I can’t even describe those first few months. It was like walking into a secret garden and discovering hundreds and hundreds of beautiful new flowers, the colors, the incredible new scents, and the wonderful shapes. They filled my day. From morning to night I was happy. I went to bed with a smile on my lips, stunned by the beauty of my children, and dreamed of running my fingers down their silky skin with awe.
Perfect from the top of her soft little head to her tiny toes, my Mohini was without flaw. People stared at her with unconcealed curiosity when I took her out. They looked at plain old me, then at her ugly father, and then I watched envy drop sharp roots into their small, petty hearts. I took the responsibility of my daughter’s beauty very seriously. I bathed her in coconut milk and scrubbed her skin with lime quarters. Once a week I crushed hibiscus flowers in warm water until the water turned the right shade of rust, and then I lowered her wriggling little body into it. She splashed and laughed and threw handfuls of reddened water into my face. I won’t bother to tell you what great lengths I went to, to protect her milky white skin.
No little girl could have been loved more. Her brother simply adored her. While they lacked any kind of physical similarity, there was a special, invisible bond between them. Eyes that spoke. Faces that understood. They didn’t finish each other’s sentences, rather it was the pauses they shared. As if in those stolen moments of pure silence they communicated with each other on a deeper indescribable level. If I close my eyes now, I can still see them sitting opposite each other, grinding rice in the stone mortar. They never spoke. Had no need for small talk. He turned the heavy stone, and she pushed the rice into the hole in the stone with her bare hand, silent and perfectly in tune, as if they were one person. I could have watched them for hours. Every other day, late evening. Dangerous work. A crushed hand was always a possibility.
When they were alone with just each other for company, that stillness settled around them, a magic circle called “us” that excluded everyone else. I remember that there were even times when it wasn’t comfortable to watch.
If I was inordinately proud of my daughter, her father worshiped the very ground she walked on. She made his soul tremble and reached so deep into his delighted being that it confused and surprised him. When she was first born, she was small enough to completely fit into his large, cupped hands, and it was a sensation he never forgot. Scarely able to believe such a marvel had sprung from his loins, he stood and stared for hours as she slept. He woke up two, sometimes three times in the middle of the night to gently change her clothes if they were damp with perspiration. Often in the morning I found a pile of her clothes at the foot of her suspended cloth hammock.
If she fell or hurt herself in the smallest way, he picked her up with large gentle hands and rocked her slowly in his arms, her tears mirrored in his own eyes. How much that man suffered when she was ill! He loved her so much that even a moment of pain endured by her was like a terrible thorn embedded deep in his simple heart.
When she was very young, she spent many of her waking hours in his lap as they listened to the static-filled voices on the radio. She sat for hours twirling a lock of his thick hair in her fair fingers, never suspecting that it was a magic trick that had the power to turn gentle giants into babbling fools.
My little boy I named Lakshmnan—firstborn, gorgeous, clever, precious, and indisputably my favorite. You see, even though Mohini was beyond anything I could have hoped for, she was undeserved. The feeling never left me that I had somehow stolen into someone else’s garden and plucked without permission their biggest and best bloom. There was nothing of her father or me in her. Even when I cuddled her in my arms, I felt as if she was borrowed and that at some date someone would knock on my door to claim her back. Hence I held back a little. I was awed by her perfect beauty, but I didn’t, couldn’t, love her the way I loved Lakshmnan.
Ah, but the way I loved him. How I loved him! I built an altar in my heart just for his laugh. I recognized myself in his bright eyes, and when I held his kicking, sturdy body against mine, you could not tell where he began and I ended, for he was exactly the same shade as me. Very milky tea.
Mui Tsai gave birth to her baby. She smuggled him into my house late one night while the neighborhood slept so I would be able to see how bonny he was—the male child she had prayed for at the red temple by the market. He was very fat and very white, with a shock of black hair. Exactly what she had prayed for.
“You see, the fortune-teller was wrong,” I crowed joyfully, hiding the pure relief I experienced when I heard her son was born healthy and alive. If the fortune-teller was wrong about Mui Tsai, then he could be written off as a charlatan, his predictions reduced to cruel lies. I put my finger into the child’s tiny palm, and he gripped my finger in his little hand and refused to let go.
“Look how strong he is,” I complimented.
She nodded slowly, as if not daring to provoke the gods with excessive pride even though I saw her bliss. In the light of the oil lamp her skin appeared luminous, as if someone had switched on a bulb inside her skull; but one must never boast about one’s good fortune. That was the belief. It was bad luck, she had once said. So that happy night she kissed her baby and complained halfheartedly about the picture of health in her arms being too scrawny. When she left, tightly clutching her precious bundle, I was happy for her. Finally she had something to call her own.
Exactly one month later, to correspond with the end of her confinement period, her master gave her baby to his first wife. Mui Tsai was too shocked by the betrayal to protest, completely devastated and unable to refuse. All that was left for her to do was accept the customary red ang pow packet with the crisp, folded, fifty-ringgit note inside in exchange.
“How dare he? Has a mother no rights?” I demanded, appalled.
She informed me dully that it was simply another long-established custom in China that the first wife was entitled to claim the firstborn of any secondary wife or concubine. Aghast, I stared at her.
“It is a great honor when the eldest wife asks for the son of a mui tsai. I think it is best for the boy. Now he will have a proper place in the family without any questions,” Mui Tsai added sadly. Her poor heart was broken, and the bright light inside her skull had blown a fuse.
She still came to sit with me some nights when she couldn’t bear the lonely calls of the lemur in the rambutan tree any more, and she still climbed into my window with the old agility that I remembered, but everything was different now. The giggling girl packed to bursting with mischievous intentions was gone, and in her place was a lost round face. Like a dejected puppy whipped for no reason it could comprehend, she sat in my kitchen with her chin buried in her palms. Sometimes she replayed the entire scene when the baby was taken away from her.
“What do you expect? To be higher than First Wife?” her loathsome mistress had scolded scornfully. Then Mui Tsai would look at me bravely and assure me that she did not expect to be higher than First Wife. Of course she knew her place. She was a mui tsai. Poor Mui Tsai. I had my two beautiful babies and she, the knowledge that some other woman cradled her child. Sometimes when she looked at the twins asleep and breathing softly inside their cotton blankets, bitter tears poured unchecked down her face. She would sniff audibly, wipe her face with the ends of her sleeves, and declare in a small, meek voice, “It is the will of the gods.”
Then one day she was pregnant again. Gloating with the second sign of his manly fertility the master readily promised that this time she could keep the baby. First Wife never came to visit, which Mui Tsai took as a good sign. She had learned her lesson well. No news from the old matriarch was good news.
I stopped breast-feeding and became pregnant again. Mui Tsai and I were once again united, playing Chinese checkers and giggling quietly in the dim light of my kerosene lamp. In the afternoons, while her mistress slept, she sat on my windowsill, and we dreamed together, impossible dreams of our children in high places. Other afternoons she helped me dig up the
groundnut beds. We washed the mud off the nuts, boiled them, and ate them piping hot in my kitchen. It was then that she used to sigh and dramatically declare that all her happiest times were in my kitchen, but as her delivery date loomed closer, she became increasingly agitated. Sometimes for no reason at all she would burst into tears and say in the most pitiful voice, “I was born under a very bad star.” Deep inside her heart the bones of her ancestors rattled and reminded her of the prediction that had been spoken inside a stuffy tent more than two years before. A whole lot of dead relatives stood, arms outstretched, and wished her childless. Had the master made an empty promise?
Often she woke up during the night, her heart pounding hard. Leaving her bed, she walked along the outside of her room, looking into the pitch black for the light of my kerosene lamp. And if she saw its glimmer, she sighed with relief, closed her door quietly, and walked toward it. Very heavily pregnant, she climbed through the low window of my kitchen. Like a sweet, dim voice from the past I can still hear her saying, “Lakshmi, you are my lamp in the night.”
I was always glad to see her round face. Sometimes we whispered, and sometimes we simply shared the silence. When I think of that time now, I realize how precious it was. If only I knew then what I know now . . . I would have whispered in her ear that I loved her. I would have told her she was my best friend. I wish I had said, “You are my sister, and this is your home.” Maybe I was too young, too absorbed in the selfish business of mothering my own. I took our closeness for granted and never gave it a second thought.
Mui Tsai gave birth to another boy. She said he had a full head of black hair. And that he smiled at her. She held him very close to her breast for the first day. On the second day her mistress came into her room. There was a spiteful gleam in her eyes when she told Mui Tsai that Elder Sister’s baby died a month ago, and it was their duty to sacrifice and help Elder Sister. Mui Tsai must give her baby to the grieving woman. The shock of hearing that her first son had died was even harder to accept than the idea of giving up her second child. She shook her head in confusion and gave her sweet-smelling bundle away. In her heart Mui Tsai knew her first son had died of a broken heart.
She was gray-faced but dry-eyed even when the malicious woman had the gall to say, “You are young and very fertile. There are many more sons in your belly.”
“Would you have them all?” Mui Tsai asked so softly that it was certain that Third Wife did not hear it.
Two months later, Anna came into my hot and freezing malaria-struck world, caramel-colored and saucer-eyed. The nights were the worst. First I was delirious with slow-burning fever, then shivering uncontrollably in my own sweat. During the day, weak behind the haze of quinine, I felt the children in Mui Tsai’s arms. For seventeen days Ayah was a moving shadow and the children bright specks of whispering anxiety by my bedside. Sometimes I felt my husband’s cool, hard lips on my clammy skin, and sometimes curious little fingers prodded my face, but it always seemed easier to turn away and dive into the forgiving blackness. When it was all over, I had lost my milk; my breasts were small rocks under my skin. My exploring hands found them hard and painful. I felt tearful and weak. The only person who could tweak a smile out of my face was my darling Lakshmnan.
I looked at little Anna and felt pity. Poor thing. Not even mother’s milk was to be her right, but she was a good, good baby with enormous, shining eyes, and I was once again grateful that another child had escaped the simple genes of my hulking husband. I lay in bed and watched Ayah pick her up gingerly as if he was afraid of dropping or hurting her, even though he had picked up and held Mohini like an experienced midwife from the very first day.
Mui Tsai was totally enamored of the new baby. She responded to Anna in a way that she had never done with Lakshmnan or Mohini. She found charm and joy in the littlest things. “Look at her tiny tongue. It’s so pretty,” she would exclaim, her round face lighting up with simple delight. One day I came back from the market and found her breast-feeding Anna. She looked up guiltily. “I’m sorry, but she was crying with hunger.”
In a flash I knew why Anna hated canned milk. I listened with burning ears to Mui Tsai’s explanation. How her milk had dried when her baby was taken away and how the first primal cry Anna emitted suddenly filled her breasts. Right then and there in front of my awkward husband, her blouse had been embarrassingly wet.
Of course. It had never occurred to me before, but it was she who fed Anna during the seventeen days when I lay delirious with fever. Only with the greatest difficulty did I manage to quell the instinctive possessiveness that filled my belly. I told myself that it was her terrible loss that made her assume such a liberty. I understood. I told myself I did, anyway. I wanted to be magnanimous. She had lost so much. Where was the harm if she fed my baby? My breasts remained parched and hers rich and plentiful for many weeks to come. So it was Mui Tsai’s small, undeveloped breasts that Anna’s little pink mouth suckled. It is a strange thing, motherhood. It gives and takes away so much. I should have been grateful, but I wasn’t. Even though I did not say anything, I wasn’t big enough to let the matter pass.
I built a low wall between us.
It wasn’t a high wall, but every time the poor girl wanted to get to me, she had to climb it. I regret building the wall now. I was the only friend she had, and I turned my back on her. Of course it is all too late now. I tell all my grandchildren never to build walls, because once you start, the wall takes over. It is the nature of the wall to build itself until it is so high that it cannot be scaled.
When Mohini was three years old, she caught a cold. In less than a week the cold had turned into a frightening asthmatic rasp. She sat small and utterly defenseless, propped up by three pillows, in my large, silver bed and labored through the task of breathing, her beautiful eyes full of fear and her mouth a ghastly blue line. In her tiny chest I heard the rattle of a dangerous snake pretending to be a child’s toy. The snake’s rattle made her father cry.
I tried all the traditional remedies I could think of and everything else the ladies at the temple advised. I rubbed tiger balm on her wheezing chest, held her screaming body over the fumes of pungent herbs, and forced little black Ayurvedic pills down her throat. Then her father traveled all the way to Pekan on a bus to buy green pigeons. They looked so adorable in the cage, cooing and nodding their pretty heads, but I trapped their struggling bodies full of tiny bones under the palm of my hand and chopped their heads off. Baby Mohini had the purplish flesh diced and roasted with cloves, black root, and saffron. Then First Wife from the confusing household next door brought a flat newspaper packet of specially dried insects. Closer inspection revealed dead bugs, ants, bees, cockroaches, and grasshoppers tangled together in a surfeit of legs, so bone dry they clicked against each other and rasped hoarsely against the paper they arrived in. I cooked them in water until the brown mixture boiled down to a third of its original amount, and that I poured into the child’s mouth. All to no avail.
There were certain frightening hours in the dead of night when she turned a nasty blue for lack of oxygen. In our backward hospital a doctor gave her small pink pills that made her body tremble and shake uncontrollably. The shakes frightened me more than the rattlesnake inside her chest. Two hellish days passed. Ayah buried his head in his hands like an old man, destitute and helpless. The radio stayed silent. He blamed himself. It was he who had taken her out for a walk and let her get wet when the sudden rain came.
I wanted to blame him, but there was no one to blame. It was me who had asked him to take the children out. I prayed. How I prayed! I spent hours kneeling on the cold temple floor and, prostrating myself on the floor, rolled across the temple to show my utter devotion. I am nothing but a bug. Help me please, dear God. Surely the good lord would not abandon me now.
On the third afternoon Mui Tsai burst into my kitchen with the most preposterous idea. I stopped stirring the lentils cooking in yogurt and, clutching my once more growing stomach, listened half in shock and half in
disbelief to the quick, excited words shooting from her small mouth. Even before she had finished, I was already shaking my head. “No,” I said, but my voice lacked conviction. The truth was, I was ready to try anything. I wanted to be persuaded.
She wasted no time. “It will work,” she insisted fiercely.
“It’s a disgusting idea. Ugh. Whoever came up with such a sick idea?” Yet . . .
“It will work. Please try it. My master’s sinseh is very, very good. He has come directly from Shanghai.”
“It is an impossible idea. How can I make the poor little thing do that? She can hardly breathe as it is. She might choke to death.”
“You have to. Do you want her to be cured from this terrible disease?”
“Of course, but . . .”
“Well, then. Try it.”
“Is it just an ordinary rat?”
“No, of course not. It is a specially bred, red-eyed rat. And when it is newly born it has no fur. It is pink and only as big as my finger.”
“But she has to swallow it live?”
“In the first few minutes of it being born it does not move. Mohini can swallow it with some honey. Don’t tell her what it is.”
“Are you sure that it will really work?”
“Yes, many people in China have done it. The sinseh is very clever. Don’t worry, Lakshmi. I shall ask Mistress Soong for help.”
“How many rats will she have to swallow?”
“Just the one,” she said very quickly.
But little Mohini never had to swallow Mui Tsai’s live rat after all. Her father refused. For the first time since I had known him, his small black eyes flashed angrily. “Nobody is feeding my daughter with a live rat. Bloody barbarians,” he thundered angrily before going in to see Mohini, where he reverted back to his crooning, babbling self.
Ayah hated rats. The mere sight of them from afar revolted him terribly. For no real reason that I can think of, Mohini began to recover, and in a few days she was better. I did not require the children of the specially bred, red-eyed rat until many years later.