A nephew bought a plastic bag of fresh water prawns from a stall on way back to my parents’ house in kampung after a trip to the cemetery during Qing Ming. These prawns were meant to end up as a dish for lunch. I took a peek and saw some of the prawns were still alive, wriggling and gasping for air. which I assumed they were caught not long ago. I was actually thinking maybe I could still save their lives by releasing them into the river not far from the house however agonized as to how to relay my intention to my nephew, him being a Muslim (my cousin himself a convert Muslim) and has little knowledge about fang sheng.
When I returned from collecting some pandan leaves nearby and had by then already made up my mind about telling my nephew of my intention to purchase the prawns from him, I found it a little too late as my aunt was already half way through getting the prawns ready for cooking. But I managed to secretly scoop up the few remaining wiggling ones and put them in a small basin of water , then made my way into the river and released them.
I slipped and fell while climbing up the muddy river bank, my track suit and slippers collected plenty of mud and I got lost while navigating my way home. I was in a daze , unable to believe that what used to be an endearing playground in my younger days has now been completely transformed into a foreign territory, of sort.
My siblings and I used to frequent this river almost on daily basis to bath and play and collect drinking water during drought seasons. I have not been to this river for so many years since I left home to pursue my studies later work in KK, but what had been a familiar sight and route has now turned into a pretty different sight, the river has changed its topography and I no longer could identify the place where we used to playfully ride on our neighbor’s sampan or helping my mother to wash the laundry while sitting on the rakit placed beside the river bank, with my mother listening to stories of our cheekiness in school told by our primary school’s teacher, who happened to be our good neighbor.
It used to be a well-tended path surrounded by rubber trees leading to the river, but it is now sadly being replaced by some overgrown bushes to the extent I could no longer tell the whereabout of the only house which used to stand where it was.
I came away from this slightly chaotic maze of confusion, but not without a lingering sense of melancholy that things and places, just like people and life itself, are subject to change and evolution, and what remains akin to only shattered glass shrapnels here and there, but which when pieced together, would form a big picture providing inadvertent clues to fragments of stories from the past.
Because time ironically stands still amidst the meandering shadows which we long left behind.
And that which we treasure and cherish is only a memory of what it used to be…
The river
some photos from Qing Ming:
We are one big family.
Papa offering a prayer for my late ma.
Me, laying some food for offering for a dear aunt, who passed away in a car accident more than a decade ago.
Niece Kewei using a brush & red paint to attentively rewrite the inscription on the tomb.
