“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.“
– Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), an Irish writer, playwright, poet, and one of the most famous literary figures of the late 19th century.
TUREP was his name. That is what it said, I suppose, on any paper that bothered to write it down. But no one in our village called him that. Names in a village do not always stay where they are first put. They move, settle elsewhere, and become something more useful. To us, he was Beh Tapu – ‘Tapu’s grandfather’ in our Serian Bidayuh tongue.
It suited him better. It placed him.
I did not understand him the first time I heard his story.
I was in lower secondary school then, sometime between 1966 and 1968, at Serian Government Secondary School, about thirty-eight miles from Kuching. At that age, distance felt large, but understanding felt small. Things either made sense quickly or they did not matter much.
His story did not make sense quickly.
I remember the hot, clammy day with an odd clarity. Shirtless, Beh Tapu was sitting upright on a thin mattress in his house. He looked too light – his ribs too prominent – as though something important had been taken from him and not returned properly. His body was there but not settled.
The house itself was nothing unusual for that time. Open-plan, no partitions, just rough wooden walls and an uneven floor that creaked if you shifted your weight too quickly. Light came in through gaps and windows without glass. At one end, a small fire smouldered, sending up thin strands of smoke that drifted lazily across the room. It smelled faintly of ash and damp wood.
Someone had told me, in a casual tone, that he had been in a coma for several days.
At the time, the word “coma” did not carry much weight for me. I had read about it in a book from the school library. It said a coma was like a deep sleep – a pause, something temporary, something that would end cleanly.
But Beh Tapu did not look like someone who had simply woken from a long rest.
He looked like someone who had been somewhere else and had come back without being told why.
When he spoke, his voice was whispery and thin, almost frayed. It did not have the shape of storytelling. I knew what storytelling sounded like – one of my uncles was excellent at it, weaving events together so that each part led naturally to the next. This was not like that.
Speaking seemed to cost him effort, not because of the words, but because of what they failed to hold together.
“There was darkness,” he said, his eyes moving as though they were trying to follow something that refused to stay still.
I tried to fit that into something familiar.
“Like night?” I asked. “Like when you close your eyes?”
He shook his head.
“No. Thicker than that.”
He paused, as if waiting for the description to improve itself. It did not.
“And pain,” he added. “Everywhere. Not like an injury. Just… total.”
I nodded, thinking I understood. Pain, after all, was not new to me. I had fallen, cut myself, and knocked into things as boys do. Pain was sharp, local and then it passed.
But again, he shook his head, gently, correcting me before I had even fully spoken my misunderstanding.
“No. Not like here.”
I did not know what he meant by “here”. The word seemed too small for whatever he was trying to point at.
He fell silent for a long while. His hands moved slightly, repeating small motions, as if he were checking whether they still belonged to him.
Then he spoke again.
“Pieces,” he said. “Everything was pieces. Not in order. Not connected.”
“What kind of pieces?” I asked.
He did not answer immediately. His gaze drifted somewhere past me.
“Everything,” he said at last. “But separated. Like it didn’t belong to itself anymore.”
I could not picture that. Things belonged where they were. A body was a body. A house was a house. Even broken things were still recognisable as what they had been.
“And then?” I pressed.
He lifted his head slightly.
“I was above.”
I laughed before I could stop myself. It came out quickly, almost as a reflex. It sounded like something from a half-made story – the kind people use when they cannot quite explain confusion.
He did not react. Not even a flicker.
“I saw the bed,” he continued. “I saw my body. But I wasn’t inside it.”
“You mean like a dream?” I asked, trying to help him, or perhaps to help myself.
He shook his head again.
“No. More real than anything else.”
He said the word ‘real’ carefully, as though it might not hold if he spoke it too quickly.
A quiet settled over the room. Outside, a cockerel crowed, loud and insistent. Somewhere nearby, a door opened and shut. Life went on, ordinary and uninterrupted, as if nothing had happened at all.
“Did you come back?” I asked after a while.
He nodded.
“That’s the worst part,” he said.
I did not ask what he meant. At that age, there are questions one senses are larger than one is ready to carry.
So, I left it there.
For years, I did not think much about that conversation. It became one of those half-remembered moments that settle quietly in the mind, neither important nor forgotten. It simply stayed, without asking to be examined.
Then, much later, it returned.
Not as a memory in the usual sense, but as something more structured — almost like a pattern that had been waiting to be seen properly.
Darkness. Pain. Fragments. Separation. Return.
But more than that, there was something I had missed entirely at the time. Not what had happened to him, but what continued through it.
There had been movement.
Even when nothing made sense, even when everything had come apart, something in him had not stopped.
By then, of course, Beh Tapu was gone. He passed away sometime in the 1980s. Not recently enough to feel sharp, but not so long ago that he becomes merely a figure in a distant past.
He was gone in the way certain things become fixed – beyond correction, beyond clarification.
I cannot ask him what he meant. I cannot test my understanding against his. I can only work with what remains.
And what remains is not an explanation.
It is more like a direction.
The last thing he said to me, during my final visit, was this: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”
At the time, I took it as advice – something practical, something meant to be useful in a straightforward way.
Now, I am no longer sure it was advice at all.
It may have been a description.
Because what he experienced did not seem to offer him choices in the way we usually think of them. There was no clear path, no map, no point at which he could step aside and say, “I will stop here.”
Everything had broken apart. Even the idea of a stable “self” seemed to have loosened its grip.
And yet, something continued.
Not clarity. Not comfort. Certainly not understanding.
Just continuation.
Something is unsettling about that, but also something strangely steadying. We like to believe that understanding must come first – that we need to know where we are before we can move. But perhaps, in certain places, movement is the only thing that remains possible.
And perhaps that is enough.
Sometimes I try to imagine the moment he could not describe. Not the darkness, not the pain, but the threshold – the point at which nothing made sense, and yet something began.
Not hope, exactly. Hope suggests a direction, a future that can be pictured.
This seemed different.
It was more like a pressure. A quiet insistence that did not explain itself.
A movement without a reason that could be named.
If I think of him now, I do not picture the house, or the smoke, or even his voice.
I picture a body lying still on a bed, seen from a place that should not be possible. I picture a silence so complete that it feels almost solid, as if it has weight.
And then, before anything can be understood, there is motion.
No explanation. No reassurance.
Just the fact that it happens.
And perhaps that is what he carried back with him – not the details, not the images, not even the meaning, if there was one.
Just the unfinished act of continuing.
There is a quiet philosophy hidden in that, though it does not announce itself as philosophy. It does not argue or persuade. It simply stands there, waiting to be noticed.
We spend much of our lives trying to make sense of things before we act – to arrange our thoughts, to ensure that what we do is justified, reasonable, and clear.
But there are moments – rare, but undeniable – when clarity does not come.
When everything feels disjointed, when pain is not localised but total, when even the sense of who we are begins to loosen.
In such moments, understanding may not be available to us.
Only movement is.
And so perhaps the sentence is not telling us what we should do.
It is telling us what, in some deep and stubborn way, we already do.
If you’re going through hell, keep going.
Not because it is wise. Not because it is brave.
But because, sometimes, it is the only thing that remains.
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
