The Rice Mother (28 page)

“No, no, don’t bother yourself,” she said quickly, her eyes alert, but I had already turned my back on her. I thought I hated her. I also thought I recognized her. She was the envious crow that Mother had warned me about. The one who drank other people’s tears to keep its own feathers black and shiny. The crow that sits on the highest tree so it may be the first to see the funeral procession.

In the kitchen I made tea. I spooned in my last precious stock of sugar. When the tea was ready, I tasted a little from a small teaspoon and judged it perfect. I knew she’d drink every last drop. I put the mug of tea on the bench, and I thought about that little green dress lying on the bed. For a little while I permitted myself the luxury of being weak, and instantly the waiting tears burned painfully into my eyes, running down my cheeks and splashing into the mug of tea. You see, the only tears the envious crow must never drink are the tears of a grieving mother. A mother’s tears are so sacred they are forbidden, or its feathers will become dull with disease and it will perish slowly and excruciatingly. I was right about my tea—she finished it all—but I was wrong about her. I made a mistake that day. Mrs. Metha wasn’t the crow Mother had warned me about, for she came back many times with many offers of help. She died recently, and as she lay on her deathbed, as ugly as ever, I felt sorry for what I had done. I bent my head and whispered my sin into her ear. It seemed as if her shriveled body shuddered slightly, but her eyes when I met them smiled. She died without saying another word.

Ah Moi, I thought, was not to be on my conscience, but it was not to be so, for less than a week later the hunched figure of her father was driving the bullock cart past our house with her body wrapped in a mat woven from coconut palm. I stood behind the curtain and watched like the black cobra that hides in a secret nook in the jungle, observing the grieving mother beat her head on the stone pillars after she places her dead son before the shrine of Lord Shiva. Poor Ah Moi had hanged herself from the rafters of her house. She had died of shame.

Her father buried her in an unmarked grave somewhere not far away. After their strange and poor burial Ayah went to offer condolences, but I couldn’t face First Wife. Even from our house I could hear her blood-curdling howls of grief, thin and shrill like a dog damaged.

I had lost a daughter too. Put in the same situation, I knew that she would have done exactly as I did. A mother’s love recognizes no laws, no bounds, and bows to no masters but itself. It dares all. At that time I couldn’t see that I had done wrong. I refused to mourn Mohini properly. Instead I let myself believe that my greatest regret was that it was not I who had saved that little green dress. I should have thought to save that green dress. Every now and again I searched for it as if it were the secret key to everything. Even now I search for it, and though I can’t find it, I know he keeps it because he believes that she will return. One day. He hides it in some very secret place away from my prying eyes and my jealous heart.

O
ur family history can be divided into two distinct ages: before and after Mohini died. With her death Mother, Father, and Lakshmnan changed into unrecognizable people. They even looked different. I would never have thought it possible for people to change so drastically in one afternoon. People, I thought, were solid objects . . . and yet they did. My entire family changed beyond recognition one hot afternoon a long time ago.

The strangest thing is, I can’t even remember that day. In fact, I can’t even remember Mohini. Maybe I am angry with her, that unlucky spirit who changed all our lives by simply going away. That is unfair, I know. She was dragged away at gunpoint; but still another part of me wants to accuse her for not being ordinary like everyone else. And that too I know is unfair. She didn’t choose her looks.

Sometimes I remember her as the scent of jasmine on Mother’s hand. Don’t look so confused. There is an explanation. Mohini died at the end of the Japanese occupation. During the occupation Mother kept cows. She got up at four in the morning to milk them before she came to awaken us, smelling of the wholesome aroma of cow’s milk. As soon as the Japanese were sent packing, Mother sold all the cows. She didn’t arise at four in the morning anymore, she arose later—and the only thing she did before she woke us up was to fill a tray with jasmine flowers for the prayer altar. My childish perception remembers the scent of the jasmine flowers on her fingers like an aftertaste of Mohini’s passing. How I hate the smell of jasmine! It reeks of death.

When I try really hard to picture my sister, I remember her only as she is in the one precious photograph that we have of her. For many years Mother kept it in a little silk purse until one day Sevenese took it to old Chin Teck’s shop in Jalan Gambut and had it framed in a black-and-gold wooden frame. Mother took down from the living room wall Anna’s best needlework effort, an embroidered peacock cavorting in a green field of orange flowers, and hung the photograph in its place. The photograph was from just before the Japanese war, the entire family captured in their best finery, although I can’t remember the trip to the studio or ever posing for the photograph. A black-and-white testament to my flawed memory.

Mother is wearing the thick gold
thali
chain she got married in and the famous ruby pendant that she sold at the beginning of the Japanese occupation. She sits and stares into the camera’s eye, refusing to smile. There is handsome pride in her face. She is no raving beauty, but she is aware of her good fortune. Father is standing, big and tall in a short-sleeved shirt that is a masterpiece of meticulous ironing. Slightly hunched, he smiles self-consciously into the camera, and yet you feel that he hasn’t quite met your eye. Lakshmnan’s chin juts forward, and his chest is puffed out like a robin. There is the same bold quality in his gaze that Mother has in hers. He understands that he is destined for great things. Anna has clasped her chubby hands in front of her in an endearing gesture and is wearing her favorite red shoes. I remember those shoes. They had shining buckles on the sides.

Jeyan’s hair has been painstakingly curled by Mohini, but he is narrow-shouldered, and his dark eyes are already dull with defeat. Sevenese grins toothily, his hands deep inside his baggy hand-me-down shorts. He is a gorgeous urchin with sparkling eyes. Then I see myself. I sit on Mother’s lap with a dazed look in my small sleepy eyes. I scrutinize my own image for eyelashes and can find none. Then I look at my mouth, slightly agape, and it is instantly apparent that I have been denied even the fleeting beauty of childhood.

The eye restless for a resting place is drawn to Mohini. The ultimate resting place. But she refuses to meet the onlooker’s stare and has turned her head to gaze instead at Lakshmnan. Even in profile, it is patently obvious that she is beautiful and different. Caught in motion and by the very act of not looking straight at the camera, she becomes somehow more alive, more real, than all the other frozen people in the picture. It is strange to think that we are all alive, and she is not. She is alive only in our motionless picture.

Before the time when I was awakened every morning by the smell of jasmine, Lakshmnan was my hero. The foreign soldiers had taught him to say, “Hey, kid.” And that is what he used to call me. In English. Always with a smile in his voice. I remember him shirtless and barefoot, energetically beating all our washing clean. Drops of sparkling water used to fly around him as if he were some sort of water god, young, vibrant, and terribly handsome with a brilliant rainbow-colored future waiting for him in the distance. Water droplets full of the sun are forever flying around him. I sit in Mother’s vegetable patch and can’t take my eyes off the mythical water god. Watching the clever way he made the sun color the soapsuds. Green, red, yellow, blue . . .

Then I remember him on the heavy grinding stone. Every morning my brother ground the spices that offered taste to our meals for the day. He turned handfuls of dried spices into small warm-colored mounds of chili, cumin, fenugreek, coriander, fennel, cardamom, and turmeric on a little silver tray for Mother, like a gift. Little wet piles of yellows, greens, oranges, deep reds, and shades of earth.

Why can’t I remember anything else? Why don’t I remember the things that Anna and Sevenese can remember?

Mother gets intolerant of me, but I can’t help it. The past for me is not big events but everyday things like coming home from school and seeing her sitting cross-legged on the bench in the kitchen, stringing garlands of colorful flowers to adorn the pictures of all the gods on our altar. No incident stands out on its own merit. Just things I saw every day, colorful garlands coiled on a silver tray beside her. Or the S-shaped Siamese mangoes she stored in the rice to hasten their ripening. I do remember the many delightful hours I spent lost inside the contents of Mother’s wooden chest. Made of solid black wood with chunky bronze handles, it was the most intriguing thing of my childhood, a box abundant with Mother’s treasures. Inside were her brilliantly colored silk saris that she had always said would one day belong to my sisters and me. I ran my fingers over the cool, silky material and tried to imagine which ones would be mine one day. The green ones I knew were meant for Mohini. Mother said that green was happiest on Mohini’s skin. Inside the box were also Mother’s important papers, and bunches of raffia-string-tied letters from Grandma. After the Japanese left, Mother’s chocolate box of jewelry came down from the top of the coconut tree and found its rightful place inside the wooden chest. The chocolate box, once opened, was bewitching. Rubies, sapphires, and green stones twinkled and winked as if happy to see the daylight and to reach for human skin.

I have surprisingly crystal clear memories of plants, insects, and animals, of beautiful purple leaves that can hold a drop of rain like a sparkling diamond on their surfaces, or of sitting outside in the sun for hours, mesmerized by ants. Back and forth, back and forth, with loads many times larger than their own enchanting bodies. And if I sat very, very still for long enough, a dragonfly might descend on me. They are beautiful things, with diaphanous wings that carry the rainbow within them. I am humbled by their big, warm, crystal-ball eyes with the dot of black deep inside. Sometimes delightful millipedes with unnecessary feet would wander up my hands, or drunken daddy longlegs would blow onto my skirts and lurch crazily in the wind. Once I sat and stared at a bat that had flown into the mango tree at dusk. He hung upside down from a thin branch and crunched the utterly naked head of a baby bird.

But of all the creatures in the world, my favorites were the chickens that lived under our house. I loved them when they were small, fluffy, and yellow, and I was proud of them when they became cooing, clucking, beady-eyed hens. Only I was small enough to bend at the waist and enter their home under the house. It was always musty and dim but wonderfully cool, with the feathery smell of chickens hiding inside the ammonia odor of their droppings. They crowded around me, clucking, making it impossible for me to take another step without squashing them with my rubber flip-flops. As soon as I stopped, they mobbed around, fluttering their wings, hopping into the air, and sometimes yelping impatiently, waiting for me to scatter their feed so that they could peck at the ground in a mad, greedy panic. I watched them feed, endlessly entertained until I had to rummage through their boxes and find the eggs that sometimes had double yolks in them. Mother would never allow the girls in our family to eat those curiously deformed eggs because it was believed that eating them might cause twins in the future.

It was the rooster I had to be careful of. He was a magnificent creature but incurably mad. He tossed his head to one side and allowed his one peculiarly dazzling yellow eye to follow the journey of my bright-blue rubber slippers. And sometimes he chased them and attacked them, banishing me from under the house for no good reason at all. Yet I loved him.

A few days after Mohini died, Mother slumped sideways slowly until her head lay on Anna’s lap as they sat on the bench in the kitchen. I remember watching her with surprise. Mother never leaned on anybody. Anna stared straight ahead, and her small plump hands lay limply on Mother’s head.

“Now that she is gone, I must get rid of all the smelly chickens from under the house,” Mother said, her voice flat and blank.

I stared at her, horrified, but true to her word, the chickens were slaughtered one by one until they were no more. The chicken wire was removed from around the legs of the house and the ground cleaned. It wasn’t dim and musty under there anymore. All the smelly chickens with the shiny feathers were gone.

Of course I have lovely memories of Father. I used to sit and watch him eat watermelons on the veranda. He could make a slice last so long that I could fall asleep watching him. One by one the seeds slipped out noiselessly from the corner of his mouth into his left hand. All this of course was before Father lost the taste for life and began wandering aimlessly around the house shuffling from room to room, as if he had lost something.

In his time my father was a true artist. He carved a beautiful bust of Mother, which I imagined was what she must have looked like before—before him, before us, and before the multitude of disappointments that dropped without fail into her life. My father captured eyes bright with intelligence and a smile full of carefree cheek. He caught her in a moment before we caged her with our stupidity, our slow ways, and our lack of her easy ability. We turned her into a restless tiger who paced her cage day and night, growling furiously at her captors, us. When our home was looted while we were at that wedding in Seremban, the bust disappeared with everything else until the snake charmer’s wife saw it in the market. A man took it out of a sack and was selling it for just one ringgit. She bought it and brought it back for Mother. The rescued bust returned into Mother’s showcase until Mohini died. Then Mother took the bust out of the cupboard and smashed the beautiful thing into splinters. Even then she wasn’t satisfied. She heaped the pieces into a pile and burned them in the backyard. The sun was setting, and in the evening light she stood with her back to us all, her hands on her hips, watching black smoke curling from the pile of wood splinters. When her bust was but a pile of ashes, she returned to the house. None of us dared to ask her why she had done it.