-143-: September 2010

And … I’m still awake … it has been days that I have difficulties sleeping at night. So I decided to do something instead of wasting my time away struggling to make myself to sleep. Some times I open up my books and start studying, sometimes I picked up a book, like a novel , select a chapter and start typing its contents.

So today, I picked a book given to me from my mom which is :

Generations - A Collection of
Contemporary Malaysian Ideas

Title : Father’s Day (pg. 15)
Author : Kam Raslan

t’s funny how the events of one day can change a person’s live forever. For me, the key event of my life was one which I was not involved. One Sunday in 1970, my parents went foe a drive and my father died. I was four or five and I remember seeing m mother in hospital. She was badly bruised and trying not to cry in a way I’ve seen many times since. I can’t remember asking where my father was but his body was being buried in Perak at the time. To be honest, I can remember very little, not just the events prior to the time are virtually nil.

I can remember my father coming up behind me, putting his hands over my eyes and saying, “Guess who?” That made me giggle like I was being tickled and I would say excitedly, “It’s Daddy.” I remembered getting out of the car at the Kuala Kangsar rest house and I can remember a recurring dream I had of flying down the stairs of our house. I’ve no idea what it meant but it would frighten and excite me at the same time. Even these memories I cannot be sure of because I sometimes wonder if I'm not mistaking them for photographs I’d seen and then imagined myself into. Not long after he died, my mother, two brothers and I moved to England, which is really the land that has defined my consciousness.

Growing up without a father is, by no means, unique. In fact, my father himself was raised not by his father but his uncle. In many cultures around the world, this system is encouraged; the theory being that it helps a man to grow up without unseemly emotional attachments to his parents. Instead, it engenders an objective love. He will then grow up emotionally detached and unencumbered by sentimentality. He will grow up knowing his responsibilities.

There are many, many differences between the way my father was raised and the way that I grew up. He may have lived with his uncle but he did know his father. From what I understand, their relationship was not good; but, for better or for worse, they had each other. My brother and I were too young to understand what a fathers role was and our father at the same time, soon, my eldest brother was returned to Malaysia and my other brother and I went to separate schools. A gap emerged – a gap that has only recently been partially bridged.

Not having a father is not like losing a limb but more like being born without a sense of smell. Try to describe to that person the smell of women’s perfume or the heavy smell of iron before a light rain and he would completely nonplussed. But although he can’t smell, he can still breathe – life goes on.

I can remember staying at a friend’s house when I was about ten and his father tucked me in at night, he tucked the duvet in tight all around my body so that I was encased like a mummy. If felt wonderful to be looked after by his father but I didn’t envy my friend. To me, having a father was a bonus in life and not something that one expected. To me, fathers – real fathers – existed in the past, lived in another country and did great things. They certainly didn’t tuck little boys in at night.

I’m not sure if I speak for all fatherless sons when I say that there is something essentially contradictory in one’s relationship to male authority figures. On the one hand, I have always been drawn towards certain figures.(be they the great man of history or enigmatic rock stars) , figures to whom I’ve been obsessively devoted. And yet, when faced with actual authority (school teachers and especially customs officials), I think, “Why are you telling me this?” The father figure becomes fractional.

I can remember when I was seven or eight, praying to my father. Of course this was not the real man and my prayers were unanswered. Even today, when people who knew him tell me stories, I’m eager to listen. But they knew him as a real person : a living, breathing, laughing, shouting human being. But to me, he is not. He is a myth and, as such, I can make him into whatever I want and I can allow myself to see various aspects of me in that mental image.

Whenever one looks back on the events of the past, it is always tempting to imagine the
“what ifs”. If that single event had not happened, my life would have taken a completely different path, what would I like? What job would I be doing? Would my father have liked me and would I have liked him? Of course these questions can never be answered and I don’t worry unduly anyway. It’s not to say that I am glad that my father died (I would have loved to have known him), but I am glad to have met the people that I have met and to be pursuing the career that I have chosen.

If I do a regret, it would be the distance that his death has placed between his culture and myself. On the occasions that I visited Malaysia, I felt myself becoming progressively alienated, now that I have returned, it is a conscious effort to lean what I would otherwise have known generous and sympathetic, time and effort are keys.

There is a company which still bears his name and a few months ago I drove there at night to take a picture of the plaque (I felt like it). As I did so, I could here some people laughing at me. When I got the pictures back, I discovered that the labs had decided not to print that picture. Memories may dim and other people may not understand my interest but I am extremely proud of my father’s life. The next step for me is to get past the myth and discover the reality. But can one ever do that with a man who is dead?

Men’s Review, June 1995.