The Rice Mother

by Rani Manicka

  Lena, my father’s servant, let me into his house. Up the long, curving stairs I ran, bursting into the sparse coolness of his dull room. For a moment I froze in the shadows. I could smell Daddy. He had not been in that room for weeks, and yet like a lost ghost his smell lingered helplessly on. I crossed the room, fitted the key into a door inside his dressing room, and turned it.

  The small, walk-in cupboard stored the thick, gray-white dust of many years. Its shelves were bare but for a startled rusty brown baby spider and an old cardboard box that claimed in green block letters to have once housed twelve bottles of French chardonnay.

  “STORE THIS WAY UP” said the tired red arrow that had been pointing downward for God knows how many years. Old duct tape gave way easily, and a cloud of white dust like a pleasing mountain mist rose up.

  All my life. All my life I had searched and not found. I opened the box.

  A box full of cassettes. A box full of secrets.

  On the inside cover of a yellowing collection of Omar Khayyám’s poems small, childish handwriting proclaimed it the private property of Dimple Lakshmnan. Who the hell was Dimple Lakshmnan? Startled silverfish peered up from their dinner of black ink and old paper.

  I rummaged though the cassettes. Each one had been carefully numbered and named—LAKSHMI, ANNA, LALITA, SEVENESE, JEYAN, BELLA . . . I wondered who all these people were.

  Downstairs, the phone rang. I heard Lena gasp loudly. Obviously the hospital.

  “I’m sorry,” he had said so cryptically on the threshold of death.

  “Don’t be sorry, Daddy,” I murmured softly. “There was never anything I yearned for more than knowing the secrets that lurked in your cold eyes.”

  The Woman in Black

  “I’m so sorry, Nisha,” a woman whispered very close to my ears, I patting my hand sympathetically. I did not know her, but she must have been a friend of Daddy’s if she saw fit to attend his funeral. I watched her move away in a suitably funereal black-and-gray dress and felt quite numb.

  I longed to leave. To return to my flat and liberate the voices trapped in the tapes. But dutiful daughters were expected to remain at least until the body had left the house. Father certainly knew a lot of people, for the whole house was crammed with flowers that didn’t smell. There was even a massive arrangement from a prominent Indonesian minister. How strange that he should send my father flowers. Daddy hadn’t approved of him. Too obvious, he said. He preferred his corruption subtle.

  I noticed that there was not a single kangaroo’s paw in sight. It was strange, the feeling of déjà vu that had flowed over me when I first laid eyes on it. I thought it strangely familiar and very beautiful. Thin and black with the slightest tinge of tender green, as if unaware that it was its very blackness that excited the intense horticultural attention and wonder.

  Like me. Unaware for too many years that my special attraction had lain in the unattainable curve of my cheek as I slept with my face turned away in the dark. Lying next to me, the men who came into my life all appeared to become obsessed with the mystery that lay so tantalizingly within reach and yet unconquered. They were gripped by the same fever, the need to possess me, to go where others had not gone . . . well, at least at the beginning.

  At the beginning they all came into my life rich with hope and glowing with expectation. To have actually ensnared the daughter of Luke Steadman! The possibilities seemed endless. The money, the power, the connections . . . but in the end they left exasperated, frustrated by the knowledge that in the dark space between them and me was a terrifying gorge of unknown depth.

  “Why,” shouted one of the more memorable ones in bitter amazement from the edge of the chasm, “do I kiss you, suck you, and fuck you, and you behave as if you’ve just licked a stamp?”

  Of course an apology only made it worse. Perhaps an explanation . . .

  “I can’t help it if my eyes that have been claimed so many years ago by despair have the same expression when I am licking a stamp as when you are fucking me. You have mastered your technique,” I said.

  “It is not you. It is I,” I soothed gently. Saved their pride. It is a precious thing, pride, a man’s pride.

  “It is I,” I insisted mistily, my long, slightly Oriental eyes pleading for understanding. “You see, I lost myself when I was seven years old. It was exactly like walking along on a zebra crossing and stepping off a white strip onto a perfectly innocent-looking black strip and suddenly tripping, falling. Disappearing into a limitless black hole with only the stars for company. And when one day I climbed out of that hole, I found myself on a white bed in a white room without my memories.”

  At that point I had to stop, for they looked at me as if I had concocted the whole zebra-crossing story to mollify them. So I never got to tell them about the stranger with the narrow eyes and the worried expression who I found staring down at me in that white room. I looked at him, and he gazed back at me with a flicker of unease. I was afraid of him. He had distant, cold eyes.

  He called me Nisha and claimed he was my father, though he didn’t try to touch me or hug me. Perhaps that only happened in Hollywood movies, all that frantic kissing and hugging between fathers and daughters. Actually it has occurred to me that my father didn’t even seem particularly happy that I had climbed out of the black hole with only the stars for company. I was left with the insolent impression that he was relieved I couldn’t remember anything.

  Sometimes I think I should have told the hopeful men that my father almost never touched me. In fact, no one was allowed to touch me. I grew up lonely in the company of servants. Perhaps then they would have understood about the unbridgeable chasm in the bed.

  If I had not looked into the mirror that day on the white bed in the white room and seen, looking back at me, the same narrow eyes that he wore in his strained face, I would not have believed that I belonged to him. How could he have breathed life into me when his breath was so cold? His eyes so distant. Yet he told me he loved me and furnished my lonely life with the best of everything. For he was rich, very rich, and important. And powerful.

  I stayed in the white room for a few more days, and then he gently led me into a big car and drove me to a very big house. Inside the house it was very cold. I shivered, and he turned the air-conditioning down and showed me to a strange, pink room that I was certain I had never seen before.

  “This is your room.” His black eyes stared closely at me.

  I looked around the little girl’s room, where everything looked and smelled new. The clothes that hung in the wardrobe still had tags. In the bottom of the wardrobe expensive shoes with bright bows sparkled gaily without the dishonor of scuff marks on their pristine heels.

  “Do you remember anything?” he asked carefully. Not hopefully, but carefully.

  I shook my head. So vigorously that it hurt. There was still a red scar where I had hit my head when I had fallen through the hole in the zebra crossing.

  “Don’t I have a mother?” I asked timidly, for I was afraid of the stranger.

  “No,” he replied, sadly, I thought, but I could have been wrong. I was only a child then. I didn’t know about daddies who pretend. He showed me a small picture. The lady in it had sorrowing eyes. Eyes that made me feel lonely.

  “Mama died at childbirth,” he said. “The poor soul hemorrhaged to death.”

  So it was my fault that the sad woman in the picture had died. I wished then that I had my mother’s eyes. But I had his. Cold and distant. I wanted to cry, but not in front of the stranger. As soon as he left, I allowed myself to fall on the strange new bed. And cry.

  I asked my father many times about those lost years, but the more details he described, the more convinced I became that he was lying. There was a secret he was hiding from me. A secret so dreadful that he had invented a whole new past for me. Now I wanted those lost years back. Their absence has ruined my life. I knew the voices in the tapes were full of secrets. That is why my father hid them all those years ago.


  I looked around at all the beautiful arrangements without any kangaroo’s paws in them. Perhaps they are too expensive to waste on funeral wreaths. I suppose they are for the homes of the rich and famous. My father was a very rich man, but he had hated kangaroo’s paws. Hated them with a passion. The way I hate the colors black and red together. For some reason the beautiful black petals made him sweat with nerves. It was interesting, watching him pretend that the curly, spidery flowers didn’t affect him. The first time I put some into a flower arrangement, he stared at them as if I had curled an assortment of hissing snakes around each black stalk.

  “Are you all right, Dad?”

  “Yes, yes, of course. Just a bit tired today.” He had looked at me then. Carefully. As if it was I who hid something hideous. As if it was I who had bought a whole new wardrobe of clothes for him, painted his room a sweet, unrecognizable pink, and told him a whole box of lies. I watched him with interest. I never knew him, my daddy. He never touched me. He never even came close enough for me to touch him. I didn’t know his secrets. And he had many. Inside his cold, narrow eyes they burned like a funeral pyre.

  “Did you remember something today?” he asked abruptly.

  I stared at him with growing surprise. “No. Why?”

  “Nothing. I was just curious,” he lied with his politician’s smile. Dishonest Daddy.

  My eyes moved to a woman who had just walked in. She wore her grief with tragic splendor, from head to toe in shades of black. Like a talented Japanese designer. She was startlingly beautiful. I had never seen her before. The woman’s lips were too red. They made my fingers clench slightly.

  Black and red. Black and red. How they colored the nightmares that tormented me! The woman looked across Daddy’s sitting room to where the coffin lay raised above the ground on a long, low table. Nestled in cool satin, yellow and still, he waited for us to feed him to the starving beast in the crematorium.

  Suddenly the beautiful stranger broke into a run. Small, mincing, feminine steps. She threw herself dramatically on the still body and began to sob. I drew back slightly in surprise.

  Another one of Daddy’s little secrets come back for payment.

  The somber crowd were quick to realize her curiosity value. People covertly stared at me, but I ignored them. For a moment the sight of the black figure sprawled over the thin yellow corpse made me think of a large, black female spider curving over and devouring her struggling lover. But whether it was only a wonderful performance was hardly the point. Even in death Luke Steadman was no struggling lover. My dear, dear father. True to the very end. Cold and certainly beyond silken webs.

  The woman was not in his will.

  His short will mentions nobody but me. His daughter. The one he gave the key to. The one he kept secrets from. As if the woman heard my unkind thoughts, she looked up and met my eyes. There was something strangely abandoned in the scarlet of her lipstick. Poor creature. In my chest I felt my heart melt a little. I couldn’t help it. I fancy I know what it means to be abandoned.

  My poor mother’s body expelled me into the world and then bled to death. So my father fed her bloodless body to the beast with the yellow saliva in the crematorium, and I was left with Father. And he, he left me things—toys when I was younger and pieces of jewelry as I grew older—on a table outside my room just before he left for work. The stark truth was, he left them outside my door so I could never give in to the spontaneous urge to run into his arms or kiss him as any daughter might. And to further negate the messy possibility of the dreaded hug when he came home, my devious father phoned beforehand to ask if I liked my new present.

  He withdrew behind a wall of polite expressions, “Please,” “May I,” and “Thank you.” Everyone believed in his great faultless act. Some even envied me the perfection of the tender love that they imagined existed between father and daughter. They held him up as an ideal. Only I stood behind the thick wall that he had built between us and sorrowed silently, horrified by its terrible perfection and the truly astonishing amount of detail that he had put into his distance. If only he would love me a little. But he never did.

  I nodded, and people moved like obedient dolls. I was the new master. Sole heir to a king’s ransom. They pulled away the abandoned red mouth from the cologne-drenched body and guided her away, sobbing, to a corner. Gently, curiously.

  Then they carried away his coffin on their shoulders. No one wept except the beautiful woman in black with the blood-red lips. People began to drift away, and I walked over to the sobbing woman. Up close she was not so young. Perhaps in her late thirties or even pouting at forty. Her eyes were startling, though. Huge and liquid. Like the glinting surface of a calm lake on a moonlit night. She, too, was full of secrets, and some were surely mine.

  I invited her into my father’s study, away from the openly prying eyes. The woman followed silently. Had she been in the house before? In the study I turned around to face her.

  “I’m Rosette, and it’s nice to finally meet you, Nisha,” she said quietly. Strangely, her voice matched her eyes. Cultivated to flow clear and liquid like honey.

  “Would you like a drink?” I asked automatically.

  “Tia Maria on ice, please.” A smile bled onto the red lips. Too red.

  I walked to the drinks cabinet. Well, well, it seemed my father did stock up on Tia Maria. I had a sudden picture of their bodies twisted and joined on the hospital bed. A sunken, yellow corpse of a man and this beautiful creature. I shook my head to clear away the distasteful corruption of their coupling. What on earth was happening to me?

  “Did you know my father well?”

  I heard her take a deep breath.

  “Fairly.” She was soft and feminine. And secretive. She was my father’s woman.

  “Have you known him long?” I persisted.

  “Twenty-five years.” She said it lightly.

  I spun around in shock. “Did you know my mother?” The words ran out of my mouth before I could stop them.

  Something rose out of the smooth moonlit lakes in her fair, carefully made-up face. It was alive and full of regret. The ugly lake creature looked at me sadly for a few seconds, then slid back into the gleaming water. Her face became blank again.

  “No,” she denied, shaking her head. The honey in her voice had thickened into dusky sediment. She had just lied. Loyalty to a man who was now dead—what was the use of that? There was still the rent to be paid and clothes in different shades of black to be purchased. I concentrated on the task of Tia Maria on ice. Just outside my skull, a clock ticked into the silence.

  “My father didn’t mention you in his will,” I said casually and heard the stillness that came to hug her. The clock ticked with determined precision. I let a few moments pass before I turned around, half smiling, and presented her drink to her.

  Still wearing the dead man’s cologne, Rosette took the cold glass in her pale hands. Poor thing, it must be said she held it in her hand quite helplessly. The abandoned look returned. Oh dear, it was true the rent did need paying. As I watched, tears gathered in her lovely, sad eyes and slipped down her pale cheeks.

  “The bastard,” she swore very, very softly before collapsing into a large stuffed sofa behind her. She looked very small and very white against the dark green of Daddy’s sofa. I liked her a little, then.

  “I’m afraid I am the only person in his will. Not even the servants, some of whom have been here a lot longer than I can remember, are mentioned in it, but I’m giving them something on his behalf.” I paused for a moment. “The thing is, I didn’t know my father very well, and I didn’t know my mother at all. If you can help to fill in some of the blanks, I would be very pleased to help you with your finances.”

  The lake creature undulated in the still dark lake. Perhaps with the realization that it was looking at the shape of its new source of bread and butter from here on. Did I relish this power? She had certainly recognized and bowed low to it. Suddenly she laughed. A harsh, bitter sound. It was the sou
nd of a woman who has never been in control of her own destiny.

  “Some things are better left in the dark. It is not the kind of memory you seek. It has the power to destroy you. Why do you think he hid it from you? Are you really certain you want to know?”

  “Yes,” I replied instantly, surprised by the clear conviction in my voice.

  “Did he give you the key?”

  I stared at her in amazement. She even knew about the key.

  “Yes,” I said, stunned by how close this composed woman had been to my father. Truly I had never known my own father. The red lips smiled. I really couldn’t stand that blood red. The color was like a knife in my eye.

  She drained her drink and stood before me. In her eyes was the knowledge that from here on was only old age and death, and the sad regrets of bad choices. Even I could have told her that my father was a bad choice.

  “After you have listened to the tapes, come and see me.” She walked up to Daddy’s desk and scribbled her address and telephone number on a memo pad. “Good-bye, Nisha.” The door closed.

  I picked up the notepad. She lived in Bangsar, not far away. Her writing was feminine and strangely inviting. I wondered at her origins. She had the thin, very fair skin of a certain class of Arabic women. The type that have bodyguards waiting outside the changing rooms of Emporio Armani.

  I tore the address off the pad and headed for home.

  Inside my apartment it was stiflingly hot. The delicate pink roses on the coffee table drooped. Pink petals lay where they had fallen. Time’s up. Death waits everywhere.

  Ignoring the muted rings of the telephone, I turned on the air-conditioning, and chilled, dry air poured silently into the room. Without changing out of my black mourning dress, I switched on the tape recorder and closed my weary eyes. The voice of someone called Lakshmi filled the cooling room with shadows from an unknown past.

  The next morning I jerked awake, surrounded by cassettes and startled by the doorbell buzzing.