the pasar malam

There is a scarf at the pasar malam that Mak wants and will not buy.

I have watched her not buy it for a year. The pasar malam comes once a week, on a field that is just a field on every other day. One stall sells kain, folded in soft stacks, and on the top of one stack there is a scarf. The soft kind. A quiet blue with a pattern in it like rain on a window.

Every week Mak stops. She picks it up. She lets it run through her fingers. She looks at the little paper price. Then she puts it back down, smooth, like she was only checking it was still there. Then she buys onions, or thread, or whatever the house actually needs, and we go home, and the scarf stays on the stack.

The makcik at the kain stall has given up trying to sell it to her. Now, when Mak picks it up, the makcik just says, "Still here for you." Mak smiles and puts it back. The two of them pretend that picking it up and putting it back is a normal way to buy a scarf. But Mak never actually buys it.

Mak makes a little extra of everything. Extra kuih, extra rice, extra room. She always says it was going spare, it was going to be thrown anyway, so take it. She gives the whole house everything and keeps the onions and the thread for herself.

So I decided that this week the scarf was coming home, and that I was going to buy it, with my own money, which I did not have.

So I went into business. For one night. One stall.

I want to be clear that this was not an empire. I have learned that lesson. No departments. No accounts. One stall, one thing, one night. We would sell sirap bandung over ice, pink and sweet and cold, the exact thing a person wants on a hot field. Ah Wei's family had the ice. Pei Pei built a stand out of a crate. I worked out a price that would clear the scarf by the end of the night with room to spare.

It was a long-weekend pasar malam, so the field was extra full, half the Causeway having come over for the long weekend, and for about ten minutes it all went perfectly.

Then the gang got to it.

"Cups," said Aiman, putting a stack on the crate. "Two sen a cup."

"You said one sen."

"That was before you needed them in front of a queue." There was a queue. You cannot argue with Aiman in front of a queue. I paid two sen a cup. Then he made me pay an extra coin just for letting me pay him, which made no sense, but I paid it anyway because the queue was watching.

I put Kavi on calling people over, because Kavi is built for it.

"COLD DRINKS," shouted Kavi, beautifully, and the whole field turned. Then, because Kavi believes free is the most exciting word there is, he added, "SECOND CUP FREE."

"Kavi, the second cup is not free."

"IT IS NOW," shouted Kavi, to a field of people who had suddenly become extremely interested in a second cup.

It worked. The crowd was thrilled. The crowd had a wonderful evening. The crowd paid for almost none of the second cups.

Divya stood at my shoulder doing the real arithmetic out loud, the way she does. "You are buying cups at two and selling drinks at five," she said. "That only works if Kavi stops giving the second one away."

Kavi did not stop. Divya wrote that down too.

A family who had driven over for the long weekend bought four cups and paid with a Singapore note. Aiman lit up like Hari Raya. He loves a foreign note more than he loves most of his own relatives.

And the whole time, the ice was leaving. Ice, it turns out, is in a great hurry to stop being ice. It was a hot night on a hot field, and by the time the queue was long our ice was mostly water. The drinks at the back of the night were warmer than the drinks at the front, and a warm sirap bandung earns you a look, and some of the looks wanted their money back.

Hana was on the ice. She held the ice bag exactly where I had put her, the whole night, long after the ice in it had turned into a bag of warm water. Nobody had told her to stop, and Hana does not stop until told. I should have told her. I was busy being the boss.

Ah Wei was on supplies. Ah Wei cannot stand near a thing without it becoming food, and a cold pink drink on a hot night is exactly the kind of thing Ah Wei cannot leave alone. He did not mean to drink up our money. He just kept sipping, one cup and then another, the way he always does, until a lot of the pink drink was inside Ah Wei instead of in the cups.

By the end of the night I stood behind the crate and counted the tin. Then I counted it again, because the first count could not be right.

The two-sen cups, the warm drinks, the free second cups, and all the pink drink Ah Wei had quietly swallowed, all of it had emptied the tin while I was busy being the boss of it.

It was one ringgit over the price of the scarf.

One ringgit. After all of that. The whole loud, melting, free-refilling disaster had somehow landed exactly one ringgit over the price of the scarf.

I have never run across a field so fast. The scarf was still there, on the top of the stack, soft and quiet and blue, waiting the way it had waited a year. I bought it. The makcik wrapped it. I paid with a fistful of warm coins that had each been a cold drink an hour before.

Aiman appeared at my elbow, because Aiman can smell a finished sale, and tried to charge me a percentage of the scarf, on the grounds that his cups had made it possible.

"Your cups cost me two sen each," I said. "The ice robbed me blind. Take it up with the ice."

"I cannot charge the ice," said Aiman. "The ice is gone."

"Exactly," I said, and Aiman, for the first time in his life, had nothing to charge for.

I gave the scarf to Mak in the kitchen. The kitchen is hers. It is where she runs the whole day from.

"For you," I said. And then, because I have watched her my whole life and I know the only way she will take a thing, I said it the way she says it. "It was going spare. They were going to throw it. You should just take it."

Mak looked at the scarf. Then she looked at me. She did not say anything. She just took it, with no fuss, the way she makes you take the extra kuih.

The next morning she wore it to the market. The quiet blue, over her usual things. She did not say a word about it. She just had it on, and off she went for the onions and the thread, the same as every week.