The Rice Mother (17 page)

Father looked around him. The light from the truck’s headlamps made them all look crazed and desperate. The smell, the ugly thoughts, the muttered prayers, and the occasional wild laugh. They looked like men who had felt the soft cold breath of death down their necks. They covered the hole. Then they were instructed to dig another, same length and width as before. In the light from the headlamps he could see that there were other places of the same length and breadth, covered with fresh earth. It didn’t bear thinking about. For two hours, maybe more, they dug. It was slow, backbreaking work, yet no one wished for it to end. More than anything else in the heat of that night was the dread of the words, “Stop. That’s enough.”

Soon I will be dead, he thought, suddenly calm.

“STOP! That’s enough. Stand facing the hole,” a loud voice ordered.

Soon he would be no more, and the thought was strangely pleasing. He was aware that he was a failure in life, and death had invited him so prettily. He made his calculations. Mohini would soon be married, and I was bright enough to negotiate a good life. The boys would be fine, of course. He felt a little stab of pain for poor Lalita, but her mother, that admirable paragon, his wife, would take care of the little girl.

Wearily the men stood in a line. Some of them began to sob, and others to plead through lips that bled copiously as they spoke. Blood ran down their chins. The pitiful sounds they made sounded like they came from very far away. The soldiers were unmoved. My father looked at the little black mouths of the Japanese machine guns.

Indeed at that moment the young child called Death was starry-eyed and so full of sleep-tousled charm that he was captivated. The child smiled at Father.

Father’s mouth curved. He was ready.

The air was suddenly filled with machine-gun blast and light. His shoulder burned red raw as he slumped forward. The man next to him clutched his stomach and fell on my father. Together they collapsed in a tangle of stinking arms and legs into the pit. Inches away from Father’s face, in the cold white light of the moonlight, he saw the face of our neighbor, a ghastly staring mask, and knew that Death was a cruel, heartless child. Others fell on top of them. They twitched and convulsed as they played the game of Death. Amused the child. He made no sound when warm blood dripped on his face and gushed onto his chest. All his screams of terror he held deep in his locked throat. From beneath the corpses he heard the soldiers talk in their guttural, aggressive way. They stood over the hole, looking in. They fired a few stray shots. Some bodies jerked inside the hole. My father opened his mouth wide, but it was only to fill his burning lungs with air. He may not have been a clever man, but he knew the value of silence.

First the headlights moved away, and then the noise of the truck lumbering off died into the night. It was dark, so dark in the pit of death that my father thought he would never see light again. He waited until the twitching stopped, for he couldn’t have stepped over a suffering body. The other bodies were heavy with the sleep of death. Arms, legs, and heads pressed upon him. It seemed as if they wanted him to stay inside that dark pit with them. That night, he climbed over the other nine bodies. It was horrible. Finally he managed to pull himself out of the grave. Tiredly he sat for a while beside the pit he had dug himself. Vacantly he looked around. The moon smiled sadly at him, and then he heard the sounds of the forest for the first time since they had driven out here. The incessant buzz of insects. A mosquito stung him. He slapped his neck and began to laugh madly. He was still alive. The sky was soft with gray clouds, and a light breeze was blowing. He was torn and bleeding, but he had cheated the charming child. Father had seen the flash of thwarted anger in its soft, liquid eyes. Never mind, he told the pretty pouting mouth, “Nine out of ten is still very good work.”

Father jumped back into the pit for a pair of shoes from a dead man, then began moving into the night, staying within the jungle but keeping very close to the tire tracks. Perhaps in a day or two it would lead him back into town, but in the gray light of dawn he was horrified to realize that he was utterly lost.

My father returned home nearly two weeks after he had been taken. One-third of his bulk was gone. He smelt like the neighbor’s cat that had crept under the firewood to die and not been discovered for a week. The skin on his body was covered in festering sores and bites. Like elastic his dark skin stuck to his big frame. He had been crawling circles in the jungle, climbing over enormous felled trunks covered with slimy mosses, slipping and sliding in black mud, and inhaling the sour smell of rotting leaves lying feet deep, and all the while feeding his blood to the swarms of giant mosquitoes, leeches, flies, fleas, winged ants, and heaven only knows what other creatures God had seen fit to put into the blackest nights imaginable.

Father told me that at night, chemicals released by the process of rotting turn decaying leaves and dark lengths of whole, uprooted trees full of fungus and lichen on the jungle floor into a strange and never-ending pattern of phosphorescent and luminous shapes. He sat surrounded by the beautiful display of glowing light at his feet, frozen rigid with fear, keenly listening for the footfall of a tiger, knowing that its padded feet could tiptoe in the undergrowth without disturbing a single frond of a fern. It would simply appear before him, its lips tar-black and its teeth glowing.

My poor father. In the moist heat his shoulder burned day and night like red-hot coals on bare flesh. The wound was beginning to stink. He covered it with leaves. Every day at dawn he licked the dew off as many smooth leaves as he could find before stumbling on for as long as his legs would carry him. Once in the dappled light, he just missed stepping on an enormous midnight-blue scorpion as it walked sedately across his path, its poisoned tail held high above its head.

He hardly ever stopped.

One day it rained in sheets, turning the paths he followed into rivers of red mud; another day it was so hot, steam rose from the decomposing leaves on the jungle floor. Once he was startled and filled with wonder to discover giant potholes in the mud and to see the nearby tree trunks splashed ear high with black slime—elephant tracks. For a while he followed it, but it led nowhere.

It took him some time, but he realized without doubt that he was stumbling around in circles. Paranoia gripped him immediately. The indelible impression that the jungle
wanted
him grew inside his discouraged body. Its collective hunger appeared in every shape and form; even the creepers that hung from tree branches caressed him with such longing that they left damp, green trails on his face.

He was sitting on a fallen log watching a hairy-legged spider as big as his palm crawling up a fleshy creeper when he felt a tickling on his bare forearm. A maggot danced. As he looked at it in surprise, another fell beside it. He simply stared at the two shiny white grubs frolicking on his flesh until a third joined them. Slowly he turned his head, and even though he had guessed at once that his pus-filled shoulder wound was a mass of writhing, twisting maggots, the sight of them made him rear back and hiss with horrified revulsion. He realized that his hand had become quite numb. They are eating me alive, he thought, diving into the blackest despair.

He thought the golden, vindictive child of death was playing with him in the sweltering heat, but he was wrong; the pretty child had lost interest in him. The maggots only ate the pus and the dead skin, after which they all vanished, leaving a gaping clean hole in his shoulder. An Argus pheasant flitted in the giant ferns, so close to his hands that Father lunged for it. What he would have done with it had he caught it has always been a mystery to me, as Father could not kill a fly that flew into his mouth. The question never arose, as he only managed to land facedown in rich black soil. Overhead, a brilliantly blue kingfisher with a gaudy orange breast flashed, but Father saw it only as a blur of blue and orange, for he was becoming dangerously weak and faint.

Where the umbrella of leaves was thinner, butterflies as big as his face sailed around his head in graceful circles, and sometimes he walked through mists of fruit flies, flapping his hands around his face listlessly. His shoulder still throbbed, his mouth was covered in sores, and the skin on his body was painfully alive with hundreds of bites and brushes with poisonous leaves. He knew he could not continue for much longer. He dragged himself on, feebly.

Finally he found tracks, human tracks. The trees were marked. Overjoyed, he followed the marks. They led to a luscious clump of banana trees. As he tore hungrily into the grove heavy with fruit, dozens of leeches fell onto his skin from under the gorgeous green leaves. He didn’t know they were on his body until he watched them, engorged with his blood and as thick as his middle finger, spring off his skin of their own accord. When his supply of bananas ran out, he starved until he became aware of the scent of mangoes. He followed the strong odor until he stood before an amazing carpet of ripe fruit under a colony of wild mango trees.

Sitting on the yellow carpet, he tore off the skins with his teeth and ate ten, fifteen, maybe even twenty fruit. They were delicious beyond compare. He turned his singlet into a bag and carried on his journey as many mangoes as he could fit into it.

Then magically, unbelievably, the jungle gave way to symmetrical rows of rubber trees. He crept forward like a hunting cat, pausing behind each tree, his scalp prickling, expecting a Japanese soldier to leap out at any moment—an inscrutable yellow face, a bayonet deep inside his shriveled stomach. But he met no bayonet. After the incessant buzz of millions of insects and the loud screams of birds and monkeys, the rubber estate was deadly silent. He walked until he came upon an old dirt road, then he followed it to a tiny shack where two Indian men were manually processing crude sheets of rubber from latex using toddy, an alcoholic drink made from the sap of coconut palm. Father shouted out to them, but only a weak moan came from his lungs. He opened his mouth to shout louder, but his legs simply gave way beneath him, and the darkness swallowed him.

They were good men. They brought my father home to us. I have never seen anyone as coldly professional as Mother. She was neither afraid of nor disgusted by her husband’s condition—the smells, the wounds, the cuts, the bruises, the torn flesh, the shine of swollen skin. She burned bits of old cloth over the stove and used the snuffed-out charred ends to rub over his entire body. Father groaned with relief as the carbon soaked into his sores. His swollen face she bathed with the liquid from boiled peanut plant leaves. His wounds she cleaned and dressed, and then she set about mending the broken man who had not recognized her at the doorway.

For weeks he lay in the large iron bed, a shriveled, iodine-covered shape. His skin was muddy with sickness and clammy with perspiration. He called for water constantly, even in his sleep. The only name that came to his lips was my mother’s, and the only person he recognized when he half opened his eyes was her. Sometimes his hand reached out to touch Mohini’s face, and silent tears rolled down his face. His lips that had looked irreparable healed very fast, but his body, ravaged by malaria, tossed and turned as if no cessation of the war inside his mind was ever possible.

“Take off his mask. Don’t give him my quinine,” he shouted deliriously. “Quick, close the doors. Hide the children,” he screeched. “Can’t you see? They’re dead in the mud,” he screamed, shivering so violently the big bed shook.

On the first Saturday of his return, Mother came back from the market, and on the chopping block outside the kitchen she unwrapped a dark green papaya-leaf package. Inside was a garishly red piece of crocodile meat. “Good for healing wounds,” she said. “He is such a long man and needs so much to fill him up again.” She cooked the meat with herbs. I watched as she spoon-fed Father with that puce-colored broth. The bits that dribbled down his chin she caught with her spoon. Every day, for many days, she untied papaya-leaf packages and cooked the bright red meat inside.

Day and night my mother sat by his bedside. Sometimes she scolded him, and sometimes she sang to him, songs I had never heard her sing before. Maybe she did love him, after all. Perhaps she was only thorny of nature. I can see her now, a light figure sitting by the bed with my father’s dark shape in it, surrounded by evening shadows. Leaning at the doorway, the sole of my left foot resting on the calf of my right leg, listening with awe to her sing songs that I had not known nested inside her, I remember thinking that Mother was like the ocean. So deep and so full of unknown things that I feared I’d never get to the bottom of her. I wished I were a stream that would grow into a river that could one day rush into her.

Then one day my father sat up and asked for a banana.

We swarmed around him, fascinated, watching him eat on his own. Our purple father was a hero. He could manage only the fee-blest of smiles that disappeared the instant they arrived. He bade Lakshmnan to bring to his bedside that special block of wood he had been saving for so many years. Then he began to carve a mask. Slowly, very slowly, a smooth face of incredible beauty took shape, with arching eyebrows and full sensuous lips. The mask, smooth and gently smiling, lay by the bed, and Father stared at it a lot. Then one night we all awoke to the sound of banging and angry roaring. We rushed to his room and found him standing in the middle of it, leaning limply against Mother’s heavy wooden pestle. The mask, smashed to smithereens, lay in fragments on the floor. For a few seconds he looked at us almost as if he didn’t recognize us before falling into a sobbing heap.

The next day I was standing at the doorway watching him eat alligator soup when he called me in. He patted the space beside his hips, and I wriggled onto the bed, laying my head gently on his tummy. He began the story of his ordeal. Every word burned into my memory. After all, he had chosen
me
to tell his incredible story to. After that he improved fast, and soon he was walking around the house, but very quickly he began to forget the details that he had carved into my memory forever. As the years went by, he could only remember the mask or the pretty child of death in the haziest manner.