The Rice Mother (58 page)

“Thank you,” I said politely and walked toward the glossy door.

Outside the building, the muggy afternoon heat hit me like a blow. Everything I had taken for granted died yesterday. The home that I had thought was mine was not, and the mountain of money didn’t exist. Yet nothing mattered but the keys in my hand and the house. I walked along the road until I spotted the Cherry Lounge bar. There was a light throbbing in my temples, and the maddest desire to laugh in my mouth. I was poor. What a joke! A lifetime of wealth had left me helpless. A degree in social science overqualified me for the job of secretary and left me underqualified for everything else. It was impossible to imagine my father’s immense wealth reduced to a decrepit house in Ampang. I thought about the many politicians who came with arms outstretched and patted my father’s back. “Good, good. I know I can always count on Luke,” they said.

How was it possible? I became certain that while he lay in the hospital, my father had been swindled and robbed blind. He was too shrewd, far too wily to have lost all the millions in real estate, shares, and secret accounts. It could only be a scam, but the thought of unraveling his empire made me feel ill. The people who could make such colossal sums disappear sat in very high places, and even my father had watched them very carefully from a safe distance.

I saw the bar across the road, walked in, bought a double brandy from a flatteringly curious bartender, and found a dark corner to hide in. I leaned back into the seat. Was it possible for life to change in an afternoon? Of course. I lifted the heavy curtain at the window. It was raining outside. Obviously I couldn’t go and see the house that afternoon, and for reasons unknown the postponement was a relief. The house was more than just a house. I had felt its magic as soon as it fell out of De Cruz’s mouth. I took off my shoes, curled my legs under me, and tore open the letter.

But the writing was not Father’s. I uncurled my legs from under me and sat up straighter. It was in a feminine hand and addressed not to me, but to my father. I didn’t want to read it there in that horrible and safe place, but my seeking eyes moved to the top of the page.

The letter was signed Dimple.

So my mother was Dimple Lakshmnan. She was not Selina Das, as the birth certificate Father showed me claimed. And she didn’t die giving birth to me. She knew me.
And I knew her.
Outside, big drops of rain hurled themselves at the smoked glass. “What a liar you were, Father!”

Even from quite far away, I knew it was the house. I stopped the car and climbed out. Lara was a grand house, almost obscured by the weeds that grew up the gates and over the red-brick wall that surrounded it. Three young boys stopped their bicycles beside me.

“You’re not going to go inside the house, are you?” one of them asked, curiously.

“It’s haunted, you know,” another added quickly.

“A woman died in there,” they all cried, their eyes formidable. “It was horrible. There was blood everywhere. Anybody who goes in there never returns,” they warned, completely caught up in the relentless need to shock the stranger.

“This house belongs to me,” I said to them, looking through the iron gates at a winding driveway flanked by enormous conifer trees.

The boys stared at me with openmouthed surprise while I slotted my key into the gate. At the metallic sound of the key fitting into place, they fled on their bicycles with hasty backward glances.

The gates unlocked with a clang and a dark echo.
I have been here before.
As I drove up the winding road, I was filled with a sense of loss. Loss of what? The conifers on either side of me were dark green walls of silence. I parked the car by the house. Creepers covered most of the facade and the red overlapping roof tiles. The wretched grounds, it seemed, had lost their battle with the waist-high wild grasses many, many years ago. Rambling rose bushes were abundant and savage with thorns. All in all it was a dismal, ghostly sight.

Yet it called to me, every dark window a beckoning eye. Under a tree, partially visible through the greenery, the statue of a small boy held something up in both his hands like an offering. I walked past two fierce lion statues that stood like guards at the entrance to a big, mahogany door. In my hand it swung open.

Inviting me in.

I stopped in the middle of the very large living room and smiled. The first real smile since my father died. The place was under a good inch of dust and cobwebs and quite ruined, but I was home. Without looking up, I knew that the lofty ceilings were painted with gorgeously robed figures from the past. I looked up, and sure enough, even the thick froth of cobwebs could not disgrace the grand paintings. A small sparrow flew into the house through a broken window-pane, its flapping wings loud in the stillness. Landing on the banister, it regarded me curiously. The banister had once shone with polish. I knew that as clearly as I knew what color the floor under my feet was. I swept my right shoe in a small arc on the floor, pushing aside layers of dried leaves, twigs, bird droppings, and the accumulated dirt of many years, and my own reflection looked back from a smooth, black surface. Ah, finally, the black marble floor of my nightmares.

Disturbed by the noise, lizards scuttled on the ceiling over the unflinching, plump hands of painted maidens and cherubs frolicking on clouds. My footsteps echoed eerily, yet there was a feeling of welcome, as if the frozen people had been waiting for me.

As I looked around, it seemed to me as if the inhabitants of the house had left with the intention of returning soon. There was a chunky vase of dried twigs, a fruit bowl of dust-covered fruit seeds, and alcohol in the crystal decanters on top of a baby grand piano. I moved to the grimy pictures on the piano and blew at them. There I was with the beautiful woman from my dreams. The face that escaped the memory-eating snake’s belly. Who was she? Dimple Lakshmnan? If she was my dead mother, then the woman in the picture that Father showed me must be another lie.

On a rather fabulous low marble-and-stone coffee table was a stack of magazines. The top one was dated August 1984. The year—in fact, the month—I fell into that black hole. Well, well.

On the wall at the far end was an ornately framed picture covered in gray dust. Standing on a chair, I cleaned the middle of the picture with my handkerchief. A woman’s chest emerged. Slightly higher, I found a face. A beautiful woman looked at me sadly, and I knew for certain she was my mother, Dimple Lakshmnan. I cleaned the whole picture, climbed down, and took a step back. Suddenly I felt as if I was not alone anymore. As if all the dead people on my mother’s side were huddled close to me. For the first time since I had climbed out of the black hole and known absolutely no one, I didn’t feel alone.

Warm and strangely content, I walked away from the portrait and went up the marble stairs. I had a fleeting image of a small girl falling. I stopped, my hand rising automatically to my head. That small silvery scar. I had fallen down these stairs; I knew it without a doubt. I had tumbled down headfirst, screaming, “Mummy, Mummy.” It was not as Daddy said. It didn’t happen on a zebra crossing at all.

For some horrible reason my father had uprooted me from this house where I lived with my mother. He left behind absolutely everything that was familiar to me and transplanted me into totally new surroundings. And because he had taken nothing out of the house, it looked as if someone had gone out for a pint of milk and never returned. I understood now why my father had taken nothing. He didn’t want anything from my old life to trigger my memories. He had always feared my memories.

Upstairs, I opened the first door on the left. Immediately I saw a vision of a small girl lying on the bed, drawing. This had been my room, not the pink room my father had shown me to when I left the hospital. I recognized the blue curtains with the yellow sunflowers. The curtains were now gray with age, but I saw them billowing in my mind. Blue with bright yellow sunflowers. Mother chose them.

I opened a cupboard curiously and drew back slightly at the unexpectedly strong waft of camphor. Inside was a wardrobe really too magnificent for a child of seven to have. What dresses! And in perfect condition too. My attention was drawn to a pair of red sandals with pretty pink bows on the top. I closed my eyes and tried to force the memories, but—nothing. “Soon,” I promised myself. “Soon I will remember everything.” I ran my fingers through the clothes, surprised at how well my old clothes had been preserved through time. From the back of the bed came scurrying noises. Rats. The wardrobe doors must be very secure.

All of a sudden I saw myself in the garden outside, standing by a small pond filled with expensive gold and red carp. As suddenly as the picture had come, it was gone. I hurried to the window. A dirty pond sat glumly in the middle of the overgrown backyard, like the doubtful eye of the garden. I fancied it looked at me with some reproach, as if it was my fault that its waters were green with neglect. Leaving my old room, I walked along the curving gallery that overlooked the living room below. I opened another door and gasped.

The room had been decorated in the same manner as my father’s bedroom in his house; everything identical. Curiouser and curiouser. Father had lived in this house with Mother and me! Something had happened here that had made him take me and flee, leaving everything behind. Seeing the room made my flesh crawl. I crossed the spartan room and opened a connecting door.

The curtains in that room were drawn shut. It was pleasantly dim, the air so still I could hear myself breathe. Very gradually, almost imperceptibly, an impression swept over me that I was not alone. It was like falling asleep on a beach and being awakened by the soft warm lapping of waves against your feet. I felt safe and protected, as if someone loved and very dear sat beside me. So strong was the feeling that I went around the huge bed and looked behind the curtains. Of course there was no one there. I pulled the curtains apart, and evening sunshine filtered in curiously, turning the air into a dust-filled magic space but banishing that strange presence from the room. I felt an inexplicable sense of loss as I walked past the large four-poster bed, carefully made and hidden under the inevitable layer of thick dust, and opened the carved doors on a row of handsome, built-in cupboards.

Rack upon rack of exquisite clothes, beautifully preserved, met my eyes. The opulent 1970s in all their beaded, embroidered glory and rich colors hung before me. I thought I recognized a blue-and-green dress with an attached rhinestone choker. I thought I remembered myself saying, “Mommy, that’s pretty.”

I closed my eyes and watched a slender figure twirl round and round so her pretty new dress cut on the bias could fly around her legs like a dazzling butterfly. It was Dimple Lakshmnan, my mother.

Carefully, I took the dress off the hanger and, standing in front of a mirror at the other end of the room, held it up against my body. My mother had been almost the same size as I am. I took off my blouse and jeans and slipped the dress over my head. It smelt of mothballs and felt cool against my skin. I smoothed the satin carefully over my hips. The dress was beautiful.

As if in a daze I dusted off the padded cushion stool in front of the dressing table and sat on it. I cleaned the mirror with some tissue paper and examined the collection of makeup on the long dressing-table surface. I pulled off the top of a blue lipstick case. Frosty pink. It smelled strongly of old petroleum jelly but appeared remarkably dewy. Christian Dior and still raring to go. I twisted it up and applied it to my lips. Then I brushed on some shimmering kingfisher-blue eye shadow that was all the rage in the 1970s. I stood in front of the mirror, and in the sunlight a ridiculous woman with bright blue eye shadow and painted lips looked at me. I felt sad. So unaccountably sad that I closed the curtains and sank, uncaring, on the dusty bed. It was then that I realized that with the curtains drawn, the room had taken on an altogether different feel. I was again conscious of that feeling of companionship. And when I looked at myself in the mirror across the room, I saw the woman in the painting downstairs. In the gloom I was beautiful, as beautiful as my mother had been. I didn’t look like my father after all. I stared, enchanted by my own image, until I saw not my surprised reflection any more but a scene from the past.