One Friday Morning

I just got back from Penang last night. Today is Friday.

Nothing feels like home. The air is familiar, smell is homely, and atmosphere totally tranquil and serene, even with the loud welcoming voices of family members. Even a direly sick person will recover double the rate at his or her home, the real thing.

I woke up early this morning, 7.30am, and accompanied my parents for a morning walk. When was it, the last time we walked together in that fashion I cannot recall. Still, it was great fun walking with the two greatest folk in my life, under the cool air.

My mum went out for awhile. I took my shower and breakfast-ed, simply reveling at being home. Mum came back with a maid, and gave me instructions on what to do and to direct the maid as well. Then she's off.

She was certainly a peculiar being, the Indonesian maid. I first thought of her as a Vietnamese, as her eyes were small, shaped like an almond and drawn-back. They were squeezed into lines when she smile. Her skin betrayed her nationality though. She was tiny, maybe even diminutive, barely reaching my chest, and people who know me, know that I ain't Yao Ming.

Just to give my readers a picture of our height difference, the maid and I:

Of course, he's 2.29m.

After giving instructions, Mum just left. There was I, and this fellow being. She was already beginning to start cleaning the house. I reckoned that I can have some time to myself while she does her work.

Minutes later she called. She did not know my name, so it was like this 'Ahh...ehh' sound. She wanted to know where to get her gear for her job. Fair enough. I showed her where to get the water, the broom, the dust pan, and whatnot.

As I showed her around, her face always broke into a wide grin and her eyes into mere lines. I could not help noticing every time she does that. I also could not help my brain's imagination, as I looked down at her, I seemed to travel through time, back to the colonial times, when the British masters still rule Malaya.

Showing the maid around the house gave me this odd sense of being a colonial master myself. Odd, because Malaysia does not control Indonesia, and because I *am* not one. It is just that, I realised, or rather I saw in my mind's eye, that was how the Britons taught the aborigines stuff they had never dreamed of. They did not have the language to communicate as I have today, so it is up to imagination as to how they communicated with each other. And every time something wonderful is shown, perhaps a watch or a telescope, the faces of those natives would lightened up and started to chatter excitingly among themselves, while the Mat Sallehs smiled on. Just like that, when I showed her where she can get clean towels or where to fill her pail.

History is amazing when it's alive. You just have to breath life into it. Images and sounds will play in the mind, and you no longer belong to the present. In fact, everything of the present is a result of the past, the legacy of history.