by Rani Manicka
All the way up to Thailand I went, on the Malayan Railway lines, for a short trip into the red-light district, where beautiful girls put their palms together and bowed deeply from the waist in the way of their kind. They removed their ornate headdresses and washed my feet in a basin of scented water while I closed my eyes and lay back with just one thought: I am home.
I know I am looking for something. Something I have not found. I traverse the streets of Chow Kit and watch the transvestites. Plastic women, they are called. They sashay boldly up and down the street; their flat chests thrust far out in front of them, their tight bottoms pushed far out behind them, pouting at passing men. Often they slide up to me, their wigs, false eyelashes, stuffed bras, tight girdles, brightly painted fingernails, and platefuls of vibrant makeup, their voices artificially high.
“How much?” I asked once just for sport, and instantly she snaked down beside me, a rich smile and a ready caressing hand on my arm.
“Depends what you want,” she bantered. I looked at her. The skin was soft, but the eyes were wretched. An Adam’s apple bobbed in her throat. It was impossible to sustain the mischief. I sighed regretfully.
She was instantly alert. “But not much,” she assured me.
I know why she is far less than a prostitute—because she gives herself away as if she were a can of worms. Her sexuality can only be offered in the dark to strangers with deformed tastes.
“Maybe next time,” I told her.
“I show you strange things,” she insisted with a peculiar blankness in her face. I believed her. I believed that she could show me something strange and exciting but utterly abhorrent to her. The idea fascinated me. How misshapen is the vessel? Aah, if only she wasn’t a man. But Sevenese, my lad, she is a man.
I shook my head, and he stood up huffily, with exaggerated movements. Let it be known I had wasted his precious time. I watched him walk away and join another of his kind. Together they pointed and stared at me venomously. I know their tragedy. Their misfortune is not that they are not what they should be, but that they are not what they want to be. Women.
Dimple
I have a memory of myself when I was very young sitting anxiously on a packed bag by the front door, my hair in pigtails, my feet encased in my best shoes, and my heart counting the minutes like a very loud clock inside my chest. I was waiting to go to Grandma Lakshmi’s home for the holidays, but getting there was an obstacle course sometimes too difficult for a child to manage. The slightest infringement could lose me the privilege. Hardest of all, I had to pretend disdain at the prospect of the forthcoming holiday.
So it was only after Father came home and the two of us were sitting in the car on the way to the bus station that I could breathe a sigh of relief and know for certain that my trip was no longer subject to last-minute changes of plan.
At the door of the bus I kissed Papa good-bye, and he waited at the platform to return my wave until the bus pulled out of sight. I closed my eyes and left all my troubles behind—my brother Nash’s threats to tie me to a chair in the kitchen and burn all the hair on my head, and Mother’s advancing, sneering face. Soon, very soon, I would sleep so close to my darling Grandma that I would hear the asthma inside her chest. Like a tired engine. Worse every time I came back.
I sat very still during the journey, staring out of the window, not daring to nod off or leave the bus for refreshments at Bentong with everyone else. I was terrified of the bad men Mother had warned me of who spirited away little girls traveling alone. At Kuantan station Aunty Lalita would be waiting for me, a Big Sister cake in hand, the wind from the jetty blowing her thin curls into her large, smiling face. I got down from the bus, put my hand in hers, and together we walked, swinging our clasped hands, like best friends, all the way back to Grandma’s. In my mind’s eye I can see the two of us walking through town, my luggage in her right hand and me barely able to contain my excitement. Kuantan hardly ever changed through the years. It was always dear and familiar, like coming home.
As we turned the corner at Old Soong’s house I saw Grandma, slightly hunched, standing by the door. Breaking free from Aunty Lalita’s hold, I ran toward the figure on the veranda. When finally I flew into her open arms and buried my face in her dear, familiar smell, she always said exactly the same thing. “Aiyoo, how thin you have become!”
And I remember: If there be a paradise on earth . . .
It is here. It is here. It is here.
How crystal clear is the memory of my early-morning hours at Grandma’s house before the sun crept up the horizon. I can see myself now waking up in the cool darkness, too excited about the awakening day. The light is still on in the living room, and Uncle Sevenese is drunk. He had long claimed the night for his own and knighted himself “a drunk Buddhist.” When I was young every and any form of sophistication was glamorous. To be young and sit in the presence of effortless cynicism is to be utterly captivated. And my uncle was the master of cynics. “How could one not revere a man who died because he was too courteous to refuse bad food?” he says of Buddha.
When he sees me peeping from the doorway, he calls me into the living room.
“Come here,” he whispers, patting the seat beside him. I run to join him. He tousles my hair like he always does.
“What are you doing still up?” I ask.
“What time is it?” There, the slight slur again. I giggle inside my hands.
I never saw the damage. I only saw a man of infinite sophistication celebrating a life of gorgeously outrageous ideas. The whisky bottle appeared incidental, if anything, its effects amusing and friendly. When he was like that, he discussed adult things with me that he and I both knew he really shouldn’t.
I poke my finger into his large tummy, and my finger disappears into rolls of fat. “Make your tummy shake,” I order, and instantly his entire tummy vibrates. That brings forth peals of uncontrollable laughter.
“Sshh,” he warns, stuffing his bottle of Bells farther down the cushions. “You will wake the Rice Mother.”
“Who?” I demand.
“The Giver of Life, that’s who. In Bali her spirit lives in effigies made out of sheaves of rice. From her altar in the family granary she protects the crops she made bountiful in the paddy fields. So sacred is she that sinners are forbidden to enter her presence or consume a single grain from her figurine.”
Uncle Sevenese wags a finger at me. He is without doubt drunk. “In this house, our Rice Mother is your grandmother. She is the keeper of dreams. Look carefully, and you will see, she sits on her wooden throne, holding all our hopes and dreams in her strong hands, big and small, yours and mine. The years will not diminish her.”
“Oh,” I exclaim, the idea growing large in my mind. I imagine Grandma, not frail and often sad, but as a Rice Mother, strong and splendid, grains of rice sticking to her body, and holding all my sleeping dreams in her substantial hands. Enchanted with the picture, I lie my head on my uncle’s pillow tummy.
“Dear, dear Dimple,” he sighs sadly. “If only you will never grow up. If only I could protect you from your own future, from yourself. If only I could be like the Innu shamans who can beat a drum from miles and miles away and make the deer dance while waiting for the hunters to arrive. While waiting for their own deaths.”
Poor Uncle Sevenese. I was too small to know that the demons and the ghosts were fast at his heels, their eyes huge and glowing like crocodiles’ eyes in the dark. Chasing. Chasing. Chasing. I lay on his belly, innocent and wondering if a shaman very far away had already beaten his drum, and the hunters were on their way. Was that why he was always out dancing the rumba, the merengue, and the cha-cha-cha?
“Birth is only death postponed,” he tells me, the whisky warm on his breath. In the morning he takes the sleeper train to dangerous, secret parts of Thailand, where it is possible to disappear without a trace. Where the girls have prized sets of impossibly clever muscles and extrude kamasalila, love fluids as fragrant as fresh lychees.
Still craving for something he cannot name, he leaves for Port au Prince in Haiti, where he consorts with voodoo doctors who have needle-thin fireworks sprinting out of their black auras.
Over the years I saved letters with pictures of him standing at the immense feet of the Egyptian pyramids. He sleeps in the desert under an astonishing ceiling of millions of stars and walks through a sea of dead birds, their tiny eyes and beaks encrusted with the whirling sands, the ones that would never finish their migratory journey across the desert. He drinks strong camel’s milk and notes how vociferously they complain when they are being loaded. They have feet as big and as soft as chapatis. He eats bread as hard as stone and watches amazed as tiny mice appear as if out of nowhere for the smallest crumb fallen on the sand. He informs me that the word for woman, horman, comes from the Arabic word haram, “forbidden,” but the men there call the pretty girls “bellaboooozzzz.”
He is offered pretty girls in shimmering veils and rich fabrics lying supine on cushions by the pool. Their flashing eyes, surrounded by clusters of painted stars, look back, adolescent with a red dot in the inner corners. Their breasts spread with musk gleam and the precious jewels in their belly buttons sparkle in the setting sun as they playfully sprinkle rose water on each other. Uncaring and unaroused, he wrote, “Am I finally weary? What can be the matter?”
Cheerlessly he disappeared on safari for a month. “The lack of company will do me good,” he said.
“He will lose his job,” Grandma lamented.
He returned restored somewhat, blackened to ebony by the ferocious sun. Then he traveled down to Singapore, unenthusiastically inspecting the standards. Eventually he took the overnight route north to the land of a thousand reclining Buddhas, saffron-clad monks, and delicately carved spires glowing in the smoky purple evening. There he closed his eyes and reached out to experience the familiar again, a yielding breast, a curving belly.
At Grandma’s the food was simple but healthy. She held my face by the kitchen window in the streaming sunlight and checked if my earlobes were healthy and transparent. Satisfied, she nodded and went back to chopping onions, quartering eggplants, or tearing spinach leaves. She was curious about everything—Father, school, my health, my friends. She wanted to know everything and seemed especially proud of my good grades.
“Like your father,” she said. “Before his bad luck pounced on him.”
We played an exhausting number of games of Chinese checkers, Grandma cheating a great deal. She hated losing. “Bloody pool,” she suddenly shouted to distract me, and as quick as a flash she moved her pieces around.
Often Granddad and I sat quietly on the veranda, watching the evening sun turn red in the sky to settle for the night. I read the Upanishads aloud for him. Once he fell asleep in his reclining chair. When I woke him up, he looked startled for a moment, squinted in confusion, and called me Mohini.
“No, it’s me, Dimple, Granddad,” I said, and he looked disappointed. I thought then that maybe he didn’t love me after all. Maybe he only loved me because I looked a little like her.
The rest of the holiday always flew by, the sun setting faster and faster, bringing the holiday’s end nearer and nearer. On the last night I always cried myself to sleep. The thought of going back to school, to Nash and Bella’s jealousy and to Mother’s fury, was almost too much to bear. She was always angriest when I returned from Grandma’s.
While we were growing, Mother and Father were the most unpredictable element in our lives. They were like gunpowder and a match, looking only for a flint or a rough surface so they could legitimately explode in a spectacular display of fireworks. In their time they found many flints and rough surfaces. Grandma said they were enemies from a past life, tied together by their sins, like two cannibals who feed on each other to live. They could have a conversation about the nuns in Andalusia, or how the breakfast egg should be cooked, that could end with a black eye and a set of broken crockery.
“And what are you doing, spying on us?” she would turn to me and scream hysterically.
“I’ve got a meeting in an hour—why don’t I leave you at Amu’s house, hmmm?” Papa would suggest, his handsome face sad.
Dear, darling Amu. I can’t remember a time when we didn’t have Amu, when I haven’t gone outside in the mornings and seen her sitting on a low stool surrounded by plastic pails, scrubbing and scrunching our dirty clothes. Mother could never do housework because of her arthritis, so she hired Amu to wash, mop, and wipe. She was there every morning, squatting outside with our pails of dirty clothes when we awakened. When she looked up and saw me, her small, triangular face would light up.
“Mind the water,” she would say.
And I would carefully arrange my dress around my knees and sit on the kitchen steps, watching her.
“Amu,” I would complain peevishly, “I caught Nash trying to rip out the pages of the book Uncle Sevenese sent yesterday.”
“Oh, dear, oh, dear,” she would say, clicking her red tongue. And then instead of sympathizing with me, she would launch into a long convoluted tale about her brother’s spiteful wife and her sisters, or she would produce a long-lost evil cousin out to swindle Amu’s poor unsuspecting parents, tales so full of intrigue and horrible people that I soon forgot my own petty troubles.
There were good times too. So exquisite you knew they could never last. Times when the entire family celebrated one of Papa’s deals with a big Chinese meal in one of the better hotels, eating abalone and lobster. When Mother was in such a good mood that I would wake up in the night and hear her singing to Papa. In those intoxicated days it seemed she was consumed by her love for Papa, burning so brightly I was scared to touch her glowing face. Then it seems she was even jealous of the Malay dancers on TV that Papa glanced at. But the money was soon gone, and they hastily returned to their ritual fighting once more, as if I had dreamed the happy lapse.
Once Mother took Bella with her to beg a loan from an old friend. Bella said he pushed an envelope of money very slowly along the table with his middle finger, all the time staring at Mother intensely.
“Next time come without the child,” he called after their departing backs. The financial situation became so dire that Amu had to bring rice and curry from her house for us. I remember tears running down Mother’s cheeks as she ate a piece of curried egg. She didn’t save any for Papa. When he came home, there was no food.
Three days later Mother went to see her friend again. She didn’t take Bella with her. She came home with a brand-new pair of gold-and-brown shoes for herself, a large grocery bag full of food, and a pair of strangely glittering eyes. When Papa returned, they fought viciously, and Mother shredded her new shoes in a fit, hurled herself on the bed, and howled like a wolf. They did not speak again until the rainy weather arrived, and Mother couldn’t do anything but sit with her feet up. Her knees troubled her, but her hands were so stiff and painful with arthritis, she could hardly open a jam jar. Then I thought Papa must love her, for he cleaned her every time she went to the toilet.
One day I came home from school, and Papa told me Granddad had fallen off his bicycle. By the time I was able to see him, he was so thin his hands were like long pieces of bone covered with skin. He cried when he saw me that time. I knew then that he was dying. A shriveled box full of history, stories so precious I knew I must save them all on paper or perhaps on tape. I did not trust my memory. One day my daughter’s daughter must know them. On my next trip back to Grandma’s I found a boxed tape recorder waiting for me. “Make your dream trail,” Grandma said. And that is what I did.
After I had read the Upanishads to Granddad, I switched on my machine and let him talk. He spoke sadly but beautifully. Behind me, where his eyes focused, I turned around and saw his Nefertiti. More beautiful than anything I could have imagined.
Every day Grandma fed him a small, very special medicinal black chicken that she cooked in herbs for him. It was very expensive to buy, but Grandma planned to give Granddad a chicken a day until
he was better. She cooked a chicken a day for nearly a year. Granddad died on November 11, 1975, leaving in my care his voice. All the grandchildren stood around his shrunken body, carrying lighted torches. Grandma did not cry. Mother came for the funeral too. She asked Papa whether there would be a reading of a will. I saw Papa slap her and walk out of the room. “No, of course there won’t be. The spider has it all, hasn’t she?” she screamed after him.
When I was nineteen years old, a man dashed out of MINB bank’s elevator and told me the craziest thing ever. He joked that he had looked out of the eye of a telescope and fallen in love with me, but his eyes seemed as surprised as I was. I thought he was a madman in an expensive suit, but I let him buy me an ice cream.
“Call me Luke,” he said, with a lopsided smile. He looked attractive then, terribly sophisticated and out of my league. In the basement food court I listened to him as I ate my strawberry ice cream and wondered how to eat the banana in the bowl with him watching me so closely. In the end I didn’t. It was too embarrassing. Leaving it was embarrassing too, but not as embarrassing as eating it in front of his opaque eyes. They were strange eyes. That day they were filled with a wonderful light and questions. Thousands of questions.
Where do you live? What do you do? How old are you? What’s your name? Who are you?
“Dimple.” He tried it experimentally on his tongue, and then he told me that the real beauty of a snake is not that its poison can kill a man in seconds but that, even armless and legless, it has buried terror of its species deep into mankind. So deep in our genes that we cannot get to it and are born to fear them. Instinctively.
