The Minorities Read online

  Uncle Jun tapped on the rim of my cup with his index finger. “Drink up,” he said. “I believe your collection’s ready.”

  I collected the box of parts neatly prepared by Cik Salmah and said my goodbyes. Before I left, and when Cik Salmah was out of earshot, Uncle Jun said to me, “Boy, he was proud of you. I’m sure, if there is an afterlife, that he is proud of you. He wasn’t a pleasant man, maybe, but he loved you. You should know that.”

  But the words that stuck were that I had “not done anything that warrants him” to come back to me.

  The scents of Geylang Lorong 42, cooked in the afternoon sun, crept up my nostrils as I exited Uncle Jun’s shop. The day had worn on while I was inside and brought with it a more imposing heat. I turned right and wandered down the road. Farther down, in the lower-numbered lorongs, was Singapore’s worst-kept secret: its infamous red-light districts, sizzling in so many ways.

  That Ghostbusters theme song played in my head: Who you gonna call?

  “Guys, I’m home!”

  Cantona gave a tense “I’m here!” from the kitchen. Whatever he was preparing in there smelled rich and spicy, and promised an amazing dinner.

  Tights sprinted out of his room, saw that it was really me and his face relaxed. But curiosity crept upon his face when he saw my company.

  The sound of running water pattered heavily from Shanti’s room.

  “Cantona, prep food for two more,” I called from the door as I kicked off my shoes. I then turned to the two ladies whom I had brought home.

  One of them, with pretty olive skin, sharp, angular features, brown tresses and green contact lenses, Bianca, said, “This isn’t going to be a group thing, is it? That costs extra.”

  The svelte girl with the blonde hair—she had introduced herself as Valentina Vixen even though she looked like a Valentina Lim—added, “For each of us.” Valentina was the more obviously beautiful one, an almost porcelain symbol of sexuality. Meeting her along the streets of Geylang was an almost surreal experience, as though I had walked wilfully into some wondrous cosmic joke. She had on rather long, thick fake eyelashes—I could tie her to the wall and ask her to blink rapidly, and I would have gotten myself a new fan.

  “Oh, definitely not. Just me. But first, dinner?”

  Bianca smiled more easily this time. “Yes, please,” she said, flicking off her suede heels.

  Valentina was more cautious, and said nothing as she followed her friend in.

  I heard Bianca greet a hearty “Hello!” to Cantona, who returned it with the kind of “Oh, hello!” one might say to a cat upon hearing it speak for the first time.

  Valentina waved at Cantona, her eyes distractedly scanning the house.

  “Whatcha cooking, handsome?” asked Bianca, leaning over the

  kitchen counter.

  Her black dress creased only slightly as it clung tightly to her body.

  Cantona stuttered out his reply: “Sorse ilish, served with organic brown rice.” He turned to me and asked politely, “Who are these lovely ladies?”

  “I’m Bianca,” said Bianca, stretching out her right hand to Cantona, who shook it with all the certainty one might have when shaking a

  thermonuclear device.

  “I’m Valentina.” She did not offer her hand for a handshake.

  “I’m Cantona,” he said, and then pretended to be engrossed in his fish.

  I invited them to sit on the couch. Bianca declined, choosing instead to pace the house, studying it. She asked questions about the flat, about the furniture, and I tried my best to answer them. I felt like I was being studied by extension. Valentina, on the other hand, took the seat, and began to use her smartphone in earnest.

  The pattering from Shanti’s bathroom stopped, and before long, the door to the room opened. The familiar lavender aroma of Shanti’s shampoo heralded her arrival. She stepped out, a towel wrapped around her chest, and eyed the newcomers nervously.

  I introduced Valentina and Bianca to Shanti. Shanti shook hands with the two, one hand clutching at her towel.

  She immediately turned sharply to me. “Can I speak to you in private, please?”

  As we went to Shanti’s room, Bianca called, “Hey, make sure you still have enough juice for us!” She cackled. We walked past my room. The handprint on the door stared at me like an omniscient eye.

  I had given Shanti the master bedroom, with its adjoining bathroom, for the sake of privacy. When my father first bought the flat, we had converted it into a guest bedroom. We only ever had one guest use the room: Uncle Jun, after a particularly nasty squabble with Cik Salmah. This was back in the early 2000s. Today, it was neat, with flourishes of blue and white. Engineering texts were stacked along the walls.

  Shanti closed the door behind us.

  “So those guests…” she began.

  “They’re social escorts. Working girls. Prostitutes. Whores. You’re probably wondering why I brought them here.”

  “No, that’s not what I’m wondering. My guess is that you react to fear and uncertainty by pandering to your baser instincts, or that you’re just plain horny. What I’m wondering is if you think it’s a good idea to have guests over now, especially after what happened last night?”

  “It’s the most perfect time, Shanti.”

  She sighed. “Is there something you’re not telling us?”

  The answer that came immediately to my head caused my right hand to tremble. I said, “Yes”, and my right hand steadied. “I will tell you in due time, I promise.”

  “You worry me,” she said, placing a hand on mine.

  There was a nervous, tentative knock on the door.

  “Come in!” Shanti called.

  It was Cantona. “Dinner is ready.”

  “Cantona, come in here,” I said to him.

  He stepped in and could not help but look around in a sort of muted wonder. It was his first time, I knew, being inside Shanti’s room.

  She said softly, “Close the door.”

  Cantona closed the door behind him.

  I said to my housemates, “Listen, I know we’re all on edge after what happened last night. But maybe it was really nothing.”

  “Nothing?” said Cantona, exchanging a nervous look with Shanti. “I cannot logically explain away what happened.”

  “Has anything happened since then?”

  “No,” Shanti conceded.

  “Yeah, nothing,” added Cantona.

  “Exactly.”

  Cantona raised a finger. “How do you explain the mark on your door?”

  “A bird flew in, smacked into it, flew out? I don’t know, and I don’t care. Does the mark have a lasting effect on our lives? Does it get in the way of our day-to-day lives? Does it torment us?” I paused. Cantona looked defeated. Shanti rolled her eyes. “The answer,” I continued, “is no. No, it cannot torment us anymore. It can’t call us stupid or worthless. It cannot be disappointed at us. It’s just a damned handprint on the door!”

  “All right,” said Cantona. “Calm down, man.”

  “Let’s just get ready for dinner,” Shanti said.

  We made our way back to the living room, where Tights was deep in conversation with Bianca and Valentina about the film Pretty Woman. Valentina was talking about the proliferation of rights for sex workers. Tights was nodding along, and I did not know if he agreed, wanted to seem like he agreed or had zero idea what she was talking about.

  Upon seeing us return, Bianca threw me a smile and for a moment I was transported away, to an alternate reality where I met her in a less transactional, less contrived capacity, and the sparks of romance were not bought.

  “Ladies,” Shanti said warmly, “can we borrow our dear Tights to help us set the table for dinner?”

  Bianca, dazzling and moulded of charm, said, “Oh, let me help!”

  “It’s all right, we can manage. You’re our guests,” I said. “Please make yourself at home, and dinner will be ready in a bit.”

  “I really hope it�
�s no trouble at all,” said Bianca sweetly. Images of bringing her to meet my mother filled my head.

  “Not at all,” I said to her, affecting a deeper voice than usual, hoping it might help me appear more impressive. Bianca appeared as impressed as Satan would be if one’s sin were killing an ant by accidentally stepping on it.

  As we set the table for six, our two guests excused themselves to smoke in the corridor.

  Later, we took our seats at the dining table: me at the head, Shanti and Cantona next to me facing one another, Tights opposite me, and Bianca and Valentina occupying the two remaining chairs on either side of him. The spread in the middle was simple. A large bowl of sorse ilish dominated the space, its mustardy fragrance also presiding over all other olfactory impulses. A slightly smaller bowl of stir-fry vegetables was placed next to it, as was a large omelette, sliced up like a pizza.

  As Shanti poured out a serving of sorse ilish on each of our plates of fragrant brown rice, I said to Valentina and Bianca, “I bet I’m the first client to do this, huh?”

  “Well, no,” Bianca replied. My smile faltered. “We’ve done the girlfriend experience before. Meet the family, pretend to have been in love for months—thank you, Shanti—hang out with the boys, call them sayang or darling during sex.”

  “That’s a thing?” I wondered who would request such a thing, and realised that in my darkest nights, that service would be incredibly irresistible.

  “Yeah. That’s the majority of our engagements,” said Valentina.

  I remained silent for a while. It dawned on me that I had not gone on a date for a very long time. My last one had been a month before my father had succumbed to his stroke; it had been with a girl whose name I couldn’t remember. I had taken her somewhere downtown. A nice restaurant with a nice view where the lights had been dimmed. I started eating.

  “I’m curious,” Valentina said into the pause. “What’s your story, Shanti? How did you end up being the only lady in here?”

  “Ah, that’s an interesting story,” I said.

  “I used to work with him,” Shanti said, gesturing in my direction.

  “Best lab assistant ever,” I commended.

  “Worst research fellow ever,” was Shanti’s return. I could not deny it.

  “But why stay here?” Valentina asked, leaning towards Shanti. Next to me, Cantona did the same. I suddenly felt like an intruder in this conversation. “I mean, you’re practically the only adult here.”

  None of the men protested.

  “Are you kidding?” said Shanti. “I love these boys. They treat me much better than the last man I lived with.”

  “Boyfriend?” Bianca asked.

  “Husband.”

  “Yeah, I feel you, girl,” said Bianca. “Horrible temper?”

  “Oh goodness, much worse than that.”

  “A beater, huh?”

  Shanti nodded. Bianca put a hand around her shoulders. “Oh, honey,” she said sympathetically.

  “He was always there for me, back when we started,” Shanti said.

  “Girl,” Bianca said, “if I could have a dollar for every man who was only there at the start, when they’re trying to impress me, I’d—”

  “You’d have six dollars,” Valentina finished for her.

  “It was good for a while,” Shanti said with a small laugh. “Devas was roguish and wild, like a dark-skinned Han Solo. I was bookish, he was a scoundrel.”

  “How did you guys meet?”

  “In university. I was twenty-two, studying Engineering.”

  “What did he study?” Cantona asked stiffly.

  “Nothing. He was the dealer who hung around campus. Supplied the hostels with weed, mainly.”

  “Was his shit good?” Bianca asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t do that stuff. We met through my roommate. She got her stuff from him. He came by our hostel one day for a delivery, introduced himself to me and we ended up spending the entire night talking, while my friend smoked up.” A wistful ghost of a smile. “We talked about everything. I couldn’t tell what he was back then. All I knew was that I had not connected with anyone like that in a long time.”

  “But you knew what he was back then,” Valentina said in a manner that was almost blaming Shanti. “You started going out with him anyway?” I was not sure if that last sentence was a question.

  “I wasn’t judging him for that. He was good at it, and he was happy doing it. By the time I graduated, he had expanded his, uh, business, to all the major universities in Singapore. I didn’t really think about the repercussions of what he was doing. He was happy. I was happy. A few weeks after I graduated, he proposed to me on the beach. I said yes without hesitating.”

  They were all listening intently, looking at Shanti with expressions of concern or reverence. Cantona was the exception. He avoided looking at her, seeming far more arrested by the fish bones lying in a pool of gravy on his plate.

  “The wedding was a small, quiet thing. I was more looking forward to life with him. We moved to a flat in Tampines shortly after. For a while, I was truly, truly happy,” she said, smiling sadly. “As you all can tell,” she added with a morbid laugh, “it didn’t last. We had our first major fight. I told him I wanted to look for a job. He said I didn’t have to, that he was earning enough for the both of us. I told him that it wasn’t about that. I just wanted to be productive and independent. Well, that’s not true. What I really wanted to do was to get out of the house for periods longer than just grocery shopping. I was getting stir crazy. I didn’t tell him that, of course. Didn’t matter though. He accused me of jeopardising the marriage to pursue my own selfish interests. I lost it.”

  “What you lost?” asked Tights.

  “She means she got very angry,” I said to Tights, who nodded fervently and resumed rapt attention.

  “Go on, honey,” Bianca said.

  “I told him I was going to get a job whether he liked it or not. He said I didn’t appreciate his sacrifices for our marriage.”

  “He said that,” said Valentina. I would have noted it as an ask, if there were more affectation of a question. “What a self-centred bastard,” she added.

  “He had his reasons, I’m sure. In any case, I eventually got a job at Qyburn Labs. As the weeks went by, Devas grew more unstable. He’d get angry over the smallest things. I overcooked dinner, or I’d be too tired for sex after work”—Cantona choked on his green tea—“and he would call me a horrible wife. I would cry and sleep on the couch and in the morning, he would apologise, but with every fight, I felt my love for him just

  eroding away.

  “One night, we were working late”—she wagged a finger between herself and me—“and Devas decides to do a surprise visit. He sees the two of us laughing over some stupid joke and he went nuts, right there in the office. He started trashing the whole place.”

  “What did you do?” Bianca directed her question at me.

  “I tried to calm him down,” I replied. “But he accused me of brainwashing Shanti. Dude then brandishes a parang. Which begs the question—had he been carrying the damned thing the whole time?”

  “What parang?” Tights asked.

  “A kind of machete,” I replied.

  “What machete?” Tights asked.

  “The big knife Jason used in Friday the 13th,” Cantona replied.

  “Aah,” Tights aah-ed.

  “So, I asked him to back off,” Shanti said, bringing the group back to the story.

  “‘Him’ here being me,” I clarified.

  “I didn’t want you to get hurt,” Shanti said defensively. “You should know that, at this point, Devas had already built up quite a sizeable gang. They’d come by the house every now and then, bearing money and gifts for him. They’re ruthless, they’re dangerous and they’re very, very loyal. Whatever the outcome might be of a fight between the two of you, it will turn out bad for you.”

  “What happened next?” Bianca asked.

  “I asked De
vas to take me home,” Shanti answered.

  “Did he?” asked Bianca.

  “Yeah, he did, but he was screaming the entire way and I didn’t want to say anything to make it worse.” Shanti had begun to tear up, and I noticed that everyone on the table was no longer touching their food. “When we got home he asked me if I was cheating on him with you, and I told him I wasn’t, but he wouldn’t believe me. He started beating me, punching me. And then, he had his way with me.” Tears streamed down her cheeks as she spoke. Cantona got up, wanting, I believe, to hug her, but Bianca gestured fiercely for him to sit back down. He got up, nevertheless, walked towards a box of tissues in the kitchen, and passed it to Shanti.

  We all remained silent as Shanti wiped her tears away.

  “He wanted to reclaim ownership of me,” she said through her sobs. “I was a thing to him. After all these years, when things got really bad, I was nothing more than a conduit for his needs, merely a means to an end. The next day I turned to the only friend I had.”

  She smiled at me, and I gave her hand a gentle squeeze.

  None of us knew what to say.

  “Ah, fuck, what is wrong with me?” She tried to force a smile.

  “Nothing, Shanti, absolutely nothing,” Cantona replied sympathetically.

  Shanti rose, and the rest of us, as one, stared at her. “I’ll go get dessert.”

  “Cantona and I will help,” Bianca said, gently making eye contact with him.

  When Shanti emerged from the kitchen half an hour later, Bianca next to her, she was smiling, positively radiant. In a different life, I pictured Bianca to be a social worker or counsellor.

  Cantona followed them, carrying a tray of Mysore pak, an Indian-style fudge made of ghee and sugar. Shanti would usually add butterscotch or salted caramel into hers.

  She took her seat and said, “Thank you for listening to me. I have never spoken about any of that, other than with you”—she placed a hand on mine—“and I feel so much better now that I have. It was a dark point in my life, and I am able to move on now because I have you guys.” She gave a small laugh. “And that includes the two of you, Bianca and Valentina!”

  Bianca clapped and whooped, while Valentina smiled back at Shanti.