The Rice Mother

by Rani Manicka

  From the mosque down the road a mullah sings his praises to Allah into the loudspeaker. His deep voice resonates and echoes into the dusk.

  “Allah-o-Akbar, Allah-o-Akbar.”

  I have always liked the sound of their prayer. As a child I would listen to their call, so tangible that if I closed my eyes, it opened like a door that I could walk into. Up a secret, magical staircase filled with haunting sounds I went until, my hair standing on end, I reached the minaret. . . . No, those days are all gone. I slide the picture back into its leather pouch. I can hear Amu singing to Nisha. She is a wonderful baby.

  I went to see Uncle Sevenese. I asked him for the name of a good bomoh. A man who can cast a black spell for me. The picture shows me that she is dangerous. A woman in love will always want more. A prostitute wants only what is in a man’s wallet. A woman in love wants to know the contents of a man’s heart. If her picture is engraved on its walls.

  Lakshmnan

  There was a fine rain falling this morning.

  Now it’s in my head. Tap. Tap. Tap. Like a child’s knuckle on a glass window. Ahhh, how tired I am. I will be fifty soon, but I feel like a hundred. I have pains in my hand that travel up my shoulder, and when I lie sleepless in my bed, listening to my wife breathing beside me, my heart sometimes misses a couple of beats. It is tired too. It longs simply to stop.

  I dream of her. She brings me baskets of flowers and fruit. She is glowing and only fourteen. How I envy her! “Take me with you, Mohini,” I plead, but she only places her cool hand over my lips and tells me to be patient. “How many more years of guilt?” I ask, but she shakes her head and says she doesn’t know.

  “It was an accident,” everyone dismissed, safe in their cocoon of blameless sorrow. Not I. For it was I who caused the accident. It was my fault. I was the fool who slipped and fell into the crevice that should have kept her safe.

  For each man kills the thing he loves. Yet each man does not die.

  Yes, he does not die, but how he lives. Oh, God, how he lives. Many years ago I read about a great Arab traveler, Ibn Battuta, who lived in the fourteenth century. He wrote that while the sultan of Mul-Jawa was sitting in audience, he saw a man who held in one hand a knife resembling a bookbinder’s tool deliver a long speech in an unknown language. Then the man gripped his knife with both his hands and cut his own throat so viciously that his head fell to the ground. And the sultan laughed, declaring, “They are our slaves. They do this freely for the love of us.”

  That is what I have done. I have slain myself for the love of my sister.

  I thought I would never again speak of her, and yet now, after all these years of silence, I feel as if I must. Nine months we spent lost somewhere deep inside my mother looking out at each other, sharing space, liquid, and laughter. Yes, laughing. My sister made my heart laugh. She made the whole world bright and dazzling without saying a word. We never spoke. Why would anyone speak to his hand or leg or head? She was that much a part of me. When they took her away, those Japanese bastards removed some vital part of me. When I closed my eyes, I would see her face, and the longing was unbearable. It made me want to scream and shout and destroy. I didn’t scream. I didn’t shout. I just destroyed.

  At the beginning I simply lashed out and crushed the people closest to me, breathing fire, and reducing everything in my path to ashes. I took pleasure in causing strife, seeing the growing fear in my siblings’ eyes, but that was hardly enough. Even twisting my heel on Mother’s heart, engorged with love for me, was insufficient. I had to obliterate me. How could I be successful and rich and happy after I had killed my sister? Sometimes I sit and wonder which god smote me with that famous headache during my senior exams. Could it be Lord Lakshmnan himself at his first attempt to sabotage his own life? Could it be that the bookbinder’s knife had already done its gruesome work?

  I know Dimple was surprised when I asked to be a part of her dream trail. After all, I had refused a thousand times in the past.

  “Why now, Papa?” she asked, startled.

  Now because the angry fires that burned inside me are dying away; the orange embers are graying. Now because Nisha must hear my side, because I too have a side, and now because it is time to admit and face the colossal mistakes.

  Sometimes my rolling head looks up to my headless body in shock at the stupid, incredible things that my body has got up to. Yet I cannot stop. There was much to destroy, but I mangled myself freely for the love of her.

  The real damage was done in Singapore, where I learned my vices well. A good family Mother knew offered me accommodation. They had a son, Ganesh, two years older than me, and a daughter Anna’s age whom they called Aruna. She appeared to hate me from the first moment she laid eyes on me. She pulled bored faces and made sarcastic comments directed at me. Her mother used to iron my shirts, and once, in a great hurry, as she ran out of the door, she asked her daughter to iron the shirt for me. With disgust on her face Aruna picked up my shirt to iron it, but I snatched it out of her hand.

  “Don’t bother,” I said rudely, turning away.

  That night my door opened, and in the half-light she walked in. She wore only a slip, the silky material clearly outlining her breasts. Startled, I stared at them. When she was close enough, I reached out and touched them. They were large and soft in my hands. I had never known a woman’s body before. She fell upon me ravenously. Countless times I loved her that night as she moaned and moved in my arms. Aruna never spoke. Before dawn she left, leaving behind the pungent smell of passion. I threw open the windows and smoked a cigarette. For a while there I had forgotten Mohini. The guilt returned.

  The next morning at breakfast the girl was quiet. She did not meet my eyes. The sarcastic comments and odd faces were gone. That night she appeared again. We built a rhythm. By the time she left before daybreak, she was familiar to my body. I opened the windows and let her aroma out.

  We established a pattern. I looked her in the eye less and less, and I began to wait for her unclothed figure more and more. There were some nights she did not come. Those days I smoked until I fell asleep.

  Then one day she whispered in the dark, “I’m pregnant.”

  How naive I was then! That practical thought had honestly never occurred to my fevered brain, and I recoiled in sudden horror.

  She pulled me closer and clung desperately. “Marry me,” she pleaded.

  We did not make love that night. She left, sobbing. I sat stiffly on the bed. I did not even like her, much less love her. I remembered her like a dream or a ghost one meets only at night. The memory is always vague and indistinct. What did I really remember? A velvet tongue on my back, soft lips on my closed eyes, the slip of her body against mine, and the black vortex into which my guilt disappeared. And, of course, the smell of her—wet turmeric. I couldn’t sleep, so I dropped out of the window and went in search of the all-night food stall I frequented in Jalan Serrangon. In the yellow light of his gas lamp Vellu’s ebony face broke into a broad smile.

  “Hello, teacher,” he called cheerfully.

  I smiled listlessly and collapsed onto a wooden stool. Unasked, he placed a steaming glass of tea in front of me. Then he went back to his job of cooling tea, pouring it high up from one enamel mug to another. For a while I watched the foamy liquid expertly stretched between two mugs take on the appearance of an ostrich plume, then I turned my head and stared into the night. A stray cat came to mew by my feet, and a mangy dog skulked and foraged among the rubbish by the drains. All night long I sat watching the procession of people who took their tea from Vellu’s stall.

  At first the cinema-goers, loud and jolly, then students from the college nearby, young and carefree; after them the prostitutes and their johns, two policemen on the beat, and then the incredibly beautiful transvestites. They glanced at me boldly. As the night moved deeper into itself, the people became stranger and stranger until finally the dustmen arrived. I stood up and left.

  In the morning at the breakfast table I told her fath
er the good news, that I had found lodgings with some friends of mine; their house was closer to the school where I taught. I did not look at her. I packed and left before night could fall and went to rent a cramped room with very little to commend it in Chinatown. I was washing my socks in the sink a week later when her brother came to see me.

  “Aruna is dead,” he said.

  She flashed upon my brain in the half-dark: half-clothed, her eyes slits of passion. “What?” I said.

  “Aruna is dead,” he repeated, his face dazed.

  In my mind I saw her neck, stretched to the fullest when her head was thrown back as she arched atop me like a mighty Greek sculpture. She was the color of earth itself.

  “She committed suicide,” came his hoarse whisper, disbelieving. “She simply carried on walking into the sea until she drowned.”

  I saw her strong figure moving, moving away, but it was not painful. Tragedy. Clytemnestra is dead. She will never dance again in the half-light.

  I went to her funeral. I met her father’s shaken eyes squarely and her mother’s uncomprehending sorrow with the kindness of a murdering impostor, but when I looked into her coffin, I saw her again stretched on my bed, her thighs curving around my pillow, her dark, sad eyes watching me. To those eyes I couldn’t lie. “Sleep, Clytemnestra. Sleep. For I have remembered you better in the half-light,” I murmured to her tragic face. I sat frozen outside. My child was dead. And there was no one to cry for him. I returned to my little room and denied her a resting place in my mind. She became transparent. Good-bye, Clytemnestra. You know I have never loved you.

  It was only by accident, through a friend of a friend, that I chanced upon my new lover. What goes around comes around, they say. And this time it was my turn to fall deep into the silken arms of a heartless lover. Mah-jongg. Her name works a miracle on me. She clicks to me. It is a secret language. An erotic command. You will never understand it because her red vinyl lips have not called to you. One click, and I, my family, my grandiose plans, my waiting appointments, my half-finished meal, my sick wife, my barking dog, my troublesome neighbors, all dissolve to nothing. I hold her cool tablets in my hand, and I am king, but more, I forget my dead sister. I linger by her side till morning.

  I’ll tell you the real secret about us hopelessly compulsive gamblers . We don’t want to win.

  I know that as long as I am losing, there is a reason to carry on. A big win would necessitate the intolerable: leaving the table when there is still money to be spoiled on my silken lover.

  Yes, it’s true I married Rani to clothe my lover. And I have remained faithful to my lover’s possessive, unreasonable demands through the years, even while my family have been poor and miserable. I have been a terrible father. A headless father.

  I knew all the expensive things in Nash’s room were stolen, just like I knew Rani poisoned Bella against my own family. Bitter though it is to swallow, I even knew that the bitch used to beat poor Dimple black and blue, but in the end I always had to return to my mistress, or the guilt was unbearable. She was my opium. She promised forgetfulness. Now death is nearing. Take courage. I do not fear. My father waits on the other side.

  When we were first married, my unending grief for Mohini irritated my wife. “For God’s sake,” she exclaimed, “there are families that are wiped out but for one during wars. I bet they didn’t carry on in this ridiculous way. It’s only one dead girl, Lakshmnan. Life goes on.” But as the years wore on, she became angry and ever more jealous that my dead sister was more real to me than she was. “How dare you insult me in this way?” she screamed. I have never told anyone but, you see, I have seen what the Japanese do to women they like. And the memory haunts me while I am sleeping.

  It was while I was hunting in the forest with my aborigine friend Udong. Japanese soldiers in the forests are like sumo wrestlers in a ballet. They stand out like sore thumbs. You can hear them crashing about from miles away. One Saturday we came upon them in a clearing. We crouched in the bushes behind the bastards and watched them with a Chinese woman. Perhaps she was a Communist messenger braving the jungle for a cause. How they used her!

  Oh, God, I cannot describe what they did to her.

  In the end she was no longer human. Covered in her own excrement and bleeding profusely, she was panting on the ground when one of them slashed her throat. Another cut off one of her breasts and stuffed it in her mouth as if she was eating it. This they found hilarious, laughing uproariously as they zipped up their gore-splattered trousers and moved off on their murderous way.

  When their harsh, guttural voices had died away, we came out of our hiding place and stood frozen and disbelieving over the woman, her naked legs askew, her face contorted with a bloody lump of meat sticking out of it. It was deadly quiet, as if the brutal jungle that daily fed upon itself had seen the appalling carnage and stood shocked. I still see her today. The silent hate in her face.

  We left her there as she was, a warning, a taunt to the Communists. Afraid of reprisals and unwilling to get involved in the war between the Japanese and the Communists, we took with us only the memory of her silent hate. In my nightmares I dream that we are not standing over a female Communist messenger’s body but Mohini, her naked legs askew, a bloody lump in her mouth, and she is looking at me with silent hate.

  I have done an unimaginable injustice to Dimple, but perhaps she will forgive me, for my head has been rolling for a long time now. I watch her, and I can see the unhappy shadows in her eyes. I have always known she would be unhappy by his side: I knew he would break her. For men like that, women are playthings and possessions. He should have married Bella. She is hardy. She knows what to do with such men.

  I should demand to know the reason for the shadows in my daughter’s eyes. I should confront him. It is my right, my duty as a father, but he is clever, my son-in-law. It is the yellow in his blood. Through the ages they have learned to bribe even their gods with sticky, sweet foods, so why not a headless father-in-law? He has bribed me with this big house that I live in. He has sealed my lips with the sweet cement that built this house.

  Aruna sits dreamy and ghostly at the foot of my bed in her slip, eyes empty but open and mouth closed. She watches me. No doubt it is all in my mind, but I can’t set aside the idea that she lives at the foot of my bed.

  PART 5

  The Heart of a Snake

  Dimple

  Uncle Sevenese yielded the address. At first he refused, but my begging, bruised eyes hurt him. I went to see Ramesh, the snake charmer’s second son. He had learned his father’s dangerous craft, meditated in cemeteries, and was certified to chase away unwanted spirits and sell potent charms to people for a monetary reward. Daylight saw him in a hospital attendant’s clothes, remarried with no children, and attached to a rumor that his first wife had gone mad.

  I drove out to Sepang. It was a very poor area. Small wooden houses lined the road. A group of youngsters stared at my BMW with a mixture of admiration and envy. Ramesh’s house was easy to find. There was a large statue of Mariaman, the god of beer and cheroots, in the garden. A salt-dried, gaunt woman with very prominent shoulder blades came to the door when I called. She had the squashed face of a bat, only on a human being it didn’t look so adorable. She was young, though. I could see my dress and person impressed her.

  “Have you come looking for him?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I replied.

  She bade me enter. The house was wooden and small, the furniture shabby and sparse. A fan in the ceiling whirled, but other than that, the place looked more deserted than inhabited. “Please sit,” she invited, indicating one of the chairs near the door. “I will go and get my husband.”

  I smiled and she disappeared through a bead curtain. In minutes a man parted the beads and stood in the small room. He was dressed in a white T-shirt and khaki trousers. He made the room shrink into claustrophobic proportions, for he had the face of a hunting panther— hungry, very black, and exuding a dangerously male smell. The white
s of his eyes were so bright, they were frightening. He smiled slightly and brought his palms to meet in the age-old Indian gesture of polite greeting.

  “Namaste,” he said. Great culture flowed in his voice. It was all so unexpected, I jumped up to return the greeting. He indicated I should sit. I sat, and he prowled to the chair farthest away from me.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked politely. He had not blinked. Disconcerted, I felt as if he could see through me. That he already knew what I was there for.

  “I am actually the niece of Sevenese, who you used to play with when you were younger,” I explained quickly. For a fraction of a second the lithe body stiffened, and the eyes flicked as if he had received an unexpected blow. Then the moment was gone. I could have imagined it. Perhaps I had.

  “Yes, I remember your uncle. He used to play with me—and my brother.”

  No, I had not imagined it. I began to think that he bore a grudge toward my uncle. I should not have come. I should not have told him we were related.

  But suddenly he grinned broadly. He had bad teeth. The flaw relaxed me.

  “My husband has someone else. Can you help me get him back?” I blurted out.

  He nodded. Once more he reminded me of that stalking panther.

  “Come,” he said, springing up and leading the way through the bead curtain. Past the bead curtain, it was windowless and shadowy. He turned to his right, pushed aside a green curtain, and entered a small room choking with the smell of incense and camphor. A rambling altar grew upward from the floor, holding a large statue of a god or a demigod that I did not recognize. Small oil lamps burned in a circle around the statue. There were offerings of cooked chicken, fruit, a beer bottle, and trays of flowers at his feet. The face of the god was hideous, with a huge purple tongue, bulging eyes that stared straight ahead, and a mouth stretched into a terrible roar of anger. Red paint dripped from the gaping hole. On the floor next to the altar was a curved knife, and beside it, a human skull. In the flickering light of the oil lamps both objects gleamed dangerously. I wondered if it was the same skull that Uncle Sevenese had told me belonged to Raja.