Six Minutes to Midnight, Part 2

Six Minutes to Midnight, Part 2

Sixty Seconds of Distance Run

You know, when I think about it, my mom was a feminist even before the word became fashionable.

She was always for empowerment via education, whether for boys or girls. I think, in her little way, the students at St Mary’s and Vivikananda not just learnt a thing or two about BM and sports but also some semangat - as you say, that the stars are reachable.

Let me tell you two incidents in her early life that perhaps shaped mummy’s worldview.

The first is a dark family secret that’s okay to be made public now that she is beyond the reproach of petty bureaucrats. 

1) This will come as a shock - my mom was never “Siti Rohani.”

After World War 2, resources were scarce and education infrastructure was limited. School places were very limited and only those below a certain age can get a place in school. So, my mom, who even as a child, knew the value of education, took the birth certificate of her dead younger sister and used it to enrol in school. This was in stark contrast to her contemporaries who missed the boat and were delighted they didn’t have to go to school.

My mother is one of the few people whose NRIC/MyKad number has an asterisk at the back - this denotes that the IC number does not reflect her real date of birth. In fact, until now, there is no living relative who knows my mom’s real name. I am just so proud that she has honoured her dead sister (who died during WWII) by living a life well lived. Having taken on her dead sister’s identity, she had done her sister proud by living the life that she did. My mom’s IC number was of the form

150835–XX-1234* where most would expect her birthday to be August 15, 1935 but her actual date of birth is September 22 1934 and she has always celebrated Sept 22 as her birthday.

2) When my mom was about 10, she was playing barefoot around her kampung house in Sungai Bakap when she stepped on the bangkai of a cobra by accident. She developed a wound under her left heel that never left her. Its some kind of nerve-ending wound that just doesn’t heal. When it gets infected, as it did countless times there is pus and what not. She’s had operations to cut away the infected bits, (not just debridements but something like a mini-amputation) but the wound keeps coming back. In the 1960s, when radiotherapy was the latest toy in the medical world, she’s had her foot zapped by X-rays but it never did any good. The never-healing wound was, as Christians would say, her cross to bear in life, a literal Achille’s heel. She’s had so much flesh surgically removed from her heel that later in life she developed bone spurs.

Anyway, it never stopped her from playing hockey for Malaysia, from swimming, diving (as a young child I’d look up to her at the highest level of the diving tower at Weld Swimming Pool in pure admiration as she gracefully plunged head first without a splash into the pool 30 feet below), or anything, really. Despite this condition, she never walked with a limp and most of her students were probably oblivious of her condition. That’s the semangat she’s made of and I’m pretty sure some it has rubbed off onto her students. The sort of spirit that builds badminton champions like Fong Chooi Yong and Ho Lai Wan.  

My mother’s paternal side comes from a long line of missionaries that can be traced all the way back to Baghdad - the furthest ancestors we could trace were called “Al-Baghdadi” - ‘the ones from Baghdad.’ The family vocation as missionaries was to travel the world spreading Islam by opening madrasah or sekolah pondok teaching recitation of the Quran and arithmetic wherever they went. They married locals and the next generation would travel further East, to Afghanistan and then finally to Kampong Sungai Bakap where my mom was born. Same kampung whose family writer Kee Thuan Chye hails from.