Diary

Page 7
Q-News, Issue 362
April 2005

Shortly after dawn I heard several loud thuds and little feet scrambling on the roof. I got out of bed. The air conditioner had turned my A-frame chalet in to an ice box. I slowly pushed aside the curtains and watched a family of monkeys sitting around an overturned garbage bin in the garden, quietly and casually picking at bits of food. A monkey swung from the roof on to the porch. I jumped back from the window. Back in bed, I thought: “Inconsiderate monkeys. Can’t they land softly?”

That night, my last in Tioman Island, Malaysia - the famous setting for the paradise island of Bali Hai in the film South Pacific - I walked up to the little mosque with the tin and wood roof on the hill and prayed behind the slowest imam in the world. He was an elderly Malaysian who walked around the village with his hands clasped behind his back, wearing a white topi in need of a good cleaning, a long shirt, a sarong and sandals. He stepped onto the prayer mat at turtle’s pace. He recited short surahs and yet maghrib felt so drawn out. As I left the mosque, we greeted each other. Language is a great obstacle, but goodness crosses boundaries. He smiled as he shook my hand and touched his hand on his chest. I carried the glow of that smile as I walked in to the night, past the chalets and huts, along the darkening bay.

The sign in the parking lot of the Kranji war cemetery discourages visitors from picnicking, picking flowers, dancing, making excessive noise, and treasure-hunting. Years ago, a family member told me that my uncle - my mother’s oldest brother - died in Singapore as part of the British forces fighting the Japanese during World War Two. No one knows for sure where he is buried. No one has ever searched. The day I arrived at Kranji, I was the only visitor. The sun was high and hot. Bengali and Tamil labourers were cutting the grass. I walked up some steps where I could see the cemetery - row on row of markers lining a gentle slope. Behind the memorial at the top of the hill is a section of the cemetery that borders a residential area. Here, Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus are buried. There are hundreds of them - perhaps thousands. I went to the cemetery office to check the register. An old Chinese man, wearing only shorts, sat on the door step poking a screwdriver into the open back of a fan. When I asked about the register, he pointed with his chin. I sat on a bench on the porch and started flipping through the different volumes of the register. Muhammad Khan, sepoy, of Pachnand, Campbellpore, died age 19. Muhammad Nur, water carrier, son of Samundar Khan and Umra Bi of Rangla, Poonch, Kashmir, died age 19. Muhammad Qasim, cook, husband of Raj Begum of Makwal, died age 19. Rahmat Din, bootmaker from Dhok Ellahi Baksh, Jhelum. Hasan-ud-Din, sepoy, son of Amir-ud-Din and Amir Bi of Moghalpura, Hyderabad (Deccan), died February 7th 1944. Hashim bin Usman, private, son of Rahmah binti Karim of Penang, Malaysia, died December 9th, 1941. The list went on and on. I sat for almost an hour reading the names. But it was only when I discovered three Hashim Khans that my heart began to race. That was my uncle’s name. I looked at their hometowns, their parents’ names, their units. Sadly, nothing matched.

India is not my mother country, declared the cabbie during the rainy ride from downtown Kuala Lumpur to the neighborhood of Sri Hartamas. I was sitting next to him. “Malaysia is my mother country. I am Malaysian.” It’s true, he was born in Malaysia - lived here all his life. Except he looked and sounded like a South Indian. “And what does the government say you are?” He kept his eyes on the wet road and said: “Indian.” Racial and ethnic categories can get a little confusing in Malaysia. There are the Malays, the Chinese, and the Indians - Malaysia’s holy racial trinity. They are inseparable, and together they have built this country, against great odds, into a land of prosperity and racial harmony. So the rhetoric goes. Much of it is probably true. For Malaysia, a lot is at stake in its self-image as a racial paradise and it will go to great lengths to promote and safeguard it. You just have to tune into it. The news presenters on any given night are a revolving tag-team of various ethnicities. On one night, a Sikh - with beard and pug - was paired with a petite Malay beauty. The chemistry was absent, but the effect was obvious. Billboard ads often depict a smiling Malay, Chinese and Indian - all promoting the same product in a single ad. When the government recently hiked taxi fares, the New Straits Times did a “streeter” - checking the pulse of people on the street. They talked to a Malay, a Chinese, and an Indian. I laughed out loud. Behind this obsession with race and identity is the ghost of the 1969 race riots - triggered, as one Malay explained, when Chinese electioneers drove through Malay neighborhoods displaying brooms. The aim was to suggest an election sweep. “But the broom is a very insulting symbol,” she explained. As I learned, there is a deep fear, indeed a resolve that racial strife never happen again. The compromise struck in Malaysia goes something like this: the majority Malays will benefit from an affirmative action policy, and the minority Chinese and Indian will grin and bear it. I recently had tea with two members of Malaysia’s intelligentsia - one Chinese, the other an Indian. They defended the national bhumiputra (sons of the soil) policy, started in the early 70s. It has tried to lift Malays from their economically disadvantaged place in society, they explained. For both, the alternative to the bhumiputra program was alienation of the majority community and racial unrest. My meeting left me with a strange feeling. How successful had this stroke of social engineering actually been? Was the situation as rosy as it seemed? Or was there something behind these illusions, something unsettled and festering?