Останься, дочь / Stay, Daughter

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“As though the sun could have shone on my behind or anywhere else in that dark corner of the floor where I slept!” Wappah scoffed. “But I didn’t say that to my mother. Would have got a good slap on my face if I had.”

“That’s right,” Marmee lowered her voice. “In those days, he was not a periyal, a boss. He had to listen to us. We told him what to eat and when to go to sleep and made him take his baths. And that… Subhanallah!” My aunt shook her head and raised her eyes and hands upwards.

Wappah, Marmee said, would run all over the house and garden to escape a bath at the backyard well. He crept under coconut fronds, squeezed his scrawny frame behind the outhouse, climbed into empty gunnysacks. His mother always found him. Her hand curled tight around his bony wrist, she would drag him across the yard, over drying jak leaves, goat droppings and chicken feathers, and set him down on a slimy patch of ground by the dugout well where his sister waited – a bucket of water drawn and ready.

When the first chilly cascade landed on his head, he sputtered and hopped from foot to foot. His teeth chattered. He snorted water out of his nose and shook it out of his ears. Before he could catch his breath, another torrent of cold water hit his shoulders. Then, another and another.

“Scrub all the dirt out, or he will get sores again!” Wappumma shouted from across the yard where she squatted over an open hearth, making breakfast.

Marmee would wedge a sliver of yellow soap into a piece of coconut husk and scrub: neck and back, arms and shoulders, down the legs and the spaces between the toes.

When the next bucket of water landed, it fell on skin scraped red. Her brother screamed.

“When Thambi got his first job,” Marmee smiled, “he started to take good baths on his own. He knew he had to look good to work in a place like the Galle Fort.”

A relative who knew of Wappumma’s descent into poverty had secured for her young son a job as apprentice to a jeweler in the Galle Fort, a fortress in the southwest corner of Ceylon.

This had been the military stronghold of European colonizers for many centuries. Built by the Portuguese in 1588, some decades later, it was wrested away by an invading Dutch army. Finally, in 1796, it came into the possession of the British, the last of the Westerners to rule the island. By the early twentieth century, when my father was a boy, the Fort was no longer an army garrison.