The Rice Mother

by Rani Manicka

  Ramesh beckoned me to sit on the floor and followed suit. Cross-legged, he seemed far more comfortable than he had on the chair in the living room.

  “She is fair, his lover, very fair,” he said. He lit another incense stick and stuck it into the soft flesh of a banana. “Does he have two deep lines running vertically down his face from his nose to his mouth?”

  “Yes,” I agreed eagerly, impressed by the extraordinary power, wielded so casually without pomp or needless drama.

  He poured milk into a bowl. “Your husband is not what you think he is,” he pronounced, looking at me directly in the eyes. “He has many secrets. He has the face of a man and the heart of a snake. Do not keep him. He has the power to destroy you.”

  “But I love him. It is her. He changed when she came into his life,” I pleaded desperately. “He built me a summer house before she came. He sent me daffodils, knowing that I knew in the language of flowers they meant ‘forever thine.’ ”

  He looked at me steadily. “You are wrong about him, but I will do as you ask.”

  I felt a clutch of fear then. To disobey the panther seemed suddenly fatal. If he had persuaded me more—but his quick capitulation spoke of disenchantment. Disenchantment came only with superior knowledge.

  “I will put his sickness in the milk and God will drink it.”

  “Why do you say he has the heart of a snake?”

  He smiled ever so slightly, sagely. “Because I know snakes, and he is after all one.”

  I felt chilled to the bone with his answer. No, I would still keep Luke. He would be different when she was gone. Alexander the Great’s mother slept entwined in snakes. No harm befell her. I would keep him yet.

  “Make her go,” I whispered tremulously.

  “Do you want to hurt her?” he asked softly.

  “No,” I said immediately. “No—just make her go away.” And then a thought came to me. If she went away, he would pine for her, and that was not what I wanted. “Wait!” I cried. The whites of his eyes floated before mine in the windowless room. “Make him stop loving her. Make him afraid of her.”

  He nodded. “So be it. I’ll need some ingredients from the provision shop,” he said, getting up. The panther was swift and graceful. He looked down at me. “I shall be no more than twenty minutes. You can wait here or have a cup of tea with my wife in the kitchen.” As soon as the curtain closed over his dark figure, the room took on a sinister appearance. Shadows in the corners came alive. The skull grinned knowingly. The oil lamps flickered, and the shadows moved. I stood up and rushed through the curtain.

  It was dark and cool in the corridor. I followed it and came into a bright kitchen. Everything was clean and tidy. The bat-faced woman turned from her task of scraping a coconut half to look at me.

  “Your husband had to go and buy some provisions,” I explained hurriedly. “He asked me to join you for a cup of tea.”

  She stood wiping her hands down her sarong and smiled. Her gums and teeth were red from chewing betel nut. Her small bat face looked quite friendly when she smiled. I leaned against the door and watched her set about making the tea. She boiled water in a pan on a gas stove.

  “My uncle used to play with your husband when he was a little boy,” I volunteered to set some sort of conversation going.

  She whirled around from the task of spooning tea into a large enamel mug, her round eyes bristling with the first sign of animation and curiosity I had seen.

  “Really? Where was this?” she asked.

  “In Kuantan. They grew up together.”

  She sat down suddenly. “My husband grew up in Kuantan,” she repeated, as if I had said something unbelievable. All of a sudden tears welled up in her eyes and ran down her squashed face. I stared at her in surprise.

  “Oh, I can’t take it any more. I didn’t even know that he grew up in Kuantan. He never tells me anything, and I am always in fear of him. All I know about him is that his first wife killed herself. She drank weed killer, burned her insides, and lay in agony for five days. I don’t understand what is happening to me either. I am so frightened, and . . . and look at this,” she sobbed, running to a drawer and wrenching out a black handbag. She opened it, turned it upside down, and shook it violently. All the coins and a few papers as well as her identity card and two square blue packets dropped out. She picked up the packets and thrust them toward me. “It’s rat poison,” she informed me wildly. “I carry it everywhere. One day I know I have to drink it. I just don’t know when.”

  I stared at her in shock. When she first opened the door to me, she seemed a vanishing mouse, a world away from the raving lunatic confronting me. I licked my lips nervously. Her distress bothered me. Her husband bothered me too, but I wanted Luke. I would have done anything to get him back. I could wait a little longer in the company of that strangely disturbed woman to get my husband back.

  There was a sound at the front of the house, and she quickly stuffed the blue packets, the coins, and the papers back into her worn handbag. It was amazing how quickly she moved. She dried her eyes, poured boiling water onto the tea leaves, and covered the mug with a lid in one fluid movement. Even before the sound of his footsteps arrived in the kitchen, she had poured condensed milk and spooned sugar into two smaller mugs. Without another word she went back to scraping the coconut halves onto a large plastic platter.

  When Ramesh appeared at the doorway, she threw him a hasty glance, furtive and full of fear, before turning back to her task. I wondered what he had done to her to inspire such terror, but I did not feel that he would harm me, and if he did, I was fully prepared to suffer the consequences of my actions.

  “Have your tea. I shall start my prayers alone. It is better that way.” He turned and left. The woman got up from the floor, where she had been scraping the coconut, strained the tea into two mugs, and offered me one without meeting my eyes.

  “You can drink it in the living room if you like,” she offered politely. There was no longer any desperation in her voice. It was calm and neutral. The mouselike bat creature was back.

  I sat in the sparsely furnished living room and drank my tea. The hot liquid calmed me and soothed my ruffled nerves. Inside me was a fear of the black deed I was about to undertake. Soon Ramesh pushed aside the beads and stood before me, a red cloth package held in his hands. Hastily I put my mug of tea on the floor and took the lumpy package with the proper respect. With both hands.

  “Keep the salt inside the cloth in a bottle and scatter it under your husband’s bed daily until it is all gone. Whenever he goes out at night, take a small handful of salt, repeat the mantra I will teach you with as much force as you can muster, and then in that same firm tone order him to come home.”

  He took my hand. His was cold and dry. He turned it over and studied my palm for some minutes. Then he let my hand drop and taught me my mantra.

  I paid him what seemed to me to be a pitiful sum. I wanted to pay him more, but he refused. “Look at this house,” he said. “I do not need more.”

  I took the salt and prepared to leave. As I was slipping into my shoes, I looked up to say good-bye and found him staring at me with a peculiar intensity. His eyes were dark and unfathomable, his face closed and unreadable. He looked like a black marble statue.

  “Be strong and be careful, or he will win.”

  I nodded and, clutching my red package, left as quickly as I could. The whole experience had unnerved me thoroughly. I could feel the blood rushing through my body in a great panic. I thought about calling Uncle Sevenese and telling him what had happened and then decided against it.

  I stopped at a shop and bought a bunch of bananas. Then I threw the bananas by the roadside and put the red cloth and its contents into the brown paper bag. I didn’t want Amu to see the red cloth. She would suspect its potential instantly. She knows all about the revenges that spurned lovers resort to. A big part of me felt ashamed. What would Papa say if he saw me sprinkling my magic under Luke’s bed? What would Grandma say?
It didn’t bear thinking about.

  I watched Luke prepare to go out. He put on his gray-and-white silk shirt. He looked perfectly charming. He smiled at me and kissed the top of my head tenderly. “I won’t be late,” he said.

  I know you won’t, you snake-hearted person, I thought to myself. I too had a secret now. It made me feel powerful in the face of his smooth deceit. He could look me in the eye and lie straight-faced. Well, so could I.

  “Shall I wait up for you?” I asked with that special half smile. He had not seen its face for a long time and seemed surprised.

  “Okay.” He nodded eagerly enough.

  Maybe I had started to hate him then. I don’t know. But there was old blood on the blade of my ax, and the thought of life without him was still unbearable. I listened to the sound of his car engine dying away at the end of the driveway before I ran up the stairs, enraged, scattered the salt under his bed, and spat out the mantras coiled inside my mouth. I called him home.

  In half an hour I did the same again. Angry tears ran down my face. I ordered him home.

  Thirty minutes later I did it again. This time my voice had grown harsh and hateful. I ordered him home. “Come home now,” I hissed venomously.

  In less than twenty minutes he was back. I listened to the purring of his Mercedes with wonder. Ramesh truly knew his stuff. This was one battle I was going to win. I wanted to laugh. The key encountered the front door.

  “Oh, you’re home early,” I observed casually.

  For a moment he stood frozen in the middle of the room as if confused. He looked at me strangely.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked. A small worry nagged in my head. I didn’t desire him so lost. He was simply supposed to return home to his wife and love her like before. I stared at him, and he stared back.

  “I thought you might be ill,” he said, his voice odd. “I thought something might be wrong at home. I felt anxious and restless. Is everything okay?”

  “Yes,” I said feebly, standing up and walking over to hold him. It broke my heart to see him look so beaten. I didn’t hate him after all. He was my life. “Oh, Luke, everything is fine. There is nothing wrong. Let’s go to bed.”

  “I thought I felt something crawl up my back inside my shirt,” he muttered to himself.

  I led him up the stairs, limp and uncomprehending. In bed, he didn’t want to make love. He held me close, as if he were a child that had been frightened by a nightmare. He frightened me. The power of the salt under the bed scared me. Over and over again I saw Luke’s confused face say, “I thought I felt something crawl up my back inside my shirt.” Luke without his glittering eyes was a frightened little boy. The responsibility of turning his brilliant brain into mush must not be mine. For hours that night I lay awake, listening to the sound of his breathing. Once he shouted, breathing hard. I shook him awake, and for a horrible flash he stared at me, hunted and without recognition.

  “Everything is all right,” I comforted in the soft darkness, stroking his head until his breathing became deep and even once more, and he fell asleep on my chest. Why does my silly heart desire his tainted caress?

  The next morning I swept away the salt. I gathered all the salt crystals together and flushed them down the toilet. Luke as he was the night before was too frightening a vista for me. The red cloth I put into the bin, and Ramesh’s warning eyes into the farthest corner of my mind. Never again would I try anything like that. I would love Luke until I loved him no longer, and then I would be free. That was the only option left for me.

  To console myself, I made a large flower arrangement. It drooped over a third of the dining table. Filled only with white rosebuds, yew, and purple hyacinths, it looked like a funeral arrangement, mourning for color, but when he walked in, he said, “Why, Dimple, that is beautiful! You really have a talent with flowers.” He did not realize that white rosebuds mean a heart ignorant of love, yew, sadness, and purple hyacinths, my sorrow. Ah well, how to expect a lion such as him to know the emotions that gently reside in flowers? It must have been his secretary who found out the meaning of the daffodils he sent and the red tulips he brought to my doorstep after all. As I had suspected.

  He was still seeing her. I felt it on my skin. Rubbing, rubbing like coarse material. She materializes in my dreams, waving at me from afar. Sometimes she laughs at me and shakes her head in disbelief. “He is not your man,” she tells me. “He is mine.” I wake up and stare at my husband, almost in fascination. He has no idea I know, so he loves me gently, like silk on my sore skin. He buys me flowers, velvet-textured and expensive. I look at him and smile, for he must never know that I know the face of his whore.

  There is Nisha to consider now.

  Amu really loves Nisha. In the afternoons they lie drowsily together inside the hammock. Sometimes I tiptoe outside to gaze at the two people that I love most in the world asleep under a tree. The sweat on their upper lips, the even breathing, and the minute veins that web their closed eyelids, like half-open windows, console me. It is funny the feelings that Amu arouses in me. When I see her in the temple in the company of other old people, she looks frail and pitiful. Her life seems wasted, over, but when I see her with Nisha cradled in her arms, I think her life rich and full.

  Bella wanted to buy a house, and I promised to supply the down payment. Surely Luke would not mind. Too bad if he does. For my birthday he bought me the largest diamond I have ever seen. I suppose he is doing very well, with the economy on the up and up. It is freakish how completely blind he is to my pain and sorrow. Is it possible that someone could be so blind?

  Mother came to see me, wanting money. Papa was not feeling very well and he had not been working. She needed twenty thousand ringgit. “Of course, Mother.” Inside her mouth, her tongue is very pink and very sharp. It moves around her mouth like an energetic alien with an agenda of its own. I was quite fascinated by it. It reminded me of that time Uncle Sevenese got so drunk, he likened Mother to the small-brained howler monkeys he saw in Africa—black with a very pink tongue. “If you saw their mating ritual, Dimple, you’d be shocked by how much they resemble your dear mother when she is talking.” Of course, he was swaying drunk when he said that. But still.

  A few days later Mother was back. This time Nash was in a spot of trouble with loan sharks. She needed five thousand. I gave her ten. I know Luke hates Mother, and he does sometimes question big cash withdrawals, but . . . who cares.

  Two weeks passed, and Mother found her way to my living room again. Nash was in serious trouble again. He had “borrowed” forty thousand ringgit from the safe in his office on Friday night, hoping to double it at the Russian roulette tables in Genting Highlands at the weekend. Needless to say, he lost all of it. His employer lodged a police report, and he was taken away. When Mother went to see him, his bronze arms were covered with cigarette burns, and his arrogant eyes cowed with wild fear.

  “It is the policemen who did this,” he whispered desperately through a split lip. He clutched Mother’s hand frantically and begged her to pay his employers off so they would drop the charges. Say no more, Mother dear. I went to the bank with her and withdrew the money in cash. I am developing a taste for giving Mother Luke’s money. Papa phoned to say thank you, but he sounded broken. I knew how he felt.

  Let me tell you a story—a strange one, but I assure you it is all true. You decide whether or not the heroine did the right thing, for I, myself, fear she has made a grave mistake, and there is no going back.

  It happens in a gorgeous house. Unsmiling, a splendid man watched her among the throng of party guests, bejeweled, gilded, and so very beautiful. Of course he couldn’t hear what they were saying, a sleek waiter and she, but he could see even the tiniest of nuances in their furiously young bodies. They were flirting with each other. He watched her eyes carefully. He could always tell all her thoughts from her eyes. They were upturned and moist with some strange emotion. Had he seen that look before? Mmmm, perhaps. He would look deeper into the shadows of his mem
ory banks. The past seemed so far away now. Above all he desired objectivity.

  There. There—a red fingernail tracing a crease in the waiter’s shirt. In front of all these people! The shame. He thought about the delicacy of her neck. It fitted so prettily inside the circle of his entwined fingers. He knew, because he had tried it for size. And it was perfect. His mind filled with a picture of the hussy, her legs, smooth and silky, wrapped around the waiter’s naked torso. The liquid picture made him gasp for breath.

  Suddenly he wanted to know what the reality looked like. Those small animal sounds she made in his bed, he wanted to watch from afar. Perhaps he was surprised by the perversion of his thoughts, but he consoled himself that it was only an experiment. He might not like it, which of course would exonerate him of all perversion. He saw her offer the waiter a quick sidelong glance with her beautiful eyes and that half smile that looked more like a pout. That look he definitely recognized. It had once fired his blood and made the need to possess her sear his loins at night. He shifted uncomfortably in his trousers.

  She tossed her long blue-black hair and swayed away. The waiter stared at her back.

  The splendid man stood up and began to walk toward the waiter. She had chosen the cast; now he must hire them. Close enough, he clicked his fingers. It was rude, but the waiter turned around, his expression polite and professional although his eyes were deeply offended. He was really quite good-looking in a dumb sort of way. The man smiled at the waiter and crooked a finger. He could see the resentment that stiffened the waiter’s shoulders as he walked over. He had the walk of a pansy. The well-dressed man relaxed.