Free The Rice Mother by Rani Manicka Page A

made me clutch my stomach in helpless pain. Beads of sweat grew on my forehead and upper lip. Then another one. So quickly.
    “Ganesha, help me, please,” I prayed through clenched teeth.
    Worse than the pain was the fear. Fear for the baby. Fear that everything was going wrong. Another ferocious spasm, and I began to panic. I was standing inside a small Ganesha temple with not a soul in sight and ringing the bell for a god’s pleasure. I rang it until my hands were bloody. “Oh, Lord Ganesha, remover of all obstacles, let my baby be safe,” I begged over and over again.
    I felt the baby kick inside, and hot tears squeezed past my tightly closed eyelids.
    I cursed my slow, stupid husband. Where was he? I imagined him sitting in a ditch somewhere. The baby began moving inside me, urgent, impatient, and dangerously vulnerable. A painful pressure was building up between my hips, and freshly brewed, all-consuming terror bubbled in my brain.
    The baby was coming. There was no midwife, and the baby was coming.
    Without any real warning I was standing in the eye of the whirling storm. The stick fell out of my mouth. The edges of the room were going black.
    God had forsaken me.
    I became certain I was dying. I forgot the neighbors and the seductive idea of suddenly appearing on the veranda with a flat belly and a baby in my arms. I forgot to be brave or proud. The hard coconut shell of pride is so easily smashed into so many pieces when it is hurled on the hard cement of pain.
    A shivering mass of sweat and terror knows no pride. Squatting like a frightened animal, I opened my mouth to howl long and hard, but a sudden tearing pain knocked the breath out of me. I could feel the crown of the baby’s head.
    “Push. Just push,” the midwife’s gray voice said inside my head. Her voice made it all sound so simple. Easy. The storm in my brain ceased unexpectedly. It was magic. “Push. Just push.” I gripped the edges of the bench on either side, took a deep breath, and pushed. I pushed and I pushed. The head was in my hand. The frightening lonely struggle I have now forgotten, but I remember the magic of quite suddenly holding a whole, purple baby in my bloody hands. I held the slime-covered thing up over my stomach and looked in dazed wonder at it. “Oh, Lord Ganesha, you’ve given me a boy,” I gasped happily. My hands, as if they had done it a thousand times before, reached for the knife lying by the chopping board. That morning I had sliced an onion with it, and it was stained with onion juices. I grasped it firmly in my hand and severed the umbilical cord. The cord dangled from the baby. The baby was free from me.
    His eyes still screwed tightly shut, he opened his tiny mouth and began to howl, the thin sound going right through me. I laughed with joy.
    “You simply couldn’t wait, could you?” I said with pure wonder. I looked at that toothless, ridiculously angry little creature and thought him the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Motherhood ripped open her body and showed me her furiously beating heart. And I knew from that moment on that for this wrinkled stranger I could tear the heads off male lions, stop trains with my bare hands, and scale snow-peaked mountains. Like a surreal comedy, Ayah and the midwife appeared in the doorway, breathless. I smiled broadly at their gaping faces.
    “Go home,” I told the midwife proudly, thinking of the fifteen ringgit I had saved by forgoing her services. I turned my beaming face impatiently away from their plain faces so I could drink in the beauty of my new, wonderful creation. In fact I wished they would go away for a little while longer, but just then a hard, bunched-up fist smashed into my lower belly, making me double up in agony, almost making me drop my precious bundle. The midwife ran forward. She grasped my baby expertly and laid him on the pile of clean towels. Then she bent over me. Her hands on my body were quick and precise.
    “Allah, be merciful,” she