the giant roti

The plan was simple.

Tonight Ayah was coming home from Singapore. He would be tired. He is always tired on a Friday. The Causeway does that to a person. It takes the whole day off him and hands back a man who has been sitting in a car park that pretends to be a road.

So I was going to make him one roti canai so big it would make him forget the entire country on the other side of the water.

One roti.

The size of a bicycle wheel.

Maybe bigger.

"Hana," I said. "You are Deputy Commander of Dough."

Hana stood up very straight, the way she does when she has been put in charge of something. "Yes, thiae." Hana always says yes first and worries after. It is a good system and I rely on it.

Mak was already at the table rolling normal roti. One eyebrow went up. In our house Mak's one eyebrow can stop a motorbike. It can stop two.

"thiae," she said.

"This is science, Mak. A big jam needs a big roti."

Mak made the sound of a person who has watched a lot of my science. But she pushed the big steel bowl across the table to me. She said it was because she had extra flour. There is never extra flour. Mak just always seems to have exactly the thing you were not allowed to ask for.

I went to the back door and called the gang.

"Report for Operation Giant Roti!"

Divya came first, already worried. Divya is my best friend. She tells me when a plan is bad, and she is usually right, and it has never once stopped me.

"thiae, this is a bad idea."

"Correct," I said. "That is how I know it is a good one."

Aiman came next, counting in his head. Aiman charges money for everything. If you sneezed near Aiman he would find a way to charge you for the air.

"I supply the ghee," Aiman said. "Five ringgit."

"Five?"

"It was three. Then I heard the word giant."

Pei Pei did not say anything. She never does. But she had heard the word roti, and now she came back dragging a metal lid the size of a small table. She put it down. She started hammering it flat. BANG. BANG. BANG. You could feel it in your back teeth. Nobody asked what it was for. You do not ask a Pei Pei what it is for. You find out.

Kavi arrived shouting the news he was supposed to be bringing.

"I TOLD EVERYONE! THE WHOLE LONGKANG KNOWS! THEY ARE COMING!"

Kavi only knows loud. He has never once been quiet, not even by accident.

Ah Wei came last, carrying two plastic bags of food. Ah Wei's family runs a stall, so Ah Wei is never not carrying food, and he is never not eating it, because in his family wasting it is the worst thing a person can do.

"Emergency supplies," he said, with his mouth already full.

So we mixed.

We mixed and we kneaded and we argued about water, and the dough grew. It grew and it grew. After a while it was not really dough any more. It was an animal. It lay in the big bowl like a sleeping cow, breathing slowly, deciding whether it liked us.

That was when the baby arrived.

The baby is the smallest one in our house and the baby wants whatever is the most important thing, in its mouth, now. The baby looked at our sleeping cow of a dough. Then the baby crawled across the floor, faster than the baby has any right to be, and put one happy finger straight into the middle of it.

"No, baby," I said.

The baby laughed and ate the hole.

So now our giant roti had a crater in the middle.

I decided the crater was good. I decided it was character.

Then the sky did the thing the sky does in Johor. It went dark all at once, like somebody had leaned on the switch. And then it threw a whole bucket of water at the roof. The zinc went off like the sky had tripped and was blaming us. Rain. Loud rain. The kind you have to plan around.

"We cook inside!" I said.

Mak's kitchen is a normal size. Our roti was not. We had to slide the whole thing onto Pei Pei's flat metal lid and carry it like a shield, four of us, one to a corner. One corner kept trying to touch the floor and join the ground forever.

"Left!"

"Right!"

"BABY!"

The baby thought the giant roti was chasing him. He screamed with joy and crawled away faster, leading it round the kitchen like the most important parade in the world.

Somehow we got it onto the biggest fire. The fire was brave about it. The roti began to cook. It puffed up in the middle, proud of itself, the way you puff up when you have not yet gone wrong.

Then it stuck.

Then it tore.

Half of it stayed on the lid. The other half decided it would rather live on the stove now, as part of the stove, for the rest of time.

"Pei Pei!"

Pei Pei was already moving. She came back with a spatula the size of a small sword. We all got under it and pushed. We saved most of it, which, when the thing you are saving is the size of a bicycle wheel, is more than you would think.

That was when the makcik network arrived.

They always know. Nobody sends for them. They come the way the rain comes, all at once and already inside, knowing the whole story including the parts that have not happened yet. They came in out of the wet in one clump, three of them, the way they always come, carrying umbrellas and, for some reason, more flour.

"Aiyoh, thiae, what is all this?"

"Operation Giant Roti," I said. "For Ayah. To make the jam disappear."

They made the sound makciks make when they have already decided to help and are only telling you out of politeness. In under a minute the kitchen had three more pairs of hands and four more opinions. The torn roti was patched and flipped and turned with a speed that made the rest of us step back and let the professionals work.

Then, outside, a motorbike honked.

Ayah's bike. He was home early. The rain had let him out of the Causeway sooner than it usually does.

Panic. Maximum panic.

We carried the giant roti out under the umbrellas like it was a king who could not walk. It was half cooked. It was torn and patched. It had a baby crater in the middle and it smelled, I am not too proud to say, magnificent. The whole street came out to watch, because the whole street already knew, because Kavi.

Even Pakcik came out of the kedai and stood under his own roof across the road, arms folded, watching the way Pakcik watches, like he saw all of this coming yesterday and decided to let us find it out the long way.

Ayah took off his helmet. The rain ran down his face. He looked at the giant roti. Then he looked at me.

"thiae," he said, in his slow Ayah voice. "Is this for me?"

"Yes. It is so you forget the jam."

He was quiet for a moment. The rain was loud.

Then Ayah did the thing Ayah does. He smiled the small smile that is only for one person at a time. He tore off a piece with his hands, even though it was still hot, even though Mak said aiyah, panas. He ate it right there, standing in the rain.

"Best roti canai in Johor," he said.

"IT WORKED!" Kavi shouted. "THE JAM IS GONE!"

And then Ayah sat down. On the porch step. In the doorway of his own house, with the rain coming off the roof in a line right in front of him, too tired to walk the last few steps inside. He just sat, with his piece of roti, and let the day come off him.

I sat down next to him on the wet step.

The roti was never really about the jam. Nobody beats the jam. Atok says so, and the jam is one of the three things Atok is right about. I made it so he would stop. So he would sit down and be in one place for a while, instead of half here and half across the water.

You cannot say a thing like that on a step with the whole street watching and Kak Long filming you on her phone for reasons of her own. So I did not. I just shoved up closer until our shoulders were touching, which says it without any of the words.

The giant roti was much too big to finish. That was always going to happen, and I did not mind. We tore it up and sent it down the whole street, piece by piece, until everyone had some. Mak brought out normal-size roti too, the good kind, for the people who like their roti to behave. The makciks brought kuih. Atok came as far as the door, which for Atok is a long journey, and accepted a piece without once admitting he wanted it. The baby sat in the middle of everything eating the crispy bits that fell, which is the baby's favourite job and the only one it has never failed.

Even Faiz came over from a few houses down. Faiz is the kind of kid who asks a grown-up first and it always works out, which is unbearable. He chewed his piece slowly and said it was "not bad."

From Faiz, not bad is a standing ovation.

Later the rain stopped. The zinc roof went quiet. It kept dripping for a long time after, the way our roof always does, long after the rain itself was done.

Ayah was still on the step. So was I.

"You know," he said, "a small one is good too."

"I know," I said. "But you cannot sit a whole street down with a small one."

He laughed his tired laugh. We stayed on the step. The roof dripped. Nobody made us go in.