Disobedient Girl: A Novel

by Ru Freeman

  Biso

  It is far too early when I wake up. It is still dark, the outside illuminated by what must be moonlight. The room itself feels anxious, as though it is waiting for something, and perhaps it is this disturbance in the air that has woken me.

  Around me, on the floor, I sense my sleeping children. When my eyes accustom themselves to the dark light, I can make out the bodies of my daughters, dressed, still, in the clothes we came in. They are motionless but noisy, their full natures revealed in the artlessness of sleep. I gaze at the girls, the way each of them rests, one, my Loku Duwa, on her belly, curled in, fearful of the world, the other on her back, fearless and inviting. They are both wrong. They should be cautious yet open, confident of their strength yet wary of strangers. I know they are young and that time may change these things about them, but character is like a second, hidden skin: what you are born with is what you have. I wish I could realign them somehow, fix this, change that, mix them up. I turn them both so they face each other; now they are halves, and I comfort myself with this small intervention in the course of their lives.

  Loku Putha is gone. I am so absorbed in my contemplation of my incorrectly arranged daughters that it takes me a while to notice my son’s absence. He was sleeping on the other side of Loku Duwa, his head facing the same direction as mine was, her feet between our two faces. That’s how we had gone to sleep, like the miniature fish in a flat tin box that one of the Irish nuns at the convent had once shown me; These are herring, she had said and explained that the name on the box, “sardines,” came from a Mediterranean island called Sardinia, where every eating house serves them. I remembered the nuns last night as we lay down, end to end, taking up no more space than two adults would on the thin mattress that Sumana dusted out for us.

  I get up with some difficulty, easing myself from the floor, registering the aches that have crept up my back as I slept. The house is quiet, but I can hear insect sounds outside. Small ones, like crickets and fruit bats. Perhaps he, too, could not sleep. The back door is pulled shut, but it is not latched. The smooth, long beam that serves as a barricade—against what? I had wanted to ask, as I watched Sumana slide it into place the night before but didn’t, knowing that such visual reminders are necessary to guard against both what comes in and what might go out—is leaning against the wall. Outside, the air is so cold my body folds into itself.

  He is standing at the top of the dirt steps leading down to the vegetable garden. He is looking at something I cannot see from where I stand, and I am about to call his name when the moon slides out from behind a cloud and he is in silhouette. He is peeing, the urine arching the way it does without effort for little boys. It makes a quick moonlit fountain full of separate particles, and he wiggles his hips, writing something in the air. It makes me smile, the way my son looks: like a small child, unburdened in every way, safe even among strangers in this unfamiliar darkness. When he finishes, he shakes off the last of it and pulls up his shorts. He continues to stand, suddenly feeling the cold, it seems, for he shivers and clutches his elbows. I want to stay there, watching him, but I know this time is precious to him. He is gaining something from his solitude, strength, perhaps, or vision or a dream. So I leave him and go inside.

  I must have been more tired than I thought, or fallen into a far deeper sleep than I intended to, for when I wake up for the second time, it is to the sound of shrieking. The girls are screaming.

  Chooti Duwa: “Aiyya! Aiyya!”

  Loku Duwa: “Amma! Amma!”

  And a mix of other voices. In the time it takes me to get up, untuck the fall of my sari from my waist and draw it over my left shoulder, and scoop my braid into a bun, I have heard what has transpired: my son has fallen down the hill below the vegetable garden. He had been trying to reach a moon moth perched on a dewy plant and slipped.

  “Amma!” he sobs from the ledge below, where he lies looking as though all that he has hurt is his sense of himself. “My leg hurts…my leg…awww…” And in his wet voice there is an unmistakable slurry of pain, thick and desperate.

  “Don’t move, putha,” I say, as calm as I can manage to be with an injured child I cannot comfort or even reach to touch. “Our nice seeya is coming, and he will get you out of there, my sweet son, my fair-skinned one, don’t cry…” I can’t stop myself from uttering the words that only make him cry more because this is all I can do from where I stand, hunched over the unsteady earth that has already betrayed him. And I know it helps him, this crying and crying unlike any grief he has ever expressed. Years of it come out of his body as he lies there, stroking his own leg, his eyes only on my face, crying.

  It takes a long time for Veere’s Father to get my boy up from where he is. First he has to enlist the help of a faraway neighbor’s teenage son, left alone at home. They construct a sort of stretcher with a long stick and the handle of an ekel broom looped with three sarongs. The neighbor’s son slides down to where my child lies, and the old man follows after, more slowly, grasping at roots and bushes as he goes. It is not that far, this distance that my son has fallen, yet he seems so badly and so invisibly hurt. I whisper prayers to myself as I watch them lift him onto the stretcher and struggle every inch of the way up the slope. Sumana and Dayawathi stand behind me, each with her arms around one of my daughters, protecting them from the sight, from my concern, from their brother’s pain. When they get halfway up, Veere’s Father says something to the teenager, and they stop.

  “Get that for the child,” he tells the young man, pointing to the moth.

  “It’s dead now,” the boy says.

  “I know,” he says, “but only recently. If you reach out you can pick the leaf he is lying on.”

  “Don’t!” I yell to the teenager. “You might drop my son!” But he has already reached past my boy and picked the leaf. He deposits it on Loku Putha’s stomach.

  Loku Putha stops crying. When they get up to the top and lay the stretcher down, he won’t let them take the moth away. “I want to keep the moth!” he says, protecting the carcass with his fingers knitted around it. I have never seen one so close, and I, like my son, am struck by its beauty. It is several inches across, with a delicately curved tail that parts decorously at the bottom like a young dancer’s feet. Each purple-edged wing is translucent, milky like moonlight, yet tinged with pale green, like morning grass. This one has four unseeing eyes drawn on the back of its body.

  “Can I keep this moth?” he asks me.

  I stroke the damp hair off his forehead and nod. I turn to Dayawathi. “Do you have something…”

  “I already sent Sumana to get a plastic bag for him,” she says, and her smile, though barely apparent, is kind.

  As soon as the moth is taken away from him by Sumana, lifted along with its leaf and placed inside a clear plastic sleeve that must once have covered an English-language greeting card, it is as though a spell has been broken. The pain returns, and with greater intensity. His leg is broken; this much is clear from the way his left leg looks shorter, and from the heat around the swelling on the shin.

  “I will make a poultice for him,” Dayawathi says and walks away.

  “Let’s take him inside,” Veere’s Father says and picks up his end of the stretcher. The teenager picks up the other side and they go in, taking the steps through the vegetable garden carefully, talking to each other. I am left alone to follow. Alone except for a daughter on either side, one hand to hold in each of mine. I feel judged, as though it is I who pushed him, I who had raised my son to desire something he should have left alone.

  “Will Aiyya’s leg get better? Will he be able to walk?”

  “Yes, Chooti Duwa, we have to get him to a doctor…” I trail off, feeling hopeless.

  “How will we do that? Where’s the hospital?” Loku Duwa asks.

  “That seeya will tell us,” I say, trying to sound reassuring, knowledgeable.

  “What if it is far away? Too far to walk? Can they carry him all that way?” my little one asks and doesn
’t wait for the answer. “They can’t carry our aiyya that far. See? That seeya can’t breathe from all that work, and he only carried Aiyya this short way!” She looks back at where her brother had been lying and traces the path to the back door of the house with an open palm, showing me the evidence of our collective helplessness. Perhaps it is her voice, the way it is pitched, high and upward arching with every statement, the way small children speak, afraid to lose their audience, afraid that the importance of their words might escape an adult’s mind, but whatever it is, it makes my eyes well up.

  “I’ll find a way,” I say. “Go and clean yourselves up for the day at the tap.” I watch the girls go around the side of the house to the washing area, Chooti Duwa in front, Loku Duwa behind. I go inside. They have laid my son down on the mattress, and his face is scrunched in pain.

  “Duwa, give him this,” Dayawathi says, following me in and giving me a tin cup with about an inch of dark oil flecked with white in it.

  “What is it?” I ask, cautious.

  She just gestures toward him with her head. “It will make the pain go away.”

  “Will it make him sleep?” I ask, smelling the liquid. It is not unpleasant, but it is strong, like crushed sweet herbs and something else, something bitter like the taste of the powder inside the antibiotics I once took after a nail from a boat gouged the side of my leg as I stood there with Siri. I hesitate, not wanting to put the cup to his mouth.

  “It will be like he’s sleeping,” she says. “We can give him something else later. Right now he should have something to help him become numb, to not feel the pain.”

  “Here’s the poultice,” Sumana says and waits, without asking, for her mother-in-law to step aside.

  I put the drink down and try to apply the poultice to my son’s leg. The scream that comes from him brings the girls running back, their faces wet. I am afraid to touch his leg to remove the steaming-hot, garlic-steeped bread, soggy in the long strip of cloth. I can barely think with the sound of his screams. I grab the cup and hold it to my son’s lips, cradling his head in my arm. “Drink this, Putha, drink it quickly. It will make the pain go away.” He swallows it in a gulp, and Dayawathi is on hand with a glass of water.

  “Rinse the rest out and make him drink it,” she says, and I do. I am willing to do anything she tells me so long as my son stops screaming. He does as he is asked, and I lay him back down, loathe to remove my arm from under his head but knowing I should let him rest. I stroke his hair, his arm, whatever I can, trying to make him stop whimpering until, at last, only the tears are left, dripping silently from the corners of his eyes, and, minutes later, not even those. He has fallen asleep.

  I clean myself at the tap outside; I wash my hands and feet and face. I ask Dayawathi for some oil, and I make a wick out of a strip of old cloth from the underskirt I had torn for this same purpose when we were still on the road. This time, my little one does not volunteer to help, and the wick is made quickly and efficiently, though, I feel, with less faith and delight held within it. I light the lamp underneath the family’s pictures of the Buddha and stand there, waiting for some relevant prayer to come to me. I wait, but there is no prayer I can think of for my circumstance. I can think only of the story of Kisa Gothami and her dead son, and the Buddha’s request that she find mustard seeds from a house that had withstood no death; I picture her running from door to door in her fruitless search, until at last her footsteps cease and she returns to acknowledge the lesson of impermanence. But my son is alive! He is only damaged, he can be mended, I know this. But what prayer? What prayer?

  “Don’t cry, Amma,” Chooti Duwa says, startling me. She begins to recite Pansil. I want to tell her those words are useless. I want to tell her there must be some prayer that will bring grace to us, but her voice stops me. It is sweet and innocent and full of belief. So I join her in uttering the precepts, vowing to show compassion toward living things, to refrain from taking that which is not given, to abstain from sexual misconduct, to devote myself to truth and clarity in thought and expression, to refuse to imbibe drinks that would impair my judgment.

  Loku Duwa joins us in the middle of our chanting, and when we are done she hands me a flower. I don’t know what it is called, but it is large and purple with soft, lush petals that look like a child’s drawing, so perfectly pointed and shaped, so neatly arranged, I am shocked that she has picked it, but when I turn around to see if anybody has noticed, I find that both Dayawathi and Sumana are standing behind us.

  “It’s okay,” Dayawathi says, gesturing with her head toward the shrine. I place the flower next to the lamp. I let her lead us in the familiar meditation:

  Pujemi Buddham kusumena ’nena

  punñena ’metena ca hotu mokkham

  Puppham milayati yatha idam me

  kayo tatha yati vinasabahavam.

  I close my eyes as I make the offering, and I want to release myself into this simple prayer about the ending of all life or, if nothing else, at least the already fading life of the flower we have placed before us. I want to be at peace, but it eludes me. What I see when I close my eyes is the flower, radiant in its purple color and unpicked; the moth, not dead but alive, returning again and again to that same plant; and my son, whole and striding before me, helping me show us the way forward, flagging down a car with a driver whose help I should have accepted.

  And just as the last words are uttered, we all hear the sound of a car pulling up, drowning whatever private hopes we had taken out to gaze at in that moment, sending all of them and us scattering.

  When I finally make it up the stairs to the storefront, I see the driver of the red car. “This boy stopped us,” he says, gesturing toward the teenager. “We were on our way back to Thalawakele. What has happened?”

  “Her son fell, and he has broken his leg…”

  “…can’t walk…”

  “…We can’t carry him to the hospital…”

  “…can you take him to the hospital?”

  “…trying to get a moon moth!”

  “…mother was still sleeping…”

  “I need to get my child to the nearest hospital,” I say, breaking through the other voices with the greater authority I can claim by my ownership of both the victim and the crime of negligence. “I will give you whatever I have if you can get us there.” I slip my bangles off my wrists and hold them out. The driver doesn’t look at them, and finally I put them back on.

  I don’t like the way the driver looks me up and down. He clucks his tongue and speaks disparagingly to me now, unlike before. “I told you to take the money, and you didn’t want to, foolish woman. This is what happens when people think too highly of themselves. Now see? Now you have to beg.”

  I know he is disappointed that I am no different than he is, that I have not lived up to the regard he found for me when we last parted company. Then, I had spoken graciously and with unhurried politeness. Now, I am needy and clamoring for him to advocate on my behalf with white people. I want to tell him that the money would not have helped. Money does not have wheels or an interior or anything that we could have used. But I must remain silent for the sake of my child, so I bow my head and look contrite.

  “You will be blessed if you can just get me to the hospital,” I tell him again, this time infusing my voice with the deference he is demanding of me, for having let him down, this boy. How glad I am that my mother is dead, that she has not had to see me come to this, to beg from Suddhas.

  “I’ll go and ask the white gentlemen,” he says and walks out.

  I follow him. We all follow him, and I wish the others, even my own daughters, had not. I have seen our people through the eyes of foreigners when I lived by the sea. The way we cluster together, as if becoming larger would make us as wealthy or more deserving of the sweets and rupees they sometimes fling at us, more worthy of the gifts their children hold out, the ugly white plastic dolls with their yellow hair and unblinking blue eyes that stare and stare at ours. I have always believed
that we are more worthy than they, and of better things than what they bring to us. I try to shake off the others and stride ahead a little, purposefully. I alone will do the negotiating. I know how.

  The driver, who has got back into the car, is listening to the foreigners discuss my request. He looks straight ahead. The two foreigners stop talking and look at me. I don’t like the way they look at me, but I am willing. I am willing to do anything they want if they will help me do right by my son. The older man smiles encouragingly, and I lower my eyes and then look back at them again, wordlessly saying what they must want to hear: Yes, Yes! I will! I am not one of those women, but I will do this for my son! They speak to the driver, and now it is his turn to stare at me. I don’t know what they have said to him, but he looks at me differently now, sympathy and disgust and self-loathing all rolled into one, and finally another emotion taking over: blame. He is blaming me. He seems angry when he gets out of the car, and I back away a little.

  “The gentlemen can only take your son with them,” he says, “because there is no room in this car for more than that. You can see for yourself. The old Suddha can barely fit into the front seat.”

  “Malli.” I call him this, hoping that this time, too, it will help a better nature to come forth. “I beg of you. I cannot send my son alone to a hospital, even if you are a good man, and they are good people…” I glance over at the older foreigner, who is watching me, his head lowered so he can see through the short three-cornered pane of glass on the window.