the shoes

Aiman charges money for everything.

I have said this before and I will keep saying it, because every time you think you have found the bottom of it, Aiman charges you for the trip down. He charges to lend you a pencil. He charges interest on the pencil. He once charged me to tell me a joke and then charged me again because the joke was, in his opinion, a good one.

So when I decided to do something nice for Aiman, the hard part was always going to be doing it without Aiman finding out and putting a price on it.

Here is what I knew. Aiman has a little sister, and the little sister starts proper school next term, and Aiman's little sister needs new school shoes, the white ones, because her old ones have gone past white into a colour that does not have a name. And here is the part that took me a while to see. Aiman was saving up to buy them. Himself. He had a tin. Every sen he charged me for a pencil, every sen he charged the goat, every sen of his strange little empire was going into that tin, slowly, for his sister's white shoes.

He had not told anybody this. I found it out the way you find anything out in our kampung, which is by accident, with the makciks somewhere in the middle of it.

And I decided that Aiman's sister was going to have those shoes before term, and that nobody, least of all Aiman, was ever going to know it was me.

This is the hardest kind of operation there is. A surprise is hard. A surprise on Aiman is nearly impossible, because Aiman notices when a sen moves on the next street.

"Covert," I told the gang, behind the surau. "Nobody breathes a word. We need the sister's shoe size and we need it without anybody asking the sister, or Aiman, or Aiman's mak, anything that sounds like a question."

"Why don't we just ask the size," said Kavi, asking it.

"Because then it is not a surprise, Kavi."

So we did surveillance. Hana watched the sister's feet at the longkang and reported back, very seriously, that they were "small ones." Pei Pei, who does not talk, solved it the way Pei Pei solves things. She got hold of one of the sister's old shoes for an afternoon, traced round it on a bit of cardboard, and gave me back the cardboard and the shoe, and nobody ever knew the shoe had been gone. Pei Pei should run a country.

The trouble was the muscle. Buying the shoes meant a trip to the pasar, and carrying things, and I needed help, and the strongest, most willing pair of hands in the gang belonged to the one person I was doing all this to surprise.

So I hired Aiman.

Full price. To help me carry "some things" from the pasar. He did not ask what things, because Aiman does not ask what, Aiman asks how much, and how much was, of course, more than I wanted, because the moment I needed him he could feel it, the way a makcik feels rain.

And that is when it nearly went wrong, because Aiman kept charging me, and I started to get cross.

Every step cost a sen. Carrying the bag, a sen. Carrying it on the shady side, a sen more. Holding the bag while I tied my slipper, that was a holding fee. By the time we were near the shoe stall I had paid Aiman so many small sums that I forgot, for a minute, why I was even there, and I stood in the pasar thinking that Aiman was just a boy who would squeeze a friend for every last coin, and I very nearly said something I would not have been able to take back.

Then I saw the tin.

He had brought it with him. The saving tin. He kept it inside his shirt, and when he paid for his own teh he took it out, and I saw inside it, just for a second, before he closed it. It was not much. It was a lot of very small coins, the kind you get from charging a friend a sen at a time, saved up slow over weeks and weeks, nowhere near enough yet for a pair of white school shoes, but climbing, one sen at a time, toward them.

And standing there in the pasar, looking at that tin, I stopped being cross.

The charging was never greed. The charging was the shoes. Every sen he ever squeezed out of me was a sen for his sister's feet, and he was doing it himself, slowly, on his own, because he wanted to be the one. He did not want the shoes to just appear. He wanted to have bought them, every coin of them. That is a boy saving up to do a good thing the hard way, one sen at a time. There is no greed in it anywhere.

So I did not say the thing I had nearly said. I paid him the holding fee. I paid him the shady-side fee. I paid every strange little price he asked, full, and I did not even mind, because now I knew where it was all going.

And then I did the rest of it the quiet way, with nobody admitting to anything.

The white shoes, the right size off Pei Pei's cardboard, turned up at Aiman's house with no name on them. No note. Nothing to say where they came from. They were just there, by the door, the morning before term. In our kampung the best things arrive like that, with nobody's name on them, and you are not supposed to ask.

Aiman's sister wore them to the first day of school, white as anything, and she did a little walk in them in the lane so everyone could see, the way you do with new shoes.

And the best part. Aiman thinks he bought them.

He had the tin. He had been saving. He came up that little bit short, the shoes turned up anyway, and somewhere in the middle of it the sums got fuzzy, the way sums do, and Aiman has decided that his tin did it. That he got there. That he, Aiman, bought his sister's first proper school shoes with his own saved sen.

I let him think it. I will always let him think it. It is the only thing I have ever given Aiman for free. The trick is that he will never know I gave it. That is exactly how he would want it. Aiman cannot stand being given anything, which is the whole reason I had to do it this way in the first place.

He still charges me for everything.

I pay it now without a word. I know where it goes.