The Rice Mother (31 page)

I can remember my wedding night like the most beautiful dream. Like a pair of wings. Suddenly having something so precious in your hands that your pathetic life changes forever. Not with happiness, but with fear. The fear of losing it. And because I knew I was undeserving. Those wings had been gained through deceit. Soon even the gold watch, that much-admired thing of beauty and status, would be no more. It was only borrowed from the same friend who had lent me his chauffeur and car. In my guilty heart I loved her already. Deeply. I would have done anything, gone anywhere for her. My soul bled to think of that day when she would come to despise me. The old witch Pani had deceived her mother with tales of riches only a good woman would believe—and yet how could I condemn her, when her net of lies had caught such a rare butterfly? I fooled myself that one day my rare butterfly might be persuaded to love me. The years, I thought, would wash away my disgrace. The years passed, and no, she did not learn to love me, but I pretended that the special butterfly cared in its own special way.

She was so small I could span her hips with my hands. My child bride. There was no way to love the girl without hurting her. When she was sure I was asleep that dark night she sneaked out to bathe in a neighbor’s well. When she returned, I could see she had been crying. Through the black slit between my eyelashes I watched her watching me. In the emotions that crossed her young face I saw a child’s hope and a woman’s fears. Slowly, slowly, as if against her will but pushed nevertheless by an innocent curiosity, she brushed my forehead with a tentative hand. Her hand was cold and damp. She turned away from me and fell asleep quickly, like a child. I remember the wedge of her back, sleeping. I watched its gentle rise and fall, gazing at skin as smooth as if woven from the finest silk thread, my mind wandering to the stories the old women in my village used to tell when I was a young boy. About the lonely old man on the moon who enters the rooms of beautiful women and lies down to sleep beside them. She was so beautiful, my wife, that that night I saw the moonlight shine through the open windows and lie softly on her sleeping face. In the pale light she was a goddess. Beautiful as a pearl.

My first wife had been the gentlest soul alive. She was so gentle and so tenderhearted that a fortune-teller had predicted that she didn’t have long to live on this earth. I had cared for her dearly, but from the moment Lakshmi’s eyes had challenged mine at the wedding ceremony, I was passionately and deeply in love with her. Her clever dark eyes had flashed with a fire that burned the pit of my stomach, but she knew me for a fool, and I suppose that is what I am. Even as a child I was slow-witted. They called me the slow mule back home. I wanted more than anything else to protect her and shower her with all the riches that her mother had been promised, but I was only a clerk. A clerk with no prospects, no savings, and nothing of value. Even the money I had earned before my first marriage had gone to make up my sisters’ dowries.

When your grandmother and I first returned to Malaya, she used to weep late into the night when she thought I was asleep. I would wake up in the early hours of the morning and hear her weeping softly in the kitchen. I knew she longed for her mother. During the day she could keep busy with her vegetable patch and household chores, but at night the loneliness swelled inside her.

One night I could bear it no longer. I got out of bed and made my way into the kitchen. Like a child she was lying on her belly, her forehead resting on her crossed forearms. I watched the curve of her neck, and I was suddenly filled with aching desire. I wanted to take her in my arms and feel her soft skin lying against mine. I walked up to her and put my hand on her head. She reared up with a hiss of terror, clasping her right hand to her heart. “Oh, how you scared me!” she accused. She leaned farther back and looked at me expectantly. Her eyes gleamed wetly, but she had closed her face like a drawer. For a while I stood looking at her unyielding figure and her cold, tense face, and then I turned away and went back to bed. She didn’t want my love or me. Both she considered abhorrent.

Dreaming in the night, I sometimes reached out for her, and even in sleep she moaned and turned away. And I knew again that I loved in vain. She would never come to love me. I gave up my children for her, and yet even now, after everything that has happened and everything that I have lost, I know there is not a single thing I would change.

The day my Mohini was born was the biggest day of my life. When I first looked at her I actually felt a pain in my heart, as if someone had reached into my body and squeezed it. I stared at her in disbelief. It was Professor Rao who first told me about an Egyptian Queen of exceptional beauty. “Nefertiti,” I whispered.

Nefertiti—the beautiful one is come.

She was so perfect that incredulous happy tears gathered in my eyes that I, of all people, had been responsible for producing this marvel. I looked into her tiny sleeping face, touched the straight, black hair, and knew her to be mine. Now as a present for thee . . . one human heart . . . mine. Your grandmother called her Mohini, but to me she was always Nefertiti. It was how I thought of her. In my mind Mohini was an illustration in an old Sanskrit book of my father’s, standing as slinky as a snake goddess, her hair long and black, her sidelong glance inspiring equal measures of fear and pleasure. Her reckless feet dancing gaily atop the hearts of many men. Boldly, proudly, she enjoys her corruption. No, no, my Nefertiti was like the most innocent angel. An opening flower.

I was thirty-nine, and I looked at my useless life full of one failure after another and knew that if I never passed another office exam, never did another thing, that precious moment when the midwife handed me my Nefertiti, tightly bundled in an old sarong smelling of myrrh, would be enough.

As the years went by, I found it easy to bear the supercilious looks of my juniors as they passed their exams and became my seniors. One by one they passed me, unvarying in their slightly contemptuous, slightly pitying look, and yet I was happy. The children had begun to appear—each one something special. I would cycle home, the wind in my hair, as fast as I could with a bunch of bananas or a quarter of a jackfruit tied to the handlebars, and as soon as I turned into our cul-de-sac, something would happen inside me. I would slow down so I could look again at the house where my family lived. Inside that small, uninspired house was everything I had ever wanted in life. Inside was an amazing woman and children who made me catch my breath. A part of Lakshmi, and to my unending joy, a part of me.

And then without any warning they came to take her away. Just like that, they killed her, the child we had so carefully tended for years. Oh, these stupid tears. After all this time. That unbearable night when she came to me. Look at these stupid tears, they refuse to stop. I am like an old woman. Wait, let me get my handkerchief out. Give me a minute—I am just an old fool.

I recall sitting in my bedroom with the lights off, my body on fire with fever. The shock of her abduction had brought on a bout of malaria. There was only a little light from the half moon in the sky. It was a hot night, and earlier I had heard Lakshmi bathing. I remember I was praying, my breath burning hot. I never used to pray. I tainted the holy with greed. “It is a fact,” I pontificated grandly, “that we pray for more.” I argued that even at the highest level a request for self-enlightenment was still a selfish want, but the truth was, I was too lazy to offer my thanks for the good fortune that had fallen into my lap. “God is inside the heart,” I declared. I thought I was a good man, and that was enough. After her birth I took it for granted that I had been born with a garland of good things, but that night, restless and full of foreboding, I raised my hands and cried out to God just like all the other despicable, needy human beings. “Help me, dear God,” I prayed. “Give me back my Nefertiti.”

Inside my head there was no peace. A million visions desired entry, twisting and turning with grotesque grins and mean eyes. They were all unfinished and raw. I closed my eyes to chase the burning visions away, and quite suddenly, I saw Mohini escape through a door with a faulty lock. Perhaps I was hallucinating, but I saw her run down a long corridor, her bare feet noiseless but the asthmatic rattling loud inside her chest. She ran gasping past tall windows with closed shutters. There was a turn in the wide corridor that ended in a door left tantalizingly ajar. I saw it all, her face convoluted with fear and then the hope that illuminated as she raced toward the open door. Then I saw the guards. How they laughed!

They laughed in her pale wheezing face. It was all a trick.

I grabbed a blanket and huddled into it. I was cold. Cold. So cold.

I saw a hand, thick and meaty, squeeze her chin, and a brutal red tongue appear from nowhere to lick her eyelids. I saw her fall to the ground, gasping desperately for breath. She called for me then, “Papa, Papa.” But I couldn’t help her. Shivering in my bed, I watched her turn blue and I saw them try to pour water down her throat. She choked and gasped. They stood back confused and helpless and watched her die. Ah, the cold in my heart.

I saw her in a hole with her eyes closed, but then she opened them and looked directly at me. In my nightmare she was wearing her mother’s sari and standing in the middle of a jungle waiting to be married, but her unadorned hair was spread out over her shoulders like a grieving widow’s. The shivering grew worse.

“It is the fever. It is only the fever,” I whispered wildly into my wet pillow, my teeth chattering wildly. I held my head in my hands and rocked so the pictures in my head would all blur and slowly fall out, and in their place would only be soft darkness. I rocked and I rocked until the pictures blurred and ran into each other like blood.

“Oh, Nefertiti,” I whispered brokenly. “It’s only the malaria. It’s the shock. It’s only the shock.” I was going mad with cold. My own helplessness angered me. I hated myself. She was alone and scared. If only I had been home instead of sitting outside the chartered bank with the old Sikh guard, sharing a cheroot . . .

The guilt. I cannot tell you how it pressed upon me that night. Why, why,
why
on that day of all days did I leave the house? Hopelessly I banged my forehead against the wall. I wanted to die.

It was the beautiful, spoiled child of death from the moonlit night outside the death pit from years ago. He was annoyed that I had refused to play his little game. “Have me. Go on take me now,” I pleaded with the vindictive child. “But return her, return her, return her.”

I chanted vaguely remembered mantras from my childhood. If I wished hard enough . . . If I prayed hard enough . . . If I went to the temple and made a vow to fast for thirty days, shaved my head, and carried a
kavadi
on my head on Thaipusam Day, would she come back?

Lost in my black despair, I took some moments to realize that my head had cleared. I didn’t feel cold, and the terrible pain inside my heart had suddenly disappeared. I lifted my head. The room was still lit by bluish moonlight, but something had changed. Confused, I looked around, and a feeling of peace and calm flowed over me. All my cares, fears, and petty insecurities dropped away. So beautiful was the feeling that I thought I was dying. Then I understood. It was her. She was free at last. I told her to be happy. I told her I would take care of her mother, and I told her I would love her forever.

Then the feeling was gone as suddenly as it had come. All the pain of her loss came crashing back. And what a blinding loss it was. I clutched at my chest, and the room pressed down on my freezing body like a wooden coffin.

My poor life stretched out, long, dull, and profitless, in front of me. Inside my chest my heart was not a whole thing anymore but a mass of red shreds. The red ribbons flew inside my body and caught on the other organs inside me. They fluttered there helplessly. Even now they are there, caught between the branches of my ribs or lying crushed between my liver and my kidney or even curled around my intestines. They flutter like red flags of defeat and pain. She was only a dream.

At first I could see the same raw pain in my wife and eldest son’s eyes, but then their pain turned into something else. Something unwholesome. Something I couldn’t understand. I would look into Lakshmi’s eyes, and something like hate would slither in the depths of them. She became ill-tempered and cruel, and he became vindictive. Fresh hate used to shine in his face when his mother asked him to help Jeyan with his math. He gritted his teeth and stared murderously at his younger brother, waiting for that poor boy to make a mistake so he could have the pleasure of hitting Jeyan’s head with a wooden ruler or pinching him until his dark brown skin turned gray. Once he struck, you could actually see him war with himself to withdraw his venom.

One day I tried to talk to him. I motioned for him to sit beside me, but he stood before me, tall and strong, his limbs powerful and full of life. He was not a reflection of me. All my sons are a rejection of me. If poor Jeyan is like me, then it is certainly not through choice. In my slow way I talked for too long. He looked down at me from his contemptuous height sullenly. Not a word passed his lips. No explanations, no excuses. No sense of regret.

Then I said, “Son, she is gone.”

And suddenly a look of such shame and such pain crossed his face that he looked like a trapped, injured animal. He opened his mouth as if to draw breath and instead drew in a passing spirit. It was a furious, turbulent spirit that he swallowed. It caused the most shocking transformation.
He prepared to lash out at me, his father.
His shoulders clenched, and his hands bunched into hard balls, but before he could turn on me, Lakshmi walked into the room. Another astonishing transformation occurred; the uncontrollable rage escaped out of his open mouth. He dropped his head, his shoulders hunched, and his fists opened like a dead man’s. He feared her. He understood instinctively her power. The uncontrollable monster had a master. His master was his mother.