The Rice Mother

  “ ‘Too salty,’ she proclaimed tightly, pushing away the plate. She stood up suddenly. The chair fell back with a loud thud and she stalked off to her bedroom. In the dining room only Jeyan ate. There were no other sounds than his chewing. Blind to all the thick emotions pressing down on us, he ate. It was truly the calm before the storm, for suddenly Rani rushed back into the dining area, shrieking at the top of her voice. ’I took you into my house and fed you, and this is the gratitude I get. Get out of my house, whore! Is one brother not enough for you?’ What could I say? It was true I wanted her husband, but she had known that before she invited me to stay or took my money.

  “She ranted and raved until Jeyan found us somewhere else to live, the little room over the Chinese laundry shop. It was nine o’clock at night when we climbed those creaking stairs, lit only by a dim, naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. I screamed when a rat as big as a cat ran in front of my foot. The room was tiny. It had one window and walls reduced to bare wood and planks. In some places tiny strips of unpeeled paint spoke of a room once light blue. In one corner was a wooden bed with a bare, stained mattress, and in the other was a table with three stools. Dirt grew like light gray mold everywhere. My love affair was over. It disappeared behind a veil as if ashamed. And in that tiny dark room where we had to share a bathroom with the dirtiest people you could possibly imagine, I began to hate my husband. It crept on me so gradually that at first I didn’t notice, and then suddenly I hated him. I hated lying beside him, listening to him breathing at night. I hated the children I would bear him. My hate was a solid thing inside my body. I felt it night and day. Sometimes I almost couldn’t trust myself with a knife in my hand in his presence.

  “And in this way I forgot about my untasted love for his brother. I told myself that there was no such thing as a field where flowers opened every day. I convinced myself that the world was ugly—a field of heartless human hearts pulsing greedily to live. The years passed, and children fell out of my body. I looked at them and saw my husband in their eyes. And I despised that little bit of them too. That certain way they spoke or the way they ate. I tried to dig everything of him out of them, and I punished them mercilessly. I made them ashamed of the bits in them that belonged to him. How cruel my frustration and hatred made me!

  “Outside our cramped room, on the telegraph wires and trees, lived hundreds of crows. The children stood at the window and stared at the rows of bodies black from beak to claw. The way they gathered themselves into organized rows of black made them seem ominous. Sometimes I had nightmares about them crashing through the windowpanes, shards of glass flying everywhere and landing on the children. They would peck at the children’s faces and gouge out bits of flesh from the screaming figures while my husband and I would sit and watch calmly. I was going mad in that room.

  “Every night while my husband and children slept, I heard Maya’s voice murmur in my ear. Maya was the great-granddaughter of a chef during the golden age of the Mughal Empire, and I had grown up in her lap. Every day of my childhood I had spent begging for and eating stories of the excesses indulged in the shady court-yards and the maze of private rooms where none but family, eunuchs, and servants might enter. She whispered into my ready ears unwritten stories handed down through the generations only by word of mouth. She knew about unpublished court intrigues, volatile passions, horrible jealousies, excesses beyond compare, tales of royal incest, and instances of terrible, terrible cruelty on a scale never known before. ‘There are some things no one sees but the eunuchs and the servants,’ the childless old woman once said to me. I never realized it, but in her lap I had learned the art of exquisite cruelty. It lay inside me silently.

  “It was my husband’s birthday. I awoke early. The sky was golden, and a mist still hung in the air. The children were asleep, and my husband’s hand was still on my stomach. A thought flashed into my head, Are you awake now? My poor heart. For years I had not thought about Lakshmnan; under my husband’s heavy hand and the tangled bedsheets, the thought instantly sickened me.

  “Troubled, I got out of bed and, leaving my tiny room, stepped neatly over the rats that were as big as cats and stood in the cool morning air. I remembered another age—picking up Lakshmnan’s shirts from the laundry basket and rubbing them against my cheek, the musk scent of him. I wanted to touch his face. Suddenly I missed him so much that tears burned in my eyes and a strange pain lodged itself in my heart. I decided to bake a cake. I went to the provision shop down the road and carelessly spent the money I was saving for a proper house for us on icing sugar, almonds, food coloring, eggs, chocolate butter, and fine flour. At home I deposited everything on the table and got to work. It wasn’t easy to get my cake into the shape I wanted, very much like a squarish egg. In my head I knew exactly what I was doing. It was early in the morning, and the children were drawing quietly in one corner of the room.

  “I hummed as I worked. The children stared at me in surprise. They hadn’t ever heard me hum ever since they were born. When the cake was baked, I trimmed off the excess bits and placed it on a clean plate. When my sugar paste was the exact dark brown, I kneaded it until it was warm and soft. Carefully I rolled all the creases out of it and, picking it up like a soft cloth, I hung it over the squarish egg shape I had baked. I cut circles the size of five-cent pieces out of onion petal and dyed them black. Onion flesh is best because it is curved and shines with the exact glimmer of a human eye. Then I moulded more colored sugar paste onto the covered egg shape exactly the way the old lady had taught me until even I was surprised by the likeness I had attained. How very like him!

  “I had learned my art well. I trickled food coloring into runny honey, and I poured it around my shape. I slotted the dyed onion shapes into the blank circles in the oval of his eyes, and I made his teeth out of the white sugar, glazing it carefully to get the glossy look of teeth. I drizzled fine strands of caramel to look like eyebrows, then I cut the nostrils slightly wider and stood back to admire my handiwork. It had taken me five hours, but the finished product was much more than I imagined.

  “Pleased, I put it in the middle of the table and sat down to wait for my husband. He walked through the door and, just as I had anticipated, his unsuspecting eyes leaped to my masterpiece, framed by the children and me sitting around it. Poor thing. The sight of his head resting comfortably in a sauce of blood on a large platter shocked him visibly. What a moment it was! Even the children recognized the head.

  “ ‘Papa,’ they cried in their babyish voices.

  “ ‘Yes, Papa,’ I agreed, exquisitely satisfied that they had recognized my work. Then I gave the knife to him. ‘Happy Birthday,’ I said, and the children chorused it.

  “For a time he was so startled, he could only stare with horror at the face on the platter, its eyes wide and bulging, its mouth open with terror. It was a Mughal revenge in the best tradition. It was the first time that poor Jeyan realized that I hated him. Until then I had kept it all inside, and the knowledge that he finally knew released me. The freedom was like the smell of fresh coffee in the morning. It woke me up. My brain yawned and stretched.

  “Now I could hate openly. Because he refused to take the knife from my hand, I stabbed the cake right through the nose. He didn’t touch the cake, but the children and I thoroughly enjoyed it, saving it for days. The children dipped their fingers into the gooey red blood under the head and licked it greedily. Their small fingers pushed into the soft lips, and their small milk teeth eagerly nibbled the glazed sugar teeth. The pink tongue, they pulled out and fought over. All this he watched with a hurt and unexpectedly stunned expression.

  “And then one day I plucked up the courage to ask him to leave us.

  “The day he left I spent on my hands and knees, bleaching his smell out of my life. It was very hard at the beginning, but we managed. Every year I worked harder and harder at my cake-making and decorating school. The children were growing up healthy and well, but they were both terrified of me. We moved to a bigger
house, but I was so unhappy inside.

  “My husband had become an old drunk.

  “Sometimes I saw him with red-rimmed eyes where the poor laborers gathered to drink cheap liquor made from rice, coconut palm, or even weeds. Once he stumbled past me on the street, muttering to himself. He had not recognized me. I looked at the pathetic creature swaying back to his dirty little room, and I felt not one bit of remorse. You see, I had become hard and cold. Nothing touched me. Not even my own unhappiness.

  “Then one day your mother, Dimple, came to see me. She had taken a bus, got off at the wrong stop, and walked all the way to my little terrace house in the burning afternoon sun. I looked at her, red-faced and clutching a plastic bag with her little tape recorder inside it. ‘Tell me your side of the story,’ she said.

  “Nobody had ever asked for my side of the story. Nobody had ever asked me why I didn’t love my saintly mother-in-law. So I told her. I said, I hated her grandmother because of all people she was the only person who really knew what it was like to be married to a man who disgusted you with his stupidity, his blindness, his ambling gait, and his stubborn ignorance. She was the only one who should have understood, and yet she married me to him. It was because she didn’t care about me at all. It was all a delicate, beautifully acted pretense. In the end she only loved her own flesh and blood.

  “As soon as I poured all my smothered, cramped thoughts into Dimple’s whirling machine, they suddenly became unimportant. Layer upon layer of hate on what? ‘So what,’ my heart cried, as it soared free out of my body. What is this terrible hate that I have carried around with me for years? Who have I hurt with my hate but my poor blameless children and myself? I must have been mad to waste all those years carrying around such a pointless grudge. I let the hate slide away. The hate for my husband, for his mother, for Lakshmnan’s wife, and my dreadful cynical contempt for everybody.

  “Suddenly I saw my untasted love again in your mother ’s little face. Lakshmnan became a person once again. Time slipped back. The past called, and I set back the clock. I still loved him. I suppose I always will. Failed desire is never the end of it but its guaranteed perpetuator. I sat down with her to have a cup of tea, and it was as if I was talking to Lakshmnan. It was the strangest thing ever. After I said good-bye to her, I closed the door, leaned back against it, and laughed until I got a stitch in my stomach. Yes, I have to thank her. I realized my children were a part of me. When they came home that day, I held their stiff, surprised bodies close to my body and cried. Confused and frightened, they tried to comfort me, and I rediscovered them. That is what your mother did for me. She helped me find my life again. Allowed me to look again at the image of Lakshmnan. It stopped raining in my world.

  “That night I opened an old box deep inside the cupboard of my soul, and I took out the picture of that colorful moment when he first put the violet piece of meat into his mouth. That moment when he looked at me to see if his look would be returned. That moment of surprise and creeping desire. That moment when sunshine flooded the room with silvery moonlight. Now that picture lies like a treasure in my old heart, and there it will remain until the day I die. When I heard that he had died, the picture, far from fading, became brighter still. Perhaps in another life we will meet again and be the husband and wife that we were denied in this lifetime.

  “Now, Nisha my dear, the reason I have told you all this is because your mother wrote to me a few days later to tell me that the tape she had used to record my story had been chewed up by her tape recorder. She said she would be coming back for the story again, but she never did. She never had much say in what she could and couldn’t do in her life. Since I knew she was saving the stories for you, I thought that this was something I could do for her. I could tell you myself what was in the ripped tape.”

  Nisha

  I stood in the middle of the hall and looked around me with a certain amount of satisfaction. The house was completely silent. Not even the old grandfather clock ticked or bonged. One day I would repair him, but now I simply wanted to feel the house.

  A team of robust women in blue had banished the thick cobwebs off the ceilings, polished the black marble floor to a high shine, put the gleam back in the curving banisters. The oil painting of Mother had returned from the restorers, a mysterious, wonderful thing of beauty. There was water in the taps and yellow light waiting in the light switches. Outside, the men had replaced the tattered hammock, dredged the pond, and released flame-colored fish into it. The weeds, painstakingly dug up, they burned at the bottom of the garden. The little summer house in the garden they strengthened and repainted in its original color, pure white.

  In the kitchen, most of the old-fashioned appliances were thrown out to make way for my own more modern items—a fridge that worked, a microwave, and a perfectly good washing machine that did not meet Amu’s approval. Oh, I forgot to say I found Amu, my old childhood nurse. It wasn’t easy, but a blind man in a Ganesha temple led me to a priest in an ashram who in turn led me to an envious cousin who tried to throw me off the scent, but I retraced my steps, and finally I stood before her. Tears came into my eyes. She had fallen on bad times and was begging in a night market, surviving on red ants she picked off dead lizards and the rotten food the market traders threw away. I saw her toothless, her twig hand outstretched, her feet thick with black dirt and stinking of rubbish, and knew instantly what it was to lie inside the loving circle of her brown limbs. “Dimple,” she said in a moment of confusion.

  “No, Nisha,” I said, and she began to sob uncontrollably. So I brought her home.

  I was officially broke, but I didn’t care. My needs were small. Nothing seemed more important than restoring the house to its former glory. Often I walked around in awe and disbelief, just touching things. Letting my fingers trail over smooth, shiny surfaces, still amazed that I had traveled countless times along the main road, never suspecting that a left turn would lead to my own house. A remarkable house with the most wonderful treasures. I could hardly believe it was all mine. I turned yet again to look at Mother’s portrait and to meet her sad smile.

  I was determined to find my relatives. Meeting Ratha had given me a taste for it. I looked in the telephone book; there was only one Bella Lakshmnan in it. I dialed the number.

  “Hello,” a strident voice answered.

  “Hello. My name is Nisha Steadman,” I said. A moment of silence was followed by a loud wailing that went right through my skull. I held the phone away until another voice, abrupt and strong, said, “Yes, can I help you?”

  “Hello. My name is Nisha Steadman. I think you might be relatives of mine.”

  “Nisha? Is that you?”

  “Yes, and you are Bella with the beautiful curls, aren’t you?” I asked, half laughing.

  “Oh, God, I can’t believe it. Why don’t you come over? Come now.”

  I followed her directions to Petaling Jaya. The traffic was bad, and by the time I arrived, it was almost dusk. I parked the car and saw a tall woman standing like a warrior at the door, peering into the darkening day. As I began to walk toward their gate, she stepped out and started limping toward me, crying loudly. “Nisha, Nisha, is it really you? After all these years . . . but I always knew you’d remember your old Grandma Rani. Look at you. You are the image of Dimple. She was such a good daughter to me. I loved her dearly.”

  She enveloped me in a bear hug and, grasping my right hand in both of hers, rained dry, leathery kisses on my hand. “Come in, come in,” she said between sobs and kisses.

  A lush woman with beautiful curls well past her waist stepped out of the house. She had the supple body of a dancer, and she wore bells around her ankles. Her eyes in the dark were enormous and gleaming. Yes, this was the exotic flower of the family. As I walked closer, I saw the fine lines around her eyes. She must be at least in her forties by now.

  “Hello, Nisha. Gosh, you look so uncannily like Dimple.”

  “You do the peacock credit,” I said. “Ahhh, you’ve been list
ening to my tapes,” she laughed self-consciously, standing awkwardly to my left as my newfound grandmother monopolized the space around me and led me away into a sparsely decorated house. There was a knot of old blue sofas directly by the front door, and a few cheap paintings of Malaysian rural life on the walls. Against one wall a showcase filled with fussy little ornaments stood. Surprisingly, the dining table looked very expensive, completely out of place in their oddly decorated house.

  Grandma Rani gathered together the two ends of her sari and mournfully wiped her dry eyes. “I have prayed for this day for years,” she sighed. Then, turning to her daughter, she said, “Go and make some tea for the child and bring some of that imported cake.” Returning her attention to me, she demanded, “Where are you living now?”

  “At Lara,” I said.

  “Oh, all by yourself?”

  “No, I live with Amu.”

  “Is that old hag still not dead?”

  “Mom, don’t say such horrible things,” Bella admonished, shaking her head with disgust.

  “So, how are you?” I asked my grandmother.

  “Bad, bad, very bad.”

  Oh, so no change from before, then, I wanted to say, but I didn’t. Instead I said, “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that.”

  Bella left to make the tea and cut the imported cake. Grandmother Rani watched her daughter’s retreating back with narrowed, suspicious eyes. When she was sure Bella was out of earshot, she leaned forward and whispered fiercely, “She is a prostitute, you know. None of our neighbors will even speak to me because of her. Why don’t you take me to live with you at Lara? I can’t live here anymore. The whole world laughs at me.”

  I looked at her glittering eyes and felt sorry for Bella. I remembered what Bella had said in the tapes about her mother. She is a karmic acquaintance. A venomous gift from fate. A mother. I could well imagine how the vile woman in front of me must have bullied my poor mother. Dimple was too fragile a flower for such a python of a woman. Already the python was trying to squeeze me. Every time I exhaled, she would squeeze tighter and tighter until she felt no more struggle, no more give within her strong set of muscles. Then her jaws would unlock to begin the task of swallowing me whole.