Aunty Lee's Delights (2 page)

Aunty Lee was also well-known and a bit of a headache to many of the island city’s food suppliers. Through letters to the
Straits Times
, she had exposed several cases of food fraud (“organic”
kailan
that had been sprayed with insecticide, “free-range” chicken with the flaccid thigh meat of cage-bound animals). All thanks to her unerring ability to pinpoint when something was “off,” in food or in life, and being
kiasu
enough to fixate on it.
Kiasu
, or fear of losing out, was a typical Singaporean characteristic and one that Aunty Lee embodied to the extreme.

All day Aunty Lee had been following news reports on radio and television and had even sent Nina round to the 7-Eleven to pick up the afternoon papers, but she hadn’t learned any more about the body that had been found. She and Nina had overdosed on DJ chatter and music (which Nina had quite enjoyed when Aunty Lee was not changing channels hoping for more news), but all she had gotten were news updates without new information and speculations from phone-in callers. Was it the body of a gambler from the casino? An illegal immigrant dropped off a boat who had failed to swim in to shore? Or an unlucky sailor? Had it been an accident, a suicide, or—most exciting of all—murder?

Naturally Aunty Lee was all in favor of suicide or murder. She did not find accidents very interesting. To her, accidents were the result of carelessness and poor planning, and she had very little interest in or patience with careless and lazy people. She found them boring.

“They should let us know what is happening!” Aunty Lee said. “How can they keep people in the dark like that. It’s not as though they are preparing for an election or something—a body on Sentosa is serious, it affects all of us. What if tourists start to worry and stop going to the Integrated Resort there to gamble? It’s going to affect all of us!”

“They can also go to the other resort to gamble, ma’am,” Nina said practically. Very little upset Nina Balignasay. “Anyway, nowadays they find dead bodies in Singapore quite often.”

“Do you think they’ve found any more bodies? Turn on the TV again. Go to CNN. Sometimes, if it’s big enough, Singapore news comes out there before it reaches Singapore.”

“If they find more bodies, then it is more likely accident, ma’am. Maybe it is a boat sinking.”

“Or a mass murder!” Aunty Lee said with relish. “One of those serial killers. After all, if you are going to go through all the trouble of arranging to throw somebody into the sea, why stop at one body, right?”

As she spoke, Aunty Lee was rapidly cutting up cucumbers with all the attention she normally paid to cooking, which was not much. She cooked the way some people drove—while carrying on conversations, applying lipstick, and texting messages—trusting the instinct that came with long practice and only focusing on the main task when something unexpected came up or went wrong.

Fortunately Aunty Lee did not drive.

“Who do you think it was? The news said unidentified female body. That means nobody reported her missing, right? What kind of relatives don’t report a missing girl!”

“Her relatives may not know she’s missing yet,” Nina observed calmly.

In many ways Nina Balignasay was the opposite of Aunty Lee. Nina was slim, dark, and generally prided herself on minding her own business. Though she had not known how to cook or drive when she arrived in Singapore, she had since learned to do both proficiently, thanks to Aunty Lee’s help-others-to-become-good-at-helping-me philosophy. And since keeping Aunty Lee comfortable was her main business, Nina’s own powers of observation had also sharpened considerably.

She had also learned not to worry that her employer would lose a finger or an eye as she speed-sliced and waved her knife around to emphasize whatever point she was making. After all, Nina was nothing if not adaptable. She had been trained as a nurse in the Philippines (even if her nursing degree was not recognized in Singapore) and would have been able to stanch the bleeding. And she had learned it was dangerous—and pretty much impossible—to try to stop Aunty Lee from doing what she wanted to.

“You think so? How can relatives not know?”

“How often do you see your relatives, ma’am?”

Aunty Lee paused in thought. Though equipped with an extensive social network, she had few close relatives left alive.

“Call Mark,” she said to Nina. “Call Mark and ask him whether that wife of his is around.”

Mark Lee was the son of Aunty Lee’s late husband and his first wife. Aunty Lee had gotten along fairly well with both M. L. Lee’s children for years. Mark was already studying in Australia and Mathilda in the UK when their widower father finally remarried, and they had appreciated the energy Aunty Lee brought into their father’s home and life even if the richness of her cooking gave him gout in two years. As Mathilda said, their mother had been dead for over fifteen years, so neither she herself nor Mark had showed any antagonism toward the plump, fair “aunty” who began appearing by their father’s side at family and social functions. Indeed, when M. L. Lee married Rosie Gan, as Aunty Lee had been called before the marriage, his two children had congratulated themselves that there would now be someone to keep their father fed and occupied, thus freeing them to focus on their own families. “We don’t have to feel bad about not staying in Singapore to keep an eye on poor old Pa!” as Mathilda said.

Mathilda had married an Englishman and settled in Warwick not long after the wedding, comfortably assured that her father was taken care of. However, things had changed after Mark married and M. L. Lee died of a heart attack—unrelated events that had taken place in the same month almost five years ago. Mrs. Selina Lee had never forgiven her late father-in-law for interrupting her Italian honeymoon by dying (they had been in the Prada café in Montevarchi waiting for her turn to enter the factory outlet when they got the news of his death) or for leaving all his earthly possessions to his second wife.

Aunty Lee privately believed that if Mark had married anyone other than Selina, M. L. Lee would probably have left a great deal more to his son than he did. The late M. L. Lee had had a bias against women with loud shrill voices like his new daughter-in-law. This was perhaps unfair to Selina, who had been deliberately louder (and shriller) in M. L. Lee’s presence since his habit of not answering her convinced her that the old man was going deaf. Selina Lee was also convinced that Aunty Lee had stolen her Mark’s inheritance from him. Aunty Lee knew that Selina had already been to two different law firms to try to find someone willing to help her contest the will. Aunty Lee might have told Mark that she would leave M. L. Lee’s property to him and Selina, which would have made things much more peaceful, but she had not. Instead, she had already agreed to make several loans, of considerable amounts of money, as requested, which Selina now referred to as “presents” and which Mark had already lost in previous business ventures. Running a wine import business was his latest attempt at entrepreneurship.

“What do you want to say to Ma’am Selina?” Nina continued with what she was doing, making no move toward the phone.

“I don’t want to talk to that Silly-Nah. I just want to make sure she’s still alive. You are the one who said I don’t know whether my relatives are missing or not!”

“I never say that, ma’am. Anyway, they will be coming here soon. And if Ma’am Selina is missing, Sir Mark will call the police, right?”

“Who knows?” Aunty Lee grouched. “If she’s not there to tell him how to pick up the phone and how to dial, you think he’ll know how to do it?”

But she left the subject. Of course, Aunty Lee would have done everything in her power to comfort her stepson if it turned out to be his wife’s body that had just floated up onto that Sentosa beach. Aunty Lee would probably miss poor dead Selina, if such were the case—Selina made life more interesting, in the same way as
chili padi
spiced up a dish. But it was all wishful thinking. Selina, very much alive and still bossy, would soon arrive with Mark for that evening’s wine dining event.

It was the dining portion of that evening’s wine dining that Aunty Lee and Nina were currently preparing. Usually dinner was not served at Aunty Lee’s Delights. The café specialized in lunches with an all-day snacks and tea menu that covered everything from late breakfasts to high tea, but it closed at six to allow Aunty Lee to get home for her own dinner. In the old days, dinner had been prepared throughout the day in the shop kitchen and collected, along with herself, by M. L. Lee on his way home from work. M. L. Lee had worked right up to the day of his death. Their Binjai Park bungalow, deeper in the estate, was a fifteen-minute walk from the shop. But even a fifteen-minute walk was not easy in the Singapore evening heat, especially with
tingkats
full of dinner.

Aunty Lee had not realized how much she missed cooking those dinners till the wine dining sessions began. Serving Aunty Lee’s local Peranakan dishes accompanied by fine wines chosen by Mark had been Selina Lee’s idea. But in spite of this, Aunty Lee enjoyed them very much indeed. She had cut herself off from social life after her husband’s death, preferring to cook small dishes rather than make small talk. But she was looking forward to tonight’s session; with an unidentified body, there would be more than small talk around the table.

“It could be some foreign diplomat got drunk and ran over somebody then dumped her body into the sea,” Aunty Lee mused. “Do you know if the Romanian embassy sent over a new guy yet?”

“Even if the newspapers say ‘unidentified,’ it could mean that the police know but didn’t tell them, right?” Nina suggested calmly. “Maybe they want to inform the family first.”

“Maybe.” Undeterred, Aunty Lee branched off on a new track. “And now also, just before Chinese New Year—must be somebody on drugs or on holiday . . . that’s why nobody reported her missing yet. They didn’t say where this woman is from, right? Tell you what, Nina. Go and phone them and ask whether it is somebody you know. Tell them a friend of yours is missing, then maybe they will tell you whether the woman is Chinese or Indian or
ang moh
. . . but make sure you sound upset, otherwise they will want to get information from you instead . . . Phone now before people start coming for the dinner.”

“Ma’am. My hands are dirty now. And I got to finish making dinner before the people come.”

“Maybe she went to Sentosa to gamble and lost all her money and she was running away from loan sharks and fell into the sea . . .”

“Yes, ma’am. Do you want me to put the pork on the sticks also?”

“Yes, Nina. Are there enough sticks? Good. Those loan sharks can be so terrible. But they should realize that if they go around killing people, they won’t get their money back, right? Unless, of course, they killed her as a warning to other people who owe them money. But if I were a loan shark, I wouldn’t kill somebody who really owed me money—I would pick somebody who didn’t and just tell everybody she did. That would be enough to frighten them. So that poor girl could be a total stranger to them . . . but maybe it wasn’t loan sharks at all. Maybe it was those expat traders who get drunk and beat up taxi drivers. Maybe it was a female taxi driver and she jumped into the sea to get away from them.”

Aunty Lee was happy again, Nina thought. Aunty Lee was usually happy when she cooked, but today, despite the frustration of having no details about the body found, she was even happier than usual. Aunty Lee was bored, Nina realized. It was to occupy her mind that she had thrown herself into Aunty Lee’s Delights after her husband died. Running the café and keeping the shop counter stocked up with Aunty Lee’s “specials” had succeeded in distracting her for a while, but now that routines were established and running smoothly, Aunty Lee was clearly getting bored. Boredom was all very well. Everyone felt bored at times. But a mind that worked with the speed of Aunty Lee’s meant boredom would be followed very soon by action and change.

Nina sighed inwardly; she did not want things to change. She was very happy working for Aunty Lee. There were far worse employers to work for. Nina knew that very well, having worked for some of them herself. And it had been Aunty Lee who rescued her, offering to take over her employment contract. “I could report them for what they did to you, of course. But then such things take a long time to get to court and then you won’t be able to work or go home—why don’t you come and work for me?” It had worked out for both Aunty Lee and Nina . . . and for Nina’s former employers, who escaped being fined and blacklisted by maid agencies.

The menu for that night’s wine dining gathering was chicken and pork satay,
luak chye
(mustard greens that had been pickling in vinegar, ginger, and sugar since yesterday—Nina had only to remember to mix in the mustard powder just before serving . . .), and the
hee peow
or fish maw soup made with prawn, fish, and meatballs. Of course the whole point of the wine dining dinners were for Aunty Lee’s stepson, Mark, to introduce people to wines that could “go” with local food, but Aunty Lee had gleefully seized the opportunity to fire up her favorite recipes. Most visitors who came to Aunty Lee’s Delights were there to shop for her sweet and savory
kueh
, fried delicacies, and, of course, the bottles of Aunty Lee’s Shiok Sambal and Aunty Lee’s Amazing Achar and Krunchy Kropok, which sold out as fast as Aunty Lee and Nina could produce them.

Aunty Lee’s hand phone rang. It was on the counter and Nina, correctly interpreting Aunty Lee’s “On it for me—make it loud-loud!,” answered and switched it to speakerphone.

“Rosie, ah—are you there? Busy or not—” Nina recognized the grainy voice of Mrs. AwYong, an old friend of Aunty Lee’s.

“Jin, how are you? Cooking lah. What’s up?”

“Rosie, you were right! I found my watch—some more I found an earring and a part of a necklace and a bangle I didn’t even know were missing!”

“I told you I was right!” Aunty Lee smirked. Nina smiled to herself. Aunty Lee knew she was usually right but she never tired of hearing others admit it. She grumbled (at least on the surface) when her friends jokingly gave her their challenging little problems to solve to “keep her brain active,” but the truth was she adored them. These little problems were a legitimate way of putting what the late M. L. Lee described as his wife’s outstanding talent for being “
kiasu, kaypoh, em zhai se!
” Nina could remember the old man saying
kaypoh
, meaning minding the business of others with as much energy as
kiasu
devoted to their own.
Em zhai se
literally meant “not scared to die” and effectively described how Aunty Lee drove everyone around her to despair through frustration as she pursued some triviality no one else could see any point in.