The Oddfits (2 page)

CHAPTER 2

Very odd.
Those were the exact same words that Yusuf bin Hassim was to mutter to himself some years later, right after he had discovered the boy. The boy was, in fact, the very type of “other thing” that Yusuf had been waiting for since his return to Singapore. He hadn’t been certain that an “other thing” was going to show up, not by a long shot. In fact, he would have been almost as content if he had left this earth without encountering one of the “other things” he’d had a hunch would one day cross his life’s path. But it turned out that his hunch had been right, and now he was fully content. Very odd the boy was, and therefore, just right. Yet to Yusuf’s profound embarrassment, he hadn’t noticed what the boy truly was right away. In fact, the boy’s oddness, or rather, his oddfittingness, was only the third peculiarity Yusuf had noticed when the boy had wandered wide-eyed into the Tutti-Frutti Ice Cream Shop.

The very first peculiar thing Yusuf had noticed about the boy was, frankly speaking, the fact that he was as blonde-haired and blue-eyed as the weather in Singapore was hot and muggy. Almost all of the Tutti-Frutti clientele were Chinese, Malays, or Indians—identifiably local. The Tutti-Frutti wasn’t much to look at—hardly worth a mention in any of the tourist guidebooks, and too out of the way for anyone who didn’t live nearby. Certainly, no westerners ever came: not tourists, nor the well-paid foreign expatriates who had been sent to represent their companies’ interests in Singapore. Ang Mo Kio wasn’t that kind of neighbourhood.

It was far away from the major attractions, a little too modern to be quaint, and a little too authentic to be comfortable. Business was conducted gruffly and conversation loudly in Hokkien, Teochew, and Hakka. Cheap clothes and bed sheets adorned with Japanese cartoon characters and bad floral prints hung from bamboo poles outside HDB slab blocks. Multicoloured fairy lights were considered tasteful shop and restaurant decor. Here and there blew the ashen flakes of spirit money—burnt offerings for the ancestral dead—and the sickly strong odour of incense wafted around corners and through alleyways, emanating from tiny, garish Buddhist shrines that were tucked in enclaves underfoot and overhead. The bakeries sold pandan bread of suspicious green hues; the “medicine” stores stocked dubious-looking dried herbs and animal parts; the jewellery stores displayed gaudy gold and jade wares against garish red cloth backing; and while the produce and meat sold in the wet markets were undeniably fresh, the floors were, well, suspiciously wet. No, westerners did not venture into these parts. And yet, one day, there came the boy, appearing suddenly and silently and pale as a ghost. Yusuf had been absentmindedly polishing ice cream spoons with a dishcloth, surveying the empty parlour. He had stooped down to put them away underneath the counter. And he had risen to find a boy pressing his little face against the glass of the ice cream case, staring with amazement at the seven different flavours on display.

“Hello, boy,” Yusuf had said by way of greeting. The boy looked up at him with the same wide-eyed gaze, as if Yusuf himself had been a variety of ice cream. Smiling a small, uncertain smile, the boy resumed staring at the tubs of ice cream, the blueness of his eyes intense with longing.

The second peculiar thing Yusuf noticed about the boy was that he was alone. In his experience, westerners living in Singapore tended to be notoriously protective of their offspring, sending them to private schools and keeping them within the confines of the exclusive clubs that defined themselves by country: one for the Americans, one for the British, one for the Germans, one for the Dutch
. . .
When the children did venture out into the “local” areas of Singapore, they were always accompanied by their mothers, or by diminutive dark-skinned maids, or both. And yet, here was this little chap, wandering in without any sign of a mother or father or a maid, or any guardian of any sort.

“Boy, are you lost?”

The boy shook his head, his eyes still riveted by the ice cream.

“Where are your parents?”

“At work,” the boy replied softly.

Very strange,
Yusuf thought to himself. Leaning over the counter, he regarded the boy. And then he noticed the third peculiar thing.

The boy was clearly and unmistakably oddfitting. Oddfittingness emanated from his every pore; it enveloped him like a cloud; it hung on him and exceeded him as if it were a baggy, oversized T-shirt that came all the way down to his scrawny little ankles. The oddfittingness was so obvious that Yusuf was ashamed to admit that he hadn’t seen it until now. He was obviously out of practice.

“Boy, would you like an ice cream?”

The boy looked up at him with an expression that could only be described as mournful. “I don’t have enough.” He stretched out his palm and, lifting it to Yusuf’s gaze, showed him the tarnished pale gold of a five-cent coin.

“Never mind, boy. Choose which flavour you want.”

The boy’s face lit up with delight. After another bout of contemplation in front of the ice cream, he made his choice: yam. Yusuf piled a cone high with two purple scoops and handed it to the boy. In a matter of minutes, the boy had lapped and crunched the entire thing into oblivion.

“Did you like it, boy?”

The boy nodded, licking his fingers to make sure none of the sticky sweetness went to waste.

“Secret recipe.” Yusuf tapped his chest proudly. “Came up with it myself. You see these flavours?” Yusuf said as he gestured at the case. “Yam, chocolate, sweet corn, red bean, strawberry, vanilla, durian
. . .
you can get these flavours from any ice cream shop in Singapore, right?”

As the Tutti-Frutti was the first ice cream shop the boy had ever been to, he couldn’t say. He looked confused.

“Well, you can,” Yusuf affirmed. “But
this
ice cream here
. . 
. the ice cream in
this
shop, your Uncle Yusuf makes them all from recipes he came up with himself. That’s what you call me, okay, boy? ‘Uncle Yusuf.’”

The boy nodded.

That night, Yusuf wrote a letter to his colleagues from his former line of work—a past existence, a different life altogether, it seemed now—notifying them about the boy. He hadn’t written to them since he had retired. He dusted off the lid of the box where he kept his professional writing implements, took out a single sheet of red paper, a magnificent fountain pen, and a pot of peacock-blue ink, and proceeded to tell them of the news:

Dear Former Colleagues,

I hope this finds you well.

Found: One Oddfit.

Age: Estimated eight to nine years old.

Will act when time is right.

Regards, Yusuf

From that day onwards, the boy became a regular visitor to the Tutti-Frutti, and a friendship developed between him and Yusuf. He came in almost every day, and in exchange for ice cream, the boy would help polish spoons, or put glasses away, or wipe the counters, or whatever other chore Yusuf needed help doing. Every now and then, Yusuf would present him with a special sundae—three scoops of any flavour, whipped cream, raspberry syrup, chocolate sprinkles, cookie wafers, a neon-red maraschino cherry, festooned with the brightly coloured paper parasols in which the boy seemed to take a particular delight.

Despite the frequency of these visits, they hardly ever exchanged a word. The boy was naturally quiet, and gave only the most minimal of answers to any questions asked of him. Yusuf was also naturally quiet, and although he was mildly curious about many things concerning the boy, he also felt that there would be plenty of time for such things to be made known. Why did the boy’s parents let him roam unsupervised? Did they know he came here every day? Why wasn’t the boy in school? Yusuf wondered these things every now and then, but he was also a very patient man. There was a right time for everything. It simply wasn’t important to know these things now. Although the way his former colleagues had been pestering him since he’d told them about the boy, one would think that there was no time to lose. They had always been in a hurry. The latest letter he’d received had read, all in capital letters:

INFORM BOY OF THE QUEST.

WHY WASTE TIME?

Yusuf had actually been so offended by this last one that instead of storing it in the bottom drawer of his desk where he had stored all the previous letters, he had crumpled this one up and thrown it into the rubbish bin.

“‘Why waste time?’” Yusuf had repeated angrily. “I don’t waste time. I wait till the time is right. I always did.” Why did nobody else understand that important matters
had
to be handled deliberately and carefully, and therefore, slowly?

Weeks turned into months—one month, then two; three months, then four. The boy still visited almost every day, and each visit was spent in happy silence and the briefest of conversations. After six months, Yusuf finally decided that the time was ripe. It was time to show the boy the Great Freezer. And then it would be time to write to his former colleagues, setting in motion the steps that needed to be taken to secure the boy’s safety and future.

To celebrate the special day (the specialness of which the boy was still ignorant), Yusuf presented the boy with one of the signature Tutti-Frutti three-scoop sundaes, extra sprinkles, extra parasols. After the boy had licked the bowl clean and lovingly tucked the parasols away in his left hip pocket, as was his habit, Yusuf made his move.

“Boy. Want to see where I keep the ice cream?”

The boy nodded.

“Follow me.”

And the boy, full of ice cream and curiosity, followed Yusuf through the wall in the shop’s corner to the Great Freezer.

The Great Freezer would come to be the stuff of legend in the More Known World, where news—fact, fiction, or combinations thereof—was necessarily circulated across the settlements and among the Territories by letters delivered hand to hand and by word of mouth. They would say that the exact dimensions of the Great Freezer were never known, that it had flummoxed all the dimension-measuring specialists, who could only come to one maddeningly imprecise conclusion: that the Great Freezer was, at the very least, magnificently expansive, if not downright preposterously gigantic. Possibly the biggest freezer ever to exist in the entire history of both the Known and More Known Worlds. It was also said that those who had discovered it had found it filled with ice cream—shelves and shelves and shelves and shelves and more shelves of it. And not just any ice cream—it was full of the same ice cream that had been appearing inexplicably every now and then all over the More Known World ever since the first settlements were established. A newcomer would find a small case of it left at his or her front door, or a crate of it would arrive at a provisions store in one of the more out-of-the-way Territories. Sometimes containers of it would appear underneath cots in a poorly supplied sick ward. This, it was said, was the source: the Great Freezer.

What people said had been true, for the truth was so fantastic that it was impossible to exaggerate it. Anyone who would hear these tales in the future would have drooled over the prospect of standing where the boy was standing now. Of all this ice cream, the Known World had only sampled seven flavours—the seven sold in the Tutti-Frutti. In total, there were seven hundred and thirty-six different flavours of ice cream, all concocted by Yusuf himself and lovingly stored here, awaiting their unexpected and irregular distribution throughout the Territories. At this point in time, only three beings had ever seen the interior of the Great Freezer, and two of them were inside it right now.

The boy was always quiet. This time, he was speechless.

The freezer was, predictably enough, freezing. As the boy walked alongside Yusuf through the aisles of the Great Freezer, he marvelled at the white puffs of air coming from his mouth. He had never experienced cold weather before. Goosebumps sprung up all over his shivering arms and legs. Yet he felt the blood circulating inside him warmer, thicker, stronger.

They stopped at the foot of a shaky metal ladder, and Yusuf clambered up its rungs slowly and carefully, retrieved two small tubs of ice cream, and even more slowly and carefully clambered back down. “Look, boy. This one is your favourite.” He pried open the lid of the one marked “Y” to reveal the lavender-hued contents. “See? Yam!”

Yusuf set the tub down and opened the other, marked “SnR.” The colour from the tub bathed their faces in a soft orange, red, and purple light. “This flavour is Sunrise. A lot like Sunset, but backwards and with coffee beans added.”

They continued on, and the boy saw and sometimes sampled a flavour here and there. There was Quiet (translucent but wondrously rich), Darkness (so intensely black it hurt his eyes), Rainbow (colourful and maddeningly elusive), Chocolate (just for familiarity’s sake), Toasty Toes (as implied, warm in the toes, no sensation in the mouth), and Yusuf’s Super-Duper Taste Sensation (hard to describe: bubbly, tangy, zippy). Just as they were about to exit the freezer, Yusuf stopped at one more shelf, opened one last tub, and held it out.

“Boy, this is your Uncle Yusuf’s favourite: Stars. Try it.”

The boy dipped a finger into the container, scooping out a small blob of velvety dark blue and, atop it, a tiny, twinkling, sparkling shard.

As the ice cream melted in his mouth, the boy felt violets and chocolate and warm honeyed peaches and coconut milk and the spine-tingling sensation that the universe was a very, very vast place indeed. As he bit into the shard, it exploded and he felt his eyes and ears and throat aglow with firelight.

“Wow,” the boy whispered. He was quite overcome.

“Not bad, eh?” Yusuf grinned.

“Do
you
make all this ice cream, Uncle Yusuf?”

Yusuf grinned proudly and his eyes flashed. “Yes. All of it.”

Once they were outside, Yusuf brushed the frost off the boy’s head and shoulders and told him, “Boy, that’s just a little bit of what’s to come. I’m sending word tonight. Don’t worry. Things are underway!”