the open house

On the first morning of Hari Raya, after the prayers, after we had gone to Nenek and Atok and asked their forgiveness and salam-ed their hands, after the house smelled of ketupat and rendang and everybody was in their best clothes, Pak Su's family came across the Causeway to visit.

Pak Su is Ayah's brother and he lives on the Singapore side, and his family is a bit fancy and a bit kiasu and very nice underneath all of it. They come every Raya. And every Raya it is the same. They arrive, they sit on the edge of the good chairs, they eat carefully, they give us the duit raya, the green packets, and then at exactly four o'clock Pak Su looks at his watch and says they had better beat the jam, and they go, back over the water, before the day is even properly warm.

Every year they visit our Raya like guests at the edge of it.

This year I had decided they were going to feel like kampung, not like visitors. I was going to give them the best open house the street had ever seen.

I made a programme.

Syafiq respects a programme, so I built one with times in it, and the times were a lie, but they looked very official in the maths book. There would be a guided welcome. There would be the best ketupat in Johor, which is Nenek's, which I had not actually asked Nenek about, but Nenek's ketupat is a fact like the sun. There would be a performance by the gang, undecided. And there would be a finale, which I would announce when I thought of what it was.

The first thing that happened to my programme is that it met Hari Raya.

You cannot run Raya on a schedule. I know that now. The guided welcome lasted about four seconds before Mak Su was swept into the kitchen by Mak and the makciks and the whole female half of the street, all talking at once, and the ketupat point dissolved because the ketupat was already being eaten, by everyone, continuously, the way it is, with no regard for my timings. Pak Su was put in the good chair with a glass of sirap and a plate that refilled itself whenever he was not looking, which is Nenek's doing, Nenek can refill a plate from across a room with her eyes.

My programme said the gang's performance was at eleven. At eleven the gang was eating. At half past eleven the gang was still eating. The gang's true talent, it turns out, is eating, and on Raya it is a talent the whole street shares.

So everything came down to the finale.

I had hired Pei Pei to build something impressive for the finale, and I had not told her what, which I have since learned is how all the trouble in my life begins. She had taken the word finale and gone off with it, and come back with a banner. A big one, a bedsheet with SELAMAT HARI RAYA that the makciks had helped paint, rigged on a frame with, for reasons that were pure Pei Pei, a fan, to make it wave.

I gathered everyone in the yard for the unveiling. Pak Su's family came out, polite, holding their glasses. The whole street drifted over. I gave a short speech about the kampung and family and the spirit of the day, which was going extremely well, and then I gave Pei Pei the signal.

Pei Pei switched on the fan.

The fan was supposed to make the banner wave gently. Instead it remembered that it was a fan, and a fan moves air with all its heart. The banner did not wave. The banner filled, like a sail. The whole rig pulled itself off the frame and went up, SELAMAT HARI RAYA and all, into the Raya sky, over the yard, over the heads of the whole street. Then it came down. Of all the places it could have come down, it came down across the roof of Pak Su's car.

There was a silence.

Pak Su's family is very good in a crisis. They are good at it the way you are good at a thing you have decided will not happen to you. They looked at the banner on the car. Mak Su said, calmly, that it was no problem at all, these things happen, in a voice that made it clear that these things do not happen, not on their side, not to them. And the funny part is that these things do happen on their side too. Things go wrong everywhere. They just go wrong more quietly in Singapore, with nobody watching, and here the whole street was watching and laughing the big warm laugh the kampung does when a thing that everyone was being careful about finally goes off.

And Pak Su laughed.

Pak Su, in his good Raya clothes, looked at his car wearing a bedsheet that said SELAMAT HARI RAYA, and something in him let go, and he laughed, properly, the way you can only laugh when you have stopped trying to keep your clothes nice.

And four o'clock came, and Pak Su did not look at his watch.

Half past four came. Five. Pak Su had his glass refilled by Nenek's eyes and did not notice. Mak Su was in the kitchen up to her elbows now, not a guest any more, arguing with a makcik about the rendang the way you only argue with people you have decided are family. Syafiq had given up counting his duit raya and was out in the lane with the gang and the baby, his good shoes off and lined up by the step with everyone else's, getting kampung dust on his Raya socks and not caring.

By six the day had gone gold and Pak Su's family had stopped being visitors at our Raya and become people at it.

By seven, Pak Su was in the kitchen.

I went in for more ketupat and there he was, Ayah's fancy brother from across the water, with his sleeves rolled up and his shoes off, drying the plates as Mak washed them, two families' worth of plates, talking low with Ayah about nothing. About the jam. About the price of things. The way you talk when you are not going anywhere for a while.

They had said they would leave at four. It was seven and Pak Su was drying our plates.

That is the thing about Pak Su's family. They always stay one day longer than they say. Every visit, the four o'clock comes and goes, and they stay, and they pretend the next time will be different. I had thought they visited us like guests. They do not. They just need a year of being careful worn off them first, and a banner on the car helps, and after that they are exactly as much kampung as the rest of us, for as long as the day will hold them.

I did not say any of that to anyone. You do not say a thing like that on Raya with a plate of ketupat in your hands. You just get a second plate, for the man drying the dishes, because he is family and his hands are full.

The banner came off the car eventually. Somebody read it out, SELAMAT HARI RAYA, and decided it had landed in exactly the right spirit after all.

Pak Su's family left long after dark, in no jam at all, because by then the only jam was the one in the afternoon they had not gone home for.

Next Raya they will say four o'clock again.

I have stopped believing it, in the best way.