The Day the Country Went Quiet

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThe alarm went off at that particular hour which is technically morning but spiritually still night. The Klang Valley was doing its best impression of calm, the roads not yet clogged, the sky a soft bruise of grey. I made coffee, drank half of it, and left the other half to go cold on the counter, as is tradition.

First on the agenda was a BLS assessment. There is something faintly absurd about being asked to prove you can keep someone alive before you have fully woken up yourself. Compressions counted, airway opened, the mannequin as stoic as ever. It offered no feedback whatsoever, which I chose to interpret as quiet approval.

Then the ward round, unhurried at first, gathering pace as the morning found its feet. Somewhere between one bed and the next, the news arrived the way news does now, a buzz in the pocket and a line of text that takes a moment to absorb. Tun Siti Hasmah had passed away.

It is strange how a death can feel personal when you have never met someone. For many of us she was simply always there, a steady presence beside a very long chapter of the nation's history. She was one of the first Malay women to qualify in medicine, and she spent years in public health, often in places where the roads ran out long before the need did. She carried herself with a grace that never seemed to ask for attention, which is perhaps why she received so much of it. A sad day for Malaysia, and the corridors felt it. Conversations were a little softer. People paused over their phones a little longer.

The paperwork, however, did not pause. It never does. I spent the rest of the morning working through forms that appear to breed quietly when left unattended, and emerged at lunch with the mild satisfaction of someone who has bailed out a boat that is still, technically, taking on water.

The afternoon clinic came and went in its usual rhythm of names, faces and small stories. Then came the afternoon rounds, which had been planned with great optimism and ran with great disregard for that plan. Time, I have learnt, is less a schedule than a polite suggestion.

By the time I got home the sun was on its way down, spilling orange across the rooftops as if to say it had waited as long as it reasonably could. I sat for a while and let the day settle.

The evening went to reading about her. Old photographs, early interviews, accounts of her work in rural clinics, her writing, her voice. What stood out was not grandeur but steadiness, a life of turning up and doing the work, year after year, without much fuss. There is a lesson in that, though she would probably have been too modest to call it one.

Al-Fatihah.