Khatijah, R.

There is some gentle rain, incessant but windless. Chopin’s complete nocturnes have begun. My parents are preoccupied with a movie on television, my husband abroad for work, my brother at a conference. This is more privacy than solitude, and a hallmark of sorts. I know what my vital statistics are. I am a twenty-six year old, happily-married, healthy Asian woman who is childless.  I have found a wonderful form of employment that complements my subjective talents. So everything has come full circle.

It naturally means that I will soon be cornered into another, haunting chapter. There is so much public expectation in my community that I give birth. What is worse is this presumption that I should naturally want the same.

I suppose the pressure had always been there, but I married young and I married a man I barely knew. It wasn’t an arranged marriage as much as it was a confluence of miraculous events. I could never ask for a better husband. He has managed to surpass even my own prodigious imagination on what could be loved about me – and I know who I am. The odds have been surprisingly kind to me.

Malay society is rabidly communal in good and terrible ways. Once an excuse for ensuring collective well-being, I suppose, in primitive times, from natural predators and probably logical when you harvest large amounts of food together. It has also resulted in a supine herd mentality. Every single action is deciphered according to the question, ‘What would people think?’ however disloyal it may to your instincts or beliefs. There is a thriving culture of secrecy and fleeing running beneath all this politeness and claim for concern. Everything about the Malay mind is a public relations war, and I worry, aside from the bliss I know and experience now, that I may have to step foot into the battlefield soon. To what end, I am unclear. 

When out with my father and brother I spotted a cute-shaped thing in a cage across the street from the seven-eleven.

It was a beautiful white kitten, probably three months' old and looked positively excited to see me. It moved excitedly to and fro, almost frantic in excitement within the bars, welcomed by fingers, mewed incessantly. The man at the shop said she was worth nine hundred, and was open to bargaining.

"She's so friendly." My brother said. 

The shop-owner gave a lop-sided grin. "She isn't just friendly, she's aching for love."

It had heartbreakingly large blue eyes and was surprised when we retreated back to the car. It mewed incessantly until I got in the vehicle, where it instantly slumped into a seating position, mute.

My father seemed moved by the scene, and asked me over dinner with a serious face, "Are cats really that clever?"

"What do you mean?"

"The way she wanted to be with you so badly. How she sat down when you got in the car. Do you think she really knew she was for sale, and wanted a home?"

"Yes." I smiled. "They're very clever." I had our old cat, Phantom on my lap. She was an eccentric thing that limped and had a terrible habit of complaining about everything. She also drooled, and left patches of her fur wet. "And Phantom would be clever enough to know we've brought home a kitten, and would be clever enough to be hurt."

My father said nothing further, his expression still thoughtful. My father was always surprised by how successfully animals communicated to us. He himself only appreciating their company when my brother and I were young adults.  

I could get used to this. Working in the city, just at the edge of the Business district, with swift changes in preoccupation between sussing out the decision-making habits of people and building myths. Conventional art is dead, it belongs to the public now and we call it advertising. 

In-between I've got my family, my husband, the eccentric cat, mystery novels and money to pay for my car and occasional indulgences like shoes and organic shampoo. 

I want to build my career, save up for the occasional adventure and fill out my bucket list. There's nothing else I want; save defending this contentment. I may be one of the luckiest human beings alive - and I don't live in a cave, nor am I beautiful, particularly gifted in any talent or rich. Score. 

Publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy. The choice of what one eats (or wears or drives) takes the place of significant political choice. Publicity helps to mask and compensate for all that is undemocratic within society. And it also masks what is happening in the rest of the world.

Publicity adds up to a kind of philosophical system. It explains everything in its own terms. It interprets the world. 

Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible. This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable." - Ways of Seeing, John Berger

Excessive food numbs the heart.

The Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him)

The painful virtue of having old friends; while everything else changes, other people’s opinion of you doens’t - there is a good and bad in that. Especially when you consider, really consider, how very little of the past we take with us. Habits, that we accumulate for our defenses through time, do not count.

A word to describe the weighted feeling of realising how long it was since you last woke up eight years old and uncertain.

Authorities at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport found this baby tiger cub stuffed among toy tigers in the suitcase of a woman flying to Iran…poor thing.

However hard you work, and however knowledgeable you become, you will be unable to represent your agency at the client’s policy levels until you are at least thirty-five. One of my partners owes the rapidity of his ascent to the fact that he went bald when he was thirty, and another had the good fotune to become white-headed at forty. Be patient.

David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man

Dropped the husband off at the airport this morning, before the sun rose. I am not sure if the fresh-mindedness of early mornings is a universal experience for everyone, but I am bushy-tailed the first hour of consciousness, somehow, if I wake before 8 a.m. In that respect, I suppose the Sufis are onto something.

The view before me were the deserted, orange-lit highways, identical anywhere else in the world. It’s peaceful. It could be one of the reasons I enjoy post-apocalyptic themes so much.  You get to enjoy these human-less vistas of empty cities, as if for one terrible moment, nature managed to sigh. I have nothing against people. I only know that we are detrimental to the earth in a way intextricable from our survival.

I stopped by the traffic light. I believe rules do not exist when they’ve lost their functionality, but I stopped all the same because of that tranquility - and my general distrust with the autombile and the phenomena that revolves around it. Ever since I was a child I was struck by the bizzare enthusiasm human beings have for this mode of transport.

How permanently destroying fertile land with masses of concrete, for the use of   mobile constructs made of tonnes of steel; powered by highly-flammable liquid is a good idea is lost on me.

The greatest pecularity is the faith it gives to any income-earning individual willing to undergo a purely procedural education. Regardless of the quality of a person’s self-restraint and ability for rational thought, we empower anyone with a pulse this murderous weapon. Sometimes, we even allow ourselves lorries and buses.

Frankly, when you think about the rate of automobile accidents that happen, and the odds that each person has at least one story (granted, of varying levels of severity) to survive and tell, it’s a mystery that driving does not evoke more reflection on our mortalities - or the gross way we rate ourselves as having reached full behavioural modernity.

Perhaps the next time you see a girl driving nervously on the road, you’d consider that she has all these thoughts packed in her mind and cut her some slack.

Having survived this round, I am going back to bed.