The Minorities Read online

  He was not.

  I picked up the copy of Cosmos by Carl Sagan. A lifetime ago, my father gave me the yellowed, fraying thing—then it was relatively pristine, of course—on the day I turned eight. He told me that, with the book, he had tasked me to not “be a dumbass like all the other idiot kids your age and their fucking video games, pressing away at the buttons like stupid goddamned zombies”. To say that my father showed me tough love was like saying that God sent Noah on an all-expenses-paid cruise.

  I turned to the last dog-eared page, realising as I did so that the book had been there, untouched, for months.

  I last held the book when a hospital bed occupied the space next to mine. Every night since the day my father became bedridden from a mild stroke (and I moved him to my room from his), he had asked me to read to him. We began, on that first night we shared a room, with Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan (“The gazelle is the hero of the story, not Hayy,” my father had argued irritably through coughing fits. “The story should be called The Gazelle and The Needy Goddamn Human Boy She Was Forced to Raise”). In a couple of days, we moved on to Victor Hugo’s unabridged Les Misérables (for a good two weeks from start to finish, most of which my father spent snoring). We followed it with Adolfo Bioy Casares’ The Invention of Morel, the story of a fugitive who hides on a strange, deserted Polynesian island—one with two moons and two suns in the sky, where dead carcasses would come back to life in the morning, where people seem to disappear and reappear at random. When a group of tourists arrive on the island, he falls in love with one of them, a beautiful young woman named Faustine. Throwing caution to the listless winds, he tries to speak to Faustine, only to be completely ignored—something that happens when he tries to communicate with the other tourists as well. The fugitive eventually learns that this aberrant phenomenon is a result of a machine created by a man named Morel. The machine can trap souls and recast tangible projections of these souls (their memories and personalities still intact) upon the island in accordance to Morel’s whims, like some bespoke moving photograph tailored to the inventor’s desires.

  “I really hope my soul doesn’t carry my memories with it,” said my father as I closed my yellowed copy of The Invention of Morel.

  “I’m sure there are memories you want to keep,” I said softly, as I always did with my father. “How about when you met—” I trailed off, letting “Ma” fade into the unspoken.

  “Who? Your mother?”

  I nodded.

  His lips curled slightly in a faint smile. He then quickly recomposed his face to its usual stoicism. “Where I’m going, that Jewish woman can’t follow.”

  “Father, come on.”

  “What memories are there to keep? We were in love, and then we were not. I’ve lived seventeen good years without Shiri by my side.”

  “She’s coming over on Saturday to see you.” It was Tuesday.

  “Then I hope I die before that.” For the first time in several weeks, my father laughed.

  The day after, I asked my father, “What do you want me to read to you next?”

  With much difficulty, he sat up. “Do you remember that book I bought for you when you were eight? I wish you still had that.”

  “I still do.”

  For a while, he said nothing. Then he said, “Good.” He lay down. “Read it to me.”

  And so I retrieved Cosmos from my bookshelf, and started reading to

  my father.

  By Friday, we had gotten far in the book. “The Sun’s stellar ash can be reused for fuel only up to a point,” I had read that day, the words of the late Mr Sagan escaping my lips. “Eventually the time will come when the solar interior is all carbon and oxygen, when at the prevailing temperatures and pressures no further nuclear reactions can occur. After the central helium is almost all used up, the interior of the Sun will continue its postponed collapse, the temperatures will rise again, triggering a last round of nuclear reactions and expanding the solar atmosphere a little.”

  My father sat up again, with a suddenness that jolted me. “When I’m gone, this house goes to you. If you do anything stupid in here, like bringing home whores, I swear to Allah that I will haunt you and kill any ghost busters you’re gonna call.”

  I stared at him wordlessly, shocked by the outburst, and could only tear my eyes away when he slumped back into bed.

  “Read on,” said my father weakly.

  And because there was nothing to be said, I read on:

  “In its death throes, the Sun will slowly pulsate, expanding and contracting once every few millennia, eventually spewing its atmosphere into space in one or more concentric shells of gas. The hot exposed solar interior will flood the shell with ultraviolet light, inducing a lovely red and blue fluorescence extending beyond the orbit of Pluto. Perhaps half the mass of the Sun will be lost in this way. The solar system will then be filled with an eerie radiance, the ghost of the Sun, outward bound.”

  That night, my father passed in his sleep.

  A sort of faint, electrical hum supernovaed me out of my reverie. Far away in my father’s room next to mine, the television came alive. I smiled, an almost mad smile stretched by relief. That smile died when I remembered that Tights and Cantona shared my father’s room now.

  “Father?” I tried again, acutely aware that I must be speaking to the walls. “I brought a whore into the house.” I laughed. “I guess you have to haunt me now.” I laughed again, so hard that tears welled in my eyes.

  I did not know how long I stood there, watching, waiting, tears cascading from my eyes, calling for my father. I did not know how I ended up in bed, lying down, staring at the ceiling.

  I fell asleep, and I dreamt I woke up in a cold, grey morgue with endless lines of body bags. My heart came alive then, throbbing violently in fear and dread, and it nearly palpitated as the bodies in the bags began to struggle and move. Their zips came undone in unison, and the canvas fell aside to unveil clones of my father, naked, each one bearing autopsy scars. As one, they turned to me and, still sitting in their respective body bags, began berating me in chorus about the pointlessness of dreaming and demanded that I do something more productive, and I woke, and I hoped to see the translucent, grumpy visage of my father’s ghost hovering above me, but I did not.

  I sat up and rubbed the sleep and dried tears from my eyes.

  My room was flooded, in majestic beams of morning sunshine, in the aroma of Shanti’s Wednesday waffles, in the clarion of the early-morning news on the television. Puddles of stray laundry were strewn across the floor as if this were a makeshift refugee camp and they were the survivors of my war against carrying-those-damn-things-to-the-washing-machine. I got off my bed and stepped on something wet and fluffy. A mad part of my brain thought I had impressed my foot upon a cat. I quickly looked down. The wool carpet by my bed had major cola stains.

  My brain rebooted from the stimulus, and I properly registered the scent of waffles.

  Every Wednesday, Shanti made waffles, lightly spiced with cinnamon and saffron and heated to crispy, fragrant perfection. She then made each of us separate batches of toppings, such that Cantona could have his waffles drenched in maple syrup, Tights could have his accompanied by a bowl of honey and a bowl of chocolate rice (he’d dip his waffles in honey before coating them with the rice), and I could have mine with a generous dollop of butterscotch smack in the middle. Shanti always had hers plain.

  I showered quicker than I’d care to admit and headed to the kitchen to find my housemates already there. We exchanged hearty good mornings and I took my seat at the head of the small, wooden, rickety breakfast table.

  “How are you feeling today?” Shanti asked me cheerfully, decanting a new dollop of batter into the waffle maker.

  Here, in the glare of morning, in the order of breakfast, the thought that I could have seen my father again seemed insane and ass-droppingly inane. “Refreshed,” I answered. I looked at Cantona. He gazed back at me, uncertainty flickering in his eyes. “Thank you
for your courage yesterday, Cantona. We’ve taken a huge step towards realising the SoundLoft.”

  “My pleasure,” he answered. I reached out and gave Cantona a light squeeze on the shoulder. He added brightly, “Maybe after today I can help pay—”

  I waved at him dismissively and turned my attention to Tights. “What did you guys watch last night?”

  “Finding Nemo,” Tights replied. He added with a laugh, “Stupid fishy.”

  “I hate that film,” I said.

  “I think Marlin should never have lost his son. It’s a show about bad parenting,” Cantona said. He took a sip of iced green tea. “He embarrasses Nemo in school, Nemo feels he needs to prove himself to his father and that kickstarted the events of the movie. By being a bad father, Marlin fathered Finding Nemo.”

  “You can’t put the blame on the father,” I found myself saying. “I think Nemo was at fault, getting captured by humans like that. He was naïve and impulsive, and that got him into trouble.”

  “That movie just makes me crave fish and chips,” Shanti chipped in from the waffle maker.

  “You can’t blame Nemo,” Cantona said, after chuckling slightly at Shanti’s statement. “Humans are larger, with powers and machinations beyond a fish’s understanding.”

  “People like gods to fish,” Tights pointed out. “More power, more big.”

  “But Marlin, with his life experience, should know the threat that humans pose,” continued Cantona, who put down his glass of green tea a bit too loudly on the table. “He should have done more to educate Nemo.”

  For a while, we sat in silence, until Tights broke it with a loud fart. “When you have bad inside…” he began, not at all sheepish.

  “Let it out straight away,” Cantona and I finished. We laughed. Shanti shook her head, smiling.

  She joined us at the table later with a mountain of waffles, which she doled out proportionately onto our plates. “Dig in, boys.”

  We thanked her. I also thanked Allah and Yahweh out of habit. Tights had already begun munching loudly. Cantona waited until Shanti was settled in at the table before he began eating.

  I cut a roughly two-by-two square of waffle and took a hearty bite. It tasted as incredible as it smelled. My entire being sang for the godsend that was Shanti, but that song of joy ended with an abrupt, jarring record scratch that raked at my heart. I addressed my thoughts to the room, “Hey, was anybody haunted by the ghost of a grumpy old Malay man last night?”

  Tights replied instantly with a shake of his head. “No such thing,” he said between bites.

  Cantona and Shanti exchanged looks. Cantona said, “No.” Shanti asked, “Why?”

  “No reason.”

  “Were you?” Shanti asked, the furrows at her brows more pronounced.

  “Not at all,” I replied. “That’s the problem.”

  Chapter Two: Ilish Out of Water

  At art vernissages, it is hard to tell the buyers from the enthusiasts, the enthusiasts from the pretenders—the alphas from the abecedarians—until you speak to them.

  “Do not,” Shanti said to us—briefing us, really—before we left the house, “speak to anyone. We need to stick together and we need to be low-key.”

  “Avengers bad guy?” asked Tights, almost giddy with excitement.

  “No, Tights,” replied Shanti. He was visibly deflated. “Not Loki. Low-key. We need to make sure nobody knows about you and Cantona.” Her gaze moved from the Chinese immigrant to the Bangladeshi immigrant, where it lingered. “If you must speak to someone, keep conversation strictly to art. And I cannot emphasise this enough—stay together.”

  The vernissage we were heading to was part of an exhibition called Toil & Canvas: A Collection of Art by Expatriates and Foreign Workers, held in the magnificent function hall of the Asian Civilisations Museum.

  My father used to tell me that art was “the devil’s ejaculate”. I never agreed with him. Art, to me, was one of the most exciting of human enterprises, when compared to other man-made contrivances such as traffic jams and bread and butter. We tether ourselves to art as we ascend to higher thought, marvelling brushstrokes of paint with the same joyous intellect we use to marvel strokes of pith and semantics. Or we wrap ourselves in art, to blind ourselves from the world, to grasp opportunistically at its allegorical wings so they can drag us above the dregs of humanity.

  Or—if you’re like my father—you see the arty-farty as more fart than art.

  Hilda the host, large and mighty, greeted the four of us in a voice that carried across the museum, her arms flourished open in a grand gesture of welcome. Behind her stood her choir of assistants completely clad in figure-hugging white polyester that suggested not sensuality but that they were deeply frugal with clothing material. Their hair was flat and slicked and immaculate, each strand in its rightful place. They were a singular unit—cold, efficient, methodical as they worked in tandem, greeting guests with pre-programmed gusto, ticking boxes on their clipboards and darting about with a kind of urgent elegance.

  “Welcome, Mr Nocta,” Hilda greeted Cantona, as we tried to hide our collective sniggers. A. N. Nocta was Cantona’s “art name”, an anagram to hide his identity. “It is wonderful to see you again, my friend. The work you sent for this exhibition is simply inspirational!”

  “Thank you, Hilda, that is very kind of you to say,” Cantona said, more to the floor than to the larger-than-life lady before him, who then grabbed his face and kissed both cheeks. When he regained full ownership of his face, Cantona said, “These are my housemates, Shan—”

  “Welcome!” Hilda interjected, loudly and warmly. The woman then raised her left hand and snapped her fingers. A stout male assistant with proud features, looking barely older than twenty, rushed forward. “Gabriel, take them to the VIP bar.”

  Gabriel led us into the function hall. The place was vast, with white walls that soared to a lofty ceiling. The entirety of the hall was carpeted with Pakistani kilim, a brightly coloured flat-weave rug (I found myself hoping, for the sake of the janitorial department, that nobody spilled their drinks). A floor-to-ceiling red velvet curtain separated us from the back half of the function room. At one end of the reception area, off to the left from the entrance, was a rectangular, stepped oak dais, a platform about thirty centimetres high. Behind the dais was an extensive brand wall on which the words “Toil & Canvas” were spray-painted in large pink fonts against a grey, industrial-grunge background. Upon the curved side of the dais were intricate Vedic carvings.

  Hilda’s assistant then led us through an already sizeable crowd, past people carrying cocktail and wine glasses, engaged in conversation—some deep, some shallow, some hollow. The guests were clothed in eveningwear or formalwear or formlesswear or things-they-had-on-from-the-morning-until-the-eveningwear. We fit in in the first two ways—Shanti had ensured it.

  We continued past the velvet ropes cordoning off the VIP area, with its magnificent circular marble bar topped by a rich brown, coated oak surface. Here, the human density thinned considerably. Cantona nodded at a couple of other men at the end of the bar, and they nodded back wordlessly. No doubt they were fellow artists, the art that bled from their experiences while displaced from their respective homelands coagulating in this vernissage. I waved to them out of reverence for their work, then remembered that I did not know them—nor did they know me—and immediately fixed my gaze at my shoes.

  We took a spot at the bar facing the dais. Gabriel asked us if we needed anything. We told him no and thanked him. He promptly left us. Shanti ordered us three glasses of orange juice and a glass of rum and coke.

  “I’m so nervous,” Cantona said, facing the crowd, sipping his drink.

  “You’ll be fine,” I told him, and I meant it.

  Cantona was a self-taught artist, the result of working as a pigment crusher in his youth and of a hand-me-down book on Italian Impressionism given to him by his mother on his tenth birthday.

  “I feel naked.”

  I
adjusted the lapels of his jacket—well, my jacket that I had lent him for this occasion. “Well, you just offended this awesome jacket by pretending it doesn’t exist.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  I understood what was in store for Cantona. He was infinitely more an artist than he was a construction worker, but pragmatism had forced his hand when he decided to leave the dustbowl of Bangladesh for Singapore’s ever-evolving concrete jungle. This was his chance to move towards self-fulfilment. Nevertheless, Cantona Fawwaz was also a fugitive on the run (of sorts) and even though this vernissage was invite-only and showcased the works of A. N. Nocta, it was far too public for his liking.

  I patted the underside of his glass. “Drink up. It might calm your nerves.”

  “This is just orange juice.”

  “And that won’t calm your nerves?”

  Cantona drank. Tights was nervously reciting the entire script of Forrest Gump to himself, his glass untouched next to him. Shanti was holding her glass, as full as it was empty, the dark liquid in it glinting in the fluorescent lights. She stood several arms’ lengths from us, scanning the crowd with those keen, intelligent eyes. She was wearing a red dress that accentuated the deep chocolate of her skin, and, if we weren’t so nervous about everything, I would have better appreciated how beautiful she looked. She occasionally glanced at Cantona, for barely perceptible lengths of time, before resuming her watch. Sometimes, I felt Shanti worried too much for Tights and Cantona, especially Cantona. I didn’t know to what extent I disagreed with her fretting, but I occasionally found myself, perhaps subconsciously, providing the counterpoint to it.

  “You’ve waited your whole life for this,” I said to Cantona as he took a gulp.

  “If they find out—”

  “They’re not going to, Mr Nocta. Every decision you have made has led to this. If you’re not on the run right now, if you had just continued serving—wasting—your time at the construction yard, you wouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t be able to bring your art to people. You would have kept your abilities a secret and that, my friend, would be a damned waste of talent. You are here, at the cusp of being recognised for what you were born to do.” I smiled at my friend. He returned it, the hesitation that pulled at his face gradually dissipating. “Go have some fun,” I said to him.