the book

There is a book at the kedai that I have wanted to read my whole life.

It is the credit book. Pakcik keeps it by the till, and in it, in his small careful writing, is who owes what. Who took a tin of milk and will pay Friday. Who has run a tab on rice since the start of the month. It is, I have always been certain, the most interesting book on the entire street, because it knows everyone's business, all of it, in one place, and nobody is allowed to read it except Pakcik.

I am not allowed to read it because of money. I want to be clear about that. We are fine. I just wanted to read the most interesting book on the street, the way you want to read any book that everybody keeps shut.

You do not just ask Pakcik. Pakcik sees you coming yesterday. If you ask Pakcik a thing straight out he does the small wave that means he already knows what you want and is going to let you find out the long way that you are not getting it.

So I decided to earn it. I would make myself so useful to the kedai that Pakcik would have no choice but to let me in.

"I have prepared a business improvement plan," I told Pakcik, holding the maths book with the cover torn off. It had a title. It had three sections. It had a diagram of the shop that was slightly wrong, but only in the parts that mattered.

Pakcik read the whole thing. He did not say anything for a while. Then he said, "Mm." That was the entire reply. I decided "Mm" meant yes, because I needed it to.

I brought in the gang as my team. This was my first mistake, but not the way you think. Aiman walked in to reorganise, and Pakcik, who can spot a person who likes money from a great distance, immediately hired Aiman himself to count stock, which Aiman was thrilled about, and which removed Aiman from my team and put him on Pakcik's, getting paid, on day one. I had brought Pakcik a free worker and lost my accountant in the same minute.

Kavi reorganised very fast. That is Kavi's whole way of helping. He moved things at speed, with great energy, to places that made sense to Kavi. Pei Pei built a thing to hold the packets of keropok in a neat hanging row, which was genuinely good, and is the only part of my improvement that survived the day.

So I reorganised the shelves. By category. Logically. All the tins together, all the soap together, all the sauces together, the way a proper shop is supposed to be, the way my plan said.

The kedai does not run on logic. The kedai runs on Pakcik knowing where everything is.

I found this out at the morning rush.

The morning rush at the kedai is fast. People come in on the way to work, on the way to school, they say the thing they want and they want it now and they are gone. And it works because Pakcik does not look for anything. His hand goes to the spot without his eyes. Forty years his hand has gone to the same spots. A man wants his usual, Pakcik's hand is already there.

Except I had moved everything.

So the rush came, and Pakcik reached for the kicap where the kicap had always been, and the kicap was now in the Sauces Section, three shelves away, being logical. And he reached for the next thing, and it was gone too, sorted neatly somewhere it made sense to me. And Pakcik did not complain. That was the terrible part. He did not say one cross word. He started looking with his eyes now, slow, in his own shop, for things he had not had to look for in forty years. The queue built up. I stood there watching the chaos I had made and could not fix, because I was the only one who knew the new system, and I had already forgotten half of it.

A man who does not complain while you wreck his morning is the loudest thing there is. Pakcik not complaining filled the whole kedai.

We put it all back, after. At the end of the day, when the rush was long over, Pakcik started moving things back to where they belonged, quietly, and I helped, because I was the one who had moved them, and that is the rule. The tins went back. The kicap went home. His hand started finding the spots again.

While we were putting it back, I finally asked him about the book.

Pakcik looked at me for a long moment. Then he picked it up, and he did not open it, and he said, "This book is for the street. Not for reading."

And putting tins back in the dark of the closed shop, I understood what he meant.

The book is not interesting. That is the truth of it. It is a list of who owes for sugar. It is the most boring book on the street. The only interesting thing in it is the thing Pakcik will never say, which is that some of the names have been in there a long time, longer than a tab should run, and Pakcik never brings them up. Never chases them. Just lets them sit, page after page, a quiet column of people who had a hard month once and were let off having to talk about it. That is what the book is for. It is for keeping, not for collecting.

I did not read it. I did not even want to, after that. Some things stop being interesting the second you understand them, and start being something better.

I bought an ice lolly from the freezer, the way you do, and I paid for it, cash, no tab, and I went home.

The book sat on its shelf by the till where it has always sat. On the way out I looked at it properly for the first time, and it looked completely ordinary, just a fat old exercise book gone soft at the corners, which is the best disguise a thing like that could have.