The Rice Mother

by Rani Manicka

  I looked at him carefully. Poor Papa, how flawed his perception. Not only hadn’t he been a good son; he had been a terrible son. He broke her heart and behaved exactly like the enemy the fortune-teller in the green tent had predicted he would become. Grandma had borne him like a rock in the face of the sea’s angry waves. But it really was too late, and there was no longer any point in correcting him.

  “We suffered together during the war,” he continued. “I hid her jewels in the coconut tree. I was the only one brave enough to climb right to the top. Nobody else but I would do it for her. I was the man of the house. She turned to me for everything, and I never let her down. I woke before everybody else to take the milk to the tea vendors. I tilled the land and took the ragi to the millers. I did it all for her. It was right that she loved me the best.”

  He took off his glasses and wiped his eyes. Darling, tortured Papa. The carefully handpicked selection of memories had undone him. He stood up suddenly and strode outside into the bright sunlight in the backyard. All of our lives twisted and ugly. When Papa smiled, he had a dimple in his chin. I hadn’t seen it for years. I saw Papa pass Nash without a word. My brother and father hold equal contempt for each other. Outside I could see Papa talking to Aunty Lalita. He wanted to wash the clothes that were soaking in a big red tub.

  Aunty Lalita shook her head. “No, no, I will do the washing later. I’m used to washing all the clothes now,” she protested.

  “For one last time, I want to wash what Mother wore,” Papa insisted, taking his shirt and his watch off. He put his watch on the old grinding stone where he and Mohini used to crush beans into paste many years ago. Then he began. I remembered what Aunty Lalita told me a long time ago about Papa washing clothes. He does not just beat the clothes on the smooth stone. He arches his entire body so the clothes are flying for a long time in the air and water droplets fly all around him, catching the sunlight and sparkling like precious diamonds. I could see Aunty Lalita standing by, watching him, and I knew she was thinking the same thing I was. My Papa is a water god.

  In the kitchen Aunty Anna was helping to prepare Grandma’s body, laid out on her bench. That sturdy thing that had so enchanted her when she had arrived as an innocent in a new land. Now it held her, dead. The bench will survive us all. I know for sure it will survive me. My time is short. It is true that I feel Nisha’s fingernails in my flesh, but her grip is not really that strong. My life is fading away. A cloth was held up to hide the naked corpse as Aunty Anna and three other women washed Grandma. I held little Nisha closer to me. She was quiet. I kissed the top of her head, and when she looked up at me with large questioning eyes, I smiled at her.

  Mother slowly limped out of Grandma’s bedroom, where she had been lying down with terrible arthritic pains. Someone brought her a chair because her knees were too stiff to sit cross-legged on the floor like everyone else. I looked into her bitter eyes. She felt no sadness for Grandma. She had hated Grandma from the day she married Papa. Nevertheless she was there to pay her last respects and wait for the reading of the will.

  I remember Grandma never wanted respect, had no time for it, and scorned it when it was offered in lieu of real feeling. She gave deep love and unstinting loyalty and demanded the same in return.

  “Love, Dimple, is not words but deep sacrifice,” she often told me. “It is the willingness to give until you are crippled.”

  Aunty Anna went into Grandma’s bedroom, and I followed her. She was sitting on the edge of Grandma’s four-poster bed, and when she saw me she smiled sadly and opened her right palm. It was full of hairpins, not the ordinary kind but the ones that Grandma wore. Kee Aa pins. No one really wore those anymore. They were like hair clips, but instead of staying close together, they were U-shaped. Grandma used them to keep her bun in place.

  “Years after I moved out of this house, I would see a Kee Aa pin and be immediately reminded of Mother,” Aunty Anna said. “I shall always remember today, taking all these pins out of her hair for the last time. Her body is cold, but her hair still feels exactly the same as all those years ago when Mohini and I took turns to comb her hair. Isn’t it funny how these pins have suddenly made her death unbearable? Poor Mother. We were all such a monstrous disappointment to her.”

  “Oh, Aunty Anna. You were not a disappointment to her at all. She loved you, and of all her children, at least you married well and made something of your life.”

  “No, Dimple. None of us lived up to her expectations. Your mother calls her a spider without the slightest idea how accurate her description is. When Latin was spoken as a language, the word spider meant ‘I stand above all.’ And she did. She towered above us all in every possible way. She could lend her hand to any skill, outfox the most cunning of people, and yet we, her wonderful children, defeated her. Do you know what she told me at the hospital when we took her there this last time?”

  I shook my head silently.

  “She said, ‘I can smell Death in the air.’

  “And blindly I said to her, ‘It’s the antiseptic you smell.’

  “ ‘No, Anna, you smell the antiseptic because it is not your time.’ ”

  I stared at Aunty Anna incredulously, because that was exactly how I felt when I took Nisha to visit Grandma. I smelt Death in the air and saw him everywhere, but I held Nisha close to my body like a weapon, and he backed down. I held the greedy ogre at bay with the little flower beside me. While I hold her close, his perfume is not so alluring, and his smile not so inviting. Aunty Anna began to cry softly, and I hugged her. Her shoulders shook with sadness. Through the window I saw Nash smoking, his handsome face bored.

  “Can I have one of the pins?” I asked.

  She opened her palm, and I took one. I am going to keep it. Aunty Anna is right—the pin will remind me most vividly of Grandma. I can see her now, standing in front of the mirror in her white sari. There is still a lot of excess powder on her face, and her mouth is full of pins as she does up her hair. One by one they go into her thick silver bun until it is secure on the back of her neck. Then she turns around to me and asks with a smile, “Are you ready to go?”

  And one day I will say, “Yes.”

  After the funeral I went to see Uncle Sevenese. He looked terrible.

  “When I was a boy, I dreamed my mother’s funeral. Everything was exactly the same. Only now I have names to put on the grown-up faces I didn’t recognize before. I saw Lakshmnan and thought him a bitter stranger. The only person in my dream that looked vaguely like anyone I knew was you, and I assumed you were Mohini all grown up. But when I saw you today with Nisha on your lap, the dream broke.”

  I gazed unhappily at him, and he tossed an old copy of Sartre to me. “Read it and stop simply living the look. You have the freedom of choice, you know. Don’t stay with him if you don’t want to.”

  Once I would have taken the book. Read it eagerly. But now . . .

  “All hope is gone—the Rice Mother is dead.”

  Upon my words Uncle Sevenese turned speechless with horror and denied himself further knowledge. I could hardly tell him then how I need my blue smoke more and more and like it less and less.

  Nisha told me there was a bird’s nest in the mango tree. She said she could hear the chirping of baby chicks even from her bedroom window. She took me out to listen, but for some reason their frantic calls made me anxious. “Come on,” I said cheerfully, “let’s try the new coffee bar in town.” We sat at sienna tables, for the whole place was done up in the new terra-cotta palette. They had the strangest flower arrangement there, using a new flower called the kangaroo’s paw. I had never seen anything like it. It was beautiful and black. A black flower. How very strange—and yet how very beautiful, with little padlike petals in the palest green. So unusual and so elegant. I went to the florist and ordered some.

  They arrived on Thursday and looked beautiful in a clear glass vase on the coffee table. Nisha thought they looked like curled sleeping spiders on a stalk. What a child she is! But I will te
ach her to love them.

  Luke won’t touch her anymore. Perhaps it is because he is now afraid of what monsters lie sleeping inside him. What if he finds that he wants to lie with her? That is what he is afraid of—new perversions he will discover within himself. I feel sad for Nisha. She can’t understand why her daddy pushes her away. I don’t know what is to become of us. If only he would let us both go, but I know that he never will. He will never let me go. He will use her to keep me here.

  February 1983. Uncle Sevenese is dead. I was standing by his bedside at the hospital when he made the sign of writing, his eyes desperate. I rushed to put a pen and paper in his hands. Shakily he wrote, “Flowers grow be,” before his heart failed. I can’t stop thinking of that unfinished sentence. What flash of insight had prompted him to request pen and paper? I felt numb all the way up the stairs to his room thinking about it. Troubled by the way I had lost him.

  Flowers grow be—!

  I put a greasy key into his door. That first whiff of his closed, stuffy room was so stale and horrible, it made me want to retch. There was a small window in his kitchenette, and I opened it as wide as the stuck mechanism would allow. The room was sordid. The cracks in the linoleum were caked in grease and black dirt, and there was a film of cigarette ash everywhere. This is the last time I will see this room, I thought in a surprisingly detached manner. Then I stood there and committed everything to memory.

  In a strange way it was still fresh with his essence, as if he had only gone downstairs for his morning coffee. His astrology books, his charts and diagrams, lay scattered on the bed. He had been working on someone’s chart when he was taken ill. I sat on the stained sheets; a picture of that prostitute in white, lounging on the mattress, smoking a menthol cigarette, popped into my grieving head. She would never know he was gone. I opened the torn exercise book and looked at the notes he had been drawing up.

  Keep away/short lifeline. Rahu/snake in marriage house/deadlock. Death, divorce, sadness, tragedy.

  Pity the poor sod whose chart he had been working on. But when I lifted the notes, the charts and astrological details of my sister and me were underneath. I froze with disbelief. It was one of us. Bella or me.

  In a drawer I found an envelope addressed to me. I did not open it, but I could feel that there was a cassette inside. He had taped me a message. A last story for my abandoned dream trail. I folded the brown envelope carefully and put it away in my handbag. It is still there. I cannot bear to listen to it yet. Perhaps one night just before the blue smoke, then it will not affect me so.

  The funeral was brief. They had to carry out the body in a hurry even before the allocated time for the cremation. His badly damaged insides rotted so fast that the gases released bloated up his big body like a balloon. Even from where I sat, I heard the hissing and spitting gases, as if his organs were conspiring to explode. They feared pieces of my uncle splattered all over the walls, so they rushed him out. Softhearted Aunty Lalita reached down into the coffin and kissed him on the cheek, even though the strong stench of decay that came from his body made me feel faint. It was not the smell of a corpse but the smell of rubbish. Even in death Uncle Sevenese refused to conform. Despite the two bottles of cologne, the reek of rotting rubbish and formaldehyde was so overpowering that a dignified funeral was not possible. The pungent fumes stung our eyes, and two women even dashed into the kitchen to hide their distaste of the intolerable fumes. An old withered lady, too old to bother playing diplomatic games, covered her nose and mouth with the ends of her sari. I supposed Aunty Lalita would now hang up a garlanded black-and-white framed photograph of Uncle Sevenese to join Granddad, Grandma, and Mohini. I felt cold. I felt cold all day. It was the blue smoke.

  Aunty Lalita came to visit. She spent a lot of time with Nisha in the garden, talking to her as if she too were only six years old. They watched the fish for hours, then they studied the carefree dragonflies with the jade and turquoise patches enameled on their long abdomens, hovering over the still water. She told Nisha what she told me when I was a child, that dragonflies are capable of stitching together the lips of wicked children in their sleep. Nisha’s eyes became opalescent pools of wonder. “Really,” my daughter breathed.

  Watching them is like looking back in time. I used to sit in the shade with Aunty Lalita, watching the dragonflies flitting back and forth at the back of Grandma’s house. I used to turn my head and see Grandma sitting on the bench, watching us through the window like I watch them now.

  Something is terribly wrong with Papa. He was rushed to the hospital with chest pains. They gave him some pills, but he flung them into the air on the hospital steps. Poor Papa, I know his pain. He seeks the same oblivion I seek.

  Nisha is having problems with a school bully called Angela Chan, who leaves crescent-shaped fingernail marks on her arms. I will have to visit the girl’s mother.

  Have I told you about my horribly wonderful dreams? They must come from the blue smoke. There is a beautiful man in a thick glass case. His limbs are long and shapely, and his curly hair gently sweeps against his strong shoulders. His face is shadowed, yet I feel his beauty. I know when he gets out of the thick glass case, he will be splendid beyond my expectations. His eyes are sad like mine are in the portrait downstairs, but I feel certain that he loves me. He has always loved me.

  For many years now he has looked at me with deep longing, but now he is impatient to feel me, fill me, make me one with him. I don’t know when exactly, but some time ago he began to cut through the glass. He is without weapons, so he uses his fingernails. His fingers are bleeding, and the glass is all red, but he is tireless. His love is deep. Day and night he scratches. He will cut himself out one day, and I will be waiting. It will be a special moment when I kiss him. I like the way that mouth curves. I yearn for the day when I press my body to that lithe length and his mouth covers mine. When I give my life to Death.

  PART 6

  The Rest Is Lies July 2001

  Luke

  Brought to this uneasy landscape of sharply protruding bones and sunken flesh by a ravenous disease, I no longer dare shut my eyes. Day and night I watch the door feverishly. In this cold hospital room where butter-colored tubes sprout sadly from my wasted arms and ride into blinking machines, I know Death will come to collect me. Soon. My breathing is hollow and loud in the silent room. Invisible hands have begun to pack me in a waxy yellow material. Ready for my journey.

  I turn my head to look at my daughter. She sits by my bedside on a black and chrome chair like a small mouse. But if she is a mouse, it is surely my work. I have turned Dimple’s beautiful child into a meek, inconsequential person. It is a cruel thing that I have done, but in my defense, it was never my intention to hurt. Nor was it easy. It took many years and many lies to accomplish. She sits, innocent of my horrible deceit. If she knew, she would hate me. She leans forward to clasp my stiff, clawed hand. The poor child’s hand is freezing.

  “Nisha,” my dry mouth murmurs. Faintly. The end is here.

  Dutifully she moves closer. So close that she inhales the reek of decaying flesh. The rot within wags a long black finger—One day you too, it warns my drab mouse. I hear her gasp.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper, the words struggling out painfully. There is so little left of me.

  “Why?” she cries, for she knows nothing of the past. An “accident” and a convenient amnesia attack sixteen years ago is responsible. I’m afraid I rather took advantage of it and set about re-creating her world for her. Feathered it with comforting lies. Decided she must never know the tragic truth. Never see the blood on my hand.

  In her face I see Dimple’s eyes, but the girl lacks her mother’s glamour. Oh, the regret, the regret. I have done them both wrong, but I will right it today. I will give her the key. Let her meet my terrible secret, that hunched, deformed shape clinging relentlessly around my neck. Yes, the one I have so carefully sheltered and fed for sixteen years. The key that locked away my darling Dimple’s dream trail.


  It must be said, I loved my poor wife badly.

  There is a soft pain in my chest, and the breath catches in my throat. Nisha looks at me with sudden fear. She runs out of the room, her heels loud on the polished floors, to look for a doctor, a nurse, an orderly, someone, anyone at all who can help. . . .

  Nisha

  There was no peace in the open mouth and the staring eyes when I returned with a nurse. He died as he had lived. I gazed astonished, uncomprehending that the smoldering coals in the narrow slits of his face could so easily be extinguished into lifeless marbles, dense and black. Like the black marble floor that stretches endlessly in my nightmares. So highly polished that a child’s face reflects back, a small face twisted with terror and shock. No doubt another fragment of an old memory, one missed by the memory-eating snake that has devoured my childhood. It winds and drips like mercury inside my dreams and whispers, “Trust me. They are safest in the dark of my belly.”

  I sank down slowly beside my still father, and in a small mirror on the wall I stared at myself blankly. The blood of many races has infused my face with its mysterious eyes, high cheekbones, and a small neat mouth that appears almost sorry to be sharing the same space as my exotic eyes. The mouth knew what the men didn’t, that the provocation in the half-closed lids disguises an invitation to heartbreak. I have broken many hearts without meaning to. Without knowing.

  In the lap of my brown dress my pampered hands mumbled that they had never done a day’s work in twenty-four years. I looked at the key I had prised out of Daddy’s tightly clenched fist. Could it be used to set free the memory pieces inside the greedy snake? Give them back their voices so they might explain silly little things like why a dripping tap should terrify me so. Or why the combination of red and black chokes me with inexplicable fear. I left my father’s corpse without a backward glance.