Disobedient Girl: A Novel

by Ru Freeman

  “That is their offer,” the driver says. “They are already going out of their way to help. We will have to go to Hatton to find a hospital. Take it or leave it. You are in no position to be demanding anything. We have other things to do today without having to stand here negotiating with the likes of you,” he concludes and spits to one side.

  How does he know to do this? To remind me of the filth I left behind, to make me feel more vulnerable and weaker than I already am? I go to the car and open the door on the driver’s side. I put my palms together and bring them to my forehead. “Please, sir, I will do anything. Please let me come with my son, sir. He is only nine years old, and he will be frightened to go alone, sir.”

  They look again at each other. The younger one is protesting, and they argue with each other in another language and I understand only one word. It is one that I have heard often by the boats when foreigners like them came to watch the catch being pulled in by the men and older boys: Junge. Boy.

  Veere’s Father and Dayawathi and even Sumana have come forward and are encouraging me to send my son with the foreigners, though I don’t want to listen to them. What do they know of white people? I try to tell them to be quiet, but they don’t seem to hear me.

  “Duwa,” Veere’s Father says, “the little one will be all right. Better anyway to send with foreigners. The hospital will even take more notice, don’t you think?”

  I hear Sumana now. “That is it. They will rush baba to emergency. That’s what he needs, isn’t it? He needs an operation right away. Our local dispensary can’t do those things. He has to get to the big hospital.”

  “Just think, duwa, we were standing there, all of us, asking for help from the gods, and this car came just in time, didn’t it?” Dayawathi adds. “Like our prayers were answered. It is your good fortune that they arrived. If not, how are we to get Putha to the hospital?”

  Veere’s Father steps in front of me and looks into my eyes as he speaks. “And anyway, the driver is a local boy, and he will be like an older brother. I am sure he will take care of our Putha and see that he gets help fast. He’s the driver after all. He can drive quickly to the hospital.”

  “The longer you delay, the worse it is,” Dayawathi says, placing her hand on my back. “The kasāya that I made for him will wear off soon, and he will wake up in so much pain. We must act quickly and get him out of here and to the hospital. That is the most important thing, isn’t it, duwa? That he gets to the hospital?”

  That word, daughter, hearing it from these two old people breaks down some of my misgivings. Aren’t they like my own parents? Wouldn’t my own parents have given me the same advice? They have been so kind to me, to my children, taking no payment, offering us not only food but their home. I feel torn. What they say makes sense. They are good people. But I am his mother. Should I not listen to how I feel? It is my son who is injured, not theirs. And how can I send him alone?

  I turn back to the foreigners. “Please, sir,” I begin again, but the older man waves his hand at me. He is annoyed, and so I remain silent, looking instead at how red his face has become, how the sweat glistens on his hairline from the single open door that has let the heat flow into his previously cold car. I look again at the younger man, the boy, and I want to like him, he looks so much like a girl. He is thin and long-faced, and his hair is like my son’s, sticking up and falling over at the same time. I almost smile, but he looks at me just then, and his eyes, as blue as the lotuses, are full of contempt for me. I take a step back. And right then, as if to rescue me from my shame, I hear my older daughter.

  “Amma, I can go with Aiyya to the hospital. They will be able to fit me in because I’m small, not like you,” she says.

  I look down at my daughter and realize that my palms are still clasped, vainly, as if I had been at a temple and the temple had been blown up and left me standing there. It is hard to take them apart, but I do, to hold her face in them. She is suddenly sweeter to me, my Loku Duwa, suddenly more beautiful than she has ever seemed, as if she is, truly, a decoration like the necklace for which she is named, my Mala Devi, little goddess. My heart clenches with regret at how easily I had passed over this daughter in favor of the one who came to me through love, not duty. I smooth her hair back and absentmindedly take her plaits in my hand, feeling their weight, remembering how I combed her hair the night before, parting it in the middle into two sections, dividing each section into threes and braiding them. They look like the wicks we made for our lamp. I remember what I had been thinking of now, as I stood before that lamp. I had been thinking about this car, about the driver, the offer they had made earlier, how I had refused them. Dayawathi is right. What else could it mean but that the gods looked down on me and saw fit to send me my deliverance?

  Her words cut through my thoughts. “I can go, Amma, I can. I’m old enough. I can look after him.”

  “No, duwa,” I say, but I smile at her. “I must go with him. I can’t send him alone.”

  “He won’t be alone. He will be with me!” she says, and her mouth trembles. As if in answer, my boy shouts from inside the house. A scream of pain that makes everybody stop talking. The driver spits again and strides over to the car. He bends down and says something to the foreigners in their language, making sharp gestures toward us. The foreigners look at each other and come to some agreement. Then the driver speaks to me, looking now and again at my daughter.

  “They will allow you to send your daughter with the boy. They can manage that. They will not take you.”

  I want to protest, but she is already bounding away from us, into the store and down the stairs, and all I can hear is her voice raised in disproportionate elation. “Aiyya! I’m going to take you to the hospital! Don’t worry! I’m coming with you to the hospital!” The children are mine and no longer mine, growing into strengths I could not have imagined, surviving tragedies they should not have been exposed to. No longer Loku Putha, Loku Duwa, Chooti Duwa, they are themselves, unrelated to me, and I have done all this to them. It is my fault that they have grown up so fast.

  I look back at the men in the car, and they are both nodding at me, as though encouraging me to nod, too, in agreement. The older man has his eyebrows raised, adding a question. Is this acceptable to me? Is it? It is not, I want to say, but it has to be, for while I am still standing there everybody but Dayawathi has gone inside to get my little boy ready to go to the hospital. I bow my head in thanks and let Dayawathi lead me downstairs. I follow the sounds of my son’s screams, wiping my face so I can join mine to the other voices offering solace to him: Hush, hush, be courageous like a good boy, your sister will come with you.

  Latha

  I better take the girl with me to the market,” Gehan said one Sunday morning, gathering his car keys and slipping his purse into his pocket.

  “What girl?” Thara asked.

  “Latha. Who else?” he asked, looking around the house as if for another female servant he had missed.

  “Girl?” Thara laughed. “Far from a girl, haven’t you noticed? Probably got some gray hairs too by now!” She tossed her own head, recently streaked with burgundy highlights to cover the few strands of white she had discovered one evening, going to Latha for confirmation and solace.

  “Latha! Is it true that I have gray hairs?” she had asked, wailed, really. “All my friends were laughing at lunch today. Nobody else has them! I’m too young!”

  Latha had examined the bowed head carefully and pronounced the verdict: “Yes.”

  “Aiyyo! What am I going to do?”

  “You can only see them if you look hard, so don’t worry about it,” Latha had said. “There’s probably a gray hair or two on my head, surely, and have you even noticed them?”

  “Well, I’m always out there for people to see. You just stay home and nobody gets close enough to look, so no wonder you don’t care,” Thara had said, making it sound like an accusation, something Latha had brought upon herself, this staying at home.

  “No
,” Gehan said, seemingly distracted with counting his money. “I haven’t been looking at her head for gray hairs, so I don’t know. I just need some help at the market.”

  “So why not take the boy?” Thara said, though she didn’t seem particularly concerned either way.

  “Podian is a pest, always looking here and there. And he is slow. And a fool. He never understands any instructions,” he said and then raised his voice. “Latha!”

  “My god. Who would have thought your mother herself picked out such a gem for her son!” Thara said, pouncing on the opportunity to remind Gehan of the fact that the only proper servant they had was the one her mother had trained and provided: Latha. The comment fell to no great effect on Gehan’s long-abused shoulders. “And to think you’d admit it even at this late stage,” she added, to even less success.

  Latha had always been ready for the outside world, for which she had once dressed smartly yet much more casually, a certain alertness to possibilities lightening her gait. After the hard disappointment with Daniel, she had almost given it up, particularly when she saw on television that even her childhood heroine, Princess Diana, had got nothing for her effort and heartbreak but a horrific death, and in a lonely tunnel at that. For a while, Latha had taken that as a personal message to her from the gods that their kind of enterprise was not going to be rewarded in this life. But, in the end, she had decided that living without intention and assurance of good fortune was like being dead anyway, so, after she had recovered and mourned the poor princess by lighting a lamp for her at the temple for seven days in a row, she had deliberately worn all her best clothes, day after day, even when she hadn’t felt like it, even when she wasn’t going out of the house, until she recaptured her former optimism.

  And now, she was just as ready for the world inside her home, and with even greater expectation, and in the call from Gehan to join him on the marketing expedition, alone, the two worlds blended delightfully together. She unhooked the two cane baskets from their perch above the rice bin and went out, pausing to remove her Bata house slippers and put on her sandals by the front door, freshly energized by the sweetly reminiscent sight of Gehan’s narrow body clothed in his usual weekend wear of blue-checked, untucked, short-sleeved shirt and khaki trousers. A body that she now looked at without fear, indeed, with the fondness of ownership, as he stood with his back to her, turning the key in the car door on the driver’s side.

  Thara wandered to the front door just as Latha finished buckling her sandals. “Make sure you don’t let him buy from the Vatti-Amma. God knows where she brings those leaves from. Probably from that filthy sewer behind her house.”

  Latha waved her head sideways in agreement but pursed her lips. What would Thara know about any kind of vegetable? She had never shopped for anything but cutlery and crockery and draperies and clothes. And everything had to be imported. She didn’t even go to The Palace now, because everybody who was somebody went to a new place called Old Dale, she had told Latha, and taken her there one day to show her a shop filled with people, a lot of them foreigners, buying clothes and sunglasses and handmade things like notepads and coffee mugs and odd-shaped caps with elephants on the front. But after a few minutes she had met a friend who wanted to go to the store café, and Thara had told Latha to go and sit in the car and wait for her, which she had done, but not before touching as many fine, unaffordable, and completely useless things as she could on her way out.

  “And don’t get goday stuff. Buy some up-country cabbage at least!” Thara yelled before Latha could get into the car.

  So, okay, Thara did know something about vegetables. She did shop for food, but only at the fancy supermarket that had opened up inside the Majestic City, and that too only because she felt guilty on her way back home from seeing Ajith at the Hotel Renuka, where they now had a regular room, Thara had confided in her, or from his rented room on School Lane, where the De Sarem family turned a blind eye to their doings and to which Latha had once brought steamy hot packets of lampreis from Green Cabin for them, which Ajith took from her dressed only in a towel. Yes, Thara shopped for food sometimes. She bought things with labels like Pastene and Ketchup and Fruit Cocktail in Syrup in a tin, all of which were inferior to the Harischandra noodles and the MD tomato sauce and the baskets of bright and flavorful fruits that Latha herself fetched from the local markets. But now was not the time to reveal any of these disparaging thoughts, so Latha contented herself with the pursed mouth.

  The pursed mouth and, later, the fact that Gehan drove not to the market but to the same Hotel Renuka, where, for the first time in her life, Latha experienced sex with a man who was her peer, his marriage up and her fallen fortunes abandoned outside the door. And, as she had imagined, Gehan was unlike either Ajith or Daniel. He was unhurried and present with her, with Latha, not another woman, not a notion of who she was but herself. But before all that, before the closing of the shades and the lighting of the lamps and the drawing down of the improbably heavy embroidered bedcovers in the air-conditioned room, he gave her a gift.

  “Madam…Thara…madam doesn’t know I took these,” he said, handing her a package.

  They had just walked into the room and shut the door, and Latha’s body was adjusting to the way privacy felt. It was unlike the privacy at Daniel’s house, which had felt more like a museum. This was different. This was a refuge. And with every second that passed, the mad beating of her heart—which had begun when she realized where they had parked, and what that meant, and the quick rush of self-recognition, which reminded her of her inferior status as a servant, not a lady like Thara, and which had swelled out of her body and into her throat and out of her alarmed eyes as Gehan checked in and walked without saying a word to her to the lift—subsided. It subsided the way the house she cared for subsided at night, taking its sounds and tucking them away to relinquish the space to her. And lately, not just to her but to her thoughts of herself and Gehan as she lay under that mosquito net, thoughts so explosive and improbable that she had sometimes had to hold her breath, afraid that one of the five sleeping bodies in the house, Thara, especially, but any of the others really, would hear them and cry out.

  It took her a few moments to look down at what Gehan had given her: it was a sheaf of photographs. They were the pictures that Thara had taken. Latha gazed and gazed at them. She had never seen a photograph of herself. Not even at Thara’s wedding had there been one taken of her. And in all the years that she had looked after the girls, whenever the camera had been brought out, she had always been asked to hand over the children and move out of the frame. And now, here were twenty-one photographs of her. They seemed to be of someone else, some mythical creature that lived inside her, someone younger, more free, unnaturally blessed.

  “How did you know she took these pictures?” she asked, still staring at them.

  “I came back home when she was still photographing you,” he said, taking the bundle back and looking through each one, his finger caressing the corners so slowly that Latha felt a rush of anticipating warmth deep within her that made it hard to listen to what he was saying. “The children had fallen asleep, and I came in to put away the foodstuffs from my mother. I watched you for a while.” As he described what he had seen, he sounded so sad that Latha put her hand between his shoulder blades. And something about that gesture effectively ended whatever misguided mores had tethered them in two adjacent but opposite-facing places. Gehan embraced her, and she embraced him back.

  “I should never have agreed to the marriage, I should never have agreed,” he said somewhere over her head, the rest coming in a rush, two decades condensed into a few sentences. “When I heard about what was happening, what you were doing, from Ajith…I felt nothing but rage. And then you went away and Ajith refused to marry her. I felt sorry for Thara. I thought she and I shared a common pain even if I could not speak about it with her. Even though she could never know that I had lost something too.”

  “It wasn’t the driver,” she said abruptl
y, wanting to make sure that he hadn’t buried that bit of knowledge, allowed a lie to sprout and grow between them, “it was Ajith.” She moved away from him and went to stand at the window.

  “I know,” he said, following her. “I know it was. I knew from before. Ajith told me. My parents would not have allowed it, between us, you know, but I had plans to find a way. I had thought of getting work abroad, in the Middle East even, I didn’t care. But Ajith, he took that dream from me. I haven’t spoken to him since.”

  And she understood then where the rage had come from. How foul she must have seemed to him, to betray both him and her friend. But, in that room, alone with Gehan again, she did not regret what she had done. She tried to feel something like that, to feel bad, but she did not. It shouldn’t matter. Why should it? She and Thara had been friends before the boys had come along. They had a bond that shouldn’t be allowed to break because of what she had done. And it hadn’t, had it? She had found Ajith, given him back to Thara. She had given up her baby. What more could she do? She gazed at the strip of ocean that was visible beyond the farthest buildings, wondering what to say.

  “I had a child while I was at the convent,” she said, at last. “They took her from me. I have paid for my part in all of this. I think I have paid more than everybody else.”

  “Why did you do it, Latha?” he asked. “You were always so good to Thara. That is what I could not understand. Why would you take Ajith from her? Surely you could not have loved him?”

  Had he not heard what she said? Why had it broken him to know that she had gone to Ajith? Ajith had always looked down on him. Why had that been excusable until her actions made everything unforgivable? And still, she wanted to avoid blaming him, not only for the question he was asking but for the one he hadn’t asked, about what it must have been like to lose a child. And maybe she wanted that not because he was deserving of her forgiveness but because she wanted to forgive herself, for having once been young. She wanted to be with him, to have this future, which, though unlike any future she had once imagined for them, complete with a wedding and a poruwa and faithfulness, was still better than not ever having the chance to be together at all.