The Rice Mother

  For one second I was terrified. Instinctively.

  Something inside me went cold. Like a dollop of strawberry ice cream. God whispered a warning, but Luke smiled, and he has such a beautiful smile, it transforms his face. I forgot the warning. I forgot that his eyes when he spoke had been cold and opaque. Like a snake’s.

  “You, bright eyes, are keeping a table full of important people waiting,” he said with his charming smile.

  I blinked. I thought men only said things like that to Bella’s breasts. His ice cream melted in its glass bowl. Suddenly bold, I stared back. He wore no jewelry. His teeth were straight and his cheekbones sharp. He looked at me with an extraordinary intensity. It held every line in his face together. Yes, I was definitely drawn. It is human nature to want the dark side of the moon. I knew that he was my destiny. He meant to have me. If you stay, his eyes said, I will pour you into myself until you are no more. And yet I did not run away. Perhaps for the same reason the skylark sings while it soars, dips, and dives as it is pursued by the talons of a hungry merlin. Perhaps I have always wanted to be in somebody else’s skin.

  I agreed to phone him. I didn’t think Papa would approve, so I did not give him my number.

  “Call me,” he ordered softly as he walked away, and I saw the footprints he had left behind in the golden sands of my dreams and in my heart. I was so caught up with my own thoughts that I did not even see the blue car that followed me home until I was standing before our gate.

  Two days later I stood in the lobby of Kota Raya shopping center and called his office. Earlier the card with his direct number on it had fallen into a drain while I was trying to pay for a glass of soya bean juice. The card floated, white and pristine, in the murky green water for a moment before sailing away underneath the loose concrete drain coverings. A snooty receptionist asked me which company I was from.

  “It’s personal,” I said.

  There was an audible pause. “I’ll put you through to his secretary,” she said, sounding so bored that it made me fidget uncertainly with the coins in my pocket. His secretary when she came on the line was cool. She made me regret calling. “Yes, can I help?”

  “May I speak to Luke, please?” I asked hesitantly.

  She told me he was in a meeting and could not be disturbed, and so smoothly suggested I leave a message that I suspected she had done it millions of times before. Doubts that Luke would even remember me began to creep in. I imagined him a millionaire playboy, hundreds of girls bugging him at the office. Maybe I had dreamed everything. I didn’t even have his phone number.

  “Er, actually he can’t call me. Maybe I’ll try later,” I babbled, embarrassed and with no intention of ever calling back. I felt young and stupid. Whatever must I have been thinking of?

  “Wait a minute. What is your name?” the cool voice demanded.

  “Dimple,” I whispered miserably.

  “Oh.” The voice sounded undecided for a moment. “Hold on, please. He is in a very important meeting, but I’ll check if he will take the call.” The line went quiet, and I put another ten cents into the money slot, my poor stomach in knots. Just getting through to him had so unnerved me I was almost trembling.

  “Hello,” Luke said abruptly.

  “Hi,” I replied shyly.

  He began to laugh. “Why didn’t you call me on my direct line?”

  “Your business card fell into the drain,” I said, reassured by the sound of his laughter. I knew then that it was going to be okay.

  “Thank you for calling,” he said softly. “Thank God I mentioned your name to Maria. Would you like to meet for dinner?”

  “I can’t really go out at night—you know, my mom, my dad . . .”

  “Well, tea, lunch, brunch, breakfast, whatever?”

  “Mmm . . . maybe I can do dinner on Friday, but I can’t stay out past nine o’clock.”

  “Fine. What time do you want to be picked up?”

  “Six o’clock outside Toni’s hairdressers in Bangsar.”

  “Done. See you at six, Friday, but will you call again before that just to speak to me? This time use my direct line.”

  “Okay,” I agreed. He gave me his number, and then he had to go back to his important meeting, but by then I was happy again. He really did want to see me, and I really did want to see him.

  I got ready for my first date with Luke with a thumping heart.

  “What shall I wear?” I had asked.

  “Jeans,” he had said emphatically. “I’m taking you to have the best satay you have ever tasted.”

  “Okay,” I agreed gladly. His voice on the phone did strange things to my heart. I felt helpless and gauche in his worldly presence. Jeans would even out the score a little, I hoped.

  I didn’t let him pick me up from home. He was not the right color. Mother would have a fit to think I was going out with a man who was not Ceylonese. It was the main criterion. I wore a white shirt and jeans, caught my hair in a clip, and wore too much makeup. Then I looked into the mirror and, utterly disgusted, took all the makeup off and started again. A touch of mascara, dark brown eye-liner on the top lid, and pale pink on my lips. I slid the clip off my hair and shook it loose, still dissatisfied with my appearance and feeling fat in my blue jeans. He would look at me and wonder why he had ever thought I was attractive.

  After much to-ing and fro-ing I left the house wearing stretch black jeans, too much makeup, and a clip in my hair. I was early. As I waited nervously, a group of young boys stopped to chat and flirt. They were so persistent, I began to think the stretch jeans and the makeup were a bad idea. I turned away from them and began to surreptitiously dab away at the lipstick and the blusher. They milled about in a group behind me and tried to tease me into conversation. When I saw Luke’s car, I practically ran into it. He looked at me carefully.

  “You all right?” he asked, eyeing the smudged lipstick.

  I nodded quickly, feeling like a fool. His gaze moved to the youths, who were already moving on good-naturedly. How to compete with such a car? I pulled the visor mirror down, and I looked a mess. Self-consciously I repaired my face. It had all gone wrong. I felt almost tearful, thinking I had ruined everything.

  At the traffic lights he took my chin in his firm hand and turned me to face him. “You look gorgeous,” he said. I stared into those dark eyes. He was not a beautiful man, but there was something compelling about him. In a room full of people he would shine like a light. It felt as if I had known him for a thousand years. As if we had spent a thousand lives together. We didn’t speak anymore. He didn’t want to know about my family, my friends, my likes, or my dislikes. All of it was unimportant. He put a tape into the cassette player. A woman sang a sad song in Japanese. I watched his hands. They had felt right on my chin. Strong and familiar.

  In Kajang he parked near a shack crammed with people sitting around Formica-topped tables. A Malay man stood outside in front of a barbecue, fanning the fires that cooked two rows of satay sticks dripping fat. He smiled a huge toothy grin.

  “Hello, boss,” he called out in a friendly manner.

  “You’re completely full. You’re going to be richer than me soon,” Luke joked, looking into the wooden shack crowded with dining customers.

  The man beamed with a mixture of pleasure and modesty. “Ah-mad!” he shouted at a serving boy in Malay. “Fetch the folding table from out back.”

  The boy ran away nimbly and came out dragging an old table. Then he carted out two wooden stools. He had the same grin as his father. Soon we were sitting at the wobbly wooden table in the balmy evening air.

  “You’re Hindu, so you probably don’t eat beef, do you?” he hazarded.

  I shook my head. “No, but you go ahead,” I said.

  “We will both have chicken.” He ordered forty chicken satay sticks.

  Drinks, dips, sliced cucumber and onions, and ground rice steamed in coconut-leaf packages arrived on the table.

  “Your eyes are like a cat’s,” he said suddenly
.

  “That’s what my grandfather used to say. I take after my Aunt Mohini.”

  “They really are the most beautiful pair of eyes,” he said in a softly assessing voice, the tone someone might use while deciding on the color of their bathroom suite. The mullah in the golden minaret down the road began citing his evening prayers into the loudspeaker. I listened to the sound. There was something about the call that always filled a hole inside me. I could close my eyes and let the drawn-out sounds wash into my very soul.

  The satay sticks arrived, piled high on blue-and-red oval serving plates.

  Luke dipped a stick into the rich peanut sauce. “I want you to start thinking about getting married,” he said, biting into the yellow flesh.

  When I arrived home, Papa was watching TV in the living room. He looked up as I came in. “What did you and the girls get up to?” he asked.

  “Nothing much. Just hung around Pertama Complex.”

  “Hmmm, good,” he commented, more involved in a quiz show than my answer.

  Mother was in the kitchen. She was putting away some food.

  “Are you back, then?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I answered dutifully. Then I quickly crept upstairs and, picking up the extension in my parents’ bedroom, I dialed Aunty Anna’s number.

  “Hello,” she said. Her voice on the other side was beautifully familiar in my rocking, slipping world.

  “Oh, Aunty Anna,” I declared almost tearfully, “I think I am in trouble.”

  “Come around, Dimple, and we’ll talk about it,” she said in her dear, unflappable way.

  Bella

  When I was eight years old, I opened Mother’s old mirrored cupboard in the storeroom and found crushed among her discarded saris a rolled-up cloth picture. Unrolled, it revealed a treasure beyond compare. Two splendid peacocks, their spread tails created with real peacock feathers and eyes of colored glass, stood preening on a pink terrace ornately decorated with lotus-flower embroidery.

  Against a black and stormy sky, they shimmered deep blue and rich green.

  I ran my wondering fingers over their cold glass eyes, along the fine blue stitches and shiny green beads that adorned their bodies. With a child’s reverence for things of brilliant color, my clumsy hands tried to smooth out the gleaming eyespot on each ruffled feather. Some of the velvety fronds were broken and beyond repair, but I still thought I had never seen anything so beautiful, until I remembered that I had seen the peacocks before. This used to hang in a glass frame upon the wall until I was four or five years old, when Mother smashed it during a ferocious quarrel and, with bleeding fingers and blazing hatred in her face, threatened Papa with a jagged piece of glass.

  I sat on the stone floor of our slightly musty storeroom, convinced I had found something very special, for the peacock is a holy, powerful creature. Even Buddha had passed one of his reincarnations as a peacock.

  I laid my plans carefully.

  One stormy afternoon, while everyone was out and Papa slept in front of the television, I carried the magnificent picture into my bedroom. Like any good Mongolian shaman would, I laid the soft cloth on my bed, carefully arranging and flattening each feather so they would not crush under the daily weight of my mattress and me. I had decided to store my unhappy soul in the more resplendent peacock of the two in the picture and hide it under my mattress. Rain blew sideways and beat steadily against the window. I ignored the sounds of the television from the living room and imagined myself in a shack with an orange fire in the middle of the room, the hypnotic sound of the rain on the roof, like a real shaman’s drum. I began to hum softly. Then I chanted secret, magic phrases now forgotten and in a rush blew my soul out of my body and into the waiting peacock. I cupped my hands over its face, its glass eyes cold and smooth under my hot palms, until I was really sure that I had bottled my soul into the animal. Many minutes passed.

  Slowly, finger by finger, I removed my hands. The beautiful eyes stared back. I exhaled carefully. It was done. It was really done. I had cast my soul into the bird.

  Believing my soul thus entrusted, I was convinced, truly convinced, that if the peacock was in any way harmed, I too would fall dangerously ill or die. It was a serious business, but I resolved not to retrieve my soul until the power of my chosen animal had turned me beautiful. Only when night came would I rest upon my soul. As long as Nash didn’t find my peacock, I was safe.

  In my child’s mind I was certain the transformation would not take too long. As in the best tales of the shamans, I would have to wait only until the snow melted on the mountain. How long does snow take to melt? Surely not that long, but every day when I looked in the mirror I saw only a Japanese Oni puppet, fit for the task of frightening small children. Atop a face inflated with fat an untidy jumble of curls perched. Sadly I stared at eyes that were dull and ordinary, when what I desperately longed for were eyes so enormous they whispered to my ears. There was simply no redeeming feature that I could see in my face.

  “Make haste, thee,” my lonely heart begged the glossy peacock.

  “Perhaps tomorrow the vermilion and the collyrium will arrive,” sighed the peacock wearily into my soulless body, its broken feathers swaying gently in the wind.

  Is it not natural then that, for as long as I can remember, I resented my sister deeply, envying Dimple her shining, straight hair, her strangely light eyes, her slim figure, her effortless way with good grades, and that other family in Kuantan that only she seems to have inherited?

  Oh, I know Mother said that Dimple was being banished to the “great spider’s web” for the holidays, but in our darkened bedroom I spied her secretly counting the days and struggling mightily to suppress her excitement at the onset of her holidays. I couldn’t help the terrible envy that grew in my heart. At her command was so much devotion. I could imagine her walking with our aunt on their way to see the caged bear near the mechanic’s shop. She is laughing, and in her hand she carries the wild honey that our Grandma Lakshmi has thought to buy from the traveling aborigines and saved especially for that purpose—so Dimple may have the half-fearful joy of feeding a caged black bear with curving gray claws.

  She didn’t see me creep up softly behind her when Grandma Lakshmi called her from Old Soong’s phone. I listened closely to her nervously whispered conversation. “No, Grandma, I’m fine. Everything is okay. Really it is. Please don’t worry. I’ll be there soon. I love you so much my heart aches.”

  I tormented myself with images of Dimple sitting in the comfort of Grandma’s lap, twirling a lock of her hair while the old lady fed her by the hand like a favorite child.

  She didn’t even notice my jealous eyes when the postman delivered packages wrapped in brown paper from Uncle Sevenese. No, she was too busy turning the pages of The Happy Prince, The Selected Poems of Omar Khayyám, The Secret Life of a Jasmine, or some other clever book that tells you how a female sea horse places her eggs into a pouch in the male. How he nourishes it with his own blood and finally suffers to give birth to the little baby sea horses. She was too busy giggling at outrageous excerpts from Vatsyayana’s famous treatise or the romantic poems of Bhanudatta. I too wanted to be friends with Uncle Sevenese.

  In my gray heart I coveted postcards sent to me from strange places in the world and sitting up late into the night, listening to an uncle’s wild stories of magic and supernatural beings. Is it so inconceivable that I too might want to listen to Taoist beliefs? Hear of an immortal flower growing on a submersible, mythical island where the trees are made of pearl and coral and the animals are glittering white? Or that I might to want know about Zhang Guolao, the great necromancer who folded up his white mule like a sheet of paper and kept it in a bag when he did not require it? Might not I, too, desire to be tickled so hard that Grandma Lakshmi has to come in and crossly tell Uncle Sevenese to stop tormenting the child? I wanted to fall asleep on his tummy and wake up to funny cartoons of me sleeping on a large belly with zzzz coming out of my mouth. Like her I would have saved and
treasured the sketches, for really they are exceptionally good.

  I can’t help remembering Granddad when he came to the Kuantan house to give Mother money. When we sat on the veranda and shared a banana. He was a mad fellow, giving me the fruit and eating the strands that he pulled away from the inside skin. He talked so little and looked so lost. Mother explained that he never spoke because he was afraid of Grandma Lakshmi. It entered my mind that she must be a horrid woman, our Grandma Lakshmi.

  So through the years I consoled myself that these people who for some mysterious reason loved my sister and not my brother and me were exactly what Mother said they were—poisonous and ugly. I let myself be persuaded that there was a valid reason for her fierce hatred. When Mother is in terrible pain, when her ankles are the size of footballs, she makes me sit at the edge of her bed and listen to her memories and the unthinkable injustices that have been heaped upon her. It makes my head spin.

  Sometimes out of the blue her fingers unclench, and with surprising strength she plucks my chubby figure in her swollen hands and dashes me, my arms flailing, into her hard chest as if I am but a soft toy.

  “Look at me!” she cries desperately. “Look what that witch has done to me. It is because of her that I have become this cruel creature. I was a good person until she came into my life with her lies and promises.” She pulls my stunned face away from her hard breasts and stares into my shocked eyes. “Is this a good life?” she asks malevolently. Then she throws her head in her hands and wails like a mourner at a Chinese funeral. I listen helplessly to the thin, long shrieks, and I am relieved that I do not consort with people capable of such harm.

  Then, I am certain that Mother is right. That wonderful Uncle Sevenese’s skin conceals horrible rot. That he is no more than a vulgar cynic, and Grandma Lakshmi an avaricious monster whose real jealousy toward Mother is rooted in incestuous tendencies toward our father. That Aunty Anna is to be avoided at all costs, for she is a hypocrite of the worst order. Her soft, shy smiles hide a deeply conniving mind. Often Nash is recruited to stand beside me by the bed and agree that the other two, Aunty Lalita and Uncle Jeyan, are two dim people best ignored. In fact they are detestable.