At 7 AM, the knock came. Three sharp raps. Not Arjun's knock. He knocked like he was asking permission. This knock was counting what was missing. "Lina? Arjun? The boy said the bar is short."
Mr. Chew. The owner. He kept the hotel like he kept his books - every lime, every clove, every hour accounted for. Lina sat up fast. The cot sheet had left a line on her cheek. Arjun was already moving, pulling his t-shirt straight, eyes on the door, then on the windowsill. Two glasses. One bottle. Lime rinds that weren't supposed to be upstairs. "One minute, boss," Arjun called, his voice deliberately rough with sleep. Lina found her batik shirt, his hand found her wrist - that small scar under his thumb. "Leave the glasses," she whispered. "Take the bottle."
Double meanings started before breakfast. Inventory wasn't just downstairs. She slipped past him, barefoot still, hair hastily tied. He watched her go - the way she could switch back to being the waitress who never asked for help. The door opened a crack. Morning heat rushed in. Downstairs, the bar played innocent. Chairs still up from last night. The red emergency light was off. By daylight, the hotel malaya bar was nothing more than old wood and peeling paint. Mr. Chew was at the counter with his clipboard. "We had twenty limes yesterday. I count sixteen. Cloves - open packet, barely used last week, now half."
Lina didn't miss a beat. She picked up a cloth. "Arjun made a new batch of the tamarind last night. For testing. We used extra."
"Testing." Mr. Chew looked at her sleeves, pushed up, then at the stairs where Arjun was coming down, too casual, holding a rag that was too clean. "Two glasses missing from the shelf," Mr. Chew said. Arjun poured water, not looking. "One broke in the blackout last night. I cleaned it.
Other - Lina took it upstairs to drink water. Rain night, boss, thirsty."
It was a bad lie. Lina never drank water upstairs. Everyone knew that. Mr. Chew wrote something down. He didn't look up. "In my hotel, people pay to disappear for a night. But my staff -" he tapped his pen, "- my staff doesn't get to disappear. I always do inventory. I always know what was taken."
He left the clipboard on the bar and walked out. The bell over the front door jingled. Lina exhaled. Arjun's hand found the small of her back, hidden by the bar counter. "What did we take?" she whispered. He leaned close, his mouth near her ear, where no clipboard could count it. "Enough to be short tomorrow, too," he said.
The morning after a night like that always has two clocks.
The first clock is the one on the wall, above the fridge that hums too loud. It said 7:12 AM. Its second hand stuck every eleven seconds and then jumped. Mr. Chew never fixed it because, he said, "Time also needs to rest."
The second clock is the body clock. Lina's was still set to the cot. To the grey light through the green louvers. To the way the cot had finally stopped creaking when they found the right way to fit. Her cheek still held the line from the sheet. Her hair still smelled faintly of rain and of Arjun's second shirt, which she had used as a pillow for ten minutes while he watched her sleep like a man afraid she might change her mind.
She tied her rubber band tighter. Three times around. The way she always did. Ritual as armor.
Arjun's hand was still on the small of her back, but only for a second more, because Ah Lan chose that exact moment to crash into the kitchen door with a rattan basket of kangkong that was dripping water onto the black-and-white tiles.
"Wah! Morning you two already here?" Ah Lan was sixty-three, wore her hair in a bun so tight it pulled her eyes, and had been frying Hokkien mee at the Hotel Malaya since before Arjun was born. She missed nothing and pretended to miss everything. "Lina, you wash choy sum. Arjun, you cut limes. But where got so many limes yesterday? Now sixteen only. Mr. Chew counting like counting gold."
Lina moved. That was what saved her. Movement. When you don't know what to say, you work. She took the basket from Ah Lan. The water was cold.
Arjun took the chopping board. Sixteen limes left. He lined them up. Four by four. Like he had been taught in National Service to line up his boots. He cut the first one. The smell hit - sharp, clean, honest. Nothing like last night's tamarind smoke, which had been complicated on purpose.
Mr. Chew had left the clipboard on the bar. That was the worst part. He hadn't taken it with him. He left it there, open, like a test.
CLIPBOARD, 5 MAY 1978, handwritten in blue Bic:
Limes - 20 -> 16 (4 missing)
Cloves packet (new) - half gone
White Horse cigarettes - my own - 2 missing from my desk, but never mind, probably rats
Bar glasses - 24 -> 22 (2 missing)
Tamarind paste (kitchen) - 1 kg -> 600g
Gula Melaka - 1 block missing
Whiskey - bottle House Pour – low
Lina read it over Arjun's shoulder. Her breath caught at "Whiskey - low." That was his private bottle? No. House Pour. The cheap one Mr. Chew gave to customers who didn't know better. Arjun had used it to top up his tamarind whiskey when he ran short in February.
"We used it for testing," she whispered again, quieter this time, not for Mr. Chew, but for herself, to remember the lie.
Arjun didn't answer. He was looking at the line that said "Tamarind paste - 1 kg -> 600g." That wasn't them. Or not only them. Ah Lan used tamarind for her Assam Laksa on Thursdays. But yesterday was Thursday and the rain had been so heavy no customers came. So why would Ah Lan have used 400g?
Someone else had been taking inventory too, but not writing it down.
At 7:30 AM, the first ferry horn blew across town, faint but unmistakable, from Weld Quay. The 7:30 from Butterworth. Arjun's shoulders did a small, involuntary thing. Every time he heard it, he did that. Like a dog whose ear twitches at its name.
Lina noticed. She always noticed.
"You okay?" she said, in Tamil, so Ah Lan wouldn't understand. "Neenga okay-va?" Her Tamil was terrible, Kuala Ketil market Tamil, learned from Indian aunties who sold flowers. But she tried, and that trying was the whole point.
He smiled, surprised. "Okay," he said. "Just... my mother takes that ferry on Fridays. To go to Penang market. To buy dried chilies. She always takes the 7:30. Because the 8:00 is too crowded."
Lina stopped washing. Water dripped from her hands.
"She's here? In Penang?"
"No. No. Not today. I mean... she would. If she came. She used to. Before." He shook his head. The lime juice stung a cut on his thumb he hadn't noticed until now. "I haven't... I haven't told her where I work. She thinks I'm in KL. My cousin told her I'm in KL working in a big hotel. With air-con."
That was the story they had agreed on. His cousin Mani from Mak Mandin, who took the spare parts shop job Arjun refused, had covered for him. "Arjun in KL, auntie, big hotel, E&O," Mani told Kamala every time she asked, which was every Sunday after temple.
Lina dried her hands on her apron. "Arjun."
"What?"
"You should write that letter. Today."
"I will," he said, automatically. The same "I will" he had said upstairs, meaning it then, meaning it less now that daylight made everything accounting.
"No. Today. Before inventory tonight. Because if you don't, you'll just become good at disappearing. And Mr. Chew is right. Staff doesn't get to disappear."
She said it gently, but it landed.
Mr. Chew's system was simple and cruel and effective. Every morning at 7 AM, inventory. Every evening at 11 PM, inventory. If you were short, you paid from your wages. If you were short twice in one week, you got a warning. If you were short three times, you were out. He had fired a boy last year for taking two eggs. Not because of the eggs, he told Arjun later, "Because if a man will lie about two eggs, he will lie about his whole life."
Arjun had never been short before. In fourteen months of carrying ice, of making tamarind whiskey in kicap bottles, of saving the good limes for customers who tipped, he had never been short. Until Lina.
Or rather, until he and Lina together decided that some things were worth being short for.
"Boss counted cloves," Lina said, looking at the clipboard again. "We didn't use cloves last night."
"I did," Arjun said, quiet. "For you. I put cloves in the tamarind last night. Extra. Because you said you liked how it smells when I smoke the gula. Remember? Downstairs? You said it smells like your grandmother's kitchen in Kuala Ketil during Chinese New Year."
Lina stared. He remembered that? She had said it at 10:47 PM, between orders, while balancing three plates. She hadn't thought he heard.
The bar door banged. Mr. Chew was back from his morning walk to the kopitiam where he bought yesterday's Sin Chew Jit Poh for ten cents cheaper. He had his reading glasses on his head. He looked at them, at the limes, at the clipboard he had deliberately left.
"Ah, good. You read my book," he said. “So you know you owe me.”
He picked up the clipboard. He crossed out "Limes - 20 -> 16" and wrote "Limes - 16 (use properly today)." He crossed out "Cloves - half gone" and wrote "Cloves - remember to close packet, humid."
He looked at them over his glasses. His eyes were small, tired, kind in a way that would never admit it was kind.
"You think I never count missing glasses before?" he said, in Hokkien, then in Malay, then in English, for full coverage. "In 1963, a couple from Ipoh stayed three nights. Every morning, one towel missing. I thought, wah, how sweaty this couple. On fourth day, I find out the woman pregnant, she takes towels to make baby blanket. She too shy to ask. I let her take one more. I write in book: 'Towels - 1 - for baby.'"
He tapped the clipboard with his pen.
"Inventory is not about punishing. Is about knowing what people need but cannot say. You understand?"
Lina's throat tightened. Arjun looked at the floor, at his own bare feet. He was still barefoot from upstairs. He had forgotten shoes again.
Mr. Chew looked at Arjun's feet. He looked at Lina's hair, hastily tied, a little crooked. He looked at the stairs that went up to the storeroom that was not supposed to be a room. He had owned this hotel since 1941. He knew every creak. He knew which creak was the first, near the head, which was the second, in the middle.
He sighed, the long sigh of a man who had taught his mynah bird to say "No rooms" because saying it himself was too tiring.
To Be Continued:
DISCLAIMER
This work is a work of pure fiction. All characters, names, incidents, dialogues, and locations including Hotel Malaya Bar, Mr. Chew, Lina, Arun, Shankar and all its regulars, staff and patrons are entirely fictitious and products of the author's imagination.
Any resemblance or connection to any actual place, whether still standing today, renovated, demolished, or bombed and destroyed during the Second World War, is purely coincidental.
Any resemblance to any person, whether alive, dead, buried, cremated, or committed to the sea, is also purely coincidental and unintentional.
No identification with actual persons, living or deceased, or with any existing establishment, is intended or should be inferred.
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