Singapore Blues
Bangladesh went through a transitional government phase, ruled by a military backed non-elected civilian government, one of whose mandates was to go after the political elite who were purportedly corrupt. That drive resulted in an outflow of politicians and businessmen to various destinations, Singapore being the most popular. The country switched to civilian government in December of 2008.
These shopping trips can be such a drag. After a month or two, they all look familiar. Done with the Abdullah street and its throng of exiles. I rather be seen somewhere else, or none at all. But they keep asking me the same questions, and all the bloody familiar faces, and then again the same topics...again, and again, and again…the ‘situation’ back home, the sheer stupidity of the caretakers and the army, and of-course the constant plotting of how to get back home…..and the brutal torture of their friends in jails of Bangladesh,
Today I just want to go to side street café and eat Singapore Noodles. Go easy on the shrimp, will ya? The doctor at Elizabeth has been specific. The doctor has seen so many Bangladeshis that he has greeted me with a heavily accented ‘kemon achen’? Went at the insistence of my hubby who wants to make sure I am ‘healthy’ all the time. Will be happy to get a car. It’s as if I love being confined to the 18th floor of this hotel all the time. Can we get a service apartment? The hubby is too status conscious for that. Half the time he is on the laptop managing his accounts and calling the banks and giving them codes and god knows what else. I wish he would talk to me sometimes, I mean talk talk, not just ask me for a glass of water or ask what I want from room service. Watch it girl, getting depressed is dangerous. But it has its occasional good parts too…..like the humongous ruby cabochon necklace he got me the other week. Not my style, but more like a show-off piece. Where did I wear it? Oh, at the restaurant below, at the gathering of other fellow exiles. You would think they would be morose or something, but hell no….wine flowed, so did caviar, which not too many appreciated, the ladies sparkled along with the jewels and the rediscovered passions for French see-through fabrics. Someone needs to tell Mrs. Reaz that her choice of fabrics with that figure of her’s borders of bearing the likeness of a tropical snowman……a bit too revealing isn’t it? Anyways, my ruby necklace will be a bigger hit when I to gets to wear it at my niece Nitu’s wedding coming up in a few months, if I make it to Dhaka by that time, that is.
The day has been spent with Mrs. Safayet at the Amrita Spa located at the Raffles. Tons of gooey mud, and scrubs, and pampering in the backdrop of piped music, the then, boredom, again. She is the only kindred soul it seems in the whole group. The rest, well, the equivalent of Bangladeshi trailer trash, simple women with humble backgrounds, suddenly ennobled with an infusion of undreamed amount of cash, transplanted from the ‘mufasshals’ straight to Gulshan and Baridhara via transit through Khilgaon and Lalbagh. Mrs. Karim is an exemption, but her nose is stuck up so high, it looks taller than the Empire State. Pedigreed with some minor sidelined Indian royal blood, she acts as if she is the reigning maharani of the exiles and yet her contempt and disdain for the rest doesn’t take long to spill out eventually. Their money helps, this combination of old and new money that is. They have bought to small estate on the northern shores from where you can literally see the lights of Johar bahru across the strait. Must give her credit for her impeccable taste though. Full of antiques, Chinese and Indian and western, and all in their perfect places. Her house has been , in Gulshan with two attached plots, the same. Had this been the US, both places would have adorned the pages of Architectural Digest by now. The sons and daughters and their spouses and their ever expanding broods of children, life a little factory of sorts, all centered in that estate, and there are already talks of buying off the adjoining estates on the left and right. I think negotiations have already started. With their wads of cash, it won’t be long before the deals go through. The locals (well they have been here for so long now, the Locals are just them Bangladeshis, and the Singaporeans are just plain ‘them’, an insider joke no doubt) are already calling the street KarimNagar. Oh well, I miss my mom, all left alone in Dhaka. I want her to move to the US with my brothers, but my ‘bhabis’ are a breed apart. Selfish, self-indulgent and totally spoilt, and did I mention their husbands, my brothers, all three of them wrapped around their petit manicured fingers like little chimps? My Boro Apa is the reigning matriarch of her huge extended family, and highly respected by the in-laws. Mom will not move there though, with these Bengali inhibitions of staying with the ‘jamai’. I call her as often as I can. Thank goodness, she has her school to take care off in Banani and that keeps her occupied. Initially she was adamant that she should quit the school and surrender the day-to-day operations to members of the trustee board. Now it seems like a blessing, with her in Singapore. And I miss my kids, immensely, achingly so. Shama has been duly deposited in a boarding school close to KL, and Shanu, my dear little Shanu, has been sent to a ‘public school’ in the UK, costing a fortune and more so, millions of miles away, in a totally different time zone, in a cold climate, where he dearly misses his mom, and hates the constant grey of its skies. Rabbi, my not so dear husband at the moment, has shipped them off so in whatever places that was available at such a short notice. I, and only I, take full credit for their good grades prior to their public schools. A strict regimen of rationed TV and play-stations, tons of reading, both out loud and in their own capacities, and all those math games, which tried my patience and my sanity sometimes, but I persevered, looking at their cherubic faces. I had to. Shanu, the finicky eater whose saving grace was either a mug of Holicks or sushi from Samdado, and Shama, they both avoid the subject of food when I call up UK or KL, and there is always this accusatory tone in their voices, that literally breaks my heart every time. Rabbi….whenever the kids gets emotional with him, duly passes the phone back to me. They need their Dad too, don’t they? In these moments, if the timing is not odd, I always call Mrs. Safayet, lately relegated to Seema Aunty. God knows why an Ivy League professor would get his head unscrewed and come home to enter politics. Uncle has been sued by Anti-corruption for putting his signature on some dubious deals and look at the mess they are in. At least they have US passports and soon will be on their way there to stay with their second son who lives in New York and some sort of a hoity-toity investment banker recruited straight out of Harvard business school. Once they are gone, I will miss Aunty a lot. She reminds me of so much of her own khala back in Dhaka. She is always affectionately calling me ‘Beta’, I just love that, and when she asks about my kids, sounds like she really means it. She had also deposited her brood in various private schools during her husband’s pre-tenure vagabond days as a professor. I hope Shanu and Shama, my sweet little darlings will turn out to be like her kids, successful, good looking, and ….well, willing to put up their parents in times like this.
I tell the taxi driver to head for the Clarke Quay. I am in the mood for hummus and the Marrakesh serves a decent plate along with their chicken cooked in fermented lime, topped with olives and dried apricots. It always cheers me up. After that? A bit of window shopping at the Hilton arcade, and maybe have tea there. Rabbi must have come back from hi morning swim, and probably will be downing more whiskey then he should have; then he has all these ‘meetings’, a combination of gossips, back-biting, strategizing their return, and more business plans. Lately there have been too many bottles of Johnny Walker lying about around the suite. Need to have a talk with him, a bit of moderation cant be that bad. He has already opened up two companies, not only to siphon the money into businesses, but also to get the resident visas that make their stay ‘official’ and long-term. Oh forgot, supposed to drop by at the real-estate agent’s office and look up some more properties. So far I have refused to make any choices, like admitting that our exiles are permanent. Rabbi is, thank god, totally happy with my delegated role as the house hunter, otherwise I would have been forced into the role of a housewife all over gain, catering to these hordes of bhabis in their diaphanous saris. Well, Mrs. Halim showed up in a skirt and a top the other day, but she looked more like her house-keeper at her hotel floor. And Halim Bhai with his loud Hawaiian shirts and dyed moustache, they make quite the pair. I like them though, with their off-the cuff remarks that border on political incorrectness and their constant for the perfect ‘Deshi taste’ (the taste of home) in all they eat. But, hey that’s another story. I wanted to take a few courses on nursing at the Yuba College, just for the heck of it, but hubby objected. Why should his wife ‘do’ nursing???? He suggested that I take some courses on finance, but what on earth for? He is there for THAT. Now he is suggesting a trip to Bali for the weekend, but I wanted to see the Angkor Wat. Ever since I took that art history course on Asian arts and architecture back in college, I have been enthralled by it. But no great hotels close by and therefore it was vetoed. I am craving for company, someone who notices my existence and talks about the world in general. Should I give Atef a call? I still have his pen in my purse…the very thought of it gives me the shivers.
Atef, oh Atef, he is some piece of work. Of mixed Indian and Middle Eastern descent, dark olive green eyes, light olive skin, lean and tall, with a head full of sexy long curls, with a body that is definitely toned for hours at a time at the gym. Both Atef and I were waiting at the VIP customers’s lounge at the Citibank while Rabbi was inside, with his ‘personal banker’. He wanted me to sign something and sent out this form, but I needed a pen, and out came a MontBlac out of Atef’s pockets.. Unlike Rabbi who treats the pen like a status symbol, always poised in his shirt pocket, he even carries a separate pen for his more mundane needs, Atef’s has seen some use, no doubt, full of scratches and even a bite mark. Goodness, a MontBlanc that gets chewed. He had flashed me a quick smile while he had forwarded the pen nonchalantly towards me. When the coffee service came, he jumped at it, asking whether I took cream and sugarand some small talk followed. He apparently represents his father’s business interests in Singapore. A bit later I was given his business card, and mechanically I gave mine, that stated my name, cell number and the name of the hotel. Initially he assumed that I worked there and asked my position. Visibly embarrassed and somewhat blushing, I just said that my husband and I ‘lived’ there. Flashing a quick smile, he looked towards where Rabbi was in and asked me what he did. I just tell him, ‘business, I suppose’…Thank god Rabbi just walks out at that very moment and I introduce him to Atef.
A few days later Atef calls and invites the pair of us for lunch. Rabbi naturally refuses and doesn’t even bother to ask what or where was the location. So, I show up myself, not without much morose that the spouse cannot join….Turns out the lunch is at Hua Ting at Orchard Road. The place is fabulous, the Cantonise cuisine is to die for, and the pleasant company, so divine…. Before I knew it, the ‘lunch’ has lasted three hours, have been informed in detail of each other’s family all over the globe, both of our mother’s penchant for ethnic looms, the love for live pop concerts. Rabbi and Atef shared the common passion for fast cars and Atef was particularly enthusiastic about the debut of the Grand Prix in Singapore in a few more months and apparently has already ‘bought’ a box. After dinner we strolled on the streets, looking at the various stores selling brands from the world over. It was tea time. Atef invites me to the Marina for tea…
It turns out Atef lives on a boat, a yatch to be exact, a smooth 80 feet schooner. I kind of guessed that he was well off, but this was totally unexpected. Initially wary of climbing onto it, I was somewhat reassured when a turbaned Sikh butler and a matronly Malay purser appeared on the deck to receive us. The purser Mrs. Abubaker, turns out to be his Amah from his early days and apparently have been looking after Atef since his early teens. She looks at me with very keen, not exactly disapproving, but curious eyes. Maybe there will me a passing remark about her to Atef’s mom later sometime. Earl Grey and buttered scones were followed by petit samosas and bite-sized pastries. The interior exuded charm and sophistication that she has only seen in movies and magazines. A bit later Atef offered his chaufer driven car to drop me off at her hotel. A total gentleman…damn.
That was two weeks ago. Since then there has been other invitations, all declined, but their phone conversations have definitely become longer, to the point we were teasing each other about their families, clothes, money, and even their looks, almost in a childish way. The Boloshoi Ballet was in town and he has tickets, but I decided not to. Why feed the rumour mill fodder with the whole town crawling with ‘us’. What I need to focus and get out my head was the brief brushing of his hand against mine in front of the chinese jade store while pointing at a piece. It had sent shivers down my spine but he was totally oblivious to this briefest of encounters. Anyway, better ask Rabbi about their dinner plans. He is ‘busy’. He is always busy lately, boozing, now he has taken up poker and has ‘discovered’ Scottish malts. He tells me to pick up some paracetamol from the corner store. How much cash do I have?
The pen is still there, with that bite mark staring at me…
My heart is beating really fast... I bring out the cell and call Atef…..
These shopping trips can be such a drag. After a month or two, they all look familiar. Done with the Abdullah street and its throng of exiles. I rather be seen somewhere else, or none at all. But they keep asking me the same questions, and all the bloody familiar faces, and then again the same topics...again, and again, and again…the ‘situation’ back home, the sheer stupidity of the caretakers and the army, and of-course the constant plotting of how to get back home…..and the brutal torture of their friends in jails of Bangladesh,
Today I just want to go to side street café and eat Singapore Noodles. Go easy on the shrimp, will ya? The doctor at Elizabeth has been specific. The doctor has seen so many Bangladeshis that he has greeted me with a heavily accented ‘kemon achen’? Went at the insistence of my hubby who wants to make sure I am ‘healthy’ all the time. Will be happy to get a car. It’s as if I love being confined to the 18th floor of this hotel all the time. Can we get a service apartment? The hubby is too status conscious for that. Half the time he is on the laptop managing his accounts and calling the banks and giving them codes and god knows what else. I wish he would talk to me sometimes, I mean talk talk, not just ask me for a glass of water or ask what I want from room service. Watch it girl, getting depressed is dangerous. But it has its occasional good parts too…..like the humongous ruby cabochon necklace he got me the other week. Not my style, but more like a show-off piece. Where did I wear it? Oh, at the restaurant below, at the gathering of other fellow exiles. You would think they would be morose or something, but hell no….wine flowed, so did caviar, which not too many appreciated, the ladies sparkled along with the jewels and the rediscovered passions for French see-through fabrics. Someone needs to tell Mrs. Reaz that her choice of fabrics with that figure of her’s borders of bearing the likeness of a tropical snowman……a bit too revealing isn’t it? Anyways, my ruby necklace will be a bigger hit when I to gets to wear it at my niece Nitu’s wedding coming up in a few months, if I make it to Dhaka by that time, that is.
The day has been spent with Mrs. Safayet at the Amrita Spa located at the Raffles. Tons of gooey mud, and scrubs, and pampering in the backdrop of piped music, the then, boredom, again. She is the only kindred soul it seems in the whole group. The rest, well, the equivalent of Bangladeshi trailer trash, simple women with humble backgrounds, suddenly ennobled with an infusion of undreamed amount of cash, transplanted from the ‘mufasshals’ straight to Gulshan and Baridhara via transit through Khilgaon and Lalbagh. Mrs. Karim is an exemption, but her nose is stuck up so high, it looks taller than the Empire State. Pedigreed with some minor sidelined Indian royal blood, she acts as if she is the reigning maharani of the exiles and yet her contempt and disdain for the rest doesn’t take long to spill out eventually. Their money helps, this combination of old and new money that is. They have bought to small estate on the northern shores from where you can literally see the lights of Johar bahru across the strait. Must give her credit for her impeccable taste though. Full of antiques, Chinese and Indian and western, and all in their perfect places. Her house has been , in Gulshan with two attached plots, the same. Had this been the US, both places would have adorned the pages of Architectural Digest by now. The sons and daughters and their spouses and their ever expanding broods of children, life a little factory of sorts, all centered in that estate, and there are already talks of buying off the adjoining estates on the left and right. I think negotiations have already started. With their wads of cash, it won’t be long before the deals go through. The locals (well they have been here for so long now, the Locals are just them Bangladeshis, and the Singaporeans are just plain ‘them’, an insider joke no doubt) are already calling the street KarimNagar. Oh well, I miss my mom, all left alone in Dhaka. I want her to move to the US with my brothers, but my ‘bhabis’ are a breed apart. Selfish, self-indulgent and totally spoilt, and did I mention their husbands, my brothers, all three of them wrapped around their petit manicured fingers like little chimps? My Boro Apa is the reigning matriarch of her huge extended family, and highly respected by the in-laws. Mom will not move there though, with these Bengali inhibitions of staying with the ‘jamai’. I call her as often as I can. Thank goodness, she has her school to take care off in Banani and that keeps her occupied. Initially she was adamant that she should quit the school and surrender the day-to-day operations to members of the trustee board. Now it seems like a blessing, with her in Singapore. And I miss my kids, immensely, achingly so. Shama has been duly deposited in a boarding school close to KL, and Shanu, my dear little Shanu, has been sent to a ‘public school’ in the UK, costing a fortune and more so, millions of miles away, in a totally different time zone, in a cold climate, where he dearly misses his mom, and hates the constant grey of its skies. Rabbi, my not so dear husband at the moment, has shipped them off so in whatever places that was available at such a short notice. I, and only I, take full credit for their good grades prior to their public schools. A strict regimen of rationed TV and play-stations, tons of reading, both out loud and in their own capacities, and all those math games, which tried my patience and my sanity sometimes, but I persevered, looking at their cherubic faces. I had to. Shanu, the finicky eater whose saving grace was either a mug of Holicks or sushi from Samdado, and Shama, they both avoid the subject of food when I call up UK or KL, and there is always this accusatory tone in their voices, that literally breaks my heart every time. Rabbi….whenever the kids gets emotional with him, duly passes the phone back to me. They need their Dad too, don’t they? In these moments, if the timing is not odd, I always call Mrs. Safayet, lately relegated to Seema Aunty. God knows why an Ivy League professor would get his head unscrewed and come home to enter politics. Uncle has been sued by Anti-corruption for putting his signature on some dubious deals and look at the mess they are in. At least they have US passports and soon will be on their way there to stay with their second son who lives in New York and some sort of a hoity-toity investment banker recruited straight out of Harvard business school. Once they are gone, I will miss Aunty a lot. She reminds me of so much of her own khala back in Dhaka. She is always affectionately calling me ‘Beta’, I just love that, and when she asks about my kids, sounds like she really means it. She had also deposited her brood in various private schools during her husband’s pre-tenure vagabond days as a professor. I hope Shanu and Shama, my sweet little darlings will turn out to be like her kids, successful, good looking, and ….well, willing to put up their parents in times like this.
I tell the taxi driver to head for the Clarke Quay. I am in the mood for hummus and the Marrakesh serves a decent plate along with their chicken cooked in fermented lime, topped with olives and dried apricots. It always cheers me up. After that? A bit of window shopping at the Hilton arcade, and maybe have tea there. Rabbi must have come back from hi morning swim, and probably will be downing more whiskey then he should have; then he has all these ‘meetings’, a combination of gossips, back-biting, strategizing their return, and more business plans. Lately there have been too many bottles of Johnny Walker lying about around the suite. Need to have a talk with him, a bit of moderation cant be that bad. He has already opened up two companies, not only to siphon the money into businesses, but also to get the resident visas that make their stay ‘official’ and long-term. Oh forgot, supposed to drop by at the real-estate agent’s office and look up some more properties. So far I have refused to make any choices, like admitting that our exiles are permanent. Rabbi is, thank god, totally happy with my delegated role as the house hunter, otherwise I would have been forced into the role of a housewife all over gain, catering to these hordes of bhabis in their diaphanous saris. Well, Mrs. Halim showed up in a skirt and a top the other day, but she looked more like her house-keeper at her hotel floor. And Halim Bhai with his loud Hawaiian shirts and dyed moustache, they make quite the pair. I like them though, with their off-the cuff remarks that border on political incorrectness and their constant for the perfect ‘Deshi taste’ (the taste of home) in all they eat. But, hey that’s another story. I wanted to take a few courses on nursing at the Yuba College, just for the heck of it, but hubby objected. Why should his wife ‘do’ nursing???? He suggested that I take some courses on finance, but what on earth for? He is there for THAT. Now he is suggesting a trip to Bali for the weekend, but I wanted to see the Angkor Wat. Ever since I took that art history course on Asian arts and architecture back in college, I have been enthralled by it. But no great hotels close by and therefore it was vetoed. I am craving for company, someone who notices my existence and talks about the world in general. Should I give Atef a call? I still have his pen in my purse…the very thought of it gives me the shivers.
Atef, oh Atef, he is some piece of work. Of mixed Indian and Middle Eastern descent, dark olive green eyes, light olive skin, lean and tall, with a head full of sexy long curls, with a body that is definitely toned for hours at a time at the gym. Both Atef and I were waiting at the VIP customers’s lounge at the Citibank while Rabbi was inside, with his ‘personal banker’. He wanted me to sign something and sent out this form, but I needed a pen, and out came a MontBlac out of Atef’s pockets.. Unlike Rabbi who treats the pen like a status symbol, always poised in his shirt pocket, he even carries a separate pen for his more mundane needs, Atef’s has seen some use, no doubt, full of scratches and even a bite mark. Goodness, a MontBlanc that gets chewed. He had flashed me a quick smile while he had forwarded the pen nonchalantly towards me. When the coffee service came, he jumped at it, asking whether I took cream and sugarand some small talk followed. He apparently represents his father’s business interests in Singapore. A bit later I was given his business card, and mechanically I gave mine, that stated my name, cell number and the name of the hotel. Initially he assumed that I worked there and asked my position. Visibly embarrassed and somewhat blushing, I just said that my husband and I ‘lived’ there. Flashing a quick smile, he looked towards where Rabbi was in and asked me what he did. I just tell him, ‘business, I suppose’…Thank god Rabbi just walks out at that very moment and I introduce him to Atef.
A few days later Atef calls and invites the pair of us for lunch. Rabbi naturally refuses and doesn’t even bother to ask what or where was the location. So, I show up myself, not without much morose that the spouse cannot join….Turns out the lunch is at Hua Ting at Orchard Road. The place is fabulous, the Cantonise cuisine is to die for, and the pleasant company, so divine…. Before I knew it, the ‘lunch’ has lasted three hours, have been informed in detail of each other’s family all over the globe, both of our mother’s penchant for ethnic looms, the love for live pop concerts. Rabbi and Atef shared the common passion for fast cars and Atef was particularly enthusiastic about the debut of the Grand Prix in Singapore in a few more months and apparently has already ‘bought’ a box. After dinner we strolled on the streets, looking at the various stores selling brands from the world over. It was tea time. Atef invites me to the Marina for tea…
It turns out Atef lives on a boat, a yatch to be exact, a smooth 80 feet schooner. I kind of guessed that he was well off, but this was totally unexpected. Initially wary of climbing onto it, I was somewhat reassured when a turbaned Sikh butler and a matronly Malay purser appeared on the deck to receive us. The purser Mrs. Abubaker, turns out to be his Amah from his early days and apparently have been looking after Atef since his early teens. She looks at me with very keen, not exactly disapproving, but curious eyes. Maybe there will me a passing remark about her to Atef’s mom later sometime. Earl Grey and buttered scones were followed by petit samosas and bite-sized pastries. The interior exuded charm and sophistication that she has only seen in movies and magazines. A bit later Atef offered his chaufer driven car to drop me off at her hotel. A total gentleman…damn.
That was two weeks ago. Since then there has been other invitations, all declined, but their phone conversations have definitely become longer, to the point we were teasing each other about their families, clothes, money, and even their looks, almost in a childish way. The Boloshoi Ballet was in town and he has tickets, but I decided not to. Why feed the rumour mill fodder with the whole town crawling with ‘us’. What I need to focus and get out my head was the brief brushing of his hand against mine in front of the chinese jade store while pointing at a piece. It had sent shivers down my spine but he was totally oblivious to this briefest of encounters. Anyway, better ask Rabbi about their dinner plans. He is ‘busy’. He is always busy lately, boozing, now he has taken up poker and has ‘discovered’ Scottish malts. He tells me to pick up some paracetamol from the corner store. How much cash do I have?
The pen is still there, with that bite mark staring at me…
My heart is beating really fast... I bring out the cell and call Atef…..
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