Day 3

For the ones who gave me life

My parents had no business meeting each other.

They were both from a small town from an opposite side of the country. They were both born in the pre-independence years when access to education and education was not as it is now —

my mother took an hour to go to school every day by bus, and my dad rode his bicycle for five kilometres to do the same.

my dad went abroad to get his degree, my mom didn’t (on my grandma’s insistence), she went straight to work instead.

By right, my parents had no business crossing each other’s path.

But they did (at a bus stop, according to my mom) — and if that was not the greatest miracle of all, I don’t know what else.

“I’ve always known I wanted to marry someone smart, someone with a degree”, my mom told me one day with a smile.

(I went running back after that to my friends and gleefully claimed “who says we women can’t choose who to marry? our moms already did that 30 years ago!”, but that’s another story)

My parents are not perfect. And my god I’m flawed in more ways than one — but there is not a day that I don’t wake up and feel like I owe this life to my parents.

Mak, all of our love combined will never match the love you that you have for us and given us;

The warm milk before bed, taking a spoon of vitamin C every morning, singing with you in the kitchen to Fauziah Latif’s song or Sembilu in our childhood home, baking and decorating cakes, coming home from school to our favorite meals ready on the table were some of the best memories I had when I was small

— it was your sacrifices, hard work and time that you devoted to us that made it possible for me to have a safe, protected, and nurturing childhood.

I still remember the day when I fell on the stairs and bit my tongue to bleed. You put on me Abah’s t-shirt after we came back from the clinic because he was not home and I was missing him, but the best memory that stuck with me from that day was being in your arms, feeling safe and reassured.

You put us above everything else and you still do every day. And I can only hope despite all my flaws that I can learn to give you the same in my lifetime.

Abah, if Mak is the bedrock of our life you were the lighthouse, the beacon that guides us.

Even though I remembered very clearly many light-hearted moments from when we were in Jerteh — like the mornings when you would walk with me and Am to wait for the school van and showed us how to make the rocket from the long grass, or when you made me a technical drawing of a mosque which I took to school —

it was the rare and hard to come by things that you did that were pivotal in my memories. Like the only one letter you sent me when I was in Jordan, explaining why you made the difficult decision to send me off because you believe in giving your children the best education you could possibly allow, or when we had teachers from my school coming over to our house using the computer at home (of which Mak was a master at using — I didn’t realised how cool that she knows until years later!), or more recently when I saw you sitting down with your mother in the living room in her last years, just talking and sharing memories,

You never needed to communicate those values to us (for one, we are never a talkative family), but now looking back at all the things that you did — educating oneself, giving value to others — those were the things that stayed in me and guided my choices in life.

I may have not said it enough or let you know this, but you are the greatest mentor I could ever ask for.

Mak & Abah, I love you both, more than I can ever say, more than I can ever show.

1 October 2015.