the assistant

All I wanted was one morning.

One morning to myself, to do one thing without being interrupted. I was drawing the map. The big one. The whole kampung on a single sheet, every house, the longkang, the kedai, the rambutan tree, the pipe, the field, all the way out to the road to the Causeway at the edge, where Ayah crosses. The master map. Every future operation would need it. It needed one quiet morning, a flat floor, and nobody touching it.

The trouble with one quiet morning in our house is the baby.

"Watch the baby while I do the rice," said Mak from the kitchen, which is how every quiet morning in this house actually begins.

So now I had a map to draw and a baby to watch, which are two jobs that do not go together. The baby wants whatever is the most important thing in the room. A big sheet of paper on the floor, with a girl bent over it being serious, is, to a baby, the most important thing that has ever existed. The baby eats Plans. It has eaten three of mine this year, two homeworks, and one thing of Kak Long's I am not allowed to mention. Paper, to the baby, is just food that has not admitted it yet.

You cannot shoo a baby. A shooed baby comes back twice. What you do with a force you cannot beat is you give it a job.

I made the baby my assistant.

"You," I told the baby, "are now my Official Assistant. You have important duties."

The baby looked at me with total trust, which is the most dangerous look there is.

Duty one was guarding a spot. I pointed at a spot well away from the map and told the baby it was the most important spot in the house and must be guarded with its life. The baby guarded it by sitting on it, which worked, because I had let the baby pick the spot by pointing at where it was already sitting.

Duty two was holding a paper. A blank one. A decoy, so the baby would have its own paper and leave mine alone. I handed it over with great ceremony. The baby held it for almost a whole second, then finished the task its own way, which was to put it in its mouth. I decided a wet chewed paper still counts as a held paper. The baby had completed its first assignment. The baby was thrilled. So was I.

Duty three was the hat. Every assistant needs a uniform. The uniform was a tupperware lid. The baby loved the hat. The baby kept the hat on.

"You have given the baby a hat," said Kak Long from the porch, not looking up from her phone.

"It is a uniform."

"It is a tupperware lid."

"It is a uniform," I said, and got back to the map.

I had built, I thought, the perfect system. A guarded spot, a decoy paper, a hat, and a quiet morning opening up in front of me like a clear road.

Then the baby decided to take being an assistant seriously, and started to file things.

It brought me a slipper and put it down on the map. It brought me a spoon and put it down on the map. It brought me a bottle cap, a stone, and a curled-up leaf, and arranged them in a careful pile on the kedai. To an assistant, the most helpful thing in the world is to bring the boss everything you find and put it exactly where the boss is looking.

"It is bringing you rubbish," said Kak Long.

"It is filing."

"It is bringing you rubbish, and you are thanking it."

I was thanking it. You have to thank the assistant. It is in the contract I made up. I moved the slipper, the spoon, the bottle cap, the stone, and the leaf off the map, one by one, and told the baby it was doing wonderfully, and turned back to the rambutan tree.

I drew the longkang. I drew the pipe over the longkang. I was just getting to the good part when Mak called from the kitchen for me to bring her the small pot.

I was gone for the length of one small pot.

When I came back, the Official Assistant had left its post.

The baby was on the map. Not near the map. On it. In its tupperware hat, in the dead middle of the whole kampung, sitting square on the rambutan tree I had not finished, holding one corner of the master map in its mouth, looking up at me with enormous pride. Because it had found the most important thing in the room, exactly as it always does, and it had brought itself straight to the middle of it.

The corner was gone. The longkang was a smudge. There was a baby-shaped sit-mark right over the field. The map of all my future plans now had a real, live baby sitting right in the middle of it, chewing.

I was not even cross.

I sat down on the floor next to the baby, in the wreck of the map.

The baby took the hat off, which it never does, and reached up and put it on my head. Then it held something out to me, very pleased, the way the baby gives you things.

It was the decoy paper. Wet. Chewed. The completed assignment.

I took it. You take what the baby gives you. That is its own rule, and it is older than me.

Then the baby crawled the small distance into my lap, the way it files itself somewhere safe at the end of a long day of being a baby, and put its head down. The tupperware hat slid off my head and onto the floor. And the baby went to sleep, half on the ruined map and half on me.

My leg went to sleep after a while. I did not move it.

Mak looked in from the kitchen, saw the two of us in the middle of the chewed map, and did the eyebrow. Just the one. This eyebrow did not mean anything I had to get up and do. It just meant she had seen, the way Mak sees everything.

So I sat there, on the floor, with a wet decoy paper in one hand and a sleeping baby across my legs and a half-eaten kampung underneath the both of us. The map could wait. I was not going anywhere. The baby had made sure of that.