Free A Disobedient Girl by Ru Freeman Page B

spices—but I have learned to love them this way. Siri taught me, laughing at my high-caste ways and coming at me with pieces of pineapple clenched between his teeth, offering a new savor and himself too. Pineapples with salt and chili, they are the taste of memory and happiness and now, perhaps, also the taste of ourfuture. I unwrap the end of my sari again, but my son beats me to it. How did he get money?
    “I took it from him while Thāththa was still asleep,” he says, his eyes nasty again, and I am sorry I asked. Well, what is to be done? A last transgression can be forgiven, after all. Soon he will be in a clean place, cool and fresh and healthy from the inside all the way out.
    I have already asked him twice to get down and check the name written on the side of the train:—Udarata Menike—even though I know we are on the right train. I had asked a stationmaster to point it out to us after we got down from the Matara–Colombo train along with everybody else, and the stationmaster, perhaps recognizing that I had not traveled much, or maybe seeing how distressed I was by the number of policemen on guard along the platforms, had walked us over to this train and waited until we climbed aboard. Yes, Loku Putha has told me, both times, this is our train, the Up-Country Lady. Already we have sat here for so long now, through lunch, when I bought a packet of cream crackers for them to eat, and afternoon tea, which I bought for them from a young boy who poured the dark, sweet water into smoky glasses from a simple tin kettle, that I feel nervous. As if he might have time to follow us, or that I might have forgotten how to be cautious and let a stranger persuade me to climb aboard the wrong train.
    “Check again, Loku Putha,” I say. “Please, one last time? I won’t ask again.”
    He climbs down for a third time and chants the name of the train, slapping each carriage on its side as he walks, up and down the length of it: “Udarata Menike! This is our train! Udarata Menike! This is our train! Udarata Menike!” The people around us stir and peer out of the windows on the platform side, laughing, pointing at him, happy to find a way to keep their own children amused.
    “Aiyya shouldn’t be out there. People are laughing at him,” Loku Duwa says.
    “I like when Aiyya sings,” Chooti Duwa says, slapping the windowpane in time to the rhythm of her brother’s song.
    I see a policeman accost him when my son reaches the front of the train. I don’t know what he tells him, but my boy stops singingand comes back to us, walking quickly as if he regrets having wandered so far.
    “What did the rālahamy say?” I ask, anxious.
    Loku Putha shrugs. “Nothing. He just told me not to loiter on the platform.”
    I don’t believe him, because he looks scared. I despise the police, for the way they stoke the fears that people have of the prospect of tragedy, for the way they always seem to collude with the worst elements of our government, for the way they disregard the murders of some people, allow thuggery to go unpunished. For letting my husband live. I try to get my son to tell me if the policeman threatened him or in some other way made him feel unsafe, but he shakes his head repeatedly.
    After that bit of excitement, I put my head out of the window only to hail a man selling thambili so we can refill our bottles. It is so hot that even the one he cuts and pierces for us is warm. After I have drained the water into our bottles, the man splits the king coconut in half and we use the scoop he fashions for us from the husk to scrape out the soft flesh. That at least is sweet and filling, and the children are happy, so I try not to worry about the germs that are probably getting into their bodies, or to berate myself for not having thought to bring a spoon along for this purpose. I hope that the goodness of the thambili itself will keep them from falling sick on our journey.
    The wait is impossibly long for those of us who