The hand that whacks, embraces too?

@AryamanBodh

One of the regular feature during my childhood days was the visits by lonely housewives to engage in a prolonged banter with my mother.

In RRF, my childhood home, a new neighbour had just moved to our oft-emptied next door flat. In came a seemingly perfect family, the head of the family, a tall, lean man donning dark glasses in the midst of the dimly lit corridors of the neighbourhood. He would walk as if he had a severe case of cervical spondylosis, straight-backed, walking straight ahead without tilting his heads even for a moment as if he had a mission in life like a racing horse prancing on with blinkers. The wife, a slim lady with long wavy hair and polyester floral sari with a faced stained in turmeric powder, an Indian natural skin whitener and scar-blemisher, would follow suit, well aware of the roving eyes around her. To complement this seemingly perfect couple was a pair of children of every dream of a middle-class family of the 70s - a daughter and a son. Then some distant back trotted in a middle-aged lady, all dressed in white widow's saree and a matching short white blouse, and a chubby man in his thirties with eyes protruding out like a frog's and appearing not quite right in the head!

They went on their lives just as we did ours. There was not much communication between both families. Most of the time, they were left to their own devices.

Three months or so into their move into their flat, we would occasionally hear shouts, yelling, sounds of punches on raw skin and crying, sometimes interspersed with groans. Like what kind neighbours would do, my family would just mind our businesses and carried on life as if nothing happened.

One morning, after a night of yelling and screaming, the lady of the house made an appearance at the corner of our kitchen window. Like a drug peddler looking for clients, she whispered her problems to Amma. Occasionally, she would turn around and look sideways just to make easily volatile husband would suddenly reappear to make minced meat out of her. It would be a regular feature for the rest of stay in RRF.

Through inadvertent eaves-dropping, I managed to gather the going-on. She had a victim of abuse by her husband and her mother-in-law. Periodically, she would show her wounds and her racoon-eyed face like her badge of honour. Amma, in her own feministic stance, would suggest ways to set her life in order - how to go about making a police report, to get a medical report on her wounds.

Credit: Andy Capp

Like a broken record in the typical fashion of a battered wife, her actions are always predictable. She would be so gung-ho about 'letting it all behind', in 'starting it all over' and putting 'a full stop to all these' on the day after the whacking. And a few days later, it would be status quo. 'He is actually kind-hearted when he is sober', 'it is my fault, actually', 'I irritate him', 'I have to take it for children' were the usual replies.

In my naive mind, I could not understand why was it is so difficult for my stupid neighbour to make up her mind. When somebody is hostile to you, you retaliate!

Nothing much really happened. She continued her mid-morning rendezvous at the corner of the kitchen window, telling her inner feelings and inner ramblings whilst Amma would go on with her stirring of her meals on the stove. It would all come to an abrupt when either Amma finishes her cooking, or the neighbour's husband comes marching back during his lunch break.

My house, My home, My kingdom

The tallest mansion of squatters!
One eye Jack is king in kingdom of blind

Growing up in RRF, we yearn to have regular addresses, not an address with block number, floor number and unit number. We were quite fed-up explaining to our schoolmates why there were so many dashes, hyphens and digits on our address instead of just the house number and road name. I suppose the stigma of living in a low cost high rise slump-like flats in the 70s was more the reason of the above. Even though living in the 21st century means condominium resort type of living is norm, we from RRF still find contentment living with our feet on the ground in landed properties!
Why am I writing this?
If you have access to people's addresses like I do, then you would have noticed that some addresses leaves no place for imagination on their social economic strata. Home addresses like 'Projek Perumahaan Rakyat', 'Projek Rumah Murah', Taman Bukit Mewah' will tell you how their home would look like.
Someone told me that many years ago, the mental facility in Kuching, Sarawak used to be called 'Rumah Sakit Orang Gila'! And Tampoi Psychiatric Hospital had been known as wad 'Orang Sakit Otak'.  When we grew up in Penang, anyone originating from Tanjong Rambutan was mental unless proven otherwise as the premier northern region Psychiatric Hospital was stationed there.
There is a place in Sabah called 'Menggatal'. Are the people ridiculed to be promiscuous, I wonder?
One cannot help it but over time certain names are acceptable by public may one day become hurtful or politically incorrect. Many years ago, children with Trisomy 21 (Down's Syndrome) used to called Mongols without batting anybody's eyelids. Ever since, Mongolia started being heard on CNN and started producing models, nobody called them Mongols anymore. Down's baby and special child they are!