Sun 26.4.2026
It was half-past-nine yesterday morning, when I decided to do some chores that needed urgent doing. I could have started from anywhere in the list of places that needed to be visited. Somehow I chose SIGC - to settle the club's monthly due.
That's when I met her in the cafeteria of the club.
She's now a PR in San Fransisco, USA, and has been there for more than 20 years. She's back for a short visit, and would be gone any day now, and we'd never meet again, most probably. And we wouldn't have met yesterday if I chose to come to the club later than I did.
Bangyong, her late father, was one of the many brothers I knew very well when we were in Bukit Temensu, our kampong. Our homes (my grandparents, in whose home we stayed) and Pak Ngah Omar and wife Mak Wo Sipah were next to each other on the Jalan Tampin main road.
Bangyong was Baharudin, a soldier who was married to Cik Gu Maimunah. One time, many years later, when I was already working, I was driving behind an army truck, and there was Bangyong at the back of the truck. I honked and waved, and he immediately spotted and recognized me and waved back.
Ita was the younger brother I went to TMS with. Jiman was an older brother who went to private school in Seremban and later married and settled in Seremban. Then there were the sisters I knew very well - Zizah, Maimun, Inah, and Jun. Alas, all have left us.
My childhood in Bukit Temensu was until I was in Form 3, when I joined the RMC. But we were in a close society in Kampong Bukit Temensu.
Azmi is one of 2 sisters, but I don't know what happened to the other one. I'm told she\s in Seremban, somewhere. I'd met Azmi once before, when she came back from San Fransisco, also for a home visit, but that was many years ago. That was how I know then that she's in the USA.
Yesterday, it was instant recognition all round. Azmi also recognized Idah, and called her Kak Long straight away. She said she's Poad age, which I whatsapped to him later, and he concurred. I told her Poad went to study in Wisconsin, where he met Karim, another Bukit Temensu boy, who was doing his PhD at the same university there. Poad and I visited Karim's house when I went to attend Poad's graduation from the university in the late 80's.
Azmi said she remarried after the passing of her first husband, Hanif, who was Deputy Director of Education in Seremban, which was 20 years ago. The new husband is an 80-year-old Irishman who had came with her to Malaysia a few times before. Syed Rahman later told me that Azmi had remarried more than once, which surprised me. Syed thought she could be teaching music now, something she had learned young. So that, and Hanif's good pension should take care of expenses, I guess.
Syed said there are a few houses Azmi can put up in Seremban, including her own house here, maintained by one of the relatives. She, like the rest, can't go back to Bukit Temensu, because before Ita passed away he had decided, for all his surviving siblings, to dismantle the ancient grand Malay house that Pak Ngah Omar and Mak Wo Sipah called home, and sold the expensive "kayu ponak" materials to Salleh Md. Nor (Tan Sri, Dr.) who had sometime ago told me himself that he plans to rebuild the house in his late mother's kampong in Johol. Salleh grew up with his parents in the Istana Hinggap staff quarters, just next to this Mak Wo Sipah's house. That's how this buying the old vacant house came about.
I got Azmi to write down her address and phone number yesterday. "In case I go to the States again". Maybe I would.
It was all too short, and Azmi left first. But not before she also paid for our roti canai, which she signaled as she left the payment counter.
She's half-a-world away now, for the memory that's half-a-century old. But we should treasure our common beginnings.
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