Nimita's Place Read online

  Nimita’s Place

  A Novel

  Akshita Nanda

  ISBN: 978-981-47-8577-8

  First Edition: July 2018

  © 2018 by Akshita Nanda

  Author photo by Eng Chun Pang. Used with permission.

  Cover art and design by Eng Chun Pang & Yong Wen Yeu

  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

  Part One

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  Part Two

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  Part Three

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  Part Four

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  Part Five

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  Part Six

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  Part Seven

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  Part Eight

  1.

  2.

  3.

  Part Nine

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  References

  About the Author

  ALSO FROM THE EPIGRAM BOOKS FICTION PRIZE

  WINNER

  The Riot Act by Sebastian Sim

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  2016

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  2015

  Now That It’s Over by O Thiam Chin (Winner)

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  Kappa Quartet by Daryl Qilin Yam

  Altered Straits by Kevin Martens Wong

  for Indira Tuli

  Part One

  2014

  1.

  I say a kitchen must have a pressure cooker that whistles, milky tea bubbling on the stove and mangoes ripening in hot straw or curling inside pickle jars full of mustard oil.

  My friend and roommate Chia Ying says no, a kitchen must have large pots of slow-cooking soup, an old wok that smells of sesame oil and a tin of condensed milk dripping onto the counter.

  Dr Alagasamy, my boss, looks like his kitchen would have a stone grinder churning out idli batter, stainless-steel tumblers for filter coffee and twenty varieties of sambar powder. Although, when he takes the research team out for lunch, it is always for Italian ravioli, Peranakan chicken or to this place on Neil Road which today serves soup-filled momos.

  The momos burst as soon as I stab them with a fork. The meat juice hits Dr Alagasamy’s spectacles. He wipes them, replaces them and delicately extracts a dumpling from the plate with his chopsticks.

  “So sorry,” I say.

  “That’s all right,” says Dr Alagasamy. “So. You did good work with the Transferase-C project.”

  Yes, I did. I spent 12-hour days harvesting DNA from bacteria, seeding animal cells with that DNA and then delicately extracting Transferase-C protein from the animal cells. Thanks to me working overtime on weekends, boss could do the experiment that has been published in the top science journal, Nature.

  But I don’t say that. I say: “Thank you for giving me the chance to help.”

  The dumpling wobbles on my spoon. It’s not bad. I dip it in chilli sauce.

  “Your contract is up for renewal next year,” boss says.

  I sit up straight. Do I get a raise?

  “You’re a valuable member of the team, Nimita. I value your hard work. I really do.”

  A raise!

  “But it’s going to be difficult to renew your contract next year.”

  What?

  “What?”

  Boss shrugs. “I’m sorry. There are these new rules. We now have to give preference to Singaporeans and permanent residents for any job vacancy. I can’t keep you on unless you are a highly qualified foreign worker.”

  “I am a highly qualified foreign worker!” I have a BSc and MSc from Pune University in India. I worked in Dr Savarkar’s lab, on the river pollution project that got 15 lakhs in funding and write-ups in three newspapers.

  “I don’t know what to say. These are the rules now.”

  The waiter puts down a steamer of green dumplings. I stab them with my fork but they are dry inside. Dr Alagasamy’s spectacles are safe.

  He clears his throat. “These are quite tasty.”

  You just fired me, boss. You expect me to eat?

  I take a green dumpling to please him, but spit it into my spoon when he’s not looking.

  How can he expect me to eat? My throat is tight. So tight.

  It’s like I’m being choked by a thin wire, by a line I thought I had cut and escaped by coming to Singapore.

  “Hey.” Someone shakes my shoulder. “You okay?”

  I blink and focus. Red shirt, beige shorts, flip-flops and round eyes growing bigger under gold-rimmed glasses.

  Chia Ying shakes my shoulder again. “Hello?”

  “Hello,” I say slowly. It’s hot and steamy under the plastic tents of the night market. Stalls of toys and clothes and bags spin around for a second. I’m giddy, probably because of the heat, probably because I didn’t eat very much at lunch with Dr Alagasamy.

  Chia Ying touches me for the third time. She’s too close. “I’m fine,” I tell her. “I’ll go get a drink. You go help Irving.”

  I walk away as quickly as I can, leaving my flatmates behind. I want to go back to our place and lie down in my bedroom with the air-con on.

  I’m almost out of the plastic tents, feeling cooler air on my skin, when I smell something and stop.

  Mangoes.

  There are proper mangoes in the bazaar. Actual Alphonso mangoes. The best mangoes in the world, all the way from India.

  Not the watery mangoes that come to Singapore from Thailand and that are only a light yellow when ripe. Not the sweetish mangoes that arrive on trucks from Malaysia, which are too dark a yellow on the inside.

  I can smell properly ripe Alphonso mangoes, straight from Maharashtra State, where I was born.

  For the first time since lunch with Dr Alagasamy, I am hungry again.

  These mangoes will be nicely wrinkled, yellow-green on the outside and a dark, intense orange on the inside. You can scoop out the flesh with a spoon or, as I was taught by Dadi, cut the fruit into three parts so there are two fleshy bowls and one section with the stone in the middle. Then, if you cut the surface of each bowl into a grid and push the skin upwards
from the bottom, the flesh becomes a mango “flower” of bite-sized cubes. Sink your teeth in; each bite is just the right balance of sweet and sour, firm and soft, bursting in the mouth with the taste and smell of summer.

  I have not tasted Alphonso mangoes for three-and-a-half years now because they don’t export well. The air-conditioned, super-expensive supermarkets near my flat sell Thai or Pakistani mangoes. Sometimes there are Amrapali mangoes from Delhi in Mustafa.

  I have never smelled Alphonso mangoes here before.

  Real mangoes in Singapore. Where could they be?

  I walk back under the plastic tents. Nearby tables are stacked with fruits and vegetables. Ooh, bhindi! But the wrong kind, not the dark-green, tender ladies’ fingers from India that are exactly the size of a lady’s fingers. In Singapore you get only long, thick pale-green American okra. They look old and faded and tough, even if Chia Ying insists that is the colour they are when ripe.

  I see bananas that are thicker or longer than you get in Mumbai. I recognise some as plantains, except they are red.

  A pile of green spikes that looks like jackfruit. I don’t like it fresh but you can cook it like meat if you are vegetarian. People push in front of me to grab the jackfruit. The fruit seller splits one open; it is bright yellow inside. Not a jackfruit but a smelly durian, which Chia Ying loves like I love mangoes.

  A huge gust of steam and I can’t smell the mangoes any more.

  Two stalls away, a dark-skinned man scoops out a heap of vadas from a kadai of boiling oil. Ooh, vadas with chutney. But no, these are being served with ketchup and I can see an actual prawn, giant-size—head, eyes and feelers all sticking out of the vada.

  The seller looks Indian but what Indian puts prawns in vada batter? Vadas are dal finely ground with some onion and chilli. They don’t have meat or fish or crustaceans inside, everyone knows that.

  The stall even has the spelling wrong: vadai.

  Forget the vadai.

  Next is a stall of—are those bits of octopus being folded into balls of batter?

  Takoyaki. The sign shows a smiling octopus.

  Really? Bhajiya with octopus inside? In India we fold onions into batter and fry them to make onion bhajiya. Potatoes for potato bhajiya, spinach for spinach bhajiya, bhindi for bhindi bhajiya. I have had fish bhajiya once. Fish, okay, but octopus?

  Irving should see this. Irving is the reason Chia Ying dragged me down to the night market when all I want to do is lie down in the dark and think.

  Our new flatmate Irving Wan arrived from China just one month ago. His job is to post about food on his social media feeds: @IWan2Eat on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and on their Chinese versions, Weibo and WeChat. Chinese people do not always have access to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, Irving says, though there are ways around the government blocks.

  Irving has half-a-million followers and a book deal from some hotshot publisher. One of the publisher’s friends is the head of the English department at Nanyang Technological University. She offered Irving a writing residency in Singapore and a teaching contract. Offered. Irving didn’t even have to apply for his job. I had two Skype interviews and one written round.

  My stomach hurts again.

  Irving is next to the vadai kadai, holding a handycam and talking to a woman frying burgers. His hair is so short he looks almost bald under the lights. I should tell him about the octopus bits.

  But first the mangoes. I am a scientist, I can work this out.

  The mangoes must be on that table with the bananas and the durian. That is logical classification, putting fruit with fruit. Also, the scent is strongest there.

  Dark round fruit. The seller pulls one open to show white crescents inside a thick, purple rind. The juice stains his fingers purple. Not mangoes.

  Dark red, spiky fruit. A customer peels one to feed a little girl. It looks like lychee but the skin is different from the rust-brown kind we get in India.

  Small, yellow oblongs the size of my palm. Now that I look at them, they could be mango-shaped. Tiny, but mango-shaped. The skin is firm and sticky with sap. When I bend down, the aroma of Alphonso is strong.

  The seller smiles at me and says something in Chinese. I can’t see Chia Ying anywhere. I need her to translate.

  I twist my wrist to make a mango flower of my right hand, the dance mudra that also means “how much?” Half a flower. My wrist doesn’t turn that well any more.

  The seller gets my meaning. He says something in Chinese and shows me five fingers. Twice.

  Ten dollars? For how many? Or is he saying five dollars for five? That’s a lot for tiny mangoes. Unless they taste like Alphonsos, but how can I tell? Will he cut one open so I can try?

  I make a sawing motion with a flat palm. The seller laughs and shakes his head. He does the five fingers twice again. So it must be the price.

  I need Chia Ying to help me translate. Or—yes, Irving has finished with the hamburger lady and is leaning on a pole, checking his handycam.

  I wave. Irving is tall for a Chinese guy, taller than me, and I’m quite tall for Singapore. He sees me over the heads of the crowd and waves back.

  “Anything good?”

  “Oh! You should see this one.” I pull him by the sleeve to the octopus bhajiya stall. “Do you have this in China?”

  His eyebrows go up. “I’m from Hong Kong.”

  “It’s in China, no?”

  He looks at the stall, rubbing his hand over his buzz cut. One week into his Singapore life and he got a buzz cut. I also cut off my hair when I moved here. It’s cooler.

  “We have takoyaki in Hong Kong.”

  “Oh.” I’ve never been to Hong Kong.

  Irving’s glasses mist. He takes them off, wipes them.

  I pull at his sleeve. “Please, Irving, help me, na? I want to taste those small mangoes and maybe buy a lot. But he doesn’t understand my sign language and I don’t speak Chinese. Please, will you speak Chinese to him for me?”

  Irving says: “I don’t speak Chinese.”

  “What?”

  “No one speaks Chinese, N. I speak Cantonese and some Mandarin but not Chinese. Look.” He points at the vadai guy. “Can you speak Indian to him?”

  “Don’t be stupid—oh.” I get it now. “Oh, okay. Sorry. Will you come see if he speaks Mandarin or Cantonese?”

  We walk over to the fruit stall. The seller smiles at us. Irving says something and the seller holds up both hands, shaking his head.

  Irving looks at me the way I look at Singapore bhindi. “That’s not Mandarin or Cantonese. He’s speaking—I don’t know. Bahasa Melayu?”

  The seller nods and says something in his language.

  My face is hot. Too many tubelights and not enough fans under the tent. My shirt sticks to my skin. “Sorry.” How was I to know the seller was Malay? He looks Chinese.

  Irving walks away.

  I need Chia Ying. She can speak to anyone. I wave at two strangers in red T-shirts, beige shorts and flip-flops before my flatmate sees me.

  “Hey, durian! And pisang raja!” She points at the too-long and too-thick type of bananas.

  “Is that good?”

  “Durian is always good,” she says. “But yeah, pisang raja is banana-licious.” Chia Ying is Malaysian Chinese and likes all the bananas I find odd. “I’m going to buy it and fry it.”

  “Chia Ying, Chia Ying, will you also ask him if I can taste those mangoes?”

  “Okay, hold on.” She gets the seller to cut open a mango. It’s so tiny, the two pieces just about spill over my palm. The flesh is a bright yellow, an intense yellow, not the orange of Alphonso.

  But the smell, the taste. I nearly bury my nose in the flesh, then bite.

  “Oh my God, try this!”

  “Yah? Okay.” Chia Ying bites into the other half, the one without a stone. “Wow, these are good. Yum-mango!”

  “Ask him how much. And where these mangoes are from. And what they are called. And if he’ll give a discount since you’re
also buying bananas and maybe I can also get some lychees but no durian, okay, please?”

  “Hold on, hold on.” Chia Ying laughs. “Breathe, Nimita Sachdev. Do your pranayama breathing.”

  I do pranayama breathing to relax but I am too excited. The mangoes are incredible.

  Ten dollars a kilo, which Chia Ying bargains to half price because she also buys four bunches of the pisang raja and two full-to-bulging plastic bags of lychees. These are rambutans, she reminds me. We have eaten them before.

  I buy three kilos of mangoes.

  They are so small I can eat three at a time. Maybe four. I have to Skype my family in Mumbai and show them the Malaysian avatar of the Alphonso.

  They are called apple mangoes, the seller says through Chia Ying. He drove down from Kota Tinggi with a truckful of fruits from his family’s land.

  “Where is Kota Tinggi?”

  “It’s in Malaysia. It’s farther than JB and there’s nothing there.”

  “How can there be nothing in Kota Tinggi? There must be something there.”

  Chia Ying waves her hand. “Farms, a lot of forest, some resorts, a waterfall. Not like KL.”

  Chia Ying is from Kuala Lumpur, which sounds like Mumbai. Kota Tinggi sounds like Lonavla, the hilly town outside Mumbai that we always visited over weekends. It is cool and green. Dadi owns a house there. She rents it out so we drive up to keep an eye on the tenants. My grandmother and I also talk about living there one day, perhaps.

  Irving appears from behind us. “What’s happening?”

  “We’re buying mangoes. And durian.”

  I groan and gather some of the bags. “Okay, but you carry the durian.”

  Chia Ying hands Irving the bananas and durian. “You will love it,” she tells him.

  Irving takes a bag of mangoes from me. My right hand feels better as soon as the weight is off. Seven years since the fracture, and my wrist still hurts if I overstrain it.

  “No, don’t mix the fruits,” Chia Ying says when Irving starts tipping some of the lychees into a half-full bag of bananas. “I’m going to give that to Hafeezah. She asked me to look out for pisang raja.”