Chapters (30)
She wasn’t stealing the babies’ air. Perhaps she was breathing too much around them. She tried to take short, shallow breaths.
‘Nala, what are you doing? If you’re going to behave like a monkey then could you please go outside.’ Usually Amma didn’t let her play outside in the afternoon sun. It made her skin darker, and Nala had beautiful fair skin. Not as fair as the babies, but still fairer than her younger sister’s.
She left the room and found the new servant girl. Nala had already forgotten her name but the young woman was happy being called Ayah. She sat on the kitchen floor, deftly peeling the violet skin from small bulbs of onion. She couldn’t cross her legs properly underneath her, they were bowed like the arches of the Pillayar temple.
‘My bones are bent but my teeth are straight,’ she had explained when she first moved in.
From time to time she adjusted her body and sat on her haunches, throwing the cleaned onions into the small hammock her lungi skirt made between her knees. She changed her position back and forth, but she never dropped an onion or lost the rhythm of her work.
‘Sit, Nala bubba,’ she said in Sinhalese, motioning to the low stool next to her.
‘I’m not a baby. I’m nine years old,’ Nala replied, perching herself on the wooden seat. It was smooth and heavy. On one end was a small, serrated blade, shaped like a peacock’s tail. Every morning Ayah straddled the seat and held the half-moon of a young coconut on the blade. She would briskly scrape out the milky flesh for the chilli sambal they ate with breakfast. Ayah had wrapped an old sarong around the blade.
‘Don’t touch,’ she warned Nala.
‘I know, I’m not allowed to touch anything,’ the little girl complained.
‘Have they named the babies yet?’ Ayah asked, switching to English as she shelled the last onion.
‘Nakula and Sahadeva,’ Nala replied. ‘They’re named after the twin brothers in the Mahabharata—the youngest Pandavas. Do you know the story?’
Ayah shook her head and Nala summarised for her: ‘Five Pandava brothers fought against their one hundred Kaurava cousins, and won. It was an ancient battle but I’m not sure it really happened. I think Archi might be exaggerating.’
Ayah laughed, revealing her full set of straight but discoloured teeth. She pulled a piece of betel leaf from her sari blouse. ‘We have stories like that too, in the Mahavamsa. Men fight and people die.’ She chewed hard on the leaf, the red pulp muffling her voice. ‘We’re supposed to learn something from the stories but I can never remember what.’ She stood up, carrying the onions to the table protectively in her lungi.
‘Me neither,’ Nala said. The twin brothers in the Mahabharata were boring. That was all she could remember about Nakula and Sahadeva.