RIFLE RANGE BOY

@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....

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 loo...