The Hungry Ghosts

by Shyam Selvadurai

  My sister raised her eyebrows, more to herself than me, then continued in a hushed, faster way. “ ‘I was delighted to hear about your summer job in the lawyer’s office. I am hoping this means you are thinking of law as a possibility? I am also hoping, Puthey, that the friend whose lawyer father got you that job is a boy. Females you must be careful of.’ ”

  My sister stopped reading and put the letter on the desk. She gave me a small sympathetic smile. “I really miss all those women at Kantha, Shivan, I really do miss them.” She sighed. “I wish we had never come here.”

  Towards the end of that summer, my sister and I were on the subway when we ran into Otara, an old classmate of Renu’s in Colombo. The women had barely known each other in school, Otara being the kind of rich, snobbish, vacuous girl Renu detested. But from the way they shrieked in recognition across the carriage, rushed to meet and grappled in an embrace, I could tell they had both been looking for a friend. Otara, it turned out, was at York University too. Renu’s cries of astonishment over the coincidence were high with relief.

  When the new semester began, my sister joined York’s Sri Lankan Students’ Union. Otara was secretary, and her fiancé, Jaya, was president. There were enough such students at York by now to form a union, so great was the exodus after the 1983 riots—not just Tamils but Sinhalese and Muslims as well, who saw no future for their children in the country. There was also a Tamil Students’ Society, its members Tiger supporters and believers in the independent state of Eelam. Otara and the union looked down on the society. Soon Renu, too, was chiming in with comments such as, “Eee, instead of fighting for Eelam, they should fight to promote deodorant among their members,” or, “Eee, hasn’t anyone told those Yalpanam types that coconut hair oil stinks.”

  Renu, Jaya and Otara presided at the union table on Thursdays in Central Square. I avoided the table if I was passing through the square, knowing that Renu would signal me over frantically, then give me a sisterly ribbing.

  Jaya and Otara were a comical couple. He was tall and gangly with a wide floppy mouth and small close-cropped head that reminded me of a pencil eraser. Otara, barely five feet and plump, wore large hair bows, short frilly skirts, leggings and little pink boots in the girly style made fashionable by Madonna. She was convinced Jaya was having affairs, and any interaction he had with a white woman brought on a storm. Once, when the union members were at Jaya’s house, she was discovered rifling through his drawers for condoms.

  Jaya had a car and gave Renu and me lifts home. On one occasion I walked into our meeting place, the Vanier Common Room, to find Otara on a sofa, sobbing into her handkerchief, short plump legs, which did not reach the floor, pumping. Soon voices from the corridor drew nearer and Renu bustled in, lips thin with worry, a desperate Jaya in tow.

  “Oh, Otara,” Renu cried, rushing forward, arms outstretched, “forgive, forgive. He didn’t mean it about leaving you. I’ve talked to him.” These histrionics happened often between the couple, with Renu acting as mediator.

  Otara sobbed with renewed vigour. She threw her chubby arms around Renu and clung to her while Jaya stood by, arms stiff, fingers splayed as if it took all his willpower not to run from the room.

  Renu got Otara to promise she’d not be suspicious of her fiancé, then sent the couple to make up in the corridor.

  The moment they were gone I demanded, “Why do you hang out with these ridiculous types? What do you get from all this breaking up, making up?”

  “Someone has to help them,” Renu replied, as if such matters were beyond my understanding.

  “Why? It seems they’d be better off without each other.”

  “It’s the Sri Lankan way to help friends in trouble. You have forgotten that?”

  My anger was really at the change in my sister. She, who had once lectured me on staying away from the community, was now embroiled in friendships with Sri Lankans she wouldn’t have tolerated in our country.

  Our home became the rendezvous for union members, even though Jaya’s parents, being doctors, had an enormous house. When I came home in the afternoon or early evening, I would often find the gang lolling about our living room or seated at the dining table playing poker for small change. On seeing me, they would call, “Shivan, come, machan, sit with us,” or, “Shivan, why didn’t you come with us to the film last Saturday?”

  “You are so exclusive, Shivan,” Renu would always say with a sisterly pout. “Even I never see you anymore. What do you do with yourself?”

  This was her cue for the rest of them to cry, “Clarice!” My secret girlfriend they had invented.

  “Ah-ah,” they would tease me, “putting it to Clarice, were you?” “How is your lovely Clarice today?” “Ah-ah, I think I saw you in the Scott Library with your darling Clarice.”

  I’d storm downstairs, hoots of mirth following me. As they returned to their game, their boisterous pleasure would drift down to me, a fire at which I could not warm myself.

  Later, after the gang had left, Renu would come down to talk under the pretext of doing laundry. She’d stand, dirty-clothes basket nestled on her hip, looking at me with long-faced commiseration. “What to do, Shivan? Sri Lanka is a conservative society and it is not going to improve. We must be careful for Amma’s sake. If people found out she had a gay son, it would ruin her position in the community.”

  “You’re homophobic, you’re homophobic,” I would cry, my voice breaking with anguish.

  The mothers of union members soon became friends or good acquaintances too, through their children. My mother, like her new friends, made puddings, cutlets and patties for birthdays or weddings, went with other women to shop for fabric, helped sew curtains, bed skirts, sari borders and blouses, crocheted blankets and pillowcases for expectant mothers, took an aged parent to a doctor’s appointment or tended a sick friend. She was often away on weekends, and if she needed an extra pair of hands, Renu went with her.

  We were frequently invited to birthday parties, anniversaries and other social occasions. I never enjoyed these events, but despite my protests I went to all of them, drawn by the chance to at least stand at the periphery of vivid lives.

  Otara’s and Jaya’s mothers, Aunty Poones and Aunty Vasanthi, were the leaders of this maternal coterie. Both were from Tamil Cinnamon Gardens families, and Aunty Vasanthi was a doctor. They wore large diamond mukkuthis that clung to their right nostrils like hard-carapaced parasites, golden ropes of thalis around their necks and a jumble of bangles that clattered with the weight of the best gold. They had the sartorial habit of taking their sari palu in a cowl behind their neck, trailing its end down their chest—the effect like that of the thick garlands worn by campaigning politicians.

  The two women had a cloyingly sweet way of talking to people they felt beneath them, and this was the tone they used with my mother, who was humble and abashed in their presence, grateful for their patronage.

  Otara and Jaya had yet to be formally betrothed. Their mothers began to plan an engagement party, with matching saris for the bridesmaids-to-be and an elaborate dinner in a banquet hall.

  One Saturday when I was not working, my mother wheedled me into going with her women friends to carry bags while they shopped for saris on Gerrard Street. I agreed in my usual aggrieved way, but I didn’t mind going; it was a chance to be involved in some activity, to feel warm and included, to be called “thambi” or “mahan” by these women.

  When Aunty Vasanthi’s minivan pulled up in our driveway, it was crowded with the women corralled into helping. They clucked and twittered, saying, “My, you have brought your boy.” “How very sweet of him to give up his Saturday morning.” “Now, let us squeeze over and give Shivan-thambi some room.” I was put in the back seat.

  As Aunty Vasanthi drove off, she said in her sugary sweet tone, “My, how good your boy is, Hema, coming along to help us old women.”

  “Yes,” my mother replied, “I have never had a day’s trouble with him.”

  The women turned to n
od at me approvingly. “He is a very fine boy,” Aunty Poones pronounced. “I am a good judge of character.”

  “Oh, yes,” my mother agreed, forgetting her humble manner and growing boastful, “he is very obedient, Poones. Most boys these days, aiyo, you know, alcohol, drugs, loose living.”

  They tisked in agreement. I stared out of the window with a fixed smile, wishing my mother would stop.

  “Now, what are you studying, mahan?” a woman asked. “I have forgotten.”

  Before I could reply, my mother declared, “English literature.”

  “Oh.”

  By this they were less impressed.

  “But that is good,” my mother enthused. “Why, with an English degree you can become a teacher in this country, nah? Seventy thousand you end up making.”

  “Really? My, how different from Sri Lanka.”

  I had gone back up in their esteem.

  “Girlfriends and such things?” Aunty Poones demanded.

  “Of course not, Poones,” my mother replied, appalled. “Chee, chee, he has no time for such nonsense.”

  “Ah, very good, very good,” they murmured, appraising me with even higher esteem.

  “One has to be careful,” Aunty Vasanthi said with the sigh of experience. “White women are always after our men, you know. Where will they find husbands like our boys?”

  “Also excellent in his studies,” my mother added. “The professors love him.”

  “And your mother, Hema, how is her health?” another woman asked.

  “Fortunately no problem there, but she is getting old.”

  “And how are your attempts progressing to get her over here?”

  “Aiyo, I have tried and tried,” my mother said, careful to avoid my astonished stare.

  “But you must not give in so easily,” Aunty Vasanthi cried, and from the way the other women nodded, I could tell this was a well-travelled subject. “Ask her to come for a holiday. Once she is here, she will like it. Particularly if she comes in the summer.”

  “She will not even consider a short visit,” my mother sighed. “These old people, they can be so stubborn, so fixed in their ways.” Another sigh. “After all, who will look after her when she is too feeble to take care of herself, nah?”

  I finally caught my mother’s eye and she looked trapped for a moment, her doleful expression slipping before her glance skittered away.

  “Don’t give in, Hema. Insist that it is your turn to look after her. A way to repay her kindness and love when your beloved husband died. My! All the affection she poured on you and your children, paying to send them to the best schools. She will be rewarded in her next life for that.”

  “Yes,” my mother said with less enthusiasm, aware of my stare.

  “Aiyo,” one of them said, “widowhood is such a trial, as I well know.”

  “And you were widowed so young, Hema.” The women clucked in sympathy and my mother looked pious.

  “What a tragedy for you. To lose such a loving husband and father, such a wonderful provider.”

  When we were finally on Gerrard Street, my mother pressed some money into my hand and said bossily, “That Poones and Vasanthi like to look in all the shops before they decide to buy anything. Go treat yourself to samosas and faluda. We won’t need you for a while.”

  What was commonly referred to by South Asians as Gerrard Street was in reality the few blocks of that road devoted to Indian stores. Since it was a nice fall weekend, the pavements were crowded, and odorous with the smells of frying chickpea dough, incense and fumes from cruising cars.

  I squeezed by women who stood in front of sidewalk racks crammed with gaudy salwar kameezes and saris, which they held up for inspection with the contempt that was always the first step in fierce bargaining. Outside a couple of restaurants, waiters were barbequing corn marinated in lime and chili powder.

  After I had found a restaurant and bought my samosas and faluda, I sat at the counter in the front window, food untouched, wretchedly surveying the large families who strolled in the sunlight—the men chewing on paan as they wheeled prams, children licking kulfi popsicles, mothers gobbling chaat from tubs, shoving spoonfuls at husbands and children. A group of Sikh teenagers, their topknots tied in colourful cloths, skimmed and ducked through the crowds on roller skates. They were followed by boys on tricycles, dressed up in waistcoats, shorts and ruffled shirts. Little girls skipped to keep up with the band, ribbons and sparkling barrettes in their hair, shiny bindis on foreheads.

  In all the years we had lived in Sri Lanka my mother had borne the burden of her widowhood with dignity and never lied to friends about her marriage or the enmity that divided her and my grandmother. But here in Toronto, her life had taken on an edge of desperation. It occurred to me that it had been there for quite a while, without me noticing.

  What had driven my mother to reinvent herself, she told me many years later, was a realization that came to her, not in a flash, but slowly—revealing itself the way the persistent lap of waves gradually wears down the surface of a rock to expose glittering mica beneath.

  In that initial year, as my mother sat at temporary desks in temporary offices—so alike she could not tell them apart, looking down, sometimes in surprise, at the work she was doing, thinking she was still engaged in a job she had done somewhere else—first inklings of the realization began to reveal themselves. As she stuffed envelopes, photocopied, collated, filed, typed lists and letters, as she stared dazedly at other immigrant temps in their own worlds, as she looked out from upper floors at the sinister grids of suburban industrial parks with their crouched buildings on tarred lots, as she sat in lunch rooms listening to permanent workers discuss office politics, as she shambled around malls on her breaks, gazing at all the things in the window displays she could not afford to buy, the realization grew clearer until she finally understood that she had repeated her own history. She had tried to escape her mother and ended up in a worse place.

  My mother began to feel a choked longing for her job at the newspaper with its excitement of deadlines, the journalists and their eccentric habits, that pleasure she always felt on Friday evening when the galleys of the women’s section she edited would be spread out before her by a peon. Then, pulling her desk lamp close, she would lean forward to pore over the pages, filled with satisfaction. She missed her friends, too, the holidays in their country homes, the other single women at work with whom she saw an occasional film or play, followed by dinner at the Flower Drum Restaurant, where they’d feast on crab claws in ginger sauce, battered prawns in chunky pineapple and capsicum gravy.

  When my mother lay in bed late at night, unable to sleep, she would think about how it was now morning in Sri Lanka. Her old ayah would be making kola kanda porridge or was crushing spices under the miris gala or chatting to the fish seller, who had come with his fresh catch.

  Her participation in the Sri Lankan expatriate community, this reinvention, was a rope that kept her from sliding into despair.

  A few days after that trip to Gerrard Street, I returned from university to find Aunty Vasanthi’s minivan parked in our driveway, ponderous in the evening gloom. The front door of the house was unlocked.

  She and Aunty Poones were seated at our dining table, Otara between them, her face numb with misery. My mother was at the head of the table. Her bewildered eyes hardly registered my arrival.

  Seeing the anger on the aunties’ faces, and Otara’s desolation, I knew why they were here and was surprised I had not figured it out before.

  My mother stretched her arms forward on the table, hands clasped tightly together. “If what you say is true, then my daughter is not the only one to blame. Jaya is responsible too.”

  “He is a man,” Aunty Vasanthi declared. “My son, like most men—”

  My mother tightened her lips contemptuously. She and Aunty Vasanthi locked gazes, then my mother narrowed her eyes and looked away. “Jaya is equally to blame. His being a man has nothing to do with it at all.”


  Aunty Vasanthi was about to retort, but Aunty Poones touched her wrist. “The thing is, Hema, you know, my daughter and Jaya are not just boyfriend-girlfriend. We are allowing them to date because we are in Canada, but it is an arrangement. The dowry has been settled. Properties in Colombo have been written in each other’s names.”

  “They are to be engaged in a few weeks,” Aunty Vasanthi cried plaintively.

  After a moment, my mother turned her locked fingers, stretching her arms out. “I will talk to my daughter. She will break this off.”

  The women rose to their feet. Aunty Vasanthi strode to the front door as Aunty Poones took Otara by the elbow and helped her up.

  “Thank you, Hema.” Aunty Poones kissed my mother’s cheek. “These are just youthful indiscretions. Let it not come between us, here in a foreign land, where there are so few of us.” She patted Otara on the shoulder. “Everything will pass.”

  When they had left, my mother moved to the kitchen and continued with her cooking. I stayed in the basement as long as I could, but eventually I had to come up and begin my chore of laying the table.

  Soon there was a clattering of keys outside and we heard Renu exclaim in annoyance when she locked, rather than unlocked, the door. She came into the hallway and began removing her shoes. My mother went to stand beside me at the dining table.

  “Renu!”

  “Yes, Amma?”

  “Get in here.”

  My sister came slowly into the dining room. Her eyes widened when she saw us. Then her face became hard and expressionless.

  “Where have you been?” my mother demanded.

  “Out with Otara and Jaya.”

  “The thing is, Renu, Otara was just here a few minutes ago. With her mother and Aunty Vasanthi.”

  A look passed between Renu and me. She put her hands in her coat pockets as if searching for something. “I’m going upstairs.”