Father ( A Tribute To)

We were never close but he was always there to shine the light on me

FOR reasons perhaps only he knew, my late father somehow thought I was Superman. While I may have the longest name in the family, mine seemed to be the one being called out for, most frequently.
 Being number eight out of the nine siblings did not help. When I sat down for a break under a mango tree, nursing my blistered palm after helping him fix barbed wires around our perimeter fencing at the kampung, I did wonder whether this man was out of his mind. I was barely eleven at the time.

 By then my elder brothers and sisters have left the god-forsaken kampung for the city, leaving just me and my younger sister, Roziah.
 A thunderous voice my father had, so much so that even the chickens my mother reared were terrified of hearing him. I knew that for a fact, since no matter how stupid I thought chickens were, I could sense that they tried all that they could to stay well out of his way.
 When my father was on one side of our kampung compound, all the chickens would gather on the opposite side. I suppose those chickens knew my father was someone they'd better not cross paths with.
 But I was no chicken. There were times when I managed to outfox the man. Once when we just moved to the kampung, he ordered me to carry gravel stones from a hill behind the house in a rattan basket to pave the path leading to the house so that it wouldn't get soggy when it rains.
 As a frail 11-year old boy, making those trips up and down the hill with the heavy loads of gravel was torturous. But fate has it that soon I saw an old wooden cart used by the contractor who built the house much earlier, almost rotting in the undergrowth not far behind my house.
 I managed to put the cart back together, fixed wheels to it and soon I was hauling a lot more of the gravels on each trip. And it was not as tiring too.
 My father saw what I had done and he came to me and said 'bagus jugak kepala otak kau ni rupanya' which means 'you're quite intelligent it seems'. I finished the task within two days and felt proud of myself.
 He was also a very early person. Usually whenever I got out of bed, he would have already spent a considerable amount of time working around the house. And boy, was there a lot to do around that house.
 I could sense that he hated it when I woke up late and although he would not scold me openly, he had his way of letting me know of his displeasure.
 My room was the last room in the house, located just next to the kitchen. When he saw my windows were still closed when he was already working around the yard, he would purposely start the very noisy lawnmower and cut the patch of grass just outside my room.
 I always knew he purposely did that to wake me up because it seemed that patch of grass was mowed most often, compared to the other areas within the kampung.
 Years later however, he somehow mellowed but still we never spoke much to one another although I got to know from my mother later that he was always fond of me.
 He knew the value of knowledge. He subscribed to the Reader's Digest magazine since the early 1960s and insisted that all of us read. In the end, the monthly magazine became a 'must-read' for me and I am quite sure that it played an important role in later shaping my future as a journalist.
 My only regret perhaps is that he didn't live to see me enter my working life. He died in 1984 of cardiac arrest at the Kuala Pilah hospital. I was away on a course prior to being employed at the time.
 The last time we spoke before I left for the city, he seemed rather open about things, for the first time telling me a thing or two about girls, about relationships and about the need to preserve integrity. Before I said goodbye to him, he handed me two of his ties and then taught me how to tie a proper Wellington Knot.
 When I got home, they already buried him. That evening I sat down on his empty bed, recalling our final conversation and the living years we had together. I knew then, as I know now, that while we were never close, I could find a lot of him in me.
 I broke down in tears as I saw his reading glasses, something I always saw him with those nights that he reads, there at their usual place, right next to his pillow.


ENDS