15 February 2020

You know my father left us almost 2 years ago now. He did not left much belongings to us, his heirs apart from some old clothes and an old beat up Kancil which I guess went to his last wife. Money? Property? Land? Don’t even think about it. And that’s fine with me, with us because we understand perfectly well that until his dying days, he was a broke man. Virtually living from day to day doing odd jobs.

We suspected he had a number of loans and debts that he never managed to pay up when he was alive. He was bankrupt once so taking out any kinds of loan from the banks was out of the question. What I remember was that he had a habit of borrowing from friends or family, mostly out of desperation. I don’t know if you remembered that my father used to open a laundry business back in the day, when I was small. That business went bust and the bank had to sell his house (our house?) since he can't pay the loans. What I didn’t know until recently is that he had also borrowed from some of our relatives to help start his laundry business. How do I know now? Well the creditor/relative is now asking us, his children to pay up on his behalf.

The first time I found out about this, I felt incredulous mixed with a sense of unease. Surely this can’t be happening. What do we the children has got to do with a debt that our father made when we were 1, 2, 4 & 5 years old respectively? It was my uncle who conveyed the text from this relative called Ghazali asking for his money. Not much, just RM28,000 plus minus. At first I thought they can’t be serious and calmly ask for some proof for this claim and debt. A few weeks later, my mother forwarded a bunch of letters signed by my late father confirming the debt.

I barely could contain my rage and fury regarding all this. If they think I’m going to spend a cent of my hard-earned money servicing a debt made by my dead father in 1984, they’ll have to pry it from my cold dead hand. I’ve got enough debt and loan of myself, there’s no way in hell I’ll be paying to a relative that I can barely remember what they look like. Legally, by civil law, we have absolutely no obligation to pay for all that bullshit. But from Islamic customs and tradition though, the children are obliged to pay for all their parent debts. How convenient.

Most of my siblings were understandably upset about all these shenanigans. You can’t fault them really since like me, they also have their own loans and commitments to fulfil every month. I don’t know whether they can afford to spare a few hundred to pay for this newfound debt. Faiz however being the self-righteous man that he is, firmly believed that we should be paying this debt no matter what. I know for a fact that he just received a generous backdated payment from the government or something recently but the rest of us were not so lucky. I know he meant well but they way that he insist that we pay for this almost made me want to shout some expletives to him.

My mother whom legally has got nothing more to do with his twice divorced late husband was caught in the middle of all this. As with Faiz, she share the same opinion that we ought to pay for father’s debts lest he would suffer in the afterlife. I have my very own opinion about that but I better not write them down here. She had to bear much of the brunt of my anger although she knows that it was not directed towards her at all but nonetheless, the tone of my conversation in our little siblings WhatsApp group was enough to drive her to tears. Up until this point, we all haven’t seen eye to eye with this relative of ours yet. My mother suggested that we all - the siblings, Ghazali and his spouse Wan Aishah meet to discuss amicably the solution for this outstanding matter. We could meet at home in Pasir Mas right after Eid for the purpose. Well good luck in making me come to such meetings. I’d rather not go back to Pasir Mas at all this year rather than get myself involved with all that. I can’t guarantee I’d be civilised enough around those two old farts.

If you know me long enough, you’d know that I’m usually a calm and collected person. I don’t easily lose my cool for anything or anyone. But you know I’ve been through hell and back since I dropped out of college. I was literally jobless when we had Adam Farihin back then and just the thought of wasting what little I have left every month to pay for something that is completely not my fault and doing… it just drives me livid. I don’t know how this nonsense would ultimately conclude but I don’t want to have anything to do with it.