From a relatively clean neighbourhood in Kajang, we moved to one that's dusty and ugly with all manner of litter and punished by the near constant roar of traffic in Petaling Jaya.

No. It was not a sudden attack of insanity that grabbed and plunked us there; the move was dictated by the need to be closer to the children's school which is a fair distance from Kajang; meaning the transport cost would've been prohibitive, like fuel and toll charges.

Add the calculus of wear and tear on the nerves of the driver and you'd have as fine a reason as any for the decision. Budget constraints mean automatic counting of the sens. A situation in empathy with the national state of affairs, don't you think? Well, at least in microcosm, okay?

At the first sight of the double-storey link house, our new home, my heart sank and a silent groan squeezed out of me like toothpaste.

I've passed by that area countless times before on the main road leading to Damansara Jaya and to other points of the compass. And always this thought trotted through my mind: "Dear Lord, the poor souls."

The cheek-by-jowl houses are packed in an area bounded by two narrow capillary-like roads. Heavily populated by people and vehicles, I already felt the neighbourhood closing in on me.

How easily one becomes spoilt. The problem is although I've spent my all my adulthood practically out of a suitcase as demanded by a nomadic life, it does get tougher as the years pile up.

At my age one yearns to be anchored down by a bit of routine with little by way of surprises such as sudden uprootings. Furthermore, the suitcase had long been exchanged for family life and, that means accumulation of belongings - lorry loads now.

It's not as though I do the packing for the nine of us, you understand. My missus won't trust me with that responsibility; my slap dash technique doesn't quite thrill her.

Propitious sign

Anyway returning to the topic, my eyes swept around, taking in the slope-roofed houses. They were a motley crew, to say the least; most badly in need of a fresh coat of paint, including ours.

Some of the front yards had boxes of all manner of stuff scattered around; looking as though yearning for the garbage man to pull them out from their misery of neglect as the weather mercilessly beat down on them on a daily basis.

Some units exuded a family air with the washings set out to dry at the front, or chained dogs with tongues lolling under the car porch, greeting passing strangers with rolling thunder barks. Just the job for killing boredom.

Then I spotted a mamma and papa pair of pigeons, cooing or feeding their two little ones in a nest on a little ledge under the roof of the neighbour's house on the right. Ours too, just outside the right widow of the hall, boasted a nest hanging from the blackened wooden struts supporting the last bit of the sloping roof, home to honey birds.

Their two chicks and parents, our landlord pronounced, were a propitious sign. There was a little tragedy in the making there which I'll leave for later.

By the time we moved last June with the final load of the household barang including potted plants, I'd heard enough to know that our new place of abode had clocked up adventures worthy of a book.

Apparently the previous tenants had been some foreign students who, allegedly upset with their college, had ripped up an expensive leather sofa set, among other thrashings caused by riotous parties late into the night. I'm sure the neighbours must've toasted their departure. So, quite rightly the landlord is planning to sue the college.

Our first days were unsettling. The household stuff was piled up everywhere, so one had to carefully negotiate them to be safe from barked shins and stubbed toes. Within days, chaos had been rearranged into order under the uncompromising hands of household's women; in itself a miracle as they discussed and agonised over the best place to display practically every item.

The males, carrying many scars from previous encounters where egos suffered necessary wounds, wisely kept out of the debates.

In between, we observed the honey birds. The parents took turns to fly off and get the meals for their two offspring. One was rather healthy, the other, sickly.

A few days later, at the urging of my daughter I had a look at the two. The healthier one was viciously kicking his or her weaker sibling with a cold concentrated look in its eye; the look of an assassin. This time both parents were absent and when they came back, they fed only the thug of a chick while turning a deaf ear to their scrawny child's hungry but weak cries.

Real life was more painful than watching such an episode broadcast over the National Geographical channel. My daughter was profoundly disturbed at such cruelty. No matter what shine I put on the incident, I knew there was no way to hide the brutality of life in the raw.

Couple of days later, the inevitable happened. The ill-fated creature had been kicked right out of the nest and lay on the ground in a daze. It was rescued and brought into the TV room, but all the loads of tender loving care lavished on it came to naught: the chick was just too weak to be fed.

My daughter had named the bird, Cherm. In less than a week the poor thing was leg up, flat on its back. Cherm was buried in the yard with a little marker carrying its name acting as a headstone.

Leaking roof

However, life marches on. And the next problem to land on us added to the woes of settling down to a new place.

They came with a heavy downpour; leakages in so many different places one was tempted to believe that we were actually conned into living in a most fiendishly clever camouflaged sieve ever constructed.

At the hall, a thin stream of rainwater was gushing down a corner, threatening to swell into a small river.

In the master bedroom the rain was really wreaking havoc. At one end where our precious old family photographs were piled up, rainwater had gleefully sprayed on it like a malevolent vandal.

When the rains subsided, a quick survey of the premises was carried out. My cousin pulled himself up onto the rafters to take a look there; and came down dazed, in a somewhat hysterical state.

"You won't believe it! The whole place is a mess of pipes running all over the place. Very difficult to fix," he cried. It didn't need much guesswork to conclude that the patchwork had been the order of the day when the tangled network of pipes was laid.

The landlord made two attempts to plug the leaks while trying to foist the house on us in exchange for a rather handsome sum. For the second successful attempt he had to bring in a crane to lift a long white pipe to the loft.

The crane trundled through the backlane and then after some agonisingly slow manoeuvring, hoisted the pipe to the first floor for the final phase to return our frayed nerves to normalcy.

The heavily pitted backlane, which construction trucks, school buses and the usual cars and motorbikes had been made impassable by the crane squatting there. Which, naturally, upset a whole clutch of people who had exercised squatter's rights over the lane which must be a shortcut leading to somewhere.

You should've heard the shouts, the honking of horns and curses that filled the air. But the crane stood firm, imperious in its disdain of the abuse hurled at it; supremely confident that its sheer bulk had outnumbered the disgruntled lot.

It was proven right when they dispersed after having exhausted their vocabulary of expletives and when they noticed that the clock was against them.

When the next heavy rains hit us, the leaks had become near non-existent. However, the family has decided to move elsewhere from this sick house later this year. Aaaaargh!!!