Going Where I Hadn’t Been Before

The office called me today. We accepted a Pakistani intern under AIESC with the name of Salman Nooraini. Then during the final skype interview several days ago, the admin team decided that he wasn’t serious in his internship as he just wanted free accommodation while he toured Malaysia. He asked in the interview who was going to take him to go for tours instead of asking about the video editing project. When the office emailed AIESC about the rejection and the reason, eHomemakers was told that he was arriving on June 2^nd and there was no way to return the ticket.

“We have to prepare the room in the office for him. We need to get a wardrobe since he will be here for six weeks.”

“This means I got to get out of the hospital to use my credit card?” I asked.

“We should go to Ikea to get one of those nicely built and long-lasting wardrobe. The plastic one I bought for Rhon from a hypermarket became flakes after six months although it was cheap. We need to have long lasting furniture for long lasting work!”

“If not, we have to get a check from accounts. Shops don’t take checks for such small purchase.”

My mind was running, “I got to help the office out,” was my last thought when I fell asleep. 

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Before I knew it, I was living the critical moments of my life again. I was crying when my mother threw a pail of cold water on me. I must be only two years old then. I was standing on the back of a lorry enjoying the ride when my family moved from the wooden house to a new brick house. I was only five then. I sat quietly as the teacher in the Standard One Class for primary school hit my knuckles with a ruler because I couldn’t hold my pencil straight.  I was pulling my ears standing up and lowering my body, a punishment form the math teacher for my wrong calculations at the blackboard. I was given a chicken wing at dinner and my grandmother said to me, “Girls must eat chicken wings so that they can grow up and get married, fly away.”

My baby brother, a Down Syndrome child, was brought back from the hospital and it was hush hush. My mother told me, “From now on, you and baby will be inside the room if there are any visitors. You take care of him because we don’t want any one to know about him.”

Getting married………….

Working overseas…….

 

Being stationed in Egypt and all the excitements….. pregnant but all my favorite foods unavailable to me….giving birth at the hospital….

Bringing up the child…..

All the years went past me, fresh and vivid.

Then I seemed to have woken up. The Indian woman who was holding her mother’s diaper kept coming near me to get to the rubbish bin next to my bed; the nurse who was taking blood pressure of the patient at the next bed kept walking past me; the Malay man who was holding his wife kept stroking his back. All these people repeated their actions over and over again. It was as if time stopped and went back just for those several minutes.

It was as if I was watching a parallel world where people in my world’s actions were repeated in the other world too. I didn’t see a white light.

But I remembered Salman’s arrival, my mind said loudly, “You’ve to go to get furniture.”

I woke up.

I couldn’t comprehend what I experienced and saw. “Strange",  I thought to myself.

The next day, I told the doctor about this.  He listened and checked the time when I saw all these things. It seemed to have occurred around 3 am or so when the nurses did not check on me for an hour.

‘What happened,” I asked.

“I don’t know. The best thing is you are alive.” This was his only conclusion.

When I told my friends Chern and Lay Hoon about this incidence, Chern who read many books about near death experience of hospital patients pointed out, ”You went out of your body that night and almost gone to Heaven! This was why you saw yourself at those important moments in your life. God was showing you your life in one fast cinematic broadcast. But you didn’t quite get there yet.”

Huh?  Really?

I was between darkness and light, the living world and the other world, and I felt the non-existence of time zones.

And I ‘came back’ because of Salman!

By Ching Ching