A few days ago, I noticed from my live traffic feed that I had a reader from Parit Buntar, Malaysia. Boy did that open the memory floodgates. I have lived in many countries, in different cities, but I spent most of my childhood in this little town on the border of the states of Penang and Kedah. But it is actually situated in the state of Perak. Pretty much like Basle, but far from it.

My earliest memories are of my experiences in my maternal Aunt's house which was situated on the main road which led to Butterworth, Penang. It was a brick and wooden structure, with a huge balcony on the second floor, set far back from the main road. The land was seperated from the main road by a parit (drain), and so to get to the house, you had to drive your car over a rickety little wooden bridge. Until today, I can still hear the lorries (semis/trucks) passing by on the main road at all hours, making the ground tremble as they sped by. Ironically, the sound of street traffic doesn't bother me today. I find it rather soothing. My aunt had a fruit orchard and raised chickens behind her home. She would take me along in her little car to buy chicken feed...and again, if I try hard enough, I can smell the grain and corn and what not that goes into chicken feed packed in huge hemp sacks. I also now have an irrational fear of chickens as I also remember being chased by a few rouge chickens gone amok. I was pretty tiny back then so the chickens were relatively huge. I remember picking eggs, fresh brown warm eggs, and local Malaysian fruits like rambutans, mangoes, cikus (looks like a kiwi but tastes very different), and mangosteens, eating them right under the tree.



My parents were working in Kuala Lumpur and they would visit ever so often. Funnily enough, I was so accustomed to my aunt and uncle, and their kids, that it would take me a few days to figure out who these interlopers were. I knew I liked them because they would take me to the local "posh" restaurant for a Banana Split, and to the playground which had a huge metal climbing structure shaped like a rocket. I could have lived in the playground if they let me. I remember thinking the huge drain in front of the house as a river. While I was fed cabai (hot chillies in Kedah-slang) and nyok (coconut milk), I was also read the complete works of Enid Blyton at bedtime. And so the drain was a river, and underneath the chicken coop, my secret hideaway.

The last time I visited the house, I was 12, and my Mum's funeral was being held there. She is buried at the nearby mosque, along with my grand-dad, and other ancestors. My aunt passed away a few years ago, and the last time I saw her was during a short visit to my cousin's house in Penang in 2000. She did not recognize me. Today, when I do hink about the past, which is not very often, I think of her not as the shell of a woman that I saw last, but as the energetic lady who would spend ages haggling with the local towkay (chinese shop owner) over the chicken feed, who would spend the afternoon with me on the balcony, smoking her cheeroot, and who was such a strong presence in my idyllic childhood. As I type this and look out to my snow filled backyard, I wonder how I got from running around the chicken coop screaming for someone to save me from the psycho chicken, to here.