“Anger is a wind which blows out the lamp of the mind.” – Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899), an American lawyer, Civil War veteran, political speaker, and one of the most famous public advocates of agnosticism in the 19th century.
KATOK fancied himself a carpenter.
Not the sort of carpenter people boasted about in town markets or praised when a fine house was completed. He was not a master craftsman whose doors fitted perfectly or whose furniture looked polished enough for rich families. No, Katok belonged to another breed entirely – the kind of village carpenter who was simply good enough.
Good enough to mend a leaking roof. Good enough to patch a broken wall. Good enough to build a shed that would survive the monsoon if the winds were merciful.
And for clients who had little money and even fewer choices, good enough was often more than enough.
The termites certainly trusted him. Wherever Katok stacked his logs or precious planks of wood, the little creatures would somehow appear without fail, as though summoned by gossip travelling underground.
Despite his shortcomings, people still liked him. Or perhaps tolerated him kindly. He was hardworking, obliging, and generous with his labour. If a widow needed a loose board repaired or an old neighbour wanted help carrying lumber from somewhere, Katok would usually appear with his hammer and saw before sunrise.
I liked him too.
Partly because, as a small boy growing up in the early 1960s, I admired anyone who could shape wood into useful things. In our remote village, practical skills were respected more than clever words. A man who could build a roof, mend a wooden or bamboo bridge, or sharpen a parang properly was worth listening to.
Katok possessed such skills, though not always with grace.
He also possessed something darker.
He had a terrible temper.
Curiously, it was rarely directed at other people. He avoided quarrelling with anyone, nor did he enjoy insulting others. Even when provoked, he usually responded with silence rather than sharp words. His anger turned inward like a blade folding upon itself. Whenever he made mistakes – and he made many – fury would burst out of him with frightening speed and force.
One moment, he would be soft-spoken and calm, almost shy. He could spend hours tending his pepper vines or repairing tools without saying more than a few words. The next, he became like dry bamboo thrown into a fire: crackling, exploding, impossible to control.
I once watched him spend an entire morning demolishing the wooden frame of a cabin he had built beside his pepper garden at the edge of the forest.
For several weeks, he had worked on it whenever time allowed. He carried timber from the village, cut the beams himself, and drove each nail with careful precision. The cabin was not large, but it represented many days of labour beneath the hot sun.
The structure had leaned slightly to one side because he had failed to square the foundation. Most men would have sighed, scratched their heads, and tried to correct the mistake slowly. Not Katok.
The instant he realised that the cabin stood crooked, rage consumed him.
He hammered the beams as though they had personally insulted him. Nails flew into the grass. Timber split loudly beneath repeated blows. He cursed under his breath while sweat soaked through his faded shirt. Every strike seemed aimed less at the wood than at himself.
Fortunately, only the basic frame had been completed. There were no walls yet, no roof overhead. Otherwise, he might have reduced the entire cabin to splinters.
I remember standing a safe distance away, clutching a guava branch I had been chewing absent-mindedly. Even the birds seemed quieter that morning. The forest itself appeared to be waiting for the storm inside him to pass.
Yet what fascinated me most about Katok was not his anger, but the strange little theories he invented for himself.
He believed in sayings.
Not wise sayings from books or famous people, but his own muttered reminders, spoken repeatedly under his breath as though he feared his thoughts might escape him.
“Measure twice, thrice, cut once,” he would whisper while crouching beside a plank of timber.
Sometimes he repeated it several times.
“Measure twice… thrice… cut once.”
As a child, I found it amusing. I thought perhaps all carpenters spoke to themselves when they worked.
But then, almost unbelievably, Katok would become distracted moments later. His eyes would wander toward the trees, or he would suddenly remember something unrelated, and absent-mindedly, he would cut the wood without measuring properly at all.
The mistake usually revealed itself immediately.
A beam too short.
A corner uneven.
A support that no longer matched its pair.
Then came the explosion.
He would seize whatever lay nearest – a stick, hammer, block of wood, even his own tape measure – and strike the ground or nearby objects furiously. His face turned red, his eyes wild and shining. He breathed heavily through clenched teeth like an injured bull.
For a small boy, it was terrifying.
I often wondered how such rage could exist inside a man who otherwise spoke so gently.
Yet perhaps all human beings carry hidden storms.
Katok certainly did.
And strangely enough, the storms vanished whenever his cat appeared.
Her name was Miyo.
She was a small grey thing with white paws and sleepy eyes. Whenever Katok erupted into one of his tempers, Miyo would eventually emerge from somewhere beneath the house or nearby bushes and brush herself calmly against his legs.
The transformation was immediate.
His shoulders softened. His breathing slowed.
“Miyo!” he would murmur tenderly, bending to pick her up. “You hungry again?”
Then he would cradle the cat like a baby and speak to her as though she understood every word. Sometimes he scratched her chin while apologising to nobody in particular.
His little dog, Belang, received the same affection.
Belang was skinny, patchy-haired, and not especially bright. One ear stood upright while the other drooped sadly. But Katok adored the creature beyond reason. He shared scraps of fish with him and worried whenever the dog disappeared into the jungle for too long.
Watching this rough, angry carpenter fuss over a cat and dog always puzzled me.
At that age, I thought grown men were supposed to remain steady and predictable. But Katok shifted constantly between tenderness and fury, gentleness and destruction. He was like the weather in the hills – peaceful one hour, violent the next.
Eventually, despite all his setbacks and tempers, he finished the cabin.
It stood on short wooden stilts between the forest and his pepper garden. The walls were plain, the windows uneven, and parts of the roof sagged slightly if viewed from the wrong angle. Still, something was charming about it.
The cabin was small but alive.
Smoke drifted from the cooking fire in the evenings. Belang slept beneath the steps. Miyo lounged lazily on the windowsill while Katok’s daughter chased chickens around the yard.
For all its imperfections, the place felt warm.
Perhaps because it carried the fingerprints of real struggle.
Katok knew I admired good carpentry, so whenever I visited, he proudly showed me parts of the cabin that pleased him most.
“See this joint?” he would say, tapping two fitted beams together. “Strong. Very strong.”
Or he would point at a window frame and grin shyly.
“Straight enough.”
Looking back now, it feels surreal that he spoke this way to me at all. I was only ten or eleven years old, barefoot most days, forever wandering between riverbanks and jungle trails with other village boys.
Yet adults in those days often treated children differently. They did not always dismiss us from conversations. If you showed interest, they shared what they knew.
And Katok taught me many things.
Not through lectures, but through example.
From him, I learned how to hold a saw properly and how to hammer nails without bending them sideways. I learned that wood has grain like flowing water, and if you ignored it, the timber punished your carelessness.
The huts my friends and I later built in the jungle owed much to Katok’s lessons. We constructed little shelters beside streams and hidden clearings deep among bamboo and tall ferns. Some collapsed after heavy rain. Others survived for months.
Even now, after all these decades, I still remember those skills.
More importantly, I remember the man himself.
As a boy, I feared his anger. As an older man, I think I finally understand it better.
Katok was not angry merely because wood was cut wrongly or walls leaned crookedly. Deep down, I think he was angry because reality never quite matched the picture in his mind.
He wanted things to be right.
Straight.
True.
Useful.
But human hands are imperfect instruments, and life rarely follows measurements exactly. A man may measure twice, thrice, even ten times, and still cut wrongly in the end.
Age teaches us this slowly.
The world does not become easier because we grow wiser. We simply learn which imperfections deserve our rage and which deserve our acceptance.
Katok never fully learned that lesson. Yet perhaps none of us truly do.
Still, I remember him fondly.
Not as a master carpenter, nor as an angry man, but as something more ordinary and therefore more real: a flawed human being trying his best to shape stubborn pieces of wood – and perhaps himself – into something worthwhile before time ran out.
Disclaimer: 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.
