Sugarbread

by Balli Kaur Jaswal

  “I don’t like it,” I told Ma, shaking the cup at her. The black dots of tea leaves rose to the surface. “It’s…unfriendly.”

  “Bitter,” Ma corrected me but she had failed the test. I wanted to see if she, too, could taste emotions. “There’s no such thing as an unfriendly taste. It’s the cardamom that kicks you a bit, takes away the sweetness.” So she was not aware of the clues she gave away every day.

  Beneath his thick beard, my Mama-ji’s mouth was set in a permanent frown. He greeted by nodding. He allowed Fat Auntie to talk as much as she wanted. At the temple, she was always the loudest. From across the women’s section, I could hear her shrill voice bouncing between the steel plates and the pale yellow walls. She got along well with the temple ladies. I wasn’t sure if my grandmother liked her because Nani-ji didn’t like anybody, but Fat Auntie was always on her side. Every time Nani-ji stood up, Fat Auntie rushed to help her. Every time Nani-ji coughed, Fat Auntie patted her back with a look on her face that seemed more like concentration than concern. These gestures made Ma’s lips become thin as if she had to swallow them to refrain from saying something nasty. Because she felt this way, I did too. I spent my lunches at the temple focusing on hating Fat Auntie, and couldn’t eat the sweet rice pudding and greasy golden rings of jalebi because of the anger that coated my taste buds, stinging my mouth with bitterness.

  We stopped going to the temple because Ma had had an argument with Fat Auntie. I did not know exactly what they had disagreed about because there was nothing they didn’t disagree about. It happened about a year ago in the dining hall after a long service.

  I had just finished eating my lunch and was staring at the portraits on the wall. There were five portraits of the Gurus and I tried to figure out the stories they told. One portrait showed Guru Nanak atop a horse, a gentle halo illuminating his long robes. Another showed three men charging towards an army with spears. In another portrait, all nine Gurus sat cross-legged in a line, a temple towering behind them. I let my legs swing under the table. Nani-ji and Fat Auntie sat opposite us. Fat Auntie’s niece was there—a girl named Harpreet with long hair and a pointy chin. “We are cousins,” she told me matter-of-factly. “My Auntie is your Auntie.” I worked it out in my mind and we were not really related. Fat Auntie’s sister was Harpreet’s mother. But Harpreet was friendly enough and when I accidentally kicked her under the table, she cheerily said, “Never mind!” before I could even apologise.

  Ma and Fat Auntie were speaking in English and Nani-ji was slowly eating her food, mashing the roti up with her fingers and shovelling it into her mouth. She frowned as they spoke because she did not understand what they were saying. The conversation was about her. “She’s too old to be staying on her own,” Fat Auntie insisted. “She can’t live in my house. I’ve got my two boys to look after.” She gestured to her two sons, my cousins Devjit and Gurpreet. They were teenagers and didn’t look like they needed to be looked after at all. I only realised I was staring when Devjit scowled at me, so I turned my attention to Ma.

  “We have no room in my flat,” Ma said. “It’s too small. At least there’s a spare bedroom in your home. You know I want to take care of my mother in her old age. But it’s just not practical.”

  “Do you want to take care of her?” Fat Auntie countered. “Or are you just making excuses?”

  Ma stared at her and I could feel her boiling rage. “What is that supposed to mean?” she asked quietly.

  “Nothing. It’s just very typical of you. You don’t like to take on family responsibilities. And it’s hard to know when you’re telling the truth.” She looked pointedly at Ma’s wrists, which poked out of her long sleeves. The sun had been strong that morning on our path from the block to the bus stop and Ma’s skin was scarlet.

  “Want to go outside and play?” Harpreet asked me. I wanted to say no but Ma turned to me and said, “Pin, go with your new friend.” She gave Harpreet a warm smile.

  “Your mother is very pretty,” Harpreet said as we searched the racks outside for our shoes. I had placed mine on top of Ma’s but then more people had arrived and kicked their shoes off and the floor was a mess of black leather shoes, sneakers, high-heeled sequined sandals and flat slippers. I finally found my shoes but Harpreet said, “Don’t put them on. We’re going to play a running game.” We left the temple building and descended the stairs that led to a courtyard where I met the other children. Ma and I had never stayed at the temple for very long before, so I didn’t know the other kids. “This is my cousin Parveen!” Harpreet said, clasping my hand. “I’m Pin,” I corrected her. Nobody called me by my full name. Daddy liked to joke that it was too long for me.

  The courtyard was a wide open space with high grey walls covered in moss and creeping vines. The ground below my feet was rough and uneven but Harpreet assured me I’d get used to it once I started running. She was in charge of choosing the game because she was the oldest. “Can we play catching?” a boy asked.

  “Later,” Harpreet replied, then I saw her turn her head to the side. “Choos,” she said under her breath. She saw me looking and she looked around before she quietly explained it. “I learnt it from my friend at school. If you say something but it’s not true, you have to say ‘choos’ afterwards. Otherwise God will punish you for lying.” I kept this in mind.

  We played “What’s the time, Mr Wolf?” One person was named Mr Wolf and they had to stand against the wall with their back facing the rest of us. “What’s the time, Mr Wolf?” we cried out, and Mr Wolf would call out a time. We crept closer to Mr Wolf according to the number of hours he called out. If he said it was three o’clock, then we took three steps. The moment anybody got close enough to Mr Wolf, they had to try to touch the wall and run before he tagged them back. The person who got tagged became the next Mr Wolf.

  We played rounds of the game until a cluster of clouds briefly blocked the sun and cast shadows on the courtyard. “Rain!” Harpreet called out, dancing around as though it was already pouring. In the distance, we heard rolling thunder. A strong gust of wind carried the smell of damp earth from some other part of the island where it was already raining. I expected Ma to come out of the temple already but there were no signs of her.

  “Let’s play some more. I want to be Mr Wolf,” one boy named Jaswinder said. It was not actually his turn to be Mr Wolf but everybody was tired and we were only half-heartedly playing anyway. He ran to the front wall. “Ready?” He called out. “Okay, ask me.”

  The adults began to trickle outside, looking up at the tin-coloured sky. “What’s the time, Mr Wolf?” we asked. He did not answer.

  “Oi! What’s the time, Mr Wolf?”

  Still nothing.

  “WHAT’S THE TIME, MR WOLF???” we all screamed in unison.

  Jaswinder turned around slowly and gave us a grin. And then he said “fuck”. A hush fell over the group. Some boys began to giggle. The girls were appalled. “I’m telling your mother,” Harpreet scolded him. She looked at me and shook her head. “I know his mother,” she said to me. He did not seem to care. He announced the word again between giggles. The other boys shrieked with laughter but nobody dared to repeat what he had said. The girls huddled together.

  Harpreet didn’t have to tell his mother. She was one of the parents who came outside when the sky began to darken. She rushed towards our group like a lightning bolt. “Say that again?” she challenged before slapping him hard across the face twice. I winced. Harpreet put her hands on her hips and looked satisfied. Jaswinder howled and whimpered as his mother dragged him off by the ear. “Saying vulgar words in the temple in front of everybody. Just you wait till I tell your father about this. He’ll give you a bloody thrashing at home. Just wait.”

  We stood there in silence for a moment, as if mourning the loss of a soldier. “Maybe we should play catching or hide-and-seek,” suggested a bony girl named Neelu. Harpreet agreed and asked me if I wanted to play too. I was about to say yes when I spotted Ma coming out of the temple ent
rance with my shoes in her hands. She was walking quickly and something was wrong. I could tell because of the way she looked at me, almost as if she was looking right past me because her mind was full of other thoughts.

  “We’re going now, Pin,” she said sharply.

  “We’re playing hide-and-seek,” I told Ma.

  “No. Get your shoes. We’re going now.”

  I turned to Harpreet. “Okay, next week,” I said apologetically. I liked the temple more now that I knew the other kids. Running around and playing made me forget God’s bad food.

  “No. We’re not coming back next week. We’re not coming back here any more,” Ma said. Harpreet’s eyes widened.

  After I put my shoes back on, Ma took my hand and led me out of the courtyard. The group of adults stepped aside quietly to let us pass. The children looked confused. Harpreet waved but Ma was pulling me along so hard, I did not have a chance to wave back.

  At the bus stop, I noticed that the backs of Ma’s hands were raw with scabs. She wringed her hands and bit her lower lip and tried to blink back tears that poured down her cheeks anyway. I put my head against her shoulder and my hand in hers but she shrugged me away. “God sees everything, Pin,” she said finally as our bus approached. “You just remember that.” I immediately felt a wave of guilt for playing “What’s the time, Mr Wolf?” with that foul-mouthed boy Jaswinder now. God had seen the whole thing.

  The following Sunday, we started going to the market and Ma made a religion out of buying food and transforming it into delicious dishes with her recipes. I knew that Fat Auntie must have said something terrible to make her so angry but I did not dare to ask her what it was. I just accompanied her to the market and when she first told me that I should never become like her, I said, “Okay.” Then I turned to my side and said, “Choos, choos, choos.” Thrice, because it was likely to be stronger that way.

  • • •

  I woke from my nap to the sound of the front gate yawning as it opened, the padlock snapping open. “Hi Daddy,” I murmured as he stepped into my room.

  “Hi Pinny,” he said, a grin in his voice. “Not playing football today?”

  “I don’t play on Sundays,” I told him. The boys in the neighbourhood sometimes let me join them in playing catching and football. I had a powerful kick and I was little enough to fit into the spaces in shallow drains where the balls sometimes ended up. I was also a girl, which made the neighbourhood people complain less if we had accidentally hit them, because I was good at looking sad and sorry when I was scolded.

  “I saw the boys downstairs,” Daddy said. He folded his legs into a pretzel and sat on the floor, then he looked around as if to check for spies. He lowered his voice. “Promise you won’t tell anyone?” I nodded. “Promise? Promise, promise?” He took out a stack of tickets from his pocket, folded like dollar bills. My eyes widened. There must have been over 20 lottery tickets.

  “So many?” I asked, grabbing for the tickets. I spread them out on the floor and surveyed the numbers. Four of them were digits I had given him and the rest were unknown to me. I pointed to random tickets and asked about them. “Where is this one from? Why did you pick this one?” Daddy’s explanations were varied. His numbers were like Ma’s dishes—full of stories and combinations. 4402 was the license plate number of a wealthy hotel guest. 2421 was the cost of his new shoes, $24.21.6748 had just occurred to him during a late shift and he took this as a sign that he needed to use it.

  “There were so many important numbers this week, Pin,” he said. “I couldn’t just buy one or two.” He didn’t need to explain to me. If Ma found out, she’d be furious. She thought the lottery was a waste of money that we didn’t have. “Why don’t you get a better job instead of putting all of your wages in stupid 4D tickets?” she always asked in a tone that meant it wasn’t a question.

  “I won’t tell,” I told Daddy as he counted and stuffed the tickets back into his pockets.

  “Thanks, Pinny,” he said. He smoothed down the messy curls in my hair, but they sprang up again.

  “I need to go for a haircut,” I told him. The humid weather made stray curls rise from my head, giving me a monstrous halo. At school, I always kept my hair back in a tight ponytail because we weren’t allowed to keep it loose. When Ma felt generous, she let me use a bit of her hairspray to keep down the curls, which she then pinned back with her black rhinestone clip so that my hair glittered.

  “Why didn’t you ask Ma to take you to the hairdresser today?” he asked. “After the market?”

  I looked at the spot on my leg. The rash I had created had vanished. Daddy’s eyes did not follow mine. He had a habit of asking questions and not really listening to the answers. I rolled over on my back and watched my stomach rise and fall with steady breathing. The room was sinking into dusk. The faint chirps of the last remaining songbirds in the contest under the other block drifted into our flat in small waves.

  “We had a lot of things to carry,” I finally said.

  “I noticed. Your Ma filled the fridge like it’s the end of the world,” he said.

  “Maybe she has new ideas.”

  “Maybe,” Daddy said, unconvinced. Faint worry lines appeared on his high forehead. The last time Ma bought this much food out of inspiration, she had gotten excited, then flustered. She rubbed cinnamon sticks on chicken thighs. Leafy vegetables were paired with snapped long beans—she usually insisted on decorating her dishes like colourful bouquets. That was the first week after the argument at the temple. Nani-ji had called our house a few times to speak to Ma, but Ma did not want to speak to anybody. “If you still think I’m a liar, then leave me alone!” she shouted into the receiver one day without even greeting the person on the other end. Gradually, the calls stopped and Ma began to create more peaceful dishes—velvety smooth fish curries, roasted and glazed pork slices, soft noodles mixed with finely shredded vegetables.

  When it came to food, Ma always said that money did not matter. She bargained at the market but if forced to pay full price for everything, she would. It was afterwards, when we were at home, that she picked through her purse and laid out the notes and change on the table, sighing and clicking her tongue against her teeth. Daddy tried to make up for the lack of money by making it look like we had more. He liked to remind me that it was only a matter of time before he won big in the 4D draw, then all of this fussing and worrying would seem silly. I listened to him because Ma refused to and I tried to let him convince me, but it was difficult because he never even won a consolation prize. Daddy didn’t just buy 4D tickets. He entered every contest and every lucky draw that was advertised. When the radio deejays announced that the first ten callers would win a Walkman or tickets to a movie, he leapt for the telephone and punched in the numbers. Sometimes I wished that he believed in God a little bit more because He would guide him to choose the right numbers for once, or call the radio station at the right time. There was something in Daddy’s eagerness that made my heart ache. He needed to win something.

  • • •

  There were two phones in our flat. One phone sat outside in the living room—it was black and slick with extra buttons for functions we didn’t need to use, like conference calling and speakerphone. Daddy had won it at his office lucky draw on Chinese New Year, the only lucky draw during which he had ever won a prize. We chucked the old phone—a basic cream-coloured phone—into the storeroom until I discovered an outlet under my desk one day. Daddy hooked the old phone to it but Ma insisted that he remove it because I was too young to have my own phone, even if it was on a shared line. “Pin doesn’t need to talk to anyone in her room. There are no secrets in this house,” Ma told him loudly. Daddy didn’t want to remove it. He told Ma, “Wait till somebody calls and listen. You’ll see why it’s nice to have two phones.” He was right. It sounded grand when calls came in, with two separate tones ringing through the air. It made the neighbours peek into our flat, impressed.

  Daddy made me promise not to listen in on conversat
ions from my extension. I tried to reason with Ma. “But if there are no secrets in this house, why can’t I use it to listen?”

  “Don’t be cheeky, Pin,” she said simply and it was the only answer she would offer.

  When the phones rang that Sunday evening in July, both Ma and Daddy were in the kitchen, chatting in low voices. I was still too lazy to get up from off the floor but then I remembered I still had chores to do before school the next morning. The prefects at school inspected our shoes every Monday and I had already gotten booked once for not washing and polishing them beforehand. The phone kept ringing—Ma’s voice got louder and for a moment, my heart stopped. Had she found out about the lottery tickets? But then I heard the tone of Daddy’s voice and he was not trying to defend himself. “If that’s what you want, then go ahead and buy it. I’m not stopping you,” he said.

  “You’re not stopping me but our bank account certainly is,” Ma retorted. It was just a regular money argument, the kind that began and erupted in our flat and lingered in the air until it was picked up again. The phone rang one more time.

  I must have picked up the receiver at the same time as Ma because usually, if I picked it up while she was already having a conversation, she heard the clicking sound and called, “Pin! I have it. Put down the phone.” It was Fat Auntie on the line. I hadn’t heard her voice since that day at the temple. I hadn’t missed it much.

  “Mother had to be taken to the hospital again today. I just thought you should know,” Fat Auntie said curtly.

  “What happened?” Ma asked.

  “It’s her lungs again. She’s been having a very bad cough for a few days now. We had to convince her to go—you know how she is. The doctors say she’s stable now and they want to keep her around to observe her for one or two days, but she insists on leaving the hospital tomorrow.”