The Rice Mother

  Aunty Bella leaned against the kitchen door. “Kettle’s boiling,” she informed us cheerfully.

  “Listen, I remember us having ice cream in Damansara,” I said to her. “You always had crushed nuts on yours.”

  “Yes, that’s right—I always have nuts on mine. Have you got all your memory back, then?”

  “No, just bits and pieces, but I remember you. I remember the hair and the gorgeous, really daring clothes you wore. All the men used to stare at you.”

  Grandma Rani snorted.

  “You know what? Forget the tea. We’ll have ice cream instead. Like old times,” I cried impulsively.

  “Deal. Damansara, then,” Bella agreed, grinning.

  “Damansara,” I said.

  “Are you girls planning to leave me here all alone with my swollen feet and my crippled hands? What if I fall while you’re out?” Grandma Rani cried peevishly.

  “Please, Grandma Rani. I promise I won’t keep Bella long. Just sit and wait for a little while, okay?”

  Bella pushed back her heavy hair. She was still a very sexy woman. “Let’s go,” she said. In the car she said, “I’m not a prostitute, you know.”

  “I know that,” I said, putting the car into gear.

  “It’s just Mother. She’s never been the same since she murdered my father with her tongue.”

  The last tape was heard, but the story remained unfinished. From inside a drawer I reached for Rosette’s phone number.

  “I have finished listening to the tapes,” I said into the receiver.

  A rendezvous was agreed upon. I replaced the receiver and wandered up the curving stairs. Daddy’s oh-so-mysterious mistress was apparently available for consultation at six. Now what gifts would be acceptable for the meeting? I had promised the lady financial gain in return for information, but of course that was before I found out that I was virtually penniless. All was not lost, though. In my bedroom I unlocked a safe in the wall, and from inside the dark hole I extracted a small box encrusted with seashells. A seaside gift for a child.

  I opened the box, and inside was a tangled collection of jewelry—all the pieces that Daddy had left on the little table outside my room over the years. I tipped the precious contents on the bed. It seemed a rather careless thing to do with objects of such beauty. White stones flashed as they tumbled onto my bed. Diamonds were Daddy’s favorite. He liked their undying brilliance best. Pearls were too understated, and the other stones looked too much like colored beads, but cold, hard diamonds held a special appeal for him. I untangled a small diamond choker set in white gold, the largest stone baguette-cut. I remembered Father had insured it for twenty thousand ringgit. It dangled like a many-splendored thing from my fingers. A change of address for the rope of stones looked imminent. I held it up so it swung at eye level.

  “How would you like to go and live in Bangsar and encircle the pretty neck of a whore?” I whispered softly.

  I dropped the choker carelessly on the bed and stuffed all the other pieces back into their shell home. Downstairs I could hear Amu talking to herself as she kneaded dough for our dinner of chapatis and dal.

  Rosette’s house was easy to find. It had the same sort of fir trees outside that surrounded Lara. Obviously my faithless father had a great liking for them. When I rang the bell, black electric gates opened soundlessly. I drove in and parked in the covered porch beside a rather aged Mercedes sports car. A Chinese maid opened the door. My gaze wandered around the house, marveling at my father’s handiwork. The same marble floor, curved banisters, and huge crystal chandeliers had been installed in the whore’s home too. Father was certainly fond of the gilded palazzo look. Rosette smiled as she uncurled sinuously out of a large black-leather settee. It looked new and modern—certainly not to Daddy’s taste. She came forward with her hand outstretched.

  “How are you?” Her voice was friendly, her hand soft and dry.

  “Fine.” This was the woman who had destroyed my mother. Look at her. How cool and poised she looked, inviting the daughter of the very creature she had destroyed into her lair.

  “Cognac, is it?” she asked already moving away.

  “Thank you.”

  “No ice, if I remember correctly.” She looked at me with a raised eyebrow. She no longer resembled my mother’s distraught description of the waving young girl. Rosette had picked up a whole suitcase full of sophistication along the way.

  I nodded.

  “So what would you like to know?”

  “Everything. Start from the beginning,” I said, and as I spoke I reached into a small velvet pouch and took out the flashing necklace. I laid it on a dark green marble table. No setting could have given the choker more allure than the glossy darkness of the marble surface. Also, no doubt, Father’s taste. I looked up and saw Rosette eyeing the gleaming stones, a look in her eyes that was difficult to identify. Not greed exactly, not even happiness, perhaps a sort of dark longing. As if she was looking into her past at something very far away and no longer attainable. A glimpse into a life lost.

  “As you probably know, my father was bankrupt when he died. There was nothing left but my jewelry and the house that my mother had left to me. I wondered if you would accept this little choker instead of the check I promised.”

  Rosette came forward with the drinks in her hands. She wasn’t drinking Tia Maria on ice after all. It looked like a glass of tea. She caught my eyes and laughed. “When you are young, alcohol is allowed at all social occasions. At my age alcohol is allowed only on special occasions.”

  “And my father’s funeral was a special occasion?”

  “Meeting you was.”

  “What are you drinking, anyway?” I asked, thrown by the older woman’s answer.

  “A special Indonesian mixture of herbs and roots. It’s horribly bitter, but it has been known to keep its victims youthful.”

  She was in her late forties, and yet, relaxed in her own environment, she looked not a day older than thirty. Plastic surgery? But there wasn’t that survived-a-wind-tunnel appearance. She watched me studying her and laughed. Fine lines appeared around her eyes and mouth. “Youth makes a capricious friend. You can give him everything, and he will still leave you. It is Age that is the real friend. He stays with you, giving more and more of himself until your dying day. Next year I will be fifty years old.

  “All my secrets lie in a little village in Indonesia where a skull-faced old man with the most marvelous magic called susuk lives. He sharpens diamond-and-gold needles until they become the finest pins the eye could ever hope to see. Then he bottles the bloom of youth inside the fine diamond pins and inserts them under his customers’ skin. Once under the skin, they lend to the wearer indefinable beauty. A beauty that is not the sum total of all the features but in spite of it. The illusion I complete with these disgusting tonics.

  “The problem with having these minute threadlike needles under your skin is that they have to be removed before you die, or at least before you are buried, or your soul, earthbound by susuk, will roam graveyards and roadsides forever. Most of our top singers and actresses in Malaysia have it done as a matter of course. Look at their glow carefully, and you will notice that behind it lies an ordinary face. Just before I die, I will have all mine taken out, and suddenly I will age before my very eyes. Macabre, isn’t it?” she said, laughing at my surprised face. “Anyway, you are not here to hear about the complications that my death will impose on my soul.” She swept her hands, white and beautifully manicured, out in front of her, indicating that I should sit.

  I sat on a leather armchair. It was large and very comfortable, but I resisted the urge to curl up in it and relax. I wanted to watch the fascinating creature who cleverly managed to inspire in turn pity and enchantment in me. I sat up straight in the chair. This was the woman who had held even in her young hands the power to lure away a man like Father and destroy Mother.

  “Well, so where shall I begin?”

  “Start from the beginning and end at the e
nding. Where did you meet my father? What do you know of my mother, and me for that matter?”

  “I met your father while I was working at the Golden Girls Escort Agency. In fact, he was with your mother, and she was introduced to me too, but I don’t think she remembered. I was sitting at a very large table with a lot of other beautiful women. I was dining with a friend of your father’s that night, but your father was immediately interested. His dark eyes devoured me. I saw him standing there, and I felt his teeth marks in my heart. Your mother never realized; she never had a clue. She was young, innocent, without a vestige of corruption, and pregnant. When she looked into his face, her eyes shone with happiness. She would never have believed the man who lived inside him. She was sweet and too pure for him to show her that ugly needful side that he hid from the rest of the world. In me he saw rice-white skin, but more than that, he saw acceptance and recognition. I understood him. Ugly and deformed and yet wrenchingly appealing. There was no gentleness between us. We did unpleasant things together. Things that would have shocked your mother.

  “I have never felt that I took anything away from Dimple. What I took, she wouldn’t have wanted anyway. The desert wants the rain so it may be refreshed, sweetened, and admired, but the desert needs the sun to know it is a desert. Your mother was the rain in your father’s life, but I was the sun. She made him look beautiful and brought out the best in him, but he needed me. Anyway, he knew where to find me.

  “He called for me the next day, and our mother hen, Madam Xu, arranged for us to have dinner at the Shangri-La. At that time it was the best hotel in the country. All night he watched me. He couldn’t eat for the hunger inside him. I laughed, and I teased the beast inside him until at last we went upstairs. Room 309 burns forever in my memory. He opened the hotel room, and I walked ahead of him, and when I turned around the man was gone and only the beast remained.

  “He pulled out of his breast pocket a black silk handkerchief, and unsmiling and unsurprised, I pulled out a similar handkerchief from my handbag. Pain can be an exquisite thing, but the man your mother married stood outside our hotel room. He remained faithful to your mother while the beast and I did our thing. Not a loving thing, but something so vital that the mere thought of losing it was impossible to imagine. And it was a thing that burned bright for more than twenty-five years until he died. You and I could never have met while he was alive, although I have watched you grow. I sat in parks and watched you play from afar—for I belonged to a different life.”

  She stopped speaking and sipped at her horrible Indonesian concoction. I was spellbound. The things that poured out of this woman’s mouth surely couldn’t be true, but, her bitter sip done with, she opened her mouth, and more words flowed out, faster and faster. Like the river of water that rushes out of a crack in a dam, quickly rupturing and finally crumbling it altogether. Bigger and higher, the waves became. Soon her words will engulf me, I thought wildly. Rosette looked directly at me. Her fine hair swung around her face and settled about her shoulders.

  “Why do you look so surprised? Surely the tapes must have been the shocking aspect. This is merely the motivation that drove all the characters to do the things they did.”

  I shook my head. “When I listened to the tapes, it was like reading a novel, a past that I couldn’t relate to, but having you here in front of me makes it all suddenly so real—too real. You make my father a stranger. A monster.”

  “No, he wasn’t a monster. He loved your mother dearly, and he loved you deeply.”

  “Yes, so deeply that he couldn’t even stand to touch me,” I cried bitterly.

  “Poor Nisha. Don’t you know your father would have filled his mouth with earth and lain down dead for you? Everything he did, he did with you in mind. Your father’s childhood wasn’t the romantic picture he drew for your mother. Brutal things molded his perversions, but he refused to acknowledge them until he met me. And then I became his deepest secret; after me he feared himself. Feared the poisonous night flowers that waited to bloom in his being.

  “Luke told me that one night he was sitting downstairs having tea with your mother with the French windows open. A pleasantly cool breeze was blowing, and the garden lamps were all on. The clock had just struck ten. They had switched off all the lights in the house and lit only the candles held by the ebony statues by the stairs. And he was feeling contented and peaceful in the mellow light. It was the way your mother made him feel. He looked up, and you were coming down the stairs in a short white top that did not quite meet your white knickers, your long hair tousled, and the back of your hand rubbing your right eye. In the light of the candles you were glowing. And his mouth dried. For one unguarded second he wanted you. And then he remembered himself and felt deep disgust. After that he hated himself and feared you. For that one unguarded second when that hideous night flower inside him, thick with horrible juices, had threatened to open. From then on he refused to touch your soft young skin. He wanted to be your father and not what the loathsome flower demanded. He wanted to be pure for you.”

  I stared at Rosette with growing shock, but she only looked back expressionlessly. I put down my untouched glass of cognac and stood up. I walked over to some windows nearby and stood looking out. “Is there nothing good you can tell me about my father?” I heard myself asking.

  “Your father loved you,” she said simply.

  “Yes, he was a pedophile.”

  “He could have been, if not for you. Be gentle with his memory. You are lucky. You have no dark compulsions that seethe inside, day and night whispering and urging you to things you are ashamed to admit to. Until your mother died, your father never knew that she had found out about me years before. She went about it the wrong way. If she had confronted him, things might have been different. The worst demon in the glare of light can look ridiculous, but in the shadows he grows in height and bulk to unbelievable proportions.

  “After Dimple died, your father listened to her tapes for the first time. As he listened, tears poured down his face. He realized then the reason for her growing coldness, her rejection of him. And when he heard about the waiter at the party, he fell on the floor with remorse. You see, when your mother let that young waiter into her body, she destroyed the good man she married. Standing watching her in bed with the waiter was the man that I held in my arms. The man your romantic mother had mistakenly, naively, thought she wanted to meet.

  “He came to me that night, pacing the floor like a caged tiger, his eyes cold. And when he took me in his arms, he was deliberately cruel, denying us both any kind of pleasure. Afterward he sat down to two large whiskies. He went home and began to hate her. Began to devise ways to humiliate and debase her, destroy her.

  “One night he came home and saw the result of his work. She was not dead yet. She looked at him like a dumb animal, and he acknowledged that it was indeed his own handiwork. Long after her body was gone, her suffering spirit remained. He couldn’t bear to set eyes on anything she had worn, touched, or lain on. She was everywhere he looked. He saw her even in the eyes of his servants. Sleep was impossible. So he closed up the house as it was. He took nothing but the papers in his study that had no connection with her and her precious tapes. The tapes he locked away in a small cupboard in the dressing room of his new home, and there they lay until you found them after his death. He didn’t want you to remember her lying in her own blood, her mouth open and gaping like a stranded fish. And in her eyes the question, Are you satisfied now?

  “Even years later a bottle of chardonnay, a clever flower arrangement, or a long black dress in a shop window would scream, Are you satisfied now? Those were the times he was happy that at least he had wiped the past clean for you. That while you lay in a hospital bed, he had magically changed your entire world. Enrolled you into a new school, got rid of all the servants, brutally cut your relatives off—a job, I might add, that seemed a pleasure to him. He hated your Grandmother Rani.

  “He bought a new home, gave you a new room and a who
le new life. Is it so difficult to forgive that he didn’t want you to remember Dimple like that? Is it so hard to believe that he loved you so deeply he didn’t want you to suffer as he did? He always wanted to tell you about your inheritance and the past, but the longer he left it, the harder it became. He set himself target dates.

  “ ‘When she is eighteen,’ he said to me. Then eighteen came and went, and he said, ’Definitely when she is twenty-one.’ Twenty-one came and went, and then you went overseas to study and he said, ‘When she comes back.’ Then of course he became ill, and then he said, ’When I die will be soon enough.’ ”

  “I wish I had known this sooner, when he was still alive. I always thought he didn’t love me,” I said slowly.

  “Nothing could be further from the truth,” Rosette said sadly.

  I walked over to where the beautifully preserved woman sat. Her skin was astonishingly white. Looking up into my face, her eyes seemed very large and full of soft darkness. I wondered what my father had seen in them. What had he seen that had awakened the sleeping monster inside him? To think that this woman had felt teeth marks in her heart when she had first looked at Father. How utterly complicated and strange other people’s lives are. How incomprehensible!

  For several minutes Rosette and I simply looked at each other, each lost in our own private thoughts. Then I bent down and hugged her.

  “Thank you for any comfort that you gave my father,” I said very softly.

  Inside Rosette’s eyes a sad, ghostly shadow passed. She lowered her eyes and bent her head. The beautiful, silky hair that I had admired earlier fell forward and hid her face. Somewhere inside me I felt the urge to stroke that silky, suffering head. I raised my hand and placed it along the side of her head. Her hair was indeed soft. Rosette rubbed her face gently against my hand like a blameless black-and-white cat would. I could never be her friend. Ever. Even then I had a vile picture of this woman entwined with my father.