World Without Men.

Chapter IV
(A summary)

(Aunt's business acumen that I never inherited.)

You must be born with the gift to be able to convert everything into numbers. Too bad I didn't inherit this mathematical gift from Aunt but instead, and I don't know where it came from, I have this natural ability to convert everything people say into pictures. Sometimes into moving pictures. Sometimes in short television commercials so funny that I had to excuse myself to go some place quiet so I can laugh myself silly.

Aunt used to say I could be one of the leading batik artists in the country if only I put my heart into sketching, drawing, coloring, and adding final touches on the top layer of a design we had worked on for weeks. At a young age you didn't see things the way adult did. Adults are different, and especially Aunt. She had the ability to see the big picture and the big picture to her was always mathematically inclined where I had no part in it.

I was wrong of course. She tried to instil the spirit of entrepreneurship early in my life by asking me to sell coklat nissang at school. Looking back, I believe it was part of her plan to get me to be interested in mathematics, counting, adding, multiplying, dividing or whatever, so that I would come home with a report card that she could be proud of. But I was hopeless. To me numbers were images in moving pictures complete with cowboys shooting each number down either with a .45 Colt, or a Winchester rifle. Sometimes even the Red Indians joined in to shoot the numbers with arrows. And I could hear the Red Indians riding away after having successfully attacked the numbers, leaving them dying like cigarette butts in the dirt sand of a prairie.

Will you please pay attention! Aunt said while I got loss in my imagination. There are a hundred coklat nissang here. Get it? How much will you bring home if you sell these at five cent for 5 pieces? In my mind I saw coklat nissang lining up by a huge white wall ready to be shot by Mexican revolutionary soldiers, and those soldiers go around making so much noise in their poncho and sombrero hat wide as a stadium. A senorita was at a cantena drinking tequila and she was in a white cotton dress with the kind of skirt that twirled in the wind. Yes, she got flowers in her hair.

Oh, you are just hopeless!

Of course I wasn't as hopeless as you think because I brought home money although I had no idea how to work out the profit but that didn't matter because Aunt let me keep the money I made and I'd spend it to buy toys at Kedai Cik Gaduh at the junction of Jalan Sungai Penaga and Jalan Tambun. When I got home with the toys Aunt would start on me real good with me not having any sense at all how to value money that I spent it as if money could be made by dreaming away about cowboys and indians. Next day I'd sell more coklat nissang that in the end I became quite good at simple calculation like for a ringgit you could buy quite a lot of apples from kedai Leong Thye where on Saturdays Australian mems came in a flock to buy groceries in their beautiful summer dresses and hats going about calling out to their children in a singsong voice, here Tommy, come here Tommy. Those were the first English words I knew very well how to say in Australian accent but somehow it didn't sound quite the same after the dream I had of a girl with flowers in her hair who worked in a saloon that in the middle of the dream I woke up to find my pyjama all wet with something I never knew I could produce by dreaming.

One time Aunt took me with her to Golok to buy kitchen utensils people said were much much cheaper there than anywhere else on earth. We went by bus with a group of women fond of stuffing their money in their brassiere because they said it was safer there than any place in the world. I can't remember what Aunt bought but I remember very well that the shopping spree lasted all day and all she bought for me was a pair of red jeans that I had to wear it underneath my pants because she said that way we won't be taxed by the border guards. I wore the jeans like this until we were safe from the border guards, taking them off in the aisle of the bus in full view of the middle-aged women in their seats with ToTo piled up to the chin, their chubby faces looking all so rotund and delicious like coconut buns fresh out of the oven.

We got home late in the night but Aunt, in her usual fashion, was up all night to do the maths while I slept on her laps thinking of the trip which I didn't like one bit because it was no fun to go shopping with chubby middle-aged women who talked too much and had an advice for everything including how I should wear my jeans. It was a bad buy because the jeans shrunk to a size that would fit a baby monkey quite nicely for a performance in a circus.

Business is quite simple really. You buy something cheap, and sell it slightly more so you can make a profit. It's a simple concept but of course somewhere along the line you will have problems like suppliers not coming in on time with the delivery, and the transport charges suddenly go up. And traders changing their mind at the last minute. All this will cause everything you plan to go haywire and you've got to have a cool head to handle the situation. Of course all the time you've got to keep your eyes on the numbers so you won't make a loss that will leave you penniless. It's not a big problem with stuff like batik sarung, gold, kitchen utensils and other non-perishable items because you can keep this for a long time without they going rotten. But it is totally different with nekbat, nissang pulut, pulut panggang, coklat nissang and buahulu. That's why Aunt insisted on payment the next day for these whether or not you managed to sell everything. She didn't extend the credit for people she didn't know because I learnt early that people can make promises after promises to pay but in the end vanished without a trace.

You know something? I miss Aunt that tears are welling up in my eyes. Guess I am not so macho afterall when it comes to memories of Aunt whom I loved very much. She'd kill me if she knew I am going to let out this cry like a sissy. I can hear her, men don't cry, don't ever ever cry.