August 1975
The fish is not fish and the sambal belacan has no belacan in it. The egg in the beehoon is tauhu dyed yellow with kunyit and the thing that looks like chicken will crumble like cake between his teeth. Behind closed doors Mama has tried to explain it all to him: they don’t believe in killing animals now. Animals are God’s creatures too and when people don’t value their lives then slowly-slowly they stop valuing each other’s lives also. If you kill the goat because you need to eat it then why not kill your neighbour because you need his land? It will be hard at first Mama says, for a while it will be hard for us because we were used to eating flesh foods but then we will get used to it like everybody else. It’s better this way. You are only six years old Reza and you don’t understand everything but one day you will understand.
You are only six years old you are only six years old youareonlysixyearsold. Suddenly in the last few weeks Mama has been repeating like a mantra what all these years she did not seem to notice. All these years she accepted then expected his beyond-his-years wisdom. Reza the tiny gentleman. Reza the man of the house. Reza the defender of his mother’s heart. Always she has said to him: you got to be strong for Mama because Mama got nobody else to depend on. And always he has stepped up. Stiff upper lip and steady hands. He has hot-Miloed her and brought her Panadol and massaged her feet. He has opened the right letters and thrown out the bad ones. He has counted out coins for the bills and when there has been money left over to buy a late supper from the curry mee man he has put only two fishballs in his own bowl so that she might have three.
But here in this musty mossy house he has shrunk and she has grown. Now he is only six years old. His mouth waters like a six-year-old’s at the thought of those forfeited fishballs. He did not even have a birthday this year. Oh sure Cyril Dragon made a big fuss about the chocolate cake he’d asked Leo’s mother to make. Like as though it was the only chocolate cake the world had ever seen and to look at the other children’s faces it well might have been. “Cake cake!” they’d all said, nudging each other and pointing. But there had been no candles for the cake and he’d not had any presents because the latest news was that Happiness was not about Things. Even the birthday meal he’d not been able to choose and what would he have chosen anyway? Those horrible bondas? Fat mealy slices of fried yam? They’d come out with vegetable pakoras and everyone had oohed and aahed. There was no ketchup. You had to eat them with a funny green chutney or nothing at all. Happiness is not allowed to be about Things now but he still has a magazine cutting of an advertisement for the Airfix set his father promised him before everything broke.
After the so-called birthday party his mother had taken him aside and pleaded with him. “Don’t be rude Reza just please don’t be rude. Cyril Dragon is doing so much for you! At least show some appreciation. Don’t make people feel bad when they are trying so hard!”
Why should he? She is welcome to show all the appreciation she wants however she wants to show it but why should he? She’s the one who’s going to reap the rich and disgusting rewards of any appreciation not him so let her be the one to stump it out. Now again she takes his hands and says, “I know you say you don’t like the food here but at least just try it out and see okay? Can or not?”
He blinks at her. “It’s not just trying out. We’re going to stay here forever and ever isn’t it? Isn’t it?”
Yes. From now on he is going to be only six years old. He is going to abandon all pussyfooting.
She turns away from him and lifts one corner of her mouth in a coy little smile. He doesn’t want to see it but it is too late and now the sight of it makes him want to pick the scabs off his knees. But then she turns back to him with a deep loud sigh and says, “I told you isn’t it, I’ll show them how to cook something nicer. Okay? Okay, Reza boy?”
He shrugs and averts his eyes.
One week later Reza is holding Mama’s hand in the lunch buffet queue and looking at a tray of what he forgets cannot possibly be real prawn fritters. He should not forget; by now he should know that the possibility of prawn fritters is exactly zero. But remember: he is only six years old now! He can be six years old. He can give Mama what she wants. Giving her what she wants is in fact all he knows how to do.
Is some small part of him still aware at this point that he is performing? That he is an old man playing the part of a six-year-old? Or has he given himself up completely to the role and has it opened its maw and eaten him alive?
“Hot hot hot,” Mama says about the chafing dishes. “Don’t touch don’t touch.” As any mother might say to any small boy. And perhaps Reza thinks, Suddenly now you have to warn me about hot pans? Have you forgotten how I used to make Maggi Mee for us at the stove when you couldn’t get out of bed and there was nothing else in the house? Have you forgotten how I used to take the tiffin carrier downstairs to the curry mee man or up the road to the mamak stall and bring back boiling soup and mee rebus?
Or perhaps he doesn’t think that at all.
All the way down the table he says “No no no” to everything. Every inch the petulant small boy. No noodles no cabbage no yellow rice even. “What?” says Mama. “You love yellow rice!” But brand-new smallboy Reza is saving all the space on his plate and in his stomach for the promised treat because brand-new smallboy Reza trusts in people and their promises. In front of the tray of golden-brown fritters he points and says, “I want that.” The voice warbly. The whole pointing arm rigid from shoulder to fingertip.
Mama puts a fritter on his plate then seeing once again that he has hardly anything else puts another.
“More,” he says. “Put more, I want more.”
“Why don’t you eat first and then see if you want some more? After you don’t finish means wasted only.”
“No,” Reza insists. “More. I’m hungry.”
In her hurry to keep moving so that others can serve themselves Mama piles them onto Reza’s plate: three four five six fritters. The other children stare goggle-eyed: fried foods are supposed to be rationed. Two pieces per child.
In his seat at last Reza sinks his teeth into the not-so-crisp batter whose sogginess and rancid oil smell he has already forgiven in anticipation of what awaits inside: the solid bite of it the solid chewy sweet prawny bite. In that brief glorious moment he remembers the floury fritters of Ramadan bazaars and the fat buttery tiger prawns of Chinese wedding banquets. He remembers the tempura prawns of dinner parties at the club when they were flush.
And perhaps then he remembers the life he had with Mama before they came here: men coming men going but always always in the end and in between it had been the two of them—Reza and Mama, Mama and Reza in their own bubble. When there was nobody to take them anywhere and nobody to pay for a treat Mama would call a taxi and they would go to town and there would be these things: prawns crabs cuttlefish chicken drumsticks.
All these thoughts at once exhilarating and devastating must wash through him as his teeth attain the centre of that first fritter. Then the disappointment: inside the batter is something cold and mushy and boiled-tasting. It smells of dusty weevilled spices and cloudy lukewarm water. Of other people’s bathrooms.
He forces himself to swallow and holds the other half of the fritter gingerly between thumb and index finger as if it were somebody else’s used tissue. There he sits for a good ten minutes before Mama noticing his plate says, “What is this, Reza? You’ve not eaten anything. I told you not to—”
“But,” he says. Trying to force the words out the same way he forced the fritter mouthful in: at the exact same point in his throat fritter and words lumpify themselves and stick fast. Like a big wodge of long hair caught in the bend of the bathroom sink pipe. Waiting to be fished out. The unbudgingness of it not quite painful but sickening. Then he draws in a big breath and gathering up all the air inside his head uses it to expel the words: “I don’t like it.”
The other children watch intently. Their own food untouched. As dinnertime entertainment it is a little more tense than the usual offerings. Annabelle Foo whispers to Kiranjit Kaur, “I think so he must be used to English-type food lah.”
“Try it with the sauce and see,” Salmah says.
“I don’t like it. It’s not prawns.” Braver now that the first words are out of the way. Willing and able to elaborate.
Though he believes himself to be speaking quietly and discreetly the one they call Mrs Arasu whips her head around and bursts out laughing while clapping her hands. Reza never liked her to begin with but now he hates her. She is not soft like fat people usually are but hard and shiny like a bead. Tall and thin and bucktoothed with a mean little hairbun no bigger than a ten-cent fishball that she nevertheless confines in a hairnet in what even Reza age six recognizes as a fine example of wishful thinking. Her lips are always oily even when she has not eaten in hours. Her skin fits too tightly around the whole hard mass of her.
“Listen to the poor innocent boy!” she shrieks, turning to Reza. “You see,” she says to him with too much patience—why should he need so much patience when he is not even crying? “You see we don’t eat prawns here because eating dead animals is not good for the body and the soul. But these fritters are even tastier than prawns isn’t it? These are cauliflower fritters but one bite and I guarantee you, you will never look at prawns again, wah so tasty they are, just like prawns but better than prawns, mmmm!”
She tears off a hunk of fritter with her teeth like a caveman devouring a boar leg and chews avidly, all the while maintaining eye contact with Reza. Perhaps it is this terrifying spectacle that dispels the last of his reticence. Or perhaps this is the moment when his whole body realizes what it means to be a small boy and not only steps up to the task but goes leaping clean over the abyss. He shoves his plate across the table. It goes crashing into Annabelle Foo’s and she giggles nervously as though they are playing a game of plate carom and she is losing. But Reza takes no notice of her. He jumps to his feet with the oily hand held away from his body in disgust to shout, “No they’re not! They don’t taste like prawns at all! They taste like dogshit! All the food here tastes like dogshit and catshit and horseshit!”
The children hold their breath. The whole perfect oval of Annabelle Foo face aglow with something between horror and admiration. The Mak twins on the brink of vomiting from the excitement of it. But Reza is not nearly done.
“You’re all pretending to like it! You’re all just bluffing! I don’t want to eat your horrible food! I don’t—”
“Oh dear,” says Cyril Dragon who has rushed from his place at the head of the table to their side. He puts a hand on Reza’s shoulder and says again: “Oh dear, Reza.”
Genuine sadness weighs down his words. His face sags. His eyes look tender and puffy. The children wonder would he say oh dear and put his hands on their shoulders if they too refused to eat? Out loud Annabelle Foo cries, “Wah!”
Even Neela has come to the kitchen doorway to watch the show. It’s entirely possible that if Cyril’s eyes had not fallen upon her when he looked up from Reza’s side he would not have said what he said next. But there she is leaning on the door jamb looking upon the scene with those slightly despising eyes and that slightly pugnacious chin and it is more than he can bear.
“Neela,” he says, “the fritters are soggy and tasteless. See, even the children are complaining, and children always love anything deep-fried. Your cooking is becoming terrible.”
It’s this last accusation that silences the entire room. All the hissing and muttering stops. People freeze mid-chew. Neela stands to attention, searches his face for something she doesn’t find. Swallows hard. Then she says, “Children where complaining? Only one. Only one children complaining.”
“Yes!” Mrs Arasu cries as if the horse she picked has won. “The fritters are exactly the same as they always are. Let us be fair to Neela!”
The ultimate slap in the face for a man of such high ideals: to be reminded to be fair by a woman like Mrs Arasu. A petty busybody who is never fair unless it suits her own purpose. Even she can see where the real fault lies here. Cyril is shaken. He stands up as if to deliver a speech at a funeral.
“I’m very sorry,” he says to nobody in particular. “I’m really very sorry, I got carried away, this type of conflict deeply upsets me.”
He says to the clock on the wall: “Neela, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I had no business, really, you do so much for us, slogging away in that kitchen, you always do your best, we all know it.”
Then he bends slightly to address Reza again. “It’s all right, it’s all right. You’re not used to the food, of course. It will take time.”
He might have got away with it had he not at this point laid an absentminded hand on Reza’s curly head. Immediately Reza swats the hand away and bares his teeth at Cyril Dragon like a wolf caught in a trap.
“Go away!” he shouts. “Go away and leave us alone! As if you can make me eat this dogshit food! You’re not my father! I don’t have to listen to you! I don’t even like you!”
“What to do, what to do,” Mrs Arasu is saying to Bee Bee in a razor-blade voice that carries expertly across the room. “The poor boy has never had a mother, I mean she must have been busy with other things all the time isn’t it?”
“Reza,” Mama murmurs, “sit down right now.” She tugs at the hem of his shirt like a demure wife begging her husband not to bargain so much with the salesman. On her face not cool authority but a weary smile.
“I told you,” Reza shouts, “I told you already isn’t it? I don’t want to eat this! I don’t want to stay here! I hate this place and I hate this food!”
Then Mama’s awareness of her impotence finally overcomes her. Before she can stop it her left hand is reaching under the table and pinching Reza hard on the thigh. She knows that Cyril Dragon who has gone quietly back to his seat is trying to catch her eye. She pulls Reza back down into his seat. She leans over and hisses between her gritted teeth:
“You are embarrassing me. You are making a fool of both of us. I am so ashamed! I don’t know where to keep my face. I am ashamed to be your mother. Why couldn’t I have died the night you were born? Now shut your mouth and stop crying and eat.”
His eyes are big enough now to swallow her whole. Though nobody has touched his face his cheeks blaze red. I wish I could have died, she said, I wish I could have died, and now that the words have taken shape he must swallow them. All the times he brought her back from the dead and now she has said to him: because of you only I want to be dead. Now everything has changed. Now she does not belong to him anymore.
There is nothing to do now but eat this whole plate of soggy batter and slimy cauliflower—someone has dragged it back to his place and here it sits in front of him. No magic wand in the world will disappear it so eat it he does, stuffing as many pieces as he can into his mouth at one time so that his mouth is so full it will not close. The salt of the fritters mixes with the watery salt of tears and phlegm in his mouth. He gags and eats and eats and gags and everyone pretends to ignore him because that is one thing adults are very good at doing: pretending. Half of the tears running down his face are tears of sorrow and the other half are the tears that are forced out of the corners of your eyes when you are close to vomiting.