My Friend M…..

The mind is a strange thing. You can not think of a person for years and then something out of the blue triggers a memory and then you remember everything as if it was yesterday and you just must know everything about him now.  Last week  I thought of M,just out of the blue. Haven’t seen him for about 20 years now, but I called up another friend, Y, who says he’s well and married with kids and all. (Funny how some folks equate being married with being well, I’ve often observed it to be some kind of a stiff sentence with little option for parole…)

M is a guy I knew from my hometown,  Seremban. We were a hockey-crazy town, and I played for my school as well as a local club. Heck, I even made it into the State’s junior squad. Mid-70’s was a long time ago, in years and kilograms  

Seremban had this beautiful large field in the centre of town, 3 hockey pitches and 1 football pitch in one field….all of which became a giant cricket field every once in a while too. Evenings would see the field crowded with players of all ages, and at least one of the pitches would be having a “serious” hockey game in progress: on any given day you’d be able to see anything from primary-schoolkids’ games to inter-state games.

We schoolkids would always hang around the field in the evenings,looking for any opportunity to join in a “friendly” game with the senior state players, it was a fantastic nurturing ground and the senior players would always encourage the juniors to join them.

A bunch of us schoolkids were also playing for the local clubs, so we were sort of like at the border of adulthood, so to speak.

M was an adult already, even way back then. I guess he must have been in his late 20’s ( I was 16 or 17). And he was a “superman”. Absolutely tireless, he could play for hours,game after game, and never showed signs of fatigue. And he was a jovial character, full of laughs and a ready smile and good humor…which he also brought into the field. Playing with him was fun, he was a tireless teammate and would be up and down the field, and his gameplay was a combination of crafty fox and incorrigible comedian…woe to any naieve opponent, M would run rings around him.

We became good friends, and along with some other guys we formed an alliance of non-conformist hockey players calling ourselves the “Paul Street Gang”, Paul St being the street beside the field, and most of the gang living along the street.

Apart from hockey, music was our other common interest. I knew a few chords on the guitar,  and a couple of others were game to strum too, chords and tuning be dammned,  everyone sang in various shades of unprofessionalism (though S was the real vocal talent, he could sing with such gusto one was advised to sit a fair distance away), and M was the percussionist, he’d play with his hands on table tops and boxes and empty cans and what not, peppering each song with indian-afro-rock grooves.

Our favourite jamming spot was Y’s room on the 2nd floor of an old shophouse building. 5 of us could barely cram into that room, but his window overlooked the Catholic Church grounds, and sometimes there’s be pretty girls there….

Looking back, I think that was about the best time of my life. School was great, though I was technically a dropout and attending classes only at nights but this also allowed me to play a lot of hockey during the day, and we had numerous Paul St gang “meetings”. Interestingly, there was no booze, no cigarettes, no drugs and such ever used when we were together. I guess we were just small-town kids and anyway we all needed to be fit for our hockey.

Sorry about the rambling. But I’m writing from memory and not any script, and I’m just writing as the memories come.

It didn’t take long to learn that M was the poorest guy I knew. He lived with his old mother upstairs in an old and crumbling shoplot, and they didn’t even have any furniture. Not even a chair, if I remember rightly. M’s only luxuries were a hockey stick and an old tattered pair of canvas shoes. He had no fixed job, just running minor errands I think, and when I think about it I really don’t know how they survived.

But he was a happy bloke. Despite living an extremely frugal life, he never complained or moaned, and took his lot as his karma, being a devout Hindu.

So it came as a bit of a surprise when one day he gave me an invitation :”I’m having a party in my house. Saturday afternoon. Must come.” huh?

Turns out his mother has died. The appropriate prayers and funeral rites had been done at the temple with minimal fuss (also along Paul St, we had the main Catholic Church, Sikh temple, Hindu temple all within walking distance on the same street, and the State Mosque was on the hillside nearby. It is as close to cosmopolitan utopia as you could get).

So what’s this party for? Death,  was something we youngsters had little experience of. And you don’t call it a party, do you?

“Don’t forget to bring the guitars, we’re going to have a great party.” HUH? Just wtf was M thinking, this sounded so totally crazy, his mother’s ashes still warm so to speak and him planning a party.

But he was the adult in our little group, and it was his mother, and his furniture-less place, so that Saturday we all went there, through the narrow corridor of the tiny downstairs shop selling Hindu incense and stuff, up a rickety wooden staircase and into M’s home, bare wooden floor, single lightbulb…..there was a mat on the floor if I remember rightly, and some simple vegetarian food, and some Coca Cola.

It didn’t take long for the gang to start the music. M on some old bongos, me and probably another guy on guitar…some food, some cola, and for the next few hours if you happened to be walking along Paul Street you would have heard some mighty singing and drumming and a whole pile of voices.

It was one of the best jam sessions ever. Everyone was just in top form. Great party!

I felt somewhat guilty as we were leaving. “Hey, M, we had so much fun, but shouldn’t we have had a quiet day, man, after all your mother just died, we should all be sad.”

 But M refused to see things that way. “Hey man, my mother loved me very much and she never liked to see me cry, so now she’s gone but still looking at me from Heaven. She’ll be so sad she can’t look after me, so I want to let her see I can still be happy and have fun and she does not have to worry about me. Understand?”

Understand?