Sugarbread

by Balli Kaur Jaswal

  The handles of the bags dug into my wrists. The voices of stallholders and customers all melded together to become one loud buzz. I told Ma once again that I was tired. “And thirsty,” I added. We were close to a set of stairs that led to a hawker centre upstairs. The first stall at the top of the steps sold ice-cold sugarcane juice. I was about to suggest a break but I knew the danger of this. It was not good to annoy Ma while she was buying groceries. It clouded her mind and made her forget important items.

  After the tofu was the baby spinach. After that, tomatoes and carrots. I helped Ma to pick each item. “Don’t rush,” she warned me. “Choose carefully.” But the air around me was becoming heavier, making it harder to breathe.

  The night before, I hadn’t slept much. My mind was full of numbers. “Four digits,” Daddy had said, sitting on the edge of my bed. “Think carefully.” Coming up with numbers sounded easy but they had to be lucky or he’d lose the 4D lottery. “Use your good senses, Pin,” Daddy always said, his eyes locked into mine.

  Every Sunday morning, he stood in the queue at the 4D shop fidgeting and hoping somebody hadn’t already taken his combination. He had never won before but always came close. On my first day at school, I had given him my classroom number, which actually only contained three digits. I had added a random number at the end, making it 1123 because I thought it sounded likely. The winning number that week was close—1121. Every time Daddy scanned the newspaper to find out that he almost won, he clenched his fists, gritted his teeth and said, “So close!” When none of his chosen numbers appeared, he kept quiet and worked longer shifts at the hotel. Ma didn’t believe in the lottery and called it a huge waste of money. Although she knew that Daddy queued up for tickets every week, she hardly mentioned it so the lottery was our secret, something only we could understand. Daddy truly believed that he would win one day. But Ma liked to say that gambling was as useless as praying when you were in trouble.

  There were four more stalls to go but my legs felt rubbery. Ma did not tolerate such excuses. “Buck up, Pin,” she’d tell me in English when the market overwhelmed me. We were at the durian stall when I knew I needed a different excuse, something more severe. A stallholder squatted on the wet floor in front of a wooden block and chopped through a durian’s tough shell with a large knife. The two halves fell away, exposing the cream-coloured fruit, round and fleshy like a heart. For a moment before the pungent durian odour rose into the air, I was mesmerised by the stallholder’s handling of the large, spiky husk. Most of them wore gloves but this man didn’t bother. He grabbed each durian out of a straw basket as tall as I was and, after making a short slit with his knife, he pried both sides of the shell apart with his bare hands. I searched for calluses on his palms—surely they had to be rough from pressing against those sharp spikes. This was when I had my idea.

  I started by fidgeting first, just a bit, then I stopped. Ma continued to look at the durians, deciding if she would buy them. These fruits were her specialty. I did not know how to check their barbed skin for ripeness. When Ma turned towards me, I squirmed again.

  “Stop it,” Ma said. She thought I was just being impatient, but I was working up to something larger. I stopped for a moment and then, when she moved on to the next stall, I continued. This time I raised my leg and scratched it until there was a long red mark. Ma still did not notice. Our next stop was the chicken stall. The stallholder there was a young woman with a son who clung to the hem of her shorts and stared at us. She shook the boy off her leg, gave Ma the prices and pulled a lumpy purple mess out of a skinned chicken all at the same time. I squatted on the floor and buried my fingernails into my flesh and dragged them across until I could hear the scratching noises.

  Ma, in the middle of her negotiation, looked down at me. “Pin, what are you doing? What’s wrong?” I made a face to show I was in pain and continued to scratch. Normally, when Ma tended to her own scarred skin, the noises were as sickening as the market smells. But now she was paying attention.

  “Itchy,” I said, shifting uncomfortably. I was starting to convince myself.

  Ma squatted on the floor in front of me. She dropped all of her plastic bags. Water seeped through the hem of her ankle-length skirt, darkening the edges. She didn’t care. She examined my leg, where I had built up an alarming rash. “We’ll go home after this one,” she told me as she rose to pay the stallholder, who quietly pocketed the change.

  Ma ushered me out of the lanes, out of the drowning sounds, the yellowish lighting, the raw smell of blood. Outside, the dampness of market air was replaced by the familiar pressing heat. People rushed around in the bright morning and melted into the white air. We stepped out onto an even pavement and flowery bushes and rumbling buses slowing down to make stops. I let out a long sigh of relief. This was Singapore again—or at least, Singapore as I knew it.

  • • •

  A secret: I let Ma believe that I didn’t like accompanying her to the market because I was scared of getting lost, but the truth was this was not my biggest fear. The market wasn’t my favourite place in the world but I could pretend I was underwater or that I was a tourist interested in buying exotic fruit or I was a Martian coldly observing life on another planet. Eventually, I could even block out the smell of blood and the shouts from stallholders and I could walk carefully so I didn’t slip on the wet floor. What I dreaded about our trips to the market was what Ma always said to me afterwards on the walk home.

  “Promise that you will not become like me.”

  The first time Ma had said it, I waited for an explanation but there was none. I asked her why and she said, “There are many reasons, Pin. You’re too young now to understand it all but you can avoid making my mistakes. I just want you to keep it in mind. I was a little bit older than you when everything went wrong.”

  The second time she had warned me, I reminded her that she had told me the previous week. She gave me a sharp look. “And I’m going to keep saying it until you learn, Pin,” she snapped. “Do not become like me.” I felt embarrassed. Ma would not have had to remind me if she hadn’t seen me imitating her walk or trying to style my hair like hers. I thought that maybe this was just how it was—daughters and mothers were not supposed to be alike. It did not make sense to me, but Ma was adamant, and she repeated this only on Sundays, so it became our weekly after-market ritual.

  I didn’t like it because it sounded like I was in danger, and I wanted to know more, but Ma did not like questions. She rarely gave answers, and only when she wanted to. I was only certain about a few things with Ma. I knew that she had a beautiful face but scarred, wrecked skin on her arms and legs. I knew that she liked watching Hindi movies and she sometimes cooed to the potted plants outside our flat. If I wanted to know anything else, I had to look for clues in her cooking.

  We walked towards our flat and Ma slowed down so I could keep up. She looked worried. “Let me take that,” she said, pulling the bag of tofu from me. Going back to our block, we always took the route that led us away from the strings of people shuffling on their way to the market. “Good thing we went early. Look at all of these people going now. It’ll be madness in there,” she said.

  Our block was Number 549. Daddy had bought a ticket with those digits before, combined with one new number each week. Directly opposite our block, the void deck of 547 was crowded with rattan birdcages. A few men helped to hang the cages from hooks in the ceilings, then they placed numbers above them. Inside the cages, brown songbirds chirped shrilly, as if trying to overpower each other. There was a sign in Chinese characters with the English translation scrawled underneath. It was for another community songbird contest. There was one under a different block every week. Old pot-bellied uncles, wearing white singlets and black shorts, sat underneath the cages with their heads cocked, listening for the sweetest song.

  “They all sound the bloody same to me,” Ma muttered as we walked out of the lift and down the corridor to our flat. We could hear the birds from our floor—the shrill w
histling would filter in through our kitchen windows all day until a winner was announced.

  Ma went into her bedroom and emerged with a bottle of ointment. She rubbed it on the rash I had dug into my leg. “Okay?” she asked, but before I could answer, she said, “Yes, you’ll be okay.”

  I felt so guilty about pretending to have a rash that I lined all of the plastic bags neatly against the kitchen walls. Ma paced the length of the counter a few times, an army general. I opened the door of the fridge and moved a carton of milk to make space. There was an order to how the food was arranged in the fridge, and it all depended on the week’s menu. I watched as Ma stacked spinach and bean sprouts in the vegetable drawer, put the chicken thighs and steely fish in the freezer, and the slab of tofu in a bowl of water. I tried to guess the food combinations for the week the way I searched my mind for Daddy’s winning numbers, but nothing came up. Nothing made sense. Only Ma knew the plan. By the time she had finished, the fridge was crammed and blurred with colour, and it was almost noon.

  I went back into my room, turned on the fan and stretched out across the cool tiled floor. Fierce sunlight softened as it entered in shreds through the slats of my blinds. In our small living room, Ma arranged the furniture as an excuse to watch television, and eventually she slouched onto the rattan sofa. The blurry shadows of neighbours continued to pass and I guessed the owner of each one, knowing I was correct. I could guess at the events of the rest of the day as well. Daddy would come home soon from his night shift at the hotel and poke his head into my room to tell me about his lottery numbers. Ma would cook a simple lunch, nothing too filling, because it was Sunday and she liked to cook big meals for our Sunday dinner. I would eat, help to clear the dishes, then go into my room while Ma and Daddy sat on the couch together and watched television. I would drift in and out of sleep, songs from the afternoon Hindi movies trailing into my room as the sun set and light escaped our home.

  • • •

  In our house, food was not just prepared and eaten to satisfy our appetites. Ma created meals based on her mood, the weather or unusual events. I always chewed my meals carefully, tasting for clues. Cabbage leaves soaked in sweet coconut gravy told me that Ma was feeling mellow. Perhaps it had rained that afternoon and I hadn’t noticed it from the classroom window at school. Bay leaves and sour sauces were signs of sophistication—Ma was inspiring me to leave the narrow hallways of this block of flats where neighbours eavesdropped and tripped over each other’s shoes. Cinnamon sticks were Ma’s way of comforting me when she noticed a flaw in the way the world worked and she was softening the blow. The sharp tang of cumin added to any dish meant that Ma was bothered about something. There were many cumin dishes.

  Daddy was the one who taught me how to find the hidden meanings in Ma’s food. He said that it was a useful skill, especially when she was upset. The first time he told me about it, I was excited. I thought I would finally be able to figure Ma out. But all I discovered were her emotions. I could taste anger in the amount of red chilli powder and mustard seeds she sprinkled in a curry and I could tell that she was happy when she roasted chicken with light soy sauce and anise seeds, and served it over white rice. But I ached to find out more about Ma. She was full of secrets. I had known that from the very first time I saw her standing at the window, gazing intently at the buildings in the distance and the sky beyond that. She did this often, becoming oblivious to everything but the wide sky ahead of her. I was never sure if she was looking at something or looking for something. “Your Ma does not always say what she’s thinking or feeling,” Daddy said. “But when she cooks, she puts her whole mind and heart into the food and you’re bound to learn something about her.” So I searched for Ma in her spices and sauces, her mixed vegetables and her sweet desserts.

  Ma had only started making the market a part of our regular Sunday routine when we stopped going to the Sikh temple. I couldn’t decide which one I disliked more. I didn’t mind wearing a salwaar-kameez or keeping my head covered and my feet bare. I liked the quiet peace of the prayer hall with its separate sections for men and women. I pretended I was a celebrity when I walked down the strip of dull red carpet and bowed low in front of the large Holy Book and the bearded priest who loudly read the script and never looked up. I could bear with the service—sitting cross-legged under fans that chopped the air, listening to the creaky accordions leading the hymns. But I dreaded eating at the temple, and for this I was sure that God would punish me.

  Temple food was charred roti—wheat flour and water rolled into a soft dough, flattened and cooked on a flat iron stove. Cauliflower and potatoes mixed with spices and lumpy dhal were stirred in massive pots and pans over huge blue flames that flared like upside-down skirts. Thin, runny yoghurt contained strips of carrot and cucumber. They hadn’t been cooked by Ma. The women in the back kitchen lived on gossip, trading stories about their friends’ children and marriages. I always heard them talking when I walked in to put my plate in the sink. Once, one of them had caught my eye as I passed her and nudged her friend. “Isn’t that…?” she asked. Her voice wasn’t low enough. On the way home, I recalled the taste of their food in my mouth, dry and sour like their hushed gossip, and I told Ma I could no longer eat at the temple.

  “It’s God’s food,” Ma always said firmly, like that was an explanation for anything. I was to be thankful for being Sikh, she reminded me, because in our religion, everybody was treated equally when it came to eating. “Old and young, poor and rich—as long as you believe in Him, you are welcome to dine at the temple.” I had to admit that it was quite generous of God to feed everyone. But I still wished He would make His food a bit more appealing. Whining around Ma was not a good idea; she didn’t tolerate it. I never attempted the scratching trick at the temple because it was too risky with so many people watching. They weren’t supposed to know about Ma’s skin trouble. It was something the three of us kept to ourselves. She had a condition that made her skin itch and become frighteningly red. She went to a doctor who gave her a special ointment and advised her not to scratch, but she said it was unbearable sometimes. If she was upset, her skin got even worse. The rashes grew and spread, and took over her skin completely. Ma wore long sleeves to the temple, even on the hottest days, and pulled them over her hands if anybody stared. People were always staring—needle-nosed ladies with their large eyes and greying hair, younger women whose glances darted away only to look back again. The men held their looks longer. I had asked Ma once why they always looked at us. She shrugged and said, “When all of my skin trouble started, they all had their own ideas about it. A stupid superstitious lot they are.”

  To get me to eat at the temple, Ma had coaxed. She had pleaded. She had threatened. She had even allowed her voice to rise to a near-shout once, but so many people had looked up that she had to lower it, defeated. Finally, when I was about six years old, she came up with an idea. In her handbag, with napkins and a purse heavy with coins, she carried a small jar of sugar. Glancing around first to see if anybody was looking, she allowed me to sprinkle the sugar onto the hot roti. I always watched and waited until it melted into the dough before I tore off a bite to test. Every time Ma let me eat this sugar bread, she shook her head and muttered, “This is the last time.” But she brought that jar with her every Sunday, to every temple programme. She told me once that roti was the only thing her own mother cooked when they were growing up. This was no surprise to me because my Nani-ji still ate roti for every meal.

  “Sometimes we had to modify it too. Just for a change,” she had said, a smile playing on her lips. It was the kind of smile she wore when she was remembering something that made her happy. It wasn’t a look I noticed because often, the past brought shadows to Ma’s face.

  Nani-ji was at the temple every Sunday, sitting in the ladies’ section, wearing her widow’s white. Her hair was so thin that small pink strips of her scalp showed through the gauzy material of her scarf. Every time I walked in and noticed her, I quickly reached up to make
sure that my scarf was covering my head, concealing my short ponytail. From the corner of my eye, I noticed Ma doing the same thing. Nani-ji knew that we cut our hair and she didn’t like it, so we tried our best to hide the sin so she wouldn’t notice and comment. Sikhs are not supposed to cut their hair or shave; the girls and women have plaits that hang down their backs like ropes, and the men wear turbans and thick beards that swallow their faces. Ma and I were modern with our short hair and Daddy too, with those faint dots of stubble on his cheeks. He managed to escape the temple most of the time because he took Sunday shifts at the hotel. He wasn’t very religious, he admitted to me. He said that he had nothing against God, but he didn’t think it was necessary to sit and drink tea in His home every week either.

  Nani-ji was too old and slow on her feet to go to the temple on her own. Ma’s brother, Mama-ji Sarjit, drove her early in the mornings. She always sat up front with his wife, my Fat Auntie, which was why we sat in the back. Ma and her brother only spoke few words to each other, and to Fat Auntie, even fewer. There had been an argument a few years earlier during which Fat Auntie had called Ma a disgrace for not attending her housewarming prayers. I knew this because Ma had said some unpleasant words about Fat Auntie’s figure, specifically about her bum. After that, we avoided the temple for a few weeks, then Nani-ji got sick and had to go to the hospital, so they were forced to speak again. They politely said hello and gave awkward side hugs as we queued up for food. The tension between them lingered in the air and settled in the milky tea I was forced to sip to push the hard bread down my throat.