The Rice Mother (54 page)

“Do you—”

“Shhh,” she said softly and began to kiss the waiter.

The man felt the blood begin to pound in his head. It was not pain that he felt but a strange excitement. It was such an indescribable rush that it startled him. He had stepped into a new dimension with his wife and the waiter. The waiter took off her little beaded jacket, and her skin that he had admired for so long gleamed like polished ivory in the golden light. Her small breasts strained against the waiter’s jacket. The waiter pushed her on the bed roughly. Good man. The waiter had taken his advice.
She likes it rough.
Until now the man had ignored the waiter, but now he could see a live thing writhing to get out of his trousers. This, this was the effect his wife had on men.

“Please don’t be rough. Love me gently,” she whispered.

The man in the darkness was stunned. Love me gently? What did it all mean?

Then the nightmare began. He watched in pure shock as the woman who looked remarkably like his wife and the man whom he had paid clung to each other and moved so smoothly that their entangled limbs looked as if they belonged to a well-oiled machine. Out of her gorgeous mouth didn’t come the curses, the harsh screams of passion, and the grunting animal sounds that she made when she was with him, but quiet sighs and gasps so drawn out that deep pleasure was unmistakable. And eventually when she came, she came softly, elegantly. Her body stiffened and her head arched back, offering her slender white neck like a dying swan.

“Go now,” she instructed softly.

The waiter put his trousers back on and left immediately. As soon as he left, she sat up and stretched, like a contented cat. From her handbag she extracted a cigarette. She lay back against the pillows inside the pool of golden light and smoked in silence, her face thoughtful. The watching man couldn’t move. He stood transfixed. All these years she had fooled him. None of it was real. The animal cries, those hoarse cries, “Harder, faster, deeper!” All of it was fake.

In the silence it came to him that for some time now she had been slowly moving money and property into her family. Money was being transferred to her uncouth, dishonest brother, many times to her avaricious mother, and once even to her sister. She probably even had a secret account for herself. He stood trembling with fury. The bitch. The fucking bitch. She was planning to leave him.

He forgot that it was he who had engineered the encounter with the waiter and that it was supposed to be his new foray into depravity. So she didn’t really enjoy watching her skin redden with pain. She didn’t like it rough. He had forgotten that he had hinted, gestured, and tutored her slowly, subtly, to pant and scream, “Harder, faster, deeper!” He wanted to punish, and at that moment he knew how to.

He would destroy her.

She was grinding out her cigarette. His legs unlocked and he moved through the connecting door and closed it gently. Silently. Presently he heard the sound of the toilet flushing, paper rustling, and a tap being turned on.

The door closed.

A thought flashed into his head. He wanted to see it all again. He wanted to be sure that he had seen it correctly. He wanted to see her naked and gasping under the waiter. It was so unbelievable, her reaction, that it was like a dream. Surely it had not happened! Dear God, she was his wife of six years now. It seemed impossible that he had never seen this side of her. Yes, he wanted to do it all again. He must be sure that he had not imagined it.

That’s what he told himself, but he knew the truth was that he just wanted to see her again with another. The really shocking truth was that he had enjoyed it. He had given his own blood and experienced an exquisite joy. He was not a learned man, but even he recognized what had happened. Man has no real defense for the pain that he suffers. The only thing that comes remotely close to defense is to transform torture into pleasure. It was the basic dough that baked into a masochist. His eyes became flints in his face. It was her fault that he had gone down this thorny path. He was not even ready to accept the sadist in himself; the masochist could go take a flying fuck. He didn’t want to continue down the terrible path. No way. No, he would not repeat the experiment; he would simply make her destitute, her and her entire family. He walked quickly across the room, closing the door behind him. He ran down the stairs and out of the front door.

You know, the hardest part had been sitting on the bed without my jeweled box jacket, calmly smoking a cigarette. Making sure my hands didn’t shake, knowing that he was in the next room watching. And thinking, “Oh God, please let him be so disgusted that he divorces me.”

I had seen him come back toward the house while I stared out of the window, but when the waiter slid up to me shaking with nerves, I knew. I didn’t even need to see Luke slip up the stairs like a nasty shadow. I let the waiter into my body, but everything else was the best performance of a lifetime. I always wanted to be an actress. Now I know I should have been one. I fooled him. I felt his eyes devour me, burn into me. I destroyed the purity that he so cherished. Sullied things sicken him. His best possession ruined right before his eyes. I wanted him to get rid of me.

After that I wanted to shower, to wash away the smell of the waiter. My hands were dirty. My body soiled. But I couldn’t. His filth would always be my shame. I came down the stairs, and the waiter was gone. After a while Luke sent the driver for me.

He was waiting for me in my room. A gasp of shock swam out from somewhere deep inside me to see him lounging on my bed like a dark fate awaiting me on my clean white sheets. I schooled the confusion inside me.

“Hello, darling. Was it a nice party?” he asked silkily. His voice was different. He was toying with me. A new sort of game.

“It was all right. I thought you might already be in bed,” I said weakly.

“I am in bed.”

I laughed nervously and walked to my dressing table. I knew I must not show my confusion. Act natural. I had taken my shoes off, and my feet were soundless on the cold marble floor. I put my beaded purse on the dressing table and switched on a small light by the mirror. He stared at my brilliantly studded jacket. Remembering. I must have looked to him in the yellow light like a jewel box of secrets. His. His jewel box. I saw a change in him. He realized with a flash that he couldn’t really let me go.

“Come here,” he said in a voice like a whiplash. It was the stranger inside him. Luke was gone. I shivered. But he had seen me with another! Why was he behaving like this? Where was the coldly angry stranger who should have turned me out mercilessly, clutching in my destitute hands my little Nisha? He clasped my trembling hand and brought it up to his lips. The stranger’s shadowed eyes watched mine. Caught, I stared back helplessly. How could he have wanted to see me, the mother of his daughter, sordid and arching beneath another’s body? To spy on me thus, unobserved? His unblinking eyes said he must punish me as only he knew how to. And now he knew I didn’t like it rough after all.

“Your hand smells different, dirty,” he whispered.

I snatched my hand away from his and began to walk away.

“Dance for me, my darling.”

“I’m a bit tired tonight. I think I’ll just shower and go straight to bed,” I said. My voice sounded squeaky. I licked my dry lips and, panther quick, he had leaped off the bed, grabbed me by the arm, and thrown me forcefully on the bed. I bounced slightly. For a few seconds I was too shocked to respond. I simply stared up at him with huge frightened eyes.

“Too tired to dance? How about something a little different then, my fussy pussy,” he purred nastily. From his hard lips I saw a creature, shadowy and terrible, plunge toward me. I recognized it. Pain. I felt the dark shape enter my body like a shiver. Inside me it will stay, devouring and malignant, and only when I am hollow and bitter with gall will it fly out of me and straight into the one dearest and closest to me. Nisha. Oh, God, what have I done?

That night, there was pain like never before. When I opened my mouth to protest, to scream, he clamped his hand over it.

“Don’t. You’ll wake the child,” he advised coldly.

It is true that your mind can float out and hover over you when it can no longer endure what is happening to your body. It floats above, looking down quite dispassionately, and thinks of mundane things like a drop of sweat gathering on your abuser’s forehead, or if the trash cans have been put out for the garbage collectors. When he was finished, Luke left me with an expression of disgust on his face; the experience as distasteful to him as it had been to me. He knew that in his blood now ran a different fascination. Not to bed me but to watch me bedded by a paid stranger. To see me humiliated thus excited him. I had helped him discover an ugly perversion in himself. And now I was to pay for soiling myself, for soiling him.

During the months that followed, he tried everything to turn his attention away from this new perversity. But nothing worked. Even his lover with the carefree smile and all the techniques they must teach a golden girl could do nothing to abate the new passion. So he had me followed. Perhaps I had a lover. Perhaps he could re-create the party trick. Strange men with speculative smiles and slightly contemptuous eyes started approaching me at parties and in hotel lobbies. I did not turn around to see his greedy eyes; instead I smiled so coldly at them that they understood instantly that never, never, never would I willingly let them into me.

Then one night I came into my bedroom and saw all the paraphernalia of an opium smoker arranged neatly on the table. I let my hands slide over a fabulous antique ivory pipe carved with the most intricate elephants. I held up the cup and admired the oil lamp painted black and patterned with silver and copper flowers. It was my birthday. I was twenty-five years old, and that was Luke’s present to me. Nothing but the best for Dimple. He knew that I knew how those things worked. Uncle Sevenese had long since disrobed the world of opium for me. I knew exactly how the skeletal old Chinese men toasted opium on the lips of the oil lamp before shaking it and inhaling the fragrant fumes. I examined a small plastic bag of opium, speculating where Luke might have got the aromatic brown stuff from. I understood the gift. He wanted me to destroy myself slowly. And why not? Didn’t poppies symbolize release from all pain? Had not Emperor Shah Jehan mixed opium in his wine to enjoy its divine ecstasies? I walked away from my beautifully crafted birthday present. In the black sky outside the moon had waned into an upward-curving yellow smile.

Opium promised magnificent dreams. I thought of Nisha, and the wind blew into the bamboo grove. It sighed and whispered. “No, don’t,” it said. “Never,” I agreed, but my hands were lighting the oil lamp and preparing a swab of raw opium over the glass funnel. Fragrant blue smoke rose from the pipe and flooded the room. Yes, yes, I know. Thomas De Quincey had warned me too, but it was impossible not to succumb to beautiful dreams. Tell me how could I say no to music like perfume and living a hundred years in one night—even if it all ended with the horror of thousands of years in stone coffins, crawling through sewers, and cancerous kisses from crocodiles. After all, what else was left but dreams?

It is not a dream.

Grandma’s dead. I still couldn’t really believe it.

Her small house was swarming with people. They sat, leaned against walls, talked in hushed voices, and sang tuneless devotional songs in old, broken voices. I never knew that Grandma knew so many people. I suppose they must have been her temple cronies. Nobody was crying except Aunty Lalita. Even I didn’t cry. All my tears were locked away somewhere where even I couldn’t find them. I knew I had made a terrible mess of my life and wished I was going with Grandma. It was only Nisha who held me back. I felt her holding on by her little fingernails. They were like small blades in my flesh, but everyday the sky outside is a little grayer and the opium a little sweeter. No, I did not think of the blue smoke at the funeral. It would have been a terrible insult to succumb in that last time with Grandma. If she could have heard my thoughts, her spirit would mourn for my poor, wasted life.

Papa dashed about, doing as much as he could to help, but when he met my eyes, he came to sit beside me. He folded his long limbs under him.

“I was her favorite, you know,” he said, looking out of the door at the place where the huge rambutan tree used to stand. Grandma’s new neighbors had had it cut down when they saw the cracks in the cement drains around their homes, fearing that the roots of the tree were breaking through the foundations of their houses.

“Yes, she told me many times.”

“I wasn’t a good son, but I loved her. We suffered together during the Japanese time.”

I looked at him carefully. Poor Papa, how flawed his perception. Not only hadn’t he been a good son; he had been a terrible son. He broke her heart and behaved exactly like the enemy the fortune-teller in the green tent had predicted he would become. Grandma had borne him like a rock in the face of the sea’s angry waves. But it really was too late, and there was no longer any point in correcting him.

“We suffered together during the war,” he continued. “I hid her jewels in the coconut tree. I was the only one brave enough to climb right to the top. Nobody else but I would do it for her. I was the man of the house. She turned to me for everything, and I never let her down. I woke before everybody else to take the milk to the tea vendors. I tilled the land and took the
ragi
to the millers. I did it all for her. It was right that she loved me the best.”

He took off his glasses and wiped his eyes. Darling, tortured Papa. The carefully handpicked selection of memories had undone him. He stood up suddenly and strode outside into the bright sunlight in the backyard. All of our lives twisted and ugly. When Papa smiled, he had a dimple in his chin. I hadn’t seen it for years. I saw Papa pass Nash without a word. My brother and father hold equal contempt for each other. Outside I could see Papa talking to Aunty Lalita. He wanted to wash the clothes that were soaking in a big red tub.