by Ru Freeman
“I didn’t intend to hurt Thara,” she said. “It wasn’t her. It was her mother. I was angry at Vithanage Madam. I wasn’t thinking. I should have…” She trailed off into silence. She had wanted to prove that she was not just a proper servant, that she was as good as they were, better, that she could get one of them, one of their kind, and Ajith was the only one she knew. But she couldn’t say that aloud, not to Gehan, who wasn’t part of that world. It would only crush him. All he would hear was that she had once thought Ajith had something he did not, something for which it was worth risking everything. He wouldn’t understand that it had nothing to do with Ajith.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked.
“The past,” she said. “The past is called that because it is over.”
He said nothing, and a small disquiet unfurled inside her body and flashed across her mind, a sharp and piercing hurt. It was the memory of Gehan at the Vithanages’ dining table when she had first met him on her return after the baby, how callous he had seemed to her then, talking loudly about his wedding preparations, never once even looking at her. She wanted to stay with that thought, to listen to what it might have to tell her, but here he was, holding her like she had never been held by anybody in all her life. How soothing it was to stay there, to believe that the past had come and gone, leaving no lasting imprint in their lives. How comforting to set aside her watchfulness for a while, not to hope but to have.
So she did. And everything changed.
Who would have thought that a house with such bitterness hid so many spaces that could generate euphoria in the minds and bodies of two people? For a while, it seemed, the whole house was refreshed by her secret union with Gehan. Those two ancestral armchairs, each in turn, served a finer purpose for them in the smallest hours of the morning while the house slept. The half walls around the wraparound veranda offered themselves up, mute participants in their while-coming-and-going trysts in the dead of night. And once, on a night of passion intensified by the complete terror of being discovered, he had joined her in her bed, the repaired net around them following their movements and leaving Latha with the sensation during all the nights that followed that she was never again alone in it. Even the kitchen sink complied, wet against her belly when his arms slipped around her waist and his face sank into her freshly washed, dried-in-the-sun hair. Fleetingly, yes, but endless in the way those moments stayed on her mind, slowed her movements, and delighted her heart.
“Latha,” he would call to her, “could you make me some tea?”
And there was a delicious thrill that crept up her spine when he said her name with Thara in the house, wrapped as it was with the danger of being found out and, she had to admit it, the insolence of carrying on in this way right under Thara’s nose.
“I’m coming,” she would say and arrive with the required lowering of her head, her hands firm on each side of the tray, but her fingers soft around the fine porcelain cups she held out, wordless utterances melting in her eyes.
“Mahaththaya has really taken to drinking tea these days, hasn’t he?” Thara said one evening. “Gehan, better stop drinking so much tea. Once in a while, at least in the evenings, wouldn’t it be better to invite some of our friends over for a proper drink?” They were sitting side by side on the veranda. Thara was reading a book, and Gehan was making notes on a stack of papers in his lap.
“I gave up drinking several years ago,” he said, cocking his head to the side and looking Thara full in her face while Latha stood at hand, waiting for the right moment to set the tray down on the side table and pour the cup of tea for Gehan the way she had learned to do: fingertips on the lid as she poured the fragrant amber brew from the swanlike spout of Thara’s wedding tea service.
Thara raised her eyebrows. She had taken to plucking her eyebrows at the same time as she had got the burgundy hair. It made her face more severe, the way those sharply defined brows drew attention to the harshness of her appearance, magnified all the more by the tight ponytail that left not tendrils but a frizz over the entirety of her head. Sunsilk, Sunsilk, Latha thought. She should use Sunsilk Egg Protein.
“Really? Hmmm,” Thara said. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“You don’t notice much,” Gehan said, still looking at his wife but in a way that communicated to Latha that he was really looking at her, offering his face up for her to look at. So she looked at it, the beloved ordinariness of it. If he had no driver and no car, if he sat on a bus, would she be able to tell him apart from all the other men who went about by public transport? Which reminded her that the only times she had ever ridden a bus in her life had been to deliver food to Thara and Ajith and to try to run away with the girls and the houseboy somewhere south; Gehan had never asked her to take public transport anywhere for any reason, not even when the driver was on leave. Yes, she thought, she would be able to tell him apart. Not because he looked any different, because he didn’t—with his thick head of common, wavy hair, the clean-shaven face but for a thin mustache over his weak and effeminate mouth, his height unblessed by a corresponding broadness to his shoulders—but because he felt different. Something in him was the same as what was in her, and those things, unnameable, intangible, would arch toward each other the way they were doing now in this room with his wife between them.
“Well, we haven’t invited anybody to this house for years, so what is there to notice? If we had people here more often, maybe there would be something worth looking at!” Thara retorted, not losing a beat.
“What do you want to have for dinner?” Latha asked, hoping to avoid an escalation. There had been such an absence of conflict in the house ever since Gehan had spoken to her that first time, each of them, Thara and Gehan, seeming to turn away at the last instance from the usual confrontations, that she was loathe to have it return.
“Cook anything you want. I don’t care,” Thara said. “I’m going out to Banana Leaf with some friends.”
“Ask the children, Latha,” Gehan said, turning his eyes slowly to meet hers. “Maybe they care.”
Thara pressed her lips together and looked away at the insinuation. Latha backed out of the room with one last glance at Gehan and went to the kitchen to cook noodles. That’s what the children liked. Madhayanthi smelled the garlic and ginger frying and came running to the back door, taking in great gulps of air and yelling for her sister.
“Ooooh! Noodles! Akki! We’re having noodles!”
“Are you going to make salmon curry to eat with that?” Madhavi asked, tripping over herself in her rubber slippers, which were wedge-heeled according to the latest fashion and whose height she was practicing getting used to.
“Yes, Loku Baba, do you want to watch? You should start learning how to cook now that you’re a big girl,” she said and chucked Madhavi under her chin.
Madhavi was a proper young girl now; she stood up straight, wore a real bra, and even knotted her hair on occasion. At the last wedding the family had attended, she had gone in sari. Both girls had. They had looked so different to Latha, like ladies. Ladies who would grow up and make marriages and have homes of their own. Who would look after them then? Whom would she tend to besides Podian? It had taken all her effort to step away from those thoughts, to tuck a pleat in here, a stray hair there, rub soft powder into their supple skins, attach thin, real gold chains with gold pendants of their names written in Sinhala script (Gehan’s choice) around each slender neck, and simply enjoy gazing at her girls, at who they had become, who they might yet be. At times like these, though, when they came rushing into her kitchen screaming like urchins, she could pretend that their leaving was a long way from coming. She could pretend that there was still a lot more to do in order to raise them right, in order to teach them how to go about in the world.
“I don’t want to peel or cut onions,” Madhayanthi said, wrinkling her nose and pouting, managing to look disgusted and beautiful in her tiny denim shorts and tank top.
“I’ll do it,” Madhavi said, taking the
five small red onions from Latha’s hand. Madhavi no longer wore shorts; everything she wore had to be below the knees, a self-imposed virtuousness having taken her over the day she had her coming-of-age celebration.
“Podian, go and sweep the outside,” Latha said, reminding him as she had taken to doing that he should not be found anywhere near the girls; it was her way of protecting him. She felt a quick twinge of guilt that she had forgiven Gehan for Podian too, and she frowned.
“Latha, why are you angry?” Madhavi asked her. “Don’t you like Podian?”
“Of course I like him. Podian is a good boy. He just sometimes forgets to do his work, that is all,” she said. She pried three cloves of garlic from a bulb and put them in front of Madhayanthi. “You can peel and cut these,” she said.
“You’re just trying to get us to do your work,” she protested, but set herself to the task. After a few moments she looked up. “Latha, do you know that Soma still cuts onions and chilies on the floor?” Madhayanthi said. “Can I try?”
“No, Chooti Baba,” Latha said.
“Soma taught me how the last time we were there,” Madhavi said. “She said I’m old enough to learn it. See? I’ll show you.” She took out a knife, turned it blade side up, and squatted quickly on the floor, gripping the handle with her toes, trying to keep it steady as she held an onion over the sharp edge.
Latha sighed, bent down, and took the knife away from Madhavi. “I said no, and that means no to both of you, I don’t care how old you are,” she said, firmly. “That’s the old-fashioned way. You don’t need to learn to cut like that. You’ll only end up slicing your fingers. You can stand and cut on the board, like me.”
Madhavi shrugged and began chopping the onions. Latha watched the girls work. Madhayanthi was in her kitchen now only because Madhavi was there. She wanted everything her sister had, every part of what her sister did. Latha sighed. What would it have been like to grow up in the same house with an older sister? she wondered. With a sister like Leelakka. A sister and a brother. Podian. She would be the middle child, cared for by one sibling and taking care of another. Where would they have lived? She sighed again. Whose children…
“Latha is thinking of boys!” Madhayanthi exclaimed in a singsong voice, giggling into her shoulder.
“Nangi! Don’t talk of things you don’t know,” Madhavi said, but she was smiling.
“What boys for me? I’m an old woman now!” Latha said, turning away from them, suddenly afraid and ashamed.
“You’re not old! I heard the paper man ask Podian about you,” Madhayanthi said. “He told Podian that your face was just like some Indian film star called Maduri. And he said that if you were Indian you would be in a film too.”
“Stupid paper man. I should tell Podian to stop talking to that crazy man. Maduri indeed. Kolang.”
“What is nonsense?” Thara asked. Latha hadn’t noticed her come into the kitchen. She stood by the door, leaning casually against the frame, taking in the scene. What it must have looked like to her, Latha didn’t know, but she wasn’t about to alert her to anything they had discussed.
“Nothing,” Latha said.
“Latha is like an Indian movie star,” Madhayanthi said, looking from her mother to Latha, “someone called Maduri.” Her childish face was alight with that inner power that Latha hated to name, knowing too well how easy it was to abuse it once it was acquired: the power to start fires whose strength she could not gauge nor understand how to put out.
“The paper man is interested in Latha, Amma,” Madhayanthi continued.
Thara stared at Latha until she looked up at her. “Is it true, Latha? Now the paper man is interested in you? First Podian, now the paper man?”
How could she say such a thing, about a boy who was like her brother! “Madhayanthi baba was just making it up,” Latha said, shaking her head and trying to look as elderly and unworthy and unwomanly as she could. She looked at Madhavi. “Wasn’t she, Loku Baba?”
Madhavi, glancing from Latha’s face to her mother’s, chose to come to Latha’s rescue. “Yes, Nangi is always telling lies. She’s always creating problems wherever she goes! Even for me at school—”
Madhayanthi glared at her. “Maybe I should tell Amma who sent you a no—”
Madhavi dropped her knife and clapped her palm over her sister’s mouth. They disintegrated together, laughing and screaming, one trying to be heard, the other trying to drown her sister out. Latha watched them with amusement in her eyes until she realized that Thara was still standing there, still watching her.
“She’s growing up, our Madhavi baba,” she said, trying to change Thara’s mind about whatever it was she was struggling to remember, or trying to say.
“She’s only a little older than we were when we met Ajith,” Thara said, and something crept into her eyes, something that harkened back to that past and brought it, complete, into the present where they stood, each in her own world. “Ajith and Gehan,” she said.
Latha picked up the abandoned onions and garlic and added them to the saucepan, where they sizzled with her green chilies: mouthwateringly pungent and furious.
“Ajith and Gehan,” Thara repeated, wonder in her voice.
Biso
I don’t want them to, but they insist, so I must let them.
“It’s just something to cheer him up when you get there,” Dayawathi says. “The foreigners say there is no time to feed the children.”
She pronounces the word with a p and the native plural, la: porinersla. I want to correct her. At least say she should use the clearer word, suddho: white men. Instead I say, “He likes dried fish,” trying to be grateful to Dayawathi and Sumana, who have taken on the role of relatives, fussing over my son, doing their best to smooth the way for him, pushing what is possible within their poverty to the absolute limit. The smell of the frying onions and green chilies makes me feel ill. It is too lush and alive and only reminds me of how broken he is, my son.
I am nothing but a spectator. Everybody else seems to know exactly what to do. All I feel is that I should not permit this. I should keep him with me. But here beside me is Dayawathi, stroking my arm and murmuring that I should not be afraid, everything is as it should be, my son will get help soon. And there is Sumana, smiling and telling my little one to stay away from the stove so the oil won’t get on her baby skin. That’s what she’s calling it, baby skin. And the old man, I don’t know where he is. I can hear his voice somewhere, and he sounds authoritative and worthy of trust. I should be glad, yes, I should. My son will get help. I have been lucky each time on this journey, haven’t I? I have known what to do, what to keep from my children, what to share, what to escape from. I knew to accept the old couple’s hospitality, to stay here and rest. They are older than I am. I should listen to them.
I wish I had more time to gather my thoughts, to fully examine my fears. But by the time I go down to the back room, the driver and the teenager and Veere’s Father have already lifted my son onto the stretcher and are bringing him up the stairs. His eyes are squinted tight, and the smallest of tears escape from them, the concentrated tears that come from real pain. I step backward against the wall and stroke his head as they pass by.
My Loku Duwa follows them with a pink siri-siri bag. She has changed out of her old dress and is wearing her good one, the dress I had the tailor make for her last year to wear to important functions, like prize givings and concerts at the school. It is the slightest bit too tight for her, the puffed sleeves pinching against her upper arms. The hem, too, is a little short. I want to stop her, to ask her to get back into the old dress, but no, she should wear this one, a clean one, to go with her brother. At least it is made out of good material, and it is a good color for her, that mauve.
“Amma, I’m taking his shirt and the blue school shorts and the small towel,” she says, sounding competent and in control.
“Amma! Aiyya has to take his moon moth!” the little one yells from below.
“Hanh! Hanh! Al
l right, all right,” I say to both my girls. I hurry them, though what I want is for everything to slow down. Chooti Duwa runs up with the plastic-wrapped dead creature and pushes past me. I follow them upstairs to where they have set the stretcher down to make room in the car for my son. I am glad for this pause; everything seems too fast, too much out of my control.
“Chooti Nangi brought my moon moth,” Loku Putha says with a wheeze, trying to smile at his sister, and then he closes his eyes again, holding in the pain. Such concern, such love that flows between siblings when the thought of defeat draws near, everything sweetened by the horrific possibility of never again. I want to reassure them both, to say, “This is temporary, your brother will walk again,” but they don’t need my promises. Instead, I hold my lips between my teeth so I won’t cry and watch them communicate with each other in this way that they are doing, without words.
When the back door of the car is opened, it looks so small inside. Pain rushes through the marrow of my bones as I imagine my son having to curl and bend to fit in there. “Please…,” I say again, but the driver intervenes.
“Move aside now, we have to get this boy into the car, and you are blocking the way. Move! Move!”
Loku Putha opens his eyes and looks at me. “Amma, you will come quickly to the hospital, won’t you? You must promise me, Amma. I don’t want to go inside the hospital without you.” And this time the tears are the slow-moving ones of loss.
