2024
Dawood falls on his knees and sobs in my front hall.
“I knew it would be like this! I knew it from the beginning, I knew it, I feared the worst. To have the police banging on the door like that! Have we become that kind of family? All the neighbours would have seen.”
“It doesn’t mean he had anything to do with it. They have to take every precaution. They’ll round up everyone who knew those flers, everyone who’s ever had a cup of coffee with them or talked to them at the mosque. They’ll question them, and then they’ll let them go. You wait and see.”
“He had nothing to do with it,” Mama says. “He wouldn’t get involved with all that. I know Amar. He’s not that type.”
“Not that type, not that type,” Dawood groans. “Who knows what type anybody is anymore? When he was small we would have said he was not the type who’ll be walking around in a full beard and robe.”
He lifts his whole arm to his eyes like a small boy being punished. “Eighty-three people dead!” he says under his breath. “Eighty-three people! To think he could have been mixed up in that!”
We’ve all seen the eighty-three faces. We know their names and ages and occupations by heart (we are after all a byhearting people). We’ve convinced ourselves we knew them personally—even intimately—because doesn’t this man look just like our uncle and couldn’t that student be the twin sister of the barista at that coffeehouse and look this young mother’s children are exactly the same age as ours. The victims are Malay Indian Chinese Other even one Nepali and two Myanmar nationals but for once we have found common ground with migrant workers. We can all agree that the universal Muslim Extremist bogeyman is worse than any pendatang asing. We are in short more united than we have ever been since 1957. Impossible not to think of my father. Impossible not to whisper to the unhearing memory of him: “One people at last!” At least for now. Turns out this was the price we had to pay for unity.
It is Malaysia’s First Time. Our first real entry in the record books of violent terrorism and no one can argue we’ve not come in with a bang. Five nearly simultaneous explosions.
“When it happened,” I ask Dawood, “what did he tell you?”
“Nothing! He didn’t say anything. We all saw it on the news together. We didn’t know what to think. After the bomb in Chow Kit we all thought ya Allah what will become of this country? Then see-see another one and another one and another one. Pudu. Bukit Bintang. Petaling Street. Mid Valley Megamall. Like a nightmare. I thought I must be dreaming. I saw he was acting one kind. Didn’t want to look at us. Walking here walking there like a cat that just had kittens like that. Couldn’t keep quiet, couldn’t sit down. So I gathered up my courage and I asked him point blank: ‘Were you involved in this?’”
“And?”
“He broke down and cried, I tell you. He said no. He said please believe him.”
“Poor boy, poor boy,” moans Mama.
Dawood goes on. “He said he might have met one of those flers once or twice but he didn’t really know them. He said the one he met liked to talk big but he thought that’s all it was. Big talk, you know? He told me, ‘I believe in the Caliphate but I don’t believe in violence. I don’t believe in killing people, I keep away from all those flers.’ But when the police came—”
His voice cracks.
“When the police came?”
“They said—my god, Encik Yusuf, my god, I don’t know what to tell you also!”
“Just tell me.”
“They said they were rounding up people who had expressed support for ISIS. I looked at him and said, ‘What is this?’ And later his sister tells me, on the Facebook they all had ISIS flags, they were pretending to shoot guns, they were putting all the jihad surahs from the Quran. Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and all that, you know all these things, Encik Yusuf?”
“A bit.”
“You knew this was happening, ISIS in our own country?”
“Knew or didn’t know, I don’t know how to answer that, Dawood, I mean, I didn’t go looking for proof, but … you could say I never ruled it out. You could say I always assume these things are happening somewhere, even if I don’t see them.”
“Ah, you are wiser than me, brother, you are wiser than me! I never thought … I mean there were always rumours that it was getting worse after the government changed, it seems the extremists were instigating people, I know, I saw how every little thing also they would point a finger and say look, they’re sidelining Muslims, they’re taking away the status of Islam, they’re selling the country to the Christians and the godless people, but I thought those flers trying to round up Muslims to fight were … I just never thought … I mean, my own son, Encik Yusuf! Only when my daughter told me about the Facebook and all that, then only I started thinking about how he has been rushing around like an international businessman these past two-three months. I said to her, ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’ and she just looked at me. Because I swear to you, Encik Yusuf, if I had known, I would not have hesitated to go to the police about my own son. I would not have hesitated for one single minute.”
“No!” Mama insists. “No, no, no. Don’t you understand? It is just playacting for their friends. Each one wants to be bigger than the other one. Boys have always been like this. In another place, another time, they might have been competing to see how many girlfriends each one had. Now it is this kind of jihad talk.”
“But then … but then why was he so busy? What was he planning and plotting?”
“That I don’t know,” Mama says. “Maybe we’ll never know. Could be that somebody was trying to drag him into it, could be he went to a couple of meetings and then got scared. After all he told you he’d met a few of them isn’t it?”
He’s rocking back and forth. Under his breath he’s saying astaghfirullah astaghfirullah astaghfirullah.
“Pull yourself together, Dawood,” Mama says. “It is not the end of the world. Everything will be fine. In fact this experience will be good for him. Maybe now he will be a bit more careful about whom he mixes with and how he talks.”
“But everybody will come to know!” Dawood protests. “Even now everybody knows already. Neighbours friends relatives. People will talk and everybody will think he’s an extremist for the rest of his life. People don’t forget these things.”
“They will. They will, Dawood, don’t worry! And the boy himself won’t be taken in by every nutcase leader. Instead of trying to show others how strong his faith is he will learn to think for himself,” Mama says.
Dawood looks at her. Remembers perhaps that she speaks from experience. Whether or not he knows our past her words calm him a little.
“But people won’t trust us anymore,” he says. “They’ll keep their distance.”
He seems now to be persisting almost out of habit or obligation. We give him a mug of strong hot milky tea. We sit with him in silence. When we hear the Maghrib call to prayer we send him home.
It’s not hard to find Amar’s Facebook page. Real name real photo. But all the bluster about jihad is gone. Oh sure there are surahs. Surahs for calming your fears. Surahs for strengthening your faith. Surahs for warding off temptation. But nothing about jihad. Nothing about infidels. No ISIS flags. Of course he would have taken it all down in those hours between the bombs and the police arriving. Who wouldn’t do the same in a panic? It doesn’t mean anything. Seventeen years old. Doesn’t remember 9/11. Doesn’t remember the Gulf War. Just a boy caught up in somebody else’s web.
That evening while Mama is watching the latest news reports on TV I go into her room and take down Amar’s photo album from the high shelf where it sits next to Reza’s. He faces me squarely from this safe remove of nearly two decades: the tiny steely-eyed baby on his teddy-bear pillow, the little boy pretending his tricycle is a speedy-fast zoom-zoom motorbike, the prizewinning schoolboy with his spotless scrubbed face.
Of course Amar is not part of this jihadi cell. Somehow—call it instinct—I have no doubt about that. It is not in his makeup. His rigid piety is cut from a different cloth. They release him with no charge the very next day. He comes home chastened and peakish to be fed bubur lambuk and a neverending string of questions by his mother: “Where were you going every day these past few months? With whom? Did the police ask you what you knew? Did you tell them everything? Are you sure? You gave them names?”
The day after that they release the identities and photos of the suicide bombers. I cannot look at those five faces without stripping the years away. Propping them up on teddy-bear pillows. Sticking dummies in their soft bubbling baby mouths. Sitting them on the seats of red tricycles. They are nothing like Amar on the surface. No beards no robes. A bunch of rough-tough gangsters at loose ends. A security guard. An engineering dropout. Two brothers running a satay stall and a car mechanic. Once they were babies and now they will hang. Their mothers will put their photo albums on high shelves. In secret they will take them out to turn the pages. Their mouths dry and their hearts overflowing with questions even after twenty-thirty-forty years.
And then I think of my father. The words if only come stealing into my head like jewel beetles. But if only what? If only he’d lived? By the time we left the house in the hills he had no hope of changing the course of history. One man cannot change the course of history alone. My father’s idols—Jesus Gandhi Martin Luther King—lived in other times and other places. A tidal wave of followers rose up under those men. People were more desperate and braver perhaps. My father only had his motley dozen. He could not have prevented these eighty-three deaths by living longer. Think of the price he paid for living even as briefly and quietly as he did. Asthma attack they said sudden death they said and what was I to know of the many possible horrors? A mercy indeed and not a very small one: my dark imaginings were blurry.
But I am no longer the boy I was then. Even as time chipped away at the edges of my nightmares all the tales I heard over the years polished them to a diamond brilliance. The lacerations all over this dead prisoner’s body, the nails strangely missing from the toes of that other one who supposedly committed suicide in custody, the nosy parkers pushed off balconies, the whistleblowers bound and gagged and stuffed into drumfuls of cement. All the methods our old government had for digging its claws into the shrivelled remnants of power and holding on.
So if only what, Kannu, if only what exactly? They would have destroyed your father anyway sooner or later. They would have found a way. He alone could not have changed them and as for the rest of us we did not care enough to risk anything that mattered. It was all a pleasant enough experiment but in the end our cari makan priorities would have prevailed. We would still be sitting under the ceiling fan studying these eighty-three faces in the newspaper while eating our roti canai roti telur roti bawang roti sardin roti tisu roti planta roti pisang and yes even roti bom because if ever there has been a people who would not flinch at ordering roti bom the morning after a bom that would be us.
The monster was already being handfed in its underground cave while my father was building his little utopia. How futile how desperate his attempt and he himself knew it. And then after his death all those years of pretending to fight that monster. An anti-terror raid here and there, while there and here a foreign-imported extremist preacher is presented with PR status on a silver platter. The fat cats purring on TV to soothe us after each close shave and then back to business as usual.
Maybe what I really mean by if only is exactly that. If only we’d cared more. If only we’d been more desperate. If only we’d all dared to dream a different dream.