The Hungry Ghosts by Shyam Selvadurai Read Free Book Online Page B

Lord Buddha for an explanation. The Tathagata, who can see both into the future and past, narrates an earlier life of Chakkupala’s, when he was an eye doctor. During that time, a poor woman asked him to cure her eye disease. In return, she said, she would put herself in bondage to him. Once cured, however, the woman pretended she was still afflicted to avoid becoming his slave. Angered, the doctor gave the woman another potion which permanently blinded her. Her blindness, the Tathagata tells his monks, was the result of bad karma from her past lives. But the laws of karma are such that, once the negative effect of a bad karma is played out, it drops from a person. The doctor by his evil deed took on the burden of that bad karma, which was coming to fruition now in the monk Chakkupala.
    This is how I think now of that long-ago moment when my mother held me tight and fed me cake, the weight of her own history pressing down on me, passing over.

4
 
    A WEEK AFTER I BEGAN MY VIGIL IN HER ROOM , my grandmother waited until my mother had departed for work one morning, then kept me back from school and took me to the row of toyshops on Front Street in Pettah. The arcade running the length of the shops was crammed with large toys, such as tricycles, dolls houses and scooters, and the passageway reverberated with the cacophony of wound-up dolls, the hooting and chugging of trains, the looped repetition of the Woody Woodpecker Song. With a tip-tap on my skull, my grandmother murmured, “Go ahead, Puthey, choose one thing. Whatever you like.”
    In my excitement I couldn’t fix on what I wanted, something new always taking my fancy. Finally one of the store owners, who was a better salesman than the rest, convinced me to settle on his blue-and-green imported scooter. He had chosen one of the most expensive toys, but my grandmother paid for it with the snap of a hundred-rupee note. When I thanked her, I called her by the affectionate appellation for grandmother, “Aacho.”
    For the rest of the morning, I trundled my scooter up and down the driveway. Soon I had learnt how to give myself a good push and glide with both feet on the platform, not falling.
    Renu arrived home in the early afternoon, and when she saw the scooter her face tightened. She gobbled down her lunch and came out to assert her claim. Lifting the scooter out of my grasp, she set it behind her, rested back against the handlebar and declared, “You’re too young for a scooter. Let me show you how to use this. And, anyway, it’s a girl’s toy.”
    “No, it isn’t,” I cried, and tried to get around her. “Blue and green are boys’ colours not girls’.”
    “What do you know?” She struggled to pry my sweaty hands from thehandlebar. “You are just a Grade One baby. I am in Grade Three and I am telling you that scooters are for girls.”
    But I would not let go, and after we had struggled for a while, Renu got impatient and gave me a shove. I staggered back and fell, shards of gravel scraping my elbow and forearms. I wailed as she set off down the driveway. Soon Rosalind and my grandmother came running.
    “What is it, Puthey?” my grandmother cried, as she and the ayah helped me to my feet and dusted me off.
    “Look, Aacho, look at that girl.” I flung my arm in the direction of the driveway. Renu had reached the gate. She turned around to come back but, seeing the two women, stood still.
    “You. Come over here,” my grandmother cried, using the insulting “
vareng
.” She gestured frantically to my sister.
    Renu stayed where she was. My grandmother hitched up the edge of her ankle-length housecoat and set off down the driveway. Renu still did not move, and when my grandmother reached her, she glared up at her elder without flinching.
    “Give that scooter to your brother. Who told you to use it? Did I buy this for you?” My grandmother referred to my sister as “
oomba
,” the “you” used for the lowest castes.
    Renu threw the scooter on the