The Rice Mother (19 page)

Mother only nodded. Perhaps she was pleased, for she smiled at us, but as she began to fill a bowl with fried rice for Lalita, a wail pierced the air. An old beggarwoman lamented loudly as a shopkeeper tried to chase her away by beating her legs with a broom. That was the way it was in those days. You had to beat beggars to keep them away.

Everybody stared, some sadly, some relieved that the smelly old woman would not be coming to their table to ruin their delicate appetites. Not Mohini, no. Her eyes brimming with tears, she shot up suddenly and charged toward the shopkeeper.

“Don’t you dare beat the grandmother,” she shouted out.

Shocked by the sight of the girl flying toward him in such anger, the man’s broom stopped in midair. The old woman, perfectly used to being beaten, stopped crying, her loose jaw hanging open. Mohini put her arms around the beggarwoman’s waist and brought her to our table. To eat with us. My sister was not even ten years old then.

Even my earliest memories are tinged with her presence. I looked up from the hole in the ground that Mother stood me in daily to strengthen my legs and saw her in a myriad of poses, acting out stories in which she alone played all the characters. Running this way and that way, pulling faces and changing voices, she fluttered around me like a gay butterfly. Then, it seemed, only she had time for me. She must have looked into my small, begging eyes and known without being told that there would be no love forthcoming for the poor, ugly creature before her. That in my mouth were none of the adorable things that all children are given to endear them to their parents but a lazy slug of a tongue. My sister took it upon herself to cherish me as best she could.

She did it every morning when the house had emptied of people, after Father had left for work, Anna and my brothers for school, and Mother for the market with Lalita in tow. Mother had to take Lalita with her, or she would simply disintegrate into a heap on the floor, shedding bitter tears until Mother returned as if it was far, far more than a trip to the market that she had lost. So every morning I found myself sitting cross-legged in a patch of weak sunlight by the kitchen window while Mohini tugged and twisted all my hair into curly ringlets and told me stories about Lord Krishna, the blue god.

“When he was a baby sitting outside, his mother saw him eat a handful of sand, so she rushed out to open his mouth and clean away the sand, but when she opened it, she found the whole world inside his mouth.”

I sat with her fingers in my hair and her breath warm on my head and envied a well-loved, mischievous child who stole buttermilk, hid the garments of maiden bathers on a whim, killed a huge cobra with his bare hands, and held up Mount Govardhan to shelter a herd of cows from a terrible storm sent by a jealous Indra. I dreamed of looking out of a palace window onto a generation of
gopis,
fair milkmaids gathering lotus buds in a green pool, each one secretly praying that they might marry me. I dreamed of an eventual wedding to the fairest
gopi
of them all, called Radha.

“One day your Radha, soft as a mustard flower, will come, and I will place the sandalwood paste and
kum kum
on her forehead,” Mohini teased. I always produced the required sickened face, but I believed her with all my heart.

Those are my happiest memories. What else is left to remember? Years spent at the mercy of cruel teachers. They pinned my exercise books to my back during recess so the extent of my simpleminded-ness could be shared with the entire school. They rapped my knuckles and flung my work out the door as worthless. It seemed the extent of my stupidity was unimaginable to them. They called me names and banished me to a corner of the classroom. In the playing fields children I had never seen before chanted out, “Kayu balak, kayu balak” (“Timber, timber”), when they saw me. “Thick as a piece of wood.”

Oh, I cried for my ringing ears.

I was so desperate that I humiliated myself to earn the right to a kind word, a greeting, or a conversation during break. I carried the schoolbags of others willingly, walked backward around the field for their cruel amusement, and barked like a dog. But in time I discovered that friendship cannot be acquired thus, so I learned to sit alone at the end of the playing field, my back to the laughing children, my small eyes facing the road, my slow mouth chewing my food.

“Kayu balak, kayu balak,” the happy children sang to my back.

The teachers continued to berate and abuse my handwriting, but I could not control my hand that had turned to wood. Tears escaped out of my carved eyelids, but their furious faces refused to soften. How could I tell them that when I opened a book to read, inky blue fishes swam on the white waters of my page so I could not make out the words clearly? How could I add the numbers properly if they frolicked and played like spider monkeys across my page? By the same token, how could I even begin to tell them about my wooden hand?

Many years after the Japanese had wrecked our lives and left, I wondered if I had fallen asleep on a mat of glossy leaves in the back garden and dreamed a Basohli painting studded with fragments of beetle wings that glittered like emeralds. Could it be that such a glorious, civilized time had really existed in my history?

I went to visit Professor Rao. He came to the door, almost bald, two hands joined together to make a wrinkled lotus flower, and frail, so frail. I had remembered him more resplendent, bigger, and smiling rapturously.

“Papa Rao,” I said, reverting unconsciously to my childish memory.

He smiled sadly. His hand reached out to touch my hair, oiled and streaked back from my forehead. “The curls,” he lamented.

“They were ridiculous. Mohini’s doing . . .” I trailed off.

His cheeks sagged. “Of course,” he agreed dully, leading me into the house. The place was silent, smaller, and strangely dead. There was not even the sickly sweet sound of Mrs. Rao’s love songs floating out of the kitchen. I could hear her moving about in another part of the house, her movements heavy and labored.

“Where is the crystal cave, the geodes, the skull, the paintings?” I asked suddenly.

He lifted his right hand and dropped it uselessly back to the side of his body. “The Japanese . . . they stole everything. It took three of them to carry my crystal cave.”

“Even your stone crab?”

“Even my stone crab, but look—they did not touch my lingam. The brutes didn’t realize its value.” He walked over to stroke the curving dense black stone.

Something occurred to me. “Has your son returned?” I asked.

“No,” he said, so abruptly that I knew an unimaginable ruin had come to pass. “Shall we listen to some Thiagaraja?” he suggested, turning away quickly so I would not see the raw pain that seized his old face.

At the first pure sound of the vina’s string, Professor Rao dropped his head into his hands. Silent tears fell onto his white dhoti, turning the cloth transparent so his poor, brown skin showed through.

“Papa Rao,” I cried, distressed by the sight of his tears.

“Sshh, listen,” he choked.

There was no marble cake or sweet tea. I sat frozen in my seat until every note of Bhairav’s raga was finished and Professor Rao had recovered himself sufficiently to raise his head and smile tremulously at me. When I stood to leave, he put his prized lingam in my hand.

“No,” I said.

“Soon I will be dead,” he said. “No one else will love it like you will.”

Sadly, I carried the black stone home. The Japanese had not wanted it. They had not seen the beauty of it. It was a rejected thing, like me. I went under our house and sat on the box full of lovingly polished worthless stones and thought of Papa Rao’s quivering mouth, and tears arrived. I held the black lingam in the palm of my right hand, my left lightly covering the smooth, rounded tip. Then I closed my eyes, and for the first time my heart earnestly whispered, “I love you, crystal.”

For a little while there was just the orange screen of my eyelids with the familiar green blobs until quite without warning there was a flash, like sunlight on water at the corners of my eyelids. And then I felt my struggling heart take a deep breath and still a little. Suddenly someone who understood my very essence held me in his arms and rocked me. A sense of peace stole over me. The stone comforted me, and by and by, I understood that I was never meant to be born a human being. I could have been happy as a rock. I could have been contented as a huge rockface on a mountain peak or a simple cluster of crystals luminous in the cold sunlight. On Mount Everest.

I would have perched high up over the world, unshakable and secure in my worth, year in, year out watching the pointless comings and goings of the deluded human race. On my granite hand I would wear a wooden watch, days and nights passing while the frozen hands on my watch sat motionless. But I am not a sparkling crystal or a craggy rock overlooking a handsome cliff. I see that instantly in my mother’s face. It is not my fate to be so admired by mankind that they throw their lives at my feet so they may know me, so they may rest a while on my peak. I am a dullard with a square face carved out of immobile granite. The laughter and passions in other people are a source of envy in my lonely heart.

I stare studiously at my wooden watch face, and people zoom around me at great speed. When I look up, the soul collector has been around, and people I love have disappeared forever, and new little people have sprung up like seeds from the ground. When you look at me, you only see a man trapped in a menial job—but be careful not to pity me, for like the earth, I will live beyond the pointless comings and goings of man. You’ll see.

I
t was only when I found out about the snake charmer’s eldest son Raja’s secret love for my sister that I first realized how beautiful she was. It was 1944, and I was eleven years old. I ran home so fast that the wind whistled by my ears and my white shirttails flapped madly in the wind. I dashed past Father dozing with his mouth half open on the veranda and made for the kitchen. She looked up from a bowl of brown chapati dough and smiled at me. I stared at the starburst happening in her eyes. Indeed, Mohini was a spectacular creature. It was a revelation to realize that she was not simply the hand that arranged neat piles of curries around a mound of rice on my plate or the considerably gentler touch (the other, of course, being Mother’s strong, rough hand) that ministered the hated weekly oil-bath ritual.

I looked into the green and brown flecks inside her lovely eyes and felt a warm glow spread inside me at the thought of how well this totally unexpected romantic twist fitted in with my plans. I can actually remember clasping my hands together and saying a prayer to God, thanking him for making my sister beautiful enough to attract the attention of Raja, for Raja was someone whom I had, for as long as I could remember, idolized and longed to befriend.

To others his sullen face on his striding figure embodied the inexplicable sounds and strange cries that came from the snake charmer’s house in the middle of the night. There was talk of evil and black magic. There was even talk of ghosts and spirits come back from the dead. People feared him and his father, but I didn’t. From the day I found out that the grinning skull inside their house belonged to him, I was obsessed with the need to know more. For years I had played with his younger brother, Ramesh, while gazing at the unreachable, tall figure of Raja in the distance. Everything about him was a source of intense curiosity and mystery—his powerful clay-colored limbs, his dirt-encrusted clothes, his unwashed bronze locks, and that peculiar but not unpleasant wild animal smell that emanated from his body in tangible waves. Of course, Mother’s vividly recalled bloody story about him as a little boy with curly hair munching bits of glass in the marketplace elevated him to unimaginable heights of dark powers.

I watched full of awe from afar as he tended to the beehives at the back of their home. I have no love of bees and can never forget the day when Ah Kow from next door threw a stone at one of the hives, and the entire swarm rose up in a dark, angry cloud and roared like a waterfall. Even the Japanese soldiers with their long guns waited outside the house for their bottles of free honey. Unhesitating and fearless, Raja dipped his hand into the droning hives and softly stole their precious honey. Sometimes they stung him, but unperturbed, he casually plucked out their black stingers from his swelling face. Once he even wore a whole swarm on his face like the most repulsive black-and-yellow beard.

All for my pleasure.

Before Raja came into my life I was a Boy Scout by day, a fruit thief by evening, and a chain-gang terrorist on chosen weekends. Raja’s brother Ramesh, Ah Kow, and I used to belong to a gang of boys who ran wild in other people’s fruit orchards and staged fierce fights with rival gangs. It seems incredible to think back now that we actually fought these battles armed with bicycle chains, sticks, and stones. We gathered in the outskirts of the old marketplace and charged at the enemy, screaming frenziedly, hurling stones, and swinging bicycle chains. Quite a lot of blood would spill too, until Chinese housewives with bad hairdos and ill-fitting
samfus
rushed out of their homes, cursing and brandishing brooms. They hit us over the head and occasionally managed to catch the ears of those too engrossed in the fight. Being caught by the ear was far worse than a hundred lashes on the head with someone’s bicycle chain. The ultimate insult was when they bent very close to our ears and swore at the top of their coarse, uneducated voices, “Devils, devils, little trouble-making devils. Wait till I tell your mother.” The rest of us had no choice but to instantly drop our murderous scowls and menacing stances and scamper away in all directions as quickly as possible. They were good fun, those fights, even if they were few and far between.