The Rice Mother

by Rani Manicka

  She puts on airs and graces, but she doesn’t fool me. Fancy telling my daughter that all the male ancestors in her family were burned like kings in funeral pyres built from sweet-smelling sandalwood, when in fact her father was nothing but a servant! My mother is of a much, much purer descent. She comes from a family of wealthy merchants. In fact, my mother was betrothed to a very rich man in Malaya. He had chosen her from a large selection of photographs, and the preparations for a grand marriage ceremony were ready when she was sent for from Ceylon. She set sail with a maiden aunt as chaperone and a large iron box full of jewelry. She was sixteen and extremely beautiful, with gorgeous cheekbones and large, lovely eyes. A family friend had instructions to journey with them, protect them, and make sure the innocents arrived safely.

  Little did my mother’s people know that the person they had entrusted their daughter’s safety to was a traitor. My mother’s guide was a big, dark man who forced her into a hasty marriage to him on the ship during the voyage.

  By the time she disembarked, the seed that grew into my eldest brother was already growing in her belly. Sometimes even now, if I close my eyes I can hear Mother crying softly through the thin wall that separated their bedroom from the living room where we children slept on mats on the floor. From my position in the corridor I could hear her begging softly in the dark for a few more ringgit so she could buy some food for us. When I heard her cry like that, I would wonder what life would have been like if I had been born to Mother and her rich, waiting bridegroom. But then I think I would miss my father very much, for I love him dearly.

  I loved him even when he was wrenching Mother’s jewelry from her unyielding body while there was no food in the house and we were all starving. In fact, I loved him even when he was dashing out of the house for the races, clutching his week’s wages in his big dark hands. I did not stop loving him when the man at the grocery store humiliated me, shouting rudely that I shouldn’t expect a single loaf of bread until my father cleared the account. God, I even loved him when he sent my three brothers away to live at his cruel sister’s chicken farm, where the poor things had to clean rows of chicken coops every day and got beaten with a length of plank by their uncle.

  When I think of Father, I always remember him in the small provision shop that he sort of inherited during the Japanese regime, a one-story wooden structure, its walls dark brown planks that were rotten in some places, but it was ours. The shop was out front, and we lived in the back behind a patterned curtain. The shop meant we had rice, sugar, and provisions during the occupation. I used to watch Father weighing things on his old scales using various lumps of metal for different weights.

  Cataracts have made him blind now, but in my mind I can see him sitting at his cramped table, surrounded by gunnysacks rolled open at the top and filled with grains, beans, chilies, onions, sugar, flour, and all kinds of dry things. When you walked into the shop, the overriding smell was of dried chilies, and then you caught the whiff of cumin and fenugreek and only then the slightly musty smell of the gunnysacks themselves. Lining the entrance was an intriguing array of biscuits in large jars with red plastic tops.

  I loved that shop. It was Father’s, but when it was closed, it was all mine. When the wooden front was locked shut, I spent hours playing with the scales and going through Father’s papers. I read aloud his order books that had pages jammed with his big, untidy writing, prices and large ticks in blue ink beside them. I made the till open its mouth and played with the money inside, pretending to sell things and give change, and before I left my shop, I always slipped some coins into my pocket. I enjoyed the sound of their chatter in my pocket, and Father never seemed to notice their absence.

  I think those were the happiest days of my life.

  Then there was the boy who used to deliver the goods for the shop. He told me I was beautiful, and once he tried to caress my face near the back of the shop, but I only laughed at him scornfully and told him I could never marry anyone with such dirty hands. I was only twelve years old then, but I had a dream. I wanted a rich man like the man promised to Mother. One day I would have servants and nice things, beautiful clothes, and only shop in Robinson’s. I would holiday in England and America. When people met me, they would be respectful and mindful of their words. They would not dream of speaking to me the way they spoke to my mother. One day I would be rich. One very fine day . . .

  After the Japanese went away, Father lost the shop at the race-course, and we moved to Klang. Then the real hard times arrived, when Father forgot to come home for weeks. We were hungry for days. My brothers stole food from the shops across town, but the shopkeepers there recognized them and came to our house to beat them. Poor Mother had to run out to the front door and fall at their feet, begging and pleading. That was the time too when strange men used to simply stride into the house, hoping to find something of value they could take away with them. But they left empty-handed, spitting disgustedly on our doorstep. Somehow we all survived.

  The day came when I passed my Form Five exams and became a fully qualified teacher, but I decided that I didn’t want to work. Why should I? It was time to marry the rich man of my dreams. I didn’t want to bring up children and supervise servants as well. But thanks to my splendid husband, I have no servants to supervise.

  When I first went to live in the spider’s house, I was very good and polite to her. I helped to cut the vegetables, and sometimes I even swept the house, but I could see that she was dissatisfied with me. Every time she looked at me, I felt the cold disapproval in her eyes. Everything I did was wrong. She watched me with those swift, condemning eyes of hers as if I was a thief in her house.

  It was many years before I realized that I had stolen her most precious thing. I had stolen her son. After a while I began to worry about her watching eyes. Such envy. It spewed out of her mouth as soon as she opened it. When I was pregnant for the first time with Nash, someone told me that if I ate saffron flowers brought specially from India, plenty of oranges, and the petals of hibiscus flowers, the baby would be born fair. So I went out and bought these things secretly and ate them in our room with the door locked so she would not see and cast her evil eye on me. But after three months in that blighted house I often felt ill and had to sit outside on the veranda away from her envious eyes. I am certain she must have seen the orange skins and the flower buds in the rubbish bin and cast her evil, for my son Nash was born dark anyway. When I was pregnant with my two daughters but living away from that woman, I ate exactly the same things and both my Dimple and Bella turned out fair. That is how malignant her eyes are.

  I have always been wary of my husband’s side. They deal in strange things. Look how strong their magic is on my brother. After all these years and even after he has made so much money and young girls throw themselves at his feet, he is still deeply devoted to the spider’s perfectly unremarkable daughter. And then there is also this eerie thing all of them have about that dead girl, Mohini. Why, I can’t even talk about her in Lakshmnan’s presence. He leaves the room as soon as I mention her. Once he came upon me so angrily when I mentioned her in the middle of an argument that I think he actually wanted to kill me. His hands fell upon my neck, and I felt how they itched to tighten their violent circle around my throat. When I was quite blue and nearly dead, he pushed me away, looking ill, his hands limp at his sides. The way the entire family keeps that dead girl’s image glowing in their lives is downright unhealthy. When my husband was first presented with his daughter, he went as white as a sheet.

  “Mohini,” he whispered like a crazed fool.

  “No, Dimple,” I said, for I had decided to name my eldest daughter after the famous Hindi movie star. I don’t see any resemblance to my husband’s family at all. In fact, Dimple looks exactly like my mother. She has the same bone structure. Gorgeous cheekbones in a heart-shaped face. The spider came to see Dimple and wanted to call her Nisha. It means “new moon” or something similar. She said that giving a child a meaningless name would mak
e the child’s life meaningless too, but I don’t believe in such old-fashioned rubbish. I wanted a nice modern name, so I stuck with Dimple. Isn’t the name Dimple so much better than Nisha? After I brought Dimple home from the hospital, that strange man Sevenese came to visit. He went to the cradle to look at Dimple and blanched. Right before my eyes he went ashen, his face twisting with horror. “Oh, no, not you too,” he cried.

  “What? What?” I screamed, running toward the cradle, thinking the baby had stopped breathing or something equally dreadful had happened, but inside the pink-and-white cradle Dimple was sound asleep, her little chest rising and falling in small even movements, a sweet pink tongue protruding from her sleeping mouth. I touched her face, and it was soft and warm. I looked up at Sevenese angrily for the unnecessary shock he had given me, but he had composed his face again.

  “What is it? Why did you say that?” I asked, irritated.

  He smiled carelessly. “Just someone walking over my grave.”

  I wanted to slap him, but I pestered him for an answer. He only laughed and pretended to talk about other things for a while, but he never really liked me and conversation came hard to him. He stood up and left abruptly as if another second in my home would have been an unbearable ordeal. Sometimes I think he has only one foot in this world. I do not understand him.

  Sevenese is not the only hard nut for me to crack. I find it difficult to understand people generally. Why is my kindness always repaid with envy and ill feeling? Even my own family has conveniently forgotten the good I have done them. Sometimes when my father and mother fought, my mother became very depressed about her life. She went into her bedroom, closed the windows, and lay in bed for days, not doing anything. When I crept in there, not even her pupils would move. There was nothing in her face. It was blank. At times like that I alternated between incredible panic that she would never come out of her trance and the overpowering need to hit her as hard as I could just to see if I could raise a reaction from her. In those dark days it was I who used the money I had made from teaching Mrs. Muthu next door to read and write Malay, to buy food for the family. It was I who went out, bought the loaf of bread, and shared it out among my brothers. Everybody else sneaked in, ate hurriedly, and sneaked out again so they would not have to deal with Mother’s comatose body. Now they refuse to acknowledge they owe me help.

  I spent my last cent on them even though I was no more than a child myself, yet rich in their big mansions, they now turn their backs on me. “Cut your cloth to suit your means,” they crow, as if that alone will keep the wolves from the door. “Other people live on less,” they cry scornfully. Then they screw their faces up disapprovingly and question self-righteously, “What about the money I gave you the last time?”

  As if a handout of two or five thousand will last a lifetime. They want me to live like the spider, but I won’t. Why should I live like a miser, counting every penny, when I have such rich relatives?

  At the beginning, when we moved into the new house, Lakshmnan and I struggled to pay the bills, but I was resourceful and went into marriage brokerage. Found some bridegrooms some brides. It was I who found that spider’s ugly youngest son, Jeyan, a bride, spending my own money to travel up to Seremban to hunt for her. Yes, I got a commission, but it hardly covered my costs. And what a flower I found for him too. All right, she had no qualifications to speak of, but for such a man as him, she was a prize beyond compare. After their marriage I invited them to come and stay with us in our home, and they stayed with us for three months, eating and living as if it was their own home. I even went to a Chinese sinseh to get him some medicinal roots and powders to increase his potency. He was a puny man. Believe me, it was only through my efforts that they have their two daughters now. And what did I get in return?

  The strumpet started making eyes at my husband. I rescued her from spinsterhood and brought her into my own home so she wouldn’t have to live under the long shadow of the spider—and how did she repay my kindness? By trying to entice away my husband! She was ungrateful but very clever. She hung about in the kitchen, decorated from head to toe, and insisted on cooking every meal. Silently I suffered tasteless bits of meat floating in watery curry. Then one day I saw my husband slapping meat on the table for her. She had dared to ask my husband to buy her meat. Even I do the marketing myself. I saw the danger immediately. I know a woman’s mind. Women are far more deadly than men. What is a man but an unsuspecting extension of that roll of flesh that hangs between his legs? No, it is the woman that is the predator.

  My husband was very handsome, and she wanted him for herself. One evening she stole my best recipe and tried to pass it off as her own right in front of me. The cheek of the woman.

  Enough was enough.

  The foolish woman dreamed of my husband on a white horse. He is no hero. There is not an ounce of tenderness in that man. He is like a male lion, too selfish and too grand to be capable of love. Such a mouse as she was, he would have chewed and spat out in minutes, still dissatisfied. She saw our violent fights and persuaded herself that my husband and I were enemies.

  “No,” I told her slack-jawed face. “We are like the two halves of a pair of garden shears, my man and me, joined at the hip, for ever snipping at each other and yet slicing in half anybody that gets between us. Do you see where you are standing right this moment?” I asked her. “In the middle,” I screamed. “He is in my blood, and I am in his. Sometimes he makes me so angry, I want to pour boiling oil into his belly button while he sleeps or fling him to the crocodiles so they digest everything, bone, hair, horn, hoof, skin, and even his spectacles. But another time I am jealous even of the air he breathes. Why, I am even insanely jealous of the women that he looks at on TV.”

  No, she didn’t know about my passion. She could not have imagined. She stood there, shocked and gaping like a fish out of water. My love is like an insect-devouring plant that lives on the flesh of insects like her. Even when you see me flying toward him in a black rage, aiming for his eyes, or even when I set his own son Nash against him, I love him deeply and will never let him go. He is mine. Yet, so secret was my love that not even my husband, the object of my uncontrollable passion, knew about it. Yes, I learned early on that my love was a whip that he could use against me, so he continues to live in the firm belief that I hate him. The very sight of him.

  “Get out of my house,” I screeched at them. Both of them. Even the sight of Jeyan and his pathetic lovesick eyes had begun to irritate me. He hung around the scheming hussy, staring at her like a stupid dog. Sometimes I think he even panted like one. I gave them twenty-four hours to find new lodgings. Fortunately they needed less.

  Once I had got rid of the two leeches from my skin, good things began to happen. Lakshmnan managed to cut a land deal with some Chinese businessmen. Usually they cheated him blind. They used him to do all the legwork, and when it was time to sign the papers, they left him out, sharing the proceeds among themselves. He came home complaining bitterly that the only straight thing about a Chinaman was his hair. I always listened to his grievances and bathed his wounds but sent him right back out there again. “You are a male lion, king of the jungle, roar like one,” I said. And finally, after many misses, he cut his first deal. He made six thousand ringgit. He put six thousand ringgit in my hand. You can’t imagine what a sum like that feels like after scratching for cents all your life. Six thousand was an amazing amount of money in those days. You have to think that a teacher’s salary was about four hundred ringgit a month to have an idea what a fortune that was. But I was not stingy like that loathsome spider, and I absolutely refused to hoard money like her lest it grow too close to my heart. So I threw Nash the most splendid birthday party ever. Oh, it was brilliant. Kuantan had never seen anything like it. First I went out and bought myself the most amazing black-and-red outfit with a high collar and barely clothed arms. To match the outfit I splashed out on a divine pair of red shoes. Then I blew two thousand ringgit on the most perfect choker necklace eve
r dreamed up. Bristling with real diamonds and rubies the size of my toenails, it was a real darling.

  Then I planned and prepared.

  The fridge I ordered from Kuala Lumpur arrived, and then finally the day of the party came. I slipped on my new red shoes and could hardly believe that it was me in the mirror. The hairdressers had done a fantastic job. They were the most expensive in Kuantan, but they certainly knew their business. At five o’clock the guests began to arrive—little people dressed in flounces, ribbons, and miniature bow ties.

  We had the usual cake, jelly, and lemonade in the garden, but the real party was later, much later, when all the little people were gone and only the fashionable people, women with nipped-in waists and flaring hips and men with dark, narrowed eyes, remained. I had hired outside caterers and a small band. Then there were fireworks and proper champagne. We took off our shoes and danced barefoot on the grass. It was absolutely brilliant. Everybody got drunk.

  When we woke up in the morning, there were people asleep on the steps of our front door. I even found a pair of knickers in the fridge. People still remember it to this day. But after my party, things went wrong once more. Lakshmnan gambled away the remaining two thousand, and suddenly we were left moneyless again. All the people who had come to the party and sent such profuse thank-you notes refused to help. One even pretended not to be at home when I went to call on her. Bella turned five, and there was no money even for a cake.