Disobedient Girl: A Novel

by Ru Freeman

  It almost hits us as we sit there, a motorbike that comes careening around the last bend and toward the next, where we are sitting. The driver stops in front of us, and we all get to our feet. The man gestures to us, and the boy steps forward. I hang back with my little one.

  “What is it?” I ask, worried that he brings some bad news.

  “Veere Aiyya’s father told me that you need to get to Hatton. You can’t go on this bicycle. Malli, you go back. I’ll take them from here. Hurry up! Climb on! Don’t stand there, get on the bike!”

  I run to the motorbike, dragging my girl with me, and I shout my thanks over my shoulder: “Putha, I am eternally grateful to you for your help. Go back safely now. I will go with this aiyya to the hospital. Tell them I’ll come and see them soon.”

  “Give that handbag and the parcel to me,” the driver says, and stacks them inside a basket tied to the front of the motorbike.

  Luck. It has found us. He had only stopped by the store to deliver a letter from their son, who is in Jordan and had sent it through this man’s wife, who had just returned from the Middle East. It is so comfortable on the seat of that motorbike after everything. It is hard not to relax just a little bit, my baby’s cheek pressed to my chest, her back against the man, her legs twined around my waist, her eyelids fluttering open and shut against the wind that is suddenly cool now that we are moving so fast, and speed, speed! toward where we need to go.

  “Malli, how long will it take to get to Hatton?” I ask.

  “We can get there in about an hour and a half,” he says, glancing at me in the side mirror. Although we have to shout above the roar of the engine and make eye contact in the mirror, we talk companionably. The little one falls asleep. I am glad to be in the company of another adult, the way it absolves me of having to be responsible for topics of conversation. I am grateful, too, to be spared my own thoughts by the sound of his voice, and I give myself fully to his concerns. I listen as he tells me about the possibility of unrest on the plantations, the foreigners who are trying to take over the bigger estates, the explosion on the train; most of all he talks about his wife. How they made the decision for her to go, what it cost to send her, the sale of the small plot of land that had belonged to his father to buy her ticket, and the way her departure had clouded their young children’s lives. And had it been worth it?

  “She sent back a lot of money,” he says. “After one year we have paid back most of our debts. Even this motorbike I bought mostly with the money she sent from there; the bank gave me the rest. It is one of the only ones in these parts, a Honda. A suddha had got it from Japan and I bought from him after he had used it for only a few years. I don’t think they have even in Colombo yet motorbikes like this. And now nobody is going to be importing anything with this government. Anyway, it is a good thing because now I can earn money for the family this way. I load all the vegetables and take them to the markets. It is much easier. Even though life was not easy for her there, she has done her best to make it better for us.”

  He is a heavyset man, with rounded shoulders and a matching belly, and a face creased by a well-maintained beard. A capable man, someone who could do heavy work if he felt inclined. I want to think less of him, but I resist. Who knows what ails such men and their families?

  “Will she go back again, now that she is home?” I ask.

  He turns the corners of his mouth down: regret and inevitability. “Thing is that her sisters need to get married too. She’s the eldest in the family. I can’t pay for everything with this bike and our vegetables. So…we don’t want her to go,” he says, and he slashes the air diagonally with his right palm to emphasize his feelings. “I don’t want her to go, and the little ones don’t want her to either. They cry all the time when we talk about it. But…family…what to do when the family needs something…That is why Veere Aiyya also went to Jordan. Same time as my wife. To help the family.” And he looks carefully at me in the mirror to see if any trace of judgment has taken over my face.

  “That is it,” I say to assuage his guilt. “When family needs something, we have to come forward and do it.”

  And we are both silent, thinking of family. We remain that way until we reach the hospital, when I have to wake up my baby, collect her package of rice and curry and my handbag, and thank him for his help. I am so relieved to have reached our destination—this hospital where my children wait for me, and I am so anxious to go to them, that I barely listen to what he has to say and, instead, murmur my thanks repeatedly.

  “Akka, I have to get back to Ohiya, but I will come here again tomorrow,” he says. “If you wait by this door around ten in the morning, I will come, and I will bring some food for you too. Or if you call the temple they can get a message to Veere’s Father. I don’t have the number, but someone here should know. It’s a big temple. Oh, and another thing. Veere Aiyya’s father said he has some relatives not far from the hospital, and he said he will come back with me to take you there after he sorts out some things at the store. They will help you. Don’t worry.”

  I thank him again and run up the wide red steps so fast that Chooti Duwa, struggling to keep up, slips and falls on the fresh polish. I stop and help her up with one hand, my feet barely hesitating. The security guard tries to stop me, but I don’t listen and he is not concerned with the likes of me, a little girl in one hand, clearly a mother. I beg and plead my way to the front of the queue and peer through the hole cut in the glass front where the receptionist sits.

  “My son was admitted here this morning,” I tell her. “Raji Samarakoon. Raji Asoka. He had a broken leg. Two foreigners brought him in a red car. Just this morning. He fell—”

  “We didn’t have any foreigners coming here today,” she tells me.

  “They came,” I tell her, pointing at the thick ledger before her, its yellow pages full of potential, “foreigners. They were foreigners, so might have just written down their names only, not my son’s name. Just look there, carefully, please, duwa, they came just this morning, look for foreign names. They had a driver with them too. And my other daughter. A little girl, about as high as my chest, she was wearing a nice light purple dress with pleats and pockets, a little too tight for her—”

  “I told you nobody came here this morning. We don’t have anybody called Raji Samarakoon, and we don’t have any foreigners.”

  “Can you ask somebody else? Another lady nurse might have been here…maybe they checked him in. Maybe they went directly to operating? Because of the foreigners?”

  “There is nobody else to ask. I’m the one here. Who is the next person in queue?” she asks, looking past me.

  And she will not speak to me again. The people in the line look at me with sympathy. A few offer words they hope are comforting but are not: maybe they took him to a different hospital, maybe they got lost, maybe they registered him under a different name because they can’t pronounce our local names.

  I go to the security guard. “Aney malli, could you tell me if a red car came with a little boy and a girl, about as high as my chest, like this one, she was carrying a bag…My boy was in a lot of pain. He had a moon moth in a bag. He was bringing that to the hospital. You would have remembered. He couldn’t walk, so the hospital would have had to bring a stretcher to get him out. The driver was one of us…”

  He shakes his head, looking carefully at me and at my little one beside me and shifting from side to side as if he regrets that he cannot say otherwise. “Nobody came in a red car,” he says. “I have been on duty since seven this morning.”

  No. I shake my head. No. They cannot be right. I run past the queue, past the receptionist, to the place where the patients are. The waiting room is full, but my children are not there. Beyond that I push through a door with big red letters saying on one half, emer, and on the other, gency. They swing shut behind me, and the nurses inside look up at the sound. They come quickly toward me.

  “You can’t come here! Who are you? What are you doing?”

 
The quietness of that place tells me he is not here. My son is not here. They have taken him. And they have taken my girl too. I shake my head again and again, no, no, no. Nurses gather around me. I hear them talk about foreigners. Foreigners who take over the country. Foreigners who force themselves on servant girls. Foreigners who steal children who live by the oceans, near the hotels. Steal them. For ugly pictures. For bad things. Bad things. My children. My children. My children.

  Latha

  With one casual conversation between her daughters, Thara had acknowledged what she had refused to see all those years ago: that in all the times Latha had accompanied Thara to her meetings with Ajith as a child, being her excuse, giving her cover, there had been two other children with nothing to do but spend that time with each other: Gehan and Latha. And the more that Thara remembered, the steadier she became. She left the house less, and when she was home, she paid more attention to whatever Latha did.

  “We seem to have dried fish every day,” she observed one Saturday afternoon, looking up from the array of dishes that Latha herself, not Podian, had laid out on the table. Latha had resumed this duty, now that she wanted to be near, not avoid, Gehan. Besides, she liked to be sure that his glass of water came to the table dry, not wet the way Podian brought it in his clumsy manner. The family had just come into the dining room to have lunch when Thara made the remark. Latha knew what she was implying, that the fish was being cooked because Karāwa caste Gehan enjoyed it.

  “Not always. Sometimes we have fresh fish,” Latha said, trying to make it seem as though they were, truly, discussing menus.

  “But even then, small fish that you have to fry with those long chilies.”

  “Fish is less expensive than meat so—”

  “Fresh fish is not less expensive—”

  “Arlis Appu gives me a good price. We have been buying from him for years now. Even after some of the others down this road stopped opening their doors when he comes by with the catch, because they all go to the big supermarkets and buy old fish,” Latha said, her head to the side, eyes aimed at something halfway between Thara and the floor, trying to chalk something up for herself in Gehan’s presence, but not too much. Besides, “mālu” had been one of the first words Madhavi had learned as a baby, from the fishmonger who came up the street, his two wooden disks piled with fish and swinging from the dipping pole over his shoulder, and that cry, Mālu! Mālu! Mālu! Thoramālu, Balamālu, Kumbalava, Karalla, Hurulla, Mālu! No, she would not banish that man from her door.

  “Maybe the fishmonger is like the paper man,” Thara said, still standing by her chair. Gehan had sat down and was serving himself rice and, Latha noticed with satisfaction, a generous portion of the dried fish. Thara continued, “Maybe you are not buying but rather selling something for that good price.”

  Latha looked directly at Thara, the fake humility gone in an instant. “I stay here, I look after the children. I am not out in the streets causing people to talk scandalously about this household,” she said, holding Thara’s gaze, hoping that the children hadn’t heard between the clattering of spoons and plates and their own conversations.

  Thara lowered her own eyes. She was about to sit, but she glanced over at Gehan first and saw that he was looking at Latha. “From now on,” she said, her voice sweet and malicious, “I want you to buy fish from the supermarket, and we will have only respectable fish like seer, the way we used to in my parents’ house.”

  “I like dried fish,” Gehan said.

  “We like dried fish too!” Madhavi said. “It makes everything taste better.”

  Latha smiled at Madhavi, at the way she had mimicked an old radio advertisement for a Japanese flavor enhancer called Ajinomoto, something she herself had taught the child. She softened. “Thara Madam, I can buy seer for you and make dried fish for the children,” she offered. And Gehan.

  “Go and bring me some peeled onions and green chilies to eat my lunch with,” Thara snapped. “This food is tasteless.”

  She had said it without having put a single grain of rice in her mouth, and it made Latha angry. She sent Podian back with the bowl containing one green chili and one onion, neither washed.

  She was glad that Gehan had spoken up. He had sided with her, if not directly then at least by inference. And for her part she was not sorry that she had called attention to Thara’s behavior, even if only between the two of them. It was the kind of thing that was probably an open secret in her circles; Latha knew at least two other friends whom Thara brought home sometimes when Gehan was not there, who were having affairs of their own. She had heard Thara on the phone with their husbands more than once, lying on their behalf, telling the men that their wives were with her when they were not. It was a solid criticism, that Thara was the one who was behaving inappropriately, and one that Latha felt could be safely leveled against a married woman, and she contented herself with this line of reasoning for a few days while Thara and she circled each other in an uneasy truce. Until the next time Gehan took the girls to visit his parents and they were alone.

  “Latha? Bring me a cup of tea,” Thara said, and when Latha had prepared it and sent it through Podian instead, he was sent back to ask her to come.

  “Is the tea not good?” she asked, trying to sound concerned but sounding petulant instead. “I used Lakspray.”

  “I suppose he doesn’t like the imported milk either now?” Thara asked.

  Latha gazed at her. Thara looked better now. Perhaps it was the gym, or the fact that she had started to eat less. She had lost a little weight, enough that she had a proper figure again. Latha tucked a stray tendril behind her ear in self-defense; of the remark, of Thara’s improving looks. It was true. Gehan had steadily demanded one change after another until the only products Latha brought into the house were local brands: Maliban, Harischandra, Kandos, Lakspray, Marketing Department, Astra, Sathosa, Elephant House, and Sri Lanka Leather Corporation shoes. Even the girls were dressed only in clothes made from Veytex, the textile mills shop in Wellawatte with its walls of amazing prints and bold colors. The only foreign thing Latha bought now was Marmite and, occasionally, Kraft cheese in a round blue tin from England. Because those weren’t available here, and even Gehan was not yet persuaded by Kotmale cheese, which, he had confided to her, still felt and tasted like soap. He had been lying on his back when he told her that. He had been laughing in the aftermath of the silly conversations that often followed their sexual engagements at the Janaki Hotel, which, Latha had told him, being farther from their home, would be safer, because she couldn’t tell him that the Renuka was where Ajith and Thara went. The memory of that afternoon made Latha feel panic and power, both of which made her quiet.

  “Why aren’t you saying anything? Am I right?”

  Latha tried. “Lakspray is less expensive and creamier. You have to use less to make the tea taste good,” she said.

  “Sit down,” Thara said, indicating the floor at the foot of the bed where Latha usually crouched to massage her feet. Latha sat and put her hands on the smooth legs that jutted out from Thara’s shorts. “No, I don’t want you to massage my feet. I want you to listen to me.” Thara’s voice was soft, dangerous, with the kind of depth a voice gains when it conceals rage.

  “The only reason I am not married to Ajith is because of what you did.” She stopped and waited for her words to sink in. Latha’s body tensed. She knew then? She knew that Latha had seduced her boyfriend? Carried his child? Set a little girl adrift somewhere? Ajith had told her?

  “Baba…,” she began, fifteen again, then, “Madam…”

  “Don’t talk. Listen. If you had kept your legs together and been a proper servant like my mother trained you to be, the driver would not have done what he did. And you wouldn’t have got yourself pregnant and had to be sent away, and my poor, decent father wouldn’t have been suspected of fucking the servant girl. And if those things had not happened, Ajith’s family would have agreed to our marriage.”

  Latha froze. There it
was again: a proper servant. That was all they had expected of her. Despite her education, regardless of it, and her looks, she was supposed to be no more, no less. Servant. A role, she understood now with bitter regret, that had been the very thing that had protected her from Thara all these years; the thing that had concealed her intentions, her desires, her womanliness, her very soul from Thara. And there she sat, Thara, once her friend, now just another woman who had so casually indulged herself in all those things and more besides, not answerable to anybody. What made it possible for Thara and so impossible for her?

  Latha lifted her head. “If I had been allowed to be a proper human being, I would not be a servant in your house. I would be living in a house of my own with a husband of my own. With children who came from me and belong to me.”

  Thara spat. And it did not matter that she had lost weight or colored her hair or polished her nails; she looked hideous. “Human being? You owe my parents your life. If we hadn’t looked after you, who would? You would have walked the streets. We fed you. We clothed you. We sent you to school. Servant? What servant? You lived like a lady in that house. You didn’t even have to cook! Old Soma did all the work. I am ashamed to say that I once thought you were like me. You are nothing like me. You are a common whore, just like my mother said. Just like Gehan’s mother said.”

  “I wasn’t paid,” Latha said, but her voice was low from the tears she was willing to stay inside, inside, not one should fall.

  “What? What did you say? We pay you good money!”

  “I wasn’t paid!” Latha said, standing up. “I worked for your family and they did not pay me. All I asked for was a pair of sandals.” She pointed to her feet. “I asked Vithanage Madam for some money to buy a pair of sandals! But she wouldn’t let me have them. She didn’t think I was good enough to even have a pair of new shoes!” And saying those words again, she could feel everything she had felt that day, the longing to look pretty, the way she had believed that she was only asking for what she owned already, her money that she had earned, the way she had wanted so much to make her clean feet look decent in real shoes, to hide the fact that she was a servant.