The Rice Mother (43 page)

A
ll my life I was steadfast in my refusal to acknowledge the greater subtlety of Omar Khayyám. The real, mystical meaning to his verse is like a wine, so potent it becomes dangerous to the animal that consumes it. It seemed easier, the shallow Western interpretation. To have ever acknowledged that the “voice within the tavern” was not the wheedling, mewling sound that slipped out of rouged lips in the early hours of the morning in some seedy hotel room in Thailand could have solved the mystery of life. And I didn’t want it solved. Solved, it slouched drab and boring in the distance.

Did Khayyám know about
apsaras
, divine female nymphs that can be bought for a few American dollars a night? I will tell the great poet, should I come across him in the next world, that my life’s liquor was a golden liquid too, but it came out of a Jim Beam bottle. And bloody good it was. Omar would understand. He was a man with a keen eye. He would guess that to deny myself the illusion of ignorance would have been to deny the quality of the pot, even question the hand of the potter. The issue was a simple one. Was it my fault if the potter’s hand shook? And I the ungainly vessel he made? Should I sneer at myself for leaning awry?

He who wrought me into shape also stamped me with the vine leaf of corruption. What was to be done?

I am a compulsive cad. Strong liquor, rich food, and the easy life move me in a way that is doubtless wrong. I look at my mother with horrified fascination. Material ambition is the compulsion that drives her. Is it possible, I think to myself, that she does not know how ugly a beast it is that she clasps so close to her breast? Thwarted, it has slowly sucked the life out of her.

Me, I rebelled. Took the long road home. I stood before a statue of Kali, the goddess of death and destruction. Malevolently she stared at me, and I stared back fearlessly. That was what my maker did. His hand shook. He made me selfish, heartless, and fearless in the face of the unknown. My point of no return is yet to be tested. “Take me further,” I challenge recklessly.

Even now that my bones are aching and my muscles weary, it still urges inside me. It is damn near impossible to ask for just one beer or just one girl. I ask for four and line them up on the bar so that their stuck-on paper brands stare at me. Four girls lined up in a row and bent double is a mighty pretty sight too. Yes, I filled my cup until it overflowed, and still I filled it some more.

I was waiting for my first prostitute. “Wah, wah, wah,” played in my ear, and the girls with the downcast eyes bored me. The sheer energy needed to take out a repressed Indian virgin with a fat mother attached to her knickers and the months and months of mild courtship with no guarantee of getting anywhere left me limp. I wanted less fuss, more variety. I hung about at the top of the school steps with my cool mates, and we watched the girls coming up. Diligently asking them all if we could touch their mangoes. Invariably all the ugly, fat girls grew belligerent, cursing us soundly, while the pretty ones blushed or dropped their heads coyly. Once one of them fell in love with me, but of course I broke her heart. The thing I searched for didn’t lie in the arms of a good woman. I wanted seasoned women who knew they ought to be paid.

All the way up to Thailand I went, on the Malayan Railway lines, for a short trip into the red-light district, where beautiful girls put their palms together and bowed deeply from the waist in the way of their kind. They removed their ornate headdresses and washed my feet in a basin of scented water while I closed my eyes and lay back with just one thought:
I am home
.

I know I am looking for something. Something I have not found. I traverse the streets of Chow Kit and watch the transvestites. Plastic women, they are called. They sashay boldly up and down the street; their flat chests thrust far out in front of them, their tight bottoms pushed far out behind them, pouting at passing men. Often they slide up to me, their wigs, false eyelashes, stuffed bras, tight girdles, brightly painted fingernails, and platefuls of vibrant makeup, their voices artificially high.

“How much?” I asked once just for sport, and instantly she snaked down beside me, a rich smile and a ready caressing hand on my arm.

“Depends what you want,” she bantered. I looked at her. The skin was soft, but the eyes were wretched. An Adam’s apple bobbed in her throat. It was impossible to sustain the mischief. I sighed regretfully.

She was instantly alert. “But not much,” she assured me.

I know why she is far less than a prostitute—because she gives herself away as if she were a can of worms. Her sexuality can only be offered in the dark to strangers with deformed tastes.

“Maybe next time,” I told her.

“I show you strange things,” she insisted with a peculiar blankness in her face. I believed her. I believed that she could show me something strange and exciting but utterly abhorrent to her. The idea fascinated me. How misshapen is the vessel? Aah, if only she wasn’t a man. But Sevenese, my lad, she
is
a man.

I shook my head, and he stood up huffily, with exaggerated movements. Let it be known I had wasted his precious time. I watched him walk away and join another of his kind. Together they pointed and stared at me venomously. I know their tragedy. Their misfortune is not that they are not what they should be, but that they are not what they want to be. Women.

I
have a memory of myself when I was very young sitting anxiously on a packed bag by the front door, my hair in pigtails, my feet encased in my best shoes, and my heart counting the minutes like a very loud clock inside my chest. I was waiting to go to Grandma Lakshmi’s home for the holidays, but getting there was an obstacle course sometimes too difficult for a child to manage. The slightest infringement could lose me the privilege. Hardest of all, I had to pretend disdain at the prospect of the forthcoming holiday.

So it was only after Father came home and the two of us were sitting in the car on the way to the bus station that I could breathe a sigh of relief and know for certain that my trip was no longer subject to last-minute changes of plan.

At the door of the bus I kissed Papa good-bye, and he waited at the platform to return my wave until the bus pulled out of sight. I closed my eyes and left all my troubles behind—my brother Nash’s threats to tie me to a chair in the kitchen and burn all the hair on my head, and Mother’s advancing, sneering face. Soon, very soon, I would sleep so close to my darling Grandma that I would hear the asthma inside her chest. Like a tired engine. Worse every time I came back.

I sat very still during the journey, staring out of the window, not daring to nod off or leave the bus for refreshments at Bentong with everyone else. I was terrified of the bad men Mother had warned me of who spirited away little girls traveling alone. At Kuantan station Aunty Lalita would be waiting for me, a Big Sister cake in hand, the wind from the jetty blowing her thin curls into her large, smiling face. I got down from the bus, put my hand in hers, and together we walked, swinging our clasped hands, like best friends, all the way back to Grandma’s. In my mind’s eye I can see the two of us walking through town, my luggage in her right hand and me barely able to contain my excitement. Kuantan hardly ever changed through the years. It was always dear and familiar, like coming home.

As we turned the corner at Old Soong’s house I saw Grandma, slightly hunched, standing by the door. Breaking free from Aunty Lalita’s hold, I ran toward the figure on the veranda. When finally I flew into her open arms and buried my face in her dear, familiar smell, she always said exactly the same thing. “
Aiyoo
, how thin you have become!”

And I remember:
If there be a paradise on earth . . .

How crystal clear is the memory of my early-morning hours at Grandma’s house before the sun crept up the horizon. I can see myself now waking up in the cool darkness, too excited about the awakening day. The light is still on in the living room, and Uncle Sevenese is drunk. He had long claimed the night for his own and knighted himself “a drunk Buddhist.” When I was young every and any form of sophistication was glamorous. To be young and sit in the presence of effortless cynicism is to be utterly captivated. And my uncle was the master of cynics. “How could one not revere a man who died because he was too courteous to refuse bad food?” he says of Buddha.

When he sees me peeping from the doorway, he calls me into the living room.

“Come here,” he whispers, patting the seat beside him. I run to join him. He tousles my hair like he always does.

“What are you doing still up?” I ask.

“What time is it?” There, the slight slur again. I giggle inside my hands.

I never saw the damage. I only saw a man of infinite sophistication celebrating a life of gorgeously outrageous ideas. The whisky bottle appeared incidental, if anything, its effects amusing and friendly. When he was like that, he discussed adult things with me that he and I both knew he really shouldn’t.

I poke my finger into his large tummy, and my finger disappears into rolls of fat. “Make your tummy shake,” I order, and instantly his entire tummy vibrates. That brings forth peals of uncontrollable laughter.

“Sshh,” he warns, stuffing his bottle of Bells farther down the cushions. “You will wake the Rice Mother.”

“Who?” I demand.

“The Giver of Life, that’s who. In Bali her spirit lives in effigies made out of sheaves of rice. From her altar in the family granary she protects the crops she made bountiful in the paddy fields. So sacred is she that sinners are forbidden to enter her presence or consume a single grain from her figurine.”

Uncle Sevenese wags a finger at me. He is without doubt drunk. “In this house, our Rice Mother is your grandmother. She is the keeper of dreams. Look carefully, and you will see, she sits on her wooden throne, holding all our hopes and dreams in her strong hands, big and small, yours and mine. The years will not diminish her.”

“Oh,” I exclaim, the idea growing large in my mind. I imagine Grandma, not frail and often sad, but as a Rice Mother, strong and splendid, grains of rice sticking to her body, and holding all my sleeping dreams in her substantial hands. Enchanted with the picture, I lie my head on my uncle’s pillow tummy.

“Dear, dear Dimple,” he sighs sadly. “If only you will never grow up. If only I could protect you from your own future, from yourself. If only I could be like the Innu shamans who can beat a drum from miles and miles away and make the deer dance while waiting for the hunters to arrive. While waiting for their own deaths.”

Poor Uncle Sevenese. I was too small to know that the demons and the ghosts were fast at his heels, their eyes huge and glowing like crocodiles’ eyes in the dark. Chasing. Chasing. Chasing. I lay on his belly, innocent and wondering if a shaman very far away had already beaten his drum, and the hunters were on their way. Was that why he was always out dancing the rumba, the merengue, and the cha-cha-cha?

“Birth is only death postponed,” he tells me, the whisky warm on his breath. In the morning he takes the sleeper train to dangerous, secret parts of Thailand, where it is possible to disappear without a trace. Where the girls have prized sets of impossibly clever muscles and extrude
kamasalila,
love fluids as fragrant as fresh lychees.

Still craving for something he cannot name, he leaves for Port au Prince in Haiti, where he consorts with voodoo doctors who have needle-thin fireworks sprinting out of their black auras.

Over the years I saved letters with pictures of him standing at the immense feet of the Egyptian pyramids. He sleeps in the desert under an astonishing ceiling of millions of stars and walks through a sea of dead birds, their tiny eyes and beaks encrusted with the whirling sands, the ones that would never finish their migratory journey across the desert. He drinks strong camel’s milk and notes how vociferously they complain when they are being loaded. They have feet as big and as soft as chapatis. He eats bread as hard as stone and watches amazed as tiny mice appear as if out of nowhere for the smallest crumb fallen on the sand. He informs me that the word for woman,
horman,
comes from the Arabic word
haram,
“forbidden,” but the men there call the pretty girls “bellaboooozzzz.”

He is offered pretty girls in shimmering veils and rich fabrics lying supine on cushions by the pool. Their flashing eyes, surrounded by clusters of painted stars, look back, adolescent with a red dot in the inner corners. Their breasts spread with musk gleam and the precious jewels in their belly buttons sparkle in the setting sun as they playfully sprinkle rose water on each other. Uncaring and unaroused, he wrote, “Am I finally weary? What can be the matter?”

Cheerlessly he disappeared on safari for a month. “The lack of company will do me good,” he said.

“He will lose his job,” Grandma lamented.

He returned restored somewhat, blackened to ebony by the ferocious sun. Then he traveled down to Singapore, unenthusiastically inspecting the standards. Eventually he took the overnight route north to the land of a thousand reclining Buddhas, saffron-clad monks, and delicately carved spires glowing in the smoky purple evening. There he closed his eyes and reached out to experience the familiar again, a yielding breast, a curving belly.

At Grandma’s the food was simple but healthy. She held my face by the kitchen window in the streaming sunlight and checked if my earlobes were healthy and transparent. Satisfied, she nodded and went back to chopping onions, quartering eggplants, or tearing spinach leaves. She was curious about everything—Father, school, my health, my friends. She wanted to know everything and seemed especially proud of my good grades.

“Like your father,” she said. “Before his bad luck pounced on him.”

We played an exhausting number of games of Chinese checkers, Grandma cheating a great deal. She hated losing. “Bloody pool,” she suddenly shouted to distract me, and as quick as a flash she moved her pieces around.