Free The Hungry Ghosts by Shyam Selvadurai Page A

defeat.
    My mother began to pretend she had forgotten her tutorials, returning late, then acting surprised if she found a tutor waiting. The men soon complained to their employer, and one evening my mother arrived home to find my grandmother seated on the verandah, eyes large with rage and fear. She paused on the top step, frightened but also exalted at the possibility of freedom. My grandmother, with the swiftness of a snake, leapt from her chair, strode towards my mother, and grabbed her plait. “You think you can fool around and ruin your life? I’ll show you, yes I will.” She yanked the plait so hard that my mother yelled and clutched her head to keep the hair from ripping out of her scalp.
    Rosalind came running, but all she could do was stand there wringing her hands, afraid to do anything that might increase her mistress’s wrath. My grandmother dragged my mother by the hair to her bedroom, slapping her all the way. She shoved the curtain aside, pushed my mother inside, drew the seldom closed door shut, locked it and pocketed the key.
    “Let her starve in there tonight,” she panted to Rosalind. “She must be broken now, otherwise there is no hope. That girl is trying to make a laughingstock out of me. After all this praise from everyone, she wants to fail and humiliate me? No, no! Hema must succeed.”
    Groping for escape, my mother visited her father’s sister. These in-laws had been barely tolerated by my grandmother during her husband’s life, and since his death she had cut them off. The level of her animosity suggested to my mother that there was some dark knowledge to be gleaned from these relatives. Her aunt was glad to see Hema, and it wasn’t long before the conversation turned to my grandmother. “Yes-yes,” the aunt declared, “Daya is lucky our brother married her.” My mother had heard this many times before, but now she asked, “Why was my mother lucky?”
    Her aunt’s back arched with pleasure and she sat back in her chair, arms outstretched, a cat sunning on a warm rock.
    It seemed that when my grandmother was sixteen, an older cousin named Charles had come to stay in the family compound. He had grown up in England and was a very handsome man, the aunt said, speaking as if sheactually knew him. Far too elegant and sophisticated for Daya. In the weeks that followed, Daya had fallen violently for this man. She had thrown herself at him, following him down to the beach at night, where he went to swim. He was a decent man, according to the aunt, a gentleman. He had ignored Daya’s declarations, gently advised her to be more prudent, told her with honesty that he did not love her back. But she persisted, and he, being a man after all, gave in. They were caught in a compromising position. News of this swept through the village, and Daya was shunned, even by her extended family. Whenever she had to visit town, people would turn away at the sight of her, and sometimes boys would throw pebbles, whistling lewdly and singing out, “Vesi, vesi.” According to the aunt, it had been an act of great charity on the part of her brother to marry such a fallen woman. An act of kindness that had never been appreciated by my grandmother, who now spat on the memory of her own husband by cutting out his family. By which the aunt meant they were entitled to some of the wealth he had left his wife.
    This story and what my mother knew of her own mother did not seem to match—and if she had really wanted the truth, or at least a version closer to the truth, she could have asked Rosalind. But the account was good enough for her, a first step towards freedom.
    What my mother had in mind as an escape, she could not yet tell. Perhaps she sensed already what she would do and it was so awful that she turned from it, unable to contemplate where such an action would leave her. So my mother continued to sit patiently through her tutorials every afternoon, and her tutors soon reported to my grandmother that Hema was