Let me start by telling a crush that I had on someone when I was in Primary Five – she was studying Primary Six in a town school about three hours away by longboat from my humble “ulu” school.
During that Christmas of 1966 I was on cloud nine but it was a short-lived flirtatious affair, for when school reopened a week later, she had to go back because her hosts, namely my uncle, who was a teacher in her school, and my aunty had to leave the longhouse and were bound for St Peter’s Primary School in Saratok town.
“You and the Indian girl seemed to go along well during last Christmas,” said Aunty Agnes when she and her husband were back at the longhouse for the first term school holidays in 1967. I was then studying in Primary Six, aged 13.
Yes, the Indian girl and I were still communicating by letters – we corresponded at least twice since January 1967. Actually I was looking forward to meeting her again for the school first term break of April 1967 but she did not join Uncle Wilson and Aunty Agnes at the longhouse, now that she was in Form One in Saratok Secondary School, as her letters indicated.
Our correspondence stopped around September of that year. There had been no exchange of photo or souvenir and the only reminder were the few nicely worded letters.
By the time I enrolled for Form One in the same secondary school–it was the sole secondary school in Saratok then – I had almost forgotten about her. And when we first met in the school as schoolmates, the flame had almost stopped burning.
We exchanged a few words in the first month of my Form One days and within the four years together in the school we seemed not to know each other anymore. She never seemed to have boyfriends and was one of the school prefects whereas I had a few short-lived flirtations with girls, including two Chinese girls.
” These marriages have thrived through the test of time. All the Indian husbands, including the Benares native, speak fluent Iban. One of them, from Seremban, is the closest to me, sharing a number of common interests.”
In Saratok we practised One Malaysia phenomenon long before ex-premier Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak put it into a concept, thanks to the Iban language being the lingua franca – it was quite common to hear Chinese or Malay parents scolding their children in Iban.
My two Chinese girlfriends spoke Iban better than some city Iban kids. Even the aforesaid Indian girl had a good command of the language as her mom was of mixed Iban and Chinese parentage.
We – the Indian girl and I – met again many years later. She was happily married to an Iban classmate from Saratok and both were attached to a hospital in Sibu. Then I was still single and throughout the years had had few girlfriends, including an Indian girl from Taiping and a Malay girl from the Kelantan royal family, not to mention one or two Chinese girls from Penang.
” Mixed marriages are very common in our Malaysian plural society. Through schools and tertiary institutions, we have been exposed to the multi-racial and multi-cultural facets and fabrics of our society. “
There were also involvements with Korean and Canadian exchange students in Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang too. These were all thanks to my engagements in music and the arts, including painting, drawing and photography.
In my immediate family, I have a niece who is happily married to a Simanggang Malay and a first cousin who is married to an Indian from Johor. Both marriages have produced many children.
There is a cousin whose wife is an Orang Ulu and three distant cousins whose husbands are Indians, including one coming all the way from Benares (a.k.a Varanasi), India.
These marriages have thrived through the test of time. All the Indian husbands, including the Benares native, speak fluent Iban. One of them, from Seremban, is the closest to me, sharing a number of common interests. The children look more Indian than Iban but they speak not a word of Malayalam.
The Johorean husband of my first cousin once knocked at the door of our “bilik” in Kedap longhouse, Saratok. It was around 4am but my brother Jon was just back from his fishing trip and wasn’t asleep yet.
When he opened the door he didn’t see anyone as the verandah light was off and only knew it was our cousin-in-law Morgan when he addressed my brother in his Indian-Iban intonation.
His car encountered a problem and needed some help; he and the wife (our first cousin) were bound for Bintangor where they were teaching then.
Mixed marriages are very common in our Malaysian plural society. Through schools and tertiary institutions, we have been exposed to the multi-racial and multi-cultural facets and fabrics of our society and as such have learnt to accept pluralism as ours to embrace.
Last week I had the privilege to be emcee for a holy matrimony between an Iban from Sibu and his Dayak Selako bride from Lundu.
In the same hotel a year ago my grandniece also held a marriage reception. Her husband is of mixed Iban-Kadazan parentage.
In the same venue in 2014, I also emceed a marriage reception between a groom of mixed parentage (Iban father and Indian-Iban mom) and his bride, an Iban Remun. So these mixed marriages are very common nowadays, thanks to our open-minded Malaysian society, especially in Sarawak.
In Saratok I have a first cousin fondly called Ujang who has been married to a Filipina for quite some time. Their eldest son has graduated from a local university, thereby speaking for a marriage which has lasted for at least twenty-four years.
Now my Filipina cousin-in-law speaks a typical Saratok Iban, emphasising the “o” sound in the words ending with “a”. Ujang’s elder sister Ulat is happily settling down in Glasgow, Scotland with her English husband and two grown-up children, one of whom is a medical doctor.
It is hard to determine who is going to be one’s life partner. In my own case, I could have been married to any of the girls I knew with intimacy before. She could have been a rich Foochow whose family owned the first plastic company in Sibu; or a Melanau beauty, who is now a Datin and a central region penghulu; a poor soul from one Bawang Assan longhouse; a Kelantanese princess or the Indian crush of Christmas Day 1966 but as fate had it I ended up with my own fellow Iban, firstly with a fourth cousin and almost two decades later with an ex-student 17 years my junior.
Despite it having been said zillions of times in the immediate and distant past, love is truly blind to the colours of our skin and many other things, et cetera et cetera.
1 Corinthians 23: “Love is patient, kind, does not envy or boast, not arrogant or rude, does not insist on its own way, not irritable or resentful, bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”
