The crickets were now in crescendo. Their incessant chirping surrounded the area, making everything stick together: skin on pinafore, hair on neck—hot like everything else in this unseasonably tropical climate. There were some things that Lucy could never get used to: the weather, the ‘Western’ stall… and Afiqah, whose hair was glossy-smooth despite the uncompromising humidity. That might have been what Lucy was thinking about as she sat opposite Afiqah in the gazebo, had she been less distracted by the task that lay before her.
What was certainly true: that the school was an endless litany of bewilderment. In conventional architecture one must never mix materials so haphazardly, yet the advice seemed lost on the principal at Lucy’s school. Where once a stone staircase opened out to a cobbled-red courtyard, it was now unceremoniously interrupted by this dark, wooden gazebo, which, after being pelted frequently by tropical rain, also smelled stale. Poor Lucy then: she who was now preparing to speak, had to also endure this among other distractions, the crickets chirping, the palm fronds drooping from skinny trees and the heat (always the heat) rising off the cobbled-red stone in rolling waves.
“Hot? 1 Masyallah, aku pakai headscarf 2 bila kat luar. Ni—” she smirked “—takde benda lah.”
Thereby the problem presented itself. Lucy flinched.
“Faham?”
This was precisely the problem: Afiqah always spoke too quickly, and now her mouth was presently occupied elsewhere, munching on bread with potato curry filling. The whole thing could have been divinely set-up: a schoolyard melee between two girls (with the wind cajoling Lucy into violence…) but there were only crickets. Nevertheless, this was it. Lucy remembered Teacher Rosmah telling her to biarkan lah, itu sebuah cerita sahaja, Lucy, kenapa marah sangat? There were words swirling in her head, ready to spill from her lips if she could just steady herself. She had to practise every single word before she could say it because, well—
“Bagai… mana kamu… crap 3… imagine… cerpen…” she stumbled.
“Apa? Aku tak boleh dengar lah apa engkau cakap tu,” came Afiqah’s reply, muffled between potato-flesh.
“Imagine 4… cerpen…”
“Apa engkau melatar dekat situ? Kau imagine lah!” Afiqah said.
Every speech begins with a single word but once Lucy forgot the first three the next thirty-three were similarly squandered. The cadences were another problem altogether: some letters stuck more closely to others, which decreed that it was not den-GAN but de-NGAN. No such problem existed back where Lucy came from, where takeaway was takeout and no one spooned curry onto slices of bread. Life, however, must always find reason to interrupt: in December Lucy and her family had moved to Kuala Lumpur so Mr. Wellington could keep a closer eye on the local operations. And so, in acrimonious fashion, Lucy traded Fahrenheit for Celsius and foot for metre—which perhaps explained why the conversation was unfolding the way it did, marred by a first shot that was already a disappointing misfire.
“Orang Amerika Syarikat tidak selalu makan burgers and fries 5,” Lucy said.
“Kuat sikit.” said Afiqah.
Wit, unfortunately, only comes after a supple tongue, and Lucy’s was still wooden—so she repeated herself, and Afiqah laughed.
“Bergurau aje. Tapi memang betul, cara korang buat kari teruk sekali! Takde rasa langsung. Jadi, aku fikir, kan lebih baik kalau semua orang makan burgers and fries saja,” said Afiqah.
Other problems presented themselves: too many syllables.
“Cikgu cakap engkau tak suka cerpen yang aku tulis tu,” said Afiqah, who had almost finished her bread.
“Kamu pergi Amerika… tempat… mana?” asked Lucy.
“Ikut kata aku. Kamu. Pergi. Daerah. Mana. Di. Amerika?” said Afiqah.
The difficulties tended to resolve when words were spoken more judiciously.
“Ka… mu… per… gi… dae… rah… ma… na di Amerika?” said Lucy.
“Ah, kan? Melayu bukan susah. Ingat.”
Opportune moment for a shift then: to who rang the bell, drew out the musket, loaded the bullet, and made Lucy go off.
#
We begin with: the bell. Approximately seventy-two hours ago (counting bedtimes, unscheduled late night snacking and other modern phenomena) one Teacher Rosmah had returned weekend assignments to a class that Lucy and Afiqah shared—but prior to the incident that would set Lucy on a course towards the stale gazebo, their teacher felt inordinately compelled to explain her choice of ink.
“Ma’afkan Cikgu, ya, kelas. Pena saya semalam habis dakwat. Sebab itu, saya pakai marker 6,” she said. “Jangan risau kalau nampak markah ditulis besar-besar.”
“Afiqah,” Teacher Rosmah continued, “Cikgu sudah fotocopy cerita Afiqah untuk kawan-kawan kamu. Cikgu rasa cerita Afiqah amat baik, dan murid-murid lain harus membaca cerita ini supaya dapat belajar cara untuk menulis sebuah cerpen.”
“Thank you 7,” said Afiqah.
“Pandainya!” said the teacher.
“Saya belajar sedikit apabila di sana,” said Afiqah.
“Kelas, sila membaca cerpen Afiqah, dan lihat bagaimana dia menggambarkan Negara Amerika Syarikat. Semasa saya membaca cerita ini, saya berasa seperti saya juga di Amerika!” said the teacher.
The class murmured in agreement (there could be more embellishment here but really, children tend to be boisterous only when it suits them). What was certainly true: that assignments were returned to their respective authors—but none of these assignments reached Lucy. Instead, Lucy watched with her wide blue eyes as three sheets of paper meticulously stapled together with Afiqah’s name at the top right hand corner arrived on her desk. There was a declaration (BAIK!) scrawled in thick red lines at the bottom.
#
To become proficient in speaking any language, girls (and boys!) must practise, practise, and practise. Lucy was similarly determined not to let language get in the way of her navigating school. Already she was reduced to eating from the only stall that had food she could recognise—and even then the ‘Western’ stall had made the unfortunate mistake of making its foreign cuisine adhere to a local palate. ‘Halal’ was a concept she still couldn’t wrap her thirteen year-old head around: pepperoni tasted slightly off, ham came in every flavour except the original, and when bacon finally made its entrance on the menu, she was dismayed to find, after closing her eyes and taking a large bite in sensuous anticipation, that it was only boring old turkey. Perhaps that was what drew the musket from out of the cupboard: hunger. For hunger then, was the reason she found herself in Teacher Rosmah’s office every other afternoon, repeating her de-NGANs until the wrong letters could come apart and reassemble on her tongue so that it was no longer den-GAN.
“Semakin lama Lucy belajar Bahasa Melayu dengan Cikgu, semakin fasih Lucy berbual,” said Teacher Rosmah, after one of their language sessions.
“Bagaimana hendak cakap fasih dalam Bahasa Inggeris?” asked Teacher Rosmah.
“Fluent 8,” said Lucy.
What relief! Her entire mouth loosened, letting air fill all the right cavities as she spoke the two-syllable word.
“Flen?”
“Bukan, Cikgu. Fluent,” said Lucy.
“Flen,” said her teacher. “Betul tu, Lucy sekarang semakin flen. Tetapi ingat, lain kali apabila nampak perkataan ini, sebut air, bukan—macam mana Lucy kenal ini?” said her teacher again, while pointing to that slippery three letter word.
“Air 9,” she said.
#
The thing with words is (and poor Lucy could have never realised this) is that they mean different things to different people. Some variation of this thought must have surely occurred to Mrs. Wellington but this isn’t that kind of story. One must, therefore, be contented with other divergences in narrative—she told Lucy to take Afiqah’s story and rewrite it in English:
Last week, my family and I went to America to visit my relatives. They had moved to America. My cousin Ilyana and her family moved to America because her father got a job in that city. He works as an engineer at Google. On the day that Ilyana and her family went to the airport to leave Kuala Lumpur for the last time, I felt very sad because I thought that I would never get to see or talk to my beloved cousin again. So, when my mother told me that we would be visiting Ilyana and her family, I was very happy.
We took a plane to America, and it took twenty hours because it is very far away from Kuala Lumpur. When I was in America, I was very shocked because the weather was very cold. The cold wind that was blowing on my cheeks was like the air-conditioning in Kuala Lumpur. But all the local people there were not wearing jackets and coats, which I thought was weird. Maybe it’s because they are very fat, so their bodies hug them and then they don’t need more clothes. Everyone is fat, but praise God, Ilyana and her family are not fat. They don’t eat burgers and fries because they say everything there is not halal.
Ilyana brought me around to see America. She introduced me to her new American friends, by telling them in English where I had come from. I said “hello!” 10 to them, because that was the only thing I knew how to say. I really wanted to ask them why they were drawing on the pavement. They were drawing flowers and bees with green and yellow and also pink chalk. I thought it was very ugly. It didn’t look like my friend Sangeetha’s drawings that she does outside her home every year during Deevapali. Maybe their parents didn’t teach them how to draw like Sangeetha’s parents does…
Lucy stopped. To be clear: she isn’t at fault. Bewildering it must have been to take the Malay–English dictionary, and thumb through all the words she had yet to learn, including the ones with letters arranged just slightly off from their English cousins (aktiviti, teksi, sistem, muzium). These were, as one might say, the bullets that loaded the musket—all different calibres, but all equally capable of hurting.
#
And if you must know, other things also took their toll. Before Lucy was summarily disappointed with the selection of ‘Western’ cuisine, she balked at the price of a slice of pizza—yet another thing she traded as she flew across oceans. No one, of course, thought to reassure her that the exchange rate was such that the pizza was now cheaper,but one ringgit was one dollar as far as Lucy knew. She also knew that this mattered to the woman behind the counter who had smacked her hand when she handed over two ringgit instead of three. And this was after she tried asking the woman politely to repeat herself. Today, however, would be different—no more ‘Western’ cuisine. She whispered under her breath the name of the dish she had been eyeing for the past few weeks.
“Mee rebus,” said Lucy.
The man in the impossibly large orange shirt grunted in the affirmative, having heard her order over the counter. A fistful of yellow noodles moved across Lucy’s eye line and headed into the strainer in the silver pot, disappearing in a rush of effervescence.
“Nak datang dari mana?” asked the old man.
“Apa?” Lucy said.
In the event that words are half-heard and half-copied in one’s mind, it’s always expedient to pretend that nothing was registered.
“Nak datang dari mana? Negeri mana?” asked the old man again.
“Saya datang daripada Amerika,” Lucy said.
“Eh kau dengar budak ni cakap Melayu!” the man said, laughing as he bellowed towards the back where his wife was peeling eggs.
“—cakap Melayu macam kaku gitu!”
To salvage what was meant to be a good day, Lucy paid (with her self-esteem) and left. With pale hands she brought her culinary reward to the place where all children sit when they are told to pause and reflect—at a corner. Friendships were still gestating elsewhere: she had arrived in the middle of March, and by then most incompatible friendships were still in the midst of decomposing into civil acquaintances. For now, however, something else was materialising: from the corner of her eye she spied a boy sitting three tables away with a phone held in front of him. Then followed a great white flash, and the boy (named Roy, because… why not?) turned back. His other friends (assumed true for the sake of simplicity) were around him trying their best to hold it in—but there was always one boy, the mischievous one of the group, who would call it.
“Sorry 11 eh!” the boy shouted, ringing clear across the canteen, to her.
#
Sound isn’t the only thing that travels across space—other things resonate as well. For instance, return back (or forward, if one wishes for certainty) to the scene of the crime, which had now reached a premature impasse.
“Perasaan cemburu itu berdosa tau,” said Afiqah, as she was packing up her things.
Imagine—jealousy that such egregious drivel was handed out to every student!
“Boleh Afiqah… tulis semula… cerpen?” said Lucy.
Sin was perhaps too strong a word. After all, the chalk scrawl on the sidewalk was just that. Everyone draws on the pavement but embellishment makes everything sound more exciting, doesn’t it?
“Cerpen itu cerpen aku. Aku pergi ke Amerika, dan aku yang melihat segalanya. Bukan engkau,” Afiqah said.
Always the conditions of perception: to see, to have seen, who performed the seeing, and why. To see, some quarters think, is to believe.
“Orang Melayu tak bohong, dengar? Bukan macam orang engkau,” Afiqah said.
If Lucy had tried her hardest to speak, what was the lie then?
#
Pada satu hari, saya and keluarga saya pergi visit satu farm di luar Kuala Lumpur. Saya gembira because saya lihat farm di America, but saya never lihat ladang di Kuala Lumpur before. Ever since saya datang to Kuala Lumpur, saya belajar yang ada dua types of makan. Halal and tidak halal. Saya baca on the internet and ia cakap Malaysians can makan makan halal only. I don’t know why. Tetapi bila saya at ladang, saya nampak something strange. Saya nampak two lorries, satu ada drawing that cakap halal and satu tidak ada. When I was nampaking the trucks, saya nampak the non-halal ayam had jatuh out, and was now atas ground by the dua trucks. Ia at tengah the dua trucks, so hard to tell if kamu tidak nampak which truck it came from. Saya nampak satu farmer jalan to the truck. Maybe kamu nampak ayam itu on the ground and he wanted to put it back. But he took it, and then he threw it into the wrong truck. I wanted to tell him that he had it wrong but I didn’t know how to say wrong…
#
Thus the point of no return: when the bell was struck. It was inevitable. The parting shot was already fired, long before Lucy had ever begun her assignment, long before Teacher Rosmah had given her an extra seventy-two hours to complete it, long before her first fitful attempt at wit after learning how to speak (again). Her handiwork, of course, would only return several days after, when the classroom had forgotten about the shower of praise Afiqah received. It would arrive in different circumstances, but read and marked by the same pair of eyes.
“Lucy… saya boleh nampak dalam cerpen ini kamu bekerja keras untuk memperbaiki bahasa Melayu kamu,” said Teacher Rosmah.
She handed back Lucy’s assignment with the blank side of the page facing up. She then paused for a moment, as if deciding on what to say next.
“Next time… try write… simple story.” 12
1 Hot (Bahasa Inggeris): panas.
2 Headscarf (Bahasa Inggeris): tudung
3 Crap (Bahasa Inggeris): perkataan kasar yang digunakan oleh seseorang apabila dia tidak berasa puas hati, seperti perkataan ‘celaka’.
4 Imagine (Bahasa Inggeris): mengambarkan
5Burgers and fries (Bahasa Inggeris): Orang Negara Amerika Syarikat biasanya makan hidangan ini. Bahan burger adalah dua keping roti, daging cincang yang berbentuk leper, sayur salad dan tomato. Kadangkala mereka meletakkan sos mustard di tengah-tengah burger tersebut. Fries adalahkentang yang dihiris panjang dan tipis. Setelah digoreng, garam ditaburkan secukup manis.
6 Marker (Bahasa Inggeris): pena yang lebih besar daripada pena biasa. Ia biasanya digunakan untuk menulis di papan tulis putih.
7 Thank you (Bahasa Inggeris): terima kasih
8 Fluent (Bahasa Inggeris): fasih. Perkataan ini seharusnya disebut dengan bunyi huruf ‘t’ yang keras.
9 Air (Bahasa Inggeris): udara. Orang Amerika Syarikat yang belajar bahasa Melayu akan selalu mengenali salah perkataan ini kerana ia dieja sama dengan ‘air’.
10 Hello (Bahasa Inggeris): Perkataan ini tiada perjemahan yang tetap, tetapi mereka menggunakan perkataan ini dalam cara sama yang kami mengguna “apa khabar?” apabila bertemu dengan seseorang pada kali yang pertama.
11 Sorry (Bahasa Inggeris): Ma’af. Walaupun perkataan ini bermakna sedemikian, cara yang ia digunakan adalah secara menyindir. Ia tidak disebut dengan cara yang ikhlas. Sungguh aneh ya, bahasa Inggeris? Jika diucapkan dengan cara yang lain makna yang berubah secara tiba-tiba.
12 Next time… try write… simple story (Bahasa Inggeris): Lain kali… cuba menulis… cerita yang lebih mudah. Adakah anda tahu bagaimana ayat ini yang dikatakan oleh Cikgu Rosmah?