The Rice Mother

  Razor blades became so precious that everyone used to sharpen and resharpen old blunt blades by carefully pressing and rubbing them back and forth against the inside walls of a glass. Motor cars had disappeared, except those used by the military and important Japanese civilians. Some Japanese wearing blue ribbons had long since purloined Old Soong’s car. Taxis were running on charcoal and firewood. The Japanese army reserved almost all medicines and hospital supplies for its own use, and we were left to traditional medicine. Next door the Chinese man’s second wife lost her leg by trying to cure a deep cut with a poultice of pineapple and overripe banana. The wound turned blue and began to give off a rotten smell. Gangrene set in. At the hospital they amputated her leg.

  The water in the pipes became steadily worse as the water-treatment chemicals were reduced. Minute cream-colored worms sometimes writhed as if in mortal pain inside our drinking water.

  After Minah’s husband was shot, I had to be the bearer of bad tidings. In her doorway she crumpled into a heap. I felt very sorry for her, so I crouched down beside her and stroked her fine blue-black hair. The smooth curve of her cheek brushed my hand. She might have had the admirable skin of a baby, but she was totally without savings. Some chickens, a vegetable garden, and the odd piece of old-fashioned jewelry were all she had.

  “Don’t cry, it’s going to be all right,” I lied.

  She only shook her head and sobbed softly.

  Minah was almost not managing when one evening a green army jeep parked outside her door. A rather smart Japanese man in civilian clothes sprang out and walked into her house. After that he was often parked outside her house. One day Minah sent her five children to her sister’s in Pekan. She told Mui Tsai that there was better schooling over there. Then the Japanese man with the jeep began to stay overnight. A few weeks later he moved in. I stopped visiting her, and she stopped talking to us. Perhaps she was ashamed to be the kept woman of a Japanese official. A few times I saw her outside her house. She had started wearing Western-style dresses and Chinese cheongsams when they went out together in the evenings. She wore cosmetics and painted her nails. Actually she looked like a movie star. Her fair calves flashed inside the slit of her silk cheongsam as she climbed daintily into his jeep. I had a problem. What if she sacrificed Mohini for a piece of land, a better house, a diamond ring, or a bag of sugar?

  One day we came face to face. It was unavoidable that it should happen, but that it should happen in his presence was unexpected. As I rounded the corner, they both climbed out of his jeep. I slowed my steps, hoping that they would enter the house before I reached them, but she stopped and waited for me, and he waited with her. I smiled. Friendly. I feared both of them now. She was also the enemy. My secret depended on the weakest link, and I was looking at it.

  “Hello,” she called. She was as beautiful as ever.

  “Hello. How are you?”

  “Fine,” she said, smiling. Her lips were red and her cheeks rouged, but her eyes were still sad. On her arms exquisitely carved dark green jade bracelets jangled like a polished warning.

  “How are your children?” I queried, stumped for conversation.

  “They are very naughty, and they refuse to learn at school,” she replied modestly. “How are your five wonderful children doing?”

  I smiled slowly. Gratefully. My secret was safe with her. For now. She knew I had six children. She had counted Mohini out for his benefit. I realized that she had engineered this meeting so that I could sleep in peace.

  “They are all fine. Thank you for asking,” I said and moved on. We understood each other. When I turned back to look, they were going into the house. His arm was around her waist.

  A year of the Japanese occupation passed. While swimming and swinging just like Tarzan on the vines that grew along the river Kuantan, Lakshmnan made friends with an aborigine lad. The aborigines are the best trackers and hunters you could possibly find. Their jungle craft is second to none; they can watch and track you for days without you ever knowing of their presence. The boy taught Lakshmnan how to make and hunt with a blowpipe. Lakshmnan soon introduced us to a whole new range of cuisine.

  He returned home with long ugly lizards that in fact, once cooked, had a rather delicate flavor. We ate wild boar, deer, squirrel, tapir, tortoise, freshly killed python, strong-tasting tiger meat, and once even elephant. Lakshmnan told us of the tribesmen’s return from the hunt, a gory procession straining under huge hunks of meat dripping blood on their shoulders. Neither my husband nor I could bring ourselves to eat the elephant meat—I put too much faith in my Elephant God—but I asked him for forgiveness and gave it to the children. The meat was coarse, with thick gray-brown skin attached, but the children said it was not too bad. One day Lakshmnan came home with a baby monkey slung over his shoulder, and Old Soong, who had been by his window watching, sent his cook to ask if we would sell him the head with the brains intact.

  He cracked the skull, poured black-market cognac inside it, and then slurped off the contents with chopsticks. That very evening he called Lakshmnan to his house and told him that he would reward him handsomely for the genitals of a tiger or a bear. A month’s rent, he said. Eating them conferred immortality.

  At school the children were made to learn Japanese, and from them I learned to say “Domo arigato.” Whatever the soldiers asked for, I nodded immediately and said my thank-you readily in their unbearably guttural language. I could see that it pleased them that I had taken the trouble to learn their sounds. They thought me docile. They did not see my fear. Even when they were holding onto a squawking chicken with a cloud of feathers flying around them, I feared them. I remembered that they had taken my husband, shot him, and left him for dead. Not even Mui Tsai’s assertion that they favored boiled insipid white rice and sugar as a dish worth sitting down for could lessen my instinctive distrust of their mean eyes.

  They must not be provoked.

  I knew that in my heart. One bowed instantly and lowered one’s eyes in their presence. Sometimes General Ito, who was always the first inside Mui Tsai and could speak bad English, asked me where my daughters were hidden. I knew he had no idea, but he had such sly eyes that I trembled like a leaf, thinking of Mohini’s soft skin right under his feet.

  I told myself again and again, “When they are all gone I will celebrate. Now I will lower my eyes and give them the youngest, tenderest coconuts from my tree.” I had heard the stories of them cutting down whole trees because there was no one available in the house to cut them some coconuts. For this reason alone I had Lakshmnan cut down the best coconuts before he went to school each day. As soon as they came to our house and pointed to the coconut tree, I immediately rushed out with the green fruit. They slashed them open with their bayonets. I watched them covertly, the way they drank, juice gurgling out of their mouths, down the strong columns of their hateful throats, staining their uniforms a darker shade of brown. I wished them harm. I hated them, but my real fear lay deeper. Deeper than a cut coconut tree or the discovery of my jewelry hidden high among the swaying leaves. I feared they would brave the clucking chickens and the ground thick with chicken droppings and search under the house. Take my daughter away.

  The thought used to keep me awake at night. Every time I saw the Chinese girl next door running free, her hair shorn to military length and her breast bound so tightly that her chest in her boy’s shirts looked as flat as a board, I worried about Mohini. I thought my daughter’s hair simply too beautiful to cut, and I knew that even if I bound her burgeoning breasts and cut her wonderful hair, her face was impossible to ignore. The cheekbones, the eyes, the luscious mouth, they would all give her away.

  My only option was to hide her.

  I was sitting alone, watching the stars so far away, when Mui Tsai lifted the mosquito screen and climbed into my kitchen. It had been so long since she had come to visit, and I had missed her terribly. She collapsed childlike and ungainly on the bench beside me. In her hand she carried a small sticky brown cake.
It was the festival of the Chinese gods, a time when the minor gods and spirits visited all the Chinese houses on earth and carried with them tales of wrongdoing up to the heavens. To bribe them, Chinese householders baked the sticky sweet cakes that made it impossible for them to tell unpleasant things about the homes they had visited.

  Mui Tsai knew that I enjoyed eating the hard crust on top of the cake.

  Resting her chin in her hands, she considered me gravely. It was then that I realized with shock how many shadows hid in her eyes.

  “How are you?” she asked. She was still the best friend I had.

  “I’m fine. How are you?”

  “I’m pregnant,” she announced bluntly.

  My eyes widened. “The master’s?”

  “No, the master never visits anymore. Not since the Japanese soldiers. He is afraid of disease. My body disgusts him. He is rude and cold, but I prefer it so.”

  “Oh, God,” I said, shocked. Her misfortunes never seemed to end. She must have indeed been born under an unlucky star.

  “Yes, it belongs to one of them,” she stated calmly. All the shadows in her eyes moved like old ghosts in a haunted house. I watched them crouch, then lengthen again.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “The mistress wants me to get rid of it,” she said very simply. She shrugged in an oddly casual way. “Anyway, how can I keep it? What if it is the son of the one who urinates inside me after he has finished planting his seed?”

  “What?”

  She looked at me with a twisted smile. Something strange happened inside her eyes. “Do you know where I can have an abortion?”

  “No, of course not.” The full extent of what they did to her she had never told me, and I had never asked.

  “Oh, well, I’m sure the mistress will know.”

  I could not help her at all. Badom, my midwife, had died two years ago. “Oh, Mui Tsai, please be very, very careful. These things are so dangerous.”

  She laughed carelessly. The shadows in her eyes flickered and died away.

  “I don’t care. Do you know the strangest thing ever? Lately I keep hearing the sound of a newborn baby crying in the next room. And when I go there, the crying baby is gone.”

  I looked at her with worried eyes, but she laughed once more. It was a hard sound. She said that she was not frightened because it was only the ghost of her first baby calling to her. Then we played a few games of Chinese checkers. I won all of them, and I didn’t even need to cheat. Her mind was elsewhere.

  A few days later an ambulance came screeching and screaming into our neighborhood. It stopped outside Old Soong’s house, and two attendants dressed in white rushed out. At first I thought it was Old Soong, but it was Mui Tsai. I ran toward the ambulance and saw a sight I will never forget. Her pale face was twisted with pain, and her eyes glazed as if she was going to pass out. On the stretcher her hand kept moving spasmodically, as if she was trying to push her stomach away from her body. Thick blackish blood had stained her samfu, and her small feet were covered with spongy bits of purplish blood. The mistress was running behind the stretcher, declaring to the attendants in Malay that she had found Mui Tsai in that state and had had no idea the girl was even pregnant.

  Mui Tsai looked right through me, so torn with pain she didn’t even recognize me. Big drops of sweat beaded her forehead, and she rolled from side to side in agony. I touched her hand. It was ice cold. Frightened, I tried to hold it, but it jerked out of mine. The white-coated men pushed me aside impatiently, and she was lifted into the antiseptic interior of the van. It looked very serious. I thought she was dying. The doors slammed shut. I looked at Mui Tsai’s mistress as she stood by the ambulance, her eyes uncaring in her flabby face. The mouth that had once been intriguingly sulky was now simply sour and bad-tempered. I wanted to walk up to her and push her to the ground, but that would mean she would see me. I would then stop being one of the invisible tenants. We could lose our home, my garden. I turned away woodenly and walked back to my house.

  Mui Tsai returned a week later. Many hours in the day she used to sit under the assam tree all by herself. Sometimes I saw her carefully trace patterns on the stone table with her finger, and other times she simply stared vacantly into space. When I went out to talk to her, she looked at me from her shaded seat as if I were a stranger, defeated even by the effort of getting up and walking over to meet me. Silent tears ran down her face. I realized that my presence upset her. But when Anna came out, she hobbled over and, linking her fingers with my daughter’s, crooned to her in Chinese, a language Anna didn’t understand.

  The war was almost over, and by May 1945 news came of Germany’s defeat and surrender. On August 6, the Americans bombed Hiroshima. The BBC spread the news that Japan had been hit with a powerful new radiation weapon. The entire city had been wiped out with a beautiful mushroom cloud. On August 15, the emperor announced to his subjects their surrender. We heard the news almost immediately on the Allied nations’ broadcasts. Stories abounded of Japanese soldiers turning on themselves in despair and committing hara-kiri with daggers. Sometimes they appeared despondent and confused, but it didn’t stop others from gate-crashing the parties of elated locals, slapping and humiliating the merrymakers. The war was over, yet in the streets Japanese soldiers were still very much in charge. We were quiet people and determined to keep our heads down until the British arrived. I still dried Mohini’s washing over the fire in the kitchen, as I had done for the last three years. No one must know she existed until the yellow bastards were all gone. I had been to the temple that morning to thank Ganesha for the grace he had shown my family. We had escaped intact—stronger even for the experience. I looked beyond the window and marveled at my children. Lakshmnan and Mohini were pounding flour with perfect timing. Anna was skinning a chicken with a frozen expression on her face. It was that sort of unusually peaceful day when I can even remember my thoughts. She will turn vegetarian one day, I thought. Jeyan was playing with Lalita inside Mohini’s secret hiding place, and geese squabbled in the yard. Sevenese was at a Boy Scout meeting that he had been forced to attend by his Scout master. I was frying spinach in curry powder and garlic.

  Droplets of water in the spinach leaves spat furiously in the hot oil, and I clearly remember feeling contented. Happy with my lot. The Japanese would soon be gone, and things could go back to what they were. My husband could return to work, the children to school, to be taught proper subjects once more, and I to the task of saving money for my girls’ dowries. I would need less for Mohini, but Lalita was doubtless going to need much more. I planned good marriages for my daughters. A dazzling life stretched ahead for my children. The first thing I planned to do was sell the bloody pool cows. Too much hard work.

  I left the spinach to fry a little longer. As I sliced an eggplant lengthwise, lost in my own thoughts, I heard the squeal of tires, a squeal that I had learned to dread, and a squeal that could mean only one thing. My knife hovered in the air for an instant, freed from my slack grip, before I sprang up and ran to the front window. Two jeeps full of silent Japanese soldiers were turning into our dirt road. My heart began to pound like a mad thing inside my chest. I screamed in a panic at the children. I opened the trapdoor, and Anna, who was closest, ran in.

  “Japanese! Quickly, Mohini!” I shouted running back to the window. The soldiers were already splitting up into twos, and walking up the path to our house. I turned away from their grim yellow faces and saw Mohini and Lakshmnan run breathlessly into the living room. She was going to make it into the hole in time, and Lakshmnan could close the trapdoor behind Anna and her. I turned back and saw two soldiers begin to walk up our stairs. The one with the blue ribbon, I knew, was General Ito.

  “Come on, Mohini,” I heard Lakshmnan hiss urgently. I could hear the raw fear in his voice, and that same fear I suppose was responsible for what happened next. As he pulled her, he lost his footing and fell through the trapdoor instead. The heavy black boots were just outside the door. Th
ey never knocked, they kicked. In that split second Mohini made a terrible decision. She decided it was too late to pull him out, and there was not enough space for her to crawl in too. So the stupid girl did the unthinkable. She pulled the trapdoor shut and pushed back the chest over the hole. When I turned around from the window, I saw her standing in front of the chest.

  I had kept my daughter indoors for so long that I had stopped really seeing her and had forgotten the way other people used to react to her. Now my eyes widened with sheer horror, for suddenly I saw her with the lustful eyes of a Japanese soldier. She was a delightful nymph, the enchantress Mohini reincarnated. Her shabby surroundings served only to magnify her beauty. Caught in the sunlight, her green eyes were huge and luminous with fear. The years spent indoors had turned her caramel complexion a creamy, pink-tinged magnolia. Her shocked mouth, slightly open, was like a pink, plump fruit, its skin thin and defenseless. Her pearly white teeth gleamed. The old blouse she was wearing was really too tight around the chest, but unimaginable sums of banana dollars were needed for cloth, and since the only eyes that laid on her were her family . . . every time she panted in fear, the material rose and fell against her budding breasts with such a suggestive thrust that it hurt my eyes. My eyes dropped to the narrow waist and lingered at a midriff exposed by two buttons lost so long ago. The old skirt, its slip rotted away, was transparent in the light that streamed in from the window behind her. Her thighs drew my eyes. Smooth and rounded. Childish, but oh, so appealing. The truth was, she was a fourteen-year-old goddess. And to them she would be a prize hole. I shook my head with disbelief. No, no, no. It was my worst nightmare come true. I couldn’t believe it was happening. How could this happen now? The war was over. We had almost made it. Locked in a trance of sheer terror I could only stare.