24/6/2006 – Waiting at the Edge - The Penang Bridge Run.

 24/6/2006 – Waiting at the Edge

I was reading John Le Carré’s The Constant Gardener this morning while waiting for the roads to open again after the Marathon Bridge Run. I had left the house at seven, only to find myself unable to reach the ferry terminal. With time to kill and nowhere in particular to be, I ended up at my auntie’s place in Brown Gardens. I ate a roti canai and drank a Nescafé from Restoran Farouk, that little corner shop on Patani Road, near the river that, as far as I know, never had a name.

That river… it has been the same stinking, blackened stretch of water since my childhood. It runs toward Sungai Pinang and has always been a festering wound in the landscape. It reeks of decay, and its murky depths seem immune to any hope of renewal—except perhaps when a heavy rain gives it a brief moment of reprieve. Somehow, despite the filth, the toughest of God’s creatures continue to endure in its waters.

                            My acrylic black and whit painting of the old Kampung landscape.

Le Carré’s book stirred the old activist spirit in me again, lighting a fire I thought long gone. But maybe it is too late now. My age and dwindling resources weigh heavily, and my responsibilities to my children override everything else. Their immigration status, their education—until those are resolved, I have no freedom to chase after fading dreams.

How I long to be back on the road, perhaps for the last entry of this long journal—somewhere foreign, one last wandering before I fade. But these days it feels like a dream deferred indefinitely. I’m not the best father, I admit. I don’t have what it takes to be like those husbands who build a nest, who raise their children into fine citizens. I've been a rolling stone too long and have gathered very little that’s of use to my children—except, perhaps, my fading sketches and battered journals, which themselves are slowly falling apart.

                                          The original P.Ramli's house in Kaunter Hall

Yes, I could have done better. I could have saved more, focused more, especially during my years abroad. But as the Prophet is said to have taught: Do not dwell on what should or should not have been. So I sit here, in patience, sipping what remains of my morning coffee, waiting for the roads to open again. And then I’ll head on to the Jerejak Jetty and hope that no one will raise too much of a fuss about my lateness.