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

jobs. She made cutlets.
    Her now old and half-blind mother would wake up in the faint light of dawn and sit by the fire while Premawathi kneaded and mixed and fried.
    The circle was complete.
    When the other two children were born, Disneris left for Colombo to find work and finally got a job. On the fifth day of every month, a money order would arrive for Premawathi—Disneris’s tiny salary minus his own living expenses. Even with the cutlet money, it wasn’t enough. There were times when Premawathi wept herself to sleep, hungry and angry.
    When Chandi was a year old, her well-connected uncle had come to Deniyaya to visit, and told her about the vacancy at Glencairn. Two months later, she left Deniyaya with her children, promising to visit and send money every month, neither of which she had been able to do so far.
    While she desperately missed Disneris’s gentle affection and good humor, she had come to realize that love and laughter could not feed her children. Still, she lived with the hope that one day their fortunes would change and they would be able to live together as a family once more.
    Her masters at Glencairn were good to her. They looked after her and put up with her children and paid her salary on time. At least the children were well fed and educated.
    She had learned from experience to put aside feelings of bitterness and unfairness at their lot, because they only interfered with her work and made her ill-tempered toward her children.
    The nuns in the convent used to say God had a reason for everything He did. Premawathi sometimes wished she knew what it was.
    CHANDI RAN DOWN the path feeling bad that he hadn’t allowed his mother to ruffle his hair as she did every morning before he left for school. He didn’t really like it but she did, so he let her. He called to his sisters to wait for him, but they were late so they only waved and kept going.
    He wished he didn’t have to go to school. He didn’t like waking up early, washing in the freezing well water and putting on his school shorts and shirt, which both scratched from the rice-water starch his mother washed them in. She ironed them every night, and every morning he had to fight to get into them; they felt like paper bags that had been stuck together.
    He didn’t like his teacher. Leela and Rangi had a lady teacher who wore colorful saris and flowers in her hair. She was pretty, young and fun.
    Chandi’s teacher looked like Appuhamy, old and faded like the sepia photographs his mother kept inside her battered Bible.
    He skipped along, by now having given up all hope of catching up. Ahead, he saw Rangi pause to pick some marigolds to give her teacher. The teacher would probably put them in a jam bottle on her table and be extra nice to Rangi for the rest of the day. Chandi couldn’t even think of giving his teacher flowers.
    He could see the low brown school building. There were just four classes, of different age groups. The school only taught children up to grade eight. After that, parents who wanted their children to continue their education sent them to the Nuwara Eliya Maha Vidyalaya in town. Not many did, though.
    The girls stayed home to help their mothers and the boys went out to work. Education wasn’t as important as survival.
    When Chandi reached his classroom, he found that although the children were there, Teacher had not yet arrived. He spotted his friend Sunil sitting a few desks away. They usually sat next to each other, but Chandi was late and the best desks in the front were already taken.
    A shadow fell across the doorless entrance, and the chatter ceased as a cadaverous gray-haired man in a rumpled national costume walked in, filling his sunken cheeks with air and blowing it out through pursed lips as was his habit. The children took care not to stand too close to him, because the air he blew out usually stank of last night’s illicit kassippu.
    He was simply called Teacher. They