The Rice Mother (27 page)

“Because I thought I could save Mohini,” I answered slowly. A tear escaped and rolled down my face. Yes, only then I understood what I had done. Yet, given the chance, would I do differently? Maybe if I had been cleverer in the way I had bartered. If only she had run into the fields and hidden in the bushes. If only Lakshmnan hadn’t fallen. If only . . .

“Oh God, oh dear God what have you done?” my husband said quietly. He hugged our clinging children once more and said, “I shall go next door and if it is not too late, try to warn them—but if it is too late, then I don’t want to hear anybody mention this ever again.”

The children nodded vigorously. They wore such huge frightened eyes. He ran out of the house. We waited in the kitchen, none of us moving, eyeing each other like strangers in two separate camps. Sevenese ran into the kitchen, Boy Scout meeting obviously over. His eyes were ferocious. He must have seen my bloody footprints. “Has the crocodile got Mohini?” he panted.

“Yes,” I said. My son had called a spade a spade.

“I have to find Chibindi. Only he can help her now,” he cried wildly before dashing out of the house.

Ayah came back very quickly. He was too late. The soldiers had already come back for Ah Moi. That night, Lakshmnan ran away from home. I saw him make for the jungle where Sevenese usually disappeared with the disgusting snake charmer boy. Lakshmnan returned the next night, bedraggled and bruised. He didn’t ask about her. He knew from my face that they hadn’t brought her back. He wouldn’t let me hold him. I didn’t know it then, but that was the day I lost him forever. I put a plate of food in front of him. For the longest time he stared at it as if there were a war going on inside him. Then he pounced on it and ate as if he hadn’t seen food for weeks. Like a starving animal. Then suddenly he vomited violently into his own plate. He looked up at me, his mouth and chin stained with lumps of partly digested food, and howled, “I can taste the food she is eating. Sour. So sour. She wants to die. Ama, she just wants to die. Help her, Ama, please, please.”

And as I watched, horrified, he crumpled into a ball on the floor at my feet, whimpering in a thin high voice. I never realized until then what my twins really shared inside their perfectly still pauses where no words were necessary. What sounds, what smells, what thoughts, what emotions, what pain, what joy? Time passed, my beautiful son whimpering at my feet, and I, I was frozen into immobility.

For so long now Lakshmnan had shed the skin of childhood and worn the mantle of manhood so willingly that I had stopped seeing him as a child. He would rise before the sun appeared on the horizon to take the covered pails of fresh milk over to the coffee shops in town and return with the stacks of banana notes. He herded the cows out to the fields to graze, cut long grass for their evening fodder, took them to the small river to be bathed, and cleaned out their living quarters twice a week. He hunted game for his family and washed the clothes I had soaked the night before in ash and the water strained from boiled rice when there was no more soap to be had. He had done a man’s job, but he was only a boy. I couldn’t bear to see him like that. I squatted beside him.

“It’s not your fault,” I said, stroking his hair, but in his head a thousand accusing voices hissed,
Lakshmnan did it. Lakshmnan did it. He let the Japanese dogs take her.
I tried to hold him, but he didn’t see me squatting there with tears running down my face. He didn’t feel my hand. He pushed his bunched fists into his cheeks until his face looked like an agonized mask, and he screamed, but still the pointing voices wouldn’t go away.
Lakshmnan did it. Lakshmnan did it.

I could feel the shocked eyes of my other children in the doorway, safe and clean in their grief and their understandable sadness, but he was trapped in his terrible guilt. He had loved her the best, and yet he was the one responsible for her shame. If only he had not been so clumsy. If only he had sprung out as soon as he had fallen. If only . . .

Who would marry her now? Nobody. She was irretrievably scarred. Damaged goods. Would they leave her pregnant? Our pride and joy would be scorned and whispered about. The flower that we had tended so carefully, destroyed. The eyes I had washed in a tea solution to bring out their true translucence, hurt forever. Had she really spent the last three years a prisoner in her own home for this? In Lakshmnan’s tormented mind she was frozen in that moment of panic and choice. The fault, he knew, was his.

“They will bring her back,” I said gently into his face, so close to his lips I smelled his sour breath. “She is not dead. They will bring her back.”

He stopped suddenly. His bunched fists came away from his cheeks, and he looked into my eyes for the first time. What I saw inside his glittering eyes haunts me to this day. I saw a land blackened, windswept and desolate. She was gone, and she had taken with her the fruit trees, the flowers, the birds, the butterflies, the rainbow, the streams. . . . Without her the wind howled through gaunt tree stumps. When they snatched her away, they snatched away a part of him too. The better part. By far the better part. He became a stranger in my house, a stranger with something cruel and adult lurking in his barren eyes. In fact, what I saw in his eyes, he saw in mine. A mean snake of terrible might. It urged us to do the unthinkable. When you hear what I have done, you will think less of me, but I was powerless to resist its will.

For the next three days my husband sat transfixed by the radio, hoping for news. He moved his chair a little so he could watch the road through the living room window. And for those three days I ate nothing. I looked at plate after plate of boiled tapioca, cream-colored and slightly shiny, in a daze. Lakshmnan woke up earlier than usual, rushed through his chores, and then sat on the steps outside, staring at the main road, his broad shoulders tense with waiting. He spoke to no one, and no one dared speak to him. The children stared at me with large frightened eyes as I pretended to be busy. Only when the child of night ran into my day, its feet blackened by the sins of day, could I close the kitchen door and lie on my bench, utterly helpless. I refused to consider my daughter’s fate. Refused thoughts of sun-darkened, sinewy hands tainted with the metallic taste of guns, of those voracious mouths and those covetous tongues. And the stench of them. Oh, God, how hard I tried not to think of that man who urinated inside Mui Tsai. I lay instead listening to the night sounds, the crickets, the buzzing mosquitoes, the call of small wild animals, the whispering of the leaves in the wind. Listening for my Mohini.

On the afternoon of the third day, they returned Ah Moi. She was bruised, bleeding, and barely able to walk, but she was alive. I know because I stood three feet away from the window, just inside the shadows, and watched my doing. Her grief-mad mother ran out of the house shrieking at the sight of the frail figure wilted over the supporting hands of two soldiers. They dropped the girl at her mother’s feet and left. The family carried the girl in. I was filled with dread. Where was Mohini? Why had they not returned her? I should have run out and demanded to know.

Perhaps they will return her tomorrow, I told myself meekly.

That night, although I tried to keep awake, I was overcome by a strange lethargy and fell asleep in the kitchen. It was a restless sleep, filled with strange dreams, and I awoke many times hot and thirsty. Disturbed and ill at ease, I roamed the house relentlessly, moving from room to room, my mouth mumbling, my eyes restless. I opened a window and looked out into the night. Everything looked and sounded normal. There were crickets in the bushes and the sad notes of the flute from the snake-charmer’s house. Mosquitoes hummed. I closed the window and went to check on the children. They looked like strangers to me. It was too hot.

Cool water cascaded down my body and crashed loudly on the cement floor, flooding the entire bathroom, making dwarf waves that slopped over the small ledge built at the doorway and ran down the corridor. I stood in the flooded corridor and, feeling slightly better, decided to brew myself a strong mug of tea. If my husband was awake, I would make him one too. I walked into the bedroom, a wet sarong pulled up to my armpits and tied above my breasts.

Ayah was sitting on the bed with his head in his hands. When he heard me walk in, he looked up. On the bed was a tiny green dress. I walked closer and touched the silky material. It was cool between my fingers. I had cut up one of my good saris to sew that dress, yet I had forgotten making it. It was another lifetime ago, Divali, the festival of lights, when I had dressed her in green to match her eyes. I remembered then the oil lamps that I had surrounded the house with, and I remembered her wearing the dress. God, she was so small then. Even the priest in the temple had pinched her cheek admiringly. I looked at the hunched defeated figure sitting on the bed in a daze.

“Where did you find this?” I asked. I was conscious that my voice was accusing. There was not a thing inside my house that I didn’t know existed. From top to bottom I knew where everything was, and yet he had carefully hidden away this dress all these years.

“I was saving it for her daughter,” he whispered.

Somewhere inside me was a feeling of such vast emptiness that I simply couldn’t acknowledge it. To validate the vacuum would shrivel me into nothing. Silently I took some clothes out of the cupboard and walked out. The well-being that my energetic bath had imbued in me disappeared. He had opened his pain out like a giant fan, a grotesque fan of discordant splashes of red and menacing blacks. I should have comforted him, but it was not in my nature; instead I nursed a growing jealousy. His love appeared in my eyes to be purer, higher than mine.

I brewed the tea and sat watching it until it grew cold. I yearned to run out of the house, storm the Japanese garrison, and demand her release, but I could only sit like a powerless old woman, remembering the past. Remembering the time I took my children to a Chinese temple on Kuan Yin’s birthday. There, among life-size paper horses, a huge statue of the Goddess of Mercy in her customary flowing robes, and shining bronze urns full of thick red Chinese joss sticks, we burned thin gray incense sticks, reams of colored paper, and little flags meant to symbolize wealth and prosperity. It seemed like yesterday that my children had stood in a curious, hushed line of shining black heads, their chubby hands clutching small flags scribbled with Chinese characters that spelled their names. One by one I watched them solemnly burn their flags in a corrugated zinc container. Above them fat red lanterns swayed and nodded in the early morning breeze. Afterward we each released a caged bird that a temple attendant in white had painted with a small red dot on its tiny body so no one would dare to catch or eat it. I had stood there and prayed for my children as they watched the birds flying free with beautiful, entranced expressions of sheer delight. Keep them safe, protect them, and bless them, dear, dear Goddess Kuan Yin, I begged, but when we were leaving, I remember looking into the goddess’s cool, serene face and thinking that she had not heard me.

Outside in the darkness I could hear Ah Moi’s brothers crawling about in the drains looking for cockroaches. Carrying candles, they combed the neighborhood drains every night, looking for cockroaches to bottle and feed to their chickens in the morning. I was diverted by their hushed whispers in Chinese.

“Wah, look how big that devil is.”

“Where? Where?”

“Near your leg, you corpse head. Quick, catch it before it runs into that hole.”

“How many have you got now?”

“Nine. You?”

Their voices and their squelching slippers in the wet drains faded away. I tried to feel outraged by the thought of their young hands cupping over those disgusting creatures in the filth, but it was the way during the Japanese occupation. Grain was scarce, and chickens fed on a diet of juicy cockroaches grow bigger faster.

I was hot again. I splashed icy cold water on my face and reheated the cold tea. Sometime afterward I must have fallen asleep on my bench, for I woke up suddenly. I had left the lamp on. The kitchen clock read 3 A.M. The first thing I remember was a feeling of peace. That constant throbbing in my head was gone. I had lived with it day and night for so many years that its sudden total absence felt strange. I put my hands to my temples in sheer amazement. As I sat there marveling at what everyone else takes for granted, my husband walked into the kitchen. His broad shoulders were slumped with defeat, and the whites of his eyes glimmered wetly in the dark.

“She’s gone. She’s finally gone. They can’t hurt her anymore,” he said in a broken voice. Such a gentle man. He couldn’t begrudge her the white peace that surely awaited her innocent little soul. There was sadness in the giant leather-backed turtle’s eyes. Then he turned away quietly and left. My throbbing headache rushed upon me once more with merciless vengeance as I stared at his retreating back.

I understood. She had been in my house. She had awakened me and spoken to her father. Perhaps they had spoken in their own little language. She had come to say good-bye. I didn’t need to wait anymore. I knew what had happened. I suppose I had known from the time I saw the bastards return Ah Moi to her family. That was why I had not rushed out to ask for her. I already knew. She was lost to me. Inside me I felt that monster serpent, black and horribly vindictive, that I told you about earlier, stretch and hiss boldly.

Mrs. Metha from the Ceylonese Association came to sit in my living room and offer her condolences. For a long time I sat locked into stillness, looking at her ugly mouth and the dull nose stud that perched on the right side of her hooked nose.

“Only the good die young,” she proclaimed piously, and I was overtaken by the strongest desire to slap her. I could actually see myself get up and slap her so hard that her face swung all the way back on her scrawny neck. The impulse was so strong that I had to rise. I offered her some tea.