The Hungry Ghosts

by Shyam Selvadurai

  She tried to concentrate on her breathing, but soon the irritation this man had kindled flared through her with a greater intensity. Out of rebellion and spite, she opened her eyes, glanced at her neighbour, and despised the smug look on his face, the sweat that beaded his forehead. Typical white man, she thought with bitterness, so brash and cocky, always thinking they were better than anyone else. It wasn’t enough she had to put up with their nonsense at work, now she had to deal with them on her off time too. The nerve, thinking she didn’t know the first thing about Buddhism. She was from a Buddhist country! She looked around at the other people, and their meek expressions disgusted her. They looked like cud-chewing cows. Slights she had experienced in Canada, her anger at me, her humiliations at the law firm where she worked, the indignities she faced at the doughnut shop, fed into her anger at this man and the congregation, sweeping her up in a spiral of rage. Wisps of past wrongs, half thoughts, all those retorts she wished she had uttered but been too abashed to express, spun her faster and faster. By the time the bell finally tinkled, my mother was exhausted.

  The sermon that day was on something called “The Four Limitless Qualities: Loving-Kindness, Compassion, Joyfulness and Equanimity.” The bhikshuni went on to talk about the enemies of these qualities: attachment and hatred being the enemies of loving-kindness; pity, foolish compassion and cruelty the enemies of compassion; overstimulation and jealousy the enemies of joyfulness; indifference and self-righteous bigotry the enemies of equanimity. The measured tone of the bhikshuni tightened my mother’s anger until she wanted to get up and yell at the woman to speak with greater animation.

  Once the sermon was over, the acolyte tinkled her bell to announce a tea break, after which the bhikshuni would take questions. My mother stood up, grabbed her coat from the chair back and shoved her arms into the sleeves.

  “But you’re leaving already?” her neighbour asked.

  His gaping disappointment nearly choked her. “I have to pick up a child,” she murmured, and with a tight smile she wrestled her way past the people in her row towards the door.

  Soon she had left the centre behind. As she bustled along a quiet street, coat pulled tight about her, arms crossed, feeling humiliated as if she had made a public spectacle of herself, she silently cried, “Why did I submit to such foolishness?” But then, as she neared her house, she found herself chuckling at how over-the-top her anger was, how completely out of proportion to anything that had been done to her at the Buddhist centre. “Oh, Hema,” she laughed, “you fool, you poor fool.” And somehow her words, her laughter, momentarily released the distress she had been suffering since my departure.

  I had by now taken a sublet I found advertised in the Georgia Straight. A few days after I moved into the apartment, I called home during the day while my mother was at work and left my phone number on the machine. She rang that evening. When I answered, she was silent for a moment. “Shivan, this is Amma. How are you?” Her flat tone surprised me. I had expected some harsh accusation, or at least a note of anxiety in her greeting.

  “I am fine, thank you.”

  “Good, that is good to hear. Have you found any employment?”

  “Yes. Temporary work at an office.”

  “Good, that is good.”

  Then we were silent again.

  When my mother spoke next, her voice was resonant with emotion. “Shivan, do you think I didn’t know about all those afternoons you had to endure, sitting in your aachi’s room? Son, do you actually think I didn’t know about them? But what could I do? I was so helpless. After that one time I opposed her, I knew she would throw us out if I did it again. You think I didn’t agonize that I sacrificed you so we could live there? I hated myself for it, but what choice did I have, Shivan, what choice?”

  “I don’t care about the past,” I replied, my voice hushed and cold. “Let me get on with my life. I don’t want this rehashing.”

  “Yes, yes,” my mother said hastily, taken aback at her outpouring, “let’s not dwell on all that. Tell me, is it much warmer there than here? Do the trees still have leaves?”

  After my mother got off the phone, she heated a can of tomato soup, peeled back the cover of a sardine tin and put slices of white bread in the toaster. This was how she ate now, having given up any proper cooking after my departure. She sat at the dining table turned sideways in her seat as if perched at a food court counter. “Enough, enough,” she murmured to herself as she slurped soup with a new charge of energy. But enough of what she could not name, until she was at the kitchen sink, washing up. She’d had enough of the past’s grip on her. It was time to take her failures and bend them to something better. She would return to Sri Lanka and her mother. It was the only path that would save her son.

  The flight my mother, Hema, took to Sri Lanka a week later arrived, like most international flights do, in the early hours before dawn. On the way into Colombo, the taxi driver complained about how difficult it was to get petrol now that the JVP had called for a work stoppage at the refinery, which none of the workers dared disobey. People had to line up for hours to get fuel, paying exorbitant prices. The poor suffered most, struggling to find kerosene for cooking and lamps. There were food shortages, and shops had to close for weeks when ordered. The intent of the JVP, whom the driver referred to by their popular name, “the little government,” was to make it so difficult for the poor they would rise up in revolt against the ruling classes.

  Halfway to Colombo, they saw flashing red lights ahead on the dark road. A policeman waved his torch for them to stop and soldiers materialized out of the gloom and surrounded the car. The officer indicated for my mother and the driver to lower their windows. As he checked her ID, my mother asked what had happened. The JVP had cut down a tree so it fell across the road, bringing down a power pylon and transformer with it. They could wait until it was cleared or take an alternative route. The officer did not grill my mother, despite her Tamil surname. There were greater threats at the moment than the Tigers. “You have returned to Sri Lanka at a bad time, madam,” he told her, as he handed back the ID. “These dogs are ruining our country. They are punishing and killing our families and friends because we are in the security forces. But for every one of us or our kin that die, we will take twenty of them.”

  By the time she arrived at her mother’s home, the sky had lightened and a mist was lifting off the road. The garden walls were slick with dew, the gate dripping. She stood outside without ringing the bell, sure her mother did not know of this visit and was probably still asleep. Rosalind had been awaiting her arrival on the verandah. As the ayah lumbered towards the gate, followed by a grandnephew who had come recently to help, my mother found herself thinking of the last time she had stood at this gate eighteen years ago, newly widowed, not knowing how she was to make a life for herself or her children, the future massive and swollen in its impossibility. All she had been able to do was move in a bewildered fumbling fashion to the next thing, and then the next thing.

  Rosalind limped because of a recent back problem and the short walk tired her. She stood panting at the gate. As the grandnephew undid the padlock and drew back the bolts, the two women did not take their eyes off each other. Yet when the gate was no longer between them, they did not embrace. The grandnephew, Saman, took the suitcases and my mother and Rosalind followed him. As they went up the driveway, she marvelled at the knee-length grass, the blotched decay of flowers and browning leaves, the hedge tangled with creepers, the flower beds choked with a bilious green weed, the stone bench layered with slime.

  “But how did it get so ragged?” she murmured in awe. “Is it not possible to hire a new gardener?”

  “No one will come for the money Loku Nona will offer, baba.”

  They were at the house now and, because my grandmother was asleep, went around the side. My mother, as if walking among the ruins of a great civilization, took in the walls discoloured with mould and dirt, the cracks and holes in the kabook that would have to be repaire
d before the next rains, the rotting eaves and missing roof tiles.

  The kitchen, at least, had been kept up, and Rosalind’s herbs were healthy in their pots. When my mother was on the back verandah, she said to her ayah, “She doesn’t know I’ve come?”

  Rosalind nodded.

  Taking off her shoes, my mother entered the house.

  Though the saleya was dim in the morning light, she could see a brownish-green mould in a corner of the ceiling, its tentacles reaching in all directions. One of the doorway curtains was ripped, a windowpane cracked. The dilapidation outside had built up a great weight in her and now these final mortifications of her old home overwhelmed my mother. The task before her seemed impossible. She longed for Toronto, her little house, her sparse routine. “The next thing, Hema,” she murmured to herself, “do the next thing, and then the next thing.”

  She went to her mother’s room and stood outside it, the ceiling fan fluttering the doorway curtain against her shins. She nudged the drapes and stepped inside.

  Her mother slept on her back, head turned towards the door, breath coming in quivering rasps, stirring the grey wisps plastered to her cheeks. With her loose hair about the pillow, she looked both girlish and ancient at the same time.

  My mother’s intent stare pierced my grandmother’s sleep. She opened her eyes, contemplated her daughter, seemed to accept her presence as if part of a dream and turned away.

  “Amma, it is I.”

  After a moment, my grandmother rolled over slowly, gazed at her, then closed her eyes, lips pressed together. She was still for a very long time. Finally, she sighed with a great tiredness and searched her daughter’s face for some answer. Whatever she found did not bring her comfort. “Where is that Rosalind with my bed-tea?” She spoke as if she needed the fortification, the calmness, of her ritual, before facing this new ordeal. She reached for a bell by the bed and rang it. This bell was new; she had always counted on the strength of her voice to summon the ayah in the past. The bell was also a dismissal of her daughter.

  As my mother left the room, my grandmother reached over and turned on the radio. The gentle drone of monks chanting pirith followed my mother as she crossed the saleya. When she was in her old room, she sat on the bed, mouth agape with exhaustion. Finally she leaned forward, chin cupped in hand.

  “I’m sorry, baba,” said Rosalind, who had followed her into the room after giving my grandmother her tea.

  “Well, it’s only the first day. She will adjust to my being here.”

  Rosalind did not reply. For the first time in all the years my mother had known her, there was bitterness in the ayah’s face, and she was disheartened by this lack of comfort from the woman who had always bolstered her. Perhaps what she wished for was unattainable. Her failure with her mother had endured for too long, as it had with her children. To reverse it now was likely impossible.

  “What a terrible country we live in, baba,” Rosalind said into their silence. “A country that gobbles up its own young.” And now she told my mother that recently, in Ratnapura, her ancestral town, three university students, suspected of being JVP activists, had been picked up at a bus stop by security men under directions from the provincial chief minister. The security men, along with the minister’s son, had taken the students to an estate, cut off their genitals, broken their hands and feet, then burnt them. A post-mortem revealed that nails had been driven into their heads while they were still alive. This was why her grandnephew had been sent here, so he would be safe from such things.

  “He is a bright student, in his first year of university,” Rosalind added, nodding to acknowledge my mother’s horror, “but it’s too dangerous, baba, too dangerous. Better to be uneducated than dead.” She sighed. “This movement is supposed to benefit us poor, but as always, we pay the price.”

  Later that day, while my mother sat on the back verandah eating lunch, her old ayah told her all she knew and had surmised about what happened during my last visit. She referred to my homosexuality as “the baba’s strangeness.”

  When Rosalind was done, my mother asked, “Does that one come around anymore?” She used the derogatory “araya” to refer to him, and Rosalind knew exactly who she meant.

  “No, he seems to have disappeared from our lives.” She used the even more derogatory “oong.”

  “What about the flats?”

  The ayah shrugged. “You must ask your Sunil Maama.”

  When my mother met with her uncle that afternoon in his office, she listened, her face neutral, as he told her that keeping up my grandmother’s properties was occupying too much of his time, and that my grandmother had become almost impossible to deal with.

  “Then we must start to sell them.”

  Sunil Maama laughed briefly in disbelief. “Daya will never allow that.”

  My mother shrugged. “She must. She will.” She stretched out her arms and examined her hands. “And what about the flats? We need to ask that thug of hers if he will buy us out. Shall I go and see him?”

  For a moment Sunil Maama was silent looking out the window, waiting for the weight of all that had happened to settle. “There is no need, Hema. I will deal with it. But you will not get Daya to agree.”

  In the car going home, anger bloomed within my mother, fuelled by her impotence to change anything. By the time she got home, she was electric with rage and stormed across the saleya to her mother’s room. She pulled back the curtain and went inside. My grandmother was propped up in bed, reading.

  My mother stood at the foot of the bed and gripped the rail. “I have been to see Sunil Maama. You must start to divest yourself of your properties. All of it must go. Particularly the flats. I have told him to contact that one and sell our share.”

  My grandmother examined her, that appraisal again. “Sunil does not have the power to do that. Neither do you.”

  “Then you must give it to me. I want, I demand, power of attorney.”

  My grandmother made a humph of dismissal at this ridiculous request. She went back to her reading, and now my mother saw what she was studying: one of those pious Buddhist tracts that temples sold.

  To turn each page, my grandmother had to lay the booklet on her lap, flip the page with her good hand, then pick up the volume again. She noticed my mother was watching this and said, even as she kept her eyes on the page, “What ill luck you and your children have brought me. I wish I had never let you into my life.” When my mother did not reply, she tossed down the tract, not caring if she lost her place, and thrust out her left arm, hand stiff like a claw. “You cannot do anything that will reverse this,” she cried, her voice cracking. “I am only sixty-five and already a cripple. Tell me, what can you do that will give me back the use of my beloved hand?”

  My mother gazed at that discarded Buddhist booklet. It, more than anything, symbolized the terrible place her mother was in. She backed out the room and quietly drew the curtain into place.

  If my mother had been her old self, she might have given up now, accepted that this return had been in vain, that its central mission to save her son would never succeed, because my grandmother was so wounded she would never admit she had done wrong. But Canada had wrenched some new self out of my mother. She could not name this change, but she could see dimly its markers—those awful early temporary jobs, her attempted suicide, the years of rage, her children’s departures, even the visit to that centre and her recent simpler diet.

  That evening, my mother went into the garden. Rosalind’s grandnephew followed, bewildered at the sight of this nona dressed in track pants and the gardener’s old wellingtons, hoe in gloved hand. Rosalind came to watch, too. My mother crouched down and began to tear at the bile-green weeds that choked the flower beds. Saman stood leaning on a spade, gawping at her, until Rosalind gently smacked the side of his head. “Bolo, what is wrong with you? Can’t you see our nona is working?”

  Soon, between them, they had ripped out all the weeds. My mother set Saman to cut the grass, but seeing
how inexpertly he wielded the scythe, she said to Rosalind, “Find me a gardener, any gardener, and I will pay the price he asks.”

  In the cool hours of the next morning, my mother returned to her flower beds, helped by Saman and a new itinerant gardener who did many homes on the street. She gave herself over to the task with gratitude, lost herself in uncovering the old beds, nursing back the flowers. At one point, drawn by a sense of being watched, she looked towards the front verandah. After staring into its dimness, she made out my grandmother seated in her old planter’s chair. My mother returned to her work elated. “I am carried along,” she murmured joyfully, “just carried along.”

  After lunch that day, she went to her mother’s doorway, stood before the curtain and called out, “Amma?”

  “Yes?” my grandmother answered peevishly.

  She was lying down and struggled to sit up as her daughter entered, but she could not support herself and collapsed back on the pillow. My mother went to the bed without calling for Rosalind or Saman, who usually propped her up. “Now, let us try again, Amma,” she murmured. She slipped her hands under my grandmother’s arms and dragged her up into a sitting position. The effort caused both women to pant, and once my grandmother was settled, they stared at each other, breathing raggedly.

  My mother went to stand at the foot of the bed, then changed her mind and sat beside her.

  “Amma …” She made to take my grandmother’s hand, and there was a jumble of gestures as my grandmother offered it and my mother withdrew her own hastily, feeling she had gone too far. “Amma,” she continued, resting her hand inches from her mother’s on the coverlet, “I want to ask your old baas and his golayas to come and fix the ceiling, the roof and the outside walls.”