The Rice Mother (15 page)

When we returned to our empty, looted home after the Japanese invasion, Mother had to use more than half of her savings to replace everything that had been stolen. To her credit she took the disaster in her stride. By midmorning she had been to the markets and managed to stock up on some provisions and later replaced most of our furniture by buying pieces looted from others. By the end of that year the rest of my mother’s savings had become just useless paper. The Japanese made us all very resourceful, but Mother was an undefeatable force. Realizing that her money was useless, she sent Lakshmnan, more dexterous than a monkey, up the highest coconut tree in our compound, where he tied her tin of money and jewels securely among the branches. Every so often he scampered up to check that her hoard was still safe. Covered in bird droppings, Mother’s little fortune remained untouched for years. The advent of the Japanese made Mother an entrepreneur, and she had quite a knack for it too. She noted that condensed milk was no more, and the coffee stall on the way to Father’s workplace sold only sugarless black coffee. There was a market for cow’s milk. So she sold her largest ruby and bought some cows and goats. Every morning before the sun was up, she milked them, and Lakshmnan took the milk to the coffee shops in town. During the day she left the milk to set into yogurt, and in the evening the ladies from the temple visited with empty containers to collect Mother’s yogurt thinned with water. They called it
mour.

I was nine years old then, and I remember our cows as huge beasts with lumbering bodies and ponderous udders. They looked at me with liquid mournful eyes that made me guiltily try to love them, but they were really too stupid to befriend. There was never the light of recognition, nor any expression to be gleaned from their eyes except sad acceptance, resigned to dreadful lives in smelly conditions. Always under their tails was dried dung.

Strangely enough, when I think of the Japanese occupation, I think of our cows—the way they came into our lives with the start of the occupation and were all sold when the Japanese left. While it is true that Mother also kept goats, turkeys, and geese, they left no impact on me. Lalita fed the turkeys and geese bean curd and spinach until they were big enough to sell and then cried when Mother sold them to a Chinese trader at the market.

Most of all I equate the Japanese occupation with fear, the acute fear that has a taste and a smell all of its own, metallic and oddly sweet. Lakshmnan and I saw our first decapitated head on our way to the market. The head was spiked on a stick by the roadside, attached to it a page torn from a school exercise book with the message “Traitor.” We laughed at the head. It was funny when we were sure it wasn’t real. How could it be real when there was no blood dripping from the severed neck or the large gash on the man’s left cheek? When we got closer, however, we realized that it was indeed real. The flies were real, and so was the persistent sweetish, stale odor around it. Fear of a kind I had never experienced before hit me in the stomach. I began to fear for my father’s life, even though my brother assured me that they only beheaded Chinese men whom they suspected to be Communists.

A few yards in front not just a head but a whole body had been skewered onto a stick and spiked into the ground. My brother’s steps faltered, and his grip on my hand tightened painfully, but my brother is like my mother—he doesn’t say die easily. We pressed on. I wish we hadn’t. The Chinese man had looked like a fake dummy, and not a very good one at that, but the second figure gave me nightmares for many years to come.

It was a woman. My brother’s reassurance that they only chopped off the heads of Chinese Communist men showed itself to be a lie. Not only was the corpse a woman, she had also been heavily pregnant. They had ripped her belly open, and a perfectly formed purple fetus hung obscenely from the gaping hole. Her eyes bulged as if horrified to see us looking at her open belly, and her mouth hung open as if getting ready to scream. Big blue flies buzzed around her open, stinking belly. She carried in her limp hand a placard that read, “And this is how Communist families are treated.” The Japanese, it seemed, had a special hatred for the Chinese that went beyond the war. “Mui Tsai is Chinese,” I said as we walked on in silence.

After they stole Mui Tsai’s fifth child, she shuffled around like a bitter ghost. Inside she was cut and bleeding, but to the outside world she was young and pretty. To the Japanese soldiers she was perfect. They found their comfort woman in our little neighborhood. How they used her! They lined up. One by one they took her on the kitchen floor, in the master’s bed, on the rosewood dining table where the master and mistress ate every day. Every time they came, they expected to have their food on the table and their sex wherever they happened to be standing. Our Mohini and Ah Moi next door owed their virginity to her. When General Ito and his men drove into the neighborhood, the first mad rush was to Old Soong’s house. At Old Soong’s they found everything necessary to satisfy their basic needs. There was always the food that they were familiar with, and then there was always a young fair girl for them to do with as they pleased, nobody’s wife and nobody’s daughter. Because they had Mui Tsai, they didn’t bother to look too hard for the other carefully hidden daughters. They might have guessed there were girls of usable age hidden somewhere in the neighborhood, but Mui Tsai did for the time being.

Mother and Lakshmnan had built a secret hole in the ground for Mohini, and to a lesser extent, if the occupation lasted for many years, for me too. As a boy I should have been safe for a few more years, but with the Japanese you never could tell. Mother said war brings out the animal inside a man. He leaves his compassion at home. Meeting him in enemy land is like turning a corner and looking into the yellow eyes of a large lion. There is never a chance to plead or reason. He will surely jump on you. The hiding place was a hole that had been cleverly cut out of the floorboards of the house. It dropped you onto the ground under the elevated floor of our house and ran straight into a hole with enough space for Mohini, me, and maybe one day even Lalita.

Mother had dismantled the old chicken coop, run chicken wire around the legs of our house, and herded our chickens into their new home under our house. She was gambling on the hope that the prospect of soiling themselves with chicken dung would put off even the Empire’s most dedicated servant from investigating that small crawl space under our house. The trapdoor was covered with a huge wooden chest that Grandma had sent from Sangra. When the wooden chest was pushed over the trapdoor, the entrance was completely concealed. It was an ingenious hiding place, and the Japanese, though they opened cupboards and peered into corners, never found it. Perhaps they didn’t try too hard. Mui Tsai had already blunted the edge of their needs before they came around.

Once Mother tried to please them by giving them food. The first time they put the offered food into their mouths, they spat it out immediately, looking at her with murderous rage as if she had offered them spicy food in order to mock them. She bowed low and begged for mercy. They slapped her bowed head. Sometimes they looked at Mother with strange expressions and asked where she had hidden her daughters. Standing beside her in my boy’s clothes, I felt her trembling against me. Once General Ito came very close and asked her again with such a knowing smile that it seemed as if one of the neighbors had betrayed us. But they were only testing, and we sighed with relief when their truck turned away into the main road.

Mohini filled her secret room with small embroidered pillows and books. She made it pretty, but we were forbidden conversation inside. We cuddled each other in silence and listened to the thumping of heavy boots on the floorboards above. At the beginning we were very frightened in our secret cavity, but as time went by we relaxed and learned to giggle very, very softly into our cupped hands thinking of the soldiers searching uselessly over our heads for our hiding place. I was so proud of our clever hiding place, for I knew they would never find it, and I was right.

It was Father they came to take away.

Little Sevenese dreamed that he saw Father fall into a huge hole in the ground, his lips bleeding profusely. Mother went to the temple, donated some money, and said some prayers.

Two nights after we had forgotten about the dream, they came. The moon was a slender shape in the sky, and the gods had flung only a handful of stars into the black void. I know because for many hours afterward I sat in a daze, watching the sky. The neighborhood was asleep, only Mother still awake, in the kitchen sewing. At the first sound of tires crunching over the road, she pricked her finger. For a second she stared at the dot of red that appeared on her finger, but even before they had stopped their trucks and jumped out, she had dragged Mohini and me out of bed and stashed us into our secret hiding place. Then she blew out the kerosene lamp and stood behind the living room curtains. They came with torchlight and bayonets. She watched them disappear into the truck driver’s house.

Minutes later they were out, the truck driver at bayonet point. In the truck’s headlamps he looked bewildered. They dragged his half-dressed body into the truck. From inside the poor man’s house came the sounds of loud sobs and wailing. His children’s terrified screams tore into the night. The soldiers stood for a while, loudly discussing something in their guttural language. It was not Ito and his men. Ito and his soldiers were predictable. We hated them, but they had become familiar figures of manageable terror. These men looked far more menacing. They were not looking for free food or a pair of open legs. They were looking for something far more important than that. As Mother watched, the group broke up, and two of them began striding toward our house. Our front door thundered with their hard rapping. Mother rushed to open the door. Their flashlights shone briefly in her face before they pushed her roughly aside. Their beam fell on Father standing stock-still by the bedroom door. Immediately they grabbed him and marched him out of the house, stony-faced in the wake of my mother’s pitiful cries.

My father turned around to look at us, but he didn’t wave. There was no emotion on his face. He was still too dazed.

They drove into the night for about forty-five minutes. The truck driver seated opposite Father began to sob, and my father, who was wearing only a white singlet and his pajama bottoms, began to shiver in the open-top truck. Eventually they were driven into a rubber plantation, up to an elegant, colonial-style stone house. In the moonlight, the unlit house was silver and ghostly. From the one open window on the first floor, through billowing white curtains, floated hauntingly beautiful classical music.

They pushed him at sword point down some stairs into an underground chamber. Water dripped from the ceiling and ran down the dungeon walls. When his hand brushed against the walls, they were velvety with green moss. The corridors echoed harshly with their footsteps and their breathing. The prisoners stumbled down a long corridor and were pushed into tiny cells. The door shut with a clang behind my father. Without the dull yellow light from his captor’s lantern, the room plunged him into clouds of black ink. Two pinpoints of orange appeared on his eyelids. There was no relief in the sound of heavy boots receding. It was cold and damp in the room, and he shivered and listened. Boots approaching. Rhythmic and hard. They passed. A dog barked outside. From somewhere nearby, water dripping.

My father felt his way around the room on his hands and knees. The walls were rough-hewn and crumbling and the floor solid stone. The room was bare, save for him and a sudden scuttling movement. He pushed himself quickly into a corner, and with his back pressed into the wall, he stared terrified into the blackness. It was a rat. He heard its claws clicking on the cold cement. A small sound. The hairs at the back of his neck rose. He hated rats. He could stand snakes, tolerate spiders, understand the need for slimy frogs, and even condone the existence of cockroaches—but he hated rats. Oh, God, and that terrible, smooth tail. He swallowed with nervous fear. He heard the scuttling sound again and bunched his fist. In the dark the rat’s teeth became longer and sharper. He would bring down his bunched fist hard on the soft warm body. Yes, disgusting blood would squirt, but he would then be safe. He remembered that his feet were bare. Once more he heard boots marching down the corridor. The sound terrified him. He felt his mouth dry.

He did not fear the Japanese. There was nothing to fear. He had done nothing wrong. He of all people had nothing to be afraid of. He had not even succumbed to his wife’s scolding and bought the black-market white sugar that she so wanted.
He was not afraid.

It was the rat he was afraid of. He told himself this over and over again. He had nothing to fear. He must concentrate on the rat that might try to nibble at his toes. He thought he felt a sword whizzing in the air just by his neck, and he jerked his head. He saw his head fly apart, away from the shining sword. Blood flew out of his neck like red rain. “Stop it,” he told himself in the intolerable darkness. He put the yellow face that had wielded the invisible sword away from his fevered brain.