It is a small village in the kecamatan of Tambusai, Kabupaten Rokan Hulu in the Province of Riau, Sumatra. During the Padri Wars of 1830's , Tuanku Tambusai (aka known as Fakeh Hj Muhammad Salleh ) fought the Dutch forces together with Imam Bonjol and Tuanku Rao in West Sumatra and in Northern Sumatra .The last defence was in Benteng 7 Lapis,Daludalu which fell in 1838. He escaped capture and came to Malaya. He was buried in Rasah in 1882.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Where art thou, Suhaimi.
At about midnight on Friday 17 September 2010, my aunt Habibah passed away at the General Hospital Kota Bharu, Kelantan. She was rushed to Tumpat Hospital by ambulance two days earlier from her house in Pengkalan Kubor near Tumpat and fortunately all her grandchildren were at home for the Hari Raya then. By the following day she was transferred to Kota Bharu General Hospital, though concious but unable to speak and the last I spoke to her grand-daughter, she would go for the CT Scan and the following night she passed away. May ALLAH Bless her soul, Al-Fatihah. The last time I spoke to her on the phone was several weeks before Ramadhan and she was always enquiring from me about whether I managed to get in touch with her only surviving offspring, my cousin Suhaimi. I was fortunate to meet Suhaimi five years ago in London when I was on my way back from the US and Ireland. He spent more than two hours at the flat where I put up and he listened more on what I had to convey. When I took my flight home, he came to send my wife Nasimah and I at Heathrow. That was the last I saw of him. All my efforts to trace him since then had failed, because his phone number and even his email account have expired, perhaps he did so deliberately or otherwise, ALLAH only knows. When his father died in an accident, we tried to get in touch with him to no avail. Now his mother's demise, no one could tell him because he went incommunicado. Suhaimi is a prodigal son but somehow he had strange ways of showing his relationship to his parents and siblings. Being the only son of a two child family, he went to boarding school in Kelantan at an early age. Perhaps that made him rather detached from his parents. When he was in ITM in the seventies, he won one of the top place in the professional accounting qualifications for the region and with that he went to London to continue as a chartered accountant. It was in 1972 when I went to see him at his 'dig' right on top of the attic, and I told him how his mother would cry if she saw the place he was staying in. But typical of him, he just shrugged it off. When he came back, he managed to secure a good job and the last I knew he was doing his own business, unfortunately he was hit by the financial meltdown in 1997. He went to become an accountant in the UK when the late Tan Sri Yahya wanted someone whom he could trust to manage the books of Lotus when he took over the Company. Thus I bumped into him in Sussex Gardens in London in 1997 when he was in the doldrums, after the death of Tan Sri Yahya. Again when I met him in 2005, he was a rolling stone, going on one job after another. After sending me a long e-mail when I came back after a few weeks, he was completely off my radar.Now I wonder where could he be, and true to Auntie Habibah or fondly known as Mak Uda to all her nephews and nieces, she would not be able to meet him, after I told her that Suhaimi might not come back even after 5 years time, and that was when I told her in 2005. May ALLAH place her soul amongst the chosen few and open Suhaimi's heart to contact any one of his nephew and nieces who are the only surviving members of his immediate family.
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7 comments:
Dear Hal,
Hoping against hope, I’d hoped Suhaimi gets to read your posting somehow. There’s nothing like extending back the silatulrahim with our kins . Strangers come and go so also the best of friends but blood ties bind. A twist of fate will bring back Suhaimi, it had happened before for others. It can happen to Suhaimi too!
Salam. I read this with sadness in my heart for I too am in a similar predicament with regards my youngest sister. She went to the US in the early 1990s (under Petronas) and refused to return after her studies. Bapak died in the late 90s and Mak followed suit 2 years ago.. we gave her ample notice when both were ill, but she steadfastly refused to come home on both occassions. I no longer know what to say..
Dear Hank and Kama,
We are just mere mortals and this is another proof of the Greatness of ALLAH S.W.T. and only HE determines all our fate and our relationships with others in this mundane life. Thanks for your all your graceful comments and I sincerely hope we shall be endowed with ALLAH's Blessings in our short life, relatively speaking.
Dear Hal,
Indeed fact can be stranger than fiction. It touches deep inside us. It is hard for us understand Suhaimi. It is hard to understand what happened Kama's own sister.
My youngest uncle left home when he was inhis teens, disappeared. That was in 1940's. Some years later he wrote home from a port somewhere in the world. Then many years later he was in London, tired of sailing the oceans of the world. In 1983 I met him in London, getting old and beginning to feel the cold weather - still a bachelor. Then out of the blue he returned to Terengganu, married a lady, had a child and passed away. Such is life.
We seem to have lost someone we love, Hal and Kama. Realising how cruel life can be makes me sit, do what I can and write what I feel can be of value to read and understand oflife. Allah is The Greatest Planner, all for reasons often beyond our rationales.
Akhi Halim, I always thought that people who left home to seek their fortune and never want to return home to parents and relatives, as harboring a huge grudge. They decide to cast themselves away because of some nasty experience and would not want to returm until those who caused the grudge make an effort to make an atonement. Alternatively, they could be running away from some shameful memory and would not return until someone assured them that there was nothing to adhamed of anymore.
Well, things could be more complicated but one would have to adress the grudge or the shame such people are harboring to encourage them to return home. Help them to overcome whatever it was that hurt them and assure them that things have changed. Make them believe that they are welcome home and that some relatives are very eager to see them again. Unless such indications are passed on to them they would not bother to come back and face the painful memory again.
Of course only Allah can open or close a heart to all the possibilities of life. We can only help people to see the possibilities. I wish you all the best in trying to play that role. Salamualaikum.
Sdr Hal,
How strange life can be, unexplanable to our normal way of reasoning. You have more or less lost your cousin. Kama has lost her young sister. Hal and Kama, this may not be the end of it all. Once I had an uncle, the youngest one. In the 1940's, when I was just a toddler, he left home in his teen and stayed with a distant relative in Singapore. Then he got himself a job on board a ship and disappeared. More than ten years later he sent a post card home just to say he was still alive calling at one port on the globe to another. Then years later another card arrived with an address in London.
In 1983 I went to see him living by himself in a room in the East End of London. He was not a young man any longer. His days at sea were over and was workng with a car assembly company. He complained of beginning to feel the cold English weather. Finally, out of the blue the old sailor returned home, married a lady, had a son and passed away.
Who knows, Hal and Kama, your dear ones may yet return. HE is the Grand Planner of life.
Akhi Norzah and Pak Cik,
Life is short and to accept all that come with it is the true test of our faith. We can labour to the last breadth on how to solve the almost insurmountable hurdles facing us, but in the end it is ALLAH's Grand Plan that we submit to ultimately.
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