Nimita's Place

  “So many festivals,” she says. “Ramadan coming up soon also.”

  I turn around the baskets of tubers. Hafeezah follows.

  “Shopping for dinner?”

  No, I’m dancing, what do you think? My basket is empty because nothing looks good.

  Shopping and cooking for just one person is too much trouble. Chia Ying and I usually shop and cook together, but she is in Kuala Lumpur with her family this week.

  I spot sad okra the colour of dried grass.

  “This bhindi no good,” Hafeezah says.

  I nod. But the French beans next to it are dark and look tender. I poke them through the plastic.

  “Why you don’t go wet market?” Hafeezah says. “You go in the morning, much cheaper. Better quality. I also only come here today because run out of diapers.”

  Not all of us are stay-at-home mums, Hafeezah. Some of us work also. “No time,” I tell her.

  She clucks. “Some more this NTUC become so expensive. Not like last time.” She fingers a spiky green bittergourd. “At least got more Indian vegetables. Also basmati rice. I like basmati, very healthy, but Abu doesn’t always like.”

  Come to think of it, Hafeezah is right. There are more Indian products than when I first started shopping here in 2011. There’s even Indian-brand Captain Cook atta instead of the house-brand baking flour I used to buy to make rotis.

  Hafeezah’s trolley wheels lock with those of another pushed by an Indian woman with a girl in her basket. They apologise at the same time and try to disentangle. Another Indian, a man this time, bumps into me with his basket of bread and eggs. A young boy runs behind him, so short I could step on him if I were not paying attention.

  If I close my eyes, I can hear chattering in Hindi and Marathi and Punjabi, as much as Malay and Chinese—no, Mandarin. I could be in one of those fancy Spencer’s supermarkets in Mumbai, not in NTUC FairPrice in Bukit Batok, Singapore.

  Hafeezah says: “Put your basket in here. Got space, no problem. Why you want to carry?” Her smile is wide under the bright fluorescent lights. She smells of baby powder and another scent I don’t recognise.

  I am tired and hungry and suddenly sick. I should have had lunch but the air-con at the SGH canteen couldn’t compete with the sunlight coming in from the glass ceiling. What stupid architect had that idea?

  “Come, come.” Hafeezah takes hold of the basket. I let go before I can feel her hand on mine.

  “Now what, you want to buy these beans?”

  I want her to go away. I move towards the baskets of cabbage on my left side. Over the round green heads, I see a ray of hope.

  “There you are!”

  Hearing my voice, Irving turns around from the chicken counter. I pull his sleeve and whisper: “Please just follow me, okay?”

  Hafeezah comes up, pushing the trolley with my empty basket inside it. “Oh, you also here?”

  I take my basket off her trolley. “Yes, we’re shopping for dinner. We’re having,” I look at his basket, “cheese and tomato sandwiches?”

  “Chicken and barley soup,” Irving says.

  I don’t see chicken or barley in his basket. Plastic box of tomatoes on the vine, $8. A block of cheese, $7.80. A slice of another cheese, $6.50. A lump of bread twice the price and half the size of the FairPrice house-brand loaf I usually buy.

  “Barley soup?”

  “Chicken and barley soup,” Irving says and holds up two styrofoam packets for comparison. “Hafeezah, which brand do you recommend?”

  “No, no, no, you don’t buy these, so expensive. You buy whole chicken, better. Come, I take you.” She begins to wheel her trolley to the frozen foods area.

  “We don’t have time to defrost a chicken,” I say.

  “Ten minutes in microwave,” Hafeezah says, then stops. “You’re keeping vegetarian or not?”

  “Oh, yah, Irving, it’s that festival I told you about. You’ll have to make vegetarian barley soup for me.” I raise my eyebrows at him. If he’s a six, he should be able to read the girl signal which is: Don’t let me down.

  He puts the chicken down. “Vegetarian barley soup. Okay. With potatoes and leeks.”

  “I thought potatoes cannot?”

  I blink very fast. “Potatoes, garlic, onions, all cannot. They’re taboo, Irving. I told you, na?”

  He looks at me like I am sad, green okra. “Plain barley soup. With some butter and salt, like Tibetan tsampa.”

  “Tsampa! Yes! Yummy.” I smile at him and at Hafeezah. “Sounds great. Can’t wait. Very hungry.”

  “May I add the chicken to it for myself afterwards? Or is that also taboo?”

  I slap his sleeve. “Let’s go stand in the check-out queue. Bye, Hafeezah.”

  She lifts a hand. “You come later for the onions. Next week also can.”

  “No, no, it’s okay. Thank you so much.”

  “What onions?”

  I pull Irving’s sleeve. “Never mind the onions.”

  In the check-out queue I total up Irving’s basket and realise he’s spending $50 on a single bag of groceries barely enough for one meal. Chia Ying and I would spend that on a week’s worth of meals. It’s a ridiculous expense, one of the lowest returns on investment ever for food. Still, I take out $25 from my purse when it’s time to pay.

  Irving ignores it, even when I start waving it in his face.

  “Put that away,” he says, looking at me like I am a crate of Thai mangoes when he was promised Alphonso.

  I put the money away. He doesn’t even let me carry the grocery bags.

  Back at our flat, the kitchen is warm. The air from the fridge feels good on my face. I look for leftovers while Irving puts the groceries away.

  “You’re avoiding Hafeezah?” he says.

  “I’m just tired.” I’m hungry and it’s too hot to cook. Are we out of yoghurt also?

  “She’s a nice person. She wanted to invite you to dinner.”

  The cool air in the fridge is not enough to cool my irritation. “Next time you go. Do a hashtag halal on your Instagram.”

  There are some apples and oranges I don’t remember buying. Did Chia Ying get those? If these were Chia Ying’s, I’d eat them without thinking. It doesn’t seem right to take Irving’s stuff without asking.

  “Are these yours?” I show him an apple and an orange.

  “Maybe.” He’s taking things out of the cupboard, moving pans around.

  “Can I—” I don’t know why I say what I say next. I want to make him as hot and uncomfortable as I feel because there is no air-con in the kitchen. “Can I buy these off you?”

  He takes a saucepan out without saying anything. The kitchen feels suddenly very small.

  If it were Chia Ying, she would laugh and say: “You goondu. Just eat, lah.”

  I turn to close the fridge door.

  “Trade you the use of your pressure cooker,” Irving says.

  “What?”

  He lifts the pressure cooker I brought from India. “Your pressure cooker for my fruit.”

  My cheeks cool down. “Do you know how to use a pressure cooker?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then go ahead. Thanks.” I wash the apple and orange and take them to my room.

  My phone buzzes. Dad.

  “Haan, beta, how are you? Busy?”

  One day I will say, yes, I am too busy to talk and then Mummy and all the buas will call me to tell me to be more polite to my poor father who loves his children so much.

  Dad wants to talk about Dadi’s house in Lonavla. I hate talking about it because it reminds me that Dadi no longer has a say in our family affairs.

  “So many trucks and cars on the road now, it’s impossible to drive up there,” Dad says.

  “So it’s a popular place to live, na?” We have a tenant and he pays rent almost every month without reminding.

  “Popular until when?” I hear him sigh. “Your Dadi’s house was a good investment once but now it is a burden around my neck. The roof tiling has
to be fixed again. Who can I get to do these things?”

  I can’t hear him. The pressure cooker is screaming its head off.

  “I’ll call you later,” I shout and end the call.

  I run into the kitchen and the pressure cooker is frothing on the stove. White bubbles and steam pour out from the sides and centre, the whistle weight screaming hot air.

  Irving stands like a goondu in front of the stove. The gas flame has been drowned out by the froth and I think I see wisps of white coming out from the safety valve in the lid. I turn off the gas and turn, ready to strangle my flatmate.

  “You idiot! Is this how to use a pressure cooker?”

  “Hey, it wasn’t supposed to do that.”

  “Don’t touch it!” I pull him back from the stove. “Let it cool.”

  “I was going to run it under the tap.”

  “The safety valve may be loose. You want to die when it pops and hits you in the face?”

  Irving rubs his head.

  “You could have killed us.” I leave him in the kitchen and go sit at the table. Hot air from the stovetop blows into the air-conditioned dining area. “What the hell, Irving? I thought you said you knew how to use a cooker.”

  The hissing continues inside the kitchen. Irving closes the door.

  He comes out after a while, still rubbing his head. His face is red.

  I stare at the table because if I look at him, I will scream.

  A chair scrapes. The idiot sits down at the table.

  “I didn’t know that would happen,” he says.

  “You don’t have pressure cookers in China?”

  “It’s Hong Kong. Why don’t you get that right?”

  “Why don’t you get the use of my pressure cooker right? Idiot.” He nearly blew up this flat.

  Dadi and I bought this pressure cooker before I came to Singapore. Every proper kitchen needs a pressure cooker.

  His face is even redder now and his eyes are big. I wait, just wait for him to open his mouth.

  He looks away.

  “Something good quality but light,” Dadi told Gopal at Gopal’s Appliances. “She’s going abroad to work. Singapore. Very good job with the Singapore General Hospital.”

  She bought me a brand-new Prestige aluminium cooker, much lighter than the cheaper stainless-steel versions. It came with a whistle weight, extra rubber rings and an extra safety seal just in case. That and a non-stick frying pan and some wooden spatulas. “The rest we’ll buy in a few years when you have your own house,” she said.

  The hissing stops and I get up from the table. Irving follows me into the kitchen.

  I put the cooker under the tap, then take off the whistle weight and open it.

  A cloud of steam gushes out. No problem for me, I was leaning back.

  “Ow!” Irving’s spectacles mist up. His face goes back to red.

  “Splash your face with water,” I tell him.

  The safety seal has come out of its setting on the lid. If the hole has deformed under the pressure of the steam then that’s it for my cooker. I can’t tell by looking. The white froth has stuck to the seal and rim and is not coming off easily under the tap.

  I have such a headache. Low blood sugar because all I have had is an apple and an orange and there is so much work and Dad is always on the phone and now this tension.

  My head really hurts.

  “You’re white.” Irving’s voice sounds funny.

  I lean against the cool part of the counter. If I wait a while, the world will stop spinning.

  “Here.”

  Irving hands me a glass of water. I drink it. He refills it and takes the pressure cooker lid from me. “I’ll clean it up.”

  “Stove also.”

  “The stove too.” He checks the cooker and makes a face. The barley is in big clumps. I can see some parts at the bottom are burnt. Not going to be easy to get rid of the stains.

  I close my eyes.

  Irving takes the glass out of my hand. I open my eyes and suddenly I’m moving backwards out of the kitchen. Before I realise it, I’m on the sofa and Irving has put a cushion in my lap. “Sit. Stay.”

  I’m going to ask him if he thinks I’m a dog when he starts the PS4.

  The scene on TV is interesting. A policewoman at a concert sees the main singer suddenly turn into a monster. Something to do with mitochondria in her cells mutating.

  “Rewind that. It’s biologically wrong. Mitochondrial mutation can’t be independent of DNA mutation in the nucleus.”

  “Here. Game controller.” He rewinds the game to the start and makes the air-con cooler before going away.

  The story is scientifically, totally wrong but like in a sci-fi movie, you forget that after a while. This PS4 game is a lot like a good movie, except it cuts to games or puzzles you have to solve to get to the next scene. In the beginning, the officer sees the monster kill her date—I get the feeling she wasn’t really into that guy but she feels bad—and then has to stop the monster from killing or infecting the other people in the concert hall. “Also wrong. What kind of infection works that fast, haan? Not even Ebola.”

  I figure out how to make the police officer move forwards, backwards, left and right. Some button combinations make her jump, kick and even fire her gun. I work out how to save all the people in the concert hall. When I get to leave the hall and follow the monster, it runs underground.

  The monster escapes through the sewers five times before I figure out the trick to the maze. I have the monster pinned to the wall when it turns back into the singer and says: “Wait, don’t shoot. I have the—”

  The screen freezes and goes dark. Irving is behind me, holding the remote control.

  “Dinner is served,” he says.

  Irving rocks the back of the chair. “Sit down before it gets cold.”

  I sit down at the place set for me and Irving takes the other. He moves a plate of sandwiches one millimetre closer to the soup and takes a picture.

  It makes a pretty picture. Yellow cheese and red tomatoes peeking out of the toast triangles. There is some green stuff on top of each toast as well as a little salad of lettuce, tomato and white paneer-like cheese.

  “The sandwiches look very nice.”

  “This is panini,” Irving says, spooning soup into a bowl.

  We have bowls?

  “You’re not really vegetarian today, are you?”

  I shake my head and he scoops soup into the other bowl.

  The aroma makes me realise I am really hungry. The bowl shakes as I lift it.

  The first sip makes my eyes water.

  “Spicy?”

  I shake my head, then nod. It’s not spicy. I don’t know why I am crying. This is great soup.

  It’s like the chicken soup we order from Mainland China or Yo! China for a treat at home in Mumbai. I blow on the surface of the soup and drink deeply.

  Research has shown that playing video games can increase appetite while suppressing the satiety reflex.

  Irving refills my bowl. Never mind.

  “When did we get bowls?”

  “I have bowls,” Irving says. He has a bunch of white plastic boxes in his part of the kitchen cupboard. I’ve never opened them.

  Irving has put paper napkins on the table. He is so totally a six because men like Dad and Romy-Bhaiya don’t know how to set tables. I use a napkin to blow my nose.

  “This is really nice. Thank you,” I tell him.

  “Stop saying that.”

  Irving uses a fork and knife to put one toasted sandwich on his plate. He cuts a corner carefully and blows on it before putting it into his mouth.

  I take the toast with my fingers. It’s not that hot.

  When I bite into it, though, it’s like a volcano in my mouth.

  “Hot! Hot!” I pour water from the jug Irving has filled with ice cubes and slices of lemon.

  He chews quietly but the corners of his mouth turn up.

  My fingers are so chilled from holding the water,
I can move the two slices of bread apart and blow into the middle. Again, the aroma of cheese makes me hungry for more. One more breath out to cool the cheese and I can take a bite. A tiny bite.

  It explodes in my mouth like a sunny day, the kind of winter day in Mumbai when the sun is warm on your shoulders but the air is cool enough that you can sit out in the garden and eat sandwiches. For garden picnics, Dadi always made cheese-tomato sandwiches, chutney-tomato sandwiches and bread-butter-jam sandwiches with bread and cheese from Parsi Dairy.

  This bread and cheese is like nothing from Parsi Dairy. The bread is super-thick, almost like cake. The cheese tastes of smoke and sweet-sour orange.

  Even the tomato is crisp and soft, like roasted capsicum.

  I take another bite and another. Before I know it, the sandwich is gone.

  “This is amazing,” I tell Irving. I eat another sandwich. “This is so good it’s bunbelievable.”

  Irving’s smile grows wider. “Bunbelievable?”

  “Yes. Like those vegan coffee buns Chia Ying showed us.”

  “That’s a real compliment.”

  I scoop myself another bowl of soup. “The soup is also really good. Chia Ying would say, soup-erb?”

  Irving laughs. “Old family recipe.”

  “Who cooks in your family?”

  “My grandma. Before she died.”

  I feel bad for him. “My grandmother was a great cook too. Before the stroke. Now Dad and Mum take turns. Who else is in your family?”

  He shrugs. “Two older brothers. My dad. My mum.”

  “What do they do?”

  “One’s a doctor. The other runs our businesses.”

  I swallow twice when I realise what he’s said. “Businesses? What does your family do?”

  “A bit of everything. Importing things. Exporting things. Real estate.”

  “Wow. You must be big people in China.”

  “Hong Kong is not China.” He stops. “It is, but it isn’t.”

  “Okay.”

  “Saying ‘China’ when you mean ‘Hong Kong’ is like saying ‘India’ when you mean,” he thinks about it, “Kashmir.”

  “Kashmir is India!”

  “That’s not what a lot of Kashmiris say, right? Don’t point your spoon, it’s rude.”

  I put the spoon back on the tablemat. We have tablemats?