syafiq's grand tour

My cousin Syafiq lives on the Singapore side, across the Causeway, and he is the most pleased person I have ever met.

He is pleased about everything. He is pleased about escalators. He is pleased about how clean the trains are. He is pleased that you can stand in a queue and the queue actually works, one person, then the next person, like everyone has quietly agreed on something.

Syafiq comes to visit and he counts things, and then he tells you the number, and then he tells you how it compares to his side.

"On my side," Syafiq will say, "the bus comes every seven minutes. I counted."

You cannot beat a boy who counts. But you can out-tour him.

So when Pak Su's car pulled up and Syafiq got out, in his ironed clothes, looking pleased, I was ready. I had an itinerary. I had a tourism board. I had a kampung to sell.

"Welcome," I said, "to the official Best Of The Kampung tour."

"Is there a brochure?"

"The brochure is the tour," I said. "Follow me."

The tourism board was the gang. I had given everybody a department. Hana was on Logistics, which meant Hana carried things. Aiman was on Tickets, which was a problem I planned to deal with later. Kavi was on Announcements. Pei Pei was on whatever Pei Pei decided she was on. Ah Wei was on Refreshments. The refreshments did not survive the briefing.

Stop one was the longkang.

The longkang is the drain that runs along the back of the houses, and we treat it like a kingdom. I did not call it the drain. I am not a fool.

"This," I said, sweeping my arm, "is the River District."

Syafiq looked at the longkang. A leaf went past on the water, slowly, like it was also on the tour.

"It's a drain," said Syafiq.

"It is a working waterway. It floods in the monsoon and becomes navigable. We have sailed it." That part is true. You can read about it somewhere else.

"On my side," said Syafiq, "we have a river with a light show. At night. The lights go on the water."

"We have a goat," I said.

This was not on the itinerary. The goat had simply arrived, the way the goat does. But Syafiq looked at the goat, and the goat looked at Syafiq, and for one second I had him, because Singapore does not have a goat that just turns up and stares at you with its whole opinion.

Then the goat ate the corner of my itinerary, which was in my hand, and we moved on quickly.

Stop two was the rambutan tree.

"This is the lookout," I said. "From here you can see the road, and the road is where everything comes from. I personally watch for my father's car from this exact branch."

"Can you see Singapore?"

"...You can see the road."

"On my side you can go up a building and see four countries."

"You cannot see four countries."

"You can see the idea of them," said Syafiq.

I had no answer to that. So I declared it lunchtime. A good tour guide can declare lunchtime at any moment.

Lunch was the next problem, because lunch was a durian.

Stop three was supposed to be Pakcik's kedai, which I was going to present as the Heritage Museum and Trading Post. But on the way there, a durian came down off somebody's tree. You cannot walk past a fallen durian. That is just rude. And Ah Wei had it open before I could even add it to the itinerary.

Syafiq looked at the durian.

"On my side," he started, "you buy it in a box. They take out the seed. There is a "

"Eat it," I said.

He ate it.

And for one moment, one whole moment, Syafiq was not counting anything. He had durian on his fingers and a face like the durian had told him a secret. He just stood there in our lane, in the heat, being a kid who had eaten something too good to talk about. No number. No comparison. Nothing on the other side of the water.

Then the moment ended, because everything ended at once.

The baby arrived. The heat, which had been leaning on us all day, leaned a little harder. Kavi, on Announcements, announced something at the top of his voice straight into the afternoon. The goat came back. Hana put down the Logistics to look at the goat. And the whole tour, the entire Best Of The Kampung experience, fell over all at once, like a shelf giving way.

The itinerary was finished. The goat had eaten most of it anyway.

So we did the only thing left. We flopped down on the step in the shade, all of us, sticky and beaten, with the kampung going on around us. The makciks somewhere. A motorbike. Atok's radio through the door. Somebody's chicken having a strong opinion about nothing.

And sitting there, beaten, I finally understood Syafiq.

Syafiq compares everything to his side. I used to think he was rubbing it in. He is not. He compares so that somebody will argue back, so somebody will tell him no, the kampung wins, the kampung is the best place there is and you belong in it. He wants the argument. Nobody here ever gives it to him, because here it is just obvious, and also everybody is usually eating.

Syafiq does not want to beat us. He wants to be counted as one of us.

I kept that to myself. I just sat next to him in the noise and did nothing, which was the one thing I had not put on the tour, and the only thing he had actually wanted to do.

"thiae," Syafiq said, after a while.

"What."

"The drain. The river district." He was looking at it down the lane, where the leaf had gone. "When it floods. How high does it actually go?"

It was one more question than the visit needed. He was going home tomorrow, to his clean trains and his queues that work. He just wanted one more thing about this place to take back with him.

So I told him. To the centimetre, more or less. He listened to the whole answer, pleased, the way he is pleased about everything.

Except this time it was about us.