Penang |
I can remember the anticipation
and joy at the sight of the greasy brown paper bag or
the newsprint that held the supper
which my late dad had brought home around 10 p.m. I recall that the food tasted authentic and delicious then. Could it be just the
flavour of the rice noodles fried with lard and soya sauce or that it was
wrapped in banana leaves that added the aromatic flavour to the dish or the
reminder of simple joy ? The slightly charred broad rice noodles fried with
prawns and vegetables topped with gravy sauce and the char seow pao ( meat
buns) that had its grease soaking
through the brown paper bag were such delightful treats which were sometimes
brought home by my dad when he came home late in the evenings. My taste buds
and food preferences have evolved but the memory remains.
The Mansion restaurant, Penang |
There are always ties that bind
us, some are more transient than others. While there are ties that we will
never want to unravel from and only hope to strengthen them while there are
others that wither through passage of time. There are some ties that have good
days and bad days as they take efforts and they will remain a constant tug of
war.
School friends lose touch with
one another as life gets busy and only to catch up again after two or three
decades. It is interesting to see how everyone has gone on with their
individual lives and some of the things that happened to friends can be
awesome. But during such get together, we can never recreate the idealism, the
innocence and naivety we all might have had possessed at one time of our youth,
yet there is a certain synergy when school friends get together, we hope to
reinforce the link and share the memories we each had about the time we were in
the same classroom attending the same lessons for several years. We all share
the sense of nostalgia and we do not want to let go of the past that forms the
present. But how often we
find ourselves remembering things
differently from everyone else. It is not that our memories are distorted but
because we each had formed our own memories or perceptions about things that
had happened. Even if some people might have heightened ability to remember
events that had taken place months or years earlier, over time, our memories
about things do change because of changes that take place in our perceptions of
things or when we deconstruct the past events, we have become selective and we
remember certain incidents, people and events and forgetting the others. At
times, our understanding of what actually had happened might have even been
totally inaccurate in the first place, we end up remembering the versions that
are far from truth.
The Jigsaw Maker written by
Adrienne Dines is a story about a middle aged woman who runs a gift shop in a
small village called Rathshannan. One day, a photographer approached her in her gift shop to sell his
innovative idea of making wooden jigsaw puzzles which contained images taken by him of some of the places in
town; he proposed that they could collaborate in making these jigsaw puzzles in
that he would provide the images and she would provide some memories of the
events from the past so as to give a background history to these places. One of
the photographs was taken of the national school building and the mystery man invited her to
write about the events from a
certain year,1969 , hence invoking her journey to the past. As she recalled
things that happened then, she realized that too many pieces were missing and
as truth was unraveled , she realized that for close to four decades she had
carried with her an unspoken guilt for a tragedy that had not happened the way
she had imagined it. An interesting story.
When we look at our photographs,
we remember things some happy some not so happy but whether they are good times
or bad times , we have come through those moments and become who we are.
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