Impractical Uses of Cake

by Yeoh Jo-Ann

  Natalie looks up briefly from her drawing and smiles.

  The only door to the meeting room is all the way at the other end of the room from Sukhin. There is no way of leaving without anyone noticing.

  Mr Leong, the vice-principal, looks at his watch and then at Sukhin. Notebook open, pen in hand—but Sukhin can see he hasn’t actually made any notes. “Any change to the syllabus?”

  “No.”

  “Any change to the coursework?”

  “No.”

  “Applying for any teaching aids or tools?”

  “No.”

  “Applying for any Ministry grants?”

  “No.”

  “Field trip?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Next—Maths.”

  Sukhin suppresses a sigh and reaches out for a curry puff from a box in the middle of the table. It’s delicious—flaky, crisp pastry around a centre of curried potato yumminess. The curry puffs, specially ordered from a shop in Holland Village, are his sole source of comfort during these ridiculous sessions. How much longer will this one last? It is nearly four—and he is desperate for a drink.

  Dennis is bored and boring. He speaks to the bit of table in front of him. He doesn’t use a single adjective in his brief rundown of the Mathematics department’s plans for the year. He uses the word “Mathematics” in every sentence. He summarises at the end: “We plan for this plan to be the plan for the year.”

  Sukhin eats another curry puff.

  Finally, a drink. A cold pint at a bar just a five-minute dash from school. And dash they did, leather soles clip-clopping against the pavement. The bar is still empty—the only good thing about being a teacher is being able to start drinking before five.

  “I thought I would die in there. Is it always so bad?”

  “Always.”

  “How was I?”

  “Perfectly awful. Planning for the plan? Wow.”

  “I almost called him sweetie at the start, you know.”

  “Pah.”

  “Don’t get jealous—I’m just being honest.”

  “Pah.”

  “Sweetie, please. You need to work harder on your vocabulary. You’re an English teacher.”

  “I’ll be back in half an hour.”

  “Take your time—I brought a book.”

  Sukhin and Jinn have settled into a routine—he is stunned by how easily and quickly it happens, but he doesn’t let this stop him from running with it. He goes to see her every other day now. He cycles home after school, makes tea and puts it into the thermos he bought her (he doesn’t like the tea from the temple), then drives to Chinatown. They talk for a bit—mostly it is him talking about his day—and then he waits in her house of boxes while she goes off to take a shower at a yoga studio nearby, where the door to the fire escape opens from the outside.

  “Not very smart,” he says when she tells him. “So anyone can get in?”

  “People don’t think anyone would sneak into a yoga studio. Not in Singapore.” A smirk. “Nobody ever notices me.”

  “Well, you’re not the archetypal bum.”

  She doesn’t look the part. Or does she? Sukhin doesn’t know any more— she’s the only homeless person he’s ever known. Nothing about her—not her uniform of track pants and T-shirts, not her thin, bare face, not the vague, uneven haircut—makes any sort of statement about her homelessness. No one passing her on the street would think, that woman definitely lives in an alley under a pile of boxes. Someone like Dennis might say something snide about the hair or the track pants, but that was the end of it. Oh sweetie, make an effort—sportswear doesn’t have to be ugly.

  He has to try very hard not to look around while she’s away. He wants to know, so badly, what has led to…all of this, and maybe the answer is somewhere in the trolley suitcase, or in the small stack of books next to it, or under the mat. She doesn’t have a phone—or he would have been tempted to check that as well. This disturbs Sukhin—he never thought of himself as the snooping sort; before this he’s never felt any sort of compulsion to look at, let alone inspect, anyone else’s stuff. But now he’s desperate with curiosity and surely, surely, there’s a reasonable explanation in here— somewhere—for vagabond Jinn.

  A week ago, he finally summoned enough courage to ask:

  “How long has it been?” No preamble—it was like lifting the filter-trap between his brain and his tongue and just letting whatever was there tumble out.

  Jinn didn’t pretend not to understand—thankfully. He wouldn’t have been able to repeat the question—or worse, rephrase it. The vagrant life— how long have you enjoyed it? Or: When was the last time you experienced the security of permanent shelter?

  “Five years, eleven months, nineteen days.” She didn’t have to think about it. And offered no elaboration.

  He didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but he wasn’t prepared for this. Almost six years. He couldn’t say a word, but he quickly anchored this new piece of information with his own markers. While he fished for a week in Sabah last year; when he was made Head of Department the year before; three years ago, while his parents were scurrying around behind his back trying to marry him off; when he broke his ankle four years ago falling from a stepladder while changing the lightbulb in the bathroom—she was living like this. What was he doing five years, eleven months and nineteen days ago? Probably marking essays. Raging at essays. Reading. Drinking tea. While she—sized up alleyways. Gathered boxes. Folded up her life and chucked it into a suitcase to make it easier to carry around.

  “What are you reading?”

  She’s back and he looks up from the book he isn’t reading. Her newly washed hair is fluffy, practically standing on end, and reeks of the strong lemony smell of the yoga studio’s choice of cheap shampoo. She’s changed into a different T-shirt. He hasn’t asked her how she manages her laundry, but he suspects she washes her things while showering and hangs them to dry in the car park nearby—it’s what he’d do.

  She takes the book, looks at the cover and hands it back. There’s a grin on her face. “Greene? The Heart of the Matter? You poseur.”

  He laughs, and it’s mostly relief. Every time he meets her, all he wants is one more sign that she is who she is, that she isn’t deranged, that she knows what she’s doing, even if he doesn’t, that he’s not somehow turning into an accomplice of some heinous plot to end the world through a zombie apocalypse that for some twisted reason begins with the clone of his ex-girlfriend.

  She packs her things into the trolley suitcase—Russian-doll style, cup into bowl into hood of windbreaker, thermos into hollow of rolled-up mat— and they go for a walk. This, too, is part of their new routine: a man, a woman and a large suitcase, zigzagging through alleyways, slipping out onto the main street, making their way past shops and people and street vendors. Waiting for the lights to change. Crossing the road. They find the small, nondescript path in the middle of a row of shophouses that leads to Duxton Plain Park and down it they go: the man, the woman, the large suitcase.

  Whoever called this area a park was either wildly ambitious or delusional—Sukhin wonders why anyone even felt the need to name it. It isn’t much more than a paved path under the cover of trees on both sides— but maybe it exceeded the quota of trees for a pathway, or failed to obey a government-designated tree-to-pavement ratio, and had to be called a park or be destroyed? But park or not, here, parallel to the chaos of the main roads, it is suddenly and surprisingly quiet. Jinn has a favourite bench—this is where she reads when she’s by herself, and where they both read when Sukhin is with her.

  He wants to know what else he can bring her—books, food, tools? More combed cotton underwear?

  She looks up from her own book, frowning. “The Koh-i-noor.”

  He brings her peaches.

  Three weeks later, Kevin Seah sits down in a frigid lecture theatre for his very first English Literature common test and refrains from using the word “morosity” in his essay on Hamlet.
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br />   Sukhin reads the essay the next day, in Jinn’s cardboard hut. He shows it to her. “Morosity boy.”

  She reads the first couple of paragraphs out loud. “Very earnest. Rather like my old Lit essays, don’t you think?”

  Kevin gets a B—the highest grade he will ever receive from Mr Dhillon, who makes up his mind never to mark scripts around the woman and her boxes again. Clearly, they combine to weaken his intellect.

  The woman sips her tea at the balcony, wondering if death will somehow change her. For a long time, it was all she looked forward to.

  So far, nothing. She wakes up feeling the same; she goes to sleep feeling the same. There is nothing light or giddy about being dead. She’s a little surprised. She expected a lift of sorts, some change in emotional weight or substance. An unbearable lightness of being? She smiles. Well, perhaps. She liked that novel.

  She stands up and looks out into the neighbourhood. It is the same. Lazy, silent and still in the late afternoon except for the wind in the trees. A little later, the piano lessons will begin and the quiet will be punctuated by the practice drills of reluctant children repeatedly gnawing off little chunks of classical pieces. Still later, buses will draw up, bringing home the tired, listless horde, all aching for home. Some are brisk, others steady and sedate.

  The woman sits at the balcony for hours, watching. The people all go past; no one sees her watching.

  The world seems completely unmoved by her death.

  VI

  IT REALLY WASN’T Seethal’s fault. She was okay—she didn’t talk too much, she wasn’t stupid, and she actually seemed to think that being a teacher was a fine thing.

  They met at his cousin Gurmit’s sangeet. She was the awkward woman hanging around the dessert table, stacking jelebi on a plate in various formations and trying not to make conversation with anyone. He was the awkward man hanging around the tea dispenser, drinking much-too-sweet tea and trying not to make conversation with anyone. The dessert table was next to the tea dispenser, and at some point, a nosy aunt (hers) introduced them. They talked about tea, then jelebi, and across the room, one and a half sets of Punjabi parents looked at each other and smiled. It would have made a nice anecdote if he had married her (met at a wedding, bonded over tea and jelebi, literally a sweet story)—but that would have been the only reason, and Sukhin was well past the age of doing things for the sake of an anecdote.

  By the end of the evening, Sukhin’s parents knew how old Seethal was (twenty-seven—perfect), what she did for a living (something to do with insurance pricing—sounded okay), whether she had a boyfriend (no—very good), what her parents did for their living (dentist—good; stay-at-home mum—very good), and whether she had been engaged before (no—very good). And Seethal’s parents knew all of that about Sukhin, with bonus points going to them for finding out that he had just been made Deputy Head of Department, that he had bought his own place, and that he’d worn braces as a teenager. Numbers were exchanged—not Sukhin’s or Seethal’s, but their mothers’—through another nosy aunt (Sukhin’s—the bride’s mother, another plus for the anecdote).

  By the time they got home, Sukhin’s parents were discussing when the wedding might be (August would be nice—not too warm or rainy—but not National Day weekend), who they would invite (not Uncle Milan, who got drunk at Gurmit’s sangeet), and whether the children would be tall (Seethal couldn’t be more than 1.6 metres).

  By the time Sukhin got home, he was unbearably bloated, wondering why he drank all that sugary tea. He went to bed annoyed with himself, and woke up with only the barest recollection of the evening.

  “Call her.” The number was written on a memo sheet from his father’s clinic. This was a week after Gurmit’s wedding dinner, during which he’d muttered hello to Seethal on his way to the gents’, once. One damn hello.

  Sukhin wasn’t half-Punjabi for nothing—he knew the significance of a woman’s number thrust at a son along with those two ominous words. He folded up the sheet and put it into his pocket, knowing that if he didn’t, he would spend the next couple of hours enduring his mother sighing about never having grandchildren.

  A week went by. He didn’t call; he didn’t intend to.

  “She might call you, Sukhin,” said his father. “I think it’s okay, yes? Modern times now—who says boys must call girls? I told her mother you’re always busy; she says she’ll give your number to Seethal, and then you two can do the WhatsApp. Easy!” He had evidently taken over as the household negotiator of this dark business.

  The three of them were having dinner at his parents’ house. They looked sly and pleased with themselves. Sukhin wanted to change his name and never speak to them again. Do the WhatsApp, indeed.

  Three days later, Seethal texted.

  Hi Sukhin, how r u? This is Seethal.

  A woman who couldn’t type “are” and “you” in full—how could he possibly marry that? Inconceivable. But he replied—no point being rude; she had probably been goaded into this by her parents and he could certainly empathise. Weeks went by. Her texts grew longer and friendlier; his didn’t.

  “It’s okay to meet her,” his mother said one day, apropos of nothing— she had been talking about whether it was worth getting a bread-making machine. “Go ahead and take her out to dinner.”

  He did—partly to shut everyone up, partly because he wondered if he should make a greater effort to just get on with it. He and Jinn were finished. It had been years. He should at least see what—well, who—was out there. It wasn’t as though he was holding out for her return—he knew her well enough to know there would be no return. For all he knew, she was probably married to some smug lawyer or banker, or even worse, a rich hipster.

  She didn’t know what she wanted, she’d told him, but it wasn’t this. They were at a cinema, mulling over the movie selection. He didn’t particularly feel like seeing anything and he’d been quieter than usual all evening—it had been a long week, and he had an essay due. It was his first term at the National Institute of Education and he hated it. The coursework was dull, the other trainee teachers were vapid, the twice-daily two-hour commute was exhausting—who knew that sitting in a moving train could be so debilitating?

  He’d heard various versions of her refusal of an unnamed “this” over the last few months. There must be more than this. This is all so ridiculous. I deserve better than this. Sukhin hadn’t thought much of it. Her love-hate relationship with her job was making her moody, he’d decided. She seemed to constantly vacillate between derision and outright envy, and that had to be tiring.

  Jinn had spent the previous year and a bit working at an events company owned by one of her mother’s friends, a company that existed solely to plan parties for very bored, very rich people. For a child’s fifth birthday, she supervised the filling of two swimming pools with gummy bears. For a bunch of eighteen-year-olds, she organised a burlesque cabaret on a private jet. Recently, for an anniversary party, she arranged for thirty crates of the vintage from the year the couple got married to be flown in from the vineyard in Burgundy where they first met.

  He pretended not to understand. “We don’t have to see a movie.”

  She blew up. It wasn’t the rant-rage-repeat of her usual outbursts—he was accustomed to her tendency to fly into dramatic fits of temper, but this time she had just gone quiet. Her eyes flashed, her lips moved, a muscle in her cheek twitched, but she didn’t make a sound. He couldn’t find anything to say, nothing that could cut the tension without sounding like a platitude, and their silence amplified the chatter of the crowd around them, turning the debate over some cheesy thriller, the giggling over Ryan Gosling, all the general indecision and inanity of the cineplex lobby, all the peopleness of people, into a sea of grating, vibrating tension.

  “I don’t want to do this any more.” Softly, just above a whisper.

  He refused to ask her what she meant, but he could tell he had become part of this.

  She walked away. He didn’t walk after her.
When he called the next day, she cancelled the call. He didn’t call back.

  Three weeks later, a box arrived at the house. Neatly taped up, SUKHIN on one side in black marker. He didn’t open it. When he moved out and into his own place five years later, he left the box behind in his parents’ house, under the coffee table, where the Really Nice Boxes sat.

  Dinner with Seethal wasn’t terrible. She was polite; he was polite. He listened with interest about reinsurance; she said that teachers were under-appreciated and that it was a shame. But it wasn’t good. She didn’t like poetry; he didn’t like pottery. She read self-help books; he wasn’t friends with anyone who did. She didn’t understand why he wouldn’t consider vegetarianism; he balked when she ordered an organic soy latte instead of cake for dessert.

  “I don’t like cake,” she said when he offered her a bit of lemon sponge.

  “You don’t like cake?” Sukhin didn’t like how incredulous he sounded. While he wasn’t at all out to impress her, he didn’t want to come off sounding—of all things!—like some sort of weirdo who judged people on their dessert preferences. Even if he was. And what exactly was wrong with cake? This unspoken question hung in the air for a few minutes— for Sukhin. He finished the slice of lemon sponge, frowning, his thoughts jumping from cake as dessert to cake as a kind of connective tissue between people. His people, anyway—obviously, there were people out there who didn’t see the point of cake, who didn’t see and therefore could never enter the community of cake, and who would never be his people.

  Seethal, to whom his shift in attitude and attention was immediately noticeable, tried to explain. “I’m not really a dessert sort of person,” she offered, forgetting all about tea and jelebi and the half-baked jokes she’d made.

  Sukhin hadn’t. He pounced on this jarring logical gap. “But all those jelebis at Gurmit’s wedding…”