It was a little after I had had my lunch when I heard the knock at the door. When I opened it, a polite man greeted me and passed me an envelope. Please collect the body within twenty-four hours, or it will be cremated. There was no room for shock. The whole week I had prepared myself for this. I did not let my hands tremble as I accepted the envelope. I told myself I was receiving something that was weightless.
The man left earlier than I had expected. I did not like the idea that he felt it was only proper to leave me to grieve in private. He did not understand that there was no grief. My son and I had not spoken to each other for many years. Unlike his mother, I had refused to visit him in prison. I would have opened the envelope right in front of the man if he had stayed. I would have done it calmly, and when I am done, I will look at him straight in the eyes and say thank you.
But the man would be mistaken if he had thought my actions were calm. Because calmness meant that I was placing my feelings under control. But as I have said, I had no more feelings anymore. It was not calmness, but numbness. Very early on I had decided that everything that was happening was as a result of fate. It was fate that would hold my son up like a puppet from a rope, and it was also fate that would move my hands, also like a puppet, to tear the edge of an envelope.
Inside the envelope was a letter. There was also my son’s pink identity card. I put the letter to one side and stared hard at the I/C. So this was what a dead man looked like. There were shadows under his eyes. There was something far away in his expression, a face not prepared for the snap of the camera.
There was his name.
There was my name too. Separated from his by the word ‘Bin’.
His race.
Date of birth.
Country of birth.
On the back, his I/C number.
Our home address.
But what absorbed me the most was a little hole that had been punched in his I/C. It was there to say that the I/C could no longer be used. To show someone an I/C like this, you would have to place your finger and thumb over the hole, praying that nobody would notice that you are holding something that has been damaged. I suddenly saw my son holding the I/C in this way, trying to pass himself off as someone who was still alive. It was just the sort of lying thing that I could expect from him. I imagined him doing it with that crooked smile on his face, the smile he always used to convince us that he would change, that he was listening, that everything would turn out all right. And I became angry.
My anger turned towards the person who had punched the hole. I had seen the way a credit card is destroyed, with a big pair of scissors slicing it into two halves. Why couldn’t they do the same with this I/C? Why this clean, straightforward hole? I felt my anger burn, first on my skin, through the flesh, like a droplet of acid, right into my bones. My son was no more. I saw a series of circles, perfect circles… the outline of a playground, the stone table under our block, the noose tightening around his neck, the shape of his mouth when he was still a baby, shrinking to the size of the hole. It is an opening through which I feel my body leaking, drop by drop, until the day I join my son on the other side.
(by Alfian Sa’at)
*Bin – “son of” in Arabic
Question 1: What have you gathered about the character of the narrator’s son when he was alive?
Question 2: What impressions have you formed of the narrator’s relationship with his son in the past?
Question 3: Explore the ways in which the writer conveys to the reader the love of a father for his son.
Remember to support your answer with close reference to the words and images of the text.
1 comment:
Thanks for the help
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