Impractical Uses of Cake

by Yeoh Jo-Ann

  Sukhin believes he could cheerfully watch Ken drown. Ken isn’t just Other People—Ken is Vermin. Ken must be removed or destroyed…when Sukhin has the energy.

  Ken’s name isn’t even Ken. It’s Kheng Joo.

  Ken had Lasik surgery done last year.

  Sukhin squirrels away scraps like these whenever he finds them. One day there will be a war, and he will win it with one (or all?) of these seemingly insignificant details.

  Ken is allergic to penicillin. And macadamias.

  “Who’s the cake for?”

  “The diligent, dapper Mr Dhillon.” Dennis is arranging candles in concentric circles on a cream-engulfed monstrosity.

  “Did you make it?”

  “No lah—Advocakes and Solicitarts. Their yuzu coconut cream is the best.”

  A gasp, exactly as Dennis intended. “But they only accept orders three months in advance!”

  Dennis smirks. “My sister knows the owner—they used to work at the same firm. So I managed to order this three weeks ago.”

  “They deliver?”

  “I wish. A bakery like that doesn’t have to bother with delivery. I picked it up first thing this morning—it’s been sitting in the pantry fridge all day. I’ve had to watch it like a hawk.”

  “This morning? Didn’t you have class?”

  Dennis laughs. “Made Sukhin take it.”

  The candle arrangement goes on and on.

  “Wow, that’s a lot of candles.”

  “The man is older than he looks. Ageing very gracefully, in spite of all the frowning.” He steps back to survey his handiwork, then resumes the task. “Almost done—go gather people. We’re ambushing him in his office.”

  Sukhin is sleeping. This isn’t intentional—his last class of the day is done and if he hadn’t rested his head on his desk for a moment just before packing up, he would already be cycling home. He is dreaming—he is walking in a field of giant saguaro cacti, all identical, all with thorny arms raised skywards.

  “Happy birthday, Sukhin!” says the nearest cactus.

  What the fuck.

  “Sukhin! Sukhin!”

  He springs upward and awake. There are about twenty faces looking down at him. Feeling violated, he glares back at them. Dennis sets the biggest cake he has ever shared a space with on his desk. Sukhin is horrified—this is for him, he realises. The cactus was right. It really is his birthday. God, so many candles.

  “Happy birthday! Did you think we’d forget?” And then, seeing Sukhin’s odd expression, Dennis realises that it is he who has forgot. Nuts. His own birthday.

  A pause. Everyone eyes Sukhin. Sukhin eyes the cake. Dennis congratulates himself again on the choice of yuzu coconut cream.

  And then a tuneless warble, rather heroically led by Dennis: “Happy birthday, dear Sukhin, haaaaaaaappy…” Sukhin feels like crying, or throwing up. I’m thirty-five and this is my life. And then, the next instant: Oh god, I’m thirty-five and I’m about to have a mid-life crisis. How cliché. How sad. All he wants to do now is get as far away as possible from these smiling faces, this stupid song, this ridiculous cake. When the singing finally stops, Sukhin forces himself to smile, thank everyone, then cut up the monster into little bits so that everyone can stuff their faces while seeming not to eat very much. He even pretends to eat a slice. Anything to have them think he’s pleased, anything to have them get the fuck out of his office as soon as possible.

  Sometime during the night, the woman awakens. She finds herself on her side, facing the wall. Behind her, he’s breathing softly in the way she has learnt to recognise as a sign he is sleeping deeply. Carefully, she turns over. He is turned towards her, but his face is half-buried in his pillow, under which both his hands are tucked. His knees are raised towards his chest, making it all look like an elaborate yoga pose.

  The woman slips her hand under the man’s pillow and onto one of his hands. How warm this feels, nestling between his skin and the weight of the pillow. He stirs slightly.

  In the morning, he will remember this weight on his hand, the sudden cold of hers.

  In the morning, if he asks, she will deny everything.

  II

  THE FORTUNE COOKIE reads, “Be sincere with all you meet. For the charming social networking.”

  Sukhin pops the cookie fragments into his mouth. What awful advice—even if he were the kind of man who’d take ungrammatical advice from a cookie. Be sincere? With all you meet? How…unsound. Charming people lie—how else are they charming? And people expect to be lied to, and they’ll lie to themselves, believing they believe in honesty and all that crap about just being yourself. What if being yourself meant not liking other people being themselves? Sukhin could think of a whole lot of people who could be improved by being other people. If only everyone had a reset button—though that would mean having to wear some sort of security vest all the time so that people couldn’t just reach out and reset you because you said something mean about their hair or something.

  Had he been mean about Vera’s hair?

  His thoughts wander back to the afternoon. He was getting a glass of water in the staff pantry. Dennis was there talking about something—what was it? Some new gym routine he was trying out. Something like that. Vera, the new geography teacher, the transfer from Methodist Girls’ School, bounded into the pantry and said hello. As she approached, Sukhin noticed how tall she was—nearly as tall as Dennis, who was only a little taller than Sukhin. Which made her, very possibly, his own height.

  “You’ve done something to your hair.” Trust Dennis to notice this.

  “Yes! I decided to go shorter. What do you think?” She patted her hair and grinned.

  “Very nice, very nice. Makes your neck look longer.” Where did Dennis get all this from?

  She turned to Sukhin. “And what do you think?”

  He stared hard at her hair, searching for something to say about it. It wasn’t very interesting, just hair. At last, he noticed something worth pointing out. “Is it meant to be lopsided?”

  “Lopsided?”

  “It’s longer on the left side. Just a bit—about a centimetre here.” He gestured at her left ear.

  She tugged at the section. “Really? I don’t think so.”

  “It is. Dennis, look. Isn’t this bit longer than this bit?” He added: “Should be easily fixed. I’m sure you could do it yourself.”

  “It’s not lopsided!” She turned a little red.

  He wasn’t going to argue—he hadn’t planned on having a conversation with her about her hair; she had forced it on him. He was happy to let her win this. “Hmmm. Okay. Maybe your left ear’s higher than your right ear? That would explain it.” He was rather pleased with the reasoning. It was perfectly logical, and most people didn’t have symmetrical heads anyway.

  Her eyes widened. “Now my ears are lopsided?”

  “No, they’re not lopsided—lopsided describes unevenness on a single object,” Sukhin explained—rather patiently, he thought. How did people get these things confused? “So your hair is lopsided. A mouth could be lopsided—no, not yours. Ears are two separate objects. So your ears—I’d just say they aren’t level. Yes, I think that would be best.”

  “That would be best?” She glared at him.

  “The best way to describe them.” He tried to reassure her: “But yours look level, actually. So it’s your hair that’s lopsided—and that’s much easier to fix.”

  At that point, she turned and walked away.

  Dennis cackled. “You must find her attractive. Usually it takes more than a week for you to offend anyone new.”

  No, he hadn’t been mean about her hair. He only pointed out that it was lopsided—not her fault, and not even a permanent state. If his haircut were lopsided, he would like someone to tell him. He would want to know. Why wouldn’t anyone? That woman was clearly far too attached to what she thought her hair should be. Delusions of symmetry. What a nut.

  Sukhin makes himself a cup of tea, wondering if he do
es find Vera attractive.

  The second fortune cookie reads, “Breathe deep and often.”

  What rot. Who wrote these things? Manufactured Chinese exoticism for the simple American—and now the simple Singaporean. Dennis had seen them at a shop in Chinatown and bought Sukhin two giant packs of fifty. One hundred ridiculous cookies. (“Look, sweetie, you can read and eat! Your two favourite things in a convenient little cookie. You love me.”)

  Vera isn’t his type. Far too tall. And far too unappreciative of symmetry.

  At the old house, Sukhin arrives to find his mother in the kitchen stirring sugar into a pot of coffee. It is blacker than ink, completely opaque—if you can see the spoon, she’s told him since he was a child, then it’s not strong enough.

  “Kopi?”

  “It’s okay, Mum. I’ll make some tea.”

  It’s been years since I gave up coffee, he wanted to say. Mum, I don’t drink coffee any more. He satisfies himself instead by creating a louder clatter than necessary as he fills the kettle and puts it on the stove, then reaches into a cupboard for the tea.

  Usually, they sit in silence, needlessly stirring their drinks over and over again. But today she appears determined to have a conversation. She tells him about her morning, about the bargain she managed to pull off at the fishmonger’s, about the phone conversation with her sister. He says nothing, only half-listening, refusing to press her for more information. She stops and looks at him expectantly. He stares down into his mug.

  “How was your day?”

  Sukhin sighs. “It was okay. Exams in three weeks. The teachers are going nuts; the kids are going nuts. Of course, quite a few are pretending not to care.”

  “Teachers or students?”

  “Both.”

  Sukhin watches as his mother removes all her rings and bracelets, puts them in a pile on the table, then puts them all on again. He has never asked her why she does this. He doesn’t ask now.

  They sit in the kitchen because the living room is never used. It must have once been meant for lounging around, perhaps even entertaining guests—there’s a sofa somewhere, an armchair, a coffee table even.

  But then the boxes took over. The largest squat in the corners and line the sides of the room, sentinels against marauders. Inside these boxes: more boxes, arranged neatly, to maximise space, and gently, so no box presses uncomfortably against another—no box, little or large, will stand for being squished. Other boxes in boxes have sidled up to these giants over the years; some perch rather audaciously on their smooth cardboard tops. In the centre of the room, the cool crowd lolls about on the former coffee table. These delinquents—hexagonal, pyramidal, heart-shaped, star-shaped, panda-shaped (just one, but one is enough)—won’t fit into other boxes and resist all attempts to put them into orderly piles, but they are the best loved.

  After tea, Sukhin goes into the living room and squeezes himself into the narrow space between a pile of boxes and the delinquents’ pedestal. With a hand-held vacuum cleaner, he carefully removes the dust from every odd-shaped box. The panda is the hardest to do—so many awkward flaps—but Sukhin hasn’t done this for years for nothing. He’s a pro, nudging every flap open with the vacuum cleaner’s blade-like nozzle, then swiping left to right in quick, even strokes. He works meditatively; he forgets where he is, who he is, even what he’s doing.

  Some of the boxes have been around since Sukhin was a child—the box that the rice cooker came in, the one that held the family’s first microwave oven and the Cadbury tin, once full of chocolate eggs, that Aunty Siew Peng gave them for Christmas when he was a boy and still liked sweets. One of the cardboard sentinels once protected the (at the time) state-of-the-art front-load washing machine that remained the apple of his mother’s eye for years because it meant she didn’t have to hand-wash all the clothes she’d had to protect from their previous washer, a pale violent monster whose sole purpose was to push Hooke’s law to its outer limits. Elsewhere in the cuboidal sea: boxes that once were home to various electronics, crockery, lamps, toys and many other objects long dead and discarded.

  Once he’s finished with the delinquents, he moves on to one of the weekend’s designated stacks, one that nearly reaches the ceiling. As always, Sukhin is efficient. He splits the stack into two, carrying the top section off and into the narrow pathway through the living room that the boxes have decided to allow the family. Then he sets to work on each demi-pile, cleaning, checking for damp and damage, until every box is cleared—and then they all go back into the stack to wait for their next round of TLC. Sukhin moves on to the next designated stack.

  Not every box makes it here, to what could be called the Dhillon Family Retirement Home for Boxes—there is a stringent selection process.

  To qualify, a box must fulfill at least one of the following requirements:

  1. It is large enough to be useful should the family decide to move. “Large enough” is a completely arbitrary measurement, decided entirely by Sukhin’s father, Dr Jaswant Dhillon. (The family has not moved houses in the last thirty years, but if they decide to, they would be very well equipped where boxes are concerned.)

  2. It is a box that once contained:

  What Sukhin’s mother, Doris Dhillon, considers a “milestone” electronic.

  A set of something or other—Doris believes that things that come in a set must always be transported in the box they came in, because it was designed for that very purpose.

  A good memory—a vague, often exploited, category of box.

  A “first” anything.

  3. It is a Really Nice Box. For a box to be kept under this category, the entire family must be in alignment that it is indeed a Really Nice Box. (The panda was a point of contention in its day—Sukhin and his mother were keen on it, but his father thought it was too kitsch. Eventually, he was won over—with veto rights over the next Really Nice Box.)

  Over the years, with very little success, the family has tried to edit their collection, trim it down, get rid of excess. Most attempts are spurred by the threat of some impending visit by relatives, but the last one was brought on by an attack of home-envy Doris experienced while looking through the pages of Home and Decor in the waiting room at the dentist’s. Suddenly, she found herself dreaming of Scandinavian-chic interiors, all soft, poetic edges and stark walls. The family spent an unhappy weekend arguing over which boxes to keep, which to give to the karung guni man. In the end— exhausted, angry—they gave up and put all the boxes back in their old spots. Doris has not breathed on an interiors magazine since.

  The old turntable, a relic from Doris’ single-girl days as an undergrad in 1970s London, plays an even older Beatles record. Sukhin doesn’t realise this, but under the calming influence of the family boxes, he is singing along to “Lovely Rita”, a song he despises.

  “Are you staying for dinner?”

  Sukhin turns off the vacuum cleaner. “No, I’ve got to go to Chinatown. Need to buy decorations for the staff party.”

  It isn’t the answer she wants, but she knows better than to try to ask again. “That’s nice.”

  “No, Mum, it isn’t. It’s a pain.” Sukhin moves, crab-like, out from among the boxes. He doesn’t notice his mother’s poorly concealed disappointment. “And it’s stupid. No one enjoys the CNY party. Everyone just pretends—it’s just a big show for the Tay. She likes to think we’re all a big happy family.”

  “But it’s not unhappy, right?” Doris wonders for the nth time why her clever, prickly son decided to be a teacher. Probably to irritate his father.

  As if on cue, her husband’s car pulls up outside. The automatic gate whirrs into action, and a few seconds later, the car is purring on the other side of the living room wall. A sudden quiet as the engine is shut off, and then Dr Jaswant Dhillon bursts into the house, talking rapidly, already in mid-paragraph as he removes his shoes and socks.

  “…rubbish ‘Punjabi’ food—not even close, darling, we must never go. I tell you, that Ranjit couldn’t tell
proper Punjabi food from random curry house stuff. Spent too much time abroad—not even in England, where some of the Indian food is the real thing, but in Scotland. But of course he had to go to Edinburgh lah, couldn’t get into Cambridge.”

  Sukhin’s father is a big man, taller than Sukhin, towering over his petite wife. His voice is even bigger—rich and strident, with all the drama of the old-time storytellers. In another age, he would have been one of them, the men who went from village to village telling stories of Hang Tuah, Hang Jebat, Badang and the rest of the old Malay heroes.

  Now he holds up a small plain cardboard box like it’s a jewel. “Anyway, the rose barfi was decent enough—not too sweet, so I got you some. Don’t eat all of it at once, yah? And keep it away from me!” A loud laugh as he presses the box into her hands. “You know what happened when Meera Auntie’s daughter—Rina? Rani? Rathi? Something starting with R, what is it?—got married and she made us take home all that jelebi.” Another loud, happy laugh, accompanied by a dramatic gesture, a cross between it-was-this-big and the standard both-arms-waving. “Two days and it was gone! Gone! For weeks I couldn’t look patients in the eye when I told them to please, for your own good, cut down on the sugar.”

  “Hey, Pa.”

  “Sukhin!” His son’s presence is unexpected and Jaswant needs time to warm up. He stalls by offering nuggets of affirmation: “Ah, you’re looking well. Doing a good job at school, I’m sure. Hard to be a teacher these days, children so different from what they used to be.”