BY Mr Alfian, who is a Singaporean Malay poet,playwright, quite a figure if you know who he is.

Arithmetic------------
His handphone beeped. He recognised the number. It should have registered as a name, but he had erased the name from his phone book a long time ago. The message was simple. It read:
‘how r u?’
When they became lovers, three years ago, they became accountants. It began one day when after a dinner she raised the issue of how uncomfortable she was that he kept paying for their meals. “I’m earning, you know,” she told him. She also told him that they shouldn’t fall into the trap of rehearsing the script to an over-determined, gendered relationship. It was not his duty to be the giver; neither was she naturally designated as taker. The dream of equality was a possible one, and all it required was scrupulousness on both their parts.
So after each meal, they would compute the cost and divide the expenses into half. It struck him how serious she was about protocol when she hunted in her coin pouch for one-cent coins.
Once they allowed the laws of numbers to enter their lives, a mental balance sheet was drafted. If an archaeologist were to find evidence that their relationship once existed, proof of it would lie not in a trunk of letters but a folder of receipts. The currency expanded from meals to mutual gifts, and later on other transactional elements which had thus far evaded price-tags. If it was discovered that he was the one who had initiated most of their phone conversations, this would be redressed by her sending him an SMS greeting the next morning before he woke up. If she had waited for him on three consecutive occasions, for five minutes each, then it would be fair for him to expect that the next time she would make him wait for a fifteen-minute tally.
It was inevitable that their quarrels would be over credit and debit, as their relationship progressed to a point where every act, every deed, was quantifiable. At times he held an image of her biting a coin to test its alloy, at other times she had a vision of him with pan scales in his hands. ‘Usurer’, she would call him playfully, and he would retort with ‘cheat’. When he labelled her a ‘loan shark’, she arched an eyebrow and purred, ‘recalcitrant’. Their conversations, in various degrees of affection and malice, were littered with phrases such as ‘it’s your turn’, ‘I did my share’, ‘you owe me’ and ‘why should I always be the one?’
Unspoken, but somehow understood between them, was the idea that by performing such obsessive calculations, they were warding off the shadowy auditor who would show up at their door, on cue, in the event of a separation. She recalled a nasty break-up where her ex-boyfriend sent her an email listing every single present he had given her, and making the pompous allegation that she had stolen a whole year out of his life, as if accusing her of embezzlement. On his part, he was familiar with how gifts from a former lover often undergo rapid devaluation after the latter’s departure: like a bankrupt’s possessions priced way below market value on the auction block. What they both knew was that separations were messy affairs—there was much stock-taking to be done, claims to file, ownerships to assert. In these cynical times, wasn’t the bulk of divorce proceedings focussed more on equitable settlements, rather than the celebration of one’s liberation?
Better to practise fastidious book-keeping, so as to ease the damage wrought by the violence of partitions. Their strategy was to ensure that neither of them was indebted to the other. Love, for them, was not about pardoning the beloved for not reciprocating in equal measure. They knew that such true forgiveness was impossible, and what one pretended to overlook for the sake of keeping peace would only return with vengeful clarity in the future. Instead, love was about insisting on one’s dues. Removing obstacles between them was equivalent to removing outstanding balances.
He looked at the message on his handphone screen again. It was difficult to decipher her intent; if he could remember correctly, he had not spoken to her since their break-up a year ago. If it had been sent by someone else, he would have replied automatically, attaching a similar inquiry out of politeness. But this ostensibly casual message struck him as being too calculated, its throwaway abbreviations (why couldn’t she type it in full: How are you?) too forced. Suddenly he felt as if the weight in his hands was not of his handphone, but of those three words. They were as real as newly-minted coins, chunks of amber, cowrie shells.
He considered. It had been a long time since he felt the need to deliberate on his responses. And that was what finally killed off their relationship. They had drained it of all spontaneity. Every gesture was premeditated, assessed for its worth. When they gave things to each other, they concentrated on the weight of the gift, rather than the lightness in the hands when the gift was received. And there were many situations which could not be reduced to the positions of giver and taker. How do you evaluate if one is on the side of a surplus or a deficit when two people are locked in a hug?
There were three words and five letters in her message. His first option was to send back: ‘i am fine’. Three words, but two letters too many. Even ‘i’m fine’ would exceed his quota by one letter. ‘i am ok’ seemed to him to be the most sensible choice: ‘ok’ was an abbreviation, to follow her example with the words ‘are’ and ‘you’. He was all ready to send his carefully-calibrated message before he cleared his screen and typed: ‘I’m doing fine.’
How wrong they were. Love forgives. Forgives immeasurably. Love doesn't keep small scores, erases even the large ones. And he added:
‘How are you?’