Amba Yahaluwo

At first, they came for the mangoes. It was April and the boughs of the tree were bowed down with the weight of the fattened fruits. If she hurried home from school, she could be in time to watch—the way they would sling their school bags over the low wall, then haul themselves up after, landing with a soft thud and whispered chuckles. 

The girl watched the way they would stuff fistfuls of mangoes in their pockets, in their bags, the abandon with which they tore into the bruised fruit on the ground. After a while Abdul would realize what was happening and would run out into the garden shrieking helplessly— but by then they had already left, scampering over the wall as quickly as they came in. Later, the girl’s father would come home and would see the naked branches of his mango tree and turn to Abdul, who could only wring his hands. This was how it began: with ripened mangoes, with a rumour that the gardener was slow and the master of the house was a lawyer that only came home in the evenings, and when the boys from the St Joseph’s down the street had already gotten what they had come for. 

*** 

There were rules to this, the girl knew. She had gotten her first blood the year before. Her mother and her aunts had stripped her naked in the shade of the jacaranda tree, and bathed her in cold spring water mixed with jasmine and kohomba leaves. The flowers to make her skin soft and scented. The kohomba to make her hair long and thick. The water to make her clean.

She blinked away the water as her aunts bathed her. They beamed at her, as if seeing her for the first time. Welcome, they told her. You are a woman now. 

The girl was excited by this new becoming. She had seen her aunts laugh in hushed tones in the kitchen while their husbands drank their coffee on the verandah. She was ready to be one of them, to laugh like them, to know the secret things only women knew. 

She had learned the rules the hard way. That summer, she was sitting with Abdul in the garden while he cleared the dead branches of the coconut trees. Grass stuck to her damp knees. She was making necklaces out of papaya stems, twisting them until they fit a shape she was happy with. With every finished necklace, she’d run up to Abdul and pull on his shirt until he looked down at her, and laughed in his big, open mouthed way, the gaps in his teeth showing. He would whoop and lift her in the air, spinning them both round and round, both of them laughing, the world a blurry green circle around her. 

She was drawn back to earth by the sharp edge of her mother’s voice. She marched into the garden and pulled her into the house, her grip tight on the girl’s arm. Inside, she bent down to face the girl, and her face was pinched in anger, and something else, a wild, helpless fear the girl would only understand much later. 

You’re not a child anymore, her mother hissed. You have to behave with some lajja bhaya. The word was drilled into her, over and over again. Lajja bhaya — “shame and fear.” Good girls behaved with shame and fear. Of what exactly, she didn’t know yet—but she guessed it had something to do with the way she laughed too loudly and ran too fast in the mud with Abdul, their arms and legs splattered with dirt; or the way she watched the boys from St. Joseph’s break into the garden with their shirts clinging to the roped muscles of their backs, a quiet, inchoate hunger gnawing at the deepest parts of her.

*** 

Of all the boys from St Joseph’s, the girl had chosen him. He seemed different to the rest—there was a slow ease in the way he tugged on the heavy branches of her father’s mango tree, the way the globed fruits tumbled into his outstretched hands like an inevitability. She liked the way his curly hair was longer than it should be, how it fell into his long lashes, requiring him to purse his lips and blow upwards to get his hair out of his eyes. There was a gentleness to the way he ate his fruit, not in greedy grabbing bites like his friends. And later, when Abdul came running out, she liked that he didn’t mock him like the other boys. In her mind she called him Madhavan, like the actor in the Tamil films her mother watched. 

She watched him only from the safety of her bedroom—but she knew it was only a matter of time before one of the boys spotted her. She was afraid of the day they’d see her, afraid they’d laugh at her like they did Abdul. Stupid little girl, ugly little thing, what are you looking at, ugly girl, she was afraid they’d say. 

But she wasn’t ready to stop watching yet. She wasn’t ready to stop looking at Madhavan, to watch the mango juice drip down his chin, staining the white collar of his school uniform, twisting her stomach into a shape she had no name for. 

*** 

Abdul never had any answers for her father when he asked about the mango trees. Every day after work he would slam the door of his shiny black Volvo and Abdul would flinch at the noise, would know that the yelling would start and once again her father would storm into the house, rolling his eyes at the bloody idiot thambi his father-in-law had made him hire.

Abdul had come from the same village as her mother. He told the girl stories of their childhood: how he had grown up with her mother; how they had jumped, screaming, into the ice cold rivers by her ancestral home; how they had played cricket barefoot in mud-soaked paddyfields; how he rode his bike faster than anyone else, the wind singing in his hair as he careened past the sharp shoulders of the mountain roads, his laugh carried high into the clouds even as he crashed right into a passing lorry and was knocked on to the unforgiving tarmac and was never the same since. 

The girl only knew him as a man her mother’s age. She could not picture Abdul as a boy, could not imagine who he was before his accident, what he might have wanted. She knew him only as their gardener, as the man who watered their plants, stooped and slowly, his thin brown fingers delicately brushing the dew off each silken petal when he was done. 

He broke flower pots often, as if he was unsure of how much he could hold. She watched him once, peering down forlornly at the bougainvillea bleeding out of a broken pot at his feet. She felt a ribbon of contempt for him in these moments. She knew her father did not allow Abdul inside their house, and so when he waved at her sometimes from his exile in the garage, pointing excitedly at a butterfly or a yellow-tailed oriole that had come to visit, she turned away, pretending she did not see him. 

She knew there were rules to this too. That she was inside, and he was outside. That his name was Abdul, and that sometimes he wore a strange hat on his head and waited patiently by their gate on Fridays for their neighbour to pick him up on the way to the mosque. That sometimes when her father brought home appam and babath curry from the Battaramulla junction, he pretended to plop the appam on her head in a way that looked a lot like Abdul’s hat, that her father bowed to her solemnly and said Salaam Al’aikum thangachi and that once Abdul saw them like that and clapped with glee, and something inside her curdled because she knew that he did not understand. 

*** 

The boy she called Madhavan came back every evening that April with his friends. When there were no more mangoes to eat, they turned their attention to the other bounties her father’s garden yielded. They grabbed at the guavas that Abdul so carefully tended, and tore through her mother’s beloved jasmine plants. As Abdul ran after them, they leapt, lightning quick, from tree branches to the wall, to the safety of the street on the other side, like the langurs that trundled across their roof in the monsoon months. 

They had seen her by then too. They looked up at her window and leered at her, sticking their tongues out and making rude signs. They were from the high school and wore long white pants, and not the blue school shorts that the boys her age wore. She thought they were too old to be acting so foolishly, and turned away from the window when they hooted at her, her heart heavy in knowing that maybe Madhavan was laughing at her too. 

She knew she should avoid the boys, but when they cried up at her window, she couldn’t help but steal a glance at them. Sometimes, some of them would be loitering at the gates outside her school, waiting to collect little brothers or sisters who would have to be herded home safely. Sometimes, Madhavan would be with them, his legs long and crossed in front of him, a cigarette dangling off his lips. 

He smiled at some of the other girls sometimes as they giggled and whispered around him, and she basked in his light and pretended he was smiling at her. Sometimes, if she stared at him too long, one of his friends would notice and elbow him in the ribs. He’d laugh with them and wink at her and she felt herself glow when their eyes met. 

On days when the summer heat grew too much to bear, the boys would throw water on each other, and run after the girl and her friends, hooting and hollering, chasing them with open bottles and threats of dousing them with the sun-warmed water. If they caught one of the younger children, they grabbed them by the collar and spilled an entire bottle’s worth of water down their shirts, until the victim was soaked through, their school shirt plastered to their skin. 

There were days when the girl ran slowly, feeling both terror and excitement at what would happen if she got caught. The boys ignored her for the most part, focusing more on the light-skinned girls from the year above her, the ones who squealed and laughed and ran right into their arms. But when they were bored and had run out of targets, they would narrow their eyes and zero in on her, calling her the lawyer baba and asking after Abdul; her amba yahaluwo, her faithful friend, they called him, sneering. 

On days when Madhavan joined them in teasing her, she held onto the memory of what his hands on her skin felt like. The boys liked to play Chinese burns, twisting her arm with vicious, gleeful laughs. When she yelped and jumped away, they’d snicker and pull at her hair, and on some days, there would be the undercurrent of something darker and untamed that flickered at the edges of their laughing, and on those days, the girl knew to pull away abruptly and run home as fast as she could, not daring to look back. 

And at night, she lay in bed and thought about Madhavan’s golden skin, so different to the dark, nut-brown colour of hers. She tried to blink away the way he grinned as he hurt her. She wondered what would happen if he saw her lower lip tremble, the way he made her eyes swell up with tears. She imagined his face crinkle in worry, how he might drop everything and cup her face gently in his hands, how he might beg for her forgiveness, how delicious his remorse might be, how warm the heat of his attention, fixed only on her. She imagined how he might bring her a popsicle to eat after school, how her friends would hoot and jeer and secretly seethe with envy as they saw her sitting behind him on his bicycle, her arms wrapped tightly around his waist. She wondered what it might be like to kiss him, both of their lips red and sweet and sticky from their popsicles, whether their noses would bump into each other, if he would stroke her hair gently, the way she saw lovers in films do. She thought about him and pressed her legs together and felt like she was being lit up from the inside. Then she remembered her mother’s words, and knew that this was what she was meant to be afraid of, that the sweet-hot ache she felt for Madhavan had a name, and it was called shame. 

*** 

The first time the girl broke the rules, she was eight, and remembered sitting next to Abdul in the back of her father’s car. It was Vesak and they were taking a trip into the city to see the candle-lit lanterns that dotted every street in Colombo, the entire city aglow for a month. 

They were stuck in traffic and the girl was becoming impatient. Her skin was damp and the stilted evening air was making her hair stick to the back of her neck. To distract her, Abdul made animal shapes with his hands and pointed to the shadows they made on the car seat in front of them. The girl made a wolf. It crept up to his rabbit and lunged. The rabbit flailed and struggled and died a slow and drawn out death. The girl cooed out loud in victory.

Abdul tickled her ribs. The girl squealed and fell back on to him. The girl’s father looked at them in the rearview mirror and smiled. His daughter was the light of his life, and he loved seeing the bright glimmer of her laugh. The girl’s mother was less certain. She glanced back in worry. Before she was a mother, she too was a girl and she knew the trouble that follows a girl-child’s body. 

But the girl was just finding out how her body is different from other bodies. The girl leaned back on Abdul’s lap, and felt a not-hard, not-soft knob under her. She wriggled on it— part of her knew, even then, that this was somehow wrong, without quite knowing why. 

Abdul tensed, and pushed her off gently. Wordlessly, he moved away from her in the car, and the girl knew then that she had crossed a line. She knew this had something to do with the way her mother would not let her go near Abdul’s room by the garage after dark, the way her mother insisted that she sat with her legs crossed when there were men in the house. She felt something flutter in her throat, like a bird was trapped in her windpipes, making it hard for her to breathe. 

*** 

By the time it all happened, the monsoons had come and the mango tree had been stripped bare. Later, when the girl looks back at her eleventh year, she will remember the way the skies opened up to make room for the thunderous rain. She will remember the way her mother’s arm shook as she parted the girl’s hair and found the purpled bruises marking the soft fat of her neck; the thin wire of her father’s mouth, trembling as he looked down at his only daughter, at the small form of her still-child body. She will remember the way the fear leapt into her, so choked by shame that she could not speak, how she panicked and pointed at the shadowy form in the garage, where Abdul, shaken by the shouting inside, was hunched on the floor, rocking back and forth; the way her father’s face crumpled; the way he threw open the doors, and raged into the garage; the way her father grabbed him by the throat, Abdul’s eyes big and wide and uncomprehending; and always, always she will remember the rusted smell of blood in the air and the sharp, distinct crack of bone as her father slammed Abdul’s limp, helpless body into the wall over and over and over again. 

And after that night, after Abdul was sent away and her mother wept herself to sleep and her father stayed up all night with a glass of whiskey in his hand, her parents would speak to her too brightly. Her mother took to cooking elaborate meals that no one would eat. Her father would make a point of leaning over the table to ask her in detail about her day, and she would respond blandly, and none of them knew how to give the others what they really needed. 

She could not tell them that she had started running home from school, pumping her small legs as fast as they could take her, breathing so hard her lungs felt raw. She could not tell them that every time she passed Abdul’s empty room, she felt the urge to scratch at herself until her skin mirrored the red, raw, ugliness that heaved inside of her. 

She could not tell them that Madhavan’s hand felt warm and soft in hers, until it wasn’t. She could not tell them how so much could happen in the shade of an ambarella tree; how fear tasted metallic; how a playful fight could turn into so much more; how strange hands pulled at her waist; how strong they were, all these boys who were not yet men, but knew by then the ways of men, the way that she knew too late what all women do—that there is a softness to her body like the fast-yielding flesh of a ripened mango, that it only takes one prodding finger to shove past its firm skin, to strike through the warm, yellowed fruit and get to the hard pit inside.

When the girl looks back at her eleventh year, she will remember the uncertainty with which her parents trod around her. She will remember dreams that felt so real that she woke up sweating. She will remember the way her house felt empty, far too big for the three of them. And as an adult, often, she would remember the sharp silence of that night. How, long after her parents had insisted on putting her to bed, long after her mother’s sobbing quietened, long after Abdul’s splintered screams stopped ringing in her ears, she sat in the dark for hours, alone on the island of her bed. 

She had almost drifted into sleep when she heard the bright, insistent chirp of an oriole outside her window. Only palm-sized, it perched on a tree branch, head cocked, eyes bright and glossy. She watched as it prepared its small body for flight, and then, faster than she thought was possible, it launched itself into the arms of the night—a tiny streak of startling yellow: brilliant, and brief, and gone.