The Rice Mother

  My father turned around to look at us, but he didn’t wave. There was no emotion on his face. He was still too dazed.

  They drove into the night for about forty-five minutes. The truck driver seated opposite Father began to sob, and my father, who was wearing only a white singlet and his pajama bottoms, began to shiver in the open-top truck. Eventually they were driven into a rubber plantation, up to an elegant, colonial-style stone house. In the moonlight, the unlit house was silver and ghostly. From the one open window on the first floor, through billowing white curtains, floated hauntingly beautiful classical music.

  They pushed him at sword point down some stairs into an underground chamber. Water dripped from the ceiling and ran down the dungeon walls. When his hand brushed against the walls, they were velvety with green moss. The corridors echoed harshly with their footsteps and their breathing. The prisoners stumbled down a long corridor and were pushed into tiny cells. The door shut with a clang behind my father. Without the dull yellow light from his captor’s lantern, the room plunged him into clouds of black ink. Two pinpoints of orange appeared on his eyelids. There was no relief in the sound of heavy boots receding. It was cold and damp in the room, and he shivered and listened. Boots approaching. Rhythmic and hard. They passed. A dog barked outside. From somewhere nearby, water dripping.

  My father felt his way around the room on his hands and knees. The walls were rough-hewn and crumbling and the floor solid stone. The room was bare, save for him and a sudden scuttling movement. He pushed himself quickly into a corner, and with his back pressed into the wall, he stared terrified into the blackness. It was a rat. He heard its claws clicking on the cold cement. A small sound. The hairs at the back of his neck rose. He hated rats. He could stand snakes, tolerate spiders, understand the need for slimy frogs, and even condone the existence of cockroaches—but he hated rats. Oh, God, and that terrible, smooth tail. He swallowed with nervous fear. He heard the scuttling sound again and bunched his fist. In the dark the rat’s teeth became longer and sharper. He would bring down his bunched fist hard on the soft warm body. Yes, disgusting blood would squirt, but he would then be safe. He remembered that his feet were bare. Once more he heard boots marching down the corridor. The sound terrified him. He felt his mouth dry.

  He did not fear the Japanese. There was nothing to fear. He had done nothing wrong. He of all people had nothing to be afraid of. He had not even succumbed to his wife’s scolding and bought the black-market white sugar that she so wanted. He was not afraid.

  It was the rat he was afraid of. He told himself this over and over again. He had nothing to fear. He must concentrate on the rat that might try to nibble at his toes. He thought he felt a sword whizzing in the air just by his neck, and he jerked his head. He saw his head fly apart, away from the shining sword. Blood flew out of his neck like red rain. “Stop it,” he told himself in the intolerable darkness. He put the yellow face that had wielded the invisible sword away from his fevered brain.

  Then he heard quite clearly the sound of screaming, a hoarse, earsplitting scream. He froze, listening intently in the dark. The sound was not repeated. His mouth was so parched that his tongue stuck to the roof of it. He worked his throat, but no saliva would come. Suddenly he felt the brush of bristly fur against his left leg. His hand came crashing down and hit the hard cement floor. The rat was fast. The scuttling was farther away. The rat was mocking him.

  The door opened, and a bright light shone into his face. He lifted his hands and covered his eyes with a scream. The sudden glare was intolerable, like knives in his eyes. He felt fear. There had been no sound of boots.

  From the darkness behind the bright light two shadows detached themselves and appeared by his sides. Two young Malay boys. They helped him to his feet with soft hands. Their eyes were blank, there was no use pleading with them. They led him down the dank, dark corridor that smelt strongly of urine. He realized this time around that there were many closed doors on either side of the corridor. Mostly he heard nothing, but once a deep sigh came from behind one of the doors. It was the despairing sound of someone who has no fight left, no hope left at all.

  And then he was standing in a small, rather bare room, all alone. In the room, lit by a naked lightbulb, was a wooden table and two chairs. On the table stood a large jug of water and an empty glass. He stared mesmerized by the sight of the water. It looked clear, sweet, and beautifully cool, with thick, gleaming ice cubes gently floating on the surface. There was something so bizarre about finding the very thing he needed most in that bare room with the naked electric bulb that he felt uneasy. He looked at the single glass on the table. Surely he could just take a quick sip, and no one would know? He looked around the room. The walls were solid and thick. He waited another five minutes. Still no one came.

  He picked up the jug and took a mouthful. The liquid rested but a second on his parched tongue, and then he was spitting it out. The water was so salty it was undrinkable. Now he felt real fear as he saw the mess on the floor. What had he done? It was a trick of some kind, and he had fallen for it. There was probably someone watching him now through the keyhole. He began to shake from head to toe. Clumsily, hurriedly, he took off his white singlet and wiped the floor with it. When the floor was dry again, with shaking hands he put his singlet back on. The key in the door turned. The door opened, and a man in a remarkable mask walked into the room. Father was so startled by the incredible sight that he gasped and took an involuntary step back. He didn’t know it at that time, but he was looking into the perfection of a Japanese No mask. The man was wearing a loose robe much too long at the sleeves. He bowed politely in the Japanese way. Father quickly bowed back. When the man moved his head, the mask seemed to come to life. Under the overhead light, the skin on the mask was smooth and lustrous like that of a girl. Father stared at the mask blankly. A beautiful young girl/boy was smiling at him, clean and innocent. Under the gently arched eyebrows in the empty sockets the stranger’s eyes were shadowed but alive. Black and alive. My father stood in the middle of the room, intimidated and confused by the mask.

  “The Imperial Army is pleased to have you here as our very honored guest,” the masked stranger said very softly, and for one heady, perfectly happy moment my father felt certain that it was all a terrible mistake. The Japanese army had no reason to welcome him as a guest. He was a little nobody clerk without the brains to be promoted even once in his lifetime. Why, he had failed every exam he had ever taken! They could ask his wife, his children, the neighbors. They would tell him straightaway. It was simply a case of mistaken identity. The man wanted by the Imperial Army was obviously someone important who could help with their cause. My father opened his mouth to speak, but the polite stranger gestured to the jug of water on the table and asked with a slightly petulant twist in his voice, “Would you like a drink?”

  And that was when my father knew that it was not a mistake.

  The stranger carefully filled a glass and held it out for my father. “Sit,” he invited, pulling out one of the chairs. The long silken sleeve rode up his arm, revealing hands that were strangely misshapen and unnaturally pale and translucent, like the skin on the underbelly of a house lizard. My father suppressed a shudder. He had never seen anything like it before. He felt a sudden fear clutch at his heart and understood the reason for the very long sleeves. He began to wonder with horror about the need for the mask.

  This couldn’t be happening to him. He was just a normal ordinary person who had no political affiliations or ambitions of any sort. He was a man content to sit on his veranda with a cheroot or hold his children on his lap while he listened to the radio.

  The mask watched him with a pleasant expression. My father felt confused. A mask didn’t have expressions. Then the mask floated toward him until it was only three or four inches away. The empty shadowed sockets were suddenly pits of terrible cruelty. Opaque and highly amused, they were riveting. The cold glint in the masked man’s eyes told Father that he had done this many, man
y times before, and he had enjoyed it every time. Father stared mesmerized and disbelieving, almost intoxicated by the exquisite beauty of the mask and the evil that lay in the eye holes. The swelling red lips, sensuously moist, were almost upon him when the spell was suddenly broken, and catching his breath, Father jerked back, horrified. The man was evil.

  “Drink, drink,” the mask cried expansively, but cold reptilian eyes considered the wet singlet with delicate amusement. My father felt the hairs at the back of his neck rise with revulsion.

  “Drink,” the No mask urged, more insistently this time.

  So my father took a large gulp of salty water. The water burned his sore throat. Immediately the man moved forward and refilled his glass. Then he began to speak. He spoke softly, and sometimes my dazed father, in his damp white singlet, the half-full glass in his hands, had to strain to hear. What the man in the loose robes said instantly became an indistinct blot in his memory. All he remembered was the incredible impression that the mask appeared to change. Sometimes it was melancholy, and sometimes it appeared bright and happy. Once angry. And he also remembered the voice. By the virtue of its very softness it inspired terror in my poor father, and of course he remembered the softly whispered urgings, “Drink, drink.”

  By the time their conversation was over, my father had drunk the entire jug of salt water. His stomach cramped painfully, and he burned with an all-consuming thirst. The two Malay boys returned him to his room. In his room he found more salt water and a cold, tasteless gruel of discarded vegetables and rice. A day or perhaps more had passed. His lips had begun to crack. Somewhere there was the sound of a dripping tap. He could feel the coolness of it in his mouth. In the dark room he contemplated the blood of the rat. That was liquid, wasn’t it?

  More time passed, and when they sent for him again, two soldiers asked him repeatedly about a Communist he had never heard of before. Ah Peng . . . Ah Tong . . . it was all a blur. “I don’t know those men.” They slapped him hard. “Not they, him,” they corrected angrily. “Don’t play games.”

  “Yes, yes, him. Him, not they,” Father screamed in pain.

  “Are you denying that he ran into your neighborhood?”

  “He might have, but he didn’t come to me.”

  “Who, then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Try to guess. . . . You know who we are looking for.”

  And so the questions went on and on, never ending in their assumption that my father had indeed given shelter to a wanted Communist and was now obviously lying. The two soldiers beat him.

  “Confess!” a voice screamed so close to his ear he felt it like an explosion deep inside his head, deafening and vibrating uncontrollably. His screaming head in his hands, he tried many answers, but they were all unsatisfactory. With an innocuous wooden tool they tore the flesh between his fingers. Father fainted with the intolerable pain. They threw a bucket of cold water in his face. When he came around, they pulled out one of his fingernails. How well cruelty suited them. The pink fingernail came out with a squirt of blood and a tiny chunk of flesh attached. They had done it so fast that it took my father some seconds to realize what had happened. His wild eyes stared at the freshly bleeding finger in amazement. Yes, he was slow on the uptake, but could this be a sort of joke? Could all this really be happening to him?

  The two soldiers smiled scornfully at the big, stupid beast writhing on the floor. Slowly the intense flash of agony blurred into an insistent throbbing. Father took a deep breath and risked another look at his damaged finger. The wound looked worse than it felt. The pain was bearable. He looked up at the rough, sunburned faces of the soldiers.

  “Pain nearly gone?” the one closest to him asked before snatching Father’s hand in a viselike grip and plunging it into the waiting jar of salt. That was when he began to scream like a madman. The agony was like nothing he had ever experienced. Like flames, pain shot up his arm, exploding in his nerves like a crack of lightning.

  “I don’t know him. I don’t know him. Oh, God, I swear I don’t know him. Oh, Lord Ganesha, protect me. Pleeease. Take me away from here. Take me away. Take me now.”

  He lost consciousness, and when he came around, two Malay lads were dragging him down the corridor. Hazily he saw two more local boys coming out of one of the many doors along the corridor. A Chinese woman stumbled between them. She was naked from the waist down. Her shoulder-length hair was wild and matted, and her eyes were glazed and blank. In the dim light of the corridor her face was chalk white. He couldn’t help himself, his eyes traveled downward. Suddenly he realized what he was seeing. She was bleeding copiously. The blood ran down the insides of her legs and dotted the floor. His first thought was that they had hurt her in her private parts, but then he realized that she was menstruating. Strangely enough, her lack of shame in her own blood frightened him more than anything else he had seen so far. He snapped then.

  “Oh, no, no, no, what have they done to you,” he sobbed like a child, crying for her as if she was a close family member, but as if his sorrow for her was invisible, she walked on, her face empty, a robot, or someone already dead, toward the room where the man with the mask waited.

  They threw my father on the cold stone floor with his burning pain, a jar of salt water and the rat for company. He pulled himself into his corner, defeated and spent. His head spun in tight dizzy circles. He finally understood why the corpses posted around town, sagging inside their bonds, had blackened fingers. The afternoon sun scorched the flesh and burned the salt in their wounds.

  He awoke with a scream. His finger was on fire. The harsh sound of his own scream was unrecognizable to him. Something was eating his finger. The rat was eating his flesh. He jerked his hand. There was a flash of pain in the dark, but the rat was so hungry that it boldly refused to let go of its meal. My father thrashed frantically in an almost hysterical frenzy, slamming his hand on the hard floor until his hand was free and the scuttling sound moved away. His hand throbbed wildly. He began to sob softly. The room smelt of his own urine.

  Days passed. He lost track of time. Everything had been reduced to a blur. He felt worse than any animal in a cage. His hand had begun to twitch uncontrollably. The salt water had made his lips crack open and bleed. His fingers moved on the huge, rough scabs on his lips with the horror of someone who finds leeches on his body. He lay many hours in the pitch black listening to the rat scuttling in the dark. When it sounded nearer, he would stamp, bang, and kick the floor until the sound receded into the edges of the room. He felt ashamed that his captors could have reduced him to such an inhuman state so quickly. He had always thought of himself as a dignified man, and yet . . .

  Finally, one day the door opened once more, and he was taken back to the room of the first encounter with the No mask and the pure evil behind it.

  There was a jug of water waiting for him. The sight of it made his knees buckle with horror, and his hand moved instinctively to his mouth. The scabs were large, and the bleeding was constant now. Every movement his lips made was excruciatingly painful. He shivered deep inside his being.

  The robed man entered the room and, walking toward the table, poured some water into a glass. He held it out to my father.

  The mask was truly a work of art. It now began to look like someone my father knew. Perhaps he was going mad. His eyes dropped to the offered water. Ice clinked inside the glass. It looked beautifully cool. He felt like gagging. My father shook his head and knew that his eyes were full of abject begging.

  “Please, no more,” he muttered through lips stiff and tight. The words made them bleed afresh. Was it his imagination? How was it possible for a mask to look disappointed?

  “The Imperial Army has no further use for you,” the familiar mask said before it took a lingering sip of water. “You shall die before dawn,” the masked tormentor announced quietly and left. The water must be unsalted. My father pounced on the jug, and two soldiers slammed the butts of their rifles into his lunging body.

/>   Later that night, four soldiers herded ten men into a truck. Loud classical music filled the cool night air. My father had no doubt it was the man with the lizard skin who listened to such beautiful music. He was a connoisseur of beautiful things, you could tell from the way he turned his brutality into an art. The men climbed into the truck one by one. They all wore bleeding lips on their parched, dehydrated faces. Their hands trembled, and their eyes bulged with terror. The truck of beaten men drove away from the elegant house with its resident rats, its masked host of exquisite cruelty, and its noiseless Malay boys who appeared and disappeared like ghosts. The truck driver sat beside my father. He stared into nothing. They drove the men deep into a jungle and stopped in a clearing. The prisoners looked at each other with fresh fear. They recognized the smell of rotting corpses. The soldiers ordered them off the truck, stuffed shovels into the men’s shaking hands and commanded them not to dig but to fill a long deep hole. The hole was deep and so black that they could not see the twisted faces of horror or the worm-infested flesh inside, but they could smell it. Rotting man.

  Father looked around him. The light from the truck’s headlamps made them all look crazed and desperate. The smell, the ugly thoughts, the muttered prayers, and the occasional wild laugh. They looked like men who had felt the soft cold breath of death down their necks. They covered the hole. Then they were instructed to dig another, same length and width as before. In the light from the headlamps he could see that there were other places of the same length and breadth, covered with fresh earth. It didn’t bear thinking about. For two hours, maybe more, they dug. It was slow, backbreaking work, yet no one wished for it to end. More than anything else in the heat of that night was the dread of the words, “Stop. That’s enough.”