The Rice Mother

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VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London W2C 0RL, England

Copyright © Rani Manicka, 2002

All rights reserved

PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Manicka, Rani

The rice mother/Rani Manicka.

p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-11791-0

1. Women—Malaysia—Fiction. 2. Mothers and daughters—Fiction.
3. Malaysia—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3613.A36 R43 2003
813’.6—dc21 2002032421

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

For my parents, watching gods at the beginning of all my journeys

All the characters in this book are fictitious and not meant to bear resemblance to any person dead or alive, except Lakshmi, who is the fierce spirit of my dear grandmother.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to my mother, for each and every one of her precious scars that she shared with me; Girolamo Avarello, for believing before anyone else; the Darley Anderson Literary Agency team, for being simply superb; William Colegrave, for his support and encouragement; and Pamela Dorman, vice president and executive editor at Viking Penguin, for the truly inspired vision she brought to the editing of the manuscript.

It was on my uncle the mango trader’s knees that I first heard of the amazing bird’s-nest collectors, living in a faraway land called Malaya. Without torches they bravely climb up swaying bamboo poles hundreds of feet high to get to the roofs of mountain caves. Watched by the ghosts of men who have plunged to their deaths, they reach out from their precarious perches to steal a rich man’s delicacy—a nest made of a bird’s saliva. In the terrible blackness even words like
fear
,
fall
, or
blood
must never be uttered, for they echo and tempt demon spirits. The nest collectors’ only friends are the bamboo poles that support their weight. Before the men take their first step, they tap the bamboo gently, and if it sighs sadly, the men abandon it immediately. Only when the bamboo sings will the nest collectors dare the quest.

My uncle said, My heart is my bamboo, and if I treat it kindly and listen for its song, the highest, biggest nest will surely be mine.

 

—Lakshmi

I
was born in Ceylon in 1916, at a time when spirits walked the earth just like people, before the glare of electricity and the roar of civilization had frightened them away into the concealed hearts of forests. There they dwelled inside enormous trees full of cool, blue-green shade. In the dappled stillness you could reach out and almost feel their silent, glaring presence yearning for physical form. If the urge to relieve ourselves beset us while we were passing through the jungle, we had to say a prayer and ask their permission before our waste could touch the ground, for they were easily offended. Their solitude broken was the excuse they used to enter an intruder. And walk in his legs.

Mother said her sister was once lured off and possessed by just such a spirit, and a holy man from two villages away had to be sent for to exorcise the evil in her. He wore many chains of strangely twisted beads and dried roots around his neck, testaments to his fearsome powers. The simple villagers gathered, a human ring of curiosity around the man. To drive the spirit away, he began to beat my aunt with a long, thin cane, all the time demanding, “What do you want?” He filled the peaceful village with her terrified screams, but unmoved, he carried on beating her poor body until it bled streams of red.

“You are killing her,” my grandmother howled, held back by three appalled yet horribly fascinated women. Ignoring her, the holy man fingered a livid pink scar that ran all the way down his face and walked his determined, tight circles around the cowering girl, always with the darkly whispered query, “What do you want?” Until eventually she screamed shrilly that it was a fruit she wanted.

“Fruit? What sort of fruit?” he asked sternly, halting before the sobbing girl.

A shocking transformation occurred suddenly. The little face looked up at him slyly, and perhaps there was even a bubble of madness in the grin that slowly and with unspeakable obscenity spread its legs on her lips. Coyly she pointed to her younger sister, my mother. “That is the fruit I want,” she said, her voice unmistakably male.

The simple villagers were united in their gasp of stunned shock. Needless to say the tall man did not give my mother to the spirit, for she was surely her father’s favorite. The spirit had to make do with five lemons, cut and flung into its face, a searing sprinkling of sacred water, and a suffocating amount of myrrh.

When I was very young I used to rest quietly on my mother’s lap, listening to her voice remember happier times. You see, my mother was descended from a family of such wealth and influence that in their heyday her English grandmother, Mrs. Armstrong, had been called upon to give a posy of flowers and shake the gloved hand of Queen Victoria herself. My mother was born partially deaf, but her father put his lips against her forehead and spoke to her tirelessly until she learned to speak. By the time she was sixteen she was as beautiful as a cloud maiden. Proposals of marriage came from far and wide to the lovely house in Colombo, but alas, she fell in love with the scent of danger. Her elongated eyes lowered on a charming rogue.

One night she climbed out of her window and down the very neem tree upon which her father had trained a thorny bougainvillea bush when she was only a year old in an effort to deter any man from ever scaling the tree and reaching his daughter’s window. As if his pure thoughts had fed the bush, it grew and grew until the entire tree, ablaze with flowers, became a landmark that could be seen for miles around. But Grandfather had not reckoned on his own child’s determination.

That moonlit night thorns like bared fangs shredded her thick clothes, ripped her hair, and plunged deep into her flesh, but she couldn’t stop. Beneath was the man she loved. When at last she stood before him, there was not an inch of her skin that didn’t burn as if aflame. Silently the waiting shadow led her away, but every step was like a knife in her foot, so she begged in terrible pain to rest. The wordless silhouette swung her up and carried her away. Safe inside the warm circle of his arms, she looked back at her home, grand against the vivid night sky, and saw her own bloody footprints leading away from the tree. They remained to taunt her father. She cried then, knowing that they would hurt his poor heart the most. He would beat his own head and cry, “How willing her betrayal?”

The lovers married at daybreak in a small temple in another village. In the ensuing bitter quarrel, the groom, my father, who was in fact the resentful son of a servant in my grandfather’s employ, forbade my mother even the mere sight of any member of her family. Only after my father was gray ash in the wind did she return to her family home, but by then her mother was a widow gray with loss.

After issuing his heartless sentence, my father brought my mother to our backward little village far away from Colombo. He sold some of her jewelry, bought some land, built a house, and installed her in it. But clean air and wedded bliss didn’t suit the new bridegroom, and soon he was off—lured away by the bright lights in the cities, summoned by the delights of cheap alcohol served by garishly painted prostitutes, and intoxicated by the smell fanned out of a pack of cards. After each absence he returned and presented his young wife with jar upon jar of all manner of white lies pickled in various brands of alcohol. For some obscure reason he thought she had a taste for them. Poor Mother, all she had left were her memories and me, precious things that she used to take out every evening. First she washed off the grime of the years with her own tears, then she polished them with the worn cloth of regret. And finally, when their wonderful sparkle had been returned to them, she laid them out one by one for me to admire before carefully returning them to their golden box inside her head.

From her mouth issued visions of a glorious past full of armies of devoted servants, fine carriages drawn by white horses, and iron chests filled with gold and rich jewelry. How could I, sitting on the cement floor of our tiny hut, even begin to imagine a house so high on a hill that all of Colombo was visible from its front balcony, or a kitchen so huge that our entire house could fit into it?