The Rice Mother (56 page)

B
rought to this uneasy landscape of sharply protruding bones and sunken flesh by a ravenous disease, I no longer dare shut my eyes. Day and night I watch the door feverishly. In this cold hospital room where butter-colored tubes sprout sadly from my wasted arms and ride into blinking machines, I know Death will come to collect me. Soon. My breathing is hollow and loud in the silent room. Invisible hands have begun to pack me in a waxy yellow material. Ready for my journey.

I turn my head to look at my daughter. She sits by my bedside on a black and chrome chair like a small mouse. But if she is a mouse, it is surely my work. I have turned Dimple’s beautiful child into a meek, inconsequential person. It is a cruel thing that I have done, but in my defense, it was never my intention to hurt. Nor was it easy. It took many years and many lies to accomplish. She sits, innocent of my horrible deceit. If she knew, she would hate me. She leans forward to clasp my stiff, clawed hand. The poor child’s hand is freezing.

“Nisha,” my dry mouth murmurs. Faintly. The end is here.

Dutifully she moves closer. So close that she inhales the reek of decaying flesh. The rot within wags a long black finger—One day you too, it warns my drab mouse. I hear her gasp.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, the words struggling out painfully. There is so little left of me.

“Why?” she cries, for she knows nothing of the past. An “accident” and a convenient amnesia attack sixteen years ago is responsible. I’m afraid I rather took advantage of it and set about re-creating her world for her. Feathered it with comforting lies. Decided she must never know the tragic truth. Never see the blood on my hand.

In her face I see Dimple’s eyes, but the girl lacks her mother’s glamour. Oh, the regret, the regret. I have done them both wrong, but I will right it today. I will give her the key. Let her meet my terrible secret, that hunched, deformed shape clinging relentlessly around my neck. Yes, the one I have so carefully sheltered and fed for sixteen years. The key that locked away my darling Dimple’s dream trail.

It must be said, I loved my poor wife badly.

There is a soft pain in my chest, and the breath catches in my throat. Nisha looks at me with sudden fear. She runs out of the room, her heels loud on the polished floors, to look for a doctor, a nurse, an orderly, someone, anyone at all who can help. . . .

T
here was no peace in the open mouth and the staring eyes when I returned with a nurse. He died as he had lived. I gazed astonished, uncomprehending that the smoldering coals in the narrow slits of his face could so easily be extinguished into lifeless marbles, dense and black. Like the black marble floor that stretches endlessly in my nightmares. So highly polished that a child’s face reflects back, a small face twisted with terror and shock. No doubt another fragment of an old memory, one missed by the memory-eating snake that has devoured my childhood. It winds and drips like mercury inside my dreams and whispers, “Trust me. They are safest in the dark of my belly.”

I sank down slowly beside my still father, and in a small mirror on the wall I stared at myself blankly. The blood of many races has infused my face with its mysterious eyes, high cheekbones, and a small neat mouth that appears almost sorry to be sharing the same space as my exotic eyes. The mouth knew what the men didn’t, that the provocation in the half-closed lids disguises an invitation to heartbreak. I have broken many hearts without meaning to. Without knowing.

In the lap of my brown dress my pampered hands mumbled that they had never done a day’s work in twenty-four years. I looked at the key I had prised out of Daddy’s tightly clenched fist. Could it be used to set free the memory pieces inside the greedy snake? Give them back their voices so they might explain silly little things like why a dripping tap should terrify me so. Or why the combination of red and black chokes me with inexplicable fear. I left my father’s corpse without a backward glance.

Lena, my father’s servant, let me into his house. Up the long, curving stairs I ran, bursting into the sparse coolness of his dull room. For a moment I froze in the shadows. I could smell Daddy. He had not been in that room for weeks, and yet like a lost ghost his smell lingered helplessly on. I crossed the room, fitted the key into a door inside his dressing room, and turned it.

The small, walk-in cupboard stored the thick, gray-white dust of many years. Its shelves were bare but for a startled rusty brown baby spider and an old cardboard box that claimed in green block letters to have once housed twelve bottles of French chardonnay.

“STORE THIS WAY UP” said the tired red arrow that had been pointing downward for God knows how many years. Old duct tape gave way easily, and a cloud of white dust like a pleasing mountain mist rose up.

All my life. All my life I had searched and not found. I opened the box.

A box full of cassettes. A box full of secrets.

On the inside cover of a yellowing collection of Omar Khayyám’s poems small, childish handwriting proclaimed it the private property of Dimple Lakshmnan. Who the hell was Dimple Lakshmnan? Startled silverfish peered up from their dinner of black ink and old paper.

I rummaged though the cassettes. Each one had been carefully numbered and named—LAKSHMI, ANNA, LALITA, SEVENESE, JEYAN, BELLA . . . I wondered who all these people were.

Downstairs, the phone rang. I heard Lena gasp loudly. Obviously the hospital.

“I’m sorry,” he had said so cryptically on the threshold of death.

“Don’t be sorry, Daddy,” I murmured softly. “There was never anything I yearned for more than knowing the secrets that lurked in your cold eyes.”

“I
’m so sorry, Nisha,” a woman whispered very close to my ears, I patting my hand sympathetically. I did not know her, but she must have been a friend of Daddy’s if she saw fit to attend his funeral. I watched her move away in a suitably funereal black-and-gray dress and felt quite numb.

I longed to leave. To return to my flat and liberate the voices trapped in the tapes. But dutiful daughters were expected to remain at least until the body had left the house. Father certainly knew a lot of people, for the whole house was crammed with flowers that didn’t smell. There was even a massive arrangement from a prominent Indonesian minister. How strange that he should send my father flowers. Daddy hadn’t approved of him. Too obvious, he said. He preferred his corruption subtle.

I noticed that there was not a single kangaroo’s paw in sight. It was strange, the feeling of déjà vu that had flowed over me when I first laid eyes on it. I thought it strangely familiar and very beautiful. Thin and black with the slightest tinge of tender green, as if unaware that it was its very blackness that excited the intense horticultural attention and wonder.

Like me. Unaware for too many years that my special attraction had lain in the unattainable curve of my cheek as I slept with my face turned away in the dark. Lying next to me, the men who came into my life all appeared to become obsessed with the mystery that lay so tantalizingly within reach and yet unconquered. They were gripped by the same fever, the need to possess me, to go where others had not gone . . . well, at least at the beginning.

At the beginning they all came into my life rich with hope and glowing with expectation. To have actually ensnared the daughter of Luke Steadman! The possibilities seemed endless. The money, the power, the connections . . . but in the end they left exasperated, frustrated by the knowledge that in the dark space between them and me was a terrifying gorge of unknown depth.

“Why,” shouted one of the more memorable ones in bitter amazement from the edge of the chasm, “do I kiss you, suck you, and fuck you, and you behave as if you’ve just licked a stamp?”

Of course an apology only made it worse. Perhaps an explanation . . .

“I can’t help it if my eyes that have been claimed so many years ago by despair have the same expression when I am licking a stamp as when you are fucking me. You have mastered your technique,” I said.

“It is not you. It is I,” I soothed gently. Saved their pride. It is a precious thing, pride, a man’s pride.

“It is I,” I insisted mistily, my long, slightly Oriental eyes pleading for understanding. “You see, I lost myself when I was seven years old. It was exactly like walking along on a zebra crossing and stepping off a white strip onto a perfectly innocent-looking black strip and suddenly tripping, falling. Disappearing into a limitless black hole with only the stars for company. And when one day I climbed out of that hole, I found myself on a white bed in a white room without my memories.”

At that point I had to stop, for they looked at me as if I had concocted the whole zebra-crossing story to mollify them. So I never got to tell them about the stranger with the narrow eyes and the worried expression who I found staring down at me in that white room. I looked at him, and he gazed back at me with a flicker of unease. I was afraid of him. He had distant, cold eyes.

He called me Nisha and claimed he was my father, though he didn’t try to touch me or hug me. Perhaps that only happened in Hollywood movies, all that frantic kissing and hugging between fathers and daughters. Actually it has occurred to me that my father didn’t even seem particularly happy that I had climbed out of the black hole with only the stars for company. I was left with the insolent impression that he was relieved I couldn’t remember anything.

Sometimes I think I should have told the hopeful men that my father almost never touched me. In fact, no one was allowed to touch me. I grew up lonely in the company of servants. Perhaps then they would have understood about the unbridgeable chasm in the bed.

If I had not looked into the mirror that day on the white bed in the white room and seen, looking back at me, the same narrow eyes that he wore in his strained face, I would not have believed that I belonged to him. How could he have breathed life into me when his breath was so cold? His eyes so distant. Yet he told me he loved me and furnished my lonely life with the best of everything. For he was rich, very rich, and important. And powerful.

I stayed in the white room for a few more days, and then he gently led me into a big car and drove me to a very big house. Inside the house it was very cold. I shivered, and he turned the air-conditioning down and showed me to a strange, pink room that I was certain I had never seen before.

“This is your room.” His black eyes stared closely at me.

I looked around the little girl’s room, where everything looked and smelled new. The clothes that hung in the wardrobe still had tags. In the bottom of the wardrobe expensive shoes with bright bows sparkled gaily without the dishonor of scuff marks on their pristine heels.

“Do you remember anything?” he asked carefully. Not hopefully, but carefully.

I shook my head. So vigorously that it hurt. There was still a red scar where I had hit my head when I had fallen through the hole in the zebra crossing.

“Don’t I have a mother?” I asked timidly, for I was afraid of the stranger.

“No,” he replied, sadly, I thought, but I could have been wrong. I was only a child then. I didn’t know about daddies who pretend. He showed me a small picture. The lady in it had sorrowing eyes. Eyes that made me feel lonely.

“Mama died at childbirth,” he said. “The poor soul hemorrhaged to death.”

So it was my fault that the sad woman in the picture had died. I wished then that I had my mother’s eyes. But I had his. Cold and distant. I wanted to cry, but not in front of the stranger. As soon as he left, I allowed myself to fall on the strange new bed. And cry.

I asked my father many times about those lost years, but the more details he described, the more convinced I became that he was lying. There was a secret he was hiding from me. A secret so dreadful that he had invented a whole new past for me. Now I wanted those lost years back. Their absence has ruined my life. I knew the voices in the tapes were full of secrets. That is why my father hid them all those years ago.

I looked around at all the beautiful arrangements without any kangaroo’s paws in them. Perhaps they are too expensive to waste on funeral wreaths. I suppose they are for the homes of the rich and famous. My father was a very rich man, but he had hated kangaroo’s paws. Hated them with a passion. The way I hate the colors black and red together. For some reason the beautiful black petals made him sweat with nerves. It was interesting, watching him pretend that the curly, spidery flowers didn’t affect him. The first time I put some into a flower arrangement, he stared at them as if I had curled an assortment of hissing snakes around each black stalk.

“Are you all right, Dad?”

“Yes, yes, of course. Just a bit tired today.” He had looked at me then. Carefully. As if it was I who hid something hideous. As if it was I who had bought a whole new wardrobe of clothes for him, painted his room a sweet, unrecognizable pink, and told him a whole box of lies. I watched him with interest. I never knew him, my daddy. He never touched me. He never even came close enough for me to touch him. I didn’t know his secrets. And he had many. Inside his cold, narrow eyes they burned like a funeral pyre.

“Did you remember something today?” he asked abruptly.

I stared at him with growing surprise. “No. Why?”

“Nothing. I was just curious,” he lied with his politician’s smile. Dishonest Daddy.

My eyes moved to a woman who had just walked in. She wore her grief with tragic splendor, from head to toe in shades of black. Like a talented Japanese designer. She was startlingly beautiful. I had never seen her before. The woman’s lips were too red. They made my fingers clench slightly.

Black and red. Black and red. How they colored the nightmares that tormented me! The woman looked across Daddy’s sitting room to where the coffin lay raised above the ground on a long, low table. Nestled in cool satin, yellow and still, he waited for us to feed him to the starving beast in the crematorium.