Impractical Uses of Cake

by Yeoh Jo-Ann

  “It’ll still run for a while, but slowly and surely—caramel.”

  The time when the bus broke down on her way to take an exam—she walked along Nicoll Highway screaming her lungs out, throwing her meticulously handwritten notes onto the road. She was quickly hauled up by traffic police for littering and causing a disturbance.

  “Control yourself,” he told her outside the dean’s office, where she’d been taken by the TP officer. “When something upsets you, you’ve got to shrug it off. Move past it. You can’t keep flinging yourself at everything.” I can’t spend my life watching you do it.

  Now she doesn’t even have to shrug things off—they simply don’t attach. Lucky Jinn. This jumps out from the back of his mind so suddenly that it nearly causes him to lose his balance. Steadying himself, he begins pedalling furiously, but he cannot distract himself from the magnitude of this, this recognition of his strongest feeling when it comes to her—envy.

  It’s nearly eleven and he’s finally reached Punggol Park. The nearly-forty-kilometre ride has been surprisingly punishing—especially the lifeless, straight, sun-blasted stretch right after East Coast Park that went on and on for nearly an hour. If it weren’t for the promise of chendol at Changi Village soon after, he might have given up then. But buoyed by chendol, here he is—at last.

  Ten minutes later, he spots Jinn under one of the pavillions. She looks happy to see him.

  “Thanks for bringing the bicycle.” She gestures at the wooden boardwalk, the water lilies. “It’s nicer in the daytime.”

  He props up the bicycle and sits down next to her. “Quite a ride. You might try it. Not with the backpack, though.” It is indeed massive, exactly as promised—two small children could fit into it easily. Three, dismembered.

  She unpacks the sandwiches he made this morning while he tells her about the chendol at Changi Village. “Delightful. I had two and wanted a third, but I wouldn’t have made it here.”

  “Chendol coma.” She hands him a sandwich.

  “Exactly.”

  “You may need to appease the chendol gods—I think they wanted you to have that third chendol.”

  “You didn’t tell me there were chendol gods.”

  “I don’t tell you to put one foot in front of the other, but you walk just fine.”

  He should have put off the move for another couple of weeks. It’s still the rainy season—would the evening storms be worse out here? “You’re going to be okay? You can always come back.”

  “You worry too much, Sukhin. I rather like it here, so let’s see.”

  Like most parks in Singapore, Punggol Park is a bit of a princess— prim, proper and manicured. All the circulation is planned—cycling paths, boardwalks, lookout points—to cover enough permutations of movement that no one feels tempted to wander off the paths. And if someone did? It would be a bit awkward—guardrails to climb, hedges to jump, water features to wade through—but hardly impossible if being stared at by the people on the designated pathways isn’t an issue. The park’s biggest achievement is managing not to look entirely fake, even if this is by design. The landscape architect has been clever enough to let it get a little frayed at the edges, with pockets of wild garlic and pandan, sporadic bursts of dog fennel and bunches of wild grass getting in the way of the stodgy ornamental varieties.

  “There are otters here on the river—did you know?”

  He does, but he’s never felt the urge to see them. He and Jinn spend the next couple of hours looking for them and watching them play. The otters—a whole family of them lives along the Punggol River—turn out to be a lot more interesting to watch than Sukhin expected. Far more interesting than most people he knows. They hold hands—he never knew that otters held hands. Paws. Whatever.

  When he gets home, he changes his sheets, does the laundry and rearranges his books. He goes to his parents’ house for tea and dinner, ignoring his mother’s questions about how his attempt at bakwan kepiting turned out. “You should do a practice run,” she said. After dinner, before he drives home, he takes the boxes that were meant for Jinn’s new house and piles them up on his old bed in his old room.

  Her old clothes are gone. The woman does not notice at first, but one by one they made their exits, replaced by softer, lovelier spies. When she looks through her things and finally notices that the spies have taken over, it’s too late. They have won her over with their softness and loveliness.

  The woman is amused but says nothing to the man who sent the spies. He must think she’s above being partial to softness and loveliness, so she lets him continue thinking this.

  This way, they can both be smug and happy.

  XI

  THE DOOR TO his office is flung open, the resulting draft sending papers flying from his desk to the floor.

  “Sweetie, help.”

  Sukhin refuses to look up. “What do you want?”

  Dennis snatches up the stack of scripts Sukhin is working on and chucks them on the chair on the opposite side. “Look at me. This is important. Something momentous is about to cross our multiverse.”

  Bloody thickskinnery of the first order. Sukhin weighs his two options: one, throw Dennis out—he needs to finish totalling up and recording the marks for that stack of scripts and this interruption already means he will have to double check that he hasn’t missed anything; two, give Dennis the attention he doesn’t deserve—it will probably save time in the long run. He stands up and shoots Dennis the coldest stare he can manage, hoping this will scare him off.

  No chance. Dennis hops onto Sukhin’s desk and stretches out on it, spreading his arms to cover as much surface as possible. “Look at me, look at me. Talk to me, talk to me.”

  “Get the fuck off my desk.”

  “Say you’ll do whatever I ask.” Dennis picks up a random card from Sukhin’s desk, a note from a student with a sketch of a fish. He raises his voice: “Or I’ll reveal our love letters to the world.”

  Mrs Chandra, head of the Economics department, who has the office next door, walks past with a cup of coffee. She gives Sukhin a very strange look. He wants to sink into the floor—Mrs Chandra’s husband is one of his father’s patients.

  Option one it is. Sukhin waves towards the door. “Dennis, go away. I’m trying to work.”

  “You work too hard, sweets.”

  This isn’t true. For days, Sukhin has done as little as it is possible to do without attracting notice. He’s attended a few department meetings, spoken to the Tay about the literature trip he and Natalie are proposing for next year—basically making sure people know he’s around and working on something, while spending the rest of the time holed up in his office otherwise occupied. God, I’ve become Ken.

  Ken, who has spent the better part of the academic year campaigning for new uniforms for the girls’ softball team and nothing much else. “We can’t expect our girls to wear polyester,” Sukhin heard him say to Tat Meng in the staff pantry just last week. “It’s so bad for morale. All the other school teams are wearing Tencel or even merino wool.”

  “Wool? For a sports uniform? Doesn’t sound practical.” Tat Meng looked torn between wanting to escape the conversation and needing to question the logic of wool in tropical sportswear.

  The glee on Ken’s face was apparent even from the other side of the room, where Sukhin sat waiting for a few colleagues to arrive for a meeting. Sukhin turned his head to the wall so that Ken wouldn’t see him roll his eyes.

  “That’s what most people think. People who don’t know their technical fabrics.” Ken paused, adding, just in case Tat Meng missed his point: “But I do. I’m always up to date about these things, you know. I make it my business to understand my industry.”

  Your industry? You’re a PE teacher.

  “Sukhin, I see you disagree with me.”

  He forgot to turn his head to the wall that time. Damn. He shrugged and pretended to be busy with his notebook.

  “So you want to tell us why merino wool isn’t good for act
ivewear? Go ahead.”

  Sukhin waved him away. Not going to engage.

  Ken had other ideas. “I suppose you know all about the moisture-wicking properties of merino wool? And its antimicrobial properties? FYI, this means it doesn’t smell. Very important to the girls. It also regulates temperature, so it’s perfect for sportswear.”

  “Yes, absolutely. Merino wool. Great choice.” Go buy it or sell it or start a religion. Or breed the sheep.

  Ken crosses his arms and widens his stance. Sukhin suspects he must have read this in some self-help book about taking charge. “You know? These uniforms are important. Some of us care about the students. We don’t walk around like you, wearing blinders.”

  “Blinkers.”

  “What?”

  “Blinkers. I wear blinkers.” Sukhin stood up—time to walk away. “The term ‘blinder’ is American, but we had the pleasure of being colonised by the British. So I prefer to wear blinkers. Please excuse me—this has been so interesting, but I have a meeting to get to.”

  Hardly an important meeting, though a convenient means of escape. Sukhin has always detested the formal meetings—the circuitous journeys through the same agendas, the same arguments, the same counter-arguments, the same counter-counter-arguments, year after year, have been tragicomic for as long as Sukhin’s been a teacher—but these days he’s laughing at himself as much as at the other teachers. Very discomfiting. So he avoids more and more of them and hides in his office and buries his head in science fiction novels and dabbles in cardboard-box architecture— he hasn’t been able to stop himself from improving on his designs for Jinn’s second cardboard house—and hopes that no one will discover he’s really a big fat fraud. Hearing Dennis admonish him for working too hard makes him clench his jaw and gnash his teeth. On one hand, clearly no one suspects he’s letting go—Dennis would be the first to hear of this, first through the door to dramatically demand, why, sweet cheeks, why, is everything okay; on the other hand, maybe he’s never actually had to work all that hard. But that’s ridiculous—there’s always so much to do.

  “Sweet cheeks, is everything okay?”

  “What?” Then he realises he’s been standing over Dennis for a few minutes, perfectly silent. Dennis, who is still on his back on Sukhin’s desk.

  “You need to break free. Which is why I’m here.”

  “You said you needed help.”

  “Exactly—so you can break free and help me. Two birds. It’s brilliant.” He sits up suddenly and now their faces are only centimetres apart. “We’re taking your civics class and mine on a combined post-exam outing.”

  “No.”

  “Yes—we drew lots and we’re together.” Dennis wags his eyebrows. “I rigged it. You’re welcome. Now neither of us will be stuck with some lame duck.”

  But we’re all lame ducks, Sukhin doesn’t say.

  “He was lying on his desk!”

  “Dennis was lying on his desk? In the Maths department? But why didn’t he just go to the lounge?”

  “He was lying on Sukhin’s desk lah. Mrs Chandra told me.”

  “What? Aiyah, that woman is such a gossip.”

  “Yes, I know, but still. Would you lie down on my desk? Are they…?”

  “No lah. You’re just bitter because it’s not you he wants.”

  “Very funny. Did I tell you he once called my ears lopsided?”

  “Twice—but wasn’t the problem your hair?”

  Tomorrow, it will be November—November! It is surprising and unsurprising. The years before this passed just as quickly, just as uneventfully— anchored by the same routine of getting the new batch of first years settled; prepping the second years for their A-Levels; ploughing through the same texts with the same anti-heroes, the same battles, the same deaths; tackling the same kinds of students, all fervent believers in the special-snowflake uniqueness of their cohort, their class, their issues.

  He rereads the email he’s just written. This should do it—mysterious enough to be attractive, short enough to keep things casual, friendly enough not to rouse suspicion. He clicks send, feeling like he’s lobbing a grenade into unknown territory—what if this kills everything? Well, let’s see if I get a reply.

  Anyway, this year—why does he expect this year to be different? He can feel a strange disappointment, now that the flurry of the first-year exams are over, replaced by the gallows atmosphere of the A-Level seatings. A student told him yesterday that she would die if she didn’t get an A in her modern literature paper. He was so amused he nearly had a Dennis moment. Sweetie, no one dies from failing literature. Most of the world can’t put a coherent sentence together—you’re going to be fine.

  But then he remembered Jinn at A-Levels—pale, anxious and self-flagellating— so he told the girl that she wouldn’t fail, that he would eat his copy of Hamlet if she did. And now, remembering how relieved she looked, how thrilled to hear him say something so uncharacteristic, he wonders if he should perhaps do this more often with his students. It could be interesting to document the effects of random dramatic affirmations of ability on half his classes, with the other half as the control group.

  He stores this in his head to tell Jinn when he sees her—he’ll try looking for her again today.

  He hasn’t seen her in a week.

  The email reply comes the next morning—short, polite and to the point.

  Yes, come see me the week after next. Anytime after 2pm, Wednesday or Thursday. Please let me know which works better.

  He responds immediately. Wednesday is perfect.

  The joint post-exam outing turns out to be a lot more fun than Sukhin expected. He and Dennis fight for days over the itinerary, then decide to compromise—the Peranakan Museum, so that Dennis can show off his heritage and bore everyone with details about his grandmother’s porcelain collection; then a tour of the sculptures in the Central Business District and along the river, where Sukhin will work in a poem-reading or two; then Sentosa for beach volleyball and dinner, for the kids. They hire a bus, buy sunscreen, fight over where to take the students for lunch, compromise again by choosing somewhere they both detest but the students will enjoy, circulate the consent forms, then pat themselves on the back when everything—every last detail, right down to pre-ordering meals for the vegetarian kids, even the difficult little jerk who refuses to eat mushrooms “because that’s basically fungi, which is weird”—is done in a week.

  Sukhin endures the Peranakan Museum with as much grace as possible, gets through lunch without losing his temper, and then tries his best not to sound too stuffy on his leg of the tour.

  He takes the students first to see Salvador Dalí’s Homage to Newton at UOB Plaza—he assumes they will all have heard of Dalí, so it’s an easy start. But Sukhin is irredeemably dull—pointing out key features of the five-metre abstract piece that looks to him like a distorted human skeleton, he goes on about gravity and surrealism until Dennis catches his eye and, grimacing, draws a hand repeatedly across his throat. He stops talking. Off they go to Fernando Botero’s Bird, just a short walk away. The students like this one better.

  “It’s so fat,” one girl says to another.

  It is indeed, like all of Botero’s creatures—great, fat neck; massive, puffed-out chest; thighs the circumference of its head; bulbous, monstrous toes.

  Dennis pronounces judgement: “Far too many carbs.”

  Even Sukhin laughs.

  The animal statues are the best received. The black elephant on a podium in front of the Old Parliament House, a gift from King Chulalongkorn in 1872, is pronounced “stately, like all elephants” by the quietest boy in Dennis’ class; they stop for half an hour while everyone but Sukhin takes photos of the Singapura cats playing on Cavenagh Bridge. Sukhin stands apart and refrains from making snarky remarks.

  The tour ends with the Merlion at One Fullerton, overlooking Marina Bay. Everyone has seen this one before, of course—it is, after all, the most widely recognised, most culturally appropriated struc
ture in all of Singapore—but up close it is quite a sight. Four storeys of half-lion/half-fish constantly spewing seawater into the bay. Sukhin stares, newly horrified— well, if they were going for memorable, they nailed it. His class stands around him, also eyeing the Merlion with reluctant awe.

  “Incredible,” Sukhin says. “In the truest sense of the word.”

  “I wonder how much the government spends maintaining it.” His favourite student, Abi—a quiet, unassuming girl with lovely manners and a knack for asking uncomfortable questions.

  Dennis’ students are intently watching the Merlion spew seawater while he talks them through their assignment—to calculate the changing speed of the spray. “Everyone take a copy of the diagram, please. Who doesn’t have one? Okay, good. Assume there are two pumps—one to get the water from sea level to the base of the Merlion and another to get the water up to its mouth. Best part—assume that the pressure of the seawater entering the pipe changes every time…”

  Time for the poem he’s prepared for this part of the excursion: “The Merlion” by Alfian Sa’at. Sukhin hands the nearest student a stack of photocopies. “Take one, pass it along.”

  As his students stare at their sheets, he reads aloud.

  “I wish it had paws,” you said,

  “It’s quite grotesque the way it is,

  you know, limbless; can you

  imagine it writhing in the water,

  like some post-Chernobyl nightmare?

  I mean, how does it move? Like a

  torpedo? Or does it shoulder itself