The Rice Mother (52 page)

I should demand to know the reason for the shadows in my daughter’s eyes. I should confront him. It is my right, my duty as a father, but he is clever, my son-in-law. It is the yellow in his blood. Through the ages they have learned to bribe even their gods with sticky, sweet foods, so why not a headless father-in-law? He has bribed me with this big house that I live in. He has sealed my lips with the sweet cement that built this house.

Aruna sits dreamy and ghostly at the foot of my bed in her slip, eyes empty but open and mouth closed. She watches me. No doubt it is all in my mind, but I can’t set aside the idea that she lives at the foot of my bed.

U
ncle Sevenese yielded the address. At first he refused, but my begging, bruised eyes hurt him. I went to see Ramesh, the snake charmer’s second son. He had learned his father’s dangerous craft, meditated in cemeteries, and was certified to chase away unwanted spirits and sell potent charms to people for a monetary reward. Daylight saw him in a hospital attendant’s clothes, remarried with no children, and attached to a rumor that his first wife had gone mad.

I drove out to Sepang. It was a very poor area. Small wooden houses lined the road. A group of youngsters stared at my BMW with a mixture of admiration and envy. Ramesh’s house was easy to find. There was a large statue of Mariaman, the god of beer and cheroots, in the garden. A salt-dried, gaunt woman with very prominent shoulder blades came to the door when I called. She had the squashed face of a bat, only on a human being it didn’t look so adorable. She was young, though. I could see my dress and person impressed her.

“Have you come looking for him?” she asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

She bade me enter. The house was wooden and small, the furniture shabby and sparse. A fan in the ceiling whirled, but other than that, the place looked more deserted than inhabited. “Please sit,” she invited, indicating one of the chairs near the door. “I will go and get my husband.”

I smiled and she disappeared through a bead curtain. In minutes a man parted the beads and stood in the small room. He was dressed in a white T-shirt and khaki trousers. He made the room shrink into claustrophobic proportions, for he had the face of a hunting panther— hungry, very black, and exuding a dangerously male smell. The whites of his eyes were so bright, they were frightening. He smiled slightly and brought his palms to meet in the age-old Indian gesture of polite greeting.

“Namaste,” he said. Great culture flowed in his voice. It was all so unexpected, I jumped up to return the greeting. He indicated I should sit. I sat, and he prowled to the chair farthest away from me.

“What can I do for you?” he asked politely. He had not blinked. Disconcerted, I felt as if he could see through me. That he already knew what I was there for.

“I am actually the niece of Sevenese, who you used to play with when you were younger,” I explained quickly. For a fraction of a second the lithe body stiffened, and the eyes flicked as if he had received an unexpected blow. Then the moment was gone. I could have imagined it. Perhaps I had.

“Yes, I remember your uncle. He used to play with me—and my brother.”

No, I had not imagined it. I began to think that he bore a grudge toward my uncle. I should not have come. I should not have told him we were related.

But suddenly he grinned broadly. He had bad teeth. The flaw relaxed me.

“My husband has someone else. Can you help me get him back?” I blurted out.

He nodded. Once more he reminded me of that stalking panther.

“Come,” he said, springing up and leading the way through the bead curtain. Past the bead curtain, it was windowless and shadowy. He turned to his right, pushed aside a green curtain, and entered a small room choking with the smell of incense and camphor. A rambling altar grew upward from the floor, holding a large statue of a god or a demigod that I did not recognize. Small oil lamps burned in a circle around the statue. There were offerings of cooked chicken, fruit, a beer bottle, and trays of flowers at his feet. The face of the god was hideous, with a huge purple tongue, bulging eyes that stared straight ahead, and a mouth stretched into a terrible roar of anger. Red paint dripped from the gaping hole. On the floor next to the altar was a curved knife, and beside it, a human skull. In the flickering light of the oil lamps both objects gleamed dangerously. I wondered if it was the same skull that Uncle Sevenese had told me belonged to Raja.

Ramesh beckoned me to sit on the floor and followed suit. Cross-legged, he seemed far more comfortable than he had on the chair in the living room.

“She is fair, his lover, very fair,” he said. He lit another incense stick and stuck it into the soft flesh of a banana. “Does he have two deep lines running vertically down his face from his nose to his mouth?”

“Yes,” I agreed eagerly, impressed by the extraordinary power, wielded so casually without pomp or needless drama.

He poured milk into a bowl. “Your husband is not what you think he is,” he pronounced, looking at me directly in the eyes. “He has many secrets. He has the face of a man and the heart of a snake. Do not keep him. He has the power to destroy you.”

“But I love him. It is her. He changed when she came into his life,” I pleaded desperately. “He built me a summer house before she came. He sent me daffodils, knowing that I knew in the language of flowers they meant ‘forever thine.’ ”

He looked at me steadily. “You are wrong about him, but I will do as you ask.”

I felt a clutch of fear then. To disobey the panther seemed suddenly fatal. If he had persuaded me more—but his quick capitulation spoke of disenchantment. Disenchantment came only with superior knowledge.

“I will put his sickness in the milk and God will drink it.”

“Why do you say he has the heart of a snake?”

He smiled ever so slightly, sagely. “Because I know snakes, and he is after all one.”

I felt chilled to the bone with his answer. No, I would still keep Luke. He would be different when she was gone. Alexander the Great’s mother slept entwined in snakes. No harm befell her. I would keep him yet.

“Make her go,” I whispered tremulously.

“Do you want to hurt her?” he asked softly.

“No,” I said immediately. “No—just make her go away.” And then a thought came to me. If she went away, he would pine for her, and that was not what I wanted. “Wait!” I cried. The whites of his eyes floated before mine in the windowless room. “Make him stop loving her. Make him afraid of her.”

He nodded. “So be it. I’ll need some ingredients from the provision shop,” he said, getting up. The panther was swift and graceful. He looked down at me. “I shall be no more than twenty minutes. You can wait here or have a cup of tea with my wife in the kitchen.” As soon as the curtain closed over his dark figure, the room took on a sinister appearance. Shadows in the corners came alive. The skull grinned knowingly. The oil lamps flickered, and the shadows moved. I stood up and rushed through the curtain.

It was dark and cool in the corridor. I followed it and came into a bright kitchen. Everything was clean and tidy. The bat-faced woman turned from her task of scraping a coconut half to look at me.

“Your husband had to go and buy some provisions,” I explained hurriedly. “He asked me to join you for a cup of tea.”

She stood wiping her hands down her sarong and smiled. Her gums and teeth were red from chewing betel nut. Her small bat face looked quite friendly when she smiled. I leaned against the door and watched her set about making the tea. She boiled water in a pan on a gas stove.

“My uncle used to play with your husband when he was a little boy,” I volunteered to set some sort of conversation going.

She whirled around from the task of spooning tea into a large enamel mug, her round eyes bristling with the first sign of animation and curiosity I had seen.

“Really? Where was this?” she asked.

“In Kuantan. They grew up together.”

She sat down suddenly. “My husband grew up in Kuantan,” she repeated, as if I had said something unbelievable. All of a sudden tears welled up in her eyes and ran down her squashed face. I stared at her in surprise.

“Oh, I can’t take it any more. I didn’t even know that he grew up in Kuantan. He never tells me anything, and I am always in fear of him. All I know about him is that his first wife killed herself. She drank weed killer, burned her insides, and lay in agony for five days. I don’t understand what is happening to me either. I am so frightened, and . . . and look at this,” she sobbed, running to a drawer and wrenching out a black handbag. She opened it, turned it upside down, and shook it violently. All the coins and a few papers as well as her identity card and two square blue packets dropped out. She picked up the packets and thrust them toward me. “It’s rat poison,” she informed me wildly. “I carry it everywhere. One day I know I have to drink it. I just don’t know when.”

I stared at her in shock. When she first opened the door to me, she seemed a vanishing mouse, a world away from the raving lunatic confronting me. I licked my lips nervously. Her distress bothered me. Her husband bothered me too, but I wanted Luke. I would have done anything to get him back. I could wait a little longer in the company of that strangely disturbed woman to get my husband back.

There was a sound at the front of the house, and she quickly stuffed the blue packets, the coins, and the papers back into her worn handbag. It was amazing how quickly she moved. She dried her eyes, poured boiling water onto the tea leaves, and covered the mug with a lid in one fluid movement. Even before the sound of his footsteps arrived in the kitchen, she had poured condensed milk and spooned sugar into two smaller mugs. Without another word she went back to scraping the coconut halves onto a large plastic platter.

When Ramesh appeared at the doorway, she threw him a hasty glance, furtive and full of fear, before turning back to her task. I wondered what he had done to her to inspire such terror, but I did not feel that he would harm me, and if he did, I was fully prepared to suffer the consequences of my actions.

“Have your tea. I shall start my prayers alone. It is better that way.” He turned and left. The woman got up from the floor, where she had been scraping the coconut, strained the tea into two mugs, and offered me one without meeting my eyes.

“You can drink it in the living room if you like,” she offered politely. There was no longer any desperation in her voice. It was calm and neutral. The mouselike bat creature was back.

I sat in the sparsely furnished living room and drank my tea. The hot liquid calmed me and soothed my ruffled nerves. Inside me was a fear of the black deed I was about to undertake. Soon Ramesh pushed aside the beads and stood before me, a red cloth package held in his hands. Hastily I put my mug of tea on the floor and took the lumpy package with the proper respect. With both hands.

“Keep the salt inside the cloth in a bottle and scatter it under your husband’s bed daily until it is all gone. Whenever he goes out at night, take a small handful of salt, repeat the mantra I will teach you with as much force as you can muster, and then in that same firm tone order him to come home.”

He took my hand. His was cold and dry. He turned it over and studied my palm for some minutes. Then he let my hand drop and taught me my mantra.

I paid him what seemed to me to be a pitiful sum. I wanted to pay him more, but he refused. “Look at this house,” he said. “I do not need more.”

I took the salt and prepared to leave. As I was slipping into my shoes, I looked up to say good-bye and found him staring at me with a peculiar intensity. His eyes were dark and unfathomable, his face closed and unreadable. He looked like a black marble statue.

“Be strong and be careful, or he will win.”

I nodded and, clutching my red package, left as quickly as I could. The whole experience had unnerved me thoroughly. I could feel the blood rushing through my body in a great panic. I thought about calling Uncle Sevenese and telling him what had happened and then decided against it.

I stopped at a shop and bought a bunch of bananas. Then I threw the bananas by the roadside and put the red cloth and its contents into the brown paper bag. I didn’t want Amu to see the red cloth. She would suspect its potential instantly. She knows all about the revenges that spurned lovers resort to. A big part of me felt ashamed. What would Papa say if he saw me sprinkling my magic under Luke’s bed? What would Grandma say? It didn’t bear thinking about.

I watched Luke prepare to go out. He put on his gray-and-white silk shirt. He looked perfectly charming. He smiled at me and kissed the top of my head tenderly. “I won’t be late,” he said.

I know you won’t, you snake-hearted person, I thought to myself. I too had a secret now. It made me feel powerful in the face of his smooth deceit. He could look me in the eye and lie straight-faced. Well, so could I.

“Shall I wait up for you?” I asked with that special half smile. He had not seen its face for a long time and seemed surprised.

“Okay.” He nodded eagerly enough.

Maybe I had started to hate him then. I don’t know. But there was old blood on the blade of my ax, and the thought of life without him was still unbearable. I listened to the sound of his car engine dying away at the end of the driveway before I ran up the stairs, enraged, scattered the salt under his bed, and spat out the mantras coiled inside my mouth. I called him home.

In half an hour I did the same again. Angry tears ran down my face. I ordered him home.

Thirty minutes later I did it again. This time my voice had grown harsh and hateful. I ordered him home. “Come home now,” I hissed venomously.

In less than twenty minutes he was back. I listened to the purring of his Mercedes with wonder. Ramesh truly knew his stuff. This was one battle I was going to win. I wanted to laugh. The key encountered the front door.