The Rice Mother (14 page)

Every evening we prayed as a family. We stood in front of the altar built at Mother’s eye level, clasped our hands, and prayed earnestly. All I could see were the gods’ heads in the brightly colored pictures. We all had our favorite ones.

Mother and I always prayed to the Elephant God, Ganesha. Mohini’s prayers were to Goddess Saraswathy because she wanted to be clever, and Mother had told us that Goddess Saraswathy ruled education. Then Mohini wanted to be a doctor.

Lakshmnan prayed reverently to Mother’s namesake, Goddess Lakshmi, for great riches when he grew up. Goddess Lakshmi was responsible for bestowing wealth on her devotees. Inside a blue frame on our altar she stood in a red sari, raining gold coins from the palm of one of her many hands. In those days moneylenders used to keep a garlanded picture of her very close to their hearts.

Sevenese prayed to Lord Shiva because he was the god of destruction, who wore a black cobra as a necklace. He was also the most powerful of all the gods. If one prayed hard enough, he could grant a boon of one’s choice, and once granted, it could never be revoked by anyone—not even Lord Shiva himself. Impressed by this information, Sevenese began to pray for his boon. He was very strange compared to the rest of us. I will never forget the day he walked into the house holding a long smooth stick in his hand.

“Look, everybody,” he said, and right before our eyes he loosened his grip and the rigid stick he grasped upright in his hands moved and transformed itself back into a curling brown snake. When he was satisfied with the commotion he had caused, he coolly wrapped the thing around his hand like a scarf and wandered off toward the snake charmer’s house. He was bloody lucky Mother didn’t see him.

Little Jeyan prayed to Lord Krishna because kindhearted Mohini had whispered in his small ears that he was as dark and as beautiful as Lord Krishna himself.

I don’t know who Lalita prayed to. Perhaps she didn’t have a favorite deity. I don’t think I took too much notice of her. It was only Mohini who made a great fuss over Lalita.

Every evening we each sang one devotional song to our chosen deity, and then Mother rang the little bronze bell, lit the camphor for the gods, and rubbed holy ash and dotted fresh sandalwood paste on our foreheads. Father never joined us in our prayer. He sat outside in his wicker chair smoking his cheroot. “God is within,” he claimed.

Sometimes when I think back, I can cry for the innocent days when Father was a giant of a figure who could fit our little bottoms into the large palm of his hand and lift us into the air high above his head. And high up there was the safest, best place in the whole wide world. But that was before I began to feel sorry for him. Those were the days when a dark fire burned brightly in his eyes as he watched Mother smile with pride and joy. It was when he was still turning a lump of wood into the most beautiful carving I have ever seen.

For years I sat cross-legged on the floor beside him, watching him studying his bust for many minutes before he was finally ready to carefully coax one tiny shaving out of it. And when it was finally finished, everybody who saw it agreed it was indeed a work of art. It was more than genius. It was love.

Father had captured Mother as none of us had seen her, as only he knew her—a young girl drenched in sunshine from a small village called Sangra, before life had touched her. Then one day Mother destroyed hundreds of hours of careful labor in minutes. I have a memory of that day when her furious body killed that bust. When she was done, spiteful splinters of sharp wood lay everywhere.

Now when I think back about Father, I feel only regret. Deep regret. For he was the nicest person that ever walked the earth, and surely the unhappiest. When I was very young, before Mother had made me feel ashamed of him, I loved him with all my young heart. I remember he used to come home with small bunches of bananas that he bought with his pitiful monthly allowance. It was our little ritual. He sat in his chair on the veranda, peeling the bananas one by one with his long, dark fingers. All the stringy yellow strands that could be pulled away from the inside skin, he put into his mouth.

“It’s the best bit,” he insisted nobly, giving us the rich, pale yellow fruit, Mohini, Lalita, and I sat solemnly at his feet as he shared it out.

I was only a child then, but I clearly understood that my large, silent father loved us all. He loved my elder sister more, though, so much more that he would have gladly held his hand inside a flame if only she had asked. I used to wonder if there was some measure of ugly sibling rivalry in my heart, but I honestly don’t think so, because it was not winning Father’s love that was important. The prize always belonged to the object of Mother’s attention.

In identical dresses we stood in front of Mother, waiting for her approval. She would adjust a bow, sweep back a strand of hair, and smile at both of us with the same level of satisfaction, and that was enough to reassure me that she loved me the same as my sister. Needless to say, Mohini looked totally different in the same dress. People used to stare at her a lot, mostly men, uncomfortable stares. Nobody believed that we were sisters. They would look into the warm green of her eyes with amazement and often a touch of envy.

I remember standing by the mirror as Mother did her hair and watching as she oiled and combed it until it turned into a shiny black serpent that undulated right down to the soft swell of her bottom. My own hair was always thin and fine, and when the Japanese came, to my greatest horror Mother reached for her scissors. She made me stand outside in the yard and went to work, and when she was finished, long, thin strands of hair lay in black patches on the ground. I ran to the mirror, tears streaming down my face. She had left no more than two inches of hair on my head. Attired in a pair of boy’s shorts and a shirt, I was sent to school. In the next few days I was somewhat mollified, as more than half the girls in school had turned into boys.

Mr. Vellupilai dutifully redid the class registers to reflect the changes. In my class, the only girl who remained a girl was Mei Ling. Her mother had permitted her to remain a girl, and she became our Japanese teacher’s favorite. One day during recess he called her into an empty classroom and raped her. I can see her now, stumbling out, lips trembling in her dazed face, the belt, made from the same material as her uniform, slightly askew. I knew, of course, that being raped was the ultimate catastrophe, but I had no idea then what it entailed. I remember thinking that it had something to do with one’s eyes, because it was her eyes that were huge and bruised that morning. And for a long time I thought being raped was having your eyes hurt. No wonder Mother hid Mohini and her wonderful eyes. In fact, the headmaster himself came to our house to advise Mother to keep my sister from school.

“Too beautiful,” he said, coughing into a large brown-and-white handkerchief. Mr. Vellupilai said he couldn’t guarantee her safety with so many Japanese around. In between mouthfuls of Mother’s fried banana cakes, he told her that Japanese teachers were going to be sent to the school. “They are coarse and vulgar,” he said. He would have no control over them; one must never forget that they did after all rape their way through half of China. With Mohini being at that age, he concluded almost delicately, he could not guarantee her safety. In fact, his exact words were, “I wouldn’t like to put a cat and a saucer of milk in the same room and close the door.”

Mother needed no second warning. So Mohini got to keep her thick serpent of hair, but she became a prisoner at home. Mohini was our secret. Outside our front door she stopped existing. We never spoke about her. She was like the chest of gold ingots buried under the house that the whole family lies to protect. No one saw the beauty that she was turning into. She could not even stand outside on the veranda or walk in the backyard to breathe some fresh air. For almost three years she remained so hidden away that even the neighbors forgot what she looked like. Mother’s fear was that somebody might reveal her existence to the Japanese soldiers for a favor or out of jealousy. Times were hard, and friends were few.

One day I remember Mohini sitting on the steps of our back door as Mother combed her hair. Like waves of the purest black silk, her hair lay down her back. As Mother twisted it into a thick rope, I spotted in the blazing sun the snake charmer’s eldest son. He must have been hunting for live mice or small snakes for his cobras to eat but had instead stumbled upon our luxurious secret. He stood frozen in the terrible heat, caught in the net of his discovery. His tattered, stained clothes were falling off his sinewy, bronzed body, and in his muscled hand he carried a closed basket. He had no shoes on, and his hair was unwashed, but in the glare of the sun his eyes were dark fathomless pits in his stunned face. The sudden movement of my head attracted Mother’s attention, and her body turned instantly to shield Mohini.

“Go away,” she barked harshly at him.

For a moment he continued to stare, hypnotized by the glorious hair, the milky whiteness, and then as suddenly as he had appeared, he vanished into the wavering yellow heat. I looked into Mother’s face and saw fear. It was not fear of the strange magic of the snake charmer or the awakening reptile of desire that had shimmered in the young man’s eyes, but fear of the rare beauty that sat so simply in my sister’s face. Indeed, Mohini was like a magnificent quetzal, which flies straight up from the crowns of hundred-foot-tall trees, circles in song, then free-falls, dropping through the air, her iridescent feathers streaming like a comet’s tail. Mother was the chosen owner of this resplendent bird. What more could she do but cage her breathtaking beauty? And a prisoner Mother’s bird remained until the day she flew away forever.

In my mind I can still see the two of us walking home from school, dressed identically, side by side in the sun eating balls of ice shavings dipped in syrup. We had to eat it fast, or it would melt in our hands. We could never ever tell Mother when we had one because Mohini suffered from horrible attacks of asthma and was not allowed to consume anything cold. So we sneaked in the ice balls only when the weather sizzled. It was very serious, Mohini’s asthma. Whenever it rained or even just drizzled, Mother would come to fetch us from school with a large black umbrella, and the three of us walked home together, Mohini under the big black umbrella, me under a small waxed brown-paper umbrella that smelt strongly of varnish, and Mother under the rain. I think she secretly enjoyed the feel of the big warm drops falling on her head. Always when we got home, freshly pressed, horribly pungent ginger juice would be waiting in a covered cup. Mother then boiled some water and poured it into the juice, filling the whole kitchen with its biting fumes. After adding a spoonful of dark brown wild honey into the vile mixture, Mother handed over the cup and waited until it was completely empty. I watched almost in awe as Mohini drank it all down. On the roof the rain tapped and drummed insistently. I think I loved my sister a great deal then.

And I remember Mui Tsai too. Sweet, downtrodden little Mui Tsai. I think she was really attached to Mother, but Mother was so determined that her imaginary gravestone would read “Devoted Mother” that she couldn’t see her friend begging for a little love. Her eyes were set far away on the horizon, where all her children were brilliant examples of good upbringing. Poor Mui Tsai. She often looked sad, but that was when she was not yet broken. They broke her like a toy, her mistresses and the master. And after that she was no longer sad. I think her mind snapped. She went to a place where she had many babies and got to keep them all.

My best memories of Mui Tsai are her elongated shadow on Mother’s kitchen wall far into the night, a secret rendezvous in the flickering, mysterious light of Mother’s oil lamp. Whenever a nightmare jerked me awake in the middle of the night, I crept into the friendly glow of the kitchen. There I found Mui Tsai and Mother cross-legged and talking in whispers or playing Chinese checkers on the bench. I would walk smiling into Mui Tsai’s outstretched arms and fall asleep in her lap. She aroused in me the same concealed pity that I harbored for my younger sister, Lalita.

I remember the birth of my little sister, a waif in a tightly wrapped bundle. She had small eyes set very close together in a broad face. And she was darker than all of us. My father had to nibble her ears to make her laugh. She was very quiet. She was like him, you see. She even looked like him. Mother frankly admitted she had not wanted any of her children to take after our father. She said his children from his first marriage were the sorriest creatures she ever saw. When she first looked into Lalita’s dull eyes, she thought that through sheer willpower alone she could change her. Change the course of nature. She was only a baby. Babies could be changed.

But the older my sister became, the more she resembled Father. In despair Mother took to rocking my quiet sister on her outstretched legs, singing, “Who will marry my poor, poor daughter?” If you had heard the anguish in those simple words, you too would have come to the conclusion that beautiful children inspire pride in their parents, and ugly children inspire a tremendous surge of protective love. Nature denied my sister beauty, but it was my mother who carried protective love so far she unwittingly denied my sister the opportunity of marriage. I know it’s wrong of me, but I cannot be rid of the notion that it was
because
of Mother that my sister never married—the strength of Mother’s will as she sang that sad line over and over again. If Mother heard me say this, she would be very angry. She would say she tried her very best. Nobody could have tried harder to find my sister a suitable husband. Perhaps she should just be flattered that I think her so powerful as to change the course of my sister’s fate with her little songs.