I attended Francis Light Primary School, tucked into the colonial heart of George Town. Named after the founder of Penang, it stood like a remnant of empire, with long corridors, wooden shutters, and the smell of chalk dust and sweat soaked into the walls.
From the start, I was marked as a gifted child—at least in the subjects that spoke to my soul. Art came like breath. Singing felt like returning home. I took to English as if I’d always known it, as though my tongue remembered something my family had forgotten. On intelligence tests, I soared. Teachers raised their brows and said words like “potential.” But when it came to math and science, my mind recoiled like a cat in water. Numbers terrified me. Formulas were foreign languages written in blood and boredom.
And the teachers—God help us—they did not spare the rod, nor the humiliation. Some seemed to take delight in our fear, wielding canes like sabers and insults like bullets. I remember one in particular, whose rage lit up every time I failed to solve an equation. He would scream, his face twisted with contempt, then bring the cane down hard across my knuckles, as though pain could multiply understanding.
In those moments, I stopped being the gifted child. I became the shamed one. The failure. The one whose gifts didn’t count in the arithmetic of empire.
But I kept drawing. Kept singing. Kept writing little stories in the margins of my exercise books. Those were my lifelines. My silent rebellion. My way of saying, I exist beyond your curriculum.
But it wasn’t just numbers and beatings I had to survive. There was another trial, quieter, more insidious—the question of faith.
My name alone raised eyebrows: Nanda Sena s/o Simon Bartholomuze. A name that betrayed no easy category. A Buddhist name. A Christian father’s name. In a school system steeped in assumptions, it was enough to single me out like a sore thumb.
“Why don’t you go for Friday prayers?” they would ask, sometimes out of curiosity, sometimes out of cruelty. Teachers. Prefects. Even friends, their questions sharpened by years of being taught that difference meant danger.
I had no proper answer, only the truth—that I was born into the Dhamma, quietly, gently, through the hands of an uncle who believed in silence over sermons. There was no mosque for me on Fridays. No obligation pressed on my young shoulders. Only a stillness. A reverence. And the quiet knowledge that faith did not need spectacle to be real.
It was the Chinese boys who understood me best. My classmates who didn’t quite belong either. They shared their snacks with me, laughed at the absurdities of school rules, and offered silent camaraderie during those long Friday afternoons when the others were away. Some of them were Buddhist too, or Taoist, or just indifferent to the system. We spoke our own language—a mix of Hokkien, broken Malay, and boyhood mischief. In their company, I was no longer strange. I was just one of them.
Looking back, I see now how early the seeds were planted. The outsider. The wanderer. The one who didn’t quite fit. But also—the bridge. The quiet witness to many worlds.
Growing up in George Town was like living inside a sacred thunderdome. The city breathed religion—not quietly, but with full ceremony, clashing cymbals, and rising smoke. On any given street corner, you might walk past a mosque, a Taoist shrine, a Hindu temple, and a Catholic church—each radiating its own fragrance, its own music, its own claim to the Divine.
It was a holy cacophony.
Islam with its majestic azan echoing from green-domed minarets. Hinduism with statues draped in marigolds and incense curling toward unseen gods. The quiet stillness of the Buddhist vihara. The solemn chants of Sunday mass. Taoist rituals with roasted ducks and red paper charms. Sikh prayers vibrating from the gurdwara. Only Voodooism was missing, I used to joke—but everything else was there, crowding the senses, demanding allegiance.
And in the middle of it all, there was I.
Not quite Muslim, not quite Christian, not quite anything the world could categorize. My Buddhist roots were too quiet to draw lines. No missionary zeal. No threats of hellfire. Just breath. Just mindfulness. Just silence. And yet, silence is easily drowned in a city of shouting gods.
They all wanted something from me—my belief, my conversion, my confession. But what I felt most deeply was their condemnation of each other. It was like watching a beautiful garden where every flower tried to choke the others out.
And still, I couldn’t turn away. I was fascinated. Awed. Confused. Overwhelmed. But most of all, I was learning. Not doctrine, but observation. Not religion, but the psychology of belief.
Maybe that’s when I became a seeker without knowing it. A watcher. A future monk without robes.
It was a rite of passage in the kampung: when a boy came of age, he would be circumcised. A communal affair. A mark of growing into Muslim manhood. And having grown up among my Muslim relatives, no one thought to question that I too would follow suit. Why wouldn’t I? I’d gone to the mosque on Fridays. I knew how to recite verses from the Qur’an. I played with the other boys, sat through their religious classes, absorbed their customs like second nature. To the outside world, I was just another kampung boy walking the same path.
But I wasn’t.
One morning, my aunt announced her plans to have me circumcised alongside her son, who had been born just a week before me. It was time, she said. No more delays.
My uncle, quiet as he usually was, stood up like a mountain.
“No,” he said. “He is not a Muslim. He is a Buddhist.”
The silence that followed hit harder than any sermon.
My aunt was stunned. Her voice rose with disbelief. “What do you mean? He’s been to the mosque! He reads from the Qur’an! He prays!”
And with that, the cat leapt out of the bag—claws, fury, and all. The family secret, guarded in silence for years, was out.
I watched the drama unfold like a ghost floating above my own life. I hadn’t known what I was—just what I wasn’t. And now, that definition had a name: Buddhist. Not by ritual. Not by registration. But by intention. My uncle’s intention. His silent, steadfast guardianship over my spiritual identity.
There was no going back after that. I was marked—not by a blade, but by a truth that shook the foundation of my upbringing.
It was the beginning of a quiet rebellion. One that would define the rest of my life.
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