DECEMBER 21 — Kuala Pilah. Exactly where in this provincial town, am I? Around the bend, where cars from Seremban descend upon the hillside town closeted by rainforest reserves and pass a KFC — to assure visitors that if the cool weather does not heal their souls, there is fried chicken.

There are two other arteries shooting off from this town, one to Kuantan in the east and the other to Tampin in the south.

It’s my first time in Kuala Pilah but the association goes back to my days in Bangi, my campus days.

A month before our graduation ceremonies at UKM, the national university, my old hostel mate died. It was late night, and he was heading from Seremban back to his home, where I write this, when his motorcycle crashed. He never got to this bend that fateful night 20 years ago.

We never got the news since we were on hiatus — the end of final term and graduation was months apart. Generation X can struggle to explain the social dynamics of society before the Internet and when handphone owners were close to being unicorns. On how for months people can be detached completely from each other even if close to each other.

(Does anyone have a copy of the old Telekom directories where they display cross-state call rates?)

At my first world debating championships I asked for home addresses to keep in touch with foreign competitors and was intimidated when a few offered their university emails — alphanumeric babble.

So outside the giant university hall, his former roommate caught me by chance during graduation rehearsal and informed me drily about Zamri’s passing. Was there any other way to pass news of such overwhelming loss?

He was not to receive his scroll for graduating from the life sciences faculty.

Sitting here, the weight of time bearing on my generation or this representative in particular, how about this title: Ruminations of friendships, kept and lost, and what it means to be friends in the age of computers not telling you the answer to everything is 42?

Two Zamris

Every Deepavali during our schooldays was about amassing the most number of greeting cards, an unspoken competition among the siblings. The cards form holiday decor in ordinary homes, in our case strung in rows on three walls in our living room.

More goes into a physical greeting card. To buy it, write a standard greeting and Yoda forbid, visit the post office to post it. Affirmation it is.

(I would receive the least number of cards, as in a horrible kitchen knife accident on both hands would still leave me enough fingers to count how many I’ve received. My best friend Pit King settles for passing me lost, found and confiscated items from the prefect’s room. Though, deserted might be the better reference to them.)

What is the equivalent today?

It costs nothing to put someone in your virtual network and the app reminds users vital dates and updates. How much of the concern shown is the tool and not the account owner?

Already there are template responses, and in time artificial intelligence will lead to the app driving the relationship. Friends constantly sending commiseration messages every time Tottenham Hotspurs implode dramatically, even if they can’t tell my Spurs from the lot in St. Anthony’s city.

Can we tell acquaintances from personal friends, in the near future?

Though, to be honest, social media tools are not the first to remind us of dates.

(Before it was low tech notebooks. My late mom always used to pore through diaries which we turn into directories, insisting all her contacts are in there despite it looking like a jungle of scribbles.)

We do forget and therefore, rely on incidences, accidents, repetitions and encounters to draw friends back to our present.

Like being in Kuala Pilah, and remembering Zamri.

I believe we have indelible memories of every meaningful friendship. It can’t be just by being in the same department, class or party. Time and circumstance do not command friendships.

By the way, two Zamris died. One from school — I have not mentioned yet — and the other the one from university, and both shortly after term ended.

School Zamri was a mixed bag.

By the time SPM — Malaysia’s O-Levels — ended, I had a difficult friendship with Zamri. We were in the same class for three years, and in the next two years in different classes, which could have been different solar systems.

From being close to being awkward when we met it became, as he tried to impose himself as a cooler 16-year-old character. Not so much warmth, instead in its place was borrowed machismo, probably exaggerated since he had a small frame and wanted to come across as in control.

Kuala Pilah Zamri was the goalkeeper in the college’s hockey team, as was I, and we’d have ad hoc sessions in the open area beside our opposing housing units on top of a hill no one cared to visit. He was very humble.

I suppose it is tougher socially in cities, for city Zamri was also warm when not trying too hard to be grown-up. We met on the day he died, and we did talk as he showed up for the school fair as a new old boy. He quipped it would be the last time we’d meet since he was going off to college.

Both dead by the side of roads in the dark before their primes, one in a quiet stretch by the hills and the other beside the American embassy in the city’s busiest stretch.

The Melawati boy — a KL suburb — and the mild-mannered small town boy.

I have fond memories, which makes them friends. Even more, the memories help me remember myself too, during those days. How I was, how I felt then.

It has struck me lately that while more are in my web, aided for me by evil American firms if you ask PAS, it is more challenging to measure the value of online driven interactions.

I suppose the final observation is, today we have a high volume of personal updates and at breakneck speed. A posted picture goes through stages of social dissection let alone the individual’s overall social media presence. 

Does it allow space for focus on particular relationships and to measure them, when everything is in real time? After all, if the present crowds us to be in it, how much introspection is possible?

Hours have passed since I started — driving to different stops and forming new memories. Now I am in a near empty mamak by the coast, excusing my social media for most of the day, it has been therapeutic as much as revealing.

I’ve not kept critical friends courtesy of social media, though it has made it easier. In some senses, I have kept these critical friends despite social media. That they have not been lost in a sea of data. Drowned out by the now.

It also outlines the limits of machine knowledge and network. I don’t recall either Zamris in social media, and it would not be different if they lived through it. I recall when I consider the past or catch up with friends and talk about the past. About what we were.

Maybe social media is not omnipresent, yet.

Probably, I prefer it that way. 

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.