Sugars by Sumitra Singam

Your mother and brother don’t know what to do with your sugars. On a summer’s evening, the air heavy with your loss, they bring them to me in a box. Icing sugar in a Tupperware, as if you’d packed it as a snack for yourself. Soft brown sugar in a glass jar with a metal lid. White sugar in a purple tin with a picture of cigar wafers on it. Molasses in a plastic jar, black and threatening. Golden syrup. Little pellets of palm sugar, indented at the top like you’ve pressed your thumb into them.

I see you earnestly measuring these sugars out. Adding butter, flour, love. Your hands always had a cake blossoming out of them.

These sugars are your legacy. I am to transform them into caricatures of you, bake them in an oven at 180 degrees Celsius for 30 minutes, and pull you out, fully formed. Alive again.

I cannot bear the white sugar in its purple tin. It demands a paper crown, party blowers. I give it away to someone who will measure spoonful into their tea, stirring clockwise. They will drink your essence and be fundamentally changed by it.

I bake the molasses into banana cake, and immediately cry at its loss. I wonder if I am cannibalizing you. This thick viscosity may have held some secret spirit of you, and I might have lost the chance to reconstruct you with some future scientific discovery. People eat the cake and exclaim at the taste. It pulls them into a circle, and they are happy for a moment. That was your skill – to pull people together. To remind them, with sugars, of love.

I put one pellet of palm sugar into the rendang I make. An entire shoulder of lamb slowly disintegrating into succulent pieces of meat. How fragile flesh is. Perhaps you would have sat with me to eat, poured a jeweled glass of wine. But then again, the chemo would have spoiled the taste for you.

The brown sugar I sprinkle across my day – in my tea, a pinch into rich pasta sauce, a tamped down cup in chocolate chip cookies, gooey at the centre. You would have enjoyed the cookies with coffee. You would have placed one on a plate, your chair pushed away from the table so you could cross your left leg over to relieve your back. You would have asked me, dunking the cookie into your coffee, how I was, even as the cancer was eating you.

One autumn day, when the air seems to hold a pause in it, I mix the golden syrup with melted butter, watch as baking soda froths in it like life. I add rolled oats, flour, coconut and make Anzac biscuits. I don’t know if you liked them. I make them anyway. I pack one or two in my daughter’s lunchbox and she tells me how they were ace.

The icing sugar remains. It is too pure and sweet; there is no hint of salt or bitter aftertaste. I cannot use it yet. It will wait, in its clear Tupperware. A reminder that you lived once, that you loved with your recipes. This is all I have to hold now. The shape of the absence of these sugars.

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