A Disobedient Girl by Ru Freeman Page B

for having recovered had passed. She looked searchingly at Leela, who was full of grace in a virginal sort of way: clear-skinned, tender, and quietly resigned. Certainly not the kind of girl Latha could picture traveling anywhere by herself.
    “I was. They put me on a train, and I sat on my suitcase between the compartments by the door, because it was very crowded and I was nauseous and needed fresh air. But somewhere near Gampola, I made my way into a third-class carriage, and there I met a woman who gave me a seat. She was the kind of woman everybody wants to be good to, you know, right? The kind even rowdy teenagers on the street corners call ammé? She called me duwa. That made me feel as though things would turn out all right, and they did.”
    “That’s nice,” Latha said. “I remember going on a train once when I was a child.”
    “Where did you go,” Leela asked, smiling a little, “when you were a child?”
    “I think I went to the hill country. It was like this.” Latha lookedout of the window to confirm this assertion, then nodded at Leela. “That’s why I don’t mind it too much here.”
    “Why didn’t you stay?”
    “In the hills? I couldn’t stay by myself, could I? The Vithanages brought me, and we went to those gardens with the big roses in all colors. The whole garden smelled wonderful then. I had never seen so many flowers in one place, not even on calendar pictures. I had one picture that came close, but they were tulips from a place called Holland, abroad-flowers, not from our country.”
    She tried to like those flowers again, the way they had dug themselves a little hole under her skin and made her yearn for their scent as a child, the way she had stolen those bars of soap just to bury her face in them again. She tried, but she couldn’t. Roses now reminded her of her body, the way it had been used and twisted and turned inside out and abandoned afterward; they smelled of the bile she had emptied along the paths planted with the thorny bushes at the convent.
    “What are you thinking about?” Leela asked.
    “Nothing,” Latha said and sighed. She looked up at Leela and wished she could add something more to her story, now that her up-country trip had petered out into a mere visit, and one leached of its magic. “Can you get me more tea?” she asked. More tea was also a perk of ailing, and Latha felt as though she was ailing right then, and honestly this time. But Leela didn’t get up.
    “How old are you?” she asked.
    “Seventeen I think.”
    “You don’t look seventeen. You look younger; fifteen maybe.”
    “No, I’m definitely seventeen,” Latha said, using her pursed mouth as added evidence of maturity.
    “How would you know?” Leela asked, swirling the tea in her cup, round and round and round like she was agitated.
    “I counted,” Latha said, majestically.
    “From when?”
    “I counted my birthdays.”
    “Birthdays?” Leela asked, real awe in her voice. “Did your family celebrate your birthdays?”
    “No,” Latha said, thoughtfully, “but I did. I didn’t know when I was born, so I just picked a date. I chose the first of May because the school principal told us that it was the most important day of the year and he was right because it was always a holiday and we sometimes watched the JVP parades with all the red flags, because that one almost always went by our house, but when I was bigger they stopped marching in the parades and so I changed it to the first of July because I read that the princess of England, Diana, was born on that date, and I felt that suited me better because she used to be poor before she became a princess. And Thara agreed too, and she gave me old things wrapped in newspaper sometimes. Her old books and pictures torn from magazines that I would like, pictures of food, mostly, but sometimes clothes and even houses in foreign countries with big gardens full of hedges and berries and even snow!” Latha warmed to her topic and