Six Minutes to Midnight, Part 3

Six Minutes to Midnight, Part 3

A Second Bite at the Cherry

My father was not my mother’s first love. My step-father was. Let me explain...

I have written previously how highly my mother regarded education and how the paternal side of her family were descended from missionaries that originated from Baghdad.

Her father, Haji Ismail, a tok guru ugama, was the guru besar of a humble sekolah kampung in Sungai Bakap.

So it probably comes as no surprise that my mom decided to take up the family vocation and become a teacher herself. She did well enough to be selected to Malay Girls College (now re-named Kolej Tunku Khursiah - TKC - Tunku Khursiah College), the all-girls equivalent of the all-boys MCKK - Malay College Kuala Kangsar. Both were boarding schools set up by the British to train Malays for entry to the administrative services.

After MGC, she trained in Kirkby College, a teacher’s training college (now defunct, not to be confused with a secondary school of the same name) and at Homerton College, Cambridge University.

At Kirkby, my mom met her first love - a Syed who was her senior. They fell madly in love and planned to get married. But his mother, a Sharifah, would have none of it - “only a Sharifah is good enough for my Syed son!,” she exclaimed and vowed that if they eloped and got married against her wishes, she would do everything within her power to make my mom’s life miserable.

Syed’s love for Siti Rohani was so boundless, so sacrificial, that he couldn’t bear the thought of Siti Rohani suffering or being miserable in the slightest. So he sacrificed his love for her and they agreed to break up. I use the word “agreed” advisedly, as we shall soon see.

He ended up marrying a Sharifah of his mother’s choosing.

My mom ended up marrying my dad who is of Minangkabau, Dutch and Bugis ancestry. More about my paternal great-grandfather here:

http://azlanadnan.blogspot.com/2018/08/haji-mohamed-taib-bin-haji-abdul-samad.html

Fast forward half a century or so.

My father passed away in 2002. Exactly a year later, I was at my mom’s house late one night when the phone rang at 2300 hrs. An unfamiliar voice asked to speak to my mom. My first thought was “siapa orang tua gila ni telefon tengah malam buta ini?” (who’s this crazy bugger calling this late at night?), then I thought maybe it was some kind of emergency that couldn’t wait til the morning.

Anyway, it was Syed. He had heard from the Kirkby old boys’ and girls’ network that Siti Rohani’s husband had passed away. He patiently waited one whole year to give my mom space to grieve my dad’s passing before contacting her, before making that fateful phone call I took.

You see, the Sharifah he married had passed away five years earlier, of cancer. His children pestered him to re-marry, “You need someone to take care of you in your old age” was the reasoning. But he refused, saying “If I were to re-marry, there is only one person in this world I would marry but since she’s taken, end of discussion. I will hear no more of it.”

I sense they must have made some kind of lover’s pact when they parted ways half a century earlier because they got married very soon after. I don’t know for a fact - one doesn’t discuss one’s mother’s love life with one’s mother, does one? - but its pretty obvious to the casual observer.

Anyway, they had a Chinese dinner wedding reception at the Park Royal - which raised a few eyebrows. My mom was her usual “Its my wedding, suka hati aku lah nak makan apa asalkan halal.” What I can say about my mom’s religious upbringing, being the daughter of a religious tok guru yet trained in the best of the West as a teacher is that she’s progressive, pragmatic and essentialist. She is a Hajah many times over and in that period of her life when her health permitted it, she’d go on umrah annually - mostly with her mak datin ex TKC kaki. She took Arabic language night classes at the International Islamic University of Malaysia for several years.

The Arabic the learnt was classical Arabic and was of not much practical use as a means of everday conversation. On her annual trips to Mecca: she’d practise her newly-acquired linguistic skills at the bazaar buying oranges and was laughed back in the face by the Arab traders for her efforts. Why? Because classical Arabic is as remote to contemporary Arabic as Shakespearean English is to what we speak now. My mom had literally asked the market trader, “Verily, pray thee tell me how much are thou oranges?” 

I remember her telling me that she took them so that she could read the Quran with understanding, not just to recite but knowing the meaning of what she was vocalising. This intimate understanding of the core of Islam is what informs her about what is essential in Islam, and what is not. What is the budaya Hindu in Malay culture, what really is it that Islam demands of us and what it does not. She is very clear about this. As a seasoned traveller, one of my mom’s favourite retorts to confused Malay katak bawah tempurong ulamaks is “There are more Muslims in China than there are Malaysians.”

She can be very critical of those who focus on the embellishments and fluff around Malay religious and cultural practices as opposed to focussing on what Islam really prescribes. She can go on ad nauseam for days on end, if the mood strikes her. There were no end of examples.

After all, culturally and linguistically, the Malays are basically Hindus with a thin veneer of 700 years of Islam. Scratch beneath the surface, another animal altogether is revealed.

Anyway, that is how my step-father and mother got to get their chance to have a second bite at the cherry, as the idiom goes...

Part 2

https://www.facebook.com/1759664068/posts/10206465946204995?s=1759664068&sfns=mo

Part 1

https://azlanadnan.blogspot.com/2019/04/six-minutes-to-midnight.html

Copyright 2003-2019 Azlan Adnan This blog post is sponsored by The Green Party of Malaysia