The Rice Mother

by Rani Manicka

  In identical dresses we stood in front of Mother, waiting for her approval. She would adjust a bow, sweep back a strand of hair, and smile at both of us with the same level of satisfaction, and that was enough to reassure me that she loved me the same as my sister. Needless to say, Mohini looked totally different in the same dress. People used to stare at her a lot, mostly men, uncomfortable stares. Nobody believed that we were sisters. They would look into the warm green of her eyes with amazement and often a touch of envy.

  I remember standing by the mirror as Mother did her hair and watching as she oiled and combed it until it turned into a shiny black serpent that undulated right down to the soft swell of her bottom. My own hair was always thin and fine, and when the Japanese came, to my greatest horror Mother reached for her scissors. She made me stand outside in the yard and went to work, and when she was finished, long, thin strands of hair lay in black patches on the ground. I ran to the mirror, tears streaming down my face. She had left no more than two inches of hair on my head. Attired in a pair of boy’s shorts and a shirt, I was sent to school. In the next few days I was somewhat mollified, as more than half the girls in school had turned into boys.

  Mr. Vellupilai dutifully redid the class registers to reflect the changes. In my class, the only girl who remained a girl was Mei Ling. Her mother had permitted her to remain a girl, and she became our Japanese teacher’s favorite. One day during recess he called her into an empty classroom and raped her. I can see her now, stumbling out, lips trembling in her dazed face, the belt, made from the same material as her uniform, slightly askew. I knew, of course, that being raped was the ultimate catastrophe, but I had no idea then what it entailed. I remember thinking that it had something to do with one’s eyes, because it was her eyes that were huge and bruised that morning. And for a long time I thought being raped was having your eyes hurt. No wonder Mother hid Mohini and her wonderful eyes. In fact, the headmaster himself came to our house to advise Mother to keep my sister from school.

  “Too beautiful,” he said, coughing into a large brown-and-white handkerchief. Mr. Vellupilai said he couldn’t guarantee her safety with so many Japanese around. In between mouthfuls of Mother’s fried banana cakes, he told her that Japanese teachers were going to be sent to the school. “They are coarse and vulgar,” he said. He would have no control over them; one must never forget that they did after all rape their way through half of China. With Mohini being at that age, he concluded almost delicately, he could not guarantee her safety. In fact, his exact words were, “I wouldn’t like to put a cat and a saucer of milk in the same room and close the door.”

  Mother needed no second warning. So Mohini got to keep her thick serpent of hair, but she became a prisoner at home. Mohini was our secret. Outside our front door she stopped existing. We never spoke about her. She was like the chest of gold ingots buried under the house that the whole family lies to protect. No one saw the beauty that she was turning into. She could not even stand outside on the veranda or walk in the backyard to breathe some fresh air. For almost three years she remained so hidden away that even the neighbors forgot what she looked like. Mother’s fear was that somebody might reveal her existence to the Japanese soldiers for a favor or out of jealousy. Times were hard, and friends were few.

  One day I remember Mohini sitting on the steps of our back door as Mother combed her hair. Like waves of the purest black silk, her hair lay down her back. As Mother twisted it into a thick rope, I spotted in the blazing sun the snake charmer’s eldest son. He must have been hunting for live mice or small snakes for his cobras to eat but had instead stumbled upon our luxurious secret. He stood frozen in the terrible heat, caught in the net of his discovery. His tattered, stained clothes were falling off his sinewy, bronzed body, and in his muscled hand he carried a closed basket. He had no shoes on, and his hair was unwashed, but in the glare of the sun his eyes were dark fathomless pits in his stunned face. The sudden movement of my head attracted Mother’s attention, and her body turned instantly to shield Mohini.

  “Go away,” she barked harshly at him.

  For a moment he continued to stare, hypnotized by the glorious hair, the milky whiteness, and then as suddenly as he had appeared, he vanished into the wavering yellow heat. I looked into Mother’s face and saw fear. It was not fear of the strange magic of the snake charmer or the awakening reptile of desire that had shimmered in the young man’s eyes, but fear of the rare beauty that sat so simply in my sister’s face. Indeed, Mohini was like a magnificent quetzal, which flies straight up from the crowns of hundred-foot-tall trees, circles in song, then free-falls, dropping through the air, her iridescent feathers streaming like a comet’s tail. Mother was the chosen owner of this resplendent bird. What more could she do but cage her breathtaking beauty? And a prisoner Mother’s bird remained until the day she flew away forever.

  In my mind I can still see the two of us walking home from school, dressed identically, side by side in the sun eating balls of ice shavings dipped in syrup. We had to eat it fast, or it would melt in our hands. We could never ever tell Mother when we had one because Mohini suffered from horrible attacks of asthma and was not allowed to consume anything cold. So we sneaked in the ice balls only when the weather sizzled. It was very serious, Mohini’s asthma. Whenever it rained or even just drizzled, Mother would come to fetch us from school with a large black umbrella, and the three of us walked home together, Mohini under the big black umbrella, me under a small waxed brown-paper umbrella that smelt strongly of varnish, and Mother under the rain. I think she secretly enjoyed the feel of the big warm drops falling on her head. Always when we got home, freshly pressed, horribly pungent ginger juice would be waiting in a covered cup. Mother then boiled some water and poured it into the juice, filling the whole kitchen with its biting fumes. After adding a spoonful of dark brown wild honey into the vile mixture, Mother handed over the cup and waited until it was completely empty. I watched almost in awe as Mohini drank it all down. On the roof the rain tapped and drummed insistently. I think I loved my sister a great deal then.

  And I remember Mui Tsai too. Sweet, downtrodden little Mui Tsai. I think she was really attached to Mother, but Mother was so determined that her imaginary gravestone would read “Devoted Mother” that she couldn’t see her friend begging for a little love. Her eyes were set far away on the horizon, where all her children were brilliant examples of good upbringing. Poor Mui Tsai. She often looked sad, but that was when she was not yet broken. They broke her like a toy, her mistresses and the master. And after that she was no longer sad. I think her mind snapped. She went to a place where she had many babies and got to keep them all.

  My best memories of Mui Tsai are her elongated shadow on Mother’s kitchen wall far into the night, a secret rendezvous in the flickering, mysterious light of Mother’s oil lamp. Whenever a nightmare jerked me awake in the middle of the night, I crept into the friendly glow of the kitchen. There I found Mui Tsai and Mother cross-legged and talking in whispers or playing Chinese checkers on the bench. I would walk smiling into Mui Tsai’s outstretched arms and fall asleep in her lap. She aroused in me the same concealed pity that I harbored for my younger sister, Lalita.

  I remember the birth of my little sister, a waif in a tightly wrapped bundle. She had small eyes set very close together in a broad face. And she was darker than all of us. My father had to nibble her ears to make her laugh. She was very quiet. She was like him, you see. She even looked like him. Mother frankly admitted she had not wanted any of her children to take after our father. She said his children from his first marriage were the sorriest creatures she ever saw. When she first looked into Lalita’s dull eyes, she thought that through sheer willpower alone she could change her. Change the course of nature. She was only a baby. Babies could be changed.

  But the older my sister became, the more she resembled Father. In despair Mother took to rocking my quiet sister on her outstretched legs, singing, “Who will marry my poor, poor daughter?” If you had h
eard the anguish in those simple words, you too would have come to the conclusion that beautiful children inspire pride in their parents, and ugly children inspire a tremendous surge of protective love. Nature denied my sister beauty, but it was my mother who carried protective love so far she unwittingly denied my sister the opportunity of marriage. I know it’s wrong of me, but I cannot be rid of the notion that it was because of Mother that my sister never married—the strength of Mother’s will as she sang that sad line over and over again. If Mother heard me say this, she would be very angry. She would say she tried her very best. Nobody could have tried harder to find my sister a suitable husband. Perhaps she should just be flattered that I think her so powerful as to change the course of my sister’s fate with her little songs.

  When we returned to our empty, looted home after the Japanese invasion, Mother had to use more than half of her savings to replace everything that had been stolen. To her credit she took the disaster in her stride. By midmorning she had been to the markets and managed to stock up on some provisions and later replaced most of our furniture by buying pieces looted from others. By the end of that year the rest of my mother’s savings had become just useless paper. The Japanese made us all very resourceful, but Mother was an undefeatable force. Realizing that her money was useless, she sent Lakshmnan, more dexterous than a monkey, up the highest coconut tree in our compound, where he tied her tin of money and jewels securely among the branches. Every so often he scampered up to check that her hoard was still safe. Covered in bird droppings, Mother’s little fortune remained untouched for years. The advent of the Japanese made Mother an entrepreneur, and she had quite a knack for it too. She noted that condensed milk was no more, and the coffee stall on the way to Father’s workplace sold only sugarless black coffee. There was a market for cow’s milk. So she sold her largest ruby and bought some cows and goats. Every morning before the sun was up, she milked them, and Lakshmnan took the milk to the coffee shops in town. During the day she left the milk to set into yogurt, and in the evening the ladies from the temple visited with empty containers to collect Mother’s yogurt thinned with water. They called it mour.

  I was nine years old then, and I remember our cows as huge beasts with lumbering bodies and ponderous udders. They looked at me with liquid mournful eyes that made me guiltily try to love them, but they were really too stupid to befriend. There was never the light of recognition, nor any expression to be gleaned from their eyes except sad acceptance, resigned to dreadful lives in smelly conditions. Always under their tails was dried dung.

  Strangely enough, when I think of the Japanese occupation, I think of our cows—the way they came into our lives with the start of the occupation and were all sold when the Japanese left. While it is true that Mother also kept goats, turkeys, and geese, they left no impact on me. Lalita fed the turkeys and geese bean curd and spinach until they were big enough to sell and then cried when Mother sold them to a Chinese trader at the market.

  Most of all I equate the Japanese occupation with fear, the acute fear that has a taste and a smell all of its own, metallic and oddly sweet. Lakshmnan and I saw our first decapitated head on our way to the market. The head was spiked on a stick by the roadside, attached to it a page torn from a school exercise book with the message “Traitor.” We laughed at the head. It was funny when we were sure it wasn’t real. How could it be real when there was no blood dripping from the severed neck or the large gash on the man’s left cheek? When we got closer, however, we realized that it was indeed real. The flies were real, and so was the persistent sweetish, stale odor around it. Fear of a kind I had never experienced before hit me in the stomach. I began to fear for my father’s life, even though my brother assured me that they only beheaded Chinese men whom they suspected to be Communists.

  A few yards in front not just a head but a whole body had been skewered onto a stick and spiked into the ground. My brother’s steps faltered, and his grip on my hand tightened painfully, but my brother is like my mother—he doesn’t say die easily. We pressed on. I wish we hadn’t. The Chinese man had looked like a fake dummy, and not a very good one at that, but the second figure gave me nightmares for many years to come.

  It was a woman. My brother’s reassurance that they only chopped off the heads of Chinese Communist men showed itself to be a lie. Not only was the corpse a woman, she had also been heavily pregnant. They had ripped her belly open, and a perfectly formed purple fetus hung obscenely from the gaping hole. Her eyes bulged as if horrified to see us looking at her open belly, and her mouth hung open as if getting ready to scream. Big blue flies buzzed around her open, stinking belly. She carried in her limp hand a placard that read, “And this is how Communist families are treated.” The Japanese, it seemed, had a special hatred for the Chinese that went beyond the war. “Mui Tsai is Chinese,” I said as we walked on in silence.

  After they stole Mui Tsai’s fifth child, she shuffled around like a bitter ghost. Inside she was cut and bleeding, but to the outside world she was young and pretty. To the Japanese soldiers she was perfect. They found their comfort woman in our little neighborhood. How they used her! They lined up. One by one they took her on the kitchen floor, in the master’s bed, on the rosewood dining table where the master and mistress ate every day. Every time they came, they expected to have their food on the table and their sex wherever they happened to be standing. Our Mohini and Ah Moi next door owed their virginity to her. When General Ito and his men drove into the neighborhood, the first mad rush was to Old Soong’s house. At Old Soong’s they found everything necessary to satisfy their basic needs. There was always the food that they were familiar with, and then there was always a young fair girl for them to do with as they pleased, nobody’s wife and nobody’s daughter. Because they had Mui Tsai, they didn’t bother to look too hard for the other carefully hidden daughters. They might have guessed there were girls of usable age hidden somewhere in the neighborhood, but Mui Tsai did for the time being.

  Mother and Lakshmnan had built a secret hole in the ground for Mohini, and to a lesser extent, if the occupation lasted for many years, for me too. As a boy I should have been safe for a few more years, but with the Japanese you never could tell. Mother said war brings out the animal inside a man. He leaves his compassion at home. Meeting him in enemy land is like turning a corner and looking into the yellow eyes of a large lion. There is never a chance to plead or reason. He will surely jump on you. The hiding place was a hole that had been cleverly cut out of the floorboards of the house. It dropped you onto the ground under the elevated floor of our house and ran straight into a hole with enough space for Mohini, me, and maybe one day even Lalita.

  Mother had dismantled the old chicken coop, run chicken wire around the legs of our house, and herded our chickens into their new home under our house. She was gambling on the hope that the prospect of soiling themselves with chicken dung would put off even the Empire’s most dedicated servant from investigating that small crawl space under our house. The trapdoor was covered with a huge wooden chest that Grandma had sent from Sangra. When the wooden chest was pushed over the trapdoor, the entrance was completely concealed. It was an ingenious hiding place, and the Japanese, though they opened cupboards and peered into corners, never found it. Perhaps they didn’t try too hard. Mui Tsai had already blunted the edge of their needs before they came around.

  Once Mother tried to please them by giving them food. The first time they put the offered food into their mouths, they spat it out immediately, looking at her with murderous rage as if she had offered them spicy food in order to mock them. She bowed low and begged for mercy. They slapped her bowed head. Sometimes they looked at Mother with strange expressions and asked where she had hidden her daughters. Standing beside her in my boy’s clothes, I felt her trembling against me. Once General Ito came very close and asked her again with such a knowing smile that it seemed as if one of the neighbors had betrayed us. But they were only testing, and we sighed with relief when their truck turne
d away into the main road.

  Mohini filled her secret room with small embroidered pillows and books. She made it pretty, but we were forbidden conversation inside. We cuddled each other in silence and listened to the thumping of heavy boots on the floorboards above. At the beginning we were very frightened in our secret cavity, but as time went by we relaxed and learned to giggle very, very softly into our cupped hands thinking of the soldiers searching uselessly over our heads for our hiding place. I was so proud of our clever hiding place, for I knew they would never find it, and I was right.

  It was Father they came to take away.

  Little Sevenese dreamed that he saw Father fall into a huge hole in the ground, his lips bleeding profusely. Mother went to the temple, donated some money, and said some prayers.

  Two nights after we had forgotten about the dream, they came. The moon was a slender shape in the sky, and the gods had flung only a handful of stars into the black void. I know because for many hours afterward I sat in a daze, watching the sky. The neighborhood was asleep, only Mother still awake, in the kitchen sewing. At the first sound of tires crunching over the road, she pricked her finger. For a second she stared at the dot of red that appeared on her finger, but even before they had stopped their trucks and jumped out, she had dragged Mohini and me out of bed and stashed us into our secret hiding place. Then she blew out the kerosene lamp and stood behind the living room curtains. They came with torchlight and bayonets. She watched them disappear into the truck driver’s house.

  Minutes later they were out, the truck driver at bayonet point. In the truck’s headlamps he looked bewildered. They dragged his half-dressed body into the truck. From inside the poor man’s house came the sounds of loud sobs and wailing. His children’s terrified screams tore into the night. The soldiers stood for a while, loudly discussing something in their guttural language. It was not Ito and his men. Ito and his soldiers were predictable. We hated them, but they had become familiar figures of manageable terror. These men looked far more menacing. They were not looking for free food or a pair of open legs. They were looking for something far more important than that. As Mother watched, the group broke up, and two of them began striding toward our house. Our front door thundered with their hard rapping. Mother rushed to open the door. Their flashlights shone briefly in her face before they pushed her roughly aside. Their beam fell on Father standing stock-still by the bedroom door. Immediately they grabbed him and marched him out of the house, stony-faced in the wake of my mother’s pitiful cries.