“Mistress Soong,” Mother called out in a thin, hoarse voice.
Finally Mistress Soong opened a dark wooden door and walked out. She was ugly beyond description. All her beauty was gone. She was fat and going bald. In her eyes, made smaller by rolls of fat, there was no joy. In fact, Mother’s presence seemed to make her uncomfortable. Here was someone who knew her secrets. All her ugly secrets must lie inside this old hag. The hag opened its mouth and explained the necessity for a phone. Mistress Soong pointed to a phone near the hallway. After the call Mother thanked Mistress Soong and quickly walked out.
She passed Minah’s house, where a long time ago she and Mui Tsai had seen the big python. Minah was long gone. Her Japanese protector had left her with a piece of land and money, and she had moved away. Mother quickly passed the Chinese house where poor Ah Moi had hanged herself all those years ago. Father was lying flat on his back. He had not moved at all. She felt like crying and didn’t know why. It was obvious that the injury was not serious. Why did she feel suddenly so lost, so abandoned? As if he had left her, when it was she who had left him to call an ambulance. Why, after all these years, did she suddenly feel a pain in her heart at the thought of his pain, at the thought of losing him? She tried hard to remember that he irritated her, annoyed her, and frustrated her beyond endurance.
She looked down at him, and he looked at her.
There was no expression on his face. He just looked at Mother as he had for all the years she had known him. Solid, dependable, and as malleable as dough. She thought she should tell him something of what she was feeling. Perhaps he would be comforted by her confused thoughts, her strange longing for him to be well. Then I came running, and the soppy words died in her throat. She felt embarrassed that an old woman like her had thought those silly things. She was grateful that she had not spoken those ridiculous, childish words. It might have shocked him into a heart attack.
She left me with Father and went into the house to get ready. She wanted to accompany him to the hospital. Stand by his side. She certainly felt too restless to stay at home alone. Quickly she changed out of her faded brown-and-green sarong and put on a light blue sari with a small dark green border. Into her choli she tucked a purse that she had first filled with money. Who knows how much medicine could cost these days? She combed her hair and twisted it into a tight bun at the nape of her neck. All of this had taken her only a few minutes to accomplish.
The house was very quiet. It seemed to know that a tragedy had occurred outside. It seemed to know that old bones don’t heal. Finally she met her own eyes in the mirror and stopped, startled. There was something foreign in them. She looked closer. She told me that she saw some distrusted emotion swimming inside. It made her feel uneasy, so she quickly looked away and started to think practically. Her feet. Something had to be done quickly with her feet. She washed the blood off the soles, and slipping her feet into her slippers, went to wait by the old man. She stood over us regally, watching me, huddled beside Father, smoothing his white hair, tears running down my face. But my weakness gave her strength. She was glad then that she had not succumbed to those strange emotions. She is a proud woman. She did not want to look weak or foolish. It was a good thing that it was not her huddled in that undignified fashion on the ground, sobbing her heart out. She knew the neighbors were looking from behind their curtains. Once they might have all crowded around trying to help, like the time when the Japanese soldiers took away Minah’s husband and shot him dead. But now the neighborhood was full of new people, a whole generation of people who smiled and waved from afar. People who believed in a strange, westernized concept called privacy.
The ambulance drove into our cul-de-sac. I waved wildly, calling out, “Here, here! Over here!”
Two white-coated men transferred Father onto a stretcher. He winced with pain. For Mother there was a feeling of déjà vu, seeing him on the narrow stretcher being ministered to by urgent hands clothed in white. She remembered the last time she had seen him stretched on a narrow bed. He had been gray and unconscious then. She had been only a baby herself then. She climbed into the ambulance and sat quietly as it sped along the streets of Kuantan.
Father closed his eyes tiredly. He seemed so far away. Strangely she longed to touch him, to feel that he was still there with her. Her own thoughts confused her. Perhaps she was getting old, or perhaps she understood his tiredness. She had long known that his days dreamed and longed for nightfall, where sweet blackness would descend like a thick, soft blanket of forgetfulness. Perhaps she feared the ultimate nightfall, and perhaps she feared that he appeared to welcome it, invite it. Once his eyelids fluttered open. They lingered on her wordlessly, and as if comforted by the sight of her anxious face, they fluttered shut again. She was pleased to have been his rock. She felt regret melt and slowly fill all the little holes and crevices inside her being. She had been horrible to him. All his life he had done the best he could for her, and she had been nothing but impatient, rude, and overbearing. She had made sure that all the children knew that she was in charge. She hadn’t given him face. She had even been jealous of all the little affections that they smuggled out into his bleak world. She had been selfish and petty.
It was only a hairline crack in his thighbone. They wrapped his leg in white plaster. He lay on the bed with his eyes closed. She realized that he was losing color. He used to be so black, and now he was fading to gray-brown. They brought around a tray of food. He looked at the pale food and shook his head unhappily. Mother mixed some of the rice and the runny fish broth and fed Father the way she had fed us all when we were very young. Like a child, Father ate from her hand. From that day onward he would not eat unless Mother fed him herself.
“I’ll bring home-cooked food tomorrow,” she promised, glad to be able to contribute positively. When she left the ward, she left with a heavy heart. She couldn’t understand herself. After all, she had spoken at length to the doctor. It was only a hairline crack. And he had assured her that there was absolutely no reason to worry. In three weeks the cast could come off, and he would be as good as new. She took the bus home. Taxis were so expensive. Anyway she always enjoyed sitting on a bus. By the time she got home, it was already four, and she hadn’t eaten a thing all day, nor taken her asthma pills. Quickly she swallowed some with water. She had no appetite, but her stomach rumbled audibly, so she ate some rice and curry.
For three weeks her life took on a pattern. She woke up with no thought for breakfast, quickly cooked some food, and rushed to the hospital. She fed him with her own hand. Then she collected the empty lunch carrier and returned home on the bus. At home she took her asthma pills, and in about half an hour she steeled herself to eat her lunch. Of course she didn’t know that swallowing the strong asthma pills on an empty stomach was damaging her stomach walls. Every day the acid inside her stomach was eating into the walls. She ignored the occasional twinge and cramp. There were more important things to do.
On the day the cast was supposed to come off, Mother went early. She waited by his bedside while they cut away the hard, yellowing cast.
“There you go,” said the doctor cheerfully to Father.
Father tried to move his leg, but it was like a stone attached to his body.
“Go on,” urged the doctor. “Move your leg. It will be a little bit stiff, but it’s as good as new now.”
Poor Father tried as hard as he could to move his leg.
“It won’t move,” he said finally, exhausted by the effort of trying to shift his stone leg. The doctor frowned, and the nurse made a face. These old men. Always fussing unnecessarily. Mother looked on. The twinge in her stomach bothered her. It had become a burning pain.
The doctor examined Father’s leg again. Finally he declared that perhaps the cast had been too tight, and what Father needed now was physiotherapy. He gave the impression that a little therapy would have Father running up and down the hospital corridors again. In fact, his leg was dead. All the nerves in it were dead. It was c
old and hard. It was quite without doubt paralyzed.
For three months Father endured therapy at the hands of unsympathetic nurses. They accused him of being lazy. One day he woke up to find a small piece of paper inside his mouth. He knew it was one of the nurses playing a joke on him. He was lonely and now the butt of their jokes. He knew that his inability to get better irritated them. They often behaved as if he was purposely not trying to walk. He asked to leave. He told the doctor he would do his exercises at home. He had big strong sons who could help him. An ambulance brought him home. They carefully transferred him to his big bed.
I heard him sigh with relief.
But now that he was home, he stopped doing his exercises, and slowly but surely his other leg became stiff. The paralysis stole up his legs and began to creep up his body. He became a strange figure with slightly bent knees. When we tried to straighten his legs, they slowly inched their way up the bed until his knees were bent again. A month passed, and Mother was diagnosed with chronic gastritis. There was nothing she could eat without causing her extreme pain. All day long she drank warm milk and ate balls of rice mixed with yogurt. She couldn’t even eat fruit any more. An apple or an orange could make her cough blood. A tomato might make her scream in pain, and food with the smallest amount of spices or oil would make her throw her plate on the floor in pure frustration.
In the bedroom it was obvious that Father was dying. Mother sat by his bedside but even she was powerless to stop death from claiming him inch by inch. Indeed that is how death took him, day by day creeping up his body with casual unhurried ease. When death claimed his hands, she put hot-water bottles on them, as if she could warm up his flesh and stop it from dying. But the truth was, the petty child of death was making Father pay for eluding his clutches all those years ago when my father had sat outside the hole in the jungle, laughed, and said, “Nine out of ten is still very good work.”
Mother made Lakshmnan or one of the boys come by once a day to lift Father and change his position. He was covered with bedsores. They picked Father’s frail body up in their hands and washed him as if he were a child.
In seven months he was paralyzed from the neck down. His entire body was so still and so oddly cold to the touch that it seemed as if he was already dead. Father did everything slowly. Now he was dying slowly, painfully. It was his way. His breath was unpleasant. He no longer wanted food. Slowly his head grew cold too. Mother tried to pour milk down his throat, but it only dribbled out of the corners of his mouth and down his chin. And still she refused to give up. She sat beside him all day.
One day he looked into Mother’s face and whispered, “I have been more fortunate than Thiruvallar.” After that he stopped speaking, and the horrible stillness of death settled in on him. Through his half-closed eyelids only the whites of his eyes showed. His breath grew so shallow that only a mirror held to his face showed that there was still breath in his stiff body. His face and head were so cold, and yet he was breathing. His eyes stared ahead into nothing. For four days he lay cold and yet breathing. Then on the fifth morning Mother woke up, and he was cold all over. His mouth was half open. The mirror no longer misted. All his children and grandchildren were at his bedside when Mother called Dr. Chew. Dr. Chew pronounced Father dead.
Mother didn’t cry. She asked Lakshmnan to straighten his legs. From the kitchen she brought a thick piece of wood, and then she left the room. Lakshmnan slammed the thick wood on my father’s kneecaps. We heard them crack, and my brother slowly pushed down the stiff legs until they were straight once more. Lakshmnan brought out Mother’s bench into the living room and laid Father on it. The mattress from the big silver bed was taken outside into the backyard and burned. It made a large fire that evening. I saw Mother standing there all by herself, watching the orange flames quickly eat into the cotton stuffing. She looked like a widow fearlessly contemplating suttee. I could imagine her rushing fearlessly into the fire where her husband’s body burned. Nobody needed to push Mother. Nobody would dare, in fact. She was burning more than a mattress. She was burning a part of her life. All the children had been conceived on that mattress. She had lain with my father for so many years on that mattress. Over the years she had filled and refilled the stuffing to keep it plumped up.
She watched it burning, and it dawned on her that she had loved him. All those years she had loved him and not even known it. Even the unfamiliar twinges when he had first fallen, she had ignored as foolishness. Perhaps she had known then, but she had been too proud to tell him. She should have told him. Bitterly she wished that she had. It would have made him happy. Why, why, she berated herself, didn’t she tell him? It might have even given him the will to live. She knew that it was his lifelong ambition that she should come to love him. The last words that had escaped so painfully from his immobile mouth sang with bitter sweetness in her ears. “I have been more fortunate than Thiruvallar.” She understood his message. In the string of stories that make the chain of Hindu legend, Thiruvallar was one of the greatest sages that ever lived. At his wife’s deathbed he granted her a boon. “Ask,” he said. “Ask for anything your heart desires.” She could have asked for the most precious thing every Hindu aspires to—moksha, release from the necessity of further births—but instead she asked for the reason why he had requested, at the beginning of their marriage, a needle and a glass of water with every meal. As far as she could tell, he had never used the objects.
“Ah, my dear wife, the needle was to pick up every grain of rice that might have accidentally fallen off the banana leaf, and the bowl of water was to dip them in and wash them before I ate them. Waste is a sin that denies entrance into heaven. But because you had never once allowed a single grain to fall by the wayside, I never needed to use the needle or the bowl of water.” Because she had been such a good wife and so far beyond reproach, Thiruvallar granted her the boon of moksha. With his last breath, Father taught Mother the meaning of love, the way she had never known existed—a humble acceptance that does not want more than is given.
Finally he was gone, the gentle heart who had loved her so dearly.
Mother stood up helplessly. Too late, too late. She should have told him. Why didn’t she tell him? Tears ran down her face. A hand reached up to touch them. So, deep in some forgotten part of her, someone was weeping inconsolably. She should have told that foolish man the shocking thing. He probably would not have believed her; nevertheless, she should have told him. It was a mistake not to. Again her head had ruined her heart. She touched her lips to my father’s cold ears, but still I heard her whisper, “I ask the boon that in my next life, I am again given the same husband, for it seems I loved him all along.”
PART 4
The First Taste of Forbidden Wine
Sevenese
Dreaming when Dawn’s left hand was in the sky
I heard a voice within the tavern cry
“Awake, my little ones, and fill the cup
Before life’s liquor in its cup be dry.”
All my life I was steadfast in my refusal to acknowledge the greater subtlety of Omar Khayyám. The real, mystical meaning to his verse is like a wine, so potent it becomes dangerous to the animal that consumes it. It seemed easier, the shallow Western interpretation. To have ever acknowledged that the “voice within the tavern” was not the wheedling, mewling sound that slipped out of rouged lips in the early hours of the morning in some seedy hotel room in Thailand could have solved the mystery of life. And I didn’t want it solved. Solved, it slouched drab and boring in the distance.
Did Khayyám know about apsaras, divine female nymphs that can be bought for a few American dollars a night? I will tell the great poet, should I come across him in the next world, that my life’s liquor was a golden liquid too, but it came out of a Jim Beam bottle. And bloody good it was. Omar would understand. He was a man with a keen eye. He would guess that to deny myself the illusion of ignorance would have been to deny the quality of the pot, even question the hand of the potter. The issu
e was a simple one. Was it my fault if the potter’s hand shook? And I the ungainly vessel he made? Should I sneer at myself for leaning awry?
He who wrought me into shape also stamped me with the vine leaf of corruption. What was to be done?
I am a compulsive cad. Strong liquor, rich food, and the easy life move me in a way that is doubtless wrong. I look at my mother with horrified fascination. Material ambition is the compulsion that drives her. Is it possible, I think to myself, that she does not know how ugly a beast it is that she clasps so close to her breast? Thwarted, it has slowly sucked the life out of her.
Me, I rebelled. Took the long road home. I stood before a statue of Kali, the goddess of death and destruction. Malevolently she stared at me, and I stared back fearlessly. That was what my maker did. His hand shook. He made me selfish, heartless, and fearless in the face of the unknown. My point of no return is yet to be tested. “Take me further,” I challenge recklessly.
Even now that my bones are aching and my muscles weary, it still urges inside me. It is damn near impossible to ask for just one beer or just one girl. I ask for four and line them up on the bar so that their stuck-on paper brands stare at me. Four girls lined up in a row and bent double is a mighty pretty sight too. Yes, I filled my cup until it overflowed, and still I filled it some more.
I was waiting for my first prostitute. “Wah, wah, wah,” played in my ear, and the girls with the downcast eyes bored me. The sheer energy needed to take out a repressed Indian virgin with a fat mother attached to her knickers and the months and months of mild courtship with no guarantee of getting anywhere left me limp. I wanted less fuss, more variety. I hung about at the top of the school steps with my cool mates, and we watched the girls coming up. Diligently asking them all if we could touch their mangoes. Invariably all the ugly, fat girls grew belligerent, cursing us soundly, while the pretty ones blushed or dropped their heads coyly. Once one of them fell in love with me, but of course I broke her heart. The thing I searched for didn’t lie in the arms of a good woman. I wanted seasoned women who knew they ought to be paid.