Eggs and Ketchup: A Christmas Story

He sat in a corner of the coffee shop, his right hand cradling a porcelain cup of warm buttery kopi-o. As he sipped the thick beverage sweetened with condensed milk, he could feel it sloshing down his throat and warming his cold innards. He flipped through the thick stack of papers before him – pages and pages of scribbled mathematical equations and pencil-drawn diagrams. A torrential downpour had just passed, and though the late morning sun was already shining outside, there was a residual drizzle pattering against the greenish glass window-panes. It was rather quiet and as the owner of the coffee shop walked by, he asked why business was slower than usual that day.

“It’s Christmas Eve, y’know. Most people have left town by now. In fact, I’m going to close my shop early today and have Christmas dinner with my family.”

He smiled and said nothing. He stirred his drink thoughtfully.

“Here, sir. Your usual order of two half-boiled eggs.”

He nodded amiably and reached for the cracked yellowed porcelain saucer decorated with arborising green fronds painted on the rim. The two brown-shelled eggs jiggled and nudged against each other as he dragged the plate towards him.

Family. He had not heard that word for some time. It was a word that he would have preferred to forget.

“Hey, Jason! Pinnochio!”

He turned around to see the class bully, Giant, walking down the school corridor. Giant was his nickname, given thanks to his large chubby frame and his physical resemblance to the character in the Doraemon cartoons.

“How’re your fake mommy and daddy? Have you become a real boy yet?” Giant sniggered.

“They are my real parents! How can you say that they are fake?” Jason retorted angrily. He leaned against the row of lockers, arms akimbo.

“Haha, can’t you tell? Do you look anything like them at all?”

Jason looked at his hands. That was true. His parents were fair with dark brown eyes and tousled wavy black hair. The hands that greeted his gaze were black and shiny.

“Betcha joints creak when you move, Pinnochio. My mom says you were picked up from a rubbish dump.” Juno, another boy, joined in the taunting.

He felt his jaw stiffen. He clenched his fists.

“Be careful not to lie, Metal Boy, or your nose will grow long like a carrot!” Giant laughed and snorted. Juno joined in the laughter.

“Bye kiddo!” the two boys ran off as the school bell rang, signifying the end of the recess period. Jason did not return to his class. He slumped against the steel wall of the nearest locker. Could it be true? Fake parents? Did they truly love him or was he just a toy or a pet to them?

He stepped off the school bus that evening, opened the door of his home and headed straight for the kitchen. Mum was there, stirring a pot of chicken soup.

“Mum, I need to ask you something,” he said, placing his school bag on the tiled floor.

“Yes, sweetie. What is it?”

“Do I really belong to you? Why do I look different from other people? Juno said that I was picked up from the rubbish dump,” he asked plaintively.

“Son, you know that we love you very much,” his mother said. Just then, his father came into the kitchen and looked at Mum.

Dad sighed and looked away, “Martha, perhaps it’s time we tell the boy the truth.”

Mum said nothing.

“Come here, Jason,” Dad said as he pulled up a chair.

It was then that he learnt the story of his birth. Or so-called birth.

On a swelteringly humid Saturday afternoon, Dad was walking home from the bus stop after work when he heard a strange whirring sound coming from the local rubbish heap. His curiosity piqued, he stepped off the path to take a look. It was then that he saw the robot. It was buried under a heap of dead leaves, apple peelings, rotting vegetables and empty mineral water bottles. It did not seem to be functional, its eyes a dull red with no glow left and its left hand rotating aimlessly in an obvious malfunction. Being a robotics professor in the university, Dad decided to try and fix the robot and brought it home.

He had forgotten all about the salvaged robot till Mum came across the black metal humanoid contraption in the cluttered garage one day, coated with dust.

“What’s this, honey?” she asked as she dusted it off and brought it into the living room. Dad turned and looked at her, cradling the broken robot in her arms. She came and set it upon the marble-topped table. They looked at the metallic figure together.

“He looks so adorable, Raj. Where did you get him from? Do you think you can fix him?” she asked hopefully, her hand in Dad’s.

Dad turned Jason over.

“Yes, I believe so, dear. Picked him up at the dump on Jalan Kasturi. Why?”

“It’s just that, somehow, he appeals to me. He looks like he needs a home and a family. Poor little guy. Dear, you know how much I want a kid but we haven’t been able to have one so far?”

“Martha, you know that’s not important to me,” Dad murmured, caressing Mum’s hand.

“But we’ve tried so hard for so long with no results. Perhaps, he’s God’s gift to us? A son,” she said.

“A son. At last,” Dad echoed, touching the welded burnished plates lovingly.

Knowing the truth did not make it any easier. The school environment is not an easy one to thrive in for children who look different from their peers. Jason spent most of his time in school reading books in the library and solving mathematical equations. He had no friends. He could not participate in any sporting activities or playground games as his physique and stiff joints did not allow him to be physically active. However, his teachers found that he had an affinity for mathematics and he found himself in the accelerated class, and from there on, he was a freshman at Harvard at the ‘age’ of ten. University was the same. Unable to communicate with his human peers, he never joined in the rowdy parties and pub crawls, preferring to while away his free time writing scientific papers in the safety of his cramped apartment. He soon acquired a reputation as a lone genius. An eccentric brilliant scholar who was a social outcast. 

Jason took the eggs and cracked them against the edge of the saucer. The semi-translucent egg whites slid out followed by the wobbly liquid golden yolks. Without thinking, his left hand reached for the yellow plastic bottle of ketchup and squirted the bright red sauce onto his eggs. He was just about to stir the ketchup into the mess of egg when he paused. It suddenly dawned on him that he had learned to eat his eggs that way from his Dad.

“Pass me the ketchup, Martha,” Dad would peek at Mum from over the edge of his morning newspaper.

“It’s on the table. Get it yourself,” she would say.

Jason would watch as Dad drowned his breakfast egg in ketchup and slurped it down.

“Oh come on, Raj. All those colourings and preservatives can’t be good for you,” Mum would often complain as she watched him eat. And all Dad would do in reply was to grin mischievously.

It had been five years since he had any contact with Mum and Dad. Despite the academic success and various accolades he had received, he often questioned why they had revived him and thrust him, an outsider and alien, into the human world. Perhaps he would have been happier, rusting away among the garbage and broken glass bottles. Among inanimate objects. His own kind. If only Dad had not cleaned him up, installed his memory chips, redesigned his organic energy processor in order to allow him to enjoy human food and invented the emotion chip for him...

He sipped the mixture of tangy tomato-flavoured sauce and egg slowly from the saucer. Then he retrieved his mobile phone from his side compartment (which he used as a pocket) and scrolled through the list of contacts. He found the entry marked ‘Appa’. His finger hovered over the lime green ‘dial’ button for a split second; then he pressed down upon the button and held up the phone to his ear.