The Hungry Ghosts

by Shyam Selvadurai

  My grandmother’s knee twitched in surprise. “You will not know how to deal with them. I must come or they will take advantage of you.”

  “Don’t worry, Amma.” My mother took her hand. “Aren’t I your daughter? Haven’t I learnt a thing or two?”

  “Well,” she said crossly, even as she hesitantly squeezed her daughter’s hand, “don’t agree to a price immediately, they will try to cheat you.”

  My mother arranged for the men to come, then told my grandmother the cost. “Aiyo, you are bankrupting me,” she cried, shaking her head. Yet my mother could tell she had got a fair enough price from those baases.

  While the men worked, my grandmother stayed in her room, and if my mother looked in, she shut her eyes and pretended to be asleep.

  The workers were done in a few days, and when they needed to be paid, my mother went to see her mother. “If you cannot afford it, Amma, I will settle the bill myself,” she said, as she sat beside her.

  “Why can’t I afford it?” my grandmother demanded with the weariness of someone speaking to the stupid. “Do you think I have frittered away my fortune in the last few months?”

  Because my mother knew how much it would please her, she asked the baases to come and get the money from their old patron. They stood at the foot of the bed, and my grandmother hectored them about cheating her daughter. Did they think, now she was sick, they could take advantage and ruin her financially?

  They had worked for my grandmother for a long time and were used to her ways, so they took this dressing-down with equanimity. Besides, she always paid them immediately, which was not often their experience. They were moved to see her state and thanked her gently when at last she thrust the money at them.

  After they left, my grandmother said, as if her daughter had fallen short, “But there is still so much to do. And you are only here for a few more days.”

  My mother smiled. “Yes, Amma, there is a lot to do. But I can’t get everything done on this one trip. Things will have to wait until I come back.”

  “Problems don’t wait like that,” my grandmother grumbled, trying to hide her relief that my mother planned to return. “Everything just falls to pieces in this hot, damp weather. See what just a few months of neglect has done to the house.”

  And so in this way, my mother took over running the house. She got the inside and outside painted, the caned seats on various chairs redone. She went out to my grandmother’s properties and inspected them, taking along the same baas to each one so they could catalogue all the work that needed doing. She would not, however, visit the flats to inspect their progress. An accidental meeting with Chandralal would lead to a confrontation, and her rage would fracture all she was working towards for her son.

  The day before her departure, my mother, Hema, said to her mother, as they had their breakfast together in her bedroom, “Amma, I would like you to dress nicely tomorrow morning. I want to take your photograph on the verandah before I go.”

  “But why do you want a photograph, duva?” my grandmother complained. “Take any old one of me out of an album. I don’t wish to be remembered as I am now.”

  My mother didn’t say anything. She spread butter and Marmite on a piece of toast from the tray in her lap. This was the moment she had been building towards since she took over fixing the house. “Please just oblige me, Amma,” she said softly. “It is one mother asking another for a favour.”

  My grandmother stared at her and there was a struggle in her face. Then she plucked at the ribbon on the yoke of her nightdress, no longer meeting her daughter’s gaze. “I wish that Jayasinghe boy had never come into our lives, otherwise none of this would have happened. From the day he entered our house he brought with him his bad karma, and it ruined our lives. There is nothing to be done about all that now. It is the workings of fate.”

  My mother put her head in her hands.

  “But no matter bad karma. I know now that I brought some very good karma from a previous life to this one. Yes-yes, I must have done something of great merit in a past existence to get a daughter like you, duva. Like rain soaking a parched land you are to me, like rain on parched land.”

  My grandmother’s voice rang poignantly hollow to my mother, these words poor compensation for what their speaker could not find in herself to do. My mother finished buttering the toast and held it out, her hand shaking. My grandmother took it.

  Each day after breakfast, a Buddhist monk came to spend time with my grandmother, explaining the pious tracts he brought and chanting some pirith—this rare privilege of a private daily visit granted because she was giving her fortune to his temple.

  That morning, as my mother sat in the saleya and listened to the murmur of the monk, she thought of how my grandmother became wretched and desperate if he missed a visit, thought also of the tracts my grandmother pored over, underlining sentences sharply, like a student anxiously memorizing for an all-important exam; she never missed a radio broadcast of pirith or bana. All these thoughts filled my mother with pity.

  When it was finally time to leave the next day, she knelt in front of my grandmother’s chair and, in the traditional way, touched her feet.

  My grandmother drew her daughter up and took her face in trembling hands. “Rattaram duva, the house will be bereft without you. Promise me you will return soon.”

  “I will, Amma, I will.” She placed her hands over her mother’s, then sat back. They gazed at each other for a long while, both aware that, despite the promise, this might be the last time they met.

  My mother stumbled to her feet and nodded for Saman to load the bags into the car, no longer able to look at my grandmother. When the car pulled away, she did glance back, but my grandmother had been swallowed in the shadows of the verandah.

  Before she left for Sri Lanka, my mother had called to tell me she was going. The resonance in her voice when she said “I must do my duty” made it clear she thought I should go with her.

  I knew the date of her return and that she arrived in the early afternoon. I was expecting her to call the same evening, and so I waited with dread for some verdict I could not name.

  She didn’t call that evening, or in the days that followed, and I found it difficult to concentrate at work. I drifted through my routines as if suffering from a low fever, unable to call her because of my anxiety and some misplaced sense of pride.

  When she did eventually telephone one evening, I rushed to pick up the receiver, sure it had to be her.

  “Shivan,” she said after a moment, “it is your mother.”

  “Ah, Amma, did you just get back?”

  Her silence made it clear she had seen through my charade. “How have you been, son?”

  “Excellent. So much has happened while you were away. Guess what? I’ve got an eight-month clerical contract with the University of British Columbia which could turn into full-time work. The woman I’ve replaced might not come back after maternity leave.”

  I went on to extol the campus’s beauty, then told her about my lunchtime routine of going for a stroll on the beach. I could feel myself growing further and further from my words, as if caught in a withdrawing tide. At last I became silent.

  “Son, she is not well, not well at all.”

  “I see.”

  “Oh, Shivan, I don’t know what to say to you, son, I really don’t.”

  “Well, what do you want to say?” My voice was hard with fear.

  “I hoped … I really hoped this illness had softened her, that she would admit to her error, that she would allow you back in her life. Then you could forgive and move on.”

  “Did you really think she was capable of that? Why on earth would you think that?”

  “I tried so hard, Shivan, to please her, to love her, in the hope that would soften her. I don’t understand, I don’t at all. How can she call me rattaram duva but not allow you back into her life?”

  “Rattaram duva? Gosh, how wonderful for you. You sacrificed me all those years ago to live i
n her house. Now you’ve sacrificed me again and made up with her. Once more, you have gained something at my expense.”

  “Shivan, don’t say that.” My mother was sobbing now. “Don’t say that, son.”

  “It’s true, it’s true. I don’t want to hear anything further about her. If you ever speak of her again, that will be the last time we talk. I’ll cut you out, I swear.”

  I slammed down the phone, twitching with anger, but also heady with relief. My grandmother would never admit she was wrong, so I was free of her. I had no choice but to go forward with my life.

  About a week after I spoke to my mother, I went for one of my lunchtime strolls down to Wreck Beach by the university. My walk took me behind the Museum of Anthropology. There were a few totem poles in the museum grounds, and near them I saw some ritual in progress and stopped to watch. A circle of white, mostly middle-aged, men and women swayed to the beat of a drum, arms held aloft, chanting in some language that could as easily have been Gaelic as Native. It was a healing ceremony, and the drummer was leading. She slowed her beat and instructed the participants to each place an object that symbolized heaviness in his or her life on a mat in the centre, then choose an item discarded by someone else. This chosen object, cleansed of its past heaviness, would represent a new beginning. As the participants converged on the mat, the drummer beckoned me to join them. I shook my head shyly and moved on.

  Wreck Beach was one of the few beaches in Canada where nudity was legal. Even in winter, when there was a warmish sunny day, diehard nudists camped out in little nooks created by the massive logs and rocks that offered shelter from the wind—nooks they staked out with boom boxes, blankets, coolers, Thermoses and garishly flowered sippy cups to conceal alcohol. Each nook had its reflector, positioned to shine the sun onto naked bodies tanned the colour of blood oranges. Today was grey and the beach was deserted, but some nudists had left objects in their nooks as territorial gestures, and as I passed along, I found myself considering them—a worn pair of Hawaiian rubber slippers, a rolled-up tattered mat, a circle of troll dolls half buried in the sand. One nudist had made an installation, and I stopped to look at it. The artist had glued pieces of coloured glass, worn a smoky smoothness by the sea, onto a rock. Washed-up bottles had been inserted upside down in a semicircle before the rock, like candles at an altar. I looked both ways along the beach, then took out my wallet and withdrew a hundred-rupee note that had been folded small in one of the inner pockets. I pulled a bottle from the sand, slid the note in carefully so it expanded and was clearly visible, then stuck the bottle back in its hole. I pried off a prominent piece of coloured glass, creating a gap in the design. Scrambling out of the nook, I continued on my way.

  I did not go back to the beach again until a sunny day had passed and the weather was grey and drizzly once more. The artist had understood my gesture. He or she had taken the hundred-rupee note and left the gap unfilled.

  I walked away elated. But by late afternoon what I can only describe as a great inner parchedness took hold of me. It lasted a few days, then lifted.

  During the evenings now, my mother wandered aimlessly about the house, unable to settle on anything. She wanted desperately to hear her mother’s voice but would not call, because it was a betrayal of me. She also felt guilty because she had gone to gain my freedom but secured her own instead. Finally she settled for writing an aerogram to Sri Lanka.

  On her first Saturday back, my mother was at the doughnut shop, absorbed in punching in a customer’s order, when someone across the counter declared, “Why, you’re still working here!” The man from the Buddhist Centre was grinning at her, head waggling side to side like a schoolboy contemplating some mischief.

  It was soon time for my mother’s break. She joined him in a far corner of the café, bringing along a doughnut and coffee for him, insisting employees were allowed this free privilege when he tried to pay.

  He glanced skeptically at her sour boss, then thanked her. “I realized the other day, that I was holding forth so much I forgot to introduce myself.”

  They exchanged names. My mother liked that David was aware he’d been “holding forth.”

  “I’m so pleased you’re still here,” David said, smiling shyly. “Where have you been? I’ve come by a few times.”

  She told him she had gone to visit her “estranged” mother. He did not ask the reason for the estrangement but nodded sympathetically. “My wife was Cambodian, and she had family back home, though we were never able to trace them because of all the killings there.” He told her more about his wife—how she had come here as a refugee in the early seventies; how he’d met her while teaching English to foreigners; a little about their life together. He was talking about her in the past tense, all the while unconsciously twisting his wedding band. Seeing my mother had noticed this, he paused, clasped his hands together tightly and told her his wife had died five years ago from cancer, leaving him with a son and daughter.

  As my mother listened to the warble of sadness in his voice, she wondered how she had failed to notice the sorrow behind this man’s forward manner.

  David changed the subject, asking how long she had worked at the doughnut shop. When she told him it had been almost two years, he shook his head. “But that’s far too long. You should be looking for a better job than this. The economy is doing well. I’m sure you could find something.” His voice took on an evangelical tone as he began to hold forth on how she shouldn’t be discouraged by the barriers she faced as an immigrant woman and settle for so little. He worked at a vocational college now and knew a lot about job placement. He would be very happy to look over her resumé, help her shape it, and show her some innovative ways of looking for employment.

  He had assumed this was her full time job, and my mother let him go on, amused. He reminded her of that know-it-all Sri Lankan folk character Mahadana Muttha, who always got things wrong. The thought made her want to giggle like a schoolgirl, and she saw now that David was attractive, with a square jaw, fine sandy hair, strong forearms. There was something endearing about the earnest triangle of wrinkles between his brows as he “held forth.”

  26

  IN THE DOORWAY OF MY MOTHER’S BEDROOM I take a long sip from the glass of Scotch I have not been able to resist pouring myself, the basket of cleaning equipment by my feet. On a high semicircular table beside the door is a photograph of her “guru,” an emaciated Tibetan monk with a shaven head, seated cross-legged, one hand raised in benediction. To either side of him are statues of bodhisattvas from the Tibetan pantheon. There are flowers in a bowl before the shrine, a red, flame-shaped bulb in lieu of the traditional oil lamp.

  My mother’s fervency about her new faith can be excessive, her self-righteous quoting from the Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life irritating, yet I am envious of her. This new spirituality has provided her a way to step beyond her history, to see her life clearly, with all its problems and mistakes.

  I sit on my mother’s bed for a while, fingering the pages of one of her Buddhist books, then get up and begin to dust. As I gently lift things on the altar and place them back, I find myself thinking of my grandmother’s story of the hawk pursued by other hawks, how it finally lets go of the meat in its talons and flies away, bloodied and starving, but free of the thing that caused it so much suffering.

  I moved to Vancouver in December 1988, and it was three and a half years later, in the summer of 1992, that I met Michael at a party in Kitsilano. The host, Bill, was a man in his fifties whom I had got to know when I was transferred to the President’s Office, a prestigious promotion, that marked me out as a rising star in the university’s bureaucracy. He often came by and perched on my desk for a chat, eyeing me merrily with frank interest, or leant in close from behind when giving instructions on a document he’d placed before me, his smell of cologne mingling with the faint odour of clove cigarettes on his beard and moustache, his belly tight like a drum against my back. He adopted a girlfriend-ish manner when talking t
o me, his high silly laugh sounding like he was faking amusement. Though I was not attracted to him, I could see he might be appealing to other men his age. He had a nice boyish smile and, despite the belly, was well built. He “pumped out” (as he put it) at the gym.

  I was aware he had a boyfriend through other workers in the office, though he never mentioned this to me. Then one day the woman at the desk next to mine told me she had run into them at the Granville Island Public Market and, much to her surprise, the lover was in his twenties and “gorgeous.” This surprised me, too, and suddenly Bill took on an aura of interest. I wondered if I was missing something about him, some quality of attractiveness that had escaped me. I became more tolerant of his advances, and when he asked me to a dinner party, I accepted, curious to meet the boyfriend and understand Bill’s allure.

  He lived in an art deco apartment building just off West 4th Avenue. When I came up the cobbled path, I saw a man of about my age seated on a second-floor balcony reading a book, head bent over the pages, bare feet propped against the railing. As I passed under the balcony, I looked up, wondering if this was the lover, and glimpsed a tangle of black curls, silky tanned arms, thighs that turned a paler colour beneath his white shorts.

  Bill welcomed me into the apartment with a crushing embrace, his smell of clove cigarettes now mixed with roasted garlic and tomato sauce. “Ah, my dear, you’re the final guest to arrive.”

  There were two middle-aged men on the sofa who I surmised were a couple because they wore matching hoop earrings, jeans, and white T-shirts under leather vests. An obese woman in a lilac cotton peasant dress sat to one side of them in an armchair. She had greyish-blond hair down to her waist and copper bangles embellished with multicoloured beads.

  Bill introduced these three as very old friends, telling me that the woman, Moon, and he had been in grade school together when she was just plain old Mary (which made her shake silently with mirth). Their pleasant greeting gave me no indication whether Bill had spoken of me before.