I can tell from the way his mouth caves in just a little that he doesn’t have all his teeth. His gray sarong is tucked carefully between his legs, and he wears tennis shoes with no socks. The stripes on his green, long–sleeved shirt are faded; he has wrapped a woolly length of brown cloth around his neck. I stand for a long time, staring at him, lost in the memory of my own father. A similar man but cleaner, distinguished in his own fashion, particularly when my mother was alive.

People always told me what a decent family we were, how my mother must have good blood, because she was quiet. She had the qualities that she her apart in our village: the pastel–colored osariya she put on every morning as soon as she rose, the pleats and fall neat, her unhurried walk, her soft voice, the way she knew how to be present and absent in the same moment. On the rare occasions when one of my father’s friends visited, my mother cooked simple but well–balanced meals, served them unobtrusively, and attended to their conversations, but never participated, not that I can recall. And yet, she made all the decisions. My father gave her his earnings to spend as she thought best; he asked her for money when he wanted it. Sometimes she would persuade him that he did not need what he said he did. And he would cajole and she would remain firm but there were no arguments. What my mother said was respected. I assumed that was what marriage was, providing and obedience on the part of the husband, good conduct and power on the part of the wife.

Was that what my mother wanted from her life? I wonder now. She had not married within he caste, or among her people, but she had always seemed content, almost wilfully so. She was gracious, and did what was right. Was that her choice or her upbringing or her circumastance? I had never asked her these questions, if her life was unfolding as she had imagined it would, if what was, was as her own mother may have imagined for her. I had simply assumed that all was as it should have been, with myself in the center of her life, my father’s life, I their sole delight, their sole hope. How easily I had stepped away from the path that my mother had walked. How swiftly I had turned from that model of duty to desire, from caring about others to caring for myself. Would she have approved?

I wipe my eyes. I hadn’t thought about my mother’s quiet admonishments, her expectations of me, to be good, to do right, to live without shame, for a long time. I had taught myself to stand alone after she died, and continued to live that way after I was disabused of my childhood ideas of matrimony. And now, here she is on my mind, carried to me on the wings of my memory of my father. I realize that my journey up–country is a journey toward her, toward whatever grace she hailed from, a hope held tight to my chest that in these cold mountains there will be some refuge for me.

A child brushes past me in the narrow corridor, and I remember why I am here. The vendor has some kind of bread–roll sandwiches in his basin and a small pile of hard issa vadai. A few flies have found their way under the plastic covering. I tap the basket to get rid of them, and he is startled awake.

“Madam…,” he says.

It’s the first time I have been addressed this way. Even the school–teachers never called me that. They never called me anything but Mrs. Not even a real name after that. Just Mrs. I smile at him.

“I was wondering if you were still selling these,” I say, pointing to his basket. Two flies have returned, and he shoos them away with exasperation and a click of his tongue, as if this were unheard of: flies on a train! On unsealed food, no less! I want to laugh, so I just tuck my upper lip in and wait. He looks up and sees my expression.

“Yes, these flies. They get in everything, madam, no matter how hard I try! Even up–country. In Colombo you can expect such things, but here?” And he pulls down the corners of his mouth and looks disappointedly out the window. I follow his gaze. It is true. There is something about beautiful places like this where ordinary displeasures have no place. On shouldn’t. Ordinary things, like flies, and hunger, certainly not murder; some perpetual serenity ought to attend.

I nod in agreement. “Eka thamai…,” I say, and he smiles.

“How many do you want, madam?” he asks, recalling me to the task. “These egg ones are twenty–five cents. They have green chillies. If you like I can give you plain ones with no chillies for twenty cents. I also have sambol ones; those are only ten cents.”

“Three… four,” I say, feeling hungry now. Hungry and determinedly alive. “The egg ones.”

He shakes his head sideways at me. “One rupee then, madam.” He wraps them in newspaper and gives them to me. I thank him and am already three steps away when he starts talking again.

“It’s a terrible thing that happened, isn’t it?” he says behind me, and I stop and turn to face him. “Did you hear, madam? About the accident? Whole family.” He clucks his tongue, slack lips reaching down on either side. “Apparently the woman was having an affair with her husband’s brother. Their uncle. Can you imagine? When the husband confronted her, she poisoned him and the children. They say she tied them all to the train tracks. At the last minute, must have felt bad, she flung herself under the train!”

And he spits in disgust. It is as if he is spitting at me.

I feel it evaporate, that comparison I had made so recently between this man and my father, my honourable father, who loved his wife and cared for his daughter and did the best he could. “Did you see them?” I ask.

“No, no, what to see? But I heard them talking. They said that’s what the conductor told them when they asked.”

“I saw them,” I say, and my voice has recovered its former strength. “She was tied to the track along with the children. He had put poison in their drinks. He had taken their shoes off. He had tied his wife and children to the tracks. They were split open. It is he who did it. He killed them. She was just a young girl. They were little children.”

He stares at me, confused by the anger that rises from my body, but he says something else, something unconnected to his lies. “Madam saw? Madam went to see the accident?”

“A mother would never do such a thing to her children.”

“They let you see the bodies?”

His words have made me so angry that my hands are shaking. I put the parcel of buns back in his basket and I walk away. I don’t need his poisonous food. Better that my children starve than that they eat the food of a fool, an ignorant, stupid man who will believe the worst a person can say about a woman they don’t know.

When I reach our compartment, the children look up at me, eyes expectant. I shrug my shoulders and feel a keen twinge in my heart at their crestfallen faces. Still, I won’t go back. Not even for my precious rupee. They leave me alone, the children, sensing my distress, and again I feel that prick inside me, for all the times they had to practice this art of becoming invisible because of my husband, because of me. I make an attempt to reach out of them, stroking their heads one by one, but they are unmoved. They glance back but turn just as swiftly to their own conversations, the sights outside the window, the hunger in their bellies reminding them to leave me behind and alone. I take a sip of the little thambili we have left and imagine what stories are being told of me in the village.

Everybody knew, of course. I wasn’t the only woman there who had a lover, but I was the first who didn’t care what people said, who didn’t try to hide how I felt. I walked just as straight as I ever did, and I went to every public gathering that was held. To school, to meet the teachers, to market, to the well, to temple, and to observe Sil, to the Avurudhu festivals and to the weddings and funerals that took place during that year. I met Siri’s eyes in the presence of other people; I smiled at him. When my husband was at sea, we even stood together as though we were the real family. They didn’t like that, those women, but they admired me for doing it, even wanted to be friends with me, letting the power I so clearly felt creep into their bones too. The people who hated me for it were the men. No wonder they goaded my husband the way they did. They didn’t want me to contaminate their women, that’s what they said. Those men wanted lovers to remain sordid, affairs to be conducted underground, like their own with women at brothels and taverns and with the wives of their friends.

They called me a slut in my hearing. They muttered vile epithets under their breath when I walked by. They even tried to keep their children from mine. But I was too full of the beauty of what I loved for the children to stay away; they were perpetually in my house. They came with their mothers. What could those men do but try to end it all? And still, it was I who won. My round belly and lifted chin, the lack of any traces of sadness on my face even after all that blood and mayhem, and later the baby herself, so perfect, so innocent, so beautiful, these were my weapons. And while I wielded those weapons, I robbed them of their filthy words.

I wonder what they call me now. The usual slurs, but what more? The conductor had done so much damage to that woman in a matter of minutes. What other despicable history have they constructed about me in these past two days? I try to imagine it, but I cannot conceive of my life as anything less than it has been.

And here’s the vendor before me as if in answer to my dilemma. “Samawenna, madam,” he says, bending from his upper shoulders, his hunch accentuating the apology. “I’m an old man. I believe what people tell me.” He holds out the package of food to me. “Here, your children must be hungry. It’s close to eleven now.”

He has left his basket unattended to look for me, and that touches my heart. The children look from his face to mine, waiting for permission.

I nod.

Latha

For months after that fight, Thara did nothing but eat, Christmas and New Year and then the Sinhala NewYear coming and going in a blur of food, food, and more food. She was constantly hungry. She ate mountains of string hoppers from the carryout join on Jawatte, sending the driver out for three bundles all for herself. Every morning Latha had to boil eggs and make white curry and sambol for her strings. She ate fruits and Chicken in a Biskit from the boxes that had been bought for Madhavi as snacks and huge piles of rice and curries for lunch. In the evening the houseboy had to go and buy the vegetable roti hot–hot from the saiwar kade all the way near the cricket grounds so she could have them with tea. She demanded steamed bread every night for dinner, still warm from the bakery, and devoured at least half a loaf at each sitting. She did not serve Gehan, nor did she wait for him. She ate alone. And in that time, her voluptuous curves turned into matronly spreads.

Latha, the guilt of those unpinned belly wraps still prickling her conscience, felt duty bound to stop Thara’s descent. Not only that, she had her own guilt to nurse. On the one hand, she felt vindicated by Thara’s defense of her, of Gehan having clearly lost the battle to evict her from their home. That served him right, she thought, because in all his dealings with her, he had not given her any indication, not once, that he remembered their past. It served him right, then, to know that Thara cared more about her than she did about his feelings or the visits of his mother. On the other hand, she felt it only right that she repay. Thara with some tangible gift, something to replace the regard she had lost from her husband at least in part on her, Latha’s, account.

But in the end, she had to postpone her intervention because not long after the New Year, an opposition political leader, a relative of the Vithanages, was murdered at a rally and even Thara was moved to action and went to protest and mourn and came back haggard and shocked after the funeral procession, in which she was participating, was teargassed by the police. That meant that Latha had to spend days listening to her, comforting her, and agreeing with her that the whole country was a disaster because of the corrupt president and finding creative ways not to agree with her that the reason for his corruption was his fisher caste. Mercifully, he was killed too, just a week later, because by that time Latha had no more excuses left and felt that soon she would have to say yes, yes, his caste was the reason for his deviant and morally repugnant behaviour, and she didn’t want to do that. And although that second period of bedlam also had the effect of giving Thara reason to fret and fume, at the very least she seemed to gather in strength every time she could say, “Bloody low-caste bastard, he had it coming,” which she did quite regularly, particularly when Gehan was within earshot. And by the time things had died down and even Thara had stopped passing on all the ugly rumors and crude remarks about the dead man to her friends on the telephone and Gehan seemed no longer to care what she said about any caste at all, Latha was glad to be able to offer Thara something more uplifting than the timely death of her love-to-hate president.