2023
After so many stagnant years our household is changing.
Slowly, Hana is losing her watchfulness. Her skittish distant manner. One morning before leaving for the market she even tells me shyly, “My reading is faster now, tuan. I read all the books several times already. Can finish one whole newspaper article. Sometimes cannot understand everything, but can read.”
So surprised am I by her addressing me voluntarily that I find I’ve frozen with my butter knife in midair. “Well done!” I say. “I’ll buy you a few more books this weekend!”
We stand there smiling at each other for a few seconds. Feeling ourselves turning turning turning towards the warmth and the light. We breathe deeper and slower. We look at each other with an unfamiliar mix of surprise and relief in our eyes.
Nowadays she leaves in the morning and comes back at night but she is nevertheless emptying me out and refilling me. She is the tiny beating heart at the centre of the house. At the centre of my days. At the centre of me. I had given myself up for dead but look: my eyelids are stirring my fingers are twitching. The great frozen expanse of me is waking up after what was only a deep sleep. When I hear her packing her lunch in the kitchen I go and prepare my breakfast to keep her company. Those few minutes of companionable morning silence are a balm to both our spirits. All the small intimacies of our routine! I leave the butter and the butter knife out for her after spreading butter on my bread. I switch on the hot-water dispenser. I put out two mugs. There is nothing unseemly about this: Mama and Ani have their breakfast later that’s all. I take out the pineapple jam Hana likes. I stir my coffee I tap the spoon against the rim of my mug three times I lay the spoon next to her mug ready for her. These small-small things make her life that tiny bit easier and I know watching the blur of her spread the butter and spoon out the Nescafé that she notices and appreciates the thought. In the hall mirror she pins and adjusts her tudung. Tucking in all the wispy hair that frames her face. Standing so close to the mirror that her breath steams it. Must speak to Ani about taking her to the optician.
Life is after all about trusting and believing. If you simply wait even the most arid soil will one day yield a sprout whose seeds you had no idea were sleeping under the surface. Now it has leaves now it has a tight bud now—you rub your eyes and shake your heads—it is blooming into something not of this earth. All the hothouse hybrids of history’s greatest botanists pale beside it. It is as lush as a peony and as bright as a flame.
Look at Mama: we all thought she was incapable of love but all she needed was time and patience. Look at her next to Amar which also has become a regular event. Bonnet days or no-bonnet days any days she asks he obediently takes his seat. One day as he is sitting with her for those five minutes after his class she says to me, “Yusuf! Go and bring the photo album, can or not?”
I myself cannot believe it. “What? Mama, I don’t think—”
“Just bring it quickly. It’s in my room on the top shelf of the cupboard.”
Why do you bother hiding it there, Mama, I should have said, when everybody knows you look at those photos every chance you get?
No point embarrassing her in front of the boy. I go and get the album. It’s an ancient one. The kind with ring binding and inside those thick black pages with sheets of parchment between.
“Come, come nearer,” she says and without a word the boy slides closer to her. She opens the album.
“See?” she says. “That’s my Reza. In those days we used to take our babies to the studio to make these pictures. Six months old he would have been. See his curly hair and his light-coloured eyes? I told you isn’t it, he looked just like you. You could have been brothers!”
Reza sucking his thumb in bloomers and a smock on his first birthday. Three-year-old Reza wolfing down an ice-cream sundae in a fluffy post-swim robe at the Selangor Club. Five-year-old Reza enjoying a root-beer float at A&W. Gap-toothed Reza grinning with a trophy on Sports Day at the fancy private school he attended while the Australian father was still paying for it.
“Ho!” Mama trumpets. She pats the photo fondly. “Here you can really see how you look alike. In the baby pictures it’s not so easy. Especially since I don’t know what you looked like when you were a baby.”
She turns to Amar with the raised eyebrows of one who has just had a splendid idea.
“Next time you come,” she says, “bring a baby photo for Nenek! Ask your mother. Sure won’t mind lah she. Tell her it’s for Nenek.”
Amar doesn’t say yes or no. Anyone else would let it go but not Mama in her blissful state of newfound love.
“Janji tak janji?” she says. “If not Nenek will have to come limping all the way to your father’s shop to ask him! And you know how hard it is for me to get around nowadays. So better you save me the trip and nicely bring me a photo. Okay?”
He laughs then. First time any of us has seen him laugh in at least two years.
“Okay,” he says.
He looks back down at the photo album. But of course there is a dearth of photos after that Sports Day one. Shortly afterwards things turned rocky with the Australian father. Then the Muhibbah Centre years.
“Long time we didn’t take pictures after that,” Mama says. Amar stiffens his shoulders but lowers his eyes in appropriately solemn understanding.
She flips through the dark pages. A single colour photo floats to the floor and Amar bends to pick it up. A photo that was never properly fixed to its own place like the others.
“Ah, that one you will recognize!” Mama cries in high delight. “That one I no need to tell you who it is.”
With both hands Amar holds the photo at a distance. But he won’t look at it. He looks at me instead. A curious expression in his eyes. The tension of it is so great that even though Mama herself said she had no need to explain the photo she says, “That’s your teacher lah. Encik Yusuf. On his Convocation Day at Universiti Malaya.”
Amar turns to her. “Only one photo of Encik Yusuf?” he mumbles.
Mama chuckles. “Ah!” she says. “The second child always like that lah. When you got two children you got no more time to take photos and all that. I’m sure it’s the same for you and your sister.”
Oh dear oh dear “your sister” … but Amar does not appear even to have heard. He’s turning the blank pages of the album with a frown on his face. He’s thinking, But no photos? Not one photo after 1975? He’s thinking, Maybe there are a few in a different album. When suddenly Mama says in a bright and trembly voice, “That’s why I’m so happy I found you. I feel I’m getting a second chance now. It’s true, I never did enough for my boys. I was young and stupid and busy with … with myself. But now I’m not young and I’m not stupid. Not everybody is lucky enough to get a second chance. Allah is the most merciful, the most generous, the most bountiful!”
He’s rubbing his sweaty palms on his knees and getting ready to excuse himself but that curious expression has not left his face. A weight in his eyes. His feelers have detected danger—something unspoken some twisted scrapheap some submerged shipwreck between me and Mama—and he’s trying to retract them but she won’t let him. With the force of her narrative she pins him in place.
“You know,” she says, “my Reza is very successful in his life, but he doesn’t come to see Nenek anymore.” Like he lives down the road she says it. Casually. Smiling benignly at Amar as though perhaps to say, Haha! My very own reports of his death have been greatly exaggerated.
Who can blame Amar for casting me the look of someone who has just seen a ghost? How he explains the inconsistency to himself I cannot say; for that matter I can hardly be sure how I explain it to myself. The tricks of an ageing brain or a little game she plays with all of us?
“That’s not right, is it?” she goes on. “Learn this now itself: your parents are your parents no matter what. They gave you life, they feed you, clothe you, send you to school. It doesn’t please Allah for boys to cast aside their parents.”
She’s turning the pages now where he left off. One by one one by one until she gets to that last page. There’s Reza glowering at Latifah in her overstuffed front hall in Bangsar.
“That’s my son,” she says. “Few months before …”
Amar blinks his giraffe lashes at her in trepidation.
“Before he went off,” she concludes.
The ambiguity appears to suit all of us. Before the threat of clarification looms Amar stands up. His white robe sweat-stained from all his palm-rubbing. She looks up at him.
“I better go, Nenek,” he says. “It’s already Maghrib.”
Her oracular expression gives way to a granny grin. “You’ll bring the photo next week?” she says.
He puts a hand on the back of the armchair to steady himself. “Okay, Nenek,” he says. “I’ll bring it.”
“If you promise something to an old lady,” she says, “you must do it. Sure sure.”
With no warning the crooked smile of his distant boyhood flashes out at us. It seems to take even Amar himself by surprise. Then slowly he stirs into that smile the immense relief of being released.
“Sure sure,” he says.
That whole week Mama does not once ask me to track down Reza on my internet my Google my Facebook. She glows with new life exactly as though she were pregnant. As though just in the last week she has felt the baby’s first kicks in her belly. And exactly like a pregnant woman she sees the rest of the world in a blur. Where before she used to drive me and Ani mad with her twice-daily What day is it today? now she knows exactly how many days it is until Amar comes again. And this time with his photo too. With that photo in her file, her application to be a part of his past will be that much stronger: it will allow her to imagine his babyhood in such lush detail it’ll be like she was there.