Hwang Sok-yong - Princess Bari

Grandfather Abdul smiled and didn’t say anything. Luna looked at me and opened her hands wide, as if to say she was at a loss for words. Ali snuck a paper bag out from under the sink and hid it beneath his shirt. We all said goodbye to Grandfather Abdul and headed down to the basement. The moment we stepped inside our flat, Ali put his right hand to his chest, bowed his head and apologized.

“I can’t smoke or drink in front of my grandfather,” he explained.

Luna said to me: “I don’t care if you don’t care.”

“I don’t care,” I said.

Ali poured us a little of the whisky he’d brought. Then he lit up a long Pakistani cigarette made with whole-leaf tobacco. He looked happy as he gulped down the whisky. Luna drank too, grimacing as she did so, and I tried a sip only to break into a coughing fit. Ali seemed completely different away from his grandfather.

“I didn’t think I’d make it through dinner!” he exclaimed. “I can’t drink so much as a single drop of beer around him.”

Luna sipped the whisky and said sarcastically: “It’s better to be British. Muslims have too many things they’re not allowed to do.”

“I am British,” Ali said.

Luna snorted.

“The asshole who beat me every day was born here too,” she said. “I don’t care if someone is Hindu or Muslim or whatever. I don’t trust anyone.”

Ali didn’t look offended. He poured himself another glass, but this time he sipped it rather than downing it all at once.

“My father and grandfather don’t get along. But my mum worries about him a lot.”

“Don’t you visit him often?” I asked.

Ali cocked his head to one side.

“Maybe about twice a month,” he said. “I prefer living by myself, but whenever I do come to visit, I feel more relaxed afterward for some reason.”

Luna took out a pack of cards and we played at the table. I don’t know if Ali lost on purpose or if he just had bad luck, but we won about thirty pounds from him. Luna and I rejoiced at having earned some fun money for the weekend. We played until late into the night, and when it was time for Ali to leave I followed him to the door so I could lock it behind him. At the door, he whispered to me:

“You have the day off tomorrow, right?”

“Yes.”

“Would you like to take a drive out of the city with me?”

Clueless as to Ali’s feelings for me, I turned and shouted to Luna: “Ali wants to hang out with us tomorrow!”

Ali shook his head, and Luna barked with laughter.

“Hey stupid, he’s asking you out! Why would I want to be a third wheel?”

Finally I understood and shut the door in his face. I looked through the peephole. Ali stood there for a while and then slowly turned and went back up the stairs.

“You’ve got an admirer,” Luna said teasingly. “This is where ladies like us have to be careful.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“That big elephant of a man is coming after you!”

Ever since I’d had that vision where my spirit split from my body, I’d stopped fearing any man. Uncle Lou, the chef from Shanghai Chinese Restaurant, had guessed what happened to me, but Uncle Tan and the employees of Tongking probably had no idea. I was still just a poor little thing. I wasn’t surprised when my first period started so late, back when I was working at the restaurant. Xiang had warned me early on about a lot of things I would need to know, and as far as I was concerned I’d already become a woman long before that.

I did not take that drive with Ali to the countryside, but I did come to think of him differently, with those big eyes and that big body of his. Men and women are not the same, of course, but Grandfather Abdul’s warm and caring nature made me feel that my grandmother had been reborn and returned to me. Ali, on the other hand, was just an oversized, immature boy — and maybe that was why I was so comfortable with him from the get-go.

I had been working at Tongking for several months before Auntie Sarah, one of the salon’s regulars, requested a foot massage. At first she kept glancing over and watching as I massaged the feet of a customer sprawled out on the reclining salon chair, but as soon as I was done she motioned to me with her chin and waved me over.

“I’ll have one of those,” she said.

She was an attractive, dark-skinned woman with a high nose and big eyes, and had probably been a great beauty in her younger days. I found out later that she was mixed — Sri Lankan and white. She practiced Christianity, like her English father.

As usual, I held her long, thin feet in my hands and closed my eyes for a moment. In my mind’s eye I pictured the various twists and turns her life had taken, though none were violent: a white man walks out of a house while a woman holding a child leans against the door and cries. Another man appears; he’s black. Then the woman, who is alone again, is working in a hospital. Her daughter, now a toddler, crawls between the other children in a nursery.

“Why haven’t you started yet?”

At Auntie Sarah’s urging, I began the massage. She looked exhausted. I put everything I had into kneading and tapping her feet, plucking the joints of the toes and applying acupressure. She soon fell asleep. I closed my eyes again and pictured her as a grown woman, dating and breaking up with different men. Whenever a customer fell asleep we made a point of not disturbing her for a while, even after her session was complete.

Auntie Sarah always dressed well, wore expensive jewellery and tipped generously, so we regarded her as a wealthy woman completely out of our league. Whenever she came by, Tan treated her like royalty. But when I touched her feet, I realized that she wasn’t all that different from the rest of us.

Luna and Auntie Sarah did not get along at all. Luna hated the way Auntie Sarah, despite being a fellow person of colour, looked down on her and treated her like a servant. But I made a point of being extra polite as I washed Auntie Sarah’s feet, trimmed her toenails and cuticles and scraped the callused skin from her heels. When she woke, I served her warm tea and ended the session by massaging cream into her legs and feet and wrapping them with a warm towel. She tipped me ten pounds. Other customers usually only tipped us in change; at most you might receive a five-pound note.

As we began to get more customers looking for foot massages, Luna, who’d learned the basics from me, began giving them herself, along with a Vietnamese woman named Vinh who had quickly picked up the technique from watching me. Auntie Sarah became one of my regulars. She rarely spoke to any of us directly, but one day she asked Uncle Tan for a favour after paying her bill.

“I’d like to chat with the girl for a moment. Would that be okay? I’ll pay for her time.”

“No problem, madam,” he said. “You can talk to her as long as you want.”

Tan smiled at me and motioned with his chin for me to go with her. I followed her out of the shop. She looked around, her brow furrowed, and headed for a café across the street. She lit up a cigarette.

“Where are you from?” she asked.

I hesitated, then told her I was from China. She nodded.

“It doesn’t matter where you’re from as long as it’s not Thailand.”

I had no idea what that meant, but just sat there quietly.

“I’d like to introduce you to someone. Naturally, I will speak with your employer about it, but let’s just say I’m hiring you for a job. All you have to say is that you’ll be working at my house. If you promise not to say anything stupid, I’ll see to it that you earn some good money.”

“Yes, madam.”

Auntie Sarah puffed away on her cigarette, deep in thought for a moment.