The Rice Mother (18 page)

T
o strengthen my puny legs, Mohini was assigned the task of walking me through the woods behind our home, up along the stream, and occasionally even as far as the Chinese graveyard on the other side of the main road. Hand in hand we walked, my sister clumping along noisily in a pair of those ridiculously uncomfortable red wooden clogs favored by Chinese women in those days, and me in my sturdy shoes that Mother had paid good money for. On one of those walks a glinting piece of blue light in the flowing water caught my sister’s eyes. She waded in, red wooden clogs and all, and returned, eyes shining, with a fabulously blue crystal clutched tightly in her hand. That was the beginning of the happiest time of my life, when the ground became a crystalline womb of infinite fertility. We found stones of stunning beauty everywhere—in the mud, along the roadside, under people’s houses, by the river-banks when Mother went to buy fish, and along the rocks near the market. We cleaned them carefully, and once a week we took them to Professor Rao.

Professor Rao was an acquaintance of Father’s, a gemologist of some note. He had shown us yellowed printed manuscripts, important papers he had written for the Gemological Society of London. He was a courtly man and a scholar of Indian history. On his head grew hair of the purest white. His son, of whom he was very proud, was studying medicine in England. At every possible opportunity Professor Rao devotedly sent his son combs of unripe green bananas through friends and acquaintances. He often read us letters from a bright, cheerful lad, thanking him for the lovely yellow bananas. They were perfectly ripe, the young man wrote enthusiastically.

It was Professor Rao who first taught us to walk around with a piece of flint in our pockets. Whenever we found a stone or a rock, we struck it first with the flint, and if the rock gave, it meant it could be polished to a high shine with steel wool. In this manner Mohini and I filled, almost to the brim, an old wooden orange-packing case with beautifully polished, colorful stones and rocks. To my child’s eyes the closed box under our house seemed like the most extravagant treasure, equal even to Professor Rao’s professional collection of rocks, crystals, fossils, and gems.

Equal to his sawn and polished half-sections of geodes, unassuming rock eggs, the thick outer shells consisting of layers of swirling patterns made by rapid cooling in the earth’s crust and inside, glorious cavities filled with the deepest purple crystals. Equal even to his three-foot amethyst cave, which easily housed my whole head. Equal, I was certain, to his uncommonly large lingam, a phallus-shaped black tourmaline embraced by Hindus as the symbol of Lord Shiva. And equal, I thought, to his amber rock with its trapped live insect in-side, even after I had taken into account the morbid fascination factor of the dramatic blurring produced around the insect by its dying struggles.

I lay on a carpet of green and yellow leaves in our back garden, unenvious of his
paua
shells, his giant conches, and his tree of coral with its precious beads still attached. But now when I look at the contents of our box, it makes me want to weep. All I can see is a box full of dusty rocks, a sad reminder of an innocent time, when hours could be spent under the house carefully polishing a stone to discover its deep orange innards. A time as fleeting and as delicate as a butterfly’s wings, when stones of improbable cerulean blue, topaz, and soft rose rested in my delighted palm.

Every week we left our slippers outside Professor Rao’s home and went up the short flight of steps into his Aladdin’s cave. At the threshold he greeted us in his white dhoti, his hands joined together like a lotus bud in the noblest form of greeting, his eyes rich with a thousand virtues, and the footprint of God, holy ash drawn in the form of a U, on his high forehead.

“Come in, come in,” he bade us, clearly pleased to see his audience.

Inside his cool home we opened our tightly clenched fists and offered him warm stones for his perusal. Gravely he captured our stones in his tweezers and examined them one by one with a hand lens. Though it is certain that Mohini and I handed over junk more often than not, Professor Rao placed our stones with meticulous care on a special tray before delving into his spare room, where the dark bottles of poisons he used to identify rocks and minerals were kept. He carried out the bottles, excitingly labeled with crossbones and skulls and purchased from specialist overseas suppliers, and carefully released a drop of colorless liquid on our offerings. Unblinking, we stared. And sure enough, for a few spellbinding moments our stones would sizzle, smoke, and often turn freckled or flash with the most lustrous colors.

Afterward his wife served us very sweet tea and her excellent marble cake. In her kitchen she listened to frivolous Tamil love songs, but in the living room Professor Rao allowed nothing but the dour classical music of Thiagaraja to fill the air. While we nibbled at thinly sliced cake, the professor opened his silver box with little compartments. Betel leaf, slaked lime, areca nut, scented coconut, cardamom, cloves, aniseed, and saffron rested inside. It was pure yoga, the exquisite way he pinched exact amounts of every ingredient, his long pianist’s fingers folding the bright green leaf into a pyramid shape and piercing it shut with a single clove.

With the pan inside his mouth, he brought alive the plight of an irritated oyster or the bubbling life of magma hundreds of miles beneath our feet, taking us under the earth’s crust where diamonds have lived for millions of years. Softly his cultured voice carried us into great halls decorated with green marble from Sparta, yellow marble from Namibia, and frescoes by Meleager and Antimenes. On the grand walls hung with perfumed oil lamps and wreaths of sweet-smelling leaves and violets, Professor Rao would point to a decadent Roman host who has purposely chosen a bizarre collection of foods simply because they are rare and expensive and he is a rich gourmet. Slaves arranged upon a long banqueting table silver platters of warblers, parrots, turtle doves, flamingos, sea urchins, porpoises, larks’ tongues, sterile sows’ wombs, camels’ hooves, cockerel combs, stewed kid, barbecued oysters, and thrushes with an egg yolk poured over them.

“Look,” Professor Rao said, “they eat with their fingers. Just like us.”

In awe we watched musicians, poets, fire eaters, and dancing girls come and go until finally the second course was over and the proud host held up an amethyst-encrusted goblet, shouting, “Let the drinking symposium begin.” As he declared thus, his slaves dropped a piece of amethyst into every guest’s silver cup, for
amethystos
in Greek means “not intoxicated,” and the Romans never missed a trick when it came to prolonging a party.

After cake we followed the professor to his glass case. He slid open the doors, and another world opened before our eyes.

“Now let me see. Have I shown you my stone crab yet?” he would ask, putting into our childish hands the considerable weight of a large fossilized crab, every detail preserved forever. One by one all the treasures inside his glass case came out to pirouette before us. Wonderingly we ran our fingers along petrified wood, pieces of jet and rosaries made out of Shiva’s tears, brownish red
rudraksh
beads. We admired clear yellow tortoiseshell, and at other times the tusk of a fossilized mammoth or the wild untreated ivory of hippopotamus and walrus.

Carefully he unwrapped round black stones that had been cracked open like a nut to reveal in their black interior sea ammonite fossils curled up and closed like a secret. He had found them on the Himalayan slopes. “There was no range of mountains until India tore itself from a supercontinent called Gondawana and collided into Ti-bet, pushing the seabed up higher and higher,” he said, explaining the mystery of the sea ammonite’s existence so high up a mountain slope.

To me, though, the crowing glory of Professor Rao’s crystal collection was always a Cherokee Indian crystal skull. Professor Rao told us that the Cherokee Indians believed their skulls sang and spoke and they regularly washed them with deer blood before using them to heal or as an oracle. It was quite a beautiful thing, with color prisms deep inside it. Sporadically, when the colors in the skull dulled, the professor buried it in the earth overnight or left it out during thunderstorms or a full moon.

With every visit he put a different chunk of crystal in our right hand and instructed us to place our left hand lightly over it. “Close your eyes and let your heart whisper, ‘I love you,’ to the crystal,” he advised.

I held the crystal in the manner requested, closed my eyes, and my monkey mind instantly scampered to the last slice of marble cake that still remained uneaten as I waited impatiently for the moment when he would say, “Open your eyes now.”

“What did you see?” he would ask us excitedly.

I would have seen nothing more than green blobs on the orange screen of my eyelids, but, thrilled by the experience, Mohini would report flashes of light, joy rushing through her veins like rainwater, and slimy seaweed growing on her body. Sometimes she thought the stone in her hand pulsated, breathed, and moved.

“They are the memories locked in the crystal,” Professor Rao would cry triumphantly.

One week he had a surprise for us. The quartz crystal cluster that Mohini had held in her hands the week before had grown a rainbow on the tip of one of its crystals. We stared at the perfectly formed rainbow in wonder. Was it possible that Mohini had made it happen?

“Yes, absolutely.” Professor Rao beamed. “The stone is sometimes like a shocked child. You have soothed it, and it has responded to you.”

Subsequently he would ask her to touch and play with the crystal every time we came for a visit. It was the only crystal he had that had flowered a rainbow.

On our last trip to the professor’s house, just weeks before the Japanese invaded Malaya, he slid open a matchbox, and inside, nestled on a bed of cotton wool, was what looked like a huge drop of clear, very green oil. Professor Rao took out the solid drop in his hands, held it up against the light, and swore it to be the most perfect emerald he had ever seen. It was priceless. Even raw, its size and beauty were so obvious that the worker who had mined the stone swallowed it and smuggled it out.

“It is my life,” Professor Rao said proudly, but as he put it back into its unassuming home, his voice was uncommonly gentle. “It always reminds me of your eyes, Mohini, my dear child. It will be yours, of course, when you marry my son.”

He was right about the emerald. It did look like my sister’s eyes. Even from the time I was a baby I have memories of her eyes. Sparkling gems. Laughing gems. How she used to laugh!

I remember her dancing.

I used to sit and watch her dance in the moonlight. I sat on Mother’s milking stool as the cows slept in the shed and watched her, so different under the moon’s silver stare, so beautiful. Her magnificent eyes were strange and long inside the thick black rims made by lavish use of Mother’s kohl.

“Tai tai, taka taka tei, tei, taka, taka.”
Her clear voice used to ring out like the clapping of small children. She arched her body, moving quickly, her hands sweeping out in the dark like the pale undersides of river trout jumping out of a black stream, her heels striking the ground, keeping rhythm with the clapping voice. Her anklets singing into the silver night.

“Tai, tai, taka taka tei, tei,”
she sings, her fingers unfurling like fans, her hands flying into the night to pluck enchanted fruit. She brushes them lightly, arranges them in a basket made of spun gold, and offers them to the Great Goddess in the sky. Then the tips of her fingers reach down to touch her own feet, and her feet, like the finest squirrel-tail brush, skip and rush forward, painting a picture on the ground. A proud peacock, a roaring tiger, a shy deer. It is always too dark to see. Her eyes dart sideways, left, right, and left again. The picture is complete. Her feet move, the heels hitting the ground, rapidly moving in a graceful circle around the picture she has drawn. And when the circle is complete, I know that her journey will be over.

“Ta dor, ta dor, ta dor, ta, ta.”
I watch her raise both her arms to the moon and spin faster and faster, the bells on her ankles ringing madly until she falls dizzy and breathless to the ground. She tilts her glowing face toward me, the rest of her body soft curves on the ground, and demands, “Well? Am I getting any better?”

And for some strange reason she would remind me of Siddhi, that wonderful female who embodies the lure of mystical powers—so beautiful, so extravagantly eyed and yet spurned by the gods.

For those unreal seconds, fooled by the moonlight and the ecstasy of her dance, I would forget that it was not a mysterious celestial being that lay panting in our backyard but my sister, the most courageous person I knew. She was courageous in a way that other people were not, in a way that Mother thought was a weakness and Father thought bespoke a soft heart. How can I explain the fire that burned inside my sister when she saw an injustice done? Perhaps you will understand if I tell you about Mother’s birthday dinner. That time Father saved for a whole year from his pathetic allowance to buy his wife a meal fit for a queen and her children.

Mother would have refused such an extravagance had she known it in advance, but Father had made his plans secretly. He had ordered it all beforehand, paying for the meal in pitifully small installments long before Mother’s birthday. The whole family sat around a huge circular table. First to appear were the chili crabs; afterward the mutton cooked in goat’s milk, the creamy
laksa
noodles, the spicy seafood
char kueh teow,
the squid sambal pungent with the smell of
belacan,
the pomfret in ginger paste, the sugar-cane sticks wrapped with shrimp paste, and on and on until the entire table was covered in steaming food.

“Happy birthday, Lakshmi,” Father whispered. There was a smile on his face.