Barbeque Weekend

Location: Being at school just because she had to since extra classes were being made.
Mood-of-the-day: Damn lecturers!

A few days after Hari Raya, parents organized a big barbeque party for the neighbours. Dad’s got the best barbeque machine around and we use it at least once every 3 months. I supposed I should have taken some pictures but really, I had no patience for being the paparazzi in my own house. Besides, most of the people that turned up were old farts anyway (hehehe!).

That’s right. Semi-D people in my area are mostly couples with grown kids, manicured gardens and a spare tyre around their waist (and this wasn’t just my family I’m talking). They come in all shapes, sizes and colours. Personally, I think my dad pulled this off just to show off the new and completed koi n’ guppy pond. I know for a fact that he didn’t feed them lunch so that neighbours can watch them jump savagely later that night. More story on that later.

Mom cooked up a feast all right. She skinned some quarter chickens and marinated them for a few hours in her soy sauce recipe. She got me working on the coleslaw and potato salad. We had planned to invite a relative who lived nearby but the family had other plans. Dang, we made extra coleslaw just for that lil’ cousin (she likes to hoard her veggies. I still say it’s weird for a toddler).

Back to the kitchen, mom also made some Laksa Johor, tribute to her upbringing (and for east-type hungry people). I remember homemade fish stock, fish paste, shrimp paste, coconut milk, ‘cili boh’, usual garlic, salt and pepper, etc, etc... Well, I’ve never quite acquired a taste for any laksa but it’s a family recipe after all (as an apt-observant neighbour pointed that out). Any way, all served with spaghetti.

My bros (all 3 of them) minded the barbeque. They’re men after all. Make fire. Cook meat. Okay that joke is old. Which also explains why some of the chickens had pretty dark features. The keyword here is pretty, not dark. Overcooked food is too often a specialty of big Bro (you should have seen his fried nuggets!). But nobody noticed because they were fascinated with mom’s secret gravy recipe.

Sis’s excuse for not being around to help out is the spending time she had with her other family. And everybody thought that she was only going for a medical check-up. So she took upon the task of washing up a few dishes. Anyway, any sour face (including mine) were quickly sweetened as she presented with a lil’ CD from her check-up. Here’s a screenshot and I urge you to knock yourself out in guessing.

It’s gonna take some time to grow though...

Signed: *Ophie, more stories on this, that and many other of those later. Soon, I promise ;)

In His Story...

Location: In this time period? Umm... November 22nd.
Mood-of-the-day: It’s more real to remember a person’s life.

It was in the 1920s when a male infant of Javanese parents was born in Pontian Kechil, Johor. He grew up to be a good man but under the old British rule of Malaya, he could only reach the education level of Standard Six. But he never gave up his love for learning. Between being a teacher and tapping rubber trees, he often lend his voice for those who demanded rights for higher learning from the British.

Eventually he was chosen to go for a new learning institute in Perak, part secondary school, part university, all proof of a better chance at living. It was a great honour, for after the imam, teachers were the most respected job in any community at that time. But soon came the Japanese and he had to leave his friends and his last year of school behind. But even his home wasn’t as safe as all the British had left.

Other than behind sent working in the fields, the Japanese gave many teachers an intensive 3-month course for them to teach the new occupier’s culture to students. Even in his old days, the man could still speak the language. But it was when the Japanese had all gone when he returned to his old school to continue his studies, saddened by the very many of his year who did not return.

Eventually, he did return home to his family and continued teaching school kids up to being a headmaster. In the account of his eldest daughter, headmasters also taught in classes and having one with a reputation for strictness was daunting. If you didn’t understand it while at school, get ready to go face it again at home. But he was mostly kind and patient and all who grew up in the community knew him well.

He also taught working folks to read and write and so he was a highly respected even long after he retired. He remained fit and healthy, with a mischievous streak. Bicycles and bull-carts filled the streets when he first drove so he never had patience for those who were slower than him. His manual Perodua Kancil had the window sticker "Cili Padi" and a "P" for inexperienced drivers, though he had been driving for over 50 years.

He was never a man of inactivity, so a time after his wife had passed away, he remarried and continued his work with the local mosque and public communities. Even after he moved to be more accessible to his families, he spent his time growing vegetables, reading the holy book and writing the words to paper and memory. He had very few health problems until tuberculosis struck on October 2004. He passed away and was buried on the day before Aidilfitri.

This is as much as I knew about my grandfather’s history and that I can honestly say that he is a great old man and that he left peacefully, surrounded by his family. He was the pinnacle of the extended family, often telling us jokes about our parents, such as how he would chase my uncles out of the neighbours’ rambutan trees or their making of bamboo cannons so it produced the loudest noise in the village.

He always looked as my earliest memory of him, a skinny but amazingly strong guy in shirt and belted pants with a skullcap and a shovel in hand or full baju Melayu with white turban and Al-Quran in hand. He had lived forever. As I remembered how I watched my second nephew tear across the living room in a tricycle without regard for people whom he expertly nearly collided and they were calling out for him to slow down.

The kid would never knew his great-grandfather, yet he seemed to have inherited Yayi’s driving skills. I guess that’s why despite the hole I had, I kept feeling like Yayi’s still around. I just have to find it in everybody he loved. Then maybe I can find him in me.

Signed: *Ophie, who’s making no bid for the excellently maintained Kancil because she can’t drive a stick.

Al-Fatihah for Yayi

Location: Neither here nor there, just... trying to get some work done
Mood-of-the-day: Death in the family

It’s just after Hari Raya Aidilfitri and so it’s a bit overdue for a blog entry. I should write about how my blue-grey kebaya was perfect and the food was great (though I had not the tongue for lontong) and that even at my age, I still get Raya money and would soon be eyeing a set of comic books from Singapore that I hadn’t been able to afford since 2002. But that was not I’m writing about.

My Yayi was ill. Very, very ill. I can hardly imagine that it was less than a week when his kids, grandkids and great-grandkids gathering overwhelmingly around the Damansara Specialist room (to the point when the nurses had to be concern) and him sitting up and enjoying some of the shepherd pie I’ve made. And still referring me as anak Yam intead of my first name.

All too quickly he was transferred into intensive care of Universiti Hospital. I was not always so close to Yayi (being he had to divide his attention to over 30 grandkids or so, I lost count again!) but I’ve always admired him. There he was, the Johorian guy covered in breathing aid with an eerily familiar black screen that on TV it gose beep-beep-beep of his heartbeat.

The news came to me on the night before Aidilfitri’s Eve, sitting in front of the Astro on local TV1, waiting for the announcement of Raya’s moon sighting. I surprised myself that my first thought was denial. Yayi was a dude, a healthy, gardening his chillies, driving-his-Kancil dude. He’ll be in nazak and then he’ll get out of it and it won’t be so very much a miracle when it happens. It’ll be just so... Yayi.

I hated the Floor 12 where he was warded. There’s too many old people in the non-ICU rooms, with Deepavali treats. Yayi’s not old, just covered in 80 years worth of wrinkles. And now he’s covered in plastic tubes. Nobody’s allowed to go into that room unless they’re clean and wearing a face mask.

And even so, they least they can do is read the Surah Yassin or try to keep talking to him. That room was too small so I read mine outside. I was never very good at reading Al-Quran so I was way behind while relatives were finished and starting again. I guess a small of piece in me was still in denial, even after seeing him looking so... sleepy.

I was still reciting when Cik Faridah stood at my side and I looked up. Everybody had been ushered out of Yayi’s room by the night-shift nurses and there was that loud, one, lone, continuous beep. No television sound effects could had given me any more sickening feeling. By then the family entourage were filling up the corridor outside Yayi’s room.

A wall, a curtain cover and a team of nurses and one doctor separated Yayi and his bloodlines. How long did that one beep lasted? Ten minutes? Half-an-hour? I keep looking through the tiny slit of a door window and watching that black screen until someone covered it with the curtain. I was just outside the door and nurses kept coming in and going out, bring in mostly oxygen tanks.

I keep a better part of my attention to that big red trolley cabinet parked outside the room. On it was one of those balloon-type breathing tools that you squeeze repeatedly, adrenaline shots, drug cases and everything with child-proof and warning labels on it. No hospital staff touched the cabinet, and all completely ignored it. But it was right there, the only trolley outside an ICU of the whole Floor 12 corridor. If I were to give it a name, I say it’s the Last Aid Kit.

The beep did stopped and one of my aunts stopped crying. Everybody huddled to the doctor who got outside. There was no heart attack, just a dangerous drop in blood pressure and slow breathing. My grandfather was still okay then, but they still can’t do a dialysis to clean his blood until the pressure gets higher. So Yayi’s was only sleeping too deep. That sounds okay... a bit.

The later it got, the family split into those going home and those staying (my mom was staying definitely). It was either 11.35pm or 12.30am. As dad drove home, I dunno why I was feeling almost angry. Maybe because Aidilfitri was in two days and Yayi should have been at Batu Arang, just like last year. And the year before, and all the years back in Pontian.

He should be the guy walking out under the morning sun and welcoming everybody with that toothy smile of his and make everybody try to catch up with him in his Kancil through the pineapple infested country-side. He would lead the maaf-maafan and slip an RM5 in the hand as he tried to remember who’s who and "anak siapa?". After all the prayers and the food feast, he’ll go through the kitchen and reminded my second grandmother (married for a handful of years) to divide the food evenly for everybody to take home. He’ll wave until we couldn’t see each other anymore.

I didn’t sleep that night. And just as well because then I got the news as dad was ready to go back to the hospital again. His cell phone rang. Yayi had a another blood pressure drop. It was 2.35am on 13 November, last day of Ramadan.

Signed: *Ophie, Al-Fatihah for her Yayi...