The Flower Boy by Karen Roberts Read Free Book Online Page A

with egg and then with bread crumbs powdered painstakingly in the huge stone mortar outside, she fried them carefully. Kalu Mahattaya didn’t accept damaged goods. By five o’clock, she would be finished.
    The cutlets would sit in a fragrant golden pile on an old wooden tray, ready to be taken to Kalu Mahattaya’s small tea shop down in the valley. By six, workingmen would start to arrive for their usual breakfast of cutlets, fresh bread and tea before catching the bus or cycling on to their various jobs.
    The smell of cutlets reminded Premawathi even now of waking up in the half light and watching her mother cooking to survive, while her four young brothers and sisters and their father slept, huddled in an assortment of old sheets, blankets and sweaters. Sometimes, she crawled over to the fire, careful to stay out of range of the popping, spluttering oil, and sat there in companionable, half-asleep silence with her mother. Occasionally, she would be given a cutlet that had burst and could not be sent to the tea shop. She would take tiny bites, blowing at it so she wouldn’t burn her tongue, wishing she could have another.
    Her mother wore a look of permanent weariness and hardship. Even the money she earned from making cutlets was never enough, and during the day she wove coconut leaves into sheets of roofing for the mud-walled, thatched houses in the area. Sometimes her fingers bled from the sharp spines of the coconut leaves and although she never complained, her mouth was twisted with bitterness and her eyes had lost their life long ago.
    But even that was not enough to feed five fast-growing, permanently hungry children. Whatever small valuables they had possessed had been sold or pawned, along with the few saris she had been keeping for Premawathi.
    The white missionaries were heaven-sent in more ways than one.
    When they came to the little Deniyaya church, talked about Jesus and urged the poverty-stricken people to send their children to the free convent schools where they would be housed, fed and taught the ways of the Christian God, they needed no second bidding. The white missionaries were a little dazed at the response they got.
    Premawathi was sent to a convent in Colombo, her brothers and sisters to another one in Galle, farther down the coast. Although she had missed her family and her thatched-roof home and the smell of early morning cutlets, she soon adjusted and spent the next ten years learning Christianity and English in the mornings, and sweeping and cleaning the convent in the afternoons and evenings.
    She was allowed to go home once a year for two weeks, and always came back depressed.
    On Sunday mornings, they were taken to worship at St. Michael’s Church, and it was there that she first met Disneris.
    He was the gardener at the church, a handsome, gentle man with a sense of humor. When he began to court Premawathi and she showed interest, the nuns were disappointed. They liked her and had thought she was excellent nun material. But Disneris was a fine upstanding young man and a good Christian, and if she was going to choose man above God, he was at least a good choice.
    They got married and moved into a small room in a boardinghouse in Polwatte.
    When Premawathi became pregnant with their first child, it was obvious that some changes had to be made. Disneris’s meager allowance from the church was hardly enough to feed the two of them. He reluctantly gave up his church job and got another one as a gardener at a British house in Colombo.
    Premawathi was hired as kitchen help and they lived there quite happily for the next seven months. When she was in her eight month of pregnancy, Disneris was told there was no room for a child in the servants’ quarters.
    Although he looked hard, no one wanted to hire a man with a very pregnant wife, no matter how hardworking he appeared to be, so they packed their one battered suitcase and went back to her village in Deniyaya.
    He did odd