The Rice Mother (60 page)

“I looked at the photograph, and how I wanted him, your grandfather. Yes, that’s right—the evil woman had guessed that her husband was the man of my dreams. She knew. She always knew. She knew which screws to turn.

“ ‘Give me your dowry to help Lakshmnan,’ she said. ”How could I refuse? She knew. She always knew. But what she didn’t count on was that one day her Lakshmnan might actually turn his head and look at me. She thought it amusing that a poor little rat living in her house harbored a secret passion for her husband. She thought she would torment me with her good fortune. She would rest her hand casually on his big strong chest and order him to bring her a pair of slippers from the bedroom because her arthritis didn’t allow for movement. She thought she would tease me for fun. But she didn’t count on a simple look that showed her just how tenuous her hold on him was.

“Anyway, I agreed to the marriage in principle and waited for the day of the first meeting. A week later I met my bridegroom in the flesh. Lakshmnan and my bridegroom-to-be were like day and night. I stared at that repulsive man in my aunt’s living room with confusion. I should have stopped the marriage arrangements right there and then, but the people, the relatives, the flowers, the saris, the jewelry, the ceremonies—I got lost in them, and my throat locked. I walked in a daze. I could not have your grandfather anyway, so I lost myself in work. Every day from the moment I rose until the moment I lay down exhausted, I worked. I worked all day long so I didn’t have to think about my terrible silence. The day of my marriage got closer and closer, and I fell deeper and deeper into my pit.

“Alone in bed, I cried. The man I wanted would soon be my brother-in-law. No one could know my shameful secret. How could I tell anyone? Every night I took my poor love that dared not breathe during the day and stroked it to sleep in the dark. My silence grew and grew until it was too late to speak.

“It was the wedding day. And it was a disaster. There was nothing to do with my hands, and so the tears flowed. A huge dam broke inside me, and the tears refused to stop. Such a river that my nose ring slipped and fell. All those tears, and nobody asked me what was wrong. Not one person opened their mouth to ask, ‘What’s the matter, child?’ If they had, I could have said it. I would have said it. Stopped the marriage. It was because I didn’t have a mother. It was because no one cared about me. It is a question only a mother would ask.

“And then I went to live at your great-grandmother Lakshmi’s house. She tried to be kind, but I felt that she too had helped to deceive me. Together they had all plotted to marry me to her idiot son. I felt her contempt for him. It was never said aloud, in words, but in her voice, her look, and her manner, and so subtly that not even he noticed. I saw it, but I wouldn’t let myself think of their terrible deception, and so I cooked and cleaned all day long. I never stopped. It was a relief to clean under the cooker, between the rafters, and brush my skin until it was raw and red. The way I brushed the skin on my stomach where no one ever saw. Sometimes it even blistered and bled, but there was a perverse pleasure to be gained by the pain I inflicted on myself. In the bathroom I examined the torn, angry skin with deep curiosity.

“Then came the dinner invitation from Rani. We went, and during dinner she said, ‘Stay. Go on, stay.’ She insisted. ’I could do with the company.’

“I looked at my husband, and he looked at me with doe eyes, so I nodded shyly. It was the wrong decision to make, but at that moment my foolish heart leaped and jumped at the thought that I would see Lakshmnan every day. ‘I only want to look at him,’ my errant heart whispered, to my shame. ’Don’t you see, that would be food enough,’ it pumped and sighed. It was my joy to cook and clean for him. When he sat at the table and smiled in admiration at my creations, my heart blossomed. I waited quietly for each mealtime to see him turn more and more eagerly toward the dining table. Alas, he complimented me too often.

“I know she is your grandmother, but Rani has a fistful of dust for a heart. I saw it shrivel up and go hard with hate and venom. She watched me closely, but I had nothing to be ashamed of or to hide. I was quiet, respectable, and hardworking. Then one day your grandfather brought home a piece of meat. He brought it into the kitchen and left it on the table, wrapped in an old newspaper. It was as if he had given me a bouquet of scented flowers. I wanted to laugh out loud with happiness. He had never done anything like that before. I opened the package, and it was the meat of a wild fruit bat.

“I began immediately. First I bathed the piece of meat in lemon-grass juice, then I beat it until it became a length of silk. Afterward I wrapped it in a papaya leaf so it would become tender enough to melt on his tongue, and the desire for more would haunt him after he had left my table. Hours I labored, slicing, grinding, pounding, chopping, and fanning the furnace lightly with a palm leaf so my pot would barely simmer on glowing coals. The secret was, of course, in the finely diced sour mango. Eventually my velvet-textured creation was ready.

“I set it on the table and called everyone to eat. When he put a violet piece of flesh into his mouth, I saw him unconsciously inhale. Our eyes met, and desire crept into his face. But even as he looked at me, I saw the sudden realization drop into his eyes that, just as the waves must leave the shore, his pursuit was of that that was already lost. No, it could never be. Confused, he dropped his gaze down to his food and, as if only then remembering your grandmother, abruptly looked up toward her. Rani was staring at him, her eyes dark slits in her jealous face. Slowly, deliberately, she tasted the meat that had made her husband gasp with pleasure.

“ ‘Too salty,’ she proclaimed tightly, pushing away the plate. She stood up suddenly. The chair fell back with a loud thud and she stalked off to her bedroom. In the dining room only Jeyan ate. There were no other sounds than his chewing. Blind to all the thick emotions pressing down on us, he ate. It was truly the calm before the storm, for suddenly Rani rushed back into the dining area, shrieking at the top of her voice. ’I took you into my house and fed you, and this is the gratitude I get. Get out of my house, whore! Is one brother not enough for you?’ What could I say? It was true I wanted her husband, but she had known that before she invited me to stay or took my money.

“She ranted and raved until Jeyan found us somewhere else to live, the little room over the Chinese laundry shop. It was nine o’clock at night when we climbed those creaking stairs, lit only by a dim, naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. I screamed when a rat as big as a cat ran in front of my foot. The room was tiny. It had one window and walls reduced to bare wood and planks. In some places tiny strips of unpeeled paint spoke of a room once light blue. In one corner was a wooden bed with a bare, stained mattress, and in the other was a table with three stools. Dirt grew like light gray mold everywhere. My love affair was over. It disappeared behind a veil as if ashamed. And in that tiny dark room where we had to share a bathroom with the dirtiest people you could possibly imagine, I began to hate my husband. It crept on me so gradually that at first I didn’t notice, and then suddenly I hated him. I hated lying beside him, listening to him breathing at night. I hated the children I would bear him. My hate was a solid thing inside my body. I felt it night and day. Sometimes I almost couldn’t trust myself with a knife in my hand in his presence.

“And in this way I forgot about my untasted love for his brother. I told myself that there was no such thing as a field where flowers opened every day. I convinced myself that the world was ugly—a field of heartless human hearts pulsing greedily to live. The years passed, and children fell out of my body. I looked at them and saw my husband in their eyes. And I despised that little bit of them too. That certain way they spoke or the way they ate. I tried to dig everything of him out of them, and I punished them mercilessly. I made them ashamed of the bits in them that belonged to him. How cruel my frustration and hatred made me!

“Outside our cramped room, on the telegraph wires and trees, lived hundreds of crows. The children stood at the window and stared at the rows of bodies black from beak to claw. The way they gathered themselves into organized rows of black made them seem ominous. Sometimes I had nightmares about them crashing through the windowpanes, shards of glass flying everywhere and landing on the children. They would peck at the children’s faces and gouge out bits of flesh from the screaming figures while my husband and I would sit and watch calmly. I was going mad in that room.

“Every night while my husband and children slept, I heard Maya’s voice murmur in my ear. Maya was the great-granddaughter of a chef during the golden age of the Mughal Empire, and I had grown up in her lap. Every day of my childhood I had spent begging for and eating stories of the excesses indulged in the shady court-yards and the maze of private rooms where none but family, eunuchs, and servants might enter. She whispered into my ready ears unwritten stories handed down through the generations only by word of mouth. She knew about unpublished court intrigues, volatile passions, horrible jealousies, excesses beyond compare, tales of royal incest, and instances of terrible, terrible cruelty on a scale never known before. ‘There are some things no one sees but the eunuchs and the servants,’ the childless old woman once said to me. I never realized it, but in her lap I had learned the art of exquisite cruelty. It lay inside me silently.

“It was my husband’s birthday. I awoke early. The sky was golden, and a mist still hung in the air. The children were asleep, and my husband’s hand was still on my stomach. A thought flashed into my head, Are you awake now? My poor heart. For years I had not thought about Lakshmnan; under my husband’s heavy hand and the tangled bedsheets, the thought instantly sickened me.

“Troubled, I got out of bed and, leaving my tiny room, stepped neatly over the rats that were as big as cats and stood in the cool morning air. I remembered another age—picking up Lakshmnan’s shirts from the laundry basket and rubbing them against my cheek, the musk scent of him. I wanted to touch his face. Suddenly I missed him so much that tears burned in my eyes and a strange pain lodged itself in my heart. I decided to bake a cake. I went to the provision shop down the road and carelessly spent the money I was saving for a proper house for us on icing sugar, almonds, food coloring, eggs, chocolate butter, and fine flour. At home I deposited everything on the table and got to work. It wasn’t easy to get my cake into the shape I wanted, very much like a squarish egg. In my head I knew exactly what I was doing. It was early in the morning, and the children were drawing quietly in one corner of the room.

“I hummed as I worked. The children stared at me in surprise. They hadn’t ever heard me hum ever since they were born. When the cake was baked, I trimmed off the excess bits and placed it on a clean plate. When my sugar paste was the exact dark brown, I kneaded it until it was warm and soft. Carefully I rolled all the creases out of it and, picking it up like a soft cloth, I hung it over the squarish egg shape I had baked. I cut circles the size of five-cent pieces out of onion petal and dyed them black. Onion flesh is best because it is curved and shines with the exact glimmer of a human eye. Then I moulded more colored sugar paste onto the covered egg shape exactly the way the old lady had taught me until even I was surprised by the likeness I had attained. How very like him!

“I had learned my art well. I trickled food coloring into runny honey, and I poured it around my shape. I slotted the dyed onion shapes into the blank circles in the oval of his eyes, and I made his teeth out of the white sugar, glazing it carefully to get the glossy look of teeth. I drizzled fine strands of caramel to look like eyebrows, then I cut the nostrils slightly wider and stood back to admire my handiwork. It had taken me five hours, but the finished product was much more than I imagined.

“Pleased, I put it in the middle of the table and sat down to wait for my husband. He walked through the door and, just as I had anticipated, his unsuspecting eyes leaped to my masterpiece, framed by the children and me sitting around it. Poor thing. The sight of his head resting comfortably in a sauce of blood on a large platter shocked him visibly. What a moment it was! Even the children recognized the head.

“ ‘Papa,’ they cried in their babyish voices.

“ ‘Yes, Papa,’ I agreed, exquisitely satisfied that they had recognized my work. Then I gave the knife to him. ‘Happy Birthday,’ I said, and the children chorused it.

“For a time he was so startled, he could only stare with horror at the face on the platter, its eyes wide and bulging, its mouth open with terror. It was a Mughal revenge in the best tradition. It was the first time that poor Jeyan realized that I hated him. Until then I had kept it all inside, and the knowledge that he finally knew released me. The freedom was like the smell of fresh coffee in the morning. It woke me up. My brain yawned and stretched.

“Now I could hate openly. Because he refused to take the knife from my hand, I stabbed the cake right through the nose. He didn’t touch the cake, but the children and I thoroughly enjoyed it, saving it for days. The children dipped their fingers into the gooey red blood under the head and licked it greedily. Their small fingers pushed into the soft lips, and their small milk teeth eagerly nibbled the glazed sugar teeth. The pink tongue, they pulled out and fought over. All this he watched with a hurt and unexpectedly stunned expression.

“And then one day I plucked up the courage to ask him to leave us.

“The day he left I spent on my hands and knees, bleaching his smell out of my life. It was very hard at the beginning, but we managed. Every year I worked harder and harder at my cake-making and decorating school. The children were growing up healthy and well, but they were both terrified of me. We moved to a bigger house, but I was so unhappy inside.

“My husband had become an old drunk.