The Hungry Ghosts Read Online Free Page A

footsteps down the corridor that it is him. Then, as he prepares dinner, he will be in the quiet centre of himself after a day of department politics and negotiating the entitlement of students and professors. The sounds and smells from the other apartmentsaround him—the scrape of a chair or hum of a vacuum cleaner above, the muted conversation of the French couple next door, the tight vehemence of their language, as if bickering in public, the dog in the apartment on the other side who greets his mistress with a mournful baying—all this will be a cocoon around Michael. And I feel that he will be relieved I am not there by his side, assisting with dinner; relieved that he is finally at peace.
    I stride over to my chest of drawers, open the top one and stare at the clothes within. A faint smell of the old basement damp rises up. After a moment’s hesitation, I fling garishly patterned sweaters, frayed shorts, acid-washed jeans, worn underpants and skinned-at-the-heel socks onto the floor, emptying drawer after drawer. When I am done, I go into the unfinished part of the basement, take two garbage bags from the shelf above the washing machine and gather the clothes into them.
    I stumble upstairs, leave the bags by the front door, then pour myself a quarter-glass of Scotch from the kitchen cupboard and drift into the living room. On the wall unit, there is a framed photograph of my grandmother. It was taken on the front verandah of our old house, and my grandmother is seated in a wheelchair with my mother standing behind her. I hold the photograph closer to the light and peer at my grandmother’s useless left hand, twisted upwards in her lap like a taxidermied claw, her mouth puckered, the skin on her left cheek stretched. All this is the result of a series of strokes, each one taking a bit of her away. The doctors tell us that she will continue to have these strokes, losing various mental faculties and physical abilities, until finally a great stroke takes her from us.
    The furnace has stopped, and the muted roar of air through the vents slows to a ticking. The ceiling creaks and shifts, as if someone is moving around on the second floor. Right above me is the room prepared for my grandmother. Earlier, when my mother took me around the house to show me all the improvements, she slipped ahead and shut the door to that room, as if worried what the sight of its new furniture might do to me. I have not been in there yet.
    I go into the kitchen and pour myself more Scotch, taking a swift gulp. The rush of heat in my blood has little effect on my mind. I take a second swift gulp, emptying the glass.

2
 
    M Y GRANDMOTHER, DESPITE HER STERNNESS, HAD a girlish love of Buddhist stories and would clap her hands and chortle when she heard a good one. She also enjoyed narrating them, her face radiant with intrigue like a traditional storyteller, voice hushed with delight. When I was a child, she would always tell me one of her stories at the end of the long afternoon vigil I kept in her bedroom while she slept. It was a reward for having done my homework quietly, sitting on the coconut-frond mat by her bed. She would wait until our ayah, Rosalind, had brought her cup of tea. “Ah-ah, now Rosalind,” she would declare to this woman who had been her servant and companion since childhood, “now what is that tale I love so?” And before Rosalind could respond, my grandmother would add, “Yes-yes,” then name a particular story.
    “So it is,” the old ayah would say with a flicker of a wink at me, “it surely is one of your favourites, Loku Nona. Now, how does it go?” Which was my grandmother’s cue to launch into the tale.
    Sometimes she told a story she’d narrated before, but brought a different angle to it, filling out a scene until it became a subplot, giving a minor character greater presence on stage, or sometimes simply retelling a scene as the full tale—these variations so numerous, I am not sure today what the