The Hungry Ghosts Read online

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  MY GRANDMOTHER, DESPITE HER STERNNESS, HAD a girlish love of Buddhist stories and would clap her hands and chortle when she heard a good one. She also enjoyed narrating them, her face radiant with intrigue like a traditional storyteller, voice hushed with delight. When I was a child, she would always tell me one of her stories at the end of the long afternoon vigil I kept in her bedroom while she slept. It was a reward for having done my homework quietly, sitting on the coconut-frond mat by her bed. She would wait until our ayah, Rosalind, had brought her cup of tea. “Ah-ah, now Rosalind,” she would declare to this woman who had been her servant and companion since childhood, “now what is that tale I love so?” And before Rosalind could respond, my grandmother would add, “Yes-yes,” then name a particular story.

  “So it is,” the old ayah would say with a flicker of a wink at me, “it surely is one of your favourites, Loku Nona. Now, how does it go?” Which was my grandmother’s cue to launch into the tale.

  Sometimes she told a story she’d narrated before, but brought a different angle to it, filling out a scene until it became a subplot, giving a minor character greater presence on stage, or sometimes simply retelling a scene as the full tale—these variations so numerous, I am not sure today what the original story is, and where my own interpretation veers off from hers.

  Tonight I am thinking of one story in particular, a story where a narrative moment became its own tale, which she named “The Thieving Hawk.” In it, a hawk steals a piece of meat from a butcher and rises triumphant into the sky. Soon, however, other hawks surround him and try to pluck the meat away, tearing at the thieving hawk with their beaks and claws. He tries to escape them, refusing to give the meat up, even though he is bloodied and wounded. Finally, however, his agony is unbearable and he lets the meat fall. The other birds swoop down to grab it, tearing and clawing at each other now. The thieving hawk flaps away, injured and starving, but free of the thing that caused him such suffering.

  That is how I think of my mother in the days after my father died, sprawled out in a plastic chair, head tilted towards the morning sun, exhausted but at peace, her waist-length hair, which she had let down over the chair back, flickering with sunlight. When my sister and I spoke to her, she was mild and gentle, touching our faces and arms with her fingertips, no longer cruel and shooing us away. She began to do things she had never done before, such as bathe us, feed us with her own hands and read to us in the evenings. In the middle of the night, I would often feel my bed give as she climbed in and held me close, gently pressing up and down my limbs, as if checking for fractures. Then she would get up to repeat this affection with my sister.

  When my father was alive, there was hardly a night my sister and I fell asleep without the sound of our parents’ fierce whispering in the living room or outside on the verandah, my mother crying, my father pleading. Sometimes, my mother would not be able to contain her anger and she would yell at my father, calling him a ponnaya, a faggot, railing at his weakness and incompetence.

  When they first met, my father had been a junior executive in a prestigious shipping company, but soon his ineptitude began to affect the company, and when he lost a major Japanese client he was fired. Over the next few years, my parents, my sister and I moved continually as my father’s bungling cost him job after job. With each sacking, he fell to a lower level of employment, until finally, by the time I was six years old and my sister eight, he had sunk to manager of a little guest house in Wellawaya. Its hospital-green walls were dusty with collapsed cobwebs and the furniture smelled of mould. The seven bedrooms had toilets with cracked cisterns and leaking rusty taps, a collage of fungi on the walls. An open drain carried water and sewage from the toilets to an underground cesspit.

  The rooms, when they were occupied, were usually taken by travelling salesmen and low-level civil servants on circuit. From our manager’s bungalow at a far corner of the compound, we would hear their drunken bawling, the same tired baila songs with their lewd lyrics. In typical Sri Lankan form, the men would not eat until they were tight, and so the staff was kept up well past midnight before dinner was served. My father would return to our quarters in the small hours of the morning, bleached with fatigue.

  Not long after we moved to the guest house, a kindly stranger, whom we would later know as Sunil Maama, my grandmother’s cousin, started to visit us, coming once a month and always bringing my sister and me a box of Kandos chocolates. My mother was imperious, speaking crossly as if she were doing him a favour tolerating his visit. At the end, he would always give her an envelope of money, and each time my mother sneered, “Is this her money?”

  “No, no, Hema,” Sunil Maama would say with an anxious smile. “It is mine.”

  “Well,” my mother would declare, even as she opened the envelope and counted the notes, “if it is hers, I don’t want it.”

  After Sunil Maama’s third visit, my sister and I wanted to know who “her” was. “Your grandmother, who else?” my mother snorted.

  “We have an aachi?” Renu tucked in her chin, incredulous.

  “Yes, of course, did you think I was born in a rubbish bin?”

  “But why haven’t we met this aachi?” I asked.

  “Because,” my mother paused for emphasis, “she hates you.”

  We stared at her dumbfounded. “Why?” Renu finally demanded.

  “Because you are half Tamil. Your grandmother did not want me to marry your father because he was Tamil. And now that you are half Tamil, she hates you.” My mother said this in a way that would not tolerate further questions.

  We were not really surprised that someone hated us for being Tamil. For by the early 1970s, the tension between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamils was escalating, particularly around the latter’s desire for a separate state. My father was resented by the waiters and other workers in the guest house, who were all Sinhalese, and he had a hard time maintaining discipline. Though the staff were kind to us, they felt no compunction referring to him as a “Tamil dog” in our earshot.

  My sister—whom my parents’ discord had made caustic, and who looked like a midget spinster with her sharp, dark-skinned face and hair cut in rigid lines—would often taunt me, saying I could never escape being a Tamil but that she would marry a Sinhalese one day, change her last name and no longer be Tamil. Then she would be rich and never allow me in her house, whereas I would end up a beggar man. This threat would send me howling to my mother, who would cry, “Stop being such a baby,” and bat my arms off her.

  Our father died of a heart attack, keeling over with a surprised shout one morning while doing the accounts in his office. We barely knew him, and so his death had little impact on us. He would be gone from the manager’s bungalow in the morning before we woke up, and come back when we were asleep, spending all day at his office to avoid my mother. Occasionally, he had tried to do something fatherly, such as take us into town to see a visiting circus troupe, but he was so awkward, begging for our affection with chastened glances, that we felt stifled by him and were always glad to return to the rudeness of our mother. We saw that by losing our father we had this new, gentle mother, and we gladly traded him to death in exchange for the person she had become.

  That first time we visited my grandmother’s house, we walked along the length of its high perimeter wall, jagged blue and green glass glinting along the top, and came to a stop before the gate with spiked iron bars. Renu and I stared up the curved driveway at the grand whitewashed bungalow, its red-tiled roofs adorned with a melody of wooden fretwork along the eaves. The front verandah had carved pillars, linked to each other by lattice panels, all painted white, and a turquoise-and-grey mosaic floor. A polished silver four-door Bentley T sat before the verandah under a carport. My mother, dressed in the white sari of a widow, did not ring the bell, but stood at the gate waiting. Soon a plump old woman wearing a sarong and blouse ambled around from the back of the house and peered down the driveway as she wiped her hands on a dishtowel. My sister and I
knew this had to be the legendary ayah Rosalind, about whom my mother had spoken so lovingly in preparing us for this journey. My mother raised her arm and the ayah was still for a moment. She began to hurry down the driveway, the dishtowel, which she had tucked into her waist, flapping like some tired sorrow. When she got to the gate, she let out a choked sob and struggled with the latch. “Aney, baba,” she cried as she stepped out, “the gods have been good to grant me this sight of you.” She began to weep, touching my mother’s face, her hair, her shoulders, her arms, saying, “Aiyo, baba, look at you, so young and already a widow.”

  Soon my mother was crying too. “I never thought I would see you again, Rosalind, I never did.”

  The ayah held my mother’s head against her spice-stained bosom. “You are home now, baba, you are safe.”

  She noticed us, and letting go of my mother knelt on the ground, the sweetness of roasted cumin powder coming off her. Rosalind gently took my hands in hers. “He is beautiful,” she whispered to my mother, “just like you were as a child.”

  “Don’t tell him that,” my mother said with a laugh and a sob. “He’s already spoilt enough.”

  Rosalind patted Renu on the head and said she had heard that my sister was very good in school, just like our mother had been.

  “I suppose I should go in and face her,” my mother said, tightening the sari palu around her waist, then blotting her tears with a handkerchief.

  “I told Loku Nona you were coming, baba, I thought it was best.”

  My mother sucked in her lower lip. “And?”

  “She acted like she hadn’t heard, but then she yelled at me that the rice was not cooked enough.” Rosalind grimaced. “Just keep your temper.”

  The old ayah ushered us to the kitchen in the back courtyard, which, like most Sri Lankan kitchens, was a tin-roofed shed, its half-walls blackened with soot. “Shivan, Renu, you stay here with Rosalind.” My mother patted the bun at the nape of her neck, pushed her handbag over her shoulder and went into the house.

  The old ayah beckoned my sister and me to sit on low stools, then she gestured to the plates set out on a long, scarred table that had a kerosene stove and a coconut scraper attached at one end. “Banana fritters. I made these especially for you.” The ayah covered the fritters with kithul treacle before placing our plates before us.

  As we tucked into them, she sat on another low stool across from us and watched with great satisfaction, every so often stroking our arms or pushing the hair from our foreheads.

  After what seemed a long time, my mother came back, her eyes red and cheeks grimy. “She will provide an allowance, but she wants us to leave.”

  Rosalind drew in her breath. “No, no, baba, you cannot give in so easily.” The ayah’s eyes narrowed as she looked me over. “She needs to see her grandson.” Rosalind took away my plate of fritters, raised me to my feet, smoothed down my hair and straightened my collar. “Yes-yes, let her see him.”

  “There’s no point, Rosalind.”

  The ayah grabbed my hand. I pulled away, terrified now, but she held on and bustled me into the pantry, with its spice safe and ancient refrigerator, and from there into the main part of the house, which was built in the old Sinhalese style, with a vast high-ceilinged saleya, that was both living and dining room. Curtained doorways led into bedrooms from the saleya, the unused rooms with their doors closed to keep out the dust. Rosalind strode to one of the curtained doorways and slipped me through.

  A tall, thin woman in a long nightgown and housecoat was seated elegantly upright in bed, polishing a tiny silver teapot, the coverlet scattered with porcelain ornaments and silver objects.

  My grandmother snorted like a startled horse and dropped the teapot, which clinked and bounced on the mattress. I began to whimper under her stare, sneaking frightened glances at this stranger with knotty arms, rope-like tendons in her neck, long greying hair in stringy strands about her shoulders.

  She finally looked about as if searching for some escape, then picked up the silver teapot and began to rub it vigorously, her gaze sliding towards me, then darting away. “Rosa-lind, Rosa-lind!” she suddenly yelled, her voice shrill. “Come here! Immediately.”

  When the old ayah presented herself, my grandmother cried, “Have you given the boy something to eat?”

  Rosalind sucked in her breath, dismayed. “I never thought to, Loku Nona.”

  “Why not?” my grandmother shrieked, flinging her polishing cloth on the bed. “Is there only cow dung between your ears?” She fluttered an arm in my direction. “This poor little boy has probably not had a meal since breakfast. Can’t you see the way he is crying from hunger? Aiyo! Take him away, take him away. Feed the poor thing, for goodness sake.” With that she grabbed her cloth and began to rub another ornament, muttering under her breath.

  Rosalind took my hand and we left. My legs were trembling from witnessing my grandmother’s anger, but Rosalind looked well pleased with herself and nodded to my mother, who was in the saleya with my sister. The ayah set me up at the dining table with another plate of fritters, which I greedily consumed, being ravenously hungry in that way one is after a fright.

  As I ate, my mother sat at the table watching me with a wry defeated smile, my sister glaring at this second helping of fritters she had not been offered. There was much activity going on in my grandmother’s bedroom, and after some time she bustled out wearing a white Kandyan sari, hair knotted at the nape of her neck. She glanced past my mother and sister to me, then she flapped towards the front door, chin tilted as if I had slighted her in some way. “Rosalind,” she said, crooking her finger for the ayah to follow, “I am going for my evening pooja. Tomorrow, when you go to Sathiya Stores, buy two plastic school lunch boxes. One blue and one pink.”

  “Yes, Loku Nona.” Rosalind shot my mother a triumphant look.

  My grandmother saw the look. She rummaged through her coconut frond purse, then let it fall to the ground, coins spattering over the polished red floor.

  Rosalind made to go forward, but my mother lifted her hand. She rose from her chair. Getting down on her knees, she crawled over to take the purse from my stony-faced grandmother, then, still on her knees, scrambled around to retrieve the coins, all the while keeping her luminous gaze on my sister and me. When every coin was picked, she crawled back to my grandmother and handed the change purse to her. My grandmother took it and continued towards the verandah, her car starting up as she went out to it. My mother stayed on her knees looking after her. She was twenty-nine years old and her life was over.

  My mother recently told me that she still dreams of her husband, the same dream she has had since his death. In it, she encounters him at my grandmother’s gate or standing by a pillar on the verandah or sometimes outside the market. He is reborn as a peréthaya, a hungry ghost, with stork-like limbs and an enormous belly that he must prop up with his hands. The yellowed flesh of his face is seared to the skull, his mouth no larger than the eye of a needle, so he can never satisfy his hunger. He just stands, staring at her, caught between worlds. For years, the anguish of that dream would continue into her day, because my mother believed she had caused his death by her anger and there was no way to beg his forgiveness, or at least reach some companionable peace with him.

  In Sri Lankan myth, a person is reborn a peréthaya because, during his human life, he desired too much—hence the large stomach that can never be filled through the tiny mouth. The peréthayas that appear to us are always our ancestors, and it is our duty to free them from their suffering by feeding Buddhist monks and transferring the merit of that deed to our dead relatives.

  My grandmother had her peréthaya stories too. In one of them, a king, Nandaka, has been away at war and is riding back to the capital with his troops, victorious. He reaches a crossroads, and seeing that one of the avenues is smoothly paved and shaded with trees, he takes it, not realizing it leads to the haunt of peréthayas. Soon his men grow fearful, as an odour of rotting flesh blooms around them and w
ailing shimmers the air. Looking back, they see that the road they travelled has disappeared. “In front of us the way is seen,” they cry, “but behind us the road is gone.” King Nandaka spies a great banyan tree ahead, and when he reaches it he finds a feast spread out by the roots. A man, who has the luminescent beauty of a deva, bedecked in jewels and gold-threaded silks, appears and welcomes the king, inviting him and his followers to eat and drink. Once they are sated, the king asks the man if he is indeed a deva. “I am not, your majesty,” the man replies, “I am a peréthaya.” The king is shocked and demands to know by what virtuous deeds he, a peréthaya, has acquired such splendour. The man explains that he was miserly in his past life, but he left behind a daughter who delighted in doing good deeds and being generous. A few months after her father’s death, when a monk, famed for his piety, came to her village, she invited him to her house, fed him and offered him a saffron robe, asking him to transfer the merit of these actions to her dead father. “It is thus that I live in such splendour, your majesty,” the peréthaya concludes, “through the fruit of my daughter’s good deeds.”

  In front of us the way is seen, but behind us the road is gone.

  Soon that house of my childhood will be no more. Once we have left Sri Lanka and brought my grandmother back here to Canada, it will be torn down to build a block of flats. For a moment, an image arises in my mind of the bulldozers crashing into the verandah, those carved teak pillars and lattice panels splintering, the turquoise-and-grey mosaic on the floor shattered, the intricately wrought antique doors, with their images of lotuses and peacocks, smashed to smithereens. A sigh that is almost a cry rises out of me.

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  LIKE RAIN SOAKING A PARCHED LAND. That was how my grandmother described our first encounter when she told me her life story years later. “I looked up from my unhappy life, Puthey, and there you were. And my heart broke then, broke with happiness.” There are many times when I have raged inside at that phrase of hers, at that malformed thing she calls love. Yet I know, more than anyone else, that love always comes with its dark twin—the spectre of loss, which drives us to do such terrible things.