A mysterious crying affair

As time fly by, we will leave behind many things in our quest for the future. That is life. Same with me, but the brain will never let it go that easy. Those things known as memory still very much instilled in the prefrontal cortex of the brain. Once a while, I will walk down those memory lanes and many incidences will come rushing back. Those memories have made me who I am today. It is like having a dash of a smell of a used-to-love shampoo and it triggers a feeling and images of all the memories that are unknowingly embedded in that particular brain.

I used to live in a flat of Kajang Utama for about 6 years. Those days were the days of struggling where we; my housemates of three and I, spent most of our times studying to finish our tertiary education, it was for the first 3 years. Iza and I had added another three years for master degree while Kak Wan and As, they’ve opted for work, but we stayed put in the same house until Iza got married and one by one left the house.

Money was a big matter during those days. On a small stipend provided we managed carefully to accommodate all the needs. However, it never deterred us from being happy. During free time, we tried to get to know our neighbors and mingling away. But sometimes, our duty as students and workers took away the liberty to spend time with them all. Anyhow, we had been close to a few of them.

As the basis of any relationship, love bridged us with one another. Apart from the adults, there were children, many of them. Children were always behaving like one, but they were only children. At times, they did test our patience but humor us at other times. It was like one big family. We helped each other to the best that we could. Nevertheless not all the families there were the perfect family or at least the decent ones. Some of them were living lives which look like had been lifted straight from the TV’s dramas with either divorced parents, second wife, step child, insufficient money and drinking problems. In other words, we were surrounded with low level middle class family that found comfort in each other company.

Anyway, it was normal life still until one weekend. Early morning of that day, I was wakened up to a sound of a child crying. My room was at the end of the block, at the third floor of four stories building, near the stairs, so I used to hear many things; even of a couple discussing their private life. But then, that morning it was a crying sound and that too, the time was around 3 am. Therefore, only one object was lingering in my mind. Oh God! Not that.

You see, I am easily feared of ghost and since, I didn’t take much attention of it but tried as best to go back to sleep. After quite some time, the crying ended with a loud thud sound. There were questions popped-up of that but I was sleepy and feared; a combination that made my mind blurred. The best choice was to ignore and thus, I went back to sleep.

Since I had to go to the lab that morning, I left early, rushing down the stairs and not thinking much about the crying sound anymore. What’s more, all the others were still sleeping. There was really no one around given that it was Sunday. People usually prefer to sleep it off during Sunday morning.

The mind was fixed at work in hand until I reached home that evening; my roommate told me the worst. A child, the one who’s hyperactive, had fallen off the balcony and was found in the drain below the apartment. They said he was found by someone who walked his motorbike out from the parking place, it was around mid morning and the ants had started to swarm his body.

I knew the boy. The family just moved into the flat. He was maybe around two years old, staying with his father after the parents divorced or said so. The father had since remarried. Another version which was told was his birth mother had left the country to go back to her home country leaving both of them behind. Anyway, at that time they family just had a new addition of a family member when his step-mother delivered a baby boy few months back.

It was also all known that he was always beaten for being too naughty. Probably he was beaten that night and run away from home. Trying to sit on the fence of the balcony and fall off, thus explained the thud sound that I heard. Or worst, probably there was someone who was very disturbed with his behavior and took it to the dangerous level. Trying to quiet him off, the person might have shoved him hard and accidentally, lose grip and he fall off.

Oh my God! There goes my Hercule Poirot deduction. 

Anyway, the boy was too small to get on the top of the fence but he was small enough to get through the in-between vertical bar of the fence.

Gosh! I was not able to stop thinking about the incidence. He was there crying while I slept through the night. He was there lay dead when I walked to the lab that morning.

This incidence will be there whenever Kajang Utama is mention. Hopefully, he is living happily on the other side though I will never know what is really happen that morning.