AS Father’s Day is just around the corner, I have to tell you this tale about my late father who passed on five years ago, at 62, from cancer of the kidney that had spread to his colon.

He was a very complex and temperamental man whom I both absolutely adored, yet fundamentally feared. From the age of 14, he was trained to be a soldier, retiring as a two-star general from the Malaysian Armed Forces. Soldiering was all he knew. As such, The General was stern to the point of being unforgiving, yet crazily playful when the mood took him. In my mother’s words: “Your father banyak angin.” Nevertheless, he loved me utterly, and it is on the bedrock of his unwavering love that I thrived and blossomed. One of the ways in which this love was expressed was to call me on the phone at least three times a day, every day of the week that we were not together after my parents divorced, when I was six. These calls increased in frequency, volume and duration after he got his first cell phone in 1997. By then, I was what he was obviously very proud to refer to as “a working adult”. When I had the time, Mr Banyak Angin and I would shoot the breeze about everything and nothing. However, I found these incessant calls intolerable when they interrupted meetings during office hours. He had a fixation with my old Malaysian identity card number which was, admittedly, possibly the coolest number in the whole country (1111121). Accordingly he would call, then doggedly insist that I repeat the number to him as if it were some military code. Through gritted teeth and sotto voce I’d spit it out. Only once satisfied that I had repeated the sequence correctly, he’d allow the call to be terminated. Two months after his death, while hard at work at the office, I glanced at the clock that told me that it was already 2.15pm. From some weird but wonderful lapse in consciousness, I wondered why my father had not called. He usually called at 2pm on the nose most days of the week to ask what I’d had for lunch. (Invariably, the answer to that query would be “chicken”.) For a good five seconds, I had totally forgotten that my father was “no more” and that the calls that I had hitherto found so annoying had ceased forever. When it finally dawned on me that my father would never call that day or any other day for the rest of my life, a terrible sense of emptiness hollowed out my heart. I had to make a valiant effort to fight back the tears. Then a strange thing happened. My cell phone rang…, or at least, Boney- M’s “Daddy Cool” ring tone resounded through the office. It was the ring tone that I had “assigned” to my father’s number on my phone. By reflex, I rummaged through my handbag for my phone, only to realise that it wasn’t my phone that was ringing, but that of a client who had come to the office for a meeting. Then, another strange thing happened. My colleague and desk-mate, for no apparent reason, turned to me, looked me square in the face and asked: “Lynn-ah, what’s your old I.C. numberah?” Had I not been sitting, I would have fallen. My jellified knees would have buckled under me. Yet, in that second, I was totally possessed by an inexplicable elation. I sprang from my chair, grabbed my colleague by the shoulders and enunciated every number loudly and clearly: “ONE-ONE-ONEONE- ONE-TWO-ONE!” Totally shocked by my reaction while completely awed by my old I.C. number, my colleague exclaimed: “Wah-liao-eh!” Exactly what my father would have wanted to hear. As it turns out, the number is a code after all; not a military one, but one of love and a message from beyond the grave that I have chosen to interpret as: “Banyak Angin will always be the wind beneath my wings.” ● Woo Lynn, who has a Masters in English Literature from Canada, is already phone-connected to her four-year-old son – at least three times a day.

Source: Malay Mail – June 12, 2008