The Hungry Ghosts Read online

  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.

  Once I had showered and changed into a sarong, I came back upstairs. My mother was now rushing between the dining table and the kitchen. Though her pace had not increased, I could see in her absolutely still face that her anger had risen. I stood helplessly by the table, getting in her way. She brought out the pork chops and banged this final dish down on the table, a bit of oily gravy trickling over the side.

  “Where is that Renu?” Before I could respond, she went to the bottom of the stairs and yelled, hoarse with rage, “Renu! Come down this very instant.”

  My sister appeared on the landing.

  “Do I have to call you for dinner? Am I your servant?”

  “I was just coming down, Amma.”

  My mother bustled into the hall and returned with an aerogram from Sri Lanka that in my distraction I had not noticed. “What rubbish are you telling this woman?” she cried, the opened aerogram unravelling as she held it out between two fingers. “A job in a lawyer’s office? A trip to Montreal with friends? Are you so ungrateful for the life I have provided that you must lie? Why don’t you tell this wretched woman the brave truth of how I go out to a job where I have to put up with an ignorant, patronizing supervisor half my age? A woman who thinks Third World people live in trees, but whose grammar and spelling are appalling? You should hear the way she talks to me, as if I am a halfwit. But what can you expect in this country? A bunch of barbarians.” She flung the aerogram on the table, pushed past my sister and hurried upstairs.

  I went into the kitchen and Renu followed. I took two glasses and filled them with water. My sister got out the cutlery.

  “Gosh, what is her problem?” Renu said in a light tone, giving me a sympathetic grimace. “She’s fit to be tied.”

  “She’s had a hard day, Renu, can’t you see?” I snapped. “She’s had a hard day.”

  These angry evenings became routine. While other women on the bus and subway after a day at work recharged themselves with a chocolate bar or bag of chips, a magazine bought for the commute, my mother worked herself into a fury over her small house with its stale cooking smell like propane gas, her bedraggled garden with its dying tree and exhausted soil, the irritation of her neighbours’ lives seeping through thin walls. By the time she arrived home, she was filled with bilious vitality and tore around the kitchen, banging pots and pans, throwing spices into sizzling oil, not caring where they spattered, yelling at my sister and me if we dared come in. When she was done, she’d stand by the table, watching us as we took our places. Her food, because it had been prepared in such anger, was often unpalatable, but if we didn’t finish everything she served, or avoided a dish, she would rail at us for being ungrateful, the words tripping out so fast she stammered.

  When she was not angry, my mother moved with the meticulousness of someone ill or unsteady on her feet, marshalling all her energy and parcelling it out to get through a day.

  On weekends, she went to malls and wandered listlessly around looking in the windows. Her other weekend activity was to read for hours at the Bridlewood Mall’s public library. She would return from there at peace. Renu and I were pained and scared that our house, our company, were so distasteful our mother needed to escape to find tranquility; it was almost a relief when she slowly soured to rage again.

  A ridiculous hope, fuelled by helpless fear, drove me to tell her I was gay; a belief that sharing this thing about myself would bring back the mother we had known.

  One evening after dinner, I went up to her room, my sister trailing behind for support. Our mother was lying on her side facing the wall.

  “Amma, I have something I wish to share that is very important, very dear to me. Something that makes me happy, and finally at peace with myself.”

  She continued to face the wall.

  “Amma, I am gay. Homosexual.”

  Her back stiffened. “Why are you telling me?” she finally asked. “What do you want me to do about it?”

  “I … I don’t require you to do anything. I only want you to know, to truly understand your son.”

  She turned and looked me over. “Are you an idiot to choose to be gay when this plague is going on? Do you want to die young? Have I brought you into this world and sacrificed so much for you to destroy your life?”

  “Amma, Amma,” Renu intervened, “it’s not a choice. Shivan is naturally like this.”

  My mother waved her hand to dismiss the idea. “If I had known you would throw away your life, I would have aborted you. Yes,” she continued, nodding at us, “I would have strangled you at birth.”

  I leaned back against the dressing table and closed my eyes, light-headed. “I wish you had strangled me at birth,” I said after a moment. “You would have done us both a service. People like you should never be allowed to have children, because look what you do to them. You’re a terrible mother, a failure. What misery you have brought to our lives.”

  She lurched up in bed. “Why did you feel the need to tell me? Why should I have this burden? Isn’t my life hard enough? Look at what you have done to me, look at how you are burdening me.”

  “I hate you! Why don’t you just take more pills and put us all out of our misery.”

  “Shivan!” Renu yanked my sleeve.

  “And let’s not call what you did an accident,” I continued, unable to stop myself, even though my mother had now pulled into herself protectively. “You took those pills on purpose so you could bring even more misery and hardship to your children’s lives. You are a selfish woman, a horrible selfish woman!”

  I took the stairs in large strides. When I was in the basement, I paced, declaring between gritted teeth, “How dare she, how dare she speak to me like that.”

  After that, we stopped eating together as a family. Once my mother had cooked, she went upstairs and lay down, returning to eat at nine o’clock, by which time my sister and I made sure to be in our bedrooms for the night.

  As Renu and I ate our dinners, we watched TV in companionable silence or talked about our lives. My outburst had made Renu realize how unhappy, how fragile, I was. She asked me about the gay world and my trials in it, nodding encouragingly as I confessed my continued unhappiness.

  I envied her, because she could escape. In her second year she had continued to maintain her A-plus average. Professors often invited her to their offices to discuss scholarships at Ivy League universities in America and advise her on the application process. “Yes, Canada is the shits,” she would say. “I am getting the hell out of here.” And she’d wave her arm to encompass not just the house and our mother, bu
t also the country.

  11

  I AM PANTING LIGHTLY FROM MY EXCURSION across the field and through its corridor of electrical towers, my shoes heavy with mud. I sit for a minute on a bench to catch my breath and peer down an empty road. The growing warmth has caused a mist to bloom up from the glistening concrete, and the street lamps have trembling rainbow nimbuses around their lights. I remember how in Sinhalese there are two words for rice: “haal” for the hardened grain, which becomes “buth” when it is boiled. In speaking of our inability to reverse actions, our inability to change karma’s ripening, we say that haal, once it has started to become buth, cannot revert to being haal.

  After a few moments, I rise and begin the walk back to my mother’s house.

  In the spring of 1988, four years after we had arrived in Canada, Sunil Maama called in the early hours of the morning to tell us that my grandmother had suffered her first stroke.

  The ringing phone became incorporated into my dream and I reached half awake for the basement extension, then pulled my hand back as if from fire. When I did lift the receiver, my mother, as if inquiring about a minor household repair, was saying, “How bad is it, Sunil Maama?”

  There was a lag between their voices, and part of Sunil Maama’s reply was cut off by the echo of her question. All we heard was, “… can tell …”

  “What?” my mother exclaimed.

  They were both silent, waiting for the reverberations to clear.

  Sunil Maama spoke, emphasizing each word: “Nobody can tell at the moment. Daya is in intensive care.”

  “Does one of us need to come?” my mother asked in an equally measured way.

  “Not yet. Best wait and see a few days.”

  Their breath across the phone line was like the distant sound of the sea. “Thank you for calling,” my mother finally said.

  “Hema, I’ll call you tomorrow, at 7 a.m. your time.”

  “Yes.”

  “Daya asked about her house, if everything was okay with it.”