My late father

On Father’s Day, Sunday June 15, I have to write in appreciation of my late father who left us about 40 years ago. A person who was born in a Malay most rural settings, unwell, never went to school, almost fully illiterate except that he might just be able to read and recite the Koraan verses. And who got married very young on an arranged marriage to a cousion in the village, had a still born child by that first marriage, and got divorced almost immediately. He re-married a young women, after that, who became my mother, with whom they another son, my younger brother. And that marriage did not last, and my mother was asked to be divorced from him by his family, for some reason which I still do not know the details. How he managed to look after us after that I did not know and still don’t. And he re-married after we were already at school, and I was then in a residential school far away. That marriage gave him a daughter and another son. He was then already very sickly and he died in the Kuala Lumpur GH, a place which he never visited before in his life; the furthest that he had been to town then was Temerloh (Pahang, Malaysia) by boat and Mentakab (about 5 km from Temerloh in a NE direction) by train, both places were only about 20 km from where he lived.

But my father was the only one who produced children among his two brothers and a sister. That to me was and is an achievement.

In appreciation and rememberance of my late father.