The Hungry Ghosts (44 page)

T
HE BOTTLE OF
S
COTCH IS ON THE COUNTER
where my mother left it. As I move about her kitchen once again, wiping and putting way the washed containers, I stare at it with longing. After I am done clearing the draining rack, I get the mop and bucket along with the detergents my mother carries around in a plastic basket. She has not kept up the house because she knows David will arrange for his cleaning woman to come by after the fumigation. Yet I have decided to go through and clean, unable to bear being idle.

In the powder room, I catch my reflection in the mirror and lean forward to look closer. Though I am not gaunt like my mother was during those early years in Canada, there is some inner hollowness to my face that reminds me of her then, scooped out by the memory of her mistakes. I sprinkle Comet in the sink and begin to scrub with a plastic scouring pad, pondering what she told me recently of her reaction to my departure and all the changes that came so swiftly after in her life. I’ve thought about her story often since I made this decision to return, imagining how she felt and thought, picturing moments, expanding scenes she only mentioned briefly, filling in things she did not touch on but which I knew had to be part of her journey, inventing and elaborating the story, like my grandmother with her Buddhist tales.

That evening of my departure, after my mother eventually did arrive home, she mistook my farewell letter for a piece of old mail left on the kitchen table and went about her usual routine of having a shower then dishing out food she had prepared earlier. She assumed I had gone out for the evening the way I used to, and was in the middle of her meal, seated in front of the
television, when she felt a strange absence in the house. As she would later tell me, it felt like a piece of furniture had been taken away. She went down to my room and found the bed neatly made but then noticed my open closet, a jangle of bare hangers on the rail. Recalling the envelope on the kitchen table, she bounded upstairs and tore it open, hands trembling.

My mother sat down on the low stool by the telephone, letter trailing from her hand and brushing the floor. Through the thin kitchen wall, she could hear a child crying, the shimmering notes of what was probably Chinese opera. A couple passed on the street, talking in some African language. She went to the window and watched them, marvelling that the woman wore only a long cotton tunic under her winter coat, stockinged feet in slippers. They disappeared from view, and in the silence left behind, the house pressed in on her.

My mother, Hema, got her coat, slipped on boots and went through the patio doors into her back garden. She walked purposefully out the gate, stood at the edge of the gully and looked down at the water, not knowing why she had come here with such intent. Unsure what she must do next, she sat on the grass, its frosted spikes scratching at her coat and track pants. Clasping her knees, she stared across at the apartment towers, thinking of all the families in there, all the immigrant women with their impossible lives.

An old feeling of defeat dripped through her, bringing with it the memory of those nights after she failed her exams when she sat in bed, knees clasped, helpless to reverse her mistakes, frantic at her failure. She had not thought of her husband in a long time, but now recalled how she had found him dead in his office. And she wept a little to remember him lying there, like a child fallen asleep at a school desk, head turned sideways on folded arms, cheek
pressed against wrist, his mouth pushed open in a cherubic pout, long eyelashes shadowing his cheekbones. She wept to think how she had failed him, and herself, because, if she could not love him, at least she might have been grateful for his devotion.

My mother didn’t phone Renu to report my departure. Shame kept her from doing so. She believed she had failed both her children and that this failure had become permanent. It was like that old Sinhala saying: rice, once cooked, cannot revert to its former raw state. Her failure had made her incapable of offering her son sufficient help, and so he had fled to the other side of the country to escape what she knew was inescapable.

A few days later, she came home to find a message from me on the machine saying I had got a room at the YMCA. I had not left a phone number. A rage took hold of her at my lack of caring or awareness that she might be suffering too. Yet she listened to the message so many times the cassette ribbon wore thin and my voice became garbled.

At the doughnut shop the next weekend, her boss set my mother to clean up the “community board.” This cork panel on which people could post notices was one of the owner’s projects to make the café a “community space”—an aspiration she then undermined by directing workers to keep up a brisk turnover of tables, to clean the floor beneath dawdling customers, to whisk away cups and plates as soon as they were empty.

My mother had decluttered the board before without giving the notices much thought. But now, as she pulled them off, she found herself mindful of their contents—beloved lost dogs and cats; mattresses, cars, even pots and pans for sale; English, math and science tuition from people with only foreign qualifications; offers to cook and clean and babysit. As she peeled back these layers of appeals, she found herself thinking how much sadness and need there was in the world and how much a part of that she was. Then, towards the bottom, she came to a pamphlet with the image of a woman facing a turbulent sea. Above this was the title “Why We Suffer and How to End Our Pain.” It was a brochure for a Buddhist meditation centre. Turning it over, she saw from the little map on the back that it was in her neighbourhood.

The centre turned out to be in a detached town house, about fifteen minutes’ walk from where my mother lived. The ground floor had been opened
up into a meeting hall, a dais at the front with a dark purple cushion on it. The room was already quite full, the majority of people white. Rows of chairs were lined up before the platform. Keeping her gaze down, my mother hastily took a place at the back. After staring at her hands for a while, she looked around. Along the back of the dais were elevated altars with statues of bodhisattvas and what looked like bottles of juice as offerings before them. She was peering between people’s heads to get a better look at the statues when a man, who had taken the seat next to her, whispered, “Yes, it’s most confusing, isn’t it?”

Her neighbour was in his fifties, short and stocky, with thinning sandy hair that fell over his forehead. “Just like the Catholic saints of my childhood.” He leaned back, hands placed self-importantly on his thighs. “Let me explain them to you. That one over there is the goddess Tara.” He expounded on the goddess, then went on to describe the rest of the pantheon, my mother nodding awkwardly, wishing he hadn’t singled her out in this way.

“And how did you hear about the centre?” he asked, the moment he was finished this explanation.

“The notice board where I work,” my mother replied, in a cold but polite tone. She was by now irritated at being patronized by this white man with his lordly manner.

“And where is it you work?”

“The Bridlewood Mall,” my mother said warily.

“Ah, I’m often in there. My daughter requires a lot of work on her teeth at the moment, so I take her to a dentist in the mall and wander around while I’m waiting. Where exactly do you work?”

She told him the name of the doughnut shop, feeling somewhat reassured he had a daughter. Also, she had noticed the wedding band on his finger.

“Well, I must pop by and say hello when I’m next in the mall.”

He told my mother about the centre’s philosophy, which was based on the teachings of a Tibetan lama—“our guru,” he said, indicating a large framed photograph of an emaciated monk on an easel beside the dais. His officious manner and way of constantly checking in with her, eyebrows raised, forced my mother to keep his gaze, nodding. Her irritation climbed a level.

He had just started to expound on a charity the centre ran in India when a plump bhikshuni hurried into the room, head down, as if on some
embarrassing mission. She mounted the dais, sat cross-legged on the cushion, settled her robes, took a sip from her glass, then surveyed the room with a surprised smile, as if the audience had suddenly materialized before her. An acolyte, who had followed, rang a little bell, and a silence that was intense, like the aftermath of a loud bang, settled over the room. The congregation gathered themselves into positions of meditation, hands cupped in laps, palms open, shoulders shaken and squared, spines settled in. My mother’s neighbour gave her a nod of encouragement, and she took up a similar position and closed her eyes, glad to shut him out.

She tried to concentrate on her breathing, but soon the irritation this man had kindled flared through her with a greater intensity. Out of rebellion and spite, she opened her eyes, glanced at her neighbour, and despised the smug look on his face, the sweat that beaded his forehead. Typical white man, she thought with bitterness, so brash and cocky, always thinking they were better than anyone else. It wasn’t enough she had to put up with their nonsense at work, now she had to deal with them on her off time too. The nerve, thinking she didn’t know the first thing about Buddhism. She was from a Buddhist country! She looked around at the other people, and their meek expressions disgusted her. They looked like cud-chewing cows. Slights she had experienced in Canada, her anger at me, her humiliations at the law firm where she worked, the indignities she faced at the doughnut shop, fed into her anger at this man and the congregation, sweeping her up in a spiral of rage. Wisps of past wrongs, half thoughts, all those retorts she wished she had uttered but been too abashed to express, spun her faster and faster. By the time the bell finally tinkled, my mother was exhausted.

The sermon that day was on something called “The Four Limitless Qualities: Loving-Kindness, Compassion, Joyfulness and Equanimity.” The bhikshuni went on to talk about the enemies of these qualities: attachment and hatred being the enemies of loving-kindness; pity, foolish compassion and cruelty the enemies of compassion; overstimulation and jealousy the enemies of joyfulness; indifference and self-righteous bigotry the enemies of equanimity. The measured tone of the bhikshuni tightened my mother’s anger until she wanted to get up and yell at the woman to speak with greater animation.

Once the sermon was over, the acolyte tinkled her bell to announce a tea
break, after which the bhikshuni would take questions. My mother stood up, grabbed her coat from the chair back and shoved her arms into the sleeves.

“But you’re leaving already?” her neighbour asked.

His gaping disappointment nearly choked her. “I have to pick up a child,” she murmured, and with a tight smile she wrestled her way past the people in her row towards the door.

Soon she had left the centre behind. As she bustled along a quiet street, coat pulled tight about her, arms crossed, feeling humiliated as if she had made a public spectacle of herself, she silently cried, “Why did I submit to such foolishness?” But then, as she neared her house, she found herself chuckling at how over-the-top her anger was, how completely out of proportion to anything that had been done to her at the Buddhist centre. “Oh, Hema,” she laughed, “you fool, you poor fool.” And somehow her words, her laughter, momentarily released the distress she had been suffering since my departure.

I had by now taken a sublet I found advertised in the
Georgia Straight
. A few days after I moved into the apartment, I called home during the day while my mother was at work and left my phone number on the machine. She rang that evening. When I answered, she was silent for a moment. “Shivan, this is Amma. How are you?” Her flat tone surprised me. I had expected some harsh accusation, or at least a note of anxiety in her greeting.

“I am fine, thank you.”

“Good, that is good to hear. Have you found any employment?”

“Yes. Temporary work at an office.”

“Good, that is good.”

Then we were silent again.

When my mother spoke next, her voice was resonant with emotion. “Shivan, do you think I didn’t know about all those afternoons you had to endure, sitting in your aachi’s room? Son, do you actually think I didn’t know about them? But what could I do? I was so helpless. After that one time I opposed her, I knew she would throw us out if I did it again. You think I didn’t agonize that I sacrificed you so we could live there? I hated myself for it, but what choice did I have, Shivan, what choice?”

“I don’t care about the past,” I replied, my voice hushed and cold. “Let me get on with my life. I don’t want this rehashing.”

“Yes, yes,” my mother said hastily, taken aback at her outpouring, “let’s not dwell on all that. Tell me, is it much warmer there than here? Do the trees still have leaves?”