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 everybody 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.

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

"Is there a brochure?"

"The brochure is the tour. Follow me."

The tourism board was the gang, and I gave them all departments on the spot.

"Hana. Logistics."

"What is Logistics."

"You carry things."

Hana picked up the cooler box, a folding stool, and a length of rope nobody had asked for, and stood ready to carry the whole kampung if I pointed at it.

"Aiman. Tickets."

"How much is a ticket."

"There are no tickets."

"Then why am I on Tickets."

"To stop you inventing some."

"Kavi. Announcements."

Kavi immediately announced, at the very top of the morning, "THE TOUR IS NOW STARTING," to a lane that contained us, one chicken, and nobody else who needed to know.

"Pei Pei, you are on whatever you decide you are on."

Pei Pei was already taking the basket off a bicycle for reasons she did not share.

"Ah Wei. 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 is a drain," said Syafiq.

"It is a working waterway. It floods in the monsoon and you can sail it. We have sailed it." That part is true.

"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 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.

Aiman tried to charge Syafiq fifty sen to enter the River District. Syafiq, who is from the side where everything costs money and you just pay it, paid without blinking. Aiman was so happy he had to sit down.

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 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 so tall you can see all the way across the water."

"To here?"

"I look for it," said Syafiq. He said it like it was nothing, still looking up the tree. "The kampung. From up there it is very small. You have to know where it is or you miss it."

I did not have anything to say to that. So I declared it lunchtime. A good tour guide can declare lunchtime at any moment.

Except lunch had to wait, because stop three was the Heritage Museum, which is what I had decided to call Pakcik's kedai.

"This is the oldest shop in the kampung," I said. "Everything in here has a story."

"How old is it," asked Syafiq.

"Very," I said.

"Forty years," said Pakcik, from behind the freezer, not helping.

"On my side," said Syafiq, "there is a shop that never closes. Open all night. Twenty-four hours."

"Pakcik," I said. "Are you twenty-four hours?"

Pakcik did the wave. The small one. The small wave means Pakcik will open when he opens and shut when he shuts, and a clock has nothing to do with it. Syafiq looked at the dusty shelves, and the credit book, and the one fish in the freezer, and then he started to count the jars on the top shelf, because he cannot help it.

"On my side," he said, at nineteen, "a shop this size would have a machine that counts the money for you."

"Pakcik counts it in his head," I said. "He has never once been wrong."

Pakcik did the wave again, which is the closest Pakcik comes to agreeing with anyone.

Then Ah Wei found the durian.

You cannot walk past a fallen durian. That is just rude. And Ah Wei had it open on the step 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 for you. 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, going straight for the open durian at full crawl.

"BABY," shouted Kavi, who was still on Announcements, and the shout brought the goat back, because the goat thought it had been called.

Hana put down the Logistics to deal with the goat. The cooler box, the stool, and the rope all went over at the same time. The rope, being rope, found a way to involve everybody's ankles.

Pei Pei's bicycle basket, which at some point had quietly become a trap on a stick, chose this exact moment to spring. It missed the durian completely and caught the goat, which took it very personally.

Aiman, with no tickets left to sell, had started charging people to pat the goat, right up until the goat was wearing a basket and nobody wanted to pat it any more.

The heat, which had been leaning on us all day, leaned a bit harder. 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 carrying on around us. The makciks somewhere close. A motorbike. Atok's radio through the door. Somebody's chicken having a strong opinion about nothing at all.

Syafiq sat down on the step with us. He did not count the step. He did not tell us how many steps there are on his side. He just sat, with durian on his fingers, in the noise.

"thiae," he said, after a while.

"What."

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

So I told him. I stood up and put my hand flat on the wall of Pakcik's shop, higher than his head, where the brown line still shows from the last big one.

"To about here."

Syafiq looked up at my hand on the wall for a long time. Then he asked how high it had gone the year before that, and the year before that, and I told him every one I could remember, and he listened to all of them, pleased, the way he is pleased about everything.