Life is like being in a school where one goes through experiences and either learns from them or are destroyed by them.Traumatic experiences often destroy one’s life and aspirations for the future. Being slashed in a robbery and taken in your own car to the bank to withdraw money from the ATM after which you are dumped in a secluded area in the dead of night can be so traumatic that you never really recover from the fear.
This happened to my friend who stopped going out because he was afraid. He didn’t want to encounter another such episode.
His life was destroyed by the two parang-wielding thieves who had slashed him and robbed him without any compunctions, leaving him bleeding and helpless.
Another kind of trauma is when you experience the horror of a fire that took away the lives of your four college mates in the dead of winter. Within minutes, the whole house was razed to the ground and those of us in nearby houses were rudely awakened and told to assemble immediately in an open area. Fear of the fire spreading was very real with the wind blowing as the houses were close to one another and made of hardboard.
In the cold and windy, wintry night, we were only clad in our nightclothes, without any overcoats as speed was of the essence. I had grabbed my violin case and my needlework box. My best friend snatched up her umbrella and teddy bear. Long after the tragedy we would laugh over this. Why hadn’t we taken our important documents? Why a teddy bear and a violin case?
In the aftermath, most of us wandered around in a daze as panicked parents, 8000 miles away in our homeland, tried to ring us to make sure that we were safe, as news of the fire had reached Kuala Lumpur. There were no cell phones in the early 60s. We didn’t have credit cards then. The phones in the college were still the round dial type and I believe there were only 2 lines while there were about 300 of us in the college.
We reacted in different ways; some were able to deal with the trauma after counselling, others had a harder time. I belonged to the latter group. Unable to cope ( being seventeen years old then ) I did a foolish thing which ruined not only my dreams but also those of my loved one. There was no turning back once you took the wrong fork.
It has always been drummed into us that we must think before we act but sometimes shock and emotions cloud your mind and that’s it. Perhaps that’s why people kill. A moment of madness and the whole future is lost. A life is taken, another is hanging in the balance and the lives of many others are affected in different ways.
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