The Hungry Ghosts (13 page)
Mili was startled. “Yes, of course, Shivan, what choice do most Tamils have?”
“If we are abandoning Sri Lanka, it’s because Sri Lanka abandoned us first.”
“Definitely, machan, definitely,” he said, bewildered by my rising voice.
Before we could say anything further, Renu rushed out, crying, “Aiyo, so sorry, men.” There was a general calling out of greetings and chatter about which car they could squeeze her into.
“Well, Shivan,” Mili said gently, and held out his hand to me. “I wish you the very best of luck. I wish you much happiness in Canada.”
“Thank you,” I mumbled and shook his hand, ashamed at my outburst and not meeting his gaze.
The evening before we left, my grandmother took me to the Wellawatte Kovil for a Ganesh pooja. My grandmother, like all Buddhists, turned to the Hindu gods for intervention with life’s daily problems, these being beneath the Lord Buddha, who had transcended all desire. Ganesh, the remover of obstacles, was appealed to in times of crisis and change. The evening Ganesh pooja was always crowded. We took our place at the back, but soon a temple worker
beckoned my grandmother forward. She always paid for this privilege, and when the priests opened the inner sanctum doors we were the first to surge forward, pushed by the crowd behind us.
The prime position was by a series of bells suspended from the ceiling in front of Ganesh. A rope dangled down from each clapper, and my grandmother, as she always did, held on to the upper part of one rope and indicated for me to take the lower end. Soon the windowless chamber was thick with incense, and on a cue from the priests we began to ring the bells. The clanging seemed to bulge the black stone walls outward. As I swayed back and forth with my grandmother, sweat trickling down my face, the boundaries of my body dissolved and melded into the
gong
of the bells, the reek of incense, the chanting of priests. My grandmother’s hand had slid down over mine. I glanced at her, but she pretended not to notice. Together our hands moved in unison, ringing that bell.
We were to leave for the airport in the late afternoon, and throughout that last morning my grandmother stayed in her room. My mother, sister and I were acutely aware of her silent presence. I was possessed by the conviction she would make some surprising move that would stop us from going—some plot she would launch at the last minute to prevent my escape. But the morning passed busily, with a stream of visitors coming to say goodbye as we packed.
My mother had suggested that in anticipation of the long journey we should rest for an hour in the early afternoon. A sudden lull descended on our house, made all the more pronounced by the frantic bustle earlier. Rosalind, who had kept close to us, lay her mat by my mother’s bed, and I could hear their voices and our ayah crying.
Suddenly there was much activity in my grandmother’s room, followed by the slap of her slippers as she scuttled out into the saleya. “Rosalind,” she called, but without waiting as she usually did for the ayah to appear, she continued on towards the front door. “I’m going out for a few hours. I’ll be home for dinner.”
I sat up in bed and listened to my grandmother’s footsteps diminish into the distance. The car door slammed and the vehicle trundled down the driveway.
I could hear the grating call of a crow, the neighbour’s child ringing out the choked sound of her broken tricycle bell.
“Thank God,” I whispered to myself, “thank God, thank God.”
And I vowed that I would never return to this house or this country again.
In the story of the naked peréthi, a poor woman comes upon three drunken men who have fallen into an alcoholic stupor. She steals their clothes and money. A few days later, a monk is passing by her abode and she invites him to stop for a meal. She holds a sunshade above him as he eats, her heart filled with gladness. Because of this meritorious deed, she is reborn in a golden mansion on an island in the middle of the ocean. Yet because she stole from the drunken men, she is naked and hungry. Her wardrobes are full of fine clothes, but if she tries to put them on, they burn her skin like sheets of hot metal and she flings them from her, screaming. Her banquet table is set every day with the most sumptuous meals, but if she tries to eat, the food turns to urine and feces or swarms with maggots.
One day a storm blows a ship to the shores of her island. The captain and his passengers, upon seeing the naked peréthi, are terrified. But once they hear her story, they are filled with pity and offer any help they can. Among the passengers is a lay disciple of the Lord Buddha, and the peréthi says to the captain, “Nothing you can offer will free me. Instead, feed and clothe this lay disciple and transfer the merit to me.” When the captain clothes the lay disciple in golden-threaded garments, the peréthi is immediately adorned in the finest Benares silk; when he feeds the lay disciple, a feast appears before the peréthi and she finds she can eat.
Many years would pass before I understood that my grandmother saw herself as that naked peréthi, marooned on an island, surrounded by so much that is good in life but unable to enjoy it. Everything she touched, everything she loved, disintegrated in her hands.
M
Y MOTHER’S BACK GARDEN HAS MOUNDS
of melting snow in corners, punctured with holes, as if machine-gunned. The cold is bearable because there is no wind. I take a swig from the mickey of Scotch I have brought with me. I can hear our neighbours, despite their tightly sealed doors and windows—the wail of a child, scolded by its mother in some clipped Chinese language, a ribbon of Hindi film music, the sizzle of a late-night dinner, a dog’s staccato bark. Water gurgles and glops in the culvert beyond these back gardens, a steady counterpoint to this human activity. I open our gate and step out onto a narrow strip of grass from which the land slopes down to the channel. The black water is like oil, glinting with shards of light from the surrounding houses and a cluster of apartment buildings on the other side of the culvert. Looking up at these looming towers filled with immigrants, a line from one of my grandmother’s stories comes to me. “They stand at crossroads or even outside the walls of their homes, these silent peréthayas. They are standing at their own gates, wanting to be let in.” I murmur these lines as I begin to clamber down the slope, the water now a roar.
The maudlin sentimentality of my thoughts makes me realize I am quite drunk; and my drunkenness has given me the courage to come down to the culvert, something I have never done before. The descent is too slippery in winter, and in summer jagged voices of young men rise to our house, accompanied by the occasional shattering of a beer bottle. After I’ve made my way to the bottom, my shoes squelching in the muddy slope, I take another gulp of Scotch. As I begin to waver along the culvert’s edge, I recall the first time I saw Canada from the plane—how, despite knowing we were arriving in summer, I was surprised at the green grass and trees between the stretches
of grey highway, tarmac and squat rectangular buildings. In my imagination, I had been expecting snow.
An old schoolmate of my mother’s named Shireen Subramaniam was to meet us at the airport. My mother had written to her asking if she could suggest a cheap hotel we might live in until we found more permanent accommodation. Much to my mother’s surprise, this woman, more acquaintance than friend, had replied that she and her husband, Bhavan, would be delighted to offer us hospitality until we got on our feet. My mother, while grateful, was uneasy about this generosity, as if she suspected something was amiss. There was a stridency in her voice when she told friends and relatives about this invitation, saying things like, “Yes-yes, we were good friends. I knew her very well.”
As my mother, my sister and I dragged our bags off the luggage carousel and loaded them onto carts, we avoided looking at each other. The distractions of immigration formalities and negotiating this foreign airport had kept our anxiety at bay. But now, as we cleared Customs and made our way to the automatic doors, our apprehension swelled, turning to panic as we came out onto a low platform and found the arrivals lounge before us packed with people pressed up against the ramps that led down on either side into the chaos. We stopped, not knowing which way to go, bewildered by the muddle of foreign faces below, white, Asian, black, the babble of so many languages as people shrieked out greetings and instructions to their relatives and friends, the blurred stridency of PA announcements. Travellers, brought up short by our indecision, bumped into us and shoved past. We were gaping at my mother, waiting for her to identify this friend. What if Shireen and her husband had not come? What if they had forgotten the day? What if they had changed their minds? As if she had read our fears, my mother said, “I … I have their phone number, just in case.”
She gripped her luggage cart, set her lips grimly and strode down one of the ramps. We scanned the crowd for a Sri Lankan face, and soon we saw a woman holding a placard with my mother’s name on it.
“Shireen?” my mother cried, her voice fracturing with relief.
“Hema?” she cried back, her eyes popping behind gilt-edged glasses.
We hurried together towards the end of the ramp, separated from Shireen by the rail.
When we reached her, this woman threw her arms around my mother as if they were long-lost best friends. Startled, my mother submitted to the embrace.
“My, how grown up these children are!” she cried, as if she had known us when we were little. She embraced Renu and me in turn, pressing us against her bony form, gold bangles and necklace cold against our skin. “Welcome, welcome to Canada! Now, you children must call me Aunty Shireen.” She beamed at us.
Aunty Shireen was angular like a faceted jewel, her carefully back-combed hair gleaming with lacquer. Her grey pinstriped suit had sharp creases, her pink silk shirt shimmered. She seemed genuinely pleased to see us, and our anxiety began to ease a little. She slipped her hand into the crook of my mother’s arm and said, as she led us towards the elevator, “So, tell-tell, child, how are things back home?”