Nimita's Place Read online

  “What is she cooking?” Malay food is new to Irving. He has lived only in China and Edinburgh.

  “Don’t know. Ask her.”

  We walk back to our flat.

  At our block, the lift opens and I hold my breath. Some of our neighbours keep cats and they sometimes pee inside the lift.

  I exhale only when the lift stops at the ninth floor, then take the mangoes and some other bags from Irving. “I’ll go ahead and open the door.”

  Hafeezah’s flat is on the way to ours. She’s already at the grille door, looking out for us maybe. Her tudung is in place, the lilac cloth framing her features. To me it looks odd, a Malay tudung around North Indian features. She has a sharp Sindhi nose and neatly threaded eyebrows.

  “Sab theek?” she asks me in broken Hindi.

  Hafeezah knows Hindi only through Bollywood movies. She has been trying to be friendly with me ever since she and her husband bought the flat next to the one Chia Ying and I rent.

  “Sab theek,” I say to be polite, then lift the bags to show I’m busy. “Chia Ying found your bananas.”

  “Thank you!” She says that to Chia Ying because I’m already walking past her, ready to turn the key in the lock and escape.

  Hafeezah was born Rita Lalwani and into a Sindhi family that moved to Singapore in 1947, after India split into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. Partition displaced her grandparents, just as mine left Lahore because of the riots that broke out after Hindus and Muslims moved into each other’s lands. When Rita converted to Islam four years ago and changed her name to marry Abu, a Singaporean Malay, her Hindu family did not like that one bit. Chia Ying says Hafeezah’s parents have not seen their daughter in three years now, not even after their grandson Altaf was born.

  Hafeezah is no one of mine and I have nothing to say about how she leads her life. But sometimes seeing her face gives me a strange feeling in the stomach. It’s like looking in a mirror, except the person looking back wears a tudung.

  2.

  Every morning before Chia Ying turns on her Nespresso machine in the kitchen, I turn on the gas stove and use its flame to light a tealight to do aarti before the pictures on my bedroom shelf.

  My stomach relaxes as I move the flame three times clockwise around the pictures of Shiva and Parvati and Rama and Sita and Lakshmana and the small statue of the elephant-headed Ganesha. Help me do this, I ask them. Help me stay in Singapore.

  After aarti, I go to the living room area where my cellphone is usually charging. Scientific studies have shown that increased exposure to smartphone and computer screens leads to disturbed sleep and possibly increases the risk of depression and mental disorders. I keep my laptop and cellphone in the living area and stop checking both at least two hours before I go to sleep.

  Irving comes out of his room in a singlet and shorts, earbuds plugged in.

  “Mangoes?”

  “I’ll film them later,” he says, putting on his shoes.

  The door closes.

  There are the usual eighty unread messages from family WhatsApp chats and one missed call from Dad in Mumbai. It’s only 6am there. My wrist aches as I press the call button.

  “Good morning, beta, did I wake you up?”

  “No, Dad, I’m awake. Is everything all right?”

  “I should be asking you that. I heard about that earthquake in Indonesia. How is everything in Singapore?”

  I switch the phone to the left hand. Not again. I do pranayama breathing to reduce irritation and cool the body, breathing out slowly through my teeth.

  “Beta, can you hear something? Have you left the gas on?”

  I stop doing pranayama breathing. “Dad, there are always earthquakes in Indonesia but what has that got to do with Singapore? Why should something that happens in Indonesia affect Singapore? How’s Mummy?”

  “No, but beta,” Dad clicks his tongue, “if I knew Singapore was going to be unsafe like this, I would never have allowed you to leave Bombay.”

  First of all, I found the job in Singapore. I am thirty years old and no one “allows” me anything.

  “I’m fine, Dad. Nothing ever happens in Singapore.”

  That is why I moved here, safest city in the world. Nothing ever happens. No robberies, no shootings, hardly any rapes. No one even honks in a traffic jam. In India, people spill out of their cars and trucks, shouting, but in Singapore, people sit quietly and listen to the radio.

  As for marching on the streets, I have not seen one tamasha in public since I came here. Police will catch anyone doing a tamasha or morcha. It is actually illegal to march on the streets or to protest against the government without a permit. Even more unbelievable, people actually obey those rules. That would never happen in Mumbai, where nobody asks permission before creating commotion on the streets every second day.

  “Dad, you are worrying about nothing. Nothing is going to happen. Now, how is everyone?”

  Chia Ying comes out of her room. I finish with Dad and follow her into the kitchen.

  “Who was that?” Chia Ying feeds a capsule into her coffee machine.

  “Dad. Again.”

  My phone vibrates and look, here’s a message from Itty-Bua. I take the mangoes to the table in the air-conditioned living room before reading it.

  Dad’s cousins Itty-Bua and Pritty-Bua are the only aunts I have in the world. Mummy is an only child and Dad’s real sister Urmila-Bua died before I was born.

  Itty-Bua and Pritty-Bua are older than Dad, so what they say goes in our family.

  The buas came to visit me last year but it was during the haze, when forest fires from Indonesia send choking smoke over the seas to Singapore.

  “So neat and clean Singapore is on the street, but too much pollution in the air,” the buas told Dad and Mummy. “So bad, I tell you, I had to put my dupatta over my nose whenever we were outside. Poor Nimmy got an infection also.”

  Immediately the tamasha started. Come back home and work, na, what is this? Why do you want to live in such pollution?

  I told them to come and see how clean Singapore air is most of the year and they refuse. Too busy, they say, but I know it’s because they think it’s too expensive. Money is tight right now because of my brother Romy-Bhaiya’s mortgage in Houston. He lost his job a few months ago. All the good IT jobs are moving to India.

  Itty-Bua and Pritty-Bua can afford to travel anywhere, anytime. Their husbands own properties in Bandra and Malabar Hill. My cousins have all studied and settled in the US and UK. The buas will never leave India, though, because they are famous Bollywood singers whose screen names are Gulshan and Gulshaan.

  Also, the best parties are in India. The buas are very fashionable. Diamonds drip from their fingers and ears and their lips also, Mummy says. Sparkly and cutting.

  What does Itty-Bua have to say this morning? “Good morning beta sweet child *muak* . How are you beta? I found this photo from our trip to Lonavla in January.”

  In the photo, we’re all relaxed and smiling.

  “Too short that trip was but so nice to see you. ”

  The buas really do love me. I type back: “Good morning Bua. I miss you too!”

  She replies immediately: “Remember when I took this photo of you in a sari? So gorgeous, God bless. ”

  She sends the picture.

  “I think it’s time to change your WhatsApp profile picture na? ” she adds.

  My current picture shows me in a lab coat. Santha the lab manager helped me take it. I think it’s very professional and neat, but why not? To please Bua.

  “Did you just change your WhatsApp profile picture?” Chia Ying calls from the kitchen.

  “Yes. Just.”

  “Nice sari.” She comes out of the kitchen holding two cups of coffee. “Irving?”

  “He’ll film breakfast later.”

  Chia Ying laughs.

  Our landlord increased our rent by fifty per cent this year, because of the stupid property boom. So we advertised for a flatmate,
posting on the Facebook page where Chia Ying and I first found each other in 2011. Her fiancé Raymond was being posted to Delhi for a few years and she needed help to split the rent.

  Like me, Chia Ying also works in Singapore General Hospital, but as a radiotherapist. Her pay is good, but not enough to cover the full rent on a three-bedroom flat. Even a flat that is in Bukit Batok and not nearby Jurong East with the snazzy malls.

  Chia Ying and I interviewed two girls before agreeing on Irving.

  Irving came to meet us at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf at West Mall. He wore white sailor pants and shoes with no socks. The first four buttons of his tight black shirt were open, to show a waxed chest. He was so totally a six that not even my buas could object to my sharing a flat with him.

  “Six? No, he’s a seven, maybe eight on ten.”

  “No, Chia Ying, he’s a six, like, six and nine, you flip them around and they look the same? Chhakka. Six. Like, one of those.” I made my left hand flop at the wrist.

  “What? No!”

  “He wears shoes without socks! His eyebrows are neat and did you see that shirt?”

  “Woman, have you heard of metrosexuals?”

  On the day he moved in, Irving wore grey slacks and a boat-neck white T-shirt with the lettering: “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun…Like Me.”

  “No, lah,” Chia Ying said to me while he was setting up his PlayStation with our TV.

  The next day, I was up earliest like always and saw Irving ironing his shirt for the day. It was light pink. “QED,” I said to Chia Ying, but she said: “Metrosexual.”

  Wait till she sees the singlet he is wearing today. Metrosexual, my foot.

  “You okay?” says Chia Ying, putting my coffee down.

  “A-one.” I will be. “If Dr Alagasamy wants a super-specialised researcher then I will come up with a super-special research project for him. I have a full year.”

  “Jia you!” says Chia Ying. I think it means “more oil” or “good luck”. “Want to watch a movie today?”

  “Can we meet after four? I want to go window-shopping. You can come.”

  Chia Ying shakes her head. “No, thanks. My window-shopping is at Kate Spade and Gucci, not showflats.”

  Her loss. My idea of window-shopping is going to open houses and checking out flats to buy. Dadi likes to do this too. We would imagine how to redecorate the bedrooms and rate the kitchens on a scale of one to ten.

  I double-check the open-house timing while taking a sip of my latte. A message pops up and I spit the latte back into the cup.

  “What?” Chia Ying reads my phone upside down.

  From Itty-Bua: “Lovely darling, so pretty you look *muah muah*. Btw you remember Gautam Bhatia from Pinky’s wedding? He’s coming to Singapore for some time. I gave him your number. He’s still single. Such a nice boy, such good family. Let me know when he messages you. You must meet him and tell me EVERYTHING OK?”

  “Shi—”

  “Shi-itake mushrooms,” says Chia Ying, who doesn’t like to swear. “Shiitake mushrooms, Nimmy.”

  “Shiitake mushrooms.” My latte tastes really bitter.

  Chia Ying takes my phone. “Who is this guy?”

  I have no appetite now, not even for mangoes. “He’s one reason I came to Singapore.”

  Actually it was my cousin Pinky who started me thinking about Singapore. It was at Pinky’s wedding where I told my family straight out that I wasn’t going to get married, was still forced to meet Gautam Bhatia and so decided to go to Singapore to work.

  Chia Ying laughs over her latte. “It’s sweet. Your aunty is matchmaking you again.” She gives me back my phone. “So, this guy not hot or what?”

  I do my pranayama breathing and think of how to explain it to her. She doesn’t understand. I left India to avoid this.

  “Why not check out the guy?”

  “I saw him once. Before I left India.”

  “That bad?”

  I push the coffee away and start cutting mangoes. “Not really.”

  “Then?”

  The apple mangoes are too tiny to make the flower grid so I eat them with a spoon. “You’ll have?”

  Chia Ying takes half a mango. “Mm, yum-mango. So what’s the problem with this guy?”

  My problem is not with the guy per se. My problem is with marriage.

  “You know how much a wedding costs in India? I can buy one full flat here with that sort of money.”

  A government-subsidised HDB flat, definitely.

  In India, weddings are so expensive that banks give shaadi loans, like home loans and car loans. Punjabi traditions and Bollywood require a minimum of four celebratory days: engagement party, sangeet or dance-cum-henna party, wedding and reception. There will be hundreds of guests at each function, even if you invite only relatives, close friends and colleagues.

  Expenses include clothes and gifts and invitation cards of thick bond paper with embossed seals of Ganesha.

  There are other headaches beyond expense. Wedding invitations must be hand-delivered to family and close friends. If the family or close friend lives in another city or country, posting it is all right, but it must be followed up with a phone call. When Romy-Bhaiya got married in 2005, Mummy and Dad called and visited over two hundred people. It was funny because the wedding was held in Delhi where Bhabhi’s parents live, we were in Mumbai, but most of the guests we invited lived in Delhi anyway.

  Delhi-ites are different from Mumbaikars. If Romy-Bhaiya’s wedding were an independent YouTube short film, Pinky’s wedding in Delhi was a three-hour Sanjay Leela Bhansali movie starring Aishwarya Rai Bachchan.

  Dad and Mummy are not doing too badly. We are upper middle class. We have a house in Worli, even if it’s not sea-facing. It’s actually Dadi’s house, bought in 1960.

  But Pinky’s father, Tony-Chacha, is the contractor who builds the houses of Delhi MPs. He and his mother, Shanti-Tayee, and his younger brother, Monty-Chacha, occupy multiple floors of a giant building in Vikas Kunj with their families. The building has two underground parking garages and a second-floor swimming pool. It looks like a small condominium, but is a family home.

  Pinky’s wedding had four formal evening functions and four informal lunch functions, and everybody had to dress up, even for breakfast, because all two hundred out-of-town guests were being put up in the same fancy hotel.

  It pinched me so much. Dadi, too, because at the breakfast table, she said: “You know, in the old days we would all be in the wedding house, we would be there to help. At a girl’s wedding, everybody must chip in, you know.”

  And everyone looked at me without looking at me because at my wedding, everyone would have to chip in for the sake of family izzat.

  I cannot afford to have a Bollywood wedding. Any wedding at all would bankrupt my family right now. Our accounts are low because the American economy has been down for years and Dad has to help Romy-Bhaiya with the house payments. “It’s for our holiday home,” Dad jokes, but the exchange rate kills him and Mummy. They have visited the US only twice in the nine years since Romy-Bhaiya settled there.

  When we had to help Romy-Bhaiya for the first time, it was before Pinky’s wedding. Even Dadi, who loves Romy-Bhaiya like a flower loves rain, commented that our neighbour Mrs Mishra’s grandson, the investment banker, never asked his family for anything. In fact, he built his parents a nice bungalow in Bandra. But she handed over the rent from the Lonavla property for Bhaiya’s sake and spent 50,000 rupees from her own savings to buy us new clothes for Pinky’s wedding.

  Fifty thousand rupees! That’s a month’s salary for a bank employee and I was making maybe 15,000 to 25,000 a month then, teaching high school students. I would have made more as a researcher, but I was taking a long break after my MSc.

  When people asked why I wasn’t doing a PhD, I told them I was considering my options. Most then told me I had spent too much time shut up in the lab at a young age. I should have been learning more about the world, they said.

 
I learnt a lot about our world because of Pinky’s wedding. When we went shopping in Colaba before going to Delhi, I realised I couldn’t afford most of the lehengas and salwar kameezes they were making me try on. Dadi said: “You’re twenty-five and need to have some nice clothes.”

  When I brought out the saris Divanka-Bhabhi had given me five years ago, Dadi said: “You can’t recycle what you wore for Romy’s wedding. Everyone will remember.”

  “This is a Delhi wedding. You’ll see,” Mummy added.

  I wore a new lehenga with a gold thread shawl and Mummy’s Jaipur-set, uncut diamond earrings at Pinky’s engagement party. Both Itty-Bua and Pritty-Bua came and tugged at my cheeks, said how nice I looked and then told Mummy: “Your earrings look so nice on her, na? How these children grow up.”

  We all live in Mumbai and they must have seen Mummy wear this set more than once. Fine.

  When Mithu-Chachi, Pinky’s mother, also recognised the earrings, I wasn’t too surprised. We do spend a lot of time in Delhi.

  Then Kitty-Aunty, who lives in Simla and is somehow related to Dad, also came up to say hello. “Your mother’s earrings really suit you,” she said. I had never met her before. Mummy says she met her once, at Monty-Chacha’s wedding, back in the 1980s.

  But that is how it is in Delhi.

  Mummy and Dadi gambled that our Delhi relatives would not wear saris from South India for the wedding. So, they pulled out a Kanjeevaram silk with peacock prints, Pochampally weaves and special Chantilly lace from Dubai.

  They looked so elegant, but our Delhi cousins stole the show with hotshot designer saris and lehenga skirts from Ritu Kumar. Some were studded with bright rubies, ropes of semiprecious stones and flashy cubic zirconia. Jhatak heart attack, so bright that I had to sit down during the strobe-light-disco portion of the sangeet.

  At the end of the evening, Dadi and Mummy were feeling giddy too. Ritu-Chachi had told them there would be one extra function, a formal meeting between the boy’s and girl’s sides of the family, before the wedding. Usually one goes straight from sangeet to wedding, but now there would be a brunch in between, because, her voice got lower here, it seems there is quite a lot of…interest, she said, looking at me.