The Rice Mother (64 page)

The sales girl popped her head into the cubicle. “Wah, so nice legs, ahhh.” I said nothing. “Very sexy, lah,” she insisted.

I was surprised to find my lifelong hatred of red and black muted into nothing more than slight disapproval at the shortness of the skirt.

“Sneakers no good, lah,” the girl commented, taking out a pair of black sandals that tied at the ankles. I put my jeans and T-shirt into a plastic bag held out by the girl, paid for the dress and the shoes, and left the boutique. Walking fast along the shops, I stared at my own reflection with surprise. I looked tall and elegant. In fact unrecognizable. Though I had hated red, red loved me. It brought out the best in my coloring and promised a long and happy acquaintance.

Red and black was in fact a superb combination.

Watching Amu in the hammock one day, I decided to try my hand at writing. Some days I wrote in my mother’s white summer house, and sometimes I wrote in her room, but always the fierce spirits that lived inside Mother’s box came to me. They whispered things into my ear, and I wrote as fast as they spoke. Sometimes they sounded angry, sometimes they were happy, and sometimes they were full of regret. I listened to their sadness, and I knew that my mother had collected their grief because she knew that someday her daughter would gain her freedom from them. Night seemed to fly in faster and faster. By the time I lifted my head, it was dark outside, Amu was already lighting the prayer lamp downstairs, and the faithful blackamoor boys were offering flickering flames of light.

“Come to eat,” Amu would call.

Then came the day I wrote the last page. I leaned back in the darkening room, and something made me reach for the tape my mother had found in Great-Uncle Sevenese’s room after his death. I put it into the machine and clicked Play.

“Rogue that I am, I whispered that into your ears, and today you have brought me a magnum of Japanese sake. I tease you about a secret lover, and you blush a dull red. No, it is not a lover you have. It is a thorn in your breast. You will not tell me the nature of the thorn. Dear, dear Dimple, you are my favorite niece and always have been, but it hurts to love such a tragically sad and misguided creature. I have studied your charts, and in your house of marriage sits the serpent Rahu. I have warned you before about the man you married. I do not trust him. He wears his smile like his clothes, easily and carelessly. I have studied his charts too, and I do not like what I see.

“He will be an adder at your breast.

“Did I ever tell you about the adder in Raja’s chest? About three months after Mohini died, Raja died of a lethal snakebite. His own beautiful cobra bit him. I always remember him like a marvelous hero from an ancient world who thought to keep a huge, glistening cobra as a rat catcher. In the moonlight, his bronze body gleaming in the tall grass, all his secrets came alive. I can never forget that moment when he said, ‘Watch me,’ and approached that swaying black menace to stroke it as if it were but a plaything. Do you remember his answer to my question, ’Is a snake-charmer ever bitten by his own snakes?’

“ ‘Yes,’ he said. ’When he wants to be bitten.’

“I often think that inside me is a mirror image of me. A reckless, unwise fellow who does everything I am afraid to do. I have lived with him for many years, and he tells me his ferocious older brother lives in your husband. I wonder if you have ever seen him lurking inside. Perhaps you haven’t. They are cunning bastards. When I am shouting No, No, No, he is shouting On, On, On, with cruel glee in his eyes. When the cock crows outside and I turn away to go home, he is the one who winks down the cleavage of the woman at the bar and drawls, I think, very unwisely, ‘Would you waste those sweet domes, unused?’

“I wake up in the bright light of the morning with only an indented pillow beside me, my toes sticky with marmalade, a jumbled, impossibly squalid memory, and the grateful thought: Thank God I left my wallet at Reception. Once or twice when I push away my glass and resolve groggily, ‘Enough,’ he lights another cigarette, raises his hand, and orders another whiskey. ’Straight,’ he tells the bartender. And then he leads me into the back alleyway, where even the taxi drivers will not go. A young girl will pull herself away from the wall she has been leaning on and run her forefinger down my face. She knows me. She knows me from the last time.

“In Thailand you can buy anything. It is easy, and I have bought a lot of things in my lifetime. As you are my niece, and as I am not yet drunk, it is neither proper nor necessary to speak of them all, but I must tell you that pure heroin is one of them. I sat on the bed in my hotel room and considered the syringe, the needle, and the brown liquid inside. I examined myself minutely. Was it another experience I could add to my memorabilia of strangeness or a habit that will turn master? I have never said no to anything before, but heroin is the devil’s machine. You walk into it and come out at the other end altered beyond recognition. My God, I would come out of the machine gaunt, muddy-complexioned, vomit-splattered, and wild-eyed. I have seen them by the railway stations; their eyes in their unwashed, shrunken faces blank of all but the unquenchable thirst for another score. Was that to be my fate?

“I hesitated, but in the end I can be counted upon only to be weak. The prospect of stagnant waste was not equal to my compulsion for a new experience, for self-destruction. I tied my upper arm with a belt, and then I looked for and easily found a thick green vein in my arm. Health inspectors know the best places to look for them. I let the needle slide into my skin and closed my eyes. The heat was instantaneous, followed immediately by a peaceful rush such as I have never known before. Life’s troubles were indeed meaningless. I let myself fall into the abyss. I fell and I fell, and I would have fallen deeper but for the face that floated before me. Kutub Minar, my long-dead beloved cat, stared expressionlessly into my eyes. The only female I ever loved with all my heart. Perhaps she is the only one I ever came across with a warm body and cold lips. Now . . . if I had found such a woman I would have abandoned myself to her the way an alpha male baboon stretches out eagerly, patiently, on the ground, his limbs limp with remembered pleasure, and waits to be groomed by the female.

“The cat mewed pitifully, as if in pain. My limbs, leaden with the drug, slept on. Suddenly Mohini appeared. I stared, astonished. Since the day she died, I had only heard her voice but had never seen her. She stood in front of me, as solid and as real as the bed I was lying on. Tears shimmered in her green eyes. I felt a strange pain, the pain of loss. I couldn’t rid myself of their images. I felt shame wash over me.

“When she reached out and put her hand on my head, I felt the warmth of her skin. Was I dead? I thought I might be, so I tried to move my head slightly, and her hovering hand slipped onto my face, her hand soft against my cheeks. I felt a heavy weight on my chest. I looked into my dead sister’s eyes. I had forgotten how green they were. Suddenly she smiled, and I heard a tremendous rushing sound, as if I were standing too close to the edge of a railway track while an express train was passing through.

“The weight on my chest lifted. Suddenly she was gone. Outside it was already dark. I heard the sounds of the food stalls in the street below coming alive. The scraping of plates and the rough, uneducated voices of the stallkeepers. The honest smell of cheap ingredients—garlic, onions, and bits of meat sizzling in lard—floated up through my open window. I felt hungry. The bloody syringe was still in my arm. I pulled it out and looked at the dark blood curiously. I would never repeat the experience. Mohini had made sure of that.

“Balzac said, ‘An uncle is a gay dog by nature.’ I am a clown dancing on the edge of an abyss, and yet I tell you this now, though, like me, you will not listen: Don’t walk into the machine, for you will come out at the other end altered beyond help.

“Don’t do it, Dimple.

“I walk into the doctor’s surgery, and he says, ‘What? Are you still alive?’ He cannot believe that such an abused body survives. But you won’t survive the machine. Leave him. Leave the adder in his jungle. Leave the child in the jungle, for surely the adder will not hurt its own child. Nisha has good charts. She will do fine things with her life. Save your fragile self now, darling Dimple. I see bad things in your charts, and at night the demons send me dreams finely drizzled with blood. I am once more seven years old and hiding behind the bushes watching Ah Kow’s mother slaughtering a pig. The panic, the screams of terror, the spurting fountain of blood, and that unforgettable reek. In my dreams you are walking in a rain of blood. I shout, and you turn and smile fearlessly, your teeth red with blood. I fear for your future. It is drawn in blood. Leave, Dimple.

“Leave. Please leave.”

Sevenese’s voice ended, and only the sound of the tape whirling remained.

Downstairs I heard Amu finishing her night prayers, ringing her little bell. I closed my eyes. In the red shadows of my eyelids I see Great-Uncle Sevenese sitting in the middle of a desert, bare-chested and wearing a white
veshti.
The desert night has painted him gleaming blue. The sand shimmers, but here and there lie dead birds, their tiny, open beaks and throats holding miniature sandstorms. He turns to me and smiles. His smile is familiar. “Look,” he says, sweeping his arms out to the sky. “It is the desert night’s one conceit, the zillions of stars that decorate her raven hair. Isn’t it the most splendid thing you ever saw?”

I opened my eyes to a room full of dusk, and suddenly knew. I knew what my Great-Uncle Sevenese had desperately tried to write for my tormented mother on his deathbed. I knew what the unfinished message was. Stretched on a hospital bed, horribly bloated and voiceless in his dying world, he wanted to say,
Flowers grow beneath her feet, but she is not dead at all. The years have not diminished the Rice Mother. I see her, fierce and magical. Stop despairing and call to her, and you will see, she will come bearing a rainbow of dreams.

Outside the wind rustled the indigo leaves, and at the bottom of the garden, the old bamboo grove burst into song.