the open house

It was the first morning of Hari Raya. We had been to the prayers. We had gone to Nenek and Atok and asked their forgiveness and kissed their hands. The house smelled of ketupat and rendang, and everyone was in their best clothes. And then Pak Su's family came across the Causeway to visit.

Pak Su is Ayah's brother and he lives on the Singapore side. 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, says they had better beat the jam, and they go, back over the water, before the day is even properly warm.

This year I had decided they were going to feel like kampung, not like guests. 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. The times were a lie, but they looked very official in the maths book. A guided welcome at ten. The best ketupat in Johor, which is Nenek's, at half past, which I had not actually asked Nenek about, but Nenek's ketupat is a fact like the sun. A performance by the gang at eleven. And a finale, which I would announce once I had 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. The guided welcome lasted about four seconds.

"Masuk, masuk," said Mak, and Mak Su was swept into the kitchen by Mak and the makciks and the whole female half of the street before I had got one word of welcome out, all of them talking at once.

The ketupat point dissolved, because the ketupat was already being eaten, by everyone, all the time, with no respect for my timings at all. Pak Su was put in the good chair with a glass of sirap and a plate that always seemed full, because Nenek kept quietly refilling it the moment he looked away. Nenek can fill a plate from clear across the room and you never once catch her doing it.

"Performance at eleven," I told the gang.

At eleven the gang was eating. At half past eleven the gang was still eating. The gang's real talent, it turns out, is eating, and on Raya it is a talent the whole street has.

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 bedsheet with SELAMAT HARI RAYA painted on it, which the makciks had helped with, rigged on a frame with, for reasons that were pure Pei Pei, a fan, to make it wave.

I gathered everyone in the yard. Pak Su's family came out, polite, holding their glasses. The whole street drifted over.

"Today," I said, in my speech voice, "is about family, and the kampung, and the spirit of the day." It was going extremely well. 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, all at once, that it was a fan, and a fan moves air with its whole heart. The banner did not wave. It filled, like a sail. The whole rig tore 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.

Mak Su looked at the banner on the car. "It is no problem at all," she said, calm, in the voice you use for a thing that is very much a problem. "These things happen."

Then Pak Su laughed.

He 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 once you have stopped trying to keep your good clothes nice.

"Selamat Hari Raya," Pak Su said to his own car, and that set the whole street off again, the big warm laugh the kampung does when a thing everyone was being careful about finally turns out to be funny instead.

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

Half past four. Five. Nenek filled Pak Su's glass again without him noticing, the way she does. Mak Su was in the kitchen up to her elbows now, arguing with a makcik about the rendang, the way you only argue with people you have decided are family. Syafiq had stopped counting his duit raya. He 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 minding one bit.

"thiae," he called from the lane. "Is this part of the programme?"

"Yes," I lied. There was no programme left at all. Nobody had noticed but me, and I had decided not to mind.

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, sleeves rolled up, shoes off, drying the plates while Mak washed them. Two families' worth of plates. Talking low with Ayah about nothing. The jam. The price of things. The way you talk when you are not going anywhere for a while.

They had said four o'clock. It was seven, and Pak Su was drying our plates.

I got a second plate of ketupat and put it down by his elbow, because his hands were full.

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

Pak Su's family left long after dark, and there was no jam at all on the way, because the only jam was the four o'clock one, the one they always used to rush home for and this time did not.

Next Raya they will say four o'clock again.