KENA SAI

BY S.J. ROZAN

Bukit Timah

On Monday afternoon the old man with the erhu was at the corner again.

In the soft shade of a tembusu he sat on a folding stool, the ancient battered instrument held upright. The knobby fingers of his left hand slid along the strings while his right arm worked the bow. A tight-stretched cobra skin fattened each long slow note before releasing it into the air.

Watching through sinuous heat shimmering up from the concrete, Ed was caught. Davey stopped also. He stared, let go of Ed’s hand, balanced for a moment on not-quite-steady toddler legs, then plopped down on the grass of the verge, never taking his eyes off the old man. Ed smiled and slid down against a mahogany tree. It would make no difference when they arrived at Ellen’s. They could stay here for now and drift on these melodies, alien and alluring.

The old man’s hands gained speed, racing, nimble as the macaques in the park; then they slowed, slipped supple and flowing, like the water in the Strait. The macaques had ruled the island once, dancing through the trees, screaming by the water holes. The Strait had washed the shores of island and mainland, tying them together as it held them apart. Now the few macaques left were confined to the reserve and the Strait was causewayed and ferried, narrowed by landfill and curbed by barriers. But the monkeys were still monkeys and the water was still water.

The music sounded sad to Ed. That was the minor scale, he knew. Probably these were not sad songs, just his Western ears that made them so. The old man did look sad, though. Because he was far from home? Or because he was old? Or because no one but Ed and Davey stopped to listen, and he knew Ed didn’t understand?

No one in Singapore stopped to listen, or stopped for anything. No one played music on streetcorners, either, and on a less out-of-the-way sidewalk the old man would’ve been arrested for interfering with the public progress, for distracting citizens from their daily rounds, for being unnecessary. But on this hot afternoon in Bukit Timah, no one other than Ed and Davey were on the street to be distracted.

Ed wondered if the old man lived here, in this sweet, treed expat enclave where Westerners dwelled to be reminded of home. He doubted he did, thought it more likely he traveled to this corner by bus, to other corners of the island also, other quiet empty suburbs where he could sit and play his quavering melodies in the damp heat. Maybe he lived with his family; maybe his daughter was a banker, his son-in-law a doctor, his grandchildren energetic high-achievers who ran off in their school uniforms in the morning, none of them with time for the old man’s music or his memories. Maybe, long ago, young and energetic himself, he’d come to Singapore from South China, from heat like this, and now he was old and an expat and he, too, wanted to be reminded of home.

Ed didn’t. Home was worlds, years, lives away. He didn’t miss it and he didn’t want to go back there, back to New York, back to winter slush and politics he had to pay attention to and buses that didn’t come. It was ten years since they’d left, since Ellen had called, so excited, the promotion had come through and they were headed to London. No more taxi drivers who didn’t know the way, no more slithery roaches, pretentious hipsters, brown smothering clouds drifting over from New Jersey.

“I think they have roaches,” Ed smiled, kissing her at the door that night. Her eyes had been glowing. “And I’m sure they have hipsters.”

“My God, what smells so great in here?”

“Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. I thought I should learn the exotic cuisine.”

All through dinner she talked, making lists, assigning tasks. She would tackle this and Ed should follow through on that. He sipped his wine, enjoying her incandescence, her mad caroming. A month later they’d settled into a West London flat. “You’ve got to call it a flat now, darling,” she told him as she breezed out the door her first day.

Ed’s own clients were people he’d never met and they didn’t care where he was as long as their websites got designed, updated, and populated, a word that delighted him: as though each page were a tiny village, JoeJones.com, pop. 313. He methodically took care of them and then took long midday walks, as he had in New York, as he always had.

In their new suburban London home Ed saw himself as one of the islands revealed when the tide of commuters swept out each morning. His walks took him to the greengrocer, the locksmith, the fishmonger, islands also, each one craggy or forbidding or gentle, each one worth exploring. The cars driving on the left-hand side of the road he found interesting to watch, like choreographed dancers in a number new to him. He wondered whether England had no tornados because her traffic went counter-clockwise. He learned to differentiate the subtle variations of fog and rain and he liked the clinks when he jingled the coins that made his pockets heavy.

Ellen didn’t. The money exasperated her and she couldn’t get used to traffic coming from the wrong direction. The gray weather was draining. The cabbies never got lost but there weren’t many places, she found, that she wanted to go.

“New York made such sense,” she sighed over lamb chops and green beans one night. The chops were particularly good; Ed had made friends with the butcher, a fat man from Sussex. I’ve given ye the best ones, tender and tasty if ye cook ’em right.

“London,” Ellen went on, shaking her head. “It’s so . . . medieval.” Her response was to buckle down and work harder. Eighteen months later she called home one morning, an hour after she got to work, thrilled once again: they were going to Prague.

In Prague Ed liked the tensions between the past and the present, the red roofs, the smell of yeast and cinnamon from the bakery. He couldn’t master Czech but the baker spoke English. From Madagascar, the vanilla, she’s cost too much but nothing else worth having. Ed cooked chicken with onions and paprika. Ellen railed against the narrow streets and the traffic. In London, she said, it rained all the time but at least you could get around.

After Prague, Buenos Aires, where Ed paused in his walks to sit in cafés on wide boulevards. Try first without milk, señor, you drink Argentine coffee now. He grilled butter-tender steaks and Ellen felt nostalgic for buttoned-up Prague where ragtop cars didn’t pound out music twenty-four hours a day. Then Nairobi, to Ed a never-still metropolis of old jeeps, bright cloth, musical speech (Fresh pineapple! Come buy it! You can do much wid it!), and dark, glistening faces. He learned to make ugali from cornmeal and served it with roast goat. To Ellen, Nairobi was dust that made her cough, bottled water, failed Internet connections (in Buenos Aires the technology worked), and armed guards.

In Nairobi, she got pregnant. It was time, she said; they didn’t want to wait until they were too old, until conceiving was a chore and delivery a risk, did they? Ed thought perhaps she’d want to go home, at least to have the baby, but she was working on some major deals and so Davey was born in Aga Khan Hospital three months before they moved to Singapore.

Singapore astonished Ed.

Ellen’s colleagues envied the assignment because, they said, Singapore was Asia Lite. Not like being sent to Shanghai or Tokyo, with their illegible street signs, illegible menus, illegible manners. Everything worked in Singapore. Crime barely existed, the water was safe. Everything worked, and worked in ways you understood. Not that life was perfect. The trees were groomed and the sidewalks practically polished, traffic flowed—but be careful, they were warned: Singapore, it’s Disneyland with the death penalty. Jaywalking, gum-chewing, free-thinking: just watch yourselves.

Ellen didn’t care about jaywalking, or free-thinking either. She was happy to be an expat among expats, to mix only with other Westerners, to live as though she weren’t in Asia at all. The safe, clean, functioning Singapore was the one she came looking for, the one she found, the one that—for a time—pleased her.

Ed saw all that—how could you miss it?—but it wasn’t his Singapore. More than anywhere they’d lived, more than where they’d come from, Singapore instantly felt like home.

He loved the damp heat, the daily rain, the bright and gray skies alternating, striping the day. The storms that blew through and scoured the air. The breathless young Singaporeans in the business of business; the expat community constantly churning, impermanent, strangers arriving and friends departing every day. Cultures mashing into one another in heady confusion: the swirling scents of curry, coconut milk, and coriander, the roast Cornish hen with fingerling potatoes in one café, the nasi lemak in the next, the chicken tajine a few doors down. Singapore had four official languages, but the one Ed loved was the unofficial one, the one everyone spoke: Singlish—in vocabulary, in grammar, and in syntax, a knotted combination of them all. In Singapore you could live your life in English, but Singlish was what the locals spoke, and the transplanted, the settled-in. Ed set out to learn it.

He also set out, as always, to learn the local cuisine. In Singapore that very idea was funny, because all recipes except the oldest Malay ones were immigrants and none were pure. He wrapped Davey in a quilted cotton infant sling and took him along to the markets, collecting the dozens of umber, ochre, black, and gold spices that went into curry, depending on whose curry you were cooking. He made pineapple tarts and oyster omelets, yellow egg noodles, coconut-stewed beef, and fish head curry.

Ellen started to drink.

“Singapore,” she sighed as they sat over the remains of vegetable dumplings and pork rib soup. She poured herself more wine. “At least in Nairobi when it was this freakin’ hot, it was dry.”

“I took Davey to the reserve this morning. We spotted a baby macaque in a tree. I don’t know which thought the other was funnier.” He told her this because she never asked anymore. Somewhere between Buenos Aires and Nairobi she’d stopped wondering how Ed spent his days. In Singapore she’d briefly become curious again, because of Davey, but it turned out baby news bored her. She cooed over Davey in the morning, once Ed had him dressed and in his high chair. She sang to him at night if she was home before his bedtime, though those early evenings slowly grew rare. She read parenting books, but not, as Ed did, to learn what to do, how to be a new person with the new person that was Davey. Ellen read to find out what Davey should be doing, what his accomplishments ought to be in this month, and this and this. She compared Davey with the child in the books—an average child, and shouldn’t Davey be more advanced than that?—and with the children she met, children of expats, of transplants, of locals. On weekends, before the midday heat chased her indoors, she’d walk with Ed and Davey in the Children’s Garden or to a breakfast of noodles at a hawker center. Davey’s chubby friendliness made the cooking aunties cluck and chuckle: what a buaya he was, a little flirt! Ellen basked in their adoration, but Ed understood: admiring Davey, they were admiring her. She was kiasu, Ed thought, cutthroat competitive, as she always had been. He used to admire her fire and drive, having little ambition of his own; but now that Davey had become her proxy, it began to trouble him. The aunties asked to hold Davey, which Ellen affected to think about and then graciously permitted—Ed always allowed it—and at first they tried to give him sweets but they soon learned that was only for weekdays, when Davey was alone with Ed.

Ed, enchanted with Davey’s first smile, his first tooth and first word, suggested on his first birthday that they think about another child. Ellen barked, “Are you crazy?” and went off to bed alone. Ed took a folding chair out onto the walk in front of the ground-floor flat and sat in the evening breeze. Ellen kept the air-conditioning cranked up high; Ed didn’t like it, living in a temperature Singapore never felt. Crazy? He considered. Well, maybe. Huat sio oreddy. The man’s mad.

Across another year Ed took Davey to the garden and the reserve, to the market and to other kids’ homes to crawl and then walk and then run around in a chattering tribe like monkeys. He cooked fried dough, sweet potato leaf stew, biryani, chili crab for holidays. He told Ellen about Davey’s day while Davey laughed and mashed his hands in his rice and Ellen nodded and floated farther away. At the end of the year she told him she’d found someone else and she’d like him to move out.

He wasn’t surprised. Though he wasn’t happy, he knew his unhappiness stemmed largely not from the loss of Ellen, long since lost, but from her insistence that they share custody of Davey.

“What mother would just totally give up her son?” she said, blinking.

What mother doesn’t know the names of his friends? Ed thought, but he understood. Ellen resisted Asia in Singapore, as she had Africa in Nairobi and old Europe in Prague, but still, this was about that most Asian of notions: saving face. Not with the cooking aunties, who would have mattered to Ed but meant nothing to Ellen; but among her colleagues. This ornament, this piece in the game that Davey was to her, it would make her look bad, cold-hearted, to give him up.

Ed didn’t protest, though, because he saw immediately how it would be and he was right. Ellen hired a nanny. A smiling Filipina named Maricor, who lived in the ground-floor flat three nights a week in the room that had been Ed’s office. Ellen made no adjustment in her life for Davey, still left for work early in the morning when the light was clear, and Maricor didn’t mind at all that Ed usually appeared an hour or so later, to go with them to the reserve, the garden, shopping at the market for spices and fruits. Ellen knew, and Ellen didn’t care, as long as Ed waited until she was gone so she didn’t have to see him, wasn’t required to make small talk and act as though they were still connected. They were, of course, because of Davey, who would connect them forever. But Ellen, as always, was eager to leave one life behind and begin the next.

Twice, on weekend days—weekends were always Ed’s, because, as Ellen explained, if she wasn’t working through a weekend she needed Me time—Ed and Davey ran into Ellen and her someone else in the Smith Street wet market. The someone, a boisterous Russian with a big smile, was a client of Ellen’s firm. He tickled Davey’s chin and seemed happily baffled by the noise, the bright colors of signs and stalls, the profusion of spices and fruits he called “foreign” and “exotic.” Ellen kissed Davey, smiled thinly, and steered her Russian away as soon as they’d exchanged enough substance-free sentences so that everyone could see she was perfectly comfortable in Ed’s presence. Watching her examine fine powders, peeled bark, and round berries in spice stalls, seeing her make purchases he was sure she had no idea how to use, Ed wondered if she was hoping to learn to cook. Ellen, he thought, cooking: none of their friends back in New York—or anywhere else—would believe it. But Singapore did strange things to you.

Ed settled into the new arrangement and found it not uncomfortable. The nights Davey spent at Ellen’s, Ed missed him, missed cooking his rice porridge in the morning and teaching him his new word of the day. Ed worked late into those nights, so his days were free for Davey and for Maricor, whose calm company he was coming to enjoy. Maricor had good English—one of Ellen’s criteria for a nanny—but Ed also spoke with her in Singlish, Maricor laughing with delight when he surprised her with a new phrase. Ellen had rolled her eyes when he’d used Singlish words: “It’s not a real language, you know.”

* * *

Six seasonless months drifted by. Ed and Ellen were quietly divorced, Davey adjusted easily to his double life and started to speak in full sentences, both Singlish and English—with the occasional Spanish word thrown in, and sometimes Russian—and the languid heat of Singapore seeped deeper into Ed’s pores, melted the suits out of his wardrobe and the hurry out of his steps. Expats and young people raced around him, career-building, but the old, true life of the island was indolent and slow and kind, and that was the life Ed lived until Ellen called one morning to say she’d been promoted again. She was going to Moscow.

Ed congratulated her: he knew she was happy. Moscow was the plum placement in Ellen’s firm and she’d worked hard for it.

“Sergei says he can get you a work visa, no problem.” Ed heard the pride in her voice about her well-connected Russian before he understood what she was really saying.

“I don’t want to go to Moscow.”

“We can’t very well share custody long-distance. I know people do, but study after study shows that’s not the best thing at all for the child.”

Study after study? Best thing for the child? “You’re taking Davey?”

“Of course. I’m his mother.”

Phone to his ear, Ed stared dumbly out the window. He lived now in another ground-floor flat a few blocks from Ellen’s, a place with a small patio where Davey and Maricor sat on the paving stones building a tower from wooden blocks. Davey wore khaki shorts (“Like Daddy’s!” he’d shrieked with glee when they’d been presented to him) and Maricor’s red sundress pooled around her knees. “Davey doesn’t want to go to Moscow.”

“What are you talking about? He’s a child. He has no idea where he wants to go.”

The patent error took Ed’s breath away. He tried to picture Davey, who’d never worn a sweater, all bundled up in parka, scarf, and boots, with a no-nonsense Russian nanny pulling his mittens on. He wondered where a child would play if nine months of the year it was too cold to be outdoors. Like New York, he realized, but worse, and what did New York parents do? Sent their kids to preschool boot camp so they’d be fast-tracked to MIT or Yale.

“There’s an American School in Moscow,” Ellen was saying, “and a couple of international schools as well that would be good for him. Sergei looked into it already. I start the fifteenth of next month—that’s more than four weeks, that gives you plenty of time. You can stay in a hotel until you find an apartment. My firm might help.”

Ed hung up thinking, Kena sai, lah. Kena sai. Hit by shit.

Early Sunday, when Maricor went to Mass at Good Shepherd Cathedral, Ed and Davey went to Malaysia. They made the trip every few months, always by ferry because they were in no hurry and Davey liked the boat ride. Sometimes they went right on through Johor Bahru all the way to Kuala Lumpur and spent the night. From time to time they went to the beach at Desaru. Almost always, whatever else they did, they shopped at the Larkin wet market for spices and vegetables. The market aunties in Singapore laughed at Ed about this, for they scorned Johor Bahru because of its dirt and crime and general not-Singapore-ness, and claimed everything found there was available in Singapore. Ed would shrug and smile and say, “Most can, some cannot, lah,” and join them in laughing at his Singlish.

On this trip he bought some things he had seen previously but hadn’t had a reason to pick up. He took Davey to the beach and they got home quite late, Davey sleeping in Ed’s arms, the heft of him at once heavy—he was getting big—and weightless. Davey didn’t wake up when Ed put him to bed and slept soundly while Ed organized his purchases.

The next afternoon, Monday, was the day of the week when Ed delivered Davey to Ellen. In practice it was almost always Maricor who received him, Ellen staying late at the office. This night, while Maricor gave Davey his bath, Ed inspected Ellen’s kitchen, noting the increased number of bottles and shakers and jars of spices and herbs, the powders and chunks and leaves and liquids Ellen had never paid attention to when he was cooking. He was careful how he handled them. If there was an organizing principle he couldn’t see it, but Ellen had systems for everything and had never liked Ed to disturb her things. When Davey was all scrubbed and sleepy, Ed read him a bedtime book from the pile he’d brought over, Ellen having no idea what children, or her own child, liked to read. After Ed kissed him good night, Ed and Maricor sat down as usual for a cup of kopi-gau, Singapore’s signature condensed-milk extra-strong coffee that had driven Ellen, from the day they arrived, to thank God that Singapore also had Starbucks.

“Has she been cooking?” Ed asked Maricor, waving his cup toward the shelves.

Maricor’s smile was sweet, but also amused. “On Sunday, she tell me. Ella necesita el fin de semana, the whole weekend, to prepare. She mix curry spices herself, lah.”

“Is it good, the food she makes?”

“I come Monday. She and Señor Sergei, they eat it all up before I get here.” She added, “He is very polite, Señor Sergei. He always eat what she make.”

Ed smiled too, understanding: if the curries Ellen made were good, Sergei wouldn’t need to be polite.

* * *

Not much changed over the next two weeks. Ellen’s conversations with Ed, ever short and to the point, were about nothing now but the impending move. It was a good thing the furniture in the flat was all rented, and whatever wasn’t (a few mirrors: Ellen had thought the flat needed more of those) the landlord could inherit. Ellen never brought anything from one life to the next. In his flat Ed had carved masks from Nairobi, matryoshkas from Prague. Ellen had her Russian work visa, her plane ticket; she was taking the last few days off work before she left, to accomplish her final errands, and she suggested Ed do the same.

Ed spent half a day getting Davey a passport and bought two tickets, for himself and Davey, for a few days after Ellen’s. “I need time to get settled before you two come,” she said. Ed’s answers didn’t matter so he hardly offered any. He met Maricor at Ellen’s on midweek mornings, took Davey home with him Thurdays, brought him back Mondays. He shopped at the market and cooked beef rendang and jicama-filled popiah. They didn’t go back to Malaysia; there was no need.

Now, on this Monday afternoon, the last before Ellen’s moving date, Ed and Davey sat entranced before the old man with the erhu. Because of the impromptu concert, they’d get to Ellen’s later than usual, but now that Ed thought about it, it was probably better this way. The old man would see how relaxed Ed was, how sweet he was with Davey; that would be useful if the police found him and asked. It would be hard on Maricor, the shock of finding the bodies when she arrived; Ed had been hoping to save her that but it occurred to him now that after she called the ambulance she’d probably ring Ed and tell him not to bring Davey into the flat. That would be easier on the boy. Ed would rush there in any case, and leave Davey outside with her, and go inside and try to take charge, though by then the police would be there and he’d be interfering. He’d be unnecessary, except to tell them, in low, shocked tones, that Ellen absolutely didn’t know her way around the kitchen or the market; that he’d warned her once or twice that not everything sold in the wet markets was edible, and that some herbs were easily mistaken for others.

Later, once the poison was identified as cerebera odollam, suicide tree, he’d shake his head blankly and say no, he had no idea where she’d gotten it, nor any idea what she’d thought its use was, though when it was ground it probably looked like any number of the darker spices used in curries and maybe that was her mistake. He’d tell the police he’d heard suicide tree could be bought in Malaysia but he hadn’t seen it here, which didn’t mean it wasn’t for sale, but that no, no, there was no possible way this was a suicide, double or otherwise, because Ellen had been promoted to Moscow and was very excited and planning to go.

Ed ruffled Davey’s hair. Yes, things were buay pai. No, better than not bad—everything was shiok, lah. Great. He settled more comfortably against the mahogany tree, wiped sweat from his face in the hot, rich air, watched the old man’s macaque hands, and waited for his phone to ring.