May I be so converted and see with these eyes? I cannot tell; I think not

My mother grew up the 6th out of 10 children, in a wooden house not big enough for all of them but which they made do with. My late grandfather was a volunteer policeman and had been friends with P. Ramlee, when they met during one of my Tok Ayah’s football matches in Singapore. My grandmother used to sell local kueh every morning, her younger children making the rounds in the village before going to school. My mother and her siblings grew up very close to each other, and their bonds were passed down to us; we first cousins were raised more as each other’s siblings and in batches, since there seemed to be new additions to our extended family each year.

My batch consisted of Y, P and me, each of us separated by two months in age. Our mothers accentuated this fact by always having us take a picture together, and we have several of these to chart our growth as we grew older. But the real markers of time aren’t photos – P recently married a beautiful, sweet girl and is now expecting his eldest child in a few months, and Y has just expressed her wish to be married to the man of her choice soon.

If there is any sign that I have long left my teenage years behind me, it’s not my nostalgia whenever I hear an NSync song, but rather, it is this.

I receive a wedding invitation every week now, and with it, the prerequisite banter often regaled jokingly, ‘So, when’s your turn, eh?’ Nudge nudge, wink wink, look the other way determinedly. If I feel like answering the question, I say, ‘Oh, years from now, hopefully – I can’t imagine settling down just yet.’ It’s a bit tricky, trying to say this in a way that doesn’t offend your newlywed friends, enraptured in their newfound togetherness as they are. I do feel happy for them because I love them (or in the case of acquaintances, appreciate their existence in this world enough to give them a present), but I don’t like how the conversation among guests at these events always falls to ribbing each other about when our turn might be. Uncertainties about my husband candidates aside (half of them are in New Zealand anyway, shooting The fricking Hobbit), it’s time to face the truth: I have a fear of commitment.

I shouldn’t be surprised. I have always been the flighty one; the whimsical one; the one who always went around without a plan. I chose my major by guessing that I’d be pretty decent in the life sciences; I chose my country of study because I’d loved Lord of the Rings and thought I’d like to study in a place with trees (I was initially meant to study in NZ and had even applied to the University of Wellington – things did not turn out that way, as you know). At one point, the only structure in my life was that I’d spend Mondays in isolation, attending the free concerts at the Faculty of Music, followed by visiting the arthouse cinema for a discounted show. Yes, that bad.

I’m really not big on plans, and marriage – living with a whole other person I haven’t already known all my life, alone and together! – is that ballgame I don’t know the rules to. The idea of making plans drives me into a panic. I’m planning a trip with friends, and the probabilities and arrangements to be made and the itineraries to be planned gave me palpitations for the better part of last month.

Responsibilities scare the heck out of me.

And as I said, even if commitment is a small nightmare of mine at the moment, I can’t even be swayed by the promise of a wedding. I’m not interested in the pomp and pageantry of being ‘king/queen for a day’, as the Malay simile goes. I think the hantaran, the gift from bride to groom and vice versa, while a good excuse to get that smartphone you wouldn’t have bought by yourself, is unnecessary and troublesome. I find wedding ceremonies exhausting. I’m not against the dowry (especially since Islamically the wife is sole owner of the dowry she receives) and the other elements that make a marriage valid, but I’m not keen on the other details.

While many women have envisioned their weddings to certain detail, I have no idea how I want mine to be. Colour? Nope. Flowers? Not a fan. Laces and frills? Have you seen how I walk? Do you really think I can handle delicate materials with my gait? You flatter me.

(Every time I complain out loud about the frivolity of it all, my mother looks at me from the corner of her eye and tells me in no uncertain terms that they are culturally valid. I know enough by now to say nothing in reply.)

Ceremony aside, what truly worries me about the whole thing is the marriage aspect, not the wedding. At this moment in time, I cannot honestly imagine what living with a whole other person would be like. He’d have to be someone very, very patient. I’m also a very mild introvert, which means I have a time limit on social interaction. I need to take a break every few hours if I’m in the company of more than one person. Marrying someone means they’re pretty much there all the time.

Oy vey.

And I don’t even have any particular idea of a dream guy. I don’t expect perfection, nor do I have very high expectations, unlike Benedick.

Rich she shall be, that’s certain; wise,
or I’ll none; virtuous, or I’ll never cheapen her;
fair, or I’ll never look on her; mild, or come not
near me; noble, or not I for an angel; of good
discourse, an excellent musician, and her hair shall
be of what colour it please God.

– Much Ado About Nothing | Act 2, Scene 3

I imagine I’m quite picky and difficult, so any guy I end up with would have to be able to live with that.

I imagine that person would be companionable. He would be someone who reads. He’d accept that I’m a bespectacled geek with certain rabid obsessions with British scifi. We’d argue and discuss constantly, because (a) that’s what you do when you’re very honest with each other and (b) that’s how my parents’ relationship has always been. He would humble me with his intelligence. He’d have a sense of humour, and forgive me easily when I laugh loud enough to wake the neighbourhood dogs. He’d bring me closer to God, not from any overt expression of religiosity, but because he is intrinsically God-fearing and God-loving.

Then again, those are the traits I can think of now. Who knows what I’ll come up with tomorrow, or the day after. (Speaking of which, let me just add Tom Hiddleston‘s name somewhere on my list…)

As of now, where I am and how I feel and how I think, I don’t have it in me to be with someone. I’m far too selfish to be able to share my dreams with someone just yet; his dreams would have to be same or similar, and what are the chances of that? And too many of the things I have envisioned for myself are things that I want. I want to study further; I want to travel more countries, getting further with each plane ride; I want to finish my tottering pile of unread books; I want to write a proper song with verses and a chorus and everything. Sure, I can do these things with someone too, but I don’t see it that way, not right now.

All my adventures I envision them alone, and I wonder if it is the result of circumstance or if I’m making it that way.

Tags: adulthood, growing up, marriage

‘You go, Glenn Coco!’

Early this morning, my dear friend June asked a question on Twitter which struck me with all the bluntness of a machete to my workdesk:

RT @j_rubis Why do some older women act like schoolgirls & gang up on a younger woman? It’s creepy.

            If you’re anything like me, tweets addressed to no one in particular become a self-centred exploration of past sins. Have I done something like that before? Was I conscious of what I did; did I give a whit of consideration to what I was doing to another person? Did I do it willingly and thinkingly? You awful person, you did.

            And what struck me most about this particular frustrated note was the sureness I felt, that I had done this before. I can’t remember to whom or when – likely it was during my delusional tyrannical primary school years, where I was vicious and socially inept to a fault – but I just knew I had.

            It was a frightening feeling.

            I judge people. I don’t hide the fact that I do. One of my ‘things’ is hanging out with friends, generating parodies of social commentaries on stereotypes; I judge them knowing I can never fully know them and that I’m painting a superficial caricature of how that person appears; I know that I can in no way reach the person’s essence. However, some truths (and character traits) are self-evident. Most of the time, I keep such thoughts to myself. Every now and then I judge myself, viciously and angrily, until I can no longer look my reflection in the eye.

            I come from a strong history of self-deprecation and admittance of faults, and perhaps it’s only natural that I nitpick others as well. Once upon a time, I’d have no qualms about saying them aloud and to a person’s face. Being educated in a co-ed system meant that the majority of my interactions where with other girls (statuses usually remain quo), and I learned (slowly) over the course of my schooling years that doing so was less truthful than hurtful.

            Something happened which reminded me of our tendency to bully in packs, just two days ago, at my cousin’s wedding. I love my cousins, but I loathe weddings. Everyone is forced to be nice to each other and plaster on fake smiles and heavy makeup; petty hatchets resurface amid the tangled dance of courtesies, and you come back from such events learning more facts about certain people you wish you hadn’t.

            My cousin’s relatives (unrelated to me) had arrived at the wedding party a little later than everyone else – a group of sisters in their mid-20’s and late-teens. They were not particular beauties, but they had symmetrical features, long dark hair, lithe young bodies and all the self-assurance of people who felt themselves pretty enough to move ahead in the world. They were known among the family to have certain airs that came with vanity – the Malay word for it is ‘gedik’, I believe. These young ladies don’t laugh and talk, but giggle and titter instead, and they don’t walk but sway, their hips moving in an exaggerated expression of perceived femininity. They were everything almost every man wants – they displayed a successful vision of the culturally ideal young woman.

            My own cousins and nieces, all in their early teens and only just burgeoning into that probing consciousness of womanhood we all go through, looked on admiringly. They wanted to know who the sisters were, and what they did and where they went to school and how old they were. Oh, look how lovely their hair shone in the midday sun. So tall, and so pretty.

            My writing is self-evident of my impression of these sisters. I know that one of them is smart and driven, if a little giggly. I know that all of them are kind, friendly and respectful. I know that I barely know them at all, except for family functions such as these, where we barely interacted because I have scant patience for topics and interests I don’t share. (I usually ended up in a fierce discussion with the old uncles (about politics or other stuff only they talk about at weddings) until my mother would drag me away.)

            But as I answered my young cousins and nieces’ questions about these sisters as best I could, I felt wary. I wondered if it was my jealousy of their looks and confidence. I wondered if it was dread at knowing that my young girls were picking up these conformist notions of beauty, that they had to dress and primp a certain way to catch a man’s eye. They are young still, and I would rather they be themselves than chase an ideal look or an age they’re not. I suddenly felt conscious of my own dress and makeup; I could feel the uneven eyeliner on the corner of my eyelid weigh down on me. It unnerved me that I, too, shared my cousins’ knowledge that this was what women were told they should look like, that this was how women are meant to behave and talk. The sisters were everything I am not.

            Still, I kept these thoughts to myself. I did not dismiss aloud the sisters’ obvious efforts at beauty, nor their precariously high heels, nor their obvious awareness of being observed and admired. My cousins and nieces are young and impressionable, but they still had time to form their own ideas. I would rather they admire these women than hate on them for things we did not even know for certain. I understood my own jealousy and feelings of inadequacy, but these young girls must learn to form opinions and impressions of people, especially other women, on their own. Our sex does get a lot of flak for being quick to gang up on others, especially if they are perceived to be a threat, no matter how vague. While I do not believe it is a means of bullying exclusive to females, women are perhaps more cruel when they resort to this, because we know what truly gets to a girl, and we attack with the precision and cruelty of assassins. We may not take away life, but we take away a girl’s security, sense of self and confidence, and how is that any better?

            I believe that in some form or manner, I may have done this style of bullying before. I may still be guilty of it now. Sometimes it’s easy to fall into a pack and start picking each other’s flaws; I’ve both experienced and seen it being done in an actual playground, as a child. While I try to be fair about my words (I am as critical of men as I am of women), I know how tempting it is to narc on someone, as part of a group. At an age where young women are still figuring themselves out and trying to find their space in the world, I don’t wish my own pessimism to mar the way my cousins and nieces see other girls, hypocritical though it may be. I want them to find in other women confidants, kindred spirits, role models, and inspiration for when times get tough. I want to share my own mistakes as a teenage girl so they won’t make the very same.

            A couple of hours after the sisters arrived, I overheard the eldest in conversation with my younger brother, as they compared internships at law firms. She flipped her long, dark mane of hair over one shoulder as she discussed spiritedly with my brother the pros and cons of working in a small firm. It reminded me that while I judge people at will, it is always important to remember that I will be pleasantly surprised by the very same people. I smiled to myself, moving past them quickly, not wishing to intrude, and was grateful that I held my tongue. We judge books by their covers, but we treasure them based on their contents.

Tags: bullying, girls

The Break-In

A few nights ago, my home was broken into.

We were away at my aunt’s, and after a couple of false starts, had gone home rather late at night. When we entered, the first thing to clue us in was the open cutlery drawers. And then we stepped into the house properly and saw that it had been thoroughly ransacked.

My brother and I ran up the house, checking to see what they had taken. It was the usual – laptops, portable hard drives, petty cash. We’re not wealthy and we don’t have much of high value. What we do have are a lot of memories and keepsakes, and while they are still intact if bruised from all the tossing around that night, they feel tainted somehow.

I have a tendency to the hysterical (my mother will gladly demonstrate to you the way in which I thoroughly lost it once I saw the extent of the damage), my brother has a tendency for dramatic violence (he slammed half his body into a wall in anger at the reluctance of the police on the scene to actually enter our house) and my father has a tendency to flare up with anger (evidently a genetic trait). My mother was the only truly calm one that night. Our cousins, whose house had just been broken into a few days prior, came to wait with us. The Niece was cheerful and blissfully oblivious, and she recognised the forensics officer as the same one who had examined her own home. She followed him from room to room as he took pictures and dusted for fingerprints, and when she came to my room, she insisted that the mess was my doing.

“Who did this? Bad people did this,” my brother said in his usual patient way with her.

“Tak! She did it!” She was adamant. Also, she’d visited my room in various states of mess before, and this was not beyond her imagination.

And although the forensics guy was pleasant and helpful, the police were either highly incompetent or very jaded. We were, after all, the fourth house in our row of houses to have been hit by the same burglars. We were already on high alert; somehow, we still didn’t see this coming.

I’ve lost all the pictures from my years abroad. I’ve lost all the work I’ve stored in various places for the last eight years. If anything, I’ve learned my lesson: always save things in an online account.

I don’t know where to begin. I don’t know how to salvage all my words from all those years. They’re hardly of good quality, so I know that if I’ve sent any to friends, odds are they’ve been deleted, or are lying in the hidden depths of somebody’s inbox. I don’t know how to replace the pieces I know I must write again, because they were so poorly done the first time around.

What I’ve also lost is my sense of security in my own home. We jump at the slightest noise; we double, triple-check all the locks on all the doors. We pray for protection, we pray for safety. My mother prays constantly that above all, we have peace of mind. I sleep with a hockey stick now, which doesn’t bode well for whoever tries to wake me up on the weekends. My neighbour offered to lend us his machete for a few nights. “Chop of the bugger’s hand,” he said.

We do what we can because the police just aren’t doing enough.

We do what we can because it’s tough times and this is what a lot of people are doing in order to survive. Perhaps this is easier. Perhaps they don’t know better.

I pray they die ugly deaths and rot in hell, all the same. I pray that I get the chance to bash in their faces and spit in their eyes. Sometimes I’m not sure what I want from them. Sometimes I think perhaps I should forgive, but my heart doesn’t seem big enough to do that yet. And I think that scares me most of all.

I want them to be caught and punished. I want them to know how it feels to not feel safe anywhere anymore. Likely they already live in constant fear and always on the run, so I want them to suffer worse. I also want the people who spout statistics and numbers in my face and tell me that my country is a safer place to just shut the hell up because they obviously don’t know what it feels like to have your safety violated. All it takes is one time.

I’m also grateful that we weren’t physically harmed. I’m grateful because things could have easily been worse. I live in a house locked in by grilles, reinforced with sharp metal spikes and padlocked in every possible corner. I should feel safer but I don’t. I am angry but I am grateful but I’m also vengeful yet very aware of how easy we had it, comparatively.

I’m also grateful because at times like these, you get to learn who really cares. My brother texted his friends immediately and they rang him back, saying simply, “We’re headed there now.” They arrived just as our cousins and uncle left, one of them dressed in a Jedi outfit because they’d just finished watching The Phantom Menace when they got the message. They quoted ObiWan at my brother, who laughed with relief, even though the scifi reference flew over his head. They stood there, being guys, all gangly and quietly supportive. They gave my brother those visually awkward manhugs, the one where they half-hug, half-shake hands.

My own friends have checked in and called and texted, and I’m thankful for all of them. Thank you, all of you.

And I know I’m expected to end this with a short, sweet sentence that is reflective in nature and acts as a summary of my thoughts, but screw that. Here’s how it’ll go:

There’s sunshine from behind the clouds and stuff, but I’m not gonna lie – I’m pretty bloodthirsty at the moment.

‘… yet the world is brought to his feet’

It has been roughly nine months since E passed.

The reason I count the time this way is, perhaps, because I have been all this time. His old nutcracker soldier stands guard over me at work, and the message on the whiteboard by his colleagues, which has been there since that awful week nine months ago, still says ‘We love you, E’.

And each time I pass by it, I wonder if he knew that we do. I wonder if we, his friends, ever made it so obvious to him that he would never have to wonder. I only knew him briefly compared to the rest of the company, and yet I was so affected by his passing. Perhaps it was because it was seemingly unjust, that a kind man like him left this world before we did. Perhaps it was the shock. I thought about it a lot that first month, and I don’t think there was any way he could have left this world that would have seemed in any way better.

Perhaps because it was most jarring and most recent witnessing of the frailty of our lives. It was a reminder of mine, as well as everyone else’s mortality. And I don’t know how I feel about it anymore.

I know people who have left this world since then. Each person has been a reminder; their lives a mosaic of the way we live. How insignificant, how small. How mired in our own mediocrity we are sometimes. How we take it all for granted, more often than not forgetting that we only have one shot at this. And yet, how great their presence, that their loss is felt in ways we remember and forget only at intervals, because being constantly reminded would be too painful.

Now that I have felt loss, I cannot imagine going through it again, or to allow it to fall on anyone else I know. But there is only so much I can do. I stare at the people I love around me, and cannot begin to conceive what I’d do without them. I know I will move on, as I have since, but how much it will hurt is something I don’t want to imagine.

I have gone through the routine; let go of some friendships and gained new ones; tried to make a few changes in my life, and yet. I find myself in a bit of a rut. It pains me to say this, but I feel as though I need to move. As though I need something new. I have driven myself ill with worry, and worried myself with paranoia about how I live. I have been worried about my health, imagining awful things and consulting various doctors who just smile bemusedly and assure me that I am fine, I have always been fine (“although you do need to move a little more”). I have felt stifled, and I have felt lonely, and I have been tired of feeling this way.

And I wonder, am always wondering, if this is just me, reverberating the pain of E’s loss – if I never let go of the string that was struck when we lost him, and if I’m still playing with it still. If his mortality has reminded me of mine, and if I’m too attached to this world to accept that.

(He’d find that line about a ‘reverberating string’, and my tiring state of mind, both amusing and exhausting, I imagine.)

There was a time I felt spiritually prepared to let go of this world. I was conveninently in Melbourne, away from almost all of my family, and I had taken to heart the temporary state of this world. I had absorbed the Islamic teaching that my fate has been set, and that I am to live this life to the best I can, in the best way I know how, and to own up to the fact that I will leave it one day, make my choices based on that.

It felt so simple then. I don’t have the same answers now. I feel that I have been so caught up in thinking and not doing, that I have grown restless in my own skin. I feel that I have placed this world in my heart, and not just my hands, and that this aching is reminiscent of it.

My mother says that she never had time to worry about such things when she was my age. She says that our anxieties and neuroses are symptoms of people who “think too much and only about frivolous concerns, because you’re wasting time doing the wrong things and fretting over it”. She had no time for a quarter-life crisis, much less consider the notion. “You,” she said, “should busy yourself with things you want to do. Better yourself. Pray that each day will be better than yesterday, and just DO it.”

She makes sense. So I’m going to pick up where I left off, before I was shaken by the everyday (that day so unlike every other day), and try that out for size.

(We miss you, E.)

Snippets of the things we (I) say

“So, how did your job interview at ___ go?”

“How did you know that? I didn’t tell you that.”

“I just could tell from your tweets. You give out that vibe; you’re more transparent than you think.”

*

“It’s too late for coffee.”

*

“Well, that would be mean.”

*

“Hey, remember the time you told me you couldn’t imagine me wearing heels? Well guess what I’m wearing.”

“You can do anything you want to.”

“Awwww.”

*

“Come on, tell me about the drama as briefly as you can.”

“Well, the act of describing it to you would make me relive the drama all over again…”

“Okay, don’t then.”

“…which would be rather nonsense, which is what it is. Nonsense.”

*

“Speaking of reliving drama, guess who’s reliving the drama. I’m going through the same ___ ____ situation.”

“It’s not my fault.”

“Yeah, it never was your fault; I just didn’t say it.”

*

“Oh, stop sounding like a fortune cookie.”

*

“Go to bed; I wanna sleep.”

*

But the thing that I forgot to say – which goes way up there in the long, long list of things I want and should say but do not – is that you will be good at whatever it is you do. And you will make the right decision, and even if it isn’t the right time, it will still lead you to where you ought to be. Time will make it look better when you look back, but you won’t see it that way until much, much later.

People change, and not necessarily for the better, but sometimes you can’t blame them. I’ll always tell you when you’re becoming one of them, don’t worry.

And you will do whatever it is you need to do until then.

And being lonely, I’ve been told, is a feeling that comes and goes. When it comes, it’s always a good indicator of when you need to drag out a friend to talk about things like menstrual cycles and how pedestrian life has become.

So sleep. Travel – pursue your wanderlust and that itch under your skin to move somewhere (anywhere) – and then come back and we’ll go have a local coffee.

And everything will look better in the morning.

Tags: conversations

We are always a little bit far.

There is this park, near where I live, that has always been there.

If you pass by the Federal Highway headed south, just before the new highrise apartments that block the skyline of my hometown, just before the train station that stands lazily and belligerently at the side like a stubborn child that refuses to have his dinner, there is a lake.

You won’t see much of it, because the trees there are the oldest in town, and huge and sprawling, branches and leaves aiming hopefully for the sky. You’ll see short glimpses of the water, usually still, green from reflecting the nearby shrubbery and the thick clumps of aquatic plants. It won’t seem like anything much. You might even mistake it for a sewage treatment centre, like the other ones placed thoughtfully alongside traffic-heavy highways.

But no. It is a lake within a huge park, and it has been there all my life.

It used to be a place for us, growing up. We would go there on weekends or on weekdays, and we’d lace up our shoes and gamely trudge along the walking pathway that frames the lake. We’d go as near to the water as we dared, but as neither of our parents fancied the idea of scooping their children from a cold, slimy lake, we were cautious. We used to ride our bikes haphazardly, struggling when faced with the 25 degree slope up the trail, and the joggers would move around us and occasionally give us a little push if we were threatening to glide backwards and into the lake. There was a restaurant on the other side called ‘Crocodile Farm Restaurant’, and the waiters would tease us with stories of crocodiles coming up to eat our kung pao prawn and yong chao fried rice.

Then we grew up, and we got caught up in exams and the daily humdrum of being Malaysian students, and somewhere along the way, going to the lake became a chore. It became something our parents did alone, when we’d be too lazy to get up for a brisk walk, and eventually it came to the point that they’d nag us to go. Being teenagers, we held our ground by slouching even further into the couch. And then I went overseas.

So I haven’t been in years.

Today was a restless day. It came on the tail of restless nights and a half-workday (on a public holiday) and meeting my old high school girlfriends and eating more candy that is advisable and feeling hit by a wave of inertia that I don’t want anywhere near my life. I was sleepy, tired, agitated, and close to tears.

“We’re going for a walk at the lake”, Papa said in his authoritative voice, which we usually ignore.

“Okay”, I said this time.

We went. My new shoes still felt strange on me (because they are MEN’S shoes) and I was dressed in strange colours. When we reached the lake, it felt like going back. I was the stranger reluctantly come home to an unchanged memory. The trees were in the same place, and they looked the same, and there were those people walking around with buckets and fishing rods. By the time we parked, rain had fallen. Papa made a comment about how the rain was the kind that would drop by unnoticed. “The kind that comes for a while, and then just stops.” I was staring at the lake ahead, taking it in, mp3 player at the ready. The plan was to walk with umbrellas, but my hijab would be cover enough, I reasoned. Besides, I’m too clumsy to walk and handle an open umbrella.

I tried not to feel too self-conscious walking around the circuit. I put on Tina Fey’s Bossypants audiobook, and it was some comfort listening to a person talk on end and airing out her thoughts about raising children and about how crazy it was to fret in an already privileged life. She is hilarious, and her game shamelessness encouraged my own. I ignored the fact that the same joggers had passed me twice in the same time I took to go one lap; I avoided staring at their proper exercise attire and comparing it to my own pink-and-purple striped thing that looked like I was getting ready to go to bed. I walked ahead. The path was getting to me, and so was the mud. To avoid the ongoing construction by the side, I walked onto the grass.

It felt smushy and nice. So I did it again.

Here is how my logic works: Walk in grass. Grass is slightly muddy and transfers some dirt to new walking shoes. Walk purposely and carefully into puddle of water to wash off mud stains. Proceed to walk into grass again for that natural feel. Shoes get more mud. Walk into bigger puddle of water. Shoes get soaked. Who cares by this point – puddles are fun, and so is the grass, and you’ll cross that shoe-scrubbing bridge when you come to it.

When I reached the acknowledgements of the audio book, I switched to Yamandu Costa’s Mafua, which is a lovely ode to the 12-string guitar and to the senses of Brazil. It is magnetic and gentle, bewitching and familiar.  And that was when I really stepped back and took it in.

The lake – our Lake – is a beautiful thing. The largest, truest patch of the richest greens I had ever seen, in a lovely arrangement you’d be hard-pressed to find anywhere else in town. It is small in comparison to older parks in the state, but it had the thickest grass and the most magnificent trees, and there it stood, unyielding and growing, as the world around it grew more greedy and more obsessed with concrete. The lush foliage helped us ignore the passing cars and the rising roads, each built on top of the other. The lake remained in the middle of it, feeding it with water and nutrients and life. People fish there everyday, though I rarely saw them successful. Perhaps the practice gave them an excuse to stare at the still water; perhaps it answered their patience with an inner peace.

In my last year of university, I lived at an apartment a little farther away from university. It forced me to walk for half an hour each way on the generous walking paths, shaded by huge pale trees that changed colours with the seasons. There was also an incredible amount of possum droppings, but we’ll have to ignore that. Whenever I felt frustrated or sad or anxious or restless, I would vent my thoughts to the trees, as if asking them what they thought and wanting them to pass some wisdom from their many years of standing by and watching us humans being silly with our lives. I could have a little cry as I briskly made my way down Elizabeth Street and they wouldn’t mind. I would look up and remember God and thank Him for creating all this. That, I miss most about my long walks.

One of my longest heart-to-hearts was with my senior and dearest Banoffee Pie, when we were lost on the hill in Wilsons Prom. As we negotiatied sharp branches and tried to read footsteps in the dirt, we talked and talked and I shared my worries and problems. She listened to me with her heavy eyes and would squeeze my arm empathetically at the right moments. She is now married and has just given birth to a son.

I wonder how the years escape us, even though we were sure we had looked quite hard.

But I know I haven’t been looking hard at all. If I had, I would have heard the creaking of the branches as they inched up the atmosphere; would have noted the seasons passing from unbearable sun to endless rain; would have known the day the flowers would bloom well before they did – the way I used to, once upon a time.

Today, I remembered how important it is to look, the way I did in the best time of my life so far. To look, rather than let everything pass me by.

O our lord, You have not created (all) this in vain. Glory be to You. Save us then from the torment of fire.

Não seja a vida sempre assim

Sometimes, I am afraid of writing. It’s a rational fear, if being scared of starting something you don’t know the end to was a rational thing.

I’m aware of how cowardly I am. It comes from years of being told why I shouldn’t do things and what happens when I do – my mind cannot but see a million possibilities, a million endings that I mostly do not want.

But I am always scared of writing. I am scared of being misunderstood, because I only truly understand myself in writing. I am scared of being too much substance or too much style, because I come from Extremistan (I did not coin that title; Taleb did it and with much more flair) and when I suffice in one I sacrifice the other, because that’s how I am. I am afraid of being unintelligible but frank, because then it would confirm that there’s something wrong with me. I know there’s something wrong with me; I just don’t want to see it in black and white.

But mostly I am afraid of getting carried away with writing, of getting carried away with words – I can feel the alphabet, different from that of either of my ancestors, crawl beneath my skin and infuse with my tissue these many words that taste pleasantly confusing on my tongue; I am not immune to the way they bind to my bones and pour out of me like a stream, on my high, whiny voice or through the first two fingers of both hands, padding out a pattern that becomes what you see right now. It is no stream of consciousness; it is a stream that escapes me and threatens to drown me, and if I lose focus for just one more second – for just one more letter, I promise you, I’ll let it take me.

I am afraid of being lost in the many probable endings, all of them too far and too real for me to see right now.

I could use a Ramadhan alliteration here, like ‘Ramadhan Rhapsody’. But I don’t think so.

Ramadhan this year, as it does every year, has passed faster than I would prefer.

When I was younger, this month used to be a bit of a bother. We couldn’t eat and couldn’t drink, and we’d interrupt perfectly good sleep to have our suhoor, our meal before dawn, which is technically going to sustain us until the breaking of fast at sunset. I don’t remember much about my childhood Ramadhans, except that we’d grumble and mope around a bit about being hungry and lacking energy (always a useful excuse when you’re meant to do chores) and that to stay up until Fajr prayers, I’d read an old Harry Potter to keep awake, much to my mother’s consternation (“You’re supposed to read the Qur’an, not some novel you’ve read ten times already!”). The days passed by longer, the weather wasn’t as hot, and we’d look forward to the end of the month, when Eid would come with all of its merriment and duit raya (Eid money; apparently other cultures give gifts instead).

The year before I left to study overseas, I had a bit of a spiritual meltdown, which resulted in me re-examining my faith and questioning every single religious practice I’d previously done by mimicry. That Ramadhan was a special one, where I tried harder than usual at praying and reading the Qur’an, though I was hardly consistent. We were also in the midst of exam preparations and us girls sharing the flat would take turns sleeping and waking up each other and calculating sums and chemical equations, fingers slapping the calculator keys hard and furious.

It wasn’t until my first Sha’aban in Melbourne, the month before Ramadhan, when I was introduced to the anticipation that usually accompanied it. “Ahlan wa sahlan, Ramadhan, ahlan!” (Welcome, Ramadhan, welcome!) they’d say a little self-consciously before grinning sheepishly, knowing how odd it appeared to others that they’d be so excited about a plain old month. My friends started setting targets early on, like wanting to finish the Qur’an or not listening to music at all or being very good about their sunnah (voluntary) prayers. Some girls talked about wearing the headscarf, some were talking about iftar menus, some started inviting friends over, marking dates carefully in planners so as not to double-book.

And then, just like clockwork, it descended upon us.

It’s difficult to describe the flurry of activity that takes place in Ramadhan in Melbourne, when everything is done so quietly and solemnly. The female prayer section was uncharacteristically quiet all of that month, the usual loud chatter replaced by the quiet humming of dozens of girls reciting the Qur’an (the men noted this lack of noise with some smirking), racing each other to finish it by the month’s end. We barely cooked at all, being invited to eat out nearly every night as our friends and neighbours tried to reap the reward of feeding the fasting. I broke fast with no less than 20 people each night, and we’d all pray together afterwards, shoulder to shoulder, arm to arm, heads bent as we faced our Maker with empty hearts and full stomachs. Our voices broke in prayer and we’d end by hugging each other, our shared Ramadhan making us closer almost without us noticing.

And I understood then this phrase some used to describe Ramadhan – the madrasah of souls. It is a month made to prepare the heart for the rest of the year, to strengthen it spiritually so that it can sustain the other 11 months. The fasting is meant to starve the ego of its worldly longings, the abstaining a test of will and faith. It is narrated in prophetic tradition that the gates of Heaven are flung open for all of Ramadhan, that there are no barriers between the words of the earthbound and the Everlasting. Good deeds are rewarded 70 times over and people race each other to give alms and provide for others. It is a month of tremendous generosity by Allah, and it spills over into mankind unlike anything I’ve ever seen.

But we are still selfish, still self-destructive, still driven by our egos. Ramadhan is an enterprise for the willing, and we often fail ourselves by taking it for granted. After those first two years, I sort of spun out of track. I met Ramadhan twice again without much enthusiasm; I fancied myself seasoned by then, a bit more cynical and knowing. There were other concerns to address, other things to do in life, and I didn’t have the same hunger for God’s pleasure in Ramadhan as I did in those two years. I treated tarawih lightly and I got distracted by other things, simpler pleasures. And as I got a full-time job, the easy excuse was that I was tired – which was true, but hardly the only truth. What I refused to admit to myself was that I had lost touch – with myself and with God. I thought myself better than I was, and history, myth and legend will tell you that most downfalls begin thus.

There is no instant connection with God. There is no spirituality that comes from knowing more than you did before. There is no good that comes from the reading of things that should be done. All effort, all thought and all prayer culminates in the doing of it. The doing, and nothing less.

This month, I’ve been trying harder. It is by no means the best Ramadhan I’ve had – I try not to make an excuse of it, but a 9-hour office job doesn’t do a person favours during this hectic month. But I try. I’ve lost dear friends this year who will never meet another Ramadhan, but I have. In that respect, if nothing else, I have been blessed.

All through this month, each time I stand for tarawih, I am reminded of one memory – or rather, many memories infused into a single recollection – of my sisters, my friends praying alongside me in various prayer clothes and dresses and colours, pulling me into the line of prayer, holding me perfectly into position. Her (their) shoulder brushes mine, and as the folds of people before us bow and supplicate towards the open, welcome heavens, I am more at home then than I have ever been in my life.

And I pray desperately, If Ramadhan means anything to me, o Allah, then let it be that feeling, of closeness to them and to You.

“Oh you who believe! Fasting is prescribed to you as it was prescribed to those before you, that you many learn piety and rightousness” (Qur’an, al-Baqarah, 2:183)

“…And it is better for you that ye fast, if ye only knew.” (Q 2:184)

Somebody hold me too close

I feel loneliest when I am in a crowd.

And it’s not about my individuality drowning in a mass of people, and neither is it a remnant of my childhood fear of physical contact. It’s about my awkwardness – how strange I feel with myself, and how strange I feel with others, trying to fit my body and its alien elements into my every interaction, and trying to have it come out normal. Natural.

They say all you need is confidence, but that’s not really it, because confidence comes and goes, like some magic I don’t know the rules to yet. At times I swagger as though with purpose, but then I open my mouth to speak and it goes, hiding away. I look in small corners where lost things are most keen to hide, but nothing.

And they say to be a writer, is to observe and understand people and their motivations. I used to watch people go past and not one of them – even the tall gangly teenager in deliberately shabby uniform, nor the somewhat piss-drunk person in unintentionally dirty clothes – move like they are out of place with the world. Sometimes I wondered (still, I wonder) if it’s just me. If somehow I’m destined to go through life a little out of tune, always out of step, a few notes too late, a stumbled cadence there. They say we never envy the less fortunate, but I do. What is living, if you don’t recognise yourself?

So I took a vacation from expectations, from people. It was easy back then, when routine was what I made of it, and I lived with young single women who had independent pursuits and only wanted you to come back and do your duty by them and cook dinner, as per the roster that was stuck stubbornly to the fridge. There was a time we were more like sisters, but people flitted in and out and you had to make do or be left behind. Nobody likes being left behind.

But those days I left myself behind. I walked alone, I sat alone, I had lunch alone (with the newspaper, if I was terrified, or staring at people, if I was brave). Mondays were made for being alone; the local arthouse cinema had tickets cheap before 4pm, and the faculty of music features its students in a weekly concert during lunch, all throughout semester. I’d buy an almond croissant, sit a few chairs away from an elderly person (looking at them, I found, they were perhaps the most sure people I had ever seen), and try to eat discreetly while some virtuoso performed. It’s hard to eat amid such talent. Harder than it is to eat alone, which is an act both vindictive and vindicative, and therefore easy to swallow. It feels rude to chew when someone is being so brilliant before you, for you.

And then I’d watch a movie. It’s a fair walk from the music hall to the cinema, and if I was early I’d make my way to the independent bookstore (I swear, I only fall into the pattern of a ‘hipster’ existence by the clumsiest of accidents) and talk myself out of buying books I’ll only finish reading in a few years. I’d choose a movie based on the reviews I’d read for about a week, which meant that I watched the most random things.

One of them was a semi-documentary of a Mongolian farmer, filmed like a labour of love in 35mm (or another kind of film, I wouldn’t know. It was the better quality film though, and ’35mm’ came to mind). A sheep giving birth, captured in a single, nervy, bloody, daring, unmoving take.

Another was a 3D movie – my one and only. Coraline, which I only watched due to my then-untainted admiration for Neil Gaiman. It was nice, but I was constantly reminded of being surrounded by the over-70 crowd clutching ice cream cones. Not that a crowd is the right word; it was more a smattering of people. I developed a taste for near-empty cinemas and pastries almost immediately.

And then there was Balibo, which made me discreetly wipe my tears away with my hijab, very useful in times like those, and if you intend to carry tissues but always forget to. I don’t usually watch movies like that one, but it was beautiful and tragic and haunting, after. It had a climax of savagery and blood, and as the tears started pouring and I hid my face in my headscarf, one of my hands clutching a small box of cereal, I felt this painful urge to hold somebody’s hand.

Lately, I have felt that pull I did in the cinema – that strong yearning to touch someone and  mean it. I don’t like to repeat all this Zen, new-age kerfuffle about energy and qi and wavelengths, although I can accept their existence. But I want to hold your hand and feel like I can implicitly understand you, even though I’m just imagining it. I want to hug you and feel our shared existence converge in an instant. I want to link my arm in yours and remember what it was like when we braved the waves together, the way we did when we would share each other’s breaths long past midnight, telling stories from our childhood in hushed whispers used only for the early morning. We greet each other by grabbing the other’s hand and arm, pulling them close and pressing our cheeks together, whispering wishes in each other’s ear.

Lately, that is what I think I need. Being alone prepared me to understand myself, but 6,000 kilometres away, years gone (has it been years? It feels so new, still) I feel lost again, near unhinged. I know what I want (what I think I want), but not what I need. I know I am angry and frustrated, and I know I can be alone, but I fear I cannot do this forever. ‘Forever is always changing’, I read, and once I looked forward to Forever, like it was something I deserved. Now I think twice.

Sondheim wrote, matched to music and chorus, ‘But alone is alone, not alive.’ I am practical, and I cannot beg you come home. Even if you do, I don’t know that we will ever be near enough to hold each other for a moment, still with purpose, as though gaining strength through osmosis. And I am practical and cannot leave here to go.

But I miss you, I miss you. I miss people and places that aren’t here and I wish I didn’t have to. I miss time I no longer have but we grow up and away and we’re forced to.

TRAVELING LIGHT :: Mustafa Davis | Amir Sulaiman from Mustafa Davis on Vimeo.

I cannot erase your messages, the only scraps of your life I have with me, in fear you’ll leave again, and too soon.

Backpacking across years.

She is an old friend, although I’ve known her not long at all.

I cannot pinpoint the moment she became such an important part of my life, but she is a gentle, strong soul, and she helped maneouvre me back when the Melbourne wind blew a bit too strong for me to see clearly. She, who was at least half my size and looked half as young.

But she is older, and in the brief moments when I do forget it, it is striking how time seems to have given her a miss. As if to make people pay extra attention to this tiny, precious thing. I cannot understand anyone who doesn’t like her, who doesn’t want her to hold onto, like an anchor (like a sister). When life got a bit too messy for me, she held me fast to the ground, fed me normalcy. Listened to me with those big wise eyes that have seen more and understand more than I do.

After two long years, we met again yesterday. We messed around with pronouns, time having made our conversational pattern a bit fuzzy. But having her near reminded me how much of home she had become for me, in those trying months when I was thinking too much and doing too little.

We have something new in common now – a homesickness for a place that never quite became Home. The day seemed to slow down, as days often do when you’re around her, and I’d forgotten to become distracted by all the small things that had come to define my life. I’d forgotten what it was like to focus. To slow down. To look at something and not try to condense it in 140 characters or less.

This is what it was like, I thought. This was what I’d missed.

What she means to me is exploring museums on rainy mornings. Trudging puddles to get to warm coffee. Languid walking down wide paved streets. Marathon eating trips while talking about life’s annoying mysteries, figuring out compromises together. Making pictures out of everyday. Looking for the pretty. Trying to define the beautiful. Asserting our individuality in a place that had far too much of it, and sometimes too litte.

Yesterday, without our familiar city in the backdrop – us present instead in the rush of the new, familiar hectic – we looked and felt lost and tired. But at least she was in my Here and Now. And so was I.