If I Could Tell You Read Online Free PDF Page B

at all, then she turned away, tilted her head up to look at the top of a tree outside the window. There was a length of string whirled and tangled in the branches, and the remains of a kite, blue and yellow and red. She watched the wind tug at the mangled pieces, watched this for a while before she said, you don’t mean it. You’re just. You’re making a mistake.
    I felt a heaviness wash over me. It made me want to sit or lie down, except I was too weary to decide which. People liked telling me that, it seemed. You’re making a mistake. They said it with a voice so sure, as if they knew me far better than I did, had my life mapped out so perfectly that it was madness to try anything else. My mother had said the same thing at the end of that long speech about how I was a disgrace to her. Auntie Sue had seen me in town with a girl, she said. Holding hands, kissing. What would the people at church think? She had known, she said. She had always known, since I was a child. She used to laugh and call me a tomboy but this. This was too much. I was embarrassing her. I stopped listening at that point, transfixed instead by the gleam of her pruning scissors, the delicate ones with red handles that she used just for the bonsai. They were lying right there. I figured why not, picked it up and started shearing away at my hair. Waist length, thick. My mother used to braid it every morning when I was a child, jerking my head back as she tightened every plait and adding a pink ribbon at the tail end. No more, I thought, cutting high up above the band of my ponytail. Alexandra, what’re you doing? she screamed, you’re making a mistake. She kept on repeating this, screaming as each rope of hair scattered and fell, dusted the tiles of the kitchen floor.

 
     
     
     
     
THE CLEANER
    IT IS NOT SO MUCH THE THINGS I HAVE TO DO, THE heavy work, or the dust I breathe in while building houses that I would never come close to having. Or the food that they feed us, sent over in a box, old rice and dal tasting nothing like back home. Or even being away from my family and sitting around, waiting and waiting for work. Not even that. Sometimes, in the night when everyone is asleep, I hold my eyes close and imagine that there are not twenty people in the same room, breathing and dreaming and wanting. We all want the same — to earn enough and then go back home. Ismail, who sleeps next to me, kicks and cries out for his ma even though he is nineteen. No one makes fun of him; everyone knows he gets enough from boss. Just that day he threw a hard hat at Ismail and he had to go get his head sewn up at the doctor’s. He was gone for a long time, so long I thought he would not come back. But he did come back and he cried in his sleep that night, like every night.
    It is not so much the cages they put us in, but the stares that we get.
    On Sundays, we go to Little India, the one place in this country that feels a little bit like back home. It even has a bare field where some people play cricket, with the wrong ball and bat but still it is cricket. It takes forty-five minutes to get there. And all the way from Jurong, to the train station, in the train, to the streets, we get looks. I try to ignore them, some of the others don’t even notice, but I see the people on the streets quietly wishing we weren’t there and occupying the air and space on their island. This wonderful country.
    So many pictures I saw of Singapore before I went. All pictures on the wall of the agency. I thought, that’s a place where I could work and bring back something for the family. There, streets are clean, trees are tall like back home, and buildings look so new that they give off their own shine. Then I got here, and I realised there are two different Singapores. For them, one Singapore. For us, another — made up of construction sites and rubbish dumps and backrooms where no one has to look at us, at our dusty hands and our faces.
    It is in our other Singapore that they