It has been a sort of our family tradition that every Merdeka Day, my parents, brothers, sisters, their respective spouses and children would all gather at my house.

It's not so much that we are a passionately patriotic lot - with the exception of my father - but that out of a happy coincidence, my first born has the good fortune of sharing his birthday with the nation.

Apart from Aidil Fitri, Merdeka Day is the only day of reunion where almost everybody is present. So it has been for some 18 years.

It has also became like a ritual that, before the meal, my father would call all his children and grandchildren to gather around him for a 15-20 minute tazkirah (reminder) on how to live our lives productively and to be good parents bringing up well rounded children.

He would advise those still unmarried to settle down quickly and start a family, and tell his grandchildren about the importance of education, of being obedient and keeping away from bad influences, and that their television watching should be strictly controlled.

My father, being a staunch nationalist, would conclude with the importance of being loyal citizens, of giving back to the nation for the educational opportunities given to us, and of loving the nation's leaders, past and present.

This year, we thought we would have a barbecue in the garden instead. I had already imagined the main points of my father's speech, now that my three boys and my sister's two eldest are teenagers, with my first two attending college.

Over the past year or so, my father had been very concerned with the alarming rise in crimes committed by young people, of children and teenagers being victims of sexual crimes, and moral degeneration among the young generation of Malays.

Every time we went back home for the weekend he would remind my boys of these things. However, his anticipated speech was never delivered, for my father passed away after a brief illness two weeks before Merdeka Day.

Times gone by

As they say, life is full of ironies. The day that I mourned my father's passing, organised the funeral and arranged for his burial, happened to be my birthday. That sad memory will surely come back in all its vividness with the approach of my birthday in coming years.

The last moment I saw my father's serene face was when the grave digger opened part of the kain kafan that covered his face so that he kissed the wall of earth, as he lay facing Mecca in his final resting place.

The grave digger then recited the iqamat and azan, following which we shoveled back the earth into the grave until it became a fresh mound. After the talqin, as people began leaving the cemetery, the grave digger introduced himself to me.

Engulfed in my own thoughts and sadness, I could not recognise that the scruffy old man was Haji Khairun, my father's best mate when they were young men serving in the Home Guard, a wing created by the British army to fight the communists alongside the regular forces.

I later learnt from my mother that our village cemetery does not have a regular, professional grave digger. This is all done by friends and relatives of the deceased. So that was his parting gift to a loyal, lifelong friend.

Haji Khairun's gesture was so touching that I was suddenly overcome with emotions, partly out of regret for not having recognised him. Later my mother told me that he had become very reclusive and melancholic after his wife died not long ago. Now his best friend had also left him.

Talking politics

Going back to our Merdeka Day ritual, we would squirm uncomfortably whenever my father got to the part about nationalism and loving our leaders.

By the time we were working adults, we were all too familiar with the scandals that gripped the nation as well as the behaviour of politicians.

None of us were enamoured by party politics, least of all Umno, which to him was much more than a political party.

In truth, both sides, my father and us, were too one-dimensional in our assessment of Umno politics. He was too reverential and we were too cynical, so much so, that there was a time when it reached a point where we would rather not push it further, lest it affect our relationship.

On the one hand, we were too respectful of him and on the other, he could not countenance his children debating a point with him. I imagined he could not get over the fact that, although we would always remain his children, we are not children any more.

That minor estrangement was healed by the Umno crisis in September 1998. It must have been terribly painful for him to finally accept that the party that had meant everything for him was capable of a scandal of such proportions.

It surprised us too that he could make that change, building a fresh political view and working to set up a branch of Keadilan at such an age, saddled with a near-disabling physical frailness. At the same time, I began to appreciate the old Umno, which he so loved and loyally served.

I began to recall his great sadness when (prime minister) Abdul Razak Hussein's death was announced on the radio some 30 years ago. He recited a long wirid after the subuh prayers, and then sat motionless as he recited the Quran, punctuated by tearful pauses as the emotions overcame him.

Thanks to Umno, a man like him, with very meager resources, was able to take care of the education of his children, and they have become useful members of society, jadi orang. That view, if not entirely right, its not entirely wrong either.

This was what he and his best mate Haji Khairun had fought and risked their lives for, and now I could understand his displeasure at us for not sharing his earlier enthusiasm. Even if that fateful event of September 1998 was a terrible crisis that divided the nation, for me and my father, it was our dtente.

It moderated both our views, and discussing politics became enjoyable and fruitful. We worked hand in glove for our new party at the local level, and his Merdeka Day speech became something to which we looked forward.

After his shattered illusions and having to rebuild from scratch the meaning of patriotism and nationhood, I began to appreciate why Merdeka meant so much to him.

A special day that the post-Merdeka generation has now become another excuse for mind-numbing entertainment, and a day when today's politicians manipulate the hallowed symbols of our nation for their political ends.

Back in the day

He grew up in hardship as an orphaned boy during the Japanese Occupation. As life at home became unbearable in those days when stepfathers and stepmothers were generally heartless, he was forced to quit school to toil in a rubber plantation, when he was barely out of childhood, (those early radio dramas, cerpen and films were actually not far off the mark).

As a young man, he risked his life in the fight against the communist insurgency. For him Merdeka meant hard fought sovereignty, so that we could chart our own destiny, so that the weak and the poor are given a place at the table to share the fruits of freedom and the wealth of the nation.

My father had always stressed the importance of education. Apart from reminding us of our duty to the nation, education was the other major theme in his Merdeka Day speech. He himself had a very limited education despite being a very bright student.

His stepfather, apart from dishing out verbal and physical torment daily, made him work to buy his school shoes and pants, and finally left him with no choice but to quit schooling altogether.

His greatest regret was not being able to proceed to special Malay classes - which in those days opened many doors - because his certificate was deliberately burned.

With immense dejection and frustration, feeling that his world had collapsed, he ran away from home to live and work with his married sister in a rubber plantation. However, his desire for education never diminished, albeit by proxy.

Educating his son

As I was his first born, he made me carry that desire for a good education and I became his laboratory.

About a year before starting school, after the muqaddam (pre-Quran) lessons, he made me spend most evenings, sitting at a desk facing a small blackboard, while he taught me reading, writing and mathematics in our living room, dimly illuminated by an oil lamp (we did not have electricity until five years later).

He became my first teacher and the fiercest I ever had. With chalk in his right hand, he was quite liberal with the rotan, not so much to hit me as to make sure that I remained awake and attentive. The swishing sound and the loud rap the rotan makes as it hit the desk was enough to drive me to tears and absorb the lessons.

His first task, of course, was to make me write with my right hand instead of my natural left. By the time I went to school, I could read and write well, able to do the more difficult subtractions and had begun to memorise the multiplication table.

By the end of Standard One, I could do complex divisions and had already memorised the entire multiplication table. Of course, all that was superfluous in an era when kindergartens or pre-school education for village kids were unheard of.

Everybody in my class did not know how to hold a pencil properly on the first day at school. I suppose that was why he was less rigorous with my younger siblings, even allowing my brother Lokman to remain left-handed.

I must admit that at that time sometimes I resented my father's ultra-strict disciplining. From our verandah, I used to watch with envy the neighbourhood children having a whale of a time after school and on weekends with their games seamlessly slipping from kite flying to top spinning to fishing and swimming to bird-trapping and back to kite flying.

Of course it did not take very long for me to accept that all that was for my own good. He did not want us to endure the hardship of a life without a good education.

However, going away to a boarding school at the age of 12, to return home only twice a year; then abroad for university studies before the MCE (SPM) results and immediately starting work upon returning from Australia; starting my own family and then pursuing hectic postgraduate studies, while working as a medical officer and going abroad again, meant that I was my father's son for only 12 years.

He seemed so distant after that. Just as I remained his 12-year-old son in his eyes from the time that I left home, conversely he remained to me that 37-year-old man who hugged me at the boarding school gates as he and the family were preparing to leave.

In my subsequent relationship with my father, it took me many, many years, after having children of my own, to finally come to terms that I was no longer his 12-year-old son who looked up to him with an amalgam of fear, respect and reverence.

Bridging the gap

It was first the haj (pilgrimage to Mecca) that helped me come to terms with my father as an adult. It was a strange, wonderful feeling. In the beginning I felt like I was his little boy again as there were just the three of us, my parents and I.

However, the closeness that the haj ambience afforded us, doing absolutely nothing for six weeks, except the prayers and umrah, gradually thawed the frozen-in-time persona that we had become to each other. We began to acknowledge that many many years had passed since I left home at the age of 12 and I was now a father myself.

As he was beginning to be physically frail, five times a day for six weeks I would take him by the hand, walking with him to the Prophet's Mosque in Medina and the Masjidil Haram of Mecca for the daily prayers, and helped him with the arduous rituals of Sa'ie, tawwaf and stoning of the devils at Mina during the haj proper.

A few years later, the radical change in his political views, brought about by the Umno crisis of September 1998, further helped our relationship. We could finally talk man to man about issues dear to our hearts and we finally had a common ground.

I was very sad that he was called back to the Lord just two weeks before Merdeka Day, the day that we had been looking forward to. It is sadder still that he could not see the release of his cause clbre, the man he had come to love and admire late in his life, the man on whom he had pinned his hopes for national healing and reconciliation.

That would have been the sweetest gift to the unknown and unsung patriot, that he had always been. Still, he would have been very happy to know that his party president was there at his burial and his talqin was read by Ustaz Dr Badrul Amin.

His passing left a great void in me, but what he had taught me lives on. In his extraordinary strictness and sometimes hardness of character, he was a very forgiving man.

Having got to where I am, he always reminded me not to forget the poor and the unfortunate, not to forget where we came from, for he himself rose from among les misrables.

I used to see the fictional Cosette in him, when he was a child and Jean Valjean in his adult life. By example, he showed us what it was to believe in a just cause and put one's heart and soul into it.

In an age when materialistic greed, individualism and cynicism triumph over old fashioned moral values and selflessness, he taught me the meaning of loving one's nation and of serving God, King and country. Alfatihah