
There are times when it pays not to listen to one’s parents. Even the skewed sense of risk endemic to high school years can yield fitful rewards that fall dormant after the heady thrill of explorations beyond the reach of a shout and long before the rise of wireless tethers. The lure of an old flame and nights of chaste nubility once drew my duck from his nest in the western floodplains of the peninsula to dryer parts about 30 miles northeast and an hour by bus, or more on a busy day when the driver would grind the jalopy to a jerky halt every other minute or so to pick up a schoolchild or give an old makcik time to unload her bags and body onto the largely straight and once narrow road.

At a forgettable settlement named after peaty waters that thrives by the sole virtue of its status as a regional crossroad, the bus would detour into a gravel park and idle for a while. The high road comes thereafter, as the terrain sinks, swells and skirts the ridges of undulating foothills that mark the last of a continental chain. The service terminates at a filthy lot at the edge of a town in the middle of a state of loss. Buttered roasts and brown buns beckon from a canteen by the railway station, but for bodies of a less discerning age, the comforts of a suburban house with creaky boards and roofs that thunder in the rain trumped the flavours of worldlier appetites.
Such escapades took place under the cloak of loftier pursuits, for even, nay especially, then, attempts to cast caution to the wing and probe the outer reaches of a cloistered district ill-befitted a fowl of domestic prospects. Homework be damned, the shorter hours of the day would roll through rubber estates, coastal lanes and country roads, in buses, on pedals or by the touch of a throttle, and run afoul of paternal instincts, for these journeys with neither maps nor meaning often ended long after dinner was cold and the skies had turned red with waiting.
I never bothered to reveal where exactly I had been or explain why I sought out these peripheries of imagined hazard. For why should one give in to the grounds for a grilling and forfeit the soul of sights and spills that taunt the mind and scrape knees of adolescent skin? As luck would have it, I survived harmless madmen and many angry dogs but failed to dodge the orthodoxy of old school paths and so abandoned, for far too long, the superior doctrine of infinite passabilities.

Little has changed. The barest hint of bland adventure evokes a murmur of fear that discourages further comment and cues a dip into the bliss of questions unasked but never forgotten. "Why do you do these things?" "Why on earth do you have to go to such places?" I could have told them it was all for the better, for the sake of tougher journeys or the salvaging of a wit on edge. But it's never certain that revelation will bring relief rather than a descent into remission and I leave the box unopened.

Repetition may be farce, but one recent trip to a nest half-empty bordered on atrocity. The coach kicked off nearly two hours behind schedule and turned out to be a double-bill, offering passage to two unsung destinations. But the driver later learnt that one town pitched a solo act and decided, in a stroke of economic genius, to skip the bypass for the benefit of a sleeping majority. He was at once politely insistent and earnestly apologetic at dumping a hapless duck by a crossroad 20 miles from home and sped off with the air of a wronged dame. I had earlier declined the driver's offer of compensation, prefering to save my senses for the task of picking up from where he had left me off, a not-unfamiliar borderland that thrives by the sole virtue of its proximity to a national highway.

Little has changed. The gravel lot is dry, dusty and driven over by buses of doubtful menace. Litter lined the fringes of the compound and what grasses grew were scorched or squalid from the emissions of diesel-fed combustions. Two coin-operated phone booths, living fossils of rural telecommunication, stood a little away from the derelict end of a terminus building which otherwise housed a sleepy vendor of snacks and penny rags.
The wait was probably shorter than it seemed, but an old red and white bus arrived well before any thoughts of watering the dismal lawn. The service is unchanged in numeration and it appears that the firm has made little effort to upgrade its vehicles with unnecessary comforts. Raw panels line the cabin, seats of industrial textures and stiff sliding windows welcome passengers to a ride that laughs in the face of perfunctory danger. A Malay girl in jeans and tank top hopped on, but reckoned there was enough time to dash down and buy a bag of guava. Her only companion was a largish Spongebob Squarepants plushie, which she hugged during the journey with the indifference of female privilege. A literal handful, including the conductor, sat in the bus when the driver continued southwest pass shops of cheap pottery and plastic souvenirs. The 20-mile trip cost a little more than a buck and is divided into 35 invisible milestones known only to the conductor who probably takes his passengers' word for their eventual alighting point.

Over the years, oil palms have displaced the rubber trees that once fuelled the state's fortunes. But the old trunk road, though a little broader now to fit obese automobiles, still runs by houses guarded by fruit trees and gaudy shrubs. Rambutans, durians, mangos, guavas, gingers, draceanas, crotons, bananas and yams flank many a driveway that leads to a house on stilts and designed for village spaces. But not a few families have clearly downgraded to more elementary structures, trading cool vents for warm rooms of brick. Some quarters lease or lend their porch to purveyors of local patties, who assemble special treats for those who ride at night.

On both sides of the road are ditches fed by streams, canals and small rivers that flow perpendicular to the track. Brooks that seep by food stalls, workshops and shanty towns bubble with the foam of municipal neglect, but those in less populated corners still gush with deep brown waters and the hearts of small water lilies. Aquatic sedges, marsh flowers and duckweed have invaded the ditches, though parts of these waterways have been ripped up and await the concrete of rural improvement.
Primitive shelters of rods and plywood serve as bus-stops where children and collared men await the bus and take their time to choose their seats. Schools, manufactories and garages have emerged in creeping densities and face the road behind broad gateways and grand names. Only village mosques, willing prisoners to more pressing calls, break the grid and impose a moral compass on this series of parrallel constructs.
A lizard straddles a wire fence. Melastoma blooms over a drain of effluent. The trees give way to a wasteland of commerce and industry, a frontier of sprawling complexes to which the townsfolk ride and return each shift and clock their earnings. Bungalows and shops have inched their way towards a hill of graves and a playground lies torn and tired near the palace of a benignant ruler.
I arrive many hours later than what a reasonable day might expect. "The bus was late and exceedingly slow" appeared to satisfy the incessant distress of a shrinking unit. It seemed crass to add to the mental agony of unfulfilled expectations by recounting the details of a transport debacle that'd beg the question of why their words once, and still, fell on stubborn ears and failed to stick in those years when the future was in their hands and theirs for the shaping.
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