APRIL 2 — I never set foot outside Petaling Jaya (PJ) until I was 18 years old. Born a kilometre away from my childhood home, I even attended the primary and secondary schools down the road. With my parents away at work from dusk till dawn, my grandmother raised me.
I believe “Amah”, as I affectionately called my grandmother, lived in fear of having her only grandson kidnapped.
“Watch out for cars and vans stopping by, don’t talk to anyone, come home straight after school,” Amah would say. That was her daily mantra.
“Otherwise people will catch you, take you to a foreign land, chop off your hands or legs and make you a beggar,” she warned of the possibilities that could happen on my four-minute walk to school.
So my weekday routine was to attend school, come home, complete my homework, watch 30 minutes of cartoons on TV, attend tuition (located at a teacher’s home a few houses away) and go to sleep.
Weekends were similar except my parents would take me to the Atria Shopping Gallery and Subang Parade mall.
They assured me that these shopping centres were just as “fun” and “exciting” as Sungei Wang Plaza and Lot 10, retail paradises my schoolmates raved about.
They were located in a land called Kuala Lumpur. I had only heard of it from school history lessons.
“Haiyah, there’s no need to go there (KL). So jam, crowded and dirty. Dangerous some more,” my mother said.
She would then repeat Amah’s mantra of there being kidnappers, this time, lurking in KL.
I was a katak di bawah tempurung; a “frog” living under a coconut shell (PJ), ignorant of the world beyond it.
This “frog” finally visited KL with a friend after his Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) exams.
We took the bus to Imbi Plaza to buy computer games on a Saturday afternoon. But we stayed for more.
It turned out that my mother was both right and wrong about KL. Yes, our capital city is congested, crowded and dirty.
I also found it to be vibrant, exotic and beautiful.
I saw a man use the “F”, “C” and “P” words to curse a bus driver who refused to let him get into his overcrowded vehicle. A stranger helped me up when I slipped on a puddle of water near the Puduraya bus terminal.
Pedestrians of different shapes, sizes and colours walked by a blue and red graffiti on a Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman shophouse which said: “Reez wuz here.”
Most of them were oblivious to it, but some frowned at the defaced wall, while others smiled and admired the artwork enough to snap photos of it.
At the Lake Gardens park, two guys were lying under a tree, looking lost in an alcoholic fog amid empty bottles of beer. Further into the park, a family of five were having a picnic. I could smell the aroma of goreng pisang.
At the Jalan Alor hawker area, I sat on stained stools while savouring the best barbecued chicken wings ever.
In this city of beauty and ugliness, I was worlds away from the Petaling Jaya suburbs with its orderly roads and mostly mono-racial community.
Speaking of roads, the KL highways and transportation system are reminiscent of the city itself: an ever-growing, ever-congested, and ever-beautiful flyover-filled network that can befuddle Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation mobile apps.
You see, most GPS navigation apps feature two-dimensional views.
Even today, decades after that first trip, this slow-learning “katak” still finds himself occasionally lost while driving or commuting through KL’s labyrinth of intersecting routes.
After years of navigating through the mostly flat PJ road system, he needs to be more technologically savvy when tweaking Google Maps’ 3D satellite view to see if his route lies along a flyover or the underpass beneath it.
Also, if you take the wrong bus, light rail transit (LRT) or monorail route, you could waste minutes, even hours, returning to the right transportation network. Make a wrong turn while driving, and you might spend precious time course correcting.
Yet, amid the occasional transportation delay and regular traffic jams, there are sights to behold outside our vehicle windows: a city every bit as human and beautifully imperfect as ourselves.
But the roads are growing familiar the more I travel through them; the places are becoming recognisable the more I frequent them. Someday, slowly but surely, I’ll know this city like the back of my hand.
After all, who’d want to lose his way in a city that is going places?
* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.
