Does Cake Make You Happy?

I grinned at the beginning pages of Yeoh Jo-Ann's 'The Impractical Uses of Cake' (2019). The author described protagonist 35-year old bachelor Sukhin Dhillon taking to a morning run with little enthusiam. Apparently he has to lose his paunch and get fit. Ahhhhh... I feel him. We’ve all picked up running now, it seems. Many of us do short runs twice a day.

As the story went on, I was pleasantly surprised by how enjoyable it is. No I’m not bored at home. Hahaha. The book is well paced and flows coherently; not too many distracting peripheral characters; the narrative is peppered with loads of humor and each chapter ends with cool punchlines. It's a good read. (Reviews here, here and here.)

Sukhin Dhillon lives alone and teaches literature at a junior college. He visits his parents and helps them vacuum the family’s odd collection of boxes. He literally has only one friend who is a fellow colleague, Dennis the Math teacher. He leads a quiet and orderly life till he ran into a homeless person living amongst cardboard boxes in Chinatown. Said homeless person called Sukhin by name. She is Jinn, an old schoolmate, an old girlfriend who broke his heart, and he seems not to have fully gotten over it.

He gets reacquainted with Jinn. He isn't sure why Jinn is now happily homeless. From happily living under a pile of boxes in a Chinatown alley, she 'moves' to Punggol Park. She sleeps out in the open. She doesn't own a cellphone, and is a vagrant. She still loves to read. He begins to visit her daily, but he doesn't always find her because she wanders around the area. After spending some time together, which included picking out leftover vegetables at Tekka Market and joining other volunteers to cook in a common kitchen for the needy and the homeless, and also participated in organizing a Christmas party for them.

There’re plenty of desserts mentioned, pineapple tarts, pineapple cakes, kaya and scones, peanut cookies, barfi, butter cake, and of course sugee cake. Especially his mother’s fabulous version of sugee cake. Sukhin seems to prefer dating a woman who likes cakes. After a nondescript ‘date’, he made a “mental note to ask women about cake before considering anything even remotely resembling a date.” But this is a side thing to lend a rounder perspective to our protagonist. It's not really about romance or love, I feel, although the entire story pokes fun at folks asking others if they're married and such.

“You don’t like cake?” Sukhin didn’t like how incredulous he sounded. While he wasn’t at all out to impress her, he didn’t want to come off sounding—of all things!—like some sort of weirdo who judged people on their dessert preferences. Even if he was. And what exactly was worng with cake? This unpsoken question hung in the air for a few minutes— for Sukhin. He finished the slice of lemon sponge, frowning, his thoughts jumping from cake as dessert to cake as a kind of connective tissue between people. His people, anyway—obviously, there were people out there who didn’t see the point of cake, who didn’t see and therefore could never enter the community of cake, and who would never be his people.

The whole point of cake in the title, is about Sukhin also picking up baking. He first baked for Jinn. He baked butter cake, orange chiffon cake, etc. In the process, he decided to give away an upside-down pineapple cake to the school canteen drinks stall's Mrs Chan (who has made him good teh on time twice a day for the past decade), and that, which earned him high praise from her. Then as he experimented, he began baking because he seemed to enjoy it the steps, and the science of churning out cakes as good as him mother's.

At the end, this isn't a love story. The appearance of Jinn and her 'disappearing' from her family and the world at large in order to be at peace with herself made Sukhin also question his own life. He questioned himself on why he wants this life as a teacher, and when faced with a promotion that he doesn't exactly want, he knows what he really wants. The ending, while open to interpretation, is as unambiguous as it can be. He had become a teacher to prove a point to his father who wanted him to be a doctor. Now, he is finally free to pursue what his heart wants. We don't know what it is. Writing, perhaps. It's a lovely way to conclude the story.

Sukhin pushed his chair away from the desk, stands up and looks around his office. It's only a box—how has he never seen this? He thinks about all the boxes he hacked apart and sliced into bits and put together again to make the rain machine, and he feels the urge to take up an axe a saw a chisel and do the same to this one. Turn it into a rain machine, turn everything in it into rain, add bits of carpet for texture, throw in a couple of chairs for comfortable viewing. He will tell the Tay: Thanks for giving me and my career so much thought, but I've decided to go in for installation art instead.