The Rice Mother

  The door burst open, and four black boots thundered into the dead silence. Time slowed as my eyes swung in slow motion toward the brown-clad animals. Yes, I knew what I would see. They stared riveted and disbelieving at my baby. I shall never forget their small black eyes, usually opaque with mean hardness, turn shiny with greed, like the jackal that comes across a whole buffalo when he has spent his entire life believing that the eyes, entrails, and testicles rejected by the lion were a feast. Even if I close my eyes now, I can remember that pinprick of light that shone in their eyes at the sight of fresh meat.

  Then one of them was striding across the room. General Ito. He took my gentle flower with the crushed rose for a mouth by the chin in his hard hand and turned her face this way and that as though checking to see if his eyes had deceived him. He made a strangely greedy guttural sound. Then his hand dropped to her throat. The thick hand encircled her neck, and one finger gently caressed the skin at the base of her throat. With a quick movement, his hand like a yellow snake reached behind her head and snapped the rubber band that held her hair. Silky glorious hair sprang around her face and I heard the hiss of his indrawn breath. His awe at the treasure, unexpected in his hands, was terrifying. Mohini stood paralyzed with shock. I saw his neck stiffen and, putting his hand on the small of her back, he urged her forward.

  “Come,” he ordered harshly.

  I sprang forward. “Wait, wait! Please wait,” I cried. Without the slightest warning, the point of his knife was resting in that tiny intimate space between my breasts. He had moved so fast. I gaped.

  “Move,” he ordered coldly.

  “Wait, you don’t understand. She’s only a child.”

  He glanced at me with superior amusement.

  “She’s Indian. She’s not Chinese. Japanese soldiers only take Chinese girls. Please, please don’t take her,” I babbled desperately to the fiercely mustached face.

  “Move,” he repeated, and I saw his eyes stray to the point of his knife. A bright red stain was spreading on my blouse; his knife was embedded in my flesh. I stared at the blank face. Yet I knew the man. I had known him for three years. I had given him my best chickens and my youngest coconuts.

  “Please, honorable General, let me cook for the Imperial Army. I have good food. Very good food.” Suddenly I could smell the choking fumes of spinach burning in the pan. I saw his lips twitch. I dropped to my knees. Crying, begging. I knew that man. So many times he had asked me with cold black humor, “Where do you hide your daughters?” I hugged his legs tightly with both my arms.

  There was disgust on his yellow face as he kicked me hard in the stomach. The pain was like an explosion. I fell, clutching my murdered stomach. Roughly he pulled Mohini toward the door. On my hands and knees I howled, like a wolf on a moonlit night. He must not leave my house with my daughter. Suddenly, nothing was more important than stopping him from getting through the door. My mouth opened, and words dropped out. Words that I should never, never have uttered.

  “I know where you can get a Chinese virgin. Flesh that has never tasted a man’s hands,” I gasped wildly, horrified at what I was doing and yet unable to stop.

  His shoulders stiffened, but he carried on toward the door. He was interested.

  “She is exotic and beautiful,” I added. “Please,” I sobbed. “Please.” I could not let him walk out.

  He paused. The fish took the silvery bait in its jaws. The yellow face turned. Two mean eyes stared at me unfathomably. He let go his grip on Mohini. A strange smile slashed itself across his hard face. He was waiting for me. I beckoned to Mohini, and she stumbled blindly toward me. I stood up and gripped her hands tightly, holding her close to me. She trembled inside my grasp like a small dying mynah bird. It is wrong! screamed the blood that pumped into my temples.

  “Next door,” I sobbed. “Behind the cupboard.”

  He bowed stiffly. A mocking bow. But when he raised his head, there was cold evil in his small almond-shaped eyes. I shuddered with fear and knew instantly that I had sacrificed poor Ah Moi in vain. He walked forward and pushed me so hard that I slammed into the wall. I crumpled into a stunned heap and saw him grab Mohini by the hand and stride out into the bright sunshine. I heard their heavy boots loud on the veranda. The whole house was vibrating and crashing from their hobnail boots, a dreadful sound that has haunted my nightmares ever since. For an instant I was poised on my hands and knees, frozen into immobility by sheer horror—he had taken her after all. Then I picked myself up and ran. I ran out onto the veranda and down the wooden steps that I had just that morning washed, but were full of muddy boot prints. I ran, arms outstretched, in my bare feet on the stone-filled path. The bastards were there within my reach. She was climbing in. I reached the truck. I even touched it, but as soon as my grasping palms touched the hot metal of the jeep, it roared into life and those laughing bastards pulled away in a cloud of dust, their tires screeching. Her small oval face turned back to look at me. She never uttered a sound; not a single word had crossed those lips of hers. Not “Save me, Mother,” not “Help me!” Nothing.

  I chased them, you know. I chased them until they disappeared out of sight, and then I didn’t stop or fall to the ground and cry. I just turned around like a Taiwanese wind-up toy and walked back.

  On my wooden steps I left bloody footprints. The torn soles of my feet walked through my house and into the kitchen toward the cooker. I removed the blackened, smoking spinach from the fire. It is a disagreeable smell, burning chili and spinach. Inside me, I heard the sound of deep sighing. Ah, the bamboo in my heart. For a long while I must have stood in front of the stove, just listening to it. “When will you sing for me? When will I hear your song?” I whispered to it, but it only sighed the more.

  Then I made a decision to have tea. I would treat myself to tea with real sugar. I had bought a tiny precious amount from a friend who worked at the Water Works Department just a week ago, and I decided I would have some now. Tea with molasses was simply not the same. For three years I had hankered for tea with beautiful white sugar, but I had always denied myself. Put the children first. Yes the children had always come first.

  I put some water into a kettle to boil and spooned tea leaves into a large blue mug. As I stood staring at the tea leaves, it occurred to me that they looked like swarming black ants. And when I poured the hot water in, they looked like dead ants, dead ants. I put a lid on the mug, and I heard tiny sounds, desperate sounds but very tiny. Someone was calling me. Actually more than one voice was calling out to me. There was also the muffled sound of banging. I decided to ignore them. I looked for the sugar and couldn’t remember where I had hidden it. Confused, I sat on my bench. Outside it began to rain. “The child’s surely going to get wet. In a while I’ll pound some ginger for her. Her chest is so bad,” I murmured softly to myself. I pulled my knees up to my chin until I must have looked like a tight little ball, and I rocked myself to and fro, to and fro, singing an old nursery rhyme that my mother used to sing to me. I shouldn’t have left her all by herself in Ceylon. Poor Mother. It is unbearable to lose a daughter. No, I would not think about the lost sugar. It was easiest to simply sing and rock. I sang the same four lines again and again.

  Time must have passed, and now and then I thought I heard that same insistent sound of children knocking, calling out to me, and crying. It seemed too as if the calls were becoming desperate, begging and terrified screaming, but they were so faint, these strange sounds, and so far away that I stuck to my earlier decision to ignore them and concentrate on the pain in my head instead. My head pounded as if a hammer was at my temples. It seemed I was swimming in a sea of pain, and only the continuous rocking motion could steady it a little.

  A very long time later a sound nearby penetrated my cocoon of pain. Squinting my eyes in the afternoon light, I looked up, and my husband was standing in the kitchen doorway. His wide, black face looked hideous, and instantly I felt hatred and a rage such as I have never known before. How dare he leave us to fend for
ourselves against Japanese soldiers while he sat gossiping with that doddering old Sikh security guard outside the Chartered Bank building? It was all his fault. Black fury rose up and swamped me until I saw nothing. Unthinkingly I had unfurled myself and was flying toward him, screaming wildly at the stupid, shocked expression on his ugly face. The drumming in my head had become so loud that though I saw his lips moving, I heard not the sounds that must surely have come out of them. My fingers connected with his high cheekbones, and I dug my short nails into his flesh, shiny with a layer of sweat, and pulled them as viciously as I could down his face. At first he was too shocked to react, but when I howled and brought my hands up again he caught them in a viselike grip. “Lakshmi, stop it,” he said, and I watched his gouged cheeks, the blood flowing down his face into his collar, with unreal fascination. “Where are the children?” he asked, so quietly that I had to raise my eyes from his collar and look into those small, frightened eyes.

  “They have taken Mohini away,” I said vengefully. Let him suffer too. It was his fault. But as suddenly as my anger had come, it dissipated. I felt lost and longed for a husband who would take my burdens away for one hour. Someone who would make things right again.

  His nostrils flared like some huge beast in pain. Suddenly he was on his knees. “No, no, no,” he gasped, staring into my eyes in disbelief. I looked down at him and felt no pain and no pity. No, he would not take over, not even for one hour. He got up slowly like a very old sick man and went to push away the chest. The children tumbled out, sobbing, into his large arms. He gathered them all close to his large body and sobbed with them. I saw them, my children, as they stole fear-filled looks at me and snuggled up to him. Even Lakshmnan. Children are such traitors.

  “I told them about Ah Moi next door,” I said, and I saw my husband’s back stiffen.

  “Why?” he asked in a shocked whisper. There was a look of such betrayed horror in his eyes, it was as if I had stabbed him in the back. So he didn’t know me after all. Blood ran down his dark cheeks and dripped onto his collar.

  “Because I thought I could save Mohini,” I answered slowly. A tear escaped and rolled down my face. Yes, only then I understood what I had done. Yet, given the chance, would I do differently? Maybe if I had been cleverer in the way I had bartered. If only she had run into the fields and hidden in the bushes. If only Lakshmnan hadn’t fallen. If only . . .

  “Oh God, oh dear God what have you done?” my husband said quietly. He hugged our clinging children once more and said, “I shall go next door and if it is not too late, try to warn them—but if it is too late, then I don’t want to hear anybody mention this ever again.”

  The children nodded vigorously. They wore such huge frightened eyes. He ran out of the house. We waited in the kitchen, none of us moving, eyeing each other like strangers in two separate camps. Sevenese ran into the kitchen, Boy Scout meeting obviously over. His eyes were ferocious. He must have seen my bloody footprints. “Has the crocodile got Mohini?” he panted.

  “Yes,” I said. My son had called a spade a spade.

  “I have to find Chibindi. Only he can help her now,” he cried wildly before dashing out of the house.

  Ayah came back very quickly. He was too late. The soldiers had already come back for Ah Moi. That night, Lakshmnan ran away from home. I saw him make for the jungle where Sevenese usually disappeared with the disgusting snake charmer boy. Lakshmnan returned the next night, bedraggled and bruised. He didn’t ask about her. He knew from my face that they hadn’t brought her back. He wouldn’t let me hold him. I didn’t know it then, but that was the day I lost him forever. I put a plate of food in front of him. For the longest time he stared at it as if there were a war going on inside him. Then he pounced on it and ate as if he hadn’t seen food for weeks. Like a starving animal. Then suddenly he vomited violently into his own plate. He looked up at me, his mouth and chin stained with lumps of partly digested food, and howled, “I can taste the food she is eating. Sour. So sour. She wants to die. Ama, she just wants to die. Help her, Ama, please, please.”

  And as I watched, horrified, he crumpled into a ball on the floor at my feet, whimpering in a thin high voice. I never realized until then what my twins really shared inside their perfectly still pauses where no words were necessary. What sounds, what smells, what thoughts, what emotions, what pain, what joy? Time passed, my beautiful son whimpering at my feet, and I, I was frozen into immobility.

  For so long now Lakshmnan had shed the skin of childhood and worn the mantle of manhood so willingly that I had stopped seeing him as a child. He would rise before the sun appeared on the horizon to take the covered pails of fresh milk over to the coffee shops in town and return with the stacks of banana notes. He herded the cows out to the fields to graze, cut long grass for their evening fodder, took them to the small river to be bathed, and cleaned out their living quarters twice a week. He hunted game for his family and washed the clothes I had soaked the night before in ash and the water strained from boiled rice when there was no more soap to be had. He had done a man’s job, but he was only a boy. I couldn’t bear to see him like that. I squatted beside him.

  “It’s not your fault,” I said, stroking his hair, but in his head a thousand accusing voices hissed, Lakshmnan did it. Lakshmnan did it. He let the Japanese dogs take her. I tried to hold him, but he didn’t see me squatting there with tears running down my face. He didn’t feel my hand. He pushed his bunched fists into his cheeks until his face looked like an agonized mask, and he screamed, but still the pointing voices wouldn’t go away. Lakshmnan did it. Lakshmnan did it.

  I could feel the shocked eyes of my other children in the doorway, safe and clean in their grief and their understandable sadness, but he was trapped in his terrible guilt. He had loved her the best, and yet he was the one responsible for her shame. If only he had not been so clumsy. If only he had sprung out as soon as he had fallen. If only . . .

  Who would marry her now? Nobody. She was irretrievably scarred. Damaged goods. Would they leave her pregnant? Our pride and joy would be scorned and whispered about. The flower that we had tended so carefully, destroyed. The eyes I had washed in a tea solution to bring out their true translucence, hurt forever. Had she really spent the last three years a prisoner in her own home for this? In Lakshmnan’s tormented mind she was frozen in that moment of panic and choice. The fault, he knew, was his.

  “They will bring her back,” I said gently into his face, so close to his lips I smelled his sour breath. “She is not dead. They will bring her back.”

  He stopped suddenly. His bunched fists came away from his cheeks, and he looked into my eyes for the first time. What I saw inside his glittering eyes haunts me to this day. I saw a land blackened, windswept and desolate. She was gone, and she had taken with her the fruit trees, the flowers, the birds, the butterflies, the rainbow, the streams. . . . Without her the wind howled through gaunt tree stumps. When they snatched her away, they snatched away a part of him too. The better part. By far the better part. He became a stranger in my house, a stranger with something cruel and adult lurking in his barren eyes. In fact, what I saw in his eyes, he saw in mine. A mean snake of terrible might. It urged us to do the unthinkable. When you hear what I have done, you will think less of me, but I was powerless to resist its will.

  For the next three days my husband sat transfixed by the radio, hoping for news. He moved his chair a little so he could watch the road through the living room window. And for those three days I ate nothing. I looked at plate after plate of boiled tapioca, cream-colored and slightly shiny, in a daze. Lakshmnan woke up earlier than usual, rushed through his chores, and then sat on the steps outside, staring at the main road, his broad shoulders tense with waiting. He spoke to no one, and no one dared speak to him. The children stared at me with large frightened eyes as I pretended to be busy. Only when the child of night ran into my day, its feet blackened by the sins of day, could I close the kitchen door and lie on my bench, utterly helpless. I refus
ed to consider my daughter’s fate. Refused thoughts of sun-darkened, sinewy hands tainted with the metallic taste of guns, of those voracious mouths and those covetous tongues. And the stench of them. Oh, God, how hard I tried not to think of that man who urinated inside Mui Tsai. I lay instead listening to the night sounds, the crickets, the buzzing mosquitoes, the call of small wild animals, the whispering of the leaves in the wind. Listening for my Mohini.

  On the afternoon of the third day, they returned Ah Moi. She was bruised, bleeding, and barely able to walk, but she was alive. I know because I stood three feet away from the window, just inside the shadows, and watched my doing. Her grief-mad mother ran out of the house shrieking at the sight of the frail figure wilted over the supporting hands of two soldiers. They dropped the girl at her mother’s feet and left. The family carried the girl in. I was filled with dread. Where was Mohini? Why had they not returned her? I should have run out and demanded to know.

  Perhaps they will return her tomorrow, I told myself meekly.

  That night, although I tried to keep awake, I was overcome by a strange lethargy and fell asleep in the kitchen. It was a restless sleep, filled with strange dreams, and I awoke many times hot and thirsty. Disturbed and ill at ease, I roamed the house relentlessly, moving from room to room, my mouth mumbling, my eyes restless. I opened a window and looked out into the night. Everything looked and sounded normal. There were crickets in the bushes and the sad notes of the flute from the snake-charmer’s house. Mosquitoes hummed. I closed the window and went to check on the children. They looked like strangers to me. It was too hot.

  Cool water cascaded down my body and crashed loudly on the cement floor, flooding the entire bathroom, making dwarf waves that slopped over the small ledge built at the doorway and ran down the corridor. I stood in the flooded corridor and, feeling slightly better, decided to brew myself a strong mug of tea. If my husband was awake, I would make him one too. I walked into the bedroom, a wet sarong pulled up to my armpits and tied above my breasts.