The Silent Art



It was a Friday night in Bangsar. She sat alone in her parked car, just off the narrow road where the four blocks of low-rise flats stood. Ten stories each, old and worn. The kind of buildings forgotten by time and by government promises.


Paint peeled off the walls like sunburnt skin, and rust clung to the stair railings as if it belonged there. She doubted any upgrades had been done in years. Probably never would. Not for these kinds of flats not in Malaysia. But life still pulsed through them.


Old government housing. Home to teachers, nurses, office clerks, delivery men. The kind of place where laundry stretched like flags between corridors, and black cats moved like ghosts between motorcycles. She often came here in the evenings whenever her daughter had dance class at Brickfields, just a short drive away.


That place, on the other hand, was chaos. Double-parked cars, relentless honking, no parking unless you wanted a summons. So this became her ritual. Park here. Wait it out. Engine off. Windows up. The mosquitoes here had a political agenda. She tilted the seat back, closed her eyes, and tried to meditate.


Just breathe, she reminded herself. Just But then, she saw them. At the main court between the blocks usually a sepak-takraw battleground tonight it had transformed into something else. A Silat class. Children lined up in rows, barefoot and focused. Some serious. Some restless. All dressed in black, top and bottom. What she once teasingly called the black pyjamas.


There were boys trying to perfect their stances, arms stiff and proud. Girls moving like wind, eyes following the instructor’s every move. Something in her stirred. She knew those steps. She knew that fire. She used to be them. She watched in silence, leaning forward slightly now, elbow resting on the car window, chin cupped in one hand. It was all still the same. The sharp turns. The low stances. The sudden “HUH!” from the instructor cutting through the humid night. And then she felt it. Not just memory. Longing. It’s been years...


Since she stepped onto a gelanggang. Since she wore her own black pyjamas. Since she struck the earth and felt it strike back. She hadn’t stopped silat by choice. There was something sacred about watching them these small warriors, still untainted by ego or politics.


Just learning how to move. How to breathe. How to stay rooted. She smiled to herself. No one noticed her. And that was how she liked it. She didn’t learn silat because it was beautiful or because her father wanted her to carry on a tradition or because it was poetic, graceful, or even culturally important.


She learned silat because she was tired of feeling small, tired of feeling like prey. It began with a single, simple truth: She wanted to protect herself. Not just from strangers. But from the boy in the basement. She learned silat not to perform but to survive. She wanted to walk through hallways and not flinch.


She wanted to step into the world and not shrink. She wanted to fight not just others but the trembling inside her own chest. Her first cause wasn’t spiritual. It wasn’t noble. It was personal. It was her saying: “Never again.” Somehow just like evolution, the meaning of silat would change. It evolve. It deepen.


But the root remained the same: To not be helpless ever again. She smiled, remembering how Silat first came into the picture.


Her father caught her in a full-blown fistfight with two Chinese boys from the kampung. They had made some comment about girls being “useless” So she proved them wrong by launching a slipper at one and tackling the other into a longkang. It wasn’t her proudest moment. But it wasn’t her worst either.


At the time, he had watched from a distance arms folded, expression unreadable before calmly pulling her aside and saying: “You want to fight, fine. But learn to do it properly. With technique. With purpose. Not like you're in a pasar malam riot.”


Back then, she rolled her eyes. Unimpressed. Uninterested. Dismissed it as one of those “dad things Now, standing in front of him again, report card in hand and bruised ego in tow it didn’t sound so bad. He had brought her to see a class. Just once. A small open hall behind someone’s house. Red bricks.


Rattan mats. Mosquitoes everywhere. And a group of boys and girls in full black moving in eerie unison. She remembered sitting on the side, arms folded, legs swinging under the bench, while her father brought her to the gelanggang one evening.


It was less an invitation, more a soft ambush.



“Just come watch,” he had said. “No pressure.” Famous last words. The hall smelled like dried sweat and minyak urut.


The mat was crowded with boys and girls in black pyjamas, moving in eerie unison like a cult she didn’t sign up for. Her father had walked straight up to the tall man with the white beard and deep voice.


“Haji Shukor,” he said, grinning. “This is my daughter. Maybe she’ll take after me.”


Haji Shukor turned, looked her overfro m top to bottom and squinted. Then, without missing a beat: “Ah. The youngest. The tomboy one.”


She blinked. She hadn’t even said hello. He nodded to himself like he’d cracked a code. “Ya, can see it. Got that macam nak gaduh face.”


Her father looked pleased. She looked mortified. Macam nak gaduh? I just sat down! She gave a half-smile and nodded politely, eyes darting to the students on the mat.


They were all moving the same way, same angle, same breath, even their *HUH!*s sounded choreographed. It unsettled her. She had an issue with unison. She didn’t like being part of the flock.


She was the kind of girl who zigged when everyone else zagged. It wasn’t that she couldn’t follow. She just didn’t like to.


“Why must we all turn left?” she asked once. “What if the danger is on the right?”


“If you want to hit people, at least learn to do it properly with a guru.” Remarked father ,She blinked. The corner of her mouth twitched. So considerate, this man.


As if enrolling her in violence but with structure was the most fatherly thing to do. She gave a half shrug. “Let me think about it,” she said. Like he’d just offered her badminton lessons. Or guitar.


But somewhere inside, she was already picturing herself in black pyjamas ready to kick the next boy who said girls were weak. Properly. With a guru, as approved by Dad.


Then it was report card day. She was still in primary school scrappy, stubborn, with a fringe that refused to behave. She stood in front of her father, toes curled on the tiled floor, while he unfolded the familiar sheet of paper. The results weren’t terrible.


But they weren’t her sister’s either. The one born just 363 days before her. The one who collected academic trophies like souvenirs. First in class. Always top 3. Neat handwriting. Polished shoes. She… hovered at Number 7, occasionally to number 12. Once 18 but that year she had the flu and a grudge against fractions, so it didn’t count.


“For a class of 45 sometimes even 50 that’s still decent,” she would later argue with herself. Upper middle class student. Not elite, but respectable. Her father skimmed through the subjects quietly.


He didn’t say much when he saw the F in Mathematics. He never really did. “Try harder next time,” he said, as usual. “You can do better in maths.” That was all. No shouting. No guilt trips.


It was expected like rain during monsoon. Maths failure was part of her academic personality. It remained her mortal enemy Her history and geography were solid always As. At least she is good at something.


He was a fair man, her father. Didn’t believe in forcing excellence. Just effort. Perhaps this is what makes her love him even more. As long as you passed, it was good. If you hit the top ten, even better he might take you out for ice cream.


But that day, what made him pause wasn’t the numbers. It was near the bottom.



He frowned. “Conduct: Poor. Fair,” he read aloud. Then he looked up. “What happened?”


She looked at the ceiling. Then the floor. Then finally mumbled, “I fought with the boys.”


He blinked. “You what?”


“I fought with the boys,” she repeated flatly. His eyes widened.


“Why would you do that?”


“Because they’re stupid.”





“Excuse me?”


“They said we girls are sissy and weak.”


He tried to suppress a smile but failed. “And so?”


“So I challenged them. I beat the one who started it.”


There was a long pause. He just stared at her equal parts amused and stunned. “You know,” he finally said, “you can’t go around beating people just because they say stupid things.”


“I didn’t beat everyone,” she muttered. “Just the one who said stupid things about us girls.”


He exhaled. Rubbed the back of his neck like he always did when he was trying not to laugh or lose patience. Then he paused, glanced sideways at her, and said almost gently, almost hopeful: “I have an idea. Silat. Might be good for you.”


She looked up. Ah. That again. She didn’t tell her father the real reason for the sudden change. Not that day. She didn’t tell him about the boy in the basement. The neighbour. The lie. The hands that moved too fast, the panic that rose in her chest like smoke. She didn’t tell him how she fought back, how she kicked, how she threatened to scream, how she ran.


She didn’t cry or scream or report. She just came home, shut the door to the shared bedroom, saw her reflection in the cupboard mirror and hated it. The girl in the glass looked helpless. And that, more than anything else, made her furious.


And she hated what she saw. The girl who froze. The girl who followed. The girl who was almost Before the thought could finish, her fist moved. Once. Twice. The mirror shattered. Cracks spidered across the surface, before pieces fell like glass rain to the floor.


She stood there, knuckles bleeding, breathing hard. Not crying. Just done. So she did the only thing that made sense. She waited until dinner was done, and her father was sitting alone in the dinning room reading the evening paper.


She sat on the chair beside him, arms on the table. “I want to learn silat,” she said. He turned slowly, surprised but only slightly. He looked at her. Really looked. Eyes narrowed. Silent. Studying.


She braced herself for the questions. But they never came. Instead, he just nodded. And for a brief second, she saw the corners of his mouth twitch. Not quite a smile, but something close.


“Alright,” he said. “I’ll inform Haji Shukor.” That was it. No lecture. No probing. No “why now?” But she knew. He was pleased. Not because she wanted to learn silat. But because she chose it on her own. With fire in her eyes.


She started classes the following week. It was held at the same open hall her father once trained in, under the towering presence of Hj Shukor himself. But it wasn’t Hj Shukor who led the sessions anymore.


It was his elder son, young, good-looking, a little too aware of both those facts. He was firm, precise, and loud. She liked his style mostly. She liked the way the movements felt in her body: grounded, flowing, sharp like poetry in motion.


But there was one thing she couldn’t stand. The “Huh!”


“Again—HUH!” the young silat master shouted at her. “You must sound the strike. From here!” he’d say, tapping his own chest.


Every movement had to come with a grunt, a shout, a bark. Like punctuation marks being forced out of her. She hated it.


She preferred silence. The quiet power of breath. The inward focus. Not this theatrical HUH! that made her feel like a noisy kettle. ​





One day, after class, he came up to her. “You move well,” he said, tossing her a towel. “But you don’t sound it. Why don’t you let the voice come out?”


She looked at him flatly. “Because I don’t like people telling me when I should make noise.” He blinked, unsure if she was joking. She wasn’t. He nodded, slightly amused.


“Okay. But just so you know… when the time comes to fight, your voice is your first strike. Let it out before they take it from you.”


She didn’t reply. She just sipped her water and walked away. He had a point. But still… the shouting felt fake. Her silence was sharper. Even from the back of the training hall, she could feel his gaze, Hj Shukor. The grandmaster. Old lion of the art. His presence filled the room like a storm that didn’t need to thunder. He didn’t often speak. Didn’t need to. One look was enough to correct your entire posture.


But today, he spoke. To her. “You,” he said, pointing with his tongkat. “You move well. But I don’t hear you.” The room fell quiet.


She blinked. “Sorry, Tok Guru?”


He stood slowly, leaning on his cane. “Silat is not just movement. It’s breath. It’s voice. It’s sound. Where is your HUH?”


She shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t like making noise, Tok Guru.”


He narrowed his eyes. “Fighting is not embroidery, girl. You must declare your strike.”


She stayed quiet.


“Even the tiger growls before it pounces,” he said. “Even the cobra hisses before it bites. You? You move like a ghost.”


She couldn’t help it she smiled.


“Exactly.” He grunted.


“Ghosts don’t win fights. They linger in regret.”


Everyone laughed. She didn’t. Later that day, as she trained in a quiet corner of the field, she thought about what he said. Maybe he was right. Maybe silence was not always strength. the sound wasn’t for the opponent.


Maybe it was for her to claim her space. To say I’m here. I exist. I strike. But still… she didn’t like shouting. “I’ll roar in my own time,” she muttered, sliding into a low stance. “And when I do… they’ll feel it.”


And so there she was again, sitting in her car watching the children silating under the open sky. Some were precise, others clumsy. One kid kept tripping over, but she smiled anyway. She didn’t expect it, but the ache came suddenly. A tight pull in her chest. She missed it.


The movements. The stillness before the strike. The warm, dusty training ground of her youth. The sound of wooden tongkat tapping the floor. Hj Shukor’s voice shouting across the hall: “HUH! Mana suara kamu?”


She missed all of it. But silat didn’t leave her. It was taken. It ended the day they moved. When the resettlement came, her whole kampung was uprooted. From the wooden houses in the village to the sterile concrete blocks in Chai Chee.


From open spaces to tight corridors. From known neighbours to unfamiliar stares. Everyone was scattered. She tried to look for them Hj Shukor, his family, her silat brothers and sisters. But they were gone. No address. No forwarding names.


Just echoes in memory. Her silat didn’t end with a goodbye. It faded quietly. Like how kampung fires die after midnight when no one's watching.


And there she was now, watching another generation begin. A new rhythm. A new lineage. ​





She stayed seated until the time for her to move out as her daughter’s class will be ending soon. Then, slowly, she adjust her seats and drive away.


“My silat didn’t die,” she whispered to herself. “It just went underground.” She used to think silat was all about form the sweep of the arm, the precision of a kick, the control of breath.


But that was just the skin of it. Real mastery was quieter. Slower. The real fight was not against another but against the voices in her own head. “Invisibility,” her guru had once said, “is not disappearing from the world. It’s disappearing from your own reactivity.”


She now understood. Martial art wasn't about defeating the enemy. It was about not becoming one. Inner self-defence wasn’t loud. It was the strength to stay calm in humiliation.


The courage to walk away without proving anything. The grace to protect your peace without drawing a weapon. She still trained. She still moved. But now, every motion was a prayer of restraint. She once believed Silat was about the body. Now she knew it was about the soul.


Silat is not about creating war, but preventing one. It wasn’t the moves that mattered. It was the pauses in between. The stillness before the strike. The silence that holds a thousand words and chooses not to speak. As a child, she learned the forms. The patterns. The strikes.


As a woman, she was now learning something harder: How to defend herself without raising her hands. How to disarm without drawing blood. How to walk away without leaving her dignity behind. “True silat,” the old master had once told her, “is the art of not needing to show your art.”


The real fight wasn't outside it was internal: When to speak and when to remain silent. When to hold space and when to walk away. When to forgive.


And when to detach without bitterness. She had read warriors who could break bones but not their own patterns. She had read about men who conquered battlefields but not their anger.


And women who smiled sweetly but were drowning in resentment. Now she trained differently. Each breath became her strike.


Each retreat, her block. Each smile, her stance.

As she drove toward Brickfields, the city noise softened behind the windshield—muted by the hum of the engine, by the rhythm of her breath.

The road bent, then opened, and for a brief second—time shimmered. She saw herself standing by a mountain forest edge, barefoot on damp earth, wind in her hair.

She was moving fluid, precise. The silat strikes came not as attack, but as memory. The movement was in her bones, older than language. A spiral of breath, weight, stillness.

The keris rested in her selempang, not drawn. It didn't need to be. It was enough that it was there—like a spine of the ancestors wrapped around her waist. Not to be brandished.

Only to remind her: You carry power not to display it, but to absorb its lesson. She stepped, shifted, blocked the wind with an open palm.

Not to push it away but to feel it. She turned, not to strike an enemy but to realign herself. A bow to the unseen.

A salute to the silence. And then just like that the vision folded back into itself. ​





She was back in her car. The light turned green. She moved forward. The girl she had once been would have never understood this form of practice silent, invisible, invisible even to herself at times. But now, every journey was training.

Every breath a kata. Every act of restraint, a revolution. She tightened her grip on the steering wheel. The world outside hadn't changed. But she had. She parked by the side of the road, where other parents were already waiting in their cars, engines humming softly in the afternoon heat.

Children in bright costumes darted out from the dance studio across the street, laughter rising and fading like waves. But her daughter wasn’t among them yet.

Somehow, she still found it difficult to understand how silat what was once whispered into the soul through breath and shadow had become a sport. A medal game. A performance before judges and cameras. It wasn’t that she disapproved.

​She understood the pride. The preservation. The beauty of young bodies moving in rhythm across polished floors. She had watched the tournaments. She had seen the power in it. But something in her resisted. How could something so deeply rooted in spirit become a scoring system?

How could an art that once taught humility and restraint now demand showmanship and applause? She wasn’t against evolution. But she hadn’t yet made peace with it.

Silat, to her, was a language passed in silence. A way of being. It was not meant to win crowds, but to lose ego. It was not to conquer others, but to temper oneself. Why had it become a competition? Why must it be ranked, judged, packaged for the Asian Games? These were questions she was still trying to understand. Still wrestling with.

And maybe, like all things sacred, some parts of silat were not meant to be explained only lived. She leaned back slightly, letting the air-conditioner hum lull her for a moment.

Then, from the side pocket of her bag, she pulled out the small notebook its pages softened by time, margins crowded with thoughts and fragments of old selves. She flipped through until her eyes landed on something she had scribbled once, half-forgotten but now glowing with clarity. “He who knows others is wise he who knows himself is enlightened. He who conquers others has strength he who conquers himself is mighty” Lao Tzu She exhaled, slow and deliberate.


Yes. That was it. That was what all this had been leading to. She didn’t need to win battles. She needed to break patterns.

She didn’t need to wield power. She needed to hold presence. And the truest silat? It was this waiting without restlessness. Watching without judgment. Moving only when it was time.

She closed the notebook just as her daughter stepped out from the building, barefoot and smiling, a towel slung over her shoulder. She reached for the door handle.

​Ready








nmadasamy@nmadasamy.com