Read Online The Hungry Ghosts by Shyam Selvadurai - Free Book Online

gaze, opened her top dresser drawer. “Heavens!” I gasped, hands to cheeks. “What is this?”
    I seized two Kotex pads, slung the loops around my ears and began to waltz about.
    “Shivan!” Renu rushed at me and snatched at the sanitary napkins, but I slipped out of her reach. She punched my arm, and the next thing I knew I had hit her in the face, the wet slap of my palm cracking the air. She cried out in shock and stumbled towards the bed, clutching her cheek. For a moment wewere still, my sister regarding me as if I were a stranger. My hand tingled from the impact with her cheekbone.
    “That will teach you to never touch me again. Never touch me.” I left the room, chin high to hide my dismay at what I had done.
    By the time my mother got home that evening, there was a purple bruise on Renu’s face. My mother called me to her room. I strolled in, hands behind my back. My mother was standing on the far side of her bed as if she needed a protective barrier. She peered at me. “Shivan, how could you hit a girl? I am so ashamed of you.”
    “Shame is for the unwashed proletariat, so I don’t deign to—”
    “Don’t talk to me in that ridiculous way. You’re not on a stage.”
    “Ah, I see that Mother Dearest, Mother Fairest, is offended.”
    “Shivan, shut up.”
    “Or perhaps I should say Mother Unfairest.”
    “I know she hit you first, but you were annoying her. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, you can’t hit your sister back. A man must act in a chivalrous manner towards his women folk. No matter how much they provoke him, a man must never touch his women folk. He can scold them or even berate them, but—”
    “Yes, yes,” I yelled, “take her side the way you always do against me. You always do.”
    “No, Shivan, that is not true.”
    “It is, it is, you love her more than you love me.”
    “Ah, Shivan, how could you even say that.” My mother stepped back.
    “How can I say that? You ask me? You dare to ask me that?”
    I ran to my room, flung myself on the bed and beat the pillow, letting out a muffled howl of rage.

5
 
    W HEN THE MIND BURNS WITH ANGER
,
immediately cast aside those angry thoughts or they will spread like an unchecked fire travels from house to house
. Those were words my mother repeated, from a book called
Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life
, when she told me the story of her life many years later.
    For my mother, too, the pivotal moment of her childhood was her father’s death when she was eight years old. He was a distant but kindly presence, a man who was often away on circuit as a judge. He would sometimes bring her toys from his travels around the island. Depending where he had been, the gift would be brightly painted clay cooking chatties from the south, or a woven palmyra elephant from Jaffna. He seemed unaware that he often brought home the same gifts. My mother never pointed this out, shy around him because he, too, was shy. When he talked to her, he would periodically suck in his breath through gritted teeth, as if he had a toothache. At fifty-five, he was less like a husband to my grandmother than one of those self-effacing elderly bachelor uncles who live on a niece’s charity. He had married when he was forty-six and my grandmother just seventeen. They had separate bedrooms because my grandmother claimed he stayed up too late at night working and disturbed her when he came to bed. The room she assigned him was at one end of the front verandah, a room typically allotted to a relative living on charity.
    By the time my grandmother was twenty-four, she had already amassed many properties, and my grandfather regarded his wife with the befuddled look of someone who had just noticed some object that had been there all along. He was particularly awed by her tantrums, the way she would yell at Sunil Maama for some incompetence, Sunil wringing his hands and gasping, “Sorry, Daya, sorry.” She would also rant at tradesmen who tried to sellher bad goods, and at