The Rice Mother (36 page)

It is too late now to wish for one of them instead.

“Rani,” the spider said, “my son is a good man. Upright, hardworking, and kind. He is only a teacher now, but one day with his keen business sense, who can tell where he will stand in the world.”

Of course, there was no mention then of any gambling habit. In the end I was forced to marry Lakshmnan for the sake of my brother, who was suddenly and mysteriously enamored of the spider’s daughter. If you ask me, it was very suspicious that he was suddenly adamant that he must marry that girl. Even in those days there was nothing even mildly approaching spectacular about her, with her downtrodden puppy-dog eyes and an unexciting mouth. Yet my brother was seduced from indifference to steely determination in one encounter.

“I will have her and only her,” he declared, with steely eyes. It is impossible that she could have intoxicated him with her joyless face and that holier-than-thou mouth. No, no, living so close to the snake charmer, they availed themselves of his evil spirits. Together the mother and daughter put a charm on my brother. My father said that the first time they went to see the bride, they were offered a plate of coconut cookies that tasted nothing like any other coconut cookie he had ever eaten. Even Mother admitted that they were different. “Like eating flowers,” she said. So delicious in fact that my brother ate
five.

I know the old witch hid something in those cookies, a love potion to make my brother fall for her flat-faced daughter. He became strange, driving his motorbike all the way to Kuantan whenever he could. Not to spend time with the girl. Oh no, the spider would never allow that. He drove all the way there just to sit in a coffee shop across the road from the Sultan Abdullah School and gaze longingly at her while she took her students into the school playing field for their daily physical exercise. Now tell me if that doesn’t sound like a gift from a snake charmer to you.

“Marry him,” they all chorused. What could I do? Stand in the way? No, I sacrificed my shining dreams for my brother. So I married Lakshmnan. And what have I got to show for it? A fine mess, that’s what I have. An ungrateful brother who doesn’t even speak to me anymore, a useless gambler for a husband, and children who are disrespectful to me. I have suffered greatly.

Do you know what my wonderful husband did with my dowry money? He gambled it all away on our wedding night. All of it. Ten thousand ringgit was gone before the night was through. I often travel back in time to that night, a secret place protected by the ravages of time. Everything is mummified so beautifully, it shocks me every time I visit it. Every thought, every emotion, carefully preserved to fool me into thinking it’s happening all over again. I see, feel, and hear everything, everything. Bring some cushions to put under my poor, swollen knees, and I will tell you exactly what my wonderful husband did to me.

I am a twenty-four-year-old bride again and have returned to the spider’s horrid little bedroom with its unpainted wooden walls. I am sitting on the edge of a strange silver bed facing the mirror in the left-hand door of a dark wood wardrobe. In the mirror my face is shadowed but unmistakably young, and my body firm and slender. I clearly see the yellowing mosquito net hanging like a soft cloud over me from the four posters of the big bed. The growing moon is luminous in the sky. Moonlight is a funny thing. It is not really a light at all but a mysterious silver glow that favors and caresses only the pale and the shiny. I watch it ignore a rolled decorative carpet and steal all the rich colors out of a matt embroidered picture on the wall, and highlight a gleaming glass jar with orange squares around the middle. It is particularly kind to a collection of cheap chinaware, a wedding gift just out of its wrapping. It stands out gleaming white and luminous pink. A silver tray shimmers.

The air is damp and heavy. The waistband into which all the folds of my elaborate sari are tucked is wet and uncomfortable against my skin. A small fan whirls heroically through the thick, oppressive air. I listen to the expensive rustle of my silk sari. It is like a whispered conversation that I cannot understand. The window is open, and the noise of chirping night insects outside is unexpectedly loud in my city ears. I am used to the sound of people.

I lick my dry lips, and the taste of lipstick mingles in my head with the smell of recently painted nail polish. There is clammy sweat in my tightly linked fingers. And there goes that nonsensical daddy longlegs moving drunkenly across the wall. He hasn’t changed at all. He looks exactly the same, even though he is really fifteen years old now. I can hear the clamor inside my brain like a Chinese funeral, the gongs, the cymbals, the weeping and the wailing, and inexplicable sounds of shuffling feet, and then I hear the silence of everyone else in the house. Everyone knows I am here. I have been careful not to make a sound, and yet they can all hear me. Hear the horror and smell the shame of my position.

I can smell it even now. The pungent smell of my shame coming from the small pot of jasmine flowers that I had presented to him as a token of my love. I had bowed my head and shyly and with both hands held out the little pot to him. He took the offering from my hands, but as I raised my eyes, I witnessed him carelessly toss it on the table by the bed. It lost its balance and rolled onto its side, pretty flowers tumbling out, falling on the table, falling on the floor. He had not even looked at my gift in his haste to leave. He left me alone in our satin bridal bed fragrant with flower petals and dashed off to some seedy joint in Chinatown.

Now that he is gone, inside the silence in the house I know my new family is silently sniggering. Alone I sit stiffly in my grand sari and wait for him. Quietly. Calmly. But inside me is an anger so terrible it is glowing white-hot. It eats my insides. He does not care for me. My position is unbearable.

I have been made a fool of.

If he imagined that I was going to play the shy, foolish bride, he is much mistaken. I was born and bred in the tough city and brought up to be bold. I am no country bumpkin. Often I have been likened to a highly strung racehorse. The hours pass, and in the mirror my beautifully made-up eyes glitter fiercely. My face has hardened in the mirror into the angry statue of Goddess Kali, and my hands are slowly becoming clawed and stiff with clenching. My soft red lips have disappeared into my face, and only a thin, tight line is visible. I crave revenge. I want to fly at him and sink my freshly painted nails into his eyes.

Still he does not return.

But when he comes back at dawn, demented with a strange inward anger, I can only stare at him in shock. Wordlessly he falls on me. I do not cry, I do not shout, I embrace him. I pull him toward me eagerly; envelop him so tightly inside my limbs that we move like one animal. Even in the midst of my white-hot anger, I know this to be my power. His weakness will always be my power. In this bed I will be master. His need of this incredible coupling will always bring him running back again and again to me. Drugged by the discovery of my own power and sensuality, I feel my own anger slip out of my eyes, burning the backs of them and bringing tears hurrying down my cheeks. I watch spellbound as his hard body strains into an arch and his mouth opens and closes soundlessly. But in seconds he is vaulting away from my clinging body.

He sits hunched by the side of the bed, his head buried in his hands, and he cries like a thing broken. The moonlight favors my husband, stretching out his naked back so it seems curving and endless. Playing a game on his body. A little light here, a little shadow there. It makes him beautiful. I reach out my hand and softly, reverently, touch the smooth, exquisite planes of his body. My fingers are dark on his light skin. He is sorry. I feel humbled by the emotions I have unearthed.

This is my wedding night, I think. It is not at all what I had expected, but the powerful emotions and the passion are far, far better than the silly romantic dreams I have childishly nurtured. He is mine, I think with pride, but the very moment the heady thought fills my head, he makes a sound like a deer coughing and sobs, “I shouldn’t have married you. God, I should never have married you. What a terrible mistake I have made.”

I can see it now, my dark hands stilling suddenly on the curve of his hard flank as I listen in astonished wonder to him sob over and over again, “I should never have married you.”

He had lost all our money, humiliated and hurt me deeply, and yet my body had quivered like a musical note under his. His unreachable despair and his heartless rejection fired my blood. The challenge of taming such a man was irresistible. One day I would be the one to hold this beautiful hurting being in my arms, the one to make all the pain go away. I will make you love me, I think. One day you will look at me with shining eyes, I promise myself.

You should have seen him then. He used to take off his shirt and carry weights in our backyard, and the Malay women who lived across the street used to stand hidden behind their curtains and watch him. When we walked in the streets together, people stared at us and envied me such a man.

I know he would have come to love me if not for the spider that hung over our early life, dribbling poison into his ear and spinning lies about me. She hated me. She thought I was not good enough for her son—but who is she to talk? Even when she was young, she was no beauty. I have seen photographs of her, and all she could ever lay claim to is her fair skin. She was jealous of everything I had and always managed to find fault with everything I did, but the truth is, she didn’t want to lose the little influence she had left over her precious son. She wanted him for herself, and the way she did it was with money. She tried to control him with money. She could have helped us financially. That miser has slowly piled up an enormous stash in the bank—a sum that my husband helped to accumulate. She could have helped us, but she thought she’d rather watch me fall flat on my face.

She puts on airs and graces, but she doesn’t fool me. Fancy telling my daughter that all the male ancestors in her family were burned like kings in funeral pyres built from sweet-smelling sandalwood, when in fact her father was nothing but a servant! My mother is of a much, much purer descent. She comes from a family of wealthy merchants. In fact, my mother was betrothed to a very rich man in Malaya. He had chosen her from a large selection of photographs, and the preparations for a grand marriage ceremony were ready when she was sent for from Ceylon. She set sail with a maiden aunt as chaperone and a large iron box full of jewelry. She was sixteen and extremely beautiful, with gorgeous cheekbones and large, lovely eyes. A family friend had instructions to journey with them, protect them, and make sure the innocents arrived safely.

Little did my mother’s people know that the person they had entrusted their daughter’s safety to was a traitor. My mother’s guide was a big, dark man who forced her into a hasty marriage to him on the ship during the voyage.

By the time she disembarked, the seed that grew into my eldest brother was already growing in her belly. Sometimes even now, if I close my eyes I can hear Mother crying softly through the thin wall that separated their bedroom from the living room where we children slept on mats on the floor. From my position in the corridor I could hear her begging softly in the dark for a few more ringgit so she could buy some food for us. When I heard her cry like that, I would wonder what life would have been like if I had been born to Mother and her rich, waiting bridegroom. But then I think I would miss my father very much, for I love him dearly.

I loved him even when he was wrenching Mother’s jewelry from her unyielding body while there was no food in the house and we were all starving. In fact, I loved him even when he was dashing out of the house for the races, clutching his week’s wages in his big dark hands. I did not stop loving him when the man at the grocery store humiliated me, shouting rudely that I shouldn’t expect a single loaf of bread until my father cleared the account. God, I even loved him when he sent my three brothers away to live at his cruel sister’s chicken farm, where the poor things had to clean rows of chicken coops every day and got beaten with a length of plank by their uncle.

When I think of Father, I always remember him in the small provision shop that he sort of inherited during the Japanese regime, a one-story wooden structure, its walls dark brown planks that were rotten in some places, but it was ours. The shop was out front, and we lived in the back behind a patterned curtain. The shop meant we had rice, sugar, and provisions during the occupation. I used to watch Father weighing things on his old scales using various lumps of metal for different weights.

Cataracts have made him blind now, but in my mind I can see him sitting at his cramped table, surrounded by gunnysacks rolled open at the top and filled with grains, beans, chilies, onions, sugar, flour, and all kinds of dry things. When you walked into the shop, the overriding smell was of dried chilies, and then you caught the whiff of cumin and fenugreek and only then the slightly musty smell of the gunnysacks themselves. Lining the entrance was an intriguing array of biscuits in large jars with red plastic tops.

I loved that shop. It was Father’s, but when it was closed, it was all mine. When the wooden front was locked shut, I spent hours playing with the scales and going through Father’s papers. I read aloud his order books that had pages jammed with his big, untidy writing, prices and large ticks in blue ink beside them. I made the till open its mouth and played with the money inside, pretending to sell things and give change, and before I left my shop, I always slipped some coins into my pocket. I enjoyed the sound of their chatter in my pocket, and Father never seemed to notice their absence.

I think those were the happiest days of my life.

Then there was the boy who used to deliver the goods for the shop. He told me I was beautiful, and once he tried to caress my face near the back of the shop, but I only laughed at him scornfully and told him I could never marry anyone with such dirty hands. I was only twelve years old then, but I had a dream. I wanted a rich man like the man promised to Mother. One day I would have servants and nice things, beautiful clothes, and only shop in Robinson’s. I would holiday in England and America. When people met me, they would be respectful and mindful of their words. They would not dream of speaking to me the way they spoke to my mother. One day I would be rich. One very fine day . . .