the shoes

"That is fifty sen," said Aiman.

I had asked Aiman the time. That was all. He looked up at the sun, told me it was nearly noon, and then held his hand out for fifty sen.

"You cannot charge me for the time."

"I read it for you. Reading is a service." He put his hand out. "And it is one ringgit now, because you argued."

That is Aiman. Aiman charges for everything. He charges to lend you a pencil and then 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. He has firm opinions about the Singapore dollar, and on a good day he will try to charge you in it, because the rate is better for him.

So when I decided to do something nice for Aiman, I already knew the hard part. The hard part was 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 she needs the white shoes, because her old ones have gone past white into a colour with no name. And here is the part it 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, was going into that tin, slow, for his sister's white shoes.

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

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

"Covert," I told the gang, behind the surau. "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 do we not just ask the size," said Kavi, asking it.

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

So Pei Pei solved it the way Pei Pei solves things. She borrowed one of the sister's old shoes for one afternoon, traced round it on a bit of cardboard, and put the shoe back, 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 the strongest, most willing pair of hands in the gang belonged to the exact person I was buying them for.

So I hired Aiman.

Full price. To help me carry "some things." He did not ask what things. Aiman never asks what. Aiman asks how much.

"Carrying is twenty sen," said Aiman, picking up the bag.

"Fine."

"The shady side is extra."

"Why is the shady side extra."

"Because you want it. Thirty."

I paid the thirty. We walked. I stopped to tie my slipper and handed him the bag for one second.

"Holding fee," said Aiman.

"You have had it for two seconds."

"Holding is per hold, not per second," said Aiman, with the face of a man explaining a law of the universe. "Ten sen."

By the time we were near the shoe stall I had paid Aiman a fee for carrying, a fee for the shade, a fee for holding, and a fee I still do not understand that he called "general." I was getting cross. I stood in the middle of the pasar with my coins nearly gone. I was paying a friend, sen by sen, to help me do him a kindness he was not allowed to know about. And I very nearly said something I would not have been able to take back. Something about a boy who would squeeze every last coin out of his own friend.

Then he went to buy himself a teh, and to pay for it he took out the tin.

I had heard about the tin. You hear about everything. But I had never seen inside it. He opened it to find the right coins, and for one second it was open, and I saw.

It was a lot of very small coins. The kind you get a sen at a time. Saved slow, over weeks and weeks. Nowhere near enough yet for a pair of white school shoes. But climbing. One sen at a time.

He closed it and tucked it back inside his shirt, where he keeps it, near him.

I did not say the thing I had nearly said.

I paid the holding fee. I paid the shady-side fee. I paid the general fee. I paid every strange little price he asked, full, and I did not mind one bit.

Now I just had to buy a pair of white school shoes, the right size off Pei Pei's cardboard, with Aiman standing three feet away holding my bag for a fee.

This is the hardest kind of shopping there is.

So I sent Aiman to fetch himself a second teh, on me, which cost me a delivery fee, but it bought me ninety seconds. In ninety seconds, with Pei Pei's cardboard, I bought the shoes. The white ones, the right size. I got them into the bottom of the bag, under a bundle of kangkung and a packet of something. Aiman was still arguing about the price of the teh with a man who had clearly met him before.

He came back. He picked up the bag. He did not look inside it. Aiman never looks inside a bag. He does not care what is in it, only how much you pay him to carry it.

"Heavier now," said Aiman.

"It is the same bag."

"It feels heavier. That is a re-weighing fee."

I paid the re-weighing fee. It was the best ten sen I have ever spent, because it meant Aiman carried his sister's new white shoes all the way home himself, on the shady side, for a fee, and never once knew it.

The shoes turned up at Aiman's house the next morning, the morning before term. No name. No note. Just there, by the door, the white ones, the right size. 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. She did a little walk in them in the lane so everyone could see, the way you do with new shoes.

"Where did you get them," a kid asked her.

"My brother bought them," she said.

Aiman was leaning on his doorframe, not charging anybody for anything, just for that one minute, watching his sister walk up and down the lane in the white shoes he was sure he had paid for. I have never seen him stand so still.

And that is the best part. Aiman thinks he bought them.

He had the tin. He had been saving. He came up a little short, the shoes turned up anyway, and somewhere in there the sums went fuzzy, the way sums do, and Aiman has decided his tin did it. That he got there. That he bought his sister's first proper school shoes himself, every coin.

He still charges me for everything.

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