Huffing and Puffing

Not something you see every day here, a Scarf on her lonesome taking deep, bite-sized puffs like she really meant it up on Onan corner. Chubby early-thirties had to be Indo; pink blouse and patterned red head-cover. Coming up subsequently to the Fries stall something in the brief exchange—given from her side it looked and fielded rather blankly by the lad serving—made the woman brighten and smile broadly when she turned away to leave. Raw bad skin, perhaps mid-thirties and fetching beyond. Have you seen a single Scarf puff like that and blow up cloud around herself like in a magic show? In fact has there been a single puffing Scarf here of any description in Geylang Serai over this long stretch? Malaysia and Java there may have been. There certainly never was such a one back in days past in Spotty among the émigrés on the Great Southern Land, not likely. Our Pere up in the village on the first visit, during the coffee in her dingy room at Radonici, surprised by taking a “stick” (as they are called here in Sing.) in her mouth and striking a flare that lit up her dark interior with the hearth in the corner. After the catastrophe of her brief love affair with the man who would shortly become her brother-in-law, it was little wonder. Here this one too might not have had any luck in matters of the heart.