Regrettable Things That Happened Yesterday Read online

  INEXPLICABLY

  INEXPLICABLY, THE FIRST thing she thought of was her mother’s advice never to turn down a gift.

  She felt that now was not the right time to remember this, a hastily issued rejoinder from when she was nine and upset that she had received Mumbai Barbie instead of Malibu Barbie at a Christmas party. She also felt a little let down by the universe and any deities that might govern it, that this should be what entered her mind when she had just been proposed to.

  Her second thought was that the little box between Arun’s thumb and forefinger was too blue—not Tiffany & Co blue, but blue in a way that suggested the makers hoped you might mistake it for Tiffany. Maya made no such mistake, but despaired again that her thoughts seemed insistent on not focusing on the one issue that really needed her attention.

  They had been walking down State Street and she had stopped at a hippie store to buy a “Green for Life” bumper sticker on a whim. She had been meticulously sticking it onto the back window of Arun’s Ford Escape, being careful not to trap any air bubbles under it while wondering briefly if it was hypocritical to be affixing that sentiment to such a gas guzzler, when she noticed out of the corner of her eye that Arun was kneeling on the ground.

  She swivelled and tried to keep her obvious alarm out of her face as he asked her in his quiet, steady voice to marry him. He didn’t add anything else—none of that “I know this is really sudden”, or “You would make me the happiest man in the world”. His request was plain, direct and exactly what she would have expected of him, had she expected him to propose.

  They had met only four months ago, at a meeting of Singaporean students at the University of Wisconsin– Madison. She was a junior studying journalism and attending only her second-ever Singapore Society meeting, having deftly avoided them until she was cornered on the way to Econ 201 by the society president and made to promise she would attend the Chinese New Year get-together. Arun was a first-year graduate student, studying mathematics. Typical, she had thought when he’d introduced himself to the group, but he was strangely magnetic. He could be surprising, she thought, just as he flashed her a shy smile. They were the only two ethnically Indian students there, and as much as she was desperate to avoid stereotypes, desperate to date outside her race, she felt some sort of attraction to him.

  She hadn’t wanted to date an Indian; she never had in Singapore and hadn’t planned to upon coming to the States. And a Singaporean Indian, of all people—she might as well have let her mother set her up.

  He had asked her later that night if she would like to meet for coffee and she found herself agreeing. That coffee date turned into him bringing her Starbucks when she was up late studying, which soon turned into them making meals together on weekends, which soon turned into them waving tentatively at each other’s parents on Skype video chats, which soon turned into Maya’s star sign being included in the Tamil newspaper horoscope clippings Arun’s mother sent him by mail every month. And now it had turned into a full-fledged proposal on a busy corner of State Street, where passers-by had stopped to watch, forming a huddle of around fifteen people who were alternately exclaiming and sighing. To Maya, it seemed like the street itself had paused and inhaled, and was looking to her now for the cue to breathe again.

  She looked down at Arun, who appeared to be his normal self—stoic, impassive, logical—and knew that he was quite serious. He was always serious, a trait of his she had thought would be a deal-breaker at first, a hindrance to her free spirit, but it was one she had slowly grown to accept and even respect. He was so serious that she wondered why he had even attempted this public proposal, when he must know that the possibility of her saying no was very real. They had only been dating for four months, after all. She wondered if he was under some kind of pressure from his family that he had kept from her, or if the latest horoscope clipping had suggested that prolonged singleness might be injurious to his health. Her mind was drifting back to her mother’s words, when Arun began to speak again.

  “There are a lot of people watching,” he said, surprising Maya by speaking in Tamil. They had only ever spoken in English these past few months, as if by an unspoken pact. She had always appreciated it, as if they were saying to each other, Hey, we’re dating because we’re people who like each other, regardless of being of the same ethnic and language group. He continued: “If you’re going to say something other than yes, could you please say it in Tamil?”

  Relief bloomed slowly in the pit of her stomach as his words registered, and she wondered if he had just thought of this, or if this was part of the plan from the beginning. Knowing him, he had calculated his actions and words precisely, down to a science, and this was his Plan B should she hesitate for more than x number of seconds.

  She wondered how long she had been standing there speechless, and quickly rehearsed her answer in her mind—her Tamil was rusty, and she didn’t want to make any mistakes. She would ask her mother later if this instance might be an exception to the cardinal rule, but now she bent down a little and took his familiar face in her hands. She looked deep into the eyes she both knew so well and didn’t know at all. She drew the corners of her mouth upward, made her eyes twinkle, and responded in Tamil: “I don’t know.”

  She braced herself for the disappointment to seep into his eyes, but Arun seemed prepared for exactly this response, judging from the speed with which a smile spread across his face.

  He jumped to his feet, pumped one fist into the air, and they hugged, as applause broke out all around them.

  YOURS TRULY, VIMALA

  THE CONTEST HAD been going on for as long as Prema could remember. Her father would come home after his morning walk every Sunday with a copy of the Tamil Nesan and her sisters would pounce on various sections of it—Indian cinema gossip, fashion, advice, horoscopes. She would join in on this activity only once a month, on the first Sunday, when she would jostle with the rest to get a hold of the paper while it was still crisp, extracting the one page that held any interest for her.

  It said the same thing each time: DO YOU LOVE STORIES? DO YOU LOVE THE TAMIL LANGUAGE? ARE YOU A STUDENT 18 YEARS OR YOUNGER? SHOW US YOUR TALENT BY ENTERING THE TAMIL NESAN YOUNG WRITERS STORY CONTEST TODAY!

  And then, in smaller print: UNDER 2,000 WORDS.

  It was followed by a prompt for that month’s story. Usually a topic sentence—“If young people do not start speaking Tamil in social situations, the language will die a painful death with no one left to mourn it”—or a concept—“sibling rivalry”—or a scene—“A two-storey attap house sits in the middle of an abandoned street. The street lamp in front of it has ceased working for a few years now. All the plants in the garden are dead. Stray dogs roam about the road, but even they do not stop at the house.”

  Prema tried every month. She had a stack of A4-sized envelopes on her desk, already stamped and addressed to the Tamil Nesan head office in Kuala Lumpur, just waiting for a newly-minted story to be slotted into them and mailed off. She had a system. She spent the first week of the month working on the story, the second week reading it over and revising it heavily, the third week making final edits and sending it off. The fourth week of the month was spent reading other short stories to get ideas and be inspired, and pretending not to be awaiting news of successful acceptance and imminent publication.

  In that fourth week, she read short stories in any language she could find—English, for the best ideas; Malay, to keep doing well in school while waiting to get her big break; Tamil, to “constantly have the sound of excellent Tamil in her ear” as she wrote her soon-tobeaward-winning entries (she had heard that statement in one of Meena Rajendran’s weekly interviews with a published author, “Stories of Success”—Sunday nights at 8pm only on Minnal 96.8FM, Tamil Hits All Day).

  The selected winners were published in the paper two months after the prompt was originally announced, and sometimes their stories would even be read out on the radio. She read these winners’ stories religiously, often whisking
the paper away to her room so she could read slowly, forming her lips into each word as she read, trying to discern some rhythm, some flow, some depth, vocabulary, inventiveness, richness, humour, moral or whimsicality that those stories possessed and hers hadn’t.

  She made notes. She underlined phrases she liked and would try to use again, she tacked up the most interesting stories on her door, she put the stories she didn’t quite like into her bottom drawer so she would not be influenced by them despite their apparent award-winning quality (she wanted to write what she herself would read—another tip from Meena’s interviews). She kept a notebook of ideas and phrases and ways to improve, as well as motivational quotes so she would not give up.

  Her behaviour worried her mother, tickled her sisters and even garnered mild notice from her father. Any attention was good news: Prema was sixth in a line of seven children, six unsuccessful attempts for a boy before Lucky Number 7 yielded the desired result. As such, all parental attention was currently focused on Mano, the darling baby of the family, the long-awaited heir and hope for the future. He was currently nine and not very friendly, a trait that all the sisters privately blamed their parents for.

  With ninety per cent of their parents’ attention thus occupied, Prema had to fight for the remaining ten per cent. This was not as hard as it might have seemed from the outset. The two oldest, Kalai and Chithra, were in their thirties, married, and had moved out for a few years now. They both lived in Singapore with their husbands, a fact that their mother deplored and their father was quietly proud of. The two next oldest—Sumathi the docile one, and Malathi, the vain one—had been shipped off to a British-style boarding school just north of KL. Prema saw them even less than she saw her oldest sisters. She felt slightly bad that every time someone asked her what her sisters’ names were, she always remembered Malathi and Sumathi last.

  That left just Prema, 14 years old and not planning on leaving home any time soon, and Vimala, 18 months older but whom Prema felt liked to act younger whenever she felt Prema was getting too much parental attention.

  The fact was, Prema never got too much attention. She believed her mother had been sapped of energy by the time she came along, and left the task of raising her mostly to her two oldest sisters. Her father had probably glanced at her once as a newborn and, upon ascertaining that she really was yet another girl, turned his disappointed gaze away, never to be coaxed back. (This was at least how it played out in her mind; she hoped one day to write a story about it or include it as a dramatic chapter in her heart-breaking memoir of an unloved child who turned into a much beloved author. Proceeds of the autobiography would go to orphans in Southeast Asia: “Those as unloved now as I was then”, she would write in the inscription.)

  She’d had five years of half-hearted indifference from her parents when Mano came along. Suddenly her mother, recently forty, got a second wind and her father, pushing fifty, became excited about parenthood.

  For a while, that energy encompassed Prema, too: Mano’s arrival reminded her parents that they’d had another baby not too long ago, and they made an effort. Her mother’s labour with Mano had been a hard one, and both mother and son were kept in the hospital for nearly two weeks for observation. When Prema came to visit, her mother would quiz her anxiously: had she eaten? Were her sisters taking care of her? Were they all being nice to each other? Was Kalai taking her to school every day? And Prema would answer them all dutifully, although the answers never differed.

  “Where’s Prema?” her father would grandly ask whenever they left the house to load into the Morris Minor to go to the hospital. This thrilled her inordinately, and she would push her way to the front of the group of sisters and wave her hand in the air as if to say, Here I am! He would smile at her, amused by her excitement, pat her on the head and hold her hand until they got to the car. This was the extent of his concern for her wellbeing, however, because the minute Baby Mano was in sight her father forgot all his previous children and became consumed with his son like a first-time father.

  They had not been entirely remiss. It was her father, for instance, who made sure that all his daughters were educated in the three languages—Malay to survive until they could escape Malaysia, English to survive once they were out of Malaysia, and Tamil for their mother, who refused to learn any other language.

  It was also her father who had introduced her to the ballpoint pen. To Prema’s mind, the ballpoint pen was the pinnacle of human inventiveness. The day her father brought home a Bic from the office for her was a day she’d remember all her life—how she had handled it so carefully, afraid to drop it, and then inevitably dropping it due to her cautiousness. But it had kept on writing, producing ink continuously without needing to be dipped into a pot of Quink, without leaving ink stains on her hands or smudges on her paper. It was a miracle. It would never run out. She would use the same pen forever.

  The total tally of stories Prema had submitted to the Tamil Nesan contest stood at either 30 or 31— depending on whether you counted one revision she had sent in. At the beginning, they used to send her a letter of acknowledgement that she thought was quite nice. “Dearest Miss Prema Chandran,” it would read. “We thank you for your most promising contribution to the Tamil Nesan Young Writers Contest. We will review your entry along with all the others, and winners will be announced in a month’s time. Thank you for reading Tamil Nesan.”

  But after her fifteenth or sixteenth entry, the letters stopped. This greatly puzzled Prema as she had grown to enjoy these little notes, and as sad as she knew this to be, she was depending on that one word—“promising”—as the only affirmation she was getting for her writing.

  She let it slide the first month, but the second month she didn’t get a letter, she called the head office in KL, worried that they hadn’t received her entry. A clerk answered, sounding unenthusiastic, and put her through to the person in charge of the contest, a Miss V. Rani. (Prema made a mental note to memorise the name and insert it as the name of a beautiful young protagonist in her next story.)

  Miss V. Rani answered politely and apologised for the missing letter, explaining that there had been a paper shortage in the office that month, but that yes, she had in fact received an entry from one Prema Chandran, 27B Jalan Kembagan, Klang, and one the month before. She thanked Prema for her “top-class monthly contributions”, and told her that the office might be tight on paper for the rest of the year, so would it be okay if they stopped sending her acknowledgements?

  Highly gratified that the Tamil Nesan head office knew her name and the frequency of her contributions to the contest, Prema had accepted the explanation. “Let the newer writers get the letters, that is fine. You don’t have to send me more,” she said grandly, and hung up after thanking V. Rani profusely. She took out her notebook and wrote “Top-class contributions—Miss V. Rani of Tamil Nesan”, and tore out the page to fold into a little square to keep in her wallet. That way she could take it out once a month to read with pride in lieu of the acknowledgement letter.

  Affirmation of any kind was rare in their household, and Prema doubted any of her family even knew what it was. What she couldn’t figure out was why none of them seemed to need it as much as she did. Her parents seemed to be independent operators, self-sufficient and requiring nothing from each other or their children. The last compliment she had probably heard pass from one to the other was that the lentil curry was tastier than usual today.

  Of her siblings, she suspected that the one who felt the closest to the way she did was Vimala, with her occasional pretences of being younger than she really was. The cutesy act grated on Prema’s nerves, but at least was evidence that she was not alone in craving more attention. She tried to bring up this similarity to Vimala a few times, to suggest that perhaps they could confide in each other, encourage each other and be the closest of the sisters. But Vimala had a confusing quality that Prema could not figure out. She felt sometimes that Vimala was her favourite sister because of how effortlessly they
got along when they were alone, but she would change completely and become someone else’s best friend when there was any other person in the room. She was a chameleon, and Prema did not know what to make of that.

  The lack of positive reinforcement in her household would normally have just been something to sigh briefly over every once in a while, were it not for her current situation. She needed a reader (said Meena). She needed constructive criticism to improve, yes, but she also needed someone to point out her strengths and remind her every once in a while why she felt a calling to put pen to paper in the first place (quoted almost verbatim from one of Meena’s interviews and copied carefully into her notebook). Vimala would have been the obvious choice, but her changing moods and personalities made for an inconsistent reader, and she’d likely give mixed, confusing feedback.

  Sometimes she would try to bring up the topic of her stories around the dinner table, drawing a similarity between one of her sisters and a character in her story, or remarking that a piece of dialogue was so funny, she would have to use it in one of her stories. But hardly anyone picked up on what she considered to be blatant offers to let someone read her work. Mano had expressed some interest once, and in her desperation she let a nine-year-old read one of her stories, a mistake she vowed never to repeat again. He took a red pen to it and wrote comments like “I don’t get it. Was this supposed to be funny?”, “Why is this character so irritating?” and “Sounds like Enid Blyton, you copycat.”

  The story that Mano had read had been Prema’s 28th contribution to the Tamil Nesan. She felt that her time was soon coming. Her characters were more developed, her vocabulary better and her themes more varied—she had even included some romance in her last two stories, something she had never before attempted. She had thought that she would describe a romantic relationship too unconvincingly, given that she had never been in one before, but she decided that she would attempt it after the winning entries for the past couple of months had revolved around themes of love. If the contest judges were on a romance kick, she didn’t want to ignore it and give them the idea that she did not closely benchmark her writing to the previously published pieces.