The Rice Mother (41 page)

Rani stopped to draw breath and look outraged. “In fact, you should give me that money, Mother-in-law, so I can throw that paltry sum in her face and stop her from pulling the good name of this family through the sewers.”

Mother’s hand trembled harder, but her smile stayed fixed.

Rani left later that afternoon without her money. For half an hour Mother paced the floors of our house, muttering, “Amazing, just amazing!” She was so angry she couldn’t sit still, and then suddenly she laughed out loud. “What cheek my daughter-in-law has! Indeed, she must think me a fool. She expects me, me of all people to put not one, not two, but
five
thousand ringgit in her hand and hope that it will reach Ratha’s hand. Hah, if I want Ratha to have the money, I will give the girl the money myself and not try to pass it through this greedy crocodile’s stomach first.”

Soon Ratha was pregnant. She suffered badly from morning sickness. Mother sent Marie biscuits, marinated ginger, and three maternity dresses. She also offered to supply the down payment on a terrace house in a newly built development outside town, but Ratha was too proud to accept and through Jeyan sent a polite refusal. I saw her once in the night market, wearing one of the maternity dresses that Mother had sent. She had cut her hair to a more manageable length. Tendrils of hair curled around her thin neck, making her appear younger, more vulnerable. She was sad. Even among the busy, pushing throng of people, I felt her sadness. This time she definitely saw me, but she pretended not to, hurrying away into the colorful crowds.

Mother and I went to the hospital to see Ratha and the baby. We took jewelry for the little girl. When Ratha saw us, it seemed as if she held her baby tighter to her breast. It is the only thing of value that she has ever had, I thought. The baby yelled in earnest.

“Come to your granny,” Mother crooned to the red-faced infant. Ratha frowned unhappily, but in Mother’s strong, sure arms the baby unclenched its fists and stopped its tiny but furious cries. Mother gave the sleeping child back to Ratha, and I saw her breathe a sigh of relief once the baby lay in her arms once more. A few days later Ratha and the newborn baby returned to the small room over the laundry shop.

“The fumes from the laundry are bad for the baby,” Mother said to Jeyan.

“Nonsense,” Ratha dismissed, when Jeyan told her what Mother had said.

She was pregnant again when I next saw her. She had on the same maternity dress that Mother had bought for her two years before. It was faded. Her hair had grown some. She had it in a ponytail. She looked unhappier than ever.

The second baby arrived. At the hospital she smiled politely at Mother and me. There was nothing behind that smile, neither hostility nor warmth. Her older child sat quietly on the bed. She stared at us curiously with large moist eyes. When Mother tried to carry her, she covered her eyes with her hands and sobbed helplessly. She was frightened of this fierce woman whom she had never seen in all her life. As if scalded, Mother turned away. She busied herself pushing back the bedclothes to look at Jeyan’s second child, another girl. This time Mother didn’t try to carry the child. Suddenly she seemed preoccupied and far away. After a few uncomfortable minutes we left. There was a sour taste at the back of my mouth.

Things were turning sour in the room on top of the shop-house too. Jeyan no longer rushed home to watch his wife with glazed eyes. He came to our house straight from work. He sat in the living room and stared at the television blankly, and after he had eaten his dinner, he complained loudly to anyone who would listen about his wife. She was mean. She was turning the children against him. She refused to cook for him. She even refused to wash his clothes. Then things got even worse. She beat the children if they spoke to him. She emptied the contents of the dustpan onto his freshly laundered clothes that the
dhobi
delivered outside the door. She had a special hatred for the first daughter, who was too much like her father. The child was becoming withdrawn and unreachable. She only spoke when spoken to, and she was slow. “Faster, eat faster,” Ratha would shout close to the child’s ear and push food into her mouth faster and faster until the poor thing was choking and coughing. Then there would be tears, more angry words, and smacks. It seemed that Ratha hated Jeyan with a vengeance. But how to be surprised? The
kum kum
had spilled before the marriage. The marriage had died then. This was only the stink of decomposition.

When the oldest girl was five years old, Ratha asked Jeyan to move out. He found a room in a different shop-house along the same street. The truth was, he didn’t know how to live without her. He had learned to live with the abuse and the hate, but he didn’t know how to cope without her. She was in his blood for better or for worse. He wanted to remain close, to watch her and his children, but she refused even to look in his direction. She made it perfectly clear that she wanted nothing at all to do with her husband. She began divorce proceedings. Jeyan thought he would refuse to pay her maintenance, and in that way he would bring her running back. From his shabby room a few doors away, he watched her, sure that she would never cope—no friends, no job, no caring family, no money, two babies to care for, and all the bills to pay. She would have to come back, crawling on her hands and knees. I saw the vindictive light in his slow eyes. Teach her a lesson, it said.

But she had vowed never to go back. She ignored the burning eyes that followed her as soon as she left her doorway. She drew an old unused blanket over the window at night so it was impossible to see even a shadow. Then she made a plan. She didn’t want his money.

First she did odd jobs with her cowering children. With their small kitten faces attached to her skirts, she went to work. That was hard. The women she worked for were heartless and exacting, but they tolerated her children because she was such an impeccable cleaner. In the nights she began to sew sari blouses for the rich ladies she worked for and their pampered friends.

Slowly she saved up enough to go to cake-baking lessons from an ex-policeman’s wife. In a flat in the block of blue-and-white residences reserved for policemen and their families, she learned to bake cakes. Then she used her precious hard-earned money to attend icing courses. From his window Jeyan jealously watched her, her progress, her freedom from him. He took to drinking in the evenings. In his blue meter-reader uniform he sat in the small sheds around town, drinking local
samsoo.

I have seen him falsely merry in the company of other men. They are all bitter there, with failed marriages yapping at their heels and the weeping shadows of their abandoned children pulling at their ragged shirttails and begging for a little bit more love. How they dismiss women! Nags, sluts, good-for-nothings. Then they lewdly discuss the prostitutes that walk the streets by the newly built flats. It took Jeyan a long time to accept that Ratha was really lost to him, but by then he really didn’t care about anything anymore.

In her small room she practiced until her gently piped “Happy Birthday” looked good enough to eat. Then she began to give lessons in the civic center. She survived without a single cent from Jeyan. Her classes became well known in Kuantan. Not only Indian ladies attended; even Malays, well known for their inborn sense of creativity and their patience for intricate artwork, began gracing her classes. They went home with bunches of rambutans and mangosteens fashioned from sugar. She moved out of that tiny room above the laundry that made her eldest daughter cough in the night. How she hated him! How she hated the woman who had spawned him! She wanted nothing more to do with us. We had cheated her of a life. They moved to the other side of town, as far away as possible from her drunken pathetic husband.

Thin and frightened, her children followed her into her new life. “You have no father,” she told them. “He is dead.” They nodded with large, believing eyes, like dumb angels, their tattered wings in their hands. Who knows what passed through their poor brains? Poor little things, their world so filled with cruel adults. Do they really not remember that stick-thin man who used to sometimes raise them high above his head? The man with the big, simple face and the slow mouth with only a few words inside it. Yes, they remembered him as they remembered the lost buttons on their blouses. Inside clothes clean but worn, they learned to tiptoe around their mother in their narrow room. Her temper was always so fierce and so nearby. She took them by the hand to school. Their teacher was a friend of Anna’s.

“They are such good girls,” the woman confided in Anna. “But I wish they’d speak a little more.”

The last time I saw Ratha, she was getting onto a bus. I watched her carefully. The children were not with her. Even from the back I recognized her instantly. Perhaps it was the steel brush, or perhaps it was the hard life, but something had altered her person to an almost unrecognizable degree. Her skin hung in small folds around her bones. At her elbows pleats of skin flapped as she adjusted the basket on her arm. When she turned to pay the bus driver and collect her change, I saw with shock that half of her mouth had twisted permanently downward like a semiparalyzed stroke patient. Her hair had fallen out in patches, and in some places I could see pure scalp. She reminded me of a Tamil movie I had once seen where the heroine runs away from the camera’s eye into woods. It is wintertime, and all the trees are bare and stark with sleep. All you see is her disappearing back. The disappearing back reminds me of her. The camera moves farther and farther away from her. She is becoming smaller and smaller until she is but a dot on the horizon. Good-bye, Ratha.

I never know where the years go, but I do not sit outside among the plump okra, the richly colored eggplants, watching insects or feeding the chickens in my magic cave under our house, anymore. The land outside is a barren wasteland. Weeds have taken over. I wake up in the morning and begin my household chores, and then it is time for an afternoon nap. Then there is the TV, of course, till bedtime. Sometimes a movie at the cinema, and on Fridays the evening prayers at the temple beckon. One morning I woke up, and I was forty, and unmarried, but Father was eighty-two years old. I looked at him, an old man on a rickety bicycle. For years I had watched him from the window as he climbed on the same rusty old bicycle and rode down the same path, and worried that one day he would fall and hurt himself. But I was at the market the day it finally happened. It was Mother, standing by the window watching, who saw him tumble to the ground, tripped by the bulging roots of the rambutan tree grown huge with the years.

She ran out of the house without her slippers to help my poor old father as he lay there on his back, too stunned to move. Mother was sixty-one years old. Her limbs were old and shrinking, but there was still great strength in them. She crouched down beside him. His face was like a dried-up riverbed, full of deep cracks. For years she had read him like a book. He was in terrible pain. She reached out and touched the cracks. Even through the pain he stared at her in surprise. The back wheel of his bicycle was still turning. She tried to help him up.

“No, no,” he groaned. “I cannot move. My leg is broken. Call the ambulance.”

So Mother ran to Old Soong’s house. A servant let her in. That was the first time she had been inside the place. She recognized the rosewood dining table where Mui Tsai had served dog stew to her master, and where the master had first run his fingers down her young thighs. Where the Japanese soldiers had thrown her on her back and raped her one by one. The terrazzo floor was cool under Mother’s feet.

“Mistress Soong,” Mother called out in a thin, hoarse voice.

Finally Mistress Soong opened a dark wooden door and walked out. She was ugly beyond description. All her beauty was gone. She was fat and going bald. In her eyes, made smaller by rolls of fat, there was no joy. In fact, Mother’s presence seemed to make her uncomfortable. Here was someone who knew her secrets. All her ugly secrets must lie inside this old hag. The hag opened its mouth and explained the necessity for a phone. Mistress Soong pointed to a phone near the hallway. After the call Mother thanked Mistress Soong and quickly walked out.

She passed Minah’s house, where a long time ago she and Mui Tsai had seen the big python. Minah was long gone. Her Japanese protector had left her with a piece of land and money, and she had moved away. Mother quickly passed the Chinese house where poor Ah Moi had hanged herself all those years ago. Father was lying flat on his back. He had not moved at all. She felt like crying and didn’t know why. It was obvious that the injury was not serious. Why did she feel suddenly so lost, so abandoned? As if he had left her, when it was she who had left him to call an ambulance. Why, after all these years, did she suddenly feel a pain in her heart at the thought of his pain, at the thought of losing him? She tried hard to remember that he irritated her, annoyed her, and frustrated her beyond endurance.