by Yeoh Jo-Ann
“For my mother. I can’t stand those things.” She made a face. So did he.
He didn’t text her again, making a mental note to ask women about cake before considering anything even remotely resembling a date.
His parents wheedled and whined, after his father got repeated calls from her mother inviting the family over for tea. Tea! One of the many euphemisms for pre-engagement talks. Sukhin refused to engage.
That was when things really got out of hand. His aunt and uncle invited Seethal’s family to their annual barbecue, and Sukhin was ordered to grill skewers of peppers, halloumi and mushrooms as her mother looked on. “So careful you are, Sukhin—no wonder you’re a teacher!” He found himself dragged to random weddings, and then: “Isn’t that Seethal?” His father would wave, and he would be marched over to her and left to have a non-conversation, in which they would take turns making random, stand-alone observations that didn’t interest each other. She didn’t seem to mind, which made the situation all the more dire—every encounter with her, he knew, went towards racking up enough points (or hours, or whatever this system was counting) before their parents decided it was proper to insist on an engagement. Seethal seemed to have placidly accepted this, which made her one of the enemy.
Sukhin did the most logical thing he could think of—he behaved like a complete asshole. It was an exit strategy.
Whenever he saw Seethal at a wedding or a party, he would make an about-turn and stride off, trying to knock over at least one chair along the way. When his aunt asked if things with Seethal were going well (“Such a nice girl, and looks a bit like Madhuri Dixit, doesn’t she? You know, that Hindi film star, hmmm maybe you’re too young to know who she is”), he gave her a long, cold stare and abruptly walked out the door, to his parent’s horror and embarrassment.
His father ran after him. “Sukhin! Don’t be rude to Aunty Malkit!”
He pretended not to hear—quite a feat; the neighbours two doors down had probably heard Dr Jaswant’s bellow. Sukhin got into his car, slammed the door as loudly as he dared, then drove off.
Aunty Lillian and Uncle Bobby were treated to the grand finale. Aunty Lillian had brought over pineapple cake, made with a recipe she’d pried out of a retired pastry chef. Sukhin’s mother, not to be outdone, had spent three hours making kaya and scones. They sat at the dining table in Doris’ kitchen and gossiped, and were still at it when Sukhin dropped by. He made himself a large mug of tea and was about to join them at the table when Aunty Lillian inadvertently set the scene in motion.
“Exciting times, Sukhin,” she began, buttering a scone. “I’ve just ordered some silk from Shanghai to make my dress—I’m not going to wait until the last minute! Your father says he’s expecting the engagement party to be in a couple of months, and a good cheongsam takes about thirty days to make, you know, fittings and all!”
He looked grimly from one parent to the other. His mother was all tight lips and shifty eyes; his father kept eating cake, refusing to look up from his plate.
“What kind of weird fantasy are you people living?” Sukhin snarled. “What the fuck is wrong with you? This is not your life!” He glared at his father. “If you want a wedding so badly, you marry her!”
He threw up his arms—Sukhin is very much his father’s son when he’s angry—forgetting about the mug he was still holding. Trailing an arc of scalding hot tea, it went sailing into the middle of the dining table, smashing itself into angry little shards of porcelain that promptly jumped onto the cake and scones, into the pot of kaya, into every cup of coffee on the table.
He laughed at their horrified faces and didn’t stop laughing until he was out the door and driving away.
One evening, as he walks Jinn back to her alley, he tells her about Seethal.
“Stupid man. You might have been happy, you know.”
“No.”
They walk in silence for a bit.
“She was so different—from you.” He regrets it the moment he says it.
“Nonsense. She lost you at organic soy latte.”
The doorbell rings, just as he’s about to do the laundry.
“Heyyyyyy.”
Dennis, through the door. He rings the bell again. Sukhin wonders if he should pretend he isn’t home.
“Open up, sweetie—I checked; your car’s here. You’re home.”
Through the peephole, Dennis is mostly head and shoulders, leaning towards the door. He’s also mostly bright orange, dressed to go join the neon army at a gym somewhere. He jabs the bell switch again. On the other side of the door, Sukhin rolls his eyes. No. Not opening the door.
Dennis switches tactics—four sharp raps against the wooden door, followed by the doorbell, then four knocks, then the doorbell again.
“Sweetie, I’ll scream.”
God, Dennis. Sukhin unlatches the door, pulls it open. “What do you want?”
“Where are your manners? Have you got any coffee?”
“I don’t drink coffee.”
“Whatever—water then. You have to offer me something.”
By now, Dennis is in the kitchen, opening cabinets at random and peering into them. He opens the fridge and squints at its contents. “Milk. Aren’t you lactose intolerant?”
“No.”
Dennis is well acquainted with the apartment—two years ago, Sukhin reluctantly suffered him in the role of self-invited houseguest for three weeks while Dennis had his own place repainted (it started out as two weeks, then got extended because the fumes were “simply too much, sweets”). Dennis had been unable to stop himself from invading Sukhin’s privacy—he reorganised the cupboards, replaced the worn-out rugs, threw out Sukhin’s old clothes, ordered furniture.
That had caused a major scene at work.
Sukhin was in the staff room looking through the lesson plans of two trainee teachers, trying his best not to sound condescending or bored, while the rest of the English department tried not to snicker. Who hadn’t been the object of Sukhin’s poorly concealed disdain? “Such a know-it-all. He must have been insufferable as a student,” said one of the younger teachers, who had been told to “go home and read Fifty Shades of Grey” after he had failed to recognise a racy bit of Marvell.
Dennis bounded up with an interiors catalogue. “Sweet cheeks, great news—they have the sofa in peacock, and they can deliver tomorrow.”
“What sofa?”
“This one,” Dennis pronounced, flipping the catalogue open to a dog-eared page. It was incredible, Sukhin thought, in the truest sense of the word—in what looked to be a flowering forest glen, a shaft of sunlight falling across one arm, a sofa languished, cool, casual, a dryad of polished wood and blue-green upholstery with an expensive sheen. A squirrel and some other woodland animal stared down at it from an overhanging branch.
“I don’t need a sofa.”
Dennis sighed impatiently. “You have two chairs and some sort of large cushion thing. You need a sofa.”
Sukhin stood up. He had to unclench his teeth to say: “I don’t want a sofa.”
“Well, I’m buying it for you—it’s coming tomorrow. Don’t be difficult, Sukhin.” Dennis shut the catalogue primly, then turned to walk away. Sukhin stared after him. The insouciance. The utter thickskinnery.
“Dennis, I don’t want a sofa.” Perhaps a little too loudly—though everyone in the English department and most of the History teachers were staring openly by this time anyway.
Dennis had the gall to look surprised, as if the sofa were some sort of shared life goal and Sukhin was laying waste to years of careful planning. Sukhin bubbled over. He reached out, grabbed Dennis by the shoulder and whipped him around. He took a step closer, and the incongruous thought hit him that Dennis was the taller man as well as the better built, and in ancient Greece would have been considered the better man—“kalos kagathos”: good looking and therefore a good person.
It was possibly this thought that sent him over the edge. Kalos kagathos— what the actual fuck.
“I don’t want a bloody sofa!” The Physics department, on the other side of the wall, would later report hearing this loud and clear. “Even Susan heard it,” said Tat Meng, who was on the phone with his wife at the time.
Still holding on to his shoulder, Sukhin gave Dennis a shove—light, but enough to send him a step backwards. Dennis glared, then stomped off. But a moment later he was back. He seized Sukhin’s copy of Hamlet—a yellowing relic from Sukhin’s own junior college days, with SUKHIN in black marker across the cover—and flung it theatrically across the room, but even he was unprepared for the binding to come undone in mid-flight and the ensuing explosion of pages over the English team.
Breaths were held, eyes widened, faces turned up towards the paper storm.
Sukhin felt a page land on his head and reached up to catch it. He read— out loud, without meaning to: “I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.”
He passed a hand over his face. Dennis’ mouth was cast in an O, his chest heaving, a hand raised protectively to his throat. “Sorry, sorry, I’m so sorry.”
Sukhin stared past Dennis, at the pages littering the floor. He wanted to grab Dennis and break him, but he couldn’t move. The period bell rang. A few of the other teachers gathered their notes and books and slowly shuffled out the door, careful to avoid the scattered pages. Sukhin left the scene quietly, cycled to East Coast Park and spent the rest of the afternoon walking along the coast. When he finally got home, Dennis had made clam pasta, and they ate in the kind of heavy, brooding silence that reaches perfect pitch when one party is clearly and irrefutably wrong, while the other is clearly and irrefutably wronged.
The sofa arrived the next day. It was there when Sukhin got home— queening over the living room, vivid, peacock-hued and as glorious as the brochure promised. On it was his copy of Hamlet, put together again and rebound, SUKHIN and all. Dennis was in the kitchen, noisily rummaging through the fridge. “I’m throwing together a salad, sweets—we’re going to have us a little picnic on that gorgeous sofa. Where are your wine glasses?”
The same sofa—the only object in Sukhin’s apartment that isn’t grey or greyish—is now under scrutiny by its patron, his nose only a couple of centimetres or so from the fabric. A frown, a “hmm”. Dennis goes into the bedroom and inspects both pillows, then lifts the duvet. “Have you changed your sheets recently?”
“Last week—not that it’s any of your business.”
Sukhin watches as Dennis slides open the wardrobe and rifles through his shirts. “What the hell are you looking for?” He is surprised to find himself more mystified than annoyed. Is this what it means to grow mellow with age?
Dennis moves on to the underwear drawer. “Who is she?”
Sukhin is aghast. “What?”
Dennis straightens up and crosses his arms. “You’ve been missing astronomy club meetings, and you’ve left before four every day for the last three months. Every day.”
“Work-life balance, Dennis. It’s a thing.” He walks off. Dennis shuts the drawer and follows him into the living room.
“And you’ve lost weight.”
“I’ve been running.”
“Aha. You’ve been running. And you gave out thirteen A’s in the common test. In October, you gave six.” Dennis looks smug. “It must be love.”
“I’m exercising so I won’t be a useless lump when I’m eighty. And maybe the kids have improved.” Sukhin pauses. How does Dennis know how many A’s his students got for their Literature papers? “Are you stalking me? I don’t even know what to call it—how do you know about the A’s?”
“It’s called a database, sweets—you put all your scores on a spreadsheet, yes? Well, where do you think that ends up? For a smart man, you can be very stupid sometimes.”
Sukhin sinks into the sofa and sighs. What do other people do with sticky, aggressively nosy friends? Some people must like having them— there are those who seek attention, and those who seek to give it. Tinder be damned—why isn’t there an app pairing up these people? It would save him (and presumably there were others like him) so much time and energy. Maybe if all the desperately private people in the world banded together and funded the app…
“I see you’re not denying that there’s a woman somewhere. Just not here.”
“I just can’t imagine why you’d think that. And what are you looking for? Lipstick stains?” Sukhin slowly rearranges the pile of books next to the sofa, hoping he will appear bored.
Dennis begins pacing—he walks to the kitchen, then back to the living room, then back to the kitchen. “I can’t understand why you’re lying to me,” he whines. Sukhin continues to stack books, splitting them into two equal piles, then into four equal piles. Remain calm—he’ll tire himself out.
“Aha!”
Sukhin’s head snaps up. God, no. No, no, no, no.
In the kitchen, Dennis is kneeling beside the washing machine, holding up a pale blue bra. Its pale green sister has followed it partway out and now sits idly across the edge of the door. If Dennis were curious enough to check, he would find “100% organic combed cotton” printed in tiny, tiny script on the sides of both brassieres.
“My dear Mr Dhillon, please take your time. I’ve got all day.”
They used to fly kites after school at the great big field beside the bay. She loved it because it was so green—grass, grass and more grass as far as her peripheral vision stretched. He loved it for the kites. He made many of them, mostly because he enjoyed making them and sometimes because he wanted to please her with something witty or silly that she could release into the wind. Her favourite was a pineapple, the earliest and ugliest of his kites. He never understood why.
After they parted, when there was no one to make her kites, she would go to the great big field to watch other people fly their kites.
She never saw him there again.
VII
SHE IS NOWHERE to be found. Her suitcase is missing, and the cardboard structure is empty. Sukhin has come to think of this large, unwieldy thing, held up and together by the mysterious combined forces of luck and physics, as Jinn’s house. A house can pretty much be anything, he muses, as long as someone is willing to live in it. Or under it—he recalls how, as a child, he turned his mother’s dining table into his house for a few weeks, insisting on eating all his meals under it, surrounded by his toys and books. His father alternated between threats and pleas, but in the end Sukhin was forced out from under the table by a cockroach that had sauntered over to look for crumbs (it couldn’t have set out to chase him out from under the table).
It’s just a toilet break. Everyone has to pee.
As he waits for Jinn to return, he inspects the boxes. Some are beginning to look a little wilted—time to put in some new ones. He wonders if he should insist on moving her to some sort of shelter, or to his place, anywhere that doesn’t involve living outdoors in a DIY fire hazard. He’s been wanting to talk to her about her living arrangements, but hasn’t found the courage nor a good enough excuse—the old Jinn would resent it, and he doesn’t want to give the new Jinn any excuse to walk away.
Where the hell is she?
He waits another fifteen minutes and then tries not to panic, but panics anyway. Where can she have gone? Well, pretty much anywhere. He decides he will find a way to put a tracking device on her. Or pay people to set up watch round the clock. Or get her a phone.
There’s a post-it stuck on one of the boxes on the inside of her house.
“S— 53 Kerbau Road, 4pm. J.”
He’s relieved. But it is 3.47.
Without stopping to think, he rushes to his car and drives like a madman from Chinatown to Little India, feeling like he’s starring in a spoof of a Singapore Tourism Board ad.
If you ignore all considerations for safety and spare no thought for pedestrians, it is possible to see the one-hundred-and-eighty-six-year-old Jamae Mosque—note the combination of South Indian and neoclassical archi
tectural styles—and the more recently constructed Buddha Tooth Relic Temple—see how the Tang style of this building departs from the dominant South Chinese typology of Singapore’s Buddhist temples—in just under three minutes. Over the next ten minutes, push your vehicle farther: race down Eu Tong Sen Street, then Hill Street—the flash of white on your left is the Armenian Church, consecrated in 1836, making it the oldest church in Singapore—and cut across Orchard Road, then Selegie Road. Dash across the intersection and onto Serangoon Road. Now see Tekka Centre whizz past, then the Sri Veeramakaliamman Temple— people say that the goddess Kali, for whom the temple was built, made sure that it survived the Japanese air raids in World War II. Sharp left onto Race Course Lane, then Race Course Road, home to the famous Banana Leaf Apolo, where meals are still served on, yes, banana leaves. Swerve onto Kerbau Road, park, then admire the multicoloured façade of the former residence of old-time candy tycoon Tan Teng Niah—you might as well; you are five minutes late and what is a few more minutes to catch your breath, now that you’ve arrived alive?
She is where she has asked him to be and doesn’t look surprised to see him. She doesn’t look particularly pleased either, which disappoints him.
“This way.”
He follows her through an alley and they emerge facing Tekka Centre. The wet market is closing for the day, and the vendors are busy packing away equipment and goods, cleaning their stalls. Some of them are pushing wheelbarrows of vegetables and fruit towards a large rubbish bin by the side of the road. The bin, about the size of a large van, is already teeming with unwanted produce, so the vendors have begun to pile the rest into boxes next to it. Some simply empty their wheelbarrows onto the street. A small, nondescript group of people rifles through the discard piles next to the bin.
“They’re saving vegetables so that they can be redistributed instead of just rotting here,” Jinn tells Sukhin, and she’s helping with the collection today. She takes two sacks from a pile on the street and hands him one. “Pick out whatever you think is still edible. Like this.” She shows him a dirty-looking cabbage. “If you remove the outer leaves, this is perfect.” She puts it into her sack. “And hardly anything can kill a carrot.”