The Rice Mother (61 page)

“Sometimes I saw him with red-rimmed eyes where the poor laborers gathered to drink cheap liquor made from rice, coconut palm, or even weeds. Once he stumbled past me on the street, muttering to himself. He had not recognized me. I looked at the pathetic creature swaying back to his dirty little room, and I felt not one bit of remorse. You see, I had become hard and cold. Nothing touched me. Not even my own unhappiness.

“Then one day your mother, Dimple, came to see me. She had taken a bus, got off at the wrong stop, and walked all the way to my little terrace house in the burning afternoon sun. I looked at her, red-faced and clutching a plastic bag with her little tape recorder inside it. ‘Tell me your side of the story,’ she said.

“Nobody had ever asked for my side of the story. Nobody had ever asked me why I didn’t love my saintly mother-in-law. So I told her. I said, I hated her grandmother because of all people she was the only person who really knew what it was like to be married to a man who disgusted you with his stupidity, his blindness, his ambling gait, and his stubborn ignorance. She was the only one who should have understood, and yet she married me to him. It was because she didn’t care about me at all. It was all a delicate, beautifully acted pretense. In the end she only loved her own flesh and blood.

“As soon as I poured all my smothered, cramped thoughts into Dimple’s whirling machine, they suddenly became unimportant. Layer upon layer of hate on what? ‘So what,’ my heart cried, as it soared free out of my body. What is this terrible hate that I have carried around with me for years? Who have I hurt with my hate but my poor blameless children and myself? I must have been mad to waste all those years carrying around such a pointless grudge. I let the hate slide away. The hate for my husband, for his mother, for Lakshmnan’s wife, and my dreadful cynical contempt for everybody.

“Suddenly I saw my untasted love again in your mother ’s little face. Lakshmnan became a person once again. Time slipped back. The past called, and I set back the clock. I still loved him. I suppose I always will. Failed desire is never the end of it but its guaranteed perpetuator. I sat down with her to have a cup of tea, and it was as if I was talking to Lakshmnan. It was the strangest thing ever. After I said good-bye to her, I closed the door, leaned back against it, and laughed until I got a stitch in my stomach. Yes, I have to thank her. I realized my children were a part of me. When they came home that day, I held their stiff, surprised bodies close to my body and cried. Confused and frightened, they tried to comfort me, and I rediscovered them. That is what your mother did for me. She helped me find my life again. Allowed me to look again at the image of Lakshmnan. It stopped raining in my world.

“That night I opened an old box deep inside the cupboard of my soul, and I took out the picture of that colorful moment when he first put the violet piece of meat into his mouth. That moment when he looked at me to see if his look would be returned. That moment of surprise and creeping desire. That moment when sunshine flooded the room with silvery moonlight. Now that picture lies like a treasure in my old heart, and there it will remain until the day I die. When I heard that he had died, the picture, far from fading, became brighter still. Perhaps in another life we will meet again and be the husband and wife that we were denied in this lifetime.

“Now, Nisha my dear, the reason I have told you all this is because your mother wrote to me a few days later to tell me that the tape she had used to record my story had been chewed up by her tape recorder. She said she would be coming back for the story again, but she never did. She never had much say in what she could and couldn’t do in her life. Since I knew she was saving the stories for you, I thought that this was something I could do for her. I could tell you myself what was in the ripped tape.”

I
stood in the middle of the hall and looked around me with a certain amount of satisfaction. The house was completely silent. Not even the old grandfather clock ticked or bonged. One day I would repair him, but now I simply wanted to feel the house.

A team of robust women in blue had banished the thick cobwebs off the ceilings, polished the black marble floor to a high shine, put the gleam back in the curving banisters. The oil painting of Mother had returned from the restorers, a mysterious, wonderful thing of beauty. There was water in the taps and yellow light waiting in the light switches. Outside, the men had replaced the tattered hammock, dredged the pond, and released flame-colored fish into it. The weeds, painstakingly dug up, they burned at the bottom of the garden. The little summer house in the garden they strengthened and repainted in its original color, pure white.

In the kitchen, most of the old-fashioned appliances were thrown out to make way for my own more modern items—a fridge that worked, a microwave, and a perfectly good washing machine that did not meet Amu’s approval. Oh, I forgot to say I found Amu, my old childhood nurse. It wasn’t easy, but a blind man in a Ganesha temple led me to a priest in an ashram who in turn led me to an envious cousin who tried to throw me off the scent, but I retraced my steps, and finally I stood before her. Tears came into my eyes. She had fallen on bad times and was begging in a night market, surviving on red ants she picked off dead lizards and the rotten food the market traders threw away. I saw her toothless, her twig hand outstretched, her feet thick with black dirt and stinking of rubbish, and knew instantly what it was to lie inside the loving circle of her brown limbs. “Dimple,” she said in a moment of confusion.

“No, Nisha,” I said, and she began to sob uncontrollably. So I brought her home.

I was officially broke, but I didn’t care. My needs were small. Nothing seemed more important than restoring the house to its former glory. Often I walked around in awe and disbelief, just touching things. Letting my fingers trail over smooth, shiny surfaces, still amazed that I had traveled countless times along the main road, never suspecting that a left turn would lead to my own house. A remarkable house with the most wonderful treasures. I could hardly believe it was all mine. I turned yet again to look at Mother’s portrait and to meet her sad smile.

I was determined to find my relatives. Meeting Ratha had given me a taste for it. I looked in the telephone book; there was only one Bella Lakshmnan in it. I dialed the number.

“Hello,” a strident voice answered.

“Hello. My name is Nisha Steadman,” I said. A moment of silence was followed by a loud wailing that went right through my skull. I held the phone away until another voice, abrupt and strong, said, “Yes, can I help you?”

“Hello. My name is Nisha Steadman. I think you might be relatives of mine.”

“Nisha? Is that you?”

“Yes, and you are Bella with the beautiful curls, aren’t you?” I asked, half laughing.

“Oh, God, I can’t believe it. Why don’t you come over? Come now.”

I followed her directions to Petaling Jaya. The traffic was bad, and by the time I arrived, it was almost dusk. I parked the car and saw a tall woman standing like a warrior at the door, peering into the darkening day. As I began to walk toward their gate, she stepped out and started limping toward me, crying loudly. “Nisha, Nisha, is it really you? After all these years . . . but I always knew you’d remember your old Grandma Rani. Look at you. You are the image of Dimple. She was such a good daughter to me. I loved her dearly.”

She enveloped me in a bear hug and, grasping my right hand in both of hers, rained dry, leathery kisses on my hand. “Come in, come in,” she said between sobs and kisses.

A lush woman with beautiful curls well past her waist stepped out of the house. She had the supple body of a dancer, and she wore bells around her ankles. Her eyes in the dark were enormous and gleaming. Yes, this was the exotic flower of the family. As I walked closer, I saw the fine lines around her eyes. She must be at least in her forties by now.

“Hello, Nisha. Gosh, you look so uncannily like Dimple.”

“You do the peacock credit,” I said. “Ahhh, you’ve been listening to my tapes,” she laughed self-consciously, standing awkwardly to my left as my newfound grandmother monopolized the space around me and led me away into a sparsely decorated house. There was a knot of old blue sofas directly by the front door, and a few cheap paintings of Malaysian rural life on the walls. Against one wall a showcase filled with fussy little ornaments stood. Surprisingly, the dining table looked very expensive, completely out of place in their oddly decorated house.

Grandma Rani gathered together the two ends of her sari and mournfully wiped her dry eyes. “I have prayed for this day for years,” she sighed. Then, turning to her daughter, she said, “Go and make some tea for the child and bring some of that imported cake.” Returning her attention to me, she demanded, “Where are you living now?”

“At Lara,” I said.

“Oh, all by yourself?”

“No, I live with Amu.”

“Is that old hag still not dead?”

“Mom, don’t say such horrible things,” Bella admonished, shaking her head with disgust.

“So, how are you?” I asked my grandmother.

“Bad, bad, very bad.”

Oh, so no change from before, then, I wanted to say, but I didn’t. Instead I said, “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that.”

Bella left to make the tea and cut the imported cake. Grandmother Rani watched her daughter’s retreating back with narrowed, suspicious eyes. When she was sure Bella was out of earshot, she leaned forward and whispered fiercely, “She is a prostitute, you know. None of our neighbors will even speak to me because of her. Why don’t you take me to live with you at Lara? I can’t live here anymore. The whole world laughs at me.”

I looked at her glittering eyes and felt sorry for Bella. I remembered what Bella had said in the tapes about her mother.
She is a karmic acquaintance. A venomous gift from fate. A mother.
I could well imagine how the vile woman in front of me must have bullied my poor mother. Dimple was too fragile a flower for such a python of a woman. Already the python was trying to squeeze me. Every time I exhaled, she would squeeze tighter and tighter until she felt no more struggle, no more give within her strong set of muscles. Then her jaws would unlock to begin the task of swallowing me whole.

Aunty Bella leaned against the kitchen door. “Kettle’s boiling,” she informed us cheerfully.

“Listen, I remember us having ice cream in Damansara,” I said to her. “You always had crushed nuts on yours.”

“Yes, that’s right—I always have nuts on mine. Have you got all your memory back, then?”

“No, just bits and pieces, but I remember you. I remember the hair and the gorgeous, really daring clothes you wore. All the men used to stare at you.”

Grandma Rani snorted.

“You know what? Forget the tea. We’ll have ice cream instead. Like old times,” I cried impulsively.

“Deal. Damansara, then,” Bella agreed, grinning.

“Damansara,” I said.

“Are you girls planning to leave me here all alone with my swollen feet and my crippled hands? What if I fall while you’re out?” Grandma Rani cried peevishly.

“Please, Grandma Rani. I promise I won’t keep Bella long. Just sit and wait for a little while, okay?”

Bella pushed back her heavy hair. She was still a very sexy woman. “Let’s go,” she said. In the car she said, “I’m not a prostitute, you know.”

“I know that,” I said, putting the car into gear.

“It’s just Mother. She’s never been the same since she murdered my father with her tongue.”

The last tape was heard, but the story remained unfinished. From inside a drawer I reached for Rosette’s phone number.

“I have finished listening to the tapes,” I said into the receiver.

A rendezvous was agreed upon. I replaced the receiver and wandered up the curving stairs. Daddy’s oh-so-mysterious mistress was apparently available for consultation at six. Now what gifts would be acceptable for the meeting? I had promised the lady financial gain in return for information, but of course that was before I found out that I was virtually penniless. All was not lost, though. In my bedroom I unlocked a safe in the wall, and from inside the dark hole I extracted a small box encrusted with seashells. A seaside gift for a child.

I opened the box, and inside was a tangled collection of jewelry—all the pieces that Daddy had left on the little table outside my room over the years. I tipped the precious contents on the bed. It seemed a rather careless thing to do with objects of such beauty. White stones flashed as they tumbled onto my bed. Diamonds were Daddy’s favorite. He liked their undying brilliance best. Pearls were too understated, and the other stones looked too much like colored beads, but cold, hard diamonds held a special appeal for him. I untangled a small diamond choker set in white gold, the largest stone baguette-cut. I remembered Father had insured it for twenty thousand ringgit. It dangled like a many-splendored thing from my fingers. A change of address for the rope of stones looked imminent. I held it up so it swung at eye level.

“How would you like to go and live in Bangsar and encircle the pretty neck of a whore?” I whispered softly.

I dropped the choker carelessly on the bed and stuffed all the other pieces back into their shell home. Downstairs I could hear Amu talking to herself as she kneaded dough for our dinner of chapatis and dal.

Rosette’s house was easy to find. It had the same sort of fir trees outside that surrounded Lara. Obviously my faithless father had a great liking for them. When I rang the bell, black electric gates opened soundlessly. I drove in and parked in the covered porch beside a rather aged Mercedes sports car. A Chinese maid opened the door. My gaze wandered around the house, marveling at my father’s handiwork. The same marble floor, curved banisters, and huge crystal chandeliers had been installed in the whore’s home too. Father was certainly fond of the gilded palazzo look. Rosette smiled as she uncurled sinuously out of a large black-leather settee. It looked new and modern—certainly not to Daddy’s taste. She came forward with her hand outstretched.