Thank God

Three days ago was somewhat interesting, I ate breakfast with Hadi, my brother who had recently transferred from Sabah to Alor Setar and set out to the heritage study site with more than enough spare time to catch up with Hadi. Hadi had got a few inches taller since the last time I met him but not as tall as he had described to me on the phone. He's still very very impressionable which comes across to me as annoying. I don't mind having an annoying little brother. It's his best and most memorable personal trait.

We reached Istana Sepachendera, an old torn down mansion Sultan Abdul Hamid built for his first consort, Che Sepachendera. From afar, the mansion is a Malaysian version of a typical haunted house. Creaking wooden floor, dusty window pane, crumbly concrete and faltering rafters. I went in the mansion to take some additional shots. "Hadi, jangan lupa ucap assalamualaikum! Bangunan lama kene hati-hati sikit.."

The first floor smelled of rotting bat faeces and damp walls. It smelled like a torn down ghost house or a lonely cave. Or a torn down ghost house in a lonely cave. The plank floor creaked of age and squeked, as if in pain. I orchestrated my shots like a true amatuer cameraman, twisting and contorting my forearms with all the flexibilty I was able to muster. The hall I was shooting reminisced a a colonial private hall. The passing of decades painted the hall black and green and the absence of life filled the hall with cold sorrow.

I balanced my feet firmly on one of the exposed beams to test a shot.

Our heritage study driver went up to the hall with his hands tucked on his lovehandles like a overconfident tourist. He examined the hall idly and picked up a rusty nail from an exposed beam.

"Abang, kitorang dinasihatkan tak usik bende-bende dalam bangunan nih." I said with my sight oblivious to anything other than what appears on the camera screen.

He felt the jagged end of the nail.

You know how people say they will get a series of flashbacks during a life threatening incident. I saw things I never thought I could able to remember with crystal clear clarity. My 20 years spent in this world were abbreviated in less than 2 seconds but before I got a glimpse of my own birth, my flashbacks were ended abruptly like a movie on TV3 distrupted by the midnight news.

I stood up with cat-like agility


My face was covered with what smelled like a mixture of bat droppings, dust and moss. I wobbled a bit, trying to apprehend the gravity of the situation. What were that flashbacks all about? What? What? Whaaaaaat the fish just happened? Hadi rushed towards me and hugged me like a baby grizzly.


I looked up.


There was a hole on the ceiling above me. I fucking fell from the first floor!


Coolness.

I smiled like there will be no tomorrow to flaunt this metalic smile of mine. I'm still alive.

I'm still alive.

I'm still alive, with minor injuries.

Thank god.

Thank god.

Thank you god.

As the head of welfare, (which is ridiculously ironic at that time) I treated myself and asked a fellow PBSM member to cover my apparent skin abrasion with cotton pads. To everybody's amazement, I smiled, walked, took more pictures, got my pictures taken and drove back to my grandmother's house. To my amazement, the first thing my studiomates did was taking out their cameras and taking pictures of my wounds. (I might have died people!)

Everybody panicked when they heard about my accident. I was forced to get myself checked twice and had to drink a tonne of air doa, made special by Tok. My dad rushed from parit buntar to alor setar to get me x-rayed.

The doctor said I was really lucky for not breaking any bones. He double check by feet when I told him I only wore selipar jepun when I fell. He repeated the same bloody sentence more than 10 times, "you're lucky". I told him I think Che Sepachendera caught me in mid fall. He told me not to not make jokes of 'these things'.

Sure thing doctor...