Shauqina: Chapter 2

Short-sightedness = I hate Maths!

I had not realized there was something wrong with my eyesight until the nurses came for their routine check-up of us. It was soon after Zak joined the school. There we were, wide-eyed ten year olds, some fearful, some curious and some not caring whether the world was going to end even. I fell into the third category. I was just following the tide, going from one station to the next, even yawning in boredom until I came to the last station – the eye-check station. It was my turn and as the nurse covered my right eye, I tried to read the letters on the white card about 20 metres away. All I saw was a blurry image of white and black prints happily merging with one another. I squinted and squinted and I thought I was starting to hyperventilate out of sheer desperation when a soft voice behind me whispered:

“Capital L”.

I dared not turn my head for fear of reproach from the nurse so I muttered out the alphabet. The voice was loyal. It helped me all throughout the test. “Small letter ‘v’”, “Number 4” and as I grew more confident, my voice was louder, steadier, haughtier. I smiled triumphantly at the end of the test, but my wide grin somewhat faded when I turned and saw Zak. It was him all along. I remembered being puzzled as I saw him smiling sheepishly back at me, his face expecting some kind of gratitude from mine. I did not receive any smiles from the nurse though. She saw through our act. When she handed me my card, her voice was gentle but firm,

“Hafeza, you need to put on spectacles. Give this to your parents, understand?”

I remembered nodding my head, a bit dejectedly. Spectacles? Where would my parents find money for that?

We were not rich but neither were we poor. My parents were frugal people who always ensured that there was decent food on the table and enough for us to put on decent uniforms to school. My mother sewed our clothes and she was a darn good tailor too. My parents, my other two siblings (before the youngest boy came along) lived in a house built by my own father. It was half brick and half wooden, with a zinc roof. It was in a Malay ‘kampung’ – a village- in the well-known Geylang/Jalan Ubi area. Jalan Kayu Putih – that was the street we lived in. Life was idyllic then. Waking up in the freezing morning to bathe in the equally freezing over-the-night water in the large, self-made brick cauldron was an experience that remained indelible. I remember every morning trying to avoid wetting my hair, but to no avail. Mak would come along, invading my privacy in the bathroom, and with one fierce look, or one sweep of her motherly strong hand, the ‘gayung’ would cascade down cool water onto my head. It was refreshing but frustrating as well. I remembered going to school with my short, wet hair plastered to my head. To add insult to the wound, my hair was oily too, from the green ‘MGR’ oil, popular among the Indians, as the icon on the hair oil bottle was a popular Indian actor. It was greasy and I could never get used to the smell but for some unknown reason, my mother seemed to think that this was a beauty tip not to be missed. Imagine me with hair oil right until I was in Secondary 1! Tomboy that I was, I would still look forlornly and longingly at my other friends – Natasha would have her long, curly locks in two beautiful braids, some have theirs in long ponytails and even those with short hair would have their hair nicely fluffed from brushing and put down with nicely pokka-dotted head bands. I did try to protest – why I could not have long hair, of which my mother would confidently say:

“I want you to concentrate in your studies, not fiddle with your hair all the time.”

Or what about this one,

“If your head is dry – otak pun kering!*”
(*Translation: dried up brains = stupid)

Life was thus placid and pretty much a routine of school, afternoon naps, playing till twilight, home, dinner, study and sleep. Free time was spent roaming fabulously around the village, exploring dirty, filthy, clogged up drains for beautiful rainbow-coloured guppies. Or stealthily scouring leaves of low shrubs to catch the elusive ‘champion’ spider and triumphantly caging it in matchboxes.

I was so hooked on those colourful guppies that I would pretend to take the mandatory afternoon nap and slipped out to the nearest drain to catch them. Unfortunately, on one of those days, as I was spooning the gooey, dark slime to get to the fish, I felt my right ear being twisted and pinched ever so painfully. My dear mother…
So, that routine was pretty much upset when I came home with that card from the nurse. My mother read it, looked at me, then looked at the card, then back at me again. What she said was totally unexpected for the sheer novelty of her thoughts:

“Amboi!! Melampau!! Suka-suka nak melaram!*”
(Literal translation: Wow! You’re too much! You are a vain pot!!)

At Primary Four, I could not see the connection between short-
sightedness, wearing spectacles and vanity. Everything my mother said was final though. Everything. So I just kept quiet and ‘suffered’ in silence.

The subject that ‘suffered’ most because of my eyesight was none other than Maths. I remember being asked to complete an additional sum on the blackboard and in front of everybody, I would have the wrong answer because ‘0’ looked like ‘8’ and ‘5’ looked like ‘6’, if you know what I meant. I was beginning to have many ugly, red crosses in my Maths exercise book, because in those days, the teacher had no worksheets for us – we copied our exercises from the blackboard. I was the brunt of jokes of my Maths teacher who seemed to think her jokes were funny and that my skin was kilometers thick! I became withdrawn and anxious in my Maths classes. It was not until primary six that my dear mother finally had the common sense to realize that her daughter needed to put on spectacles by which time my degrees was pretty high ( I started at 400 degrees!). And yes. Another long lasting effect was that I simply hated Maths. My love-hate relationship with Mr Mathematics went far beyond my junior college days. Not to mention that my Maths teachers were one of a kind – one talked to the blackboard as she taught, another announced to the whole class that my name was ‘ugly’. Yes, I hated Maths. Period.