the way the colors don’t suit her, and the fact that the older woman’s sari blouse is held together by safety pins and worn on the outside at that, a clear sign that she has little to hide or be ashamed of; impoverishment has blighted her all her life.
“This is my son’s mother, Dayawathi,” he tells me, “and this is our daughter-in-law.” He turns back to them. “These people were on that train we heard about on the radio,” he tells them, and they are instantly kinder, our fate their excuse to take care of us. They both start talking at once, overlapping each other’s sentences yet neither seeming to care.
“You must eat with us…so far to walk…where are you going?”
“How frightened you must be…I would be terrified.”
“I heard it was old JVP people…but some others said Tamils…do you know?”
“Children had died…how many children?…did your children see?”
I can barely keep up with their observations and questions, so I give up trying. I nod or shake my head and shrug when appropriate and leave them to tell my story. My children stare at them, openmouthed, as if learning about all this for the first time; it certainly sounds more important in their voices, the event that we have survived.
“Leave them alone now, they should rest a little. Sumana, break a bottle of Portello for them,” the man tells the younger woman. The children perk up when the drink is mentioned, but I am only reminded of the half-eaten meal beside those dead bodies. Portello, too sweet like new love and dark purple like bad blood. When Sumana returns with a tray of cloudy glasses and the bottle of lukewarm Portello, it feels ominous. I want to refuse, but I cannot; I watch the children drink and feel nauseated, the bile rising up to my throat. I stagger to the corner of the house and retch over the side of their half wall.
“Better stay here today. You can’t travel like this. You are sick, and the children are tired,” the older woman says, and her voice is both comfort and temptation.
Before I can argue, the children start to beg: “Nangi and Chooti Nangi are tired, Amma,” my son says, “they can’t walk any more today.” He curls his toes as he says this, and I feel like weeping for him, for those weary feet. Theirs, yes, but mostly his oldest-child feet, the uncomplaining ones.
“Are you sure you don’t mind?” I ask the man, Veere’s Father. That, Sumana tells me, is what she calls her father-in-law, ever reminded of his importance and contribution to and role in her life. I ask repeatedly over the next hour, making the customary protestations, feigning polite reluctance, gauging the strength of their offer. But it stands. They are good people. We stay.
The meal they serve is simple: rice with white leek and potato curry, a spicy tinned fish curry, and sambol. The children are delighted, and so am I. It feels good to be inside a home, at a table with hot food and more plantains and plain tea with ginger to follow. Afterward, I help them wash the blackened pots in the equally blackened sink, its cracked concrete crevices packed as if by intention with years of dirt and grease. Still, I am warmed by the sight of the ineffectual bar of Sunlight soap. I imagine that people of our means will always buy those hard yellow cakes with dogged determination; it is as though we imagine faith and loyalty alone would transform it from a rudimentary lard-based block into billowing suds that make everything in our lives sparkle. I imagine it now, that possible transformation, as I scrub and scrub with the wad of coconut fiber in my hands, the thick soap oily and useless. These things are the same everywhere. We are the same, our people, up-country or from the South, down to the calendars we leave on the walls, long after their years have passed, as our simple decorations, our paintings.
There is no way to stave off the “father of your children” questions, and by evening I have told Dayawathi the entire story of our journey. I tell her of the abuse, but not about the infidelity, for she would not sympathize. Women who are loyal to good husbands never understand, and the others, tied for unexamined reasons to some variety of louse, feel only hatred toward people like myself, we who choose, we who don’t live by those rules of propriety that are established for us by men: For the sake of. For the sake of the children, the parents, our honor, our appearances that fool nobody. All one earns by living that way is pity, and of all the emotions I wish to arouse in another human being, pity is the least of them.
“Are you still feeling sick?” she asks, and I realize that I have spat on the ground.
“No, no, something was caught in my throat, nendé,” I say, shaking my head. Sumana brings me a glass of water and returns to watching the children. She holds my Chooti Duwa in her lap as she shows them how to play a game with a fistful of seeds, tossing them up and throwing them down. I observe her for a while. The old woman reads my thoughts.
“We don’t have any grandchildren yet,” she says. “My son has gone to the Arab countries, to Jordan, to earn something for them. He is the one that sent money for our radio. Otherwise, we wouldn’t know half the things that are going on even in our parts, let alone in the rest of the country. Not many people from our area go abroad, only a wife from one other family who went at the same time, but my son is headstrong and he heard about it from a friend in Colombo. There’s an agency there, and he found a way to go. They, my daughter-in-law and my son, want to move to the city, to Nuwara Eliya. They say there is work there. They don’t want to tend our vegetables and mind the store.” She shrugs, disappointed and judged.
“This is a peaceful place,” I say, noting how neatly they have laid out terraced vegetable beds behind their house, a garden that was invisible from the road. It is not large, but it is sufficient. I would live in such a place. I try to imagine what it would be like. The children going off to school, myself at home alone. How clean the store would be, how I would dust those chocolates, cook better food, perhaps buy some tables so people can sit to eat, not hunch over handheld plates on the benches lining the veranda. I would put in a window, get some light inside…
“Where are you going to from here then?” she asks.
No, the store cannot be mine. I have somewhere to go. “I’m going to my aunt’s house. I hope she is still in good health, and that there will be room for us there.”
“We would let you stay, but we find it difficult to manage as it is,” she tells me, a real apology in her eyes. “People have moved away. Few stayed nearby. And even most of them go to the town for what they want. Only the old-timers on their way to the milk factory each morning and the occasional car stop here. People like you…” Her voice trails off again. There’s a mix of apology and resignation and resentment, too, in her voice. For the inability to join that movement headed somewhere else.
“Don’t wo
rry about us,” I tell her. “We will be all right. It is good of you to allow us to rest here for the day.”
“Well, you can stay till tomorrow and then you can get an early start. That way you will be at your aunt’s house by afternoon. The station is not that far from here. Our son’s father can show you the way.”
I am grateful that she makes this offer. Having had the opportunity to take my mind off the journey, the getting-there, having been allowed to let the children roam free and to unburden some of my story to this older woman, I feel too tired to move. I am so exhausted by what I have managed to accomplish—the escape, the difficult journey, getting my children to safety through all of it—that her kindness is almost dangerous. It is the type of goodwill that convinces me that everything is well, that I can relax, hand over the care of my children to good strangers like her. Perhaps, I tell myself, just for a few hours I can give in to that relief. Surely I have earned that respite.
Dinner is bread warmed over the fire and leftover sambol tempered with a new onion. It is more than enough for me and for the children. My Loku Duwa in particular seems very happy, blossoming even, with her conversation about the gardens, what she has found there, the size of the vegetables. She has always been domestic by nature, and I am glad to listen to her. Hearing her talk, I permit myself to imagine a future for her, to picture her grown up, a nurse or a lady doctor who comes home to a well-managed home, a loyal husband at her side.
“Big! The carrots are so big!” my Loku Duwa says, making me smile.
“And the other vegetables too, everything is bigger and brighter than what we have in our village.” That is my Loku Putha.
“But they don’t have fish,” Chooti Duwa says, claiming a little something for us.
“That’s true, duwa, we don’t get much fish,” the old woman tells her. “It’s expensive. That’s why we rely on the tins of Jack Mackerel that we buy from town.”