Sanjeev finds them a table near the giant glass windows that fade into a boardwalk overlooking the twinkling sea. “Like a postcard,” he tells Donita, nodding at Sentosa in the near distance. Construction cranes crisscross the blue skies, and little red flags wave from the castle spires at the theme park’s entrance. Donita has no use for the view because she is too busy staring at the stall menus advertising steaming bowls of stir-fried noodles, grilled marinated meats, Vietnamese pork rolls, and platters of mixed vegetables. After Sanjeev tells her she can order whatever she likes, she wants to sweep her hand over the food court and turn it into a personal buffet.
The food court is built to look like Singapore’s streets in olden times. Thatched awnings stretch over the stalls, and the tables are made of heavy wood. Donita chooses the char kway teow with two side dishes of fried chicken and curry puffs. The dark flat noodles arrive, steaming and glossy with oil. Sanjeev orders a pyramid of yellow rice with curries and pickled vegetables surrounding the base. As Donita eats, she feels the void in her stomach asking for more. “Is there dessert?” she asks, picking up a slice of sweet roasted pork with her chopstick. Sanjeev points to an auntie pushing a cart and peddling shaved-ice desserts and lychee jelly puddings through the fake yesteryear lanes. “Call her over now,” Donita says.
Afterward, as they cross the overhead bridge to the bus stop, Donita explains to Sanjeev that Mrs. Fann doesn’t leave her enough food at the end of each meal, and since she’s hardly allowed to go out on her own these days, she never knows when she’ll be able to buy herself a snack.
Sanjeev frowns and shakes his head. “Your boss is not treating you well.” Traffic roars on the overpass, drowning out Donita’s other complaints. Mrs. Fann made her stay up late last night to clear out the storeroom in the hall. The dust made Donita’s eyes burn, and when she sneezed, she was scolded for spreading germs in the flat. Mrs. Fann checked her purse thoroughly again before she left the flat today to make sure she wasn’t stealing, and then she made Donita raise her arms and spread her legs so she could check if she was concealing anything. Her fingers dug into Donita’s inner thighs and made her want to scream.
“She told me, ‘I have to do this. You people cannot be trusted. Carolyn Hong caught her maid stealing on her day off, and you see what happened when she confronted her?’”
“She knows you are friends with Flordeliza?” Sanjeev asks.
Donita shakes her head. “If she finds out, she will probably get the police to arrest me just for knowing her.”
It is unusual to discuss Flor with Sanjeev. Donita had told him about sneaking around behind the Hong residence and finding the backpack, and she was surprised at his reaction. “Are you crazy? Something could have happened to you,” he said. “Just let the police do their work. If she is innocent, the truth will come out.” Donita had bristled at the word if. “I know she is innocent, and don’t call me crazy again,” she snapped, and the conversation stalled there. Later Sanjeev explained that a couple of years ago, there was a riot in Little India over a Bangladeshi construction worker who had accidentally been run over by a bus. “Now the police are even more careful about any misbehaviour or protest from people like us.” Will anybody burn down buildings over Flor, though? Donita doubts it. On the domestic-worker Facebook groups, women warn one another not to talk about it because their comments can be reported. They’re all better off minding their own business.
The bus stop is on a crowded footpath on the edge of a busy highway. Donita’s head begins to hurt from the roar of traffic, the dust, and the hot exhaust from the buses that have crawled to a stop and lined up at the curb. As they push through the crowd to get to the double-decker bus at the end of the line, Sanjeev grips Donita’s hand, but as soon as they board, he drops it to pat his pockets as though looking for his transit card.
“You’re holding it,” Donita says. Sanjeev glances at his other hand awkwardly and doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t look her in the eye, and when the bus suddenly lurches forward, he doesn’t reach out to catch Donita the way he does on the MRT, hooking one arm protectively around her waist. Donita scans the bus, and within seconds, she spots them—a man wearing a white turban and a woman whose thick line of scalp pokes out behind her scarf. Their pinched expressions and hard staring make Donita want to straddle Sanjeev and kiss him passionately, just to scandalize them even further, but he has inched so far away from her now, he can’t even hear her muttering, “Why can’t they mind their own business?”
The more truthful question Donita wants to ask Sanjeev is What are you so afraid of? It gets stuck in her throat every time they go out in public and have to separate because he sees people from his community. Even when they’re not on a bus that is on the route to the Sikh temple, Sanjeev tells her it’s better to sit separately.
“You say people take pictures of maids on their days off with their boyfriends and post them on Facebook,” Sanjeev explained. “If we’re sitting together on the bus, they post the pictures and make up all sorts of stories about us. I don’t want your ma’am to come across these photos.”
Is Donita supposed to think him brave for the few times they have been so wrapped up in each other and their bubble of conversation that he forgot to jump away from her for the Mrs. Fanns of the country? Or that he pretends to keep them apart in public for her sake? She can’t bring herself to talk to Sanjeev about this, though, or about any aspect of their relationship. It feels like a conversation that would take days. She wants to spend what little time they have together luxuriating in the company of someone who makes her feel fully herself. Around Sanjeev, Donita is both sexy and sharp. He gives her his rapt attention with his eyes, and in his arms she feels both tenderly appreciated and protected. Nobody has been so many things in Donita’s life before.
In the apartment, Sanjeev tells Donita that he confirmed with his roommates that they would be out for the afternoon. “I asked them to give me a few hours.”
“Hours,” Donita says, raising her eyebrow at Sanjeev. Redness creeps into his cheeks and makes Donita kilig—that fluttery feeling that overcomes her every time Sanjeev gets shy. She gives him a playful nudge to let him know she was just joking, but if he has the stamina for a couple of hours, they should make the most of it. Over the past few days, they have been sending each other messages about all the things they want to do with each other, and Donita pictured this afternoon to be one long session of continuous pleasure.
Perhaps Donita had also allowed her imagination to roam too far. She pictured satin sheets and plush heart-shaped pillows, maybe some rose petals strewn across the bed. Instead, the walls of the room are covered in textured paint that resembles dried oatmeal. Sanjeev’s single bed is adjacent to a built-in wardrobe with paint flaking off the silver knobs. It is nice being alone together, though, and when she closes her eyes and feels Sanjeev’s body pressing against hers, all the other details disappear. Yet, after an hour or so of breathless tumbling in the sheets, she also wants to talk. Every conversation with Sanjeev is a discovery.
“Who is that?” Donita asks. She points at a picture tucked into the frame of a standing mirror.
“My friend Armeet’s family. His mother, father, and two younger brothers.”
“Why do you have his family’s picture in your room?”
“I told you, this is not a hundred percent my room,” Sanjeev explains patiently. “Only like . . . twenty percent. We share it. The room next door has two bunk beds. A few more sleep in the living room.”
“The bed is yours?” Donita asks.
“Some days,” Sanjeev says. “Like now.”
Obviously. Donita squirms. She doesn’t like the thought of sharing this bed with so many other people, but then, how different is it from going to another pay-by-the-hour hotel?
“You wash the sheets?” Donita asks, poking at a threadbare corner of the striped blue and white bedsheets.
“Of course,” Sanjeev says.
At least this room has traces of Sanjeev’s daily life, like his baseball cap sitting atop a pile of spiral-bound books from his hospitality course, and the laptop charger plugged into the wall. On the back of the door, there are shirts hanging from a row of hooks meant for handbags, and a crushed ball of receipts and tickets is slowly unfurling across the dresser. But maybe none of those things are his. This thought makes Donita shift uncomfortably again. This time, Sanjeev notices.
“What’s wrong?” he asks. He moves to give her space.
“Sanjeev, do you ever think about us together . . . next time?” Donita asks. She avoids scaring him with the word future, even though sometimes the only thing getting her through a tough day is fantasizing about a future with him.
“You mean your next day off?” Sanjeev asks. “Will your ma’am let you have any public holidays off?”
Donita sighs. She doesn’t really feel ready to broach the topic of where their relationship is going, but it also bothers her that there is nowhere for them to go. Not just on Sundays, where they have to fight for space with all the other foreign workers in the few tiny public spaces and the even fewer private spaces they are allowed to inhabit. Officially, they cannot have a life together. The work-permit rules are such that Donita will never be able to live in Singapore as anything but a domestic worker, nor can she migrate here on other terms. So, then, where do they go?
“The next holiday is in November,” she says. Mrs. Fann doesn’t give her public holidays off anyway.
Donita was even afraid Mrs. Fann would make her work today because she had been going on about “the big day coming up.” She’d spent most of last night’s dinner flipping through a pile of photocopied registration forms with the heading sage on top. She seemed oblivious to Donita’s presence and to the fact that Donita had to stand at attention and wait until she finished her dinner before she could have her own.
The best thing about Sanjeev’s room is the sky. It fills half a window; the other half of the window gives a partial view of an adjacent apartment building. Sitting up in the bed, Donita can see the afternoon unfurling for the other residents. Their movements are languid; it is a day of rest, after all. Sometimes she feels like Sunday for her is not a day for relaxation but a chance to do everything she cannot do in Mrs. Fann’s presence. It’s burdensome, cramming all her acts of freedom into the hours before her curfew—she smokes more cigarettes than she usually would, she hikes up her skirt so the hem barely covers her bottom, she searches for another condom in the box so she and Sanjeev can have another round to last them for the next two weeks. He looks as if he is perishing from their last hour, and Donita feels tired too.
“It’s called Diwali,” Sanjeev says.
“Hmm?” Donita asks, preoccupied.
“The November holiday. My family, I miss them more during rakhi,” Sanjeev says. “On Diwali, it’s mostly eating food, but those other occasions are more special.”
“What do you do?” Donita asks.
“On rakhi, the girls tie strings around their brother’s wrists, and their brothers give them money. It’s to show appreciation for your sisters, for all the things they do for you.”
“You don’t have sisters,” Donita says.
“I do,” Sanjeev says. He reaches to the floor and picks his phone out of his pants pocket. “Cousin-sisters. And family friends. All considered sisters.” He scrolls through his camera’s photo gallery and shows her a picture of three smiling girls. “Every time I leave home, I miss them the most.”
Three girls with manes of thick dark hair stare into the camera. Laughter shines in their kohl-lined eyes, and behind them are small hints of Sanjeev’s homeland—a fence, a patch of pavement, a car parked on the road’s edge. Donita can imagine these sisters crowding around Sanjeev whenever he returns. She can picture him teasing them and also protecting them. “You think they would like me?” Donita asks. She feels her heart skipping as soon as she asks the question. Too soon, too much. “I mean . . .” she starts, but Sanjeev gently takes her hand.
“They would like you,” he says. His words bring a wave of relief coursing through her. She smiles.
“What time do we need to leave?” Donita asks.
“Not yet,” Sanjeev says.
“Maybe we go out for a walk first,” Donita suggests. On their way into the neighbourhood, they had passed a corridor of low-slung shophouses with carved shutters, and Donita wants a photograph of herself taken there. For all her curiosity about where and how Sanjeev lives, Donita realizes she doesn’t want to be stuck indoors.
Sanjeev nods and draws her close to him. A slow smile spreads across his face. “Let’s take a shower first,” he says. A giggle escapes Donita’s lips as he wraps her in the sheets and carries her like a bride across the threshold of the master bathroom.
Yesterday, when Donita told Cora and Angel that she was going to attend a poetry reading with Sanjeev because one of his friends was performing, Angel replied immediately. “The Migrant Workers’ Poetry Competition? I submitted so many poems to them and they didn’t choose a single one. Tell me if the winners’ poems are any good, okay?”
Not waiting for an invitation, Angel also sent a few of her poems to the chat group. Cora replied right away: Bless you, Angel, you have such a big heart. Donita wasn’t sure what a good or bad poem looked like. I’ll let you know, she wrote to Angel anyway. She looked through Angel’s poems and found that they were all about her breakup. One was titled “Suzan You Are a Fucker I Wish You Get a Disease.” Maybe the judges didn’t want to know about her heartbreak.
She and Sanjeev arrive at the Esplanade for the reading, and Sanjeev looks as if he might launch into a guided-tour speech about the architecture if Donita asks him about it, so she tells him that she looked it up before they got here. It was not quite what she was expecting. It’s certainly a landmark building, surrounded by financial towers and a boathouse restaurant on the banks of the gleaming river, but its hunched spiky dome doesn’t look very inviting.
In the lobby of the Esplanade, a blast of air-conditioning and soft amber spotlights welcome Donita. There is an installation of delicate silver wind chimes hanging from the ceiling, and at the slightest movement or whisper on the ground, sound waves travel to create an orchestra of harmonious tunes. A grand piano on a marble platform overlooks the crowd.
“So in this country, the people do have music, but only inside the correct buildings,” Donita says. Her remark reverberates through the wind chimes, which produce a tinkling melody to match. Sanjeev laughs.
Donita feels Flor’s presence strongly because she woke up this morning with her mind still tangled in a dream of that Sunday when they met at the Marine Terrace market. In the dream, on their walk towards the canal, they heard a cheer erupting from a group heading across the road to the beach, followed by thumping bass beats. Flor told her: “If you don’t hear any music, it means somebody has made a complaint.”
“They don’t allow music on the beach?” Donita asked incredulously.
“Oh, they are fine with it,” Flor replied. “Your ma’am makes music all the time, no? Yelling, banging things? They just don’t like us doing it.”
Here, at least, it looks as if people wouldn’t mind the kind of music Donita is hearing. Gathered on the stairs and gravitating in groups towards a live free concert on the mezzanine are other Pinoy women.
“They are all here for poetry?” Donita asks, wondering if she should have worn something a little more formal. Her hair is still damp at the ends from their shower together.
“Maybe, maybe not,” Sanjeev says. “A lot of people come here on weekends.”
They make their way towards the stage where a man with dreadlocks is playing bongos. Donita’s shoulders bounce to the rhythm. The man makes eye contact with her and thumps the heels of his hands against the taut skin of the instrument. The beats travel right through Donita’s body and she shakes her hips. “Come on,” she says to Sanjeev, pulling him in before he can decline. The crowd gives them space to move together, and they begin a call-and-response song with the bongo player. Sanjeev’s feet are quick to catch the rhythms. His hands grip Donita at her waist, secure, and for a moment, she feels as if everybody else disappears. They are two people dancing together, their bodies carried by a song from another continent. Her laughter rings in the air as the song fades to an end, the width of her smile matched by Sanjeev’s.
Laughing and catching their breath, they move away from the crowd, hand in hand, and go up the escalator to a gallery on the third floor. There are people milling about here too, but they chat in low voices and laugh politely. Some are clearly artists, like that woman wearing a slick purple wig and white go-go boots who is staring intently at a framed black-and-white photograph on the wall. A couple of teenage girls carrying grainy white tote bags huddle together, peeking furtively around the room. Behind them, there is a long table with plates of sliced fruit, bottled water, and cheese.
While Sanjeev says hello to his friends, Donita makes her way to the table. She fills a small plate with slices of cheese, papaya, and grapes. One of the teenage girls glances at Donita, and she freezes, wondering if she was supposed to pay. There is no sign or cash register, but maybe there are things that people just know about art events. Did everybody get an e-mail beforehand about wearing these shapeless linen dresses and gigantic black-framed glasses? There is a man standing near the window who definitely looks like he is in costume.
Another young woman smiles at Donita, calming her nerves. She notices a crowd gathering at the back, a group of Filipino and Indonesian domestic workers in separate cliques, and they have kept away from the fruit table. When the host of the event tells people to take their seats, those women hang back and gravitate towards the seats in the farthest row. Donita wants to shout at them: It’s Sunday! We can sit wherever we want! But she gets nervous too, holding her plate of fruit and hovering by the front row with all the other people. Sanjeev gives her a wave from where he’s standing with his group, and she waves back and points at where she’s saved him a seat. He nods.
The woman who smiled at Donita is carrying a tote bag with sage printed across it. That’s the same word that was on Mrs. Fann’s forms, the ones she instructed Donita to cross-check against the list on her laptop yesterday. As they settle into their seats, Donita asks the woman, “What is this place, SAGE?”
“It’s an organization for women,” the woman says. “Society for the Advancement of Gender Equality.”
“Oh,” Donita says. “I think my ma’am is joining you, very busy becoming members with all her friends.” Although . . . gender equality doesn’t sound like something Mrs. Fann would champion. What she knows is that Mrs. Fann doesn’t like the way this SAGE place has been running sex education programmes in schools. “They’re saying it’s okay to be gay,” Mrs. Fann told Donita. “You come from a Catholic country, so you understand. They don’t allow this in the Philippines, right? Singapore is becoming too liberal. It’s time to get some sensible leaders in there.”
Donita looks at Sanjeev, hoping he will call her over and introduce her to his friends, but they only look at her briefly and offer smiles and waves from a distance when Sanjeev breaks away to join her.
The host of the event is a bespectacled man who goes by the name Syncopate. He is dressed head to toe in loose black garments, and even though he has a microphone, his voice is a whisper. He frowns. “Testing?” he says.
“It’s like a funeral,” Donita whispers to Sanjeev.
“I think it will be more fun than that,” he says.
“You sure? Look at him. He looks like he’s going to jump into the Singapore River afterward.”
Sanjeev chuckles and Donita nudges him back. They lace their fingers together. “Later, when I meet your friends, I have a lot of questions about you,” she says, touching the threads on his wrist. She might just be imagining it, but Sanjeev’s body suddenly tenses.
“Don’t need to mention too much,” Sanjeev says.
“Mention what? All the things we did this afternoon? You think I am going to give them a full report?” She laughs. “I was just going to ask them, Is Sanjeev really so nice to his sisters that they give him so many threads?” Sanjeev returns her teasing nudge, but his laugh is hollow.
Syncopate has been given a new microphone now and he is introducing the poets. Sanjeev’s poet friend has a moustache that has been so finely sculpted with wax, it looks like a drawing. There are also two men from Bangladesh wearing long kurtas over their jeans. A Filipino woman in a frayed dark denim skirt and a ruffled blouse sits next to Syncopate. She keeps smiling at her friends in the back row and then biting her lip, as if she’s afraid she’ll start laughing. The Indonesian woman next to her is less reserved. She waves with both hands and blows kisses to the back row.
“For this year’s edition of the Migrant Workers’ Poetry Competition, one winner, two runners-up, and three honourable mentions were awarded to poems that captured the foreign worker’s experience in Singapore. There are many talented writers in our midst. To think that they just started writing poetry a few years ago!”
At this, one of the Bangladeshi men frowns and whispers to the other one, who nods. “Sir,” he says, tapping on the microphone in front of him. “Sorry for interruption.”
Syncopate looks slightly ruffled but he allows it.
“Sir, many of us already knowing poetry long before coming to Singapore.”
“Of course, of course,” Syncopate says, nodding. He holds up his notes. “As I was saying—”
“No, sir, something the Singapore people must understand,” the man continues. “In Bangladesh, we all read Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel Prize winner. Even the poorest children also can recite famous Tagore poems. My father used to read Jibanananda Das’s poems to me. You know the writer Mohammad Rafiq? I wanted to study with him. Everybody in my country is a poet.”
“I see you’re ready to take the stage, Abhi,” Syncopate says with a tight smile. “Will you read us your poem?”
Abhi reads in his native language. Like most people in the room, Donita doesn’t understand any of it, but the words are like a wave softly swishing over her bare skin. She feels like closing her eyes, but she’s afraid she will look ridiculous. When Syncopate reads the English translation, all of the hairs on Donita’s arms begin to rise.
“This Is What I Do for You”
My father says these words
as I pack my bags for a land
hungry for buildings. The trees here
are steel against the wind; the rain
does not replenish soil, but makes
the rivers swell to their limits.
Here my fortunes will rise like the rivers
in my hometown. They will seep into
the soil, and the roots will stretch far
so my father can forget
our wealth of sweet mud and emerald fields
reduced to white paper, signed scrawl.
Debt gawps like a canyon and makes my
father ill. My days are compacted into
dormitory solitude
mobile phone screen
measured steps along bamboo scaffolding.
One day, I will have enough to leave,
and then I will watch this island grow
tiny under my soaring body. The buildings
shrinking, the trains scrawling
like signatures and I will say:
“Singapore, this is what I do for you.”
The audience members sigh and hmm collectively. Donita hears her voice among theirs, and she’s surprised at this involuntary response.
“Tell us about your poem, Abhi,” Syncopate says.
“This one is about sacrifices,” Abhi says. “We migrant workers, our families give up so much so we can come here. My father sell his land to pay the agent so I can come here, make money. He say, ‘Abhi, when you go to Singapore, first thing you must do is pray.’ But when I come to this country, first thing I try to find is poetry.”
“The participants were given a prompt,” Syncopate explains to the audience. “‘Convey the migrant worker experience to Singaporeans.’ Every year we also have a theme. For this year, the theme was Returning. All the winning entries explored this theme with depth and complexity. Siti Hadiyah from Indonesia wrote about how she returned to her Islamic faith in Singapore and started wearing the hijab as a way to cope with a difficult work situation when she first arrived.”
“Yes, thank you for the introduction, sir,” says the Indonesian woman. Her round face beams like the sun. Syncopate invites her to read her poem, which is written in Bahasa, a language that crackles like applause. Donita picks up some words that this language shares with Tagalog: lima, anak, saket. When Siti Hadiyah says the word mahal, she pauses to ask the audience in English: “Do you know what this means?”
“‘Love’!” “‘Expensive’!” “‘Love’!” “‘Expensive’!” members of the audience call out. Syncopate rises from his chair and makes a Lower your volume gesture with two flat hands, which nobody heeds. Siti Hadiyah smiles. “In Tagalog and Bahasa, one word meaning two things. ‘Love’ and ‘expensive.’ Which one will it be?” She repeats this phrase in Bahasa, and when she finishes, her friends cheer loudly, and she begins to cry and fan her face in embarrassment. “Sorry,” she gasps.
Donita feels as though she might start to cry as well. There are times when Mrs. Fann berates her so relentlessly that Donita can feel the tears in the corners of her eyes, but she blinks them back. To cry would be to let Mrs. Fann win. Sometimes Donita even digs her fingernails deep into her palms to distract herself from her despair. Sanjeev noticed the little half-moon dents in her skin while they were showering today. They were small ridges, and the water made them shine. “You going to tell me my future?” she teased, and he said, “Your future is with me.” She happily put aside all her questions.
Now his friend is taking the stage. Sanjeev sits up a bit straighter. “I’d like to welcome Ranvir Singh to read his poem. Ranvir, will you be reading the English version? He translated it himself.”
“No, sir, I only want to read the Punjabi version.”
“Then I can read out the translation,” Syncopate says.
Ranvir shakes his head. “No need, sir. My English translation is not so accurate—the rhythm is wrong. I will just read the Punjabi version; afterward, if anybody want to know what it is about, they can ask me.”
Syncopate grips his notes. He looks as if he might have a heart attack.
“Go, Ranvir!” Sanjeev calls as if this is a football game. Syncopate shoots him a dirty look.
Before Ranvir reads, he takes in a deep breath and looks at Sanjeev. “This one is about something very close to all of us,” he says, and then he reads. The lines of the poem sound like brushstrokes, one and then another. Donita has no way of knowing what he is saying, but she notices it’s having an effect on Sanjeev. He leans closer to the stage, his face turned up and eyes closed, as if there is a breeze coming through an open window. At the end, he sighs.
“Very nice,” Syncopate says, and he moves on to the other poets. Donita sneaks a glance at Sanjeev and finds that he is looking off into the distance. He has also let go of her hand.
After the poetry readings, there is a reception, and once again, Donita does not understand the currency. The poets sit at one end of a long table, where Syncopate’s books are proudly displayed along with a collection of migrant workers’ poems. There are price tags on Syncopate’s books, but a donation box for the collection, and Donita wonders if the money will go to the poets. If so, she needs to work out how to write poetry because it could be a good side business.
Flor enters her mind then. It is impossible for Donita to cast her out of her thoughts—there she is, between the lines of all the poems, sitting in a cell and saying nothing about where she was that day. Why won’t you tell them? The question keeps Donita up some nights, and it is making her see things. Last night, before going to bed, Donita looked out of the window and saw a woman who resembled Flor sitting by the canal, flicking the ashes from her cigarette onto the ground. The night shadows obscured her face and she was only a faint outline between the trees, maybe not even there at all; Flor’s ghost, come to haunt Donita and beg for her help. Donita eyes the microphone on the stage and an image flashes in her mind: She is marching up there and calling for everybody’s attention. I want to tell you all about something important. My friend is Flordeliza Martinez and I know she is innocent. And then what? Where is the proof? Everything sounds like speculation—the stormy look in Peter Hong’s eyes as he loomed over his daughter; Donita’s glimpse of Flor walking slowly through the torrential rain. Donita knows what she saw, but sometimes doubt singes the edges of her memories. Sometimes she shuts her eyes to picture Flor and she sees a stranger.
There is another problem now. Sanjeev still has not introduced Donita to Ranvir. In fact, every time she tries to wander over to Sanjeev and his friends, Sanjeev turns his shoulder slightly to close the circle.
“That guy is your lover or what?” Donita asks, irritated, when they leave the Esplanade. “He read his poem, you pay so close attention until you drop my hand. Then you don’t even introduce me.”
“No, no,” Sanjeev says. “Nothing like that.”
“What was his poem about?” Donita asks.
“Something a bit difficult to explain,” Sanjeev says.
According to Sanjeev, anything in Punjabi is difficult to explain. Sometimes he views videos on his phone, grainy and shaky squares of people talking straight into the camera or animated in skits with other characters. His shoulders shake with laughter, but when Donita asks him what’s so funny, he shrugs and tells her there is no translation.
“You can at least give me a summary. Don’t be like that Stinko-Face, cannot explain anything.”
“Who?”
“The host just now.”
“Syncopate,” Sanjeev says.
“Whatever,” Donita says, losing patience. What is this argument even about? She’s annoyed with Sanjeev and she can’t figure out why, exactly. She just thought that this afternoon would be more about meeting his friends and getting to know them. Maybe they’d all go out in a group afterward, and they’d bring their girlfriends too. But since Ranvir read that poem, Sanjeev has been in a wistful mood, and he’s hiding something.
They walk together in uncomfortable silence along the boulevard outside the Esplanade. The sea is silver and still. Everything in this city looks designed for permanence, yet Donita always feels as if she’s on a rickety bridge. Last night, after seeing the ghost of Flor from her window, she felt as if nothing were real. As if maybe she died back in the Philippines, and Singapore was some strange afterlife. The rules are always changing or do not exist at all. These are things she cannot quite explain to Sanjeev—she doesn’t have the words for them in any language.
A long double railing divides the land from the river, and on one section of steel grids, tiny pieces of coloured paper are attached. As Donita and Sanjeev approach, she sees that they are actually small padlocks, some painted in vibrant pinks and yellows.
“Why are they locking the bridge?” she asks.
“It’s something the teenagers do,” Sanjeev says. “They put their initials on the padlocks and then lock them onto the bridge to symbolize their love.”
“What is the point of putting it here?” Donita asks. “The padlock is forever?”
“I guess so,” Sanjeev says.
“So you will buy me one?” It comes out more forcefully than the light teasing that she intended.
Sanjeev looks at her. “Donita . . . I’m sorry about my friends. I thought they would be more welcoming. I invited you because I wanted to introduce you to them, but I became afraid of what they would say.”
“Why don’t they like me?”
Sanjeev sighs and rubs his face in his hands. They are standing on the bridge, surrounded by couples. “That poem that Ranvir read is about having two lives. One here and one back home. Different expectations.”
“So what does that mean?” Donita asks.
“Ranvir’s poem was a letter to his past self in Punjab, warning that he would change once he came to Singapore. He would start to walk differently, talk differently, and even . . .”
“Even?”
“Love differently,” Sanjeev says. His voice is barely a whisper. Donita sees the shape of the word love on his lips and wishes this weren’t the way she had to hear it the first time. “I didn’t know about any of this, but Ranvir had a girlfriend here, and they were together for two years. He kept it a secret,” he continues. “Then he went back to India for a holiday and he was going to tell his family that he was marrying this girl—she was Filipino, so he knew they would have a hard time accepting her, but he was determined.”
“What happened?”
“His mother fainted.”
Donita snickers. “Serves her right. Racist lady.”
“It’s not funny, Donita,” Sanjeev says. “Ranvir’s whole family was grieving.”
“Why? She died?” Donita retorts. “All this drama because she cannot accept Filipino daughter-in-law.”
“Ranvir wrote his poem about his struggle. He broke up with the girl, and he told me to be prepared for things to be very different if I wanted to be with a Filipino girl in the long term.”
“Just because he cannot say no to his mother does not mean you are like that.”
“Our families are very important to us.”
Donita understands what he’s saying now. “Even your family?” she asks.
“I don’t think my mother will faint, but she certainly will be upset if I bring home a foreign girl.”
“Then what is the point? Just sex?” Donita asks.
“No,” Sanjeev says. “That is not all we’re doing together. We are also talking and sharing our lives. I want you to be in my life. That is why it’s so difficult. Because this feels like a relationship.”
“It is a relationship,” Donita says.
“And it can go on,” Sanjeev says. “But it will end.”
“When?” Donita asks. “When they expect you to go home and get married?”
Sanjeev bites his lip. “This is why I wanted us to get to know each other as friends first,” he says.
“Friends?” Donita asks incredulously. What they did together this afternoon was certainly not the exchange of friends. “If you are using me, why don’t you say so?”
“I am not using you,” Sanjeev insists. “I just want—”
“What do you want?” Donita asks. “Sex with me but real love from somebody your family will choose for you?”
“No, Donita,” Sanjeev says. His voice is full of sorrow but Donita is too hurt to buy it. The bile rises in her throat—this is what anger does to her.
“Then what?” she asks. “In the shower, you said I was your future. Your future what? Future story you can share like Ranvir, so you can win some poetry contest?”
“I want to take things slow.”
“Take things slow? Everything else you do very fast!” Donita jabs her finger at Sanjeev’s crotch to make her point clear. His cheeks go red as Donita spins on her heel and storms off in the opposite direction. He doesn’t follow.
She finds herself back in the comfort of the Esplanade. Her stomach is churning and she wonders if it’s from the excessive food today—the double desserts and the cheese at the poetry gathering—or from being so upset. She can feel a sob rising in her throat and she makes it to a bathroom just in time to throw up everything she has eaten.
Donita’s sobs come quickly and loudly then and they echo across the bathroom. She flushes the toilet and steps out of the stall to see the Filipino poet standing near the sink, her face full of concern. “Are you in trouble?” she asks quietly, handing Donita a tissue.
One glance in the mirror shows Donita how she must look to the woman. She has been throwing up and sobbing. “No,” Donita says, braving a smile. “Not like that.” She and Sanjeev are always very careful because she would be deported if she tested positive for pregnancy at her twice-yearly checkup.
The woman doesn’t look convinced. “Listen, there are places to go if you need to . . . you know. They take cash, no records.”
Donita shakes her head. “I am fine,” she insists, but she also realizes she doesn’t know this for sure. What if she’s pregnant? Her last period was a long time ago, but stress always throws off her cycle. Fresh tears spring to her eyes. How did her only day away from Mrs. Fann manage to bring her so much misery?
The woman scribbles down a phone number and an address for Donita. “But listen—don’t tell anybody about this place, okay? The people who work there . . . they’ll be in huge trouble if the government finds out. You don’t want them coming after you.”
Donita takes the piece of paper from her. It doesn’t sound like a place she ever wants to go to, but if she needs to take care of matters, it’s the only option. She can’t just go to any clinic to get an abortion without them alerting the ministry. She stuffs the paper into her purse and wills away this problem, at least for a little while.
On the bus going home, Donita watches the buildings gathered at the edge of the silvery sea. The bus climbs a ramp to an overpass and the city falls at her feet—a spray of red-roofed resort-style apartment buildings and green parks carved around the water. The bus pulls up to her stop on Marine Parade Road far too early. There are still two hours left till curfew and she is not going to waste them inside Mrs. Fann’s flat, where she will be confined for another two weeks. Donita follows the smell of salt and sea and crosses the pedestrian bridge to the beach. The sound of her footsteps pounding down the ramp drown out the question in her mind: What if, what if, what if?
Picnic blankets and tents cover the grassy parkland. A Roller-blading couple zip around Donita as she crosses the running track onto the sand. All of the barbecue areas are overflowing with opened bags of chips, soft drink bottles, music, and laughter. Donita finds a stone bench and sits watching the waves crash against the sand. There are families swimming and picking up seashells, and of course she wonders about the parents she never knew. By the time her mother was Donita’s age, she had already given birth to a child, but was that when her life began to end as well? Donita looks up to see that a group of Pinoy women at a nearby barbecue party are looking over at her, and she understands why—it’s strange to be alone like this on a Sunday. Everybody has company, but she fell straight into Sanjeev’s arms when she arrived, and her other friend has been arrested for murder. Angel and Cora had invited her on their trek through Clementi Forest today, but she wanted to spend time with Sanjeev.
What if she is pregnant? That will be the end of her time in Singapore, which means starting from the beginning again with even less than she had before. There will be debts to pay to her agent, and she will have nothing to show for her time away, not even a modest balikbayan box. She tries counting the days since her last period, but her round-the-clock work makes the dates blur together.
She takes out the piece of paper and types the address into her phone. The hushed fear in the Filipino poet’s voice makes Donita feel nervous herself as the map appears on her screen. She hunches over it, noticing first that the address is in a very small side street—so small that it juts out like a ledge. All the other streets in this area are tiny veins.
Donita shrinks the map with her thumb and forefinger and sees where it is in relation to Chinatown, the Singapore River, and Sanjeev’s apartment. A long straight line before a dive into back streets.
Her heart begins to thrum.
She pinches the screen and spreads her fingers apart. The lanes widen and signs expand. Donita travels through the neighbourhood with her fingers, a sense of gnawing familiarity growing stronger as the back lanes bring her to the hotel where she and Sanjeev stayed that first afternoon. With a flick of her finger, Donita is on the main road opposite the fruit stand and the tea stall. She can picture the wall mural on the building labelled shophouse 23, and she can see the little symbol for the bus stop coming into its dimensions—the bench, the roar of vehicles, the laneways sprouting from the main road.
The only thing missing is the rain—and Flor walking away as Donita shouts her name.