{ သားသားၾကီးလာရင္ဖတ္ရန္ သံမဏိလူသားဖိုးဖိုးၾကီး တစ္ေယာက္အေၾကာင္း} (၁)

သားသား ၏ ဘ၀မွတ္တမ္းအစမွာ ေက်ြးေမြးျပဳ စု ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေပး ခဲ့ဖူးေသာ ဖိုးဖိုးၾကီး ေဒါက္တာ ဦးလွခိုင္ (ေမျမို ့)၏ ဘ၀မွတ္တမ္း ကို အျမဲအမွတ္တရရွိေနေစရန္အတြက္ ရည္ရြယ္ျပီး ဂုဏ္ယူစြာျဖင့္ ေဖၚျပလိုက္ပါသည္။

John Hla Khine (Jalaluddin din Mohammed) Old Albertian 1943 - 1952

The Exodus -

               Now about my unconventional manner of Exodus from the land where my umbilical cord lies buried. Whether i like to admit or not, that is where i 'belong', although by the quirk of fate I have become a citizen of another country.

          When i was back home in Burma, because of my religious denomination and my stubborn 'unbending' nature, i was not popular amongst my friends and superiors alike, most of whom talked behind my back referring to me in a derogatory term 'Kalaa'. You definitely know of the proverbial 'black sheep' of the family and i happened to be a member of that 'clan' or ‘genus’. When I was younger, during the postprimary school days, if someone came to complain to my mother about the 'bloodied' nose of his son, it was me. If someone came to see my mother about a tender pumpkin which was brought down with a bamboo spike, it was me. If someone came to inform my mother about the 'youngster' (12-13 years) swimming 'across' the Maymyo Kandawgyi lake, it was me. If someone came to report to my mother, dragging along a young girl with swollen cheeks for having being slapped, it was...... . Now my mother being a remote descendant of the barbarian Mongolian Tartar, Ghengis Khan, is of a very serious mien with a volatile temper. Even before the complainant had finished his or her sentence, she would grab whatever  'weapon' that was available and near at hand: broom, slipper, wooden clog (HkonHpaNak), zalone (ceramic bowl) or whatever and bang away at me with it in front of the visitor to show that justice was done and 'shown' to be done and the 'demanded' debt of hurt or loss was repaid instantly. But, the following week found me swimming and floating with non-chalance in Kandawgyi lake, and the bust-ups with other boys continued as usual. And, needless to say, my mother swung, and biffed and slapped willy nilly as the complaints came in, in tandem.

Rivalry amongst siblings

             Maurice, two and a half years my junior, was an 'angel'. Never creating any problem for the parents, never transgressing any bounds that were forbidden. Quiet, studious, friendly, reliable and dignified. He was consulted upon and relied on by the parents. He could be trusted and ran important errands for the mother. My mother had never looked at him 'askance' for any minor infringement of her home-laid rules. As far as i remember, we were never good friends either. But what i do remember is that, when we did meet, we dwelled in a vicious cycle of conflicting ideas, disagreements and arguments that renewed every 4 - 5 minutes of the encounter. His first word to whatever I’ve said would be, ‘No’. Our ideas never flowed in the same direction. Yet, he still loved me and treated me like his elder brother.

           My father, on the other hand, being a high caste Hindu (fully converted to Islam before marriage to my mother) possessed very gentle and 'harmless' behaviour. i've never remembered him raising 'even' a finger at me, leave alone shout and yell and threaten me with hard and sharp objects. He was so gentle, humble and kind and forgiving that, he would crouch down to touch the feet of the complainant to ask for forgiveness for my uncouth behaviour and sins. He was of that sublime nature until he passed away after surviving stroke for four and a half years (result of eating Maymyo pineapples sprinkled with liberal amount of table salt). He would watch and witness with a forlorn and sad eyes as i get beaten like a 'Byaw' drum by my mother. One night, while i was nursing my painful muscles after one such traumatic 'drumming', he gave me the following poem written in his clear, neat and cursive handwriting:

        

ဤဘ၀နွင့္ရင္ျပီး ျဖတ္သန္းခဲ့ရေသား အေတြအၾကံဳမ်ားကို ဆက္လက္ေဖၚျပပါမည္ ေက်းဇူးတင္ပါသည္။