The Minorities Read online

  The Minorities

  A Novel

  Suffian Hakim

  ISBN: 978-981-46-5528-6

  First Epigram Edition: October 2018

  © 2018 by Suffian Hakim

  Author photo by Keith Premchand. Used with permission.

  Originally published in 2017 by Suffian Hakim as The Minorities

  Published in Singapore by Epigram Books

  www.epigrambooks.sg

  All rights reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Starters

  Prologue: Primordial Soup

  Chapter One: Diet Coke & Mentos

  Chapter Two: Ilish Out of Water

  Chapter Three: Chinese Century Egg

  Chapter Four: Mysore Pak

  Chapter Five: Gula Melaka Dreamsicle

  Mains

  Chapter Six: The Long Arm of the Coleslaw

  Chapter Seven: Bloodroot Juice

  Chapter Eight: Group Therapy Biscuits

  Chapter Nine: Roadkill Pizza

  Chapter Ten: Rum & Raisin the Roof

  Chapter Eleven: The Emperor’s Fortune Cookie

  Chapter Twelve: High Steaks

  Chapter Thirteen: Gangbangers & Mash

  Chapter Fourteen: Seafood Ghoulash

  Chapter Fifteen: Bridle Cake

  Chapter Sixteen: Anarchy Lime Pie

  Chapter Seventeen: Fever Dream Almond Soup

  Chapter Eighteen: Reverie Rice

  Chapter Nineteen: Spinal Fluid Karma Cocktail

  Desserts

  Chapter Twenty: Ice Cream Saudade

  Chapter Twenty-One: The Onion

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Waffles with Covenant Sauce

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Tainted Loaf

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Sunrise Soma

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  “Suffian Hakim’s literary prowess is like unsolicited spooning. You never thought you needed it, but it’s there and it feels good. In his sophomore effort, The Minorities showcases Suffian’s signature weighted prose and sophisticated humour—a style that elevates the subject matter into an imaginative plain. Irreverent and relevant as the story lives and breathes and spoons.”

  —Zul Andra, former editor-in-chief of Esquire and founder of Zul Andra & Partners

  “A generous tale of belonging and connection in spite of diverse backgrounds that oppress us all. Doused in irreverent humour and familiar Singaporean flavour, Suffian’s characters are faithfully human, humane, very much down-to-earth. Let this book into your life. You won’t regret it.”

  —Jennifer Anne Champion, author of

  A History of Clocks and Caterwaul

  “A winning, roaring read! Suffian Hakim writes with such natural talent and pure panache. The language simply leaps off the page, with knee-slapping humour. The hip menagerie of characters—lost souls looking for home—is endearing from the get-go. This is group therapy with catharsis, and no neat closure. Freud would have absolutely adored this speculative and absurdist jaunt.”

  —Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé, author of Singular Acts of Endearment

  “Buckle up for a joyful, wild ride in Suffian Hakim’s inimitable terrain of transmigrating pontianaks, telekinetic apparitions and guided group therapy for supernatural beings with issues.”

  —Sebastian Sim, author of Let’s Give it Up for Gimme Lao!

  and The Riot Act

  “Not only is this an action-packed horror comedy coming-of-age road trip novel—it’s also a story about home. What kind of place do we want Singapore to be? A nation of model citizens? Or maybe something like what Suffian imagines: a found family of classless refugees, banding together, regardless of hygiene and visa status, both supranational

  and supernatural.”

  —Ng Yi-Sheng, Singapore Literature Prize-winning poet and author of Lion City

  For Mohamed Aizat Amali,

  Mustakjm Van Haasnje,

  Muhammad Iskandar,

  Mohamed Nazir,

  Nasruddin Baharudin

  and Syah Fidzuan

  Six majorly brilliant minorities

  who gave me the best memories

  of my life,

  but ya.

  Starters

  We who are finished—

  when did we even start?

  They took our souls from our bodies,

  And now they expect our hearts.

  Prologue: Primordial Soup

  In the beginning, there was nothing. Earth did not exist, nor did the moon and the sun. Stars did not exist, nor did galaxies and black holes. The phrase “Do you like what I’ve done with the place?” did not exist.

  And then twenty billion years ago, the Universe was created.

  Most would argue that it was the act of a singular God, acting alone, out of His, Her or Its own agency. God was a solitary being, existing ex nihilo, with neither twin nor equal.

  Some monotheists describe existence as a product of God’s Word, that He, She or It spoke the Universe and its constituents into being.

  Those words would probably have been the loneliest ever spoken. “Let there be light,” for example, was uttered by a solitary being, at the cusp of existence, to an audience of nothing.

  The concept of the Divine Word is contentious for many reasons. For one, there are disagreements on its content. While some believe that, in the void of nothingness, God first said, “Let there be light”, others argue that God was more likely to have first said, “Fuck, it’s dark in here”, then the more documented and luciferous statement.

  Then there’s the dialectic which precedes the above debate: what is the nature of God? Where some see God (without actually, you know, seeing God) as a speaker-creator, uttering words of power that bring things into existence, others do not. Some believe God to be a sculptor-creator, moulding existence from primordial material with divine hands or some kind of divine chisel. Some—these tend to be long-dead Egyptians—believe God to be a masturbator-creator, His hot, heavy breaths creating the sky and the winds, and His seminal fluid giving rise to the oceans.

  Of course, each Godview has been challenged.

  A speaker-creator, silencers say, cheapens the value of words as the alpha and omega of communication. Uttering Words at the brink of creation that no other being can hear or respond to, they point out, is a profanely pointless path for an all-powerful being.

  A sculptor-creator, the rigid point out, would have required material that predated God, and begs the question: who brewed the primordial soup?

  The detractors of God as a masturbator-creator are mainly unable to fantasise a conjugation of what is carnal with what is dogma (carma?). They need a hand in seeing the profane-cum-sacred.

  Maybe the truth is that God is none of the above.

  Maybe the truth is that God is all of the above: He, She or It spoke existence into being, and sculpted the primordial material into a magnum opus that, in equal amounts, held both chaos and cosmos. Then, after a hard eon’s work, God, shall we say, unleashed the oceans?

  And eventually, whether directly or indirectly, whether by the ministrations of evolution or by some form of divine arts and crafts, God created life: entities that consumed, that reproduced, that participated in majestic eco-systems. Life manifests itself in hulking, sky-scraping trees that photosynthesise oxygen from sunlight, carbon dioxide and water. Life is in the very minute tardigrades, visible only through modern microscopes, yet capable of surviving the

  harshest conditions.

  Life is in homo s
apiens—human beings—of all forms and nuance. It was in cave-dwelling early humans painting the walls of their homes with depictions of animals they hunted and killed. It was in Mesopotamian priests studying the stars to decipher the intentions of Anu and Dagon and Hadad and their fellow gods. It was in Bushido-sworn samurai, performing hara-kiri so that, with death, their names do not become bitter to the tongues of the living. It is in New York penthouse-dwelling millennials concerned about their stagnant growth in Instagram followers. It is in the post office clerk, the Hollywood child actor, the rubber millionaire, the South Sudanese beggar, the climate change denier. It is in the rabbi and the imam. It is in the gym regular flexing in front of the mirror, and in the teenager wearing a homemade Batman costume at Comic-Con. It is in the porn star, using an enema to prepare herself for an anal scene, and in the nun putting on her habit as she prepares to greet newcomers to the orphanage. Life is equal in all people.

  The problem with human beings—perhaps the most unfortunate problem with human beings—is that despite their common humanity, despite being participants in the dance of life for only 130,000 out of the universe’s 14 billion years (an insignificant millionth of the cosmic timeline), they have a debilitating ability to set themselves apart from one another.

  They could use the most trivial of things—grammar, for example—to see a member of the same species as lesser and Other. They could use the most sacred of things—religion and faith—to become so divisive that they would kill one another in the name of God as they know Him, Her or It.

  There are divisions by nation and tribe. There are divisions by wealth and income. There are divisions by ethnicity, marked by trivial factors such as the colour of one’s skin, heritage and language, and cultural norms and traditions.

  The cost of these divisions of people is exactly that: the division of people.

  And when divisions happen, humanity seems to lack the oversight to preserve both equality and diversity between tribes or demographics or nations or communities. As a result, minorities begin to form: groups marginalised, formed of the margins of human division.

  The truth is that human progress is a numbers game. Minorities have chips stacked against them since their moment of inception, lacking the resources and manpower larger groups would naturally have.

  The minorities are the wretched of the earth and, in divisions of religion, the wretched of the afterlife, too. Their cultures are branded backwards and the antithesis of what the larger groups deem “cultural” and popular.

  Then again, consider God. God, a race unto His, Her or Its own. God, whose words we do not quite understand and might misinterpret. God, who some of us believe does not exist. God, whose true nature and motivations we’ve debated endlessly. God, whom we use to further our own political agendas.

  God, the ultimate minority.

  Chapter One: Diet Coke & Mentos

  I was not the most intelligent person in the world. I was not even the most intelligent person in the room. That distinction belonged to the man lying on the wool carpet, his mouth wide open and filled with cola, trying his best not to gargle. Affixed to his head was a metal bowl-shaped contraption with wires sprouting from it and meandering across the floor, past unused nuts and bolts and a solitary almond, past crumpled sketches, past a dusty first-edition copy of Cosmos by Carl Sagan, to the laptop before me.

  I was nowhere near as intelligent as the lady wearing a South Park T-shirt, braless and free, crouching over said man, holding a singular Mentos over his mouth.

  I was occasionally, but most often not as intelligent as the young man holding a camera up to the scene, observing, documenting and saying things like, “We’re not just doing this for the money. We’re doing this for a shitload of money!”

  I used to believe I was more intelligent than the previous owner of the four-room Yishun flat we were in, and I was proven very, very wrong. As a matter of fact, his last words to me were, “If you do anything stupid in this house, like bringing home whores, I swear to Allah that I will haunt you and kill any ghost busters you’re gonna call.” I was pretty sure what we were about to do fell under “stupid things”, despite the apparent lack of whores.

  I didn’t even say intelligent things. Presently, I said, “Shanti, in the immortal words of Snoop Dogg, drop it like it’s hot!”, to which the lady armed with the singular Mentos asked, “Have you turned on the BrainScan?”

  To which I replied, “Oh, yikes, no, no, no, no, I have not, what is wrong with me, I have sambal for brains I tell you, oh man, how did I forget this”, as I quickly double-clicked an icon in the form of an electric-red human brain. A window popped up on the screen, whose edges had several small modules digitising numbers and displaying fluctuating bar graphs, while a main central module, occupying nearly three-quarters of the screen, featured a graphical representation of an adult cerebrum. Orange striations on the digital brain indicated interconnected firing synapses. I labelled this pixelated cerebrum with Cantona’s name and age, as well as the words: Subject Zero. “Okay, we’re good.”

  Shanti turned to the man under her. “Cantona, you ready?”

  The man with the mouth full of cola raised a thumb up at Shanti.

  “Tights?”

  “Action!” said Tights from behind the camera.

  The Mentos dropped from her hand, into the mouthful of Diet Coke. An instantaneous effusion of foam exploded from Cantona’s mouth. It was as majestic as it was alien, a froth geyser that appeared almost plasticine. To his credit, the man lay still, even as foam fell back onto his face.

  Shanti called from the floor, “Did the BrainScan work?”

  I looked at the BrainScan’s interface again. The main module showed the pixelated cerebrum with angry red striations, over and beyond the orange ones. It showed Cantona’s brain activity, revealing his apprehension at the influx of carbon dioxide into his throat—harmless at this amount. It highlighted his fear, a feverish flourish in his amygdala. A steady network of lines along the cortex also depicted his determination in remaining still for this experiment to work. I pushed the screen so it faced them, jabbing my finger excitedly at the monitor. I hadn’t smiled that widely, or freely, in a very long time. “Yes, it did! Holy hell, it worked!”

  Shanti let out a sort of unbridled, joyful whoop, and high-fived an equally jubilant Tights.

  Cantona took the cue to begin coughing and sat up. His wet black T-shirt clung to his chest. “Fatafati!” he hacked out in his native Bengali, smiling triumphantly.

  Shanti knelt by Cantona and began wiping away cola from his face and neck with a napkin, while Tights recorded them with his camera.

  “Thank you for that, Cantona,” I said, hand to heart. “It was something to behold.”

  “No problem,” he said, still retching out droplets of cola. “I wish there were a more conventional way I could pay rent, other than whoring myself out.”

  “But for Science!” Shanti exclaimed.

  Whoring himself out.

  There was a dull tap-tap-tap. Someone must have patted Cantona on the shoulder for a job well done.

  A job well done whoring himself out.

  Somewhere near me, or somewhere impossibly far away, Cantona’s voice was saying, “I felt fear, but more of cola going up my nostrils than of my own mortality.”

  “Whoring yourself out?”

  Cantona was then next to me, peering at the laptop and saying, “Dude, it works! I thought you’d be more excited than this.”

  Shanti’s voice was saying, “Now that we know it works, we need to move on with phase four.” Then she appeared before me, her smiling face near mine, dominating my vision. “We can make the SoundLoft happen!”

  Cantona was whoring himself out.

  “He’s distracted,” Shanti said with a sigh.

  “Look, man,” Cantona said, “if you’d rather I pay—”

  “No,” I quickly said. I took his hand and kissed it. “No, my friend. You’re a genius. A brilliant, brilliant genius
. People should pay you just to be near your brain.” I rested a hand on his shoulder. “You guys make me proud to have you staying here.”

  I turned to Tights, camera still running, taking it all in as he always does. I pulled him in for a hug. “I cannot ask for rent from any of you. It is my privilege to have each one of you in my house.”

  I turned to Shanti and cradled her face with my hands. I kissed her forehead.

  They were looking at me as if I were insane, but I took it. I did not know how to explain to them the other experiment we had inadvertently performed above and beyond, beyond the one for the SoundLoft. “We’ll continue this tomorrow?”

  “After Cantona’s exhibition?” said Shanti. Cantona made a small, queer, dismissive sound.

  “Yes.” I saw the look on Shanti’s face. “Yes! It’s in my planner. I didn’t forget.”

  Cantona asked me, rather worriedly, “Are you okay?”

  And again, falsely, I said, “Yes.” They deserved the truth, and I made a silent promise to give it to them when I could, when this was less embarrassing, and not a matter of life and death.

  “You know where to find us if you need anything,” Shanti said softly.

  They left. Cantona closed the door gently behind him.

  I found that I was holding my breath. I waited until every footfall upon the linoleum floor faded into the small stirrings of evening. I waited as the air thickened with silence. And when all that pulsed in my ears was my nervously beating heart, I scanned my room.

  “Hello?” I called out, and the empty room brought back to me its harrowing silence. “Father?”

  The ghost of my father replied with nothing, because he was not there, unseen, unheard, un-alive—absent. The nothing told me everything: my father was dead, as he had been for months, and as resounding as his final words to me were, he was going to remain that way.

  “Father, are you there?”