“I regret giving birth to you!” screamed the woman in a shrill voice. “Go away! You always make my blood boil.”
In a second, my friend appeared in the doorway and quickly jumped down from the open veranda of their house instead of using the notched-log ladder.
As he approached me, I could see he was in tears. Fighting to suppress his emotions, he sucked in his lower lip while wiping his eyes repeatedly with the back of his hands.
Some men were smoking and drinking under the awning of a nearby shop but none of them seemed to pay any mind to my friend’s mother and her temper tantrum.
The year was 1963; I was ten years old and my friend, who was a distant cousin, was nine. I liked him but never entered his family home because I did not like his mother. Her loud, screechy voice always grated on my nerves. Also, I sensed that she did not like kids.
That day was not the first time I witnessed her temper tantrum, which I found extremely unpleasant.
Once we were out of earshot of the men in the shop, I asked Sijim (name modified to maintain his anonymity) if he had eaten lunch although it was in the late afternoon and we had just finished school for the day.
I guessed that he was hungry because his mother never cooked anything whenever she had her tantrums.
When he shook his head, I took him to my house and gave him a plate of cooked cassava tubers which he gratefully ate together with some leftover vegetables and bits of salted anchovies.
No one was at home as it was that time of the year — roughly from September till December — when my parents (just like many other parents those days) had to leave me all alone in the village to attend school while they stayed on our paddy farm in the jungle several miles away.
Later, as I wanted to keep him away from his mother till nighttime, I took him to a mountain stream behind our house to wash some cookware and my school uniform and, after that, to catch some fish, little crabs, and shrimps.
I imagined that the activities would be a good mental distraction for him and, in any case, it would be nice to have an extra dish for dinner as I was a bit tired of plain vegetables.
Expecting Sijim to be rather quiet because he was always withdrawn every time his mother blew her top, I was shocked when he suddenly declared that he wanted to run away.
I shivered as goosebumps covered first my arms and then my whole body, and it was not because I was neck-deep in one of the cool crystal-clear river pools.
I did not react immediately because I was desperately trying to think of something appropriate to say. But in the end, all I could ask was, “Why?”
“Nobody wants me. I feel useless,” he said.
I couldn’t help but notice blue-black bruises on his stomach, chest and buttock. They were not visible when he had his shirt and shorts on.
“Where could you go?” I asked.
“I don’t care. I just want to die!”
“Oh, don’t be like that! You can stay with me for a while.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why?”
“You don’t have enough rice for both of us.”
He was right. My parents left just enough rice for me to survive until the end of each week after which I had to walk to the farm to get more.
“What about staying with me until this weekend?” I asked.
“My father will look for me,” he said.
“Say that I’m scared of being alone … that you’re keeping me company. He might believe that.”
“What about our food?”
“Don’t worry about that. I know what to do.”
And so, for four days, we ate a mixture of rice — the little I had left — cassava tubers (plenty of them around the house), yams, maize, pumpkins, and some sago flour given by a kind neighbour.
What I did not take into account was salt. We ran out of it after three days and had to ask for some from a schoolmate. He gave us just enough for two meals.
After school late on Friday that week Sijim returned home while I went to join my parents and little siblings.
After dinner that night, while my father was enjoying his roll-your-own cigarette and my mother was smoking some skewered fish over the fireplace, I spoke about Sijim hoping for some wise or practical words from them.
Mother’s first words were, “Ooh … that woman! I think she’s insane.”
“Was she always like that?” I asked.
“I think she changed after she gave birth to her second child,” she said.
“She’s not the only one. A few others in the village are like that, including men,” said Father. “Ever watched your uncle Ronald?”
“Him?” I was surprised. “Really?”
“He’s not violent or something, but he’d rather work himself to death than raise his kids,” said Father.
“There was one time when I heard Sijim’s mother say, ‘I should’ve aborted you!’ Mother, what does aborted mean?”
“It happens when a pregnant woman gets rid of her baby.”
“You mean, kill the baby?”
“Yes.”
“How? Cut open her stomach?”
“There are ways. I’ve never seen it done, but I’ve heard stories.”
“Some dukun (witchdoctor) or bomoh (shaman) can do it,” said Father.
“Why do some parents hate their own children?” I asked.
“Who knows?” replied Father. “I heard that Sijim’s mother wanted to abort him but the grandmother convinced her not to do it. She was the one who took care of Sijim.”
“Abortion can damage a woman permanently and she won’t be able to get pregnant again, ever,” said Mother.
“The grandmother died, remember?” said Father. I nodded. “Well, now you know the rest of the story.”
The story did not sit well with me, and for a long time I found myself watching closely every time I saw a little child in the company of its parents. I still do it today.
Sijim continued to stay with me — I can’t remember how long — until one day a cousin took him in. From time to time, he returned to keep me company, for which I was glad, and I even taught him how to read.
Unfortunately, I slowly lost contact with him after I left the village to attend Serian Government Secondary School (now SMK Serian) as a boarding student. For much of the year, I was in school while most weekends were spent with my Chinese-Bidayuh cousins just outside Serian town. During long holidays I used to do odd jobs such as construction work in Kuching to earn some pocket money so as not to burden my parents unnecessarily.
Fast forward to 1973, I was in Kuching working as a telegraphist for the Telecommunications Department. One day I went to Sky Bookstore in Padungan looking for a thriller novel and instead got enamoured with a book that contained a brief story of a boy whose birth was unexpected and unwanted.
According to the mother, the boy was the major contributor to his father’s “breakdown” and the demise of the marriage of his parents. They were not ready for more than one child, especially so close together (the boy unexpectedly came eleven months after his brother). Also, the mother wanted a girl but got a boy instead.
I met Sijim again when he was in his early sixties. I bumped into him in Serian town as he came out of a lottery shop. We spent the whole morning in a coffee shop trying to bridge the years during which we had not seen each other. It turned out that he left the village and did odd jobs in different places around the time when I went to work in Kuching after finishing high school.
Curiosity got the better of me and I had to ask about his parents, especially his mother. He was silent for several moments before he answered.
“I had to sort out what love and affection are on my own because they failed to teach me,” he said. “I am indebted to you for looking after me when I needed a friend.”
That was quite a surprise because I did not know that I was doing anything much.
“Are you angry with your parents?”
“Not anymore. I used to feel short-changed that I didn’t have the sort of parents other kids had. I still wonder, though, about how different my life would have been if I had been part of a normal family.”
“Are your parents still alive?”
“No.”
“What did you feel when they died?”
“It was curiosity, not regret or longing, that made me attend their funerals. I didn’t love them and didn’t miss them. Mostly, I just didn’t care.”
A year later (or was it two years?), he passed away. I did not know about it because his home was in another village and no one informed me. Anyway, even if I had known I would not have been able to attend his funeral because I was in Germany for three months spending time with my daughter and grandchildren.
I still think of him from time to time and wonder if there were things that I could have done better or differently for him. Being a flawed human being myself I can’t completely make sense of my own life, let alone the life of other messed-up people.
As it is, Sijim still lives in my Books of Memories where he will remain as long as I am alive.
The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of the New Sarawak Tribune.
