ONE of the earliest memories I have of my childhood home is waiting for the school bus in my mother’s front garden. It would be early enough for the dew on the grass to wet my white canvas school shoes, and still dark enough for the snails to be actively chomping on the moist vegetation of our verdant garden.
I used to squat there and poke their soft undersides gently with the stems of fallen leaves to see their bodies undulate at the touch. I loved seeing how the eyeballs on the ends of their long upper tentacles would retract if I brought the stem close – it was a childish thrill as I squatted there in the grass, being eaten alive by mosquitoes in the half light of daybreak.
I remember always checking the hanging thermometer on the porch wall. This was at the height of my undiagnosed OCD. I would check it three times, blinking hard each time, tapping the bottom where the mercury pooled, and then check it another three times. And repeat this. Another three times. I mention this because it is important. All that time spent looking at that wall thermometer, touching it for whatever comfort it gave me, means I have total recollection that in my tender years, the temperature was always hovering around 26-27 degrees Celsius at about a quarter to seven in the morning. It was balmy and comfortable, just like my sheltered suburban childhood on that quiet street in Petaling Jaya.
This was the early 1980s. When you think about Petaling Jaya in those days, you will remember new housing developments, young trees still slender and willowy, barely taller than the painted gates they stood outside of. The houses on my street were identical, but some the developers opted to build in mirror image, with the structure reversed. I befriended one such neighbour and was delighted to explore her home and wonder at the flip side of my own abode.
Of course, by the time we were both in secondary school, neither one of our homes really resembled the original as a number of home renovations had taken place in that decade, which was typical of the excesses of the time. This was, after all, the 80s. What was a modest double story 70s-era bungalow with a sizable verandah, had by 1989 morphed into a bloated version of its former self – the verandah eaten up and internalised to create a larger front room from which to twitch the curtains.
And twitching curtains was a real art form back in those days. The gang of kids I ran with would roam up and down the breadth and length of SS1/2X on foot, really just for the sake of roaming. Like a motley crew of after-school vagabonds still high on the day’s vim, we would gallivant around the neighbourhood after completing homework or attending mengaji classes, just as the afternoon sun had begun to abate, looking for fun, a laugh to be had, or litters of new kittens to visit. I especially remember one elderly lady on our street (truthfully, she was probably only in her forties at the time, but young children often attribute great age and decrepitude to those of a certain vintage), a feeder of feral cats whose piss-scented driveway itself would make one’s eyes water. We all absolutely loved to congregate on this woman’s car porch, cooing at the fresh kittens she seemed to always produce every couple of weeks. My mother would hear of it, of course, from another twitchy curtain, and berate me for risking my health and being a general nuisance to the neighbours.
That was the norm, back in the day. Often, there was a mother at home, a card-carrying member of the twitchy curtain set. This network of women seemed to always know which child belonged to which home. When my youngest sibling made a prison-break from his kindergarten which was a distance and a busy main road away, it was a kindly neighbour who spotted him crying on the side of the road and drove him home.
I tried that once, as a concerned adult – I asked some children noisily loitering in the street in front of my house if they were being ‘carted off’ by unknown elements (it was a new driver that I did not recognise, and funnily enough, driving a big white van - an Alphard) – and got an angry email from my neighbour for my trouble. Where I thought I was foiling a possible kidnapping, it was merely a first-world pickle of the “who’s getting dropped off where” variety.
Well, this is my neighbourhood now, a mere 20 minutes away from the one I grew up in 40 years ago. My parents still live in the same house, though those sapling trees are long gone. The Majlis Perbandaran, in one of their mass tree cullings of the early 2000s, deemed the tall old things too unsturdy to weather the seasonal monsoon rainstorms and strong winds. Some tree branches might have fallen down and caused damage to a Datuk’s gate. Or car – I can’t quite remember the details. A week later, it seemed that all the trees were guilty and were being punished for it. What was a beautiful, mature tree-lined residential street now resembled a stark, rather severe neighbourhood.
Everything took on a sun-faded, scorched appearance after the trees were gone, and even the grass looked thirsty. And it just felt like it got hotter. Perhaps the whole world did.
Urban sprawl is inevitable, in any place that people can live, work and play. Our quiet street by then had began to see more drive-through traffic as people and their cars discovered a way to beat the jams on the main artery from Section 14 and other parts of Kampung Tunku, to SS3, Kelana Jaya, Sungai Way, or further afield to Subang Jaya. They would drive through my neighbourhood at full speed, to shave some 3 minutes off their commute. In this particular decade of zooming traffic, I doubt very much my young friends and I would have been allowed to play on the street at all.
Which brings me back to my mother’s front garden. Nostalgia is a funny thing. You remember some things in such minute detail. The freshness of the grass underfoot. The abundance of garden snails, also underfoot. That particular quality of birdsong in the half light of daybreak. The cool, balmy feel of that memory. Always a pleasant 26 degrees. – The Vibes, November 1, 2020
