Class Action

Amanda says that if she ever had to go through her schooling again today, she would just, to quote her directly, “do things a whole lot different!”

“You mean ‘differently’, don’t you?” Saffy asked the other day. 

Amanda paused. “Do I?” she asked eventually, a question that led Saffy to later say privately, and not for the first time, that it’s an absolute scandal that Amanda was ever allowed to step foot into a classroom at Harvard, much less graduate from it.

Aside from that grammatical point, I told her, I said that I did see Amanda’s point.

Looking back, I remember long days and long nights that stretched literally into years of me just sitting at a desk. Just me with a pile of books in front of me, scribbling and reading. Reading and scribbling. Sitting back in the chair and sighing.

I sweated blood and tears getting to grips with calculus and valency tables. I struggled to memorise the capital city of Czechoslovakia and the speed at which a falling object dropped from a great height would hit terminal velocity. I went cross-eyed trying to understand the subjunctive in French while I barely understood how to conjugate the verbs.

Oh, I passed all my subjects eventually, but what good did any of it do me, I now wonder? Czechoslovakia doesn’t exist anymore, so what was the point of knowing the name of its capital? As a lawyer and later as a journalist writing about hotel rooms, I’ve never ever had to use algebra. Ever. Or calculate the density of water at 10 atmospheres of pressure. And I have literally never had to discuss with anyone the rainfall patterns of the Sahara in July. 

So, beyond learning how to read and write, and do basic maths, I don’t see how much of anything I ever studied in all those long years of primary school, high school and university was beneficial at all.

What I wish I had learnt in school was how to pick a lock and hotwire a car.

“Really?” Saffy asked when the subject of wasted education came up again the other day.

“Totally,” I said firmly. “I can’t tell you how many times in my life, I’ve locked my keys in the car. Of course, that was back in the day when you could manually click the lock from the inside and then shut the car door. But still…”

“And hotwiring the car?” Saffy asked.

I shrugged. “Oh that. I always thought that would be a cool trick to know. They do it so casually in the movies!”

“Well, if I had to do my schooling all over again,” Saffy said, “I would have learnt yoga instead of stupid netball. Eight years of netball and only because I liked the outfits! Being able to do a headstand like you can now would have been so much cooler than stomping so pointlessly up and down that court!”

I preened, pleased to be reminded that after years of fruitlessly slamming myself up against a wall, I am now able to wobble up to an unassisted headstand. Next on my bucket list is the handstand which, in terms of utility, is probably not very useful, but then again, neither was the ability to work out when and where two people would meet if they started out from opposite directions and moved towards one another at different speeds. 

At least a handstand has the advantage of being a great party trick. 

The other day, Sharyn’s mother-in-law fainted in the bathroom. To hear Sharyn tell it, there was a great deal of screaming. “My maid found her. She scream. My husband go in to see why she scream, and he saw his mudder on the floor, he start screaming. Den I go in and have to scream at him and my maid to stop screaming! Wah liau!” she sighed, shaking her head at the memory.

Saffy’s bosom inflated. “What happened then?”

Sharyn shrugged. “Like dat, lor! Must call ambulance! We all doh-no what to do! My husband say must put pillow under the head. My son says must lift her leg. My maid say must put Tiger Bum! My neighbour come in and say must turn my mudder-in-law on the side. We all like Doctor Quack. Lucky ambulance come so quick.”

The long and short of it is that Sharyn says she wishes comprehensive first aid was a mandatory subject in school. “What for learn about what year Raffles arrive in Singapore? Better you learn what to do if your mudder-in-law faint or have heart attack, right or not?”

Amanda says she wishes schools taught girls what to do when boys say they’ll call and then they don’t. Saffy says she’s practically got a PhD on that subject.

Tall Tales

So, the other night, we were watching reruns of Game of Thrones and there’s a scene in the throne room with Queen Cersei and her hulking mountain of a bodyguard. And this being Game of Thrones, his name is literally Mountain – which is helpful because there are so many hard pronounce names in the show, it’s such a relief when a character gets one that’s a simple, easy to remember.

“Gosh, I’d forgotten how tall he is!” Saffy said, while stuffing her face with popcorn.

“The Mountain?” Amanda asked, currently curled up under a light shawl in the armchair. 

“He’s enormous! How tall do you think he is?”

Amanda pulled out her phone and tapped. There was a pause. “His name is Hafthor Julius Björnsson. He’s…uhm…186 kilos and he’s six feet nine!”

Saffy sat up, and hit pause on the remote control.

“Wait, what? 186 kilos? And six feet what?”

Amanda’s eyes flicked back to her phone. “Six feet nine.”

For days, it’s all the girls have been able to talk about. 

“Six feet nine!” Saffy told Sharyn. “The guy is literally twice your height, Shazz. If you stood next to him, you’d come up to his navel!”

Behind her Coke bottle thick spectacles, Sharyn’s eyes bulged. “Wah!”

“I know! I wonder what meal times with him must be like?”

“He’d probably have to eat ten roast chickens or something,” Amanda said. “I read that he eats six to eight times a day!”

Sharyn sucked in her breath. “Hah? Sicktime a day?!”

“Well, you don’t get to be that size by eating carrot sticks, Sharyn,” Saffy pointed out.

“Wah liau. Then when he go toilet and do number two, how? Must flush tree time, I think!”

The girls fell about and shrieked. Later that evening, Saffy was still cackling at the idea of The Mountain sitting on the loo and doing a dump. “That Sharyn kills me. The things she says!”

Amanda lifted her lovely face to the ceiling and stared into the corner. “But you know…I have to wonder…what…” She trailed off and turned pink. 

Saffy glanced at me, her eyes flicking back to Amanda. “What?”

Amanda hesitated. “Well, you know…He’s so…big. Do you think…do you think everything is in, uhm, in proportion? You know? Down there?”

Comprehension finally dawned on Saffy’s face. Her bosom inflated. “My God, you know, I never even thought of that! Well…I guess he must be. And he’s an ang moh as well!”

Two of Saffy’s ex-boyfriends have been American and Swedish, and to hear her tell it, if they were a statistical sample, Western men are tremendously gifted. Which is also why, apparently, the relationships never lasted very long. “Oh, the whole thing was impossible!” she told her friend Suzanne after she broke up with Matt, the Citbank trader from Dallas. “I literally cannot walk straight the next day! And let’s not even talk about the state of my jaw!” she added with a pout.

Suzanne had been bug-eyed. “Really? Like…how impossible are we talking about?”

Saffy didn’t hesitate. “Like that you tiao you just had with your soy bean drink! Only twice as big!”

And as Amanda now pointed out, Matt had been six foot two and played quarter back in college football. “Imagine someone who is six foot nine!”

“He’d be packing a mutant cucumber!” Saffy said firmly, shaking her head at the violence and damage that could be inflicted by a vegetable that size on a petite five feet seven girl like herself. 

A few days later, at a party, Amanda’s friend Anna brought along her new German boyfriend. I wasn’t there, but apparently, the guy is literally six foot nine, the same height as the Mountain.

“He’s huge!” Amanda reported later. “I got such a neck-strain looking up at him that I finally had to ask him to please sit down. And even then, I still had to look up!”

Saffy frowned. “But Anna is, what, like five feet five!”

“She literally comes up to his navel,” Amanda said. “I don’t know how that relationship is ever going to work!”

“Has she, uhm…” Saffy coughed gently. “You know, tried the salad bar…”

“That was the first thing that crossed my mind” Amanda said. “But there were so many people at the party, I didn’t get a chance to ask! But really, how could she? It would just be anatomically impossible! Oh, speaking of, Anna did say that Johann can only travel in business class and even that is super cramped. He literally can’t fit into an economy seat!”

Saffy says if that isn’t a metaphor for her love life in general, she doesn’t know what is. 

Retirement Benefits

Once, when she was a child, my sister said she wanted to travel the world like our parents.

I remember Mother smiling indulgently. “Oh, my dear. You have to grow up and go to school and study!” she said. “Then you have to become a doctor and work really hard and make lots of money. When you retire, then you can travel!”

It was just the sort of thing you can’t un-hear and it sticks in your mind and years later, it’s still a subject that comes up every so often during Michelle’s therapy sessions.

“My therapist says my inability to relax and let go can be traced to that conversation,” Michelle sighed recently on FaceTime. “She says it explains why I’m always pushing myself and feel so much guilt when I’m on holiday. I am not giving myself permission to enjoy my down-time because apparently I feel like I don’t deserve the moment.”

I stared at my phone. “What, so when you retire at 65, suddenly, you will get that permission and you’ll become less uptight about having fun?”

Michelle stiffened. “We don’t use the word ‘uptight’ in therapy!”

When I recounted the conversation to Amanda, she said it’s such a typical Asian parent thing to say to their kids. “My dad said the exact same thing to me that one time I was in university and I wanted to come home to Singapore for the holidays. He said I was so spoilt and that I should just stay put and study for the next semester’s courses.”

“Oh. My. God,” Saffy sighed. “My mother said the exact same thing, too! What, is there some guidebook out there that Asian parents read about what to say to their kids?”

“He said I would have plenty of time to travel when I retire!” Amanda went on. “Exactly what Jason’s mum said!”

Saffy’s bosom inflated. “You see, that’s the sort of thing that qualifies as fake news. If people said that sort of rubbish today, they’d be arrested!”

Apparently, Amanda told her father that if she waited till she was 65 to travel, she’d be lucky if she was able to lift her cabin luggage into the overhead compartment.

“You’d be lucky if you’re still alive at 65!” said Saffy, whose Uncle Max literally dropped dead on his 64^thbirthday while walking from his bed to the bathroom. To hear Saffy tell it, it was the sort of thing that made you want to cash in your CPF and blow it all on a first class round the world trip.

“I mean, he died on his birthday! I can’t even imagine it!” Saffy’s bosom inflated. “He woke up and thought to himself, ‘Happy birthday to me! I wonder what presents I’ve got waiting for me downstairs. But let me pee first’, and literally ten seconds later, he’s face-planted on the floor!”

“What a crappy birthday present,” Amanda said, shaking her head.

“Well, his wife said the upside is that he didn’t linger and suffer from some malignant disease that took years to finish him off,” Saffy said. She paused and gave the matter some thought. “She really is a glass half-full kind of person. It’s not the kind of thing I would ever have thought of.”

For Amanda, the moral of the story is, have fun now because you never know – tomorrow, you might be stuffed into a coffin.

“If you want to have an affair, have an affair!” she said airily to Sharyn who turned goggle eyes at her.

“Hah?”

“If you want to go on that cruise to Spain, go now!” Amanda went on. “Don’t wait till you’re retired. Your hips may have given out by then!”

Sharyn looked unconvinced. “Yah, but if I spend all my mah-ney now, and then when I’m ninety-tree and I’m still alive and by den, I got no more money, then how? Next week, my mudder turn ninety-nine and my fah-der is ninety-four, so proh-blee I oh-so got same gene!”

Amanda pursed her lips. “When you’re ninety-nine, there’s no way you would be able to travel, so, either way, you should travel now!”

Sharyn drew in a breath. “Yah hor! You are right. Should travel now. And if I spend all my money and I am still alive at ninety-nine, I come live with you, lah, Saffy!”

“I wouldn’t count on it, Shazz,” Saffy replied. “I’ve got no money now, so I can’t imagine where I’ll be living at ninety-nine. Maybe I’ll be living with you, Amanda!”

Saffy later said the look of panic on Amanda’s face was priceless.

It's Raining, Man...

Saffy says that given the amount of time she spends these days staring up at the sky, she might as well take up meteorology as a second career. 

“You very free, lor,” her best friend Sharyn told her the other day when she walked into Saffy’s office and found her peering up through the tinted windows.

Saffy whipped around, frantically waving her hands. “Can you not say such things so loudly, please?”

Sharyn shrugged. “Yah, what. Every time I come in here, you never work, one! Got dat time, remember, you were sitting at your chair, going cross-eye! You say you were exercising your what, ah? Your pelvic muscle!”

“Ugh,” Saffy said, turning back to the window to stare up again. “You can blame Amanda for that. She was so into her Kegels, she made us all do it. Jason says he’s still doing them!”

Sharyn glided up next to Saffy and looked up. “So, what are you looking at?”

“Rain clouds!”

“Today where got rain? Is so hot!”

“I’m trying to train my internal barometer!”

Sharyn sighed. “Aiyoh.”

A few weeks ago, someone in Saffy’s yoga class gave her a book called ‘Inner Engineering’ by Sadhguru. “It’s quite life-changing!” Marissa said as she thrust the orange covered book into Saffy’s hands. 

Later that evening, Saffy says she wished she could give Sadhguru a make-over. “I think if he trimmed his beard a little, he’d be so much cooler!”

“The man rides a motorcycle all over India, Saff,” I said. “You can’t get any cooler than that!”

Saffy turned astonished eyes on me. “How do you know this?”

“I watch all his YouTube videos. I think he’s the coolest dude I’ve never met,” I told her. “He’s so smart and explains heavy metaphysical and spiritual stuff in simple language. My sister became a vegetarian after watching one of his videos!”

Which is how that evening in bed, Saffy found herself turning the first page. She could only get through two pages. “It’s so intense!” she reported the next day. “I loved that he started page one with a joke though!”

“Oh, Sadhguru is full of jokes,” I said in a way that seemed to indicate he and I were squash buddies. 

That night, Saffy read another two pages. And the following night, another two. Each morning, she would stumble into the lounge room, goggle-eyed. “My God, the things that man says! And how he says them! I seriously can’t wrap my brain around any of it! But I also can’t stop reading!”

During the day, she’d catch herself thinking about her relationship with other people, and situations. After one office meeting, Sharyn asked, “Ay, you sick, ah? The whole meeting, you smile and not say anything. Marcus from accounts WhatsApp me and say you very scary!”

Saffy blinked. “No, I was just thinking that none of this matters at all. All this angst is just a reflection of my externalities and has nothing to do with what’s going on inside.”

Sharyn stared. “Yah,” she said eventually. “Confirm, you sick.”

And then, one night, Saffy got to a passage in which Sadhguru said he has tuned his inner consciousness to such an elevated state, he is be able to tell if it will rain.

“Can you imagine?” she said the next morning at breakfast. “That’s just totally mind-blowing!”

Amanda was unimpressed. “There are weather apps for that kind of thing!”

“Yes, but still! That’s real skill!” Saffy’s eyes shone.

For a week now, she’s alternated between sitting with her eyes closed concentrating on tuning into her inner barometer and staring up at the sky for any sign of rain to check if the bright blazing blue sky above correlates with what she’s feeling. 

“So, how? Can feel rain or not?” Sharyn asked the other day. She’d just marched back to the office from Lau Pa Sat and had to disappear into the bathroom to mop up her sweat and dry herself off. 

Saffy pursed her lips. “I can’t feel anything!”

“Of course not, lah!” Sharyn sighed. “I no need read your book, I can confirm got no rain! These few day so hot, where got rain? If Sadhguru was here, he also tell you the same ting!”

Far from being discouraged, Saffy perseveres. Even when she announces that it won’t rain, and there’s a thunderstorm two hours later, she’s convinced she’s on her way to becoming a human barometer. 

“It’s just a matter of practice,” she told Amanda who told me privately that it’s a good thing Sadhguru never wrote a book on levitation. 

“Can you imagine?” she asked.