the trays

At our surau in Ramadan, the buka puasa is shared. When the sun goes down and the fast is over, everybody eats together at the long low tables. The food comes out on big trays, bubur and kuih and dates and sweet drinks, and it is carried out by the grown-ups. Some of the uncles drive back over the Causeway from Singapore every evening in the fasting month, just to break fast here, at their own surau, with their own people.

Always the grown-ups. The trays come from the kitchen, held high and careful, and the kids sit and wait to be served, like a row of small birds with their mouths open. I have sat and waited my whole life. I have watched a hundred trays go past my head, carried by big people, on their way to the spot where they get put down and a big person serves me.

This year I decided the kids should carry the trays.

It is a good idea. I want to be clear that it is a good idea, and I had thought about it properly. The trays are not even that heavy. The little ones could carry the cups. The bigger ones could carry the bubur. We sit there with our perfectly good hands doing nothing while the uncles and the aunties walk back and forth past us all evening, and it makes no sense, and I was going to fix it.

So I ran a campaign.

I know how a campaign works. You need a manifesto, which is a piece of paper that tells everyone they are wrong in a polite way. I wrote one. It had points. It had reasons. I made a poster to go with it. The poster was supposed to say LET THE KIDS CARRY THE TRAYS. But I am not good at fitting words on a poster. I ran out of room, so the big letters only got as far as LET THE KIDS CARRY THE TR, and the A and the Y and the S ended up squeezed tiny in the corner.

I gave us all ranks, because a campaign needs ranks. I was the head of the campaign. Hana was my deputy. Hana is my cousin and she takes a rank completely seriously. The second I made her deputy she stood up very straight and asked what a deputy of a campaign does. I said a deputy supports the leader. From then on Hana would not do one single thing without first checking whether it was a thing a deputy supports, which slowed the whole campaign down to nearly nothing.

Kavi was in charge of getting support. That is where it went wrong.

Kavi only knows loud. I sent him round the surau to collect the names of people who agreed with us. Kavi collected names at the top of his voice.

"WHO AGREES ABOUT THE TRAYS," he asked the quiet surau, twice.

That is fine in a market. It is less fine across a quiet surau, where some uncles had come early to sit and pray in the corner, and Kavi was suddenly next to them, loudly, twice, with a paper about trays. An uncle did not get cross. He just put one gentle hand on Kavi's shoulder and steered him toward the door, the way you steer a goat out of a kitchen, no anger in it at all, only direction. Kavi went out the door still explaining about the trays.

Aiman wanted a fee. Aiman is in the gang and Aiman charges for everything. He set up a little table outside and offered to collect signatures at five sen a signature, and ten sen for a signature that was neat, and he was charging the people signing, not me, which is somehow worse. He had a queue. Then an auntie looked at him. She did not say anything. She just looked at him, the long look that mothers of four boys have, the look that has seen every trick before and is not going to fall for this one, and Aiman folded up his table and put his prices away and pretended he had only been resting there.

I took my manifesto to the committee.

The surau has a committee, which is some of the older people who decide things, and Pakcik is on it. Pakcik runs the kedai on our street, the shop with the freezer and the credit book, and he knows everybody's business and tells none of it. He was sitting with the committee drinking tea when I marched up with my poster held out in front of me like a flag.

I made my case. I made all of it. I had the bit about our hands. I had the bit about how it makes no sense. I had the bit about the little ones being perfectly able to carry a cup. I built up to my slogan and I delivered it, LET THE KIDS CARRY THE TR, AYS, and I stood there breathing, waiting for them to be amazed.

The committee was very kind about it. That was the worst part. If they had said no, I could have fought a no. You can argue with a no. But they did not say no.

"How nice that you want to help," they said. "Have some tea. We will think about it."

That is a thing grown-ups say that means the conversation is now over, nothing has changed, and they are still going to carry the trays themselves.

I went back the next evening with a better poster, one where all the letters fit. Same answer. More tea. I was getting a lot of tea and no trays.

I was running out of campaign. When grown-ups smile and give you tea and say they will think about it, they have already said no without saying it, and you cannot beat that with a bigger poster.

It was Pakcik who got me, in the end, and he got me the way he gets everybody, without seeming to do anything at all.

I was standing by the kitchen door being defeated. The buka was over. Everyone had eaten and gone in to pray. The warm full part of the evening was finished, and only the clearing up was left. Pakcik came past carrying a stack of the empty trays back to the kitchen, the dirty ones, the ones nobody carries, because carrying the dirty empty ones is not the fun part. It is just the part that has to happen so that tomorrow can happen too. He did not give me a speech. He did not even slow down very much. He just held the stack out a little, sideways, toward me, the way you hand a thing to a person whose hands are free.

So I took them. I do not really know why. There was no campaign in it. No poster, no slogan, no rank. Just a tired man with an armful of dirty trays and a kid with nothing left to fight.

I carried the empty trays into the kitchen. They are heavier than the full ones look. A full tray you carry proudly. A dirty stack you just carry.

Then I went back out for more. The plates. The cups. The sticky ones.

Hana appeared beside me and took a stack.

"Is this a thing a deputy supports," she asked.

"Yes," I said.

"Good," said Hana, and carried it in.

Then Kavi came and helped too, quietly for once, because there was nobody to be loud for, only dishes. We cleared the whole lot in and stacked it by the sink while the aunties washed, and the aunties let us, and nobody made a thing of it. Nobody clapped. There was nothing to clap. It was the dishes.

The next evening, when the sun went down and the fast broke and the food came out of the kitchen, an auntie put a tray of kuih into my hands. The full one. The good one. To carry out to the tables. She put one into Hana's hands too. And one into Kavi's, who carried it so slowly and so carefully and so silently that I almost did not know him.

We carried the trays out to the long low tables and put them down. The little ones sat there with their mouths open, waiting to be served, looking up at us the way I used to look up.

On the way home, Hana said my poster had also been quite bad. It was true. The AYS had gone onto a second line. So I let her win that one.