My hand vibrated.it was my watch buzzing me to get up. I love this technology;small and subtle. And on top of that it measures your sleep, monitor your exercise , keep giving you your health data and,tells time too. What a brilliant thing to have. I moved slowly out of the bed to allow my body functions properly. A slight miscalculated move might trigger the wrong muscle to work. It happened a lot lately and the pain was unbearable. Well I don’t expect young people to understand what happened, only the old ones can relate.
It’s still time to catch the Fajr prayers at the surau. My old Wish moved slowly into the dark and somehow I was afraid. Sometimes the imam was unwell and someone might beg me to go in his place.
“Haji, Imam sakit tekak boleh ganti?”, the bilal requested in a heavy nismilan accent. I looked into his sad eyes and saw desperation. Panicked, I declined. Luckily someone else moved forward and led the prayers. My memory is short nowadays and could not remember the verses properly. As an old man you would get this a lot and most of the time it caught you unprepared. I gave up memorising the Quran sometime ago when it became hard to recite the verses properly. The order and the words got mixed up wrongly.Aah that was hard! So day by day the many verses that kept me company while driving have slipped away. I must collect them again and keep them fresh in my mind. When I was in ICU last time, those verses kept me going through the night. The long and sleepless night was a torture of some kind. The room was dark but my eyes were wide open and the wires and tubes were all over my sick body. I was at the edge of living but I wanted to live some more and this hopelessness must go away. My lips started to recite the few verses that I remembered. I kept going until morning. It was as if I experienced the” alam kubur “and the Quran is your only company.
I left the surau immediately after(hahaha geng tak zikir). The sky was still dark but it started to reveal the beautiful clouds and the color of the air. The cool wind greeted my cheeks as I drove back. The brief luxury of life that I treasured every morning. I wanted to live for those moments and would go all out to make sure my day to start as beautiful as that one.
By 7 am, I sat down to prick my finger for a glucose test, measured the blood pressure and stood on the bloody scale to find if I gained a kilo or two. Those are my daily rituals that I owed to my beautiful self. As a diabetic, glucose test always gave a messy reading. Now that the expensive low-GI rice is nowhere to be found, I bought the cheap one with sticky grains. My glucose level went up right away. Dont tell me to skip nasi altogether, it is the one food I would die for. I have reduced to once a day rice meal—— whatelse you want me to do! …….
By the time the sun was up, I greeted my plants at the back garden. Searching for any fatality from last night. Most of the time they grew happily showing off their new leaves or buds. Missing leaves meant escargo must be nearby. Hunted them down was easy but sometime there were so many of them; a pink killer spread must be applied. What is interesting in gardening is that day by day from one pot to another you started to understand your plants. Why are they refusing to grow? Why the cuttings never work? Why they died suddenly? Every plant has its own needs and behaviour so successfully serving them is a fulfilling interaction. Well only keen gardeners would understand.
Time for physical exercise. I walked because can no longer run. Once, I ran because the stupid watch said I could do better than the previous km (10’). I made it to 9’ per km,but, later that day I paid a heavy price andnlost my sleep due to knee pains.So I took it easy and strolled down until an hour passed. Everyday I walked at least 5km and my knees/legs could take it harmoniously.
Be happy folks!
