In a flash I knew why Anna hated canned milk. I listened with burning ears to Mui Tsai’s explanation. How her milk had dried when her baby was taken away and how the first primal cry Anna emitted suddenly filled her breasts. Right then and there in front of my awkward husband, her blouse had been embarrassingly wet.
Of course. It had never occurred to me before, but it was she who fed Anna during the seventeen days when I lay delirious with fever. Only with the greatest difficulty did I manage to quell the instinctive possessiveness that filled my belly. I told myself that it was her terrible loss that made her assume such a liberty. I understood. I told myself I did, anyway. I wanted to be magnanimous. She had lost so much. Where was the harm if she fed my baby? My breasts remained parched and hers rich and plentiful for many weeks to come. So it was Mui Tsai’s small, undeveloped breasts that Anna’s little pink mouth suckled. It is a strange thing, motherhood. It gives and takes away so much. I should have been grateful, but I wasn’t. Even though I did not say anything, I wasn’t big enough to let the matter pass.
I built a low wall between us.
It wasn’t a high wall, but every time the poor girl wanted to get to me, she had to climb it. I regret building the wall now. I was the only friend she had, and I turned my back on her. Of course it is all too late now. I tell all my grandchildren never to build walls, because once you start, the wall takes over. It is the nature of the wall to build itself until it is so high that it cannot be scaled.
When Mohini was three years old, she caught a cold. In less than a week the cold had turned into a frightening asthmatic rasp. She sat small and utterly defenseless, propped up by three pillows, in my large, silver bed and labored through the task of breathing, her beautiful eyes full of fear and her mouth a ghastly blue line. In her tiny chest I heard the rattle of a dangerous snake pretending to be a child’s toy. The snake’s rattle made her father cry.
I tried all the traditional remedies I could think of and everything else the ladies at the temple advised. I rubbed tiger balm on her wheezing chest, held her screaming body over the fumes of pungent herbs, and forced little black Ayurvedic pills down her throat. Then her father traveled all the way to Pekan on a bus to buy green pigeons. They looked so adorable in the cage, cooing and nodding their pretty heads, but I trapped their struggling bodies full of tiny bones under the palm of my hand and chopped their heads off. Baby Mohini had the purplish flesh diced and roasted with cloves, black root, and saffron. Then First Wife from the confusing household next door brought a flat newspaper packet of specially dried insects. Closer inspection revealed dead bugs, ants, bees, cockroaches, and grasshoppers tangled together in a surfeit of legs, so bone dry they clicked against each other and rasped hoarsely against the paper they arrived in. I cooked them in water until the brown mixture boiled down to a third of its original amount, and that I poured into the child’s mouth. All to no avail.
There were certain frightening hours in the dead of night when she turned a nasty blue for lack of oxygen. In our backward hospital a doctor gave her small pink pills that made her body tremble and shake uncontrollably. The shakes frightened me more than the rattlesnake inside her chest. Two hellish days passed. Ayah buried his head in his hands like an old man, destitute and helpless. The radio stayed silent. He blamed himself. It was he who had taken her out for a walk and let her get wet when the sudden rain came.
I wanted to blame him, but there was no one to blame. It was me who had asked him to take the children out. I prayed. How I prayed! I spent hours kneeling on the cold temple floor and, prostrating myself on the floor, rolled across the temple to show my utter devotion. I am nothing but a bug. Help me please, dear God. Surely the good lord would not abandon me now.
On the third afternoon Mui Tsai burst into my kitchen with the most preposterous idea. I stopped stirring the lentils cooking in yogurt and, clutching my once more growing stomach, listened half in shock and half in disbelief to the quick, excited words shooting from her small mouth. Even before she had finished, I was already shaking my head. “No,” I said, but my voice lacked conviction. The truth was, I was ready to try anything. I wanted to be persuaded.
She wasted no time. “It will work,” she insisted fiercely.
“It’s a disgusting idea. Ugh. Whoever came up with such a sick idea?” Yet . . .
“It will work. Please try it. My master’s
sinseh
is very, very good. He has come directly from Shanghai.”
“It is an impossible idea. How can I make the poor little thing do that? She can hardly breathe as it is. She might choke to death.”
“You have to. Do you want her to be cured from this terrible disease?”
“Of course, but . . .”
“Well, then. Try it.”
“Is it just an ordinary rat?”
“No, of course not. It is a specially bred, red-eyed rat. And when it is newly born it has no fur. It is pink and only as big as my finger.”
“But she has to swallow it live?”
“In the first few minutes of it being born it does not move. Mohini can swallow it with some honey. Don’t tell her what it is.”
“Are you sure that it will really work?”
“Yes, many people in China have done it. The
sinseh
is very clever. Don’t worry, Lakshmi. I shall ask Mistress Soong for help.”
“How many rats will she have to swallow?”
“Just the one,” she said very quickly.
But little Mohini never had to swallow Mui Tsai’s live rat after all. Her father refused. For the first time since I had known him, his small black eyes flashed angrily. “Nobody is feeding my daughter with a live rat. Bloody barbarians,” he thundered angrily before going in to see Mohini, where he reverted back to his crooning, babbling self.
Ayah hated rats. The mere sight of them from afar revolted him terribly. For no real reason that I can think of, Mohini began to recover, and in a few days she was better. I did not require the children of the specially bred, red-eyed rat until many years later.
Sevenese came into the world at the stroke of midnight. When he was born, the snake charmer was playing his flute, and the sweet, lonely notes that accompanied his birth were almost like an omen for the strange person that he swelled into. The midwife packed him, dark red in a clean towel, and presented him to me. Under his transparent skin his blood pounded through a web of minute green veins. When he opened his eyes, they were dark and strangely alert. I breathed another sigh of relief. He did not look like my stepchildren.
When he was a child Sevenese had a winning smile and a cheeky answer ready on his tongue at all times. With his head of curly hair and mischievous grin, he was irresistible. I was proud of his quick mind in those early days. Even very young, he was already attracted to all things unusual. The snake charmer’s house stood on the curve of the road and pulled him like a magnet. Even after I forbade him that house, he slipped away on the sly and spent hours there, tempted and tantalized by their strange charms and potions. One moment he would be in the backyard, and the next he would have disappeared to that horrible house. There was something missing or unfinished or different inside him that propelled him on, searching, searching, and never finding. Many nights he came running into the kitchen, awakened by morbid dreams that made the hairs on my forearms stand on end. Huge snarling panthers with glowing orange eyes that sprang out of his chest and then turned around and feasted on his face. Once he saw my death. He saw me lying inside a box. On the lids of my closed eyes were coins, and small children he didn’t recognize were walking around me with burning sticks in their hands. Old ladies were singing devotional songs in hoarse voices. Mohini, grown up and with a child on her lap, was crying in a corner. When he dreamed my death, he had never seen a Hindu funeral, yet he described it in such amazing detail that my back chilled. He lies beyond my understanding.
When Anna was two and a half, I walked in from the garden unexpectedly one day and stopped dead in my tracks. She was burrowed deep inside Mui Tsai’s blue-and-white-patterned
samfu.
I stood astonished, for I had imagined that Mui Tsai had stopped breast-feeding her a long, long time ago. This secret was like a betrayal. I didn’t think it normal for my two-year-old to be still breast-feeding. Anger rose up from the black mud in my stomach. The red-hot resentment made me forget that I had suckled at my mother’s breast till the age of almost seven. Ugly, cruel words gathered in my throat. They were bitter in my mouth. I opened my lips, then suddenly realized that Mui Tsai, unaware of my searing eyes, was staring far into the horizon, silent tears rolling down her grieving cheeks, her anguish such that I had to turn away and bite my tongue. The blood was racing in my veins. She was still my friend. My best friend. I swallowed the poison in my mouth.
Standing behind the kitchen door, I breathed deeply and, in the most normal voice I could manage, called to Anna. She came running with nothing but innocence in her face. There was no betrayal on her part. In my breast I still felt that strangely ugly beast of jealousy stirring. He is a pitiless thing. Why we hold him so close to our hearts, I will never know. He pretends to forgive, but he never does. Unmoved by the wolves he had seen crouched and waiting in her destroyed future, or the black crows of despair circling overhead, he whispered in my ear that she longed to steal my child for her own. I held little Anna close to me. She smacked a wet kiss on my cheek. “Aunty Mui Tsai is here,” she said.
“Oh, good,” I said cheerfully, but from then on I was loath to leave Anna alone with Mui Tsai.
Time burned into the months like lighted joss sticks and left fine white ashes on my body, changing it. I was nearly nineteen. A woman. My hips had broadened with creation, and my breasts were full and tender with milk. My face too was changing. Cheekbones appeared. A new sense of confidence had entered and settled inside my eyes. The children grew quickly, filling the house with laughter. I was happy. It was a good feeling to sit outside in the evening watching them play, the square white cloths that I used as diapers, Lakshmnan’s small shirts, and Mohini’s tiny dresses billowing in the wind. I hugged very close to me the knowledge that I had made a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. My children were all beautiful, none of them afflicted with that which my stepchildren bore uncomplainingly.
Mui Tsai cut her long hair to a shoulder-length bob. We were both pregnant again. In those days every unguarded moment in the dark had, in its sticky ending, years of responsibility and pain. Baby Sevenese’s big round eyes watched as Mui Tsai walked with the heavy walk of the condemned.
This time definitely, the master had promised. “He looks sincere this time,” Mui Tsai said. There was nothing I could do or say. Her dull eyes looked at me with a blankness that I had never seen before. She was a small animal, her foot trapped in a mangle. Even in the shadows cast by my oil lamp I saw her silent, pitiful cries glittering in her eyes. Before, we had discussed everything. Even bedroom secrets; nothing was large enough to be a secret between us. Now there was my silent, petty wall, and on the other side she stood woeful, alone and watching. I had my brood of children, and she had her master’s visits and her empty pregnancies.
But we are still friends, I told myself, stubbornly refusing to tear the wall down. When you are young, it is difficult to destroy a wall you have built with the red bricks of selfishness and cemented with gray pride.
After she gave birth, I kept the kerosene lamp burning late into the night and sat by the window listening for her footsteps, for her singsong voice to whisper, “Are you still awake?” Weeks went by, but her round face never appeared at my window. Of course in my heart I knew what had happened. Quite by chance I saw her. I was very pregnant then, but from my veranda I saw her sitting on one of the green stone chairs, her elbows resting on the heavy stone table. Head bent, she was staring at the ground. Her straight hair had fallen forward, hiding her face. Slipping my feet into my slippers, I hurried clumsily to the wall that circled Old Soong’s property. I called out to her, and she turned her head dully. For a moment she simply stared at me. At that moment I felt as if I didn’t know, had never known her. She was a different person. Then she stood up reluctantly and walked over to me.
“What happened?” I asked, although I knew.
“Second Wife has the baby,” she said expressionlessly. “But the master says I can keep the next one. Where is Anna?” she asked, and a trace of emotion came into her face.
“Come and see her. She’s getting very big very quickly.”
“I shall come to visit soon,” she said softly with a small smile. “You had better go before the mistress sees you. Good-bye.”
The curtains at one of the windows twitched and fell back into place. And before I could say good-bye, Mui Tsai had already turned away and was walking back toward the house.
I didn’t worry about Mui Tsai for long because that afternoon word came that my husband had met with an accident. While he was cycling to the bank, a motorbike had crashed into him. I swallowed the news that he had been taken unconscious to the hospital as if it were a solid object. It had the feel of a weathered brown stone in a shrinking riverbed, tasteless and hard but smooth.
The stone was very heavy in my stomach when the children and I took a taxi to the hospital. I was sick with fear. The thought of bringing them up on my own without a breadwinner terrified me. I herded the children into the emergency ward and arranged them on one of the long benches in the waiting room. They squeezed their small bodies between a groaning woman and a man with a terrible case of elephantiasis. I left them staring at the poor man’s hugely bloated leg and walked along a corridor. There I saw Ayah’s still body lying on a narrow trolley pushed up against the corridor wall. I ran toward him, but the closer I got, the more frightened I became. A gash had opened his head like a coconut, and red blood had gurgled out, matting his hair, spilling on his shirt, and pooled under his head. I had never seen so much blood in all my life. In his bloodied face, four of his front teeth, the very ones that I had taken such exception to at our wedding, were gone. A hole blacker than his face gaped at me, but the real shock was his leg. The bone had broken clean off and was pushing through his pink flesh. The sight of it made me feel faint and peculiar. I had to grab something to stay upright. The nearest thing was the corridor wall, and I fell back against it heavily. With the wall solid against my back, I called his name, but he was unconscious.