The Rice Mother (33 page)

M
y brother Sevenese said that sometimes animals spoke to him in his dreams. Once in the middle of the night he dreamed of a cat that stood outside our door and said quite clearly, “It’s so cold. Please let me in.”

Startled, he woke up. Outside, a storm bellowed inconsolably. Flying winds lashed at the window shutters and screamed at our front door. Huge drops of rain drummed loudly on the corrugated zinc roof over the extension. Inside the house, the air was damp and heavy.

My brother got out of bed, propelled by a force greater than him: fearless curiosity. Flashes of lightning filled the corridor with white light, and a sudden clap of thunder made him jump and clasp his hands to his ears. On such a troubled night, who knew what treacherous spirit, what insane demon waited on the other side of our closed front door, but open the door he must. At the other end of the corridor in the flickering light of the oil lamp, he saw Mother’s shadow on the kitchen wall, bent over her sewing. He pulled back the bolt on the front door and opened it fearlessly.

On the doorstep, patiently waiting, was a bedraggled mother cat and five shivering little kittens. The cat looked up and stared unblinkingly at him, her eyes bright sapphires in the gray of the stormy night. He stared back speechless, but as if he had invited her in, she gently grasped in her mouth her shivering babies by the loose skin on their necks and carried them one by one into the warmth of our kitchen. Sevenese and Mother made a bed with rags on the kitchen floor, watered down some condensed milk in a shallow plate, and watched with satisfaction as it disappeared underneath her little pink tongue.

According to my brother, that is the only time he can ever remember feeling close to Mother. He forgot about the thin cane hanging on its hook on the kitchen wall and was aware only of the sweet smell of banana jam on Mother’s breath when she held him close to her and kissed the top of his head. He felt warm and loved and was glad to be indoors with her while the night raged outside.

Mother allowed him to keep the cat. The kittens she found homes for.

For a stray, the cat was strangely regal. Tall, with a small triangular face and a coat of the lightest, most luxurious gray you could possibly imagine, she stalked about the house, her nose high in the air. My brother grandly named her Kutub Minar and made her a basket beside him. Some nights when he awoke sweating and terrified by one of his wretched nightmares, he turned toward her basket and never failed to see the reassuring sight of her head raised, two blue pools of light regarding him steadily. When she stared at him with those moonlight-washed eyes, my brother swore a silent energy passed through him until his heart stopped pounding madly in his chest. And only when he was calm once more did she yawn widely, lay down her head, and, closing her eyes, fall back into a patch of yellow sunlight in a field of glorious flowers.

Kutub Minar made certain to keep out of Mother’s way. She rested her small, sharp chin on her paws while her alert, beautiful eyes followed Mother’s every move warily. Mother was like a caged panther. It is no wonder she made the cat nervous. Animals are attracted to still, peaceful people. People like my father and Lalita. The first time Sevenese came home from the snake charmer’s house, the cat arched her spine, hackles quivering, ears flat against the sides of her beautiful face, and swore at him. Her long tail lashed from side to side. Sevenese stared at her distended claws in astonishment. She was surely getting ready to spring at his throat. Then all at once she realized that it was her beloved master that she spat at, and with a strangled cry she dropped her tail and streaked into the fields at the back of our house, disappearing into the woods. It was either the smell of the snakes or the hunger of the malignant spirits that the snake charmer consorted with that spooked her so. She remained a good companion all through my brother’s childhood, dying suddenly when he turned seventeen. One morning we woke up and found her dead in her basket, curled up as if deeply asleep.

For many years after Mohini died, I used to wake up in the night and see Sevenese sitting up in the dark of our bedroom, waiting for her ghost to appear. He sat so silent and so still, it was a chilling sight. Last time he had been caught off guard. This time he had questions for her and things to tell her. He had not dreamed her. “Listen carefully for my voice, my little watchman,” she had said. He listened very carefully, but the years passed without another word from her. Every year the festival of lights came and went, and every year we surrounded the house with clay lamps the night before, as we had always done, awakened at dawn, bathed, wore the bright new clothes that Mother had sat up late into the nights making, and ate a big lunch of choice food. Everyone’s favorite dish was on the table. Lalita and I still scrupulously carried trays of festive cakes and trembling bits of colorful jelly over to our neighbors’ homes, but Divali had lost something. It had become hollow. Divali in an unhappy household is like a smile from a dead child, the smile so brittle that none of us dared speak about it even though we all saw it. It was there in all our eyes as we smiled cautiously at one another and watched our family members become distant strangers.

Lakshmnan was the strangest of all. It seemed to our confused eyes as if he hated us and openly enjoyed any spectacle of our humiliation or pain. And there were many. Cannily he redeemed himself in Mother’s eyes with the exceptional grades he brought home. He was so clever he was able to sell his class notes to his friends on a weekly basis. Lakshmnan studied like a fiend. He poured himself into his work. Every day he studied late into the night. He had the shrewd idea that he might meet the goddess of riches in the house of the goddess of education. He was in a labyrinth, but at the end of his labyrinth was a pot of gold, wondrous riches, and precious stones. He wanted that which he could touch proudly and use carelessly. He wanted long cars and big houses. He wanted to handle money with his left hand. If education was the tasteless bread he must eat in exchange for his shining cold dream, then eat it fiercely he would. Top place in his class was a savagely fought battle between him and another boy called Ramachandran. If Lakshmnan returned home with a black face, it meant Ramachandran had pulled first place out from under his feet.

We had all missed four years of school as a result of the Japanese occupation, so when we went back we returned to the same level we had been at when the British first left. So it was only when Lakshmnan turned nineteen that his senior exams sailed out of the horizon and loomed closer. In those days, senior papers were marked overseas in England, and afterward you could use your school certificate to attend college or even go straight to university. Lakshmnan did nothing but study, his curly head bent over a book, his brow furrowed with concentration, consuming endless cups of Mother’s steaming hot coffee. She was very proud of him.

Success seemed assured.

On the day of the exam Lakshmnan left confidently, but even before the sun had cleared the tops of the coconut trees, Mother saw him return, escorted by Mr. Vellupilai himself.

“What’s the matter?” she asked worriedly, walking around the side of the house to meet them.

“I don’t know, Ama, but I couldn’t even see the paper for the pain inside my head,” Lakshmnan said. There were dark shadows under his eyes, and dazzled even by the weak morning sunlight, they squinted at Mother from his bemused face.

“The teacher found him slumped over his paper on his desk. I think you had better take your son to a doctor,” Mr. Vellupilai advised gravely.

Immediately Mother took Lakshmnan to the hospital. They couldn’t tell her what the matter was. Perhaps it was strain or pressure. However, they said Lakshmnan needed glasses. He was short-sighted. Mother ordered the spectacles at an optician in town. Lakshmnan walked beside her, dazed, disbelieving. What had happened was a tragedy. It showed in Mother’s face when we came back from school. They had both set great store by his success at the exams. Now he would have to wait a whole year to resit them.

One evening when I looked out of the kitchen window I saw Lakshmnan sitting under the jasmine tree, smoking. He was smoking with jerky, nervous puffs, and I realized instantly that he wanted Mother to see him. Some part of him wanted to goad her, test her. My brother was bored.

When all is lost, there is only the devil and the god he reveres, Money. Lakshmnan had always burned to be rich, but now he wanted it easy. His greedy heart led him to a crowd of wealthy Chinese boys. They had cars, girlfriends with the kind of names you would give to a fluffy kitten, and a collection of bad habits that they were oddly proud of, and they talked of business deals worth thousands and thousands of ringgit. They boasted carelessly of their losses at the gambling tables. “Easy come, easy go,” they crowed. My brother recognized in their loosely fisted hands the seeds of the secret trees that bore the fruit of money. How he admired them! From them he learned to say, “Sup sup sui”—no problem, piece of cake—and “Mo siong korn”—don’t worry about it, it doesn’t matter.

He never brought these new friends around to the house, but I saw him with them on my way back from school. I didn’t like the look of their sly, narrow eyes, but I never told Mother about them. I was too frightened to tell on him. Also I guessed that they only wanted his notes. No, not the ones that were for sale, but the ones that made him the top of his class. Come this time next year I knew they would be gone, their bald heads and hooked beaks deep inside another carcass.

Lakshmnan and I sat for the senior exams together. This time around he didn’t study. “I can still remember what I learned last year,” he announced arrogantly as he put on his shoes to go out for the night. When the results came, he only managed a Grade Two. Ramachandran the year before had picked up a Grade One and was studying at Sandhurst Military College in England. He sat in a shoeshine’s chair, had his photograph taken, and sent it home with the caption: “Look how far I’ve come. The colonial masters are cleaning my shoes now.”

With a Grade Two, Lakshmnan’s highest opening was as a labor officer in a government office, but even that option was closed to him, as there were no jobs around at that time. I had attained a Grade Three, and my headmaster offered me a teaching post. Mother was pleased, and I became a teacher.

Lakshmnan was furious and frustrated. I can remember him nervously hurrying to and fro in the living room like a caged ape for hours on end. Other times he sat in the living room smoking endlessly, his fingers tapping the wooden table distractedly, staring at nothing, a pile of empty cigarette packets strewn carelessly on the table and an ashtray full of dead stubs. For many weeks he ranted and raved about his bad luck, then finally, gritting his teeth with rage, he joined me in the teaching profession. That was not the plan. How he hated teaching! Walking along the corridor, I have passed his class and seen him teaching with his fists clenched.

The way the teaching system worked in my day was that you were trained for three months on the job. Every weekend you went away to a different location where you received your training. Lakshmnan wanted to do his training in Singapore. It was not the “superior level of training” that he was really after but the bright city lights. He was truly excited by the idea, and for the first time he became almost human in his interactions with us. Our house radiated with the sunshine of his altered self and Mother’s happiness. He had been so difficult and so unhappy for so long that Mother thought it must be a good idea to send him to Singapore. It had grieved her to see him sit in the living room impatient and restless, smoking box after box of cigarettes. That afternoon they sat in the living room discussing the logistics of the idea.

My brother Sevenese was reading a comic book in the bedroom when a voice popped into his head. The comic book fell out of his suddenly nerveless fingers. It was the voice he had been waiting for, for so many years that he had nearly forgotten it.
She
had spoken to him. He jumped out of bed.

“Don’t let him go,” the voice said.

Immediately he ran into the living room and announced in a rush that Mohini had told him that Lakshmnan must not go. First there was shock on Lakshmnan’s face, then pain, monstrous pain. He still would not talk about her death. In fact, the mere mention of her name made him leave the room.

“What utter nonsense!” he shouted, springing out of his chair.

“What are you talking about?” Mother asked Sevenese, blanching like an almond.

“I just heard Mohini’s voice say very clearly, ‘Don’t let him go,’ ” Sevenese said.

“Are you sure?” Mother asked. A worried frown buried itself in her forehead.

“I don’t believe this. Mohini’s ghost returns with advice about how I should run my life. This is absolutely ridiculous, and I can’t believe that you’re entertaining such rubbish,” Lakshmnan spluttered at Mother. “I can never do anything I want to in this mad-house,” he exploded childishly.

“Why are you so angry? Just wait a minute,” Mother said, but Lakshmnan did what he usually did. He stamped off, slamming his clenched fist into a pile of bricks outside in uncontrollable temper.

Of course Lakshmnan left for Singapore. Mother was unhappy, but to stand in the way of his fist pounding and teeth grinding took a much harder heart than that soft spot she had reserved for him. She sent him off with a suitcase full of new clothes and his favorite savory snacks. At first he wrote home quite often, cheerful letters that were full of his comings and goings, and it seemed as if Mother had made the right decision to let him go after all. But Mohini was soon proved right. Without any warning, the letters dried up. An uninformative postcard arrived after two months, and then nothing at all. Mother began to worry and fret. She should never have let him go. In her perpetual bad temper everything irritated her. Poor Father—for many weeks I don’t think he even dared speak.