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Hide and seek

 





When we were young, we used to indulge in a game known as “hide and seek.” One member of the group would be the policeman who would close his eyes and the rest of us would go into hiding. He would count up to 100 before he set out to find the rest who would have gone into hiding. Initially we were innocent and used to hide within the kampong boundaries. 


Overtime we became cheeky and used to leave the kampong and spend our time in the towns making it impossible for the “policeman” to locate us. One of the young men in our neighbouring kampong was short of stature and used to pass through our kampong after a hard day’s work.


We used to shout “pendek” when we spotted him and go into hiding. We realised we had found a new game and would wait for the short man to pass through the kampong. We would shout “pendek” (meaning shorty in Malay) every time he passed our kampong. He would jump out of his bicycle, park it on the kerb of the road and look for the young boys who called him pendek. Most days he would not be able to spot us as we went into hiding. Once in a way, he would spot the offenders running into a particular house; he would knock on the door and report to the parent that their son was mischievous and was calling him nicknames. The offender would get a thrashing with a broom or whatever was handy to the parent.


But the fun the group used to have, seeing the short man getting down every time he passed through our kampong continued. If the guy had disregarded our pranks, we would have ceased calling him names but the angrier he became, the more we wanted to irritate him. I noticed this that we indulged in this naughty prank only during weekends and school holidays, as during schooldays we had to be home by 6pm to attend to our studies and homework. But overtime we gave up troubling the man; I don’t know if it was because the short man moved out of the kampong or if it was because he started taking a different route to avoid us.    


All contents (c) Ganapathy Ramasamy, mynameisgana@blogspot.com


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