I HAVE lost count of the number of forks in the road I’ve stumbled across since the 1950s – literal ones, mind you, not those fancy moral or philosophical ones people mention when they run out of sensible things to say. Most of them came and went without fanfare, vanishing into the forgettable mist of the past.
But there is one that never quite faded from my memory. It was a T-junction, really, though to my childish eyes it might as well have been the gate to the world itself: a place where two narrow roads decided to argue about which one was right.
The Old Road
The late 1950s were those patient, slow-cooking years when the people had the admirable habit of walking more and talking less.
My father had a pair of legs that seemed expressly designed to outdistance anyone else’s, and I spent much of my early boyhood riding his shoulders. He’d stride along the rough, winding road to our farm, firm and confident, while I bounced on his shoulders, clutching his hair in both fists so as not to be flung into the nearest bush.
About a mile before the farm, the road split at that T-junction. To an adult, it was just another turn. To a child, it was a grand and puzzling mystery.
On the left lay a narrow, overgrown road. Bushes crowded in, vines draped across, and the occasional lizard darted out, as if to warn against venturing that way. My father said the path led to a crystal-clear river winding along the southern foot of a solitary granite mountain that loomed over the surrounding flatlands.
The right road – our road – was humbler but dependable: a ribbon of stones, rocks, and dirt cutting towards the paddy fields that had more mud than mystery.
Between those two choices stood the pride of the local countryside: a rest stop cobbled together by someone who believed in comfort but only had access to inconvenience.
Picture it – a long, round log set across two X-shaped posts, with a thatched roof made of leaves and good intentions. The roof provided almost as much shade as a newspaper on a windy day, but on a blazing afternoon, it was heaven’s compromise.
It became the beating heart of that junction. Farmers, traders, travellers, and wanderers stopped there to swap stories or news about life, feasts, and whatever Nature or God had most recently done to inconvenience them.
My father would light a hand-rolled cigarette – a masterpiece of precision that looked like something the angels might smoke if they were poor – while my mother sipped from her dented tin cup and listened with half an ear for gossip worth remembering.
To me, that patch of shade was the beginning and the end of my world. Life before the junction was our village – predictable, sometimes dusty, and noisy. Life after it held paddy fields, the smell of wet soil, the promise of dragonflies, and the sound of my father’s voice.
The Conversation
Jump forward a dozen or so years to the late 1960s. I was sixteen, which is the professional age of confusion. A brain half-filled with dreams and half with dread, all stitched together with the terror of exams.
It was school holidays, the season when boys either imagined themselves heroes or managed to prove they weren’t. I found myself at that same T-junction beside my father.
We were carrying supplies to the farm, stocking up for the new farming cycle that would last from September till the harvest around March the following year.
My father, in his habit of speaking only when the silence grew too proud, asked suddenly, “What are you going to do with the rest of your life once you finish school?”
Now, that was a cruel question to put to a boy who could barely decide whether to button his shirt inside-out. I stammered the only honest answer I had: “I don’t know.”
He didn’t chide me, only nodded; rolling his cigarette as though he was crafting philosophy out of tobacco.
“Well,” he said, “you’d better start thinking. You’re at a fork in the road now.”
I looked at the junction and squinted, half suspecting he was trying to be poetic – which wasn’t like him.
“What do you mean?”
He gestured with the cigarette, smoke curling like thought itself.
“Life’s full of forks, just like this one. Sometimes you already know which road to take. Other times, both roads look like trouble dressed differently. But you can’t stand still forever – you’ve got to pick a direction. And once you do, you’ll find the other one fades behind you.”
I didn’t know what to say to that – most wisdom at sixteen sounds like bad news. But I never forgot the tone of his voice: calm, practical, with that quiet understanding that choices are heavier than they seem.
That evening, while fireflies lit the darkness outside and my mother cooked supper over a smoky flame, I revisited the question. I told my father I’d been thinking about what to do, but all my thoughts slipped away like minnows.
“I don’t want to choose yet,” I said. “It feels too soon.”
He smiled – the kind of smile that forgives ignorance in children and confused young adults.
“That’s fair. But think while you can. There’ll come a time when you’ll have to, whether you like it or not.”
I told him my near-term ambition was to pass my exams. One of my teachers had told us, “Just get a foot in the door, and the rest will follow.”
My father laughed – a low, warm laugh that stayed with me for many, many years, and even long after the Creator had called him home.
“That’s good advice, boy. Sometimes, a foot in the door is all the fortune you need. The rest is what you make of it.”
The Long, Winding Left Path
Years slid by like old river logs – one after another, bobbing, bumping, disappearing around the bend. The junction stayed where it was, stubborn as memory.
That left path began to stir with life again as the farmers started clearing land in that direction. The vines lost their entanglement and monopoly, and a whisper of civilisation crept into the underbrush.
When I was about eighteen and too full of youth to sit still, my younger brother – Little B – and I decided to explore it. We armed ourselves with nothing but a machete and the kind of optimism you don’t survive twice.
It was a battle of stubbornness against the jungle’s better intentions. The vines whipped back, the air grew thick, and at times we thought the road had vanished completely. But boys at that age are like stray dogs – they keep going because the idea of turning back is worse than exhaustion.
When we reached the cliffs, we noticed that the old footbridge along the cliff face was gone – only rotting pegs clung to the stone like forgotten punctuation marks.
We didn’t tell our parents. Some memories are better when they’re yours alone.
The Reunion
Life – being the complicated prankster that it is – took me away from that land. I traded rice fields for offices, rivers for roads that were straight instead of alive. I made more choices than I can count now – some wise, some resembling the foolishness I once vowed to outgrow.
Circa the late 1990s, my hair had learned humility, and my step had lost its argument with time. In the company of a close cousin, I returned to that T-junction, the one that had waited patiently while I chased the winds.
It was the same place and yet not. The log seat was down to half itself, chewed by weather and termites. The roof had long surrendered. But the air – the air was still the same, thick with earth and silence and memories that refused to stay tame.
I stood there for a long while, trying to place my younger self on that stretch of road – the boy with dreams too light to anchor, sitting beside his father, who knew that even the smallest decisions shape a life’s course.
The wind stirred the tall grass, and for a moment I could almost hear the flick of a match, smell that familiar cigarette, and see him there again – timeless, unhurried, and smiling as if he’d expected me all along.
The Lesson of the Fork
Life, as my father said, is nothing but a series of forks and T-junctions.
Some are clear. Others are hidden under vines. Every man carries his own machete – dull or sharp – to decide which path he’ll take.
Looking back, I have learned this much: you don’t always need to know where the road goes before you walk it. Sometimes, it’s enough to listen to the earth beneath your feet, to the quiet approval of someone who walked before you, and to trust that even a crooked path can lead you home.
And so, when I close my eyes now, I still see the sunlight flickering through the trees; still hear the river muttering its secrets down below. I see the fork in the road, eternal and unassuming, waiting like an open question.
And somewhere in that golden distance, my father is lighting his cigarette again – and waiting, as fathers always do, for me to choose my way once more.
“You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can control your attitude toward them.” – Maya Angelou (1928-2014), an acclaimed American author, poet and civil rights activist.
The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of the Sarawak Tribune. The writer can be reached at www.hayhenlin@gmail.com
