The Hungry Ghosts (9 page)
My mother had scored distinctions in the sciences, but also in the arts and humanities. She had not made up her mind which path she wished to pursue for the Higher School Certificate. My grandmother, however, soon decided on sciences in preparation for medical school. She informed my mother of this decision matter-of-factly. Opposition was useless.
One afternoon, on a day when my mother usually had tennis practice, the family car arrived early at her school and the driver told her she was wanted at home. She came back to find four men lined up in chairs on the verandah, faces twitching with nervousness, my grandmother standing over them, beaming among the sniffles, frayed cuffs, shrunken trouser legs and oil-soaked hair. The tutors were to prepare her daughter for distinctions in physics, chemistry, zoology and botany.
My mother enjoyed her extracurricular activities and excelled in sports, drama and debating. Now, however, she was expected to come home right after school and spend each afternoon and early evening in the gloomy study, fan swirling the dusty air above while she tried to pay attention to the droning
of these tutors. She felt suffocated by their odour of sweat mixed with chalk; it was the odour of quiet defeat.
My mother began to pretend she had forgotten her tutorials, returning late, then acting surprised if she found a tutor waiting. The men soon complained to their employer, and one evening my mother arrived home to find my grandmother seated on the verandah, eyes large with rage and fear. She paused on the top step, frightened but also exalted at the possibility of freedom. My grandmother, with the swiftness of a snake, leapt from her chair, strode towards my mother, and grabbed her plait. “You think you can fool around and ruin your life? I’ll show you, yes I will.” She yanked the plait so hard that my mother yelled and clutched her head to keep the hair from ripping out of her scalp.
Rosalind came running, but all she could do was stand there wringing her hands, afraid to do anything that might increase her mistress’s wrath. My grandmother dragged my mother by the hair to her bedroom, slapping her all the way. She shoved the curtain aside, pushed my mother inside, drew the seldom closed door shut, locked it and pocketed the key.
“Let her starve in there tonight,” she panted to Rosalind. “She must be broken now, otherwise there is no hope. That girl is trying to make a laughingstock out of me. After all this praise from everyone, she wants to fail and humiliate me? No, no! Hema must succeed.”
Groping for escape, my mother visited her father’s sister. These in-laws had been barely tolerated by my grandmother during her husband’s life, and since his death she had cut them off. The level of her animosity suggested to my mother that there was some dark knowledge to be gleaned from these relatives. Her aunt was glad to see Hema, and it wasn’t long before the conversation turned to my grandmother. “Yes-yes,” the aunt declared, “Daya is lucky our brother married her.” My mother had heard this many times before, but now she asked, “Why was my mother lucky?”
Her aunt’s back arched with pleasure and she sat back in her chair, arms outstretched, a cat sunning on a warm rock.
It seemed that when my grandmother was sixteen, an older cousin named Charles had come to stay in the family compound. He had grown up in England and was a very handsome man, the aunt said, speaking as if she
actually knew him. Far too elegant and sophisticated for Daya. In the weeks that followed, Daya had fallen violently for this man. She had thrown herself at him, following him down to the beach at night, where he went to swim. He was a decent man, according to the aunt, a gentleman. He had ignored Daya’s declarations, gently advised her to be more prudent, told her with honesty that he did not love her back. But she persisted, and he, being a man after all, gave in. They were caught in a compromising position. News of this swept through the village, and Daya was shunned, even by her extended family. Whenever she had to visit town, people would turn away at the sight of her, and sometimes boys would throw pebbles, whistling lewdly and singing out, “Vesi, vesi.” According to the aunt, it had been an act of great charity on the part of her brother to marry such a fallen woman. An act of kindness that had never been appreciated by my grandmother, who now spat on the memory of her own husband by cutting out his family. By which the aunt meant they were entitled to some of the wealth he had left his wife.
This story and what my mother knew of her own mother did not seem to match—and if she had really wanted the truth, or at least a version closer to the truth, she could have asked Rosalind. But the account was good enough for her, a first step towards freedom.
What my mother had in mind as an escape, she could not yet tell. Perhaps she sensed already what she would do and it was so awful that she turned from it, unable to contemplate where such an action would leave her. So my mother continued to sit patiently through her tutorials every afternoon, and her tutors soon reported to my grandmother that Hema was both docile and quick at her work. The next three years passed in this way, and when she was eighteen my mother sat for her Higher School Certificate.
She went to the first exam intending to do her very best. Yet once she was seated in the classroom and the exam bell had rung, she found herself observing a gecko crawling after a fly on the ceiling, the spinning, humming fans, the girls crouched over their desks, the invigilators standing in the doorways and murmuring to each other across the hall. All this created a hazy shimmer across my mother’s mind. She watched the minutes pass on the clock, then studied the other girls busily working around her, noting their school ties and the barrettes and ribbons in their hair, the styles of their shoes, their various tics and twitches of nervousness, how some girls clutched
rosaries and other religious totems on their laps. At the halfway point, an invigilator made a tour of the room, and when she saw my mother’s blank examination book she nudged her and whispered, “Are you ill? Do you need a Disprin or something?”
“No, no,” my mother whispered back. Seeing the woman’s concern, my mother began to answer the questions frantically. But too much time had passed, and when the bell rang she let out a burble of despair and kept working until, finally, the invigilator had to pry the booklet from her.
As my mother left the classroom, she knew that even though she would not fail, she could not expect anything more than a credit. She felt frightened and cornered by this saboteur within, helpless in her grip. During each of the remaining three exams, her mind drifted from the questions and she would find herself, as before, looking about the room, observing the other students. Then a voice inside her would cry, “What are you doing! You are eating yourself!” and she would frantically try to answer a question, only to soon lose interest again.
My mother, when she told me about those examinations, said she could not make sense of her actions, even to this day. It was as if some element of karma was at play, just like in those old Buddhist stories, some bad effect from a previous life realizing itself in this one. My mother laughed as she said this, yet I sensed she half believed it, as I, too, have come to half believe that we sometimes make choices inexplicable to us.
The results came out a couple of months later. This time, my grandmother rose at dawn to wait. She and Rosalind spread the newspaper out under the dining-table lamp and craned over the columns. My mother watched as my grandmother ran her finger down, beginning at the top; watched the frown crease her forehead, the furrows growing deeper. After she had reached the end of the first page, my grandmother declared, “But there must be some mistake, they must have forgotten to print Hema’s name.” She glanced at Rosalind and then at her daughter. Perhaps she saw something in my mother’s face, because she quickly turned the page and ran a shaking finger down the columns that now listed only credits and passes. When she was halfway down she let out a throttled cry. My mother had received credits in physics and biology and a mere pass in botany and zoology. “But, how can this be,
it’s not …” My grandmother stopped, seeing the mixture of emotions on her daughter’s face.
In the silence the women could hear the Milk Board van outside the gate, the clink of bottles, a lone scooter passing, its puttering like the call of a lost bird. My mother pressed her folded arms into her stomach, ready for a beating.
“Why?” my grandmother said. She sank into a dining chair and covered her face with trembling hands. “Oh, God, I am cursed. Rosalind, I am cursed,” she whispered. “Here it is again. My happiness denied. The naked peréthi, I
am
the naked peréthi.”
My mother looked at her, not understanding.
Rosalind, who appeared to get the reference, forgot decorum and rested a hand on her mistress’s shoulder. After a moment, my grandmother pushed her chair back and stood up. She stumbled away, then turned to her daughter. “You don’t know what you’ve destroyed. You don’t know how lucky you were to have this chance to not end up like me.”
“Don’t worry,” my mother cried, anguished. “Don’t worry, I’ll never end up like you. Because I am not some vesi who throws herself at a man and ruts around with him on a beach, like a bitch in heat.”
My grandmother stared at her daughter in disbelief, then her face hardened. She drew herself up and walked away, steadying herself on the edges of the furniture as she went.
For a week my grandmother stayed in her darkened room. Occasionally, my mother caught glimpses of her through the curtained doorway, lying with arm across forehead as if she had a migraine. Then one evening my grandmother got out of bed with great energy. She put on a white sari and left for evening pooja at the nearby temple, a place she had only ever visited at important times like Vesak or the New Year or my grandfather’s death-anniversary dana. This marked the beginning of my grandmother’s religiosity. She had accepted that she would find no happiness in this life and must bear her karma. She would perform many acts of merit to ensure a better future life, doing good deeds for the monks and the temple, which was the highest form of merit. And she instructed Rosalind that her daughter was to eat all her meals on the back verandah.
In the months that passed, my mother watched her less-intelligent friends
get into university. She could have sat the exams again, but she did not dare approach my grandmother for another year of school fees. Other friends started to take cooking classes with the famous Anita Dickman and go to needlepoint and ballroom-dancing classes in preparation for becoming society wives. Some of them, by nineteen, were already engaged or married. No one came forward to find my mother a husband. She began to sever contact with her school friends, unable to bear the pity and concern in their eyes; unable to bear their splendidly appointed new homes, their doting husbands and plump babies; unable particularly, if they were in university, to bear their talk of medical or law school or be introduced to their student friends. Sometimes, when no one was looking, she would open a friend’s medical text and read a page. Then a cry would rise in her: “How have I come to this place? How?” And her throat would swell with rage at her mother. She hated her home, but was trapped by it. Her life would be lived out as a spinster with a mother who never spoke to her. When she thought about this future, often in the middle of the night, she would moan aloud.
My mother was twenty when she met my father. She was a typist by then at the shipping firm where he worked. He had none of the smart briskness, the arrogance, of the other young executives, and he walked with a slight drag, as if wearing shoes too large for him, his shoulders stooped, his bulbous nose scarred by old acne. He had a nervous crack of a laugh, and instead of flirting with the typists in the entitled manner of the others, he stuttered when asking for anything. My mother sensed that he liked her, and, being desperate for affection, signalled him over when he appeared at the door of the steno pool. They were soon having lunch together and going to films at the Regal Cinema in the evening, or for sunset walks along the Galle Face Green esplanade, or to cheap dinners at Tamil cafés. He proposed to her two months after they met.
When my mother told my grandmother she was getting married, she replied, “A Tamil and a Christian,” as if such foolishness was exactly what she expected from her daughter. “Are you blind to what is going on in our country? Have you forgotten the 1958 riots, how Tamil people lost their homes and businesses? How Tamil women were raped, the gold earrings ripped from their ears? By marrying this man, you will become one of those women, mistaken for Tamil because of your surname.”
She said all this with disdain, as if speaking about a servant girl on their street who had got pregnant out of wedlock.
“I am a fair person,” my grandmother told her. “I will give you a dowry. You can have that house of mine in Nugegoda.”
“I don’t want a cent from you,” my mother cried, her voice ragged. For she understood my grandmother’s offer came from relief at being finally free of her daughter.
T
O TRULY IMAGINE FREEDOM
, one must understand how one might escape. My understanding occurred when I was seventeen. By then, out of sheer loneliness, I had become an even more voracious reader and was the favoured client of a book-man who turned up at our gate once a week, an old wooden tea chest filled with books roped to the rear carrier of his bicycle. He would spread a pink tarpaulin on the verandah floor, then lay out his recent findings, each sun-bleached, monsoon-curled tome handled as if it were the finest glass, that raw-rice odour of pages in the tropics rising up to me as I knelt on the other side of the tarp. I chose what I wanted, then gave back the volumes I had bought the last time. He credited me a certain amount for these returns and I paid the difference. I devoured practically anything. Georgette Heyer, Victoria Holt, Dickens, Thackeray, Austen, Agatha Christie, P.G. Wodehouse, Leon Uris, Tolstoy were all swallowed in great gulps. I also favoured the biographies of old Hollywood stars, whose movies I would never see, there being no market for them in Sri Lanka. I read about the torrid sex lives, the ghastly childhoods, the ruinous marriages, the alcoholism and drug abuse, the sheer madness of the likes of Joan Crawford, Vivien Leigh, Judy Garland and Jean Harlow as if they were spicy potboilers.