#BeliaForUnity

Story 6: Something of My Father's Past

I grew up in a single-mother family since my father passed away when I was 12. Our love towards our father made us save all the things he used while he was alive. We still have his clothes (even though no one is wearing it), his bike (even though no one is using it), his car and other things that belonged to him. We even kept his mobile phone and saved his phone number. My brother used father's phone number when he was studying at university. Some situations happened that made my brother buy another sim card for himself. So literally he was using two numbers at the same time when he was studying.

As time passed, the need of using my father's phone number decreased for him since it was a prepaid number, where he had to top up every time. After some time, the number got terminated because he did not activate the number for a long time and yeah, we lost the number. My mother is a sentimental person, therefore she really did not want to lose the number. We tried asking the call centre and yet we could not retrieve it back. Everybody in my family actually tries to call that number at least once a day. Months pass, and no one will answer our calls. We felt like we had lost our father once again.

And here comes the unexpected news. One day, when my mom was trying to call the number, a Malay boy answered the call. At first he cancelled the call when my mom tried to explain to him why we called him. We still keep on calling that number. Then, on another day, the Malay boy's mom picked up the call and asked us what we wanted. We explained everything to them and we said it would be very much appreciated if we got the number back since it meant a lot to us.

The Malay aunty was so kind hearted and was ready to help us immediately. She came all the way from Kedah to Ipoh with her family just to settle down with this. She said she felt so touched when she listened to our story. Finally, the number was changed under my name and until now I'm still using it. I promise to my mom that I will never ever lose the number anymore.

At last, we got a new Malay family as a friend. We used to send Hari Raya greeting cards to them and in return they sent Deepavali greeting cards to us. That incident increased our respect for Malays. This story may sound insignificant to some, but to us, especially me, I will never forget what the Malay family had done to us and will forever feel grateful towards them.