the fearless kid and other stories

Football fans in UM must have been to 'Jamal' at least once. It's a favourite place for my friends and I to hang out, especially when there are 'live' EPL matches. For the man in kopiah himself; business has been good, despite a freak accident which involved a flying car, and despite having a wife that never speaks bahasa, or so I heard. Jamal thrived, changing it's name twice in the process (the restaurant, not the man). As of now, lots of people would call the restaurant 'Asshifaa' rather than 'Jamal' (or Jamal Pak Tongkol, or Jamal Mohamed Sheriff, for that matter) and the man himself is rarely seen at the restaurant, having taken over another restaurant on the same street (come to think of it, he's rarely seen at either establishments. Balik India, perhaps..?). I call the two restaurants 'Jamal hijau' and 'Jamal kuning', respectively, for nostalgia's sake.

Anyhow, the last EPL weekend I was there ('lifeless people spend their weekends at Jamal' is my motto) and there was this fearless little kid; he's Chinese I think, and on the first night that I saw him he had a machine gun and a pistol. The second night..? A sword. But these 'weapons' have nothing to do with him being fearless. The thing is, he approached everyone, wanting to 'fight' everyone (not in a hostile way but in a playful manner), and I mean everyone; Malays, Chinese, Indians, even Arabs. And everybody loved this kid. Everybody smiled.

Kids are honest and sincere. They take some time to identify colour (if I'm not mistaken, kids below the age of four can't identify colour and have no permanent memory). I was like that once. We all were. Then we grew up. And we started building these walls around us.