The Hungry Ghosts (6 page)

I thrust out my arm, offering up my bruises, and tilted my cheek so she could see the purple welt. She dropped her handbag on a table. “What happened, son, what did you do?” She held my wrist and examined the bruise.

My sister and Rosalind were also in the room now.

I began to sniffle. I suddenly wanted justice. “Aachi did this to me. With a slipper.”

My mother became very still. Her grip tightened on my wrist, then she let go of my arm and straightened up.

“It’s nothing, baba,” Rosalind began. “You know how your mother is, she—”

“Aah, that wretched witch,” my mother whispered. She strode out of the room, and we all followed. I, in particular, wanted to see my grandmother worsted.

The pistol shots of my mother’s high heels echoed across the cavernous saleya. When she got to my grandmother’s doorway, she ripped back the curtain and went in. “How dare you touch my child!”

My grandmother was getting dressed for temple. She turned from the mirror and examined my mother. “Get out of my room.” Then she went back to pinning the sari palu to the shoulder of her blouse.

The slipper was lying on a side table. My mother grabbed it and flung it in the wastepaper basket, much to my delight. “You will not ruin my children’s life like you did mine.”

My grandmother had finished pinning her palu. She wound it around her waist in preparation for the battle, then turned to my mother. “Remember your place. This is my house. I have allowed you to stay. You are lucky.”

“You allow me to stay because you don’t want to lose face with your friends and our relatives.”

“You’re wrong. I let you stay because I shudder to think what disgrace you would bring on our family name if I allowed you to live on your own. What horrible mistakes you would make.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” My mother crossed her arms over her chest.

My grandmother let out a bark of a laugh. She leaned towards my mother. “Look at where your mistakes have brought your children. Look at them! Tamil, poor and undereducated! You’re a disgraceful mother. A failure!”

My mother gripped her chest tighter, eyes filling with tears.

Renu glared at me. I was the one who had brought this humiliation on our mother.

“I wish you were not my daughter.” My grandmother’s voice was melodious with longing. “Every day I wish it was so. But I accept that this is my karma, that I must have done something terrible in my previous life to deserve you. Through meritorious deeds at the temple, I am trying hard to work off the ill effects of that karma.” She pushed past my mother and left.

My mother began to weep.

“See what you have done,” Renu hissed. She rapped a tokka on my head. “Now we will be forced to leave and live on the road because of you. We will become beggars.”

I rushed out of the room. My grandmother was hurrying across the saleya. When I caught up with her on the verandah, she quickly scoured her cheeks with the heel of her palm then glared at me. “Go away, you wretched child.”

“Aachi, I … I promise I will be a good boy.” My voice was husky with fear. “Please don’t put us out on the road, please don’t let us become beggars.”

Her lips thinned in astonishment. Then a change came over her face, a readjustment. “All I want is your welfare,” she declared in a tone both haughty and injured. “That is all I want. The very best for you.”

“Yes, I know, I know.”

“Is it right for you to call me a gaani like I am some woman selling bananas at the corner? Is it right to say you hate me when I have shown you nothing but love?”

“No, no.”

“If you had done your homework well, if you hadn’t played around with your pencil, breaking that point on purpose, none of this would have happened.”

“Yes, I was wrong, Aachi, I am sorry.” I massaged my right elbow as if it were tender.

“And what is a few strokes with a slipper? You had better get used to it, because in the school you are going to, there will be a lot more of those. And not from a frail old woman like me.”

I nodded vigorously, as if agreeing the punishment had been light.

“Hmm, anyway, you seem to have learnt your lesson. Which is a good thing. It shows you are an intelligent boy underneath this wildness you have brought with you.” She turned and went down to her waiting Bentley T in the carport.

I crept back to my room and curled up in bed.

My window opened onto the back verandah, and I could hear my mother seated at the opposite end, still crying. Rosalind clicked her tongue soothingly, as if she were feeding hens.

“I was wrong to return, Rosalind,” my mother said when she had quieted down. “This is a mistake. I must take the children away.”

“And live on what, baba? Loku Nona will not give you an allowance now. She has chosen him.”

“But it’s unbearable, Shivan being in this position.”

“Whatever punishment the poor child has to endure, his future is secure. Think carefully, Hema-baba. After all …,” the ayah was silent for a long moment, “she is not entirely to blame.”

“Rosalind! How can you say that?” My mother’s voice trilled with insincerity.

“There are children involved now. You cannot afford to make another mistake.”

“He’s a boy,” my mother pleaded, “a little boy.”

And so I understood that my mother would not defend me anymore. She was no longer in control of our destiny. I was.

That night, as we ate dinner on the back verandah under a dim naked bulb that cast a pallid glow, I found myself observing my mother and thinking for the first time about how she must look to an outside eye, cheekbones stretching her skin, lips dry and chapped, blackish-purple hollows at her temples. She had always been thin, but now I saw that she had grown even more so since my father’s death.

The next morning, instead of sitting with my sister, I took my copybook and
The Radiant Way
to my grandmother’s bedroom. She lowered the bank statement she was reading and her eyes followed me as I went to sit on the mat by her bed and begin my work. Even though she frowned sternly as she went back to the statement, I could tell she was glad I had come to her.

After some time had passed, my grandmother folded up her glasses, gathered her bills and accounts and put them on the side table. She glared to warn me against any mischief, but there was no real rancour in her gaze now. She lay back and closed her eyes. The laundry basket was not far from where I sat. The smell of lavender perfume and rose talcum powder seemed to deepen the sweat and damp of unwashed clothing. The fan whirled sluggish air about. I could feel the perspiration gathering in the crook of my arms and knees.

When I was sure my grandmother was asleep, I crept to the window and looked out through its thick bars. Renu was playing batta. She stopped, her feet planted on two squares, the batta stone in her hand, then continued with the game as if she had not seen me.

Two days later, my mother came home with a box from Perera and Sons. She gathered us together around the back verandah table, and once Rosalind had brought cake plates and a knife, she announced she had been offered a job as an apprentice editor at the
Lanka News
, a paper owned by a friend’s father. My sister and I had also been accepted into the schools she wanted.

The ribbon cake had hard vanilla icing and sugar flowers, the sort we only ever had at birthdays. My mother beamed at us. “Happy?”

We nodded, but there was a troubling new vivacity to her manner, a harsh glitter in her eyes. As she began to cut slices, she said, not looking at us, “Children, how was your day, what did you do?”

“I had a tea party,” Renu replied.

“Alone?” My mother passed the first slice of cake to Rosalind, who was standing behind her. “You know, you must look after your brother. He is, after all, the youngest. You should include him in your games.”

“He couldn’t play,” Renu started to say, “he had to—” I kicked her in the shin.

My mother continued to pass out slices as if she had not heard, the knife sighing as it cut through the hard icing. She kept my piece beside her, and
once she was seated she beckoned me forward and hoisted me into her lap. She kissed the back of my neck, her teeth grating briefly against my flesh. “But you are still my baby boy, my best, darling boy, aren’t you?” Her arms were tight around me.

“Yes, Amma,” I whispered. Sitting there in her hot embrace, breathing in her cheap perfume that smelt vaguely of chlorine, I glanced down at the slice of cake and was repelled. Yet when she held out the first forkful, I forced myself to take it, the crumbs prickling my throat.

“Yes, children,” she said, “a bright future is before us. Indeed it is.”

Another of my grandmother’s favourite stories begins with the line,
Like a leopard stalking its prey through tall grass, a man’s past life pursues him, waiting for the right moment to pounce
. It is the tale of a monk named Chakkupala, who, at the moment of achieving enlightenment, becomes blind. The other monks are puzzled by this and they appeal to the Lord Buddha for an explanation. The Tathagata, who can see both into the future and past, narrates an earlier life of Chakkupala’s, when he was an eye doctor. During that time, a poor woman asked him to cure her eye disease. In return, she said, she would put herself in bondage to him. Once cured, however, the woman pretended she was still afflicted to avoid becoming his slave. Angered, the doctor gave the woman another potion which permanently blinded her. Her blindness, the Tathagata tells his monks, was the result of bad karma from her past lives. But the laws of karma are such that, once the negative effect of a bad karma is played out, it drops from a person. The doctor by his evil deed took on the burden of that bad karma, which was coming to fruition now in the monk Chakkupala.

This is how I think now of that long-ago moment when my mother held me tight and fed me cake, the weight of her own history pressing down on me, passing over.

4
 

A
WEEK AFTER
I
BEGAN MY VIGIL IN HER ROOM
, my grandmother waited until my mother had departed for work one morning, then kept me back from school and took me to the row of toyshops on Front Street in Pettah. The arcade running the length of the shops was crammed with large toys, such as tricycles, dolls houses and scooters, and the passageway reverberated with the cacophony of wound-up dolls, the hooting and chugging of trains, the looped repetition of the Woody Woodpecker Song. With a tip-tap on my skull, my grandmother murmured, “Go ahead, Puthey, choose one thing. Whatever you like.”

In my excitement I couldn’t fix on what I wanted, something new always taking my fancy. Finally one of the store owners, who was a better salesman than the rest, convinced me to settle on his blue-and-green imported scooter. He had chosen one of the most expensive toys, but my grandmother paid for it with the snap of a hundred-rupee note. When I thanked her, I called her by the affectionate appellation for grandmother, “Aacho.”

For the rest of the morning, I trundled my scooter up and down the driveway. Soon I had learnt how to give myself a good push and glide with both feet on the platform, not falling.

Renu arrived home in the early afternoon, and when she saw the scooter her face tightened. She gobbled down her lunch and came out to assert her claim. Lifting the scooter out of my grasp, she set it behind her, rested back against the handlebar and declared, “You’re too young for a scooter. Let me show you how to use this. And, anyway, it’s a girl’s toy.”

“No, it isn’t,” I cried, and tried to get around her. “Blue and green are boys’ colours not girls’.”

“What do you know?” She struggled to pry my sweaty hands from the
handlebar. “You are just a Grade One baby. I am in Grade Three and I am telling you that scooters are for girls.”

But I would not let go, and after we had struggled for a while, Renu got impatient and gave me a shove. I staggered back and fell, shards of gravel scraping my elbow and forearms. I wailed as she set off down the driveway. Soon Rosalind and my grandmother came running.

“What is it, Puthey?” my grandmother cried, as she and the ayah helped me to my feet and dusted me off.