Remembering the quieter side of Dr Siti Hasmah [WATCH]

When Tun Dr Siti Hasmah Mohd Ali died yesterday, I was left remembering her warmth, a plate of bihun and the extraordinary life she led, writes INTAN MAIZURA AHMAD KAMAL

KUALA LUMPUR: When news came yesterday morning that Tun Dr Siti Hasmah Mohd Ali had died at the age of 100, I found myself transported back to the cosy living room of her Kuala Lumpur home, where I had interviewed her almost four years earlier.

I could see the piano, the family photographs and a little cushion bearing a picture of her and her husband, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad. I could also see the stuffed toy she held as we talked.

And, most unexpectedly, I could almost smell the bihun goreng and kuih Melayu she had laid out for breakfast.

I had gone to interview her about Iraq — the humanitarian mission she led to Baghdad in 2000, when she was 73.

She travelled with an all-female delegation to Iraq, visiting hospitals and other facilities and witnessing the effects of sanctions and shortages on women and children.

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At one point, she was secretly invited to meet Saddam Hussein — so secretly that even members of her delegation did not know where she had gone.

And yet, sitting across from her all those years later, I remember neither the former first lady nor the pioneering doctor first.

It was the tiny, elegant, grandmotherly figure in a demure baju kurung, with neatly styled hair, glasses and a soft, gentle voice.

She invited me to sit down and, somehow, the room immediately felt less like the home of a woman who had spent decades at the centre of Malaysian public life and more like a grandmother's home.

Perhaps it was because everything around us seemed to point back to family — photographs of her children and grandchildren, pictures of her husband and reminders of a long marriage.

She had met Dr Mahathir when they were medical students in Singapore. They married in 1956 and had seven children.

But what struck me was how she still worried about him, fretting about how hard he worked and about his health. There was something wonderfully ordinary about it.

LET THE MUSIC PLAY

Then she sat down at the piano.

Her fingers, adorned with sparkling rings, moved across the ivory keys. She apologised for her eyesight, saying it was no longer what it used to be. Sometimes, she said, the black and white keys seemed to blend together.

But then she played. She even proudly offered to play the violin. I remember thinking how touching that was. She didn't seem to want us to remember that her eyesight was failing. She wanted us to hear the music.

Music had been part of her life for decades. She began playing the violin in her 20s and continued playing music well into old age, later taking up the erhu.

But what I remember most were the details between the big stories. Breakfast. Bihun goreng. Kuih Melayu. A newspaper.

At one point, I asked her to pose with a copy of the New Straits Times — of course, with the Sunday Vibes inside. She happily picked it up and smiled for me. There was no fuss. She simply obliged.

As our conversation continued, I remember thinking that this was no longer really an interview. It felt as though I had somehow been invited to breakfast with somebody's grandmother.

Her biography was extraordinary. She was among the pioneering generation of Malay women in medicine, becoming the first woman medical officer in Kedah's Maternal and Child Health department in 1965 and, in 1974, the state's first woman maternal and child health officer.

Her public work later extended into literacy, mental health and women's welfare.

LOVE OF FAMILY

But that morning in her living room, none of those achievements seemed to matter quite as much as the woman sitting in front of me. What stayed with me was her gentleness - the way she listened and laughed, the way her face lit up whenever she talked about music, and the way her brows gently creased whenever she worried that her husband was working too hard.

And then there were the photographs. So many smiling faces — pictures from her early years with Dr Mahathir and many more of her children and grandchildren, all in pretty frames lining the walls around us.

They seemed to tell their own quiet story of a woman whose life, despite decades in the public eye, always centred on family.

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Perhaps that's what death does. It makes us look past the grand sweep of a life and notice the little things that gave it warmth.

But a life is also made up of mornings like that one. Meals shared, music played, people we worry about and love, family photographs gathered around a home, and the familiar things we keep close because they mean something to us.

And I feel extraordinarily lucky that, for one morning, Dr Siti Hasmah allowed me to see that quieter side of her.

I had gone to her home hoping, rather cheekily, that I might bump into her famous husband.

Instead, I found the woman who had spent a lifetime beside him — a doctor, a pioneer, a musician, a mother and grandmother, and, above all, someone whose warmth made me feel less like a visitor and more like a guest at her table.

That's the Dr Siti Hasmah I will remember.

Not standing on a stage or beneath a formal portrait, but sitting beside her piano, smiling behind her glasses, apologising that her eyesight was no longer what it used to be — and then, with those slender fingers, playing anyway.