“As you wish,” Mother said. She sat in the car in a cold rage. Father looked out of the window in silence. He enjoyed looking at miles of green rubber trees. It calmed him. It made it easier to ignore the waves of rage coming out of his wife and his eldest son.
That night, my brother Sevenese had a dream. He was sitting on a stretch of barren land. For miles as far as the eye could see was dry, red soil. In the distance a buffalo-driven cart was trundling toward him in a cloud of red dust. Around the buffalo’s neck was a bell that tinkled softly. My brother had heard that sound somewhere before. The driver of the cart wore a long white beard and said, “Tell him the money will be lost in one sitting.” In the cart behind him was a long black coffin. The bell tinkled in a gust of strong wind. Yes, my brother had heard that sound before. “Look,” the old man said, pointing to the coffin, “he never listens to me. Now it is dead. You tell him. The money will be lost in one sitting.” Then he hit the poor buffalo with a long stick, and the cart continued on its journey through the barren landscape.
“Wait!” my brother cried, but the cart moved on in a cloud of dust. Only the memory of the twinkling sound remained, like the little bells Mohini had worn on her ankles. He woke up, and his first thought was, “He must not marry her. The marriage will be unhappy.” Until he had dreamed it, nobody had realized that my brother’s sudden interest in marriage had everything to do with the dowry. But of course, it all made sense. The burning compulsion to marry that unemployed, dark girl with the scary rashes had greed for a mother.
Lakshmnan and Mother looked up from their breakfast. Sevenese felt like a deer in a den of snarling tigers.
“The money will be lost in one sitting,” he told Lakshmnan. There was a dead silence in the room. Lakshmnan stared at Sevenese with a strange shocked expression.
“Don’t marry her. It is a mistake,” Sevenese said. The same thought zigzagged around the room. Once before we had disregarded Sevenese’s warning and had regretted it. Could we afford another mistake? This one could be colossal.
“I heard the bells that Mohini used to wear on her ankles,” Sevenese added.
Shock was replaced by cold, implacable anger. Lakshmnan did not grind his teeth or haul Sevenese up by the collar. “You are all wrong,” he said, so quietly and so out of character that we were far more stunned than if he had ranted and raved. Then he walked out.
Mother sat down immediately to write a letter to the girl’s parents. She explained that on our return she had found the oil lamps on the prayer altar had been extinguished. It was an ill omen, and she had been advised not to proceed further with the match. Sevenese took the letter into town and posted it.
A letter came back, addressed to Lakshmnan. Lakshmnan tore it open and read it in the vegetable garden with his back turned to us. Then he crumpled it in his fist and threw it into a clump of banana trees. He turned around and came back into the house, a preoccupied expression on his face. He went to look for Sevenese. By then Sevenese was already a health inspector with the Malayan Railway, traveling up and down the country to inspect the cleanliness of facilities offered by the company. He was down for the weekend but was in the bedroom packing to leave in the morning.
Lakshmnan stood in the doorway. “Did she actually say I would lose it all in one sitting?” he asked abruptly.
“Yes,” Sevenese said simply.
For perhaps an hour Lakshmnan prowled the house restlessly, deep in thought. Finally, it seemed his turmoil was over. He went to Mother and announced that he would marry Rani or no one. What his thoughts were with regard to the dowry, he told no one. Perhaps he thought he wouldn’t gamble it all away. Perhaps he had big plans of starting a business like his Chinese friends.
As soon as he left that evening to play a game of cricket in the school playing field, Mother rushed out to retrieve the crumpled letter from the banana grove. I think that letter still exists in her wooden chest.
Dear, dear man,
Please do not forsake me. I think I am already deeply in love with you. Ever since you left, I have not been able to eat or sleep. Your beautiful face is constantly in my mind. We do not believe in such nonsense as extinguished lamps being ill omens. It is the nature of a lamp to extinguish when its wick shortens to nothing or the oil burns away. An act of carelessness surely cannot be an ill omen for our marriage.
I am a simple girl from a poor family. My father saved many years for my dowry, and it will be the perfect down payment for a house, or you could use the money to start your own business. A talented man like you could do so much with the money. Your father told me that you were interested in business.
I have suffered greatly in my lifetime, but by your side I will be happy even with plain rice and water. Please, my love, do not forsake me. I promise you will never regret the decision to marry me.
Yours forever,
Rani
Mother was livid, so angry her hands shook. She had disliked the girl on sight, and she had been right to. The sneaky madam was waving the dowry money like a red rag to a bull. She turned on my father.
“It’s all your fault,” she cried unreasonably. “It was you giving her the idea by talking about Lakshmnan’s good business sense. Why couldn’t you just shut up? You knew that I had brought up Lakshmnan’s gambling habit to put them off.”
Father was silent, as he usually was. In his eyes was dumb acceptance. Didn’t he know that that very look infuriated Mother all the more?
Lakshmnan had his own way. He had his double wedding. It was a horrible day. Mother was in a terrible mood. She refused to wear flowers in her hair and wore a dull gray sari with hardly any patterns on it. She stood to one side, stiff and unhappy. Lakshmnan, too, far from being happy that he had got his own way, was sullen and unsmiling. He seemed impatient to get the ceremony over with. That night Lakshmnan’s new mother-in-law came quietly up to him to delicately confide in him that they didn’t have the ten thousand at that moment, only three. In the softly lit room her inky black eyes shimmered with cunning. The many years of being a compulsive gambler’s wife, of playing hide-and-seek with the fishmonger, the butcher, the baker, the vegetable man, and the coffee seller, had taught her well.
“Obviously we will give you the other seven thousand when we get it. A cousin in financial trouble has borrowed the money. We couldn’t say no. You don’t mind, do you?” Her intonation and diction were flawless. She must have come from a family of good breeding.
Of course Lakshmnan understood. He was not my mother’s son for nothing. The rest he would get in never-never land. She held the bulky envelope out. Take the cash, waive the rest. He was being cheated. He knew it. Blood began to pound into his head. He had married their ugly daughter. He was due ten thousand. All his elaborate plans, of starting a new business, the deals he would cut—they hung in tatters. A justifiable rage was building inside him. “No,” he wanted to say, “take your ugly daughter and come back when you have the full dowry.” But the silken invisible vines that clung inside his being pulled and pressed against his chest. Cold alabaster chips lay waiting, their tongues clicking, whispering, “Take it, take it. Oh, make haste.”
The outrage of being cheated allowed Lakshmnan to rush out of the house and lose all the money in one sitting. His wife, he soon found out, far from being happy with plain rice and water, expected to be able to dry-clean her saris—a notion that made my mother rigid with shock, and even Father choke on his hastily swallowed tea.
PART 3
A Sorrowing Moth
Rani
My mother named me Rani so I would live the luxurious life of a queen, but when I was just a baby, a sorrowing moth landed on my cheek, and though my mother recognized it instantly and brushed it away with a howl of dread, the grieving dust on its downy wings had already settled into my skin. The dust was like a spell on my soul, outwitting happiness and embracing for my poor body the terrible rigors of existence. Even marriage, the one thing that had shone like a polished paradise of true love and e
verlasting happiness, has been just another disappointment in my life. Look at me, living in a small wooden house, with creditors baying at the door day and night. I have only relived my poor mother’s wretched life.
I curse the day that black widow spider, my mother-in-law, came into our house spinning her silken lies. Like strings of silver they flowed out of her terrible mouth and caught me struggling in their web. The truth is, between them all they forced me to marry Lakshmnan. Before he came into my life, I had doctors, lawyers, engineers, and even a London-trained brain surgeon who came to ask for my hand in marriage, but it was I who hesitated. Spoiled for choice, I managed to find imperfection in all of them. A crooked nose, too short, too skinny, too something. In my dreams I had seen a prince, tall, fair, good-looking, and rich. I thought patience was a virtue. Finally look what I got.
It is too late now to wish for one of them instead.
“Rani,” the spider said, “my son is a good man. Upright, hardworking, and kind. He is only a teacher now, but one day with his keen business sense, who can tell where he will stand in the world.”
Of course, there was no mention then of any gambling habit. In the end I was forced to marry Lakshmnan for the sake of my brother, who was suddenly and mysteriously enamored of the spider’s daughter. If you ask me, it was very suspicious that he was suddenly adamant that he must marry that girl. Even in those days there was nothing even mildly approaching spectacular about her, with her downtrodden puppy-dog eyes and an unexciting mouth. Yet my brother was seduced from indifference to steely determination in one encounter.
“I will have her and only her,” he declared, with steely eyes. It is impossible that she could have intoxicated him with her joyless face and that holier-than-thou mouth. No, no, living so close to the snake charmer, they availed themselves of his evil spirits. Together the mother and daughter put a charm on my brother. My father said that the first time they went to see the bride, they were offered a plate of coconut cookies that tasted nothing like any other coconut cookie he had ever eaten. Even Mother admitted that they were different. “Like eating flowers,” she said. So delicious in fact that my brother ate five.
I know the old witch hid something in those cookies, a love potion to make my brother fall for her flat-faced daughter. He became strange, driving his motorbike all the way to Kuantan whenever he could. Not to spend time with the girl. Oh no, the spider would never allow that. He drove all the way there just to sit in a coffee shop across the road from the Sultan Abdullah School and gaze longingly at her while she took her students into the school playing field for their daily physical exercise. Now tell me if that doesn’t sound like a gift from a snake charmer to you.
“Marry him,” they all chorused. What could I do? Stand in the way? No, I sacrificed my shining dreams for my brother. So I married Lakshmnan. And what have I got to show for it? A fine mess, that’s what I have. An ungrateful brother who doesn’t even speak to me anymore, a useless gambler for a husband, and children who are disrespectful to me. I have suffered greatly.
Do you know what my wonderful husband did with my dowry money? He gambled it all away on our wedding night. All of it. Ten thousand ringgit was gone before the night was through. I often travel back in time to that night, a secret place protected by the ravages of time. Everything is mummified so beautifully, it shocks me every time I visit it. Every thought, every emotion, carefully preserved to fool me into thinking it’s happening all over again. I see, feel, and hear everything, everything. Bring some cushions to put under my poor, swollen knees, and I will tell you exactly what my wonderful husband did to me.
I am a twenty-four-year-old bride again and have returned to the spider’s horrid little bedroom with its unpainted wooden walls. I am sitting on the edge of a strange silver bed facing the mirror in the left-hand door of a dark wood wardrobe. In the mirror my face is shadowed but unmistakably young, and my body firm and slender. I clearly see the yellowing mosquito net hanging like a soft cloud over me from the four posters of the big bed. The growing moon is luminous in the sky. Moonlight is a funny thing. It is not really a light at all but a mysterious silver glow that favors and caresses only the pale and the shiny. I watch it ignore a rolled decorative carpet and steal all the rich colors out of a matt embroidered picture on the wall, and highlight a gleaming glass jar with orange squares around the middle. It is particularly kind to a collection of cheap chinaware, a wedding gift just out of its wrapping. It stands out gleaming white and luminous pink. A silver tray shimmers.
The air is damp and heavy. The waistband into which all the folds of my elaborate sari are tucked is wet and uncomfortable against my skin. A small fan whirls heroically through the thick, oppressive air. I listen to the expensive rustle of my silk sari. It is like a whispered conversation that I cannot understand. The window is open, and the noise of chirping night insects outside is unexpectedly loud in my city ears. I am used to the sound of people.
I lick my dry lips, and the taste of lipstick mingles in my head with the smell of recently painted nail polish. There is clammy sweat in my tightly linked fingers. And there goes that nonsensical daddy longlegs moving drunkenly across the wall. He hasn’t changed at all. He looks exactly the same, even though he is really fifteen years old now. I can hear the clamor inside my brain like a Chinese funeral, the gongs, the cymbals, the weeping and the wailing, and inexplicable sounds of shuffling feet, and then I hear the silence of everyone else in the house. Everyone knows I am here. I have been careful not to make a sound, and yet they can all hear me. Hear the horror and smell the shame of my position.
I can smell it even now. The pungent smell of my shame coming from the small pot of jasmine flowers that I had presented to him as a token of my love. I had bowed my head and shyly and with both hands held out the little pot to him. He took the offering from my hands, but as I raised my eyes, I witnessed him carelessly toss it on the table by the bed. It lost its balance and rolled onto its side, pretty flowers tumbling out, falling on the table, falling on the floor. He had not even looked at my gift in his haste to leave. He left me alone in our satin bridal bed fragrant with flower petals and dashed off to some seedy joint in Chinatown.
Now that he is gone, inside the silence in the house I know my new family is silently sniggering. Alone I sit stiffly in my grand sari and wait for him. Quietly. Calmly. But inside me is an anger so terrible it is glowing white-hot. It eats my insides. He does not care for me. My position is unbearable.
I have been made a fool of.
If he imagined that I was going to play the shy, foolish bride, he is much mistaken. I was born and bred in the tough city and brought up to be bold. I am no country bumpkin. Often I have been likened to a highly strung racehorse. The hours pass, and in the mirror my beautifully made-up eyes glitter fiercely. My face has hardened in the mirror into the angry statue of Goddess Kali, and my hands are slowly becoming clawed and stiff with clenching. My soft red lips have disappeared into my face, and only a thin, tight line is visible. I crave revenge. I want to fly at him and sink my freshly painted nails into his eyes.
Still he does not return.
But when he comes back at dawn, demented with a strange inward anger, I can only stare at him in shock. Wordlessly he falls on me. I do not cry, I do not shout, I embrace him. I pull him toward me eagerly; envelop him so tightly inside my limbs that we move like one animal. Even in the midst of my white-hot anger, I know this to be my power. His weakness will always be my power. In this bed I will be master. His need of this incredible coupling will always bring him running back again and again to me. Drugged by the discovery of my own power and sensuality, I feel my own anger slip out of my eyes, burning the backs of them and bringing tears hurrying down my cheeks. I watch spellbound as his hard body strains into an arch and his mouth opens and closes soundlessly. But in seconds he is vaulting away from my clinging body.
He sits hunched by the side of the bed, his head buried in his hands, and he cries like a thing broken. The
moonlight favors my husband, stretching out his naked back so it seems curving and endless. Playing a game on his body. A little light here, a little shadow there. It makes him beautiful. I reach out my hand and softly, reverently, touch the smooth, exquisite planes of his body. My fingers are dark on his light skin. He is sorry. I feel humbled by the emotions I have unearthed.
This is my wedding night, I think. It is not at all what I had expected, but the powerful emotions and the passion are far, far better than the silly romantic dreams I have childishly nurtured. He is mine, I think with pride, but the very moment the heady thought fills my head, he makes a sound like a deer coughing and sobs, “I shouldn’t have married you. God, I should never have married you. What a terrible mistake I have made.”
I can see it now, my dark hands stilling suddenly on the curve of his hard flank as I listen in astonished wonder to him sob over and over again, “I should never have married you.”
He had lost all our money, humiliated and hurt me deeply, and yet my body had quivered like a musical note under his. His unreachable despair and his heartless rejection fired my blood. The challenge of taming such a man was irresistible. One day I would be the one to hold this beautiful hurting being in my arms, the one to make all the pain go away. I will make you love me, I think. One day you will look at me with shining eyes, I promise myself.
You should have seen him then. He used to take off his shirt and carry weights in our backyard, and the Malay women who lived across the street used to stand hidden behind their curtains and watch him. When we walked in the streets together, people stared at us and envied me such a man.
I know he would have come to love me if not for the spider that hung over our early life, dribbling poison into his ear and spinning lies about me. She hated me. She thought I was not good enough for her son—but who is she to talk? Even when she was young, she was no beauty. I have seen photographs of her, and all she could ever lay claim to is her fair skin. She was jealous of everything I had and always managed to find fault with everything I did, but the truth is, she didn’t want to lose the little influence she had left over her precious son. She wanted him for herself, and the way she did it was with money. She tried to control him with money. She could have helped us financially. That miser has slowly piled up an enormous stash in the bank—a sum that my husband helped to accumulate. She could have helped us, but she thought she’d rather watch me fall flat on my face.