Traffic was unusually heavy at nine this morning in the SS19 housing area here, as hundreds of people streamed into the peach-pink Abu Bakar As-Siddiq Mosque where special prayers were being readied.
An elderly Malay man in a blue Kancil driving past rolled down his window and asked: “Did someone pass away?”
“Yasmin Ahmad,” passers-by supplied.
“Ohhh...” he answered, shocked into silence. Instant recognition. The lines on his face deepened in sadness.
Yasmin Ahmad, celebrity film director and a giant in the world of commercial advertisements, was larger than life. The multicultural crowd that gathered in the mosque compound was proof of that, as well as reflecting the eclectic ethnicities she liked to use in her many movies and award-winning television ads shown in Malaysia and Singapore.
“She was a perfectionist,” said a Malay man met at the cemetery who remembers going on the various Petronas ad shoots with Yasmin.
“Not the easiest person to deal with. Had quite a bit of temper and was not afraid to show it,” the 49-year-old laughed softly.
“But she got things done,” he added.
“She was a darling,” said an ethnic-Chinese fellow reporter — off-duty — who had become friends some five years ago at a special pre-cinema release screening of Yasmin’s hit film “Sepet” at the Leo Burnett ad agency in Kuala Lumpur. It was Yasmin’s easy-going friendliness that touched her.
“Such a darling,” she repeated softly.
Yet for all the radical ideas and her penchant for shaking up the entertainment world while alive, her funeral was a sombre, quiet affair.
The crowds were respectfully silent at the mosque while her body was bathed and prepared for the last rites and again at the new Muslim burial ground in USJ 20 where she was laid to rest.
Tears ran down the faces of many freely today as they witnessed Yasmin’s body, cleaned and wrapped in pristine white sheets, laid into the clay yellow earth.
Yasmin’s husband, Abdullah Tan Yew Leong, staggered backwards and was gently led to a straw mat at the side.
Her mother, a tiny woman, was bowed under the weight of her age and very likely, at seeing her child go ahead on the last journey before her.
She passed out. The women nearby rushed forward and caught her in their arms, and gently put her on the mat as a mother lays her exhausted child to bed.
They fanned her prone figure furiously as the imam read out the last prayers for Yasmin’s soul to be at rest in a voice that rose hardly above a whisper.
The ladies in their headscarves dabbed unconsciously at their eyes hidden behind big, black sunshades. The men clapped each other on the back in masculine support, each gripping the other’s shoulder tightly.
A pall hung over them, heavy as the overcast dawn which greeted her death. It did not disperse even when the noon-day sun blazed overhead.
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