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, and one of the stalls sells kain, folded in soft stacks, and on the top of one stack there is a scarf. It is the soft kind, a quiet blue with a pattern in it like rain on a window. Every week Mak stops. Every week she picks it up and lets it run through her fingers and looks at the little paper price and 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.

Mak makes a little extra of everything. There is always extra kuih, extra rice, extra room, and she always says it was going spare, it was going to be thrown anyway, take it. She gives the whole house everything and she 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 cold drinks at the pasar malam, sirap bandung over ice, pink and sweet and cold, the exact thing a person wants on that field in that heat. Ah Wei's family has the ice. Pei Pei built a stand out of a crate. I worked out the price. The price would more than cover the scarf by the end of the night.

The price did not survive contact with the gang.

The first problem was Aiman. Aiman supplied the cups. Aiman charged me per cup. Then Aiman charged me a fee for charging me per cup, which I did not understand and paid anyway because there was a queue forming and you cannot argue economics with a queue watching.

The second problem was the ice. Ice, it turns out, is in a great hurry to stop being ice. It was a hot night on a hot field and our ice was water before we had sold ten cups, so the drinks at the end of the night were less cold than the drinks at the start, and a less cold drink earns you a look, and some of those looks asked for money back.

The third problem was Ah Wei. Ah Wei was on supplies, and Ah Wei cannot stand near a thing without it becoming food, and a cold sweet pink drink on a hot night is, to Ah Wei, almost the definition of a thing. He did not mean to drink the profit. He drank it the way the sun takes a balloon, slowly, without asking, just by being himself near it.

The fourth problem was Kavi. I put Kavi on the loud part, calling people over, which Kavi is built for. But Kavi, calling people over, kept shouting that the second cup was FREE, because Kavi thinks free is the most exciting word there is and he wanted the crowd to be excited. It worked. The crowd was very excited. The crowd had a wonderful time. The crowd paid for almost none of the second cups.

By the end of the night I stood behind our crate with a tin of money that was not the tin of money I had planned. My own stall had eaten my stall. The cups, the melted ice, the drunk profit, the free refills, all of it had quietly emptied the tin while I was busy being the boss of it.

I counted it twice.

It was one ringgit over the price of the scarf.

One ringgit. After everything. The whole loud melting free-refilling disaster had, by some accident of a kind night, landed exactly one ringgit over the one number I had needed it to clear.

I have never run to the kain stall so fast in my life. The scarf was still there, on the top of the stack, soft and quiet and blue, like rain on a window, 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.

I gave it to Mak in the kitchen. The kitchen is Mak's. It is where she runs the whole day from.

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

Mak looked at the scarf. Then she looked at me. She knows there is no such thing as a scarf going spare. She knows exactly what a night of cold drinks costs and exactly what it earns and exactly what I had done with the difference. She did not say any of that. She just took it, the way she makes you take the extra kuih, with no fuss, because that is the deal, that is how it works in this house, you take what is given and you do not make a thing of it.

The next morning Mak wore the scarf to the market.

She did not say a word about it. She just had it on, the quiet blue, over her usual things, and she went off to buy the onions and the thread, the same as every week, except this week she was wearing the thing she always put back.

Aiman came round later and tried to charge me a percentage of the scarf, on the grounds that his cups had made it possible. I told him the cups had made nothing possible and that the ice had robbed me blind.

But I paid him for the cups. I always pay Aiman for the cups.

It was the best one ringgit over I have ever made.