Cikgu: Pronounced “chik-gu.” Malay for Teacher.

The Day the World Got Bigger

I’m rather sure it all started in kindergarten. I can’t tell you what year it was; they all blend together now, and the only real frame of reference for me was that every time I moved up a year the ceilings seemed to be getting higher and higher.

It was in a reasonably low-ceilinged room that it happened. We were talking about animals and that while all animals are different, they can be clumped together into larger, main groups. This seemed absolutely natural to me, and I saw no reason at all to disagree.

Snakes, for instance, were ‘reptiles’. I knew all about reptiles of course; my father was a zoologist at the nearby National Zoo. Every night at bedtime my mother would open the big zoological books and tell me about the animals. Crocodiles fit into this category as well, as did tortoises and lizards.

Dogs and cats and cows were what were called ‘mammals’ —a word I found immensely funny at the time—and this too went along with what my parents had told me and was absorbed as absolute unquestionable fact.

The cikgu then moved on to insects. Aha, thought I. My parents had told me all about them, too. You don’t live a lifetime in Malaysia without encountering the itchy 6pm mosquitoes, and you certainly wise up to the consequences of leaving food around the house after observing the ensuing ant trails. Insects have six legs and are very, very small.

This was, of course, echoed in class. “Ants are insects,” said the cikgu. “Mosquitoes are insects. Butterflies are insects,” she adds the latter to surprised smiles and gasps. “Spiders are insects, and flies are insects…”

This is where it started. First there was a growing, almost aching sensation coming from my chest, and a slight nervous twinge around my stomach. It spread up and up, causing my shoulders to hunch and a tingling around the back of my neck.

There must have been some kind of mistake, some sort of oversight. Just a few nights ago my mother had been explaining the difference between spiders and insects: spiders eat insects, and they have eight legs instead of the usual six. The sheer erroneousness of what I was now being told was unbearable, unthinkable. I didn’t want to stop and consider my mother’s teachings in any way wrong, but at the same time the cikgu’s teaching could not be wrong either. They were both adults. It was as simple as that.

I found myself drawing in a breath and my hand shooting up to try to get her attention. “Cikguuuu!” I called. The cikgu paused mid-sentence and gestured for me to stand and speak.

“Spiders aren’t insects!” I admit, I spluttered. I was overwhelmed.

The cikgu’s eyes narrowed at me the way they so often did at the naughty boys in the classroom. “Spiders,” said the cikgu, the word suddenly possessing a venomous severity, “are insects.”

“But,” I began, but already I could feel the suppressed snickering around the classroom. Big-mouthed Noah, whose voice was so loud that the school frequently gave him large speaking roles in the kindergarten plays, had certainly gone too far this time. “But,” I tried again, hoping to find the right words. “But they are! They… they…”

What had my mother told me? I searched frantically for the memory, but it had become a dream to me, blurred and out of reach. All I was left with was the absolute dead certainty that I was right, I had to be right, and this adult had to be wrong.

The cikgu pursed her lips, as old women are wont to do when little boys are being naughty, and said, “Well if they aren’t insects, what are they?”

The class’s attention was on me, and as I stared back at the cikgu my mind worked furiously to try and recall what my mother had said. Anything would do, anything at all. It stands to reason that if spiders aren’t insects, they must be something else. But what were they? Had my mother told me? Wasn’t there a name for them? Wasn’t it a difficult, clickity word that was hard to say and harder to spell?

The cikgu was expecting an answer, and I had none. “Well she didn’t tell me that,” I started to say, and the cikgu seemed to make up her mind about me.

“Go and stand in the corner.”

There is nothing to be done for a boy in kindergarten against such a sentence. It is, in a way, even worse than being hit with the wooden ruler reserved for especially naughty boys.

Physical pain is something all children get used to. Scraped knees and banged funny bones are facts of life, and a simple whack of the ruler, while unpleasant, is hardly really worth remembering a few days later.

Standing in the corner, suddenly separate from the rest of the students, forced to watch as the class went about its ordinary routine in my absence, was a kind of agony that until then I had never known. The class looked different from where I stood; it was distorted, far away. All of a sudden I felt alone, isolated, disbarred from my ordinary life and now forced to watch from a remote, alien vantage point as everyday events unfolded without me.

“Spiders,” resumed the cikgu, not sparing me a glance as she said it, “are insects. Ants are insects. Mosquitoes are also insects.”

The room seemed to expand. There was a hot feeling behind my eyes, as if I was about to start crying, yet my eyes remained dry the entire time. It was resentment I felt, at the cikgu, at being punished, at myself for speaking out of turn, and most of all at this monstrous new reality I was now being made to face.

Children are wrong all the time; sometimes—actually many times—wrong while in full knowledge of being wrong. That is where lies are born, out of the fun of distorting truth and testing each other’s knowledge of the real world. Adults, on the other hand, being so far removed from children, have a responsibility to be right all the time. Surely. I depended on their infallibility; it was an anchor in this world I was just now learning so much about.

This to me had been an absolute truth of life, and one that was now shattered. With it, the world seemed to become a darker, larger, more uncertain place. I could no longer trust in my old securities; the world was far more savage than I had ever dreamed. The very idea chilled and horrified me.

I was silent throughout, and when the cikgu finally let me sit back down, I did so without meeting her eyes and without a word. The lesson went on, and I, defeated, remained small and quiet for the rest of the day.