Car Slaves

 

Sitting in the middle of the recent Hari Raya traffic jam, I remember an old cartoon showing a Martian peering into a telescope directed at Earth. He says to his companion, 'The planet Earth is populated by beings that move on wheels. They breed little two-legged creatures to guard, clean and move them. These smaller creatures live their lives around the wheeled beings and are slaves to them.

Staring into a darkness lit with brake lights of different shapes, I started thinking how completely accurate the Martian description was. We have become slaves to the car which dictates our every move.  The car decides when to leave the house, how long to suffer on the road, which toll to avoid, and when to refill our Touch ’n Go cards. If we do not own a four-wheeled being, we summon one with a tap on a phone, as if cars have become a new species of domesticated household pet, obedient, responsive, and always on call.

But how did we get here?

Post-independent prosperity brought two magical facilities of modern life: the housing loan and the car loan. Together, they promised the Malaysian dream of owning a house and a car. The small repayments meant we quietly transferred our financial freedom to the banks for fifteen or more years. We thought we owned these amenities, when in truth, the banks owned us. The car in the porch was not merely a convenience. It was debt on wheels.

But before the banks claimed us, we first claimed the car as something almost sacred. A family’s new car was treated with the reverence reserved for a newborn child. Before it even reached home, it had to be blessed. Hindu owners took it to the temple for a special archanai, where holy water was sprinkled, sandalwood paste applied, and lemons sacrificed beneath the tyres. Catholic and Anglican families drove theirs to church for a prayer and a generous sprinkling of holy water. Malay Muslim families held a doa selamat at home or at the surau. Buddhist monks tied yellow strings to rear-view mirrors. Sikh families offered an ardaas at the gurdwara. Chinese families welcomed their new vehicle with incense, oranges, and auspicious rituals. An idol or symbol was a permanent occupant of the vehicle.

The car emerged spiritually fortified, followed by a ritual every morning, when it was washed and cleaned, if not by the owner, by the maid standing on a stool to reach the roof of the car.

And like any family member, the car had its rites of passage. First came the newborn blessings. Then the wedding years, when it was dressed up with ribbons, flowers, and a “Just Married” sign. After that came the school‑bus years, when the car became a mobile cafeteria, library, counselling centre, and a repository for lost toys and stationery. And finally, the last rite of passage: the funeral convoy, where the car that once carried us everywhere, now accompanies us on our final journey. The car quietly witnesses our entire life cycle, patiently waiting in the porch like a loyal family member who never quite learned to talk but always knew where we needed to go.

Early houses had no porches or garages. So, we invented the makeshift garage: four poles holding a roof of zinc sheets. By the 70s, housing developers surrendered and built proper car porches, even for the smallest terraced houses. These became social spaces that became places to read newspapers, dry clothes, play games, and occasionally park the car.

But today, the car connects us to something far less innocent. The petrol that keeps it alive comes from regions where wars are fought, and civilians live under drones and airstrikes. The quiet sedan sitting in the porch is linked by an invisible pipeline to deserts where people are bombed for the very resource that keeps its engines running. The car that once symbolised our independence now reminds us of our dependence on banks, on oil, on global markets, on conflicts we will never see but cannot escape.

And that is the final irony: in domesticating the car, we have allowed the car to completely colonise us. It rules our schedules, shapes our cities, empties our wallets, and ties us to distant wars.

And yet, as the jam finally begins to move, I realise the car is still our companion; flawed, demanding, and occasionally exasperating, but always ready to carry us home.

Clocks, Calendars and the Panchangam

 

There were clocks everywhere in the house, but none showed the correct time after the old man died. The clocks had been under his care. He wound those that needed winding and changed the batteries of the rest. Most hung within his reach, and for those he could not reach, he had a small stool on which, even when frail with age, he climbed to tend to them.

Time dictated the old man’s life. If the clocks reminded him of the hour, the Hindu calendar he bought every year from a shop in Scott Road in Brickfields, reminded him of time’s location in the day, the month and the year. The Panchangam, which arrived annually by post from India with a declaration it was cleared by Customs, informed him of cosmic time, mapped against the movements of stars and planets.

For him, a day was not just hours of light and darkness. Each hour was shaped by celestial movements visible only in the Panchangam. Its pages divided time according to its terrestrial influence. There were good periods and bad periods, and he managed the affairs of his family according to these times. He was the conductor of their collective movements. “Not now,” he would say, looking up from the curled pages of the almanac. “Wait until 10:30. The Kalam is not right.”

And his children, raised under his authority, waited. They accepted his injunctions not merely out of obedience but out of an understanding that forces existed beyond their knowledge. If they must not walk into the rain without an umbrella, there must also be reasons for not stepping out at a certain hour that their father understood. If he said the haircut must happen on a Tuesday or a journey must begin before the sun hit a certain angle, they adjusted their lives to fit the cosmic slot he identified.

But as time progressed, the Panchangam began to lose its grip. Life was no longer shaped by celestial rhythms but by the schedules imposed by the state—bus and train timetables, office hours, school bells, payment deadlines, and the fixed times of public events. Time was no longer something to be interpreted; it was something to be obeyed. When it came to knowledge, no one turned to the Panchangam anymore, nor to books or a teacher’s notes. It was everywhere now, scattered into the digital ether. Turn on a computer, type a few words, and a hundred responses appeared, maybe thousands.

The children of his children practised a form of polite resistance. They smiled and nodded when he warned them of an inauspicious hour, then quietly checked their wristwatches, calculating whether they could leave just early enough to beat the traffic but late enough to satisfy his ritual. They moved between two worlds: the ancient rhythms of the Panchangam and the frantic, linear demands of English‑medium schools, which started and ended on fixed times unaltered by anything the Panchangam said.

By the time the great‑grandchildren arrived, the resistance had turned into a scoff. To them, time was a digital print on a smartphone that was flat, soulless, indifferent. They were educated according to prescribed curricula that made no mention of the Panchangam and lived for holidays gazetted by the government and not decided by the phases of the moon. A “good time” was a Friday night at the mall, regardless of where the planets sat in the heavens.

As the years pressed on, the transformations in the lives of the old man’s family came not from changes predicted in the Panchangam but from the way life was ordered by employment, holidays and the mundane timetables of buses and trains. We are now untethered from time beyond the clock and calendar. Retirement, moving from government quarters to their own homes, the incessant need to renovate their abode, the upgrading of their cars and the pressure to educate the young through schools and universities ordered their lives. There was also the inevitable but quiet greying of the hair. These were changes dictated by biology and economics and not by any grander cosmic order. We were merely aging in a line, moving further away from the ancestral script.

Then came the cancer.

To the doctors, the tumour in the old man’s pancreas was not foretold by any almanac but revealed by blood tests and x‑rays showing cells that no longer obeyed the body’s script. They spoke of prognosis, malignancy and palliative care, mapping out a timeline of inevitable decline. They looked at their charts and saw a man running out of time.

But the old man was looking at a different map.

While the clocks ticked on the walls, he spent his final weeks on the edge of the bed, his frail fingers marking dates on the Panchangam. He drew a red circle around two dates, thirty-five days apart. As the family learnt after his death, the first was an inauspicious day, the day he was diagnosed with the disease. The other was the day he died, an auspicious day according to the Panchangam.

When the end came, it was a quiet rebellion against every medical textbook. There was no gasping for air, no thrashing against the predicted pain. He didn’t die according to the doctor’s timeline; he died according to his own. He had seen his location in the cosmos, found the right Tithi, and simply let go.

He left the family with a peace that made the doctor’s predictions irrelevant. While they were busy measuring time in seconds and minutes, he had been living in a version of time that foretold how he would live and die.

Now, with the old man gone, the clocks have surrendered. They no longer need to be wound because no one is worried about the “quality” of the hour. We are “educated,” we are “global,” and we are utterly lost. We know exactly what time it is, but we no longer have any idea where we are in the cosmos.

Marooned in a Digital Maze

 

When modern life collapses because two bills go unpaid and domestic peace hangs on a WiFi signal.

Woke up to a nightmare this morning. 

The Internet was not working. 

Tried using the very same Internet connection to find the problem. 

Bill not paid; service suspended. “Pay now through our website,” the message said. How to pay through the Internet when there was no Internet?

Never mind, I thought, I’ll use my handphone — different provider, different system. 

But here came the real nightmare: that line was barred too. Payment not made. 

A double fault. And one the family, still asleep, would never forgive, because their morning ablutions won’t work without a connected phone in their hand.

So off I went hunting for the nearest centre where I could make a payment. 

Ten kilometres away. No parking anywhere. A hundred restaurants packed with breakfast eaters. The only empty spaces were “Reserved” lots with Town Board warnings threatening locked wheels for anyone foolish enough to park there.

But a desperate man becomes creative. I parked in front of a restaurant which had a reserved parking lot, walked in, ordered a meal, and told them I’d be back shortly. 

Then I marched to the Internet provider, paid the bill, and returned to the restaurant. 

I almost walked away, but that would mean being a captive to technology and dishonest at the same time.

So, I sat down, ate the meal I had strategically ordered, and walked out feeling absurdly triumphant — as if I had outsmarted the entire system for one morning.