Sugarbread

by Balli Kaur Jaswal

  “You. What you say? You so funny? What you say?” he asked in broken English. He asked me the same thing in Malay. I hoped that one of the girls behind us would imitate his voice to distract him but the bus became strangely silent. He stood there for two more stops, asking me over and over again what I had said. I just shook my head and replied, “Tidak, tidak.” Nothing, nothing. The girls being dropped off filed past Bus Uncle, leaving me trapped under his stare. His eyes were like marbles behind those large frames. I shrugged at him and looked out the window. Eventually, he moved away and went back to the front. Giggles rose again but they were nervous and unfamiliar. One girl asked me what I had said.

  “Nothing,” I told her, annoyed that nobody had tried to help. I collected my cards and put them back in my bag. For the rest of the journey home, I stared out of the window and watched the way the sunlight bathed the bricks and concrete golden-brown. The spaces between the painted lines on the road below disappeared, then appeared again once the bus slowed down. My neighbourhood was one of the last on the bus route. There were four girls after me who all lived around my block. When Irene Seet got off the bus, I got my things ready—bag, folder and water bottle—and carefully made my way to the front seat. Bus Uncle turned to stare at me again. This time, I looked back at him for a long time. I saw Ma doing that once at the market. The vegetable stallholder had pulled his hand back quickly after handing Ma her change, having caught a glimpse of her scarred wrist under her sleeves. Ma had stared at him until he pretended to be distracted by a noise and turned away.

  “Apa?” I asked Bus Uncle boldly. He didn’t respond and it seemed like he didn’t hear what I had asked. I was a bit relieved. I could get into trouble at school for being rude to Bus Uncle. Mrs D’Cruz might make me stand up in front of everyone at Assembly and apologise for my behaviour. She might make all the students and teachers pray for me and Ma would hate that, probably pull me out of the school altogether.

  Then a look of recognition came over Bus Uncle’s face. His eyes lit up and a smile lifted the corners of his narrow lips. It was not a friendly or forgiving smile. There was something mean in his eyes. The bus jerked to a stop and the door creaked as it opened. As I stood up, Bus Uncle softly said a word I thought I knew but I was so eager to get off the bus, I dismissed it and ran towards my block, the windows glinting like eyes in the afternoon sun.

  • • •

  The corridor leading up to our flat was made narrower by potted plants, doormats, shoe racks and parked bicycles. All of the flats in our building were identical, but you wouldn’t have guessed it from what was outside. Everybody seemed to try hard to make their homes look unique—strange grille patterns and bright curtains were popular. Sometimes I walked past the other flats slowly on purpose, because some families liked to keep their doors open if they were at home. Through the bars of their front gates, I peeked into their flats: rattan furniture and television consoles, wooden dining tables, cushions covered in faded printed sheets, beaded curtains that rattled as the residents stepped in and out of the kitchen. One time, a neighbour had caught me looking, and waved her hands and stomped in my direction as though shooing away a bird.

  The door to our flat was open but I had to ring the bell so Ma could come out and unlock the gate. “Coming!” she called, but before I heard her voice, I smelt the food. Noodles stir-fried in oyster sauce with prawns and bean sprouts. Red chillies cut and soaked in soy sauce. Honeydew cut in cubes and piled on a side plate to soothe my mouth if I got stung by a hot seed. I could barely wait for Ma to open the door because I hadn’t eaten anything all day. During recess, Farizah and I had continued our mini-championship of Old Maid in the courtyard. She didn’t eat because she was practising ignoring her appetite. She didn’t have to start fasting until the weeks before Hari Raya Puasa in November but she wanted to do better. Last year, she had to fast for nearly a month. She had fainted during two separate assemblies and had to be sent home.

  Ma opened the gate and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “How was school?”

  “Okay.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing.” I went into my room and shrugged my bag off my shoulders before coming out into the kitchen again, where Ma was sitting.

  Ma rolled her eyes. “I’m glad I sent you to a good school to do nothing and come home,” she said sarcastically. I giggled. Normally, I wouldn’t know if Ma was making a joke or not but the food and the kiss indicated a good mood. It meant that she was not angry about what I had said about Nani-ji the day before. I hoped that she would forget about Nani-ji altogether.

  “Your hair’s a mess, Pin,” Ma said. She ran a wet hand over my curls, flattening them only for a few seconds.

  “I need a haircut.”

  “I’m sure we can find a way to pull it back so you don’t have to go and get it cut all the time.”

  “Why?”

  Ma shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll bring you for a haircut next weekend if you want. I just thought you might want to try something different for a change.”

  “No,” I said.

  I took a plate from the shelf and scooped the noodles onto it. Ma had already put the soy sauce with chopped red chillies in a small bowl. “Remember to eat your fruit,” she told me, pushing the cubed honeydew towards me. She watched me eat for a while.

  “Tasty?”

  “Mmm,” I said. The noodles were sticky and she had sprinkled crispy fried shallots on the top. There was a hint of garlic, but not too strong, which meant that Ma was alert. She asked me the regular questions about school—what did you do in maths? Science? English?

  “What did you do today?” I asked. I had to be careful about asking questions like this. On a few occasions, she took it as an insult when I asked her what she had done. “What haven’t I done?” she would snap, gesturing to the bowls and plates of food and the sparkling clean stove. But I was better now at detecting her moods in her meals. She was never upset when she made Chinese dishes because they were too light. White rice and pale yellow noodles were often used as quiet peace offerings. Malay dishes were warm, suitable for early dinners. The Indian dishes, with their fiery reds and their stabbing spices were the ones that warned me. They caused me to suck in my breath and think hard before I said anything.

  “I cleaned up the flat, I washed the clothes and I visited Nani-ji,” she said.

  “How is she?” I asked, because I knew it was polite.

  “She’s…she’s okay,” Ma said. She looked down at her hands and began to clear the plates.

  As I turned to follow her into the kitchen, something in the living room caught my eye. I turned around and saw a portrait on the living room wall. God’s portrait. He looked the same—old with sad eyes and a long, snowy beard that hung from His chin like drapes. He was holding up one hand, the lines on His palm covered by a single string of beads. His eyes followed me as I walked towards Him. I quickly jumped away and His eyes were still fixed on me. We started a quiet staring contest.

  “Ma…” I called out.

  Ma came out of the kitchen. “I found that in the storeroom this afternoon while I was cleaning up. There’s so much junk in the storeroom, Pin. We can throw out your old bicycle, can’t we? And I tell you, the stacks of newspapers and phone books in there. You need to remind me the next time you hear the karang guni man coming. We can clear out all of our old things and get some money out of it.”

  “Why did you put it up?” I asked her, my eyes still locked with God’s.

  She drew her stomach in a bit and placed one hand on her hip.

  “Why not?” she challenged.

  “Nothing,” I mumbled, pushing past her into the kitchen. I scraped the few remaining bits of bean sprouts and shallots into the garbage chute and washed my plate. Ma seemed to have forgotten that she had banished God to the storeroom for a reason.

  Somebody rapped on our door loudly, then shook the gates so they rattled. I rushed to the door to find my friend Roadside standing in the
corridor with a football tucked under his arm.

  “Hi, Pin. Can you come out and play?” he asked.

  “Hold on,” I said and called out to Ma to ask her permission.

  “Wash up first,” Ma said.

  I groaned. Roadside grinned. “Okay, see you downstairs.” He disappeared before Ma could come to the gate to say hello to him.

  “Why do I have to wash up when I’m going to get dirty again?” I asked Ma.

  “Because it’s my rule,” she replied.

  “But I’m going to play football!”

  “Pin, don’t argue,” Ma said. “You know what my mother used to say when I wanted to race down the street with boys? Cheap, she called me. Cheap and dirty.”

  I had always known that it was a privilege to be allowed to play with Roadside. A year ago, he and I had started our own detective club. We were very busy; there were many mysteries to solve in our block of flats. There was the Lift Button Pusher Mystery that Roadside and I tried to solve by staking out different floors of the building and making notes on who entered the lift at which times so we could figure out who was pressing all of the lift buttons at once and causing the lift to stop at every floor. Then there were several shoe thefts that we took upon ourselves to solve, but the town council put up posters reminding residents to keep their shoes inside and the thefts stopped on their own. Our last case was a vandalism mystery: we set out to discover who had spray-painted “O$P$” in red on the gates of an elderly man’s flat on the third floor. We stopped working on that case after Roadside’s father explained to us that the man owed money to loan sharks, and that we were better off playing outside than letting our imaginations run wild in the hallways of our block. Now Roadside joined the boys in football and I tagged along. Sometimes Ma still mentioned that she was very liberal to let me play with boys outside where everyone could see.

  My towel was clipped to the bamboo pole outside. I had to lean out of the open kitchen window to pull it off. It was warm to the touch because it had been a hot day. There was a light afternoon wind, enough so the clothes on all of the bamboo poles on our block swayed as if to music. The jagged rhythm made them look lifelike. I thought about God breathing onto our block and I glanced back at Him again on the wall. He sat still in the frame, His eyes surveying the flat.

  The boys had already started by the time I got there, so I sat on the grass edging the basketball court and watched them. Their T-shirts were thrown together in a pile, a slight odour of sweat drifting from them. There were a few boys whose names I didn’t know because they only joined us occasionally, but the regulars were Roadside, Malik, Samuel, Deven, Wei Hao and Kaypoh. They trusted me with the scoring but I daydreamed when the games were slow. I was also in charge of timing. I checked one of the watches on the ground. We had 20 minutes before the older boys came to the court and claimed it.

  There used to be more space in Singapore, my parents often told me. People didn’t have to live piled on top of each other, lined up in hallways. There were dense forests and wide roads. Daddy missed those days but Ma did not. “That was such a long time ago,” she argued. “Why does it matter? Look at what we have now.” She gestured around her so we knew she meant the safe, well-lit streets, the sturdy concrete buildings and the trees sheltering the pavement like roofs.

  The boys were red-faced and sweating, their ribs showing through tan skin, light skin, skin the colour of tar. They ran and laughed and stumbled and pushed. As I watched, I envied their swift angling. Sometimes Malik’s sister would come, and she’d sit on the grass with me. She was more insistent about playing, and she threw tantrums, but Malik wouldn’t let her join in. “You and Girl just sit on the grass and take care of our things,” he instructed her. All of the boys except Roadside referred to me as “Girl.” I didn’t like it and Roadside knew this, but he had never corrected his friends.

  Then the older boys showed up with their familiar sour smell of cigarettes. “Okay, get out,” one of them said jokingly, snapping his fingers. Roadside tucked the football under his arm and directed us towards the blocks. “Girl, any games under your block?” Malik asked.

  “I don’t think so,” I replied.

  “We go her block lah,” Malik said to the others.

  The boys set up the game in the void deck after checking to see if anybody else was playing there. Every void deck in the neighbourhood was the same: there were concrete mahjong tables and small shops on each end, and in the middle there was enough space to play football, even though a few pillars that held up the building sometimes got in the way. On the walls facing us were signs that said “No Soccer” but the walls were dotted with dusty circles from where footballs had impacted.

  After a short argument over the scores, the boys picked up the game where they’d left off. They darted through the maze of walls and their yells echoed through the space. I got bored waiting for somebody to get injured or tired so I could take his place. I went over to one of the mahjong tables and sat down on its cool cement top. The mahjong squares were painted on and the old Chinese ladies from the block only had to bring their tiles. I had seen them before in their silvery pyjamas, with their teased white hair and jade earrings that stretched their lobes like dough. They played swiftly, swapping tiles and chatting loudly. One of them always smoked cigarettes and she liked to croon at me in Malay when I walked by. Cantik! she would call out. It always made me smile and look down at my feet, then she’d laugh and say, “Don’t so shy lah, pretty girl!”

  The ball hit the wall with a loud smack. “Bloody hell!” one of the boys shouted. The rest of them broke into laughter. I traced the tabletop with my finger. It was rough and stained with cigarette burns. The older boys who lived downstairs from me smoked, then tried to mask their breath with mints before they got home to their mothers. One time, Deven’s mother spotted him holding cigarettes for one of the boys while he showed him how to do a banana kick, and he wasn’t allowed to come down to play with us for a whole month.

  The boys shoved and tripped over each other’s ankles, and swore loudly in every language. They called each other names, then laughed and lightly shoulder-punched each other. Malik teased a Chinese boy about being so pale that he couldn’t see him against the white walls. The boy retorted that the walls under my block were all so dirty that they matched his dark skin better. There was a quick pause, a tension in the air, before Malik burst out laughing and cuffed the Chinese boy on the cheek. They continued playing.

  Their exchange reminded me of the twist of Bus Uncle’s lips as he said that word. Mungalee. It was a mean and ugly word for Indians and I only knew it because Daddy told me once that people used to call him that when he was a young boy because of his dark skin. They mistook him for a South Indian because he was friends with lots of them and when they walked down the street together, their classmates shouted, “Mungalee lai liao! Mungalee lai liao!” The Indians are coming! The Indians are coming!

  I asked Daddy what he did when people said those mean things, and he said there wasn’t really anything he could do. He said it was always better to let ignorant people make fools of themselves. But hearing about it made me angry, and I wanted to go back into Daddy’s childhood and shout ugly names right back at those people.

  “You’re lucky, Pin,” Daddy said. “People in this country have learnt to tolerate each other. Even our own teachers used to call us Blackie and Darkie and all kinds of names. They wouldn’t be able to get away with it now.” Bus Uncle was old, so maybe he did not know that Singapore had changed. It still bothered me, though, and it made me think of something else that had happened the previous year on the school bus.

  Before somebody had the idea to bring cards, pick-up sticks and sticky balloons onto the bus, we occupied ourselves on the journeys home playing the Question Game. It was pretty simple. We split up according to race, then asked each other questions in our own language. The person answering would have to reply either “yes” or “no”, without understanding what the question had rea
lly meant. Sometimes, a person would say yes to questions like, “Are you the smartest girl in the school?” or “Will you have a rich husband?” That person got points. Sometimes a girl answered no to a good question and she got no points. Or sometimes without realising it, a girl might have admitted to having ten ugly boyfriends or a crush on Bus Uncle. The Chinese girls asked the Malay girls, the Malay girls (whom I usually joined) asked the Chinese girls, and the Tamil girls asked all of us. Their language was the most fascinating—fast and rough like pebbles rolling around in a tin can.

  Margaret Lee, whom everyone called Maggie Mee like the noodles, asked questions in French because she had attended a bilingual school in Canada when she was very little. I liked Maggie Mee; she knew what a Punjabi was and asked me once if she could come to my house one day to eat real Punjabi food. Her best friend in Toronto was Punjabi. She told the other girls they were stupid and narrow-minded when they asked me why I didn’t understand Tamil. “You think all Indians are the same?” she asked them, shaking her head. Like Farizah, I could always count on her to speak up for me, although sometimes I wished I could do more speaking up for myself.

  There was a girl on the bus named Gayathiri Vengadasalam and nobody really liked her very much. She was loud, she pinched people when she wanted their attention and she didn’t speak proper English. She was a Bursary Girl who looked and talked like a Bursary Girl, who shamed the rest of us who couldn’t afford to go to First Christian without our monthly allowance from the school. Her old pinafore was faded and spotted like denim, her blouse had a yellow tinge, and she wore her school badge too high so it glistened from her shoulder instead of above her heart where the crest was supposed to sit. She also had very dark skin.

  It was Abigail Goh who invited her to play. “Want to join the question game?” she asked brightly. Gayathiri nodded. Abigail ducked into her seat with her friends and they began to whisper and giggle.