I have just returned from a 24-hour visit to my old hometown Johor Bahru (JB) where I was born and bred. I left for University in KL in 1971 and had since never actually lived in JB again except the trips home during term breaks and the regular visits to my parents after I started working. Mother passed away in September 2006 and after my return to Malaysia in January last, I made one trip to JB for the annual family reunion and had never again ventured there till yesterday.
Short, very short as it was the visit was full of nostalgia. JB had grown so much but the old town still retains its charm, messy as it still is today! But it seems more compact and somewhat tidier. Lots of development going on, hopefully things will get better.
I visited my parent's graves. Regretfully they are quite far apart and I had to drive from one to another. My father's grave had undergone a make-over and was newer and neater (he died in 1996). One of the marble tombstones of mother's grave (she passed on 1n 2006) was uprooted and I could not do much but leaned it against the box. I wish the Religious Department would do more for the upkeep of the cemetery. It is always terribly overgrown with weeds and the soil erosion is bad, and there was always heaps of rubbish here and there around the cemetery. Shame with all the financial resources they have they could not even make the effort to look after the place and upheld the dignity of the departeds' resting place. I drove around to the neighbourhood where I lived with my parents in two different houses (Nong Chik government quarters) from the age of 6 to 20. They have all been razed to the ground to make way for newer development. And the family land in Air Molek is now used as a paid parking lot and some food stalls and gradually being squeezed by other development. My eldest brother Long is adamant about not selling it and making some arrangement for a joint-venture development. Well I hope the day will not come when the government will just make a compulsory acquisition of the land and we will all be under compensated of the land's actual value.
I also stopped briefly at my 'almer mather' Maktab Sultan Abu Bakar (English College) where I studied from 1965-68 and took some photos and spoke to one of the teachers who promised to invite me to give a "motivational talk" to the students one day. Then there was the compulsory visit to my tailor "Mun On" at Jalan Trus. I had been patronizing that tailor since 1967 and nothing had changed about it, except those days I would pay RM3.50 to have a shirt made with my own material and today it is RM70! I still could not find another tailor who will do my short-sleeved batik shirt according to my liking as they do, that's why I kept going back to them all these forty years plus!!! Amazing isn't it! Anyway this time I deposited four batiks materials to be tailored and as a goodwill gesture they charged me only RM 60 per shirt! Hoong Po or Wan J will have to collect them and bring to KL once ready.
