“You’re so good you’re not living with your grandma,” I tell her.
“Both my grandmothers are dead,” Salmah replies.
“You’re so lucky.”
The train stops at Lavender station and a group of Bangladeshi men walk in. I used to ask Salmah who gets off and on at Lavender, it was usually so deserted. Now the answer is: the whole world. The new Singapore Immigration Building was built next to it, and sometimes we would see groups of Filipinos, Thais and even Caucasians. The Bangladeshi men take a seat opposite us. Most of them are wearing white shirts, with pin stripes, tucked neatly into their trousers. All of them have moustaches. And all of them have combed their hair with oil.
“How are the guys?” Salmah suddenly asks me.
“Like devils,” I tell her.
“That’s nothing new,” she says.
“I don’t know how they can talk so much rubbish,” I tell her. “There was this one day when I brought down my lecture notes, to see if I can study with them. I mean, if I get tired, I can joke around with them for a while. Five minutes. And then get back to work. I couldn’t study in the house because my grandma was awake and she was nagging and nagging. She was telling me how when she was my age she knew how to cook, how to clean the house. So I sat with the guys. And I realised that I couldn’t study at all. They’re so funny. Everything they said was funny. I couldn’t stop laughing. You should hang around more with us.”
The train stops at Bugis. People walk in and find seats. At this time of the afternoon, the train is not so crowded and everyone finds a seat. Some even have space to lean to one side and occupy two seats. A Malay woman walks in through the door on our left. She weaves her way towards us, holding on to the strap of her handbag with one hand. She is wearing highheeled shoes, and she has to walk near the side of the aisles so her head does not knock into the horizontal handrails. She has high cheekbones, and she is wearing this white satin spaghettistrap dress that has a very high hemline. It shows off her thighs, her strong calves. She settles down two seats away from me. I take one look at her Adam’s apple. The Malay lady is a man.
I look at the Bangladeshi men opposite me. Some of them are frowning, looking at her. The lady crosses one leg over another and leans forward, and then she rests her chin on her fist, her elbow on her knee. Her eyeballs swing from side to side, and then settle on an MRT poster. She is behaving as if she is an actress in a movie. She sucks in her cheeks for her best shot.
I wonder whether if this were their country, the Bangladeshi men might make wolf-whistle sounds at her. But they are quiet, and after a while, they start pretending that they didn’t see her walking in, sashaying, and then now tucking strands of hair with those big hands behind her ears. I steal a glance at this lady and wonder if she is wearing a wig. Her fingernails are painted a deep blood red. Suddenly I hear Salmah whispering into my ear.
“Transvestite,” she says. But she uses the Malay word for it, which has more sting, which makes one giggle. “Pondan.”
“Isn’t it funny,” Salmah then informs me, still whispering, “that of all stations, she has to come in at Bugis?”
When I was small, my father used to tell me stories of how he used to go to Bugis Street with my mother for a laugh. I thought it was strange, to go and see pondans on your date, but I supposed that was how courtship was for them at that time. My father used to say that some of them were really gutsy, wearing tight clothes, mini-skirts, flirting around with the Caucasian sailors. He said he once saw one climb a table top with her high heels and then do a strip-tease show. When she took off her bra people applauded; she had a flat male chest, shaven to smoothness. She threw the bra upwards and it hooked onto a lamp post. It was scenes like these that kept my mother and father occupied and amused when they went out on dates. But nowadays, Bugis has been cleaned up, dolled up decently for the tourists. There’s nothing there but a shopping mall. The transvestites are gone. But somehow this one, with her biceps and lipstick, has found her way into our train.
The lady starts to yawn, and she uses that coarse hand to cover her mouth. But her fingers are bent delicately, in defiance of its design. I have seen the way the fingers of transvestites work. They touch everything as if it carried germs. They only use their fingertips, which is what the lady is using to wipe the sides of her eyes. Then she turns to me, and smiles.
“Eh,” she exclaims, softly. She places her fingertips on her chest. Her voice is deep. She has it under control though, she tunes it soft so instead of gruff she can keep it sultry.
“You look like Ziana Zain!” she suddenly exclaims. Ziana Zain is a Malaysian singer hysterically famous among the Malays. She sings ballads with titles like ‘The Peak of Love’. Her eyebrows are very arched, and when she sings, her mouth is very wide, such that
