peasantry

Old houses and their compounds are good grounds for hunting ghosts! I have limited memories of this old house that I have renovated (and am still renovating) so I have few ghosts to capture but the house and the land on which it is standing has given me so much to learn from the past. For example, just two weeks ago while taking a student around the house I suddenly saw a small round object on the ground. Instinctively I knew it was an old coin – but my student said it was an old mirror. Of course the teacher was right. The reason why it was easy for me to know what it was is because that wasn’t the first time I’d found an old coin half-buried or fully exposed on the ground. Before this I’d found 2-3 old coins at the same house. Based on a better “specimen” this coin was from the Straits Settlement “period” and it’s made of copper and had a value 1 cent.

I’m sure one cent then was a lot so my forebears must have really been careless with their money to lose it like that. Maybe they had holes in their pockets? Poor peasants with holey pockets!!!

architected space

I asked an architect what architects do and she said, "sculpting space".

I think my house is changing space and time.

In Memoriam

Kak Mon (2007-2009)

cats have a way to get really close to us. Just last night when I was out exercising at the Taman in front of the house, a teenage cat just simply joined me and then followed me back until to the front gate. At home in kampung, Kak Mon had until earlier today, been keeping father company. Her presence will be sorely missed by him.

My first pet-cat was Bob. We had him a long time ago but he left me a scar, literally, and it's still visible on the back of my right hand. Our family never keeps a dog because mother is religiously allergic to them. But some day when I have to manage a large farm/ homegarden I may need to enlist the help of a rotweiler. god willing.

rumahku

For the past few months I have been spending time (and lotsa money) to "rehabilitate" the house that I never grew up in. It belonged to my mother and her mother and the mother before her.... but my mother has recently decided to pass it on to me. RUMAHKU. Actually I'm just a "guardian" as any rumah pusaka actually belongs to a paruik. The project manager is my sister, Nor Haslinda Hashim. Thank god she seems to know what she's doing (albeit at my expense) since she has architectural training from Universiti Teknologi Malaysia. Dr. Naziaty of Universiti Malaya has been very encouraging too. There's no ramp to get into the house yet but the new staircase is quite accessible and safe for some people. There's an accessible toilet on the ground level...yeay.

The view from the frontyard overlooking sawah padi. Just beyond the bamboo grove is Sungai Muar.

magical realism

I did it again - I bought a book by Italo Calvino last night.

Books

I learned the Arabic alphabets before I did any other. I started learning it even before I attended primary school, and unlike most other kids my age at the time I skipped the sekolah makan TADIKA (kindergarten). Instead I attended mengaji at night and during class, I’d recite the Quran using a copy that was available at the surau.

Our family did not have a copy of the Quran at home until some time in the 1980s. The first Quran that my parents brought home was a brand new copy that they’d gotten for free from the village masjid, if memory serves me right. But it was not the family’s first book.

I can vaguely remember that around puberty I usually spent the afternoons sprawled on the couch reading HAMKA. It was one of my father’s few books. Some time later I found all of his books scattered under their bed at home while … I can’t really recall why I was looking there. But a couple of the authors’ that I can still remember were HAMKA and Agus Salim, both of whom were Indonesian [Minangkabau] progressive thinkers in the first half of the 20th century. Father read those books while he was still in the army for goodness knows why. Agus Salim’s book was written in two languages – Indonesian and Dutch. I don’t remember much else about those books, but there was a line in HAMKA’s that stayed with me for awhile. It was the part where he thought that something beautiful could never be sinful.

So puberty was a time when I actively looked for books. It was around this curious time that I got hold of a sibling’s book, THE READER'S DIGEST BOOK OF THE HUMAN BODY, which somebody said years later was a seminal book on sex, hippie-style (because it contains drawings of unshaven men and women!).

I can’t recall the first book that I bought with my own money. But I can remember very well the most recent book that I bought_a novel by W. Somerset Maugham. I’d read his novels before but when I was at the bookstore suddenly it occurred to me that I needed to have a copy at home. Come to think of it right now maybe it’s time I stop buying books and save the money for something else.


Something beautiful can never be sinful