After every flood has subsided, the bunch of kids would go down the river bringing tire tubes of all sizes and dusssss, into the water. That was one of the ways of celebrating the early morning breeze during my childhood. Cold it have been but for a kid like me who was immortally mortal by the heat of naughtiness, it was a big no problem haha. We would stay there until one of the moms came and started scolding everyone, ohh yes, it’s time to get ready for school. From 7 to 11 o’clock and that was our prime play time…down the river, of course.
We use to stay there and molding santul, a small ball shaped molded sand . Each of everyone was having their own site to polish his santul and later we would fight each other’s, bangging them to the death haha. Racheal’s was the only one santul every one could not win. His santul was as big as a soccer ball. Imagine that. He would carried it inside a plastic bag every time we went to the river side and it was always funny to look at. After the mandi sungai season was over, he crushed it on his own and we would look at it and felt guilty. How sad.
Everyone would sneaked in my uncle’s orchard and stole as much as limau manis and buah koko, then ran away to the up steam. My uncle knew it after some time and we would get caught red handed, sometimes. That’s the reason we became green little ninjas back then, putting up branches on the back and wore green t-shirt while crawling through the grass just to steal fruits. Funny.
There was a time when I lost total control during life-boating on the still-heavy-current of the subsided flood. Everyone was shocked and mission to rescue me, was started. They all jumped in their own ‘lifeboy‘ (nickname for the tire tubes) and
started to catch me up on a heavy current and deep Liawan river. I was stranded on a bamboo pile, we called it liagu. Someone actually died there, and I though it was my turn to be swallowed alive. Thank God Im still alive. Thanks to them I can still write this one adventure I had haha. Now the place isn’t there anymore. Everything changed.
