I chanced upon this by coincidence. This was taken in 1995; the location was a little storeroom sandwiched between the Band Room and the Chinese Orchestra Room. The scene is rather dark and perhaps only those who have lived through it, as I have, can feel a tinge of nostalgia sweeping through their skin. The boy is dressed in the green Temasek JC uniform (though black-and-white, I can recognise it anywhere). The guitar he is holding is not only badly tuned, but had a few strings missing when I remembered playing with it. The shelf he is sitting on brings a hilarious tale to mind; when I was entering the room, a hand shot out from it and scared the shit out of me, only to realise later that it was my senior Sameer (one of the few who can fit in it) who had thought I was someone else. The hat (or tudung saji as we called it) was used by my mate Elfie in an unscripted Chinese drama sketch, whilst taking a break from studying late at night at the Scope (as most of us were).

My memories of it included a stale, misty air - a conveniently cool retreat from the humid environment (for the room was right below the airconditioned Arts lecture theatres), of the difficult journey (particularly when I had just finished with ablutions) by meandering precariously around the boys that were scattered around the entrance to the girls’ quarters.

I had a chance to use that same Malay Cultural Society (MCS) room in 2001 - the last year it was to exist. The following year, we were moved to a classroom, the old place locked up till whenever.

When I returned to Singapore last July, I had the opportunity to mingle with NTU Muslim Society students in an orientation camp - some of them my old school friends. In what eventually is a resurrection of history, I was thrown into the posterior compartment of a van travelling within campus, my companions a chatty bunch of TKGS-TJCian girls two years my junior. They were telling me madly about their experiences and joys of college life - of how wonderful it was and how great it had been to meet me, the senior who lived it all before them. One of the girls, for some odd reason, had two copies of the MCS newsletter in her possession at that time - one published in my graduating year, the other hers. “I was the MCS JK (committee member),” she smiled. It was years since I last saw the cover; flipping through the magazine and laughing at the inside jokes that were hidden throughout the pages.

It seemed utterly surreal: the TJCian juniors around me, my primary school friend (the boy who used to sit beside me) driving the van, hanging out with my best friend Soffiah, Rahmat chatting with me after prayers, meeting Sameer after all these years - it is indescribable. I was sitting with a group of NUS/NTU boys, playing some silly lame-ass games when one of the NTU seniors passed by me and said my name, asking me if I was indeed she. It threw me off-course, but he said he must have met me back in JC (he had already graduated from TJC then) and for some reason, he remembered who I was.

The MCS-JK girl told me later on, as I was leaving the compound for home (I was not to stay overnight with the other campers), that the MCS classroom has been split into half as it was shared with another society. There were rumours that it will eventually disappear altogether. Temasek JC was one of the few, if not only college I know that has a room set aside for Muslim students to pray. Our seniors fought for that right back in the 80s, therefore acquiring the dinghy storeroom that despite its size and lack of humanitarian facilities, was worth much more than its looks.

It had history; my life in Singapore had history. People who grew up with me, who knew me and who faced things I had to face with as well. But it must have stopped there, at the point when I signed my acceptance letter to Medical School. Sitting in the NTU hall, watching everyone pray in a group - I miss that, the sense of comraderie, that cultural mix I belonged to. And yet I know I’m not similar to them anymore, for my current obstacles and my life’s priorities are now different.

When the MCS-JK girl passed me my batch’s MCS newsletter, she gave me a grin. “It’s amazing what coincidence can bring.”

i hate swot vac and her sibling, the exams. unlike the rest of the campus, we were given a week (instead of two) to cram our brains with the last minute information. i have been nesting in my room for days now and i swear this dump is hardly liveable, what with all my textbooks, notes and past exam papers scattered around my room. urgh, i feel like punching someone, i really do. i am stressed dammit!

thank goodness i had a little girl-to-girl chat with aishah this morning. oh, whatever it takes to at least rid me of my exam worries during that little stretch of time! we were reminiscing about singapore, how exam questions back home were (to some extent) highly predictable and not as vague and random as the ones here. we then talked about our school life - the social revelries, the cliques and the simmering rebellion.

it was fun in secondary school; a place that boasts of an absence of all concrete responsibilities. it was where we first tasted independence and being the naive nymphettes we were, we tossed ourselves back and forth from depression to joy over the littlest things. it was when mistakes were not a sin but a must. we were told to echo the school motto - grow up (for heaven’s sake!) and be gracious young ladies. i made the greatest friends there and i have never laughed as much as i had then. the innocence of that youth still makes me grin as i think of it now.

somehow or rather, junior college was too different. with the social circles around me, it felt as if i could never belong in any. the glaring mistakes that i made seemed to grow tenfold as it was whispered from person to person. it wasn’t morally acceptable anymore to flow against the general tides. it was like being branded for life; a tarnished mark on my forehead. surely life wasn’t all that bad as i did make good friends; i wasn’t a social outcast or anything. however, certain obvious groups that i once found pleasurable, turned out awkward over time. i made the wrong moves at the right times, you could say. and the different glances were proof.

ah jc, the one bitter pill that made me want to leave home for far too many reasons. still in the midst of discovering who i was, i must have taken no notice of where i was standing in. x marks the spot. it was like a slap on my head and an awakening of my conscience. god, there is no place for me at home. like pawns in a chess game, it seemed that my destiny was already arranged from birth by the powers that be. i wanted to abandon the system, i had to. i am a disposable minority.

a foreigner here, a foreigner still at home i say. i belong nowhere and everywhere it seems. i want to be a global wanderer; be a travelling gypsy and leave my mark in places far and wide. the atypical malay minah and her brethren of ironical atypical stereotypes. the one who disemboweled her culture and previous identity, but not her religion.

oh well, as my mother told me one stressful night, my journey starts with twenty-one words. i shan’t bore you with that. more importantly, she said that i should focus on the present and the future would fall in place. a pity that in doing so, i still am not able to understand my past. i have the vaguest of ideas of where i went wrong.

mortality; what is it and what defines it?

idealists proclaim that night is not the opposite of day. if this statement could have its ideas re-arranged with a bit of wishful thinking, can we all agree then that darkness is the mere absence of light? an opposing, evil force need not be created to explain the drifting away of good. after all, like most things in life, we are all affixed with an expiry date. it is inevitable that the righteous must perish one day.

i call the glass half-full. i say that mortality is the absence of life and not the coming of death.

exposure to the health industry has made me think of eveything as an illness. why, my tutorial group once resorted (with an exasperated sigh and a look of defeat) that life itself is a disease; merely a degradation that leads to the slow wasting of death. jokes of euthanasia, to ease the suffering of the cancer-stricken in our learning cases, were tossed around; weightless as its importance.

i am rarely sadistic and i often do not champion the cause of suffering. at least, not always as i believe i wanted to. the real concept of death is something too elusive. we can talk about it in sniggers (”over my dead body, you twerp!”) or infuse it into moments of emotional desertation (”oh, i am dead without you by my side”). frankly, i have used them both in the explained contextual states. but i say it because, like most of us, i take life for granted. i believe that life is not fully appreciated if i don’t embrace it’s vivacity and religiously delve into its existence in the first place.

i remembered back when i was fourteen, listening to the lyrics of *iris* by the *goo goo dolls*, how it was that just like the movies, you need to bleed to survive. it struck me true; too true in fact.

i nearly lost my father that same year. it was a rainy night (often does misery present itself in torrential downpours i reckon). there was a heated argument between us, my father claiming that i was irresponsible. treat me like an adult, i said. you never trusted me and it’s not because you couldn’t, but you just didn’t want to. i screamed in the car, saying that my father never loved me. you were always thinking about yourself, how everything had to revolve around you. i had to change my plans because of you. i had to submit because you wanted me to. all because of you!

my father had an ischaemic attack. no, it did not happen that night. he presented with the symptoms a few days later. i was still angry, conjuring an illusionary insurmountable pile of urgent homework to rid myself of my visitation responsibilites. my mom successfully dragged me anyway in due time, telling me that he had to see me.

i could never imagine seeing the indestructible male figure in my life crumbling before me. there he was, lying in the highly-surveillanced ICU units, encased in a vast network of tubes. my father was sitting up for what i found out to be a first in days. the nurse in charge told us that his health was improving and if not for the feeding tubes, he would be up and about like normal in a few more days. he did transfer to the familiar wards soon after.

from then on, my father has never ceased to remind me of that misfortune. his subtle hints on how my injurious actions (being way too out of line) had caused it were far too frequent. these occasions often made me question the extent of his love and care towards me. nonetheless, i do stubbornly admit that i was a partial-precipitating factor (and not the actual causation) - his anger was of his own making and i had never wished for it, as i am aware that my father is rather hot-headed. furthermore, he had a childhood incidence of rheumatic fever that left his mitral valves stiff and non-compliant, therefore aiding in the presentation of angina. he has had it replaced for prosthetic ball-and-cage metal valves that night. being the fillial daughter that i was expected to be (coupled with much encouragment from my mom and my fears of living in hell), i sought forgiveness from him (even though i still stand by my 23.89%-causation reasoning).

years later, my maturity (finally) grew to acceptable levels. everything was not about my father, rather he lived his life for his children. going overseas was a tremendous risk that he took, knowing that it meant a possible limited financial state in the future. but it was all about me. how unlike many of my malay counterparts, i had the will and aspiration to become a respected professional and he couldn’t bear to see that fire dying away. how, unlike typical malay fathers, mine had the determination to see me live my dreams. i am thankful that my father had not left the family. in fact, our relationship has blossomed to such phenomenal stages that i have never felt any closer to him than i am now. my father has finally learned to trust me and let me go. still, i am perenially “daddy’s little girl”, without all the cutesy cliches of course.

you could say that i decided to delve into medicine because of personal reasons. the healing power is something so impressively astounding to me and one i strived to achieve, for i simply must have my own slice of the gargantuan medical pie. it is my means of making a difference to someone else’s life.

so that is my brush with near mortality - the absence of a father, an essential part of my life. as i glance at a chapter on prosthetic heart valves, reading up on all the different complications that come alongside it; it is somewhat terrifying to realise that my father is susceptible to all those ills. i was telling aishah that i would rather die before my loved ones. unemotional as i am when it comes to not crying in sad movies (she probably would kill me for this, but aishah has a problem with that), i feel i would not be able to handle certain things that trespass into my comfort zone. i wonder what it would be like to have a patient die on you. surely it would be traumatic, but would it induce life-long emotional debilitations? for sure, medical school has repeatedly stressed that empathy and not complete emotional surrender is one factor health professionals should strictly adhere to.

nonetheless, i would see my parents soon. they have already purchased their plane tickets and would be arriving here in two weeks; the weekend in the midst of exams. i miss them terribly so.