On Sal Mal Lane

by Ru Freeman

  What Suren did know, however, was that in Kala Niles he had an adult who embraced him fully, who was ready to support him as well as to let his talent guide her. He knew, because he had been told, by Mrs. Niles, that Kala Niles talked about him with her peers who also taught the piano, and that when she described his skill, she referred to him as my prodigy. Suren’s fingers had the twice-blessed curvature of strength and restraint. His impetuoso evened out with incalzando to draw forth if not the half notes of the ragas he had begun listening to thanks to his father, then at least interpretations hitherto concealed from his teacher. He arrived serious-faced and determined to conquer whatever musty pages she had chosen to set before him. He returned having transformed them into pieces whose notes corresponded with his fingers but whose hesitations and reprieves were foreign to her ears. At his touch, demi-semi-quavers rippled and staccatos clapped with an urgency that, once a week, brought Kala Niles to a state of ecstasy that could only be grounded with the heartbreak of his elongated breves, quivering in the silence of a remembered note and making the tick-tock of her metronome sound like guns.

  Kala Niles’s anticipation of Suren’s lessons grew to such a pitch that she took to hovering at the farthest edge of her garden, where, hidden by the bushes that formed her hedge, she could hear him practice, waiting to catch the moment when the taught-piece became his. She would try to guess which piece he had chosen by the scale he first practiced to warm up his fingers. She would close her eyes and picture the piece of paper on which he had dissected the music, the tonic, dominant, and subdominant chords neatly arranged and memorized; if the piece was in the key of A major, she could see the A, D, and E chords written out. She had taught him that trick and he had absorbed it easily, using it to master every piece. But most of all, she listened simply to hear him play. In this, she had company.

  The Bolling girls had seamlessly added a new routine to their days: crouching in front of the hedge along Mrs. Herath’s garden to listen to Suren practice, though whenever any of the other neighbors appeared they would stand up and pretend to be deep in discussion, faces close together, heads bent, fiddling with their own or each other’s fingers as though they were whispering secrets.

  “Like heaven,” Rose breathed.

  “Even better. Like hell!” Dolly murmured, without her usual shriek of laughter.

  Suren’s music was both inspiration for and antidote to their girlish crushes, but it was a game they could play only as long as he was seated at the piano. The moment he stopped, banality returned and they were left to hope against hope that the decency of his upbringing, which would require him not to dismiss them outright, combined with the purity of their need, would secure Suren for one or the other of them. They agreed that with Dolly’s attentions already focused on Jith, Rose was the more likely candidate. In this, despite all that was shabby and by-the-seat-of-their-pants about their existence, the twins were not unlike the Herath children: when it came down to it, they wished the best for each other for they knew that luck, should it find them, would neither tarry nor multiply.

  This listening that they did, however, could only occur when Sonna was out of the house. He had greeted their friendship with the Heraths first with astonishment and then with rage.

  “They probably think of you like servants!” he had yelled that first day as he cornered them behind Raju’s gate.

  “No, they gave us biscuits on a tray!” Rose wailed as she tried to get away from Sonna, who held her close with her recently combed and braided hair twisted around his fist. The farther she moved her feet away from him, the more she arched her neck, trying desperately to ease the sharp pain that was shooting through her head.

  “On a tray?” Sonna spluttered. “On a tray?”

  “Yes! An’ had enough for all!” Dolly howled in turn, her head, too, yanked back by Sonna.

  “You can’ stop us from being friends,” Rose sobbed when he finally released them, unable to think of a rejoinder to their claim of biscuits served on trays.

  “If I see you there I’ll drag you back by your hair like the vesi up the street. That’s what you are like. Two of you. Like fuckin’ prostitutes.”

  These altercations, which became frequent and painful for them, were never reported to their parents. Both Rose and Dolly believed, and they were right, that should their father find out that Sonna had appointed himself the arbiter of their lives, he would either drive him out of their house to live on the streets or fight him until he was too broken to be mended. And because they wanted Sonna to stay as far away from the Heraths as possible, in the beginning Rose and Dolly came to listen and sometimes talk when there was no chance of Sonna returning to discover their fraternity. Eventually however, they grew bolder and set up their own games in the full light of the neighborhood with not only the Herath children but the Tisseras’ quiet son and even the Silva boys, who were lured away from their parents’ advice, so delightful were their shouts of play.

  To all of this, Sonna had no response.

  Meanwhile, Suren’s resentment at his parents, both of them, the one for having described a dream for him and the one for having crushed it, had taken root in a corner of his heart. It expressed itself occasionally, in the mid term test that he contrived to fail, for instance, or the fact that he forgot to bring home the results of his London Music School exams, for which his mother had paid extra and to which she had chaperoned him, sitting outside the Masonic Hall while the British examiners, flown in for the occasion, administered the tests in theory and music.

  “I had a meeting with your class teacher today, Suren,” his mother said one evening. After dinner.

  Suren said nothing as his mother watched him. Mrs. Herath found his calm face disconcerting. He had the untroubled look of the blameless, further enhanced by its suggestion of an unshared inner life. No child in her knowledge—and hundreds of them had passed through her hands by then, arriving in their tumbled, mismatched groups and leaving as a single unit, lockstep in their admiration for her—could be as good as Suren appeared to be. Of course, she was right. None of the children were. Not Suren, with his saintly face; certainly not Devi, whose only preoccupation was extracting the maximum amount of fun from each day, and fun is rarely all good; not Nihil, who would willingly trade good for safety; not even Rashmi, who, though she appeared to be given over entirely to the matter of good and perfection, would soon be cozy with the delight of bad behavior.

  “Consi tells me that you answered almost half the questions wrong on the math test last week,” Mrs. Herath continued. “She took me aside in the staff room. She was quite concerned about you. She said you had finished the paper before anybody else and handed it in. She was shocked to discover that it was mostly wrong.”

  Suren said nothing, since what he wanted to say could not be uttered. He had decided to cut back on the regurgitation of facts. He was tired of it, and bored. He had tried, and succeeded, in answering the 1979 copy of the national grade 10 GCE O/L paper in mathematics the previous week, and so it seemed pointless to convince his teacher in grade 7A that he knew how to divide and multiply and figure out logarithms when he knew much more than that. Even if his maths teacher was his mother’s best friend.

  “What’s the matter? Didn’t you study? How could you get so much wrong?” his mother asked, frowning.

  Suren shrugged. Divulging his experiment would smack of arrogance. His continued yearning to dedicate his life to the study of music was even more untranslatable to his practical, strong-willed, and devoted mother. How could he explain that his love of music stemmed from a mind that craved harmony but was constantly in tension with the practical realities of living his life, of minding his siblings, of navigating the thousand bromidic requirements of his birth order?

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “How can you not know?” Mrs. Herath rested her chin in her hands. Her forehead knit itself together in genuine concern. She had neglected him, she thought, that was the only explanation for the dis
maying situation in which she found herself. She had simply set him aside as soon as his intelligence and forbearance had been confirmed, like a freshly ironed suit of clothes, and moved on to the next of her children. Rashmi she had not even had to consider: that child had been born perfect. She had been distracted by Nihil, who was constantly throwing one worry or another her way, and by Devi, what with all the terrible things that had been said about her at birth by the astrologer, who reaffirmed his predictions every time she visited him and he unfolded the brown parchment etched with symbols and letters that nobody but he could understand. Warnings seconded by every relative, friend, and stranger over the age of forty. Even the ladies of Sal Mal Lane had echoed Kala Niles’s dark predictions about Devi just the other evening when they had stopped by to have a cup of tea with Mrs. Herath after taking a look at the latest addition to her garden, a gorgeous flamboyant, destined to sit a little awkwardly among the graceful sal mal trees that dominated the neighborhood, not unlike a road-tart at a gathering of chaste goddesses.

  “Not that there should be anything to worry about,” Mrs. Nadesan said, “but it is something all of us have heard at one time or another, this seventh of July business.”

  “We Muslims don’t believe these things,” Mrs. Bin Ahmed had said, “but it is always best to be careful. Prevention is better than cure, after all.” And she had nodded sagely.

  “The first time I heard of anybody dying it was when I was just a child, about nine years old,” Mrs. Tissera had added, crossing her legs and rearranging her slight frame until she took up even less space than usual. “The woman who used to cook for us, her son, born on the seventh of July, fell into our well and drowned.”

  These kinds of conversations, which seemed to occur more and more frequently, had distracted her and kept her from realizing that her older son was at risk, Mrs. Herath thought, still gazing at Suren.

  “I’m going to ask Mr. Pieris to give you after-school classes. That will fix this problem. Soon you’ll be back on your feet again, Putha. Don’t worry.”

  Suren watched as his mother stood up, strode to the living room, where she picked up her soft brown leather handbag, recovered from it a very small red notebook stuffed with bits of papers, and made a series of phone calls. He listened for the reliable musicality of the whirring dial, his mother’s index finger inserted into each numbered section with crisp authority, willing the telephone to speed up. He listened as she discussed his downturn with a clutch of her best friends: Consi, Monica, Lakshmi, and Chubba. She referred to it as a stumble, a little stumble, to be precise. She would muster the forces of private classes and restore him to his former glory. By the time she was done, Suren wondered if the better part of valor might not have been to simply answer the question paper correctly, but it was too late now to harbor regret. Mr. Pieris was coming to regenerate his math skills and he would begin the very next day.

  As a further rebellion, therefore, Suren began to borrow Tony Sansoni’s guitar, Tony being the only one in the Sansoni family who interacted with the children. Tony Sansoni, who couldn’t play the guitar himself, looked forward to lending it whenever Suren asked. Suren’s request and careful return of the instrument elevated the transaction and made Tony feel as though he must have once known how to play it even if he could not remember it now since why else would this musical boy bring the guitar back with such reverence? Over time, he came to see the ridiculousness of holding on to an instrument he did not use, one that someone else clearly loved.

  “Why don’t you keep it, Suren,” Tony said one Saturday morning. “I don’t need it today.” He leaned toward Suren, overwhelming him with the scent of Azzaro Pour Homme, a gift Tony had recently received from his boyfriend.

  “I can’t play it for the rest of the day anyway, Tony Aiyya,” Suren replied, his schedule now further complicated by his math lessons with the tutor. His words were soft and polite, but, Tony noticed, he continued to hold the guitar in his arms.

  Tony rearranged a curl that had crept over one eye. “Then tomorrow. You can play tomorrow when you have time.”

  Suren hesitated for a moment. On Sundays he went with his sisters and brother, all of them dressed in white, to the temple for Dhaham Pāsal, and the rest of the day was usually devoted to getting ready for the next week of school. To bring the guitar back would mean risking more of his mother’s interventions, for surely she would trace any new transgressions to his music, and to the guitar in particular, an instrument she found inexplicably crass. He shook his head and laid down the guitar, in its case, on the cane settee in the Sansoni veranda.

  His resolve lasted for one more month. Four weeks later, thanks to Tony’s feeling increasingly guilty that the guitar belonged to a no-longer-boy who never played it, and to Suren’s habit of taking longer and longer to refuse to keep it for an extra day and to lay the instrument down on that settee, the guitar went home with him to stay.

  “When you have finished playing, you can give it back if you like,” Tony said, understanding that this might be the extra nudge that Suren needed. “But I would really prefer if you kept it. I am going abroad for studies and can’t take it with me anyway.”

  Two facts played in Suren’s head and beat in time to his footsteps as he walked back home: going abroad for study and I now have a guitar.

  Nihil’s Secret

  Kala Niles’s affection for Suren had the effect of softening her aspect; she had taken to wearing pastel-colored flared skirts rather than the severely pleated ones she had always favored, and she had gradually become more generous toward all the children. So much so that even Nihil came to look forward to going to the Nileses’ house for lessons. Just this past Christmas she had allowed all four of the Herath children to help chop dried fruits, small piles of sultanas, dates, and preserves as well as the nuts, and add them to the batter for the Christmas cake she was making. And before that, during Deepavali celebrations, she had agreed to reschedule their lesson for another day so that Nihil and Devi could go over to the Nadesans and help them decorate the entryway in front of their house for the Hindu festival of lights.

  “Take these flowers too,” Kala Niles had said, giving Devi a brown paper bag filled with the tiny variety of jasmine that grew at the back of her house, in the kitchen garden. “They will be able to use them for garlands and things.”

  Devi had stolen a few flowers, one to tuck into her blue Alice band and some extras to press between the covers of her still-blank exercise books. At the Nadesans’ house they had crouched for hours on the ground next to Mrs. Nadesan and the Tisseras’ son, helping to create the elaborate paisley and swan motifs, carefully outlined with colored rice and filled in with powdered dyes and flower petals. It was slow work, but immensely rewarding for the younger Heraths, who watched the design take shape and marveled at what they were able to create with Mrs. Nadesan’s expert guidance. They whiled away the afternoon as they sipped hot plain tea with ginger, and said yes more than once to handfuls of warm, spicy chickpeas.

  “So pretty I wished I could take a picture!” Devi said when Nihil and she went back to Kala Niles to hand over the plate of floury sweets that the Nadesans had sent in thanks.

  “Better go home and take a nice body-wash to get all the dyes off your face and hands before Amma gets home,” Kala Niles said good-naturedly, wiping a particularly large stripe of vermilion on Devi’s cheek and getting her own fingers smeared with it in the process.

  Yes, Kala Niles had warmed to Suren’s siblings, and this warmth had the unintended effect of not only making Nihil feel more relaxed around her, but making him realize that coaxing words out of her father, Mr. Niles, was neither as onerous nor as unrewarding as he had imagined it might be. Indeed, even though some of the time when Nihil came in, the old man seemed to be in considerable pain and he only turned his head slowly toward Nihil, sighed, and said nothing at all, Nihil still found that the most comfortable place to spend the time between the beginning of Devi’s lesson and the start of his own
was beside Mr. Niles. It was a pleasant place to sit, for Mr. Niles’s corner of the partially closed veranda was next to his daughter’s lush rose vines and their bright colors, yellow and red, and their thick untroubled fragrance overwhelmed, for the most part, the appearance and smell of age and decay.

  Understanding that rituals were important to Mr. Niles, Nihil observed a routine. He sent Devi in for her lesson with a little push between her shoulder blades, then walked over to Mr. Niles, silently counting the handkerchiefs remaining in the stack on the floor next to the old man. He found this to be a good gauge of Mr. Niles’s degree of discomfort: the fewer the handkerchiefs, the deeper the sighs; on those days he would sit on a chair and read, after Mr. Niles’s breathy acknowledgment of his arrival. Sometimes Mr. Niles would ask him about school, about the world outside, about his parents, but mostly he remained silent.

  At last, when the weight of those sighs fell more gently upon him, and after nights of careful consideration, Nihil felt that the time was right to share his keep-for-himself secret. He waited until Mr. Niles had finished his meager contortion toward him before speaking into a silence punctuated by Devi’s jerky F-sharp major scale.

  “I can say any word backward,” he said. “I can sing songs, recite poems, write sentences, all backward. Like this. Instead of singing ‘my bonnie lies over the ocean,’ I can sing it like this, naeco eht revo seil einnob ym.” He sang the line and smiled at Mr. Niles.