Sugarbread

by Balli Kaur Jaswal

  The recess bell rang while Mrs Parasuram was checking to see if we had all of the required books for the year. “Parveen, please stay behind,” she reminded me. The girls queued up single file and disappeared down the stairs, their footsteps becoming more rapid as they got closer to the courtyard.

  Mrs Parasuram smoothened the wrinkles on her sari before sitting down at her desk. I expected a scolding as loud as her long wooden ruler had rapped on the surface of my desk. She looked like the type of teacher who banged things to scare you into thinking she might hit you.

  “Pull up a chair, Parveen,” she said. I did as she told. “Now tell me. What happened just now?”

  “Abigail was making fun of you.”

  “What did Abigail say?”

  “She said you were…she was being racist.”

  Mrs Parasuram did not look surprised at all. “What exactly did Abigail say, Parveen?”

  It took me a while to tell her and when I did, I couldn’t look her in the eye. “She said you were…black. And she could smell coconut oil and you don’t bathe.”

  “And?”

  “That was all. She says things like that all the time.”

  “About you?”

  “About lots of people. Last year, she said that Muslims were pigs.”

  Mrs Parasuram’s face was a mask. Nothing I said seemed to bother or surprise her. Behind her, the ticking hands on the clock reminded me that precious recess minutes were being taken away. It was 9.10am. Zero-nine-one-zero. I memorised the numbers for Daddy’s lottery.

  Finally she spoke. “Parveen, I know you may disagree with me but there are far worse things than being called such names. Do you know that there are countries in the world where people are killed for the colour of their skin? You will always run into people like Abigail. But you made yourself look like the bigger fool just now when you shouted back.”

  “But—” I began, then shut my mouth. I didn’t know what to say. I thought I had done a good thing by telling Abigail off, and I wished that Mrs Parasuram hadn’t interrupted our conversation so I could call her all the names I wanted. I knew it wasn’t the right thing to do, but who really cared? She needed to be taught a lesson.

  “But nothing, Parveen. You can’t change the way people think, but you can prevent yourself from being bothered by their stupidity. Is that clear?”

  I nodded vigorously, my eyes fixed on the clock. “Yes,” I said, but it was not clear. I thought she was plain wrong, and I could have told her so, but then I’d have to listen to another lecture and my recess would go down the drain. Mrs Parasuram told me to conduct myself like a lady, then dismissed me. I walked slowly out of the classroom with my head hung low to show my remorse, then broke into a run as soon as I turned the corner.

  Mrs Parasuram’s words echoed in my mind for the rest of the day. There are far worse things… If I’d had the guts to challenge her, I would have requested a list of all the things that were worse than being called a Mungalee, a dirty Indian who used too much coconut oil, or a Blackie. To me, there was nothing worse.

  • • •

  “Don’t rub your eyes! Drink some water,” Ma said. She was chopping onions and they made my eyes sting. I opened the fridge door and searched the side racks for the old two-litre Coke bottle we used as a water pitcher. The shelves were full again. Eggs and jam bottles rattled as the door swung. The vegetable drawer overflowed with leaves and fat stalks.

  “I’m making fried rice,” she said. “With prawns, peas and carrots. Could you pass me a chilli?”

  “Red or green?”

  “Red. Always red with this kind of rice,” she said. I opened the vegetable drawer and pulled out a package wrapped in newspaper and bound tightly with rubber bands. There were three more newspaper packages, all containing various spices bought from the market and it was a lucky guess that I had got it right. Ma split the chilli with her fingernail, scooped out most of the seeds and pushed them aside, which meant that she wanted the chilli for flavour, not to challenge us. If she kept all of the seeds in, she was trying to see how much we could take.

  “What time is Daddy coming home?” I asked. Ma’s back was turned to me. When she was cooking, there was always a delay before she replied because her mind was so focused on adding the right ingredients at the right time. Any distractions she had while cooking surfaced once the meal was already cooked. Mushy potatoes; soggy spinach leaves; dry, chewy chicken.

  “He will be back in the evening,” Ma said. “How was school?”

  “Okay.”

  “Just okay? What did you do?”

  “Nothing.”

  Sesame oil bubbled in a pan on the stove. Ma pushed the onions off her chopping board and into the pan. They sizzled. Drinking the water made my eyes hurt a bit less, but they were still teary.

  “Nothing? Just nothing?” Ma said.

  “It was the first day! We really didn’t do much. We went through the school rules about uniforms, socks and hair,” I said. I touched my ponytail. Ma had sent me to the hairdresser two days ago. She said my hair was too unruly to be kept long. I agreed with her. God would have to understand. He didn’t have much say these days anyway. A few days after Nani-ji’s funeral, I woke up to find Ma dragging a chair to the wall where God sat. He gripped the edges of the frame and ducked his head into his shoulders as she pulled him off the wall and placed him back in the storeroom. A square of paint in a paler shade remained on the wall where the portrait had been.

  Ma stirred the onions, spreading them across the pan so they didn’t clump together. There was time for her to turn around briefly. “Okay, then what is your new teacher’s name?”

  “Mrs Parasuram.”

  “Indian?”

  “Yes.”

  “Young or old?”

  “Old. Like maybe not a grandmother but still old.”

  “Is she nice?”

  “She’s okay.”

  Ma turned around and began making slits in the sides of the prawns. They were silver and curled with long whiskers. She removed the whiskers, then pulled out a thin black string from each prawn. “That’s the waste,” she informed me.

  “That’s yucky,” I told her.

  Ma threw the prawns into the pan and turned around again. “It’s rude to call food yucky, do you know that?”

  “Why?” I thought of all of the times we saw signs at the hawker centre with pictures of fried chicken feet and fish head curry. They didn’t look very appetising, and there wasn’t anything wrong in saying so. I was just being honest.

  “It’s like you’re saying that you don’t appreciate that you have food to eat every day.”

  After God had been put away, the meals in our flat began to explain Ma’s emotions again. Tofu stir-fried in oyster sauce for contentment; crisp deep-fried brinjal slices with fish curry to stifle her anger; glass noodles with shredded cabbage and carrot soup for sadness.

  I slipped off the kitchen stool and went to my room to start on my homework. When I passed the storeroom, I walked as close to the opposite wall as possible. God was probably furious about being imprisoned there. If I listened closely at night, I thought I heard a faint knocking sound coming from the storeroom, coaxing me to open the door and help Him back onto the wall again.

  At Chapel that morning, Mrs D’Cruz had spoken about learning to love God and trust in His word. She told us that we should treat our friends and family with the same respect and trust that we treated God. I thought about God sitting in the depths of our storeroom and I liked the idea of putting all of the people I didn’t like in there as well. Fat Auntie would be the first, then Bus Uncle. Abigail would join them as well. I would send Mama-ji there just because Ma didn’t like him.

  • • •

  We missed English the next day and the day after because it was the beginning of the year and Mrs Parasuram told us she had a lot of administrative work to handle. She collected fees, checked our uniforms and went through the school rules while we sat in our seats, bored sti
ff. I kept the book of tickets Daddy had drawn on and flipped through it during the lessons. Sometimes I gave Kristen advice. “In this school, you have to stand up when the teacher asks you to give an answer. And remember to wear your belt all the time or you will look like a pregnant girl.”

  In the corner of the tuck shop, Kristen slowly unwrapped a sandwich. “She moved here from another country,” Farizah said.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “She rides my school bus in the morning and I heard her mother talking to the driver.” We both stared at Kristen, who didn’t seem to have a clue that we were talking about her. “Where did she come from?” I asked. Farizah shrugged.

  I reported this to the girls on my school bus who were also intrigued with Kristen, even the ones who weren’t in my class. “She came from another country,” I told them.

  “How do you know? She doesn’t talk to anyone,” a girl said. Some of the others cast irritated looks in her direction for being so sceptical.

  “I sit next to her,” I said proudly. “So I know.” The truth was, Kristen had not said a single thing to me. It seemed that she deliberately kept her lips tightly pursed. She never had any questions and only offered a small smile and mouthed “okay” or “thank you” when I gave her tips on what to do.

  There was a new Bus Auntie in charge and we all listened to her because she smiled and helped us onto the bus with the pull of her strong arm. She never allowed the bus driver to move off until she saw that we were safely in our void decks when we were dropped off. She told us to call her Auntie Honey even though the name on the fees notice said “Lau Siew Hock”. Honey was her Christian name, she informed us. She wore a big jade cross around her neck and hummed under her breath. We could make as much noise as we wanted, but that was also a very Primary Four thing to do. The previous year, the Primary Five girls had sat closer to the front of the bus and talked about their favourite American pop stars and film actors, and snickered meanly about the girls they didn’t like. We did the same, making sure to hide our pick-up-sticks deep down in our bags so nobody could see that we would still play games if we were allowed to.

  • • •

  Kristen finally spoke up on the day that Mrs Parasuram handed back our first compositions for the year. Mine came back with a few red marks, but there was also a comment written at the bottom: “Parveen, good grammar and spelling. Your handwriting is good as well. But in the future, please write the truth.” My face burned. We had been instructed to write about our school holidays and I had written about going skiing in Los Angeles. It wasn’t true, but it was far more exciting than my holidays had actually been.

  “She knows because it’s always warm in Los Angeles. You can’t go skiing there,” Kristen said. I thought she might be making fun of me but there was a kind note to her voice. She must have peered at my paper when I was looking at it. “Have you ever been there?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “Have you?”

  “Yeah. I lived in Chicago for two years,” she said.

  “What was it like?”

  “It was nice, but much colder than it is here,” she said. “I didn’t really get much of a vacation though, because we were preparing to move back here.” As her voice got louder, the girls sitting around us turned back to look and whispered. She could speak! Kristen noticed and blushed. She took an eraser from her pink pencil box and began to play with it.

  “I’ve never been out of Singapore. Except to Johor Bahru. And Kuala Lumpur, but I was very young,” I confessed. Everybody knew that Malaysia didn’t count. To really leave the country, you had to fly.

  “What did you do over the holidays then?”

  “Nothing. We couldn’t have fun because my grandmother died.”

  “Oh,” Kristen said. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. The others were turning back to look at us. From the front, Farizah cast me a curious look. I sent one back, which meant that I promised to tell her everything during recess. Then it occurred to me that Kristen would be sitting alone again. “You can sit with us for recess if you want,” I said. I was nonchalant in case she said no.

  Kristen beamed. “Okay,” she said. Mrs Parasuram tapped on her desk with her ruler. “Girls, stop talking,” she said sternly. I rolled my eyes at Kristen once Mrs Parasuram’s back was turned towards us again. She covered her mouth with her hands to stifle a giggle.

  Farizah ended up having to stay back during recess to do make-up work because she had been absent the day before. I hardly noticed she wasn’t there as I talked to Kristen, who was suddenly very chatty. She told me more about herself. “I lived in America for two years. My father’s company decided to transfer him back here. I was born in Singapore.” She had a slight accent so I could hear the letter R in her words.

  “Do you miss your friends?” I asked her.

  Kristen nodded. “My parents told me I’d make new ones,” she said nervously. I gave her my warmest smile and she returned it.

  “Which school did you go to here before you moved to America?” I asked her.

  “St Mary’s, the one in Bukit Timah. But my mother went to this school so she wanted me to come here too,” Kristen said. Of course Kristen was not a Bursary Girl. She was one of the girls whose mothers had gone to First Christian. She lived in Bukit Timah, probably on landed property. It didn’t matter—it never mattered to me with the other girls, but for some reason Kristen was the kind of person that I wanted to impress.

  “It’s a good school,” I told Kristen. And then I told a lie. “My mother was a student here too.”

  “Cool,” Kristen said. “Maybe they knew each other.” But thankfully, she did not ask when Ma had gone to First Christian and I quickly changed the subject. For a moment, I wanted to tell Kristen that what I had said wasn’t true. But as she continued with her stories about America, her friends and her new house here in Singapore, I kept my mouth shut.

  • • •

  I watched the shadows of neighbours bobbing past my window. The family next door had visitors who all left in a group, a cluster of heads and arms floating past. The ceiling fan swirled above me, stirring a breeze through the room that usually soothed me to sleep. Tonight, the air was too still and no matter how fast the fan was spinning, I could not sleep. The door of the flat opened and I heard Daddy leaving for his night shift. His was a tall shadow with broad shoulders. “Bye bye!” I called into the window.

  “Go to sleep, Pin,” he said. He tapped his goodnight on the window and continued down the corridor. I watched for shadows, but there were fewer as it got later. The night was suddenly very quiet. I lay back in my bed and shut my eyes to force myself to get tired. My mind began to wander instead, making me feel more awake. Over the week, I had sat with Kristen at the tuck shop every day during recess. The other girls were welcome to join us, but I secretly preferred that they didn’t. They stayed at their own tables and watched us, occasionally whispering when they thought I didn’t notice.

  It was only on the school bus that the other girls crowded around me to ask questions about Kristen. “She knows how to roller blade. She has an older brother,” I announced. Abigail rolled her eyes and pretended not to listen. I knew it bothered her that Kristen sat with me for recess. When Auntie Honey told us to sit down, we hurried back to our seats and two girls I didn’t know very well pushed to sit with me.

  At home, the floor tiles were cold against my bare feet as I walked into the kitchen to get a glass of water. The next day was Saturday—homework day. Mrs Parasuram gave us homework for everything, even art, and she made us write out our spelling corrections ten times instead of five like the other teachers did. When we complained softly amongst ourselves, she paid no attention but we hoped that she heard. Today, she had given us a lecture on how we needed to start bucking up because the PSLE was next year and preparation started now. “I expect this class to excel in everything, even the subjects that you don’t think matter. Being a good student isn’t just about g
etting good marks for your graded subjects,” she said, her eyes surveying the room. I looked away. I knew she was addressing the whole class, but I had a feeling she was specifically talking to me. Miss Yoon must have shown her my disappointing art folio from last year.

  I was walking back to my room when I noticed a shadow that I could not recognise. I stood in the hallway of the flat waiting for the neighbour to return to his or her own flat so I could figure out who it was. “Go on,” I whispered. But the shadow remained, hanging like a fog outside our window. I gave the storeroom a furtive glance, wishing that God could be out there to protect me. I ran back to my room and leapt into bed, yanking the curtains across the window so the shadow couldn’t look into my room. Seeing the shadow outside kept me even more awake than I had been before and I didn’t drift off to sleep until early morning light began to seep into the room, making all shadows seem like something out of my imagination.

  Ma left early for the market the next morning. “I’m only picking up a few things so I don’t need you to come with me, Pin. We have enough in the fridge to last for the whole week. I just need to buy more chicken,” she said as she closed the door behind her. Just to make sure she was telling the truth, I went into the kitchen to check our fridge. It was nice to see that we did in fact have a lot of food.

  I saw Daddy sitting in the living room reading the newspaper and I asked him if he believed in ghosts. I sat myself down on the arm of his chair and held on to his shoulders to keep myself from slipping off.

  “May I ask why you’re so interested all of a sudden in ghosts?”

  I kept quiet for a moment to think of what to say. It seemed silly to tell him the truth—that the shadow in the window was Nani-ji’s ghost, especially since I’d seen it once before she died. But I had heard of near-death experiences, when a person’s spirit left their body and lingered to watch. Farizah swore that the spirit of her great-uncle still came back to his old house to sit in his old chair and read the newspaper. “You can see the chair rocking slowly at night and it feels cold just where he would be sitting.” It seemed like something Nani-ji would do, peering through our windows into our flat.