Life's Remains....

Looking at my children, how close they are with each other, made me realise that I don't know how it feels to be them... to have siblings with age difference small enough to actually share an era. I was born in 1964, which means that I started school in 1971, at which time my youngest older brother is well into his teenage years, my eldest sister is 30 years old. I was almost like an only child, spoiled silly by my mother and sisters, frowned upon by my father and brothers as an annoyance. I have no fond memories of brotherly love, like wrestling each other or playing a game together, which makes me rather apprehensive of how my two sons relate to each other. They are 5 years apart, but I was often afraid that Afiq will treat Aiman as a nuisance and leave him out of whatever he was doing. That, happened for a while, but I found out that Afiq blamed Aiman for not being able to play his PS2...(long story). I straightened that out, and ever since, he and Aiman are so close, it warms m...

The arrow of time can only move in one direction. Forward. That is the law of the universe... the law of God. What this means is just that we only have memories of the past, and we can't see the future. And (it is theorised) that even if one has gone to the future, and come back to the past, he will not have any memories of the future he's gone to. So all we have in our minds are things that has happened in the past. I am trying to think of things that happened in my life, and the more I think, the more I realised that, I seemed to have forgotten of so many things in my past. This happens all the time, (especially during Eidul Fitri), when the conversation, inevitably, steered itself to comparisons of then and now. More often than not, I am surprised that some people remember things about me or what I said or do that I have no memory of. And it amazes me that some will remember every detail of a certain long gone event like it only happened yesterday. Once, I showed an old pict...

My mother told me that my name means the Sun. And, she bought me a book of Aesop fables and, though I love all the stories with its moralities, I can’t help but become attached to the story of the wind and the sun. Thereafter, somewhere in the beginning of my life, I made the unconscious decision to adopt the sun’s virtue in making people to do things. And, today I can’t do it otherwise. Throughout my life, people around me tell me to be more aggressive. They say I am too soft. Some adults say that I’ll never survive in the real world, if I continue to let certain things go... not get back at those who have put me down or bullied me. Maybe it is the result of people constantly telling me that I am soft and indecisive that has made me soft and indecisive... Maybe this sun attitude as opposed to the wind attitude is just my way of consoling myself. I don’t know. Perhaps, I am too much like my mother. My father is very assertive and will tell people exactly what’s on his mind. My mother t...

If life were a premise of death I’m dying to live If death is what we live for Live and let live If the rich are kind There will be no hunger If the poor are apathetic What are the rich? If war is the answer I shall not ask questions If peace is what we kill for Please don’t have children....

Haji Jaafar knows where the devil lives. He told me, and at first I didn't want to believe him. "The devil called my name once," Haji Jaafar said to me. "It was when we, your mother and I, were travelling to Alor Star... or somewhere, I can't recall, but I know it was a long journey." There were no expressways then. The roads were narrow and dangerous, and the journey up north will take maybe ten hours from Muar. Hj Jaafar told me he heard it clearly, above the drone of the car engine and howling wind as he sped to his destination. "Maybe it was the wind rustling the leaves in the trees," I suggested. "No," Haji Jaafar said, "it can't be." I waited for his point of argument, but it never came. Instead, he fell silent and looked out the window. "He even tried to cause an accident..." Haji Jaafar said to no one outside the window. "He pulled on the steering wheel... but I managed to fight him... I read out the a...

Someone told me a joke about a man who had just bought a car. It was his first car and, not wanting to have even a scratch on it, he took it to a hindu temple, a buddhist temple, a church and a mosque. At the hindu temple, the hindu priest chanted mantras over the car and tied a red string around the car's right wing mirror. The buddhist monk sprinkled the car with water after chanting traditional mantras and then a white string was tied to the left wing mirror. The christian priest blessed the car with holy water and gave the driver a cross to hang from the rear view mirror. At the mosque, the imam was astounded since nobody ever asked to bless a car before. So after a recitation of selected verses from the Qur'an, he took a hacksaw and promptly cut the tip off the car's exhaust pipe..... to circumcise it. When I first heard this story, I thought the new car owner was an atheist, albeit a superstitious one. This man, I had deduced, did not really believe in the existence o...

Abilene is a place in Texas, USA. I’ve never been there, but the first time I heard of the place was when I was in college (UiTM) during the Organizational Behaviour class. Dr. Zulaika told the class about a bunch of people, a husband, a wife and the wife’s parents, who were sitting around, doing practically nothing when all of a sudden the father said, ‘Let’s go to Abilene.’ From where they were, Abilene was 85 km away. Because he sounded so enthusiastic, the son-in-law said, 'Ok, why not.' The wife said, 'Yes, let’s have dinner there.' The mother said, 'Sounds like fun.' The trip was bad, and the food was lousy and then they had to travel all the way back again. Then, the mother said, 'Maybe we should’ve stayed home.' And the wife said, 'Yes, I thought, everybody else wanted to go, so I went along.' The husband said, 'I thought you wanted to go, Dad…I didn’t want to disappoint you.' The father said, 'Not really, I just made the sugg...