This piece by Aidila Razak (UnR2) was a response piece to “Malaysia’s Gang Menace,” a documentary directed by Jules Rahman Ong, who also guest facilitated the session. After watching the documentary, the writers were asked to write stories from the perspective of one of the characters in the documentary.
It is pitch black in Fuad's home, but a glowing screen in the corner of the narrow living has attracted half of the village's children. Lined up against the wooden wall, girls in their tweens gossip while a boy not older than they pokes fun at them, laughing. Around them, children younger – some mere toddlers – run around in the dark, deftly missing the holes on the wooden floor of this home elevated on stilts. Next to the front door, a woman in her twenties sits next to the doorway, the door ajar to let the cool breeze in. There are only two doors in this home – the front door and the back door, which leads to the kitchen.
It is a bright night out, the moon is almost full. One can see the house across the small street even though there is no street light. There are no street lights to be found around here.
Nursing a child, the woman sits cross-legged in her T-shirt sarong, and says hello to another woman, a little older, who pops her head in and says something to Fuad in her native language. “That's my sister,” Fuad says in Bahasa Malaysia, before asking one of the children, a boy, to pass her a box of betel leaves and nuts before she bids goodnight. “They're not all my children,” he says, his white teeth luminous against the darkness. “They're just here because of that.” 'That' is the television set, now showing prime time news on a political development. The news is about water shortage in Selangor, a state hours away from this home in the middle of the Krau Forest Reserve. The television show is on tonight because there are guests from the city, and Fuad's home was chosen to host.
In the kitchen, his wife cooks by candlelight on a woodfire stove propped precariously on the bamboo floor that bounces with every step she takes. But in the living room, the generator is on for the television, so the urban folk won't be bored.
The television, a 13-inch box with fuzzy pictures, was bought for several hundred ringgit from a Pakistani man who comes around the village with goods to offer.
Fuad paid for the TV in cash, but his neighbours, he says, don't mind paying the Pakistani man interests on installments.
A little boy on his lap, Fuad seems younger than his age.
Having left the village as a young man to work as a labourer, Fuad has gone as far as Singapore, but returned to start a family. As a result, he got married later than his peers. His small frame and boy-like features would not betray it, but he is pushing 50 now, but his eldest child is only 14.
Fuad has three children, all boys. The first sat for his UPSR but did not want to go to secondary school. The second, did not even complete primary school. “I did everything to keep him in school. First I tried talking to him, persuading him to go. When he still refused I started hitting him. He still didn't want to go. “Finally, I had to return his books back to the school,” he said, his voice laden with regret. “I asked the teacher, did anything happen in school? Was he bullied? They said there was nothing like that. I still don't know why he doesn't want to go to school.” He turns to look at the boy, who sits by his father grinning. Fuad shakes his head.
“Why don't you want to go to school?” he asks. His voice gentle, almost pleading. The boy, skinny in his baggy shorts, shrugs and gets up to play with the other children. “The Jakoa people, they come here and see the children running around and say the Orang Asli don't know how to take care of their children.” Jakoa is the acronym for the government's Orang Asli affairs department. The officers pop by at times to check on the residents, check that the children are healthy, sometimes give them aid. “Let me ask you, which parent doesn't want their child to succeed?” Like Fuad, his wife, too, did not complete secondary school, but both had hoped their children would do better.
“I tell my children things are not the same as before. I didn't sit for SPM but I can still survive, it won't be the same for you. “They don't listen. They think they can be like me, tap rubber and feed my family. Things are already hard now. The BR1M I received is already gone to buy diesel for the generator.” The Bantuan Rakyat 1Malaysia was RM500. “It's not the same, it'll be harder for them. I wish they would understand.” The boy on his lap has fallen asleep. The boy, bald-headed and lean, looks not unlike the twins in cartoon 'Upin dan Ipin'. He stirs as Fuad speaks, but sinks back into slumber as his father pats his shoulder gently.
The boy is five. Fuad says he was delivered in this living room, his wife too far in labour to be transported by motorcycle to the nearest hospital about an hour away. “I was the midwife for this one and I took care of her after childbirth, too.” Unlike his topless brothers the little boy is in a T-shirt and long pants. “This one's my only hope.”
***
It is still dark this morning, but the 'school bus' has just passed. The 'bus', as they call it, is actually a small lorry, the type people use to move house. The bus is paid for by Jakoa to make sure the children go to school.
A little boy barely 100cm tall stands quietly by the smaller house in front of Fuad's, so still, one could almost miss him if not for his crisply pressed white school shirt.
Barely audible, and averting his eyes, the boy with side-parted hair whispers that he is in standard two. He was not at Fuad's home last night.
He shakes his head when asked if he has had breakfast this morning and nods to say that he's waiting for the bus.
The bus will pick him up on its way out of the village, heading to the more interior parts of the village first for the handful of children who live there.
Mat Rock – or at least that's what he likes to be called – lives in one of the homes at the far end of the village has children in primary school.
The bus does not go all the way to the cluster of homes – there is only a small dirt road leading to it. The children walk down to an area where the bus can reach them, a few hundred meters down hill, armed with torchlights.
When it is raining, Mat Rock says, he waits for the rain to subside and sends the children to school himself. He tries to take as many children from the neighbouring homes who have missed the school bus, on the back of his motorcycle. Those who can't fit make the journey on foot.
This morning, Mat Rock decides to bring his kids down to wait for the bus at Fuad's and waves from across the street. But only one daughter is going to school today. Last night, he lamented that many children in the village are dropping out of school. His grandfather was educated and spoke English he said, as did Mat Rock's father. Mat Rock, too, completed secondary school. But his son, has no will to do so. “When you see them running around in the day with blond hair, or the boys with longer hair, you know they've quit.” His son, he said, was a good student in primary school. He enjoyed going to school. But when things changed suddenly when he entered secondary schoool. “Macam hilang semangat. I asked the teachers if he got in fights, if people were picking on him. They said no,” he said, venting his frustrations late into the night. “Do you know why this is happening? Why? Why is this happening?” He says he has asked this question many times, to himself, to his son, to anyone who might have an answer. Why are Orang Asli children dropping out of school? Fuad didn't complete secondary school, but he did finish primary. His son didn't even manage that. Why are Orang Asli children regressing, Mat Rock asks.
*** Soon after Mat Rock's daughter arrives with her father at Fuad's compound, the school bus trundles down the uneven dirt road. Mat Rock's daughter and the little boy from across the street climbs up a ladder and joins more Orang Asli children who squeeze on the wooden plank benches or stand at the back of the truck.
The truck travels out of the forest reserve area, past a Felda settlement, through an oil palm plantation and finally arrives at the school less than 30 minutes after it went past Fuad's home. The sky changes colours as dawn breaks. One by one, the children climb out of the back of the lorry. The driver, an elderly man in thick glasses, helps the little ones, holding their hands or in some instances, putting his hands under their armpits and lifting them down.
Dwarfed by their backpacks, the little ones skip to the school gate, but the older children, the ones in light blue kain baju kurung and green pants continue their journey and walk to the junction up the road. “They'll wait for another bus there,” the driver says. The other bus, he says, will take them into a secondary school in town.
*** Back at Fuad's place, it is just past seven a.m and the youngest boy, apple of his father's eyes, is getting ready for school. Stirring from under the mosquito net where his father placed him last night, the little boy rises from the sleeping area he shares with his parents and makes his way to the outhouse beside the kitchen.
His mother boils water for breakfast while the little boy splashes icy cold water onto his body from behind the zinc sheets that have seen better days before they became the walls of the open air bathroom.
The village's only luxury is running water, supplied to Fuad's house through a single tap. Just two years ago, the village survived only on water from wells. Soon, they hope, there will be electricity. Fuad looks for the little boy's kindergarten uniform. He is supposed to be in track bottoms today, and thank goodness there is a spare one as the other pair is still wet on the clothesline. But the lining of the spare track bottoms is torn and fraying.
“What is this,” he mutters, as he cuts off the lining from the pants as the little boy waits, already in his collared kindergarten T-shirt.
“Why did you have to do the laundry last night?” he yells at his wife.
It is already bright outside as the toddler finishes his cream crackers and Milo. With a small backpack and a smile, he clambers above the threshold that comes up to his waist and climbs down the steep ladder. Birds sing, cockerels crow and a hornbill perches on a tree next to the home as he puts on his white school shoes. His brother, the middle child who disliked school so much that he endured beatings at home, peeks out the window – a towel on his shoulder, his curly hair dishevelled from sleep – and waves to his little brother. “Why are you not already tapping?” Fuad asks, and sees that his eldest son, too, has also just woken up from sleep. No matter. There is still the little one, he thinks, and lifts the boy onto the back of their neighbours' motorcycle behind the neighbour's daughter, who is also in her kindie uniform. “Hopefully this one stays in school.”
This story was workshopped in the second edition of the UnRepresented: KL writing programme. Check out more writings from our alumni in the Past Works section and make sure to follow UnRepresented: KL on Facebook.
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