Homesick by Roshi Fernando Page A

through the flooding streets, and a schoolboy, clutching his shoes, looked at him as he floated past, and suddenly lunged at him, dragged him into his arms, pulled him up onto a wall and then into a temple flower tree. They sat like monkeys, watching the water flow away. Kumar remembers that the boy woke him and carried him down, carried him in his arms until he found people who knew Kumar’s parents. He remembers the boy’s face, straining, and his white uniform murky and wet. He remembers his mother’s cry and his father wresting him out of the schoolboy’s arms. And how his mother knelt at the boy’s bare feet, touching them with her forehead.
    Jim says, “You nearly drowned? In a monsoon? Can that really happen?”
    Kumar nods up and down: he has learned to nod yes properly.
    •
    It is fifteen years until they find the man who really killed the girls, when he does it again. The DNA is matched, and as easy as a flip of a coin, Kumar is released, through a sliding, rackety gate, into the fast-moving world he cannot comprehend. He has rejected the clothes he came into prison with: they remind him of Shamini and Lolly. Lolly frightens him. She will be twenty-three now, and he worries that he may figure in her nightmares as she figures in his. He wears other people’s hand-me-downs, the clothes of those who never left the prison. And he wears his fluorescent jacket,for that, he thinks, truly belongs to him.He goes to the lodgings he has been directed to, using the change they have given him for the bus fare.
    When he has worked on the roads for a few months, his social worker asks him if he would like to meet some Sri Lankans. He is asked to dinner by the local preacher who translated for him, and that way gets a job in a garage, and then on the trains. Up and down to Hastings, seeing the sea every day, and he is happy.
    One day, Shamini is on the train. He nods to her, and she turns her back to him. He is glad not to speak to her, but it is he who paid for her life in England, he wants to say. When I was twelve, they sold me to a German man for the summer.
    She turns back as if she has heard his thoughts, fumbles in her bag, bringing out her purse.
    “No, no.
Eppa
,” he says—no thanks, in Sinhala, the first Sinhala he has spoken in years.
    But she takes his hand and palms twenty pounds into it, and then she is gone. He looks at the closing door into the wet October evening. He sees only his eyes reflected back at him. He can actually see himself clearly.

Love Me Tender
    P reethi ran down the hill. And once there, she stopped. Across the road were flats: red balconied blocks, compact and sound. They stood in their own land, laid mostly to grass, with squat elm trees lined up like defending soldiers, their branches cut square and short. She crossed the road and looked closer at the trees: their leaves were new and fleshy, the colour luminescently yellow. Preethi looked into the grounds, wondered if the one girl she knew who lived there might be playing outside. Her name was Sofia. She was younger than Preethi but had followed her home last year, shouting names at her, because Preethi had not been with her usual friends. The grounds were empty: she thought of returning home, to the hall with the black and white tiles, the sun shining through the stained glass of the front door, the clock they had inherited from the previous owners ticking its admonishments from the darkly wooded dining room. And then:
    “Oi,” from one of the trees. She leapt back from the metal railings. “Up here.” She turned to leave. “No. In the tree!”
    She swung herself under the railing, smelling the dog wee and the grass, the sourness of the smooth metal on her hands. She wiped them down her orange dress and, looking over her shoulder and to the opposite houses, walkedslowly toward the tree. Her eyes adjusted as she looked up. She recognised the boy: Danny, the mong.
    They called him a mong in school because of his arm. She had never