The Rice Mother by Rani Manicka

communicated with each other on a deeper indescribable level. If I close my eyes now, I can still see them sitting opposite each other, grinding rice in the stone mortar. They never spoke. Had no need for small talk. He turned the heavy stone, and she pushed the rice into the hole in the stone with her bare hand, silent and perfectly in tune, as if they were one person. I could have watched them for hours. Every other day, late evening. Dangerous work. A crushed hand was always a possibility.
    When they were alone with just each other for company, that stillness settled around them, a magic circle called “us” that excluded everyone else. I remember that there were even times when it wasn’t comfortable to watch.
    If I was inordinately proud of my daughter, her father worshiped the very ground she walked on. She made his soul tremble and reached so deep into his delighted being that it confused and surprised him. When she was first born, she was small enough to completely fit into his large, cupped hands, and it was a sensation he never forgot. Scarely able to believe such a marvel had sprung from his loins, he stood and stared for hours as she slept. He woke up two, sometimes three times in the middle of the night to gently change her clothes if they were damp with perspiration. Often in the morning I found a pile of her clothes at the foot of her suspended cloth hammock.
    If she fell or hurt herself in the smallest way, he picked her up with large gentle hands and rocked her slowly in his arms, her tears mirrored in his own eyes. How much that man suffered when she was ill! He loved her so much that even a moment of pain endured by her was like a terrible thorn embedded deep in his simple heart.
    When she was very young, she spent many of her waking hours in his lap as they listened to the static-filled voices on the radio. She sat for hours twirling a lock of his thick hair in her fair fingers, never suspecting that it was a magic trick that had the power to turn gentle giants into babbling fools.
    My little boy I named Lakshmnan—firstborn, gorgeous, clever, precious, and indisputably my favorite. You see, even though Mohini was beyond anything I could have hoped for, she was undeserved. The feeling never left me that I had somehow stolen into someone else’s garden and plucked without permission their biggest and best bloom. There was nothing of her father or me in her. Even when I cuddled her in my arms, I felt as if she was borrowed and that at some date someone would knock on my door to claim her back. Hence I held back a little. I was awed by her perfect beauty, but I didn’t, couldn’t, love her the way I loved Lakshmnan.
    Ah, but the way I loved him. How I loved him! I built an altar in my heart just for his laugh. I recognized myself in his bright eyes, and when I held his kicking, sturdy body against mine, you could not tell where he began and I ended, for he was exactly the same shade as me. Very milky tea.
    Mui Tsai gave birth to her baby. She smuggled him into my house late one night while the neighborhood slept so I would be able to see how bonny he was—the male child she had prayed for at the red temple by the market. He was very fat and very white, with a shock of black hair. Exactly what she had prayed for.
    “You see, the fortune-teller was wrong,” I crowed joyfully, hiding the pure relief I experienced when I heard her son was born healthy and alive. If the fortune-teller was wrong about Mui Tsai, then he could be written off as a charlatan, his predictions reduced to cruel lies. I put my finger into the child’s tiny palm, and he gripped my finger in his little hand and refused to let go.
    “Look how strong he is,” I complimented.
    She nodded slowly, as if not daring to provoke the gods with excessive pride even though I saw her bliss. In the light of the oil lamp her skin appeared luminous, as if someone had switched on a bulb inside her skull; but one must never boast about one’s