On The Train, June 11, 2008

Today was a bad news and good news day for me.

While waiting for my train home I received a text message from our friend Halim K asking for Dato Lat’s number. He replied after I sent him the number stating that his child is at the IJN waiting to be operated. I immediately shared the news, the best I can, with the rest of my batch mates.

For the past few weeks I have been either reading or doing something with my laptop on the way home. I pretty much block out myself from the happenings around me. I was basically in my own world on the train. Today was no different and I had the best surprise I ever had since the first day I took the train to work.

I had my laptop switched on and both my ears stuck with earphones, Pink Floyd was blasting, already when I boarded the train home. Naturally I just picked my favourite seat and started to be engrossed with the multimedia presentation that I need to finish for our reunion. When the train stopped at KL Station a gentleman boarded and sat next to me. By then commuters filed in and it got worse at KL Sentral. I continued working on the multimedia show and of course was full with our old and new photos with word SDARA78. At the corner of my eyes I could see the person next to me was watching closely to what I was doing and as usual I judged him to just being curious until the person suddenly asked me. ‘You budak SDAR ke?’ ‘Aha’ I said. ‘Batch bila?’ he continued. I replied,’ Fiver 78’.. What he said then caught me by surprise big time. ‘Bond ke ni?’ I said ,’ ya’ and looked at him very hard. I just could not figure out who he was and finally I asked. ‘Sapa ni?’. Salim, Salim Kabri’ he said. Hearing that like an excited small boy I almost yell ‘Ya Allah Salim!’ and I went speechless. I was just so excited that I was speechless for a moment. Imagine the last time we were together was in 1980. Then there rest of our train ride was just another excuse. I told him about our reunion and him being in our MIA list. To make live even more interesting for both of us. Salim just bought and moved to a new house just next to mine at Bandar Seri Putra. Syukur alhamdulilah, if you are honest in what you are doing Allah will help you in a strange way.