The Hungry Ghosts (20 page)

In that initial year, as my mother sat at temporary desks in temporary offices—so alike she could not tell them apart, looking down, sometimes in surprise, at the work she was doing, thinking she was still engaged in a job she had done somewhere else—first inklings of the realization began to reveal themselves. As she stuffed envelopes, photocopied, collated, filed, typed lists and letters, as she stared dazedly at other immigrant temps in their own worlds, as she looked out from upper floors at the sinister grids of suburban industrial parks with their crouched buildings on tarred lots, as she sat in lunch rooms listening to permanent workers discuss office politics, as she shambled around malls on her breaks, gazing at all the things in the window displays she could not afford to buy, the realization grew clearer until she finally understood that she had repeated her own history. She had tried to escape her mother and ended up in a worse place.

My mother began to feel a choked longing for her job at the newspaper with its excitement of deadlines, the journalists and their eccentric habits, that pleasure she always felt on Friday evening when the galleys of the women’s section she edited would be spread out before her by a peon. Then, pulling her desk lamp close, she would lean forward to pore over the pages, filled with satisfaction. She missed her friends, too, the holidays in their country homes, the other single women at work with whom she saw an occasional film or play, followed
by dinner at the Flower Drum Restaurant, where they’d feast on crab claws in ginger sauce, battered prawns in chunky pineapple and capsicum gravy.

When my mother lay in bed late at night, unable to sleep, she would think about how it was now morning in Sri Lanka. Her old ayah would be making kola kanda porridge or was crushing spices under the miris gala or chatting to the fish seller, who had come with his fresh catch.

Her participation in the Sri Lankan expatriate community, this reinvention, was a rope that kept her from sliding into despair.

A few days after that trip to Gerrard Street, I returned from university to find Aunty Vasanthi’s minivan parked in our driveway, ponderous in the evening gloom. The front door of the house was unlocked.

She and Aunty Poones were seated at our dining table, Otara between them, her face numb with misery. My mother was at the head of the table. Her bewildered eyes hardly registered my arrival.

Seeing the anger on the aunties’ faces, and Otara’s desolation, I knew why they were here and was surprised I had not figured it out before.

My mother stretched her arms forward on the table, hands clasped tightly together. “If what you say is true, then my daughter is not the only one to blame. Jaya is responsible too.”

“He is a man,” Aunty Vasanthi declared. “My son, like most men—”

My mother tightened her lips contemptuously. She and Aunty Vasanthi locked gazes, then my mother narrowed her eyes and looked away. “Jaya is equally to blame. His being a man has nothing to do with it at all.”

Aunty Vasanthi was about to retort, but Aunty Poones touched her wrist. “The thing is, Hema, you know, my daughter and Jaya are not just boyfriend-girlfriend. We are allowing them to date because we are in Canada, but it is an arrangement. The dowry has been settled. Properties in Colombo have been written in each other’s names.”

“They are to be engaged in a few weeks,” Aunty Vasanthi cried plaintively.

After a moment, my mother turned her locked fingers, stretching her arms out. “I will talk to my daughter. She will break this off.”

The women rose to their feet. Aunty Vasanthi strode to the front door as Aunty Poones took Otara by the elbow and helped her up.

“Thank you, Hema.” Aunty Poones kissed my mother’s cheek. “These are
just youthful indiscretions. Let it not come between us, here in a foreign land, where there are so few of us.” She patted Otara on the shoulder. “Everything will pass.”

When they had left, my mother moved to the kitchen and continued with her cooking. I stayed in the basement as long as I could, but eventually I had to come up and begin my chore of laying the table.

Soon there was a clattering of keys outside and we heard Renu exclaim in annoyance when she locked, rather than unlocked, the door. She came into the hallway and began removing her shoes. My mother went to stand beside me at the dining table.

“Renu!”

“Yes, Amma?”

“Get in here.”

My sister came slowly into the dining room. Her eyes widened when she saw us. Then her face became hard and expressionless.

“Where have you been?” my mother demanded.

“Out with Otara and Jaya.”

“The thing is, Renu, Otara was just here a few minutes ago. With her mother and Aunty Vasanthi.”

A look passed between Renu and me. She put her hands in her coat pockets as if searching for something. “I’m going upstairs.”

My mother let out a gurgle. “Are you my daughter? The one I raised to be decent and honest? I don’t recognize you.”

“Renu, Renu, say you are sorry,” I pleaded. “I know you didn’t initiate this. That Jaya must have led you on.”

“Why should I say I’m sorry?” Renu replied with a little smile. “Jaya and I love each other.”

“But they are to be engaged,” I said gently. “It is an arranged marriage. Did you know that?”

“Yes.”

“Why, Renu, why did you do it, then?” My mother held her hands out, pleading.

“Because I’m sick of not having anything.” She glared at my mother and me. “Jaya loves me, I know he does.” Her voice trembled. “He loves me, he told me so.”

“Don’t talk to me about love,” my mother cried. “You have deceived your friend and made a shameful vesi of yourself.”

My sister and I both flinched.

“Yes, a vesi. That is what you have become, aided and abetted by that weak, pathetic Jaya.”

“Amma—” I began to protest on behalf of Renu.

“After all I have done for you both, after all I have sacrificed, this is the reward I get?” My mother rushed into the hallway, pulled the front door open and, without a coat, went out into the cold rain in her slippers.

We didn’t dare go after her.

My mother’s birthday was a few days later and we were treating her to a Chinese meal.

I dressed and came upstairs to find Renu seated at the dining table examining her nails.

I yanked at my cuffs. “Where is Amma?”

“Changing. She didn’t like what she was wearing.” My sister’s tone was flat, warning of some crisis.

I found our mother seated on her bed in a dressing gown. She was leaning forward, chin cupped, tears dripping down to puddle in her palms. A sari lay coiled on the floor.

I sat beside her. “Amma, don’t cry, what is the point?”

“Everything is ruined, just ruined.”

My mother wiped her face on her dressing-gown sleeve, then tugged at the bangles on her wrist. “We should never have come here, never. Look at what this country has done to Renu. Why else would she have acted this way? I made a big mistake bringing you children here.”

She got up, took a tissue from a box on the dressing table and blew her nose. Then she picked up the sari and began to fold it in a measured way, as if it took all her strength to do so. “I’m dreaming about my mother all the time now. The same two dreams. In one, I see her walking in her usual brisk manner ahead of me. I call to her, but she doesn’t hear me, and when I catch up she does not know who I am and apologizes pleasantly, saying she has no daughter called Hema. The other dream is worse. I’m walking past the Wellawatte market and she is seated outside the market begging, her skin covered with
sores. I bend to reason with her, but she turns her head away, and I don’t know if she has lost her mind or is just angry because I abandoned her.”

My mother finished folding the sari and put it away in a drawer as I watched her, appalled. Hot air ticked through the pipes and the bright overhead light removed all shadows from the room, giving it a hospital sterility.

The next week, on our way to do grocery shopping at the Bridlewood Mall, my mother kept ahead, face stern, chin tilted up. Young Tamil men were hanging around the escalator, but my mother said nothing about their plight and glared at one of them who got in her way.

When we were at Price Chopper, I took a basket and waited, like I always did, for my mother to name the items I was to find. I left her with the cart by a pile of oranges and went on my search. I returned to find her still by the oranges, cart empty.

“Amma?” I put down my basket and touched her arm.

“I cannot do this.” She shook my hand off. “You do it.” She thrust the list at me, hurried towards the entrance, pushed past customers at the checkout, and left the store.

I stared at the list. Seeing that we needed six oranges, I began to pick mechanically through the pile for the good ones. Finally I had collected all the groceries but did not have the money to pay for them, so went looking for my mother. She was on a bench in the cemetery, staring into the distance as if at the horizon, arms folded, legs stretched out and crossed at the ankle. Gulls whirled in the wind, their cries reminding me of summer visits to Lake Ontario. When I came up to her, she gave me a long hollow look. “I wonder what these people must have felt, dying in this country. If I die in this godforsaken country, please don’t scatter my ashes here. That would be unbearable.”

I sat down next to her, frightened by the desolation in her face.

November days turned dark by four thirty. A perpetual wind blew in from the north and it stung tears from my eyes. I no longer looked up at the sky or at the world around me. Leaves crumbled, and when it rained clumps stuck to my feet. The crabapple tree in our front garden was bare now. Its branches seemed elongated, as if wrenched upwards by the low grey sky. The first snow fell, melted, turned black, froze into sheets of ice, became slush.
Then once again the brown grass was revealed, off-white dog droppings like bundles of wool.

Renu and Jaya’s relationship did not survive long. Under pressure from his parents, their friends, relatives here and in Sri Lanka, Jaya gave in.

He came to visit late one evening, standing in the doorway, twirling his car keys, smiling sheepishly at me. Renu and my mother had hurried to their rooms and did not come down. He sat at the dining table tapping his keys on the surface, sneaking timid glances up the stairs.

Jaya was taking the winter semester off and going to Sri Lanka. Next year, he would transfer to McGill University in Montreal. He wanted to try to get into medical school and McGill had the best program. Otara would study English literature at McGill. When he finished relaying all this, he looked at me helplessly.

After he left, I went upstairs to Renu.

She was at her desk, drawing—an activity she had taken up since the affair with Jaya ended.

I sat on the edge of her bed. “It couldn’t have worked out, Renu,” I said gently.

My sister did not respond for a moment. “He’s a bloody coward. If Amma and our father braved Aachi to get married, why couldn’t he have done the same? I was willing to take on everyone for him.”

“But look what happened to Amma and our father.”

“We’re here now. Jaya grew up in Canada, for God’s sake. This is not Sri Lanka. People are allowed to change their minds, aren’t they? To marry the person they love?”

I didn’t respond, because what I had to say was obvious. We might be living in Canada, but we had brought Sri Lanka with us.

A few weeks before Christmas, my mother had what she later euphemistically called an accident. She swallowed ten sleeping pills and then, in a panic, woke us up to take her to hospital.

She was put in an emergency room with white, oil-painted walls that glimmered under the fluorescent lights. There was a steel supplies cupboard in one corner, and nurses came and went, indifferent to my mother’s privacy or suffering. Renu and I took turns in the sole chair by the bed, holding our mother’s hand and gazing at this woman whose face was scrubbed of
expression, her damp hair severe against her skull; this woman who breathed in the way of an exhausted child. We could hear someone in another room ululating, a rising “oh-oh-ohh” of pain that reached a plateau, then lifted into a higher register until she was screaming. After a silence, the cry began all over again. When I wasn’t holding my mother’s hand, I leant against the windowsill and looked out at the flat roof beyond, littered with bottles, cans, piping from an uncompleted job.

After this, Renu began to spend all her free time at York’s Scott Library. She found a full-time weekend job. When she was home, she stayed in her room.

On my mother’s first day back at work, I came home to find her preparing dinner, face grim. She was still wearing her office clothes, and as she rushed around the kitchen with a new manic vigour, her narrow brown skirt hobbled her knees and her beige blouse stood out like a shell.

“Amma?” I said hesitantly.

She flicked a sidelong squint at me, then continued with the cooking.

Renu had returned moments before me and was looking through the mail on our hall table. She gave me a warning glance before sauntering upstairs.

“Are you alright?” I asked my mother, edging into the kitchen.

I reached out to touch her and she shrugged to ward off my hand. “Yes, yes, I’m fine. Just go change, Shivan.” She bent over the chopping board, white scalp visible through her thinning hair.

“I’ll continue the dinner, Amma. Why don’t you go and put on something comfortable.”

“I said I don’t need help.”

Fearful of leaving her alone, I began to move around the kitchen, checking the boiling potatoes, picking up a dishtowel from the floor. “What else are we having? Shall I prepare another vegetable?”

Her fingers danced at dazzling speed over the curve of an onion, the knife a hair’s breadth behind. Chopped pieces fanned across the board.

“Well,” I said, “we can have frozen peas.” I got them out of the freezer.

My mother threw down her knife. “Shivan, get out! Get out of my bloody kitchen!”

I looked at her, my eyes wide, clutching the bag of frozen peas. She grabbed the bag and flung it in the sink. After a moment I left, walking in a stiff haughty way to hide my humiliation.