Sugarbread

by Balli Kaur Jaswal

  Bilu writhes and screams. He rolls on the ground, getting sand and dirt in his hair and eyes. Tears stream down his cheeks. The man walks away but continues to keep his eyes fixed on them. “I said, leave us alone!” Jini yells. Momentarily, Bilu stops, bewildered. He looks at the man, who is now hurrying down the street. Even Jini is surprised by the sound of her own voice.

  “Go out?” Bilu asks. Tears are dripping onto the collar of his T-shirt.

  “No. I’m going out. You must stay in the house,” Jini says almost pleadingly. Bilu dissolves into sobs again. He clenches his fists and rubs them into his eyes. Jini feels her heart breaking. Even when Bilu is trying to trick her into letting him do something he has been forbidden to do, she pities him. “It’s not fair. He doesn’t know any better,” she tells herself. She has heard her mother use these excuses as well. Jini thinks of what her mother would do. She pulls Bilu to her chest and sings into his hair. Bilu’s sobs fade and soon all she can hear is light sniffling.

  “Okay? Now you go home. I’m just going to the shop,” she tells him. He scrambles to his feet and charges back into the house as if nothing has happened.

  Bilu cannot go to school, so every day for him is like the dull June holidays. School is too difficult for him. He cannot hold a pencil or write his own name, he cannot walk very fast and when he tries to run, he stumbles. He cannot be away for a whole day from those he is familiar with. Jini’s father insisted on sending him to school but he screamed and clung to the legs of his desk, and scrambled into corners when his teachers tried to discipline him. In his second week, he went missing for hours and was found sleeping in a shallow drain, a puddle of dirty water soaking into his uniform. There is something wrong with him but there is no room to find out what, not with Jini’s father disappearing every two weeks and leaving them with no money or food. Jini’s mother prays constantly because it’s the best they can do.

  Shop Uncle is standing behind the counter, engrossed in a Chinese book. He is a middle-aged man with a few streaks of silvery hair and a tattoo of some Chinese characters on his arm. Today, he looks like he is in a good mood. He is scanning each character in his book with his finger. He chuckles at one part.

  “Uncle,” Jini says. “I want six eggs. I only got money for three. Can I take now, pay later? Please?”

  His smile disappears. “Indians always cheat! Always cheat me!” he shouts. She stands and waits with her hands behind her back, her head bowed. “You got money for three, you only buy three.”

  “Five. My father is coming back tomorrow, then I’ll pay you. Okay?”

  Shop Uncle shakes his head but he puts an extra egg in the bag. It’s just as well that they have only four eggs—one for each member of the family, minus her father.

  “Why you look so sad? I give you one for free already,” the Shop Uncle says.

  “Thank you, Uncle.” Jini forces a smile.

  “Girl, I tell you a secret. I always happy,” he says. “Never sad. Sad no good. No use. Must always be happy. Understand?”

  Jini nods. “Happy,” she croaks. Shop Uncle grins.

  “Happy! Must always be happy!” he says, sitting back in his chair. Sunlight streams into the shop windows, making the shelves gleam. Jini tries to keep the man’s words in her mind on the short walk home but as she approaches her house, his voice fades, then dissolves into the stifling afternoon heat. She wants to take Shop Uncle’s advice, but with her father leaving them with barely enough money, Bilu’s problems and her mother crying herself to sleep every night, she doesn’t know how to be happy any more.

  • • •

  On weekdays, the noise in the house comes from Jini singing songs at the top of her lungs, from her mother pounding spices in the kitchen, from Bilu expressing his changing moods—squeals and cries, shouts of glee and sorrowful sobs. The neighbours contribute without even knowing it. Jasbir Kaur next door calls her sister an ugly pimple-face. The Jeyanathans a few doors down play their Tamil songs loudly on the radio. The widow with four grown sons wails about how much she misses her dead husband. There are several Punjabi homes scattered around the neighbourhood, and the children sometimes get together and walk down the street in a pack, calling out to their buddies to play football.

  Weekends are a bit different because they don’t feel like school holidays. On Saturdays, Sarjit comes back from the army and Mother looks lighter, happier. He is 19 and doing his National Service. He stays in the barracks because he says it’s a hassle to come home and go back every day. The army has given him a desk job because he is good with numbers. Mother calls him her soldier; her face always lights up right away when she hears the creak of the gate outside and the sound of his boots pounding against the soft grass.

  “Son!” she cries, flinging her arms around his neck. Ever since their father left, she cries each time she sees Sarjit. “We’ve missed you,” she coos, helping him pull the laces off his boots. “Jini, there is tea on the stove. Bring some for your brother,” she says. Jini rushes into the kitchen to get the tea. She can hear muffled crying again from the living room. The rattan furniture squeaks and groans as Sarjit sits down wearily. Every week he says the same thing: “I’m tired.”

  “How’s school?” he asks Jini as she serves him the tea.

  “It’s the school holidays, Dumbo,” she says. He pulls one of her plaits and she twists away from him, laughing.

  “You’re the Dumbo. Where’s Mr Bilu?”

  “In the room somewhere,” Jini says.

  “He’s not still following you all over the house?”

  “No. But be careful. If he starts again, we’ll never get him to stop,” she says.

  “Speak Punjabi,” her mother instructs. She does not approve of English being spoken in the house. “How am I supposed to know what you’re saying if you don’t speak in a language I understand?”

  Sarjit rubs his eyes with the back of his palm. “I’m going to find Bilu, then take a nap,” he tells Mother.

  “Okay, son,” she says. “Jini, don’t go anywhere. I need your help with dinner.”

  On Saturdays, Jini is allowed to help in the kitchen. Her mother often complains that girls usually start helping in the kitchen at a much younger age. “Look at Jasbir and her sister. They can make saag with their eyes closed and they’re two years younger than you. Why is it so difficult for you?” she always says. “I was seven when I started cooking.”

  But Jini can’t help it. When she tried helping in the kitchen before, she only seemed to slow things down or make a mess of the ingredients. She was clumsy and asked too many questions. “What is this? Which tree does this grow from? Is this spicy?” She grows listless when her mother starts ignoring her, and she thinks the food they eat at home is boring anyway. Dhal, roti, dhal, roti. Saag sometimes, if there is enough money for spinach. Chicken and potato curry on a rare occasion, if their father has sent home money. Jini would rather eat like other Singaporeans—nasi lemak like the Malays, kway teow like the Chinese, dosai like the South Indians. She has seen the British with their straight brown moustaches, their accents that sharpen the edges of words. She envies them most for their thick steaks and hearty potatoes.

  I knew everything by the time I was your age, her mother always says. What more is there to know, Jini wonders, looking out of the window onto the stacks of tin roofs and yellowing grass. She knows her school work, she knows her friends and she knows which buses can take her all over the island, to streets of cramped shophouses with carved wooden shutters, to the heart of town where more shiny buildings are slowly sprouting like trees, to corners of the island where sand and silt spill into the sea so you feel like you’re on the edge of the earth.

  Her mother takes out a bag of flour from under the kitchen cabinet and pours the contents out into a steel bowl. “Check it for insects,” she tells Jini. “Last week, I found a small spider sitting in the atta.”

  Jini washes her hands, dries them off, then begins to sift through the grains for anything suspic
ious. “Nothing,” she says when she’s finished. Her mother wordlessly hands her the bowl of green lentils. Jini sorts through the little beads looking for stones. Last week, Bilu got very upset when he bit down on a stone, which made him throw up his dinner. Her mother looked furious for a moment but then a look crossed her face, and it was one Jini could not forget. Her mother was momentarily stunned and frightened. She looked at Bilu like she wasn’t sure how he got to this house, this dinner table.

  Jini picks out two small stones and tosses them into the sink. “Finished,” she says. On the stove, a pot of boiling water gurgles. Her mother empties the lentils into it and takes out a few jars of powder—some yellow, some brick red, some that look like fine sand.

  “I have to teach you how to make roti,” Jini’s mother tells her. “Otherwise when you have a husband and children of your own, what will you cook for them?”

  Chilli crab. Tofu with peanut sauce. Chinese vegetables with plump stalks and juicy leaves. Hainanese chicken rice with sweet soy sauce and ginger chilli. Noodles—both thick and thin—with fish cake and pork balls. Red-hot South Indian curries served with sticky bread and milk tea. Durians, longans, rambutans for dessert. Chendol. Ice kacang. Jini can think of a million things she’d cook if she had her own kitchen. She would work hard in school, she would have a good job and earn lots of money. She would never be short of ingredients.

  As if reading Jini’s mind, her mother says, “We can’t even have a bit of chicken this week. I was going to make curry for your brother. Poor thing eats the same thing at the army every day. They just give them beans and bread, beans and bread every day. That’s no meal. After a while it gets boring, doesn’t it?” Jini knows better than to reply. Admitting that yes, it does get boring will only make her mother sadder when she realises that’s what they eat every day. Beans and bread—just the Punjabi version.

  “Okay, first we have to make the dough. Sprinkle some water on the flour. Go ahead, do it. Just a bit. Now gather the flour together and make it stick. See how it clumps? Now keep gathering and mixing like that. You’re trying to make one big ball of dough out of all of these grains. Don’t even waste a little bit.” Her mother’s way of instructing is softer when it comes to making roti. She coos to the flour because she believes it is important to show care when a person is cooking. “When you don’t care, the person eating can tell. If you are angry or upset about something, your bitterness seeps into the food like a poison. It enters the mouth of the person eating, and then they become angry and upset.”

  Jini adds more water. Her mother cautions her not to make the dough too sticky or they’ll have to absorb the water with more flour. “The first time I made this in India for your father, I was so nervous, I kept spilling too much water into the bowl. My hands were shaking. Then I added more flour to make it less sticky. Then I spilt more water, added more flour, spilt more water…the final ball of dough was huge! I wondered what your father would say. Luckily, he was pleased. He thought I’d made him a lot to eat on purpose.” She laughs and it seems like the first time, the sound jingling like wedding bangles. Jini is not as amused. An image of her father, greedy and expectant crosses her mind and brings with it a flash of anger so bright that it blinds her for a moment.

  “Now you knead the dough. This is important. You have to make it soft.” Jini’s mother grinds her knuckles into the dough, which sinks. Then she uses the heel of her hand to flatten and roll it back up repeatedly. Jini notices how hard her mother’s hands are and how young she really is. She thinks about the British again. She has seen wives on the army base near her school wearing cotton skirts and paper-thin blouses. They have smooth, pale skin and light eyes that glisten in the tropical sun like precious stones. When they walk, they appear to be dancing, and she can only imagine what they must be like when they cook. Always happy, using their fingers delicately, pampering their roughened skin with scented lotion afterwards.

  Jini has noticed a small change in her own skin lately but she thinks it has something to do with the heat. On hot days, small rashes break out on her arms and legs and they disappear at night, when the air is cooler. Sarjit noticed a small rash on her elbow once and scrunched up his nose. “Eee. Dirty. Somebody didn’t bathe today,” he told her. “One of my army mates never bathes and his body has dark patches all over.” She cringed and took more time in the shower that evening, until her mother banged on the door and told her to stop wasting water.

  She and her mother take turns kneading the dough. They add a bit of ghee to it to make it softer so her knuckles can just slide across and bits of dough don’t get stuck to her skin. Then they hear a scream. At first, it sounds like it’s coming from the neighbour’s house and they simply look up, then continue what they are doing. Her mother always says it’s not nice to listen too carefully to what the neighbours are saying and doing because they will do the same thing back to you. Then they hear it again, a tortured noise, and Jini realises that it’s coming from the living room, from Bilu.

  She and her mother rush out to find him lying on the floor, writhing and twisting. His face looks pained and his mouth is open but he’s not making any sound. But when her mother steps towards him, he lets out a shriek and scrambles to the wall. Her mother sits down on the floor.

  “What is wrong now?” Sarjit is standing over Bilu, just staring at him. “What did you do?” she asks him angrily.

  “Nothing!” he says. “I went to see him, I tried to hug him and he called me Papa. So I said, no, not Papa, this is your Pra-ji, your big brother. He kept insisting, Papa, Papa, so I just walked out. Then the next thing I knew, he was…like this.”

  “Idiot!” Mother cries. “Never tell him that Papa isn’t around.”

  “I didn’t! I just said that I’m not Papa.”

  “You must have said more than that,” she says. She turns her attention to Bilu, who is crawling underneath the furniture and sucking his thumb. Jini feels sick inside watching the scene. Sarjit flings up his hands and walks out of the room. “I didn’t say anything else,” he mutters, exchanging a glance with Jini. They both know what their mother is like when it comes to protecting their little brother. He always comes first, because he needs more care than either of them. They will need to take care of him one day when she’s old and gone, she often reminds them. If not his own family, then whose? This is why she pushes Jini to study hard, and she has been dropping hints to Sarjit about marriage. “After the army, when you’re earning money, settle down with a nice girl, somebody who won’t mind taking care of Bilu if something happens to me.” She is very hopeful about this idea, even though people in the temple have told her to stop mentioning Bilu’s condition and bringing him out of the house. “Which girl is going to be so understanding?” they ask gently.

  Bilu’s face is swollen—eyes, nose and lips all red and puffed so he looks like a cartoon of himself. His long hair has come undone from the bun on his head. Jini has often thought of suggesting to her mother to just cut it. People would probably talk, but once they realise how difficult it is to keep Bilu still and manage him, they’d sympathise. But she’s afraid to bring it up to her mother, knowing that she’ll suspect that Jini is trying to ask for permission to cut her own long plaits. Jini would never do such a thing to dishonour God. On occasion, the thought slips into her mind and she thinks about what she would look like with a short bob that curls under her ears. It frightens her. She would be a completely different person.

  As she watches her mother coax Bilu to stand up and walk towards her, the pity she feels quickly turns to rage. If not for their missing father, Bilu wouldn’t be like this. He wouldn’t be screaming so loudly that there’s a roaring in her ears even after he has stopped. Her mother wouldn’t be sitting on the floor, struggling to keep the patience in her voice as she speaks to him. Jini is furious now, anger boiling in her chest and moving down to settle in her stomach. She remembers the first image that came to mind when Sarjit took her aside and quietly told her that their father wa
s gone again. She was worried; she imagined him on a back road somewhere at night, having been robbed or run over by a car, confused about his surroundings. She even imagined him imprisoned by some mistake. Now all of those images flood to mind but instead of fearing for the worst, she relishes in it. Nearly a month has passed now and all they know is that he has returned to India. He sends back money occasionally but it is never enough. She is certain that he will not be coming back. There is some comfort in thinking of him being injured. It numbs the pain she feels from hearing Bilu’s inconsolable cries.

  “The food!” her mother suddenly shouts, jerking her out of her thoughts. She rushes back into the kitchen and turns off the stove. The dhal must be burnt and stuck to the pan now—the fire has to be shut off at just the right boiling point or the lentils become soggy and tasteless. She can hear her mother cursing in the kitchen.

  Bilu is still sobbing. Jini squats down on the floor and closes her eyes. Then she begins to sing to him the way she did yesterday afternoon when she caught him following her. She begins with a hum and notices his short, shaky breaths becoming longer. “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine…” she sings softly. The lyrics enchant Bilu. She is surprised when he points outside to the evening sun, descending behind rooftops and fences. “Sa-shine,” he says. “Sa-shine.” He crawls to Jini and she holds him until she hears her mother calling her to come into the kitchen and help her finish cooking dinner.