AS THE RAIN FALLS - PART TWO

The sounds of the falling rain cannot but bring forth sudden hunger and the yearnings for fried bananas, fried fish and prawn crackers, fried noodles and noodles soup or even the mamak rojak or pasembor. Never mind that these foodstuff seem to be bad for health. That set aside, these are wonderful things to overcome the pangs of hunger that come from the sound of the falling rain !

The thing that is of concerned nowadays, almost everything that used to be pretty cheap then is now gone sky rocket in prices. The traders are taking full advantage to abuse the slight rise in the cost of petrol and diesel. Imagine the roti canai which used to cost just forty sen, and later on sixty sen and still later on eighty sen, is now ONE RINGGIT a piece ! A thorough look at these roti canai also reveals that they are a little smaller in size (less dough )than what it used to be . What of the popular teh tarek ? This too has not been spared of the spiral price. It used to be a big glass of the stuff at just one ringgit but nowadays, the big glass stuff is dispense with and instead we get it in a small glass at one ringgit and twenty sen ! Just what is this ? When we ask the mamak why this sudden higher cost. His reply is simply, cost of petrol has gone higher !

This spiraling higher prices in foodstuff do not escape the local vegetables and fish that we get in the market. Never mind the fact that the vast majority of these vegetables and fruits are heavily doped or coated with pesticides to ensure that healthy looks for us innocent consumers and hence very harmful indeed for our health. These farmers have never heeded the government rulings on the proper use and applications of these chemicals because they know that there are no regular inspections by the authorities on their uses and even if there are, they somehow get away with it with minimum fine or penalty. All the farmers are interested in is to sell their produce at the best possible price in the market and such good prices are only for those produce that are the greenest and the healthiest looking. Heavy chemicals means higher cost on production but this high cost of production is easily absorbed through the consumers. Hence where previously with twenty ringgit, we can get reasonable variety of vegetables both local and import ones, nowadays for the same variety it will cost fifty ringgit ! The same goes with the fish which are doubled and for some quadruple in price. When we were in Kuala Trengganu in the good old days when I was in FELDA in the sixties, for just a mere one ringgit we get to have a pail full of ikan kembong, which today costs NINE RINGGIT ! Need we mention other varieties of fish ?

As the saying goes these days, it costs a bomb to have a good meal at home, let alone at the restaurants ! However, if you are clever and willing to set aside that empty pride of yours to eat at selected stalls in the shopping complexes food courts, you can still get a bargain on even Japanese food as experienced by us recently at the Mega Mall. Only the night before when we supper at a Japanese restaurant for a simple two California Rolls and two noodle soups that cost us seventy five ringgit, it is heavenly for us to discover an alternative food stall serving Japanese food at a cost of a mere thirteen ringgit and eighty sen for a food tray of tempayaki serving ! The stuff we get is good enough for the two of us to share it !

Of course anything can be expensive if you choose it to be so. Apparels and handbags are no exception here. Again if you know how to shop, you can get very high class looking apparels or even hand bags if you take greater pain to look for them. The same goes for tailoring too. If you can direct or even show your tailors exactly what you want, you will get the same high quality looking finishes to your clothing. Money saves here goes a long way towards the savings for our children’s education in the later years. With ladies especially, the tendency not to wear or be seen to wear the same clothes again for a function is fairly common. To keep up with this masquerade, you have to be extra wise with that precious money which should be wisely spent ! For us males, we go easy on these things. Just a nice jacket and a suit or two , go a long way to meet our basic needs for good dressing for those special occasions. At other times, a nice batik shirt , a decent shirt or tee shirt will serve the needs. Need I say more ?

I still cannot understand why ladies fancy doing their shopping's overseas. More often than not of course they justify that these cost a lot less than at home, which is totally untrue taking into consideration the flight and accommodation costs. We have often heard of these special shopping trips overseas or to the neighboring countries , just to shop ! Of course there is nothing much that we men can say to our wives when they gang up to do so. Letting them go is better than having them home to lament or made you feel guilty for not letting them off to be with the others. I am however very happy that Ainul has always been very careful on her spending for all these stuff I mention earlier. Being branded conscious has never been her forte, so to speak. She will take a long time to choose things that are great looking and yet budget wise and this kind of outings entails hours on end - the very reason why I shy being with her when she shops ! On most occasions overseas, whenever Ainul choose to be at a mall, I will be there too but find myself a good movie or two to relax at, and even when I have finished with these movies, I will find that Ainul has still to finish her shopping, which at the end of the day, I find it not worth the time, because she buys hardly anything worth the time spent being there in the first place ! Hence I do not have the patience here but I am glad though that Arman John Jennrich has all the patience to be with her each time she shops there. He likes shopping ! It is just the opposite with Farah though. She is almost like me. In and out fast ! I cannot say the same for Faraziland Farahat though, although I think Izzat is like me too though I may be wrong since they are all with families now !

The shopping complexes that we have in our country have stuffs that match most overseas countries. Even the displays can match theirs too and as for the prices, they are not too bad, which accounts for the fact that even the Singaporean have chosen to do their shopping here nowadays more especially because their currency is higher than ours. When it used to be at par with ours, we go all the way to shop in Singapore then because we do not have the kind of shopping complexes that we now have. The Casino at Genting is a major attraction to the Singaporeans too but soon when they have their own Casino, things might be different, I suppose ! The Chinese as a whole enjoy gambling. They gamble on virtually anything that they deem can make money. When I was running my own business as a joinery owner at one time, I cannot help noticing my workers indulge in cards games during the work breaks and this is no ordinary card game of "main colek" but game of 21 as they call it. For short Black Jack , I think, and of course money is involved here ! We used to have very active mahjong groups of people indulging in the game at the neighboring flat dwellings just below our house in those days long ago. Every night we can hear the sounds of the mahjong chips that will resound throughout the night till the early hours of the morning especially on weekends. We use to ask Kok Chee, our Chinese best friend just what is involved in these mahjong sessions. His simple reply is, it’s of course money ! There is money to be made by the winners and the house-owner gets paid too for the use of his table or tables for the occasions. When it comes to making or losing money, we leave it to our Chinese friends. To the Chinese, there is no life without gambling ! To the Chinese, LIFE IS A GAMBLE !

That brings me to the subject of our own Gin rummy gang that still indulge in the game whenever opportunity prevails. Of late, however, we have slowed down quite a bit , more especially after Sabri’s heart operation, which sees him to be somewhat easily tired. Hence instead of the usual four to five weekly sessions that we used to have, these days, it is confined to the weekends only and even then we end early. The other thing is, we now must have our quorum and the same cannot be considered complete if Mahatun is not around because she is our official scorer now ! Card dealers however have been left open although we have tried to make it mandatory for the winner to do the dealing. This does not take place when it comes to me winning a game because my clammy hands will wash off the cards prints ! Hence the failure to enforce the mandatory rule on the winner to shuffle and deal on the cards. Arguments during gin is getting less since we are now very familiar and almost disciplined on our gin rules but of course the ranting, cynical and witty remarks on verbal expressions by anyone of us are the norm - that’s what makes our sessions enjoyable. I have often tried to introduce alternative to the Gin but to no avail. I thought Monopoly should be interesting but then the group’s reaction is, there will be only one winner in this one- meaning myself - and this they do not like. Scrabbles good but confined to only four players whilst the new card game of Micheavelli is not well received and deems no challenge at all. Of course we do not go to Poker because that’s gambling and we do not gamble in our Gin although some visitors of ours who play the same at their places have been heard to suggest that we should play money stakes on ours but we are not at all attracted to that concept. Quite honestly, the one reason why I have never taken up golf is because I do not believe that I have to pay and have money bets on any game. I still stick to my favorite squash but confine myself to play only with Tunku Besar who has been playing with me ever since my regular sparring Dr. Then Suk Min left for Australia in 1980.

These days, just what is the best past time to relax and enjoy the day ? For both Ainul and I, it is always the movies more especially when being Seniors, we are no longer compelled to que up with the main crowd and instead enjoy the privilege of direct purchase at the Phone Reservation or Gold Class counters. The only snag is we can only purchase tickets for ourselves and our grandchildren . However that’s quite good already when I consider what I have to go through in the past with bookings for the movies. I recall the time when we are in London East End or somewhere I cannot quite recall and it is for a James Bond Movie at a cinema there. It is a very long que and what with the unpredictable London weather which can be cold or hot or rain all at the same time, it takes me almost one hour in that que before I got to buy the tickets and yet I can see the que still stretches the whole way down the blocks. The British people are really very patient when it comes to bookings for any thing. In those days queuing up is not practiced in our country. Everywhere you go, people will simply bull dozed themselves in and the scenario is worst at the buses. Before the passengers can alight, the incoming ones are already rushing in and creates a bottle neck human jam at the entrances. Thank goodness that is now changed and our people are more civilized although we still do get the jostles at the lifts. It is difficult to instill civic mindedness to the general mass. There are always the abusers despite being educated and looking well-dressed, for that matter. I guess habits die hard.

Habits are man-made and we cannot say that habits are all bad although the word habit is always implied for anything that is not acceptable. Like everything else, these come in pairs just like we all have a pair of eyes and ears, a pair of legs and hands and even our kidneys come in pairs jus as all living things come in pairs and all these for a reason. Hence with our habits, we have the good and the bad one but then it is all subjective. It is up to the person to evaluate for himself if it is good or bad for him. Setting aside the bad ones, I will say it is good habit to be polite, considerate, moderate, generous and loving others. Definitely it is good habit to have some form of exercise daily. I strongly believe in exercise to keep me healthy and feeling good for the day. Exercise too helps to regulate our motions. In these days there are so many distractions that prevent us from exercising but then there are many form of exercises that needs no space such as the simple hands and feet or the neck exercises whilst seated. I have always enjoyed all the Ji Gong movements and I have adopted the basic ones for my daily needs. You will be surprised just how much stamina is derived from these seemingly simple exercise and from my experience even if I lay off squash for a few weeks which has happened on several occasions in the past, I still maintain the same stamina when I come back to play the game. However, another contributory factor to this is the fact that I consume my Sunrider products without fail everyday. By the way, if any of you are interested in the products, wherever you are, you can always purchase them online using our membership number MY000000582 at www.sunrider.com. Sunrider products are very wide range and suits everyone’s needs. Better still get into the business for longevity in personal income and doing the business at your leisure.

With that note, I say farewell to you till next time when we return from our Mediterranean cruise which will be from the 27th May till 12 June.

written by Tunku Farid