The Rice Mother

by Rani Manicka

  Two months had passed since Jeyan and Ratha had gone for dinner and mysteriously not returned. Life went on as before. Jeyan came by in the evenings, but he always seemed in a hurry to rejoin his wife. I know Mother was hurt that Ratha had left without even a proper good-bye, but she all said was, “I am happy as long as they are happy.”

  Then one day Jeyan came bursting through the door in a frenzy of panic. His face was twisted with some unfamiliar emotion. It was nearly nine o’clock, and Mother was waiting for the wrestling to start. She never missed it, got really involved, rooted loudly for her favorite wrestlers, and even today still believes all those kicks and punches are for real. I don’t have the heart to tell her otherwise. I know my mother; she would feel cheated, and the match would lose its appeal. Anyway, that night when Jeyan came, he was breathing heavily and almost incoherent with panic. “Rani has given us twenty-four hours’ notice to get out of her house!” he cried.

  In those days, when government servants did something unpardonable or really terrible, like stealing, they were given twenty-four hours’ notice to leave their quarters. And laughable as it seemed, Rani had taken it into her head to issue the same official-sounding notice to her brother-in-law and his wife.

  Inside Mother’s chest I could hear the sound of wheezing. “Why?” she asked.

  Jeyan threw his arms wildly into the air. “I don’t know. I think they argued. Lakshmnan has left the house in a rage, and Rani is accusing Ratha of being unsatisfied by one man. I tell you, she is a madwoman. Can you believe that she is sitting outside on the steps of her house, shouting loudly for all to hear that Ratha is trying to steal her husband? It’s not true at all. Ratha loves me. Rani is crazy. She is crying, screaming and saying crude, vulgar things, like Ratha wants both the brothers. In the kitchen Ratha is on her hands and knees washing the floor. I don’t know what to do. What shall I do? Shall I bring Ratha back here?”

  “No, not here, because Ratha doesn’t want to live here, and I cannot have her back after the way she left, but there are rooms available in the shop-houses near the cinema. Go and rent a room quickly. The shops are open until nine thirty at night.”

  “But the rent, the deposit—?”

  “What happened to your dowry money?” Mother asked, her brows knitting.

  “We don’t have it at the moment. Rani needed money badly, so she asked Ratha for it. She promised to give it back in the next few months, though.”

  “When did all this happen?” Mother asked, in a very quiet voice.

  Jeyan didn’t have to think. “Last Monday.”

  “Didn’t your wife want her husband before that, then?” Mother sneered angrily, but poor Jeyan could only stare at her helplessly. He was only a man—no match for Rani, her dexterous tongue, and her scheming ways.

  “Find out how much the room costs and I will give you the money,” Mother told Jeyan. “Now, go quickly. Otherwise I will surely end up paying for a hotel room.”

  “All right, thank you.” Jeyan was already turning away, his face big with terrible worry. Mother’s door was closed to him and his wife. Rani was ranting and raving on her doorstep, and his wife was on her hands and knees brushing Rani’s floors. And now it seemed clear that even his dowry was lost to a scheming woman. He had never faced such a multitude of problems in all his life.

  “We should never have gone to stay in her house,” he muttered to himself. Jeyan was naturally obtuse to the ways of women. Once Mother asked him, “Jeyan, do you know why your wife was crying on her wedding day?” He looked at her blankly, perplexed. Didn’t all brides cry with joy during their wedding? Later he asked Ratha and came back to report. “She won’t tell me,” he complained almost petulantly. “She says it’s not important why.”

  “Call it nerves if you want,” Ratha said wearily, when he returned to insist.

  So Jeyan and his bride moved to a cramped room on the first floor of a shop-house. They had to share a bathroom with ten other people, and there was plenty to keep Ratha’s cleaning instincts busy. She must have been very busy indeed, for she never came to visit. Mother was sure that Rani had completely poisoned Ratha against us while she had the chance.

  Late one afternoon, Rani came to visit. She brought a small bag of grapes. The imported variety, she explained importantly. Mother thanked her, and I hurried to relieve her of her package. She eased herself into a chair. I washed the grapes and, putting them on a plate, offered them to her.

  “How are you keeping?” Mother asked pleasantly. You wouldn’t think it to watch them, but I knew that she hated Rani and was perfectly aware that the feeling was returned in equal measure.

  “It’s my joints,” Rani said, with an ache in her voice. She lifted her sari to show fleshy ankles. “Look how swollen they are!” she cried. I stared at her legs. Perhaps they did trouble her in the night, but during the day they certainly looked healthy. Delicately she threw the green sari back over her legs and reached for a handful of grapes. “I’ve come to explain to you about this whole mess with poor Jeyan and that terrible woman. I don’t want you to get the wrong impression. I took that girl in purely from the goodness of my heart. Honestly, sometimes I think I am too good. I help people, and they stab me in the back. I even bought her husband vitamins so he would be more vibrant with her. And what does she do? She tries to entice my husband, as if I wouldn’t notice. I’ve eaten more salt than she has eaten rice.”

  She popped a couple of grapes into her mouth and chewed them reflectively. “I knew straightaway what she was up to. Whenever Lakshmnan was in the backyard lifting weights, she was in the kitchen pretending to clean. She doesn’t know that I can see her when I am sitting on the sofa in the living room. I can see the looks she throws out of the kitchen window. I’m not blind. She wanted him to think she was hardworking. Trying to make me look bad. I borrowed a measly five thousand ringgit from her. A teacher’s salary doesn’t go far. The children were hungry. There was no food in the house, and there were bills to be paid. Anyway, I have since heard that she is running around saying that I, can you believe I, who gave the ungrateful girl a roof over her head, have eaten her dowry.”

  Rani stopped to draw breath and look outraged. “In fact, you should give me that money, Mother-in-law, so I can throw that paltry sum in her face and stop her from pulling the good name of this family through the sewers.”

  Mother’s hand trembled harder, but her smile stayed fixed.

  Rani left later that afternoon without her money. For half an hour Mother paced the floors of our house, muttering, “Amazing, just amazing!” She was so angry she couldn’t sit still, and then suddenly she laughed out loud. “What cheek my daughter-in-law has! Indeed, she must think me a fool. She expects me, me of all people to put not one, not two, but five thousand ringgit in her hand and hope that it will reach Ratha’s hand. Hah, if I want Ratha to have the money, I will give the girl the money myself and not try to pass it through this greedy crocodile’s stomach first.”

  Soon Ratha was pregnant. She suffered badly from morning sickness. Mother sent Marie biscuits, marinated ginger, and three maternity dresses. She also offered to supply the down payment on a terrace house in a newly built development outside town, but Ratha was too proud to accept and through Jeyan sent a polite refusal. I saw her once in the night market, wearing one of the maternity dresses that Mother had sent. She had cut her hair to a more manageable length. Tendrils of hair curled around her thin neck, making her appear younger, more vulnerable. She was sad. Even among the busy, pushing throng of people, I felt her sadness. This time she definitely saw me, but she pretended not to, hurrying away into the colorful crowds.

  Mother and I went to the hospital to see Ratha and the baby. We took jewelry for the little girl. When Ratha saw us, it seemed as if she held her baby tighter to her breast. It is the only thing of value that she has ever had, I thought. The baby yelled in earnest.

  “Come to your granny,” Mother crooned to the red-faced infant. Ratha frowned unhappily, bu
t in Mother’s strong, sure arms the baby unclenched its fists and stopped its tiny but furious cries. Mother gave the sleeping child back to Ratha, and I saw her breathe a sigh of relief once the baby lay in her arms once more. A few days later Ratha and the newborn baby returned to the small room over the laundry shop.

  “The fumes from the laundry are bad for the baby,” Mother said to Jeyan.

  “Nonsense,” Ratha dismissed, when Jeyan told her what Mother had said.

  She was pregnant again when I next saw her. She had on the same maternity dress that Mother had bought for her two years before. It was faded. Her hair had grown some. She had it in a ponytail. She looked unhappier than ever.

  The second baby arrived. At the hospital she smiled politely at Mother and me. There was nothing behind that smile, neither hostility nor warmth. Her older child sat quietly on the bed. She stared at us curiously with large moist eyes. When Mother tried to carry her, she covered her eyes with her hands and sobbed helplessly. She was frightened of this fierce woman whom she had never seen in all her life. As if scalded, Mother turned away. She busied herself pushing back the bedclothes to look at Jeyan’s second child, another girl. This time Mother didn’t try to carry the child. Suddenly she seemed preoccupied and far away. After a few uncomfortable minutes we left. There was a sour taste at the back of my mouth.

  Things were turning sour in the room on top of the shop-house too. Jeyan no longer rushed home to watch his wife with glazed eyes. He came to our house straight from work. He sat in the living room and stared at the television blankly, and after he had eaten his dinner, he complained loudly to anyone who would listen about his wife. She was mean. She was turning the children against him. She refused to cook for him. She even refused to wash his clothes. Then things got even worse. She beat the children if they spoke to him. She emptied the contents of the dustpan onto his freshly laundered clothes that the dhobi delivered outside the door. She had a special hatred for the first daughter, who was too much like her father. The child was becoming withdrawn and unreachable. She only spoke when spoken to, and she was slow. “Faster, eat faster,” Ratha would shout close to the child’s ear and push food into her mouth faster and faster until the poor thing was choking and coughing. Then there would be tears, more angry words, and smacks. It seemed that Ratha hated Jeyan with a vengeance. But how to be surprised? The kum kum had spilled before the marriage. The marriage had died then. This was only the stink of decomposition.

  When the oldest girl was five years old, Ratha asked Jeyan to move out. He found a room in a different shop-house along the same street. The truth was, he didn’t know how to live without her. He had learned to live with the abuse and the hate, but he didn’t know how to cope without her. She was in his blood for better or for worse. He wanted to remain close, to watch her and his children, but she refused even to look in his direction. She made it perfectly clear that she wanted nothing at all to do with her husband. She began divorce proceedings. Jeyan thought he would refuse to pay her maintenance, and in that way he would bring her running back. From his shabby room a few doors away, he watched her, sure that she would never cope—no friends, no job, no caring family, no money, two babies to care for, and all the bills to pay. She would have to come back, crawling on her hands and knees. I saw the vindictive light in his slow eyes. Teach her a lesson, it said.

  But she had vowed never to go back. She ignored the burning eyes that followed her as soon as she left her doorway. She drew an old unused blanket over the window at night so it was impossible to see even a shadow. Then she made a plan. She didn’t want his money.

  First she did odd jobs with her cowering children. With their small kitten faces attached to her skirts, she went to work. That was hard. The women she worked for were heartless and exacting, but they tolerated her children because she was such an impeccable cleaner. In the nights she began to sew sari blouses for the rich ladies she worked for and their pampered friends.

  Slowly she saved up enough to go to cake-baking lessons from an ex-policeman’s wife. In a flat in the block of blue-and-white residences reserved for policemen and their families, she learned to bake cakes. Then she used her precious hard-earned money to attend icing courses. From his window Jeyan jealously watched her, her progress, her freedom from him. He took to drinking in the evenings. In his blue meter-reader uniform he sat in the small sheds around town, drinking local samsoo.

  I have seen him falsely merry in the company of other men. They are all bitter there, with failed marriages yapping at their heels and the weeping shadows of their abandoned children pulling at their ragged shirttails and begging for a little bit more love. How they dismiss women! Nags, sluts, good-for-nothings. Then they lewdly discuss the prostitutes that walk the streets by the newly built flats. It took Jeyan a long time to accept that Ratha was really lost to him, but by then he really didn’t care about anything anymore.

  In her small room she practiced until her gently piped “Happy Birthday” looked good enough to eat. Then she began to give lessons in the civic center. She survived without a single cent from Jeyan. Her classes became well known in Kuantan. Not only Indian ladies attended; even Malays, well known for their inborn sense of creativity and their patience for intricate artwork, began gracing her classes. They went home with bunches of rambutans and mangosteens fashioned from sugar. She moved out of that tiny room above the laundry that made her eldest daughter cough in the night. How she hated him! How she hated the woman who had spawned him! She wanted nothing more to do with us. We had cheated her of a life. They moved to the other side of town, as far away as possible from her drunken pathetic husband.

  Thin and frightened, her children followed her into her new life. “You have no father,” she told them. “He is dead.” They nodded with large, believing eyes, like dumb angels, their tattered wings in their hands. Who knows what passed through their poor brains? Poor little things, their world so filled with cruel adults. Do they really not remember that stick-thin man who used to sometimes raise them high above his head? The man with the big, simple face and the slow mouth with only a few words inside it. Yes, they remembered him as they remembered the lost buttons on their blouses. Inside clothes clean but worn, they learned to tiptoe around their mother in their narrow room. Her temper was always so fierce and so nearby. She took them by the hand to school. Their teacher was a friend of Anna’s.

  “They are such good girls,” the woman confided in Anna. “But I wish they’d speak a little more.”

  The last time I saw Ratha, she was getting onto a bus. I watched her carefully. The children were not with her. Even from the back I recognized her instantly. Perhaps it was the steel brush, or perhaps it was the hard life, but something had altered her person to an almost unrecognizable degree. Her skin hung in small folds around her bones. At her elbows pleats of skin flapped as she adjusted the basket on her arm. When she turned to pay the bus driver and collect her change, I saw with shock that half of her mouth had twisted permanently downward like a semiparalyzed stroke patient. Her hair had fallen out in patches, and in some places I could see pure scalp. She reminded me of a Tamil movie I had once seen where the heroine runs away from the camera’s eye into woods. It is wintertime, and all the trees are bare and stark with sleep. All you see is her disappearing back. The disappearing back reminds me of her. The camera moves farther and farther away from her. She is becoming smaller and smaller until she is but a dot on the horizon. Good-bye, Ratha.

  I never know where the years go, but I do not sit outside among the plump okra, the richly colored eggplants, watching insects or feeding the chickens in my magic cave under our house, anymore. The land outside is a barren wasteland. Weeds have taken over. I wake up in the morning and begin my household chores, and then it is time for an afternoon nap. Then there is the TV, of course, till bedtime. Sometimes a movie at the cinema, and on Fridays the evening prayers at the temple beckon. One morning I woke up, and I was forty, and unmarried, but Father was eighty-two years ol
d. I looked at him, an old man on a rickety bicycle. For years I had watched him from the window as he climbed on the same rusty old bicycle and rode down the same path, and worried that one day he would fall and hurt himself. But I was at the market the day it finally happened. It was Mother, standing by the window watching, who saw him tumble to the ground, tripped by the bulging roots of the rambutan tree grown huge with the years.

  She ran out of the house without her slippers to help my poor old father as he lay there on his back, too stunned to move. Mother was sixty-one years old. Her limbs were old and shrinking, but there was still great strength in them. She crouched down beside him. His face was like a dried-up riverbed, full of deep cracks. For years she had read him like a book. He was in terrible pain. She reached out and touched the cracks. Even through the pain he stared at her in surprise. The back wheel of his bicycle was still turning. She tried to help him up.

  “No, no,” he groaned. “I cannot move. My leg is broken. Call the ambulance.”

  So Mother ran to Old Soong’s house. A servant let her in. That was the first time she had been inside the place. She recognized the rosewood dining table where Mui Tsai had served dog stew to her master, and where the master had first run his fingers down her young thighs. Where the Japanese soldiers had thrown her on her back and raped her one by one. The terrazzo floor was cool under Mother’s feet.