The Rice Mother (49 page)

The mango tree in the garden blossomed. It was magnificent. Amu built a hammock under it and napped there every afternoon. I watched her from my summer house, and she looked enviably peaceful.

I went to see Uncle Sevenese at his studio apartment. It was a terrible place, four flights up a dirty iron staircase, at the end of a smelly corridor black with dirt, behind a faded blue door. While I was climbing the stairs, careful not to touch the greasy banisters, I saw a woman step out of his blue door. She was attractive in a hard sort of way, with her hair in a smart bob. She wore white hot pants and white stiletto heels. Her heels were loud on the metal stairs.

Suddenly I didn’t want to come face to face with her. I didn’t know what I would see in her face. Quickly I turned around and went back downstairs. I hid in an old-fashioned Chinese coffee shop, where a tired fan whirled quite high on the ceiling and old Chinese men half sat and half squatted on three-legged wooden stools as they sipped their coffees and ate toasted white bread spread with
kaya
. I ordered a cup of coffee and felt inexplicably sad, remembering Uncle Sevenese telling me how he used to wait outside the baker’s to steal little tubs of
kaya.
In those days it was not green but orangeybrown. He used to open the tub, stick his tongue in it, and lick the sweet mixture of coconut milk cooked with egg yolks.

When I was younger, he was my hero on a white elephant who could do no wrong, but now he lived all alone in a tiny apartment with hard-faced prostitutes in unsuitable shorts leaving his room at eleven in the morning.

When enough time had elapsed, I tried the stairs again. He opened the door, bleary-eyed, and grunted when he saw me. He walked away, leaving the door open. I let myself in.

“Good morning,” I said cheerfully, avoiding the sight of the unmade bed. He looked as if he was nursing a really bad hangover. I took the packets of cigarettes I had bought at the coffee shop downstairs out of the brown paper bag and put them on the table beside the bed. He plugged in a kettle.

“How’s it going?” he croaked, unshaven, his eyes smudged with ghastly dark rings.

“Not too bad,” I said.

“Great. How’s your dad?”

“Oh, he’s fine. He’s just got nothing more to say to me.”

He turned around from making his coffee. “Do you want one?”

“No, I had one in the coffee shop,” I said automatically and then, remembering, blushed. My uncle watched me with a sly smile. He knew I had seen the prostitute. He was still a child who enjoyed shocking people. He lit a cigarette.

“And how’s your husband?” There was a new note in his voice. I didn’t like it.

“Fine,” I said brightly.

“You still haven’t given me his birth date and time so I can work out his chart,” he accused, looking at the kettle through a haze of smoke.

“Yes, I keep forgetting,” I lied, knowing full well that I didn’t want to give him the astrological details. I suppose I feared what he would find. “I’ve brought you some cigarettes,” I said quickly to change the subject.

“Thank you.” He looked at me speculatively. “Why don’t you want me to do his charts?” he asked.

“It’s not that I don’t want you to do Luke’s charts. It’s just that—”

“I had a dream about you. . . .”

“Oh, what about?”

“You were walking in a field, and I realized that you had no shadow. And then I saw your shadow running away from you.”

“Ugh. Why do you have such dreams? They make my hair stand on end. What does this dream mean?” I asked, full of dread when I wished to be scornful of superstitious nonsense in my new happy life. In my large house with its crystal chandeliers, frolicking Renaissance figures, and perfume compartments in the ceilings, Uncle Sevenese and his dreams had no place. I began to regret coming to see him. As soon as I saw that prostitute, I should have simply left. Then I felt mean, entertaining such beastly thoughts. I looked around at the shabby room. I used to love him with all my heart.

“Why won’t you let me help you?” I asked.

“Because you can only give me material things that I don’t need and won’t do my soul any good. Do you think I would be happier in a big house with a black marble floor?”

“So, what is this dream of yours supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know. I never know until it’s too late, but all my dreams are warnings of ill fortune.”

I sighed. “I have to go, but I’m leaving some money for you on the table, okay?”

“Thanks, but don’t forget to bring the details of your beloved next time around.”

“All right,” I agreed wearily, my good mood entirely ruined.

What had happened to the times we spent talking for hours late into the night after everyone else had gone to sleep? There was nothing left to talk about. I knew it was me. I was frightened of letting him near enough to destroy the fragile wings of my happiness. I had never been so happy in all my life, and I knew that he had the power to destroy it. In fact, I was sure he could.

I knew things were too good to be true, but the illusion of happiness had to be protected at all cost. I made a decision to stop seeing Uncle Sevenese for a while.

Three months later Luke was ecstatic when I told him I was pregnant. I wanted to call the baby Nisha if it was a girl. A long time ago Grandma Lakshmi had wanted that name for me, and I thought to please her by naming her great-granddaughter Nisha instead. Beautiful like the full moon. I hung pictures of Elizabeth Taylor all over our bedroom so that the first thing I laid my eyes on in the morning and the last thing I saw before I retired was beauty.

I began to feel sick all day. Grandma Lakshmi advised ginger juice. Luke brought me flowers wrapped in silver paper and ordered me to do no work at all.

It was while I was lying quietly in bed one night that Luke sat down beside me and started telling me about his past. He was orphaned when he was three years old. His mother, a young Chinese girl, was raped by Japanese soldiers and left for dead. She somehow survived and gave birth to him, but eventually died of malnutrition on the steps of a Catholic orphanage. The nuns opened the door one morning to a child crying by her cooling body. His poor little body was covered in sores and his belly distended with worms.

They gave him the last name of the nun who found him, Sister Steadman. Although they brought him up as a Christian, he remained steadfastly Buddhist, and strangely attached to all things Japanese. It was the strength of his will that kept him so. I cried when he told me how little Luke would wake up in the middle of the night and leave the softness of his bed to wedge his small body between the two bottom shelves of a cupboard. The nuns found him each morning for almost a year curled up between the familiarity of two hard surfaces. I thought of the child Luke with a distended belly and emaciated limbs, and I wondered if his eyes had been opaque then.

The months passed very slowly. Every day my body changed. I moved out of our shared bedroom. Luke needs the temperature very cold to sleep, but a wheezing had begun in my chest. The pregnancy had made me delicate. I would return to my husband’s bed when the baby was born. I lay on the cool floor of the living room and stared at the paintings on the ceiling. The truth was, I wasn’t sure I liked them all up there watching me. The artist had made all those people seem not just alive but present, as if they were a stern race that existed on another level inside the varnish on my ceiling. When I switched off all the lights and went upstairs, they came down and helped themselves to the food in the fridge. In fact, if I stared at them for too long, I began to feel they changed their expressions. For the most part they seemed indifferent, but sometimes, just sometimes, it seemed as if they were quietly amused by our goings-on. The more I looked at their foreign faces with their proud Roman noses, their vaguely smug expressions, and their curved, spoiled mouths, the more sure I became that I wanted to take a brush and paint the whole damn thing white. But Luke likes them up there. He is proud of his ceiling. He says it is a work of art.

I suppose it is just that I was bored. I had nothing to do all day but wait for Luke to return. I missed the friends that I never saw anymore. I had shopped enough to last a lifetime, and I was, of course, not allowed to take walks in the evening on my own for fear of kidnap, rape, and murder. Forbidden to soil my pretty hands with ordinary housework, or for that matter gardening, I was quite the useless wife. When would the baby arrive?

I went into Luke’s study, and he had his back to me, looking out of the window. Ramrod straight. Lost to me. Music swirled around him. A jilted Japanese lover’s song.

It was the woman’s haunting voice mingled with the lilting flutes that carved him so still. Watching him standing there, I knew he was sad inside. Some deep part of him that I cannot touch. I felt it reach out like a thin wayward tentacle that refused his master’s iron will. Gently, gently, I had begun to understand Uncle Sevenese’s desire for a cold lip, for I too had begun to long for the coldly distant lips of my husband.

“Luke,” I called softly. And I saw the poor little boy with the distended belly rise off the floor, shake off the tattered clothes of his orphanage, and step into the smart navy blue bush jacket and trousers that Amu had ironed yesterday. And so attired, Luke turned away from the window to face me.

“You’re back,” he noted with a smile.

“Yes,” I said, walking into his outstretched arms. The baby lay between us. I loved him dearly.

“What did you buy?” he asked indulgently, stroking my belly gently. The room was filled with sunset colors. Behind him the setting sun was deep red.

“A present,” I said, trying to look into his eyes. Into them, behind them.

He raised an eyebrow. His slanting eyes were curious. “Well, where is it?”

I waddled outside and returned with a long, narrow box. He tore open the plain green wrapper, lifted the lid, looked inside, and glanced up with a merry query.

“Now why would I want a walking stick?” he asked, lifting the cane out.

“A cane, a very long time ago, was an occasion to show one’s rings off. This one is made of snakewood and the head of ivory,” I explained with mock reproach.

“Mmm, it’s exquisite,” he said, examining the fine details on the small ivory terrier head. “Where did you get it?” he asked, running his fingers over the wood so dark that it looked as if it had been soaking in snake blood for centuries.

“It’s a secret,” I said, hoping to sound as mysterious as he so often did.

He stood on his ice island and laughed. “I shall treasure it forever.”

And I loved him even as I felt the distance between us growing.

That night I dreamed that Mr. Vellapan, our family doctor, came to visit. He sat outside in my summer house with me. It was hot, and he had taken off his shoes.

“Is it very bad?” I asked.

“It’s not good news, I’m afraid,” he said.

“How bad is it?”

He shook his head. “You won’t make it through the weekend,” he answered sadly.

“What?” said I. “Won’t I even have a chance to say good-bye to everyone?”

“No,” he said, and I woke up. Luke was fast asleep. I snuggled close to his hard body and lay awake for a long time, listening to his breathing. There was so much I still didn’t know about him. He was not mine. What are you hiding from me, Luke?

I admit I stood outside the door for the express purpose of eavesdropping. It was the Whispering God who urged me on. Maybe I shouldn’t have, for I shall never be happy again. Happiness I know now to be the sole preserve of the ignorant, the simple, those who can’t see or choose not to see that life, that all of life, is full of sorrows. Behind every kind word is a bad thought. On a bed upstairs love lies dying.

“What did you eat?” he asked into the phone. Not flirtatious, not even particularly loving, but I knew instantly.
He has a lover.

The thought slammed into my brain so fast and with such impact that I actually reeled. Blood rushed into my head, and the passage outside Luke’s study spun in dizzy, laughing circles.
He has another
. But it was only yesterday that he was in love with me. It is true that love is heartless and has to fly from heart to heart.

Fool. Crazy, stupid fool. Did you think that
you
could hold him?

A man like him.

“Okay, see you at nine then,” he said before I heard the click of a line disconnected. He had sounded neither tender nor voluptuous, as I knew he could be, but he was going to meet her the next day at nine. Nine. When he was supposed to be at a directors’ meeting.

I felt the baby kick. Hard.

My knees gave way, and I collapsed to the ground. A small sound escaped my lips, but he didn’t hear. He was already on another phone call, his voice clipped and professional. “Buy the idiot off,” he ordered coldly as I squatted, destroyed, outside his door. Then panic hit me. I had to get out of the passage. Outside his door I became cold with paranoia. I felt certain that he would open his door at any minute. I began to crawl away on my hands and knees.

The servants. They must never see me like this. He had a lover. My hands were trembling. I felt faint. I had been warned. A leopard never changes its spots. Who was she? What did she look like? How old? How long had this been going on? I crawled clumsily, my head reeling. I didn’t want Amu to see me like that.

I made it up the stairs, clinging desperately to the banister. I hated myself and hated the horrible thing inside me that made me so repulsive. So ugly. No wonder even my own mother hated me with such unexplained ferocity. Then a small thought arrived by late train. What if I had made a mistake? Hope poured through my veins like little bubbles that don’t kill. They fizzed like Coca Cola in my blood.
What if I had made a mistake
? I sat on the bed heavily. The stitch in my belly was gone, and my heartbeat slowed. I looked up, and he was standing in the room.