from Malay Sketches

3. two hands

Last Saturday, at a Prize-Giving Ceremony for Top Malay-Muslim Students, I had walked up the stage to collect my scroll. Everything went as we had rehearsed, up till the moment I was face-to-face with the President. Suddenly I stopped, snatched the scroll from the tray held by the girl beside him, and left his hand frozen in mid-air.

Of course, the protocol was that I should shake his hand. But I was wearing my baju kurung and a tudung. The President is a man, and I’m not supposed to have any physical contact with the opposite sex. That’s a kind of protocol too.

It was difficult to bring people around to my point of view. My mother said I had “shamed the whole community” with my “rudeness.” My father said, “When you do something like that, it’s so easy for them to call us extremists.” My sister said, “You dishonoured the guest of honour.”

I didn’t know how many people in the audience thought the way my family did. I asked my sister to describe what the scene looked like to her.

“You made him look so stupid,” she said. “He was reaching out his hand, smiling so proudly.”

“Proudly?”

“Yah what, you were the only girl wearing a tudung among all the students. He probably thought, ‘Oh, this is a girl who can balance between studies and religion.’ And then you had to spoil everything.”

“So what did the audience think?”

“People were shocked. He really looked stupid. His one hand sticking out. Like the Kentucky Fried Chicken Colonel, you know, but just one hand lah. Some people didn’t know whether to continue clapping or what.”

So overnight, I became this poster girl for Malay non-integration. Apparently the President, in his memoirs to be written years down the road, would one day describe how Malays had become more fundamentalist, just because a panicky girl had once decided not to shake his hand. As damage control, my sister suggested that I write a letter to him. I showed her the first draft.

“You’re not apologizing,” she said. “You’re justifying what you did.”

“No, I’m not. I’m educating him.”

She rolled her eyes. “You nak educate the President? Who are you?”

I wrote a second draft, this time removing the parts that argued that the handshake wasn’t even part of our culture. I toned down all the rhetorical bits that began with “You, as a fellow minority member, should …” I focused on the fact that I had never meant to offend.

When I reached the postbox later that day, I found myself confronted by two different slots: singapore and other countries. It made me pause. My sister had asked who I was. What kind of country did I see myself living in? What kind of country did I want for myself? I wasn’t different for the sake of being different. And being different is not the same as being difficult.

I rested the envelope on the lip of the slot for singapore. I’ll describe the scene for you. There is a girl standing in front of a postbox. She is wearing a baju kurung and a tudung. An envelope has just dropped like a leaf from her fingers.

But she is still standing there, her hand frozen in mid-air.

11. second take

There was a problem when the camera crew arrived at Pak Jumat’s one-room flat. The director told him that his house was “too clean.” They asked him if he could revert the house to its original state.

“That time you said that there’s not going to be room for the camera and lights,” Pak Jumat said.

“Don’t worry,” the director replied. “That’s for us to handle. So, maybe we come back in the next few days?”

Pak Jumat sighed. He had spent the previous weekend transferring his stuff to his neighbour’s house—the stand fan whose drooping neck was bandaged with black gaffer tape, piles of newspapers, old biscuit tin cans...