Intentions
On Monday morning, Monkho sat alone in the conference room, popping tiny curls of sweet curd into his mouth and staring at his cellphone lying face down on the table. His mind churned from the previous night’s spat with his wife, but his body warmed from the digestion of Curuud, a product he had co-designed and had a bottomless supply of in the company kitchen. At the sound of shuffling feet in the hall beyond the doorway, he pocketed his phone, picked his teeth, and pushed curd crumbs off the striated veneer of the large conference table.
His colleagues trickled in: the chipper executive assistant scurrying around and lobbing handouts onto the table; stylish youths from sales conjecturing about the prospects of rain; stern faces from accounting and transportation grunting greetings and yawning like lions.
Then came the production folks, often called the “white coats”. They hadn’t come to the meeting in a white coat per se – that was strictly attire for the manufacturing facility – but their button-down shirts and woolen sweaters oozed scents of sanitizer and sour milk; so, smell-wise, they might as well have been sitting here in laboratory garments.
An elderly man slumped into the seat across from Monkho and folded his arms over the table like a middle school student. It was Ravjaa, the head of the dairy production department. He rested his eyeglasses over his grizzled, combed-over hair, directing his solemn, pockmarked face to colleagues on either side, then the agenda in front of him, and then to Monkho.
Monkho managed a smile, then let his eyes be drawn back to the printouts in front of him. The white coats were a terrifying bunch, but, surely, he thought, after the Curuud campaign, he had gained their respect.
As the teams settled in – department heads and senior specialists around the table, juniors and assistants on the row of chairs against the walls – Director Chimgee hurried in, and the chatter died down.
A middle-aged woman, seen in pantsuits of varying muted colors and a perennial ponytail, Chimgee was a relatively new implant to the company, poached from a rival food and beverage giant by the now-elusive founder, post-IPO, to bring professionalism and productivity to the company. And thus far, she had delivered it, tolerating no buffoonery and docking salaries judiciously. With his direct supervisor on maternity leave, Monkho was now the head of the department and directly reporting to Chimgee.
Over forty people waited with bated breath as the director unclasped her leather notebook. She cleared her throat, looked around, and asked, “Where’s Monkho?”
Monkho, who sat at the farthest end on her left side, raised his hand.
“Can you see me in my room? We have to talk about something.” There was an accusatory note in her decidedly neutral voice.
All eyes shifted from the director to Monkho, who nodded timidly, mortified by being called out like that.
The director lurched up from her seat and minced toward the door. Monkho’s stomach twisted in knots. His head spun as he stood and walked.
Couldn’t she have brought it up after the meeting? His office was two doors down from hers.
As they entered the director’s room, she told him to close the door.
“Your wife, Shüre, called the office this morning,” she said.
Now it dawned on Monkho what this was going to be about. His heart skipped a beat. “Oh?”
“She got through to me, and asked me why you didn’t get a raise. Said you do too much work for the same pay.”
His face heated like an induction oven. “Well, I can explain–”
“I told her there must be a misunderstanding. Because you did get a raise with your promotion. Three months ago.”
“She doesn’t…” Monkho muttered, scrambling for a way to save face. “She doesn’t know about it because it’s a… surprise.” The trail-off at the end made his statement sound like a question.
Monkho wanted to explain the actual reason, but where could he begin? And was this the right time and the right place?
“A surprise?” asked Chimgee.
“Y-yes.” Monkho smiled sheepishly.
“Like you’re saving up your money to buy her something?”
“I am.”
The director frowned at him quizzically. “Have you talked to her yet?”
He shook his head as he fished his phone from his pocket. Eight missed calls.
“Then I’m so sorry about this,” Chimgee said. “I’ve told her.” She drew up her mouth and shrugged, as if to say, Don’t blame me. It’s all your mess.
“That’s okay,” Monkho managed to muster, wiping sweat from his forehead. “I’ll handle it.”
Back in the conference room, the stares gathered on Monkho like a swarm of laser sights.
“Za, let’s begin,” the director addressed the rest of the group and studied the agenda, and everyone else followed suit. The sales guys spoke up, tentatively muttering numbers related to the projected quarter. Their words were trailed closely by the pitter-patter of typing by the assistant in the back.
Monkho found himself seated, his arms under the table, palms up and fingers splayed, pushing up against the underside of the table. The coolness of the wooden furniture kept him anchored. He dreaded the thought of checking his phone again. How could he explain himself? What could he tell his wife now? He had been caught, plain and simple.
***
Monkho was the eldest son in a family of five. His parents, Mr. and Mrs. Modon, had met and conceived Monkho while studying forest engineering at the National University of Agricultural Sciences around 1988. Two years later, the People’s Republic of Mongolia started the painful transition to just Mongolia, kicking off a tumultuous decade that created a generation of disillusioned and disturbed souls.
Mr. and Mrs. Modon, being of sound mind and body, had tried like any other Mongolian to embrace capitalism. But owing to some bad habits and scarcity mindset – not just of them but of the whole country – the couple’s efforts to find affluence always ended with less than the initial capital. Trying their hands at business after business, they had racked up debt after debt, burning bridge after bridge.
As the eldest, Monkho was often assigned the tedious chore of babysitting his younger siblings. Forbidden from helping his parents, he had only his school to focus on. He hated it.
By the mid-2000s, his father, unable to work for anyone, spent his days as a mobile mechanic, and his mother, increasingly bitter towards her husband, wrote recipe books and haunted hospitals for various ailments. When Monkho attended a college in Hungary, his parents had sent him a monthly allowance of $100, footing the remaining bills after a hefty scholarship.
Upon return, he found his parents struggling. Sending any of his younger siblings abroad was out of the question. He couldn’t help but feel guilty – and responsible – for them.
He hopped between jobs, each time getting higher pay, coming out as more experienced, until he had landed at this food and beverage company. Finally, he thought, I’m going to pay back my parents, contribute to the bills.
But then he met Shüre and got her pregnant.
With equal measure of dread and excitement, they planned their future together. With her parents’ tacit support, they secured a mortgage for a small apartment in Youth Town, a string of kitschy, five-story buildings resting on an escarpment along the Tuul river. When the novelty of the nubbly wallpaper, boutique storefronts, and double-loaded stair towers faded, they realized that the whole neighborhood was at risk of being wiped out by a minor flood.
Monkho wanted to provide for his two families, the old and new one, with the latter requiring a more exclusive commitment. The cognitive dissonance ate away at him. His parents hadn’t had a stable job, hadn’t paid social insurance, and were therefore ineligible for a pension. Then there were his younger siblings, who, with fewer opportunities and more exposure to their parents’ fights during their formative years, couldn’t really finish school with solid grades, much less a scholarship abroad.
On the other hand, his wife had left her job at an international development project to give birth to their baby boy. Half of his meager salary went to the mortgage, a quarter to bills, and the rest to groceries. It wasn’t nearly enough. Monkho knew that if he worked hard, he would eventually advance in his career.
Three years passed, and Monkho’s career was stuck; the only person making strides was his toddler. Shüre would nag him about getting extra jobs – it was her parents who were taking his son out of the city, away from the winter smog, her parents who were buying the necessary clothes, the diapers – not Monkho’s.
Monkho resented it when Shüre brought up the fact that his parents didn’t support them. He resented it to the point that after receiving a raise, he avoided telling her about it and diverted the extra bump to his youngest brother for his college tuition.
And now, seated at the conference table with tense shoulders and a red face, quietly listening to his colleagues’ discussion, Monkho deliberated on a way out of this mess. Every potential income of his was already accounted for. Even if he found a new gig, the time taken away from the family would draw suspicion. How was he going to find the missing money? Should he get it back from his brother? After all, as his wife insisted, it was his parents’ responsibility to pay the tuition, not his. But he was the eldest in the family, and the only one earning a decent salary. No, he would find another way.
***
The discussion in the conference room came to a lull when the next item on the agenda was called. It was foreign relations. Director Chimgee looked up and around. “Where is Sanaa?”
At that moment, a bespectacled young man with slicked back hair entered through the doorway. This was the head of the Foreign Relations department, and the only son of the founder, Ganaa.
“Sorry, Director Chimgee,” he said, ambling toward the table and shrugging off the leather messenger bag on his shoulder, “I saw you exiting the conference room and thought the meeting hadn’t started yet.”
Chimgee swiveled her chair and beamed at Sanaa. If she felt threatened by the Nepo Baby, she didn’t show it. “Sanaa? Any updates from Foreign Relations we must know about this week?”
Sanaa claimed the seat next to the director, straightening the collar of his white starched shirt. “Not much. As you know, I recently went on a business trip—”
“I’m going to stop you right there, Sanaa,” said Chimgee, smiling through gritted teeth, “That trip was not approved by me and will not be reimbursed by the company.”
“I’m going to tell you what I told your father,” Chimgee went on, in a tone not unlike a kindergarten teacher giving yet another reminder to an exasperating child. “We are a publicly traded company, and a founder’s son being this profligate will immediately tank our stock.”
“Fine,” Sanaa said, leveling his glasses, sounding wounded by the comment. Something about his look reminded Monkho of Bruce Wayne, portrayed by Christian Bale, in that boardroom scene, wolfish and resolute in taking back his dead father’s company. Except Sanaa’s father was very much alive and present in public life, as a politician.
“My vacation in Europe was business-oriented. I visited some cheese factories in Milan and Bern, met some retailers to discuss our product, and even brought some cheese. Everyone, please stop by my office after the meeting to try some.”
Murmurs of thanks and assent floated across the room.
A smirk settled on Sanaa’s face. “So, after reconnoitering these European markets, I have come to the conclusion that Curuud is not ready for them.”
This snapped Monkho out of his rumination. Curuud was the finger-shaped soft curd product they had made for the international market, to vie for a slice of the children’s snack market. Closer in sustenance to mozzarella cheese sticks, in appearance to curly fries, the colorfully packaged product had been a hit in Mongolia. As the marketing person, he had spent a lot of time working on Curuud’s marketing plan, coming up with the cartoon mascot, and overseeing a foreign contractor’s work on the packaging and promotional designs. His eyes ached as he thought back on those strenuous late-night sessions in the office, phone on airplane mode, talking to himself, rationalizing the customer avatars.
“There are just too many costly steps to meet the import regulation requirements,” Sanaa said, studying his fingernails. “Again, this was a business trip, by the way. I don’t understand why my expenses aren’t being reimbursed.”
Anger boiled up in Monkho, not just at the casual arrogance of the founder’s kid, but at the complicit silence of the director.
“In the meantime,” Sanaa continued, “I have found an alternative product that is much easier to penetrate the market with. The pet food business is solid, and there are already hard curd dog chews supplied on North American and European markets. It’ll be the same as the traditional hard aaruul[1] you see on marketplaces here, but packaged as pet chews.”
Someone tsked. It was Mr. Ravjaa, one of the white coats. “Dog food,” he said.
Sanaa blinked. “Excuse me?”
“You want us to make dog food, not dairy.”
It’s about to go down, Monkho thought. Mr. Ravjaa was a force to reckon with.
Sanaa blew out a sigh. “We can only get into the Western European markets through existing niches,” he said. “The demographic of pet owners is big enough to test the waters with the dog chews. Does that offend you?”
“Offend me?” Ravjaa said, looking around the room, and finding everyone’s eyes averted, “Try enrage. Kid, what you’re proposing is so…un-Mongolian. Aaruul is your first solid food, your main source of calcium. Gnawing on a piece of aaruul with your baby teeth is a rite of passage for every Mongol child.” He stabbed his finger into the table for emphasis. “Even each province in Mongolia has their distinct style of aaruul. And now you want us to turn it into…dog food?”
Everyone stared at Sanaa, who took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I see what you mean,” he said. “When it comes to food, Westerners don’t like new things. Have you heard of the 80 percent familiarity theory? I learned of it while I was in America. A new food product must be at least eighty percent familiar to be widely adopted by them.”
“Somebody’s face will be eighty percent familiar if you keep it up,” Ravjaa said. Everyone froze in silence. The typing noise coming from the assistant died down.
Ravjaa and Sanaa glared at each other for a beat before bursting into laughter. Their laughter lasted long enough to make others join in. Even Monkho found himself chuckling, while being unsure of what was happening.
Ravjaa turned toward Chimgee. “With all due respect,” he said, chuckling, “I detest bastardizing our tsagaan idee, but sometimes my nephew comes up with the weirdest ideas.”
“Let’s move on,” Chimgee said, waving her hand, “and have a separate discussion about it later today.”
The next item on the agenda was mysteriously titled Restructuring.
The director clicked her pen and cleared her throat. “We were planning this for next year, but I met the board last Friday, and they recommended we move the restructuring to next month.”
“April?” Monkho couldn’t help but notice that everyone else appeared unfazed by the news. Was I out of the loop somehow? he thought.
“The beverage factory is going to see some restructuring,” Chimgee said, cautiously choosing her words. “The bakery will be downsized. Here at the HQ, the Foreign Relations department is going to absorb Marketing. But we’ll discuss these in detail with the relevant departments.”
Monkho balked. “What did you say?” he said, perhaps a little too loudly. “Sorry,” he added meekly.
As everyone shuffled out of the room, Monkho stayed in his chair, rapping the edges of the agenda sheets on the table. Most of his colleagues had just left them, and he had mindlessly collected some. Director Chimgee finished scribbling in her notebook and looked up at him.
“I wanted to ask about the restructuring,” he said, wringing his hands. “How would my role be affected?”
Chimgee glanced beyond him toward the open doorway. She folded her arms and leaned back on her chair. “I’m sorry to give you more bad news, but we’re in a bind actually. The board wants us to downsize a lot of personnel, as we don’t have the budget anymore. Navchaa is ready to return. So we’re going to have to let you go at the end of this month.”
***
Wracked in deep thoughts, Monkho made his way down the stairs and through a long hallway. Bright light streamed through the row of windows on his side. The upper floors of the building looked deserted. Most of the staff had driven out of the compound, riding in their respective cliques, in search of a hip new downtown restaurant they could be seen in.
He shambled back to his office, closed the door, and called Tsonkho, his younger brother. A groggy voice picked up on the fourth ring. Monkho explained in brief and breathless words how his scheme to support him had been compromised – and furthermore, he was being laid off from his job at the end of the month – but he would get the money from somewhere else to pay off the last year of tuition. By the way, what was Tsonkho doing answering his call with a groggy voice at 11 am in the morning? Had he partied all night? Monkho hadn’t hidden money from his wife and kid just so his brother could party it away.
“I just got back home from a lesson,” Tsonkho mumbled. His little brother’s college was on the other side of the city, and the bus commute often took one and a half to two hours.
There was silence for a moment, and Tsonkho eventually conceded that it was okay, and that he would ask for the rest of the money from his younger sister’s husband. They had already paid for a portion of Tsonkho’s tuition.
But this didn’t sit well with Monkho. He was the eldest. It behooved him to pay at least the agreed portion. He told his younger brother that he would find a way to pay for it somehow.
Monkho then probed about Tsonkho’s TOEFL preparation, and lectured him on how one of the scholarships announced by the Ministry of Education could take him abroad. “You have to work your butt off for a year, but trust me, a good score will change your life.”
“Umm…”
“What? What’s on your mind?”
“I’ve decided to go on a mission after graduation,” Tsonkho said, “To Myanmar.” He had converted to Christianity a few years ago, and it was becoming harder to talk to him without feeling like you were listening to a sermon.
“Isn’t there a civil war there?” Monkho asked, trying to sound curious instead of worried. He remembered reading somewhere that the country was going through the longest civil war in modern history.
“It’s fine,” Tsonkho said. “God will protect me.”
“What did Mom and Dad say?”
“I haven’t told them. But they’re obviously going to say no.”
“How are they anyway?” Monkho asked, suddenly remembering.
“Still fighting,” Tsonkho said.
Monkho wondered if all the accusations his wife made about his parents were true, that they expected him and his younger sibling to pay for Tsonkho’s tuition.
“I’m sorry you’re going through all of this. But if you open up to the Lord…”
“Okay, not again.” He jabbed at his phone and hung up, and then struck the desk.
His phone vibrated. Now that he had unmuted it, the multiple calls from his wife became real and menacing. He swiped up to send a pre-set text that rejected the call: “I’m in a meeting. Can I call you later?”
A flurry of texts started to buzz in. Monkho tried to ignore the litany of hurtful words and see what her main points were. “Coward, I know you’ve been sending money to your parents,” one text said. “Have you even bought a single diaper?!!!” another mocked him.
Monkho considered calling her, but decided against it. Didn’t an ancient proverb say, eat if you’re angry, sleep if you’re sad? He pocketed his phone and hurried out of the compound.
The compound, a three-story, brick-and-mortar affair with cream-colored siding, was tucked next to Gachuurt Road, a narrow, divided drag that funneled overweight semis and dented vans escaping or entering the capital.
Monkho hurried toward the nearest tsainy gazar, kicking up dust across the run-down sidewalk, passing a row of poplar saplings. Some of the implants had been propped up by a stick, no doubt stunted by the surrounding cacophony and dust.
The tsainy gazar was a drab, stuffy hall that mostly served workers from the factories in the vicinity. The greasy scent of soups and stir-fries mingled with the cleaning solution recently used on the plastic covers of the refectory tables. Stealing a glance through the serving hatch at the cooks bustling in the kitchen, Monkho asked for banshtai tsai, beef dumpling milk tea, from a girl behind the counter.
Scanning the dining area, he spotted, to his surprise, Ravjaa and Sanaa sitting together. Ravjaa spoke in between scoops from a large bowl of soup as if he were in a soup eating contest. Sanaa listened and nodded while raking gravy from beef strips into his small mound of rice.
Curious and slightly amused, he took his meal on a tray and trod towards them.
“Mind if I join you?” he asked, flashing a smile. Ravjaa looked up from his food and nodded, while Sanaa seemed surprised.
“Hope your food is tasty, Mr. Ravjaa,” Monkho said as a way of greeting. Sanaa nodded strenuously while chewing his beef strips.
Ravjaa smiled conspiratorially. “Sanaa followed me here to ask about my thoughts on the new product concept. At the end of the day, if we can sell dog chew, then dog chew is what we’ll sell. But it’s just a bit too disrespectful to tradition if you ask me.”
“I liked what both of you suggested,” Monkho said, trying to feign interest, and get on their good side. “The aaruul being chewed by the medieval warriors, and the 80 percent familiarity theory.” He felt like he had to offer something clever to tie up this point, so he added. “And I thought, why not combine it?”
He was just spitballing now, trying to avoid an awkward silence during lunch. “Why not create a product that makes the consumer feel like they’re the Mongol warrior?” he half-asked, in the spur of the moment. “Something they have to depend on as endurance food, shaped in a way that fits snugly into your mouth. We can call it Bat-Aaruul.”
“Bat-Aaruul?” asked Sanaa.
“Or not!” Monkh said, jovially. “Just thinking out loud here. I was imagining a play on words: baatar for warrior, aaruul for the hard curd, and there’s also Bataar, the oft-mispronounced-and-misspelled-by-Westerners version there. A riff on the popular phrase, you know?”
The men looked intrigued: Ravjaa raised an eyebrow, and Sanaa brought a finger up under his chin.
“Just imagine the product description,” Monkho said, adopting a podcaster’s voice. “Aaruul was a vital staple for the ancient Mongol warriors, who endured long journeys on horseback with no rest, no water, just a piece of hard, creamy curdle in their mouths, providing nutrition and hydration.’ Wouldn’t that be easier to promote?” He looked at them eagerly.
Sanaa’s face looked sour. “I mean, is that going to make an average European want to buy it?” he asked. “It brings up our colonial history. And that’s the worst kind of image you can invoke if you want to penetrate their market.” He looked down at his plate. “Plus, I’m still convinced that every European country’s cheese is far better than any Mongolian dairy.”
Monkho considered this with a poker face, and they all sat chewing their food.
Sanaa then broke the silence with, “Yeah, no, I like it. It’s wild. By the way, where did you get your degree?”
“Master’s in marketing from a university in Hungary,” Monkho said, feeling slightly self-conscious. “But I did my bachelor’s at NUM here.”
“I studied at Brown,” Sanaa said. “It’s in Rhode Island, in the U.S.”
“Wow, that must have been cool,” Monkho said.
“My son is going to Harvard,” Ravjaa chimed in. Then he added, “Actually, he wants to. He’s fifteen.”
“Yeah,” Sanaa said, ignoring Ravjaa’s comment. “Like a lot of dog owners in our town.”
They all chuckled.
“I’m glad I’m going to join your team and learn from you,” Monkho said, smiling. But Ravjaa and Sanaa’s faces blanched.
“Sure, sure.” Sanaa said, and Monkho couldn’t help but notice that it was Sanaa’s turn to make a poker face.
Monkho suspected they were already aware of his upcoming termination. He was the last to learn of his own firing. What an idiot? He told himself.
He was going to be jobless, scorned by his wife, taken for granted by his siblings, and unable to support his parents. What could he do now? What could he do? There was nothing, nothing he could do but step out, and just leave everything.
Except…
“I’m glad the company has you now,” Monkho said. “I hope to be part of a lot of exciting projects. I have my wife and son to take care of, so I’m planning on settling in for the long run.”
Ravjaa and Sanaa looked uncomfortable. Good, he thought. Because that would lay the groundwork for his next tactic.
He talked vaguely about his financial issues, exaggerating here and there, spinning a yarn so melodramatic and nuanced that any solution his listeners provided would be squashed by another problem that had already befallen him.
He concluded his speech with an indirect question posed to both of them. Would either of them be willing to lend him some money?
“How much do you need?” Ravjaa asked.
“Six hundred thousand.” It was about 200 US dollars.
“Oof,” Rajvaa said.
Sanaa grabbed his phone. “I can wire it to you,” he said. “What’s your bank account number?”
***
Monkho seated himself at the back of a soon to be crowded bus and started his commute home. With his work and home on the two edges of the linearly sprawling city, it would take two hours. But he often took solace in the fact that he claimed seats easily because he got on at stops close to each end of the route. It also helped that he had left work early today.
A call came in. It was his mother. She wanted to know how things were. Monkho wanted to share everything with her, but, not wanting to bother the fellow passengers, he reported in curt words that everything was good. His mother asked him if he was taking care of his health. Yes, yes, he was.
The bus doors hissed open and people spilled in and out. An elderly couple sitting in front of him talked about rain tomorrow. “Finally,” the old man said, pointing at the naked bushes on the road median. “The rain will be a boon to these plants.”
The woman countered with, “I’m sure they get watered by the city,” placing a hand on the man’s forearm.
The bus chugged along the newly built highway. Monkho texted his brother, “I’ve wired you the money.” He continued typing, “Don’t expect any more because I’m done. I expect you to pay me back after you graduate and get a job,” but erased the text before hitting Send.
His phone buzzed. “Not needed anymore. I’ve wired the money back to you,” a text from his brother said. “Sorry you’re getting fired. If you need to talk, I’m here for you… with Jesus.”
Monkho smiled, and replied with, “I fear I’m too old to be proselytized. I’d rather go to a monastery to lift my spirits.”
So, he did have the money to cover at least one month’s raise. He wondered if he should go along with his charade of all this being a surprise, and buy his wife something.
Then he realized that he had to pay Sanaa back. But then, he thought, aren’t I going to be fired soon? Plus, Sanaa had his cool new idea. He could make the BatAaruul product and export it to European countries.
He unlocked his phone, and speed dialed a number. The contact name read, “My Coral💚”. The phone rang, and rang, and rang.
* * *
That night, Monkho dreamed of sitting in the conference room with a small red-and-blue box on the table in front of him.
He opened it and marveled at the packaging, and the logo of a large-jawed baatar, with big scimitar-like letters forming the word “BatAaruul” in the center, with “No sugar, just protein, fat, and nutrients” scrawled below it.
Inside, a plastic wrapper contained a stack of five horseshoe-shaped curds. He thought back to the time when he was young and new, and proposing ideas to the company seniors seemed daunting and scary. He had come a long way, he thought.
There were his colleagues around the table, like that day, each cooing and laughing while unboxing a BatAaruul.
Monkho placed a piece of the hard curd into his mouth. It fit into his mouth like a mouth guard. “See?” he said to his colleagues, “just like a Mongol warrior.”
He saw himself flashing a creamy curd-cover-for-teeth smile from a third-person perspective, as one does in a dream. The vague and nondescript acquaintances around the table were in various stages of putting an aaruul guard in their mouth.
Monkho felt proud.
But then a dull pain hit his gums. Due to the mold’s tight fit, the hard curd was chafing against his gums and teeth, afflicting him with increasingly sharp pain.
Disappointed, he decided to pull the curd out. It didn’t budge.
To his shock, he realized the aaruul was stuck to his upper teeth. Monkho tugged at the mold, first with one hand, and then both, his fingers crowded at the slippery, slobbering edge of the curd.
Looking around, he could see his co-workers whimpering and mewling, eyes narrowed and mouth downturned like the Tragedy Mask.
Monkho yanked at the aaruul with all the strength he could muster until it flew loose from his mouth and clattered onto the table.
Immediately, his mouth felt free as fresh air hit his teeth, but his relief was soon replaced with more dismay when he saw that most of his upper teeth were missing. The mold on the table had a curved array of jagged protrusions, each pair presumably the roots of his extracted teeth.
Blood trickled from his mouth like warm wine. Terrified, he looked at his colleagues and saw the same scene. Everyone was looking at him with gaping bloody mouths, angry and despairing, growling the same line.
“You,” they said, “you thought of this stupid idea.”
[1] Mongolian traditional dairy made of dried curd from sheep, goat, cow or camel milk. There are many variations in texture and shape and flavor across different regions of Mongolia.