Tuesday

Mei was playing Police and Thief with Hakim bin Abdul Rahman[^1] in a Tuesday’s setting sun when Baba’s voice rang out. “Mei! Go home!” Officer Hakim stopped chasing Outlaw Mei when he heard what she heard: panic clumsily camouflaged as parental authority.

Baba was never home this early. Baba was never this scared. Were fathers always this human? His uniform was dark, damp with sweat from running home after the Chinese workers were ordered to leave the depot. Mei watched her father’s eyes dart to Hakim as he discovered specters in the boy’s toffee skin.

“Now, Mei!”

Her father’s time card fluttered through trembling fingers as it missed his pocket. A fresh hole marked 21st July, 1964. The words Malayan Railways swam off the card into the heat.

It had been ten months since Mei turned her Colony of Singapore papers in for Malaysian ones. It didn’t matter to her. It was just a name, wasn’t it? But she had heard the whispers. She turned to Hakim and watched confusion, then understanding, bloom across his face. Yesterday, she was copying answers from his math homework. Today, the adults have decided that someone like her and someone like him cannot belong to the same country.

Mei started after Baba. Behind her, shapes shifted in the haze - men with glass bottles and blades. Frightened, Mei slipped and tripped. Sand and sky blurred into the unravelling of a girlhood, but someone grabbed her arm before her face hit the ground.

“Go, go!” Hakim urged in English. Or was it Malay? Chinese?

Back on her feet, Mei followed her father into the tiny room behind a coffee shop they called home. Her mother was rationing water in the common bathroom, while fellow tenants shuttered the windows. The whole place smelled like her father: Tiger Balm, cigarettes, and the particular sourness of fear.

But also: the defiant aroma of curry. Someone chanting Tamil verses. A baby giggling. Life, stubborn as weeds in concrete, persisting.

On the fourth day, the trains ran again. Hakim’s desk sat empty for a week at school. When he returned, his face was stamped with scars. Silently, he left half of his kueh lapis on Mei’s desk. They sat together at recess, chewing through coconut and hope.

It is also a Tuesday when Mei, recently eighty, visits now-independent Singapore’s National Museum. Outside, gleaming towers grow where kampongs once stood. She moves through the 1964 Riots Exhibit, remembering how blood and broken glass patterned a macabre mosaic on the streets. In a display case lies a taxonomy of rupture: a stopped watch. Singed identity papers.

A Malayan Railways time card.

Not Baba’s. 21st July has no punch hole. Instead, the scrawl reads Abdul Rahman. The same name as her erstwhile playmate’s father. Vertigo overwhelms her: while she ran home with Baba, Hakim ran home alone, separated by conflict as arbitrary as a children’s game. The first labors of a country’s birth. The first ghosts. The first necessary salt.

[^1]: bin means “son of” in Malay. Hakim’s full name is Hakim bin Abdul Rahman, which means Hakim, son of Abdul Rahman.