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Roti Time Travel

by Joshua Lim

 

You put a strip of roti in your mouth and chew —

— and now your living room is wreathed in shadows by the angry grey skies outside the windows. Your son crawls across the floor, chasing after the ball which rolls under the sofa where you sit. He looks up at you with large pearly eyes, saliva dripping from his lips. “Appa.”

From the kitchen you hear the clatter of utensils. Your wife is spooning baby food into a container. You attempt to move, but your body is rooted to the sofa. All you can do is stare at your son’s pure, innocent face, wishing you could remain like this forever.

And you feel your hands reaching for your car keys. No, you want to scream, stay. . . but you pick up the baby and call to your wife. “Ready to go? We’re late!”

You stop chewing —

— your living room floods with light —

— you work your jaws on the roti, crushing the strip of oily flatbread between your teeth. Forcing the world to dim again. Burying yourself in the past.

---

You were first introduced to that mamak stall in Petaling Jaya when you were nineteen. The waiter came over as soon as you and your friends sat down.

“Roti Time Travel, tapao dua,” said Arman to the waiter.

You turned to him. “Roti Time Travel? What’s that?”

“You never heard of it before?” said Sandesh.

“No,” you replied. “Is it just roti canai with some crazy ingredient added on top?”

Arman said, “Do you want to try?”

“Okay.”

“Sorry, boss, Roti Time Travel lagi satu makan sini,” said Arman. The waiter nodded and moved away.

You were familiar with the odd names of food sold in mamak stalls. Milo Dinosaur was a Milo drink piled high with enough undissolved Milo powder to give you diabetes. Roti I Love You was just a heart-shaped roti telur with the words “I Love You” written on it with strawberry jam and mayonnaise. Nasi Kandar Basikal had apparently nothing to do with actual bicycles.

“Wait for it to come, you will see,” said Sandesh, grinning.

It arrived, and it looked just like a regular roti canai. You stared at it, trying to identify the specialty. Even the dhal and the curry seemed normal. “This is just roti canai!”

“You haven’t tasted it yet,” said Sandesh. He and Arman were waiting. “Go on.”

You tore off a fragment with your fingers. “Should I dip it?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

You dipped it in dhal, then put it in your mouth. You bit down —

— and you are in a classroom, writing furiously.

You glance up. The clock shows ten minutes left. The whiteboard bears the words SEJARAH KERTAS 2. For the first time you notice that you are wearing your high school uniform. The stress you felt during the exam comes flooding back into your mind, and the words begin to swim before your eyes. You feel the nausea rising and you retch, spit out something —

— and you were back in the mamak stall, your friends staring at you across the table.

“Bro, you okay?” said Arman. He pushed your Teh O Ais Limau towards you. “Did you choke? Have a drink.”

“Nah, he just got a shock,” said Sandesh, still grinning.

You gawped at them. “What the heck was that?”

“It’s Roti Time Travel,” said Arman. “What did you see?”

“I . . . I was taking SPM Sejarah. Last year.”

Your friends both nodded knowingly.

Sandesh said, “Try again with a bigger slice.”

Now you stared at your meal as if it had just turned into a wild animal. The half-chewed mouthful of roti lay on your plate. You cut another strip and put both pieces into your mouth. You took a deep breath before you started to chew, and —

— “He’s open! Go!”

You dash across the field, eyes tracking the football flying through the air, booted forward by your defending teammates. Someone from the opposite team is close behind, gaining ground. There is no one except the scrawny goalkeeper in front of you.

Heart pounding, pulse racing, you jump and catch the ball on your foot with an excellent first touch. You dribble, see Arman dive the wrong way, and kick the ball with all your might . . . straight into the near post.

The ball ricochets into the bushes. You fall to your knees as a collective groan rises behind you. Your pursuing opponent slows down and pats you on the back. “Bad luck,” says Sandesh. You swallow —

— and you returned to the present.

“Better?” said Sandesh.

“We were twelve,” you said, your heart still racing. You could feel your cheeks still burning with the embarrassment. “We were playing football. Back in Ipoh.”

“That’s how it works,” said Arman. “Let me show you.” He measured carefully and tore a tiny chunk from your Roti Time Travel. “The bigger the segment, the farther back you go in time. The magic is all in the roti; the dhal is just there to add taste. If you stop chewing, you come back. It’s that simple.” He waved the miniscule shard on his fork. “See, this size would bring me to six days ago.” He put it in his mouth and chewed. You watched his eyes glaze over for a few seconds, then he swallowed. “Ah, that was useful.”

“What did you see?”

“A business class I had last week. I forgot that my lecturer had given us a new assignment,” said Arman. “I’ve eaten this so often that I’ve mastered the art of estimating how big or small a slice should be.” He sounded proud of himself.

“And that’s why we don’t eat them here,” said Sandesh. “You order takeaway so that you can eat it whenever you want. When you’re studying, when you want to recall something, ah! You cut a piece of Roti Time Travel.”

You stared at your plate and the roti canai on it. You ate a couple more bites to convince yourself that your friends weren’t pulling your leg, then you took the rest of the roti to go.

---

You have not shaved for a week. As you dip your Roti Time Travel into the curry and put it in your mouth, a few drops fall into your beard. You pay no attention, and chew —

— you are sitting at the cramped desk in your old workplace. The clock on your laptop shows the date. A few days too early. By this time you are already an expert like Arman. You work your teeth around the roti, isolating a tiny sliver, and spit it out . . .

. . . now you are strolling along a path lined with willow trees, the gentle evening breeze in your hair and your then-girlfriend’s hand in yours. The familiar, peculiar combination of nervousness, excitement, and happiness swarms into your heart as always whenever you take a girl on a date, but this time it’s  different. There is something special today.

You turn to look at her. She is frowning, the worry lines on her face sticking out worse than usual, halfway through telling you how horrible her bosses have been that day. You listen, and yet at moments you let the words fly past as you take in every line of her features, every loose hair, every expression, every half-faded pimple scar, wondering if you will ever meet anyone like her again.

“You know how to feel better?” you tell her. “You take your frustrations, and do this.” You pretend to crunch something up in your hands, then you fling it far, far out into the sky. Her laughter is music to your ears.

The roti in your mouth has been reduced to mush, but you do not swallow. As long as you keep on chewing, this moment never has to end.

---

Throughout Malaysia, only this particular mamak stall in Petaling Jaya sold Roti Time Travel. The cooks carried magic in their fingers, people said, and they would not share it with anyone. You didn’t care who sold it as long as you could buy it.

You bought Roti Time Travel occasionally during your university days. Its popularity had exploded citywide, but it cost almost twenty times as much as a regular roti canai. You would buy a whole piece and keep it in your freezer, defrosting it when you needed. Sometimes you ate it with curry or dhal, sometimes plain. This method could make one piece last a couple of months.

Somewhere along the line you realised that Roti Time Travel does, in fact, make you time travel to a certain degree, otherwise they would be calling it Roti Memory. You were transported into the past mentally, restricted to the actions and viewpoint of your past self, but you were free to gaze around and notice things in the background that you might not have seen before. You were a future invader in your own head, unable to change anything, but free to observe and enrich your own memories. With all five senses still intact, this method provided a deep sense of immersive realism that mere human memory could never provide.

When it came close to exam season, you bought two and ate them piecemeal during revision. You ended up with half a roti left, so you threw it in your fridge, thinking it too much trouble to refreeze it, and promptly forgot about it. The next time you needed magic-aided memory, two days later, you did not think twice about popping it in your mouth.

And that is how you were hospitalised for diarrhoea.

Arman and Sandesh laughed at you when they came to visit you in the ward. “Bro, you can’t keep it in the fridge,” chided Arman. “All kinds of roti are made with no preservatives. They will expire extremely fast if you don’t freeze them.”

“And this contains magic,” Sandesh said. “Expired magic is very unpredictable.”

You laughed at yourself through the pain. “It did make me very dizzy.”

From then on, you made sure not to keep your Roti Time Travel overlong. You kept a spare piece in the freezer “in case of emergency” and you would throw it out after six months if uneaten. You maintained that habit even after you graduated, started working, lost touch with your friends, changed jobs, got back in touch with them, and got married. Time seemed to fly by faster when you weren’t as concerned about taking photos and videos to be stored in your albums. After all, any time you wanted to recall a lost memory, there was a roti sitting in the freezer ready for you.

---

Just before you can chew on a new strip of roti, the doorbell rings.

You look up with bleary eyes. You are not expecting any visitors. You cast your gaze around your living room, at the piles of uncleared clothes draped on every surface and empty dishes on the coffee table. You lie back on the sofa.

“Go away,” you growl, but the bell goes ding-dong again. You drag yourself up and peer through the curtains. “Urgh. Why them?”

Your phone rings, then goes straight to voicemail.

“I know you’re at home,” squawks Sandesh’s voice. “Open up, I can see you through the curtains. Come on, bro. Let us in.”

You groan, but you open the gates and invite them inside. They stare at your gaunt expression, but they say nothing and find seats on your sofa. You sit on a stool facing them.

“What?” you say.

Arman and Sandesh exchange glances.

“‘What?’” Sandesh bursts out. “Is that all you have to say? You haven’t been answering any of our calls or any of Trisha’s family’s calls. You haven’t shown up at work even after your extended leave. Your boss has threatened to fire you, and still you aren’t responding to his messages. What are you doing, bro?”

You say, “If you don’t have anything useful to say, get out.”

Arman seizes your attention with a snap of his fingers. “Bro, look at yourself.” He indicates the messy room and your unshaven, unshowered body. “I know that all this has been hard on you, but you have to move on. If you need any help, we’re here for you, just drop us a call. But you have to get on with living your life.”

You nod imperceptibly.

Arman notes your mild response. “I know everyone has been telling you this, so it means nothing to you. But you have to find the strength to live in their memory. You can’t grieve forever. Do it for Trisha.”

“Don’t bring her up.”

“What would she say if she saw you like this? Moping around, unable to pick yourself up, living like a pig?”

“I said don’t bring her up.”

“Is that Roti Time Travel?”  says Sandesh suddenly, noticing the last piece on the coffee table. His tone changes. “How many pieces have you eaten? Have you been eating this every day?”

“Does it matter?”

“Oh shit, he’s addicted.” Sandesh stands up. “This has to stop now.”

“Don’t tell me what I can do!” You leap to your feet.

“So you want to eat yourself to death in this house?” shouts Arman. “Gorging on Roti Time Travel every day? Is this what your wife would want?”

Using more energy than you have exerted in the past week, you punch Arman in the face with all your might. He collapses onto the floor, stunned. Sandesh jumps up, and you shove him in the chest, sending him staggering. You kick Arman as he lies groaning. Sandesh comes at you with a wide punch, and you try to dodge but your reflexes are slow after weeks of inactivity. It catches you flush on the jaw. Your vision is suddenly filled with blinking stars, and you have the sensation of falling into enveloping darkness.

Maybe this is death, you think, and it is a happy thought.

---

You married Trisha on a windy day in August, almost a year after you started your new IT job that paid you well enough for her to be a housewife. As Trisha was from Kuala Lumpur, your parents and relatives came down from Ipoh for the wedding. You cannot remember much of what happened that day, but you remember the feeling of almost crying when you saw your beautiful wife in her gold-and-green saree, smiling and gazing at you like there was no one else in the world.

That is one of your favourite memories to revisit with Roti Time Travel. You have cut it so many times that you know exactly how large a strip to cut: two inches across, four inches long. And you still do not remember anything else about the wedding, because every time you return, you focus only on her.

Work is hard and unforgiving under your scumbag managers, so whenever you time travel, you make sure to speed-run through the daytime until you see yourself clock out and go home to your wife. Then you relish every minute, every conversation, every mundane meal, every whispered word of love, even all your arguments. Trisha had a fiery temper and a sharp tongue on her, so although many of her words hurt deeply to hear again, you bear them with a smile. In this manner you have replayed your entire relationship seven times over.

One of the few things you used to argue about was your Roti Time Travel.

“Did you buy that magic roti again?” she asked one night.

“Ya.”

“Three pieces?” She was looking into the freezer.

“I like to keep a few extra.”

“You have to hide them somewhere. My mother is coming over tomorrow; she’ll notice it for sure.” Her mother was strictly religious and shunned all types of magic that was not temple-approved.

“I’ll put them in the icebox.”

“Do you have to buy so many pieces? You always leave some extra. Then I have to throw them away after a month.”

“I’ll eat it more often, okay?”

“I’m not asking you to eat it more. I’m asking, do you really need it?”

Eventually you kept only one piece in the fridge at a time.

Your son was born five years later, a healthy boy whom the priest named Roshan. You were never very keen on the idea of having children, but when your son entered your life, he opened your heart in ways that you never thought possible. Trisha would joke that you doted on him more than on her. You began to dream of seeing him grow up into a strong young man, perhaps becoming an engineer like yourself. You were there to see him take his first steps, and you looked forward to hearing his first word.

The car accident that took their lives also took a portion of your memories due to severe head trauma. With the doctor’s permission, Arman brought you a strip of Roti Time Travel to help you recall what happened. You chewed, and saw —

— blinding rain, windscreen wipers barely effective.

            Trisha’s scream. “Look out!”

Paramedics, doctors saying, “He’s stable.”

And your darling son, before you drove out that night: “Appa.”

---

Before Arman leaves your doorstep, he turns and regards you with sad eyes. There is a large bruise forming on his cheek.

“We can’t help you if you won’t help yourself,” he says. “I hope you will think about what I said.”

“Goodbye” is all you say.

You watch them drive off in Sandesh’s car. Then you sink onto your couch and hold an icepack to your aching jaw. Waves of frustration well up. You snap and fling the icepack against the door in a roar of rage. It shatters, spilling ice shards over the coffee table and across the floor. You grab the Roti Time Travel from the plate, but a horrible thought strikes you.

You stagger to your refrigerator and check every compartment. Your worst fears have come true. When you were unconscious, Sandesh and Arman had taken away all your Roti Time Travel — all twenty-six pieces that were sitting in the freezer.

No matter, you tell yourself. You walk out, get your motorcycle and ride to that street in Petaling Jaya where the mamak is located. You will restock, and you will see your loved ones again. You have enough cash on you to buy ten more pieces. That will last you a week, maybe.

Nothing could have prepared you for the sight of the abandoned shop lot, the lights shut off, the steel shutters closed, the giant yellow FOR SALE with attached phone numbers hanging over the storefront sign that once declared RESTORAN AL-MAHADI. There is a government notice hanging on the shutters, announcing the mamak’s closure for failing to meet sanitary requirements.

You stand outside, money in hand, frozen for a long time. Then you get back onto your motorcycle and return home.

The last piece of Roti Time Travel waits on the plate. You long to stuff it in your mouth right then, but you wrap it up and place it back in the freezer. You estimate you can endure a few days at a time without the roti. Maybe you can make this piece last for six months. In the meantime your own brain must work by itself.

You dig into your memory, trying to recall her face, or his. All you can summon are blurry images that merge and morph into different people, abstract ideas. You pull up the photo album on your phone, scrolling down the regrettably few photos that you have compiled over the years. Their faces smile out at you, but they are unmoving and lifeless. There are videos, but when you press play, your son’s babbles and Trisha’s laughter burst out of the speaker with a metallic timbre. All that remains of them in this world are a handful of artificial memories stored in digital media.

No more smell of your wife’s cooking. No feeling the softness of your son’s chubby face when you pinch his cheeks. No enjoying the warmth of their bodies beside you in bed. Now even the immersive experience of time travel has been taken away from you.

You resist the urge, hour after hour. But loneliness comes worst in the night, and your longing for their presence intensifies to a maddening degree. You jump out of bed and run into the kitchen. You reach for the fridge door, but your desire to drift into the past is firmly overshadowed by your terror of losing your final chance at time travelling forever.

And now you break down, sitting alone leaning against the door of the fridge, sobbing the shards of your heart out. The silence in your house has never been heavier.

Eat it, your mind whispers. Eat the whole piece, then end it all.

One full piece can last you until morning if you spend your time chewing strip by strip for hours at a time. You pull yourself up and take the final piece from the freezer, heating it up and slicing it into appropriate-sized strips.

Eat, and be with them again.

You sit on the sofa with your plate of scraps in the darkness, and eat —

­— another slice —

­— another —­

­— another —­

—

—

---

But there is one thing you have forgotten. You bought Roti Time Travel in bulk, so the roti that you are eating was purchased weeks ago and defrosted four days ago.

There are two strips left. You place one in your mouth —

— and you travel in time.

You are in your living room, seated at the same sofa. It seems like night, yet you can see the sun through the window. You see people flash across the room like lightning. Days and nights blur together into pale grey. Like a timelapse, you and your wife and son scurry around like vibrating shadows, too fast to see. The world begins to spin, and a familiar dizziness creeps over you. You remember your last experience with expired magic. You stop chewing.

But before you can spit out the roti, time freezes.

Your son Roshan crawls across the floor, chasing after the ball which rolls under the sofa where you sit. He looks up at you with large pearly eyes. “Appa.”

Trisha walks out of the kitchen, holding the baby bowl. She sits beside you on the sofa. “Did I just hear him say something?” she asks. Her voice rings like music in your ears.

 “Yes,” you hear yourself say. “He said ‘Appa.’”

Trisha gasps. “No!” She picks up your son. “Roshan, say ‘Amma.’ Say ‘Amma!’”

You stare at her. She is radiant, eyes sparkling. You have seen this expression a million times over multiple relived lifetimes. You know that this is how she would have reacted in real life. You also know that this moment never happened.

“Would you like to hold him?”

You take the baby, feeling his weight, his plump body, his babbling laughter, the smell of baby powder. Trisha feeds him the first spoonful. Then she looks at you knowingly.

She says, “Roti Time Travel again?”

You open your mouth, but no words come.

A tender smile appears on her lips. “Do you really need it?”

Do I need it?

Tears spill down your cheeks. Trisha leans in, kisses you on the cheek, and slowly takes Roshan from your arms. She smiles, and this smile is full of life. “We’ll be okay,” she says. “It wasn’t your fault. Take care of yourself, all right? I love you.”

She reaches out and gently plucks the half-chewed roti out of your mouth —

— and you blink in the sunlight.

You sit there quietly in the living room for a long time, working your tongue around your empty jaws, eyes glimmering. Your heart is twisted in a knot so tight that you can hardly breathe. But with a burst of strength, you grab the final strip of Roti Time Travel from the plate, stagger to the window and fling it far, far out into the morning sky.

 

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Host Commentary

…aaaaand welcome back. That was “Roti Time Travel” by Joshua Lim, and if you enjoyed that then there’s a couple of his other stories free to read in Fantasy Magazine and The Dark linked from his website at joshualimwriter.wordpress.com, as well as a few anthologies to buy—and some listed as forthcoming, if you want to keep an eye out.

Joshua sent us these notes on today’s story: I originally intended for “Roti Time Travel” to be a comedic story with a ridiculous premise (time-travelling bread? what?). But I was going through a period of mourning in my life when I finally picked up the pen, and I believe writing this story helped me to process my grief.

Thank you, Joshua, for the thoughts and the story, and sorry for your loss—and I’m with you on writing being a method of processing, whether I want it to or not. Grief has been a shadow over this castle for a while now, to be honest, and the temptation to go back and live in those moments over and over is… well, who among us would truly have the strength to say no?

But life is for living, and if death is a tragedy then it stopping us living our own lives after is doubly so. “Moving on” is so much easier said than done, and it can only ever be at the pace it needs to be, there’s no forcing it—but it has to happen one day, even in small, uncertain steps. I maintain that you shouldn’t ever feel guilty for the way you process your grief, because it is deeply personal, and deeply necessary… but the point of a process is that it’s a method of change: the definition on the Cambridge Dictionary is “a series of actions that you take in order to achieve a result”, and what result are you hoping for if not the chance to live your life again? If you want to carry their memory with you, well, you only carry something if you’re going someplace.

Grief is heavy. It’s no wonder it traps us under its weight, and there’s no shame in that. But we have to stand up and walk forward again, one day, because that’s what being human is—healing, and hoping.