The Rice Mother (26 page)

Droplets of water in the spinach leaves spat furiously in the hot oil, and I clearly remember feeling contented. Happy with my lot. The Japanese would soon be gone, and things could go back to what they were. My husband could return to work, the children to school, to be taught proper subjects once more, and I to the task of saving money for my girls’ dowries. I would need less for Mohini, but Lalita was doubtless going to need much more. I planned good marriages for my daughters. A dazzling life stretched ahead for my children. The first thing I planned to do was sell the bloody pool cows. Too much hard work.

I left the spinach to fry a little longer. As I sliced an eggplant lengthwise, lost in my own thoughts, I heard the squeal of tires, a squeal that I had learned to dread, and a squeal that could mean only one thing. My knife hovered in the air for an instant, freed from my slack grip, before I sprang up and ran to the front window. Two jeeps full of silent Japanese soldiers were turning into our dirt road. My heart began to pound like a mad thing inside my chest. I screamed in a panic at the children. I opened the trapdoor, and Anna, who was closest, ran in.

“Japanese! Quickly, Mohini!” I shouted running back to the window. The soldiers were already splitting up into twos, and walking up the path to our house. I turned away from their grim yellow faces and saw Mohini and Lakshmnan run breathlessly into the living room. She was going to make it into the hole in time, and Lakshmnan could close the trapdoor behind Anna and her. I turned back and saw two soldiers begin to walk up our stairs. The one with the blue ribbon, I knew, was General Ito.

“Come on, Mohini,” I heard Lakshmnan hiss urgently. I could hear the raw fear in his voice, and that same fear I suppose was responsible for what happened next. As he pulled her, he lost his footing and fell through the trapdoor instead. The heavy black boots were just outside the door. They never knocked, they kicked. In that split second Mohini made a terrible decision. She decided it was too late to pull him out, and there was not enough space for her to crawl in too. So the stupid girl did the unthinkable. She pulled the trapdoor shut and pushed back the chest over the hole. When I turned around from the window, I saw her standing in front of the chest.

I had kept my daughter indoors for so long that I had stopped really seeing her and had forgotten the way other people used to react to her. Now my eyes widened with sheer horror, for suddenly I saw her with the lustful eyes of a Japanese soldier. She was a delightful nymph, the enchantress Mohini reincarnated. Her shabby surroundings served only to magnify her beauty. Caught in the sunlight, her green eyes were huge and luminous with fear. The years spent indoors had turned her caramel complexion a creamy, pink-tinged magnolia. Her shocked mouth, slightly open, was like a pink, plump fruit, its skin thin and defenseless. Her pearly white teeth gleamed. The old blouse she was wearing was really too tight around the chest, but unimaginable sums of banana dollars were needed for cloth, and since the only eyes that laid on her were her family . . . every time she panted in fear, the material rose and fell against her budding breasts with such a suggestive thrust that it hurt my eyes. My eyes dropped to the narrow waist and lingered at a midriff exposed by two buttons lost so long ago. The old skirt, its slip rotted away, was transparent in the light that streamed in from the window behind her. Her thighs drew my eyes. Smooth and rounded. Childish, but oh, so appealing. The truth was, she was a fourteen-year-old goddess. And to them she would be a prize hole. I shook my head with disbelief. No, no, no. It was my worst nightmare come true. I couldn’t believe it was happening. How could this happen now? The war was over. We had almost made it. Locked in a trance of sheer terror I could only stare.

The door burst open, and four black boots thundered into the dead silence. Time slowed as my eyes swung in slow motion toward the brown-clad animals. Yes, I knew what I would see. They stared riveted and disbelieving at my baby. I shall never forget their small black eyes, usually opaque with mean hardness, turn shiny with greed, like the jackal that comes across a whole buffalo when he has spent his entire life believing that the eyes, entrails, and testicles rejected by the lion were a feast. Even if I close my eyes now, I can remember that pinprick of light that shone in their eyes at the sight of fresh meat.

Then one of them was striding across the room. General Ito. He took my gentle flower with the crushed rose for a mouth by the chin in his hard hand and turned her face this way and that as though checking to see if his eyes had deceived him. He made a strangely greedy guttural sound. Then his hand dropped to her throat. The thick hand encircled her neck, and one finger gently caressed the skin at the base of her throat. With a quick movement, his hand like a yellow snake reached behind her head and snapped the rubber band that held her hair. Silky glorious hair sprang around her face and I heard the hiss of his indrawn breath. His awe at the treasure, unexpected in his hands, was terrifying. Mohini stood paralyzed with shock. I saw his neck stiffen and, putting his hand on the small of her back, he urged her forward.

“Come,” he ordered harshly.

I sprang forward. “Wait, wait! Please wait,” I cried. Without the slightest warning, the point of his knife was resting in that tiny intimate space between my breasts. He had moved so fast. I gaped.

“Move,” he ordered coldly.

“Wait, you don’t understand. She’s only a child.”

He glanced at me with superior amusement.

“She’s Indian. She’s not Chinese. Japanese soldiers only take Chinese girls. Please, please don’t take her,” I babbled desperately to the fiercely mustached face.

“Move,” he repeated, and I saw his eyes stray to the point of his knife. A bright red stain was spreading on my blouse; his knife was embedded in my flesh. I stared at the blank face. Yet I knew the man. I had known him for three years. I had given him my best chickens and my youngest coconuts.

“Please, honorable General, let me cook for the Imperial Army. I have good food. Very good food.” Suddenly I could smell the choking fumes of spinach burning in the pan. I saw his lips twitch. I dropped to my knees. Crying, begging. I knew that man. So many times he had asked me with cold black humor, “Where do you hide your daughters?” I hugged his legs tightly with both my arms.

There was disgust on his yellow face as he kicked me hard in the stomach. The pain was like an explosion. I fell, clutching my murdered stomach. Roughly he pulled Mohini toward the door. On my hands and knees I howled, like a wolf on a moonlit night. He must not leave my house with my daughter. Suddenly, nothing was more important than stopping him from getting through the door. My mouth opened, and words dropped out. Words that I should never, never have uttered.

“I know where you can get a Chinese virgin. Flesh that has never tasted a man’s hands,” I gasped wildly, horrified at what I was doing and yet unable to stop.

His shoulders stiffened, but he carried on toward the door. He was interested.

“She is exotic and beautiful,” I added. “Please,” I sobbed. “Please.” I could not let him walk out.

He paused. The fish took the silvery bait in its jaws. The yellow face turned. Two mean eyes stared at me unfathomably. He let go his grip on Mohini. A strange smile slashed itself across his hard face. He was waiting for me. I beckoned to Mohini, and she stumbled blindly toward me. I stood up and gripped her hands tightly, holding her close to me. She trembled inside my grasp like a small dying mynah bird.
It is wrong!
screamed the blood that pumped into my temples.

“Next door,” I sobbed. “Behind the cupboard.”

He bowed stiffly. A mocking bow. But when he raised his head, there was cold evil in his small almond-shaped eyes. I shuddered with fear and knew instantly that I had sacrificed poor Ah Moi in vain. He walked forward and pushed me so hard that I slammed into the wall. I crumpled into a stunned heap and saw him grab Mohini by the hand and stride out into the bright sunshine. I heard their heavy boots loud on the veranda. The whole house was vibrating and crashing from their hobnail boots, a dreadful sound that has haunted my nightmares ever since. For an instant I was poised on my hands and knees, frozen into immobility by sheer horror—he had taken her after all. Then I picked myself up and ran. I ran out onto the veranda and down the wooden steps that I had just that morning washed, but were full of muddy boot prints. I ran, arms outstretched, in my bare feet on the stone-filled path. The bastards were there within my reach. She was climbing in. I reached the truck. I even touched it, but as soon as my grasping palms touched the hot metal of the jeep, it roared into life and those laughing bastards pulled away in a cloud of dust, their tires screeching. Her small oval face turned back to look at me. She never uttered a sound; not a single word had crossed those lips of hers. Not “Save me, Mother,” not “Help me!” Nothing.

I chased them, you know. I chased them until they disappeared out of sight, and then I didn’t stop or fall to the ground and cry. I just turned around like a Taiwanese wind-up toy and walked back.

On my wooden steps I left bloody footprints. The torn soles of my feet walked through my house and into the kitchen toward the cooker. I removed the blackened, smoking spinach from the fire. It is a disagreeable smell, burning chili and spinach. Inside me, I heard the sound of deep sighing. Ah, the bamboo in my heart. For a long while I must have stood in front of the stove, just listening to it. “When will you sing for me? When will I hear your song?” I whispered to it, but it only sighed the more.

Then I made a decision to have tea. I would treat myself to tea with real sugar. I had bought a tiny precious amount from a friend who worked at the Water Works Department just a week ago, and I decided I would have some now. Tea with molasses was simply not the same. For three years I had hankered for tea with beautiful white sugar, but I had always denied myself. Put the children first. Yes the children had always come first.

I put some water into a kettle to boil and spooned tea leaves into a large blue mug. As I stood staring at the tea leaves, it occurred to me that they looked like swarming black ants. And when I poured the hot water in, they looked like dead ants, dead ants. I put a lid on the mug, and I heard tiny sounds, desperate sounds but very tiny. Someone was calling me. Actually more than one voice was calling out to me. There was also the muffled sound of banging. I decided to ignore them. I looked for the sugar and couldn’t remember where I had hidden it. Confused, I sat on my bench. Outside it began to rain. “The child’s surely going to get wet. In a while I’ll pound some ginger for her. Her chest is so bad,” I murmured softly to myself. I pulled my knees up to my chin until I must have looked like a tight little ball, and I rocked myself to and fro, to and fro, singing an old nursery rhyme that my mother used to sing to me. I shouldn’t have left her all by herself in Ceylon. Poor Mother. It is unbearable to lose a daughter. No, I would not think about the lost sugar. It was easiest to simply sing and rock. I sang the same four lines again and again.

Time must have passed, and now and then I thought I heard that same insistent sound of children knocking, calling out to me, and crying. It seemed too as if the calls were becoming desperate, begging and terrified screaming, but they were so faint, these strange sounds, and so far away that I stuck to my earlier decision to ignore them and concentrate on the pain in my head instead. My head pounded as if a hammer was at my temples. It seemed I was swimming in a sea of pain, and only the continuous rocking motion could steady it a little.

A very long time later a sound nearby penetrated my cocoon of pain. Squinting my eyes in the afternoon light, I looked up, and my husband was standing in the kitchen doorway. His wide, black face looked hideous, and instantly I felt hatred and a rage such as I have never known before. How dare he leave us to fend for ourselves against Japanese soldiers while he sat gossiping with that doddering old Sikh security guard outside the Chartered Bank building? It was all his fault. Black fury rose up and swamped me until I saw nothing. Unthinkingly I had unfurled myself and was flying toward him, screaming wildly at the stupid, shocked expression on his ugly face. The drumming in my head had become so loud that though I saw his lips moving, I heard not the sounds that must surely have come out of them. My fingers connected with his high cheekbones, and I dug my short nails into his flesh, shiny with a layer of sweat, and pulled them as viciously as I could down his face. At first he was too shocked to react, but when I howled and brought my hands up again he caught them in a viselike grip. “Lakshmi, stop it,” he said, and I watched his gouged cheeks, the blood flowing down his face into his collar, with unreal fascination. “Where are the children?” he asked, so quietly that I had to raise my eyes from his collar and look into those small, frightened eyes.

“They have taken Mohini away,” I said vengefully. Let him suffer too. It was his fault. But as suddenly as my anger had come, it dissipated. I felt lost and longed for a husband who would take my burdens away for one hour. Someone who would make things right again.

His nostrils flared like some huge beast in pain. Suddenly he was on his knees. “No, no, no,” he gasped, staring into my eyes in disbelief. I looked down at him and felt no pain and no pity. No, he would not take over, not even for one hour. He got up slowly like a very old sick man and went to push away the chest. The children tumbled out, sobbing, into his large arms. He gathered them all close to his large body and sobbed with them. I saw them, my children, as they stole fear-filled looks at me and snuggled up to him. Even Lakshmnan. Children are such traitors.

“I told them about Ah Moi next door,” I said, and I saw my husband’s back stiffen.

“Why?” he asked in a shocked whisper. There was a look of such betrayed horror in his eyes, it was as if I had stabbed him in the back. So he didn’t know me after all. Blood ran down his dark cheeks and dripped onto his collar.