Archive of Our Own

June 2007

⟡°. ⋆༺☾𖤓༻⋆. °⟡

"Kau fikir ni zaman bila? Call je lah."

"Alaaa, kalau call tak feel!"

Kahar had groaned a long-suffering groan, had rolled his eyes, and had muttered a string of colourful obscenities under his breath that had made Hakeem wheeze with mirth until his eyes watered and he'd had to grip the edge of the canteen table to keep himself upright.

The conversation should've ended there.

By all reasonable measures, it had ended there.

Kahar had closed the matter and had clearly filed the suggestion under Perkara Merepek Yang Hakeem Cakap Hari Ini—a folder Hakeem suspects has, by now, expanded into a small filing cabinet of its own, possibly requiring its own room, possibly requiring its own dedicated archivist—which, to be fair to Kahar, was the sensible response, because nobody with a functioning mind would voluntarily become a pen pal unless they were eighty years old, or trapped inside a historical novel, or Hakeem, who'd possessed neither of those excuses and had done it anyway, because his relationship with reasonable measures are at best, questionable, and at worst, openly antagonistic. 

On the very same evening they collected their SPM results, while the residual excitement of the day still thrummed through his bloodstream, Hakeem sat at the wooden desk in his room—the one that'd listed to the left for as long as he could remember because one leg had always been a little shorter than the others, a flaw he had came to terms with, because it felt, in its crooked persistence, like a reflection of himself.

The back of his neck had prickled with the aftertaste of finality, with that skittering electricity that lives under the skin on days that close chapters too neatly. Five years had ended that day in the short anticlimactic time it'd taken to walk to the front of a hall, accept a slip of paper, and walk back to his seat with knees that didn't quite belong to him. Five years. The feeling had been too large and too unwieldy to sit with, had refused to fit inside his chest no matter how he'd tried to organise it, had spilled out his ears and his fingertips and the corners of his mouth, and so Hakeem had done what he typically did when a feeling grew larger than his chest had ever been capable of holding.

Hakeem had become annoying.

He'd reached for an old exercise book, had flipped it over, and had torn a page from the back, the paper coming away with a rough sound that left a ragged fringe along one edge, the reverse side still carrying the pressed ghost of Chemistry notes—equations and molecular diagrams bleeding through the page like impressions from a previous self, already beginning to recede. He'd clicked his pen. He'd stared at the paper. He'd thought very, very hard. And he'd written:

Kahar!

Hi!! 

Ni Hakeem!!! :D

He'd folded it into an envelope and had written Kahar's Kelantan address across the front with such tongue-tip concentration that anyone observing from outside would've assumed he'd been composing a statutory declaration, or a ransom note, or at minimum something in which the spelling had mattered, and it had, it really had, but the gap between the care invested and the contents enclosed had been, from any standpoint, cavernous. He'd checked the spelling thrice, had affixed a stamp with his thumb and had felt, upon pressing it flat, an obscure hope. The following morning he'd cycled to the postbox, and had slid the envelope through the slot.

Afterward, whenever the postman had come around, Hakeem would collect the post and go through each envelope, and the flavour of deflation would be bitter on his tongue when none of them were addressed to him. He'd put the letters down, return to the television or the yard or wherever he'd theoretically been occupying himself, and when the postman had come again, his one-person pantomime would repeat itself scrupulously from the beginning.

Kahar probably hadn't even bothered replying.

The more Hakeem had considered this possibility, the more probable it had seemed, and it had been fine, it had been completely and absolutely fine, it had only been a letter, a stupid joke of a letter with an even stupider content, and if Kahar had read it and had made the perfectly reasonable decision to carry on living his life without sending anything back, then that would've been fine, Hakeem would've been fine, and he'd been repeating this to himself with decreasing conviction for nearly a fortnight when, on a Tuesday afternoon thick with the pressure of humidity, a letter had materialised among the utility bills and miscellaneous printed notices.

The handwriting had been indubitable. 

It had looked—and Hakeem had said this to Kahar's face before, had received threats of violence that had been disproportionate to what had been a fair and accurate observation—like what you would get if his father's ayam kampung been handed a pen and invited to try its wing at written communication. Hakeem has torn the envelope open with unsteady fingers, and in his haste has caught his foot against the doorstep in a spectacular collapse of basic spatial awareness.

Ye, Hakeem.

 

— K

His bum hurt from the fall, but Hakeem had laughed, sitting there on the floor with the letter in his hands, because Kahar had replied with a message so brief it had existed at the outermost frontier of what could be described as correspondence. Except that Kahar has taken the trouble of locating paper, of unearthing an envelope, of composing an address in his own dreadful hand, of sourcing a stamp, of walking all the way to a postbox, and has dispatched this letter more than four hundred kilometres across state lines, for the sole purpose of confirming that, yes, Hakeem, your letter has arrived, your existence has been duly logged, here is the paperwork attesting to that fact, signed, Kahar, who has done every last part of it.

That afternoon Hakeem had cycled to the nearest stationery store—an understocked shop wedged between a kedai jahit and a hardware store that had smelled of paper dust and rubber eraser and cheap plastic folders—and had happily spent a hefty portion of his hoarded savings on what he would come to think of, with great amusement and unironic fondness, as his writing-letters-to-his-best-friend supplies: 

• a stack of pastel lined paper, 
• a ruler decorated with cartoon ducks that served no purpose beyond being decorated with cartoon ducks,
• a box of envelopes, 
• an album of floral stamps
• as well as a packet of cute cat stickers, because Kahar was going to receive them adhered cheerfully to his correspondence whether he had wanted them or not.

⟡°. ⋆༺☾𖤓༻⋆. °⟡

The thing about writing letters, Hakeem's discovered across several months of doing it, is that they're significantly harder than they look.

Not the physical act—the physical act is fine, is actually quite pleasant in the way that uncomplicated things are pleasant, the pen moving across paper with a satisfying weight that texting's never managed to replicate, though texting is an exercise that costs money per message and requires navigating T9 predictive input, which means paper's never faced stiffer competition. Hakeem's come to understand that paper is patient in a way that screens aren't, and he appreciates this about paper with a sincerity that would've embarrassed him at fifteen but which the long, unscheduled days of gap year life have refined in him into something genuine. He appreciates having the time to think and reconsider and cross things out and write them again differently, appreciates the privacy of composition, the fact that the letter doesn't exist as a thing another person can read until he's decided it's finished and sealed it in an envelope and committed it to the postal system, which takes three to six working days on average and occasionally what appears to be longer, as though certain letters require additional time in transit, held in contemplation by the universe before it sees fit to deliver them.

No, the physical act is fine.

The hard part is everything else.

Specifically, the hard part is deciding, each time, what kind of letter this one is going to be, because Hakeem has noticed across the months of correspondence that his letters to Kahar tend to fall into one of several categories, and that he doesn't always choose which category he's writing until he's already three paragraphs in and the decision has been effectively made for him by whatever his hands have been doing while his brain was occupied elsewhere.

There's the Category One letter, 

Which is the one that reads like an unmediated transcript of his brain, full of nothing and everything; observations about his mother's cooking, the kuih experiments and the ambitious western culinary attempts with locally available substitutions; accounts of what he's been doing, which mostly amounts to watching cartoons on TV3 or NTV7 or TV9 when the antenna's cooperating; detailed field reports on the neighbour's chubby tabby who's been treating their front porch as sovereign territory and can't be dislodged, reasoned with, or successfully pspspsps-ed in spite of of how earnestly Hakeem tries. 

These letters make Kahar respond within a week, which is the fastest Kahar's letters ever arrive, and the responses are short and dry and contain two sentences of direct engagement before pivoting to a paragraph of something else entirely, which Hakeem's come to decode as Kahar's written equivalent of laughing: the deflection being the tell, the pivot being the evidence, the speed of the response being the clearest and most unambiguous signal of all.

Next, there's the Category Two letter, 

Which is the informational one, of updates and logistics, in paragraphs that are more orderly than anything Hakeem usually produces and therefore still not very orderly by objective standards, but orderly enough—what he's been reading from the perpustakaan desa that he reaches by bicycle; what his father said at dinner about the future, a conversation that happens with increasing frequency as the future stops being a theoretical concept and starts being a pragmatic one with actual deadlines and actual costs attached to it, paternal love translated into the language of a man who doesn't have much to offer except his attention and the hard-won wisdom of a life lived within its means; whether he's heard back from the institutions he applied to, which in June he has, some of them, the letters arriving in the same post as Kahar's every so often, the future and Kahar landing in his hands on the same mornings.

Kahar responds to these letters in kind, writing about his own applications and his own pending future, and he avoids writing too much about his family, which Hakeem's noticed without pressing, because there are parts of Kahar's interior whose doors are left unlocked but whose lights are kept off, and Hakeem's got enough respect for the infrastructure Kahar's built around himself to wait at the threshold rather than walking in uninvited. So Hakeem receives what's offered and cradles it and writes back about the domestic warmth of a small kampung house, trusting that Kahar receives it as an offering and not as an inadvertent underscoring of absence—a warmth Hakeem's always had in abundance and has long believed, without ever articulating this to anyone including himself, partly Kahar's as well. He leaves the space open in his letters, like a second chair pulled out at a table already set, and doesn't point to it or name it, and hopes that it might make it easier for Kahar to turn the light on and open the door.

And then there's Category Three, 

Which Hakeem tries very hard not to write and writes regardless, approximately once every six weeks, always at the small uneven desk in his room with the sunlight coming through the window at the angle that makes the room look briefly larger than it is, the light falling warm across the page and his hand moving across the paper in the serene tranquility of afternoon quiet that a house with only one person in it during the day can generate—his father at the kebun, his mother at her warung—and these are the letters where the composition gets away from him somewhere in the middle and he looks up from the page and finds he's said something he didn't plan to say, words that put themselves down in ink before he could resolve whether they belonged there, whether he was ready, whether Kahar was ready, whether either of them were ready for the consequences of those words existing and travelling across the country to a house Hakeem's never seen and can only imagine from the details Kahar feeds him.

These Category Three letters Hakeem stares at for a long time after finishing, sitting with the evidence of his own life written in his own handwriting, present and irrefutable and humiliating. He always puts them aside and writes a Category One or Category Two instead, sometimes a combination of both, and sends that, and then puts the Category Three letter in the drawer of his desk where a collection of them's been gathering since March, letters that were written and meant and sealed in their envelopes but never posted, addressed to Kahar at an address Hakeem's memorised through sheer repetition of writing it, a collection that represents, if arranged chronologically and read in sequence, a fairly damning record of everything Hakeem's been thinking and feeling and hasn't yet found a version of courage adequate to send.

Hakeem picks up his pen, smooths the fresh page in front of him, and writes the date at the top, as though the date is itself significant, as though he's creating a record of sorts rather than merely writing to a person, which perhaps he is, which perhaps is the point of letters.

Today, he tells himself, is a Category One.

7 Jun 2007

 

Kahar,

Harap kau sihat. Aku sihat. 

Mak aku tak habis lagi dengan eksperimen fish and chips pakai ikan sungai yang bapak aku tangkap. Aku rasa minggu ni je aku dah makan lebih banyak ikan daripada yang Tompok pernah makan sepanjang hayat dia. Cakap pasal Tompok, kucing jiran aku tu dah berjaya conquer laman depan rumah mak aku. Aku tak pasti sama ada aku patut bagitahu tuan dia atau biarkan je makhluk gemuk tu terus hidup dalam delusi yang rumah mak aku ni memang dia yang punya.

Anyway, Bapak aku cakap kalau aku duduk rumah lagi lama, dia nak suruh aku ikut dia pergi kait kelapa lepas dia siap menoreh. Masalahnya, pengait ada satu je.

"Bapak pakai pengait. Adik panjat je lah nanti."

Kahar, aku rasa Bapak aku tengah mempertimbangkan untuk sumpah aku jadi kera, lebih kurang macam sumpahan ikan pari. Lagi-lagi pula haritu, bini dia a.k.a Mak aku merajuk sebab aku TERhabiskan puding roti yang jiran bagi.

"Batu Belah Batu Bertangkup, makanlah aku, telanlah aku. Aku kempunan puding roti."

Boleh Mak aku kata cenggitu? 

Tapi jangan risau. Mak aku masih hidup dan aku masih belum bertukar spesies, sebab lepas tu aku terus buat satu loyang baru untuk dia. Sebelum kau tanya, ya, mak bapak aku dua-dua luluskan puding roti aku dengan markah memuaskan. Mak cakap tekstur okay tapi boleh lagi kurang manis. Bapak aku habiskan tiga ketul dan bagi thumbs up.

Hakeem sits back in his seat and reads over what he has written. He's executing Category One with exceptional skill and he would like, in an ideal world, to be acknowledged for this. He writes faster, moving his pen momentum to not waste his footing.

Kahar, nak tahu? 

Kalau taknak pun, aku nak cerita.

Dua, tiga malam ni, aku asyik mimpi pasal sekolah. Bukan mimpi buruk macam bulan lepas—takde katak yang kejar nak belah perut aku untuk balas dendam sebab aku belah diorang untuk kelas Mr Sin. Cuma... 

Aku mimpi Kudrat? 

Entah lah. Aku mimpi pasal court badminton lama. Pasal kelas kita. Pasal taman kecil dekat tengah bangunan dorm. Pasal koridor yang kita selalu lalu. Pasal tangga yang kita selalu duduk bila malas nak masuk prep. Senang cakap, semua tempat yang pernah kita lepak dulu. Pelik, kan? Macam mana otak manusia boleh rindu tempat yang dia habiskan lima tahun untuk mengutuk hampir setiap hari. Sial, Kahar, semalam aku mimpi kita makan ikan jaket dewan makan yang keras dan tak sedap tu. Bila aku bagitahu Mak, dia gelakkan aku dan cakap:

"Adik rindu Kudrat lah tu."

There's a large blot of ink where the pen'd rested against the page, spreading outward in a sluggish dark circle while Hakeem sat very still and didn't write. He looks at the blot. He thinks about what Mak had said, and then about what he'd said back, which had been something dismissive and deflecting that'd satisfied nobody present, least of all Hakeem himself, who'd heard it come out of his own mouth and had instantaneously known it for the evasion it was.

Kahar, bukan Kudrat yang aku rindu.

Aku rindu kau.

Hakeem stares at these two sentences.

He puts the pen down and reads them again, as though they might've revised themselves in the interim, which they haven't, because sentences don't do that, because Hakeem'd written them with his own hand in his own handwriting and they're true, and true things have this deeply inconvenient tendency to look exactly like themselves no matter how many times you check.

Hakeem snorts softly.

He takes a new sheet and begins to copy the letter out again from the beginning, meticulously and faithfully, because the letter is good and he's not going to let two sentences from his fickle, trembling heart ruin it—that is, until he arrives back at Mak's line, where he writes instead:

"Adik rindu Kudrat lah tu."

Hahaha. Mungkin aku sunyi. 

Mungkin juga aku dah gila Kahar.

The hahaha is doing a herculean amount of heavy lifting for three syllables, propping up everything around it like a load-bearing wall, but he leaves it, because the alternative is the two sentences sitting face-down on the desk to his left, and that's where they're going to stay.

Ye lah, aku takde kawan kat sini. Yang ada cuma Tompok. Dia pun taknak kawan dengan aku. Aku ajak dia borak, dia menguap depan muka aku. Dasar binawe.

Oh, aku dah mula dapat beberapa surat tawaran. 

Tak banyak, yang ada pun bunyi macam "tahniah, anda diterima" lepas tu sambung dengan "sila lah cari duit sendiri". Jadi aku tengah fikir lagi mana satu yang masuk akal, mana satu yang aku mampu, mana satu pilihan yang paling kurang beban untuk Mak Bapak aku. Biasiswa penuh belum nampak bayang lagi. Kita tengok je lah dulu.

Kau macam mana? Dah dapat surat? Atau Dato' Abu Yamin ada plan untuk kau? Haha.

Hakeem bites the end of his pen and considers the Dato' Abu Yamin line, weighing it. 

It's fine, he decides.

It's a jab delivered with the lightness of someone who knows exactly where the bruise is and has chosen to tap it rather than press it, and Kahar'll understand the distinction. But Hakeem reads it one more time, and then, because he wants the question beneath it to arrive not as anything else, he adds the line that is, at this point, the most honest thing left in the letter:

Aku nak tahu, sebab kau kawan aku.

One sentence. Seven words. 

And yet, it'd taken Hakeem longer to write than all the paragraphs above it combined, sitting with his pen poised and the afternoon tranquility embracing him, and he's going to leave it exactly as it is, because it's true, and because Kahar deserves the true version, and because this small, plain, unimpressive thing sitting at the bottom of an otherwise very cheerful letter is as close as Hakeem's willing to get, today, to what's lying face-down on the desk beside him.

It's enough. It'll have to be enough.

Kahar, balas cepat!!

(Atau balas lambat. Bila-bila. Aku tetap tunggu.)

 

P.S. Aku nak hantar puding roti sekali tapi aku rasa kau tak sanggup makan benda yang dah seminggu mengembara merentas sistem pos Malaysia :(

P.P.S Macam biasa, tolong pspspspskan mana-mana kucing Kelate yang kau nampak ♡

P.P.P.S Kau rasa kucing Kelate kalau nak minta ikan, dia sebut "nak ikan" ke "nok ikey"?

⟡°. ⋆༺☾𖤓༻⋆. °⟡

It's a Monday, and Hakeem is humming.

This is, he reflects, pedalling down the road with the charming June air caressing his face, fluttering his lashes, and musing his hair in ways he will not discover until much later, an unexpected condition for a Monday to produce in a person, but the thing about Mondays now, is that they're just a square on the calendar hanging in the living room, distinguished from another day by the numeral printed inside it, and Hakeem had looked at it this morning—18 Jun 2007—and had felt, after five years of Kudrat's rigid scheduling and the tyranny of having places to be, a kind of surreal and luxurious freedom that he's still not accustomed to.

Hakeem sings along with the breeze as he picks up speed, the red plastic bag hanging off the handlebar swinging in an ebullient arc with the motion of the bicycle. He slows as he reaches home, parks the bicycle with the kickstand, and heads inside. 

"Mak?" He pokes his head into the kitchen, which is empty and still holding the scent of the nasi lemak they had for breakfast. He holds up the bag. "Mak! Ni, tepung jagung dengan santan!"

"Toskan beras pulut tu, Dik!" comes his mother's voice, somewhere outside.

Hakeem puts the ingredients onto the kitchen table, finds the glutinous rice already soaking in its bowl and drains it. The water runs off clear and he sets the bowl aside.

"Dah! Lepas tu, Mak?"

Mak appears in the doorway a moment later, a handful of pandan leaves tucked against her side. She looks at Hakeem. She looks at the ingredients. She looks at Hakeem again.

"Lah, kukus lah lapisan bawah dia. Bukannya pertama kali kau buat seri muka, Anaking."

Hakeem pouts, "Lupa..."

She regards him and his pout for exactly one second. Shaking her head, she lifts the pandan leaves and swats him at the back of the head with them—lightly, barely a touch, the leaves making a soft swishy sound against his hair—and delivers her verdict with airy exasperation.

"Ha, muncung, ikut siapa pun tak tahu lah."

"Ikut Mak lah!"

"Eii—bila pula Mak muncung macam tu!"

And then they're both pouting, standing in the kitchen on a Monday morning with their bottom lips jutted out in matching protest, and if Bapak were here, which he's not because Bapak's at the kebun at this hour without fail, moving through miles of rubber trees, he would've come through the door, taken one look at the two of them with their identical faces arranged in identical expressions, and said, with the weary certainty of a man who's been both husband and father who has witnessed this tableau enough to have developed a stock response: 

"Dah, dah—dah macam itik dua-dua."

Hakeem breaks first. He giggles and reaches for the steamer, and his mother makes a tch sound that is functionally disapproving but carries, at its crux, an endeared laugh.

They move through the small kitchen together seamlessly. 

Hakeem assembles the steamer while Mak measures out the coconut milk and water and salt, combining them with the rice in the bowl. Hakeem coats the square cake pan with a thin layer of oil, and Mak pours the mixture in, smooth and white, the pandan knots she drops on top buoying on the pale surface. Hakeem picks up another pandan leaf and fashions it into a bow, and his mother looks at it, squinting, before she, charitably, lets him place it on the pan alongside the proper knots before sliding the whole thing into the steamer.

She brings over the blender and they tear the rest of the pandan leaves apart together, pulling them into rough pieces over the blender's mouth, the green, grassy fragrance rising up between them. Mak pours the water in, and Hakeem reaches over to plug the blender in when—

PON! PON!

The postman's motorcycle announces itself from the road.

Hakeem pushes the plug in, and then he's moving toward the front of the house with a speed that he would describe, if pressed, as a brisk walk. His heart does a hop when he sees what the postman is holding out—an envelope, which he had been, in his entirely unattached way, half-expecting, and a parcel wrapped in brown paper, which he hadn't been expecting at all, and both of them are addressed in that ugly handwriting, the letters leaning to the right, the script of Kahar's pen careening across the brown paper in the lurching, characterful manner, and Hakeem's heart does the hop again, and he's not going to describe this, not even to himself.

He thanks the postman. 

He stands at the front of the house with the envelope in one hand and the parcel in the other, turning them over in the June sun just to confirm that they're real and addressed to him, and they are, they genuinely are, and he's still standing there conducting this verification when his mother's head appears around the kitchen doorway, angled out toward him with the composed, unhurried expression of a woman who's been watching her son waft toward the front of the house every time the postman comes for the past several months, a woman who's said nothing about this because she's a patient and tactical observer of her only child, and who's now observing that said son standing with a face that's doing rather a lot despite his efforts.

"Anaking! Surat daripada Kahar, ke?"

Hakeem nods, grinning wide.

"Mm hm!"

12 Jun 2007

 

Hakeem,

Aku sihat. 

Yang jadi tak sihatnya bila surat kau sampai dengan bulu kucing. Kau tulis surat kau sambil bergolek dengan Tompok ke? Sakit hidung aku. Aku tulis surat ni dengan hingus yang tak berhenti lagi. Kalau ada kesan lembap dekat kertas ni, faham-faham je lah.

Pasal Mak kau masak fish and chips pakai ikan sungai tu—sedap ke? Mesti sedap, kan? Aku tak pernah lagi makan masakan Mak kau yang tak sedap, jadi secara statistik, kemungkinan dia berjaya tu tinggi. Pasal Bapak kau suruh kau panjat pokok kelapa tu, apa masalahnya? Kau memang ada potensi jadi kera. Perangai pun lebih kurang je.

Pasal sunyi tu—

Aku rasa aku pun sunyi. 

Aku rasa aku pun dah gila Hakeem.

Hari-hari rasa sama. Pagi aku siram bunga-bunga kat taman Mak aku, ada bunga raya, bunga ros, beberapa bunga yang aku tak tahu nama dia. Sekarang aku siram je semua, teka mana yang perlukan air lebih, mana yang tak, dan aku harap tekaan aku betul sebab takde orang yang akan bagitahu aku kalau salah. Tengah hari aku lukis, atau cuba main gitar—ye, masih sumbang, masih—atau kalau aku malas, aku cuma baring dalam bilik dan tengok kipas berpusing sampai aku rasa nak tidur, lepas tu tidur. Petang aku jalan keluar, pergi pantai, lepak dekat tepi rumah api sampai matahari turun. Malam kadang-kadang aku boleh tidur, kadang-kadang tak, dan bila tak boleh tidur tu aku duduk dekat balkoni bilik aku dan dengar bunyi ombak sampai pagi.

Aku masih tak bercakap dengan Beja. 

Aku masih tak angkat bila Beyad telefon.

Ayoh nampak aku smoke kelmarin, nampak dengan mata dia sendiri, tapi dia langsung tak cakap apa-apa. Mungkin dia dah penat. Mungkin anak bongsu dia yang paling bermasalah ni dah lepas had yang dia sanggup tegur. Mungkin dia dah decide yang ada benda-benda yang dia tak boleh ubah dan aku salah satu daripadanya. Mungkin. 

Pasal plan masa depan—sama je. 

Aku masih tak dapat surat tawaran apa-apa. 

Masa makan malam semalam, Ayoh tanya apa aku nak buat lepas ni. Soalan yang amat mengejutkan, sebab Abu Yamin tak tanya apa yang anak-anak dia nak, Abu Yamin tentukan apa yang anak-anak dia nak. Tapi yang lagi mengejutkan, lepas tu Ayoh tanya:

"Saing kecik kamu tu, dia ke mana lepas ni?"

Aku ingat aku salah dengar, dan aku rasa Beja pun ingat dia salah dengar, sebab dia terus tercekik tulang ikan. Ayoh terpaksa gumpalkan nasi dan suapkan terus dekat mulut Beja. Kau kena tengok, Keem. Diorang nampak bodoh gila. Ayoh dengan muka cuak dia, Beja pula separuh mati. Aku tergelak. Lepas Beja dah sah tak mampus, dia ngan Ayoh pun mula gelak. Dan untuk beberapa minit, meja makan yang sunyi tu rasa macam meja makan yang dulu, meja makan yang penuh dengan lima penghuni, cerita, dan tawa.

Semuanya sebab Ayoh tanya khabar saing kecik aku.

 

— K

 

P.S. Tak payah hantar puding roti tu. Kau nak kasi aku keracunan makanan ke? 

P.P.S Ye, Keem Keem, aku sentiasa pspspspskan kucing-kucing kat sini.

P.P.P.S Dia sebut "meow". Kucing Kelantan, kucing KL, kucing Sepanyol, semua sebut "meow". Jangan tanya soalan merepek dah.

P.P.P.P.S Surat ni sepatutnya datang dengan bungkusan. Kalau tak dapat, bagitahu aku.

Hakeem reads the letter three times.

The first time straight through, fast and greedy, his eyes skipping ahead before they've finished the sentence they're on, devouring paragraphs because the sight of Kahar's handwriting has triggered impatience inside him, the childish urge to know everything. The second reading is slower, retracing lines he had skimmed too quickly the first time. The third happens because he's not ready to stop yet, and Hakeem has never been good at ending things he enjoys.

'Aku rasa aku pun sunyi'.

Hakeem has known Kahar for years, and throughout all those years there has always been a  version of Kahar that exists at a slight remove, held back behind a practised restraint. 

Kahar complains. Kahar grumbles. Kahar insults people with an abysmal creativity that deserves academic recognition. Kahar threatens violence over petty, minor inconveniences. What Kahar doesn't do, generally speaking, is volunteer loneliness. Kahar treats his interior feelings the way a big, bad dragon guards treasure. The existence of the treasure is occasionally, tantalisingly implied, but access remains consistently restricted. That's always been Hakeem's domain, overwhelmingly Hakeem's, and Hakeem's very good at it, and the arrangement's suited both of them fine across their friendship. Hakeem's the one who narrates every emotional fluctuation in real time, announces when he's happy or sad or irritated or hungry or bored or experiencing several of these simultaneously, as he often is, meanwhile Kahar watches, listens, and reacts. 

But here's Kahar, in his chicken-handwriting, essentially flaying himself open in sentences and presenting the contents, telling Hakeem about lying in his room watching the ceiling fan rotate until sleep finally arrives like a visitor who couldn't be bothered to RSVP, about the bunga raya and the bunga ros and the flowers whose names he doesn't know and waters on pure guesswork and stubborn optimism, about the balcony and the sound of waves carrying him through the long hours when sleep doesn't come at all. Here's Kahar handing Hakeem something real, with both hands, across four hundred kilometres of peninsula.

He reads the dinner scene yet again, and the laugh that comes out of him is immediate—Beja tercekik tulang ikan, Ayoh suapkan nasi terus ke mulut, the image fortifying itself in his head with such vivid clarity that he might as well have been sitting at that table, and he can see all of it. Kahar sitting there watching his family dissolve into chaos, the three of them laughing together for the first time in what's clearly been a very long stretch of quiet and difficult months. 'Diorang nampak bodoh gila'. He can hear exactly how Kahar would've delivered that line, the deep affection operating underneath layers of dryness, and Hakeem sits there in his childhood bedroom wheezing at a scene he wasn't present for but feels like he was.

And then he reads the line that comes after.

'Semuanya sebab Ayoh tanya khabar saing kecik aku'.

Hakeem looks at the far wall for a long time.

Abu Yamin's never liked him. This isn't a wound Hakeem nurses or a grievance he returns to pick at—not anymore, and arguably not ever, because you can only be wounded by things that surprise you, and this had never surprised him. It's simply a feature of the landscape, as established and wizened and unremarkable as the permanent tilt of his desk, the kind of fact you absorb early in life through means that are never explicit and therefore impossible to argue with, communicated in tone and temperature. Abu Yamin'd looked at Hakeem and decided that proximity has a hierarchy and that Hakeem doesn't clear the threshold, had never cleared it, and wasn't likely to start. Hakeem'd understood. He'd tucked the understanding somewhere in his head and his heart and stopped looking at it, and had, resiliently, moved forward.

But Abu Yamin, who doesn't ask, who determines, who's always been the fixed and formidable weather of Kahar's system—Abu Yamin'd asked about Hakeem. Not a general enquiry about Kahar's friends as a collective, not a broad and diplomatic sweep across the boys from school treated as an undifferentiated category, but 'saing kecik kamu tu', specific and singular, which means Hakeem's been spoken about, has existed there as a named and titled presence in his absence, has been carried into rooms he's never stood in. Abu Yamin now has a title for Hakeem and is asking, at Abu Yamin's dinner table, where that titled presence is headed next.

Hakeem thinks about what this means and stops, because he's never going to arrive at an answer, because unpacking Abu Yamin's interior is a project that'll yield nothing conclusive, and Hakeem is, occasionally, a person with a functional relationship with his own limitations.

He picks up the parcel instead, turning it over between his hands before pulling it open. Inside, folded with a neatness that's paradoxically characteristic of Kahar and at odds with the handwriting rioting on the outside, are two pieces of kain batik. 

The first is a deep, generous red, coloured in shades that remind Hakeem of sunset rays caught in the shallow places where sea meets shore, of rambutan skins split open and glistening under afternoon sun, somehow both loud and intimate at once. The second carries earthier tones, warm browns and muted olive greens layered together the way soil looks after rain's moved through it, the sort of colours that belong naturally to kampung gardens and shaded footpaths and old trees that've spent decades rooted in one place. Delicate bunga motifs bloom across both surfaces, their shapes seeming to move whenever the cloth folds and settles, quietly alive.

A smaller note lands in his palm.

Satu untuk kau, satu untuk Mak kau.

 

— K

Hakeem sits with both pieces of batik for a while, his fingers moving over the fabric, the cloth soft in the expensive, understated way of things that cost significantly more than they announce. He's got an inkling—the instinctive inkling of a person who's spent his whole life being careful with money, who knows the weight of a ringgit the way some people know the weight of a name—that these aren't cheap, that Kahar'd gone and spent real money on this. Unable to be alone with the feeling, he gathers both pieces and carries them into the kitchen.

His mother's by the sink rinsing out the blender.

Hakeem sets both batik on the kitchen table.

"Kahar kasi."

She turns, wiping her damp hands against the sides of her shirt, and looks at the fabric on the table, and her brows quirk in intrigue. She picks up the earth-toned batik.

The batik unfolds with a soft rustle. She shakes it out once. Holds it at arm's length. Tilts her head to the left. To the right. Lifts one corner toward the window where the afternoon light comes through the grille in slanted bars, illuminating the browns and olives, the delicate bunga pressed into the cloth. She runs her thumb along the border, tracing the pattern.

The verdict arrives first as a long, satisfied exhale.

"Elok betul kain batiknya."

"Kan," Hakeem agrees.

He watches as the first batik is folded and set aside. Then comes a different rustle, and Mak has found the second batik, holding it up—the red one, threaded through with gold, the one Hakeem has been trying hard not to assign too much meaning to.

She studies it with the same rigorous attention she had given the first, moving through the inspection once more; arm's length, the tilt of her head, the border beneath her thumb, the cloth held toward the light. Then she lowers it and lets it rest across her hands, considering it.

"Yang ni macam terang sangat untuk Mak."

She looks up.

Her eyes find Hakeem.

Hakeem becomes very interested in the steamer. The steamer, with the utter indifference of an appliance that has no stake in his emotional wellbeing, continues steaming.

"Kahar beli untuk Adik?"

The question arrives in the kitchen with a conversational lightness that's surely misleading about its actual nature, which is a tidy trap assembled in the middle of an afternoon that'd been going well until fifteen seconds ago. His mother's always had this gift, the ability to ask the most destabilising questions in the most pleasant tone, as though the answer isn't going to sit in the kitchen between them with all its implications plainly visible to everyone present.

Hakeem keeps mum.

His mother hums.

It's a distinct hum, and Hakeem knows all her hums—the content hum, the disapproving hum, the I'm-listening-but-reserve-the-right-to-disagree hum—and this one's none of those. This is the hum of a woman who's enjoying herself thoroughly. A soft laugh escapes her, and then she's crossing the kitchen toward him and Hakeem stands there, resigned. She takes the red batik and folds it once, and then she drapes it across his forearm, standing back to look at the effect. 

They both look at it at the same time.

The striking tones settle against his forearm like they were chosen for it.

Which they were.

Which is, as previously established, the problem, because noticing this leads inevitably to thinking about Kahar holding this fabric up and deciding yes, this one, these colours, for Hakeem, and thinking about that opens a door that leads to a hallway full of further thoughts, in this kitchen, with his mother standing two feet away and knowing far too much.

His mother cups his cheek with one calloused, gentle hand.

It's the gesture of his childhood, present in every version of every moment that has ever needed it, the good ones and the hard ones and the ordinary ones that didn't seem to need anything at all until she did it and suddenly they did, and it's survived every year between then and now. It undoes him a little bit every single time without exception, which he'll never tell her, because she already has an unreasonable amount of power over him and she's not above deploying it.

"Comel."

"Mak..."

"Molek."

"Mak—!"

She laughs heartily, and her thumb moves, brushing over the shallow dip at the corner of his mouth, the one that only appears when he smiles, which is happening right now whether he likes it or not, his face having staged a total mutiny and refused all further instruction. 

Her amusement subdues, still there of course, but softer now, moved gently aside to make room for what sits underneath it, patient and vast and asking nothing. It's the look she gets sometimes, the one that is so terribly, openly kind that it lands on the part of him that is still, always, just her son—the look that makes him feel both seen and heard and held.

"Pandai Kahar pilih."

And then, apparently taking pity on him, because her enjoyment of his embarrassment has a ceiling, and the ceiling is his actual distress, and she knows precisely where that line is—she gives his cheek one last gentle pat and turns herself to the steamer, lifting the lid.

Pandan-sweet steam rises in fragrant billow.

"Dik. Kahar suka seri muka, kan?"

"Hm," Hakeem confirms.

"Tapi seri muka tak tahan lama..." She replaces the lid, and then she turns and nudges Hakeem's side with her own. Her eyes are bright. "Kita buat semperit, nak? Boleh kamu pos ke Kahar."

Hakeem looks at his mother.

His mother, who has a batik draped over the back of a kitchen chair that she hasn't put away yet. His mother, who has never once, not in eighteen years of him, asked Hakeem to explain himself, who has met him where he is and asked nothing further. Who had looked at two pieces of batik and a letter postmarked Kelantan and a son standing in her kitchen with his heart more or less visible on his face, and had decided, without making a single thing of it, that the person her son carries in his heart deserves to receive something made, with hands that have spent a lifetime making things for the people she loves, hands that are rough from years of that loving.

Hakeem knows his mother is good. 

But sometimes it rises up and finds him at sideway angles, the staggering enormity of her, the way she loves without ever once positioning it as something he owes her or must earn back, how she opens her hands and loves and keeps loving. The small kitchen goes briefly bright and blurred, and Hakeem needs to take a breath, needs to stand very still in the pandan-sweet air, and just be her son, and feel the dizzying, unbearable weight of how lucky that is. How tremendously undeserved it feels. How it is may very well be the greatest stroke of fortune in his life. How much he loves her, this calloused-handed woman he has the privilege to call 'Mak'.

Hakeem takes the breath.

He nudges her side back with his own, shoulder to shoulder.

"Okay, Mak," he says.

His mother smiles and reaches for the butter.

⟡°. ⋆༺☾𖤓༻⋆. °⟡

19 Jun 2007

 

Kahar,

Aku sihat. 

Mak sihat. Bapak sihat. Tompok sihat, walaupun dia tak layak. Sekarang kau dah tahu status kesihatan penuh isi rumah aku, termasuk kucing jiran, kita boleh proceed.

Pertama sekali, sorry pasal hidung kau. 

Aku nak kau tahu yang aku dah ambil segala langkah berjaga-jaga sebelum pos surat tu. Sebelum aku sempat masukkan dalam sampul, Tompok pecah masuk bilik aku ikut tingkap dan, dengan selamba, terus baring atas surat yang aku dah letak atas meja. Aku dah halau dia, aku dah ambil surat tu balik, aku dah periksa lagi sekali, takde apa. Tak tahu macam mana bulu Tompok masih berjaya menyusup masuk. 

Mungkin Tompok sengaja. Aku dah cakap dia possesssive.

Oh—kain batik kau sampai dengan selamat.

Mak aku suka sangat! 

Mak basuh dua-dua kain tu pakai tangan, jemur, lipat elok-elok, dan sepanjang beberapa hari lepas aku rasa semua orang dalam radius dua kilometer dah tahu yang "kawan Hakeem" kasi kain batik dekat dia. Jiran sebelah minta serai, Mak tunjuk kain batik. Makcik hujung jalan datang ambil tempahan pun, Mak tunjuk kain batik. 

Harini, Mak pakai kain batik yang kau kasi pergi warung.

Apa-apa pun, sebagai tanda terima kasih, surat ni dihantar sekali dengan dua (!!) balang kuih semperit, hehe! Kau lucky gila, sebab kuih semperit mak aku adalah kuih semperit paling sedap seantero dunia! (Aku tahu aku berat sebelah. Aku juga tahu aku betul.)

Mak cakap: 

"Satu balang untuk Kahar, satu lagi untuk keluarga Kahar yang lain."

Aku tahu yang keluarga kau tak makan makanan siapa-siapa je, kan? Aku faham. Tapi Mak aku tak tahu. Kalau aku bagitahu dia, nanti Mak mula risau yang kuih dia tak cukup sedap. Lepas tu aku pula yang kena dengar dia mengomel sambil buat kuih batch baru, semata-mata nak buktikan dia boleh buat yang lebih sedap. So, kalau ada kemungkinan semperit tu tak habis dimakan, kau habis kan, ye? Jangan bagi kuih semperit Mak aku terbiar sampai lemau, please. Sian kuih semperit mak aku nangis, takde orang nak.

Masih pasal nangis, kau tak rasa ke bunga-bunga yang kau siram tu menangis sebab kau tak reti jaga diorang? Kau dah berapa minggu siram diorang atas dasar tekaan semata-mata? Pergi cari buku, Kahar. Perpustakaan ada. Jangan aniaya bunga-bunga yang cantik, please! Pasal gitar kau sumbang, try je lah lagi. Jangan give up! Teacher Faniza dulu selalu kata "Practice makes perfect!" Mana tahu nanti bila kita jumpa balik, kita boleh senggol-senggolan, cubit-cubitan, aku bernyanyi, kau petik gitar? Hahaha. 

Pagi tadi, aku dapat satu surat tawaran.

Universiti tu offer course yang aku nak, Kahar. 

Bukan course yang orang kata aku patut ambil, atau course yang nampak paling selamat, atau paling mudah buat duit—course yang aku nak. Dan dia datang dengan biasiswa penuh. Yuran, buku, semua. Aku tak kena risau pasal tu. Ada dorm, tapi biasiswa tak termasuk bayaran dorm, jadi kalau aku terima, aku kena cari rumah sewa sendiri. Kena fikir berapa yang aku mampu, berapa yang Mak Bapak aku boleh tolong.

Aku tak tahu sama ada aku patut terima atau tak.

 

P.S. Fun fact: Aku tak pernah tengok rumah api depan mata. Aku teringin nak tengok.

Hakeem puts the pen down.

Let's see:

• Replies to Kahar's previous correspondence? Check.
• Compliments Kahar's present and conveys Mak's appreciation of it? Check.
• Short updates on Hakeem's family (+Tompok)? Check.
• Not-so-subtle reference to Mas Idayu? Check. Flying colours.
• Swift evasion of Kahar's family topic to avoid Kahar's discomfort? Debatable. Perhaps a bit abrupt.
• Hakeem's progress on offer letter/his uncertain future? Could be better, but okay lah.

Knowing that that's the utmost best he can do as of now, Hakeem reaches for the cat stickers, and peels two off the sheet, placing them at the bottom of the page. One is an orange cat sprawled belly-up. The other black cat appears to be wearing a tiny bow tie. He folds the letter into thirds, the creases sharp and neat, and slides it into the envelope he'd already prepared.

Hakeem's quite proud of this one. 

He'd gone in meaning to write a Category Two and had written something that sits between Category One and Two. Well, of course he'd managed it, he thinks, because what he'd sent is an abridged version. An edited version. A tediously curated highlights reel of the much longer, significantly more mortifying original draft that's neglected to the left side of his desk, where he'd placed there thirty minutes ago with the intention of Not Today and Possibly Not Ever.

Treacherously, Hakeem's eyes drift to it.

19 Jun 2007

 

Kahar,

Aku sihat. 

Mak sihat. Bapak sihat. Tompok sihat, walaupun dia tak layak. Sekarang kau dah tahu status kesihatan penuh isi rumah aku, termasuk kucing jiran, kita boleh proceed.

Pertama sekali, sorry pasal hidung kau. 

Aku nak kau tahu yang aku dah ambil segala langkah berjaga-jaga sebelum pos surat tu. Sebelum aku sempat masukkan dalam sampul, Tompok pecah masuk bilik aku ikut tingkap dan, dengan selamba, terus baring atas surat yang aku dah letak atas meja. Aku dah halau dia, aku dah ambil surat tu balik, aku dah periksa lagi sekali, takde apa. Tak tahu macam mana bulu Tompok masih berjaya menyusup masuk. 

Mungkin Tompok sengaja. Aku dah cakap dia possesssive.

Oh—kain batik kau sampai dengan selamat.

Mak aku suka sangat! 

Mak basuh dua-dua kain tu pakai tangan, jemur, lipat elok-elok, dan sepanjang beberapa hari lepas aku rasa semua orang dalam radius dua kilometer dah tahu yang "kawan Hakeem" kasi kain batik dekat dia. Jiran sebelah minta serai, Mak tunjuk kain batik. Makcik hujung jalan datang ambil tempahan kuih pun, Mak tunjuk kain batik. 

Harini, Mak pakai kain batik yang kau kasi pergi warung.

Aku tak pakai kain aku lagi. Ye lah, nanti apa pula orang kampung kata, haha. Lagipun, kain batik yang kau bagi tu, lawa sangat. Aku tak rasa aku sesuai dengan kain tu. Aku nak pegang pun segan, Kahar. Aku rasa aku cuma patut tengok je daripada jauh. 

Kain tu terlalu bagus untuk aku.

Aku tak layak.

Walaupun aku tak layak, aku suka Kahar.

Apa-apa pun, sebagai tanda terima kasih, surat ni dihantar sekali dengan dua (!!) balang kuih semperit, hehe! Kau lucky gila, sebab kuih semperit mak aku adalah kuih semperit paling sedap seantero dunia! (Aku tahu aku berat sebelah. Aku juga tahu aku betul.)

Mak cakap: 

"Satu balang untuk Kahar, satu lagi untuk keluarga Kahar yang lain."

Aku tahu yang keluarga kau tak makan makanan siapa-siapa je, kan? Aku faham. Tapi Mak aku tak tahu. Kalau aku bagitahu dia, nanti Mak mula risau yang kuih dia tak cukup sedap. Lepas tu aku pula yang kena dengar dia mengomel sambil buat kuih batch baru, semata-mata nak buktikan dia boleh buat yang lebih sedap. So, kalau ada kemungkinan semperit tu tak habis dimakan, kau habis kan, ye? Jangan bagi kuih semperit Mak aku terbiar sampai lemau, please. Sian kuih semperit mak aku nangis, takde orang nak.

Kalau diorang tak makan, tolong jangan bagitahu aku.

Ada kemungkinan tinggi aku akan nangis sama-sama dengan semperit.

Masih pasal nangis, kau tak rasa ke bunga-bunga yang kau siram tu menangis sebab kau tak reti jaga diorang? Kau dah berapa minggu siram diorang atas dasar tekaan semata-mata? Pergi cari buku, Kahar. Perpustakaan ada. Jangan aniaya bunga-bunga yang cantik, please! Pasal gitar kau sumbang, try je lah lagi. Jangan give up! Teacher Faniza dulu selalu kata "Practice makes perfect!" Mana tahu nanti bila kita jumpa balik, kita boleh senggol-senggolan, cubit-cubitan, aku bernyanyi, kau petik gitar? Hahaha.

 

Kahar, aku tahu bukan tempat aku nak cakap benda ni, tapi—

Apa kata kau maafkan keluarga kau?

Semua orang buat salah. Kau pun. Aku pun. 

Aku tak cakap yang kau kena berbaik dengan diorang macam benda yang jadi sebelum ni tak pernah jadi, atau yang kau kena lupakan semua benda. Tapi sampai bila kau nak simpan marah kau? Aku tak pernah jumpa Beyad, tapi kalau dia sama macam Beja, dia pun mesti nak bercakap dengan kau. Abu Yamin pun. Kahar, kalau masih ada rasa marah untuk diorang bagi pihak aku, buang lah, sebab aku dah lama okay, dan kalau aku kat tempat diorang, aku pun tak berkenan kau berkawan dengan orang macam aku. Haha. 

Manusia je apa yang kita ada dalam hidup ni, Kahar. 

Kau tak rindu diorang?

Sorry, Kahar, aku takkan cakap pasal ni dah. Jom ikut aku tukar topik.

 

Pagi tadi, aku dapat satu surat tawaran.

Universiti tu offer course yang aku nak, Kahar. 

Bukan course yang orang kata aku patut ambil, atau course yang nampak paling selamat, atau paling mudah buat duit—course yang aku nak. Dan dia datang dengan biasiswa penuh. Yuran, buku, semua. Aku tak payah risau pasal tu. Ada dorm, tapi biasiswa tak termasuk bayaran dorm, jadi kalau aku terima, aku kena cari rumah sewa sendiri. Kena fikir berapa yang aku mampu, berapa yang Mak Bapak aku boleh tolong.

Kau orang pertama yang aku bagitahu. 

Aku tak tahu sama ada aku patut terima atau tak.

Sejujurnya, Kahar,... Aku takut.

Selama ni, masa depan cuma wujud sebagai imaginasi. Dia cuma benda yang cikgu-cikgu suka cakap dekat perhimpunan. Benda yang orang dewasa suka tanya setiap kali jumpa saudara-mara. Benda yang boleh ditangguhkan kepada tahun depan, dan kemudian tahun selepas tu, dan seterusnya. Tiba-tiba sekarang dia ada atas meja aku.

Aku takut sebab aku tak tahu apa yang akan jadi nanti. 

Aku tak tahu sama ada aku akan suka tempat tu atau benci tempat tu. Aku tak tahu sama ada aku cukup pandai untuk ada dekat sana. Aku tak tahu sama ada aku akan berjaya atau akan menangis dekat bilik air dorm macam watak drama petang TV3.

Aku harap kau masih nak teman aku.

Bodoh, kan? Aku tahu. Hidup tak bergerak macam tu.

Kau ada jalan kau. Aku ada jalan aku.

Dan mungkin satu hari nanti jalan-jalan tu akan bawa kita berjumpa balik. Atau mungkin jalan-jalan tu akan bawa kita semakin jauh daripada tempat kita sekarang. 

Aku takut, Kahar, tapi aku masih berharap. 

Aku harap yang kau dengan aku boleh lalu semua benda ni sama-sama. 

Aku harap aku masih boleh sembang benda merepek dengan kau. Aku harap bila ada benda baik jadi, kau masih terfikir nak kongsi bahagia kau dengan kau. Aku harap bila ada benda buruk menimpa, aku masih orang yang kau cari untuk luahkan duka. 

 

Kahar, aku harap kau masih nak aku.

 

P.S. Fun fact: Aku tak pernah tengok rumah api depan mata. Aku teringin nak tengok dengan kau. Mesti cantik, kan? 

"—Dik! Tolong Mak angkat bakul kuih ni!"

Hakeem jolts at his mother's summon. The letter—already too emotionally charged to be left unattended—gets folded and shoved into its envelope. He bolts to the front of the house, and his mother is there at the doorway, two woven baskets balanced against her hips.

"Cepat Mak balik." Hakeem grabs both baskets. "Kuih habis awal hari ni?"

"Ye," she says, stepping past him into the house "Tadi Makcik Piah kampung sebelah datang borong. Katanya ada rombongan lelaki mengejut datang merisik. Habis terus meja kuih Mak."

"Ooo, kaya lah Mak harini." Hakeem sets the baskets down by the kitchen counter. "Kenapa tak call suruh Adik ambil Mak?"

Mak chuckles, fanning herself with her fingers as she moves into the kitchen. "Kaya apanya? Mak nak call Adik tadi, tapi tertinggal telefon pula. Lagipun macam nak hujan."

Hakeem trails after her. The smell of what Hakeem had cooked earlier escapes in a warm rush as Mak lifts the tudung saji: ikan goreng kunyit, sambal belacan, a pot of sayur bening.

"Mak nak makan?" Hakeem asks.

"Kejap lagi," Mak replies, covering the dish again. "Mak nak rehat dulu." Her eyes snag then, naturally, on the packed package sitting on the counter. "Tak pos lagi semperit dekat Kahar?"

"Uhh… Baru nak pos," Hakeem prevaricates.

As she walks over to her room, Mak pats Hakeem's cheek.

"Pergi lah pos sekarang, Anaking. Sebelum hujan turun."

Hakeem nods, retrieves the envelope from his table, and cycles to the post office with the package tied to his bicycle's rack. The sky above is doing that overcast thing it does before rain, a meteorological fait accompli, and Hakeem pedals faster, the front wheel bumping over the cracks in the road. He makes it to the post office without incident. He makes it back home without incident. He has dinner with his parents, and over plates of the ikan goreng kunyit and sambal belacan, the words tumble out of him—the offer letter, the course, the scholarship, the dorm situation—and his parents receive the news with both pride and practical concern.

It's not until the house has gone quiet and Hakeem is lying in the dark, that the dread settles over him like a second blanket. It sits on his chest and breathes with him. He lies under it and thinks about futures that exist only as outlines, about a version of himself a year from now who he can't picture clearly. He thinks about Kahar, and the letter, and a lighthouse he's never seen.

He replays the afternoon in his head. The letter. The folding. The shoving-into-envelope, the bolt to the front door, the baskets, the bicycle, the post office—

Hakeem sits up.

He had written two versions of the letter.

He turns to check the desk. 

The desk is empty. The envelope is gone, inducted into the national postal system, carrying both letters inside it—the sensible one and the stupid one, arriving in about three to six working days, give or take, to a recipient who didn't ask to receive Hakeem's heart in an envelope.

"... Sial."

⟡°. ⋆༺☾𖤓༻⋆. °⟡

Two days pass. Then three. Then four, which is when Hakeem starts doing the thing where he mentally tracks his letter's progress through the postal system.

The thing is, and Hakeem has thought about this extensively, Kahar's number is right there in his Nokia, sitting in the contacts list between two other names, a button away from the possibility of resolution. He could call. Kahar would pick up. Hakeem could say something breezy and conceivably that would be the end of it. The problem is that calling feels like cheating, a disruption of the rhythm they have built together, letter by letter, week by week—this intentional correspondence that has its own texture and weight and an anticipation that lives in the waiting. Their letters take time. Hakeem has always believed this and continues to believe it now, even while existing as living evidence that the postal system is not without its hazards.

So he doesn't call.

What he does instead, because his brain isn't content to let him suffer in straightforward silence, is compose and delete multiple text messages over the course of the week, such as: Kahar, kalau ada surat dari aku sampai, buang lah yang panjang tu, tak penting. He deletes it in under a minute, because tak penting are the two least convincing words in the Malay language, and Kahar will read them and understand, that they are in fact, extremely penting, penting enough to make Hakeem break their unspoken protocol, penting enough to generate a text message at all, penting enough that the very request for the letter's destruction is its own full-throated confession. The fundamental problem is that sending any message asking Kahar to not read the letter will make Kahar read the letter. This isn't even a character flaw on Kahar's part, it's closer to a feature of the universe, as non-negotiable as gravity, or the second pothole outside their house. The moment Hakeem sends anything resembling jangan baca or tolong bakar or, in a moment of unfeigned desperation, tanam je surat tu dalam tanah Kahar please, Kahar will read that letter with the bright, gleeful, fully-committed attention of a person who has been specifically told not to, which is the single most dangerous reading posture that exists. 

And so the only move available to him, the single option that doesn't actively accelerate the disaster, is to do nothing. Hakeem does nothing, then, across many days.

He does the laundry. He cooks rice and lauk and washes dishes and sweeps the floor. He helps his mother at her warung sometimes, making change and chatting with the regulars who have known him since he was small enough to hide under the warung table and who still speak to him like he might do it again at any moment. He goes to the market on Thursday because Mak asks him to and comes back with everything on the list plus two extra mempelam because they looked good and he was feeling generous toward himself. He waters the plants along the side of the house—the bunga kertas and bunga telang and bunga melur, the kunyit and pandan and serai clustered in their bushes—with more care than he usually brings to the task, thinking, about Kahar's flowers and Kahar's uninformed approach to horticulture. He naps on the front porch with Tompok, who arranges himself across Hakeem's shins. He watches Bapak fix the broken latch on their house gate one afternoon, passing tools over when asked, and then helps him paint over the rust while Bapak talks about the house and Hakeem listens. He follows Bapak to get coconut, which, mercifully, doesn't require Hakeem to climb anything, and is rewarded with fresh coconut water drink and a head pat that he also accepts without complaint.

He waits. 

He doesn't call. He doesn't text. He stands by the decision. He does. He believes in letters. He's not going to compromise that, but he's also, progressively and ultimately, going a tad bit insane.

On the eigth day, Mak asks him why he keeps lurking around the front of the house, and Hakeem says he's not lurking, he's existing near the mailbox, which is a normal place to exist.

On the ninth day, he makes kuih cara berlauk and burns the first batch because he's distracted, and has to throw it out, which feels cosmically appropriate.

On the tenth day, 29 June 2007, there is a letter.

26 Jun 2007

 

Hakeem,

Sorry surat ni sampai lambat. Tapi bukan aku yang hantar 2 surat dalam 1 sampul surat. 2 surat yang buat aku tak boleh tidur langsung 2 malam. So sebenarnya bukan salah aku pun. Salah kau. Macam benda lain dalam hidup aku, benda ni juga salah kau, Keem. 

Aku tarik balik 'sorry' aku. 

Pasal kain batik tu, nasib baik Mak kau suka. 

Mak kau selalu bagi aku makan sedap-sedap dan aku tak pernah tahu nak balas macam mana. Aku teringat satu kedai kain batik yang Mak aku suka dulu, dan aku fikir ni macam cara kecil untuk aku balas budi Mak kau. Tapi kau—aku tak faham kau, Hakeem. 

Siapa cakap kau tak layak? 

Takde apa yang 'terlalu bagus' untuk kau.

Kau sentiasa layak.

Sebelum kau nangis, semperit mak kau dah habis. Satu balang aku letak dalam bilik aku. Satu lagi aku letak dekat dapur. Sedap. Aku habiskan balang aku dalam masa 3 hari, dan tak lama lepas tu, balang yang dekat dapur tu pun habis—aku, pembantu rumah, pekebun, dengan driver Ayoh habiskan. Semua orang cakap sedap. Abe Li (driver Ayoh) tanya Mak kau ambil tempahan ke sebab dia nak order 2 balang untuk orang rumah dia. 

Beja pun aku nampak curi-curi makan 2 kali. Aku tak tahu pasal Ayoh. Tapi kalau diorang taknak makan pun, apa masalahnya? 

Aku suka Hakeem. 

Sekali lagi, jangan nangis. 

Kau tahu aku tak boleh tengok kau nangis.

Pasal bunga-bunga Mak aku, kau tak perlu risau. Diorang masih hidup mekar dan wangi. Abe Cad (pekebun) ada nak selamatkan bunga-bunga daripada tangan kasar aku. Aku tak pergi perpustakaan, tapi ada buku 'Bunga-bungaan Malaysia' dalam bilik buku rumah aku—Mak punya dulu—dan aku tengah baca buku tu. Pasal gitar, ye lah, ya lah, aku sambung belajar lagi untuk realisasikan impian dangdut kau. Puas hati?

 

Ye, Hakeem, bukan tempat kau untuk cakap benda ni, tapi—

Kau betul.

Aku tengah cuba.

Aku tak rasa aku akan pernah boleh lupa apa yang diorang dah buat, tak rasa luka tu akan jadi macam tak pernah ada, tapi macam yang kau cakap, aku pun salah. Mungkin aku yang paling bersalah sekali dalam cerita ni. 

Aku cuba. Slow sikit lah, tapi aku cuba.

Dan ye, aku masih ada rasa marah untuk kau. Kau kawan aku. Diorang tak patut buat kau, tak patut cakap kau macam tu. Diorang jahat dengan kau.

… Aku pun jahat dengan kau. Aku harap kau boleh maafkan aku.

Dan aku harap kau boleh maafkan keluarga Abu Yamin.

Mungkin nanti kita boleh cakap pasal benda lagi. Satu hari nanti.

 

Aku dah agak kau akan dapat course yang kau nak. Aku rasa kau patut terima. Kau pandai. Campak mana-mana pun kau boleh hidup. Setakat universiti tu apalah sangat. 

Hakeem, walaupun aku tak tahu kenapa kau hantar 2 surat dalam 1 sampul surat, sama ada sengaja atau tak; walaupun aku tak tahu sama ada surat-surat sebelum ni pun ada versi panjang yang kau tak pernah hantar—aku rasa aku patut balas kejujuran kau dengan kejujuran yang sama. Kau dah bagi aku bahagian kau yang kau sorokkan, dan aku rasa tak adil kalau aku terus simpan bahagian aku yang aku sorokkan dari kau.

FUCKkk, aku tak tahu ni surat keberapa aku tulis. Banyak dah pokok terpaksa mati sebab aku tak boleh nak tukar apa yang dalam kepala aku jadi ayat yang boleh kau baca.

Kalau cakap pasal takut, aku pun takut. 

Aku takut dengan masa depan aku. Aku takut dengan masa lepas aku. Sekarang pun, tatkala aku tulis surat yang entah keberapa kali ni untuk kau, aku takut. Aku takut dengan macam-macam benda, Keem. Aku tak rasa akan ada masa yang aku tak takut.

Mungkin kau terkejut, mungkin tak, tapi aku—

Aku taknak sambung belajar.

Aku dah fikir, dan aku dah cakap dekat Ayoh. Aku nak cuba hidup sendiri, bukan sebagai "anak Abu Yamin" tapi sebagai "Kahar". Aku nak cari duit aku sendiri, penuhi impian aku, bina hidup aku dari bawah dengan tangan aku. Ayoh tak setuju, dan dia masih tak bercakap dengan aku, tapi dia ada bagi aku nombor kenalan dia untuk rumah sewa.

Aku nak kau teman aku.

Kisah apa aku kalau hidup tak bergerak macam tu?

Kita boleh buat jalan kita sendiri. Kita juga boleh tempuh jalan kita sama-sama.

Sebab bila aku dengan kau, aku rasa aku boleh pikul sedih aku, marah aku, kecewa aku, resah gelisah aku, benda-benda berat yang aku tak tahu nak letak mana dan terpaksa tanggung sorang-sorang, bila kau ada, benda-benda tu boleh dikongsi. Tapi bukan tu je, gembira aku, seronok aku, yakin aku, bangga aku, tenang aku, yang selalu rasa separuh, diorang jadi penuh bila aku kongsi dengan kau, jadi lebih lengkap dan lebih nyata. 

Keem Keem, teman aku. Kau boleh kongsi takut kau dengan aku, dan aku akan kongsi takut aku dengan kau, dan mungkin dengan cara ni, kita boleh kongsi berani kita.

 

Selagi dan sebanyak mana kau nak aku, Hakeem. 

 

—K

 

P.S. Nanti aku bawak kau pergi tengok rumah api. Aku janji. Buat masa sekarang, kau tengok je lah lukisan rumah api yang aku selit dalam surat ni.

Kahar talks about both their mothers in the same breath—his and Hakeem's, the one who is here and the one who isn't, held together in the same paragraph with the same tenderness, and Hakeem hadn't braced for that, hadn't seen it coming, and now here he is, sitting at his bed with a letter in his hands. He reads about the kain batik first—'siapa cakap kau tak layak, takde apa yang terlalu bagus untuk kau, kau sentiasa layak'—and Hakeem can hear it in Kahar's voice so clearly it's almost audible, that blunt, verdict-issuing tone that doesn't invite rebuttal or appeal or any kind of counter-argument, that states things the way you state facts that existed before either of you were born and will continue existing regardless of whether the recipient has come around to believing them yet. Kahar has decided Hakeem is worthy. The matter is closed. Hakeem's opinion on the matter has not been solicited and will not be entertained.

And then Kahar pivots, into the semperit situation report—the deployment of two balang across two separate rooms, Abe Li's order enquiry, Beja's shameless and repeated semperit stealing—and Hakeem is grinning at the page, following along, genuinely charmed, the grin getting wider with every line, and then he hits 'aku suka Hakeem' and he stops.

He reads it again.

'Aku suka Hakeem'.

No comma. The same construction, the conscious, deniable yet undeniable grammatical gap that Hakeem himself had left in his own letter, buried in a paragraph about a batik cloth he was too nervous to touch: 'walaupun aku tak layak, aku suka Kahar'. Hakeem had written it and told himself it was ambiguous, that it could mean anything, that nobody would necessarily read it as the thing it was. And Kahar had read it, had understood exactly what it was and what it wasn't saying, and had sent it back to Hakeem in the same shape, wearing the same disguise, sitting between Beja's cookie theft and 'jangan nangis, kau tahu aku tak boleh tengok kau nangis' like it had merely wandered in from another sentence and happened to land there. Plausible deniability. Complete absence of actual deniability. The two of them passing this thing back and forth between them, using the same code, pretending they invented it for different reasons.

Hakeem puts the letter down on his thigh.

Tompok chooses this moment to appear at the open window, materialising on the sill, and then dropping into the room. He pads across the bed toward Hakeem with his tail held high.

Hakeem looks at him. 

"Apesal kau?"

Tompok looks back. "Meow." He headbutts Hakeem's shin.

"Ughh… Ye lah, buat lah apa kau nak."

Hakeem lets him climb up without argument, partly because he doesn't have the wherewithal and partly because arguing with Tompok has never once in the history of their relationship produced any result except Tompok doing the thing he wants and Hakeem feeling foolish for having tried. Tompok arranges himself across Hakeem's lap. His purr starts up immediately, low and motorific, and Hakeem puts one hand on him, and picks the letter back up with the other.

Hakeem's heart hurts. His eyes sting.

He doesn't know why.

Perhaps it's the humour and the sorrow living in adjacent sentences without either of them cancelling the other out—Abe Cad, professional pekebun, heroically rescuing the bunga-bunga from 'tangan kasar aku,' sitting right next to 'Mak punya,' in the body of a paragraph without asking to be noticed, without any of the punctuation or emphasis Hakeem himself would have used to mark something important, just placed there and left, the things Kahar offers without ceremony because ceremony would require him to look at them directly while handing them over, which Kahar is still, learning to do. He doesn't linger on the image too long—Kahar with his mother's book open across his knees, trying to learn something from her that he can no longer ask her directly, reading about the flowers she planted that are still growing in a house she no longer moves through—because it does things to Hakeem's chest that he has no room for now.

Perhaps it's the forgiveness section. 'Aku pun salah. Mungkin aku yang paling bersalah sekali dalam cerita ni. Aku cuba, slow sikit lah, tapi aku cuba.'  Written without the performance of self-flagellation, written the way Kahar writes the things he means most—clean and unadorned and harder to look at for it. Perhaps it's the 'FUCKkk', which makes Hakeem laugh out loud, a startled and slightly damp sound that fills the room and sends Tompok into an offended readjustment before he resumes purring, because of course Kahar's most honest paragraph opens with a profanity, because Kahar's vulnerability has always arrived a little dishevelled, like it had to fight its way out and the effort shows. Perhaps it's the fear. The way Kahar names it without the 'sorry' and the 'bodoh kan?' and the hedging qualifiers that Hakeem had reflexively stapled to his own confession—just 'aku takut, aku takut, aku takut,' said three ways, past and future and present tense all at once, the weight of what has already happened and the uncertainty of what hasn't yet, all of it named plainly and set down on paper without apology.

Definitely, it is 'aku nak kau teman aku'.

Decidedly, it is 'kau boleh kongsi takut kau dengan aku, dan aku akan kongsi takut aku dengan kau, dan mungkin dengan cara ni, kita boleh kongsi berani kita', which Hakeem reads out to hear how it sounds, his own voice hushed in the room, Tompok an endearing nuisance on his lap, the afternoon going gold outside, and Hakeem thinks about fear as a thing that can be divided and shared and handed between two people, thinks about what it means to have a person hold out their hands and to have that person be Kahar—his terrible and tender Kahar.

Doubtlessly, it is 'selagi dan sebanyak mana kau nak aku, Hakeem'.

He rubs his eyes with the back of his hand, which gives him something to do with his face. He squares the pages of the letter, edges aligned, grateful that the small ordinary ritual of it is at least grounding him, and then he unfolds the separate piece of paper he had saved for last.

A lighthouse.

And beautiful feels insufficient for it, feels like a word too small to carry what's actually sitting in Hakeem's hands. The sketch has been done in pencil, and the tower rises from the bottom of the page. Stonework climbs upward in patient layers of cross-hatching, denser where shadow would fall and lighter where an imagined sun would catch the surface, the gradations stunning in their depth. The lantern room crowns the top, its glass panels rendered through fine strokes that suggest both reflection and transparency at once, and from the lantern room, the beam stretches outward across the paper in widening bands, each one a little fainter than the last.

At the bottom, in Kahar's handwriting: 

Dulu. Kini. Nanti.

 

— K

Hakeem is still looking at the angular 'K' when his bedroom door creaks open.

"—Keem, Dik, tidur ke?" Mak peeks her head in. 

Her eyes find Tompok first—"Eh, ada Tompok?"—and she pads into the room and settles herself on the bed beside Hakeem, reaching over to scratch the back of Tompok's twitching ear. 

Hakeem sniffles quietly and gathers himself, which he's aware isn't very subtle and is also aware his mother has noticed within the half-second it took her to walk through the doorway, and yet she says nothing about his eyes or his nose or the stack of opened letters beside him. It seems that she has chosen, with the maternal clemency she has been extending to him his whole life, not to mention it, instead sitting there silently with her hand moving in circles over Tompok's ear, giving her son the space to arrive at himself again without an audience watching him do it.

Hakeem shifts, intending to stand, perhaps to flee, but Mak pulls him gently back down.

Tompok, disrupted by this unacceptable display of human attachment, registers his displeasure with one offended meow, swishes his tail with irritation, then leaps off Hakeem's lap and slips out through the open window as he had entered, taking his leave without a backward glance. 

The room watches Tompok leave.

"... Senang betul jadi kucing,..." Hakeem mumbles. "Ikut suka hati dia je." 

Mak chuckles and wraps one arm around Hakeem's shoulder, pulling his attention back into the room. “Baru dapat surat balas daripada Kahar?”

Hakeem nods.

Her eyes drift downward.

"Yang ni—" She gestures at the paper still in his hand. "Kahar lukis?"

Hakeem nods again.

Her fingers hover above the drawing, tracing the lighthouse's outline through air alone, careful not to smudge the pencil. "Cantik."

Hakeem smiles before he can stop himself, the corners of his mouth lifting, ambushing his face with feelings that he had been trying very hard to tamper. "Sangat." He looks back down at it too, and the lighthouse meets him there. "Dalam surat sebelum ni..." Hakeem says, voice gone soft and a little frayed at the seams,, "Keem cakap yang Keem tak pernah tengok rumah api..." He laughs, a small huffing thing that escapes despite him. "... So Kahar lukis ni."

Mak hums.

A hum with whole footnotes attached to it.

They sit there for a while looking at the drawing together, and Hakeem can feel the warmth of her shoulder against his and the soft puff of her breath near his temple, and inside his chest a creature is curling up and going this is nice, can we stay here forever, can we never ever leave.

"Mak..."

His mother turns. Hakeem looks back down at the lighthouse, at the small confident beam, at the anchoring being with its steady, sturdy base, at all the things he is not and has never managed to be no matter how hard he has tried.

"... Kahar ajak Hakeem teman dia."

Mak waits.

Hakeem clears his throat, which accomplishes precisely nothing. "Bukan macam tu. Maksud Keem—" He feels his face getting warmer, the heat creeping up his neck with the urgency of a fire that has remembered it has a job to do. "Keem tulis dalam surat yang universiti bagi biasiswa penuh tapi dorm kena bayar sendiri, lepas tu Kahar cakap Ayoh dia ada kenalan yang sewakan rumah dekat kawasan sana, lepas tu Kahar cakap... Kahar cakap..." His throat catches embarrassingly, snags on itself like a zipper on fabric. "Kahar cakap Hakeem boleh jadi housemate dia..." Words start tumbling out of him now, falling over one another in their hurry to escape, a small stampede of anxieties trampling each other on the way to the door. "Kahar cuma nak tolong. Tapi Keem taknak susahkan dia. Lepas tu kalau jadi tak elok macam mana? Kalau kitaorang gaduh? Kalau nanti Kahar menyesal? Kalau nanti Keem jadi beban? Kalau—"

Mak squeezes his shoulder.

"Dik."

But Hakeem keeps talking.

"Kalau nanti semua benda berubah? Kalau nanti universiti susah? Kalau nanti duit tak cukup? Kalau nanti Keem tak pandai hidup sendiri? Kalau nanti Kahar sedar yang Keem ni takde pape? Kalau nanti Kahar dah taknak Keem? Kalau—"

The squeeze of his shoulder becomes firmer.

"Dik."

Still he continues.

"Hakeem Rizal bin Hilmi."

Hakeem stops, because nobody alive has ever successfully kept talking through their mother saying their full name, and he's not about to be the first to break a record.

"Apa yang Hakeem nak?"

His eyes waver, blur, do that thing where the lighthouse on the page goes underwater and the lines wobble like they are trying to swim.

Mak sighs softly and cups his face, thumb pressing beneath his chin until he looks at her, until there's nowhere else for his eyes to go but back into hers. "Mak tanya ni..." Her voice stays gentle, the voice she has been using on him since he was three years old and convinced there were monsters in the closet who specifically wanted to eat him. "Apa yang Hakeem nak? Hm?" Her thumb strokes once across his cheek, a tender warm sweep that undoes him on the spot.

 "Hakeem…, Hakeem nak teman Kahar?"

Yes.

Of course yes.

Of course, of course, of course yes.

Hakeem wants. Hakeem wants to wake up in a house and know that Kahar exists within walking distance, that Kahar is in another room making tea and humming under his breath. Hakeem wants the shared low-grade fear of being twenty and broke and responsible for their own electricity bill, wants arguments over laundry that escalate into sighs and sorries because neither of them can stand not talking to each other for more than a day. Hakeem wants to hear guitar played badly through thin rental-house walls and feel his chest go warm, fond as he sings along to its tune, because it is Kahar playing it badly, Kahar missing the chord change. Hakeem wants to sit across from Kahar or next to him, wants to intertwine their fingers together. Hakeem wants mundane, ordinary days. Hakeem wants the absurd, staggering privilege of being included in Kahar's future, of being one of the people Kahar imagines when Kahar imagines the years ahead. Hakeem wants—he wants, so, so much, and he has spent so long hiding these wantings under his ribs that finding them now, all together, in one heap, with their faces upturned and hopeful, takes the air out of him.

His eyes sting again.

"... Hakeem takut."

Mak looks at him.

Her hand stays warm against his face, and then her other hand rises to join the first, framing his face between them, and her thumbs pass over the high points of his cheeks like she's wiping away tears that haven't fallen yet, getting ahead of them, mothering them out of existence.

"Hakeem, Puteraku… Kanyaah téh obat tina sagala sieun, segala luka dan duka."

The words arrive in that cadence she only uses when she has reached past Malay for her mother's tongue, and Hakeem catches kanyaah, catches sieun, catches luka dan duka, and his chest does a harrowing collapsing, because he has heard her use kanyaah before—over scraped knees, over fevered foreheads—and he knows what she's calling the feeling she's offering him.

Hakeem's body shakes as he fights himself from crying. 

He leans into her palm, sniffling around his sobs.

"... Mak tak marah? ... Tak benci Hakeem?"

Her face changes.

She turns more fully toward him, knees bumping his, and she looks at him with an expression so full of baffled tenderness that Hakeem regrets asking, regrets ever having doubted her, regrets the many nights he spent rehearsing this conversation in his head and writing her into the role of a cruel woman she has never once been, would in fact be insulted to be considered for.

"Hakeem ingat Mak tak kenal Hakeem ke? Hakeem anak Mak. Mak kasihkan Hakeem dari dalam perut Mak lagi. Mak yang pegang tangan Hakeem masa Hakeem bertatih. Mak nangis dengan Hakeem masa Hakeem takut nak masuk darjah satu, masa Hakeem demam sampai tak boleh bangun, masa Hakeem menangis tiga hari tiga malam sebab ikan laga Hakeem mati."

Hakeem laughs wetly, a startled hiccuping sound, because he had forgotten about the fish, and Mak has clearly not.

"Hakeem dengar Mak cakap ni. Dengar elok-elok." Her forehead nudges his. She waits until his eyes meet hers. "Apa pun yang Hakeem buat..." Her smile trembles at the edges, the way smiles do when they are carrying more than their fair share of weight. "Hakeem masih anak Mak."

"Tak ada apa-apa yang Hakeem boleh buat untuk berhenti jadi anak Mak," she says, very simple, very firm, like she's laying down an unshakeable law of physics. "Tak ada. Faham?"

He nods inside her hands, jerky and graceless.

She kisses his forehead, and then she pulls back just enough to look at him, eyes shining with tears but smiling, "Lagipun, Anaking sayang, bukan kucing je yang boleh ikut hati."

⟡°. ⋆༺☾𖤓༻⋆. °⟡

30 Jun 2007

 

Kahar,

Harap kau sihat. Aku dan semua di sini, sihat. 

 

Sebenarnya, aku tak tahu nak mulakan surat ni dari mana, jadi aku mulakan dari benda yang paling senang, sebab kalau aku mulakan dari benda lain, aku rasa aku takkan sampai-sampai ke bahagian yang penting.

Surat ni akan sampai sekali dengan empat (!!!!) balang semperit—dua untuk Abe Li, dua lagi untuk kau dan keluarga kau. Mak kata tak perlu bayar, yang ini adalah:

"Tanda terima kasih sebab Kahar sanggup jadi kawan Hakeem."

Aku dah cuba nak protes. Aku cakap dekat Mak, "Mak, Kahar tu kaya, dia bukannya takde duit nak bayar." Tapi Mak pandang aku dengan muka yang kau pun tahu—muka Mak yang maksudnya "diam, Hakeem, jangan kurang ajar"—jadi aku diam. Aku duduk tepi dapur dan tengok dia susun balang. Dia tulis nama Abe Li atas dua balang dengan tulisan cantik dia, dan untuk balang kau, dia tulis "Kahar & Keluarga" dengan bunga kecil sebelum nama kau. Aku tak tahu kenapa bunga kecil tu buat aku rasa nak nangis.

Pasal dua surat dalam satu sampul tu—aku tak nak cakap pasal tu. Aku tak ingat. Aku tak tahu apa kau cakap. Surat apa? Sampul apa? Hakeem siapa? Tak kenal.

Ok. Sorry... Memang silap aku. Aku tak tahu macam mana benda tu jadi, sebab aku ingat aku dah check semua sebelum lipat dan masuk dalam sampul, tapi hmm... Mungkin tu kesalahan yang aku perlu buat? Sebab kalau aku tak TERhantar dua-dua surat tu, maka kau pun takkan TERbalas surat aku dengan jujur, kan?? Surat yang buat aku nangis tiga jam. Jadi, Kahar, kalau kita fikir betul-betul, besar kesilapanku, besar lagi kesilapanmu.

(Tapi seriously, aku malu. Mak nampak aku nangis baca surat kau.)

 

Kahar, aku baca surat kau berkali-kali. 

Aku baca sampai aku rasa aku boleh hafal. 

'Kau sentiasa layak.'

Kau tulis macam benda tu fakta, macam benda tu hukum alam. Dan aku harap kau betul, Kahar. Aku harap kau betul sebab walaupun aku tak kisah kalau aku tak layak untuk benda lain, aku nak layak untuk kau. Aku nak layak untuk duduk dalam hidup kau tanpa rasa aku ni tetamu tak diundang. Walaupun orang lain rasa aku tak layak, walaupun keluarga kau rasa aku tak layak untuk kau, asalkan kau rasa aku layak, asalkan kau—kau seorang, Kahar—rasa aku layak, aku rasa itu dah cukup.

Dan atas sebab yang sama, aku dah maafkan keluarga kau. 

Aku maafkan diorang sebab benda tu dah lepas. 

Hakeem yang dulu pernah nangis dalam tandas sesorang sebab kata-kata yang aku tak nak ulang—Hakeem tu masih ada. Tapi Hakeem yang sekarang dah belajar nak pegang tangan Hakeem yang dulu tu. Hakeem yang sekarang dah kental! Jangan risau, Kahar. Hakeem kuat! Mungkin kuat-kuat manja lah. Tapi still kuat.

Dan, Kahar—

Kau tak perlu minta maaf dekat aku. Tapi kalau kau nak minta, aku terima. Aku terima dengan dua tangan. Aku terima dan aku tatang macam minyak yang penuh!

Aku maafkan kau.

Aku dah lama maafkan kau, Kahar. Mungkin sebelum kau sendiri sedar yang kau perlu dimaafkan. Mungkin masa kau pandang aku kali pertama lepas semua jadi dan mata kau cakap benda yang mulut kau tak boleh cakap lagi masa tu. Aku maafkan kau masa tu juga, aku rasa. Aku cuma tak tahu macam mana nak bagitahu kau sampai sekarang.

Tolong buat-buat tak nampak kesan basah kat dakwat kertas ni. Aku tahu kau benci bila aku nangis, tapi nak buat macam mana, surat dah pakai pen, dakwat dah lari, dan aku tak nak tulis semula sebab aku takut kalau aku tulis semula aku akan tukar perkataan dan jadi kurang jujur. Jadi terima je lah surat berbintik-bintik ni. Anggap je sebagai hiasan. Anggap je sebagai cap rasmi Hakeem Rizal—surat bertarikh 30 Jun 2007 ini datang dengan sekurang-kurangnya tiga titik air mata, dijamin asli.

 

Sekarang bahagian yang buat aku tak boleh duduk diam.

Kau taknak sambung belajar.

Memang sangat macam kau. Kahar yang aku kenal memang akan pilih jalan yang bukan jalan yang dah dibentang depan dia. Kahar yang aku kenal akan buat jalan dia sendiri, walaupun jalan tu penuh dengan batu dan akar kayu. Aku tak patut terkejut. 

Aku bangga dengan kau, Kahar.

Kau nak jadi "Kahar", bukan anak "Abu Yamin". Kau nak cari duit sendiri, bina hidup sendiri, dengan tangan kau sendiri, dengan keringat kau sendiri, dengan kesilapan kau sendiri yang kau berhak buat dan berhak belajar daripada. Aku tahu yang kau dah fikir banyak kali pasal benda ni. Aku tahu kau dah pusing-pusing dalam kepala kau, dah timbang kiri kanan. Kalau kau dah berani cakap dekat Ayoh kau, maknanya kau dah yakin. Dan kalau kau yakin, aku yakin dengan kau.

Jalan apa pun yang kau pilih, aku akan sokong kau, Kahar. 

Kau tahu aku akan sentiasa sokong kau. 

Kau nak jadi tukang kebun, aku sokong. Kau nak buka kedai kopi, aku sokong. Kau nak jadi nelayan dan tinggal dekat tepi pantai dan main gitar untuk ikan, aku sokong (dan aku akan nyanyi untuk ikan-ikan tu). Kau nak buat benda yang tak ada nama lagi, yang kau cipta sendiri, yang takde orang lain pernah cuba—aku sokong. Aku akan duduk sebelah kau dan tepuk tangan walaupun aku tak faham apa yang kau buat. Itu janji aku.

Tapi aku rasa kau perlu terima satu benda. Dan aku harap kau tak marah aku sebab cakap. "Anak Abu Yamin" tu juga adalah sebahagian daripada "Kahar". Bukan keseluruhan kau, bukan yang paling penting pasal kau, tapi sebahagian. Sebab kalau kau bukan anak Ayoh kau, kau bukan kau yang aku kenal. Kau takkan ada Abe Cad yang ajar kau nama bunga. Kau takkan ada Mak kau yang tinggalkan buku 'Bunga-bungaan Malaysia' untuk kau jumpa bertahun-tahun kemudian. Semua benda tu bentuk kau jadi Kahar. Walaupun ada bahagian-bahagian yang sakit, ada bahagian-bahagian yang kau nak buang—semua tu masih sebahagian daripada cerita kau. Dan cerita kau cantik, Kahar. Walaupun yang berlumpur mahupun yang berdarah. Cantik.

Kau tak perlu buang semua tu untuk jadi Kahar. Kau cuma perlu tulis bab-bab baru, dengan tangan kau sendiri, dengan kata-kata kau sendiri. Bab lama masih ada dalam buku. Tapi bab baru tu—itu kau punya sepenuhnya.

Mungkin susah. Mungkin sangat susah, tapi aku tahu kau boleh.

Aku percayakan kau, Kahar.

 

Semalam, lepas aku baca surat kau, aku cakap dengan Mak. 

Aku cakap yang aku takut. Aku cakap aku risau aku bakal jadi beban. Aku cakap macam-macam benda yang aku simpan lama, benda-benda yang aku ingat aku tak boleh cakap dengan sesiapa, benda-benda yang aku rasa kalau aku keluarkan dari mulut aku, dunia akan hancur, akan berhenti berputar atas paksi, akan berkecai dekat kaki aku. 

Kau tahu Mak cakap apa? Mak cakap:

"Kanyaah téh obat tina sagala sieun, segala luka dan duka."

Kasih sayang itu ubat untuk segala ketakutan, segala luka dan duka.

Mak juga cakap yang aku boleh ikut hati aku, jadi ya, Kahar, aku nak ikut kau. Ya. Seribu, sejuta kali ya. Aku tulis ayat ni dan tangan aku menggigil sebab seumur hidup aku, jarang aku biar diri aku nak benda dengan terang-terang macam ni. 

Aku nak teman kau, Kahar.  

Aku nak teman kau ke rumah sewa tu. Aku nak teman kau bina hidup kau dari bawah. Aku nak teman kau masa Ayoh kau masih marah, masa Ayoh kau dah tak marah. Aku nak teman kau masa duit tak cukup dan kita kira syiling atas meja dan ketawa sebab kita kaya dengan benda lain. Aku nak teman kau masa duit cukup dan kita rasa macam raja walaupun kaya kita tu cuma cukup untuk makan kat kedai mamak hujung jalan. Aku nak teman kau masa kau yakin. Aku nak teman kau masa kau tak yakin. Aku nak teman kau lalu jalan yang kau pilih, dan kalau jalan tu jadi susah, kita cari jalan lain sama-sama. Dan kalau kita sesat, kita sesat sama-sama. Aku tak kisah. Asalkan dengan kau.

 

Jaga diri kau sampai kita jumpa, Kahar. 

Jangan lupa makan. 

Jangan bunuh bunga-bunga Mak kau—aku tahu Abe Cad ada, tapi jangan uji nasib. Siram ikut jadual. Jangan letak banyak sangat air. 

Sambung belajar gitar tu sebab aku serius pasal impian dangdut aku, aku dah pilih lagu pun, aku dah latih suara aku bawah pokok pisang Bapak. 

Cakap dengan Ayoh dan Abang-abang kau bila kau dah sedia, atau tunggu diorang cakap dengan kau dulu, mana-mana yang kau rasa elok. Aku tak nak desak kau. Aku cuma nak yang terbaik untuk kau. Aku cuma nak kau gembira, Kahar. 

 

"Selagi dan sebanyak mana kau nak aku, Hakeem."?

Sial. Aku tak rasa kau faham apa yang kau dah cakap, Kahar. Aku tak rasa kau faham makna ayat tu bila dia dah jadi milik aku. Aku tak rasa kau faham aku akan pegang ayat tu sehingga tulisan cakar ayam kau pudar atas surat kau. Jangan menyesal, Kahar. Jangan pernah menyesal. Sebab aku nak kau. Aku nak kau. Aku nak kau. Aku nak kau—

Mungkin sampai kita tua. Mungkin sampai rambut kita dah putih dan mata kita dah tak nampak dan telinga kita dah tak dengar dan kepala kita dah tak ingat semua benda. Mungkin selamanya. Tengok lah macam mana.

 

P.S. Aku letak lukisan kau atas meja aku, depan tingkap, supaya cahaya pagi kena dekat dia. Aku pegang janji kau, Kahar.