The Rice Mother (4 page)

From the ship I watched my mother till she was a small speck of sobbing green among a crowd of waving, wailing relatives.

Oh, the journey.

The journey was horrible beyond description. I was delirious with fever for almost the entire voyage. My head swam, and my dizzy stomach rolled and heaved. Sometimes I felt so bad that I wished I was dead. My husband sat as solid as a rock by my side and stared helplessly as I twisted like a snake in the small bunkbed with the endless need to retch. A sickening, sour smell permeated everything—my hair, my clothes, the bedclothes, my breath, my skin—everything felt grimy with the sticky sea air.

I awoke in the lurching darkness with a raging thirst. A gentle hand rested on my forehead.

“Ama,” I called out weakly. Disoriented, I imagined my mother had come to nurse me. I turned to smile at her. My husband stared into my eyes with the strangest expression. Taken aback by the intensity of his regard, I blinked and stared back, unable to look away. My mouth dried.

“How do you feel?” he asked softly.

The spell broke.

“Thirsty,” I said hoarsely. He turned away, and I watched him, loose-limbed and large, pour me some water. I studied his expression as I drank, but his ebony face was filled with nothing more than kindness. I remember that incident clearly because for the rest of our life together I was never again to see that oddly desperate look in his eyes.

The sky was clear cerulean, and the surface of the sea was a thick piece of sparkling glass in the bright sunlight. Concealed at the bottom of its green depths, I knew, were mysterious, wondrous cities studded with fine palaces, dazzling minarets, and exquisite sea flowers, home to the powerful demigods in Mother’s stories. Up on the ship, hundreds of immigrants strained against the rails and stared fiercely at the approaching land. The air vibrated like the beating of a thousand wings. The wings of hope.

To my incredulous eyes Penang Harbor looked like the most exciting place on earth. More people than I had ever seen in my life swarmed and scurried about like a colony of ants on a sand dune. And what strange sorts of people they were too. I gawked, spellbound.

Here were olive-skinned Arab merchants in long flowing robes and headdresses of white and black. Even from afar their prosperous mien stood out like a red kite in a blue sky. Their dressed heads they held at an arrogant tilt, and their fat fingers, crammed with huge rings, glittered red, green, and blue fire under the blazing sun. They had come to trade in spices, ivory, and gold. The wind cupped their strange, guttural language in its hand and flew it up to my ears.

Then there were the Chinese men—slit-eyed, flat-nosed, and determined, not a moment to spare in idleness. Shirtless and sunburned a deep bronze, they hunched low and staggered under heavy gunnysacks they unloaded from barges and trawlers. They were tireless in their task. To my young eyes that had learned only to appreciate the sharply accentuated features and the large soulful eyes of my native land, their moon-faced flatness appeared a deformity.

Locals the color of ripening coconuts hung about with a mildly subservient demeanor. There was something instinctively noble in their faces, and yet they were not masters of their own land. I didn’t know then that their war against the white man had been lost quickly, subtly, with covert violence alone.

First to disembark were the Europeans. While segregated in first class they had apparently dined so well that they had swelled into larger-than-life proportions. Tall, haughty, and elaborate of dress, they strode forward like gods with sunlight in their hair. As if the world owed them an oyster. Their beige and inaccessible lips I found oddly absorbing. The men were unusually solicitous toward the women, who, high-nosed, tightly corseted, and carrying tiny frilled parasols pathetically incapable of the job at hand, stepped, straight-backed, into fine cars and fancy carriages. My last glimpses of them were fascinatingly white wrists and fluttering lace handkerchiefs.

Strong men in white loincloths and swarthy faces came forward to help the passengers. Big iron boxes were loaded into covered rickshaws, and sinewy, barefoot men in triangular hats and screaming muscles pedaled people and their belongings into the town.

I felt a tap on my shoulder and looked up into my husband’s broad, dark face. I must have shone with youth and eagerness, for his small eyes looked at me with almost fatherly tolerance.

“Come, Bilal will be waiting,” he shouted into the din. I followed his huge figure as he easily carried along all that belonged to me in his hands. He stopped in front of a large black car parked under the shade of a tree. Bilal, the driver, was Malay. He spoke no Tamil, and as he could pluck no Malay from my tongue, touched his right hand to his chest in a respectful gesture and summoned a yellow grin for the master’s child bride. I climbed into the motor car with its pale leather seats. I had never been in a car before. And this is the beginning of my rich new life, I thought with an indescribable sense of adventure.

The streets weren’t paved with gold but thick with dust and dirt. Warehouses with curved Oriental roofs and bold Chinese letters at the entrances dozed in the burning sun. Rows of narrow shop-houses stood on either side of the street, congested with a marvelous array of wares. Fresh produce in baskets spilled out onto the pavement, and on specially built wooden steps sat large bottles of dried goods. Tailors, shoemakers, bakers, goldsmiths, and the grocery store were all in one long row of color, noise, and smell. Inside coffee shops stringy old men with leather faces and baggy shorts lounged, cigarettes dangling from their stained fingers. Disappearing around corners were tattered dogs with moist noses and scavenger eyes. In a makeshift stall by the roadside a row of ducks hung by their broken necks, and in a wooden cage on the ground a flock of live ones squawked and quarreled noisily. A huge butcher’s knife buried in a chopping block glinted crazily. Men, colored midnight blue by the sun, swept the drains by the road with long brooms.

At a set of traffic lights in the middle of town, two old women squatted in the shade of a tree and gossiped, the loose skin on their faces wobbling. On the other side of the road a creature more glorious than any I could have imagined alighted from a car. She was delicate of bone and fair, so fair she was almost white. Dressed in a bright red Chinese costume, she had pinned her midnight hair with jeweled combs and trailing beads. Her eyes were almond-shaped and large but slanting and coy, and her mouth was shaped like a tiny rosebud. She had painted it very red, and it glistened in the sun. Everything about her was perfect and doll-like until she took a small tottering step forward. Suddenly it seemed as if all the richness of her costume and her startling beauty would swoon into the large monsoon drain by the side of the road. Immediately, one of her minders shot out a steadying hand. Ungratefully she cracked her fan on the helping hand, pulling away haughtily. It was then I realized that her feet were no bigger than my balled fist. And I have small hands. I blinked and stared at her misshapen feet, clad in black silk shoes meant for a very small child.

“Her feet were bound when she was a little girl,” my husband said in the terrible heat inside the car.

I whirled around in shock. “Why?”

“So they wouldn’t grow big and clumsy like yours,” he teased lightly.

“What?” I cried in disbelief.

“It is the custom in China to bind a girl’s feet. The Chinese consider bound feet beautiful and desirable. Only the poor peasants who have a need for an extra pair of hands in the rice fields have daughters with unbound feet. As early as the age of two or three the best families bind the feet of their young girls so tightly that the growing bones mangle into a painful arch. Once bound their feet can never be unbound again, or they grow into deformed shapes that would make even their strange rocking steps impossible.”

I had left my innocent village behind forever.

Instantly I decided that the Chinese race was barbarous. To bind one’s own daughter’s feet as she howled in agony, to watch her through the years hobbling along painfully, must take a particularly cruel heart. What depraved taste had first hankered for a deformed foot? I looked down at my sturdy feet in their brown slippers and was glad for them. These feet had run free through forests and swum in cool water and had never even considered the possibility that somewhere in the world little girls sat helplessly in pain all day and wept softly all night.

Soon our car was making its way out of the bustling town. A man in muddy clothes led a water buffalo by the nose along the side of the road. Small huts dotted the flat landscape. My husband relaxed back into the hard seat, and his small eyes closed into sleep. In the blazing midday sun the road stretched out like a silvery gray snake, twisting through rice-paddy fields, through spice plantations, and eventually through the bright orange soil of virgin forests. On either side rose walls of tangled dark green vegetation. Giant ferns threw their fronds out into the yellow light, and fat creepers swung untidily from tree branches in an effort to snatch at pieces of dappled sunlight, like children reaching for birthday cake. And here and there in the rough bark peered shapes like old faces frowning with worry. Between the flat leaves all was still and quiet. Mile after mile. Water mirages appeared and disappeared on the road. In the terrible heat the forest wisely slept, but I couldn’t even blink for fear of missing something momentous.

The two hours of constant vigilance paid off.

On the horizon I saw first one then two and then a whole line of people on bicycles. They were dressed from head to toe in black. And every single one of them was frighteningly faceless, lurking inside the shadows their black headdresses threw over their faces. The headdresses were kept in place with red handkerchiefs tied under their chins. On top of the black headdress and red handkerchiefs they wore enormous straw hats. Their sleeves they wore longer than their hands. Not a tiny strip of flesh was exposed. Unhurriedly they approached.

Urgently, I shook Ayah awake.

“What? What is it?” he muddled, bewildered into sudden wakefulness.

“Look!” I cried fearfully, pointing at the obvious menace in the black procession ahead.

His eyes followed my finger. “Oh, them,” he sighed, relieved, and settled back sleepily. “They are
dulang
washers. They work in the tin mines and sieve tin ore in large trays at mining sites. Underneath all that black material are some of the fairest Chinese girls you will ever meet. I have seen them at night. They look like dolls in their tight cheongsams.”

The slender trail wheeled past. Silent. Harmless.

I was intrigued. They wrapped themselves like the mummies in an Egyptian pyramid so they could remain rice-powder white. We rattled along on roads meant for carts, passed small towns and lazy villages. Once Bilal slowed down for two small wild pigs that snorted and scurried across the road in a moment of curiosity. Brown children, naked, ran to the side of the road to watch us and wave enthusiastically. Sweating freely inside six yards of material anchored on a firmly tied white petticoat, I loved them instantly. Inside me a barefoot girl longed to get out. Even now I think I remember those velvet-eyed children best. Midafternoon we passed a Chinese temple with granite pillars, a deep red interior, and intricately carved stone dragons resting on its ceramic roof.

At length we reached Kuantan, our final destination. Bilal drove into a potholed road strewn with sharp white stones, a cul-de-sac of sorts. The road encircled an untidy clump of wild bushes, a bamboo grove, and a rather splendid rambutan tree, and served the five dwellings built around it. The house closest to the main road was the grandest, obviously mine. Under a shady angsana tree nestled a table and chairs made of stone. It was beautiful, and I loved it. Inside the coolness of its thick walls I imagined soft-footed servants. I noticed red Chinese lanterns hanging by the door and pondered the reason for them.

Bilal slowed the car down next to the big, black gates, but as I prepared to get out, two savage Alsatian dogs rushed out to the gate and barked at us. Then, having negotiated a large pothole, Bilal drove on, right past the beautiful house. A small brown face at one of the windows watched us pass with avid curiosity. I turned toward my husband, but he deliberately avoided my searching gaze and stared ahead. Confused, I turned away. We bumped along the terrible road, and then I noticed that all the other houses were poor and wooden. Bilal stopped outside a small house on low stilts.

My husband got out, and I clambered out in my brown slippers, a crumpled, dazed little person. The bags came out of the trunk of the car, and Bilal, who was not my husband’s trusted driver at all, bade us good-bye and drove off. Ayah fished around in his baggy trousers and produced a set of keys. He smiled into my reduced face. “Welcome home, my dear, dear wife,” he said softly.

“But . . . but . . .”

But he was gone, striding ahead on those ridiculously long legs of his. The wooden door of the wooden house opened and swallowed him whole. For a moment I could only stare at the dusky interior of the house, then I followed slowly. At the first step I stopped. Mother had been tricked. The thought was heavy. My husband was not rich, he was poor. Pani had duped us. I was all alone in a strange country with a man who was not what he was supposed to be. I had no money of my own, didn’t speak a word of English or the local language, and hadn’t the least idea of how to return home. The blood ran very fast in my veins. I could have pulled outrage or even sheer fear out of my thumping heart, but I was so green, so new at the game of life, that it still stretched out as a great adventure that I wouldn’t miss out on.

Inside it was cool and dark. The house was sleeping, quietly and softly. Not for long, I thought. Burning with a new sense of purpose, I opened all the windows in the small living room. Fresh air and weak, slanting evening sunlight streamed into the little house. Suddenly it didn’t matter at all that it wasn’t a grand house or that I wouldn’t have servants to command. In fact, the challenge of making something out of nothing beckoned, far more exciting. I could still be the lady of the wooden house.