It was that stray chicken crossing the road in front of our car that triggered my long train of thoughts. Call it a reactionary response of my subconscious mind if you like. Not unlike when a cop character played by Shah Rukh Khan stumbled upon an old portrait on the wall and after a series of quick flashbacks, he realised that the crook he was about to kill was his own brother. Maybe I've watched one too many Hindustani movies, but the sight of that runaway chicken brought back vivid memories.

Such as chasing chickens out of the kitchen. All of a sudden, I was a nine year old boy again. You see, I was a kampung boy once, and my grandma used to ask me to chase away stray chickens that found their way into her kitchen. For a fleeting moment, I could almost feel the energy, the mere radiance of youth manifesting itself; being very much alive and full of optimism.

A time when people were able to take simple values for granted. When families were close knit and neighbours exchanged dishes everyday. A time when everyone knew everybody. And when each kenduri, or Hari Raya, always meant a big `gotong-royong'. It was a celebration of life in its purest sense.

My eldest daughter asked me why I was smiling, and it jolted me back to reality. Hastily, I put the car into gear and gently pressed the gas pedal. The stray chicken was no longer there, having crossed the road to wherever it had to go.

Strangers among us

This morning, when I took the elevator down at my apartment block, a man and his daughter got in. The girl was clad in a familiar kindergarten uniform. We readily talked about our daughters, since mine went to the same kindergarten a few years ago. The conversation was cut short when the elevator door opened, and we went our separate ways. It struck me then that here was a man I had so often noticed but never bothered to talk to. At best, a lift of the eyebrow, Ziana Zain style. And I admit that I've been guilty of labeling my other neighbours as `the Red Chevrolet', `the Silver BMW' or, simply, `MAV 8007'.

Suddenly I felt so lonely. For a middle class professional living in a metropolitan city with a population nearing 1.5 million, that feeling can be strange. What more with the advent of the latest telecommunication devices such as the handphone and the internet, one should find it hard to fathom such loneliness.

Perhaps it's because of our own desire for privacy. To have our own personal `room'. 'Space'. We tend to build walls; whether real or imaginable. And to transgress these walls would be to invade into one's privacy. A simple, friendly act like dropping by to say `Hi' could constitute as trespassing and subject one to liability in tort.

Pat a neighbour's kid a little too hard and you'd risk being charged with assault and battery. Try to exchange dishes with your neighbour, and chances are she would either think you're trying to show off or trying to poison her dog. After a while you resign to that urban fact and sigh that ignorance is bliss, hence it's best to ignore.

In this era of computers, laptops and internet, one tends to take refuge from such self imposed exile in the form of e-mails, e-messengers and chatrooms, basking in the surreal comfort of the cyberworld; a world of make believe. You believe that you have a lot of friends, but not until you have a punctured tyre (or flat battery, or both) early in the morning do you wish that you knew your next door neighbour.

Your mailbox (I'm referring to the traditional one) is empty, save for the occasional utility bills. Even the number of Hari Raya greeting cards keeps diminishing each year. There's not enough greeting cards for your wife or kid to hang around the house anymore, unless you choose to print all those Yahoo! and American Greeting cybercards that flood your e-mail Inbox.

Once upon a time

I can still vividly remember how I was first introduced to the computer. It was 1982, and one of my classmates at the Malay College had this Sinclair ZX 81 Personal Computer. It's a rudimentary piece of machine going by today's standards (the 286 type), but it was cutting edge technology at that time. And if you managed to type a love letter to your girlfriend in Tunku Kurshiah College using Wordstar and printed it on a dot matrix, she'd look up at you as if you were the next Bill Gates.

Now, just 22 years later, my nine years old daughter is sending e-mails to her friends, 'It's no biggie, Papa', and your neighbour's new BMW probably has more electronic gadgets than those on board the Space Shuttle.

Tell your kids that there was once this thing called Black & White TV, and they'd bombard you with curious questions or simply shake their heads in disbelief. Tell them that you survived your childhood watching just two TV Channels that started at 3.00 p.m. (and that just showing Sports TOTO results for the first one hour) and ends at 11.00 p.m. with just an hour of cartoons each day.

Or that you actually saw all hundreds of episodes of Dallas, Peyton Place, Hawaii Five-O, Six Million Dollar Man and Man From Atlantis. You'll have a tough time telling them that Charlie's Angels and Starsky & Hutch are not new. Tell them that you spent the better part of your days playing kites, guli (marbles), dam (checkers), congkak and caklempong.

Well, I did just that, and even went one step further. One fine weekend, my other half and I designated one whole day `going back to basics'. We went camping and brought with us fishing rods and kites (I couldn't find any congkak, and caklempong would be too ridiculous), and we spent the whole day teaching them how to fly kites and to fish.

It was like falling in love all over again, as I observed my children intently pulling the strings as I had painstakingly instructed, and jumping wildly when the kite soared effortlessly into the Ampang skies, and later jumping even higher when we managed to catch fish.

Happy as we were, I still felt a tinge of sadness. As the old saying goes, `Give me a fish, and I will eat for a day, but teach me to fish and I will eat for a lifetime'. But somehow I just knew this wouldn't be the case for them.

ZAIM AL-NAIM is a lawyer by profession, currently attached as group legal advisor in an oil and gas company. His love of writing, as he jokingly puts it, stemmed from his sleepless nights due to occasional bouts of insomnia, and he hopes to cure other insomniacs by putting them to sleep by reading his work.

He hails from Teluk Anson (now Teluk Intan), then a sleepy hollow town by the Perak river. His childhood days as an ordinary Malaysian kampung boy, his later days at Malay College and his legal education much influenced his writings, and he blends them all pretty well. He loves to highlight the struggle of the common people to obtain a meaning in their ordinary lives.

His blog is at http://zaimhq.blog-city.com and you may contact him at: zaimhq@gmail.com