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Monday 24 December 2012 @ 03:05
Staring about the dragon-shaped cloud, long, spread through the light blue sky, I heard sighs from my tired father. The rest of us in the car were a bit quiet except for the loud Korean music from Asyraf's phone.
In another 100 metres, turn slightly right, says the woman's voice from Nokia Drive, out of the blue.
Hey ho! Hey ho! *foreign gibberish words*, barks the Korean singer.
I felt a little old, sitting quietly in the car, slightly irritated by the noise from the speakers. I wished for some classical music to match with the stream of trees outside the car window. The Dragon cloud was really looking all grand; its head on our left, its lengthy body curvy all the way to the front and elongated to the right side of the car. As if shielding us all through our long tiring journey home. It made me forgot about my fatigue days I've left behind. It made me temporarily deaf about the disturbing da-da-da-dum-cak-kala-dum-das-tas from the earlier speakers.
"Can you please turn down the volume?" Even asking this to my brother who's humming the unknown song made me felt old. Not sure why I asked him that when it didn't bother me so much then.
"Why should I?" He rebelled.
"I think you should quiet down. The song is..." Mama said suddenly and went back to sleep. Apparently she was too tired to finish her words. The music then played a humdrum tone.
Then, Nisah invited us to play the Only-Three-Words game. Despite the low battery life of our Samsung Tab, she touched the screen picking out Memo. She typed, Special Day, as the title and we began playing. Each of us got to type only three words and turned out none of our sentence made sense. It was easy to detect which sentence was whose. Asyraf's were full of weird animal characters. Nisah's were full of feelings and mispelled Mat Rempit-ish words. Mine were of more advanced vocabularies and those made the two laughed to teary eyes.
The day was about to embrace night time. Dusk it was when we were asked to stop our giggles.
"What did I said about laughing too much? It darkens the heart. Say Astaghfirullahala'ziim, now," mama ordered Nisah. I sensed jealousy from her for not being able to have fun like us three. But then I realised Nisah did laugh the loudest. Instantly, she recited the Arabic words. Repetitively, she recited it again to prevent her from being drifted away too much.
We continued playing until our story developed a very disturbing plot filled with neurotic characters; involving ants, elephants with four trunks, monkeys with four wings, a goat, a danseur grandfather and a mysterious narrator called "I". That "I" also turned out to be having a dilemma of either winning his incestuous desires or his unrequited love for ants. He was also obsessed by a goat who ate cabbages but wanted to eat rice instead. Overall, it was strangely hilarious. Since mama hated when we laugh Macam Orang Tak Ingat Tuhan, our laughter sunk to a whisper.
The game slowly turned boring. Apart from the dying Tab, mama's phone, my phone, our tummy asked to be filled and our minds couldn't think of anything creative to be written. Ayah stopped by at a mosque for us to perform jama' ta'dim before finding us a restaurant for dinner.
While waiting for our six-year-old sister, Alesha to finish her maghrib, we reread the story and giggled. Despite the long journey, absurd short story written with the collaboration of a 21-year-old, a 14-year-old and a 12-year-old, I felt light. It's good to be reunited.
