Sugarbread

by Balli Kaur Jaswal

  “Sorry,” I mumbled.

  Mrs Parasuram did not look satisfied. “Why are you here?”

  “I…I don’t know,” I stammered. I couldn’t think of an excuse that would suit Mrs Parasuram.

  “I’m disappointed in you, Pin. Most girls run away from trouble, but you seem to like running into it. I’m going to be watching you closely from now on. You’re on very thin ice. I hope you know what that means.” She punctuated her sentence with a sharp click of her tongue. “Now put on your shoes and return to class.”

  My whole body felt like lead as I walked back to class. Kristen was chatting with Abigail Goh when I got to my desk. “Did you read my note?” I asked her, noticing that it was gone.

  “Yes,” Kristen said icily. “It’s just as well. You’re no longer invited anyway.”

  I was confused. Just yesterday, Kristen and I were leafing through each other’s autograph books. I had written my signature phrase: “Drink hot coffee, drink hot tea. Burn your lips and remember me!”

  I heard a snort and I saw Abigail covering her mouth to stifle her laughter. “You and Farizah are uninvited. No fanatics allowed,” she said. She looked pointedly at my kara.

  “I have to wear this. It’s for my religion. I’m Sikh,” I told her, just as I had tirelessly told the prefects, the teachers and the girls on the school bus who had asked. “I’m not a fanatic.” I didn’t realise how loud my voice was until I noticed a hush fall over the room. Abigail Goh raised an eyebrow.

  “Sikhs are disgusting,” she informed Kristen. “The men have beards and they wear these funny-looking turbans. They only wash their hair once a week.” She wrinkled her nose.

  I felt my face grow hot. I couldn’t breathe. Everybody in the class was waiting for me to say something. Some girls moved away quietly from the table, distancing themselves from Abigail’s mean words. Others stepped in quickly to fill the spaces, observing the expression on my face. I wanted to reach across the table and hit Abigail so hard she wouldn’t remember what she had said to me.

  Mrs Parasuram breezed back into the room carrying a teetering pile of workbooks. Everybody scattered back to their seats but I remained standing, glaring at Abigail. She looked back at me and I noticed she was getting nervous. She wanted me to say something back to her but I didn’t.

  “What’s going on over there?” Mrs Parasuram called. “Parveen, please sit down.”

  Her voice brought back the memory of what she’d said to me the first time I had snapped at Abigail: There are worse things. I could hear Mrs Parasuram making her way down the aisle. “Parveen, what did I just ask you to do?” She sounded exasperated. I didn’t turn around to face her. I still kept staring at Abigail. All of a sudden, I felt very sorry for her. She did not have any real friends. The girls who surrounded her were terrified by her and everybody else secretly hated her. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than being Abigail. I told her so. I said it softly, then I said it again for Mrs Parasuram’s benefit. “There is nothing worse than being Abigail Goh.” Abigail kept her face blank but she twitched nervously in her seat.

  Mrs Parasuram cleared her throat. I turned around and sat down in my seat. I thought I’d be asked to stay after class again since I was already in trouble for going to the chapel but Mrs Parasuram didn’t say anything. She walked back to the front of the room and continued with the lesson. I tried to do my best to concentrate during the lesson, and didn’t drift off and start daydreaming like I did sometimes during science. I raised my hand and answered two questions correctly. When the bell rang for recess and everybody filed out, I glanced at Mrs Parasuram and noticed she was smiling to herself. I realised that it was the first time I’d ever seen her smile.

  Mrs Parasuram nodded in the direction of a cluster of girls. I turned around to see Abigail’s usual group of followers. As Abigail walked out, they trailed after her, giggling and whispering. I was a little disappointed. I had somehow thought that they would agree with me and finally see what kind of person Abigail was. At the very least Kristen would hang back and say she was sorry. But the only person waiting in the doorway was Farizah. I felt guilty all of a sudden, remembering how I’d laughed along with Kristen when she had made fun of Farizah. If Farizah had been in my place, she would never have done the same thing.

  I turned back to Mrs Parasuram and opened my mouth to give her an explanation for what had happened between Abigail and myself, but she spoke before I did.

  “You did well today, Parveen,” she told me. At first I thought she was referring to the science lesson, but then I noticed she was still looking at the girls as they turned the corner. “You did very well.”

  12

  FARIZAH ONCE TOLD me never to look directly at visiting spirits because if you saw their faces, they would haunt you forever. She said that they brought attractive gifts like coconut jam and cashew nut cookies to lure their victims, but the food was filled with poison. Her house had been visited by many spirits when she was young because the old man who had lived there before her family did was unwilling to leave. He apparently used to hold prayers and send spirits over to Farizah’s house in the middle of the night.

  A few weeks later, I saw the shadow outside our flat again and this was what got me thinking about the spirits that visited Farizah’s house. It stayed still between the potted plants, as if it wanted to blend in. I rose from my bed and squinted, trying to figure out who or what it was. I wasn’t sure if this was a visiting spirit because, according to Farizah, spirits floated and brought coldness into the air around them. This shadow stood firm in the corridor until I reached for the ruler on my desk and banged it against the window railings.

  The shadow scampered but I still couldn’t get a glimpse of who it was. I ran to the door but by the time I had unlatched it, the corridor was clear except for the plants that had been knocked over. Loose soil was scattered all over the ground. I waited outside for a while but then the fluorescent lights flickered a bit and I started getting nervous. When I walked back into the flat, Ma was coming out of her room.

  “What happened?” Ma asked. She rubbed her eyes sleepily.

  “Somebody was outside.”

  “You were dreaming, Pin,” Ma said. “You used to sleepwalk when you were younger.” She turned to go back into her room.

  I went to sleep and I dreamt of the shadow figure stepping slowly towards my window. I still couldn’t identify the face of the person walking down the corridor but I noticed how the feet gave loud, insistent knocks against the ground. They were so close to my ear that I could feel the floor vibrating slightly under me. The window grilles rattled. I strained my neck to see the person’s face, then I heard Farizah’s voice warning me not to make eye contact. “Don’t look,” she whispered, terrified. I was not scared. I was curious. “Hello?” I called out as if making friends with a stray cat. “Hello?”

  • • •

  Kristen tried to talk to me a few times over the next week, but only when she thought Abigail wasn’t looking. On a pink scented piece of notebook paper, she wrote, “Are you mad at me? I still want to be your friend.” She had dotted all of the I’s with hearts. I had heard from girls on the school bus that hardly anybody had shown up in the red cheongsams she had ordered everyone to wear. Only Abigail and Pui Fen had worn what Kristen wanted. She spent most of the time at the party whining that her birthday picture would look ugly and most of the girls ended up calling home to ask their parents to pick them up early.

  Ma was cooking when I got home from school. The metallic smell of fish stung the air. I made a face even though Ma didn’t see it. We hadn’t had fried fish in a long time. The taste and the prickling of tiny bones were bad enough, but fish had its own meaning in Ma’s world. It was a punishment—not a punishment for me, but Ma’s punishment for everything else. The stench of fish; the clumps of blood; the glassy eyes—they were all signs of Ma’s frustration. Fish awakened our flat. It made us sit up straight and think about our actions.

  “What ha
ppened?” I asked Ma.

  Ma bit her lower lip for a long time before she spoke. “The more I think about your Fat Auntie and what she did, the angrier I become. At first I was sad. Now I’m just furious. I called her the other day, to try to reason with her. She had the nerve to call me a liar. She said I should be ashamed of myself, making up tales. And then she said that my mother’s intentions had always been to give her the jewellery.”

  I could hear the words as they came out of Fat Auntie’s mouth. I could see her spitting into the phone. The smell of fish blood filled my nostrils and when I tasted it, I suddenly knew how Ma could cook according to her emotions. The taste of fish was the taste of hatred, pure and simple. I could not connect it to anything else. This was how it must have started; this was the only way Ma knew how to speak to the world. When she said anything else, nobody listened. Her stories and her feelings and her intentions had to be conveyed through spices and recipes, sauces, oils and meats.

  Ma turned on the stove and poured vegetable oil into a deep frying pan. She shook her head as if to shake the thought out of her mind. “I’m so damn angry, Pin,” she said. “I don’t know what to do.”

  I knew what to do. It occurred to me as I was standing in the kitchen and for a moment, I was too numb to move. I knew exactly what to do. I went to the storeroom and opened the door. Clouds of dust rose to greet me and entered my lungs. I stepped past an old toolbox and knelt between my four-wheel bicycle and a pile of sand buckets. There was God, sitting in the corner, still as tall and proud as He was the first day Ma had propped him up on our living room wall. I lifted Him up and brought Him out to the kitchen.

  “I think you should put this back on our wall,” I told Ma.

  The look on Ma’s face changed from anger to surprise to bewilderment. “And why on earth would I do that, Pin? After all the trouble He’s put me through?”

  I really didn’t know why I wanted him back on the wall until I remembered His arrival with Nani-ji. Whether she believed Ma or not, Nani-ji would have wanted God sitting on our living room wall. And Fat Auntie could take Ma’s jewellery and call Ma a liar, but we could honour and respect Nani-ji. I recalled something Mrs D’Cruz had said about forgiveness one day during morning devotions. She said it was important to forgive others for their mistakes because we, too, yearned for forgiveness. Nani-ji had had a hard life and she was gone now. It was time to show her we had no hard feelings. I also hoped that Fat Auntie would come to our flat one day so I could point to the wall and show her that we respected Nani-ji more than she did. But it didn’t matter now if she never believed Ma. We were learning to give in even when we knew we weren’t wrong. Fat Auntie never would.

  As I explained to Ma, I found myself getting flustered. I thought she would laugh at me. But Ma stared at me intently as I spoke. I told her about Abigail Goh, Mrs Parasuram and Bus Uncle, and even how I’d gone to the chapel twice to speak to a different God. I told her about Roadside, and how I had nearly drowned in the canal the day Nani-ji had died. I told her about how I had liked eating sugarbread at first, but then I gradually began to dread the evenings when it was all I had for dinner. I didn’t plan on telling Ma everything but once I started, I couldn’t stop talking.

  Ma threw her arms around me and drew me close to her. I could smell the damp market vegetables on her clothes. “Oh, Pin,” she cried. “I don’t have to worry about you at all, do I?”

  She cooked afterwards and served the fried fish with rice, cabbage and roasted nuts mixed with sambal. The sour, metal taste was gone, replaced by something sweeter. It filled my mouth and warmed my throat going down. It was a new taste and there was no way to describe it, but I knew what it meant: Ma and I had no more secrets between us. We knew everything we needed to know.

  • • •

  A few days passed before I saw the shadow again. The next time it appeared, I was prepared. I pushed aside the blinds and threw open the windows quickly. The shadow flinched, but stayed. It was Roadside.

  I didn’t have any words, and neither did he. We stared at each other, then finally, he said, “Pin.” His face was bright with relief.

  “Yes,” I said tersely. Immediately, I thought of the canal’s gushing waters, the pressure of the current pulling me further away from home. I thought of Roadside and the boys walking away.

  “Pin, you’re alive,” Roadside said. “I thought maybe…”

  “You thought I died?”

  “After that day at the canal, I didn’t see you again. Then when we came back from our holiday in Malaysia, the neighbour told us there had been visitors to your flat because of a funeral. So I thought…”

  “It was my grandmother,” I said. “She died the same day you left me in the canal.”

  Roadside swallowed. Under the fluorescent lighting in the hallway, his face was covered in ghoulish shadows. “I didn’t want to leave you there,” he said quietly. “But the other boys—”

  “The other boys teased you. You didn’t want to help me because they would say I was your girlfriend,” I said. “You left me to drown.”

  Roadside stared at his feet. “I’m so sorry, Pin,” he said. “I’ve been coming here again and again, to try and apologise, but I was too scared to knock on your door.”

  I pulled the curtains shut and sank back into my bed. At Nani-ji’s funeral, I had stared at her still body and kept my eyes open until they burned with tears. I did the same now, focusing my gaze on the ceiling, but the hot tears came before I could summon them.

  “Pin,” Roadside said. He was closer to the window now. “I still want to be your friend. We don’t have to play with those boys any more. We could become detectives again.” He lingered at the window for a while, then I heard his feet shuffling down the corridor. I closed my eyes. Maybe one day I’d be able to forgive Roadside, but for the moment, the memories of the canal made my lungs ache as if I was underwater again.

  13

  IT WAS JULY again.

  I searched for an empty table while Ma ordered cold drinks from a nearby stall. Men and women swarmed the hawker centre and disappeared into the lanes that led into the wet market. The heat was unbearable that morning; even Ma agreed. A thin sheen of sweat made her cheeks glow.

  “One coconut and one grass jelly,” she called. The stallholder paid no attention and kept his back turned. “Oi,” she snapped. He whirled around. “I said one coconut and one grass jelly.”

  A young Malay couple with two toddlers rose from a nearby table and I rushed to chope it. I had a packet of tissue in my pocket just for reserving hawker centre seats. I took out two pieces, one for Ma and one for myself, and placed them on the table. Oil and water seeped into the tissues, making them stick to the table. Ma walked over with a wobbly tray and sat down with a sigh.

  “You’d better finish that coconut this time. They keep raising the prices,” she said, shaking her head. She cast a glance back at the stallholder, who was watching us through a neatly arranged tower of bottles and cans. Ma narrowed her eyes and the stallholder lowered his head. He suddenly became very engrossed in counting his coins.

  “Why is he looking at us?” I asked Ma, taking the coconut from her. The stallholder had chilled it in ice before slicing off the top and putting the straw in for me to sip the juice. She didn’t have to worry about me not finishing the juice. It was sweet and cool, perfect for such a hot day.

  Ma shrugged. “I told him I wasn’t going to buy from him any more if his drinks got more expensive. I think he was watching to see if I was serious.” The man should have known better. Ma was very serious.

  Ma took a sip from her grass jelly. It was black, with long pieces of jelly drifting like snakes at the bottle of the glass. She offered me some, but I made a face. “What did I tell you about making faces, Pin?” she asked sternly. “It’s rude to make faces at food.”

  “Even at drinks?” I asked, though I knew the answer.

  “Even at drinks. Think of how lucky you are that you have something cool and refre
shing to drink on such a hot day. Think of all the people who struggle even to get a glass of water.” Her eyes suddenly filled with sympathy. She looked back at the stallholder again and her face softened.

  This was my third time following Ma to the market since she had started making regular weekly visits again. For some reason, I expected it to have changed while we were gone. Singapore was like that—it seemed as if every time I blinked, new housing estates had been built, more shopping centres had been opened, and some streets had become so different that they were difficult to recognise. But the market stayed exactly the same, as if it had been frozen under a magic spell. The first time we went back, I was afraid I’d get lost, but I recognised the lanes and the stallholders even better than I had a year ago. Even Ma was impressed. “Pretty soon I’ll be able to send you here to run errands on your own,” she commented, watching me pick through vegetables like an expert. I beamed with pride, imagining myself among the ladies, haggling with the stallholders and haughtily strutting away when I was not pleased with their prices.

  Strong sunlight glinted sharply off the glass windows of a bank building opposite the market, hurting my eyes. Two men hurried past us carrying large straw baskets and shouting at people to clear the path ahead of them. The crowds parted slowly. The men clucked their tongues and swore under their breath. Their baskets were filled to the brim with dragon fruit, a fruit that looked so bizarre I had never tried it. It was round and pink, with green flaps that curled out from the skin. But inside, it looked completely different. I had seen market stallholders selling cut dragon fruit slices. They were white or purple with little black seeds. I asked Ma if she had ever eaten it before.