Grandaunty gobbled the heap of hot white rice which was served on her best blue china plates. She talked as she ate, pinching balls of rice flavoured with chillies and soy with her right hand and throwing the balls into her large wet mouth with a flick of her wrist and thumb. Mother ate more slowly, unaccustomed to manipulating such hot rice with her hand, while Mei Sim used a soup spoon on her tin plate.
“Your uncle,” Grandaunty said in between swallows of food and water, “is a timid man, a mouse. I used to think how to get male children with a man like that! I had to put fire into him, everyday must push him. Otherwise he cannot be a man.”
“Huh, huh,” Mother said, picking a succulent piece of the stewed pork and popping it into her mouth whole.
“But Peng Ho, he is an educated man, and he cannot be pushed. You must lead him gently, gently so he doesn’t know what you are doing. Three children, you cannot expect him to stay by your side all the time. Let him have fun.”
“Wha . . .” Mother said, chewing the meat hard.
“Yes. We women must accept our fate. If we want to have some fun also, stomach will explode. Where can we hide our shame? But men, they think they are datuks because they can do things without being punished. But we must control them, and to do that we must control their money.”
Mei Sim thought Grandaunty was very experienced. She was so old, yet her hair was still black, and her sons and husband did everything she told them. She was rich; the knitted purse looped to her string bag under her kebaya was always bulging with money. Father had to borrow money from her once when some people didn’t pay for his goods, and she had charged him a lot for it. He still complained about it to Mother each time they drove home from Grandaunty’s house.
“But how?” protested Mother, a faint gleam of sweat appearing on her forehead and upper lip as she ate more and more of the pork.
Grandaunty began to whisper and Mei Sim didn’t dare ask her to speak up nor could she move from her seat as she hadn’t finished her lunch.
Mother kept nodding and nodding her head. She was no longer interested in the food but continued to put it in her mouth without paying any attention to it until her plate was clear. “Yah, yah. Huh, huh. Yah, yah,” she repeated like a trance-medium, while Grandaunty talked softly about accounts and tontines and rubber lands in Jasin. Mei Sim burped and began to feel sleepy.
“Eng!” Grandaunty called harshly. “Clear up the table, you lazy girl. Sleeping in the kitchen, nothing to do. Come here.”
Siew Eng walked slowly towards her mother, pulling at her blouse nervously.
“Come here quickly, I say.” Grandaunty’s mouth was dribbling with saliva. She appeared enraged, her fleshy nose quivering under narrowed eyes. As Siew Eng stood quietly beside her chair, she took the sparse flesh above her elbow between thumb and forefinger and twisted it viciously, breathing hard. A purple bruise bloomed on the arm. “I’ll punish you for walking so slowly when I call you,” she huffed. “You think you can so proud in my house.”
Siew Eng said nothing. A slight twitch of her mouth quickly pressed down was the only sign that the pinch had hurt.
“What do you say? What do you say, you prostitute?”
“Sorry, ’mak,” Siew Eng whispered, hanging her head lower and twisting the cloth of her blouse.
Only then did Grandaunty get up from the table. The two women returned to the chairs beside the sirih table, where two neat green packages of sirih rested. Sighing happily, Grandaunty put the large wad in her mouth and began to chew. Mother followed suit, but she had a harder time with the generous size of the sirih and had to keep pushing it in her mouth as parts popped out from the corners.
Mei Sim sat on her stool, but her head was growing heavier; her eyes kept dropping as if they wanted to fall to the floor. She could hear the women chewing and grunting; it seemed as if she could feel the bitter green leaves tearing in her own mouth and dissolving with the tart lime and sharp crunchy betel nut and sweet-smelling cinnamon. Her mouth was dissolving into an aromatic dream when she heard chimes ringing sharply in the heavy noon air.
For the briefest moment Mei Sim saw her father smiling beside her, one hand in his pocket jingling the loose change, and the other hand gently steering an ice cream bicycle from whose opened ice box delicious vapours were floating. “Vanilla!” she heard herself cry out, at the same moment that Grandaunty called out, “Aiyoh! What you want?” and she woke up.
A very dark man with close-cropped hair was carefully leaning an old bicycle against the open door jamb. Two shiny brown hens, legs tied with rope and hanging upside down from the bicycle handles, blinked nervously, and standing shyly behind the man was an equally dark and shiny boy dressed in starched white shirt and pressed khaki shorts.
“Nya,” the man said respectfully, bowing a little and scraping his rubber thongs on the cement floor as if to ask permission to come in.
“Aiyah, Uncle Muti, apa buat? You come for business or just for visit?”
“Ha, I bring two hens. My wife say must give to puan, this year we have many chickens.”
“Also, you bring the rent?” Grandaunty was smiling broadly, the sirih tucked to one side of her mouth in a girlish pucker. “Come, come and sit down. Eng, Eng!” Her voice raised to a shriek till Eng came running from behind the garden. “Bring tea for Uncle Muti. Also, take the hens into the kitchen. Stupid girl! Must tell you everything.”
The boy stayed by the bicycle staring at the women inside with bright, frank eyes.
Curious, Mei Sim went out. He was clean, his hair still wet from a bath. “What school you?” she asked. He was older, she knew, because he was in a school uniform.
He gave her a blank stare.
“You speak English?”
He nodded.
“You want play a game?” She ran out into the compound, motioning for him to follow.
Mei Sim had no idea what she wanted to play, but she was oh so tired of sitting still, and the white sand and fallen brown coconuts and blue flowers on the leafy green creepers on the fence seemed so delicious after the crunch, crunch, crunch of Grandaunty’s lunch that she spread her arms and flew through the sky. “Whee, whee,” she laughed.
But the boy wouldn’t play. He stood by the sweet smelling bunga tanjung and stared at her.
“What you stare at?” she asked huffily. “Something wrong with me?”
“Your dress,” he answered without the least bit of annoyance.
“What to stare?” Mei Sim was suddenly uncomfortable and bent down to look for snails.
“So pretty. Macam bunga”
She looked up quickly to see if he was making fun of her, but his brown round face was earnestly staring at the tiers of ruffles on her skirt.
“Want play a game?” she asked again.
But he said, “My sister no got such nice dress.”
Mei Sim laughed. “You orang jakun,” she said, “but never mind. You want feel my dress? Go on. I never mind.”
He went nearer to her and stretched out his hand. He clutched at the frills around the bib, staring at the pink and purple tuberoses painted on the thin organdy.
“Mei Si-i-m!” Her mother’s voice brayed across the compound. There was a confusion as the boy rushed away and the woman came running, panting in the sun, and pulled at her arm. “What you do? Why you let the boy touch you? You no shame?”
Grandaunty stood by the door, while the dark man had seized his son by the shoulder and was talking to him in