Chapter 8: LSS 72

IT’S STILL that Thursday. Sara and Ben have retreated to their rooms upstairs. Helen and I are in the kitchen. She is washing up, beginning to prepare dinner. Everything has to be like normal. Words are few. Helen and I fall naturally into this. This is what has kept us inviolable in the worst of times, comfortably content and happy in better days. We are survivors. The unvoiced agreement is, life must go on.

Neither of us has been the type to cry “help”. We will both move out of this mode in different ways, because of my illness, and we will both find great sustenance in the change. On this day, I am desperate to reach out. For 20 years in Sydney, there have been very few friends, compared to the happy parade back home. Outside of Helen and the kids, my entire Sydney family comes from Helen’s side, and there already is a great, pervasive sadness among them. The friends I have made in Sydney are dear to me. But I simply cannot tap into them, or Helen’s family, for what I need. Not now, at this moment. Now, I need my history, the people I grew up with. I need to tell my people, put out an SOS, tell them I am in deep trouble. I need my people, desperately. Simple as that. I want them to reach out across the seas, put their hand on my shoulder, look into my eyes and see the sadness, the desperation, the tears being held back, queue up to each give me a big, long hug. I want the comfort of their caring, their love, their  wishing a way out for me, the best medicine possible, their prayers for a miracle. I need to stand naked before my oldest friends and family. I am needy. I am not too proud to beg.

Jerry Chong, bless his soul, years ago put together a WhatsApp group, made up of friends who have been together since 1963. We are all classmates from the very first year of schooling at La Salle, Sentul. The chat group is named LSS 72, for the school and the year we graduated, at the end of Form 3, the ninth year of school. We have studied and played and fought and loved together from the age of seven.

LSS 1972: Bala, Jerry and I are the front row, from left.
Behind us are Zul and Ho Pang Yee.

For the last two years at LSS, Jerry was head prefect and I was deputy. Another very close pal, Bala, was the school librarian. The three of us were as close-knit as you can get. 

Some of us have kept in touch as adults, into working life and marriage. We have not met often, but the bond is forever. No trip back to KL can feel complete, fulfilling, without a couple of sessions with LSS 72 at Backyard, a lovely watering hole in KL that Jerry co-owns and manages with a consummate, natural ability. After midnight, the mike and stage are always open to me to sing a few songs if I want to, and my former classmates are a ready, embracing, appreciative audience. It is a beautiful sound, when I pick a song I know they know, and so many loud, hearty, happy, lusty male voices join me on the chorus. No trip may feel complete without Jerry, Bala and I — along with Guna, three years our senior, who has made himself the fourth musketeer — meeting up separately for lunch or dinner. A extra special single malt or tequila from Jerry’s private collection is always around.

  Post-op with (from left) Guna, Bala and Jerry;
  Kuala Lumpur, 2019.

These are the people before whom I am secretly planning to spill my guts. They will hear me, they will be there for me. Helen has chosen to focus, single minded, on the kind of dinner I have grown accustomed to — meat, veggie, steaming rice, sliced chilli padi. I don’t tell her that, in my head, I am composing a message LSS 72. I know it will be a salve.

When I look back on these moments, when I commit to actions not normal for me, which seem to just fall into place naturally, I see the new normal that overtook me long before COVID-19. More importantly, I see another segment in the design, beyond my will, that opens up just ahead of every new step I will take.

I tell my LSS 72 friends about diagnosis, early discovery, major surgery in the next seven days. I tell them I am strong. I have Sentul in my blood, just like them. That God is on my side. Whatever happens, it’s been a good run. I tell them I will fight this and I know they will pray for me and my family. That I will leave the chat group some time in the night to follow. I will keep Jerry posted, and he will share everything with the group. Goodbye is left unsaid.

The childhood friends I grew up with, played a hundred games with, discovered girls with, take their rightful place as my immediate, unquestioning, loyal support system. My past reaches out to me in this new future. The support comes flooding in. I don’t know what they’re really thinking back home. I am not the first to take a punch to the guts like this. There have been others, different illnesses. “Willie, we’ve got you, man,” one of them writes back. The heart lifts in the madness.

With my LSS friends in 2017; from left are
me, Renaldo, Johnson and Jerry.

It helps to be able to talk freely. These are friends from when I was very young. Our shared history affords a rare intimacy for me, out here in Sydney. Their messages to me are like anxiety tablets. These guys are veterans at this. They’ve been through this before, they know what to say, and they mean it. One guy even asks, “How are you for money?” Straight out. To the point. Direct. Get to the important stuff. Like best friends do.

We’re Sentul. We know how to roll with it. Until it hits you, of course. Then you know there has never been a guidebook. But that’s OK. Your friends are with you, but you’re alone. Neither truth is cancelled out by the contradiction.

The next points of contact are just as important, and part of another chat group, Angammah Central, my first cousins. “Angammah” is a Malayalee term that refers to a person predisposed to the particularly dramatic, prone to emotional exaggeration and making Everest out of an ant-hill. It’s quite apt, and easily understandable. Prone to exaggerate ourselves, we like to think it doesn’t apply to Malayalees like us. The group’s initials, AC, are also the initials of our grandfather, Dadda, or Mr Anthony Christostom Emmanuel. To say we wear it with pride is to say the sun coming through the window at 5.30 in the morning wakes most of us up.

I give AC a version of the note to my school friends. With my cousins, I become more Catholic. I know they will pray for me. I need to know they are praying for me. And the magic is, I don’t need to ask. This is what “family” is, this is why you can presume their love for you, why I will do the same if the situation were reversed, God forbid. I ask them to tell their parents, my uncles and aunties. AC is the only chat group I simply cannot leave. This is blood. In spades.

LSS lunch at Gem, Petaling Jaya in 2017,
pre-op — From left are Selva, Ben, Mohan,
Mazlin, Pirahaspathy, Andy Kana,
me and Dhilli.

After a while, I put the phone down. I have held it in my hand more than an hour, Helen tells me. I realise it also means I have been focusing on being sick. And it tires me. So, I walk away for a bit. I begin to think of the best distractions for me. Music. Food. Prayer. I don’t want to eat yet. Can’t think of anything I’d like to listen to. So I lie down on the sofa, close my eyes, pray. It only takes a few seconds, a few words of prayer, and the calm returns. I am starting to really see that I can do things for myself, to slow the racing heart, cool the mind, warm the body. Praying is so easy. I listen to my own words. All I ask for is strength, to face whatever is ahead.

I’ve read that receiving a diagnosis such as mine “is like being handed a new passport”. In my book, it’s a passport you never applied for. And much more. Hearing I have cancer is an entire bio-remake. It gets into your DNA. Here is a new name to add to William, Willie, Bill, Will, bloke, sailor, mate, chap. My body will never be the same. The most everyday things will be different. “Goodnight” fills with a new meaning.

The guy with the new passport believes there will always be fear. That’s natural. It’s another part of the human condition. Leave it be. Dormant. Ignore it. Open the heart and the mind and the soul to strength, belief, peace. Peace is an army, assembling at the front line.

I can sense myself change. It’s an inner strength, recharging, revitalising. I am reclaiming some territory of self-determination. The idea that I have some say in all of this has more than reared its head. I am actually deciding how I will take all this, roll with the punch, pick myself up, stand straight, throw back my shoulders. Little by little, my strength returns, along with confidence, belief. I shadow myself. The shadow is amazed the man does not break down, scream in despair, fall into a simpering heap. It sees a man accepting of fear, not meek because of it. The shadow sees a very private man has stood naked, and it has been good. The shadow sees calm, a growing sense of knowing.

LSS Pulau Langkawi bash, 2017: In the front row, from left, are Mazlin, Sokhdave,
Jerry, Noel, Felix and Francis; at back are Ratna, Siva, Woo, Johnson, Zahriman and I.