“What are you doing?” she shouts.
Salmah’s hair is tied up in a bun at the back of her head. Sazalie looks at me with an expression that could be angry or puzzled or both. I look back at him. I want to tell him that I am doing all this for him, but he wouldn’t be able to understand. I want to tell him that ever since that first day I saw him in the void deck I could never stop thinking about him. But Salmah’s tudung is crumpled and silent in my hands.
BIRTHDAY“I’m not asking you to pawn off your jewellery,” Rosminah’s husband tells her.
Rosminah picks out a 50-dollar note from her purse, the equivalent of two days’ work. It had been folded neatly into one special corner of her purse. It was to be used to buy her friend Kala a birthday present. For Rosminah’s birthday, Kala had given her a sandwich maker. Rosminah had opened it with care, taking her time with the scotch tape. She had later used the wrapping paper to line her drawers.
It was enamel white, the sandwich maker, and there was a yellow light that blinked when the bread was done. The sandwiches it made were triangles with crispy sides and soft insides, which Rosminah fills with Kraft cheese or Ayam Brand sardines. Her husband brings the sandwiches to work, which Rosminah packs, in aluminium foil.
“I’ll pay it back by the end of the month,” says her husband as Rosminah places the money by his side. She is used to his lying. Or forgetting, which to Rosminah was no different. She is also used to his anger when she places the money directly into his hand, with her eyes looking into his face such that he has to turn away. At one such instance, his face had crumpled and he flew into a rage, asking Rosminah if she really thought that he was poor, that he really needed her money that badly.
Before the wind could blow it off the bed, her husband picks up the note and slips it into his shirt pocket.
“How are the children?” he asks next, cocky and unable to stay silent. Rosminah clasps the button on her purse with a click which she will remember days later. With patience she replies, talking to the reflection of her husband in the bedroom mirror.
“They are all right.”
“Any problems in school?”
“No.”
“Anything for me to sign?”
“No. Nothing.”
“I don’t sign if I see red marks.”
“Our children don’t get red marks.”
“I know. I just don’t sign if I see that they have been lazy.”
“Our children aren’t lazy.”
“I know.” Her husband pauses to compose himself. “I know all that, you don’t have to tell me.” Her husband then starts to yawn. It could have been a real yawn or he could have made it up. Whatever it was, he tells Rosminah that he is sleepy and tells her to switch off the lights. Rosminah walks to the light switch and wonders why all her fingers can do tonight is obey. In the dark, she hears her husband’s voice, familiar yet distant at the same time.
“You’re not sleeping?”
“I don’t feel like it’s time yet to sleep.”
“What time is it now?”
“I think it’s already twelve. But I don’t feel like sleeping.”
“You just lie down and close your eyes. When you open them it will be morning.”
“Maybe I will go take a look at the children.”
“They are all sleeping. What is there to look at?”
“Maybe I will light the mosquito coil in their room. Tonight there are many mosquitoes.”
“I don’t feel any mosquitoes. But if there are, you light one for this room too. And then you come and sleep.”
“I know, after I light the mosquito coils.”
“Tomorrow you must wake up.”
“You have to wake up also. You have to wake up earlier than me. I will sleep later.”
Rosminah’s husband keeps quiet for a long time and drifts off to sleep. He sleeps with a 50-dollar note in his shirt pocket. He might or might not crumple it, but in the morning it will still be there. For a moment, Rosminah wants to march back to her husband, demand her money back, insist that she had saved it up for someone else. But the thought of having nothing to say when he turns and grumbles, except a half-spoken apology, angers her. She turns to walk into the children’s room.
The room is half-lit by orange streetlamps outside the window. A gentle wind rhythmically pushes the curtains into the room. The children are sleeping on a mattress side by side; Mohd Rosli with his head buried under his pillow, and Siti Nuraini’s half-open mouth facing the sole-smeared wall. There is a study desk beside the mattress with a blackened fluorescent tube that flickers when it is switched on and marker scrawlings of both the children’s names on the mock pine finish. Attached to the desktop are shelves that hold dog-eared school textbooks and Happy Meal toys (a Dalmatian popping from a box, a bear grinning on a scooter), as well as some Games Day trophies for beanbag races and individual sprinting.
On the sides of the desks are stickers: kittens, football players and even a Neighbourhood Watch one that was meant for the front door. Some of the stickers are half-peeled, as if at one time there was an attempt to scrape them all off. They have left fibrous stains on the wood and fingernail scars where the pine grains show through.
The children seem to be breathing in unison, just like brothers and sisters should. When Siti Nuraini was still two years old,
