Sometime into my dream yesterday night took me down the vista of years till I see a younger me, clinging onto my eldest aunt walking along the streets of Old Seremban. Like a baby koala, whose mom and dad were honeymooning Down-Under, it must have felt awful being misplaced. However, that’s the idea of a honeymoon; three people don’t fit nicely together in that term box. They had to find someone to house the fledgling for eleven days. “No fear”, yi ma gleefully exclaimed, “she’ll be as healthy as a young bamboo shoot when you love-birds return.” I was expectedly flabbergasted, and so I cried like a busted water hydrant for a day. It finally stopped after late Grandma Ah Nin made me a grasshopper out of some lalang grass.
Part of that memory constitutes an even bigger picture, which served to build my philosophy of life. What descended upon this six-year-old was the cruelty of reality, of learned helplessness and of appreciation. I have probably not told anyone about this; primarily because this happened a long time ago (in which memory is all but coherent) and also it seemed insignificant to many.
I digress. Holding onto the grasshopper, I walked hand in hand with my aunt along the streets of Old Seremban. (We covered that part already.) I recalled the line of buses at the station, commuters shouting for tickets, and the counter person’s indifference to their worries of not being able to board a seat in the bus. SO much noise fascinates an innocent mind, yet we continued towards Terminal 1 for some shopping experience. As my height allows me to have ample servings of knee views, it was easy to spot a 20 cent coin on the floor. Unbeknownst to my aunt, I had it swiftly in my hands as we entered the tattered building.
While she looked at clothes, I remained mesmerized, looking at the variety of colors and mannequins, like a deer entering a city (technically, this ain’t a city, and I ain’t a deer, but you get the drift). Holy Barney! There’s one pillow with loads of Barney snippets sprawling across it. I was ecstatic and my brains were spurting out. And omg behind it was one with many fishes on them. Somehow in between those discoveries, I lost sight of my aunt. As frantic as I ought to have reacted, I curiously walked out of the store into the main space only to have felt even more panicky than I had felt before. I wasn’t crying, that’s for sure.
In one corner, there was this boy. Yes, he was alone. Probably a little older than I was, but that didn’t matter because right in the back of my mind I told myself that perhaps he was lost too. Then I would have a friend and we could go find our guardians together. He sat there, that boy in his worn-out track pants and slippers (I got so used to staring waist down first), clad also in his grey Power Rangers t-shirt. It didn’t matter to him at all that he smelt funny or his hair was messy, for he kept eyes on passer-bys while persistently jiggling the paper cup in his hands. Before I know it, I was next to him. Seeing the cup filled with coins, prompted me to give mine away. And so I did and the boy stared at me with a look that splits between syukur and surprise, nevertheless he smiled. He then pointed to my right across my shoulders and I turned in reflex to see a worked up aunt storming towards our direction. Yi ma grabbed hold of my hands and yanked me away from the boy. “Don’t talk to strangers,” she said, “…dangerous” and under her breath I heard words like “dirty” and “beggar”. Beggar? What’s that? But it never did escape my mouth. Now, this memory wouldn’t leave my conscious either.
Blah,
Vonnie S.
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