The Rice Mother

by Rani Manicka

  “What’s your name, then?” they demanded curiously, with murky-colored eyelashes and eyes bluer than the sky. There had never been any doubt that they were the children of the greatest people in the world, with the biggest empire history had ever known. To the colonized mind it was an honor to serve such a race, and it seemed downright impossible to imagine them malleted by an Asiatic people with a mission as narrowly feudal as the Japanese invaders—nothing more elaborate than the desire to bestow Singapore to their emperor as a present for his birthday on February 15, 1942. And Malaya was a basket of raw material picked up on the way.

  The war, it seemed, was over before it began, but it was only the beginning of the daily grind, the misery, the unspeakable cruelty of the Japanese occupation that lasted for the next three and a half years.

  We returned from Seremban to a home looted empty except for my parents’ big iron bed and the heavy bench in the kitchen. Everything else was gone. There was not even a mat to sleep on. The eight of us spent an uncomfortable night on the big bed. We awakened at dawn, and I can remember running in the dark to the market with Lakshmnan and Mother, the mouths of empty sacks in our clenched hands.

  The market was unrecognizable. Far from being a scene of war, it was crammed full of goods as if it was a Sunday market. Locals who were used to haggling loudly over puppies, cats, and poultry scrambled to grab bottles of jams, marmalades, and pickles. Old Chinese women fought for tins of sardines, pilchards, luncheon meat, and canned potatoes, and argued over canned beetroot, bags of sugar, canned apples and pears, boxed fruit juices, medical drug supplies, and clothing stolen from abandoned British homes and warehouses. We filled our sacks to the full. Where we buried our ginger to keep it fresh, we deepened the hole in the ground to hide our new stockpile.

  This was before the first wave of soldiers arrived in open trucks, threatening the loss of heads as a punishment befitting the serious crime of looting. It was harsh but instantly effective. Heads on poles is difficult to beat as an effective deterrent. With the new decree a problem arose. How to hide things that obviously didn’t belong to you yet were piled right up to your roof? Day and night for more than a week, large bonfires of pure panic burned. The looters of the big European houses piled fridges, electric fans, toasters, gleaming pianos, and whole sets of large furniture into a big heap in front of their attap houses that were not even fitted for electricity and set a match to it. We watched chairs, cupboards, tables, rolled Persian carpets, and beds burn with a bright, tall orange blaze spitting thousands of sparks. For Mother it was a blessing in disguise. She and Lakshmnan traversed the areas where the servants of the big European houses lived and picked out the furniture she wanted from unlit bonfires.

  Things in our neighborhood changed drastically with the Japanese occupation. Girls turned into boys overnight, and girls of a certain age vanished into thin air. Father lost his job, Ismail lost his father, and Ah Kow lost his brother to the Malayan Communist Party. He went off to live with the hill people, as they were known, in some camp called Plantation Six near Sungai Lembing, where their main effort seemed to be small-scale ambushes on Japanese patrols.

  The Japanese wasted no time. They set about making us walk a mile in their culture, their morality, and their very foreign method of living, as if standing to attention and singing their national anthem every day before morning exercise, or forcing children to learn the Japanese language, could instill in us a love for their ugly flag (which we instantly dubbed a soiled sanitary towel) or their distant emperor. It is amazing to think that they did not comprehend that we bowed low at the sight of a Japanese uniform in the street not out of respect but from the fear of being slapped across the face. Every day on our way to school we passed a sentry who stared at us sternly, his unsmiling face puffed up with self-importance. There was nothing he enjoyed more than punishing someone who failed to bow satisfactorily before the symbol of the emperor. Long live the emperor. In the streets, moving buses with a soldier standing on the roof rained propaganda leaflets on people’s heads.

  Hiding behind the dustbins, we no longer heard the idle chatter of prostitutes but the frightening thud of feet as panting people were chased in broad daylight down the back lanes in the worst parts of town.

  A few times while at school we heard the planes flying low and the siren going off. All of us would throw ourselves to the ground and remain so until the siren stopped and the lights came back on. I remember seeing a cow blasted away by a bomb once. It had glassy staring eyes and a huge chunk missing from its stiff bloated body. We held our noses and went very close to it, close enough to see the massive raw wound that left its entire stomach exposed. Flies buzzed, and Ismail vomited near the cow, but the rest of us were quite fascinated by its destruction.

  There are moments in our lives that live forever. The first time Raja deigned to talk to me was one of those moments. In the bright sunlight a black shadow fell over me. When I looked up, he was looking down on me, sprawled on the ground nursing my scraped knees and bleeding palms. With the sun behind him, he looked like someone from a superior race of warriors. His large straight fingers dripped with yellow ink. He knelt beside me, brushed his magic liquid on my raw knees and hands, and the stinging pain disappeared. His strong hands hauled me up. “So you are the boy who lives in number three.”

  I had never heard him speak before. His voice was oddly soft. I nodded, bemused, unable to speak. This was the boy who swam fearlessly in the river on the other side of town where the large, smiling alligators with jaws full of ivory teeth hunted. During dry spells, when the river turned brown and the mud dried on his skin, he would stride home wearing maplike dusty yellow patterns on his skin, almost like the skin of a snake.

  He smiled slowly. I remember thinking then that he was wild, wild like the black cobras he tamed and charmed into dance. When you looked into his young eyes, they were like cool mirrors, but if you dared to look really deep, you could see the ancient fires burning inside. I thought I had looked close enough. I imagined that I had seen all there was to be seen. I am still sorry I didn’t look closer. What others took to be powerful bonfires of great destruction stoked by dark, unmentionable things, I only saw as a small friendly flame creeping toward me. As water desires to be horizontal, I coveted his dangerous world. An exciting world where a second chance was a glamorous illusion created by a long black enemy in the grass. Raja was a sorcerer of black magic and the very animal I longed to emulate.

  I asked him once, “Is a snake charmer ever bitten by his own snakes?”

  “Yes,” he said. “When he wants to be bitten.”

  I used to sit and watch Raja eat. He ate like a wolf, his shoulders hunched, a hard sheen of suspicion in his eyes, sharp teeth tearing into his food. Soon, to my mother’s intense irritation, I began to eat like that as well. That was always her biggest weakness—no sense of humor. As soon as I got home from school, I wolfed down my food and rushed over to his house. Raja never went to school, never had and never wanted to. He was wild through and through. There were no soft edges to him at all, except his forbidden and secret love for my sister. That he was utterly besotted was patently obvious. He spent hours crawling silently on his belly in the bushes at the back of our home, like the deadly snakes he charmed, hoping for a glimpse of her; he yearned avidly for the smallest scrap of information about her. What she ate, what she did, what she said, when she slept, what made her laugh, her favorite color. Inside my little person nodding to sleep was all the information that he longed for. Every word I uttered was devoured with embarrassing greed. And the more I spoke, the deeper he fell into the well of love. His face would melt right before my eyes like the beeswax candles that his mother made and burned in their house. A small smile would blunder onto his uncultured face, and his straight, bronze eyebrows would droop slightly over his dark eyes. He couldn’t read or write, and he wore rags, but inside the hard shell of his body a red-hot passion bubbled dangerously.

  I was young then and unwise to th
e ways of love. His passion was no more than my stepping-stone to get closer to him. I saw no harm in encouraging what I thought was a rather endearing tenderness for my sister. All I could see was the increase in my own stature. Fate, I thought, had presented me with an interesting hold on him. Somewhere inside me I must have known that no marriage was possible between my mother’s Mohini and my hero in rags, but in my defense, how could a child have known that love could be so dangerous? I had no idea that it could kill.

  Raja made the daily grind, the sheer boredom, of the Japanese occupation go away. He changed the grain of my childhood. Sitting on logs under the towering moss-laden neem tree, we traded stories. He leaned forward and listened to mine carefully, and then he told me his. And the stories that lived inside his curly head were of the most surprising kind, African stories. Old men with crinkly hair announcing at the door of the witch doctor’s hut, “I have come to eat black goat.” Old women who could splash sand into their open eyes, and chickens that absorbed the evil spirits living inside a man.

  “De’ wo’ afokpa. Me le bubu de tefea n’u oh!” (“Take off your shoes, you are desecrating the magic area.”)

  I would stare into his face, caught up in the magic power of a foreign language. For hours I sat barefoot, staring into his glowing eyes, listening to his deep, softly lethal voice. From the still afternoon air he plucked out fearful djins who stood so tall their heads disappeared into the clouds, and on another day he would smile gently and weave a world where a stick given by a praying mantis and placed in an earthenware pot could turn into a beautiful baby girl. Sometimes I closed my eyes, and his voice made shining ebony bodies run into the burning African sunshine or gleam midnight-blue among the silver trees in the moonlight. From between his lips came the spectacle of public circumcision and strange initiation rights where nubile virgins and young men danced, whirling faster and faster around an orange voodoo fire until they came out of their own bodies and watched themselves take and be taken by everybody else.

  As an empty cupboard accepts other people’s belongings, I received onto my shelves ancient stories about lions that turned into men, sacred snakes sent out into the dreams of the sick to lick their wounds and heal them, and Musakalala the talking skull, but I think my favorite story has always been the story of Chibindi and the lions. Let me think for a moment so I may once more taste the flavor of a very long time ago, a flavor that I have forgotten since, and that I long for.

  Many years ago, under a neem tree that no longer exists, felled to grow a big international hotel with a swimming pool, restaurants, and in the basement a nightclub with a rather luscious breed of prostitutes lining the bar, Raja stood as Chibindi, the Great One, a hunter whose magic song could tame wild lions.

  “Siinyaama, Oomu kuli masoonso, Siinyama.” (“Oh you who eat meat, There is only dry grass in this bag, Oh you who eat meat.”)

  Under the neem tree all around us growling lions stopped and began to dance to his magic tune. Backward and forward they pranced on their hind legs, their tails swishing from side to side, their bodies twisting and turning, their heads nodding and wagging. The great cats purred with sheer pleasure. They would have torn him to bits but for the fine, strong voice with which he sang his song. Louder and louder climbed his voice, and faster and faster the big cats twisted and turned their tawny bodies.

  Chibindi stamped his feet as he chanted; holding his hands in front of him at shoulder level, he moved them up and down as if encouraging a whole pride of lions dancing on their hind legs to dance faster and faster. Soon the terrible lions forgot their greed for the flesh of man.

  Just remembering Chibindi brings back memories. Sad memories. Yet I can see Raja now, standing under the neem tree, thumping his bare feet on the dry ground, his arms waving madly, and he has forgiven me. My Chibindi.

  One day, to my greatest excitement, Raja agreed to teach me snake charmer secrets, secrets only passed on through the generations from father to son. It was like a dream come true. Suddenly I was wrapping snakes around my neck like Lord Shiva. Venom, I learned, was the most precious thing man had, and fear the most precious thing a snake had. Fear is the smell the snake looks for when it flicks and darts its tongue about. Only when it smells fear will it attack. Raja said that it was a long time ago that he had taken out the fear inside him, given it sharp teeth and fine, long claws, rubbed swiftness into its thick limbs, and made it wait beside him.

  “Tonight the moon will be full,” he told me one afternoon. “Moonlight excites snakes. They come out to dance. Tonight at the Chinese cemetery?” His young, old eyes watched me, questioning, testing.

  The first few times I shook my head regretfully, wishing with all my yearning heart that I could go. Even once, I told myself, would be enough. He had much to teach me, so much to show me—but always there was the specter of Mother’s elongated shadow waiting in the kitchen like a crouched tiger until the early-morning light slowly crept in through the open windows. It never ceased to amaze me, the way she hardly ever slept. I don’t think she slept for more than two or three hours a night. However, one afternoon under the neem tree I simply nodded, and the words, “Okay, tonight at the Chinese cemetery,” appeared on my tongue.

  As it happened, it turned out to be surprisingly easy to slip out of my bedroom window, climb down onto a strategically placed drum, and slither away noiselessly. At the snake charmer’s house Raja was waiting in the shadows. As I passed, a hand shot out suddenly and pulled me into the darkness. He put his forefinger to his lips.

  He was my taboo, but I was his secret.

  A pungent smell of crushed onions came from his dark form. He moved without even the whisper of air against his clothes, for he wore no shirt. Chibindi’s skin gleamed like varnished red clay in the pale moonlight. Around his neck on a yellow string was a gold amulet shaped like a horn. It glinted in the night. The amulet, I knew, was meant for the spitting cobra. The spitting cobra searches for the glimmer of its enemy’s eye so it may aim its deadly poison right into it and blind him while keeping a safe distance. A sparkling amulet distracts the attention of the cobra, and he will spit at the amulet instead.

  In his hand Raja held a forked stick and a gunnysack. I was thrilled. Blood throbbed in my neck. What adventures lay before me?

  “Take off your shirt and trousers,” he whispered very close to my ear.

  From a rusty tin he scooped out a pungent mixture, the horrible reek that I had noticed earlier. Swiftly he coated my naked limbs with his puree, which had the consistency of yogurt and was cool on my bare skin. His hands were hard and sure. I remember thinking that the only soft thing about him was his love. Like the soft center of a boiled sweet.

  “Snakes hate this smell,” he explained, his breath warm against my skin.

  I stood quietly under his ministrations. “The cemetery is the best place to catch them,” he told me in a hushed voice. Many snakes came to the cemetery for the fowl and small piglets that Chinese people left on the graves as offerings to appease their ancestors. Because it was an ill omen to eat food offered to the dead, not even the drunks or the very poor came to steal the rich banquet available. The snakes feasted and became large and plentiful. He talked in a low excited voice about a beautiful cobra that he had almost caught the last time. It was the largest one he had ever seen. It must have been a truly remarkable specimen, because it made his eyes glitter hotly that night. I put my clothes back on hurriedly and worried about Mother and the incredibly strong smell that covered me from from head to toe.

  “How come you don’t have to rub this smelly stuff on your body?” I whispered, wrinkling my nose with disgust.

  He laughed softly, rubbing his hands vigorously with some crushed leaves. “Because I want them to come to me.”

  We took a shortcut through the back of his house, past the field, through the small jungle where I had spent hours practicing to blow the perfect smoke ring, past the row of shop-houses. The cemetery lay on a few sleeping hills. Even from afar, the sig
ht of the grassy mounds illuminated pale green against the night sky and dotted with white gravestones filled me with foreboding, but I followed Raja’s confidently striding body silently through the tall grass.

  Under the full moon, round pomelos looked like ghostly orbs among the gravestones. The air was filled with the smell of fresh flowers on the graves, but the fragrant air was thick and unnaturally still. Nothing moved. I have thought since then that a Malay or a Christian graveyard can be a peaceful place at night, but a Chinese graveyard is an altogether different matter. Far from being a place of rest, it is a place where spirits still hungry for earthly desires wait for their relatives to come by and burn them paper houses complete with furniture, servants, and big cars with number plates parked outside. Sometimes they even burn paper images of a favorite wife or a bejeweled, richly robed concubine holding stacks of fake spending money. That night I was conscious of them everywhere, the impatient, hungry spirits, their restless eyes following me with jealous yearning. The hairs at the back of my neck sprang away from my skin, and a small, sleeping spider called fear jerked awake and began crawling slowly inside my stomach.

  Tablets covered with Chinese writing and black-and-white photos of the dead seemed unnaturally white against the dark foliage. A small boy with liquid eyes looked at me sadly as we passed his grave. A young woman with thin, cruel lips smiled invitingly, and a horribly old man seemed to scream soundlessly at me to leave him to sleep in peace. Everywhere I looked, unsmiling faces stared sullenly at me. Our footsteps were quiet in the still, sibilant air. I looked at Raja.