the weighing

Mak sent me to do the market shop on my own for the first time. The morning market, the pasar pagi, which is a completely different animal from the night one. The morning one is fish laid out on ice and vegetables in green piles, an auntie behind every stall, everything still wet from being splashed to look fresh. It starts before the sun is properly up. It is loud, and it smells of the sea and coriander and the drains all at once. Half of what they sell is on its way to kitchens on both sides of the Causeway. I love it more than almost anywhere.

She gave me one ringgit and a short list. Ikan bilis. A bundle of kangkung. Two onions. That was the whole list.

But I did not want to come home with only the list. I wanted to come home with the list and one thing extra. A treat. A surprise nobody had asked for, slipped into the basket at the bottom.

The way to do it, I had decided, was trading. You do not just buy a thing and walk away. You trade up. A marble for something a bit better, that for something better again, up and up, until you are holding more than you started with. I had watched the big people haggle, and I had decided haggling was the real magic of the market.

The one thing about the morning market is that it does not last. It shuts all at once, fast, the ice melting into the drains, the aunties reaching for the hose, the whole thing folding away while you are still deciding. You have until it packs up. Not a minute more.

But first I had to understand the scales. The fish auntie has a scale and a thumb. The thumb rests, very lightly, on the edge of the scale, sometimes, and sometimes it does not, and the number the scale shows is, in the end, the number she has decided it will show. I stood and watched her thumb like it held the secret of the whole world.

"You are blocking my stall," said the fish auntie.

She caught me staring, gave me one small free fish anyway, and waved me along.

"For your mak," she said, like it was nothing, and turned to the next customer.

I put the free fish in the basket and did not think about it. I had a chain to start.

My first trade was a marble for a bruised mango.

"That is a bad trade," said Divya, who had come with me, because Divya always comes.

"It is an investment," I said.

"It is a bruised mango," said Divya.

Next I traded the bruised mango for a fish head the fish auntie was going to throw out anyway. I had big plans for the fish head. I was going to trade it up into something much better.

A cat had bigger plans.

The cat came along the top of the wet stall, looked at my fish head, and took it, calm as anything, the way the fish auntie's thumb settles the weight. I argued with the cat. I told the cat the fish head was the foundation of my entire chain. The cat did not care. The cat has never once cared. When it was over I had no fish head and no mango, just the marble I had started with, somehow back in my hand. Divya said that was the best I could have hoped for.

Ah Wei was no help, and I should have known. Ah Wei cannot watch food go to waste. I tried to pay for one trade with a packet of keropok. The keropok did not make it to the stall. Half of it went into Ah Wei between one stall and the next.

"A snack in a pocket on a hot morning is a snack going stale," said Ah Wei, sorrowfully, with his mouth full. "And a snack going stale is worse than a snack eaten."

You cannot be cross with Ah Wei. You can only watch your trade goods disappear.

The trade I was proudest of was a hair clip Divya found in her pocket, swapped for a small bag of buah kana from an auntie who I think felt sorry for me. Then I traded that for a bigger bag of buah kana from the next stall along.

"That is the same buah kana," said Divya. "Only more of it. And you paid for the extra with a hair clip, which was free."

"You do not understand commerce," I said.

"I understand arithmetic," said Divya, "which on a market morning is worth a great deal more." And she put the bigger bag in the basket before I could trade it down into something worse.

The chain got grander and grander, and somewhere in the middle of all that grandness, I got completely muddled up.

Because while I was trading up toward my brilliant surprise, I had traded away the onion money. I had been so clever, so deep in the chain, that I had spent the plain boring onions on the path to the treat. And now the stalls were packing up. The ice was going into the drains. The aunties had the hose out.

I had a clever pile of trade goods and no onions. Onions were the one job Mak had actually sent me to do.

So I undid it. I traded the bigger buah kana back for the small bag, and the small bag back for somebody's onions. I gave the grand surprise away one swap at a time, faster and faster as the hoses came on.

"Onions," I said to the last auntie, out of breath. "I will give you all of this for onions, and ikan bilis, and a bundle of kangkung."

"You had onions an hour ago," said Divya, who misses nothing.

"I know," I said.

I got the boring list back, the whole thing I was actually sent for, at the very last stall, just as it was closing.

And while I was trading my clever pile back into plain kangkung at the vegetable auntie's stall, she bagged it up and put in extra. More than I had paid for.

"That is for your mak," she said. The way you say a thing you have said a hundred times.

The same thing the fish auntie had said, two hours ago, with the free fish.

"Why," I said.

"She watches my stall when I have to step away. Sends kuih over on a slow day." The auntie shrugged, like it was the most ordinary thing there is, which to her it was. "Tell her it was going spare."

Going spare. The exact words Mak uses when she gives you the thing she made extra on purpose.

I went home with the whole list, and a bit extra in the bag that I had not paid for and had not thought of. I put it on the table next to Mak. I did not call it a surprise. Mak took it the way she takes everything, without a fuss, and slid half of it back toward me before I had even let go of the bag.

I ate my half before it reached the bowl. It was going spare.