Published in Antithesis Volume 32: Tender (2022)

Smoke curls languidly through the corners of his mouth. I follow its smell around the cracked cement wall, grass crunching beneath my slippers.

‘You know how much he hates that,’ I say. Sa has kicked off one of his shoes; I find its soft brown shape in my flowerbed. My chrysanthemums bloom in neat surgical rows—purple and yellow and white.

‘Then he should’ve set a better example.’ Sa offers me a cigarette, the box still wrapped in shredded plastic.

‘I don’t smoke.’

Sa shrugs. He folds the box away into his jacket. ‘You always were Pa’s golden girl.’

‘Are you coming back inside?’ My toes curl. I feel every blade of grass like needles on my skin.

‘No. I need a smoke.’ He puffs, coughs, and bursts into laughter. ‘Goddamn I need a smoke.’

The air fills with the scent of burnt tobacco. I swallow down bile. I’ve lived with this smell all my life.

‘The last time I saw him, he asked if I wanted to step outside for a cig.’ Sa laughs again, so hard that tears collect in the corners of his eyes. ‘Him!’

…

Ah Mah’s coffin was inside, and Mama had cooked laksa for the people coming to pay their respects.

Smoke coiled from the tips of joss sticks. Soft Hokkien singing drifted from an old CD player. Relatives and family friends sat and chatted underneath white tents, sheltered from the tropical heat. It was all very much like a wedding.

I crouched outside the family home with Sa, burning spirit money in an open steel drum. Yit had stayed up all night folding joss paper into gold ingots; if Ah Mah couldn’t be rich in life, she could at least be rich in death.

When the coffin was lowered into the ground, we would burn her a paper palace, a paper car, paper clothes, paper shoes. A paper television. I think I would like to see a Heaven like that—countless castles hanging in the sky.

Sa brushed the ash off his pants. ‘Have you spoken to Pa yet?’ he asked.

I shook my head. ‘Have you?’

‘Yes,’ said Sa distantly. He handed me his bowl of laksa. ‘He’s over there.’

I found Papa underneath the tent furthest from the house, sitting in his favourite chair. His face was turned towards the paddy fields I grew up in, shimmering like a mirage in his watery gaze. Pa had been spending more time in that chair. He was becoming inanimate, like Ah Mah. It took a lot to move him.

I offered him the bowl. ‘For you.’

He nodded. Without turning, he said: ‘You look thin.’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you eating?’

‘Yes.’

‘No beef?’

‘No.’

His eyes glimmered in the fading red light. ‘Good.’

…

When I was a child, Papa would put aside money every month for school shoes and cigarettes.

It’d seemed impossible to keep our endless pairs of white shoes pristine. We used to slather the soft fabric with whitener. It hardened like clay in the heat.

We weren’t allowed to play in the paddy fields during burning season. For weeks after, the air would be thick and soupy like condensed milk, like a thousand cigarettes burning to their stubs.

But when the crop was young and green, and the fields flooded with rainwater up to their stalks, we’d wade into the muddy banks, catching fish and tadpoles in plastic bags. Sometimes we’d forget to seal up the holes and they’d escape, slipping through our fingers like spirits. Sometimes Sa would get leeches.

We’d trudge home with mud-caked shoes and his legs pulsing with slick black globules. Papa would sprinkle salt over their bodies then peel them off, one by one. I’d watch as red droplets welled up and dribbled down Sa’s skin.

…

Yit came home the Chinese New Year I turned twelve. With him came enough money for twice the beer and sweets than usual.

Papa sat outside with his friends, smoking and drinking as they played blackjack. Grimy cards branded with cigarette names changed hands. A perimeter of beer cans surrounded them—in the evening, Mama and I would crush the cans to sell to the recycling van.

I sat at the window, watching them play.

‘Your eldest back, eh?’ One of the men asked. ‘Where he working?’

‘Singapore,’ said Papa. A cigarette bobbed in the corner of his mouth. ‘Construction.’

The group hummed. They played another round. I followed the whisper of cards on sun-calloused hands. Ah Mah had taught me blackjack, and it’d never occurred to me to ask how she’d learnt it.

‘The younger ones?’ asked Ming from the noodle shop. ‘What they doing?’

‘Your second almost can work,’ said a man I didn’t know. ‘Or marry.’

Papa grunted. ‘I’m not worried with her.’

The men mumbled in agreement. Papa let his cigarette stub fall to the ground and crushed it beneath his boot. As the festive time called for generosity, he lit a new one immediately.

‘And youngest?’

‘He wants to be doctor.’

The men laughed.

‘Yes yeah?’

‘Swimming in money!’

‘Call the boy! Come here boy!’

Sa trudged out later and stood at the beer can fence with his head held high. The men snickered and nudged each other like schoolgirls. ‘Is it true, boy? Is it true?’

Sa raised his chin higher. ‘I’ll go to university and I’ll be a doctor.’

They laughed again like it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. ‘Good! Ambition good! Dreams good!’

‘Aim for moon, and you hit roof not gutter,’ someone said.

Did they have dreams too, once? Or was this how it’d always been? Crushed to the ground in our little pocket of rural Malaysia?

Papa looked at Sa, unimpressed. ‘See how first.’

Sa and I retreated to the back of the house, where the chickens clucked placidly in their pens. Sa showed me a cigarette stick, white and pristine.

‘Where’d you get that?’ I asked, as Sa lit it.

Sa shrugged. Instead of putting it to his lips, he offered it to me.

The smoke that rushed into my mouth was harsh and bitter. I spat the cig out. I knew Pa would be angry once he smelled the smoke on our clothes.

…

Sa and I walked to the grocery store, five ringgit in my pocket and fifty cents in his. Pa had given me the cigarette money because I was older.

Mak Cik Zurainu greeted us when we walked in. Brooms and dustpans hung from the ceiling, clicking gently. The counter was dusty. I sometimes think the ashes from the burnings and the cigarettes must linger in the air, crumbling into particles deposited on countertops.

Rows of cigarette packs sat like teeth underneath the glass. Each of them sported incomprehensible Western names—Benson and Triple Five and Marlboro.

‘Tolong bagi rokok,’ I said.

Mak Cik slid open the glass door below the counter, taking out a box of Benson & Hedges. Sa pocketed it. The cigarettes cost three ringgit. We used the leftover money for ice creams.

We sat down at the edge of a paddy field to tear open our packets. Our feet dangled just out of reach of the mud and leeches. When Sa finished his ice cream, he pulled out the box of cigarettes.

‘You’re really going to get in trouble,’ I told him.

Sa took out a pink lighter from his other pocket, the one we used for lighting joss sticks on the family altar. ‘I won’t.’

But his hand shook as he lit a single stick and put it to his mouth.

He sucked. Gagged. Coughed. He couldn’t finish, and we left half a cigarette stomped out in the grass.

It’d been foolish. Pa may not have gone to school, but he knew how to count to twenty.

I hid in our room as Pa’s voice thundered against the stained cardboard walls. He was generally a quiet man, but anger is a powerful motivator. I heard thin clinking, a belt being removed; thick cracks, like meaty thunder; only half a cry, because Sa was always too proud.

Sa wore the red stripes on his legs like a badge of honour afterwards, showing them off to his friends at school.

I rolled my eyes at him. ‘You got off light, you know. For stealing.’

‘You’re only so smug because you know he’d never hit you.’

I frowned, offended. Sa scoffed. ‘He loves you too much.’

…

I stepped into the kitchen, leaning against the doorframe to take off my shoes. A crumpled envelope was clenched in my fist. The shouting grew louder.

‘You want be like me, boy? Huh?’

Ah Mah was sitting in her rattan recliner; unmoving. She’d seemed glued to that chair, those final years.

‘Ah Mah,’ I greeted.

‘Ji,’ she said. ‘Come eat.’

‘I’m not hungry.’

Ma was inside her room, folding the day’s laundry. She knew better than to get involved.

‘You want look like gangster? Huh? You want people think you stupid?’

I shut the door to my room and sat on the mattress. I reread the letter.

The door creaked open, and Sa stepped inside. When we were younger, he would always come back with a bruise or two after a row like that. But he was eighteen now, and Pa’s joints were getting sore.

He saw the letter. ‘You got in?’

I nodded.

‘Pa will be happy,’ he huffed, sprawling belly-first onto the mattress.

‘What did you do this time?’

Wordlessly, he lifted the sleeve of his shirt. Dark, swirling coils inked into reddened skin glared up at me. I thought the dragon motif was quite impressive.

‘No wonder Pa’s pissed.’

‘He was going on about the cigs too.’ Sa rolled onto his back. ‘As if he doesn’t still smoke a pack a week.’

I knew I should discourage him, as the older sibling. Smoking was bad for his health. But no one could talk Sa out of anything—one could only talk him into things.

‘When are you leaving?’ asked Sa.

‘Soon, I think.’

Sa shut his eyes. ‘I suppose at least there’s one child he can be proud of.’

…

With my scholarship from the Australian government, I was in Melbourne a month later.

It hadn’t been intentional. My Mathematics teacher had given me the application form and told me to mail it in. It’d cost a hundred ringgit.

Two years later, Sa followed. He’d ended up at The University of Sydney on a different but equally generous scholarship.

(I suppose back then, Australia was keener on their neighbouring backwater countries.)

‘I don’t think I’d be here without you,’ said Sa, lighting a cigarette. A curl of smoke drifted into the potted hyacinths hanging from the café roof.

He was just visiting, and I’d been counting how many sticks he’d had that day. I was at four so far.

‘Oh?’

‘I was jealous, you know. When Pa gave you the money, and when we sent you off at the airport. I couldn’t let you be the only smartass in the family.’

‘Well.’ I sipped my latte. ‘How much did he give you?’

‘A thousand five hundred.’

I stared at him. ‘I got a thousand.’

‘Huh.’

We looked at each other. Beneath the thin sunlight and the fancy hanging flowers, we laughed.

…

I stand at the back of my house with Sa, watching him smoke a cigarette. A brown shoe lies abandoned in my flowerbed, nestled in my purple chrysanthemums like a grave marker.

I know that inside, my laptop lies open on a dining table. Through the screen is a hospital room, fuzzy and tantalisingly close. On the other side of that screen is a phone propped up on a pillow, the lone anchor connecting us to his last moments; some fragile string buffeted by the whims of network congestion and wireless traffic.

I know I would give anything to be there. But a sickness has torn through our world—the borders are shut, the skies have emptied, so that has become impossible. I know I have the privilege of walking away from the screen and pretending. Yit doesn’t have that—even now he’s sitting outside that hospital room—but perhaps it’s fitting for his eldest to be the only one who stayed.

I look at my flowerbed. Purple, yellow, white. There were chrysanthemums on Ah Mah’s grave. I think I’ve been preparing for this moment for longer than I know.

‘Was it Benson & Hedges?’ I ask Sa.

‘What?’

‘The last cig you smoked with him.’

Sa exhales. A curtain of smoke veils his face. ‘Yeah. His favourite.’

I wait. It could have been minutes, hours, days. I could be a tree rooting myself to the ground; becoming inanimate.

Sa stubs out his cigarette against the wall. Ash crumbles through his fingertips. His eyes remind me of Papa’s that day, sitting underneath a white tent in the dying light.

‘I’m ready.’

We walk back into the house together. The smell of smoke still lingers behind us. I’d like to believe it’d stay there forever.