A nighttime agreement
In the seventies apartment block where César lives, in SS2, Petaling Jaya, a calico cat appears every night at ten on the staircase. César goes down, leaves food on an aluminum plate, and stands there while she eats. He doesn't let her into the apartment. She doesn't insist. A territorial arrangement that's worked for years without anyone negotiating it out loud.
The cat isn't his. Not anyone's, really: she belongs to the block. But César is the only one who feeds her at a fixed time, every day, with the regularity of someone who knows that agreements hold through routine. Not words. If he comes out of the workshop late — because a setting hasn't worked out on the first try, because a client changed their mind about a half-made ring —, the cat waits. When César reaches the staircase, she's already sitting on the third step. They look at each other. He leaves the plate. She eats. He goes up.
There's nothing spectacular in that scene. Just consistency. The same consistency as the neighbor in 7C — a Chinese retiree who waters the plants in the hallway when César travels to visit his mother in Butterworth and in return gets his wedding rings fixed for free whenever a setting comes loose. The same as the Hokkien couple at the kopitiam downstairs, who keep his table every morning at six and put the coffee on a tab when he forgets his wallet. Or the woman at the nasi campur stall on the corner, who gives him extra sambal without being asked because she knows he likes it spicy and because she's seen him show up at the same time for years.
