The Rice Mother

by Rani Manicka

  Afterward his wife served us very sweet tea and her excellent marble cake. In her kitchen she listened to frivolous Tamil love songs, but in the living room Professor Rao allowed nothing but the dour classical music of Thiagaraja to fill the air. While we nibbled at thinly sliced cake, the professor opened his silver box with little compartments. Betel leaf, slaked lime, areca nut, scented coconut, cardamom, cloves, aniseed, and saffron rested inside. It was pure yoga, the exquisite way he pinched exact amounts of every ingredient, his long pianist’s fingers folding the bright green leaf into a pyramid shape and piercing it shut with a single clove.

  With the pan inside his mouth, he brought alive the plight of an irritated oyster or the bubbling life of magma hundreds of miles beneath our feet, taking us under the earth’s crust where diamonds have lived for millions of years. Softly his cultured voice carried us into great halls decorated with green marble from Sparta, yellow marble from Namibia, and frescoes by Meleager and Antimenes. On the grand walls hung with perfumed oil lamps and wreaths of sweet-smelling leaves and violets, Professor Rao would point to a decadent Roman host who has purposely chosen a bizarre collection of foods simply because they are rare and expensive and he is a rich gourmet. Slaves arranged upon a long banqueting table silver platters of warblers, parrots, turtle doves, flamingos, sea urchins, porpoises, larks’ tongues, sterile sows’ wombs, camels’ hooves, cockerel combs, stewed kid, barbecued oysters, and thrushes with an egg yolk poured over them.

  “Look,” Professor Rao said, “they eat with their fingers. Just like us.”

  In awe we watched musicians, poets, fire eaters, and dancing girls come and go until finally the second course was over and the proud host held up an amethyst-encrusted goblet, shouting, “Let the drinking symposium begin.” As he declared thus, his slaves dropped a piece of amethyst into every guest’s silver cup, for amethystos in Greek means “not intoxicated,” and the Romans never missed a trick when it came to prolonging a party.

  After cake we followed the professor to his glass case. He slid open the doors, and another world opened before our eyes.

  “Now let me see. Have I shown you my stone crab yet?” he would ask, putting into our childish hands the considerable weight of a large fossilized crab, every detail preserved forever. One by one all the treasures inside his glass case came out to pirouette before us. Wonderingly we ran our fingers along petrified wood, pieces of jet and rosaries made out of Shiva’s tears, brownish red rudraksh beads. We admired clear yellow tortoiseshell, and at other times the tusk of a fossilized mammoth or the wild untreated ivory of hippopotamus and walrus.

  Carefully he unwrapped round black stones that had been cracked open like a nut to reveal in their black interior sea ammonite fossils curled up and closed like a secret. He had found them on the Himalayan slopes. “There was no range of mountains until India tore itself from a supercontinent called Gondawana and collided into Ti-bet, pushing the seabed up higher and higher,” he said, explaining the mystery of the sea ammonite’s existence so high up a mountain slope.

  To me, though, the crowing glory of Professor Rao’s crystal collection was always a Cherokee Indian crystal skull. Professor Rao told us that the Cherokee Indians believed their skulls sang and spoke and they regularly washed them with deer blood before using them to heal or as an oracle. It was quite a beautiful thing, with color prisms deep inside it. Sporadically, when the colors in the skull dulled, the professor buried it in the earth overnight or left it out during thunderstorms or a full moon.

  With every visit he put a different chunk of crystal in our right hand and instructed us to place our left hand lightly over it. “Close your eyes and let your heart whisper, ‘I love you,’ to the crystal,” he advised.

  I held the crystal in the manner requested, closed my eyes, and my monkey mind instantly scampered to the last slice of marble cake that still remained uneaten as I waited impatiently for the moment when he would say, “Open your eyes now.”

  “What did you see?” he would ask us excitedly.

  I would have seen nothing more than green blobs on the orange screen of my eyelids, but, thrilled by the experience, Mohini would report flashes of light, joy rushing through her veins like rainwater, and slimy seaweed growing on her body. Sometimes she thought the stone in her hand pulsated, breathed, and moved.

  “They are the memories locked in the crystal,” Professor Rao would cry triumphantly.

  One week he had a surprise for us. The quartz crystal cluster that Mohini had held in her hands the week before had grown a rainbow on the tip of one of its crystals. We stared at the perfectly formed rainbow in wonder. Was it possible that Mohini had made it happen?

  “Yes, absolutely.” Professor Rao beamed. “The stone is sometimes like a shocked child. You have soothed it, and it has responded to you.”

  Subsequently he would ask her to touch and play with the crystal every time we came for a visit. It was the only crystal he had that had flowered a rainbow.

  On our last trip to the professor’s house, just weeks before the Japanese invaded Malaya, he slid open a matchbox, and inside, nestled on a bed of cotton wool, was what looked like a huge drop of clear, very green oil. Professor Rao took out the solid drop in his hands, held it up against the light, and swore it to be the most perfect emerald he had ever seen. It was priceless. Even raw, its size and beauty were so obvious that the worker who had mined the stone swallowed it and smuggled it out.

  “It is my life,” Professor Rao said proudly, but as he put it back into its unassuming home, his voice was uncommonly gentle. “It always reminds me of your eyes, Mohini, my dear child. It will be yours, of course, when you marry my son.”

  He was right about the emerald. It did look like my sister’s eyes. Even from the time I was a baby I have memories of her eyes. Sparkling gems. Laughing gems. How she used to laugh!

  I remember her dancing.

  I used to sit and watch her dance in the moonlight. I sat on Mother’s milking stool as the cows slept in the shed and watched her, so different under the moon’s silver stare, so beautiful. Her magnificent eyes were strange and long inside the thick black rims made by lavish use of Mother’s kohl.

  “Tai tai, taka taka tei, tei, taka, taka.” Her clear voice used to ring out like the clapping of small children. She arched her body, moving quickly, her hands sweeping out in the dark like the pale undersides of river trout jumping out of a black stream, her heels striking the ground, keeping rhythm with the clapping voice. Her anklets singing into the silver night.

  “Tai, tai, taka taka tei, tei,” she sings, her fingers unfurling like fans, her hands flying into the night to pluck enchanted fruit. She brushes them lightly, arranges them in a basket made of spun gold, and offers them to the Great Goddess in the sky. Then the tips of her fingers reach down to touch her own feet, and her feet, like the finest squirrel-tail brush, skip and rush forward, painting a picture on the ground. A proud peacock, a roaring tiger, a shy deer. It is always too dark to see. Her eyes dart sideways, left, right, and left again. The picture is complete. Her feet move, the heels hitting the ground, rapidly moving in a graceful circle around the picture she has drawn. And when the circle is complete, I know that her journey will be over.

  “Ta dor, ta dor, ta dor, ta, ta.” I watch her raise both her arms to the moon and spin faster and faster, the bells on her ankles ringing madly until she falls dizzy and breathless to the ground. She tilts her glowing face toward me, the rest of her body soft curves on the ground, and demands, “Well? Am I getting any better?”

  And for some strange reason she would remind me of Siddhi, that wonderful female who embodies the lure of mystical powers—so beautiful, so extravagantly eyed and yet spurned by the gods.

  For those unreal seconds, fooled by the moonlight and the ecstasy of her dance, I would forget that it was not a mysterious celestial being that lay panting in our backyard but my sister, the most courageous person I knew. She was courageous in a way that other people were not
, in a way that Mother thought was a weakness and Father thought bespoke a soft heart. How can I explain the fire that burned inside my sister when she saw an injustice done? Perhaps you will understand if I tell you about Mother’s birthday dinner. That time Father saved for a whole year from his pathetic allowance to buy his wife a meal fit for a queen and her children.

  Mother would have refused such an extravagance had she known it in advance, but Father had made his plans secretly. He had ordered it all beforehand, paying for the meal in pitifully small installments long before Mother’s birthday. The whole family sat around a huge circular table. First to appear were the chili crabs; afterward the mutton cooked in goat’s milk, the creamy laksa noodles, the spicy seafood char kueh teow, the squid sambal pungent with the smell of belacan, the pomfret in ginger paste, the sugar-cane sticks wrapped with shrimp paste, and on and on until the entire table was covered in steaming food.

  “Happy birthday, Lakshmi,” Father whispered. There was a smile on his face.

  Mother only nodded. Perhaps she was pleased, for she smiled at us, but as she began to fill a bowl with fried rice for Lalita, a wail pierced the air. An old beggarwoman lamented loudly as a shopkeeper tried to chase her away by beating her legs with a broom. That was the way it was in those days. You had to beat beggars to keep them away.

  Everybody stared, some sadly, some relieved that the smelly old woman would not be coming to their table to ruin their delicate appetites. Not Mohini, no. Her eyes brimming with tears, she shot up suddenly and charged toward the shopkeeper.

  “Don’t you dare beat the grandmother,” she shouted out.

  Shocked by the sight of the girl flying toward him in such anger, the man’s broom stopped in midair. The old woman, perfectly used to being beaten, stopped crying, her loose jaw hanging open. Mohini put her arms around the beggarwoman’s waist and brought her to our table. To eat with us. My sister was not even ten years old then.

  Even my earliest memories are tinged with her presence. I looked up from the hole in the ground that Mother stood me in daily to strengthen my legs and saw her in a myriad of poses, acting out stories in which she alone played all the characters. Running this way and that way, pulling faces and changing voices, she fluttered around me like a gay butterfly. Then, it seemed, only she had time for me. She must have looked into my small, begging eyes and known without being told that there would be no love forthcoming for the poor, ugly creature before her. That in my mouth were none of the adorable things that all children are given to endear them to their parents but a lazy slug of a tongue. My sister took it upon herself to cherish me as best she could.

  She did it every morning when the house had emptied of people, after Father had left for work, Anna and my brothers for school, and Mother for the market with Lalita in tow. Mother had to take Lalita with her, or she would simply disintegrate into a heap on the floor, shedding bitter tears until Mother returned as if it was far, far more than a trip to the market that she had lost. So every morning I found myself sitting cross-legged in a patch of weak sunlight by the kitchen window while Mohini tugged and twisted all my hair into curly ringlets and told me stories about Lord Krishna, the blue god.

  “When he was a baby sitting outside, his mother saw him eat a handful of sand, so she rushed out to open his mouth and clean away the sand, but when she opened it, she found the whole world inside his mouth.”

  I sat with her fingers in my hair and her breath warm on my head and envied a well-loved, mischievous child who stole buttermilk, hid the garments of maiden bathers on a whim, killed a huge cobra with his bare hands, and held up Mount Govardhan to shelter a herd of cows from a terrible storm sent by a jealous Indra. I dreamed of looking out of a palace window onto a generation of gopis, fair milkmaids gathering lotus buds in a green pool, each one secretly praying that they might marry me. I dreamed of an eventual wedding to the fairest gopi of them all, called Radha.

  “One day your Radha, soft as a mustard flower, will come, and I will place the sandalwood paste and kum kum on her forehead,” Mohini teased. I always produced the required sickened face, but I believed her with all my heart.

  Those are my happiest memories. What else is left to remember? Years spent at the mercy of cruel teachers. They pinned my exercise books to my back during recess so the extent of my simpleminded-ness could be shared with the entire school. They rapped my knuckles and flung my work out the door as worthless. It seemed the extent of my stupidity was unimaginable to them. They called me names and banished me to a corner of the classroom. In the playing fields children I had never seen before chanted out, “Kayu balak, kayu balak” (“Timber, timber”), when they saw me. “Thick as a piece of wood.”

  Oh, I cried for my ringing ears.

  I was so desperate that I humiliated myself to earn the right to a kind word, a greeting, or a conversation during break. I carried the schoolbags of others willingly, walked backward around the field for their cruel amusement, and barked like a dog. But in time I discovered that friendship cannot be acquired thus, so I learned to sit alone at the end of the playing field, my back to the laughing children, my small eyes facing the road, my slow mouth chewing my food.

  “Kayu balak, kayu balak,” the happy children sang to my back.

  The teachers continued to berate and abuse my handwriting, but I could not control my hand that had turned to wood. Tears escaped out of my carved eyelids, but their furious faces refused to soften. How could I tell them that when I opened a book to read, inky blue fishes swam on the white waters of my page so I could not make out the words clearly? How could I add the numbers properly if they frolicked and played like spider monkeys across my page? By the same token, how could I even begin to tell them about my wooden hand?

  Many years after the Japanese had wrecked our lives and left, I wondered if I had fallen asleep on a mat of glossy leaves in the back garden and dreamed a Basohli painting studded with fragments of beetle wings that glittered like emeralds. Could it be that such a glorious, civilized time had really existed in my history?

  I went to visit Professor Rao. He came to the door, almost bald, two hands joined together to make a wrinkled lotus flower, and frail, so frail. I had remembered him more resplendent, bigger, and smiling rapturously.

  “Papa Rao,” I said, reverting unconsciously to my childish memory.

  He smiled sadly. His hand reached out to touch my hair, oiled and streaked back from my forehead. “The curls,” he lamented.

  “They were ridiculous. Mohini’s doing . . .” I trailed off.

  His cheeks sagged. “Of course,” he agreed dully, leading me into the house. The place was silent, smaller, and strangely dead. There was not even the sickly sweet sound of Mrs. Rao’s love songs floating out of the kitchen. I could hear her moving about in another part of the house, her movements heavy and labored.

  “Where is the crystal cave, the geodes, the skull, the paintings?” I asked suddenly.

  He lifted his right hand and dropped it uselessly back to the side of his body. “The Japanese . . . they stole everything. It took three of them to carry my crystal cave.”

  “Even your stone crab?”

  “Even my stone crab, but look—they did not touch my lingam. The brutes didn’t realize its value.” He walked over to stroke the curving dense black stone.

  Something occurred to me. “Has your son returned?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, so abruptly that I knew an unimaginable ruin had come to pass. “Shall we listen to some Thiagaraja?” he suggested, turning away quickly so I would not see the raw pain that seized his old face.

  At the first pure sound of the vina’s string, Professor Rao dropped his head into his hands. Silent tears fell onto his white dhoti, turning the cloth transparent so his poor, brown skin showed through.

  “Papa Rao,” I cried, distressed by the sight of his tears.

  “Sshh, listen,” he choked.

  There was no marble cake or sweet tea. I sat frozen in my seat unti
l every note of Bhairav’s raga was finished and Professor Rao had recovered himself sufficiently to raise his head and smile tremulously at me. When I stood to leave, he put his prized lingam in my hand.

  “No,” I said.

  “Soon I will be dead,” he said. “No one else will love it like you will.”

  Sadly, I carried the black stone home. The Japanese had not wanted it. They had not seen the beauty of it. It was a rejected thing, like me. I went under our house and sat on the box full of lovingly polished worthless stones and thought of Papa Rao’s quivering mouth, and tears arrived. I held the black lingam in the palm of my right hand, my left lightly covering the smooth, rounded tip. Then I closed my eyes, and for the first time my heart earnestly whispered, “I love you, crystal.”

  For a little while there was just the orange screen of my eyelids with the familiar green blobs until quite without warning there was a flash, like sunlight on water at the corners of my eyelids. And then I felt my struggling heart take a deep breath and still a little. Suddenly someone who understood my very essence held me in his arms and rocked me. A sense of peace stole over me. The stone comforted me, and by and by, I understood that I was never meant to be born a human being. I could have been happy as a rock. I could have been contented as a huge rockface on a mountain peak or a simple cluster of crystals luminous in the cold sunlight. On Mount Everest.

  I would have perched high up over the world, unshakable and secure in my worth, year in, year out watching the pointless comings and goings of the deluded human race. On my granite hand I would wear a wooden watch, days and nights passing while the frozen hands on my watch sat motionless. But I am not a sparkling crystal or a craggy rock overlooking a handsome cliff. I see that instantly in my mother’s face. It is not my fate to be so admired by mankind that they throw their lives at my feet so they may know me, so they may rest a while on my peak. I am a dullard with a square face carved out of immobile granite. The laughter and passions in other people are a source of envy in my lonely heart.