Amrit

Every evening, he called. Father always picked up the phone, but Amrit was right by his side, expecting the call. He and Father exchanged pleasantries and then Father handed the receiver over to Amrit. Father was courteous enough to leave her alone in the living room while she spoke to her future husband.

On the first phone call, there were many awkward silences, which were then hastily filled with polite questions confirming the biographical sketches they had been provided. She knew his name was Jaspal and that he worked for an insurance company in Toronto. He had a younger brother. On weekends, he went to the movies with friends, and he was helping his family renovate their home in a suburb of Toronto. His voice was deep and gentle and his accent curled around his words like somebody from a television show.

What he knew about her: aged twenty-three; born on 18 August; completed secondary school exams; learnt some skills at secretarial school; pursued work afterwards. Even those facts were padded. She did not so much complete her exams as scrape through with two passes, which did not grant her admission into any pre-university program. Secretarial school had been the only option. On some days at secretarial school, she had felt that the world was hers; there was nothing she could learn that she didn’t already know. Thoughts shot through her mind, convincing her that she was too clever, tearing her away from dull routine. Then, when she sank, the last place she wanted to be was at a desk, learning the proper typing hand placements and how to address letters. She wanted to be in bed or trapped inside it somehow, woven into the thick linings of her sheets.

When Father had informed her of the arrangement, he made it very clear that she was to give Jaspal the best impression of herself, so she pretended that everything he knew about her was accurate. This was her only chance to change.

In their second conversation, he asked her tentatively if she liked to cook. ‘I do actually,’ she said. ‘Curries and things.’

There was a laugh of relief on the other end. ‘You never know if you can ask that question nowadays,’ Jaspal said. ‘Some girls get offended.’

‘You don’t expect me to cook for you, do you?’ she asked. A pause, and then she added, ‘I’m joking.’

He laughed again. ‘That’s cheeky of you,’ he said, and she smiled to herself, warm in that recognition. Father had not told him that she had a sense of humour. It occurred to her that Father knew little about her beyond her behaviour and failed accomplishments. During the conversation she cracked a few more jokes, noticing with triumph the laughter that tumbled down the line. The next day she spent an entire afternoon daydreaming about her new life in Canada. Jaspal featured infrequently in her fantasies but she told herself this was because she had not met him yet. She had only seen a photograph; he was pleasant-looking, with light skin and greyish-brown eyes.

‘Does it snow a lot?’ she asked, during their third conversation. ‘Is it very cold?’

‘You’ll get used to it,’ he said. ‘Driving on icy roads can be dangerous, though. Can you drive?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘You’ll have to learn. Once you have a licence, you’ll be able to go anywhere on your own.’

‘That’s nice,’ she said, picturing herself behind the wheel of a car, surrounded by white landscapes. ‘I’ve always wanted to see what snow looks like. I know it’s actually quite troublesome, but there’s a bit of novelty to seeing it for the first time. It sounds like a nice change. It’s always so hot here.’

‘I’ll get to see it for myself soon,’ he reminded her. ‘We’ll be in Singapore on the 7th.’

‘Yes,’ she said. It’s all happening so quickly, she wanted to say, but she didn’t know if this would make her sound reluctant. She wanted to marry him. Marriage was exactly what she needed. Nobody had explained it to her; nobody had to. They wanted her to be expunged of this tendency towards recklessness. She did, too. She was tired of who she had become. Marrying Jaspal was a start to something new and she was in dire need of a change. Everywhere she looked, it seemed as though Singapore was hurtling forwards into the future, with a new order that made people more straight-backed and tight-lipped. The air was still and humid, a constant heavy breath on her skin. Yet Amrit remained unsettled, her mind overtaken by uncontrollable bursts of brilliance for days and weeks before the helplessness crept in. One morning a few months ago, she opened her eyes to realise that she had wet the bed in a drunken stupor. The stench of urine had filled the room and travelled into the hallway. Yet she could not fathom getting up and cleaning herself. It took an effort to make the smallest movement, and mysterious aches shifted and intensified in waves.

During their fourth conversation, Jaspal mentioned that she wouldn’t have trouble finding a job in Toronto. ‘You speak English pretty well,’ he said.

Amrit was indignant. ‘I was the best speaker in my class,’ she informed him. In fact, on the merits of her excellent English, Mr Lau had hired her to answer phones at the advertising agency. She had originally applied for a copywriting job but had no experience or prior employers to vouch for her. Mr Lau had told her that she could answer phones for six months; in the meantime, she could learn the inner workings of the company. Last week, when she returned to work after three consecutive sick days, she had avoided Mr Lau, the guilt burning into her.

Jaspal’s laughter was empty. ‘You’re funny,’ he said.

‘I wasn’t joking,’ Amrit replied. ‘Or boasting. My English results were the best in the school. I’d like to work in advertising.’

‘Do you want children?’ he asked.

‘Of course I do,’ Amrit said. ‘I want two. Two girls.’ She thought about Simran and Kiran, their soft hands and feet when they were babies, their gentle smiles and the way they clutched Gurdev’s pant leg and hid behind him shyly. ‘I want to work and raise children as well. I know it’s hard, but people manage.’

‘That’s nice,’ Jaspal said vaguely. ‘It’s very modern of you.’ The distance between them did not hide his disappointment at her mention of working. Amrit racked her brains to think of lighter subjects, but besides their shared future, what would they have together?

A few days later, Amrit woke to the sound of her alarm. It fell with a crash from the edge of her mattress to the floor, but it continued a jerky ringing until she pressed the button. She lay in bed, the sheets heavy and moist with sweat, and knew that she would not go to work today or tomorrow. She had taken another three days off and claimed a flu, unverified by a medical certificate. ‘I was so sick I couldn’t see a doctor,’ she’d told Mr Lau over the phone. ‘It’s my back. And my stomach. Everything is painful,’ she said, knowing that no doctor would take her seriously. It wasn’t pain or fatigue exactly. There was no precise way to talk about it. She had tried to go to the clinic several times but a succinct way to describe her symptoms eluded her and she ended up leaving.

She blamed herself. Somewhere there must be the terminology for the way thoughts sped through her mind, tricking her into thinking the world was illuminated solely by her ideas. There was a name for what would inevitably follow: a plummeting sense that she should not exist. Amrit’s regrets were endless. If she had finished school and gone on to university, she was certain she would have the words. Education was the way out of any state of uncertainty or misery. The government was always saying that Singaporeans had to compete with each other; Amrit could compete with nobody. With her limited words, all she could say was that it felt like hell.

The phone rang at 8.45 a.m. She heard a door open somewhere in the flat and, moments later, a light tap on her door. ‘Phone call for you.’ Narain’s voice was muffled through the door.

‘Come in,’ she called to Narain. She had not spoken to him in ages. He was rarely around when she got home, and in the mornings, she was still asleep when he got ready for work.

The door opened. In the doorframe, Narain looked larger than he was. He tucked in his shirt as he spoke to her, avoiding looking at the room. She assessed it through his eyes. Worn and unwashed clothes lay strewn across the floor; a pair of underpants dangled from the corner of the ironing board. The dressing table was crowded with makeup and accessories still wrapped in their packages. Glasses lined with Ribena and crusty Milo stains littered the floor next to her bed. The dust on the floor was thick and visible, even though only a tiny sliver of light entered through a space between her curtains. Before going to sleep last night, she had used clothes pegs to bind them together, but the draught through the open windows must have caused them to snap off.

‘I’m not going in today,’ Amrit said.

‘You have to work. You’re not going to get anywhere with this career that you want if you don’t put in the work.’

Amrit sat up. ‘You know what they make me do the whole day in that bloody office? Smile. Smile when clients come in, smile when I show them to the conference room, smile even when I’m on the fucking telephone.’

‘And what’s so hard about that?’ Narain asked.

Amrit stared at him. Smug, that was the word for him. Self-satisfied, just because he had a degree from America. ‘I’m smarter than that. I could write better ads than half the people in that office. Mr Lau just doesn’t want me to succeed.’

‘Grow up, Amrit,’ Narain said. He shut the door, shielding himself from the insults she would hurl if she didn’t feel so drained. She felt something low in her stomach, a plummeting sensation that was not pain – but what was it then? What doctor could cure disappointment that grew into a pile of stones within her, or elation that made her skin tingle with pleasure?

There was only one consolation today – she could still recognise the emotions stirring within her. It was better than the days to come, when she would feel nothing at all.

Two days passed. Amrit woke one evening to find the room engulfed in shadows. While she was sleeping, somebody had come inside and parted the curtains in a bid to rouse her. Weak light from the opposite block of flats only succeeded in casting her surroundings in different shades of grey. She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand and caught a whiff of vomit on her pillow. A vague memory: she had called her office, finally, to say she could not come in, and Mr Lau had said, ‘You’re fired.’

She had hung up and walked to the coffee shop where the usual customers let her share their whiskey. ‘Promise I’ll pay you back,’ she’d said after a few drinks, and then she left with one of them. In a damp patch of wet grass, she crouched and threw up, and he rubbed her back, saying soothing things. He led her to the park, where he unzipped his pants and pushed up her skirt. They were frantic and flustered as their bodies slammed together, as if this was all that was necessary. Before placing her in a taxi, he gave her a five-dollar note and wrote down his phone number on an old supermarket receipt. ‘I can’t call you,’ she told him. ‘I’m getting married.’

‘To who?’ he asked.

‘A graduate from overseas,’ she said. She hoped this would impress him and scare him off. She placed the paper in her purse anyway. His name was Hakim.

Amrit’s bedroom door opened with a nearly inaudible creak. In the old Naval Base house, things had announced their presence, even if everybody was still. Floorboards creaked from invisible pressures, windows drilled at the slightest breeze. This flat felt like an airtight box in comparison.

Father stepped inside and flipped the light switch. It blinked, bringing flashes of diluted light into the room before flooding it completely. Amrit groaned and sank against her mattress. Father began talking loudly, then shouting. ‘Getting married in two months and you still can’t behave like a lady. Taking advantage of my kindness. One fine day, I’ll lock you out. I’ll make sure you don’t have a way to enter my house again.’

But it isn’t your house, Amrit thought, through the haze of her hangover. It would baffle him and then incite more anger, but wasn’t it true? Sure, he had paid the mortgage and signed the paperwork, but this flat had been designed to be identical to thousands of other government properties on the island. Again, Amrit struggled with words. She wanted to reassure Father that he didn’t have to feign pride in this place. What they once had – the Naval Base bungalow with jungle vines masking the concrete – had been his house. What he had before she existed – a fertile spread of Punjab farmland passed down through generations – had been his house. Living was messy. These uniform flats, stacked on top of each other, were tidy solutions. Nothing about this square room or the sturdy cement tiles or the high-rise view of the estate from the window sufficed as a house.

‘You hear?’ Father was saying. He thrust his thumb behind his shoulder, gesturing to the unlit passageway behind him. ‘Listen, you hear it?’

Amrit shook her head and shut her eyes. The light penetrated and produced a string of dancing shapes through her skull.

‘Outside. Your mother is crying. She is sitting and crying and wondering: why, why, does my daughter behave this way? When so many other daughters are so good, why does mine shame me? When will I ever rest?’

Amrit stared at Father, amazed. It had been so long since he used Mother to evoke guilt that the moment would be nostalgic if it weren’t laced with absurdity. As a little girl, his mere mention of Mother’s disappointment made her wary of causing mischief. That first time Amrit ran away and returned, Father thought he could prevent further incidents by describing how Mother’s cries filled the room at night. He told her he could not sleep because Mother did not sleep.

‘I don’t hear anything,’ Amrit said.

Father lunged into the room and grabbed Amrit’s arm. ‘Then come. You hear it for yourself.’ His fingers dug hard into her skin.

She shouted: ‘If Mother isn’t happy, she can talk to me herself. Tell her to come to me and say something!’

Father looked as if he might lunge at her, his feet separated at an awkward stance. Then the padlock to the main gate clanged faintly like a bell, announcing Narain’s arrival. A distraction. Satisfied, Amrit flipped to her side and tossed the sheet over her head. The light seeped through the worn cotton and made her entire body throb with pain. Later, Father came in again to tell her Gurdev and Banu were on the phone. They were going to Malaysia for the weekend and wanted to know if she needed anything from there. Amrit pulled back the sheet and told Father she wanted nothing from anybody. The door slammed, and then Father moved about the house, yelling, banging more things. She drifted back to sleep and had dreams of the walls splitting like eggshells.

Mr Lau was not there when she went to collect her last pay cheque, but the other people at the office conveyed his resentment. The women in the payroll department shrugged when she asked them if her cheque was ready and then they deliberately took a long time to locate it. The marketing manager, who had always made it a point to say hello to her, regarded her coldly. He said something in Chinese to the man sitting next to him, who looked up at Amrit.

‘When the receptionist isn’t around, you know how many things are out of place?’ one of the payroll girls asked angrily when she returned. Amrit could tell she relished the opportunity to scold somebody, in Mr Lau’s absence. She shook the envelope at Amrit. ‘Mailings were not mailed. We all had to take time from our lunch hour to answer your calls. You know that or not?’ She tossed the cheque at Amrit. It slid off the desk and floated onto the floor. Everything fell quiet. Too proud to pick it up, but too broke to leave without her money, Amrit crossed her arms over her chest and tried to look as if calmness was her only plan. Somebody finally came along and picked up the envelope. It was the marketing manager, whose name she was having trouble remembering. She didn’t know any of their names; she started this job knowing she didn’t have to remember because she would not be here long enough. He shot the payroll girl a disapproving look and told Amrit she needed to go.

She clutched the envelope to her chest. On her way out, someone loudly remarked, ‘I told him: next time, don’t hire these kinds of people.’

Jealous, Amrit thought triumphantly. They had seen her engagement ring – she might even have mentioned it on the phone to the payroll girls when she called to say she would be picking up her cheque.

Today the sun beat furiously against the windows of a nearby building. On either side of it, construction cranes stooped towards the complex bamboo scaffolding that shrouded the buildings-in-progress. The city was being built before Amrit’s very eyes. There were times when she sensed it was important to acknowledge this but the urgency didn’t overwhelm her today. The buzzing traffic and the drilling and clanging of construction failed to excite her. She remembered she was supposed to leave Singapore. The point of the marriage was to make her disappear. A heavy wave of shame washed over her, momentarily dissolving her surroundings. When she tried to count her misfortunes, none were detached from her own foolishness.

A bus honked, jolting Amrit from her thoughts, but she couldn’t figure out where she was in relation to the bus. She was too close to the kerb; she was standing on the road. A man caught her sleeve and jerked her back. ‘See where you’re going. The light is still green,’ he scolded. She turned to see a small crowd watching, and a young woman she vaguely recognised coming towards her. No, Amrit pleaded silently. Although she had long forgotten their names, her former secondary school classmates were always similarly dressed – tailored jackets and high heels, briefcases swinging at their sides.

‘Amrit from Stanford Girls’ School, right? I knew you right away,’ the woman called. ‘It’s me, Gail.’ The crowd behind her looked reluctant to disperse until Amrit waved back. Then their interests waned.

‘How are you?’ Gail asked. Her voice had not changed since she was sixteen. It was high and breathy, easy to mimic. It was the only thing Amrit remembered about her.

‘I’m well, thanks.’

‘What happened just now? It looked like you were going to jump out in front of that bus,’ Gail asked, laughing lightly.

Amrit forced herself to laugh as well. ‘I wasn’t looking.’

‘So what are you up to these days? I haven’t seen you in ages.’ Her words were clipped in a faint British accent, a remnant of their diction classes at Stanford Girls. Amrit had not spoken like that for years. Everything that spilled from her mouth was tainted in Singlish, that foul dialect of common Singaporeans. If she spoke, she would not convince anyone that she had once been a Stanford girl.

‘I’m getting married,’ Amrit said.

‘Congrats,’ Gail said, nodding. ‘That’s good news. So I suppose you work around here?’ She glanced uncertainly at Amrit’s denim slacks.

‘No, not today,’ Amrit replied, offering no further explanation, though Gail waited. ‘I’m. I just left my job. I’m getting married and we’re moving to Canada.’

‘Oh, congratulations. Canada is very nice,’ Gail said, brightly.

‘We’re really looking forward to it. It will be nice to get out of here,’ Amrit said pointedly.

Gail offered a tight smile. ‘Won’t you miss your family? That’s why I didn’t want to study abroad. I was afraid I’d miss my mum’s cooking too much.’

‘Well, my fiancé’s family is there. I can adjust easily to a new place.’

‘You’re in love!’ Gail said, blissfully.

Amrit feigned the same joy. She loved the change he could bring to her life, the escape route he offered. She loved what a husband represented. As Jaspal’s name lingered in her mind, his face appeared and became Hakim’s, the man she had gone to the park with. She pressed her fingers to the piece of paper with his phone number on it that she kept in her purse.

After she and Gail parted with promises to stay in touch, Amrit boarded a bus home. Her seat at the back was hot from the engine. A gash in the upholstery poked the back of her thigh. As she shifted, her purse slipped from her hands and coins scattered across the seat, some falling into the exposed stuffing. She stared helplessly at the coins, and a stream of tears poured down her face. More passengers got on and stared before finding seats away from her. The conductor finally came bobbing along with the vehicle’s jerky rhythm. ‘Going where?’ he asked, snapping his ticket puncher at his side. He was taken aback when he noticed her crying. Amrit fumbled for her ticket and passed it to him.

‘You still must tell me where you’re going,’ the conductor said.

Amrit shook her head and looked away. Straight rows of evenly spaced trees shot by the windows. Outside a church, two workers were struggling to keep a banner tied to a fence, as a strong gust of wind made ripples through the fabric. At the next stop, she pushed past the conductor and stumbled off the steps. She walked briskly until she found a pay phone, and then she opened her purse and pulled out the piece of paper. Hakim. She felt her heart thumping as she dumped out all of her ten cent coins. She could talk to him all day.