Everest

B a lli K au r J as w al

That was the year my brother decided to become a mountain

climber.
He announced it at dinner one night. “It’s my resolution for
1993,” he declared proudly and then he described his training
programme: he would climb all twenty-five storeys of our HDB
block each morning before school and each evening before going
to bed. This was the start. Once he was able to endure the climb
without feeling short of breath, he would find a more challenging
structure to scale.
“You won’t find a mountain in this country,” my father said.
“The closest thing is that hill in Bukit Timah.”
“Let him,” my mother said quietly, except both Mahesh and
I could hear her. “It’s important to have goals.”
My father ate the rest of his dinner in silence. This was
normal in our house—our flat, I should say, because whenever I
referred to it as a house, my father would ask, “Where’s the roof ?
The yard?” Roofs and yards were features of storybook homes;
they were the stuff of my father’s dreams. He had been successful
in moving us from India to Singapore but his sights were set

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further west: Toronto, London, Chicago. Singapore was meant
for transit purposes only but we had been living in Ang Mo Kio
Avenue 10 for nearly two years.
“I don’t have asthma, do I?” Mahesh asked. “I wouldn’t be
able to climb if I had asthma.”
“No, that’s Meena,” Mum said.
“I don’t really have asthma,” I said. “Just a little bit.”
“There’s no such thing as a little bit of asthma. You have a lot
of asthma.”
“Mahesh,” Mum warned.
“Do I have any conditions?” Mahesh asked. He looked
genuinely worried.
There was the slightest hesitation before Mum said, “You
could climb Mount Everest.” She didn’t say no, you’re perfect,
because he wasn’t. He had been held back a year in school and
when he read, he saw the words in reverse. God became dog, slap
became pals.
After dinner, Dad announced he was going for a walk and
extended no requests for companions. We stayed at the table as
Mum cleared the dishes. “Oh my DOG,” I mocked Mahesh as
payback for his comment about my asthma. “Do you want some
PALS or a SLAP?”
“Shut up,” he shouted. He rushed at me. Mum hurried out of
the kitchen and held him back as his fists rose. I scampered into
our shared bedroom and locked myself in. Mum knocked loudly
on the door. “We don’t shut doors in this house,” she called.
“Open up and say sorry to Mahesh.”
When I opened the door, tears were streaming down
Mahesh’s face. Mum’s eyes were narrow with disappointment.
She was holding a long plastic ruler. “You know he’s sensitive
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about his learning problems,” she said. “Why are you so mean?”
I held out my palms and got three smacks on each one.
Rubbing my sore hands afterwards, I wondered who was more
sensitive about his learning problems—Mahesh or my parents.
At age two, he had been left sitting alone on the bed and he had
rolled off the edge, cracking his skull open on the tiled floor. The
doctor had given him stitches but told my parents to watch out
for problems in his speech, and later on, his reading and writing.
It seemed an unfairly prolonged punishment for a moment of
carelessness. Every sign of his slowness resounded like a bell
of doom and his rare attempts at success were granted Mum’s
most enthusiastic and absolute blessing. I preferred my father’s
cynicism. Before we went to bed that night, I reminded Mahesh
of Dad’s words: You won’t find a mountain in this country.
Our dining room looked out onto a HDB estate so newly
and neatly planned that it looked exactly like a builder’s model.
Singapore was like that—it looked like plans, whereas India had
been a tangle of overlapping blueprints. When we first arrived,
we only had one mattress and the whole family crowded together
on it to sleep. In the middle of the night, I would wake to find
my cheek pressed against the cold tile floor and I would go out
to the balcony where a strong breeze swooped through the flat.
In the adjacent block, brightly-lit windows revealed lives played
out in miniature—the man who leaned out the window to sneak
a quick cigarette, two schoolgirls who polished their Bata canvas
shoes and then propped them against the balcony railing to dry,
the couple who kissed chastely each night while their in-laws’
shadows loomed in the background. In the flat directly opposite,
a cat daintily patrolled the window’s ledge and paused to stare
right at me, or so I imagined.
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In the mornings, Dad was always the first one up. He would
find me asleep on the balcony and pick me up, gently laying me
down on the mattress where he had fallen asleep. We all took
shifts like this because the sparseness of the flat was oddly stifling.
Rather than provide more room, it restricted us to a single area of
comfort, beyond which was nothing but empty space. Outside,
the cogs of our Ang Mo Kio estate were in full motion: the
cacophony of vendors’ cries at the wet market mingling with the
frantic chirps of caged oriental white-eyes, children doing flips
in the community pool and the MRT gliding across the sky like
a banner advertising progress. Inside, our flat began to resemble
a home despite Dad’s insistence that we would move soon. With
each of his paycheques, there was a new furniture addition, and
by the end of our first year in Singapore, the flat was complete.
This bothered Dad. He was determined that we wouldn’t settle
for a life of HDB dwelling, of peering tentatively at the tops of
trees from the sixteenth floor rather than living amongst them.
Mum strove to establish a sense of belonging here. Rarely leaving
the flat, she opted instead to spend evenings indoors, sewing
drapes to match the coverings on the rattan sofa. She ordered
paint samples even though the landlord had strictly forbidden
any changes to the colour of the walls.
~ kitten. I smiled shyly at her, wanting to pet the kitten as well.
Mahesh began training the day after his announcement. He left
the flat and returned twenty minutes later, gasping for breath. Fat
beads of sweat rolled down his flushed face.
Dad couldn’t help looking impressed. “You made good time,”
he said.
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Mahesh nodded and then vomited all over the floor.
I yelped and jumped back. “It nearly touched me!” I shouted.
“You’ll have to take it slow the next time,” Dad said to
Mahesh that night as he tucked us into bed.
“I need to be at the highest skill level by August next year,”
Mahesh said. “Fit to climb Mount Everest.”
Dad seemed to understand this urgency. He, too, had been
known to set deadlines for the things he wanted to achieve.
“We’ll be settled in London or New York by the time Meena is
finished with primary school,” he often said.
In the hot soupy atmosphere of Singapore afternoons, it
was natural to dream of other places where snow fell gently and
leaves turned golden in autumn. I began spending my free time
wandering around the neighbourhood on the pretence of running
errands for Mum. I was actually reimagining our neighbourhood,
filling the canals with water to turn them into lakes and replacing
the buildings with mountains. “Good girl,” she said when I asked
her if I could go to the provision shop on her behalf.
It was while buying a tin of Milo one afternoon that I
befriended the girl who worked in her grandmother’s provision
shop. The shop was in the void deck of a nearby slab block,
which looked like our tall point building laying on its side. At its
entrance, the girl sat cross-legged, stroking the belly of a white
She scooped it up and handed it to me so suddenly that when
I reached out to receive it, I dropped the Milo tin. It rolled off
slowly towards the concrete chess table. The girl scrambled to her
feet and retrieved it while I rocked the kitten gently in my arms.
“You stay where?” the girl asked.
“Block 539,” I said. “You?”
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“This block. 537. My floor is the highest. Seven.”
I thought it would be boastful to tell her that I lived on the
sixteenth floor, but she looked up at my block and asked, “Yours
go up to how many?”
“Twenty-five,” I replied.
She gestured proudly at the shop behind her. “People
come here buy my grandmother curry puff. Best in Singapore.”
I had tried the curry puffs and they were quite good, spiced
with turmeric and packed with sardine and potatoes. Her eyes
darkened slightly as she gazed at my building. “People go your
block to jump.”
“Jump?”
“Tallest block. I saw it last time. One man jump from the
top. Got police everywhere. Blood everywhere. His head like a
watermelon, like a bomb—pah! Exploded. They cover his body—
my grandmother say lucky we never see his face, otherwise his
ghost come to visit us.”
The kitten squirmed in my arms. I adjusted my grip so she
would rest more comfortably but she began wiggling frantically.
“You can let her go,” the girl said. “Cat always land on their feet.”
I began lowering the kitten to the ground but she leapt
before I was ready to let her go. “See,” the girl said as the kitten
scrambled away. “Always.”
~ glaring white heat. Our HDB estate chugged along like fine
During the March holidays, Mahesh amped up his training
routine by climbing the stairs in doubles. I was tasked with timing
him at the peak—the twenty-fifth floor landing. Although I
hated to admit it, his stamina was increasing. There were some
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days when he arrived at the top barely breathless, although his
face was always red and his shirt soaked with sweat. One day I
suggested that he probably took the lift for the first ten floors. I
didn’t actually believe it but his reaction was worth it. Eyes wide
with indignation, he screeched, “I didn’t.” His voice echoed across
the corridor. The door to one of the flats flew open and an elderly
man poked his head out. He shooed us away with his hands
and then ducked behind the door. When he appeared again, he
was carrying a straw broom and sweeping it vehemently in our
direction. Mahesh and I giggled and bolted down the stairs to
our home.
Our laughter came to an abrupt halt when we noticed Dad’s
shoes outside our flat. We opened the door to find him on the
phone in the living room, his anger just barely contained. “You
need to give me a concrete reason for rejecting the visa. I won’t
get off the phone until you do.” I knew that the rejection was
from England because a week before, Canada and the United
States had both said “no”. England had not been Dad’s first
choice—cities like New York and Toronto were more promising
to him—and this made the rejection sting even harder. Mum
emerged from the kitchen and directed us to our room with her
finger over her lips. Passing her, I noticed dark rings under her
eyes.
When school started again, the days crawled slowly in the
machinery. For a few weeks, the void deck of Block 537 was
inaccessible because it hosted two Chinese funerals, and then
a Malay wedding, and then a pasar malam. My mother smiled
at the orderliness of the night market’s arrangements—leaflets
announcing its arrival were slipped under our door. “They’re
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advertising a market,” she said delightedly. “In India, these
things just happen.” The cheer in her voice was false; we could all
recognise the weariness that underlined her words. Every laugh
was an effort towards convincing Dad to accept Singapore as
our final destination. They argued constantly behind shut doors,
which were no longer forbidden.
I was glad to have an excuse to go to Block 537. The girl’s
description of my block as a suicide tower had offended me.
People came to 539 to live, not to die. But I could not escape
thoughts of the man who had jumped. I knew about suicide—in
India, a couple from our building had leapt in front of a train
together when their parents forbade them to get married. The girl
had died instantly but the boy had lived, suffering brain damage
and the loss of his legs and right arm. Prolonged and throaty
moans had regularly floated into our flat and nobody knew what
he was mourning—his lost love or his own life. A person who
jumped into death had to be guaranteed it, because what if, like a
cat, he landed on his feet?
Mahesh continued to climb the stairs. His calves became
defined and his gaze purposeful. He fell asleep early every night
and woke up with a spring that I resented, since my adjustment
to waking was always gradual and torturous. Then one afternoon,
Mum received a phone call from Mahesh’s form teacher. He was
doing poorly in all his subjects, she said. He needed to apply
himself more. “He’s applying himself to an important goal at the
moment and when he becomes the first Singaporean to climb
Mount Everest, you will all see,” Mum informed her. She hung
up and then burst into tears.
I was surprised that Mum considered us Singaporean
already. Singaporeans were the people milling around Ang Mo
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Kio, wearing singlets and black shorts, buying 4D tickets and
milk tea in packets. They were the ones who painted their faces
red and white and stood in line for National Day Parade tickets.
They were outside, filling the blank spaces of the town council’s
blueprints. We remained bound to this building, our dreams now
narrowly defined by its walls.
~
The argument happened during dinner one night where we were
all present. This was rare—for one thing, Mahesh preferred to
train in the evenings when the weather was cooler but before
eating, to avoid repeating the vomiting incident from his first
climbing attempt. Dad stayed at work till very late and arrived
home by the time we were in bed. The only consistent dinner
attendees were Mum and myself, so she didn’t bother cooking
anything elaborate. Peanut butter on toasted Gardenia bread was
a regular item on the menu. But that night, everyone was in.
Dad came home in an unusually cheerful mood and Mahesh had
suffered a cramp during his morning training session so he was
taking a break. He sighed periodically and bemoaned the fact
that he was not climbing the stairs. “Even one missed session
sets you back.” He said it loudly for everyone’s benefit and it
irritated me.
“Your muscles are working fine. You just don’t want to train
today.”
“Shut up. You don’t know anything about mountain climbing.”
“It’s not a mountain,” I said. “It’s a block of flats. It’s not even
close to Mount Everest. Nothing you climb in Singapore will
prepare you for mountain climbing.”
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“Mahesh, Meena, enough. Don’t ruin our family dinner,”
Mum said. We seethed at each other across the table. “Now, what
should we eat?” Mum asked.
“Chicken rice,” I said before Mahesh could trump me with a
suggestion of Hokkien noodles, his favourite.
Mum looked around. “Everyone okay with chicken rice?”
Mahesh looked like he might protest when suddenly, Dad
spoke up. “We’re going back to India,” he said.
Mum turned to him and blinked rapidly as if her eyelids
were suddenly more capable of language than her lips. “What?” I
asked on her behalf.
“I applied for a job with a company in Bangalore and they
offered it to me this afternoon. The company is small but it’s
growing, and in the next few years, they are planning on expanding
in the US. They already have people looking at strategies for
developing the business in Chicago and Boston. It means going
back to India for a while, but it’s a more certain possibility that
we’ll be able to relocate elsewhere afterwards. Our visas won’t
be rejected if the stay is sponsored by employers.”
“When did you apply for the job?” Ma asked. She still
looked baffled.
“Three weeks ago. I did the interview over the phone last
Thursday and…”
“You didn’t tell Mum?” Mahesh asked.
“No, he didn’t bother,” Mum said bitterly. “Even your own
children think you’re an insensitive fool,” she informed Dad.
“Come on, Reshma, don’t spoil a celebration.”
“Celebration?” Mum asked. “What are we celebrating? This
isn’t what anybody wants. We want to stay in Singapore.”
“We can’t,” Dad said. “There’s no future for the kids here.”
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“There’s a safer future here than anywhere else,” Mum
retorted. “Look at this country—no drugs, no crime. What kinds
of people will our kids be mixing with if we go to America?”
“You know full well why we can’t stay here,” Dad said.
“If we go to India I’ll have to find a place to train,” Mahesh
said. “There are more mountains there for sure, but…”
“We won’t be in India for long,” Dad said perkily. “Maximum
twelve months and then they’ll move us to the US.”
“We’re not going,” Mum said.
“We have no choice,” Dad replied.
“Somebody’s already climbed Mount Everest in the US,”
Mahesh wailed. “I want to be the first one.”
“We can get help here. You haven’t even looked into the
options,” Mum argued.
“What options? He’s doomed. They’ve held him back in school
and now he’s about to fail another year level. He’s slow, Reshma,
he’s slow. He can barely read and his writing hasn’t improved. In a
bigger country, there will be more opportunities for him.”
I stared at the rubber placemat in front of me. Mum had
bought these from the night market. Each one depicted a hand-
drawn set of kitchen utensils. I could not picture these placemats
on a table anywhere else besides this table, in this flat in Ang Mo
Kio. If we went back to India, nothing we had here would look
right in our new place.
“Meena, go and buy the chicken rice,” Mum said, pressing a
ten-dollar bill into my hand.
I grabbed Mahesh’s wrist and pulled him to his feet. Mild
surprise registered on my parents’ faces—I didn’t usually reach
out to Mahesh to take him anywhere, but I didn’t want him
sitting there, listening.
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In the lift, Mahesh stared sullenly at the lit numbers as we
descended to the ground floor. I walked briskly, forcing him to
keep up with me. “My leg,” he said.
“Your leg is fine,” I snapped. I marched to the hawker
centre where proud new signage declared: “Chicken Rice Voted
Number 1 in Singapore!” The line was long and winding, and
within the boxy confines of the stall, a perspiring hawker darted
around trying to keep pace with the orders. We said nothing
while we waited, and then, in the distance, I noticed the girl from
Block 537 holding her cat. He had grown; his limbs dangled over
her arms. I waved at her but she didn’t notice me.
“Who’s that?” Mahesh asked.
“My friend,” I said, even though I didn’t know her name.
We finally got our chicken rice packets and made our way
home. Again, my movements were brisk. “Let’s not let our dinner
get cold,” I suggested sunnily, hearing Mum’s voice in mine.
Mahesh lagged behind, scraping his feet against the pavement. I
busied myself with a new game—I walked with my eyes closed
until reaching a particular destination. Provision shop, I told
myself in my blindness, as if instructing a taxi driver. I opened my
eyes to find myself face to face with the ice-cream fridge outside
the local Econ Minimart. I stayed alert while crossing the road
and then tried again. The bank. There it was, the POSB. Tailor.
Stationery shop. Tuition centre. 7-Eleven.
I was aware of Mahesh walking behind me. I stopped at the
7-Eleven and when he caught up, he went inside. “What are you
doing?” I asked Mahesh as he headed straight for the magazine
rack. He picked up a celebrity gossip magazine and opened it to
the centre page. Then he stared at the words.
“Can you read it?” I asked softly.
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“Just the first few words.”
The headline was “Inside Hollywood: Age of Innocence
Costume Exclusive” behind an enlarged picture of Winona
Ryder in an overflowing Victorian dress. There were many hefty
words that were beyond Mahesh’s ability, so I pointed to “age”.
He shook his head stubbornly, dismissing my help. He settled,
finally, for the words “inside” and “costume” but his voice was
thick with disappointment.
Why couldn’t he read? We wouldn’t understand it until
months later, when—at his school’s insistence—my parents sent
him to a learning specialist. The prospect of identifying a cure for
Mahesh convinced my father that we should stay in Singapore a
little longer and he reluctantly turned down the job offer in India.
Some unfamiliar and alarming terms involving neurological
disorders were bandied about but eventually dismissed. The
problem was eventually identified: a severe learning disability.
The phrase was frightening, “severe” suggesting irreparable
damage, despite the specialist’s insistence that the condition had
not been triggered by Mahesh’s fall. Gradually, this knowledge
eased my parents’ burdens. No longer speculating on how they
could repair the past, they began looking toward the future with
less anxious urgency.
On the walk home, we didn’t know any of this yet. We
reached the void deck of our block in silence. Mahesh pressed
the lift button but I had an idea. “Let’s climb to the top of the
block,” I said.
“I can’t. My leg. I’m not even wearing proper shoes.” He stuck
out his foot as proof; a rubber sandal dangled from it.
“Slowly,” I said. “I can’t go up the stairs fast like you anyway.”
Mahesh smiled. This was what his Mount Everest plan was
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all about—the ability to do something extraordinary when a

simple task eluded him. He limped to the staircase and began
his ascent. I fell behind him, staying to my mission to go slow
and steady but even then, I was struggling for breath by the tenth
floor. “How many more?” I asked.
“We’re halfway there,” Mahesh called back. “Don’t give up.” Margarine and the
His voice had taken on the certainty of a leader.
We climbed and climbed, leaving the housing estate below us. Syrian Refugee Project
The absurdity of living so high in the air, so far from the ground, K oh C hoo n H w e e
had occurred to me on many an evening when I stared out the
balcony window but rising slowly like this, I felt just how strange
Every time I read the news headlines nowadays about the Syrian
our living arrangement was. Coming to terms with strangeness
refugees, I wonder about Marjorie. It is an utterly selfish thought.
was not something that the town planners of Ang Mo Kio could
The Syrians might hate me for it, if they could somehow read
have prepared us for. They had carved their paths and plotted an
my mind (or be bothered to, with everything that’s happening in
estate so diligently that a blinded girl could navigate it with ease.
their lives) since Marjorie’s life prospects are quite the opposite
This is not living, Dad always said, but we were living, weren’t we?
from theirs. Maybe they won’t hate me, since Marjorie did say
We were here, making the world’s most impossible terrain out of
that they are a very kind, very innocent people. She had travelled
concrete steps and steel railings.
there once upon a time, before the war. Maybe they would just be
A pain shot through my chest and gripped my sides. “Wait,”
quietly happy inside that some of us from this end of the world
I gasped. I sat down on a step on the sixteenth floor. Mahesh had
still think about them, and still get upset by news about what’s
disappeared. I listened to his footsteps clapping above me, racing
happening to them. Most probably, though, they have too many
only against himself. He would climb to the roof if he could.
problems in life to think about us, the lucky people in the lucky
He would continue stepping steadily until he was no longer
countries with the fortuitous histories. I wonder if Marjorie
insignificant, until he was dancing on the clouds.
thinks about us anymore.
I remember when she first walked into our classroom after
morning assembly one day many years ago. It was in the middle
of the term. In fact, it was in the middle of the week—Wednesday,
because Nabilah had to fetch her younger brother from school
on Wednesdays and I normally accompany her so we can all

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