the bunga telur job

There was a wedding two houses down, and the whole street was cooking it.

That is how a kampung wedding works. The day before, the whole street cooks it, together, in the yard. They call it the rewang. When I got there the fires were already going under giant black pots. Aunties were lined up at long tables. An uncle was stirring a pot the size of a bath with a paddle longer than my arm. The whole yard smelled of rendang and woodsmoke, and it was the best place in the world to be.

And they gave me napkins.

Napkins. Me. They sat me at the end with the little ones, folding napkins into triangles, while real work happened everywhere I looked. I folded four napkins and my whole soul left my body.

"I do not want napkins," I said. "I want a real job. A grown-up job. Give me a job that matters."

Mak was there. Mak is my mother and she runs our kitchen, and at a kenduri she is somewhere in the middle of everything, moving, never still. She heard me and did the eyebrow. One eyebrow. In our family one of Mak's eyebrows can say a whole paragraph. This one said sit down and fold the napkins, you. I did not sit down. I went to find a real job.

I started at the top. The biggest pot. The kawah, a black iron thing as wide as a table, with a fire under it and a paddle leaning on it that was taller than me. That is a job that matters. I rolled up my sleeves and presented myself to the uncle in charge of it like a soldier reporting for heavy machinery.

He looked at me. He looked at the paddle, which I could not have lifted with both arms and a run-up. He did not laugh, which was kind. He went away and came back and handed me a much smaller spoon, a normal spoon, and pointed me at a little pot at the side. I stirred the little pot with enormous dignity for about a minute, and then I went to find a job that was actually real.

I did not stop at the kawah.

"Can I do the satay fire," I asked the satay uncle.

"The satay fire is not for borrowing," he said, kindly, and that was that.

I offered to carry the big tray of raw chicken and was redirected, very fast, by three aunties at once. I tried to help pound the rempah, and they handed me a bowl to hold steady instead. Holding a bowl steady is a real job the way holding a door open is a real job. It is a job they give you so you feel useful while the real work goes past.

Hana came with me. Hana is my cousin and my deputy, and she takes everything I say completely literally.

"We are looking for one real job," I told her.

"One real job," said Hana, and nodded. And from that second Hana would not touch a single task, because none of them had been officially named the one real job yet. An auntie tried to hand her a stack of plates. Hana stepped back from the plates like they were a test she might fail by accident.

I found the bunga telur table. Bunga telur are the little gifts you give the guests at a wedding, a boiled egg, dyed and decorated, sitting in a small stand with a paper flower, one for each person to carry home. There were hundreds to make. This, I decided, was the real job.

I made bunga telur for an hour, and I am not going to pretend it went well. The aunties make them all the same, neat and calm and identical, a long row of little flowers. I started the same and then I got ideas. I gave one egg two flowers. I gave one a flower and a leaf and a small flag I made out of a toothpick. By the end I had a row of experimental bunga telur that nobody had asked for, each one more decorated than the one before. The last one was so loaded it could not stand up. It just lay there being grand. An auntie looked down my row, from the normal ones to the one lying down under its own flowers, made a small sound, and moved me along.

After the eggs, they let me ferry water, which I could not ruin. Then they sat me on a low stool to peel things, in a circle of aunties who peeled four to my one and talked the whole time about people I did not know. I peeled, and I listened, and I learned more kampung business in twenty minutes than the makciks could teach you in a week. I did not notice that this was, in fact, a job. I was still looking for the kawah.

They sent me to carry trays. This I could do, and I was good at it for almost the whole way across the yard, a tray of bunga telur held high, walking it toward the front. Then a chicken came out from under a table and ran straight across my feet. I jumped. The tray did not jump with me. Forty little decorated eggs went up into the air over the yard, and then, all at the same time, they found out about gravity. I caught the tray. I did not catch one single egg.

So that is how, by the end of the afternoon, I ended up at the one station nobody fights over.

It is round the back. It is the washing, and the refilling, and the keeping-up. The pots come back empty and go out full. The water gets carried. The dirty trays get wiped and stacked so they can go out clean again. And Mak was there. She had been there the whole time. Not at the kawah, not on the dais. Round the back, in the steam, moving, keeping the whole thing fed, the way she runs our kitchen at home.

I started washing. I was sour about it at first, the way you are sour when you wanted the kawah and got the sink. Hana found me and I gave her a cloth and told her this was it, this was the one real job, official. She took it and got to work so seriously that she out-washed everyone, which is the most Hana thing there is. She lined the clean pots up by size. She would not let a single tray go back out with one drop still on it. An auntie called her a good girl, and Hana stood up so straight she nearly tipped the basin. The chicken came back to inspect us and I told it the wash station was closed to chickens, and it disagreed, and we had a short discussion I did not win.

And somewhere in the scrubbing I stopped being sour. The empty pot came in, I scrubbed it, it went out full to the front. Another came in. Every clean tray that went out to the wedding had been dirty back here a minute before.

Now and then a small cousin came running round the back with an empty dish and the news from the front, and we sent them out again with a full one. The bride was here. The groom's car had got lost coming off the Causeway, and then been found. Somebody important had taken three helpings of the daging, and an auntie at the kawah was quietly thrilled about it. The front sent us its news, and we sent the front its food, and that was the deal, and the deal held all afternoon.

Far off, at the front, the kompang started, the hand drums, deep and steady, which meant the groom was coming and everyone out there was watching the beautiful part. Back here nobody looked up. The wash kept going.

Mak handed me the next tray to wipe. She did not make a thing of it. She did not say see, or I told you. She handed me the next one, the kompang went deep at the front, and the two of us kept the back going.

"This is a real job," I said.

Mak did not answer. She just handed me the next tray.