The Rice Mother

by Rani Manicka

  “Thank you,” Rosette whispered. “I may be a prostitute, but I loved your father.”

  “At least you have lived your life so you know what all your what-ifs look like,” I told the bent head. Then I turned away and left. I knew I would never go back to that horribly gilded cage with its lonely black-and-white cat.

  That night I woke up in the small hours for no reason at all. For a while I lay there, confused and oddly restless. There had been no nightmare, and I was not thirsty. And then I suddenly remembered another occasion when I had woken up for no good reason.

  I saw myself pushing back my blankets, sliding off the bed, and going to find Mommy. At times like these Mommy always knew what to do. We could snuggle up in her big bed, and she could pull out from under her bed the adventures of Hanuman, the Monkey God.

  Like a movie I see myself walking to my mother’s room. The whole house is quiet. I grip the cool banister and, looking down, see the living room full of shadows and dark corners. The hall downstairs is dark except for the soft glow from the night lamps. That means Daddy is still not home. My bare feet on the cold marble floor are silent. The door to Mommy’s room is closed. Amu and the driver are fast asleep in their rooms downstairs. I see myself, small with shoulder-length hair, pause for a moment in front of Mommy’s door before turning the knob. The door opens, and quite suddenly I am wide awake. Somehow the room looks different. The bedside lamp is on. The room is quiet and still but for the sound of dripping. A soft, wet sound. Plop . . . plop . . .

  Like a dripping tap.

  Mommy has fallen asleep on the small table by the bed. She is slumped on the table, her face turned away from my view. She was so tired that she fell asleep on the table.

  “Mommy!” I call softly.

  The room is cold and silent and slightly smoky. There is a sweetish odor that I do not recognize. There is something weird going on that I cannot put my finger on, but the hairs on my arms stand up and my mouth is dry. I turn away to leave. I will see Mommy in the morning. It is best. Things always look better in the morning light. And then I hear that thick dripping sound again. Plop. I turn around slowly and start walking toward Mommy’s sleeping figure. She is wearing her pretty blue nightie. On the table where Mommy has fallen asleep are the strangest pipes and things that I have never seen before. I walk closer and closer.

  “Oh, Mommy,” I say. The sound is like a lost whisper. I get closer and closer, and then, instead of turning around to face her, I take two more steps past the deeply sleeping figure. If I go any farther I will walk straight into Mommy’s bed, so I am forced to turn around. I turn around very slowly. For some secret reason that I myself do not understand, I close my eyes. I take a deep breath and then slowly open my eyes.

  I look directly into Mommy’s eyes. They look at me, and they look right through me. Mother’s eyes are glazed, and her mouth opens and closes like a fish. In her stomach is that beautifully carved Japanese sword that used to hang in Daddy’s study.

  “Hara-kiri. Hara-kiri. Hara-kiri,” Angela Chan, the bully in my classroom, sings in a taunting, lilting voice.

  My mind begins to whirl. “Ring a ring a roses,” she sings, her voice nasty in my head. “Stupid girl, you shouldn’t have told,” her mean voice hisses.

  I shake my head and the voice disappears, and once more I am looking into Mother’s glazed, blank eyes. Then my head is suddenly and confusingly full of nursery rhymes sung by taunting voices. They fill my head like a million buzzing bees so there is no room for my stunned brain to think.

  Wee Willie Winkie runs through the town. Upstairs and downstairs in his nightgown. Rapping at the window, crying through the lock. Are the children all in bed for now it’s eight o’clock. Wee Willie Winkie had bare feet in Mother Goose’s book of nursery rhymes.

  The Dove says, Coo, coo, what shall I do?

  Where are you going to up so high? To brush the cobwebs off the sky.

  May I go with you? Aye, by and by.

  Mary Mary Quite Contrary. And frightened Miss Muffet away. Cobbler, cobbler, mend my shoe. Old King Cole was a merry old soul. And a merry old soul was he. I see the moon and the moon sees me. God bless the moon and God bless me.

  Without warning the nursery rhymes stop. Silence.

  Mommy has committed hara-kiri. Will Daddy be proud? He always said that only the bravest samurais had the guts to commit hara-kiri the proper way, finish the job themselves. I take two steps closer to Mommy. I reach out and touch her hair. Soft. Her mouth closes and opens. “Mommy,” I whisper, “you are bleeding to death. Have you not heard Papa say ‘great strength is needed to finish the job properly?’ ” The blood from her wound is flowing quickly down her open palm, down her middle finger, and dripping into a red pool on the black floor.

  Red on black. Red on black.

  I stand frozen and watch a drop of blood poised on the end of her finger; then, as though in slow motion, it drops to the floor. I watch its graceful progress until it hits the spreading puddle of red and disappears into the thick liquid, and only then do I begin to scream.

  I pull my hair out in fistfuls and, sobbing, run to the bedside telephone. There I find I cannot remember how to dial 999. My fingers get caught in the dial, and the receiver springs out of my clammy hand. I run out of the room, screaming.

  “Mommy, Mommy, MOMMY!” I scream hysterically.

  At the bottom of the stairs I see Daddy, his foot on the first step. He has just come home. He is wearing his best batik shirt, the one he wears only to dinner functions with dignitaries. The smile on his face freezes at the sight of me.

  I lunge toward him. “Help, Daddy, help!” I cry wildly.

  I trip. At the top of the stairs stands a stern-faced goose with a black neck.

  Hah, I recognize him. It’s Goosey Goosey Gander, wandering upstairs and downstairs in his lady’s chamber. He must have mistaken me for the man who wouldn’t say his prayers, for he took me by my left leg and threw me down the stairs.

  And I begin to fly down the stairs toward my stunned father. The marble steps confront me halfway down. There is no pain. I begin to roll. Images flash by. In the marble floor I see my terrified reflection. In the ceiling I see Mommy’s glazed eyes accusing, her gorgeous laugh dead and trapped inside a bubble she is blowing, and at the bottom of the stairs Daddy’s urgent, horrified face rushes toward me, his smile hurt and gone. Then just blackness. The black hole caught me. “No more memories for you,” it said in a soft, soothing voice. It was a friend. It cared. It gave me a memory-eating snake for company.

  PART 7

  Some I Loved

  Nisha

  I lay quietly in the darkness watching my memories one by one, like a stack of old movies found in a forgotten attic, until dawn broke outside my window. By five-thirty in the morning, I knew my father had loved me. I understood him a little now. The pain of vessels not quite perfect. Uncle Sevenese had taught my mother that. I buried my face in my pillow and cried silently for the lost past. “I really did love you. I wish you had told me. I would have understood.”

  I drove into Kuantan. Parking on the main road, I walked into Great-Grandma Lakshmi’s cul-de-sac. Memories flooded back. I knocked on the door, and my great-aunt Lalita appeared. She held me in her feeble arms, but she looked so old I didn’t recognize her at all. Tears swam in her blurry eyes.

  “Come in. Come in. You are exactly like your mother,” she half laughed, half sobbed. “Do you remember me?”

  “A little bit,” I answered. She was the last survivor. The rest were dead. They were a long row of black-and-white photographs wearing garlands of fake flowers.

  “That’s all right,” she said. “You were only a child then. My mother always said, ‘One day, Lalita, that girl’s going to be a writer.’ Are you a writer?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? It was your dream. You used to write beautifully, nice things about your terrible father. I suppose I shouldn’t criticize the dead. Your mother was a beautiful girl. Did you kn
ow that your father fell in love with her the first time he saw her?”

  I nodded.

  “Would you like some coconut candy? It’s the soft type. Very good for the toothless.”

  “Yes, thank you,” I said, smiling. She was lovely, exactly as Mother had described her. So innocent.

  “Oh, wait a minute. Your great-grandmother left something for you.”

  She disappeared behind a curtain and returned with a bracelet that she placed carefully in my outstretched palm. I looked at it, and the shadow of a memory flashed across my sketchily constructed past. I closed my eyes and fingered the cool stones of the bracelet. There was a memory connected to the jewelry. By and by I heard my mother’s voice say, “Grandma Lakshmi said to Granddad, ‘Take Dimple with you. Sit there and make sure he doesn’t exchange the stones for something less precious. These jewelers are all crooks.’ I bounced on the middle bar of Granddad’s bicycle, all the while cocooned by his long white sleeves on either side of me, the rushing wind in my face. The jeweler’s room was dark. He worked by a small blue flame. Granddad handed over the jewels, and we waited there with our arms crossed while the jeweler worked at his wooden table with sharp metal instruments, setting Grandma’s jewels. I remember wanting an ice cream but Granddad saying that we had to wait until the setting was complete.”

  I opened my eyes. “Where did the stones come from?”

  “The sultan of Pahang and my brother Lakshmnan were sitting at the same gambling table once, and the sultan lost. He gave the jewels in lieu of the money lost. One never argued with a sultan, and my brother accepted the jewelry, hoping for a quick sale, but my mother got hold of it first. She recognized their value instantly.”

  “So these opals were actually won by my grandfather in a gambling game?” I asked, examining the pretty yellow lights in the green stones. Now I had something from my grandfather. I stood underneath his garlanded picture. I saw a handsome man, but in my mind his handsome head rolled on the ground. I turned away from the image. “Thank you. Thank you so much for this. Can I see the Kuan Yin statue?” I asked.

  “How do you know about her?”

  “I listened to all my mother’s tapes. It was you who spoke about the Kuan Yin, remember?”

  From deep inside the showcase with the pipe-cleaner birds and the gorgeous white coral that my granddad had stolen from the sea came the statue. She was smooth and beautiful. I ran an admiring finger down the jade, noticing that it was not glossy dark green, as it was described in the tapes, but a very pale green.

  “I thought it was supposed to be deep green?”

  “Yes, it was gloriously green many years ago when first out of its box, but every year since then it is fading.” My great-aunt’s smile was dusty with age.

  The jade was changing color.

  “You know—?”

  “Yes, I know. Return her.”

  I took the statue to a Chinese temple in Kuantan town. As soon as I stepped into the darkened interior, a red inner door opened, and a priestess in white walked out. She looked around expectantly and, spotting me, approached. Her eyes were fixed on the cloth package in my hand.

  “You have brought her back. I dreamed last night that she was coming back to the temple.”

  Astonished, I held the package out, and the priestess unwrapped it reverently.

  “Oh, look at the color. She must have brought much ill fortune to the woman who kept her. Was it your mother?” she asked, looking up into my face.

  “No, not my mother, my great-grandmother. And yes, the stone has brought terrible misfortune upon my family.”

  “I am so sorry to hear that. Such statues have powerful energies in them. They need prayer and a clean mind, or they will destroy the lives of the people who keep them. Now that she is where she belongs, she will regain her color.”

  Evening was approaching. On the horizon the sun was a ball of liquid blood, and for a while I tarried under the canopy of a large tree. Kuantan was small. I found places I recognized from the tapes and smiled to see them unchanged after so many years. I entered a newly built shopping complex. There was something I had to do. Outside a small boutique I hesitated, took a deep breath, and entered. Inside I browsed halfheartedly. What I really wanted was hanging on the mannequin in the window, but I just needed a little courage. Courage to ask the bored sales girl to take it down so I could try it on. Eventually I stopped pretending to browse. It had to be done. It had to be said.

  “Can you take down the dress that is in the window, please?”

  The girl’s face mirrored her thoughts. If I take the damn thing down, you had better buy it. “Which one?” she asked politely.

  “The red-and-black one.”

  “It’s a very nice one, but it is two hundred ringgit, you know.”

  I said nothing while the girl took down the dress. In the small cubicle the little dress looked rather short.

  The sales girl popped her head into the cubicle. “Wah, so nice legs, ahhh.” I said nothing. “Very sexy, lah,” she insisted.

  I was surprised to find my lifelong hatred of red and black muted into nothing more than slight disapproval at the shortness of the skirt.

  “Sneakers no good, lah,” the girl commented, taking out a pair of black sandals that tied at the ankles. I put my jeans and T-shirt into a plastic bag held out by the girl, paid for the dress and the shoes, and left the boutique. Walking fast along the shops, I stared at my own reflection with surprise. I looked tall and elegant. In fact unrecognizable. Though I had hated red, red loved me. It brought out the best in my coloring and promised a long and happy acquaintance.

  Red and black was in fact a superb combination.

  Watching Amu in the hammock one day, I decided to try my hand at writing. Some days I wrote in my mother’s white summer house, and sometimes I wrote in her room, but always the fierce spirits that lived inside Mother’s box came to me. They whispered things into my ear, and I wrote as fast as they spoke. Sometimes they sounded angry, sometimes they were happy, and sometimes they were full of regret. I listened to their sadness, and I knew that my mother had collected their grief because she knew that someday her daughter would gain her freedom from them. Night seemed to fly in faster and faster. By the time I lifted my head, it was dark outside, Amu was already lighting the prayer lamp downstairs, and the faithful blackamoor boys were offering flickering flames of light.

  “Come to eat,” Amu would call.

  Then came the day I wrote the last page. I leaned back in the darkening room, and something made me reach for the tape my mother had found in Great-Uncle Sevenese’s room after his death. I put it into the machine and clicked Play.

  “Then said another with a long drawn sigh,

  ‘My clay with long oblivion is gone dry;

  But fill me with the old familiar Juice,

  Methinks I might recover by and by!’ ”

  “Rogue that I am, I whispered that into your ears, and today you have brought me a magnum of Japanese sake. I tease you about a secret lover, and you blush a dull red. No, it is not a lover you have. It is a thorn in your breast. You will not tell me the nature of the thorn. Dear, dear Dimple, you are my favorite niece and always have been, but it hurts to love such a tragically sad and misguided creature. I have studied your charts, and in your house of marriage sits the serpent Rahu. I have warned you before about the man you married. I do not trust him. He wears his smile like his clothes, easily and carelessly. I have studied his charts too, and I do not like what I see.

  “He will be an adder at your breast.

  “Did I ever tell you about the adder in Raja’s chest? About three months after Mohini died, Raja died of a lethal snakebite. His own beautiful cobra bit him. I always remember him like a marvelous hero from an ancient world who thought to keep a huge, glistening cobra as a rat catcher. In the moonlight, his bronze body gleaming in the tall grass, all his secrets came alive. I can never forget that moment when he said, ‘Watch me,’ and approached that swaying black m
enace to stroke it as if it were but a plaything. Do you remember his answer to my question, ’Is a snake-charmer ever bitten by his own snakes?’

  “ ‘Yes,’ he said. ’When he wants to be bitten.’

  “I often think that inside me is a mirror image of me. A reckless, unwise fellow who does everything I am afraid to do. I have lived with him for many years, and he tells me his ferocious older brother lives in your husband. I wonder if you have ever seen him lurking inside. Perhaps you haven’t. They are cunning bastards. When I am shouting No, No, No, he is shouting On, On, On, with cruel glee in his eyes. When the cock crows outside and I turn away to go home, he is the one who winks down the cleavage of the woman at the bar and drawls, I think, very unwisely, ‘Would you waste those sweet domes, unused?’

  “I wake up in the bright light of the morning with only an indented pillow beside me, my toes sticky with marmalade, a jumbled, impossibly squalid memory, and the grateful thought: Thank God I left my wallet at Reception. Once or twice when I push away my glass and resolve groggily, ‘Enough,’ he lights another cigarette, raises his hand, and orders another whiskey. ’Straight,’ he tells the bartender. And then he leads me into the back alleyway, where even the taxi drivers will not go. A young girl will pull herself away from the wall she has been leaning on and run her forefinger down my face. She knows me. She knows me from the last time.

  “In Thailand you can buy anything. It is easy, and I have bought a lot of things in my lifetime. As you are my niece, and as I am not yet drunk, it is neither proper nor necessary to speak of them all, but I must tell you that pure heroin is one of them. I sat on the bed in my hotel room and considered the syringe, the needle, and the brown liquid inside. I examined myself minutely. Was it another experience I could add to my memorabilia of strangeness or a habit that will turn master? I have never said no to anything before, but heroin is the devil’s machine. You walk into it and come out at the other end altered beyond recognition. My God, I would come out of the machine gaunt, muddy-complexioned, vomit-splattered, and wild-eyed. I have seen them by the railway stations; their eyes in their unwashed, shrunken faces blank of all but the unquenchable thirst for another score. Was that to be my fate?