The Rice Mother by Rani Manicka (Sceptre)

The Rice Mother is the debut novel by Malaysian born writer Rani Manicka. It is the multi-generational story of one family. All beginning with Lakshimi, the matriarch to six children, three grandchildren, and a great-grandchild. It is a story of love and loss, betrayal and deceit, and also of remorse and redemption. 

Lakshmi was born in 1916 in Ceylon, present day Sri Lanka..At the age of fourteen, Lakshmi is married off to a wealthy man named Ayah who has a job in Malaya. The man was much older than her and also a widower with two children. Unknown to Lakshmi or her mother, they were deceived by the man’s mother. Lakshmi discovers that he was not the wealthy businessman as described before getting married but with no option of returning home, Lakshmi decides to make the best of her life in this new land. 

Lakshmi has six children. The eldest are the twins Lakshmnan and Mohini. Lakshmnan was everything Lakshmi could hope for in a boy but it was Mohini that she was most taken with. She gave birth to the most beautiful girl the heavens could provide her with. After the twins came Anna, the strong and reliable daughter, followed by Sevenese who became enamored with his neighbor, the snake-charmer’s son. Sevenese also realized that the snake-charmer’s son was in love with his sister Mohini. The youngest was Lalita, everyone’s favorite. 

Life was mostly peaceful and grand. Then the Japanese came and for the three years of the Japanese Occupation, the Imperial Army committed a number of atrocities that the citizens would not soon forget. The most devastating blow to the family was the kidnapping and killing of their daughter Mohini. This act will change the life of all the members of the family. 

Lakshmi becomes inconsolable and turns into a cruel and nearly intolerable presence. Lakshmnan blames himself for his sister’s capture and loses himself to loose women and gambling even though he is married and has three children. Ayah was also taken by the Imperial Japanese Army and tortured and left for dead but survives and is only a shadow of his former self.

Of Lakshmnan and Rani’s three children, Dimple was the spitting image of Mohini. For Dimple, this was more of a curse than a blessing. Dimple decides to make a “dream trail” by asking and taping everyone in her family to tell their stories so she could understand herself. It isn’t until Dimple’s daughter Nisha grows up and is bequeathed a key from her father that will unlock the secrets of her past. 

I can’t imagine the suffering of losing a loved one during a time of war and how that death will affect everyone surrounding them, but even if the story is fictional, it can make your own family problems seem trivial in comparison. 

Manicka’s beautiful prose of this family epic sometimes reads as an ongoing storyline of an American soap opera such as Days of Our Lives or One Life to Live, not that that’s a bad thing. She writes in such a way that will have the reader gain an understanding to light the customs and manners of Tamil and Malay culture. ~Ernie Hoyt