Ben-Hur, The Exorcist and me

Sonic Temple

I don’t know why my younger brother and sister and I would watch the Oscars. Maybe because when I was a child in Malaysia, we had three TV channels and two of them were state-run and the third one was TV3, a private station. They had Thundercats, Transformers, Star Wars and the Oscars (once a year, anyway). I needed to record the telecasts on VHS. I didn’t know why I did it every year. It was a big deal in my house. My mom would make sure the TV was cleared for the few hours that they were on. We used to eat as a family at the dinner table. I miss the green banana leaf piled up with rice, spicy red egg sambal and sweet payasam.

When it was Oscar time, she’d pile the home made Indian food on a white ceramic plate that I could take out to the living room where the TV was. She knew that as important as it was for her existence to be validated by her offspring’s approval, she also realized that it’s important to feed your children with dreams that will sustain them. I had inherited my father’s love of the movies. There was a cupboard in his bedroom that was filled with tapes of his favorite films. They were next to his chequebooks. They had a religious theme. Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus Of Nazareth and The Gospel According To Matthew.

Being a Hindu man of the cloth himself, it must be like watching the Maple Leafs Greatest Goals compilation if he was a regular sports fan like the other dads. For the longest time, I wished he was. It would save me the effort of explaining his priestly profession to outsiders. Other kids in school would tell me that their father was a teacher, a fireman, a cop or he worked at a bank. I would tell them that my dad was a businessman. It felt easier to explain than saying that he speaks to ghosts and exorcises demons for a living. Before I saw the William Friedkin film, I asked my uncle, what “The Exorcist” meant. He said, “That’s what your father does.” I was both fascinated and terrified because I did not want his head to spin around and curse me in the Devil’s tongue while using a silver crucifix in a manner that it wasn’t intended for.

Maybe he saw those movies for relief and company. He always seemed like a lonely man. He couldn’t exactly drop by the neighbourhood bar where the rest of the exorcists hung out. There are some things that happen at work that you don’t want your wife and kids to hear about.

I don't think that’s unusual. I’m sure children of cops and military men go through the same routine. However, my dad was lonelier than the rest because many would see his work as too fantastic to be true. I have seen things make me almost want to beg to differ but the explanation would be impossible.

He told me once how he got on his bicycle to the bus stop to take the hour-long ride to the next big town which had the nearest cinema around to see Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments. It seems of man’s primal desires to attach meaning to his surroundings. We have evolved with a gift for pattern-seeking. It allowed us to separate predator from prey and friend from enemy.

I think maybe he could relate to something he saw in those films. Something that somehow made him felt not so alone. If Charlton Heston can talk to God and come down from Mount Sinai in one piece, maybe he could too.

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