There's just something wonderful and special about reunions, a gathering of people that has common past experiences and memories. This was especially true for my class reunion last Friday at A&W Jalan Timur.
I would have preferred somewhere different to meet, (not a fan of fast food) but I was soon educated on the significance of our place of congregation; Jalan Timur field was where our school had our annual sports day.
When I arrived (late due to the all round massive jams; excuses, excuses!) at around 8:30pm, it was hard finding my class mates among the crowd of diners, when I finally did spot them, I was unsure as it was 18 years since I’ve seen some of them and I could barely recognize them. After a closer look at a bunch of guys crowded together looking over a photograph, at the back corner of the restaurant (some things haven’t changed), I found my long lost class mates and the faces began to look familiar to the (much) younger, fresh faces I remember from 1989.
Our conversations started with the ‘what are you doing now? Are you married? How many children? How many wives?’ type questions, where I found out what my buddies have been up to and some were incredibly interesting, one has been an air steward for 18 years and saw the world and another had started his career chauffeuring ‘escorts’! Real estate, stationary business, food, IT were the other professions among us, we were all doing alright.
After the ‘warm-up’ lap, the memories of past began to slowly come back, bits by bits at first and then a mighty rush leading to the 2nd type of rhetorical line of questions like “Do you remember the time when…?”. The conversations just kept going on and on and we covered every subject that we could remember; teachers (our beloved class teacher, Mr. Chin was one of the favorite subjects, more on him later), naughty and sometime illegal things we did, girlfriends (La Salle was an all boys school, with the exception of the sixth formers), female teachers (slightly different slant on the conversation compared to teachers in general!). There was much laughter and joking and it was a great time to say the least. It was funniest when we began to recollect memories of our characters back in school; there was the sensitive one, the unpredictably mental ones (there was a few of those), the stylo ones, the ‘softer’ ones and many others. It was almost as if we were transported in a time machine back in school again and were behaving exactly like 17 year olds (I was 18 then, due to Remove class).
There were 9 of us that made it out of the 21 originally invited and confirmed, sadly we missed the other others that couldn’t make it for one reason or another, it would have been twice the fun, if at all that’s possible. Next phase of conversations centered around those that were not with us and what’s been happening with them, sadly, we spoke of the loss of one of our class mate, Raj Kumar, who perished in a car accident late last year; I had only found out of this much later than the fact and did not attend his funeral. We were told that it was well attended by La Sallians numbering in the hundreds, which was no surprise as Raj was a good friend to many and popular in school. We also spoke of others not in our class and there were some sad stories too, one was in Serenti drug rehabilitation center and some others in trouble with the law.
Our class teacher, Mr. Chin took made up a large portion of our chatter, I’ve not personally met him after school and had to rely on witness’s account of him, apparently, he is quite cool these days, trotting along with Oakleys and ‘quite happening’ as they say. He’s on an overseas teaching assignment and comes back to Malaysia every once in a while, the guys promised that they would arrange for him to attend our next gathering, which would be a blast I think… I’m dying to hear what he has to say about this bunch of misfits! He was strict but fair with us, being the discipline master; he had to be extra strict with us, since he was our class teacher.
Those who atteded: Mohd. Zaini, Shane De Cruz, Imran Hamid, Syed Alam Shah, Shah Jahan, Mohamed Ameen, Loong Kok Leong, Khumararaj & myself (James Valentine).
To both the Shahs (Syed Alam Shah and Shah Jahan), thanks for organizing this get together, I had a great time and I know the rest did too. To the rest of the gang, thanks for the memories, you were the greatest! I am looking forward to our next meeting, don’t wait another 18 years! OK?
