November 2010 was cold when Father left us. Dinner was quiet. We couldn’t care less what was blaring from the television. We wandered through the faculty of memory, mentally playing Father’s demeanour like movie snippets, in random fragments of a timeline. I sometimes projected imaginary holograms of him standing, sitting, pacing the house, speaking near me with the sharp Benson & Hedges scent in his breath during my everyday activities. His apparition lingered around us for months after he departed this mortal world. November 2018 is perhaps warmer — literally and figuratively — compared to that same month in 2010.
Father’s younger brother died last night. He was laid to rest this morning, in the cold ground of Teluk Pasu, after the cousins siphoned milky tea water out of the dug grave. Perhaps the morning rain will never feel as right again for his widow and the children he left behind.
Suddenly, I miss Father.
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