I nodded.
“Whenever I look at someone’s feet, I can tell where they’ve been.”
I added that I could also tell whether they were sick or healthy. I began to rub Uncle Tan’s feet. A red aura appeared to me around the meridian point at the centre of the bottom of his foot. When I pressed it, he let out a low sigh. I repeated the eight steps of the basic foot massage and massaged about half the acupressure points of the foot, which numbered more than one hundred.
“Your kidneys are unhealthy,” I said, wiping the beads of sweat from my forehead.
When Uncle Lou translated this, Tan shook his head and whistled. He stood up, took a ten-pound note from his trouser pocket and handed it to me.
“Take it. You did good work.”
Lou translated again. I bowed my head in gratitude and took the money. The two of them spoke for a long time. On the way back, Lou told me: “He wants to hire you. Didn’t I say you have talent?”
I began working at Tongking the very next week. Uncle Tan had me move in with a Bangladeshi woman who worked at the salon. Luna was three years older than me. She was only twenty, but had already had two kids. She’d married at sixteen and become pregnant right away, but after a few years, she left her husband and came to London. After she and I became friends, she showed me the scars on her back and thighs from where her husband had beat her.
As usual, luck was on my side. There were low-income, high-rise apartment buildings near the salon that were subsidized by the district office, but the conditions were terrible. Most of the flats were tiny and consisted of only a single room, or a room with a living room-slash-kitchenette. Children ran wild through the hallways, and the flats were crammed with up to ten people each. Most of the tenants were immigrants, but Luna lived on a street lined with row houses in a borough called Lambeth. It was just as poor as the other neighbourhood, but quieter and safer. The whitewashed brick buildings, which were so old I had no idea when they’d been built, looked clean from the outside. Each row house was three stories with a half-basement; it was in one of these half-basements that I came to live with Luna. A flight of stairs at the entrance of the building led down to her flat, but our kitchen opened onto a small terrace so it didn’t feel that much like being underground.
As this place became my new world, I should probably introduce the other people who lived there. As soon as you came down the stairs, you saw a narrow hallway with doors on each side facing each other. Each flat was a long rectangle divided into a kitchen and a room that served as both bedroom and living room. A Nigerian couple lived across from us. The husband worked at a gas station, and the wife was a part-time housekeeper.
The first-floor flat on the right was occupied by a Chinese cook and a Filipino janitor, who were roommates like Luna and me. The flat on the left had a Sri Lankan family living in it. They ran a small restaurant nearby. Up on the second floor was a Polish family. The husband did home repairs and ran seasonal work teams staffed with labourers from his hometown. His wife and daughter worked together as shop assistants. Living in the flat to the left of theirs was Abdul, an elderly man from Pakistan. His was the only name I remembered, because Luna had taken me to meet him right after I moved in.
Grandfather Abdul, who managed the units in our building, wore a traditional tunic that buttoned all the way up to his throat and came down to his knees. His beard was white, and his brown skin looked as though it had been darkened by the sun. When Luna introduced me to him, he prepared tea for us that smelled like mint. He was always reading from a thick book, his reading glasses perched low on his nose. Only later, after I’d picked up some English and was able to converse with him, did I learn that it was the book of Islamic scripture, the Qur’an.
The landlord, a forty-something Indian man, came by on occasion to visit Grandfather Abdul. He was always sharply dressed in a suit and tie, and had never once spoken to me or even so much as greeted me. The first time I bumped into him out front, I thought he was from the immigration office and nearly turned and ran. Grandfather Abdul always called him “Mr Azad”, even though the landlord looked young enough to be his son.
Oh, I almost forgot about the people who lived on the third floor. I’d thought that the Chinese chef, the Filipino janitor and I were the only East Asian faces in the building, but up on the third floor on the right-hand side was a married couple from Thailand who were there as students. An elderly Bulgarian couple lived across from them. I think that about covers it as far as our building and my world were concerned. My days mostly followed the same pattern: I woke up at seven, prepared a simple breakfast to eat with Luna, went to English classes that started at nine and studied for three hours, ate a sandwich for lunch at the English school’s snack bar or somewhere else nearby and then headed over to Tongking, where I worked from one in the afternoon to nine o’clock at night. The place where I studied English was referred to as a “visa school”: people attended in order to secure a residence visa. It cost half of what the other schools charged, and most of the students were women working in bars or similar types of establishments. They would show up only half the time, and barely paid attention when they did. Attendance would suddenly skyrocket at the beginning of the week that classes were being assigned, and then it would peter out again. There were a few students who showed up every day without fail, but the teachers didn’t make much of an effort.
At the salon where I worked, Uncle Tan and four of the women who’d learned nail art gave manicures and pedicures to customers, while I was there to give them foot massages either during or after their treatments. Customers who were short on time turned down the massages, but we started to get more and more who came back just for one, after having had a taste of it. On Uncle Tan’s recommendation I taught Luna how to give foot massages as well. It only made sense, as she was helping me to study English. Being roommates with Luna, who’d grown up in England, helped me to pick up the language much faster than when I was in China. Talking to customers all afternoon in the salon was also a big help.
One day I left work first and arrived home only to realize that I’d forgotten to get the key from Luna. I rummaged through my bag and stamped my feet in frustration outside our door; there was nothing else to do but run back up to the first-floor entrance and ring Grandfather Abdul’s doorbell. His voice came over the intercom, asking: “Who’s there?” I told him I was Bari from the basement, and that I’d forgotten my key. The door opened and I headed up the stairs. He was standing outside his door, watching me from over his reading glasses.
“Come on in,” he said.
When I stepped inside I saw a man sitting in the living room. He stood up to greet me. He was very tall, almost as tall as the floor lamp shining up at the ceiling, but it wasn’t just his height that was imposing. He also had broad shoulders and long arms. His curly hair was cropped short, and his large eyes were open wide in his brown face, the whites showing around the irises. At first I was too afraid to look directly at him. Later I found out that he’d played cricket when he was in his teens, at school.
“Rest here for a bit,” Grandfather Abdul said. “When Luna gets home, she can let you in, right?”
“Yes. Thank you, sir.”
“You probably haven’t eaten yet. Would you like a piece of pie?”
I was too afraid to sit down in front of the strange giant, so I stood there timidly and said: “No, thank you.”
“Oh, this is my grandson, Ali.”
Ali stooped from the waist and extended his big bear paw of a hand to me.
“Pleasure to meet you.”
His voice was deep and husky. I put my hand out too. To my surprise and relief, Ali grasped the tips of my fingers lightly and then quickly released them. I sat across from him. Each time our eyes met, he grinned at me. His smile, with those big, even teeth of his, was so friendly that I relaxed and began to smile back.