The Hungry Ghosts Read Online Free Page B

original story is, and where my own interpretation veers off from hers.
    Tonight I am thinking of one story in particular, a story where a narrative moment became its own tale, which she named “The Thieving Hawk.” In it, a hawk steals a piece of meat from a butcher and rises triumphant into the sky. Soon, however, other hawks surround him and try to pluck the meat away, tearing at the thieving hawk with their beaks and claws. He tries to escape them, refusing to give the meat up, even though he is bloodied andwounded. Finally, however, his agony is unbearable and he lets the meat fall. The other birds swoop down to grab it, tearing and clawing at each other now. The thieving hawk flaps away, injured and starving, but free of the thing that caused him such suffering.
    That is how I think of my mother in the days after my father died, sprawled out in a plastic chair, head tilted towards the morning sun, exhausted but at peace, her waist-length hair, which she had let down over the chair back, flickering with sunlight. When my sister and I spoke to her, she was mild and gentle, touching our faces and arms with her fingertips, no longer cruel and shooing us away. She began to do things she had never done before, such as bathe us, feed us with her own hands and read to us in the evenings. In the middle of the night, I would often feel my bed give as she climbed in and held me close, gently pressing up and down my limbs, as if checking for fractures. Then she would get up to repeat this affection with my sister.
    When my father was alive, there was hardly a night my sister and I fell asleep without the sound of our parents’ fierce whispering in the living room or outside on the verandah, my mother crying, my father pleading. Sometimes, my mother would not be able to contain her anger and she would yell at my father, calling him a ponnaya, a faggot, railing at his weakness and incompetence.
    When they first met, my father had been a junior executive in a prestigious shipping company, but soon his ineptitude began to affect the company, and when he lost a major Japanese client he was fired. Over the next few years, my parents, my sister and I moved continually as my father’s bungling cost him job after job. With each sacking, he fell to a lower level of employment, until finally, by the time I was six years old and my sister eight, he had sunk to manager of a little guest house in Wellawaya. Its hospital-green walls were dusty with collapsed cobwebs and the furniture smelled of mould. The seven bedrooms had toilets with cracked cisterns and leaking rusty taps, a collage of fungi on the walls. An open drain carried water and sewage from the toilets to an underground cesspit.
    The rooms, when they were occupied, were usually taken by travelling salesmen and low-level civil servants on circuit. From our manager’s bungalow at a far corner of the compound, we would hear their drunken bawling, the same tired baila songs with their lewd lyrics. In typical Sri Lankan form, the men would not eat until they were tight, and so the staff was kept up wellpast midnight before dinner was served. My father would return to our quarters in the small hours of the morning, bleached with fatigue.
    Not long after we moved to the guest house, a kindly stranger, whom we would later know as Sunil Maama, my grandmother’s cousin, started to visit us, coming once a month and always bringing my sister and me a box of Kandos chocolates. My mother was imperious, speaking crossly as if she were doing him a favour tolerating his visit. At the end, he would always give her an envelope of money, and each time my mother sneered, “Is this her money?”
    “No, no, Hema,” Sunil Maama would say with an anxious smile. “It is mine.”
    “Well,” my mother would declare, even as she opened the envelope and counted the notes, “if it is hers, I don’t want it.”
    After Sunil Maama’s third visit, my sister and I wanted to know who “her” was. “Your