The Rice Mother (23 page)

“What do I look like?”
he asked again. His voice had changed too. I had heard it before in the cemetery. I had heard it among the gnarled feet of a large tree in the silence of white stone tablets. It was a very low hiss.

“No, you do not look like a snake,” I slurred with a tongue gone fat and lazy. I was too frightened to look at him directly. “I want to go home.” My heart was pounding in my chest.

“No, not yet. The effect will wear off soon and then you can go home.”

I began to shiver with fear. Raja and I did not speak. I dared not. I could feel him breathing beside me, but I kept my eyes downcast on the moving floor. It was as if the cement was a thin cotton cloth, and underneath it a million ants moved, milled, and teemed. Beside me I felt the heat that came from Raja, but I refused to turn my head and see what beast sat beside me. Whatever drug gripped me it was all-powerful. What a trip! No other reality existed but what I could feel and see at that moment. Too young to recognize that I was hallucinating, I stared at the floor, terrified. A lifetime passed, sitting there not moving, my heart pounding wildly like an African drum just waiting for the dangerous creature to pounce on me at any moment.

Finally Raja said, “Let’s go.” His voice was flat. He sounded disappointed. “Come on.”

I looked into his face, into the flat, dead eyes in his slightly triangular face, and shot back in alarm. Yes, he did look like a snake. He had turned into a snake. The potion we had consumed had turned him into a snake. I felt my face to see if I too had turned into one. My face under my hands moved, and I cried out in horror. Inside my numb mouth my teeth began to chatter. I was turning into a snake too. Crazy thoughts jumped into my head. He had brought me here to turn me into a snake so he could keep me in a basket and make me dance to his stupid little flute. I sobbed helplessly in slow motion. The sound long and drawn out.

When his face came very close, I shut my eyes and began to pray to Ganesha. Then Raja’s voice was in my ear. “The magic is too strong for you. Don’t worry, in a few more minutes everything will return to normal. Come, we will walk together. It is getting dark outside.”

I opened my eyes, surprised. He had not hurt me. I watched him in a daze as he put out the fire and came to help me up. We walked together, with me leaning heavily on his arm. I refused to look at him. “The fresh air will do you good.” His voice still sounded like the rasp of sandpaper, but now that we were outside, I felt better. Safer. It was evening, and there were people taking slow strolls, laughing and talking in low voices. Their voices seemed very far away.

“Don’t worry, all will be normal in a little while. Stand straight and walk like a man. Keep your head up.”

Finally we turned into our little neighborhood. The thought of Mother waiting at home was frightening. Right away she would see the change in me. She would see the moving skin and be livid.

Inside the walled garden of Old Soong, Mui Tsai was building a fire. She was burning all the dead leaves and grasses, and Old Soong was standing by with his heavy hands on his hips, watching her like a grinning crocodile, his large mouth open and full of teeth. I looked at the fire that was as large as a funeral pyre, and suddenly without conscious thought I began to run toward it. I ran like the wind. I was an iron filing rushing toward a giant magnet. Mui Tsai stared, openmouthed and confounded. I thought she looked like a frightened rabbit. Laughing, I ran toward the beautiful fire, my hands outstretched, and the fire reached out and called me to it. Within the orange tongues eating dead leaves was an attraction greater than I.

The first blast of purifying heat hit my body as I leaped into the fire, but instead of being in the middle of my master, I was lying on the ground with Raja on top of me, his heart knocking on my breastbone. I looked into the glittering eyes, into the unfamiliar mutant triangular face, and knew that I had really scared him.

“Stop it,” he hissed. “Try to behave like a normal person.”

There was nothing to say. I had not reached my master’s feet.

Raja led me to the steps of my home and strode away. Mother came out, and I stared astonished at her. She was beautiful. A most dangerous female tiger, her eyes polished yellow amber and indescribable. And she was furious. Not with me. Just generally furious. I saw it in her burning eyes.

“What happened?” she growled, coming down the steps as fast as a springing cat. When she touched me, I wanted to flinch, so strong was the energy that emanated from her body. I could hear Mui Tsai’s nearly hysterical voice in the background, telling her about my leap into the flames. I felt Mother’s eyes looking at me, at my moving skin. Inside the house, Mohini was hiding behind the curtains. Like a cat. Beautiful, soft, and perfectly white with large green eyes. There was something so benign and so beguiling about her that I wanted to reach out and stroke her. It was clear now why Raja loved her so deeply. I frowned as I realized the implication of Raja’s transformation. A snake and a cat in the same room. I should never have encouraged him. I opened my mouth to warn Mother, but Lalita’s distressed face pushed itself close to mine. In her hand, held very close to her head, was the doll I had saved from the monsoon drain. I stared at the doll curiously. It appeared strangely lifelike. Suddenly it winked slyly at me, opened its mouth, and bleated like a goat. A horrified scream gathered in my windpipe, but a great gush of air rushed into my throat instead, and black spots appeared in my view, like the kind of ink spots you see in old photographs or the way an old mirror goes cloudy and gets badly speckled. Slowly the spots grew bigger and bigger. More spots appeared like spreading ink until my world became black.

After that I don’t remember anything else, but Mother tells me that I screamed like one possessed for a mirror. Thrashed wildly with the strength of a full-grown man to get into the house so I could look at a mirror.

I was ill for two days. Mother was told to rub a paste of spices and chilies on my head to clear my thoughts. When I was better, I couldn’t bear to see Lalita’s staring doll anymore. I felt that its eyes, far from being sightless, hid old evil. Every time I looked at it, I saw it alive and staring at me, its mouth curving to bleat like a goat. I reached out my hand to touch it so I would be reassured that it was only a doll, only to recoil in disgust. Its skin had the texture of the dead people the Japanese had stuck on poles or left hanging upside down at the roundabouts. I know because once, goaded beyond endurance, I accepted a dare to touch one of them. The dead man’s skin was cold and slightly pliant. It made me sick to think of my innocent sister sleeping next to the monstrous thing. When I was better, I threw the doll into a monsoon drain on the other side of town and watched the fast-flowing water carry it away until it was a pink-and-yellow speck in the distance. I returned home to a distraught Lalita and pretended to help her to search for the doll for hours. Then I blamed Blackie, the dog next door.

After that incident I was very careful. I had seen Raja once in such a way that there was no going back and no forgetting. There could be no more pretending that the people who came to see his father, their mouths twisted with thwarted intentions, and who left clutching cloth packages and hopeful expressions didn’t exist. No more pretending that the lumpy red-and-black cloth packages they carried away were filled with the essence of apple or pink pomegranates instead of the horrible bits from all those midnight trips to the unmarked graves so a lover might be punished or an enemy destroyed. I began to avoid Raja.

Then came the day Raja approached me and asked for a lock of her hair. For precious seconds I could only stare blankly at his closed face, then I shook my head dumbly and ran away. I already knew what charms these people could do with a lock of hair. I began to fear Raja. I couldn’t forget the glittering eyes in the triangular face watching me, watching me, and watching me.

So I began to watch Mohini. Every day I rushed home from school and examined her carefully. Her smile, her words, her limbs, everything had to be minutely observed to be certain that no subtle changes had occurred in my absence. I was going crazy with guilt and worry. In the mirror a stranger with haunted, feverish eyes stared back. At school I had even stopped noticing the foul taste of the castor oil they poured down my throat. I had no wish to go crawling back to my old gang, so I sat on my hard wooden chair in school and stared blankly as one teacher after another finished his class and walked out. When the last bell for the day rang, I charged out of the classroom. Once I had finished examining Mohini for signs of I don’t know what, I sat down and waited for the evening to arrive.

Every day at dusk when the sun had sunk over the shop-houses and the threat of the Japanese soldiers had been laid to rest for the night, Mother let Mohini walk in the back garden. It was my sister’s favorite time of the day. Sunset, when the sky was still tinged with unreal purples and moody mauves just before the mosquitoes got too avaricious on her skin. She walked along Mother’s rows of vegetables and sometimes filled a plate with blossoms for the prayer altar from the jasmine bush at the end of the garden. It was her much cherished walk into the world outside, but this I knew to be the most fearful time of all. For lying flat on his belly in the bushes and trees was Raja, watching me, watching her, watching us. I learned to stand by the back door and worry, watching her in the gloom until she came back in and closed the back door. Sometimes I would even walk beside her, keeping so close to her and peering so worriedly into the bushes that, touched by my concern, she tousled my hair.

“What’s this?” she asked tenderly as her fingers brushed the deep creases in my forehead.

But of course I could never explain to her. I knew Mother had plans, big plans for the jewel of our family. A great marriage to a great family. So “this” became my secret shackle. I had fixed it to my own leg, and I had to bear it. “This” was what I knew lay motionless behind the still bushes.

I wanted to tell her about cobras. Tell her what I knew, what I had seen. Warn her that though they are fascinating creatures, she must fear them, for a cobra recognizes no master. It will dance for you if your song pleases it, and it will drink the milk you leave by its basket every day, but it owes you no allegiance. You must never forget that, ultimately, a cobra never betrays its own nature, and for reasons known only to it, it may turn around any day and sink its poisoned fangs into your flesh. In my child’s head Raja was a big black cobra. I wanted to tell her about Raja. I thought constantly about his eyes glittering coldly in his face. He meant to have her or harm us. I felt certain of that.

One day, dashing home from school, I found him leaning against the wall of Old Soong’s house, waiting for me. He unwrapped a black cloth package and took out a small red stone. It sparkled in the sunlight. When he put it into the palm of my hand, it was neither light nor cool, it was strangely heavy and as hot as a newly laid chicken egg.

“I have a present for your sister. Put it under her pillow as a lovely surprise,” he said in that velvety voice that I had learned to hate.

I threw the strangely hot stone on the sand and ran away as fast as I could. He didn’t follow me. I could feel his burning eyes on my back. When I reached the steps of our home, I turned around, and he was still standing by the red-brick wall watching me. There was no anger on his face. He raised his hand and waved at me. I was full of fear that day. How I longed for the days when he was a brave warrior called Chibindi.

That evening I saw Mohini bend to pick something up from the grass, something that sparkled in the dark. Petrified, I screamed and pretended to fall. My sister came running. As if in great pain, I asked her to help me into the house. She forgot about the bright, shiny thing on the ground. Later that night I tiptoed out of the house. It was moonless, and I could barely make out the object in the grass. I bent to pick it up, and Raja’s bare feet came into my vision. I straightened slowly, dreading what I would find before me.

“Give her to me,” he ordered. His voice was hard and emotionless.

The blood ran cold in my body. “Never,” I said, but to my disgust my voice sounded small and weak.

“I will have her,” he promised, and turning away, melted into the darkness. I peered anxiously into the inky night, but he was gone like the wind, taking his despair with him.

That night I dreamed that I was hiding behind some bushes, watching Mohini walking by a river. There were colorful birds singing in the trees, and she was laughing at the antics of some cheeky monkeys with silver-rimmed faces. I saw her drop to her hands and knees on the bank and, holding her heavy hair away from her face with one hand, drink like a small cat. A few feet away was a shape in the water, a pair of terrible watching eyes, unblinking and full of menace. A crocodile. I fear crocodiles. The most frightening thing about them is that you can never tell by looking at their eyes if they are dead or alive. They keep the same blank expression. It makes you wonder if they come into this world through a different door.

The crocodile pretending to be a harmless log, glided silently toward her until without the slightest warning it intended to snap its powerful jaws over her head. Pull her in with a sickening splash. I wanted to warn her, as I wanted to tell her about the black cobra in the bushes, but I couldn’t remember her name. The monster opened its massive mouth. I ran to the edge of the water screaming, but it had already fitted her head easily between its yellow teeth. In my baggy shorts I stood at the edge of the river, paralyzed with a mixture of horror and disbelief, and stared at the wild thrashing in the river. The brute disappeared into the water, taking her with him. She was no more. The water turned calm. The river had fed. From the bank on the other side Raja’s distorted face screamed out words as he ran into the crocodile-infested water, but he spoke in that dream language that I cannot understand while I am sleeping and cannot hear when I am awake.