An irony of life

Mat (left) and Syadhwan: Good friends

1. My son, Muhammad Syadhwan, has a good friend who is a very skilful car mechanic. His name is Ahmad Yusairi, but he is well known by his pet name, Mat [mɑːt].

2. We would take our cars to him for services or repairs and he is capable of delivering a very satisfactory job. Mat is a dedicated worker, very down-to-earth and honest young man. 

3. He has been married for several years and only now he and his wife are expecting their first child. Syadhwan would share Mat's ups and downs with me, so I know that Mat is facing problems with his health condition.

4. Apparently, he is struggling with symptoms of diabetes that has begun to threaten his livelihood. He has been admitted to the hospital a few times due to diabetes complications such as diabetic coma and extreme fatigue.

5. Weeks ago, I got a shock when Syadhwan told me that it had been a while since Mat was diagnosed with insulin deficiency and consequently he has been injecting himself with insulin ever since. 

6. I felt deep pity for Mat because he is such a promising mechanic, but due to his health condition he is probably going through hard times.

7. At times I heard Syadhwan said he would spend weekends at Mat's workshop to learn the ropes from the expert. "Don't say," I told him. "Just do."

8. I felt like telling him off for being irresolute. My dear son, say what needs to be said only, otherwise just do what needs to be done.

The courtier's advice

1. Folklore around the globe holds troves of interesting tales of morality. They include many stories about attempts by those who possess power and wealth to do injustice to ordinary people. 

2. Essentially, there is a resourceful character in every story. He might be a wise sage or a witty courtier who plays the role of protecting the have-nots from being victims of unfair treatment. Consider the following tale of instant justice.

3. Once upon a time, an emperor who was accompanied by several courtiers, stumbled over a piece of rock in his garden. Being in a bad mood and feeling embarrassed by the incident the emperor pinned the blame on his gardener and odered his arrest and execution. 

4. On the following day, the gardener was asked to make his last wish before his hanging and he asked for an audiece with the emperor. As he knelt before the latter, the gardener hacked and spat on his footwear. 

5. The emperor was stunned and just as he was about to explode with rage, his favourite courtier stepped forward in the gardener’s defence. 

6. He explained that there could be no person more loyal to his master other than the accused. He pointed out that the unfortunate man had acted against his will in order to give the emperor a good reason for hanging him; otherwise he feared that people would say the emperor hanged him for a mere trifle. 

7. The courtier's explanation opened the emperor's eyes to a great injustice that he could have done. So the gardener's life was spared. 

8. As you might imagine, the gardener wouldn't dare to insult the emperor on his own account; he had acted on the courtier's advice all along.

Justice and a gold coin

1. If you were given a choice between justice and a gold coin - which do you choose? Apparently, most people would choose justice because its virtue governs our societies. It is the moral principle that underlies social progress. Upholding justice, Socrates was reported to have said: “Nothing is to be preferred before justice.”  

2. The above question is the subject of an Indian folk tale. An idiosyncratic courtier when asked the question by his emperor had chosen the gold coin instead of justice. His choice had made the other courtiers as well as the emperor himself dumbfounded. The courtiers who were envious of him for being the emperor’s favourite thought that he had had it for displaying such idiocy in front of the emperor.

3. The emperor was very disappointed in him so the courtier had to explain himself. According to him a person would ask for what he didn’t have. As regards justice, the courtier said that the emperor had made it available to everybody in the country. He further explained that since justice was already available to him and he was always short of money, so he said he would prefer the gold coin to justice.

4. The question would remain relevant indefinitely. It persists in the heads of those in positions of power. Like the emperor’s courtier, they might well prefer the gold coin to justice except that they do not need to explain themselves until their insidious disregard of justice come to light. A professor of philosophy, Paul Bloomfield, wrote: “Leadership without an inner moral compass reliably pointing toward justice inevitably ends in the abuse of power.”

The pictures speak for themselves

M.I. Merican and M.S. Marikan (right)

1. My South Indian roots appertain to my father’s side of the family. When he married my mother, a young Malay girl from a family of rice growers - my ethnicity in my vital records belongs with my mother’s.

2. However, my facial features do not quite typify my ethnicity. For instance, during my pilgrimage to Mecca years ago, a few shopkeepers asked me where I came from and my response seemed to make them wonder. I still recall one of them quipping “not original” which apparently meant that to his eyes I didn’t look like a typical Malay man from Malaysia.

3. Generally, in looks I take after my father I guess. For instance, I have oblong face shape akin to that of his (see pictures). As I recall, he had completely turned grey when I was still very small. I guess it’s a hereditary trait that I started to go grey when I turned thirty despite the fact that people normally grey later in life.

4. The shapes of my eyes bear a similarity to his. We have deep-set almond eyes which are slightly “upturned.” With age, his hooded eyes accounted for the droopy eyelids that invite comparison with that of mine. The bags under his eyes were more pronounced during his later years, a feature I now notice developing on my lower eyelids.

5. We also share a rather straight nose with long, narrow ridge and a round tip. The wings of our noses flared out and upward a little so that the nostrils are visible from the front.

6. My laugh lines match his as well. Distinct skin folds run from each side of our noses to the corners of our mouths and thence extend further down the jaws. Besides that, my jowls have begun to resemble his. The skin at the lower part of my cheeks bulges and hangs down and covers my jaw.

7. His other facial features that match mine include his ordinary-looking lips with a rounded philtrum and slightly downward corners; his somewhat narrow ears which seemed a bit longer than mine because of the extended lobes and his round and slightly receding chin except that I sport a goatee.

8.  The pictures below speak for themselves. I have passed my mid-50s when the picture on the right was taken. I guess my father had also had his picture taken at about the same age. The pictures show near likeness in appearance between us, but of course there are traces of my mother's features on my looks as well.

M.I. Merican and M.S. Marikan (right)

Note: My great-grandfather was from Pondicherry, South India. In the 1770s he emigrated to the newly founded British settlement in Penang along with his mother and elder brother and decades later became a very successful merchant in George Town. My grandfather, Vapoo Merican, was born in the settlement and became a merchant in his own right. My father had detached himself from the merchant lineage to join the civil service under the government of Kedah instead.

My Chulia roots

1. If you were to wander around the old part of George Town, the capital of Penang, you would possibly come across one of the oldest roads in the city, Chulia Street. In the 19th century, the road used to be part of the enclave of Tamil Muslim traders where businesses throve.

2. In 1786, Captain Francis Light acting for the East India Company established a British settlement at the eastern tip of Penang island facing the mainland. The new port had attracted the influx of immigrants seeking greener pastures, particularly from southern India.

3. The South Indian immigrants from the Coromandel and Malabar coasts settled along a road built by the British as early as the development of the port itself. It was initially named Malabar Street but later changed to Chulia Street because at that time Europeans used the term Chulia or Chulier for South Indians, the family roots on my father’s side.

4. My great-grandfather, Mohamed Merican Noordin, the patriarch of the Noordin family, was a prominent Chulia merchant during the first three decades of the 19th century until his death in 1870. His mausoleum is situated in Chulia Street in the vicinity of the famous Kapitan Kling Mosque.  

5. My grandfather, Vapoo Merican Noordin, the eldest son of Mohamed Noordin, was a merchant in his own right. He established his own company under the name V. M. Noordin around mid-1800s and ran his business in Chulia Street until his unexpected death in 1884.

6. Vapoo left two sons; Mohamed Hussain, probably a young man at the time of his death, and Mohamed Ismail, then aged two. The latter, who was my father, left George Town towards the end of 1910 aged 28 to make a name for himself as a civil servant in Alor Star.

7. Apparently, my father’s emigration had affected his relationships with close relatives over time. I only have very dim childhood memories of occasional trips to Penang to visit his relatives but nothing really come to pass. I was nine when he passed away in 1956 and for us, namely my siblings and I, it marked the end of family ties with his side.

8. When he died, my father took the Noordin lineage with him. Thus my siblings and I were severed from the merchant lineage. However, I knew that my father was well remembered by his younger relatives; probably his nephews or nieces or more likely their children.

9. For instance, there was a piece of comment I read on the internet in praise of my father written by someone who claimed to be his nephew. And in another instance, my father’s services as a civil servant under the government of Kedah were highlighted in a blog on the history of the Noordin family.

10. It was an irony of life that my father didn’t have any children from his earlier marriages and only be blessed with a firstborn in his mid-60s after marrying my mother. They got a second child about a year later and a third and the last child when he was 68. 14. I suppose that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

11. I guess the youngest of my cousins, if any of them are still alive, would be octogenarians by now. The older ones would be nonagenarians or centenarians. In actual fact, their children and I very probably belong in the same age group.

12. And there is off course the question of paternity that has arisen from a simple matter of variations in the spelling of names in our vital records. On account of the mistakes, I had to submit a statutory declaration form in order to obtain a copy of my father’s death certificate.  

13. Despite the anomalies, I am fortunate enough to become aware of my paternity during the first nine years of my life.

14. I suppose that’s the way the cookie crumbles.