A         
Disobedient
      Girl

Ru Freeman

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A Disobedient Girl

Ru Freeman was born in Sri Lanka and now lives in the USA with her husband and three daughters. This is her first novel.

For my mother, my first teacher and editor, who taught me to expect
more than the quietly possible out of life. And for my father, who
demonstrated the worth and pleasure of breaking a few rules along the
way, and whose wisdom I continue to acknowledge only after the fact.

“I am resolved of all indignities. She remains

wrapped like a flower, like the bloom

of a flower, within herself, far away.

The wind like an ogre moves

around her, not touching.”

—Gamini Seneviratne, “I, the Wind,”
from Another Selection

image  PART I  image

Latha

She loved fine things and she had no doubt that she deserved them. That is why it had not felt like stealing when she’d helped herself to one of the oval cakes that were stacked in the cabinet underneath the bathroom sink in the main house. Who would care if one went missing from the seven sitting there, awaiting their turn in the rectangular ceramic soap dish bought at Lanka Tiles to match the new pale green bathroom towels? And, since she had been right and nobody had noticed, it was now a reliable source of luxury. When one wore out, which it didn’t for several months, she simply fetched herself another.

Every day, at 3:30 PM, she cleaned her face, feet, underarms, and hands at the well, using one of those cakes of Lux, which, despite having escaped, undetected, with thieving, not daring to smell like flowers all day long, she reserved for this ritual. Every day the soap, pink and fragranced, filled her nostrils with the idea of roses. She had seen real roses only once. That had been when the Vithanages had taken her with them on a trip to the hill country one April. She had been five or six then, her second year with them, back when her duties had been few and blissfully pleasing. The hill country, with its lush, verdant cleanliness, the ice-cold brooks, and the famous Diyaluma waterfall, at whose foot she had stood as part of the family, all their faces sprayed with mist, wet with the tears that the particular slant of the falls, airbrushed water in slow motion, invariably brought on. After the falls, they had driven down for a picnic at the gardens in Hakgala, where the roses bloomed in such perfection that only their scent distinguished them from the artificial creations sold in Colombo. From that day on, roses had become a delicious prospect— a memory and a luxury blending together on her face, caressing her.

Today, as always, she felt sad as the relatively warm well water took the bubbles and the smell down the sloped pavement and evaporated both instantly between the blades of grass at her feet. She straightened up and looked off into the distance, smelling the tendrils of hair that hung long and wet down both sides of her face; she used her left hand to gather the strands nudging her right cheek, that being a more dramatic gesture, she thought, than using her right hand. This was the moment when, in her soggy state, she imagined herself into a teledrama, playing the role of the beautiful yet discarded maiden, surrounded by the soft aura of the virtuous wronged.

Next to the presence of finery, she also felt, quite strongly, that her life should unfold with a minimum of three square helpings of drama, as soul minding and body feeding as the plate of rice or bread she was given at each meal. The old well at the edge of the garden, which was used only for washing clothes and, in her case, for bathing, and which therefore she considered an extension of the spaces that belonged to her, was the perfect place to dwell on those fantasies and to populate them with characters propelled by passion, wrongdoing, and guts.

“Latha! Lathaaaaaaaaa!” That call was part of this late afternoon event too; the sound of Thara’s voice calling her from the veranda, making sure that she hadn’t gone without her. The maiden went the way of the soapy bubbles and Latha returned to being eleven years old again.

“Enava, Thara Baba!” After all this time, she still felt silly saying it. Baba. How could someone her own age be a baby? She picked up her tin bucket, the soap hidden beneath her washed underwear, and headed toward the house.

Thara met her halfway down the path.

“Can we go to that street again today?” she asked, linking arms with Latha.

“Aney, Thara Baba, I’m going to get into trouble because of you.” She said it because she wanted to put a check mark in her head after the word tried. After all, who could fault her for being an accomplice to Thara’s misdemeanors if she had tried to dissuade her? It was one of the first English words she had learned at school. Try! Try! And try again! The school principal still insisted that they chant this every morning, and though there were rumors that he sympathized with the people who wore red and marched with banners embroidered with the sickle and hammer on May Day, and that his job was a front for spreading a doctrine that encouraged his students to think themselves equal to the rich, and though all of that was considered dangerous and subversive, his message and, frankly, his possibly clandestine life resonated with Latha. She had resolved to follow her own interpretation of his creed: she might get it wrong, and she might get in trouble, but by god she would try to be better than she was. Next to her, Thara giggled happily; it was time for the flowers.

The flowers they picked from other people’s gardens were various, and arranging them was Latha’s specialty. She liked to get an assortment but favored the pastels. Rings of white vathu-suddha studded here and there with small-petaled yolk yellow araliya, her favorite flower. Sometimes, a small sprig of Ixora for a splash of red, even though the plant was considered poisonous to the mind by some who sounded like they knew these things; Soma, the old servant, for instance, with her faded clothes and neatly whittled hands that handled vegetables like pliant but precious gems, testing their firmness with a press of concave fingernails. Every now and again, if she was lucky, a fresh, new-blooming gardenia that needed nothing else, its perfume, its satin skin, its very existence enough of a reminder of highs and lows, being and death.

But lately it wasn’t the flowers that Thara was after. It was the Boy. The Boy lived on the street that paralleled theirs, within the same Colombo 7 neighborhood. Thara had explained it all to Latha one day, checking off the necessary requirements on the fingers of one hand: race, religion, caste, school, looks. Of these, Thara cared about the last two. The other three were for her parents’ benefit. Of course, the right address was the icing on the cake.

“Colombo Seven is best. Next is Colombo Three, Colpetty. After that… well, Colombo Five and then maybe, if everything else is absolutely perfect, even the money, then Colombo Six. Nothing else. Amma would never tolerate it, so why bother? Right? Right, Latha? Why bother? Might as well stick with the known crowd. I’d never go for a marriage proposal, so might as well bring home someone they can stand.”

“What if the marriage proposal is better?” Latha had asked.

“How can it be? If they could find someone by themselves, would they ask a Kapuwa to do the work for them? No. Only uglets with cowcatcher teeth come calling with their mothers in tow, the matchmaker with his pointy black umbrella leading the way. Not for me. I’m going to find him for myself even if I have to grow old doing it.”

Well, she had found him all right, and before her twelfth birthday, and living in the right kind of house to boot. Despite Latha’s reservations, she had to approve of her young mistress’s resolve and enterprise, and not only because Ajith came complete with a friend: Gehan. That was a bonus.

Gehan was probably destined to be one of those who would have to rely on a matchmaker to find himself a wife. Latha felt certain of that. He had none of Ajith’s grace or good looks, none of that air of knowing his place in the world. He was a hanger-on, and completely ordinary. Latha was sure she had passed by him dozens of times on her treks to the stalls that bordered the cricket grounds to buy mangoes seasoned with chili and salt from the street vendors. Yes, he had been there, buying pineapples, or maybe olives. He looked like an olive eater. Her mouth watered as she imagined the taste of a boiled green olive, the vinegar and spice orchestrating its small earthquake on her tongue. She could see him spitting the seeds onto the sidewalk. Not like Ajith and Thara, or even herself; they all knew how to get rid of pits discreetly. She sighed. Well, no matter, they came as a pair, and Gehan would always be available whenever Ajith was, and she was hardly likely to find a romantic interest anywhere else, no matter how deserved that outcome would be.

“Want to try stealing today?” Thara had asked her the day they found the Boy.

“Chee! I can’t steal!”

“Come on, it’s more fun,” Thara begged.

“No, baba, I can’t let you do that,” Latha said. “It’s a sin. How can we pray with stolen flowers?”

“Why not? If everything must come to an end and die, then how is a stolen flower different from any other flower?” Thara practiced her latest coquetry, shaking her head from side to side so her shoulder-length ponytails whipped the sides of her cheeks. Latha’s hair came down in waves, and she thought it was prettier than Thara’s, but Mrs. Vithanage, Thara’s mother, had insisted that Latha wear hers in tight plaits. Sometimes she practiced the cheek whip when nobody was home but it never looked the way it did for Thara, whose straight, silky hair brushed her face like it loved it. When Latha tried it, her hair, thick and heavy, refused to cooperate, hanging down the sides of her face and making her look like the bad women in the teledramas, the ones whom the village ostracized or husbands left their wives for. She consoled herself then by noting that they got a lot more screen time than the good women with smooth, broad foreheads who parted their hair in the middle and never changed styles.

“In fact,” Thara continued, “it’s a better flower to offer. It reminds us that there is evil in life, nothing can last, and we must remain unmoved by these things.”

“But shouldn’t we remember what the priest said about not stealing? What about the five precepts?” Latha asked, trying again.

“Why do you want to bring the precepts into this? We’re just talking about the flowers.” Thara flung up her hands. The bangles she put on in the evenings went tinkling down her thin forearms and gathered at the joints in her elbows. She cocked her arms and shook the bangles down to her wrists again. She looked funny doing that, like a chicken flapping its wings. Latha smiled just a little. They must look like sisters standing face-to-face like that, except for their feet, one set smooth and sandaled, the other ashy and slippered. And the bangles, of course. Latha didn’t own any bangles. Her eyes followed the movement of Thara’s arms, staying one jingle behind the narrow circles of glass. Finally Thara stopped, her fists dug into her waist, waiting for a response.

“But if we steal the flowers, then we’re breaking the precepts! There is a right way to get flowers and a wrong way to do it.” This was Latha’s last try.

“There is no right and wrong, and precepts are for fools. Everything is just as it is! And we must experience things without condemning them, because if we condemn them, then we’re becoming too involved. That’s what I think the priest meant when he talked about it last Sunday at temple.”

“I don’t understand all these things.” Latha shook her head and looked miserably at her empty siri-siri bag, fiddling with it and causing it to make the soft tissuey squeak that gave it its name.

Thara pushed out her lips and scratched a mosquito bite on her chin. Suddenly, she grinned. “How about this? The flower must remain unmoved by being stolen or being picked with permission, or even by dying! We can remember that as we recite our prayers this evening if you like,” she said, her cajoling beginning to wear Latha down. “Besides, it would be quicker.”

Thara was right about that bit at least. Half the time when they went flower gathering, they would have to leave because nobody was home to ask, even when there were so many blooms on some bushes that the owners would never have noticed it if they had picked a few on their way out. Besides, wouldn’t they be creating merit for the owners by using their flowers for prayers? Latha squared her shoulders and nodded.

“Hanh ehenang,” she said, relenting.

The first three houses were easy. There were no gates and, more important, no dogs. But the fourth presented a series of problems, the largest of which was a grandmother moving around, albeit slowly, in the house. They watched her for a few minutes, hidden from view behind a short and somewhat prickly hedge.

“Hopefully she’s deaf,” Thara said. Latha suppressed a giggle. She felt a warm, pleasant excitement gather between her legs, like wanting to pee and never being able to pee again, both at the same time. She clutched Thara’s arm.

“I’ll keep watch, baba, you get the flowers,” Latha said, warming to this new sensation brought on by good intentions and bad behavior.

“No, you pick them and I’ll keep an eye on the old cow.” Thara shoved Latha away from her and onto the gravel driveway. Latha scurried across it and pasted herself against the trunk of the araliya tree. But the very characteristics that made it so lovely to have in a garden—the low, spread-apart branches; the thick, large, moisture-rich leaves; the bunches of waxy yellow blossoms—all these ensured that it provided very little cover for an eleven-year-old girl in a bright blue, puff-sleeved dress. It was a tree meant for lovemaking, a leaning tree, not a tree for hiding from grandmothers.

“Kawda?” The voice was at once beseeching and nasty. The old lady, dressed in a housecoat of indefinite hue and cut, was at the window, shading her eyes and peering into the garden. The pee began to leak into Latha’s underwear. Tears threatened to start up top. Thara was gesticulating wildly from behind the hedge, mouthing a word Latha could not understand. Run? Come? Maybe she was just gaping. After one last and somewhat manic series of gesticulations, Thara grimaced at Latha and stepped out from behind the bushes. She walked boldly to the front door and rang the bell. It had a tinny, high-pitched sound, entirely at odds with the dimensions of the soaring pillars and beams that made up the house, built in the style of a Walauwwa. The Boy opened the door before the bell stopped ringing and grinned at her.

Latha was just about to step out from her ineffectual hiding place when she heard the sly, teasing hiss behind her. And that was how she met Gehan.

“So how many of those flowers are stolen?”

“Naa… api…,” she said, looking somewhere off to the right of his left shoulder but instantly aware of everything about him: that his blue-checked shirt was the same color as her dress; that he wore khaki shorts and Bata slippers, like hers; that his hair stood up on end along the path where he had just run his hand through it, like a sculpture; that he was very brown, browner even than she became during cricket season, when she and Thara climbed the roof of their house to watch the games. One more thing: he was wiry and elongated, like a reedy plant reaching for sunlight through dense shrubs; everything concentrated on the upward journey, just the barest of threads for roots.

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell. I’ll even pick a few more for you. Look. Here, take these.”

Why did he have to pick the entire bunch? She always made it a point to pick only the blooms. She couldn’t stop herself: “Aiyyo! Don’t pick the buds! You’re wasting the flowers!”

“You’re wasting the flowers!” he mimicked. “So what? There are at least two hundred on this tree, and tomorrow, two hundred more!”

Latha frowned at the bunch he had picked in its entirety off the tree: her favorite flowers, in all their golden sun-and-moon beauty. He wouldn’t put them down but continued to hold them in his outstretched hand. He looked ridiculous: a romantic hero without the face or manner for it. Milky white sap was dripping onto his dusty slippers. There was dirt under his toenails. He shuffled his feet under her stare. She sighed and took the offering, stooping to rub the stem in the dirt to stop the bleeding.

She turned to go, then paused. “Thank you,” she said, over her shoulder, pouting her mouth as she said it. He smiled and she felt happy; perhaps he had not guessed that she was a servant. She tried to ape Thara’s confidence as she walked over to join her at the door.

Thara’s voice brought her back to the present.

“Come, Latha! Let’s go before Amma gets home!” Thara shouted as she ran to get their bags for the day’s picking.

“Just give me a minute to change my dress. I’ll meet you by the gate.”

Thara stopped running and turned around. “Change your dress? What are you changing your dress for? That one looks fine.”

“But I’ve been helping Soma nenda in the kitchen and it smells like curries and anyway it’s wet now,” she said.

“It’ll dry as we walk and nobody’s going to smell you after all so what’s the point of changing?”

“I’ll meet you by the gate,” she said, and ran away before Thara could argue. She went into the storeroom where she slept, between the padlocked haal pettiya full of dry goods and spices and the barrel full of unhusked rice, and she put her soap away on the wooden shelf next to her mat, hiding it carefully behind an old Vesak card with a picture of the Sri Maha Bodhiya on the front. She spread her towel and wet clothes on the rack near the door. Then she climbed on a low bench and took her blue dress off the coir rope where she had hung it to air after the last time. If she was going to get in trouble, she wasn’t about to let Thara bully her about her dress.

She slipped on the thin leather slippers that had once belonged to somebody, a relative of Thara’s who was a schoolteacher, she imagined; they were that kind—flat, unflattering, and noisy. They were a size too big for her, and she had to grip them with her toes when she walked, but at least they were not her old rubber slippers, at least they made her feel dressed up. She checked the picture of the English princess that she had cut out of the newspaper and pasted inside one of her exercise books. Latha had taken to the princess afresh since she’d read in the accompanying article that she had been a nobody and a nanny who looked after other people’s children before she decided to become a princess instead. Having confirmed that, indeed, the look she had been practicing, peering out with her chin tucked but her eyes uplifted, had been properly copied, Latha stepped out. Then she went back into the storeroom and lightly stroked the still-moist surface of her soap. She rubbed the tips of her fingers on her wrist, then rubbed her wrists together like she had seen Thara do when she wore her mother’s perfume.

Now she was ready.

Biso

I have mended his slippers. Frayed, old, pinned together between the toes. This is the most that is possible. The temple bells are ringing. I pay heed, though their sweetness has been lost to me for years. I see him before the last chimes fade, picking his way through the mangrove swamps. Beyond him the sea. I would go to the water if I knew it would not humble me. Twice I tried, walking into the blue, two in one hand, one in the other, singing. But when the waves broke over us I half-drowned to save them. Dragging their confused bodies to shore until that, too, became mere play. No. No more of the hot, brined sand under our feet, no more rituals to stave off my madness. We will go to the cold green hills, to the slopes of tea and the music of waterfalls. I will make them forget.

There is a full moon tonight and the children wait, just out of sight in the kitchen behind me, still dressed in their white school uniforms, waiting to light lamps and incense around the Bo tree. I press into the splintered frame of the door as he pushes past me.

“Move, vesi!”

I cast my eyes down at my feet, but I stay where I am. Whore, bitch, cunt. Words that came calling with such fury the first time but lost their effect so soon. He looks confused but staggers indoors. I wipe his spit off the front of my blouse with the edge of my sari and raise my eyes to my children. They scamper to my side, little mice.

Outside, the air is moist, and Loku Putha leads the way. He has his father’s walk, his face, his movements, the same quick eyes, the same rare smile, but he is still only nine years old. Give me two years, and with the grace of the gods he shall not become his father. My firstborn daughter stumbles over some hidden root, and he turns to catch her. He grabs her hand, steadies her, then shakes it off. He clips the side of her head with his knuckles and wipes his hand on his shirt as though she were tainted.

“Watch where you’re going! Pissi!” he adds and looks defiantly at me.

Her face wrinkles. “Aiyya called me an idiot…”

“It’s okay, Loku Duwa. Stay here next to me,” I say, and take her hand in mine. My youngest, the baby, glances at us, then runs ahead to join her brother.

“She’ll fall before we reach the temple.” She sounds as if she wishes that upon her younger sister: a fall, a scream, tears, a bloody knee, a ruined evening, blame. I sigh and stroke my daughter’s hair, trying to ease her older-sister conundrums, jealousies and concerns twisting together, inseparable.

The chanting of the priests floats over the sound of the sea. The smells of oil, incense, frangipani, jasmine, and lotus mix with the taste of sea salt on my tongue. It calms me. I heave another sigh, audible and long, and feel my anxieties rise up out of my body and drift away.

A boy about my son’s age accosts us; he wears a banian and a pair of shorts that are too small for him. “Five cents to look after all your slippers,” he says.

“That’s alright, putha, we’ll leave them here,” I say, and stroke his head. He smiles but ducks from under my palm, moving on to other potential customers. Nobody steals slippers at temples, and yet there are people who pay to have them watched, as if they had not come to temple to meditate on the transience of their lives, on the irrationality of clinging to their possessions. We leave our slippers in a dark corner outside the temple walls and climb the thirty-three worn steps to the top. Once there, I wiggle my toes in the liquid sea sand and smile.

Despite all that has happened to me in this town, I have always loved this temple. Each full moon I have come here, alone at first, then with my firstborn, my Loku Putha, to watch him crawl on all fours at the roots of the holy Bo tree, then with both of them, my son and daughter, and now with all my children. I used to come here with Siri when the moon was not full, when the temple was likely to be empty. We would come here to light a lamp, and to reflect upon how insignificant we were, when alone, in the scheme of things, in the same way that our flowers lay, dying before our eyes at the clean, empty shrines: two flowers, two sticks of incense, two people, and all of the Buddha’s teachings surrounding us in the quiet. But on Poya days like this, the moon full and low over the ocean like a lantern we ourselves had reached up to light, I came with my children to forget that lesson, to do what a mother must, to take heart in the crowds of people, in their essential goodness, in the arrays of flowers piled high and seemingly abundant with life and hope. That is how it is when people gather together, Siri used to tell me; we can convince ourselves of immortality, even in a temple. How prescient he had been, though he hadn’t known it then. I have never come to temple with my husband, not even when we were first married and I asked him to accompany me. He was always uncomfortable with tranquil pursuits.

“Amma, I want to light the first lamp,” Chooti Duwa says beside me, pouting in anticipation of my answer, waiting for her older siblings to preempt her with their usual cautionary words. When I say yes, her mouth and eyes open wide, letting in as much delight as her slender body can hold.

I stand aside and watch them. My son cleans out five lamps, one for each member of our family, while his sisters take note of his every movement. Chooti Duwa holds our basket of flowers; her older sister clutches our incense and candle.

“I’ll pour the oil,” Loku Duwa says. She takes out the old Arrack bottle that I had cleaned out and taken to the Mudalali to have it filled with a half-pint of coconut oil this morning. Standing on her toes, she fills these first lamps with great care.

My boy lights a match to the candle that the little one has in her hand now, then he bends down and picks her up. He holds her over rows of wrought-iron lamps, most of them already lit. Her dress is too short for her. Loku Duwa tugs at the fabric, giggling a little at the sight of her sister’s exposed bottom under the scrunched-up skirt, the white knickers that I stitched the way the nuns showed me, puffing up on the side closest to her brother’s body, one round buttock revealed. Together they make the kind of picture I have seen in the newspapers, the ones they put on the front page after a Poya day, to show the country that innocence has survived and will endure, to remind us that there is something worth living for when all seems lost. My little girl wriggles at the touch of her sister’s fingers, and some of the wax from her candle falls onto Loku Putha’s hand. He yelps in pain, but he continues to hold on to her. He reserves his frown for Loku Duwa.

“Stop it, modaya! You’re going to make me drop her. Chooti Nangi is going to burn herself!”

Idiot. Fool. These are the words he uses to address his firstborn younger sister, never referencing their relationship with the proper term, Nangi. I sigh and move away from them and sit by the temple wall, among other women, my legs tucked sideways underneath my body, my palms together, my mouth reciting prayers by rote, mulling over my children, their respective flaws, their way forward. Do all children come into being in the same fashion? Already marked with their future, a history-to-be prewritten by their predilections? I wonder. My son, dark skinned and full of some untouchable resentment, with his backward glances and watchful spirit, had come to me that way, come out of my body full of anticipated slights, taking his independence as soon as he could walk. There was some knot in him that no amount of breast milk could console, no amount of attention suffice to untie. Then my first daughter, dreamy and sad from the start, never able to articulate what it was that she felt, never knowing, exactly. I had tried to soothe them both in all the usual ways, done my best to keep myself safe for their sake, until Siri found me and my attentions turned away from them; then I stopped trying, telling myself that it was useless, that they were who they were. Only his child, Siri’s daughter, my youngest, had seemed untouched by an already-known fate; only she had seemed blessed by possibility, as if, with time and knowledge, she would become something other than she already was.

Their faces are illuminated to varying degrees as they stand before the rows of lamps, first by the candle and then, when my baby reaches out and lights the first lamp, by the second flame and then the next and the next. When her brother puts her down, she runs to me and curls into my lap. I hold her close; my baby, conceived on a night like this, under the full moon, hidden by the still-wet catamarans pulled up onshore. In everything she does, I see Siri. In the way she moves, her footsteps deliberate with pride, in the way she regards the world, her chin lifted, as though she were assessing its worth and finding it both fascinating and hospitable, in the mischief that dances in her eyes. She has kept him for me, made it impossible for people to forget him or to say that she is fatherless. I know these three children, who they are, what they desire, where they are bound, and that is the proof of my love.

Tomorrow, I will go with the dew under my feet to the plantain grove beyond the kitul trees that my father put in when my son was born. Those first plantain trees have given way to the offspring who came up around their trunks; I tended them all, felling the old to give way to the new, revisiting not just the grove but, through my care of them, my parents’ lands, where I had first learned to be mindful of the growing things that sustain us all. I will cut down a frond from one of the young trees and I will walk home in the morning rain with it over my head. He will not hear me rip the leaves, or smell the steam when I hold them over the wood fire to turn their waxy green to dark. In silence I will lay them out, in silence make four mounds of still hot rice, embedded with hard, dried, salted fish, the taste of my life by the sea. Two pieces each for the girls and myself, three for my son. The orange coconut sambol, ground with the last of our dried red chilies, will stain the white. Condensation will have to provide the gravy. I will add them to the woven market bag that once belonged to my mother and that I have carried for ten years. I will slash the kurumba from our front yard with my knife, drain the sweet water into my children’s plastic drink bottles. Then I will go to them. Instantly awake at my touch, rising with practiced stealth, they will follow me. When he wakes up, stinking, drunk, we will be gone… gone… gone…

Latha

Latha!”

“Enava, madam!” She always had to yell just as hard as Mrs. Vithanage in order to be heard, and she was still working on finding a way to infuse reverence into her screams. Mrs. Vithanage was becoming testy with her.

“This girl is always somewhere else. She used to hover next to me like a cat. Now I never know where she is. Latha! Mehe vareng!”

Latha cringed. She hated it when Mrs. Vithanage used the derogatory conjugation of verbs on her, the vareng, palayang, geneng that was the lot of laborers. She stopped running and began to walk. If she was going to be insulted, she was going to deserve it. Let her wait. Latha passed the driver, who stood by the family car, a sedate black Peugeot with white, plastic-covered interior that had arrived in the country in a fleet that had been imported by the government seven years earlier for something called the Non-Aligned Conference; she had learned about that at school because it was one of her principal’s favorite topics, the conference, not the cars, which latter he had condemned bitterly. All day the driver loitered there, next to that car, even though he knew exactly when he was needed and even though that schedule never changed: take Thara to school at 7:00 AM, take Mr. Vithanage to the Ministry—whatever that was— at 8:30 AM, bring Mr. Vithanage home for lunch at 12:30 PM and return him to the Ministry after, and bring Thara home from school at 1:30 PM; on Tuesdays, take Thara to elocution lessons (where she had learned, and subsequently taught Latha to recite parts of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and “The Song of Hiawatha” and “The Highwayman,” which last was her, Latha’s, favorite, what with the maiden and all) at 3:00 PM; on Wednesdays, pick up and drop off the piano teacher at 4:00 PM and 5:00 PM respectively; on Fridays, take lunch for Thara at school and wait until she finished swimming lessons to bring her back, smelling of chlorine, ravenous; and every day, bring Mr. Vithanage home at 5:30 PM. Thursday mornings he took Mrs. Vithanage to the market, with her hair in a bun.

“Latha?” the driver said as she passed, a greeting and an acknowledgment of her existence.

She stopped. “What?”

“No… nothing. Why in such a bad mood?” He snapped a green twig from a bush of poinsettia (there were poinsettias all along the driveway, and personally, she thought they were ugly: pale, undecided colors and too much foliage) and began to pick at his teeth, sucking bits of lunch out from behind his jaws. Disgusting. He wasn’t bad-looking despite the fact that he was short, and the dark skin, but chih, what terrible manners. “Too much work?” he asked her, after a particularly robust, and clearly productive, suck.

She scowled. Why he insisted on talking to her as if she were an equal she had no idea. Didn’t he notice that she sat in the backseat with Thara when she accompanied her on occasion? Not next to him, like the gardener did?

“I don’t know why you suck your teeth like that. It’s such an ugly habit.”

The driver snorted. “Madam is in for trouble with you, isn’t she? Sending you to school and all that. You better watch your attitude. Soon…”

Mr. Vithanage came onto the veranda, dabbing at the perspiration on his face with a creased brown and white checked handkerchief. She had washed and ironed it just yesterday. Washing. She hated having to do the washing, but since Mrs. Vithanage’s row with Soma, the old servant, Latha was the only one left. She wished Soma would come back. In her absence Latha had become the cook, cleaner, and laundress, and while she didn’t mind the ironing, she detested the washing. It made her hands sore. It made her back ache. Most of all, she had no time to pick flowers with Thara, which meant…

“Latha! Child, can’t you hear madam calling you? What are you doing standing here? Go and see what she wants.” Mr. Vithanage gestured vaguely into the house, shook his head, and stepped down to the portico.

The driver held the back car door open for him and then shut it. He leaped up the steps, picked up Mr. Vithanage’s briefcase from the cane chair between the mahogany pedestal table and the matching urn with its arrangement of fake ferns the likes of which Latha had never seen in nature, and deposited it with great respect on the front seat. He got in on his side, stroked the steering wheel three times, and brought his hands together in worship. He touched the picture of the Buddha that he had cut out of a Vesak greeting card and hung from the rearview mirror with a bit of black cord, then started the car. He caught Latha’s eye and held her gaze as he drove slowly down the curving driveway. Latha rearranged her body, pulling it up to its fullest height, and shouted, this time with more deference.

“Madam, I’m here. I’m coming.”

Well, it couldn’t last, could it? She should have known it. One day they were picking flowers and eating ice palams out of green and white striped pyramid-shaped boxes, pushing the sweet bars out with their fingers on the one side, groping for them on the other with their wet tongues—she, Thara, the Boy, and Gehan—and the next it was done. They were all ready to go when it happened.

“Thara! Latha! Come back in here. Where are you going?” Mrs. Vithanage was standing at the top of the steps on the veranda, her arms crossed. She was wearing one of her hand-loomed cotton saris with Guippio lace edging on her blouse. A bad sign. She was most virulently Radala bearing when she wore Guippio lace. Latha did not know where it came from, that lace. It was stronger than the local kind, though if she had to choose, she’d pick the latter because of the way it felt against her skin, soft and imperfect, like the work of human hands.

“To pick flowers, Amma,” Thara said, her voice all girl and honey. Latha stifled her giggle.

Mrs. Vithanage frowned. “You’re too old to do that. You don’t need to go picking flowers anymore. Let the gardener do it.”

“Amma! The gardener doesn’t know how to do it. We know all the houses, and they know us!”

“Exactly. You have become common in this area. Soon they’ll be talking about you like they really know you. Yes, no more picking flowers. Get back inside and practice the piano.” Practicing the piano was Mrs. Vithanage’s idea of a solid punishment, which made Latha wonder if she was actually invested in Thara’s acquiring skill in playing the instrument or if all the piano lessons were merely serving some lesser role, as an excuse for Mrs. Vithanage to keep her daughter from other, more desirable, activities. This sort of banishment to the piano was becoming far too frequent to do Thara any good, since she went to it only in anger and banged furiously at the keys with no thought to the pieces she was playing.

“Latha, you go to the kitchen,” Mrs. Vithanage continued. “I will tell the gardener to get the flowers from now on.”

Mrs. Vithanage stared into the distance over their heads, down the driveway, past the garden, beyond the gate that was wheeled into the wall and wheeled back shut by the driver each time the car passed through. She could probably see the future too, Latha thought, with that amount of focus. She squinted her own eyes and tried to copy the look: seeing but not seeing, here but actually there.

“Amma!” Thara’s voice broke Latha’s concentration.

“Kollo!” Mrs. Vithanage’s voice was strident, summoning the gardener. An end-of-discussion voice. Latha flinched.

The gardener came running from behind the poinsettias, his hedge clippers in hand. What had he been clipping? Latha was sure the gardener did nothing most of the time. He just carried his tools around, wheeling his barrow here and there as if he were engaged in something. It was always empty. Didn’t anybody notice that it was always empty? Mrs. Vithanage assigned him the task as Latha and Thara listened, their heads cast down in perfect imitation of each other, their long braids—these days Mrs. Vithanage insisted that Thara braid her hair too—hanging to the same length down their backs. Thara had new white sandals with heels. The heels clacked when she walked. Latha didn’t like the sound of the clacking, only the height that the heels gave Thara, who now appeared older and more ladylike. She curled her toes in her own slippers. Maybe she could ask Mrs. Vithanage to buy some sandals for her with her pay. Better still, maybe she could ask Mrs. Vithanage to give her the money directly, instead of depositing it in the bank every month.

“Latha! Stop daydreaming! What are we going to do?”

Latha looked up. Mrs. Vithanage and the gardener had disappeared. Thara looked miserable.

“I don’t know what to do. We’ll let him pick the flowers, I suppose.” Latha’s mind was still on the white sandals as she looked—up, for now—at Thara’s face.

“Not the flowers, you fool! How will I see Ajith?”

“Maybe he can come here,” Latha said thoughtfully, crossing her arms in front of her. She was sure she didn’t strike quite the same pose as Mrs. Vithanage. She needed a bigger bosom for that. Her arms slipped down to her waist.

“When? Amma is always here.”

“Yes, but she’s not in the garden, is she? They can come to the back gate, and we can hide behind the garage and talk.” The plurals had slipped out, but Thara hadn’t noticed. She never seemed to notice.

“But what about the driver?” Thara stood in front of her and jiggled up and down in anxiety. She looked older than Latha right then, her smooth brown skin creased around her mouth and eyes, the eyes full of worry, pleading for help.

“He won’t tell,” Latha said, feeling secure all of a sudden about the driver’s allegiance.

“How do you know?” Thara grabbed Latha’s arms and undid them, holding on.

“I don’t know how I know, but I don’t think he will tell.”

“Amma will kill me if she finds out.”

“I thought you said he was the right kind of boy. Won’t she be glad that you found him by yourself ?” Latha smiled.

Thara hit her playfully on her arm, then squeezed her. Latha grinned.

The next day, Thara rewarded her further with a strip of glittery gold paper from a roll, about three feet long, for which she had traded three felt pens, including red, in school. The paper rustled and glittered in their hands, and the very best part of it was that, when they rubbed it against their bodies, the gold shimmer came off on their skin and lips. Then, when they took orange star toffees and sucked on them until they were all sticky and put that on their mouths, it looked like they had lip gloss on! Fair’s fair, and Latha set about assisting Thara in her quest for privacy with renewed resolve. For a time, between the fake lipstick and the constant scheming required to avoid Mrs. Vithanage, both of them were either blissfully happy or inconsolably miserable. In short, they were in heaven.

But, of course, that spell had to be followed by the biggest change of all, and after that, everything was different: Thara attained age.

For months, it seemed, Thara had talked of nothing else but how many girls in her school were wearing bras.

“We call them holes so the nuns don’t know,” she confided to Latha, sitting on the well and swinging her legs as Latha squatted beside her and scrubbed the clothes with a wedge of hard white Sunlight soap she had hacked off a long bar, peeling the yellow wrapper back so she left the rest unblemished. She didn’t like Sunlight soap. It never washed things properly. She had seen something called Sunflakes in the stores, bright blue packets with pictures of basins full of suds, hanging down the sides of the shops from black ropes. The shopkeepers had told her that they made washing clothes easier; you just had to put a little bit into a big tub and shake the water, they said. But when Latha told Mrs. Vithanage, she had scoffed and refused to buy them. We do things the old way in this house is what she had said, and Latha had felt particularly outraged at the use of the we in that sentence, given that it was only she who did the washing. This was why she had taken to bringing a knife down to the well and making flakes out of the bars, not caring that it would be considered wasteful by Mrs. Vithanage, and rejoicing in the fact that indeed it did make it easier to wash the clothes, so long as she used the hard soap after the first soak.

“Latha! Listen to me instead of staring at those stupid clothes! We call them holes because you can’t see the bra but you can see the little hole-shaped imprint on the back of the uniform where the straps come down.”

Latha bunched the pile of white, box-pleated, sleeveless uniforms she was washing and beat them repeatedly on the flat stone put there for that purpose. She imagined bras inside them. She disentangled one of Mrs. Vithanage’s enormous bras from a soapy pile of underwear and put it underneath a uniform, then held it up. “Like this?”

“Yes! Exactly like that!” They both laughed. “And we know that she has got her period because that’s when you get the bra. First, the girl is gone for seven days from school, then when she comes back she has all new clothes. New uniform, new shoes, new ribbon in her hair, and”—she paused for effect—“the bra.”