Story 1
The Unordered Flowers
The flower lorry from the highlands reaches the sheds at a quarter past midnight, and it has never once been late in the forty years Mak Esah has been there to meet it. Lorries change. Drivers change. The quarter past does not. She believes the mountain itself dispatches it, the way a body sends its blood, without being asked and without expecting thanks.
Tonight the driver is new. She can tell before he opens the door, because he parks a full metre short of the bay, the way they all do their first week, afraid of the dark gap between tailgate and dock. He climbs down into the lamplight, twenty-two at most, still wearing his jacket zipped to the chin as if the highland cold had followed him down the mountain and might be waiting to get him.
“You must be Mak Esah,” he says. “They told me to find the aunty who checks the manifest before she says hello.”
“Then give me the manifest,” she says, “and afterwards we can be friends.”
The sheds around them are filling with the night’s first commerce. The flower market before morning is a bourse like any other, only better perfumed: the temple buyers come at one for marigolds and lotus, the hotel men at two for whatever photographs well, the wreath makers at three, quiet and courteous, because their customers cannot complain and so they have only their own standards to answer to. Prices are argued in a shorthand of raised chins and small insults, settled with pencil stubs, and honoured absolutely. Mak Esah has seen millionaires argue over fifty sen and then pay for a stranger’s whole order because the stranger’s daughter was getting married. That is the flower trade. The margins are thin and the meanings are enormous.
