The broken places

By The Minority Report Guruchathram Ledchumanan

Last week I walked into the Muse office when our editor-in-chief, Nathan Downey, asked if I’d heard about the church bombings that had taken place in Malaysia. The bombings had been conducted by Muslim extremists who opposed the use of the word “Allah” in a Catholic publication. I hadn’t heard about it. I’ve been here so long chasing the American dream, I forgot about the dreams of those I left behind. The dreams of my grandfather are unknown to me. I never met him. I wasn’t that lucky. God loved him so much that he wanted to spare him the embarrassment of spawning me. So, He took my grandfather before I was born. All I know of my grandfather comes from a faded black and white photograph of him sitting on a beach in Taiping, Malaysia, in the kind of swimming trunks Sean Connery wore in Dr. No. The water created a bridge across his black and white stomach. The smile on his face is now forever beaming down on his descendants. A smile I sometimes see in my mother when she’s reading something that reminds her of him. When my mother was a child, he would often take her to libraries and bookstores. He taught her how to type and write. Bookstores remind me of my mother and how she would take my younger brother, sister, and I to the roam the aisles of Anthonian, the only bookstore in Seremban, the small Malaysian town I grew up in. If heaven exists, mine will be filled with an eternity of me and my siblings and mom running through every section of the Seremban bookstore that was as big as our young, unknown dreams allowed it to be. When I got my first byline in a newspaper at 19, my mother told me that my uncle, her eldest brother Simon, got teary-eyed and told her, “After Daddy died, I didn’t think anyone of us would write like him again.” My mother also told me that once my grandfather had a disagreement with the local pastor in Taiping, and in true Subramaniam fashion, instead of lowering himself to his opponent’s level, he wrote to a Methodist pastor in the States and asked for help building a church. The church still stands today next to my grandfather’s house. It’s the house my mother grew up in. My uncle Simon met and fell in love with a Malay Muslim woman named Amnah. Neither family approved. The only one who supported them was my father, a Hindu who married their Christian daughter after her father’s death. Not every completely-Christian marriage in my extended family lasted: Some had affairs, some got better jobs in bigger cities, some lost the love of their life, and some never found it. But my uncle Simon, now Sulaiman, is happily married to the best decision of his life. I have Muslims, Hindus, Christians, communists, atheists, heathens, and blasphemers in my family. I tried to imagine what would have happened to them if Muslim extremists fire-bombed my grandfather’s church. I know that nothing much would change between them. My Muslim uncle Sulaiman, born a Christian and named Simon, would not have been among the bombers. His rebirth afforded him a wisdom that was previously unattainable to him. It’s a wisdom he would impart unto others, admonishing them for their terrorist ideas. My family would be caught in the crossfire but they would not be alone. I hope that the rest of them are as fortunate as I am to have been blessed with a family that would bind together during the times they are stretched to the breaking point. Ernest Hemingway told us that, “Life breaks us all but we become stronger in the broken places.” My country is breaking apart. I'm not sure if we will break or if we will grow stronger as we near these conflicts of religion.

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