A Doctor in The House: A Memoir of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad (35 page)

With no foreseeable entry back into mainstream politics, I kept busy with the business of making people well. I was also able to conduct minor surgical procedures at my clinic, including circumcisions. I was popular because I used local anaesthesia, whereas the local 
mudin
 or circumcision specialist used a cutthroat razor and no anaesthetic. I can personally vouch for the pain this can cause. To this day, I get people coming up to me and shyly reminding me that it was I who had performed their circumcisions. I sent more serious cases to the government hospital, as there were no private hospitals with surgical facilities in those days.

I made a lot of house calls and charged my patients very little. Someone even suggested that I could easily win elections by giving free treatment. But this was by no means the reason for my low charges. If I ever ran for office again, I wanted people to choose me because I could serve them politically, not medically. I treated people free of charge when I saw that they could not afford to pay. I believe most doctors do, except that nowadays the cost of medicine is so high that completely free treatment would make a big hole in one’s pocket.

Time passed slowly, but not uneventfully. In 1971 Hasmah, who was working as the first woman Medical Officer in Kedah at the time, was involved in a car accident while driving to the hospital in Arau, Perlis. A motorcyclist turned into her path and, swerving to avoid him, she ended up crashing into a telephone pole before her car rolled into a padi field.

She remembers weaving in and out of consciousness before being able to wave to some passing villagers for help. A group of them happened to be nearby as they were literally moving a house to another location, a common
kampung
practice at the time. The first thing Hasmah asked them was if the motorcyclist was all right, but he had already fled the scene. They managed to get her out of the wreckage and into a taxi, which took her to the Kangar hospital. Once she was there Hasmah tried to call me at the clinic, but as it turned out, the telephone pole she had knocked down meant there was no way to reach me by phone. The taxi driver who had taken her to the hospital was kind enough to drive to the clinic and tell me the news himself. I put down tools immediately and rushed to the hospital.

When I finally saw her, Hasmah simply told me that she had been in an accident. She seemed very calm, so much so that I did not immediately realise how serious the accident had been. She managed to get away with just a cut on her forehead but she could have been injured far worse. I was very relieved at her escape. We had been married for 15 years by then, and I had been in the political wilderness for almost two years. I have always had the tendency to keep things to myself, even from Hasmah, mainly because I don’t want to make her anxious for no reason. The decisions that are needed are usually mine to make. But during those years when I was out of UMNO, she made things easier for me by being supportive, sympathetic and understanding.

Hasmah and I both came from large families and we had wanted a large family ourselves. But we ended up stopping with four children of our own—Marina, Mirzan, Mokhzani and Mukhriz—and adopting three more. By the time Hasmah finished her housemanship and we were able to get married, I was 32, and that was considered to be quite old at the time.

Being a parent is a great accomplishment and it also feels like a windfall of good luck. Having children to care for also makes you feel immortal—you know that they are going to survive you, that they will have children of their own and that a part of you will always live on through them. I confess I wanted one or two of our children to become doctors themselves, but as it turned out, none of them wanted to.

When we had our children Hasmah was one of the few working mothers at the time, and since there were many occasions when we both pulled night duty, we were used to being unable to meet each other as often as we would have liked. The children were very young and seemed to accept that this was the way things were.

My wife thought I would want a son first but when Marina was born in 1957 in the Alor Star General Hospital, I was very happy. At dinner we would sit her on the high chair between us and on weekends in our free time, we would drive with her to Penang. Marina was always outgoing and independent. When she was about 13, we hosted a girl named Lauren Hess from the US under the American Field Service programme.
[3]
 Lauren was about Marina’s age and the two of them got along well with each other. I later met Lauren’s parents in California and they expressed their wish to have Marina stay with them. I had now “inspected” their house, they said, and they hoped I would trust them. We sent Marina to stay with the Hess family for about three months when she was 16 years old.
 

She travelled alone and even went to school there, and when she came back I think she had picked up a few American ways. She wanted more freedom and wanted to study in Kuala Lumpur. I had a problem with that, and told her she would have to stay in Alor Star with us. Marina turned out to be a lot like me: argumentative, stubborn, opinionated and always believing she is right. She does not mind expressing her views and that makes things very difficult sometimes. Hasmah always said that an elephant could get crushed between two people who think they are always right.

Mirzan has always been much more quiet and retiring. At one point he sat for an examination that would qualify him to study in a private (i.e. public) school in England, under a programme designed to expose Malaysian children to a different way of life and culture. He thought he had failed the exams at first, and he was so upset that he just stayed in his room. But, as it turned out, he was one of the few to be selected, so he left to study there until he finished his ‘A’ levels. But he found it difficult making friends with his English classmates and he kept very much to himself while he was there. He eventually studied at a technical college in Brighton, before going to do his MBA at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in the US.

Mokhzani was very outgoing even as a young child—once, in kindergarten, he went up to a girl and told her, “You look gorgeous!” But he also had a tendency to hurt himself by falling down a lot. He broke a femur when Hasmah and I were visiting Europe in 1962, and after that, he broke his arm in an accident at the age of four. Still, it never seemed to dampen his cheery spirit.

I was on a train on my way to Kuala Lumpur when Mukhriz was born. He could be quite irresponsible when he was young and he was not very studious at first. But after we sent him to Japan—where he learned to speak Japanese fluently—and then to the US to study, he changed and became much more serious in nature. I think he resembles me the most. Helping people seems to give him a lot of satisfaction, and he’s much more of a politician than the others.

The first child we adopted was actually the daughter of one of my patients. It was common practice at the time for parents to ask others to nominally adopt their children by tying a black string around the child’s wrist, but in this case, this six-year-old child was brought to our house so often that I eventually decided to bring her into the family properly. Her parents agreed. Her name was Aishah, but since it had become a tradition for all the children in our household to have a name that started with the letter “M”, we re-named her Melinda. Melinda adapted quickly to our family, and the other children accepted her as their sister with no resentment. When she later married, she moved to Japan with her husband.

Much later, I adopted two children from Pakistan, a boy and a girl. During a visit to the country I had seen the local children wearing full traditional gear, and I had been so charmed that I knew I wanted to adopt one into our family. As it turned out, we ended up with two, Maizura and Mazhar.

Hasmah left the job of disciplining the children to me and I know I was often quite strict with them when they misbehaved. My own sisters had pinched me when I had misbehaved as a boy, and I remember once fleeing my father as he chased me around the house, to spank my bottom. I once used a ruler to spank Mokhzani, but I caught myself starting to get carried away and I stopped immediately. That’s why I’m against teachers using canes in the classroom—there is a tendency to lose control when you are angry. That was the first and last time I used the ruler. After that all I had to do was bring it out and show it to the children, and that was enough. I even had a cane, although again, it was also more for salutary effect.

My wife would scold the children too but more often than not, she would take their side. Sometimes when I scolded the children she would tell me I was just as bad as they were. But it was important that they understood their mistakes. I wanted them to be disciplined, not to be spendthrifts, and to learn to be able to look after themselves. At the same time I wanted to be closer to my children than my father had been to me when I was a boy, so I worked hard to have an affectionate and relaxed relationship with them. That was something I had wanted from the very beginning, so despite my occasional harshness, my children did not grow up fearful of me. Mealtimes, especially dinners, were important because that was when we could all talk together.

As they grew older, my children did not always approve of the things I did during my political career or the people I associated with. They often told me that these people were making use of me, when really I thought I was the one who was making use of them. My children did not always share my political views either, but whenever there was a heated discussion I always clammed up because I did not want to quarrel with them.

Hasmah always said that my years out of politics between 1969 and 1974 were a blessing in disguise because it allowed us to focus on our new house in Titi Gajah, which we had moved into during the 1969 General Election. It was at that house that I tried my hand at boatbuilding to fill up my free time. There was a river behind our house and I wanted to go upstream to our small 
kebun
 or fruit orchard, where we grew rambutan
[4]
 trees.
 

I ordered the plans from the US and modified them with the help of our neighbour, who was a contractor. I also read books to figure out how to work with fibreglass and build moulds. In the end I built five boats, each named after one of my children. I started with a small boat, then a racer, but the last one was a 26-foot cabin cruiser built from marine plywood. I sailed that one with my children from behind the house to Kuala Kedah, and then across the sea to Pulau Payar. The fishermen of Kuala Kedah were so frightened the boat might sink that several of them accompanied us on their own boats, just in case. On hindsight, the trip was certainly risky because I was not an expert boat-builder, and if there had been a storm we would have likely sunk. The boat, however, turned out to be very seaworthy and I later sold it to the Attorney-General, Tan Sri Abdul Kadir Yusof, who sailed it all the way to Mersing in Johor. I found boat building to be a lot of fun, although I burnt my arm once on the exhaust of one of the boats. I still have the scar.

I did other things to occupy my time. In the workshop in the basement of our house, I followed instructions in a manual to make wrought-iron chandeliers and rods for hanging signboards. We had a hand-operated letterpress but I could never learn to do the typesetting properly. With a partner, I also opened a small shop that could do off-set printing work, duplications and other odd printing jobs.

I have always been curious about how things work. I dismantled clocks as a child in a bid to find out what literally made them tick, but had less success with putting them back together. I would stand for hours outside the window of the printer’s shop near our house, watching the men inside work the presses. When I visited car manufacturing factories during official visits to Japan, I always wished they would show me how the car was made from the very beginning of the assembly line and not from the end, as they usually did. You cannot learn about things from back to front. I wish more people had this kind of curiosity, because I have found it to be very useful to me.

My interests were eclectic, and even included interior decorating. I designed our wedding bedroom, from the bed and kidney-shaped dressing table to the fabrics and carpets (the colour scheme, ironically enough, was a PAS shade of green). I designed the first desk I could afford to buy after I had become a Medical Officer.

Not everything I tried my hand at worked out perfectly and there were a few near-disasters along the way. I once tried my hand at smelting iron in my workshop in the house, just to see if I could do it. Nothing happened when I tried to light the gas the first time, but so much gas had already seeped out of the tank the second time I tried to light the fire that there was a small explosion. Nothing was damaged and I was not hurt, but I did not tell anyone about what had happened either.

As a medical practitioner I earned a bit more money than most other people, so when a friend could not operate a Mobil petrol station as he had no money, I bought it off him as an investment. I did not have the time to manage it myself however, and it was very badly run. In the end, the Mobil representative came to see me and said if I wanted to keep the petrol station I would have to give up my medical practice. I was not willing to do that so the station was taken away from me.

It was not the first time I had tried my hand at other things besides medicine and politics. When I was still a Member of Parliament in 1966 I experimented with being a property developer. There was one other Malay property developer at the time and I thought that if he could do it, there was no reason I couldn’t either. I took a piece of land that my sisters owned and built 32 three-bedroom, semi-detached houses, giving my sisters a house each as payment for the land. The development was called Taman Malid, a combination of my name and that of my partner, Tan Sri Khalid Haji Abdullah. I did not make much money from Taman Malid, although I can claim to be among the first Malay property developers in the country.