The Rice Mother

by Rani Manicka

  “I hesitated, but in the end I can be counted upon only to be weak. The prospect of stagnant waste was not equal to my compulsion for a new experience, for self-destruction. I tied my upper arm with a belt, and then I looked for and easily found a thick green vein in my arm. Health inspectors know the best places to look for them. I let the needle slide into my skin and closed my eyes. The heat was instantaneous, followed immediately by a peaceful rush such as I have never known before. Life’s troubles were indeed meaningless. I let myself fall into the abyss. I fell and I fell, and I would have fallen deeper but for the face that floated before me. Kutub Minar, my long-dead beloved cat, stared expressionlessly into my eyes. The only female I ever loved with all my heart. Perhaps she is the only one I ever came across with a warm body and cold lips. Now . . . if I had found such a woman I would have abandoned myself to her the way an alpha male baboon stretches out eagerly, patiently, on the ground, his limbs limp with remembered pleasure, and waits to be groomed by the female.

  “The cat mewed pitifully, as if in pain. My limbs, leaden with the drug, slept on. Suddenly Mohini appeared. I stared, astonished. Since the day she died, I had only heard her voice but had never seen her. She stood in front of me, as solid and as real as the bed I was lying on. Tears shimmered in her green eyes. I felt a strange pain, the pain of loss. I couldn’t rid myself of their images. I felt shame wash over me.

  “When she reached out and put her hand on my head, I felt the warmth of her skin. Was I dead? I thought I might be, so I tried to move my head slightly, and her hovering hand slipped onto my face, her hand soft against my cheeks. I felt a heavy weight on my chest. I looked into my dead sister’s eyes. I had forgotten how green they were. Suddenly she smiled, and I heard a tremendous rushing sound, as if I were standing too close to the edge of a railway track while an express train was passing through.

  “The weight on my chest lifted. Suddenly she was gone. Outside it was already dark. I heard the sounds of the food stalls in the street below coming alive. The scraping of plates and the rough, uneducated voices of the stallkeepers. The honest smell of cheap ingredients—garlic, onions, and bits of meat sizzling in lard—floated up through my open window. I felt hungry. The bloody syringe was still in my arm. I pulled it out and looked at the dark blood curiously. I would never repeat the experience. Mohini had made sure of that.

  “Balzac said, ‘An uncle is a gay dog by nature.’ I am a clown dancing on the edge of an abyss, and yet I tell you this now, though, like me, you will not listen: Don’t walk into the machine, for you will come out at the other end altered beyond help.

  “Don’t do it, Dimple.

  “I walk into the doctor’s surgery, and he says, ‘What? Are you still alive?’ He cannot believe that such an abused body survives. But you won’t survive the machine. Leave him. Leave the adder in his jungle. Leave the child in the jungle, for surely the adder will not hurt its own child. Nisha has good charts. She will do fine things with her life. Save your fragile self now, darling Dimple. I see bad things in your charts, and at night the demons send me dreams finely drizzled with blood. I am once more seven years old and hiding behind the bushes watching Ah Kow’s mother slaughtering a pig. The panic, the screams of terror, the spurting fountain of blood, and that unforgettable reek. In my dreams you are walking in a rain of blood. I shout, and you turn and smile fearlessly, your teeth red with blood. I fear for your future. It is drawn in blood. Leave, Dimple.

  “Leave. Please leave.”

  Sevenese’s voice ended, and only the sound of the tape whirling remained.

  Downstairs I heard Amu finishing her night prayers, ringing her little bell. I closed my eyes. In the red shadows of my eyelids I see Great-Uncle Sevenese sitting in the middle of a desert, bare-chested and wearing a white veshti. The desert night has painted him gleaming blue. The sand shimmers, but here and there lie dead birds, their tiny, open beaks and throats holding miniature sandstorms. He turns to me and smiles. His smile is familiar. “Look,” he says, sweeping his arms out to the sky. “It is the desert night’s one conceit, the zillions of stars that decorate her raven hair. Isn’t it the most splendid thing you ever saw?”

  I opened my eyes to a room full of dusk, and suddenly knew. I knew what my Great-Uncle Sevenese had desperately tried to write for my tormented mother on his deathbed. I knew what the unfinished message was. Stretched on a hospital bed, horribly bloated and voiceless in his dying world, he wanted to say, Flowers grow beneath her feet, but she is not dead at all. The years have not diminished the Rice Mother. I see her, fierce and magical. Stop despairing and call to her, and you will see, she will come bearing a rainbow of dreams.

  Outside the wind rustled the indigo leaves, and at the bottom of the garden, the old bamboo grove burst into song.