The Hungry Ghosts (21 page)

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, but 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.”

“Yes, yes.” My mother’s voice was impatient.

“Tomorrow, then.”

“Tomorrow.”

She put the phone down.

When I came upstairs, my mother was standing by the patio door, looking out through the sheers at our garden, which was revealing its shapes in the dawn light. She was remote and spectral, the bones of her face sharp, hair tousled, lips greyish brown without makeup. Renu sat on the sofa, dressing gown trussed tightly, eyes narrowed with worry as she watched our mother, wondering what this news would do to her. She glanced at me to communicate her concern, but I would not meet her eye. I sat on the stairs that led to the second floor, my hands clasped, dread mounting within me.

Over the next few days, as we waited to hear if my grandmother would pull through, I could hardly swallow sometimes for the dryness in my throat. She had seemed so indomitable, so enduring a presence in my life. But now I was understanding I might never hear her voice again, never feel her touch on my arm, never have anyone call me “Puthey” in that loving tone.

One afternoon, I was working at the bookstore when it started to rain. I stood at the counter, chin on knuckles, gazing out through the mud-flecked window. The world outside—pedestrians hurrying by, half-human, half-umbrella; slowly passing vehicles sending up graceful fans of muddy water; blurred neon store signs—all appeared insubstantial.

I was at the end of my university career, with a degree in English literature. A few days before we got the call from Sunil Maama, I had visited a government employment office and seen how unqualified I was for most postings on the boards. Even the majority of summer jobs were beyond me. I did not have
experience as a waiter or camp counsellor, did not have a lifeguard’s certificate; and I knew better than to apply for jobs in light construction or with the Parks and Rec department, because these jobs, which paid the best, went to white men. As I looked at the other young people taking down contact information, I felt how much I was still an outsider in this country.

University had provided a rhythm to my life, and I had drifted through, reading textbook after textbook, typing paper after paper, swotting for exams at the end of each term. In the summer I would work at the bookstore and whatever other retail jobs I could scramble for. Now, beyond the summer, there was the void of fall and winter, and beyond that the void of all the years to come.

Then there was the troubling fact that since the beginning of winter, for a reason I did not understand, I was going through a sexual dry spell. Despite adding Sunday tea dances to my weekend visits to bars, I could find no one who wanted to sleep with me who wasn’t completely unpalatable. Many nights I took a bus home, long after the subway closed, surrounded by immigrants coming off late shifts, smelling like dusty cardboard boxes.

I had a frequent dream about love, inspired by some story my grandmother must have told me. In the dream, I lived in a cave, my clothes suggesting medieval Sri Lanka—chest bare, a white dhoti wrapped around my lower body, hair pulled into a topknot. I had a beautiful lover, though I could never remember his face when I awoke. His dhoti was green silk with gold stars, and he had a large emerald in the middle of his topknot. My dream comprised three moments of leave-taking. In each, my lover repeated the same line with great sorrow: “My food and drink I get by the power of this jewel. You ask too much. I cannot part with it.” The first time he said this, he was in my cave; the second, he was farther away from me, at the foot of the steps leading up to my grotto. In the final, and most strange moment, he stood in the middle of a flowing river. After he spoke, he dove in. There was a flash of a shimmering green snake’s body, then he was gone. I would wake up from this dream filled with sexual desire and a bewildering sense of loss.