smaller lives

I've always known I adore trains, but I've never understood why. Sometimes in the middle of admiring them, this feeling starts weighing on me. The uncertainty, the questioning, wait what's so amazing about these carriages, why did god make me like this?

Two years ago I met someone who had a theory. That I love trains for the way they stay on track, unlike me with the plans that fall flat and unfulfilled dreams. That the admiring of railway came from the obsession with having things gone my way. A theory, but still something more than my blaming on our creator. 

But what about the desire to cuddle a cat-sized caterpillar? What of the stray beetle or moth that flies into the house and my first instinct is to say hello? What about the rainy days when I watch my step only for snails and not to ensure my own safe, dry path?

When did insects start appearing on me more often? The moth crawling for its life on the train floor. The butterfly that kept crashing into a glass window at the hotel I stayed at with my cousin. The caterpillar whose green colour made it almost luminescent, like it's glowing in the dark.

Sometimes a moth on my t-shirt, sometimes a caterpillar hanging from my hair. A bee stopping on my finger to say hello as I waited outside Masjid Wak Tanjong. Even a praying mantis, somehow ending up on our ninth floor flat. 

I have few positive memories of my father that have made me who I am today. I know he raised my older brother and I on his loud voice and kicks, but he was the one who taught me to treasure spiders. That a spider helped our prophet into hiding, something like that. He wasn't a very good teacher or story-teller.

He was the one who protested when my mother and I started smacking our hands on ants in the kitchen. Jangan bunuh lah, kesian, and he would mindlessly blow around the counter until he walked away, satisfied. Oblivious to the ants' immediate return.

On rainy days from a family gathering, or dinner at a random restaurant, he was the one who told us to look out for snails. I've always watched him pick one up from the middle of the path and plop it at the side, so it wouldn't be stepped on by other people. 

My mother would always groan in disgust, and she would always ask him, How would you know that's where the snail wants to go?

As time went on I tried to make this into my habit. I didn't want to accept something so good being my father's. I didn't want an affection for snails and insects to be inherited from someone whose abuse is the only thing my older brother and I have in common.

There is a memory of me at 20, walking in the drizzle with my colleagues. A mound of brown by the entrance to the mall, accompanied by other tiny mounds. I stop, fearing them squashed on by the unsuspecting, or the nonchalant. 

But even with my colleagues encouraging me, I couldn't do it. I had a paranoia of pulling too hard and plucking their shells right off their backs. And as much as I loved the little creatures, I didn't know anything about them. I didn't know what would hurt them.

The year I was turning 23, walking home with a boy training to be a steward. We met a huge snail, slowly gliding smack-dab in the middle of the pathway. It was half a cycling path, and I just could not leave it to a messy fate. But of course my inability to pluck and plop it to the side was a problem.

Solution? I stood there, shielding it from humans. I stayed rooted for more than half an hour, ignoring the annoyed looks from cyclists when the snail and I start entering their side of the path. The boy I was with didn't protest much and just waited patiently, one of the things I appreciated about him.

My father made it look so easy, but I just couldn't do the same. In that one way he was better than me, saving the lives of countless snails.

I didn't have to be raised vegetarian to treasure the smaller lives. I just had to be raised the way I am, feeling so insignificant and minuscule. Maybe it is the way I am treated like an insect that makes me emphasise with them. We are small, but I know we're worth so much more. It's just sad I had to learn this from a figure who treats ants like treasures, and a daughter like a bug.