The Rice Mother (29 page)

When I was little, Mother and I would walk to the market every morning. To mask the boredom she started a game. She became Kunti, an ancient storyteller in a small village in Ceylon, and I was magically transformed into Mirabai, a beautiful little girl who lived in a secret forest with a gentle family of deer.

“Ah, there you are, dear Mirabai,” she crooned thoughtfully, as if she really was terribly ancient. Then she held me by the hand and told me the most wonderful stories about turbaned conch-shell blowers from a different time. About Rama, his magic bows, and Sita crying inside her enchanted circle. How I held my breath, dreading the moment when Sita, unable to resist the deer, steps out and into the evil arms of Ravana, the demon king of Lanka. And the Monkey God’s tail growing and growing and growing. There were miraculous stories about a sacred, five-headed statue of the Elephant God that a temple priest found on a shrinking riverbed in Mother’s village in Ceylon.

Of all the stories she told, my favorites were always the ones about the Naga Babas—naked, ash-caked ascetics who roamed the barren Himalayan slopes hoping to stumble upon Lord Shiva deep in meditation. I could never ever tire of the Naga Babas in Mother’s world—their immense powers and their terrible rites of initiation, the years spent in cold caves staring at blank stone walls and the dismal months in burning deserts. Sometimes I think Mother’s stories are what I remember best of my childhood.

Some afternoons I sat by her legs as she turned lengths of material into clothes for us all on her Singer sewing machine. I remember watching her legs go up and down as she pumped the pedal, the wheels turning faster and faster as the ravenous machine ate yard after yard of cloth. When I was older, I would rest my chin on the smooth metal surface of the sewing machine and worry that it might accidentally eat Mother’s fingers. For a very long while I was nervous of its obvious greed and its malicious teeth, but eventually I learned that Mother was really too clever to be outdone by it.

I remember too the caramelly smell of sugar melting in clarified butter inside our big, black iron pot. Those were the good old days when Mother settled me on the bench with a few raisins by my crossed legs and set about making yellow
kaseri
for teatime. She made the best
kaseri
ever, with plump raisins and sweet cashew nuts hidden within. I loved watching Mother make
alvas
too. She held the black iron pot firmly by its ears and stirred the mixture until the oil came out of it and it became as transparent as colored glass. Then she spread out the orange glass mixture on a tray and cut it with a sharp knife into diamond shapes. While it was still hot, she dug out and let me have all the edges that didn’t quite make it into a perfect diamond shape. Even now that I am all grown up, I have a childish liking for
alva,
still hot. For the not quite perfect edges. Like a time machine it takes me back to those afternoons when it was just Mother and me, happy in the kitchen. Father was at work, and everyone else was at school. I suppose Mohini was at home too. Of course she was. She spent the entire time the Japanese were in this country hidden away inside the house.

Sometimes, after she became less than a memory, I would imagine that I had seen her fair feet disappearing beyond a doorway. I felt certain that I had heard the pretty sounds of the bells she always wore on her ankles, but when I ran around the corner, there was never anyone there. It used to disturb me terribly that I didn’t have memories of her. I strain and struggle with my memory. Did she wash my hair? Stand me on the kitchen step outside and oil my body on Friday afternoons? Didn’t she pick me up and tickle me until I cried with laughter? Didn’t she also help stir the sugar mixture to make the
alvas
? Didn’t her fair hand smuggle more raisins from the mixing bowl and scatter them at my feet when Mother’s strict back was turned? Yet I can only see Mother bent over the hot stove, stirring the sugar and ghee mixture with her wooden spoon. Anxious that it should be perfect.

Even when I think of us standing in a row in front of the prayer altar, I can’t really remember Mohini. I can picture Mother praying with such intense devotion that tears slipped out of her closed eyelids, her voice quivering, as she sang her songs of praise. Mother believed that if she lit the oil lamp, burned the camphor, prayed every day without fail, and rubbed ash on all our foreheads, she could protect us all and keep us out of harm’s way. I can even hear in my head Lakshmnan singing in that strong, firm voice of his, Anna’s little babyish voice, and Sevenese’s beautiful, high voice that sounded more like a small bird singing in the morning than a little boy’s voice. I can even recall Jeyan’s tuneless songs that Lakshmnan couldn’t help sniggering at. But I can’t remember Mohini’s voice, if she was there at all. Of course she was there! She stood there next to Lakshmnan, with wet hair all the way down her back.

They tell me I should at least remember helping Mohini to make pickles. Stuffing fifty green limes until they were bursting with rock salt and storing them in a tightly shut glazed pot under the bench for three days until they looked like cut-open hearts. Then taking them all out and arranging them carefully on large curving areca nut leaves to dry in the sun until they were yellow-brown and as hard as stone.

“Don’t you remember us all sitting together on the kitchen doorstep and squeezing fifty fresh limes into the pot filled with the hardened brown limes until even our fingers hurt?” they ask incredulously. “Can’t you remember how Ama used to add a mixture of ground chilies and fennel into the pot? And didn’t we all watch while Mohini replaced the cover on the pot and tied it as tightly as she could?” I stare at them stupidly. In the beginning, when her departure was still razor sharp, I would take down her photograph and stare at her avoiding my gaze. Could I have just erased her from my memory? No, it is impossible. I am not that powerful, surely. Then why can’t I remember her like everyone else does? That afternoon when they found her and took her away, I have no memory of it at all. I can’t even remember those three hellish days when no one knew if she was dead or alive.

Maybe I was too young. Or maybe that twisted dream of Father coming all by himself into the zinc-roofed lean-to, built to house the cows, his shoulders hunched and his face contorted with pain, is not a dream after all. Maybe it was simply too complex for a child to remember herself, frozen with shock, afraid even to breathe under the house, her hands full of soft yellow chicks.

How absolutely motionless she had sat when she saw him lean his forehead against Rukumani the cow and sob so hard that she knew in her little child’s heart that he would never mend again. She should have died instead. She knew without being told that nobody wanted her all that much anyway. Surely her father would never have cried so. She felt rejected by his suffering, which appeared to her too wordless and far, far too enormous to manage. It was her fault. She had no business taking up space inside Mohini’s hiding place. Silently she watched him crying so hard that even the cows moved restlessly in the shed, their bells clanging, and still he cried like a baby.

I was ten years old when Mohini died. And it seems it was for many years that Father sat hunched in his chair for hours, staring at nothing. At first I thought that if I brought my cuts, bruises, and injuries to him, he would sing to my hurt limbs in his truly horrible voice as he had always done before. Then I would giggle, and both our pains would slip away quietly by the back door, for he had always joked that even the worst pain could never bear his bad singing. But when I stood beside him, holding my hurt limb, he would stroke my thin, frizzy hair absently, and his eyes would remain focused in the distance. Maybe, far away on the horizon, Mohini stood and called to him. And then I became too old to sing to, and he never sang again.

My brother Sevenese was only a boy then, but already all his strange powers were inside him. On the night that Mohini died, he saw her. He awoke hearing the sound of bells. He sat up in bed, shaken out of a sound sleep. There among mirrors and other small objects that gleamed here and there in the moonlit night, her apparition stood as solid and as real as he was. Surprised, he stared at her. She looked very white and very beautiful. Dressed in the same clothes that she had left the house in, she was instantly familiar and dear. Everything about her looked warm, real, and ordinary. She was just standing there, watching him. There was not a mark on her face or body that he could see. Even her hair was shining and combed. Then she smiled gently.

“Oh, good,” he cried, with relief and joy. “They didn’t hurt you.”

He watched her walk with that soft tinkling sound to the other bed, where Anna and I were asleep. He said she stroked our hair softly and bent to kiss our sleeping faces. We neither awakened nor stirred. He watched with growing confusion. There was something odd going on that he could not understand. Then she moved to the other side of his bed and kissed Jeyan, breathing softly, and stood looking down for the longest time at Lakshmnan, so exhausted with worry and waiting that he was dead to the world. With an expression of deep pity she bent down and kissed her twin brother gently, her lips lingering on his cheek as if reluctant to let go.

“He has such a hard life ahead of him. You must try to guide him, though I fear he may not listen,” she whispered. Then she looked straight into Sevenese’s bewildered face. “Listen carefully for my voice, my little watchman, and perhaps you will hear me.” Then she turned and walked away with the sound of soft tinkling bells.

“Wait!” he cried, his arm outstretched, but she carried on walking into the dark, not turning back. In the corridor on the way to the kitchen the soft tinkling of bells died away. Thinking he had dreamed it all, Sevenese got out of bed and went into the lamplit kitchen, where our mother was simply staring out into the night, hands empty. They lay upturned helplessly in her lap. That in itself confused and disturbed my brother. Mother’s hands were always busy, sewing, mending, cleaning the anchovies, picking the little black insects out of our rice, writing letters to her mother, crushing dal, or doing something.

“Has Mohini come home, Mother?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she said sadly, still staring out into the night sky. Suddenly she turned her head to look at him curiously. Her eyes were just black holes in her slack face. “Why, have you seen her?”

He stared at her. “Yes,” he said, suddenly frightened. A small voice inside his head whispered that he never need worry about Raja abducting Mohini again. Never again need worry about his selfish part in turning a teenage crush into an uncontrollable obsession. The Japanese had solved his problem for him.

A curious thing happened just after the occupation. The departing Japanese had to abandon their warehouses full of treasures and confiscated property. During the occupation they had not the spare ships to carry nonwar essentials back to their motherland, and once vanquished they were forced to leave our country empty-handed. The snake charmer’s wife came running to our house to tell us about a large warehouse by the marketplace that had been broken into.

“Quick!” she cried. “The whole warehouse is crammed full of things, and everybody is helping themselves to bags of sugar, rice, and all sorts of things.”

“Go now,” Mother told Father. “Everybody is looting the warehouse by the market. See if you can get something too.” He changed from his sarong into a pair of trousers while Mother fidgeted and muttered impatiently under her breath.

“Hurry,” she shouted to his disappearing figure on the bicycle.

Father cycled as fast as he could, but by the time he reached the warehouse, he was too late and everything was gone. He had passed a procession of people carrying aloft big boxes and bulky sacks, but inside the gaping doors of the store there was only litter on the floor, and a vast sense of emptiness. He rode his bicycle right into the middle of the empty storehouse and surveyed the scene. He thought dispiritedly about Mother’s expectant hands and sharp tongue, but as he was cycling out, he saw an oblong box almost hidden behind the door. It must have fallen out of someone else’s sack. He picked up the box and was surprised to find it rather heavy. Quickly he climbed onto his bicycle and rode home.

“That’s it?” Mother exclaimed, looking with disappointment at the box in his hands. The snake charmer and his son had been lucky enough to come home with a large bag of sugar and a gunnysack full of rice. She shook the wooden box, and we heard a dull thudding sound. Whatever was in it was well packed. The wooden box had been nailed shut. Its meticulous packaging hinted that it was something out of the ordinary. Mother prised open the box with a knife while we crowded around her curiously. She pulled the lid away and removed the straw that had been used as padding. Her hand touched cold smoothness. A jade doll, so beautifully made I heard Mother gasp, was in her hands. She held it up. The translucent stone glowed a gorgeous dark green. The doll was only six inches high. She had very long hair swirling about her hips and a peaceful expression on her face. None of us had ever seen such exquisite beauty. On the small gold stand she stood upon was a carved inscription in Chinese. There was silence in our house. Mother had gone a strange color.

“It looks like Mohini,” Sevenese said in a too-loud voice.

“Yes, she does,” Mother agreed in a terrible voice. At that time I thought it was because the horrid Japanese had taken away our Mohini and given us a little toy instead. Mother let us all touch it before she placed it in the family showcase where the bust of herself had once rested. The doll dwelt inside our showcase with my collection of cheerful pipe-cleaner birds and the intricate coral pieces that Lakshmnan had picked up from the beach. It would be many, many years before I learned that the inscription described the doll as Kuan Yin, the goddess of mercy, a Ching dynasty piece, more than two hundred years old. This information was unimportant to Mother, for she had known what it was and what it meant to her the moment she laid eyes upon it. She felt the vapor of horror and saw the disappearing hem of all her hopes.